What's in my bag? I'm in my bag.

LIKE...

Being considered attractive in NYC—especially among writer-types scraping by in a broken, underfunded industry—offers only a marginal advantage. It's like adding cumin to a dish; it doesn't transform the meal, but it adds a touch. (My fellow immigrant princesses might challenge my take on cumin, but let's be so for real.)

In LA, meanwhile, I’d step outside without a wallet, YOLO-ing with the expectation that things magically work out because I’m attractive. I was often right, but looking back, that was a wild assumption. I could NEVER pull off that David Blaine-level stunt work in New York City. NEVER.

The people of New York City, including the transplants, are a hard-boiled bunch, navigating with their wit and credentials. It’s a vibe that is strikingly refreshing after spending time in Los Angeles where—and I mean this—nobody cares. In LA, your ticket into the club—both the metaphorical 'in-crowd' and an actual nightclub—hinges largely on who you know, and, if you're lacking in connections, how you look. Ideally, you have both. Personally, my connections come from media and Twitter, and I only managed to leverage them after I lost weight. The assertion of my personality, and the fact that I am an assemblage of interestingness is of no consequence to the people of LA because they do not care. This, I believe, is where the real difference between the coasts lies: the general level of collective interest/fucks given.

I recall being at Apt 200 surrounded by people to whom 'existential' might seem like a big word. This isn't me placing myself above them. They possess something I lack: the ability to detach. I believe "fab"—the favorite adjective of the fashion set—essentially comes down to this detachment. To be "fab" is to be free from overwhelming concerns. It’s that void-like quality I wrote about in my first post, but it’s also an incuriosity because you’re in your bag, ontologically speaking.

I would conjure the white girl vibe when I’d listen to music, almost dulling my other senses and causing me to feel what can only be described as the opposite of embodied: void-like. I could exist as an empty, diaphanous vessel unfilled by anything at all. There’s no burden of ‘identity’ in the club or the bedroom or the hammam or the garden or online as the avatar of your choosing–anywhere deemed a feminine space worth inhabiting. Online, especially, is where anyone can lay down their burdens—the thick coating of class and race, geography and gender–and escape the indignities of womanhood, blackness, otherness. No fat…no trauma…no spiritual heaviness…no intensity…only purity. A blank canvas no one can ascribe assumptions and project onto. You’re the default player in the game. A babygirl.

I've come a long way from my Apt 200 days (a whole three months). Today, I can confidently declare myself moderately fab, but my version of fab is very much babygirl—meaning, I am still sincere and earnest. I’m still in my tattered Coach bag, caring a little more than is required but vibing more than ever.

Some might interpret my recent embrace of "fab" as poseurdom, picturing me as just another maladjusted babygirl hanging on every word of a maladjusted gay guy. There's some truth in that, but there's also more to it. I'm not a "catfish" creating a false identity for deceit or personal gain. Instead, I see "fab" as a grafted and layered addition to my identity, akin to a collage.

As I explored in Hyperreal Individualism, editing one’s identity can make you a target, but it can also provide a tactical advantage—real or perceived— over competitors. "Fab" is one such edit; getting skinny is another. These edits are feasible because everything—"truth," "identity," "gender," "career"—is a sort of fiction. The only real thing is vibes for the herds.

Herds of people rapidly communicate through the collective unconscious, marrying vibes to aesthetic cues because, in our hyper-visual world, aesthetics spread quickly, boosting visibility and lowering the bar for in-group adoption of ideas.  

The archetype of the sheep represents conformity, herd mentality, and a tendency to follow the crowd without questioning or thinking critically. Like sheep, humans move in herds without motivations or aims, forming directionless groupings with no discernible agenda or perspective despite their collective behavior—conveniently categorized as “-core”; “-pilled”— suggesting otherwise…suggesting a sense of genuine direction…suggesting a sense of being in your bag for real.

In 1998, eco-interventionist artist Agnes Denes unveiled a large-scale installation at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. The installation introduced live sheep into the Academy garden, creating a "strong paradox" by disrupting the lacquered environment with their presence, which appeared absurd, if not unbelievable, in that context. The surrealist symbolism of the sheep represents not only all animals at an archetypal level but also all humanity.

Denes evokes an image of threads and fabrics—society's social fabric—interwoven and distorting, fraying gratuitously in many directions, impacting millions of other threads, much like how a noise signal can affect the trajectory of a herd of sheep, causing them to veer rapidly in the opposite direction. In the accompanying text for the exhibit, she asserted that the world was evolving into one "independent society" where various aspects of human existence were intertwining and interfacing for the first time. Denes was addressing globalization and the advent of the internet, which have made it increasingly challenging to delineate social and geographical boundaries as technological advancements continue to merge sporadically into competing surrealities at a rapid pace. 

The emergence of the social internet further blurs the distinctions between "real life" and "online," as well as between truth and deception, accelerating cultural movements and trends while casting a profound shadow. This shadow is where Jungian psychology and surrealism intersect. Dr. Dennis Merrit, a Jungian archetypal psychologist I spoke to, describes this "inflection point" in his works on Ecopsychology—a field that emerged in the 1990s from Carl Jung's teachings—as an opportunity for profound introspection into "how our attitudes, values, perceptions, and behaviors affect the environment...we are capable of forming a deeper connection with nature that will naturally foster environmental protection." Hence, eco-interventionist art like Denes' sheep should, according to Dr. Merrit, aim to promote a "'think globally, act locally, think archetypally—but manifest uniquely' approach," reshaping dominant epistemologies to reflect our modern world, fostering a shift away from art that merely generates noise and signals for the herd.

In a 2009 web post for The Atlantic titled "Climate Change and the Culture of Surrealism," Lisa Margonelli argues against such staticity and passivity if eco-interventionist art is to remain relevant: "Surrealism, once a vibrant historical art movement, had been reduced to a ‘passive spectacle. But when [Surrealism] was started by European artists struggling to come to terms with the horrors of World War One, Surrealism was a movement for social change. I guess nearly a hundred years of modernity have turned surrealism into a passive spectacle."

The late Robert Bly used surrealist imagery in his deep image poems, a term coined by Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly. Deep image poems foreground geography and concretize archetypal imagery, allowing practitioners to imagine the written word as a wild, living, breathing wonder, freely, buoyantly undulating, rushing, and flowing to an innate rhythm. Bly believed that, without this intention from the start, "psychic energy"–vibes–could not be imbued and imprinted upon his poetry, thus rendering his writings static and passive, limited to figurative language. 

Surrealist symbolism like Denes’ sheep, at the most meaningful level, illuminates inequalities, harnessing the force and potency of primal imagery to reposition the familiar and the absurd by leveraging primal ecological imagery to scrutinize the Anthropocene, among other themes. At its most superficial level, however, surrealism coheres effortlessly with our image-based, hyper-visual culture, making it the perfect vehicle of expression for our modern world, capturing mundanity alongside absurdity.

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