Someone once broke up with me over phone and concluded with this YouTube link — naturally, it has stayed with me ever since. The video is intensely hypnotic: Stevie Nicks, mid make-up session, breaks into the most gut-wrenching, yet effortless harmony with Christine McVie, supported by a guitar that suddenly joins in from somewhere outside the frame. The camera transfixes on Nick’s unknowable face. When I need to cry, I pull it up.
When done well, fashion shows qualify as the most enchanting form of consumer theatre. This was certainly the case with 20471120, the Japanese fashion brand Masahiro Nakagawa. Founded in 1994, the brand’s elaborate shows grew into massive, ticketed entertainment events with numerous acts, props, and hundreds of models. Spring/Summer 1998, held on the helipad of Tokyo Bayside Square, captures the productive madness of Japan’s fin-de-siecle moment in fashion like no other artefact: corporate financing meets subcultural edge.
For sixteen or-so years, yoga has been my only hobby and physical excercise; and while I was not trained in the Ashtanga tradition (go Sivananda!), I cherish my weekly primary series, as well as the historical document that is this video. The subjects of Guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (who was later disgraced, accused of wide sexual misconduct) in this video exemplify not only the physiological culmination of yoga as a monastic practice as it is turned into athletics, but the transnational pull the movement had between the 70s and 2000s. Devoted yogis from San Francisco to London will spot bodies on these mats that would become legendary teachers in their own right. I most love this video because it captures the mechanical, dead-pan humor of many gurus, which colors the experience of practicing in India—a nuance of the practice that is all but lost in the West.
It’s hard to fathom today that the Tennessee clip-on diva Chris Crocker once held the title of most watched video on YouTube ever (his performance of a lifetime, Leave Britney Alone, was eclipsed by a music video by Justin Bieber). It speaks to the completely folkloric state of the platform in the first decade, where queer production thrived in the content of countless para-fictitious media personas, to the confusion and frequent outrage of the mass public. Crocker is my absolute primal scene for queer internet affect, and my first education in camp as subversion, as humor, and as a form of critique. At twelve years old, I would watch his videos ad nauseam, they taught me to speak English and gave me strength and inspiration as a fellow rural homosexual surviving off the fumes of my own performed otherness. I mourn the many incredibly funny videos that were since deleted, like “Real Bitch Island” and his deranged fights with his grandmother and legal guardian, Mamaw (R.I.P) – but luckily, hundreds of videos still survive (if you know where to look).
