by Alina Simone
“A new framework for art criticism,” Taj said, still writing. “Something’s either just titillating or titillating plus.”
“Or it’s just not titillating,” Anna added.
“T, NT, or TP, then?”
“I guess.”
Taj paused to spoon some ful mudammas into his mouth with a pita triangle.
“I’ll tell you a story about Paul,” Taj said, “but it’s probably not the kind of thing he wants to get around.”
“I promise,” Anna said, trying to hide her excitement. It really only hit her now: she was sitting with a guy who knows Gilman! This put things on an entirely different level, didn’t it? But then Anna realized something else. She wasn’t just excited because Taj knew Gilman; she was excited because things were about to get fucked up. Already—and without getting drunk or high—they had stumbled into the zone of inappropriate intimacy. She could tell Taj things. And Taj could tell her things. Not everything, maybe, but a lot of things. Things they might not tell anyone else, because they either knew them too well or not well enough. Why was it that she never felt this way with other women? Brandon was the closest thing. But she and Brandon had something in common. They had been cubicle serfs at Pinter, Chinski and Harms together. A “loser bond” they called it. Because theirs weren’t the kinds of jobs anyone aspired to but the kind you simply ended up at, sucked in by promises of health benefits and discounted Metrocards. You made excuses for being there until the excuses became the reasons themselves. So she and Brandon had Chinski and Harms, but what did she and Taj have?
“—had signed up for this special six-week seminar with Herzog out in LA,” Taj was saying. “It was called Ephemeral Cinema or Cinema of the Ephemeral or something, and every week everyone in the class was supposed to make a three-minute movie and bring it in for crit. Paul was starting to get a name for himself in certain circles, but hadn’t hit on the magic bullet yet. At the time he was in a Mario Giacomelli phase, shooting these supercontrasty, eight-millimeter films at night. Basically in the dark. Grain big as golf balls.” Taj was tearing open a Sweet’n Low packet as he spoke, pouring its contents onto the table. “I think I still have some of those in a box somewhere.”
Anna had no idea what Taj was talking about, but it was all interesting. She ate her egg.
“So Paul was showing his boring movies in crit every week and no one liked them. Then he comes home one day and his roommate is fucking some guy. He had found this cheap studio to sublet but it was a share, so he and this other guy basically lived in one big room together.”
“I had a roommate like that once,” Anna began. “In college we—”
“Yeah,” Taj went on, ignoring her. “I forget all the details, but I think the guy was like, some kind of Puerto Rican queen. Or Vietnamese queen?”
“An ethnic queen?” Anna supplied helpfully.
“Something. And maybe he was fucking this other guy for money? I don’t know. I remember Paul telling me there was something weird about it. Maybe they were dressed up like Pilgrims or, like, finger-painting with their balls—whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly normal. Plus, of course, they’re both totally jacked up on something. Paul had crit the next day and he hadn’t made his movie yet, so he thinks, What the hell? And grabs his Nizo. He sets the camera down on something and hits RECORD. He shoots them for three minutes, all one take. They probably didn’t even notice, or didn’t care, if they did.”
“That’s so messed up—”
“Yeah, not exactly what you’d call a triumph of the human spirit.” Taj paused to pour the contents of another Sweet’n Low on the table and began to draw a spiral in the sugar with his finger, a sort of Spiral Jetty. Like land art, Anna thought, only table art. After coming across Yagihashi’s turd sculpture in City Park she’d done some Google searching on modern sculpture and now remembered that one of Smithson’s other works was called Broken Sugar. Would it be funny, she wondered, if she subtly formed Broken Sugar out of sugar on the table, as a response to Taj’s Spiral Jetty? Maybe not, she decided.
“Anyway,” Taj went on, “the next day Paul had crit and of course his ‘movie’ makes a big impression. A lot of people hated it. Herzog was intrigued. But mostly—here’s the thing—people cared. They argued. When he was showing his slow-as-shit ‘abstractions’ no one cared. Now that there was all this verbal fisting going on, everybody all excited, and Paul at the center of the whole thing, he was loving it. He told me that’s when he had his epiphany.”
“Whoa,” Anna breathed, wondering how much of this was documented on the Internet, hoping none of it was.
“Whoa is right. In a way, Nowism was born right at that moment.”
Anna was confused—hadn’t Maoism been around for a long time?—but held her tongue.
“Even then, I remember thinking, you know, man, this is like a cliché that hasn’t become a cliché yet. It’s something you’ve just discovered that’s actually been there forever. This all goes back to our theory. Where’s the plus? Give me the plus, man. It just feels too fucking easy. And this is coming from me, who’s all about hyperrealism, you know?” Taj pulled his chair in, closer to Anna. “Like, I was just thinking before you sat down—see those people?” Taj pointed to the threesome at the neighboring table, dropping his voice a register. “I’d love to film them.”
There were two women and a man gathered around a laptop. The women both looked, as her mother would say, like they’d “lived a lot of life.” The man had stringy hair and an uneven sunburn that reminded Anna of guys who hang around small-town bus stations asking for change for a twenty.
“They’re looking at footage of mermaids on YouTube. They’ve been here all day,” Taj whisper-hissed. The three heads leaned in toward the screen at the same time. “See? Imagine that shot from above. Their heads all coming together in this sort of white-trash pinwheel—”
She hadn’t ever considered things that way, shot from above. But now Anna was thinking—and she was pretty sure this was racist of her—that these weren’t the kind of people she expected to even have laptops. It was really something, though, the way even people in neighborhoods like this—places with too many notary publics and payday loan shops, where the bodegas all accept WIC—now had laptops and wireless cafés. And then Anna couldn’t help but think, What is a notary public, exactly? And why did poor people need so many things notarized anyway? And why was it that she thought of them as poor and herself as not poor, anyway, when she still had nineteen thousand dollars’ worth of student loans and no job? Where had that logic come from?
“This is it! This is it! It goes by really fast, see?” the fat lady said to the other two. “Shitsville. Tony, go back a sec. Uh-huh—there! That’s not one of those fake suits. You can tell by the way it’s flapping.” Anna watched the woman tapping at the screen with her index finger, thinking, You’re not supposed to touch that.
“My niece said there’s a place in Florida where they do that. Girls in mermaid suits. They have a whole show underwater,” said the man with the stringy hair. “She lives near there, in Tampa.”
“Do you agree?” Taj was asking.
“Hm?”
“That anything could be a camera? You know, this could be a camera,” he said, indicating his pen. “Or this,” he said, tapping on his glasses. “You can tape whatever you want, but you have to shape it. Otherwise there’s no movie. There’s just footage.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Anna said. It was true that Gilman’s movies might be better if they were a little more shaped.
“So where’d you go to film school anyway? NYU? USC?”
“No—”
“Miami?”
“No, I mean, no film school,” Anna said. From the look on Taj’s face she feared this could be a deal-breaker. “I went to grad school for Slavic studies for a little while but—”
“You mean you’ve never even studied theory?” Taj enunciated each of these words slowly and clearly, as if Anna were a Japanese tourist asking for directio
ns to Century 21.
“Well, not art theory, no.” Anna said. Her eyes dropped to her mug as she waited for him to dismiss her. It looked thick enough to withstand a jihad.
“Finally,” Taj said, almost to himself. “I could kiss you right now.”
Anna looked up, wondering if she’d heard correctly, to find Taj staring at her with shining eyes.
“So here’s the one thing I’m asking everyone. I don’t need a person with skill, or experience, or even talent, though that would be nice,” Taj added, chewing. “Not that you don’t have any of these things, but I just need someone I can trust absolutely. One hundred percent. And someone who trusts me. This whole thing is stressful enough and I can’t have people second-guessing me.” Taj pushed his empty plate aside. He put his coffee cup on top of his plate, and on top of that, his napkin, fork, and knife. “Do you think you can give me that?” said Taj, still not looking at Anna, but rather at the ketchup bottle that he was moving to align with the condiments. “Your absolute, complete trust?”
Noticing these tics, Anna realized the ball was now in her court. “Of course.” Her voice was clear and free of doubt. “Yes.”
“OK?”
“OK.”
“Cool,” Taj said. “God, I’m sorry—I didn’t even get a chance to ask you about your stuff.”
Anna batted her hand dismissively, hoping this conveyed the notion her “stuff” was monumental enough to survive his disregard.
“Either way,” Taj said, flicking an eye back down at his cell. “It’s almost four. I better let you go.”
Not wanting to be let go, she opened her mouth to suggest more coffee, but a pretty brunette had already appeared tableside.
“Sorry. Are you Taj?” She smiled down at him.
“And you must be…,” he said, consulting his list, “Béla Tarr?”
The girl swung her courier bag down on a chair. “That’s me!”
“Well, thanks,” Anna said, standing up and gathering her things. But Taj was smiling at Béla Tarr now. Her moment had clearly passed.
8
When Anna got home, she googled the shit out of Simone, whose real name, it turned out, was Gerda Bergner. Gerda’s story was biblical in its dual simplicity and complexity. As a nineteen-year-old German exchange student, she had sent a video fan letter to a filmmaker she admired, a much older man, offering to fly to the city where he lived and have sex with him. In the video (which had been removed from YouTube, much to Gawker’s consternation), Gerda was reportedly wearing nothing but kneesocks as she cavorted around a dorm room reciting the Duino Elegies. The filmmaker pretended to say no before he said yes, and Gerda flew out to meet him. Over the next three days, she filmed their assignations in airport bathrooms, on motel bedspreads, and atop various wood laminate surfaces with her cell phone. The finished videos, which she first posted on her Tumblr alongside a series of brutally explicit diary entries, looked as though they’d been directed by American Apparel. The filmmaker consented to be taped for reasons unclear to anyone, including his longtime girlfriend, but perhaps once the nipple clamps were in place and the shaft of his penis slathered in Nutella, such concessions came easily. Nonetheless, Gerda gave the filmmaker the pseudonym James Franco and replaced his head with an ominous black dot. Neither of them could have anticipated the geyser of publicity that accompanied the publication of the videos on Squeee!, an obscure webzine whose audience, though small, consisted entirely of gladiatorial retweeters. One week and eight million views later, everyone was outraged and excited that Gerda had fucked this guy knowing he had a girlfriend, posted the videos online, called it art, and then had the gall to take as a pseudonym the name of the self-martyring Christian mystic Simone Weil. Everyone except Gerda, who accepted her notoriety with surprising sangfroid, as evidenced in an interview with Gawker that Anna dug up.
GAWKER: People hate you. Does that make you sad?
SIMONE: No.
GAWKER: Why not?
SIMONE: If people hate me, it means they hate women.
GAWKER: But a lot of women hate you.
(Simone shrugs.)
GAWKER: Wasn’t Franco’s girlfriend the real loser in all this?
SIMONE: If perception is reality, I could be any number of things. I don’t believe I did anything wrong.
GAWKER: Your critics accuse you of seducing your way to artistic credibility.
SIMONE: Is that a question?
GAWKER: Are you just a slut with a cell phone?
SIMONE: I have a right to make art about my life with the face and body I was given, just as I have a right to shape my own narrative. If “James Franco” had seduced me, instead of I him, and I had filmed those encounters from the vantage point of victimhood, people would be much more accepting of that. They might praise me for “reversing the male gaze.” But does “reversal of the male gaze” constitute a legitimate female gaze? I don’t want my films to be viewed only as a counterfactual to a male point of view. The viewer feels threatened because I am a woman unafraid of expressing, exploring, and documenting my sexuality. My advice to them? Get over it.
GAWKER: One last question: Who is “James Franco”?
SIMONE: “James Franco” is Paul Gilman.
By the time Brie came home two days later and asked about the box, Anna had practically forgotten it was still there, sitting by the door.
“It’s good to see you getting into something,” Brie said, and Anna could hear the unspoken “finally” at the end of that sentence. But mostly, Brie didn’t want to talk about Anna, she wanted to talk about her situation at work, which had gotten fucked up lately. And her boss, Pom, so named by the other interns because she drank four Pom Wonderfuls at her desk each day—a $112-a-week juice habit, Brie pointed out.
“So Pom hands me her phone and tells me to dial star two and activate the international data plan from midnight on the tenth through the eighteenth, when she’ll be in Iceland. So I’m like, OK, and I call the guy and give him the code or whatever and he puts it in the system.” Anna was standing in the doorway of Brie’s room, watching her sort through clothes she’d brought home from Rishi’s, sniffing crotches, asses, armpits.
“Then, last night, I get this call from fucking Reykjavík. It’s like, three in the morning, and of course it’s her. She starts screaming that her phone doesn’t work and her green light keeps blinking.” Brie held a pair of jeggings up to the light. “God, I washed these like once and they’re already totally faded.”
“Sounds bad,” Anna said.
“So she’s like, ‘Call Sprint customer service.’ And I’m like, ‘But you’re the one with the phone. What if they want you to do something to it?’ And she starts screaming, ‘I don’t give a shit, just call them! Tell them my green light is blinking!’”
Of course, here Anna thought about pointing out that it wasn’t like this was the kind of job that, you know, paid actual money. Surely Brie could just walk away, couldn’t she? But that would only lead to some ardent speech about what a great networking opportunity this was, how all the interns who made it past April last year got sent to Bonnaroo, how much a recommendation from Pom would help with getting even-higher-level internships at places Anna had never heard of. It would only make her feel old, and besides, she didn’t have time for all this right now. There was only one more night to finish Taj’s assignment, and she hadn’t even started.
He’d called her yesterday morning while she was still eating breakfast in front of the computer.
“Anna? Taj.”
“I didn’t think you’d call.” She had begun to tell herself it was just one of those things.
“Sorry. Multiple situations,” he was shouting, and Anna could hear loud noise in the background, some kind of jackhammering. “I’m on set and it’s sort of crazy around here.”
“If you’re busy—”
“No. I’ve just been thinking, before we get started, it would be a good idea to sort of break you in.”
“What does that m
ean?”
“Desensitize you a little. The way I work, it’s pretty … well, I think I told you. It’s going to require a different mode of thinking.”
And then he’d explained the assignment: she was to go on Chat Roulette and record all of her video chats over the course of two unbroken hours. There was only one rule: she had to pose as anyone but herself.
“Don’t worry, it’s something I’m asking everyone to do,” Taj had told her, which of course only made Anna worry more, knowing there was still an “everyone.”
Chat Roulette. She vaguely remembered that fad. When had it been a thing? 2008? 2010? She was surprised to learn it still existed. What happened to sites like these after the Internet hordes had come and gone? It must be the digital equivalent of Area 51 by now.
“Isn’t Chat Roulette all, you know, penises and stuff?” Anna said, stumbling over the word penises, getting over it.
“Then talk to them,” Taj said. Anna could think of nothing she wanted to say to a penis, divorced from the head of someone she knew. “This is about losing your inhibitions,” he added.
Her eyes skidded guiltily toward the door, and the Pandora’s box filled with all the movies she would never make, movies as brave and raw as Gilman’s. Taj’s diagnosis was dead on—she was inhibited.
“Pretend like you’re the star of a Gilman movie,” Taj said, reading her thoughts. Anna turned the idea over in her mind, felt an unexpected thrill at the prospect of an adventure.
“What do I do with the footage?”
“You bring me a DVD,” Taj said. “I’ll e-mail you directions. We’re shooting in Williamsburg.”
* * *
By the time Anna felt motivated to go over to the dollar store to buy her disguise, the lights of the bodegas were smeared like cheap watercolors across the darkening sky above Fifth Avenue. She found two 99-cent stores right across the street from each other—a synthetic-housewares version of the classic Burger King/McDonalds face-off. She chose Lucky Gift 99¢ over 99¢ Plus and Gifts, where, either way, everything actually cost $1.08 with tax. Inside, it smelled like naphthalene and Febreze and there was barely any room to move. Everything gave off that sad feeling of cheap things about to be broken. Once in the party aisle, Anna found that her options were quite limited. Halloween was long gone. The only mask left on the shelf, amid the paddleball games and super cap guns, was a pair of oversize cat’s-eye glasses covered in green sequins that came with a matching wand. It would have to do. Out on the street, Anna threw away the wand and slipped the glasses on, just to get into the mood. By the time she reached home, she regretted it; the plastic earpieces digging hard into her temples had given her a headache. Upstairs, she passed by Brie’s closed bedroom door, through which she could clearly hear her retelling the story of Pom’s Blackberry to someone on the phone.
