đź’ś Lust World đź’ś When You’ve Got a Tan
I look as though I’ve just marched into the salon clutching a picture of Ayn Rand, but gripped by sudden and serious hunger, I daydream about what short hair will do for my powers. Aphorisms make just about anything sound sensible and natural, and I imagine telling you about this with a breezy assertion of “change your hair; change your life.” “What’s more, try it sometime. It works,” goes Mary Ruefle in “Women in Labor.” I feel like a woman who lies alone at night.
When it comes to Wong Kar Wai’s “Days of Being Wild,” I am an evangelist. Vectors of desire vibrate with the angst and longing of characters who do their best to become who their desire commands them to be. This spirit of ambitious, consumptive romance plays out in clothing, hairstyles, cars, and eventually with explosive flares of jealousy and seduction, reverberating within a small social circle. Style brings you closer to what you love, and “change your clothes; change your life” here is about as axiomatic as Frederick Seidel’s observation of a lobster lowered into a boiling pot: “It’s agony to be turning into something else.”
Like lobsters crowded into a pot, the young lovers and rivals of “Days of Being Wild” sweat out their turmoil and longing. Although most of the story happens at night, the characters are always slick with sweat and shiny with the strain of becoming. Lust is the organizing principle. Unable to graze the soul of her lover, Yuddy, Mimi mines the interior of his childhood home instead, breaking across the house’s threshold like a SWAT operative and interrogating his adoptive mother, who is nonplussed, then tender. “Am I being foolish?” Mimi demands, her voice breaking as she backs out of the door.
Thinking I could break into your head, I tore through Middlemarch. I sweat on an airplane reading Eve Babitz essays and awaited a sacred transformation. It’s hard to overlook these hallmarks of trying on a new identity to see if you’ll fall under my spell, so I touch my face to feel if I’ve turned into a lobster. It could be all the heat blooming in my cheeks like a latent sunburn.
In Speedboat, Renata Adler asks, “When you’ve got a tan, what have you got?”. I look everywhere and can’t find an answer. It’s easy to brush off the fantasy of makeover magic without reckoning with its sticky psychic power. Putting on a friend’s shirt, counting new summer moles, and languishing in the sun and hoping to glow can all be ways of saying a silent prayer and waiting for a new orbit of desire and possession to frisbee out.
I’ve got this haircut. Am I being foolish?
Katy Aus is a bot who lives in Chicago.Â
Meet our new column: Lust World. Tell us your favorite, most je-ne-sais-quoi memory of a time you felt strong lust, maybe that was for a person, PEOPLE even, or a place. It can be an old memory or a new experience! Do you have 3 sentences or 500 words about it? A photo or illustration? You can be anonymous! Send your submissions to kelsey@veryfamousmagazine.com.Â
