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By Alexandra Schwartz
Miranda July is smart at plotting. Her stories will come to you fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unpack them. In her Los Angeles office, a small space where she helps store more than three decades of articles, photographs, awards, ribbons and costumes, she is a purse she filled in a single, feverish bone-exercising adventure. of her first feature film. Film “Me, you and everyone we know” (2005). Something similar happened with her first novel, “The First Bad Man” (2015), and with her last film, “Kajillionaire” (2020): a sudden vision, a pause to think, then a rush to understand everything . July is a filmmaker, performer and artist who enjoys working with media that don’t seem like media at all until she comes to exploit the latent possibilities within it. She opened an interfaith charity shop in a posh London branch and created an app that allows strangers to transmit intimate messages and narrate the internal monologues of models at a Hermès fashion show. But she considers herself above all a writer. Sometimes on a movie set an actor improvises a line and has to say: No, please stick to the script. She knows what she needs to say.
In the fall of 2017, July began to feel the arrival of a second novel. This time, however, he sought to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of ignorance, what editor Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life. “for as long as he could. ” I felt like there was a way to calm a lot of anxiety by having a plot,” he told me recently. “You feel safe. And there’s a way in which running like this can restrict things if you have a clever concept too soon.
He started taking notes on his laptop. ” A mother suffering from trauma. Sexism and marriage. All women suffer with all intelligent men,” reads the first. A few months later: “A kind of Lord of the Rings tale about marriage, motherhood. and middle age. Expenses piled up until they finally reached around two thousand. The resulting novel, “All Fours,” will be published this month through Riverhead.
In the past, July’s protagonists were outsiders, kind-hearted weirdos who flaunted their brilliant fiction like a fantasy gem. Old Dolio, the heroine of “Kajillionaire,” played by Evan Rachel Wood, is a small-time con man who lives in a building with his emotionally repressive parents. Cheryl Glickguy, the narrator of “The First Bad Man,” is a lone worker at a women’s self-defense nonprofit who finds herself in an erotically explosive relationship with her boss’s daughter. “All Fours” breaks with this tradition. The novel’s narrator is an anonymous forty-five-year-old man who lives in Los Angeles with a sweet husband and music producer, Harris, and a sweet, precocious seven-year-old boy, Sam. She is a “semi-famous” artist and writer, a prestige of which she is both proud and defensive. He is a recognizable member of Miranda July’s global group. In fact, she looks a lot like Miranda July.
The novel begins with a road trip. The narrator has won an unforeseen amount of cash: a whiskey company has legalized a phrase she once wrote and paid her $20,000 to use it in an ad. (“It’s a word about crafts, but it’s out of context, maybe also “It applies to whiskey,” he explains. ) Her most productive friend, a sculptor named Jordi, advises her to spend money on beauty, so she decides to drive to New York. Less than an hour after leaving, he stops to refuel. A man in his thirties is cleaning his windshield. He is handsome and friendly. They argue. His calling is Davey. He is a Hertz worker; his wife, Claire, works at an interior design firm. They save some savings, Davey tells him: twenty thousand dollars.
The narrator checks into the Excelsior, a miserable motel nearby. She tells Harris that she still drives. Who knows why someone does something? She asks reasonably. ” Who created the stars?Why is there life on Earth?
The next day, he cancels his stay at the Carlyle. He then calls Claire and hires her to renovate the Excelsior’s room. He needs to make it sumptuous, sublime, enlivened by a Parisian hotel whose opulence once brought her to tears. willing to pay for the most productive of all: wallpaper, carpets, tiles, curtains. They agree on a quantity. You can guess what it is. In a matter of days, she and Davey succumbed to the kind of magnetic, overwhelming allure that leads men to jeopardize their careers as governors and women to sign up for cults. The Excelsior’s room becomes any part of their love nest: Davey, an honorable soul, wouldn’t possibly break his wedding vows by consummating his hobby, but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s supposed path will have to come to an end. What will happen when he returns home to face his life?
“If an e-book really works, you’re in a narrow channel and the water is flowing very fast,” editor George Saunders, a friend of July’s, told me. This is what it looks like to read “All Fours”: being dragged, without an oar, on a flowing river, parading before the thrill of the rapids. July’s narrator is caught in ecstasy through a plot that she still has no choice to set in motion, even if it turns her life upside down. July knows what it feels like. When a character acts as an ego loyal to its author, it’s natural to wonder if the things that happen to them are taken from authenticity. But what about the other way around? When you create an avatar in your image and then send it on bold and outrageous adventures, you may find that you’ve opened a portal from the made-up world to the real world: that what you’ve dared to believe on the page can widen your mind’s eye to see what may happen beyond.
At the beginning of December I knocked on the door of Julio’s little house. No one respondió. Entré. La main room, furnished with a long white table and two frayed armchairs covered with a pattern of lemons, was covered with shelves. A long, dark braid that looked as if Marina Abramović had been scalped hung from a hairnet near a door. The door was familiar. As July aired on “All Fours,” he eased the boredom of writing by dancing there, squirming sensually in costumes or in states of nudity. Sometimes she would film herself and post the videos on Instagram, stepping out of her personal jobs to flirt with the world.
July has been renting the space since 2003, when she moved from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles before directing “Me and You and Everyone We Know. “Shortly after the film’s release, she and writer-director Mike Mills began dating; He spent each and every night in his space in Silver Lake, but kept all his belongings at home. Every few days, he would return to replace his clothes and stumble upon what looked like a time capsule. The kitchen was still full of beans and rice. An ex-boyfriend’s condoms were still in the bathroom drawer. Nothing had replaced it.
July kept the beans, threw away the condoms, and moved in with Mills. They married in 2009 and had a son, Hopper. She went to the small space every day for work, a fifteen-minute walk away. But after promoting “All Fours” in 2019 with a flexible seven-page proposal, he began to worry. How would you achieve the boundless concentration that writing a novel requires?An e-book is like a child; It requires your full attention at all times. July’s solution is to spend one afternoon a week, on Wednesdays, in her space. Freed from the hectic turmoil of domestic obligations, she can write as soon as she wakes up.
July’s voice entered the room, followed by the rest of her. In the flesh, she doesn’t seem to be a user susceptible to engaging in sensual dances. She’s thoughtful, deliberate, serious to the point of gravity, even if emotion can make her cry in an instant. “She’s very accurate in the way she talks, thinks and dresses,” Sheila Heti, who is close to July, told me. Today he wore a pair of gray Wranglers with a military blue Nike jacket elegantly placed over a ribbed white turtleneck sweater: fat top.
“It’s a little bit in transition,” July said, pointing to the room. It had reorganized. On the floor was a collage of photographs that he was retouching for an upcoming exhibition of his work, which would be presented through the Fondazione Prada in Milan. As we were going to sit down, he calmly let me know that I had stepped on it.
July opened her computer to show me more “All Fours” notes. Many were similar to aging. In two months he would be fifty years old; The fact of completely and definitively abandoning young people had been one of the triggering themes of the novel. July had felt like she was beginning to cross that boundary when she was filming “Kajillionaire. “”Me with those women younger than me, and then Debra Winger,” she said. “I saw her go through all kinds of things that I can relate to, more so than young women. “Winger played Old Dolio’s stern and aggressively unmotherly mother, and July asked her not to. Wearing makeup: A complicated request for an actress, let alone an actress in her 60s who had once been celebrated for her looks. “I’ve never been around anyone who had a sex symbol in their youngsters, like literal, classic sex. “Symbol,” July told me. I thought, “I think maybe I’m not hot enough that this loss is something I have to make so hard to deal with. “»
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However, the concept of aging as a loss (of beauty, of femininity, of the self) had remained. In “All Fours,” the narrator never seriously thought about aging until she had a routine gynecologist appointment and was prescribed estradiol, an estrogen cream. It’s ironic: Worried about her preference for Davey, she had explained her mood swings to Harris by telling him she was menopausal. But it was inconceivable, a bluff. Now, your doctor tells you that you are indeed in perimenopause. Symptoms indexed through WebMD come with “decreased libido or libido. “She discovers a sex hormone chart that shows men’s testosterone is comfortably approaching the same standards of living; Women’s estrogen is like the hump of a camel that crashes at fifty. “We’re about to fall off a cliff,” she tells Jordi, panicked. Davey awakened his latent carnal preference, his ecstatic connection to his own body, just in time for his loss forever.
July read a 2018 note: “Thinking about what aging means for the trans child, the lack of hormones and blockers. “(Binary Hopper, as does Sam, the narrator’s son. )”And how the physical changes of middle age and old age make anyone who lives like more of a woman than they were born into, which most women do. We found that makeup and pretty clothes don’t paint anymore. The note continued:
It’s not that we need to be masculine, but the femininity we were taught was youth. It’s losing steam. For any kind of woman, especially a trans woman, but for all of us. Therefore, it is obligatory to invent a new form of femininity. Out of nowhere. It’s not based on everything you’ve noticed – or if you have, it’s so rare that it’s part of an exquisite and hard-to-understand collection.
I told July that it reminded me of the recent uproar when Pamela Anderson decided to wear makeup to Paris Fashion Week. People behaved as if they had never noticed an older woman’s bare face before.
“Yes,” Julio said. And I just watched “The Golden Bachelor” in its entirety. Since she is not a viewer of the truth, she was fascinated by the self-presentation of the candidates, older women who were fighting for a chance in love. “How many times do we hear, ‘This isn’t over!’You have a chance moment in life! “I said to myself: yes, it doesn’t end when you’re 80 either!This is the miracle of the possibility of the moment – or the eighth!Or ninth!
After her appointment with the gynecologist, the “All Fours” narrator begins to get carried away. He feels on the verge of a kind of death. Davey is long past return to Claire and has limited contact, but she makes the decision to have him at all costs. He embarked on a rigorous strength education program. Your triceps start to tighten and your glutes start to lift. Since leaving Monrovia, he has booked his room at the Excelsior one night a week, on Wednesdays, under the guise of participating in an art project. Now, she’s trying to summon her future lover by performing a raunchy and enthusiastic mating dance in front of the motel and posting it on Instagram. Davey doesn’t see the video, but Harris does. The past messes of their marriage were one-sided, the narrator’s secret, but the dance sinks. in a common crisis that they still have no option to face together.
Wednesday nights in July led to a comparable breakup. “It’s one of the things that seemed to break a fundamental rule of being a mother and a family,” she told me. “You loosen your fatal grip on the design as described to “The more I looked, the less meaning the design had.
When she finished her novel, so did July’s romantic dates with Mills. They now had girlfriends and “nested” in Mills’ space, alternating four-night stints with Hopper. But July needed a position of her own, and magically, she had given me the impression just weeks before my visit. Behind his space was another space of the same size, owned by the same owner. His long-time tenant had just left, leaving him in a deplorable state. “I haven’t done my house since I was in my twenties, but since then I’ve directed three feature films,” July told me. She had deliberated and then signed the lease.
We walked through what was just July’s non-shared backyard and climbed a flight of stairs to the other house. The kitchen was a mess of chipped linoleum and dark, austere cabinets. A porch next to the living room was enclosed, its walls covered with worn furniture. woodwork that seemed to have been intact since the seventies.
But gentle beauty, especially in Hopper’s long bedroom. July was raving about the peach-colored tiled bathroom, which had a dangerous-looking old radiator rolled up in the ceiling. Her own room had enough room for a queen size bed. He told me he planned to treat the renovation as an art project. He didn’t ask the landlord for permission; It would be his own neighbor, his artistic and domestic life aspect after aspect. “From now on, each and every day will be Wednesday,” he said.
On one of the July shelves is a collection of books written by Richard Grossinger, with titles like “Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings,” “Dark Pool of Light Volume II: Consciousness in Psychospiritual and Psychic Ranges,” and “2013: Lifting the Earth to the Next Vibration. He and his mother, Lindy Hough, met when they were students, and when July was born in 1974, North Atlantic Books, his publishing house, was born. When July 3 and her brother, eight-year-old Robin, moved from Vermont to Berkeley.
July’s parents joined the graphomania. For them, writing is not a voluntary activity,” Robin told me. “It’s not even a vocation. It’s a limitation. Hough wrote poetry and fiction. Grossinger has written nonfiction on any and all topics under the sun, and many more; his interests ranged from baseball to Tai Chi, ecology, bodywork, and astronomy. North Atlantic was left without its home, and its family circle has no other life than that of business. July and her brother served as unpaid interns, sorting through stock in the basement. , going to the post office to post orders in a strange collection of boxes. July’s parents weren’t licensed to operate a residential property, so when a delivery truck arrived, Robin told me, the whole family rushed to bring it in. the books before the neighbors noticed. ” It’s definitely idiosyncratic, even for Berkeley,” he added.
July discovers a lot to appreciate in her upbringing. The fact that my parents are writers, though not prominent or successful, made me realize that this is worth doing day in and day out,” he told me. “They had their audience, and that’s enough. ” But pride is not without its added shame. One of the press’s bestsellers is “The Monuments of Mars,” a treatise on extraterrestrial civilization written by conspiracy theorist Richard C. At the grocery store, in July, a National Enquirer factor faithful to the same subject. ” I knew we were in this territory somehow,” he said. “It’s a very fine line and we just pass it. “
July has been encouraged by this dynamic in all of her work, especially on “Kajillionaire. “In the early days of the press, the Grossinger-Hough family was plunged into financial anxiety, similar to that of Old Man Dolio in the movie. However, it doesn’t occur to him to challenge his parents’ judgment or their distrust of the outside world, even if it’s evident that his scamming techniques leave a lot to be desired. They distribute their meager loot in three ways, as business partners. “I thought it was an insult to treat you like a child,” says the father of Old Dolio, played by Richard Jenkins. “It seemed so disingenuous. ” July’s two parents appear, in fictional form, in “All Fours”. The narrator’s father, who believes that his soul has been replaced by that of an impostor, meditates for hours a day and is plagued by what he calls “the box of death,” a state that turns out to correspond to depression.
As a child, July liked to record one-way conversations on cassettes, leaving pauses so she could just pay attention to them and chat with herself. In high school, she discovered her voice with Snarla, a feminist magazine she made with her most productive peers. Johanna Fateman, who would later become a member of the Tiger organization. July has created a recurring series of interviews with other parts of herself: her confidence, her insecurity. Fateman described the couple as fictional characters, Ida and July. , the call Miranda eventually took as his own.
Snarla turned out to be the July price in the world. She and Fateman handed out copies at 924 Gilman Street, an all-ages punk club in Berkeley, where the fanzine caught the attention of Pacific Northwest riot bands who saw a spirit relative in July. Her hair had bleached white, like the most sensitive of a cotton swab, and she wore stockings over her shoes, so she had this otherworldly quality,” Carrie Brownstein of the Sleater-Kinney Group, who met July when they were nineteen, told me. After graduating, July enrolled at the University of Santa Cruz, but school was never her thing. He dropped out of school after two years and moved to Portland, the center of the scene.
At that moment, July knew she wanted to make movies. He had already written and directed a play, “The Lifers,” which he discovered in a correspondence he had begun with a thirty-eight-year-old inmate in Arizona whose call he had discovered on a list of criminal correspondents in the back of a magazine. July had been fascinated by incarceration since she was a young woman (at bedtime, her father would read Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” to her) and the inmate, who was serving a life sentence. Convicted of murder, he had no contact with anyone from the outside. “I would write about my daily life, like, ‘I’m taking driving lessons,'” July recalls. “And he wrote on his, ‘There’s a riot. ‘She sent him audio letters and virgin cassettes, which he returned filled with her voice.
In July, “The Lifers” was presented on Gilman Street with two actors recruited through classified ads on the East Bay Express; The rehearsals took place in his parents’ attic. July is a perfectionist, prone to meticulous planning, and sleepless anxiety. The night before the play’s premiere, she panicked and walked across town to a friend’s house, then too shy to wake her up. family, went home and lay down under a parked car. “Before, I was much more concerned about madness,” he says. His father’s mother, brother and sister committed suicide, a legacy he faces in “On All Fours. “Death didn’t come out of nowhere.
“All Fours” isn’t the first time July has described the cliff, this precipice over which some other era of life looms unfathomable. She’s also there in “The Future,” her 2011 film, in which she plays Sophie, a woman in her Thirty Years trapped with her boyfriend in a state of perma-immaturity, afraid to pursue anything: a career, a cat, both, the end of young people and all their possibilities. “I took a step and both. Really hard, not great,” July told me. When she was a newly created teenager, she was surprised to return from a summer vacation and noticed that a frifinish had grown breasts, and she was even more surprised when she asked to touch them. and she was expelled in anger. ” I don’t know why we all act like professionals in this field,” he remembers thinking. We’re amateurs. We don’t know anything.
Amateurism (that of conventions as a form of fruitful innocence) is a vital artistic vanity for July. When she arrived in Portland, she created an underground distribution network, eventually called Joanie Four Jackie, of short films directed by women. For five dollars, any woman can simply send her film to a post office box at her workplace. July had rented and won in return a cassette of ten films “made through women. “July spread the word by handing out leaflets to traveling bands and publishing magazines for teens. “He’s already getting a steady stream of videos about everything from dreams to breasts, but he’s like, ‘It doesn’t have to be artistic or punk, just real,'” Sassy reported. By the time July finished the project, ten years later, he had distributed another two hundred short films.
Part of what July was looking for in the community. In Santa Cruz, she had taken a film course and had been discouraged by the machismo that clung to the profession. “They were usually boys, and each and every short film they made had a gun on them. “”In him,” he said. Joanie and Jackie are a way of translating the democratic spirit of the riot-grrrl movement into the hierarchical world of male cinema. July hadn’t made a movie yet, but it was all unfolding. Her first love experience, at the best school, with a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student. “I developed my feminist consciousness over the course of that relationship,” she told me. “I took us up the hills to a cliff and dropped it on me. . And when he came, I broke up with him. I didn’t even enjoy it. It just seemed like a clever image.
In Portland, he discovered true love with a woman who worked at RadioShack; July nicknamed it Radio. “I’d never noticed a tomboy girl,” she told me. And then I like, “Oh, it’s the whole package. ” In this case, complete without the option to communicate. The pair formed a band with July’s roommate; July was devastated when Radio left her for her bandmate. He had already booked an excursion to the West Coast, so he called each and every place to announce that some other act would open: “It’s called Miranda July. “
July had experimented with writing short scripts for herself, playing with voices, imagining the kind of characters they might belong to. It was those pieces—abstract, unsettling, strangely strange—that he began to perform, in front of an audience that was expected to hear music. “I was impressed, but I think there was some skepticism,” Brownstein told me. For herself, July worked odd jobs (at a Goodwill, a café, and then a peepshow) and made a brief, brutal foray into sex work. His stories have become more complex, his mise-en-scène more ambitious: catwalks, screens, projected sets that he controlled with a clicker in his hand.
Finally, he felt fit to pick up a camera. In her first film, “Atlanta,” a 1996 ten-minute short film, July played a twelve-year-old swimmer competing in the Olympics and her domineering mother. In her second film, “The Amateurist,” she reprises two roles: an “amateur” and a bland, emotionless “professional” who monitors her through video surveillance. The amateur wraps herself in a fur coat, strips naked into her underwear, dances. , the professional hands you; The professional translates this custom into a disconcerting virtual system, as sinister as it is impenetrable.
After July had directed six short films, he agreed, on his third attempt, to enter Sundance’s New Filmmaker Incubator. “At the time, I was very punk,” July told me. “I had never gained comment or instruction on anything. So applied, but with real resentment. The soon-to-be-released film, “You and Me and Everyone We Know,” is a tender and strangely harsh treatise on relationships between friends. Richard, a divorced shoe salesman, longs for love, but turns away from it. His eldest son is bullied and, in a sublime twist, followed like a sexual guinea pig through two classmates who also flirt with a middle-aged perverted boy who turns out to be Richard’s colleague. Her youngest son discovers affection in a stranger; adult in an online chat room. Meanwhile, Richard is pursued through Christine, an open-hearted functional artist whose seriousness excites and frightens him.
At Sundance, July learned how to kill her loved ones and come out stronger. (A lesbian tale was removed; too many subplots. ) But there were some compromises I wasn’t willing to make. “That’s when the tension to recruit stars started. “”People were like, ‘Who are you planning to hire for this lead role?Maggie Gyllenhaal?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I think I’ll play it myself. ‘»
The narrator of “On All Fours” is enjoyed by many, unknown to most. She feels that the world underestimates the extent of her success, her ambition, her power. His admirers “aren’t the kind of standout men, nor a young man who wants to suck the wisdom of the cock,” he thinks. “My fame neutralized me. “
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When “Me and You and Everyone We Know” debuted at Sundance in 2005, July was transformed overnight into a celebrity that most freelance writers can only dream of. Within a minute, he had made experimental works for a specialized audience. The next day, it won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and, a few months later, the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. All over the world, other people were tattooed with the symbol ))((, which the youngest son in the film invents to represent the greatest act of love and eros he can imagine: pooping with the object of his affection.
As July became a recognizable figure—that puppet of curls, those airy blue eyes—she began to realize that the usability the public had assigned her was not the user she knew her to be. She had cast herself as Christine, but the show had worked too well; the actor and the role were now confused. “To me, it couldn’t be more obvious,” she told me. “Wow, I totally made this movie!” I have written it. I play. I learned it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But, she continues, “the culture itself seemed to be a sieve that prevented that, and all that came out were the clothes and the character she played, who was vulnerable and couldn’t have made a movie. ” When other people identified July, she would ask her to give them a hug, “as if she were a lost, desperate little woman or something. ” “Me and You” tackled thorny and taboo topics head-on: Agnès Varda’s film “Kung-. ” Fu Master!”, about a middle-aged woman’s affair with a fourteen-year-old boy, had been a primary source of inspiration; However, the month of July felt “declawed” by popular perception. “I don’t identify with this. woman,” she remembers thinking. “And now I’m trapped like her, and everything I do is cute. ”
It’s hard to get rid of the accusation, and not just because of “You and me. “July’s first book, the short story collection “Nobody Belongs Here But You” (2007), featured an organization of cheerful eccentrics who confessed their outlandish weaknesses. and perverse desires with naïve sincerity. ” The Future” told through a talking cat, expressed throughout July; In a climactic scene, the groom, played by Hamish Linklater, stops time and converses with the moon. Meanwhile, July is known for her virtual experiments like “Learning to Love You More,” an online page she ran for seven years with the artist. Harrell Fletcher, who posted weekly messages: “describe what to do with your body when you die,” “write the phone call you wish you would receive,” blurred the line between art and life. The Onion published an article titled “Miranda Julio summoned before Congress to explain exactly what she thinks,” which summarized the prevailing attitude.
Back at July’s table, as we reviewed his notes for “All Fours,” the question of the book’s taste kept coming up. “I give myself permission to write directly,” one note read. “I’m so tired of how smart he is and I’ve been funny and weird,” she began.
I asked July what she wrote “directly. “
“I’ve gotten so used to creating a character that’s weird and untrustworthy enough that she can say things that are really right and do things that are really right, and everyone will laugh, but some of them will resonate with that. like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the way I am,'” he said.
It wasn’t until the end of “The First Bad Man” that July felt the need to write more directly, to let go of the cloak of blatant fiction. The writing of this book was interrupted by the birth of Hopper; July and Mills had had a scary time in the NICU.
“I was in a very difficult situation, very close to death and mortality,” he told me. He ended up integrating this adventure directly into the novel, entrusting it to Cheryl, the fastidious eccentric whose peace is shattered by the rebellion of her bosses. daughter. Touched by the pain and love of July, the e-book matured, deepened; Cheryl, who began her fictional life as a singular presence, ended it as an ordinary woman. “Oh, this is something new,” thought July.
This effect – liveliness – is what July is looking for in “All Fours”. “It will never be autofiction,” he writes in his e-book proposal, “because, for me, nothing works without the alchemy of invention. But the invention would be purified, it would connect with reality, to let in anything else: risk. July had tried it for the first time with “The Metal Bowl” (2017), a short story he published in this magazine and whose narrator is a prototype of the “All Fours”. It’s risky to let other people see who you think you are, to divulge your prejudices, your ego, your wild and shameful hopes, and your absurd failures. But that’s what the e-book is all about: leaving the canopy of convenience. fictions to fit the facts of life.
In February, I returned to Los Angeles to see how the space’s renovation paintings were progressing. July never had much furniture (her only contribution to the space with Mills was a set of linen curtains) and had to buy it all second-hand. . On my first visit, I accompanied her as she searched an extensive scrap metal shop in Filipinotown, where she hoped to find coral-colored toilets. A pair of bright orange doors were classified as J’s former property. Robert Oppenheimer; a horrible chandelier came from Rupert Murdoch’s estate. Unfazed by the owner’s friendly chatter, July sifted through the offers and left with a couple of 1930s recessed lamps. The dresser remained at large.
July now finds herself in her kitchen with an artist friend, Chadwick Rantanen, who had come to help her paint, and Nico B. Young, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old, also an artist, whom July hired as her contractor. (They were brought in through Young’s girlfriend, a former nanny of Hopper’s. )Young had completely reconfigured the room, covering it with custom-made cabinets that he then covered with a bright yellow resin reminiscent of Laffy Taffy.
A decision had to be made on the location of the refrigerator. July ordered Rantanen and Young to move the plane to the left and then to the right again. All angles had to be taken into account: the technique from the sink, the area from the table, the view from the entrance. On the one hand, there is a more functional area: the youth vote. On the other hand, the best symmetry Julio dreamed of.
“I’m really drawn to that sense of space,” he admitted, as the men moved the refrigerator away from the counter again. “It’s like, ‘Oh, look how sumptuous it is!'”
“It does show a little bit of restraint, though,” Young said. Look at the entire area you just used. “The difference can be measured simply in inches, no more than three.
“yes, I have to spend,” Julio joked.
I later asked July about the budget for her renovation. Twenty thousand dollars, he says, as in “On All Fours. “This also comes from the same source. A few years ago, Johnnie Walker published a line from his short story “The Moves,” in which a woman recalls that her father taught her how to make a woman. Somewhere in the world there’s an ad for whiskey that says “Don’t wait to be sure. Move, move, move. “
We were back in July’s office, near a stack of e-books he’d consulted while writing “All Fours. “There were classics like “The Second Sex,” as well as philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s “The Agony of Eros” and “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Bioidentical Hormones. “At the top of the pile, an e-book called “A Woman’s Story. “She’d seen a photo from July’s wedding day sitting at her desk: July, in a knee-length white suit. A dress and a short veil that had been designed for her through Rodarte, status alongside Mills in the woods, was either charming and serious.
In “The Metal Bowl”, the narrator describes their marriage as follows:
We had been looking for each other for years. It was a tough job, but our two tunnels were supposed to eventually connect. We’d make it: Hallelujah! After all, they confiscated our clay-encrusted hands!And we would be together, together, for the rest of our lives. As long as we dug as hard and fast as we could, everything would work. But, of course, neither of us knew for sure how the other user’s searches were going. It’s possible that one of us has simply stubbornly tunneled into the other user, while the other user walked away in another direction.
Marriage in “All Fours” is marked by a similar feeling of distance, for which the narrator feels responsible; next to the laid-back Harris, she’s the confused and suspicious one. Like July, she suffered a traumatic birth, and as she and Harris went to the hospital to tend to their fragile newborn, they functioned as a close-knit unit. One day, according to her, some other crisis will surprise them again.
Instead, he is ambushed by desire. July is one of the wonderful writers on sex, even if what she describes cannot be called sex in the strict sense. To remain faithful to his wife, Davey is infuriatingly chaste: no kisses, no genitals. And the narrator dances and lies on the floor, his feet touch, but that’s not enough. One day, the narrator follows him to the bathroom: “I put my hand in the stream of his hot urine, grabbed a handful that was overflowing. Davey needs to regain intimacy, so she will allow him to insert his tampon. “I felt on the verge of tears, an aggregate of shame, excitement and a kind of unforeseen sadness, as if this came after a lifetime of abandonment. “, he tells us. It’s disgusting, it’s touching, and it’s a lot of fun: all the qualities of sex, pleasure.
When sex enters the book, it does so like a sudden rain in the desert, unforeseen and unstoppable. At one point, the narrator finds himself in bed with Audra, the woman who introduced Davey to the arts of physical love. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like that of a banana, but instead of being unpleasant, she smelled like incredibly warm, velvety water,” the narrator marvels. July, so relaxed on the page, is definitely squeamish when he’s asked about those kinds of scenes. “I’m still in the phase where it’s okay if you read the book, but I’ll have to kill you later,” he said. And he continued: “I perceive that this is my own shame. I feel at peace with my shame. This is what I have to paint with. The part of her sitting with me, as the bright California light filtered comfortably into the room through sheer white curtains, was separated through an interior screen from the personal part of her that had described to the narrator fighting with “the big ones. ” and Audra’s comfortable tits and huge tits. ” ass, and the mystery had to be respected. Julio confessed that she was particularly pleased with a line in which the narrator wonders if Audra was “listening to a vibrator, if that was nonsense. “
One function of sex in “All Fours” is to create a kind of inversion. The surprise of eros forges an intimacy between the narrator and a stranger and, as a result, her former intimate becomes a stranger in turn. What reconnects her with Harris is, paradoxically, the procedure for breaking their union. July also describes her split from Mills as a “transformation. “To avoid festival-and-festival thrills, they had steered clear of each other’s careers. But the separation, July said, had been a high-risk collaboration, like “carefully cutting the wires of a pump. “
I wondered what it would be like for July to leave the comfortable home she shared with Mills. “It was a glorious season in this space,” July told me. But in later years he liked to walk across the lawn at the end of painting day and lie in his small room. I was looking for solitude, but not only that. Hopper was there part of the time and went out of his way to make his space livable for a child. July asked me if I’d heard of “repair,” a concept he’d been taught when Hopper was a child. “You screwed up, didn’t you?” she says. ” You’re wasting your calm. Or you do something even worse, something subtle, that you know is rarely quite right. She adopted a meditative voice. ” Oh my God, what I did there, I got a little scared!Did you see what I did? I attacked you. I’m sorry I did that. I wonder what I can do next time. ” Mistakes are inevitable. The lesson is what comes next.
The following month, July flew to Milan, where the Fondazione Prada presented its exhibition in the city center. Titled “New Society,” the exhibition functioned as a kind of retrospective, the first of July’s career. The day before the opening, July and the exhibition’s curator, Mia Locks, were busy, meeting with guides and posing for promotional photographs. A crisis had just erupted with “I’m the President, Baby” (2018), a painting July had made in concert with Oumarou Idrissa, an Uber driver she had met while he was transporting her to an interview he was conducting with Rihanna. The room is made up of 4 sets of jewel-toned velvet curtains that were originally connected to Idrissa’s phone and bed. , opening and ending depending on when he slept, the Uber app, Instagram or contacting his circle of relatives in Niger via WhatsApp. July had discovered that the curtains didn’t fall perfectly and a fleet of Prada seamstresses had grouped them together in hem combinations.
This July is the time to create art with the Prada group. In 2010, she asked to direct a film for “Women’s Tales”, an anthology of short films commissioned through Miu Miu. July replied that he was looking to make a film about an app that didn’t exist and was also looking for investment to create the app. The result was Somebody, a messaging service that went live in August 2014 and lasted until October of the following year. Messages sent through Someone were intercepted through a nearby stranger, who then used the app’s geolocation tool to locate the intended recipient and relay the text verbally. The speaker can simply choose from a menu of movements to visualize the performance: cry, laugh, scream, kiss. Julio is fascinated by collaboration; How does it feel to be invited to come into contact with someone else, to replace and be replaced by another?By separating the artist from the equation and, in short, turning people in general into actors playing the role of an outsider, Someone is one of his greatest total achievements on this subject.
July in preparation mode, alert, nervous, tired. But by the next morning’s press conference, he had fully assumed his role. Dressed in a gray A-line wool skirt, a cardigan with red eyelets and black heels, she stood motionless, her hands clasped as Locks made introductory remarks about a translator translating into Italian. When it was his turn to speak, he came back to life.
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“In those roles, it’s funny, because I have the power, I’m on the same level and everyone is looking at me, but at the same time I’m vulnerable,” July told reporters. He pointed to the back of the room, where a video of “New Society” is shown, the functionality that gave the exhibition its name. In this play, July asks his audience to create a new society together, complete with a flag, a coin, and a national anthem. At some point, he abandoned the theater entirely. ” Getting other people involved is scary,” she said. It’s dangerous. Makes my center beat faster. . . This race probably looks a little bit like the curtains I’m running with. It’s like his own painting.
As July filled with new questions, I made my way to the second floor of the room. There was the collage I had stepped on, I secured a window. A few months earlier, in July, a phrase “Learn to love yourself more” had circulated. : “Do an art exhibit in your parents’ space. “A finish of the land was faithful to the result, in which a young Milanese, Miriam Goi, exhibited various knick-knacks from her mother’s space along a text on the museum-style wall. The effect was charming, amusing at the same time, mocking the “official” notions of art and ennobling the non-public flavor in all its particularity.
Growing up, July felt that “some other people are wise and special. And then there are the other people, and they’re less attractive than we are. July has come to disagree, and his paintings are proof of that. “Writer Maggie Nelson told me that one of the things that makes July so effective on the page is the simplicity and accessibility of her prose. Stranger things happen: these kinds of very strange, bright cloud spaces appear, so it’s very avant-garde in that sense. “But I’m still haunted by the mystery of how you can do this with pretty undeniable language,” Nelson said. “It looks like a stealth operation. “
For all her populism, July has no interest in giving up entirely. Later that night, dressed in a sheer pale dress and Balenciaga heels, she greeted her followers near a new virtual art she had begun making while she was still finishing “All Fours. “On Instagram, he had asked seven strangers to upload videos in response to the prompts; Then, employing editing equipment on her iPhone, July stitched the videos together in combination with those she had made in the ballroom at her workplace. He titled the work “F. A. M. I. L. Y. (Collapse While I Love You).
I walked slowly between the six giant screens on which the work appeared. In one of them, a boy danced in a wheelchair while July crouched down beside him, wrapped in a pair of bare stockings. In another, a wearer wearing a veil and a garbage bag hanging upside down. It came down from the ceiling, like an insect hanging from a bag, while July writhed and then began to rise towards her partner: a disembodied ass that jumped, like a frog, towards arriba. la wall. The contact between July and her partners may seem simply affectionate. Kisses were exchanged; One frame merged with another. But there is also a sense of detachment, of rupture. Trying to join is not a guarantee of locating you. Here’s a guy in the shower, suddenly joined in July, but even when she pushed against him. , he continued as if she wasn’t there.
July celebrated her 50th birthday with her girlfriend, as well as her friends Isabelle Albuquerque and Sheila Heti. After dinner, they moved into their new home, sitting on a rust-red sectional couch that July still seeks to settle onto a red Turkish carpet. “Look, if you squint, is it like?” said July of her pop-up color palette.
A few weeks earlier, he had spent an afternoon with July and Albuquerque. Tall and angular, with black hair slicked back and a Bowie-like back, Albuquerque had burst into July’s office, a bubbling hot spring next to July’s motionless lake. ‘My God! ‘” she shouted when she saw the preview of “All Fours” that Julio had in store for her. Like Jordi, Albuquerque is a sculptor; July modeled the character after her and it is the dedication of the book.
“I’m still processing it,” Albuquerque said when I asked him what he thought of the performance. “But I don’t just see it as my epass. I feel like I’m part of a lineage. Many other people describe the seasons of their lives through their romantic relationships. The months of July are the most productive understood as a series of absorbing friendships that They date back to grade school. Some ended in bad breakups and most continue, even if they’re past one; Heti told me that after she and July first talked, twelve or 13 years ago, to an interview in a magazine that Heti ran, she communicated with July by email. “We have to communicate for an hour a week to start our friendship,” Heti said. “It was our ritual. We send very long emails with photos: this is my life, this is my first boyfriend, this is my pet. Everything to fill the gaps.
Before “All Fours,” friendship had never played a genuine role in July’s work. It’s like there’s no room for her; The poles of romance and solitude seemed too great. But it’s at the heart of the new book that anchors it in authenticity. Jordi serves as a confidant and sounding board for the narrator, just as, in writing the novel, Albuquerque did for Julio. On Wednesday nights, they would meet in the Albuquerque studio or take long walks to their favorite vegetarian place and talk about the big issues in their lives, and July would keep them from writing scenes along the way.
“There’s so much pain and heaviness, and sharing it with you, without being alone, helped me in part to write about it,” July said in Albuquerque. He tilted his head back and pretended to shout to the heavens: “What are we trying to do?”do?” Tell us! In this life!How can we be loose and safe?”
The first third of the novel—the erotic obsession with Davey, the extravagance of the Excelsior’s remodeling—had arrived without a hitch in July. But what would happen next? I had no idea. He began to consider himself a kind of perimenopausal evangelist, passing on to other women all the data he had accumulated about their bodies in conversion. Drafts have become manuals and manifestos. She was led out of this path through the publication of an actual nonfiction work on the subject, “What New Hell Is This?”through Heather Corinna and Rick Moody, an old friend and one of his early supporters. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, he reminded her. “I started crying,” July said. It was as if he had quoted the Bible passage that was going to save me.
One detail of this heady was that it survives in the definitive book, albeit in a modified form, is a series of interviews July conducted with middle-aged friends about the state of their marriages and their desires. You remind me of me before I transitioned,” one trans user interviewed the novel’s narrator told him. “That feeling that time is running out but you’re too bad to ruin your life. “However, when the narrator ruins his life, some of those same friends find it enough; She can’t help but boast, as if she, and she alone, has discovered the key to happiness.
“I think one of Miranda’s most brilliant characteristics is her genuine respect and her ability to elicit emotions from the ultimate experience,” Maggie Nelson told me. “I’m more of the post-ecstasy and laundry type. But Miranda informed me of the strength of those moments that can lead someone to replace their life. After reading a first draft of the novel, Heti painstakingly wrote his comments. “I thought I didn’t see the character clearly,” he said. In a way, it replaced the universal experience. “
By July, the book had proven to be something of an incentive, and he thought reading it would motivate other people to change their lives as well. Still, she had to be willing to acknowledge that no woman is a true ordinary woman. “That word when whales send out sound waves?” asked Nelson. I think there’s some kind of echolocation precept that works. Sometimes he discovers an echo, the character. And the creature in his hands says, “No, it’s not like that for me. “
Thinking about the novel’s release, July felt vulnerable. “And I feel vulnerable to the launch of each and every one of the commissions of this. . . ” He paused. “It’s like there’s an invisible war, and I turned on the lights. . Or at least I pointed my finger at him.
What is the war? I asked.
“The concept that, as a woman, as you get older, you’re not going to grow or become more and more powerful,” she said. “I mean ‘powerful’ in each and every way, not just through worldly power. I am more useful, in a way, to the world. I want less and I can give more as I get older, you know?I don’t feel dependent on anyone. The war was not only opposed in the open air. world, as opposed to the impressions and expectations of others; Its fiercest front was the inner one. “The only genuine risk is that of an outgrown thought, of a calcification of the mind,” July had written in his notes, long before he knew the end of his life. the novel, even before I knew the beginning. ” It scares me. But again, who has time? Still. ♦
The day the dinosaurs died.
What if it starts to itch and you can’t help it?
How he denounced an infamous mobster through his own sister.
Overrated Woodstock.
One hundred and eleven mile swim by Diana Nyad.
Photo Booth: Hyper-staged portraits of black love by Deana Lawson.
Fiction through Roald Dahl: “The Owner”
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