🌻 in poor taste

a self-defense

i’m but a refraction of all the content i’ve ever consumed, etc

Ten alternatives to having good taste:

1. Refreshing Facebook Marketplace every Friday night. Going on desultory walks around your neighborhood, scanning the sidewalks for discarded bounty. Last year you stooped a three-foot vintage mirror with iron trim, and now you’re convinced that this mode of interior design is superior because it is more serendipitous, more cosmically aligned. You end up with the furnishing God thinks you deserve.

2. Keeping your middle school playlists secret like a forbidden crush. Because one time you said you liked Taylor Swift and your trendier girlfriends didn’t leave you alone for months. Listening to the same songs your dad ripped from the 2009 Grammys Nominations CDs you borrowed from the public library, that he burned onto your plastic MP3 player that somehow doubled as a flash card set. Spending $1.99 on iTunes to buy the new Maroon 5 single to listen to, over and over again, before you fall asleep.

3. Searching “makeup for asian eyes” on YouTube and watching probably twenty-some videos without finding a guru with eyelids like yours. Double, hooded, not much space. When you finally figure out how to do your eyeliner, you don’t change it for ten more years. 

4. Going on a family vacation in Hawaii, and asking the woman tanning next to you for her favorite poke spot. Not looking at the Yelp reviews. Ignoring the fact that it’s more of a kava bar, a little seedy-seeming, the air thick with cigar smoke and people talking real, real slow. Damn that’s good. Soy, sesame, scallion. Returning the day you fly out to order two more plastic deli containers of poke: one for here, and one to go.

5. Once you found a barely touched Marc Jacobs perfume roller in a classroom so you kept it and used it and your then-boyfriend started to know it as your trademark scent so why not just stick with that forever.

6. You cringe when you browse your old Goodreads ratings. The same five stars for Harry Potter, Angela Davis, and Kai Fu Lee. Books you read for debate club versus for nostalgia versus for business terms to say at school when your 30-under-30 dormmate starts to explain his startup and look at you like you’re stupid. You wonder if future-you will cringe at the books you think are changing your life today. 

7. Some guy used to make you playlists when he was trying to get you to fall in love. Each week, you listened carefully, adding favorites to your library, texting back inelegant descriptions of what you thought about each song. Grasping for words and senses you never possessed. It sounds blurry? Can you say that about a song? This one is good, I feel like it sparkles. Do you, um, like music that sounds bad on purpose? You didn’t fall in love with him, but you fell in love with the sound. He doesn’t make you playlists anymore. You realize you don’t remember which songs were his.

8. Is it unethical to judge people for bad taste in music, but acceptable to judge them for bad taste in books? What about film? What about food? You wonder if your hopelessly normie Spotify Wrapped (Taylor Swift is still on top) is as embarrassing as the date who called Sapiens his favorite book. You ask these questions to all your friends. One of them dinged a new romantic prospect for liking Monet. Too basic, perhaps. One said it’s about fiction versus nonfiction—you can't judge someone for being moved emotionally (subjective) but you can for having bad thoughts (objective). 

9. Everyone you know is writing the same blog posts about taste. They are all reading Rick Rubin and W. David Marx; they are all shopping SSENSE sales and buying Matisse posters to put up on their walls. For You Pages are out; taking screenshots of Substack posts is in. Stanley Cups are out—too Midwestern-suburb-core—but $200 electric kettles are in. This all still feels to you like a kind of yuppie class signaling—conspicuous consumption, rebranded again—but maybe this thought, too, is gatekeeping?

10. You are writing one of those blog posts about taste. Specifically, that it’s okay for taste to be bad or unrefined or mass-market or even algorithmic. It can be a holdover from your angsty preteen years that you never got around to updating. It can be a song you discovered on “Lit Shower Mix” (made by Spotify, for you) or the backing track to an Airpods advertisement, it can be the turquoise of your childhood bedroom walls (it was called Mint Mojito in the Pottery Barn brochure and you felt so adult to choose it), and it can be watching La La Land for comfort on every airplane ride until it’s unabashedly your favorite film. It’s the DJ you discovered at that midnight set, when you didn’t know if it was the best music or the best high of your life, but you moved and swelled with the crowd until your friend dragged you home. The city you first solo traveled in, the book which retains its relevance with each annual reread. Sometimes I want to experience what everyone else does. Sometimes I remember a moment just because it’s my first. I don’t know how to pick my preferences from a catalog of cool when they are so invariably not. I don’t want to wipe these snapshot memories because they've since lost their shine. I am, as my taste, an unapologetic hoarder of every place I’ve ever been, every person I’ve ever met, everything I’ve ever loved.

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Month one of “publishing more,” per my last post. No life updates, but here are some essays I’ve read & loved this month:

• Garth Greenwell on artistic style: “A highly functioning style, I like to say, gives the impression of an entire life, and therefore an entire world, condensed to a voice.”

• Anna Wiener on writing-as-side-hustle: “The job became her life, and life is material, so the job became the subject of her creative practice, too.”

• Rayne Fisher-Quann on grief: “This is it, I think: the great tragedy at the centre of everything is not that the world is empty or evil or ugly, but that it’s full of immeasurably beautiful things that tend towards decay.”

I want to hear about your bad taste. Thanks for reading,

—jasmine