My Dinner With Kanye
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Q: JULIA FOX POSTMODERN PRINCESS
the
world
needs
your
take.
💗
A: Another New York native, Kate, as in @kateofficial, who started a podcast over the pandemic called, simply, Kate’s Podcast, posted a photo of a Los Angeles Apparel billboard and screenshot of a text conversation today on Instagram. She captioned it, “is it time to write an essay about the time @kanyewest pulled over to look at me on this billboard, make a few calls to find out who i was, and take me out to dinner in la like two weeks ago?”
It’s in response to the Interview magazine editorial of Julia Fox’s second date with Ye at Carbone in New York (their first was at Carbone in Miami), titled, “Date Night.” The seeming nonchalance with which this story was posted yesterday got all of our group chats going: Is this for real or are they each just making an ex jealous? What would you do if someone turned your date into a photo shoot, complete with a fashion pull? Would you write an introduction to the story, like Julia did, making something that appears cold (because it was staged) look warm?
Everything with him is always a media moment, because, how he sees it, this is the way the world is going: the only control left comes with interrogating popularity, credibility, and artistic integrity from within the publicity machine—there is no escape. A date, which is a meeting, an interview, and in the case of celebrities, a photo op, anyway, should be styled by the people on it, not Page Six. And Julia isn’t at her first meta rodeo: the character she played in Uncut Gems was written based on her real self, and she still had to audition for it. She once made art for an exhibition called R.I.P. Julia Fox. She’s a classic over-sharer on Instagram, even now. She’ll probably get her own reality show, which I would obviously watch.
Have you ever listened to a friend talk about their first and second dates, all dreamy and forgiving? People always cite those times later on, too, because they are anticipatory. (Rollercoasters, even emotional ones, can never go higher than their first drop.) Have you ever heard someone talk about meeting a celebrity, teasing out all the small details that would go unnoticed if they were not a public figure? It’s its own genre, necessarily sincere but not the new New Sincerity, which ends up being disingenuous because it denies its own desire for attention.
I’ve noticed that it’s often those who say they have no feelings about celeb-worship that end up feeling the most in the moment, pushing people aside to get a photo of someone they may have just been made aware of, even. A person garnering attention, like a car crash, allows for an escape from one’s self, from responsibility. Someone sucking all the air out of a room is like a portal to jump through. For an interview Julia did with The Cut today, she texted, “if ur in a toxic relationship, get out of it cuz u never know who or what could be waiting on the other side.”
I recently had dinner with a group of people, and one of them was well-known enough that a person walking outside the restaurant stopped and backed up, then took a video of us through the window. No one else at our table noticed. Later, there was a debate about who acted the right way around this person. The waitress, the live musician, the dinner guests, the guests of guests, the onlookers, we all had a role to play in this scenario, and we had to be aware of it the whole time. I’ve always wanted a spread following Us magazine’s “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” called “Stars—They’re Not Like Us!” documenting the behavioral changes that come from being constantly scrutinized by magazines like Us.
The most fascinating part of stardom, to me, is the emotions that it inspires. Just being near a gathering crowd makes people behave in unexpected ways. Spectacles represent instant life changes, a question-marked box, irresistible risk. Writing about encountering celebrities is stigmatized because of what it means for the writer’s image, and so we’ve missed out many times on the story of what this feels like: being visited by someone from another world.
Here’s hoping Julia’s text starts a trend, a collection of feel-good, rather than tell-all stories about celebrity dates, or even just dates with him—called My Dinner With Kanye (how has no one else come up with that as a headline yet?). In Ye’s text to Kate, he calls her Cinderella, and in Julia’s text for Interview, she writes, “It felt like a real Cinderella moment.” More than we’re interested in so-called aspirational content, it’s fun to see people admit to their fantasies.