Today over at The Awl, Emily Gould interviews Tao Lin for her awesome Cooking the Books series.
The salad they make looks pretty tasty, but the real reason to watch the video is the undeniable tension between Lin and Gould. What begins as endearingly awkward buds into a rapport not seen since Ted Danson and Shelly Long lit our hearts ablaze so long ago. We’re not sure about you, but I’m rooting for this pair, guys.
3 responses
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more awkward exchange, ever, in my long life.
When you’re young, stuff like this is kinda quirky and cute. When you hit, oh, 40 or so, it becomes really, really sad. Tragic, even.
What is tragic about it? It’s just kind of two people talking and exchanging glances and making eyes at each other with a lot of sexual tension in the air. Seems ‘pretty funny’ at worst.
Oh, you perceived it as sexual tension? I guess I’m losing my edge here. I perceived it as nervous giggling because she was experiencing Lin as completely lacking in social skills and she had to work really hard to meet him way more than halfway to keep the converstaion going. I mean, do you really think she was sexually attracted by his saying he never cut things up but just chewed them off and spit them into the salad bowl? (I shudder at the “infantility” [word?] of that!!) I perceived her as being pretty grossed out by that and gave her tons of social skill brownie points for blithely glossing that over by saying (paraphrasing) “ok we’ll make the socially acceptable version of the salad here.” Her closing by saying “I felt like we tortured you here” seemed to me to tip her hand about how she was experiencing Lin, and that doesn’t sound like “sexual tension” but just nervous tension to me, but this is the Rumpus after all, so what do I know.
The part I think sad/tragic is that Lin’s “shtick” or “lack of social skills” can be construed, at this moment in time, anyway, as “cute” or “quirky” and, because of his “celebrity” or “momentary notoriety” there will always be women attracted to him, despite what I perceive as his near-autistic behavior. He will age out of “cute” and “quirky” however into just sad, though, in my opinion and experience, because it’s exhausting to try to constantly fill in the blanks for people like that, in an ongoing personal relationship. But maybe that will make for more material for him to write about. But I find that kind of sad.
I wish him all the best in the world, I really do, but the more I actually experience him IRL (well, online and in video) the more I *get* why as a 22-year-old he would glom onto a vulnerable, fragile, compromised 16-year-old as a gf. If we are to accept Lin’s own assertions of the autobiographical origins of Richard Yates.
Trust the art, not the artist is what I usually go by. But if the art *is* the artist, I’m not sure where that leaves me when it comes time to figure out whether I can accept the art or not.
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