Consumption report

and a to-be-published essay on Bruce Lee

The unpaywalled portion of this newsletter originally appeared in my friend and writer Akosua T. Adasi’s newsletter, Consumption Report. Check out (and subscribe!) to her newsletter here. Akosua is an Elizabeth Hardwick stan and an incisive and cool literary girlie/critic; I loved this piece she wrote for Dirt on autofiction and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist.

Please consider subscribing. This week’s paywalled essay is on the many traces (and faces) of Bruce Lee, a version of which will be published in Are.na’s 2024 anthology of writing. You can read more about their 2023 anthology here.

As always, if you can’t afford to subscribe, email me and I can a) comp a subscription or b) share individual posts. If you’d rather donate to me directly (Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue), you can Paypal or Venmo with your email, and I’ll add you to the subscriber list.

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A few weekends ago, I found myself on Martha’s Vineyard, an island that a friend once jokingly called “the Hamptons for intellectuals.” There were, alas, few intellectuals in the company of many entitled WASPs, who, in another time, might’ve been the prospective patrons of said intellectuals, artists, and writers. It’s truly a shame that today, the wealthy have poor politics and poor taste: Every art gallery had the same boring seascapes and childish horse portraits, and patrons wore the most god-awful branded apparel (Vineyard Vines and Black Dog Tavern). The upside: The vegetation was gorgeous, and I stuffed my suitcase with all kinds of rocks and seashells.

I am still relishing Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, a novel that I began in June and have been inching my way through. I’ve read “Part One” probably five times, and yet to tire of Hardwick’s lush prose! Anyway, while lounging on the beach, I came across a curious passage in “Part Four” about “a number of intellectual men, radicals, [who] had a way of finding rich women who loved them in the brave and risky way of Desdemona,” which led me to wonder: Where have all the gigolos gone? Does this specific kind of rich woman, this intellectual patron-in-waiting, still exist? New York’s American Psycho finance bros are thriving but where are The People’s American Gigolos? Certainly not on Martha’s Vineyard, certainly not in New York. (I’m begging an editor to commission me to write this piece….)

Last month, I re-watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), only to realize that I had somehow forgotten: Holly Golightly’s (Audrey Hepburn) love interest and upstairs neighbor Paul Varjak is, in fact, a sugar baby! His lifestyle is generously sponsored by a rich married woman, his “interior decorator,” who Paul later confesses his love for Holly to. Paul wants to break things off, but instead, his sugar momma writes him a check for $1,000, coolly declaring that he should be entitled to “a week’s vacation with pay,” adding: “It’s simply a matter of fair labor practice, darling! If you were really smart, what you would do is get the other boys together and organize a union.” Incredible.

Even though old Hollywood movies were subject to the Hays Code until 1968, “inappropriate” sexual relationships and conduct were still heavily alluded to. And to my pleasant surprise, a number of films tackled shockingly progressive subject matters that are still relevant today. In Adam’s Rib (1949), two married lawyers take on opposing sides of a trial, where a woman is charged with attempted murder for shooting her philandering husband. The woman’s defense attorney, played by Katherine Hepburn, argues that her client was a grief-stricken mother and wife, who was only trying to protect her family’s integrity. In other words, under feminism, women should be allowed to shoot their philandering husbands! It’s a delightful little rom-com that, in my opinion, makes a more convincing feminist argument than Barbie (2023) does.

Our flight off the island was delayed by a clogged lavatory, which is honestly a new one for me. (JetBlue had to import a mechanic in from the mainland.) I kept myself entertained by watching YouTube clips of movies, a pasttime I call “microdosing cinema”: Queue up a 3-minute scene that I’ve been itching to watch, and the urge to re-watch the entire movie is, for the most part, quashed: when Alana fumes at her family in Licorice Pizza; the frighteningly realistic but deeply funny Marriage Story* fight; most La La Land musical numbers; the Wolf of Wall Street* scene that should’ve landed Margot Robbie an Academy Award nomination. I’ve done this plenty of times with movies I haven’t seen (Black Swan, Her, Goodfellas, A Star is Born), mostly for scenes detailed in Hunter Harris’s “This One Line Plays In A Loop In My Head” column. This works for shows, too: Tony Soprano yelling “Carmela, can you please shut the doooOOoOOr”; Girls’ Marnie singing “Stronger” (cursed clip); Fleabag’s hair is everything mantra.

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Since I was 16, I’ve routinely fallen in and out of love with Bruce Lee. Or rather, I get into one of my Bruce Lee phases where I obsessively try to watch everything he’s been in. I never do. Most martial arts movies are… not my cup of tea! But this summer, in light of what I’ve dubbed the Simu Liu Psy-op (I don’t share all the opinions in this piece by Steffi Cao, but it’s good background info), I found myself once again thinking about Bruce and how his presence continues to haunt American cinema. This is the first draft of a to-be-published essay in the Are.na Annual anthology, which serves as the basis for a much longer essay I’m currently drafting on Bruce Lee and Asian American cinema:

A man like Bruce Lee is made in his mannerisms.

There is, of course, the matter of appearance — the shaggy mane and sharp mandible, the taut musculature and furrowed brows. But these details are almost extraneous, mere accessories to adorn his movements. The true marvel of Bruce Lee is his gestural charisma: the snake-charmer swagger that, when directed against his enemies, distracts from the snake-like speed of each punch and kick. He wields his strength like a switchblade, controlled and deadly. Devoted fans are familiar with this fatal dance between hero and villain. And Bruce, always the hero, must triumph against all odds.