Note to Self

“You’re a guy who put an ad on craigslist?” Anna said, not knowing what else to say.

He searched her face for a long moment, then finally seemed to uncoil a bit.

“OK, you want to know about Paul?” He opened a creamer even though his coffee was gone.

“No, that’s really OK—”

“Of course you do,” Taj said, matter-of-factly. “So, first of all, Paul comes from money. And I know those movies ‘didn’t cost anything.’ But movies that don’t ‘cost anything’? They all cost, minimum, twenty grand. So forget about the brutal honesty of ‘exurban realism’ or whatever it is he calls it. It was all family money.”

Anna didn’t really see what that had to do with anything, but she let Taj talk.

“And with Paul, the thing is … it’s an aesthetic, OK, and I’ll admit he’s made it work, for himself at least, but where do you go from there? He’s got his little game, ‘Is it documentary or fiction, is it real or fake?’ How interesting is that? This stupid manufactured intrigue. With me, I like to think it’s really clear-cut. It’s either totally, obviously real, or really, obviously fake, you get what I mean?”

Anna nodded, understanding nothing. She had googled Taj, but oddly her search hadn’t yielded any results.

“Age of Consent, OK? It’s a trick. Paul uses all his gimmicks, his faux realism, keeping everything so very, you know, grim? And what you think you’re getting is honesty. But you know what you’re really getting? Think for a minute about what you’re getting. Do you know what it is?”

Anna shook her head mutely, feeling the way she had back at Columbia when trying to master impossible inflections, the complex morphology of Slavic declensions.

“You’re getting sex,” said Taj. “You’re getting sex packaged as art, so you can go to a theater and sit there nicely with your friends feeling smart, and afterward you can go somewhere and talk about fucking without feeling like you’re exploiting anyone, because it’s art. But guess what? All those movies, Calista and the rest of them, they’re nothing but porn. It’s all one kind of porn or another. And don’t even get me started on Simone,” Taj said, though getting starting on Simone was something he clearly relished. “If there’s one thing her story proves, it’s there’s no faster way to fame in today’s attention economy than to show someone your pink parts.”

“So what if it’s titillating?” Anna said, surprised to find herself arguing. “At least it makes you feel something. If that guy in Age of Consent was obsessed with, I don’t know, plumbing, and was reading from a bunch of plumbing magazines about pipes and things with a bag on his head, it wouldn’t be the same. People wouldn’t care. It’s because he’s sharing something private—”

“You’re right,” Taj said.

“I mean, maybe it’s less arty, or more shallow or whatever,” Anna went on, emboldened, “but I wouldn’t want to watch it either if it was about plumbing. I guess I don’t mind that Gilman uses sex to draw you in.”

“No one’s denying you your right to titillation, OK? I get it. Titillation is important, necessary even. But it can’t be everything. You have to have titillation plus something else. If you’re going to show me your nut sack, make it the Michelangelo of nut sacks. Blow me away with your craft, your insight, your something—shit—” Taj grabbed his pen and scrawled something down. “That’s kind of a great idea: Titillation Plus. What if we call it that?”

“Call what what?” Anna said.

“A new framework for art criticism,” Taj said, still writing. “Something’s either just titillating or titillating plus.”

“Or it’s just not titillating,” Anna added.

“T, NT, or TP, then?”

“I guess.”

Taj paused to spoon some ful mudammas into his mouth with a pita triangle.

“I’ll tell you a story about Paul,” Taj said, “but it’s probably not the kind of thing he wants to get around.”

“I promise,” Anna said, trying to hide her excitement. It really only hit her now: she was sitting with a guy who knows Gilman! This put things on an entirely different level, didn’t it? But then Anna realized something else. She wasn’t just excited because Taj knew Gilman; she was excited because things were about to get fucked up. Already—and without getting drunk or high—they had stumbled into the zone of inappropriate intimacy. She could tell Taj things. And Taj could tell her things. Not everything, maybe, but a lot of things. Things they might not tell anyone else, because they either knew them too well or not well enough. Why was it that she never felt this way with other women? Brandon was the closest thing. But she and Brandon had something in common. They had been cubicle serfs at Pinter, Chinski and Harms together. A “loser bond” they called it. Because theirs weren’t the kinds of jobs anyone aspired to but the kind you simply ended up at, sucked in by promises of health benefits and discounted Metrocards. You made excuses for being there until the excuses became the reasons themselves. So she and Brandon had Chinski and Harms, but what did she and Taj have?

“—had signed up for this special six-week seminar with Herzog out in LA,” Taj was saying. “It was called Ephemeral Cinema or Cinema of the Ephemeral or something, and every week everyone in the class was supposed to make a three-minute movie and bring it in for crit. Paul was starting to get a name for himself in certain circles, but hadn’t hit on the magic bullet yet. At the time he was in a Mario Giacomelli phase, shooting these supercontrasty, eight-millimeter films at night. Basically in the dark. Grain big as golf balls.” Taj was tearing open a Sweet’n Low packet as he spoke, pouring its contents onto the table. “I think I still have some of those in a box somewhere.”

Anna had no idea what Taj was talking about, but it was all interesting. She ate her egg.

“So Paul was showing his boring movies in crit every week and no one liked them. Then he comes home one day and his roommate is fucking some guy. He had found this cheap studio to sublet but it was a share, so he and this other guy basically lived in one big room together.”

“I had a roommate like that once,” Anna began. “In college we—”

“Yeah,” Taj went on, ignoring her. “I forget all the details, but I think the guy was like, some kind of Puerto Rican queen. Or Vietnamese queen?”

“An ethnic queen?” Anna supplied helpfully.

“Something. And maybe he was fucking this other guy for money? I don’t know. I remember Paul telling me there was something weird about it. Maybe they were dressed up like Pilgrims or, like, finger-painting with their balls—whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly normal. Plus, of course, they’re both totally jacked up on something. Paul had crit the next day and he hadn’t made his movie yet, so he thinks, What the hell? And grabs his Nizo. He sets the camera down on something and hits record. He shoots them for three minutes, all one take. They probably didn’t even notice, or didn’t care, if they did.”

“That’s so messed up—”

“Yeah, not exactly what you’d call a triumph of the human spirit.” Taj paused to pour the contents of another Sweet’n Low on the table and began to draw a spiral in the sugar with his finger, a sort of Spiral Jetty