It’s been hard getting motivated to write. It’s a terrible feeling to fail as a self-assigned artist, and when I neglect to post even a single “blog” in an entire summer, it really bums me out. It was like, one day I was so stressed I HAD to make art in order to find equilibrium. The next day I’m so stressed I verge on indifference to the world and can’t possibly pick up a pen. Why can’t my art practice be a byproduct of equilibrium?
I don’t suffer from the kind of anxiety that prevents people from getting things done. When I make a to do list, I’m fairly methodical about clearing all of the tasks therein. When I set out to make an art thing happen, I usually do it within the season. After I quit my last job, I started writing a fan fiction in tandem with 1000 Words of Summer. I should let that count as part of my public quota of publishing. Do my hours in the drum studio count? Probably. Do I wish I spent all my time there instead of at work? That, too, yes.
When I started my new job, as a prescribed arts administrator, I became preoccupied with jogging as a mental cleanse, and continued to lose ways to make time for the self-assigned artist. Athletic activities have a particular and peculiar relationship with art as a zero sum game in a self-assigned artist’s life. These identities are only in combat because of the me at the center, pulling them apart.
My last year in New York, I got into these house and hip hop dance classes at the Ailey Center, and found it was a safe passage out of the treacherous life of a small business owner whose primary audience was at night clubs and comic-cons where days and work and libidos blend into an amorphous blob. Now, I miss the blob of being a workhorse, athlete, and artist.
This substack isn’t about my persona, though. This is about Akiko.
I am going to describe Akiko, and I presage the kind of person she was by comparing my own artistic aspersions to hers amounting largely to failure; which is itself a sort of legacy of the Asian diaspora, a default to move up from. And while many of you will recognize an Akiko or a failed artist in your life, it is still the case that Akiko by definition was someone who slipped through the cracks of archetype.
Akiko died in an Uber on her way to work.
[…]
About ten years ago, I met her through Youngmi at Mission Chinese Food. We bonded quickly over carpe diem covenants of New York, and had mutual respect for our different ambitions and obsessions, moored to distinct disciplines of hedonism. For me it was witnessing gay sex, and for her it was “partying.” While we didn’t really like the same things, we did share a love of house dance. Her way there was quite different than mine. I took dance classes because I suck at dancing. She took dance classes because she was in love with the dance instructor.
I respected Akiko’s energetic drive like hell. She would throw the most extravagantly self-catered birthdays. Hers was January 1. How cool is that? She was a chef by trade in a second career after publishing via Japanese advertising. She got married and had twins. They seemed really satisfied in life. She did not.
After her divorce, Akiko seemed to be tying things on harder, longer. There’s a comedy bit about the difference between a drunk gay man and a drunk straight man, but I think a drunk Japanese woman in NYC is its own proposition entirely. Boy would she get twisted.
Her death simultaneously inspires in me the desire to live a more free life full of abandon, and gratitude for having played it much much safer in life. She is both admirable and pathetic. Like many irresponsible people, she was the victim of urbane abuses so subtle only another woman would recognize it. No one around her will have done anything wrong and yet she was still wronged.
Youngmi and I joke that poor Akiko has been overshadowed by Dolly. Pretty typical of Akiko. But more importantly we’ve talked about all that she represents in us, Asian women with blended contexts and pathologies that excite and terrify everyone as only an Asian could. And the point is that we can feel represented by our kin.
I pray her children have the resources to mourn Akiko, grow up healthy with and not despite the understanding of how extraordinary it is to disappear while maniacally dancing.