taipei. tao lin. (192)

i forgot what inspired me to pick up taipei  but i did.  i have read other works by tao lin but wouldn't call myself a fan.  as i wrote in my post for his work richard yates, i am not sure how i feel about lin.  on one hand, i am never fully engaged in his work, i read it like i read things online, half-focused, but then he is pretty spot on when it comes to the hipster culture.

taipei, is another novel that is actually an autobiography that is framed as a novel (see: shelia heti's how a person should be?) which as i said before, thanks for the honesty but i can't help but feel cheated.  i mean why not just say it's a memoir?

in any case, in taipai, i discovered that tao lin did a shitload of drugs.  i mean a shitload.  and the sad part was that he did them because he felt like he functioned better in the world with them.  to quote the ever wise cher horowitz (which i think i have quoted before for this blog) "it is one thing to light up a doobie at a party, but it's quite another to be fried all day."  doing the occasional drug is kosher in my book but i can't imagine to the point of recklessness that lin did, having memory loss and vomiting all over union square from snorting too much heroin.  though in lin's defense he wasn't too fucked up because he did keep his google document of notes and of course all the videos which helped him create this work.  i am assuming all of the videos were real, i tried to look up the mcdonalds one but saw on his website the listing of the MDMA videos under his work.  i mean in the end he was able to do all of those drugs, not die, and still created a novel. so kudos to him.

but i mean reading about someone on drugs gets old quickly which resulted in my half-focus as a i read.    because in the end, regardless of how interesting these moments were to lin and his friends, they are all "you had to be there moments" for everyone else.  i have often thought that my life could be a tv series (after seeing mtv's "my life as liz") or a novel, well maybe more a collection of short stories, but i feel like i can never recreate the magic of what happen to me because for it to truly be great, you had to be there.  i could describe it but it was only truly worthwhile in that moment.  taipei was just one big, you had to be there story.  paul and erin's filming of tawian's first mcdonalds was great but i am sure it was 100% funnier if you were on drugs and there.  the same can be said for the #xmenlivetweet, i can imagine how incredible it all was for lin but to read it secondhand it wasn't all that amazing.  and i know because i have had ridiculous drunken (not drugged) incidents like lin, but i recognize that i am the only one that truly gets their magic.  like all the times i have snuck booze into the theater, for example my friend cody and i took in a bottle of rum when we went to see "pirates of caribbean" and i turned to him and in what i thought was a whisper asked for the rum, only for him to knock over the bottle and everyone heard the clank of the rum bottle.  or the time that my friends larry, peter and i went to see "jackass" and drank too much, and i had to pee so i decided to run out during an old person skit, and i ran straight into the mens room, apologized to a man peeing and bolted out the door while the concessions stand workers just stood their and laughed at my dumbass.  hilarious but would people want to read it?  my version of taipei would be called cahuenga and would be all about the drunken fun my friends and i had on cahuenga blvd circa 2008-2010.  but i mean other than my friends, who would anyone truly appreciate it or get it?  i mean lin has his celebrity clout to keep his readers reading but i am a nobody.

oh and before i drop all the drug talk (though it is like the defining theme of the novel), i did appreciate the irony of paul's disgust with erin taking prescription drugs.  erin started taking a pill as prescribed by her doctor and paul lectured her on not needing it and her becoming dependent on it.  this fight then escalated to the point in which paul left.  it was brilliant because the druggie recognizes the harms of prescription drugs.  society condones the recreational use of drugs yet drug companies are constantly trying to fix ailments that a) either don't exist or b) manageable without drugs.  i mean the number one side effect of most prescription drugs is death.  might as well take drugs for fun then.

though i have to add lin does not believe in drug problems as seen in this excerpt:

“They began talking about a Lil Wayne documentary that focused on Lil Wayne’s “drug problem,” which Lil Wayne denied. Paul felt it was bleak and depressing that the filmmakers superimposed their views onto Lil Wayne. Calvin seemed to agree with the documentary. Paul tried, with Erin, who agreed with him, he felt, to convey (mostly by slowly saying variations of “no” and “I can’t think right now”) that there was no such thing as a “drug problem” or even “drugs” – unless anything anyone ever did or thought or felt was considered both a drug and a problem – in that each thought or feeling or object, seen or touched or absorbed or remembered, at whatever coordinate of space-time, would have a unique effect, which each ever-changing person, at each moment of their life, could view as a problem, or not, for themselves.”

this is an interesting reasoning, everythinf outside of this notion of "self" is essentially a "drug" because it has some effect on us.  so i guess drugs really aren't a problem just another stimuli of life.

aside from drugs, there is also paul's relationship with erin, his wife.  i still don't know how that marriage happen though i will say i have, at least twice, tried to get two sets of my friends to marry when we were in vegas.  sadly it didn't happen both times.

erin and paul's relationship interested me because it reminded me of my best friend and i during my cahuenga years (maybe i should write this book).  we had alot of fun together but we also had these random fights.  my friend was also passive aggressive like paul, expecting someone to read his mind when he was upset instead of communicating or saying he wasn't upset when he was.  but part of the issue for us was just like erin and paul was that most of the fights happen when we were really drunk so that caused alot more drama than was necessary.  for me, it was interesting because i didn't know how authentic paul and erin's feelings truly were, everyone likes to believe there is more honesty when one is on drugs but at the same time your mind is so fucked that it might be true but it's definitely askewed. in the end, it just demonstrated how drugs can ruin relationships in addition to people.

as i mentioned earlier, lin is spot on when it comes to hipster culture.  i will admit that i loved the random asking of "do you like rilo kiley?" (for these that are curious, i do).  i also loved that marina abramović's "the artist is present" was mentioned because i sat with her for that piece.  goodreads was also namedropped though i don't think it's hipstery, i just use it.  but i guess everything felt very relevant but then again it was just his life.

i read it, not sure i would recommend it but at least i can say i read it.  which i guess is the point of reading tao lin.