CARMA IS MY BOYFRIEND, GRIMES IS JUST A FRIEND
in which I cannot even get into the Azealia Banks threesome of it all because that deserves its own entire novella— but google it if you don't know.
So much of the work I do is underneath the tip of the iceberg of what I actually share with an audience, that I thought I’d try to write about some of the “researching” I do for my projects — i.e. hyper-fixating down a k-hole of search terms and message board links till 3:26 am. It will probably only be of interest to me.... haha… unless…🥺
These liner notes are an experiment. Speaking of: my Twitter!
Anyway! Last week I did a preview screening of a short I made with Brian Joseph Davis, my frequent collaborator and best dad friend (friend who is also a dad). It’s called Carma with a C. I haven’t done a live event in New York since before covid, and I forgot how important it feels to my sanity. I’m not someone who can write in isolation, and of course, I can’t perform in isolation either (though I’ve definitely entrapped my friends into being an audience at my house during the pandemic: there was nowhere for them to go 😈 )
Michael Seidlinger (who wrote a book so scary the entire staff of the NY Review of Books peed themselves at the same time, yuck!) and Emily Schultz (a mysterious sleuth) also read from their terrifying works. At some point soon I’ll be able to share the film with everyone, but in the meantime, it’s all over my social media, Carma, Carma, Karma!!***
***btw can you believe that Taylor Swift released this perfect song Karma, mere months after we made Carma? I can, because I am pretty sure she has been watching me and using my life as inspiration for her music for the last few albums.
This isn’t going to be about Taylor Swift though, it’s going to be about another musician-who-menstruates whose work has meant a lot to me over the years, and whose identity has felt like a model of sorts for my own, but then freakin’ disappointed me by being a scab!
There’s a particular category of cultural objects that compel me to make work by irritating me— things that snag my attention from out of the information stream that shoots out of my screens to waterboard me on the daily. They tend to feel like cultural touchstones for me to some extent, but also make me feel extra-alienated and confused about other humans. That’s why I end up writing papers about the Ice Bucket Challenge for my PhD program, or writing a Seinfeld-episode play about Hillary Clinton’s likeability issues. This also explains why a lot of my work ends up being about social media, because it really chaps my ass on there!
For the past few years, my attention has been uncomfortably snagged on Grimes’ relationship with Elon Musk, specifically her social media defenses of his labor practices and his politics, all while trying to hang onto her twitter-bio cred as an “anti-imperialist.”
Naomi Fry wrote brilliantly (duh) about the way their couple-debut at the Met Gala felt not just irritating or jarring in the way everything clickable online constantly does, but actually kind of melancholy for many people— almost sad. She writes there was
“ultimately a sense of deep disappointment in many people’s responses to the new couple, which revealed a nostalgia for a time when political differences translated more securely into differences of taste, and vice versa.”
The part of the narrative that really made me squirm came later— as Grimes began “clapping back” at critics of her relationship with Musk. On Twitter, Grimes was regularly dragged for becoming cringe for capitalism; this is back when I was actually on Twitter, before Grimes’ boyfriend turned it into an even bigger poop mountain than it already was.
Btw, it’s quite literally not fake news.
I don’t think Elon Musk is intelligent or interesting, so I don’t have that much to say about him except that I think there are better ways to get back at your shitty, abusive father than by being a shitty, abusive boss. Oh, and husband.
However, I did/do have high regard for Grimes as an artist— I still think Art Angels is a work of absolute fucking genius, and hugely admire the ways she has control over the production of her work, including her unbelievably fantastic self-directed music videos, like this one, which is basically everything my eyes and ears have ever wanted in one place. Or this one, which she directed for Oblivion, a song about her sexual assault experience. Watching it makes me feel a lot of overwhelming things in my chest, and I want to write more about it someday when I’m ready, which is not today.
I definitely had something beyond ego-transference with Grimes, some sense of creative kinship that surpassed para-social fandom. She was an artist whose career gave me hope for myself, I thought we were similar in some way: freaky high femmes interested in creating catchy popular art, but with the aesthetic aggression borne of weirdo alt origin stories (underground Montreal distortion synth for her, West Philly DIY warehouses & conceptual poetry for me). We were two short shrimpy girls in weird outfits trying to make art that was pretty but also scary, who wanted to star in their own compositions as performers but didn’t particularly feel comfortable performing as their “real” selves. We both had small boobs and got harassed by guys in the indie scene, were both weirdos in high school and Spice Girls fans as babies— you get it.
Art Angels was my soundtrack for many years. I had sex with my first girlfriend playing it on repeat, I ran around the Silverlake reservoir and daydreamed about making movies listening to it, I cried over a breakup with a TV writer to the upbeat chorus of California (“you only like me when you think I’m looking sad”!)
I didn’t consciously realize I was also projecting my politics onto her until the news came out that she was dating Musk, and all of a sudden I felt personally betrayed. I was walking around in a fully grumpy mood for days, I swear.
It’s not the first time I’ve been bummed out by one of my creative faves revealing themselves to be not-actually-an-extension of my mimetic desire for a coherent identity, but this one particularly bothered me. Probably because at the time I myself was involved with someone corporate and conservative who held all the financial power in our relationship, and I had my share of defensiveness and misgivings about it, while at the same time I felt like I needed to prove to myself and the world that it could be okay, that I could be okay. I didn’t want to be someone who chose a romantic partner whose values and politics contradicted mine, I didn’t want to be a faker, I didn’t want to be deluding myself, and I didn’t want to become complacent. I didn’t want to think about the fact that I might actually feel trapped. So when I was confronted with Grimes being an apologist for her union-busting oligarch boyf, it hit me right in the fontanelle of identity anxiety.
And the fontanelle punch smacked me right onto set! In Carma with a C I made Elon a power lesbian, with a girlfriend who was an aspiring Matilda Djerf, GOOPy bicoastal influencer. The character is less interesting than Grimes, but more representative visually of the kind of Rick Caruso voting anti-vax pick-me girl I see taking on this kind of role on Instagram.
Carma’s overlord partner is a power lesbian because let’s go lesbians! but also because I’d rather screen kiss one (especially when played by the devastating Olivia Jampol). As a queer person, I’m also always interested in watching the ways capitalism gets us to confuse identity politics with actual progress— I’d of course rather we had a lesbian president, but not as much as I want universal healthcare, and why is it that I feel like I’m only allowed to choose one?
As the years have worn on, Grimes seems to have pivoted from saying there’s no way there’s actual union busting going on in electric fast car funville, to asserting that actually unions aren’t even a good solution, actually, and you know what would be better than a union? is GAMING with NFTs!! I can’t even get into the theory behind that (blockchain… coinbase…. equating a utopia with the elimination of all jobs besides being a content creator), but basically she asks, why would you be a janitor when you could just play video games! I do think it’s interesting how in these Silicon Valley fantasies, the jobs that will be automated and eliminated are always like, “janitor” or “farmer” and never the jobs that actually make more sense to automate, like “manager”, “boss” or “C-suite".
She also came up with the soothing theory that AI was actually the “fastest path to Communism,” in her famous Proposition for the Communists, which concluded that “enforced farming is not a vibe.”
Grimes’ vibe, in other words, was no longer focussed on arguing that Elon was an ethical capitalist who respected workers, but full-on Silicon Valley Burning Man escalationist who drank a full barrel of the libertarian LARP fantasy ball Kool Aid and now is making the call from inside the Master’s House.
Look, everyone tends to be defensive of their romantic relationship while they’re in it, which I think is pretty understandable—especially when it sucks! As little animals, humans are evolutionarily predisposed to want to prove their ability to form high-value bonds with other humans, as we’ve evolved to be fundamentally group-inclusion oriented for our survival. That said, Grimes’ defensiveness and equivocation was especially hard to watch.
It’s my impression that the greater the wealth gap becomes in our society, the more intensely the effects of economic power imbalance are felt in a personal relationship. Wealth becomes an island of safety in a sea of lava, and it takes a very evolved rich person not to feel entitled to take advantage of that in some way— which definitely happens, I’ve seen it happen in other people’s relationships… just not in my own. Wealth is one common source of power imbalance, another is age, and then there’s the old classic, “gender” (if you don’t know what I mean by gendered power imbalance in relationships, honey, I’d like to direct you to my favorite site google dot com). Not all imbalanced relationships are going to be abusive or coercive, but in my experience, it’s a lot easier for them to go that way. Incidentally, have you guys all seen the White Lotus season finale yet? You got this!
By the way, my financially imbalanced relationship ended up, like, really bad. Which is, just like Oblivion, something I will be writing about someday when I feel ready, but not today.
There’s one more reason I can think of that this story bummed me out so bad. The messaging I received as an AFAB youth emphasized that marriage would create security, and somewhere along the line, I replaced that narrative with the hope that creative success would offer me some degree of protection and power, that my work could become a life raft in the late-capitalist ocean of lava. And Grimes, by any definition, had achieved creative success, in many ways seemed to be living the greatest aspirations I have for my work. Yet there she was, apparently seeking refuge on the island of the world’s richest Redditor, willing to walk back her beliefs in order to protect the relationship, either consciously compromising or deluding herself. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe her politics were always a little underbaked, as she herself says, “My politics are literally insane. I’ll probably go down for it in the end.”
Maybe artists shouldn’t be expected to talk about politics. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to talk about this! Lol.
Loved this wander with the hitherto unknown Grimy one. Needless to say, I’ve cancelled my order of twin Teslas.
I was just looking at the lyrics to Genesis earlier today and thinking of how much I liked the song a few years ago never having read what they actually are until now...so sad...like a premonition of everything (& what you wrote above)