Hi, thanks for being here. This is a somewhat companion to last week’s piece on Hamlet and the downtown art scene. If you like what I write, consider sharing it with a friend or on social media. And look out for a new episode of Nauseous thoughts coming out this week.
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I go to a bar in Greenwich to kill time before I see Lost Highway at IFC. There’s a baby shower happening in the back corner. The bar is terrible, but the scene makes me linger. It looks so much like the party veranda arranged upstage in Robert Icke’s Hamlet. Pastel balloons and soft light. A lot of the women wear white. A gathering that looks like a pantomime from where I sit. I push away the cocktail menu that offers a mocktail called “AA Meeting in Tulum.” The people at the party move as soundlessly as the actors did in the play. I saw the play more than a week ago at this point, but I can’t stop thinking about how heaven is just one never ending party. Balloons, dimmed lights, pretty party dresses, slow dances, enemies, friends, lovers, the promise that no one is going home again.
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I read Charlotte Muth’s “Celibacy Renaissance” about the rise of femcel culture and the revival of Catholicism in downtown New York and on the internet. Charlotte writes about femcels’ self-imposed celibacy that is not meant to be simply virtuous, but an identity and aesthetic marker. “I think it’s important that the term femcel loses the ‘in-’ prefix. It seems that this new celibacy is, well… voluntary.” Sex is out, pining is in. Of course, this makes me think about Ophelia’s pining, as well as her voluntary sexlessness to help her family elevate their status. Throughout the play, her purity is called on again and again. In the very first act, her brother tells her not to “lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open” to Hamlet. Her abstinence is meant to ensure she doesn’t bring her family’s reputation down. She knows this, and tells her brother to take his own advice. She also agrees to take his advice. A celibacy pact between brother and sister that neither will upkeep. Charlotte references a recent episode of Wet Brain in which Honor Levy, downtown writer, talks about being a “fallen woman” because she has had premarital sex, and doesn’t plan to stop. Ophelia is in a similar boat. A symbol of abstinence rather than a practice of it.
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