🍒 CHERRYPICKING #007
Twinks v. Dolls Cigarette Race goes corporate, Camila Cabello goes hyperpop, and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison
I’m back from vacation and already in the process of moving yet again. At this point, I wonder why I even bother unpacking my suitcases. Heat has begun creeping back into my life, or more specifically humidity. She’s a bitch. Like a coworker who always comments on your lunches… always ready with a disparaging thing to say about the state of your work bag or any other petty insult she can hurl at you. Still, why can’t you get to sleep?
In the morning you will take a cold shower, these help, but only so long as you stay under the faucet you’ve been meaning to repair.
I get like this in the summer, lose track of time, belly down next to a window fan, a cold glass of ice pressed to my sweaty forehead for a moment’s relief. I begin to arrange my days around when I can get into a body of water, and if no such puddle exists I make penance with the universe and accept my fate.
Does anyone still remember popsicles?
I visit my best friend and swim in his parent’s pool. I am an eight-year-old boy again all-consumed by trucks or dinosaurs (or in my particular case the tiny glass trinkets his mother keeps on their shelf.) My popsicle is orange, which is an inferior flavor but I don’t think it matters much. It is summer, it is hot, and I am a boy. I hope it rains tonight, I hope there are still popsicles in my freezer.
🚬 Twinks v. Dolls
What started as a single tweet and accompanied video, the Twinks vs. Dolls Cigarette race is entering its third official year. You may be reading those words and thinking to yourself, none of these words are in the Bible, and you’d be correct, or maybe not, I’ve never actually read that book. What’s it about anyways?
We may have reached peak-Bushwickification here. Hyperpop twinks in “God’s Favorite” hats and Dolls donning their Leak NYC bodysuits crowd into warehouses and see who can smoke the most cigarettes the fastest. Lung cancer be damned!
In the years since its inception this phenomenon has grown exponentially. This years games were held at Singers. Likely spurned by social media, and the novelty of the event, seemingly everyone wants to be a part of the “Olympics of Bushwick.” Everyone wants to say that they saw the toe-sucking competition or that they got spit on by a Doll named Luna. Well, maybe not everybody, but most of the circles I am in for sure.
I won’t engage in handwringing over any of this, I know this is a performance in filth politics. I know this is an opportunity for many members of my community to feel empowered and justified in their particular gender-presentation and a way to shirk off some of these prescribed expectations. Still, I can’t help but feel that this event has grown in a way not dissimilar to Pride parades themselves. Who will be the corporate sponsor for the Twinks vs. Dolls cigarette race next year? Are we only a few years out from a Netflix original rom-com set in the baked bean kiddie pool?
Perhaps this is the natural transition of all things queer. What starts as radically unique, something ironically humorous or truly edgy, become a mainstream event that everyone (including corporations) wants to be a part of and say they participated in. Not so much for the authentic experience of it, but more-so for the internet clout it can provide.
📚 The Bluest Eye
I purchased my copy of “The Bluest Eye” at a Savers in Peabody, MA for $2.49. The author, Toni Morrison, as a figure, has loomed over my literary palette for years—being continually recommended to me through friends, booklists, and podcasts. (Which I also see as friends because I have what we in the business call a: “parasocial relationship,” or whatever.)
I laid belly down on a boulder at Dead Horse Beach like a lizard and tore into the novel. My friends, it would seem, were right. I never had any doubt that Morrison, considered one of the masters of the art form, would provide and enjoyable read—but still the expectations were impossibly high. I was afraid that I would read only the first three pages, realize the work was incredibly heady, grow disinterested, and move on to greener pastures—by which I mean scrolling on TikTok.
This simply was not the case. I devoured the story of Pecola, a young foster girl growing up Black in Lorraine, Ohio. This story is not something I can relate to necessarily, (which itself I think is a bit of a literary nonstarter, as why should the reader be entirely reflected by a novel in order to find its value?) yet this difference in perspective is in fact the very premise of the novel. The story, which sees a mental unstable woman, and asks “how did she get here?” allows the reader to engage more wholly with the lived experience of someone entirely (and hopefully) different than us.
Pecola’s life is not easy, she is considered crazy and ugly, she experiences abuse and trauma and a life so burdened that it is a wonder she made it through at all. Yet she is used as a scapegoat and an example for her community—something like a boogieman. Morrison uses this perspective to ask the reader who, or what, they use in this same way. Who do we look to to make ourselves better saying, “well at least I’m not them.” And is not this line of thinking an inherently superior and anti-humanist one. Does this show we lack empathy?
I finished the novel with a notebook filled with scribbles of questions, and thoughts, and new vocabulary words that blossomed out like poetry. I was only scratching the surface of this novel, of this I knew for certain, and yet even in the things I was still unclear about, the things that caused my stomach to drop, the things that disquieted my soul, I felt better for all of it. Believe the hype, Morrison is one of our greatest literary vessels, and if you have $2.49— and a mind willing to be prodded—you have the ability to be moved by her words.
💿 B.O.A.T
We will be young forever, this is why we snarl back at any reminder otherwise. This is why the music, fashion, and identity of millennials became cringe in the last few years, and why millennials in turn retorted with near-constant think-piecing about there own cultural upheaval. But sometimes, these ideas re-enter the zeitgeist reimagined through nostalgia and re-appropriated by a younger generation who themselves are certain they will never age out. And somehow, this is a key theme to the latest album from an ex-Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello.
The album, something like Spring Breakers meets Motomami, serves as a celebration of Miami, aimless youth, and a lot of partying. At first the album seems filled with disparate concepts, dead-ends, and aesthetic postering that falls just short of authenticity. And for sure, the album is not a home-run, it’s messy, unfocused, and features entirely too much Drake. But isn’t that exactly what our 20s are like?
C,XOXO, I feel, hits its stride with the track “B.O.A.T.” which features an off-the-wall Pitbull sample. The ass-shaking anthem plays as if it is being heard from another room almost like a far-off memory. Here Camila offers some of her softer and more introspective lyrics in stark contract to the carefree “Hotel Room Service.” Sandwiched together, this sample provides a reminder that the music we hear now— the songs of our nightlife— will one day be played on an oldies station or reinterpreted by another, younger musician.
There is a sadness in this, for sure. Like looking at a photo of yourself at 12 and realizing at that time you thought you were a grown-up, only to see a child with a baby face and a bowl cut. This feeling tinges the interlude “305tildie” which leads into “B.O.A.T.” Here we see a sense of juvenile play-acting, a perfectly potent reminder that while we might feel we are the most mature versions of ourselves, time reveals with hindsight just how far we still have to grow. Time has a funny way of coming for us all. The music of the early 2000s is now retro, the girl groups are considered legacy acts, and we are—whether we are ready to settle with it or not—getting older. Memento mori.
AND…
For more of my writing, check out the first chapter of the book I’m working on. The feedback has been so fulfilling already and I am excited to get more of my thoughts out on the page. Chapter one, Spark Plugs, follows the story of Rory as he self-medicates and crumbles under the pressures of his University writing program, causing him to move out of the city and into what feels like the end of his life. Read it here.
Read more from CHERRYPICKING:
🐆CHERRYPICKING #001 | 👽CHERRYPICKING #002 | 🐑CHERRYPICKING #003