The Most Interesting Thing

by Abasi-maenyin Esebre

Art Heals, Art Sustains, is a column where we discuss how the art, literature, food and music we consume sustains us and changes our lives. Today, Abasi-maenyin (author of this essay on Afreada) writes about making up one’s own mind about what is the most interesting thing. Your life, your interests.

Inside: Damien Chazelle, Eve Babitz, Benjamín Labatut and more.

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My go-to definition for ‘character’—the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own life, as she put it—comes from Joan Didion’s brilliant, timeless essay On Self-respect. Whenever I reread the essay on the Vogue website, I wonder why the editors today chose to include the addendum that’s become almost synonymous with the piece itself: “Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.” [Italics mine.]

In her heyday, Joan held many lighted cigarettes hostage. | Photo: Lit Hub

That introduction makes me think about how we often introduce movies, ideas, people, places and products with what we think the audience may regard as the ‘most interesting things’ about them, which then greatly influences how the audience responds to the things. Framing alters perception. 

Take Barbie for example. Before its historic box-office run, the Barbie marketing team and cast members during their scheduled interviews made sure to mention the fact that the film’s set design led to a worldwide shortage of pink paint—a framing that inspires collective awe and one less critique aimed at Mattel, which used feminism as a backdoor to consumerism in the same way Edward Bernays’s ‘Torches of Freedom’ campaign used feminism to market cigarettes to women.

While the Barbie example of how introductory information can shepherd our attention in one direction is somewhat harmless, the same can’t be said for the most interesting thing most non-Columbians know about the notorious Pablo Escobar. Instead of being informed about the aeroplane bomb explosion that killed 111 people which he orchestrated with his right-hand man, Velásquez, the first story I heard about the Medellín Cartel leader was about the night he set $2,000,000 ablaze to keep his daughter warm. A story that somewhat manages to humanise such an inhumane man.

The Barbie Malibu Mansion, probably the pinkest building in the world | Photo: Hogwash Studios

In these instances, it is clear to me how our voracious appetite for intrigue correlates with how easily we can be deceived. Blurbs, synopsis, and even stories, too, are a series of carefully selected omissions. They are made of sentences meant to spark interest, interest that often melts into awe, which is the core of why we are susceptible to propaganda. We will, for good or for bad, pay attention to anything that offers the most interesting thing. And so, my thing these days is to pay extra attention to every subtitle, blurb, and rumour that surrounds any piece of media that I consume.

WHEN MORE IS ENOUGH

In 2022, after I watched Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, I was disappointed, disappointed at the collective outrage of the critics who dismissed the movie as an ambitious catastrophe. One scene most critics funnelled their outrage into involved a scene with elephant dung. But, being critical of this ‘most interesting thing’ they peddled, I decided to see the film for myself.

The world’s first visual thesaurus ought to associate this still with any search for the words debauchery, excess, and beauty. | Photo: Scott Garfield

I’d already seen Chazelle’s Whiplash, which made me ponder how often people are abused in the pursuit of greatness, and  La La Land, which reminded me that some attraction ends in repulsion. I find Chazelle to be a fine director with his whip pans and jazz scores, the iconic performances he draws from actors and his well-paced stories. His cinematic lighting and memorable sets meant he could do no wrong, in my eyes, at least. And he didn’t. Babylon was a case of more is enough. Its excess was the same excess that made Everything Everywhere All at Once a masterpiece. It highlighted the ugly specs that will forever taint spectacle. In Nellie Laroy’s death, I saw that no one notices when a single tile on a disco ball goes out. And while I can admit some parts of the film felt rushed or forcibly clobbered together, the overall picture is one where its flaws define its beauty. Yes, pay extra attention to the notoriety around a thing, but sometimes the best thing to do is to flat-out ignore the noise.

THE ENDLESS BEAUTY OF ESSAYS

If flaws make beauty, then essays are infinitely flawed. I came to this conclusion when I read Eve Babitz, the Jewish artist and writer from LA. Years ago, when I first read Meeting Eve Babitz, an excerpt grafted from Lili Anolik’s biography of Babitz, I was floored. A searing exposé on a sensuous, intelligent woman with a wit as biting as Dorothy Parker’s and notoriety redolent of Niñon de Lenclos, the profile/interview led me down a rabbit hole I haven’t crawled out of ever since.

Eve Babitz also held a couple of cigarettes hostage like Joan Didion (a fellow contemporary of hers) | Photo: Miranda Babitz

After one too many adjectives and one too many anecdotes—all scandalous, all thrilling—I rushed to get Babitz’s books. Her words gave me vim; her prose was neither harried nor idle. Her paragraphs came across as zebra crossings that made me pause to glimpse LA as it refracted through her eyes. Her musings on the city turned into musings on its inhabitants, which, in the end, became a covert way to centre herself in the narrative. 

Apart from the exploration of one’s city as an art of introspection into one’s self, what I really gained from reading Babitz was the pleasure of the endless beauty of essays. A very good essay is worth two short stories and one novel. It is the closest we come to the other. One cannot get any more personal without crossing over into telepathy. In essays, writers laminate tears once cried and turn trauma into taxidermy. Babitz’s essays taught me how to write and, more importantly, how to read. Before I became enamoured with Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi and Akwaeke Emezi, there was Babitz, Didion and Sontag. They wrote about John Wayne, a murder-suicide case in Tennessee, and critical photography theory; in nearly every object, word, place or event is the possibility of a story. 

Benjamín Lababut amongst plants: Don’t you just love it when a writer looks like a cross between Ben Affleck and Mads Mikkelson? | Photo: Cristobal Palma

For two years in a row, when anyone asked me to recommend a book, I blurted out The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert without pondering the question, because the essays there made me see the beauty in disasters and the disaster in beauty. These days, When We Cease to Understand the World by the Chilean author Benjamín Labatut is the book I blurt out when anyone asks me to recommend a book. (Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things and Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory come close.) Labatut’s book opens with an essay on Prussian blue and veers off into third-person autofictional pieces about 20th-century physicists, from Botlzmann to Heisenberg, a subject I didn’t know I could find fascinating; the book left me open-minded, to dare and read works I assume might be boring. Such is the beauty of essays. Truly, for me, the only thing better than a good essay is a bad essay.

- Abasi-maenyin, February 2024.