July 23, 2000
with mad gratitude to Ara Taylor
Either click image to enlarge,
or
July 23, 2000
with mad gratitude to Ara Taylor
Either click image to enlarge,
or
Issue 52, The “Spring Fashion Issue”
While the process of uploading/archiving/formatting my site to WordPress is—generally speaking—yawnsville territory, the occasional film strip I “re-visit” compensates for the pain-in-the-assery of it all : remembrances of whom was with me, where I was, the tilt-a-whirl of excitement I felt upon picking up the copy of Flaunt, in which this brief review (see: paragraph three) appeared…
Massive thanks and congratulations, B.B.: In five sentences, you target the subject matter with a marksman’s precision. Not only is this excerpt testament to a well-honed sense of verbal dexterity, but the analysis also exhibits a sophistication—namely, your ability to exude charm despite a frugal economy of language.
And thank you, Flaunt Magazine, for the elation (however fleeting). I don’t even have to close my eyes, and I’m there again: a 7-11 in Eagle Rock, bona-fide literary groupie Mark Ewert waiting in my grandmacamry while I made this pit stop to wherever it is he was staying. The A.C. in the store is cranked, my skin a menace of gooseflesh as I stand, feet planted so I’m facing the magazine rack. There’s a large expanse of glass behind the titles—does one call it a “window” if it’s never meant to be opened?—and on the other side of the freshly-Windexed surface that’s filling my lungs with a mildly toxic freon blue scent, dusk spreads itself across the asphalt sky, immense and in gasoline hues—a Molotov cocktail tossed onto the L.A. skyline. A thick copy of Flaunt is in my hands, Selma Blair on the trademark die-cut double cover, and it’s the moment just after I flipped past Omahyra’s “Quinceñara” editorial: the moment when my eyes landed on this review, confirming the validity of what I’d heard, and as I’m scanning the words, a feeling comes over me that’s an onslaught of stimuli: it’s like being on a float in a parade, the crowd cheering; it’s like tossing a fistful of lit firecrackers; it’s a warmth of validation crawling into me by the fingertips, a delirious warmth, a fix I hadn’t even known I was craving. It’s my own Sally Fields moment, an implicit understanding of the fickle undercurrent in her Oscar acceptance speech when she gushed: “You like me, right now, you like me!”
I grab the other two copies from the shelf and head towards the cashier, not giving a damn about the transitory nature of things.
I feel traces of it still: “You like me… You like me…”
“Right now, you like me!”
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