Tasteful Rude l March 14, 2023

Beautifully Ruined: Kate Braverman’s Lithium for Medea

The last time I visited Venice Beach, I made one of my wildest teen fantasies come true.

At one of the many beachfront stores where bathing suits cost five times what they should, I bought myself a gold lamé string bikini. The day was overcast but warm enough to be mostly naked outdoors and so I wore my purchase out of the shop and onto the footpath.

A nasty breeze blew my bowl cut crooked. The clouds parted. I wondered if the 24-karat glare from my bikini was bothering any seagulls. I curled my toes. Moist earth sucked them. I thought of Rose, the cocaine-fueled protagonist of Lithium for Medea, the late Kate Braverman’s first novel. In one of the book’s later chapters, Rose has an epiphany about the wetness that I let lap and slurp at my feet. Rose arrives at the understanding that our ocean isn’t pacific.

Tasteful Rude l January 21, 2022

Julian

About the existence of cats, our father encouraged us to ask, “Why?”

He couldn’t stand them.

Cats annoyed and disgusted him and because of these effects, they also annoyed and disgusted my mother. Rarely did Mom or Dad simply utter gato. Gato always traveled alongside cochino.

Gatos cochinos.

I never asked Dad about his anti-catness. He did once mumble something about cats’ historic ties to the devil, but the comment didn’t explain his unique distaste. His grudge seemed personal, not infernal.

Tasteful Rude l February 11, 2021

FRAMING BRITNEY SPEARS DEEPENED MY DESIRE FOR JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE TO EAT A BAG OF DICKS

Watching Britney Spears shave her head in 2007 made me want to do it too. The bitch looked good bald, better than Demi because she wasn’t doing it for a film role, she was doing it because life, and I recall feeling liberated by proxy as I watched Spears snatch hairdresser Esther Tognozzi’s razor and drag it along her scalp, using it to carve her femininity away, the precise curve of her cranium set free by her own hand. This incident and others appear in Framing Britney Spears, a new documentary by the New York Times. The film casts strong doubt over the legitimacy of the patriarchal legal arrangement under which the megastar has been stuck for the last twelve years. Framing Britney Spears also deepened my desire for Justin Timberlake to eat a bag of dicks.