"Almost or Nearly as Described, But Not Completely"
Dancing about architecture / Writing about TikTok
[Image: A woman films herself from a slight upward angle as she walks down the street, her orange hoodie emerging from a camel coat. The sun shines through the branches of the trees above her head, offering momentary flashes of light around her face as she moves past. What do you think it says about me that I just walked into the bedroom and greeted my romantic partner by saying “Hey Miya.” Which is my name. My name is Miya—not, not, not theirs—my name. Anyway, let me know.]
[Image: Two men sit side by side on TikTok, singing a mashup of Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, and I’m With You by Avril Lavigne, the covers of each album superimposed above their heads. The guy on the left, in a gray hoodie, clasps his hands together on his lap. The guy on the right, in a peach hoodie, holds an acoustic guitar. Their shaggy hairstyles are a near-perfect match. Damp and slightly curly, parted in the center of their foreheads where it falls in each of their faces, hitting just above their eyes. There’s a typo in the text at the top of the screen. It reads: Sons that are the same. A few days later, having seen a few more of their videos of my For You Page. I post on twitter: obsessed with the two guys on tiktok who stare stone-faced and unblinkingly into the camera and play/sing two “songs that are the same”—I am somehow gutted by each and every video. Lately I’ve caught myself saying I lied when what really happened is that I misremembered, and repeated that misremembering to someone else. This is what I’ve done in this case. The men make fixed eye contact with the camera lens, in a way that feels like they are able to see through it—the way that sometimes when I photograph a friend, I feel as if they see my right eye watching them through viewfinder—but the men are not unblinking, as I described them in my tweet.]
There’s an installation in Chelsea right now by Julia Phillips called Observer, Observed. A pair of cast bronze binoculars is affixed to the structure of the High Line on the Flyover at 26th Street, which visitors can look through onto the adjacent streets and buildings. Meanwhile, a camera inside the binoculars transmits live footage of the looker’s eyes to a large LED screen, which is visible from the street below.
At my job, I often edit images from photo-opps at the Empire State Building. Celebrities are photographed on the observation deck, peering through the binocular towers, but they’ll slightly cheat the pose, leaving just enough room between the structure and their face so that the photographer’s camera can still see their eyes.
[Image: If you, like me, have ever said ‘my eye color changes depending on the weather, or what I’m wearing’ then your eyes probably are not blue and probably are not green. The camera cuts, and she’s added a filter, which frames her face with a chain comprised of her enlarged eyes, formed into the shape of a heart. The heart-of-eyes blinks as she does. Shoutout grey eyes—embrace it, love it, they are cool.]
I test the filter on myself, and then delete the clip that I recorded. My eyes are gray. I’ve known this, and part of myself revels, but part of me clings to the story I’ve always held—that my eyes match my brother’s, and my father’s, and that somehow we all have different eye colors listed on our IDs. Legally, my father’s eyes are green, and my brother and I took the same tactic: we asked our respective DMV employees to determine our eye color for themselves. My brother’s DMV representative told him they’re hazel in a smooth and certain voice which he would later imitate for us upon returning home. (If I ever find out that this isn’t how it really happened, I will simply force myself to continue misremembering) My representative paused and gazed into my eyes with her brow furrowed. Blue? she offered, and I said Okay. Some number of years ago, I read an article which said that over time, wearing contact lenses will change the color of your eyes. I don’t know if this is true, or if this was the case for me. My mother’s eyes are blue, but they’re more of a classic light blue than mine ever appear. I like that the color of my eyes is a slightly darker, muddier amalgam.
Not to contribute to the internet “discourse”—especially the discourse of last week—but I finally read The Cut’s list of 100 etiquette rules, and I felt like maybe I should take a moment to address one proposed rule in particular:
If you’ve been reading this newsletter, I think it’s pretty clear that I disagree with this completely as a rule. And if you’ve been reading this newsletter, I hope you mostly disagree with it as well. This isn’t solely a space for me to describe TikTok, but it has certainly been a large part of what I’ve written here so far.
I wrote a bit about my experience with social anxiety a couple weeks ago, and another manifestation of this is that I’ll frequently leave a conversation wondering if I’d brought up something that felt relevant in the moment to myself, but which bored or confused—or maybe even baffled—the person I was speaking to. When I think too hard about this, or too long, I start to wonder if I’m a selfish conversationalist. If I’m following the free associations of my mind without taking the time to stop and show my work for the other person, just as I never showed my work on math exams; I always tried to solve it in my head, because in my head, the steps to do so seemed to go without saying. I rarely explain how I’ve gotten from point A to point B, why two ideas have linked themselves in my brain inextricably, like the way that I have long kept books about architecture on my bookshelf in a stack that also includes books about dance. These are objectively separate topics, but my interest in them is an overlapping association that I’m continuously teasing out. When I moved a couple years ago and unpacked all my books, the dance & architecture pile was re-formed on my new (from Craigslist) bookcase. If I were speaking to someone about architecture, and I suddenly started talking about dance, the logic of that conversational turn might not be as apparent to them as it feels to me. This is sometimes my concern when I bring up a video I saw on TikTok in conversation. What bearing does that have on what we’ve been discussing?
It’s cliche at this point to scoff at people who like to describe their dreams to others. It reminds me of when everyone decided all at once to be viscerally disgusted by the word moist. The aversion caught on like wildfire as people adopted this particular expression of refinement, like the word itself was somehow vulgar. I don’t think people were lying exactly about the word moist, nor do I think they’re lying when they say they’re bored listening to the details of someone else’s dream, but I do think it’s often an exaggeration—or, more likely, a grasp at connection by claiming a stance they may not personally hold.
With dreams, the frustration lies in the fact that they’re not grounded in reality—the events of the dream never actually happened (most of the time), and the almost-one-to-one symbolic translations outlined in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams have been largely debunked—so retelling dreams feels pointless. But it’s strange to me that article would equate describing a TikTok with describing a dream.
There are a few different definitions of the virtual:
carried out, accessed, or stored by means of a computer, especially over a network
not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so.
The internet is obviously the former. It is not inherently the latter. But the two are often muddled together. Are we really still primed to think of the internet as something so ephemeral that the things we see and do there aren’t even real? Is listening to a friend describe a person they saw on TikTok really so different than hearing them describe someone they saw in “real life”? You would never stop a friend from telling you about the man who whipped out a set of nail clippers on the subway, and how they shared a glance with another rider, smirking and widening their eyes together at the scene, and the delicate *snap* which sent tiny fragments across the deckled rubber floor as the Q train crossed over the Manhattan Bridge.
The article isn’t against all small talk, though, (Rule 34 is “Actually, it’s great to talk about the weather”) and The Cut would certainly agree that TikTok is a huge part of the culture, especially for younger people. So what is gained by encouraging us not to describe the things we see on social media, especially when social media makes up so much of our world these days? Or is that exactly it—are we still in denial of how much our lives have been reduced purely to what we consume? Our online experience continues to creep further into the rest of our lives, and our online experience is becoming increasingly individualized.
There’s a saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This maxim has been attributed to Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, and Frank Zappa, but most likely came from 70’s actor and singer Martin Mull. Despite the fact that this is a phrase often used to dismiss attempts to describe music through words as futile, when I first encountered the quote, my book pile felt vindicated. This is the practice of ekphrasis: “a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.” A translation across mediums. The experience of one work of art, expressed by way of another, reflecting the personal, cultural, and socio-political lense through which the maker’s seeing emerges.
This bring us to another definition of the virtual:
almost or nearly as described, but not completely, or according to strict definition.
The thing is, hearing someone describe something they saw on TikTok is different than hearing them describe something they witnessed in person. Because when you witness something on the internet, you almost always witness it alone. Whether or not there are other people occupying the space you’re in, you hold your phone in your hand and the world around you has a blind spot to the experience you’re having. Other people can see the same TikTok, or Tweet, or Instagram Story that you saw, but their immediate experience of viewing it was likely also solitary. In this way, the internet does kind of resemble a dream: a series of images and sensations which feel in a way like they’re occurring in our minds.
Why shouldn’t we want to hear the people in our lives describe the world around them for us? Don’t we all wish at times that we could see the world through someone else’s eyes? How else are we going to understand how they’re experiencing it, or how they think about it? We should be engaging deeply with the media we consume, and you can take anything, even a TikTok, as an opportunity to go further, to consider how it makes you feel and why. Tell me what you see, because in doing so, you’ll tell me how you see it.
In total agreement RE: describing dreams and tiktoks not being boring (I felt that article on "proper behavior" to be mostly click bait), and love how you compared that the general aversion to "moist", which truly, is not *that* bad of a word. I feel the same way about talking about the weather, or talking about recently taken vacations. If it's a dear friend of mine, I'm always going to be interested in what they dream of, what they found hysterically funny, the places they loved when they visited Italy, etc. If you consider yourselves friends, then that interest should come naturally—you should have some level of interest in their daily lives, interests, feelings, etc.
Bravo! hearing how another perspective is engaging with the very ordinary moments we all experience is invaluable. Empathy building. Connection giving.