I remember the Earth Room

The second half of Daisy Alioto’s essay On Filler about Joe Brainard, microplastics, hotdogs and more.

Read the first half and full piece here. 

Plus, some links from Daisy and Walden for your weekend. Periodic reminder to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Spotify and wherever Zyn is sold.

“Pop’s disco revival is wearing a bit thin, but if you can do it with this much élan, this kind of cleverness, this singularly fizzy and bizarre vibe, maybe it can last just one more summer,” writes Pitchfork’s Jeremy Larson about Sabrina Carpenters “Espresso,” which despite its charms, sounds like a better summer’s B-side. Did I mention there’s an odd sort of bravado happening about hotdogs?

“This hot dog season is particularly special, because it seems that hot dogs have never been more front of mind in our collective consciousness,” writes The Cut, “hot dogs are having a moment.” That moment included a giant hot dog in Times Square in May and June, an art installation addressing, “a national symbol of patriotism and also an emblem of the hard-to-digest truth about mass production and labor, consumerism and marketing, it seemed like a natural match for the setting.”

In 1969 Joe Brainard wrote, “I am, at the moment, pretty much off art for art’s sake. I’ve had all I want. But I guess if you really love art it makes sense, and is interesting.” This was the point in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard at which I realized maybe he never loved art, only people. After all, he walked away from his art and his writing for the last fifteen years of his life. He never walked away from people.

Whatever was going on with that giant hot dog in Times Square, reminded me of an (eventually censored) installation I liked much better—the New York–Dublin Portal by Benediktas Gylys, essentially a two-way camera between the two cities.

“Though certainly at least one of the more notable rule breaks, an OnlyFans model flashing her breasts and promoting her content, took place in New York, it seems the bulk of the mischief—and certainly the lion’s share of the mooning—was in Ireland,” wrote Megan Nolan in The Guardian this May.

“This induced in me a familiar blend of shame and pride, one that arises whenever Irish people do things that are so stupid that I find them funny in a deep gut way,” Nolan continues. What she is describing, of course, is a kind of intimacy.

I remember mooning. 

Intimacy was the Polaroid Corporation’s code word for the market around using polaroid film to create private pin-ups. “We will never know exactly who first figured out that using a Polaroid camera meant whatever happened in front of the lens never needed to be seen by a lab technician. It is clear, though, that it happened early on,” writes Bonanos in Instant: The Story of Polaroid. “I never saw any research that said X percent of sales went for bedroom pictures, though,” said their director of corporate comms. 

Last weekend I went to my friend Josh’s apartment to model a t-shirt his company, Night Gallery, made in collaboration with Richard Kern. The photographs would be Polaroids. I looked through the stacks of prior photos, trying to think of a concept that wasn’t already taken. “Has anyone gotten in the shower yet?” I asked. Nobody had. “Ok, I’ll do it.”

What are the more out there things people have asked you to do?

As the warm water began to soak my hair and the fabric of the t-shirt and the silk shorts I changed into while Josh was in the other room I thought—as I often do—of my old lifeguarding coworker, Craig, who fantasized about getting pushed into the pool in his socks.

I remember Craig.

Article continues below

SPONSORED BY MUBI GO

Experience MUBI’s curation on the big screen every week, with 2 months of MUBI GO for just $20 (usually $39.98).

With MUBI GO, you get a ticket to see a hand-picked new release in theaters every single week. Plus, you can stream all the exceptional films showing on MUBI anytime. Recent MUBI GO selections include Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, and Annie Bakers’s Janet Planet. 

This week’s MUBI GO pick is Kinds of Kindness. Four months after Emma Stone won the Best Actress Oscar® for her role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, the duo reteam for this provocative cinematic triptych. Co-starring Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chaou, Joe Alwyn, Hunter Schafer, and a remarkable Jesse Plemons, Kinds of Kindness is a boundary-testing study of the limits of control. Join now and see Kinds of Kindness in theaters with your MUBI GO ticket. 

A weekly movie ticket. Unlimited streaming. One membership. 2 months for $20. Offer ends July 11th.

I kept a list in my notes app for a week of things that felt like the opposite of filler. Walking between two cars and feeling the heat on your legs. Saying “I’m sorry” and meaning it. Coming home with a bag of plums and neither saving them nor putting them in the icebox. 

Grabbing the first person you see on your way back from the bathroom and asking, “Did Italy score?!” Killing the fly that has been buzzing around your apartment for days with the butt end of a tube of toothpaste, while on the phone. Brushing an eyelash off your husband’s cheek and telling him to make a wish. Tilting your head to the side and breathing really fast like a rabbit with an ear infection. 

The opposite of filler is lying so close in bed that your partner has one, big whale eye. It’s blowing cigarette smoke directly into your friend’s mouth (a bribe, so she doesn’t smoke her own) and asking, “More?” It’s a tweet, since deleted: "I want you to sew my life closed.”

I remember Italy.

Joe Brainard tilted his head to the side so much his neck became sore. Joe Brainard was often on speed. One of his favorite Alex Katz paintings was Upside Down Ada, of Katz’s wife with her hair fanning out—perhaps a Polaroid pose for another time. “If I’m a fool I don’t want to think about it,” he wrote, in How to Be Alone Again.

The simplicity of this line reminds me of the exchange at the beginning of Grace Paley’s short story Wants, between a woman and her ex-husband running into each other on the street. “Hello, my life,” she says. “What? What life? No life of mine,” he responds. 

As Dirt pushes into Fiction, I have been thinking a lot about short stories that feel like the opposite of filler. Earlier this month, we ran three stories, each with a different angle on the richness of life. In Those Paper Boats by Suchandrika Chakrabarti, a character’s world slowly fills up with origami. “As August neared its end, the flat quietened down; but she stayed, leaving a trail of those paper boats to your bed.”

In Splitting the Rabbit by Erin Somers, the narrator simultaneously writes and rewrites the story of her life. “‘Don’t listen to me, nothing I say means anything,’” she says, meaning the opposite.

That Joe Brainard cared so deeply about people seems to be the key to why his writing about “nothing” never feels empty. “I’m crazy about people. Not very intelligent. But smart. I want too much. What I want most is to open up. I keep trying,” he wrote in a piece called Autobiography. His diaries might narrate a bus trip from New York City to Vermont or what he can hear happening inside a house from his lawn chair. 

The difference between filler and not-filler in language comes down to language that is obsessed with itself vs. language about the limits of language. And I much prefer the latter. In Goodnight, Philip by Jordan Gisselbrecht, two characters attempt to describe finding and losing love without actually describing it—quickly reaching the limit of these similes:

“It’s like a bad cough all the time,” I said, reaching.

“So don’t smoke.”

“Or it’s like getting naked, removing your skin, neatly folding your skin over the chair. Having someone join you on the chair.”

My friend Kara tells me about a job she had in her early twenties. The job had no boundaries, she was overworked, she says, “But I was getting asked really good questions, every single day. I felt really alive. Unhappiness is the opposite of that. Nobody ever asking you any good questions.” 

I remember really good questions. 

Starting in 1949, Polaroid put famed photographer Ansel Adams on a $100 a month retainer. “He was around the labs regularly, offering commentary and occasionally getting drunk with the chemists. He stayed on the payroll for the rest of his professional life,” writes Bonanos, with an eventual raise. Many of Adams’ iconic landscapes were shot on a peel-apart Polaroid film called Type 55.

With Polaroid film, the filling is the invention. 

“As a Polaroid camera spit out its photo, rollers spread its cocktail of developer over the negative, including a green-gray chemical that blocked out light. Over the next few minutes, as the dyes migrated through the white background layer, the opacifier protected the picture underneath. Then it turned from opaque to clear, unfogging the image,” writes Bonanos. 

He calls this process, “a striptease: a slow reveal, one that keeps you guessing, then delivers.” Great writing does the same. “The emulsion was based on gelatin, and it remained soft and gooey under its Mylar cover for several hours, and sometimes more. If you pressed on the surface with something hard, like a dull pencil, you’d distort the image.”

I remember the Earth Room. 

Everything of value is just a room full of dirt when you’re not in it: Love, Art, Memory. Maybe it comes to you easily, but you have to justify holding onto it as the cost of everything around it keeps rising. The first time I visited the Earth Room, I remember wanting to touch or photograph it—which is expressly against the rules of the space. This time, I didn’t feel a need to own any piece of it. It was enough just to know it existed. 

A couple days after I visited last week, I was talking to my friend Brianna about a man she went out with two years ago. Their relationship (maybe that’s not even the right word) was short, but the sense of mutual recognition left a lasting impression. 

“It’s like you’re in a room and you think you’re alone,” she said, her hands moving deftly through her hair as she replaced a plastic roller. “Then you meet someone, and you realize there’s someone else in the room—they’ve been in the room the whole time.”

Earthworms can consume their weight in dirt per day. Enough for the imaginary worms in Walter De Maria’s room to find and lose each other many times over. Brianna was still styling her hair. I clasped my hands together. “I know exactly what you mean,” I told her.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• The Jim Henson Company is selling their iconic Jim Henson Company Lot. (The Wrap) 

• “Writers are kinda like drunks at the bar, telling the same old sad stories over and over again. Then you get sick of those stories, and you start to make up new ones.” Meaghan Garvey on Zach Bryan and Denis Johnson (GQ) 

• Rob Harvilla has the cure to our post-prestige TV malaise: bring 👏 back 👏 bloopers 👏 (New York Times Magazine)

• Cold Caller by Honeyglaze (Spotify)

• Tough by Quavo, LDR (Spotify)

• B.O.A.T. by Camila Cabello (Nick Léon 150 Trance edit) (Twitter)

• DA: I went on Wear Many Hats to talk about Taste, UBI, web3, Lil Yachty, perfume, tattoos and more. Thanks for having me! (Spotify)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Angel Food asks, what makes a great literary sex scene? (Angel Food)

• Do authors really need to spend their own money to make a book successful? Maris Kreizman answers. (LitHub)

• Olly Haynes on Dutch art collective KIRAC reads like “A Scandal In Bohemia” for the OnlyFans age. (The Fence)

• Can you ever really own an aesthetic? (It’s Nice That) 

• DA: I desperately need this dresser. (Good Behavior)

• “Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse.” Jessie Kindig walks up and down the metaphorical ladder from Thoreau’s wild apple tree. (The Point)

• A subway take on armpit hair. LET THE MAN SPEAK. (Subway Takes)

• Inside the movement to deprogram the attention economy. (New York Review of Architecture)

• ​​DA: Mary H.K. Choi’s account of her autism diagnosis made me weep. (The Cut)

Have a great weekend…