Front Range, CO, August 24, 2026 — Multi-hyphenate artist Inaiah Lujan and their production company Trulu Productions will premiere their first directorial project at two Front Range shows this weekend in Colorado Springs and Boulder. The short film stars feminist punk band GUNK! for their song “FEMICIDE”, a snarling grindcore track that rejects the American subjugation of women and girls.

Inaiah met GUNK! at Colorado Springs’ RENCE FEST in March after performing with their own band, The Hardly Nevers.

“I’ve not been in the bar scene much since I’m sober, so I wanted to play and leave. But the moment Gunk stepped on the stage, I felt a bolt of lightning come through me, and it reminded me of everything I loved about the punk and hardcore scene growing up. The second-to-last song they played was ‘FEMICIDE’, and I got a flash of the music video in its entirety.”

It’s the juxtaposition between vocalist Willie’s terrifying stage presence and the quaint femininity of the prototypical American Dream that Lujan drew upon, capturing the transformation from meekness to carnality in this short film about a 60s-era housewife who receives messages of anarchy from futuristic femmes through her television.

Willie, who starred as the housewife-turned-shrieking renegade, says the performance intimidated them. Yet with Lujan’s concise vision, patient leadership, and a supportive crew (including assistant director James Beck, director of photography Jai von Westphalen, and assistant camera Tim Kelly), the role began to feel like an exact transcription of their own thoughts on systemic misogyny.

“I think this music video matters because it sends a clear message without having to do much talking,” they said. “As a lesbian and person of color, seeing myself in full trad attire with no piercings or tattoos drove the idea of the need for rebellion even deeper. I’m grateful that Inaiah was able to align my exact feelings about the lyrics with their vision for a film.”

Lujan says that in punk and hardcore spaces, lyrics tend to matter less than stage presence and intensity. The video for ‘FEMICIDE’ plucks GUNK! from their standard dive-bar backdrop into a sharply edited story that takes its time articulating itself. From finding the perfect props to Willie’s spacey-eyed half-smile, to their video-husband’s hands clasped over his ears as Willie shrieks, Lujan made sure the message was clear.

“When we empower women, they shake the foundation around them. Whatever opposes it is going to cower, and whatever aligns with it will be free.”

With no immediate plans to make ‘FEMICIDE' available online, the only opportunities to view the video are at two upcoming shows: one at the Concrete Coyote in Colorado Springs on Friday, August 28th, and another in Boulder at Square State Skate on Saturday, August 29th. Both events are all ages.

Buy tickets:

8/28 - Colorado Springs @ Concrete Coyote
8/29 - Boulder @ Square State Skate (free, $10 suggested donation)

Follow GUNK! / Follow Inaiah Lujan / Read GUNK’S Femicide Manifesto

All images are stills from the video ‘FEMICIDE’, courtesy of Inaiah Lujan

In the prologue of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, after the clandestine apprehension of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) by the obsessed Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), we see his naked body from the waist up, pushed against the wall of a darkened motel room, quivering in anticipation. Perfidia, who has agreed to meet him here under the guise of returning the captain’s gun and hat, and so that she may not face punishment for trying to plant a bomb in a government building, traces the gun’s nose down his back before she presumably inserts it into his anus, much to Lockjaw’s degraded, desperate, and gasping pleasure. This is domination: for the rest of the nearly three-hour film, Lockjaw’s body holds a rigidity that makes him seem like he still has the barrel of a gun jammed inside his body’s most private cavity, carrying with him the evidence of his humiliation in his gait, as if Perfidia’s impact is still present.

But what comes just before this moment, in the same scene, might reveal a different story than one of explicit blackmail and coercion. Perfidia, in the darkened room, slinks over to a fully-dressed Lockjaw and mounts him. Sheepishly, he says, “But what about my shoes?” To which Perfidia softly and slowly, while stroking his face with the very gun she will soon use to penetrate him, tells him to shut up. Her tone and body language suggest something more than the captured acquiescing to avoid further subjugation. Despite the heaviness on her face when leaving the motel, despite a command by Lockjaw that looks like exploitation, the want in her body language and on her voice is apparent.

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A hallmark of Paul Thomas Anderson films is how closely interpersonal relationships are played, highlighting a sometimes repugnant brokenness in its characters. Many of his leading characters, from Boogie Nights’ Dirk Diggler to Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock, are either startingly naive or abusive assholes, fighting for some form of relevance or belonging, in large part to suffocate some shame, emptiness, or trauma that is too great to face head-on. And sometimes, the image of control his characters possess is only that, an image or farce. Take the iconic scene from 2012’s The Master, where Amy Adams’ Peggy Dodd jerks her husband and cult leader (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, referred to as ‘The Master’) off into the bathroom sink, into submission. And more to the point, in The Master, it’s the relationship between the two main characters - Master and Freddie - who maintain a tightrope walk between brotherly love and homoerotic affection, between abuser and the abused, that gives the story its brilliance. It’s that fine line, tug of war, ‘who’s besting whom?’ sensation that makes these characters so robust, as Paul Thomas Anderson presents his stories as sympathetic, judgment-free case studies in human nature. These relationships are codependent cycles that feed each other: this is especially true for Perfidia Beverly Hills and Steven J. Lockjaw, whose consensually-blurry dynamic is the catalyst for the story, and the evidence that the psychological struggle for power is sometimes the sex itself.

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A political action drama set in the present day, One Battle is the story of ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) past coming back to haunt him, sending him on a fast-paced goose chase to find and protect his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Before they became Bob and Willa Ferguson, they were Ghetto Pat and Charlene, the boyfriend and young child of radical leftist Perfidia Beverly Hills. This brazen, bold, Black woman leads the chaotic extremist organization, the French 75, before she disappears, informing on the rest of the crew and saving herself. She is enigmatic, cunning, and sexy, and she knows it. The French 75 make moves that are motivated by the sheer force, adrenaline, and optics of revolution rather than by a clear set of goals. They spend their time calling law officials with threats of violence after anti-abortion laws are passed, and blowing up banks and transmission towers, courtesy of Ghetto Pat’s expertise in explosives.

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Perfidia is committed to the cause, but more so committed to herself as the face of the cause; to the idea of herself as a singular being who won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. She lets the senator know her full government name, articulating every syllable; she never conceals her face during the French 75’s operations, nor do most of her comrades. And yet, in the 30-minute prologue in which she is present, there is a heaviness to the way she carries herself and to the way she avoids the camera’s gaze, often seen alone, turning inward, or not speaking when something is visibly on her mind. The scenes of her silence are louder than her moments of boastfulness, firing a machine gun that rests upon her extremely pregnant belly, proclaiming, “Bitch, I feel like Tony Montana!”

She meets her match in Captain Lockjaw when the French 75 enter a Texas detention center to free the Mexican migrants held captive there, and Perfidia finds her way into his quarters, his nap disrupted by the sight of a gun pointed at him. Lockjaw, seated in his well-worn sofa chair, drinks her in with his eyes, the overwhelming reality of her sex appeal rousing him from a sleepy fog more than the realization that she is there to fuck up his whole operation. “Sweet thang,” he coos, a lustful tongue wriggling in his agape mouth and a growing boner in his pants. If everything before this moment was for the French 75, what happens here is just for Perfidia. Titillated by her ability to excite her foe, she orders him to “get it up” and keep it up, licking her lips as a very-horny Lockjaw eagerly complies. Perfidia marches him and his hard-on out in front of everyone, and the French 75 evacuate the captives, an infatuated Lockjaw stating to Perfidia, “I’ll be seeing you”.

For the rest of the film, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw is positioned as our most immediate, tangible villain. He is also the character with no past, no friends or loved ones, the greatest spiritual deficit, and the strongest want. He might have the “warm embrace of the US government” on his side, but he has absolutely nothing else in his life. He is alone, pitiful, and has probably been a loser well before his anti-immigration career began. He is a seasoned flunky. He exists only as a tool of the state, a man who allows himself to be controlled by the illusion of power so that he might beget his own, though it’s clear he is not made of the stuff that would enable him to use it in any convincing way. We can’t even be sure he actually believes the ideologies he has devoted his life to defending. Any acts of force he orders are executed by others: he can’t even kill his daughter on his own, the thing that stands in the way of his acceptance into the completely absurd Christmas Adventurers organization, the place where Lockjaw believes he will finally find love and approval.

Perfidia, too, exhibits internal lack and emotional withholding. She does possess true bravado and strength, which is why she is a leader of the French 75, but it is unwieldy, applied only when it benefits her. It feels, throughout the prologue, that the post-partum monologue she shares is on the verge of bursting out of her even before she got pregnant. In the hours I have spent reading and watching social media content about One Battle, a recurrent frustration expressed is the suggestion that Perfidia’s existence serves no purpose beyond being an object of fetishization for white men. It’s argued that space is never made for us to understand where Perfidia is mentally and emotionally, outside of the scenes just before she is arrested. We don’t know much about who she is or was outside of being a fiery revolutionary (in a long line of revolutionaries, says her mother) and an objectively sexy Black woman… but if we don’t know, neither does Perfidia. It’s this mix of self-doubt, aimlessness, the instinct toward self-preservation, and the flirtation with stereotypes meant to oppress her that gives Perfidia her complexity and animates her actions. She wants something, though she’s not yet sure what, and she sure as hell won’t let anyone else tell her where to rest her allegiance, desires, or power.

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Malcolm X stated in a 1962 Los Angeles speech that the most disrespected, vulnerable person in America is the Black woman, asking Black women to examine why we internalize this hatred, primarily as it relates to our physicality. We are repeatedly discriminated against in the workplace, we have the highest childbirth fatality rate, and despite being the most educated class of people in this nation, we still cannot seem to avoid being hypersexualized by culture at large. At the same time, we are constantly on the front line of liberatory movements and the caretakers of our communities. Unlike the Jezebel and sapphire stereotypes that sell the messaging that Black women are volatile floozies, the strong black woman stereotype is the inverse of this: constantly available to the needs of those around them, with little regard for their own wants. I think about the Black women who were fixtures in my community as a child: ever-present at church or the annual Juneteenth cookouts. We depended on their service, and they were gifted at supplying us with the comfort and support we needed whenever we called upon it. And so, it was always jarring when my parents would tell me that Ms. So-and-So wasn’t going to be at church for a while because of some chronic health issue, or hidden substance abuse battle, or familial strife that I could not have known about from the way they purported themselves as ambassadors of safety and trust for everyone but themselves.

We want to be comforted by the belief that a black revolutionary woman like Perfidia Beverly Hills is proud to take up that role. Believing that she could want something other than what we want for her, what makes her sensible and digestible to us, makes us uncomfortable: that someone who looks like us doesn’t want to be responsible for protecting all of us. But that expectation in and of itself is a type of marginalization: we see your power, and we want it, and you must use it in the way we see fit. Being a hero, being at the top of any hierarchical structure, means sacrificing yourself: your dreams, your safety, your peace, your autonomy. If you are the leader of the charge and are responsible for planning which banks across the city will be blown up next, for the good of the people, it doesn’t matter how much you want to stay home and watch Gilmore Girls or try a new recipe; you’ve got shit to do. Sure, most of us believe we would never be so self-interested that we would sleep with the enemy, abandon our child, and expose the whereabouts of our colleagues so that they might be killed by a desperate-for-power immigration officer. But most of us will also never be in that exact set of circumstances. In the battle between what you want for yourself and what everyone else expects of you, which would you choose?

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Lockjaw is far better at doubling down and denying his truth than Perfidia. Though his life’s work is about cruelty and abuse on the grounds of believing straight, cisgendered, American-born whiteness is the pinnacle of human existence, his fragility is thinly veiled. He bares his teeth or purses his lips when spoken to by those with real authority, when faced with a tough decision, when afraid. As he gets closer and closer to locating Willa, he appears on the verge of tears. The most telling scene of how fundamentally pathetic he is is in his first meeting with the Christmas Adventurers, the extremist, uber-rich, invite-only secret society he yearns to be a part of, when leader Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn) asks him if he has any debts. Lockjaw tells him of a jetski he purchased - a Dynamite Dolphin 335 - that was defective, and thus he refused to pay what he owed. This revelation is made for us to laugh at Lockjaw (this uptight, repressed white supremacist is into jet skis?). Still, even more so, it communicates that he can’t even conceal how much of a powerless, wimpy dunce he is from the truly evil people he badly wants to be a part of. These Christmas Adventurers are far too evil even to consider whimsical recreation like jet skiing. Even as he reads Perfidia’s goodbye note taped to the window, as he yells at Willa calling her a fucking mutt, there is real pain in his face, the evidence of his conditioning to operate as a being of force and domination, rejecting his simplest desires like love and family for the guise of a thing that can never effectively fill the void in his maw.

We hate fascists for good reason, frustrated by anyone who would prefer to accelerate the capitalist system that controls rather than support efforts toward freedom and reform. But maybe we don’t consider enough how the machine creates both ends of this extremism. Maybe we don’t think about how many lies someone like Lockjaw has to believe and accept as his reality to be shaped into the type of guy who thinks killing his only child will lead him down the path to fulfillment. Maybe we don’t consider the way we assume monolithic, permanently heroic behavior and perspective from those we believe ought to protect us. The meeting and subsequent trysts had by these two is nothing but a competition for dominance. Steven J. Lockjaw wants to be consumed by something outside of him, and Perfidia is only interested in a life that allows her to perform the consumption. In any case, she wants her life to be determined on her own terms. And so when these two meet, one of them obsessed with the power he can claim by proxy, and the other choosing for herself what power means. Somewhere between hate-fuck and pissing contest, the consensual fogginess is part of the game.

“There’s two types of cunts: good cunts and shit cunts,” announces Amy Taylor, vocalist of Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers. The crowd goes bananas in applause; redheaded (and rattailed) bassist Gus Romer removes his shirt and snorts into the mic in agreement. From where I’m standing, slightly stage left and on the front row, I can see a mole on his freckled back just above the waistband of his jeans. Amy is 5’2 and no more than 115 pounds, but her 80s bodybuilder energy fills every corner of the historic Ogden Theatre, from the Tito’s-slicked floors to the dusty stagelight trusses on the ceiling overhead. She wears a furry tiger-striped bikini top and matching boyshorts, tan boots, and the bangs of her blonde mullet are freshly trimmed.

“When we were backstage gettin’ ready, I came out of the dressing room with this outfit on, and the boys said I looked like Tigger,” she tells the crowd with a squinty grin, her hands on her hips.

“Yeah, more like the little fuckin’ Flinstones baby, ay!,” shouts guitarist Dec Martens, who, by the looks of his hair, had once hoped to be in a Ratt cover band.

_____

Pau and I had been sitting outside on our lunch break on a Thursday, eating shitty Greek salads and drinking La Croixs when we decided to check out our live music options for the weekend ahead. The show was four or five pages down in the search results, scheduled for 8pm on October 1st. Neither Pau nor myself were massive Amyl and the Sniffers fans at the time – I’d come across a photo of Amy on Instagram some months prior, followed the band because I liked the look of her untempered brio, and listened to their 2021 LP Comfort to Me only once before kind of forgetting about them. Regardless, Pau and I were looking to get out and go just a little berserk, and getting drunk at Carrabba's with our new coworkers was not a suitable option. We paid $30 online for our concert tickets, and listened to the band’s records on repeat, and two days later, we smuggled Bacardi shooters into the venue under our boobs so we could enjoy our libations without leaving the claustrophobic comfort of the pit.

_____

Three bras are pelted onto the stage from disembodied hands, and Amy scoops them up, swinging them above her head like a lasso as the next song begins:

I can make my own choices

I ignore all the voices

Life is layered, it's lawless

The people behind and beside me begin rocking side to side, generating angst and brushing shoulders and tying up their split-dyed hair. We begin to jostle around, either to engage with the light shoves or to avoid them. This is the incubation stage, the bull terrier kicking up his hind legs in warning, when folks are scanning their surroundings, making sure they know exactly how many steps they must take in order to stand clear of the thrashing pit. I tend to hang out on the edge of the action, braced in a self-defense stance, ready to push the scrawny guy with the bridge piercing back into the commotion, but tonight I’m feeling the synergy. I shove my hoop earrings into my pocket and let go of the guard rail anchoring me in place, backing deeper into the crowd. Other than Pau, no one here knows me, so I’m free to be whoever I wanna be. I’m not in Florida anymore: I packed up my clothes and shoes and books and left, and I didn’t really tell anyone goodbye. I threw away tarnished jewelry and useless memories and immobile friendships, and I also left behind the parts of myself that felt like yesterday. Florida Lindsay would’ve stayed on the edge of the mosh pit with her arms folded, but New Lindsay gets rowdy and lets loose and submerges herself in the moment, and she doesn't give a damn!

As the band takes the song from mid-tempo to double time, the commotion in the crowd accelerates too, and I make sure to keep up. I push 6’4” girls and 4’11” guys and they push me back, and we throw our elbows and skank and stomp and jump, picking up anyone that gets knocked on their ass. Someone kicks me in the hip and I shake it off, excited about the bruise that will blossom there by the morning, and my right ear rings from the nearby speaker, and I yell the few lyrics I can remember as loud as I can, determined to lose my voice.

My choice is my own

My voice is my own

Opinion, my own

I own it! I own it!

_____

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of my Floridian roots, if you couldn’t tell from the name of this Substack. I take issue with natives who curse our state, unwilling to accept it for what it is. Florida has it all: to the south, there are crystal clear beaches, mind-blowing Latin and Hispanic food, terrifying highways, the Everglades, Art Basel every December and DJ Khaled’s house. In central Florida, we have Nascar, theme parks, the I-4 Eyesore, the Margaritaville Resort and a lot of old people. And the state wouldn’t be complete without its northern region, home to smelly chicken coops, nature trails and natural springs, collard greens and boiled peanuts sold on the side of the road, and lifted trucks with billowing Trump 2024 flags. There’s something for everyone! In my eyes, it’s criminal to rebuke the place you come from, as, like it or not, that place will always be tied to the person you become long after you’ve left.

For me, though, Florida began to lose its luster once I started living through my memories instead of in the present. It’s like, when you’re in your early 20s and you go out drinking all the time. The first couple weekends it’s crazy fun, and the people you meet at bars and clubs are buying you drinks and making you laugh, and a really cute guy with a little Texas twang gives you his number and you go to Waffle House with him and his friends at 3am. But then it’s five weeks later, and you’ve slept through three alarms so now you only have twenty minutes to get showered and get to work on time, which is going to be pretty much impossible considering how thoroughly hungover you are, and you’ve been sort of dating that guy from before even though you’re positive he’s the dumbest motherfucker in the nation, and when he texts and asks if you wanna go back to Razzle’s tonight you say yes in hopes of a good time, even though you know you’d rather stay home and catch up on the Real Housewives of Atlanta. When I wasn’t stuck inside all the nostalgia, I was just pining for things to be different without taking the action to make them change. I would drive down Nova Road, frustrated that it took the same shape it always had, or go to art events in Orlando and pray to make a friend, though I’d quickly wind up lonesome and ready to leave, just like the last three times. I kept trying to be happy with my circumstances, and tried telling myself that the reason I wasn’t enjoying my life was because I was ungrateful and prideful: if all my peers could be content with the hand they were dealt, why couldn’t I? 

I couldn’t escape the heaviness though: literally everything I did in a day made me want to cry. The repetition and that stifled feeling in my chest started making me angry and lazy, detached and super, super bored. I shrank into myself and became timid and anxious, two words I would prefer not to be associated with. As a kid, I would make the worst grades on easy assignments, feeling like the material was not worth my time if it didn’t provide me with a challenge. In college, I emailed my literature professor over an assignment that asked us to translate lines from Hamlet into layman’s terms, and then explain that we understood what the original line meant. (‘But I’m already restating the sentence in the simplest language possible,’ I argued. ‘Shouldn’t my translation demonstrate that I know what Polonious was saying? With all due respect, is this not kind of redundant?’ Instead of completing the assignment properly, I wrote a paragraph about why the directions were stupid, and I got a C.) I perform the best – creatively, academically, on the job – when I’m under pressure, and Florida stopped providing me with opportunities to get smarter and push harder.

In June, I finally got wise and applied for a job that would require me to move out of Florida, and on September 18th, I officially left. Once I arrived in my new city, I got an additional, even cooler part-time job that will allow me to rub shoulders with millionaires and gallery curators and smart people from places like Iceland and Bolivia and the Bronx. I miss my car, and most of my beloved books are still in the custody of Mom and Dad (this just gives me an excuse to buy a ton more), and I’m definitely nervous about the things that lie ahead of me, but I figure it’s better to be a little scared than completely numb. Fear means you have something to lose, that you have something worth fighting for, and regardless of the self-doubt and disappointment that pops up at times, I know I’m always worth a fight. 

In training for Job A, all of us new hires were asked to write down one thing we’re afraid of as it relates to this new career path. Most everyone wrote down something about money or about figuring out the work/life balance, except for about three people, who said they didn’t believe in fear, that worry was a weakness, that people who are scared cannot succeed. Everyone in the classroom oohed and aahed and applauded, impressed by their display of invincibility, but I found their proclamations hard to believe. I can appreciate that these individuals wanted to convince themselves of their bravery in that moment, but I think it’s more brave to admit your insecurities and weaknesses, and then commit to doing the thing with everything you’ve got anyway. If you’re not at least a little bit scared, are you properly testing your limits? Have you really, definitively decided to risk it all in the pursuit of something higher, or do you doubt yourself so much that you’re still clinging to your safety net? On the last day of work at my retail job in Daytona, I spoke to my coworker about the rigor of the training course ahead of me, and of the horror stories I’d heard about people being sent home for wearing the wrong type of socks.

“Don’t worry about it, Lindsay,” he said reassuringly, “you can always come back home if things don’t work out.”

I looked at him and smiled ruefully, realizing he didn’t understand, after weeks of yammering on about this move and this job, how major this was for me. “Thanks, Tony, but no, I can’t. Not until I’m 90.”

Anyway, I’ll miss Florida, in the way you miss the stuffed animal you carried with you everywhere as a toddler. I feel free for the first time in a long while, but naturally, there are memories I’ll carry with me forever from my nearly-thirty-years in the Sunshine State. I’ll miss Biketoberfest and the famous Iron Horse Saloon beef tips. I’ll miss that one July afternoon last summer when my day at the beach was cut short by a severe and sudden thunderstorm, sending my lifeguard friends and me running into a nearby dive bar where we played pool barefoot and listened to Kenny Chesney. I’ll miss driving to Trilogy Coffee in Deland for hot tea, taking two state roads up to St. Augustine, and then coming back home. I’ll miss Publix subs and bar hopping on Mills and Red Pig Brewery and every little thing that makes Florida different from every other place I’ll go, but the fact of the matter is Florida can’t handle me. I’m going to spend the next 60 years of my life unleashing every part of myself Florida didn’t have room enough to hold. I’m gonna tell my stupid jokes in a room full of fancy people and laugh at myself when it flops. I’m going to rock weird outfits and imbue them with my swag so hard everyone in the 7-Eleven will do a double-take. I’m gonna share my ideas and use the big voice God gave me and go skinny-dipping, but above all, no matter what, I’m gonna get real weird with it!

_____

Google Maps says our bus will arrive in two minutes, but we are just outside of Union Station, a five minute walk from the stop. Pau is the navigator, a Los Angeles native who is more accustomed to finding her way around a big city than I am. We stand on a step and wait patiently for the escalator to carry us underground to the bus terminal, and then take long, lunge-like strides toward the appropriate gate. The station looks relatively new: no graffiti, only a stylish amount of trash, a sleek monochromatic design to match the sharp-edged architecture in the downtown district above ground – but it’s full of homeless people, and the jaundice-green tint of the fluorescent lighting is giving big Jacob’s Ladder energy. I’m getting nervous,  glancing at Pau while trying to keep an eye out for the proper gate number even though I’m not sure which it is. Was it B6 or B8 or A2? The space in front of me is dolly-zooming, likely on account of the two shots of tequila I had on an empty stomach about a half-hour prior, and I lift the wraparound Rocawear shades from over my eyes in an attempt to quell the anxiety creeping up my spine.

“Oh, fuck,” Pau mutters, looking at her phone before breaking into a shuffling gallop. “It's here.”

“Wait, seriously?” I try to match her awkward canter until I realize the unsustainable footing is definitely going to make me trip over my own feet. We don’t want to look like tourists, but we kind of are, and we want to maintain our city girl composure, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get where you're trying to go, so we break into a full-blown sprint at the same moment, side by side. I’m holding my sunglasses in place on top of my head and trying to keep my bag from thumping against my thigh, and Pau is clutching her red satin blouse closed while trying to keep her leather mini skirt from riding up. Our footsteps slam on the floor of the concourse; the only sound rising above it is that of our laughter, bouncing off the walls in all directions as we look at each other, smiling, our expressions a mix of embarrassment and anticipation for our oncoming evening of revelry. It’s a precious moment that feels like a scene out of a 90s movie. Pau catches up to the bus and bangs a hammer fist on the side until the exhausted driver opens the door for us. The panic dries up, and as I board, I commit my senses to absorbing every little fleck and speckle of the night. I feel seventeen again.

III.

    I’m in the airport, feeling small and trying to look composed. When I find my gate I accidentally sit on my braids and give myself whiplash. My business casual outfit is uncomfortable, and I want to change into an oversized T-shirt and bike shorts and (wo)manspread with my shoes off, but I know I’m being watched. The Chloé purse my mom gave me is getting on my nerves too, because there are too many pieces of heavy gold hardware that make the bag difficult to open and close, and it juts out into a bulky rectangle when I put everything in it: a hardcover book, a 5 ½ x 3 ½ notepad, my wallet, my passport, a vial of perfume, pink JBL headphones that stutter and occasionally shock me, eight pseudoephedrine pills, two Blistex tubes and five Pentel RSVP pens. 

The suitcase I’m using has been in the family for at least a couple decades: my grandmother’s name is still on the ID tag though she died in 2005, and it’s unlikely she’s done much traveling since. The sight of her college professor penmanship makes me wonder just how many music conferences this suitcase has been to, and how many states it has seen, and how many tenor sax and bassoon reeds have slept in the interior pouch of the carry-on, betwixt Grandma’s toiletries and Grandpops’ film cameras. 

My older brother and I always preferred when Grandpa picked us up after school, because that meant we got Checkers burgers and fries, five double stuffed Oreos, eight ounces of chocolate milk, ice cream drenched in chocolate syrup, bottomless Sprite and three uninterrupted hours of Cartoon Network. Grandma was more strict and had no tolerance for our puerilities. She made us do our homework, then gave us a splash of skim milk with two regular Oreos, followed by mandatory piano lessons that my brother loved and I abhorred. Television was prohibited until we took a long bath and let her scrub between our toes and powder our butts. She liked order, purpose and poise. What would she think of me right now, klutzing about, being so rough with her suitcase zippers that one already popped off? 

VII.

The blue sky is juicy and at 95-percent saturation, little clumps of cumulus clouds polka-dotting the atmosphere. My little cousin Melody is starting fourth grade tomorrow, and I hadn't even known of her existence until I got in the car and saw her seated behind me. She is opinionated and sassy and reminds me of myself, and within minutes she forces me to let her play a Roblox game on my phone. Her mother Rochelle is driving us to their family home.

“The roads back here are really bumpy, Lindsay, so you might wanna hold on to something,” says Melody, more a demand than a suggestion. I dramatically clutch the dashboard with both hands.  Rochelle is asking me how my flight was, and if I feel ready for tomorrow, but my lack of sleep and awe over my view of the landscape makes my responses come out delirious and unfocused. We pass field after field of spectacular nothing. Gorgeous, barren acres of dry emptiness. I don't see any of the crop circles I'd been counting from the plane, but I do see all the windmills. We pass three acres of sunflowers with their backs to us as we drive toward the sun, parallel to them. A gas processing plant; one dilapidated house wrapped in the arms of a leafless tree; a flat screen TV and crummy loveseat tossed off the back of a pickup truck and into the dirt; a wheat field that looked basically identical to the field on the other side of the road where no life sprang forth. And the sun sparkled and the sky stood, more glorious than any sky that came before it. Bold in spite of the land of nothing, full of meaning and stubborn self-possession. The sun and sky don't ask permission. The naked, naked Earth. 

XXIX.

    There is a homeless man shopping in the store today. The sales advisors don’t know what to make of him, and the customers ignore him, their body language closed off as he walks past, headed in my direction. He has rubbery red skin on his bony chest, made visible by the stretched-out neckline on the stained t-shirt he’s been wearing for a minimum of several days. His hair is curiously platinum blond and bone-straight, but very thin and brittle. He walks with a severe limp, a brand new pair of K-Swiss on his feet, and he holds three shopping bags: T-Mobile, Lids, Foot Locker.

    “Excuse me miss,” he says in a gentle voice, “Could you help me find some jeans?”

    In the men’s department, he tells me he wants one black pair and one blue pair, on sale, and a shirt to go with each. He says he wants them in a size 36, which I can tell from looking at him is going to be too large, but I don’t argue. I pick out a black short-sleeve button-up with white and cerulean vertical stripes, and a powder blue dress shirt. I’m grateful he agrees with my selections. Back at the register, the man pulls a huge wad of cash from his pocket, at least $600, and pays the $86 for his four items.

    “I’m changing my life today, miss.” We’re taking an easy stroll toward the fitting room now. He wants to change into one of his new outfits and discard the ratty old clothes right away. 

“Is that so?”

    “Yes, I’m turning a new leaf. The old me is gone and over with. Later, I’m gonna get a room at the Salvation Army and see about finding a job. I’m done drinkin’, done livin’ on the street. Today, I’m a new man.”

    “Good on ya, mister. Me, too.”

IX.

My knees are adorned with Salonpas patches and my press-on nails look pretty good, even though my fingers are stiff from the mess I made with the fast-drying glue. I’m in bed in the almost-dark, save for the creepy lamp with a red lightbulb that reminds me of frightening light fixtures in a couple David Lynch movies. I try to make myself worry about tomorrow morning, but I can't really bring myself to. I’m already here, drowsy from over-the-counter sleeping pills, my alarm set for 5am. I bought the dress and the hosiery and shoes, and I responded promptly to all the emails, and I found the only shade of red lipstick that doesn’t make me look like Al Jolson, and my mom let me borrow her wedding-day pearls on the condition that if I lose them, I don't bother coming back home. 

With my thumb, I feel the scar tissue under my lip where my vertical labret piercing used to be, only four days prior. There’s concealer in my makeup bag to cover the tattoos on my ankle and collar bone, too. I'd had plans to lock my hair and tattoo my hands and keep my septum ring forever, but life had other plans for me. A few weeks ago, a friend asked me why I spend so much time trying to sort out how to be myself instead of just being it. For a long while, I made the mistake of putting too much emphasis on belonging to something – a clique, a guy, an ideology – that it became difficult to untangle my actual self from the truncated, two-dimensional version of me I’d manufactured; the ‘me’ I made when I couldn’t be settled with the totality of who I am. And once I determined that the thing I’d wanted to belong to could never really fulfill me, the thought of trying to make peace with myself felt even more impossible than it had before. 

Lately, I’ve favored an alternative, quasi-punk sense of style, claiming black as my favorite color and wearing t-shirts with Mel Gibson’s mugshot on it, or that say things like “I Love Patriarchy”. My artwork is dark and libidinal and ironic, too, and although I had a very brief phase in my late teens as a hardcore punk girl who pretended to be a straight-edge atheist, that sensibility didn’t stick until I started collaging some years later, surprising myself with the cool, freaky shit I found tucked away in the back of my mind. I was inspired by my own influences and organized my own tastes by watching what I created when I wasn’t trying to create anything in particular. I’d sit on my bedroom floor after work, surrounded by old magazines and random brochures and a dirty mason jar jammed with paintbrushes, and let myself go berserk on the canvas for eight nonstop hours, watching myself come to life in the form of crumpled gold leaf and palette knife swipes. It was during these chaotic bursts of creative energy that I knew myself, or, that I could at least figure myself out most easily, in my private hours, late at night, while flecking my bedroom floor with acrylic paint and keeping my phone on Do Not Disturb. When a collage was finished, I shared it proudly, knowing it looked as complicated and clandestine as I feel inside, loaded with double entendres and inside jokes meant for me alone. 

Now, lying in bed without any jewelry in my face, and with my business professional outfit hanging in the dark closet across the room, I fear losing that girl, the girl I feel I must cleave to at all times, lest I get distracted and she slips away again. I worry what it will mean for me to have to put that Lindsay on the shelf, and locate new dimensions of myself I’ve been afraid to know. I’m certain I need to broaden my horizons, but I fear that means I’ll lose control. I’m too young for change to be this scary. Most of all, I fear being wrong again.  Am I really who I think I am, or have I been running in circles all this time?

XIII.

Lenora and I exit the hotel lobby, walking in stride and clutching Starbucks lattes gone tepid. I release my braids from their high ponytail and Lenora’s Venezuelan hair billows in the warm breeze. She’s wearing pants and patent leather stilettos, and I’m wearing black pantyhose and block-heeled loafers. Our sixty-one year-old Lyft driver, John, is leaning against his car, and when he sees us walking toward him on the brick pavement, he says “Wooooooow”, grinning, glad he gets to start his day driving around two beautiful girls in their late 20s. It’s his lucky day. We’re both sober, caffeinated, and we just received some really, really good news.

“I’ve never been in a Tesla before,” I say. I’m feeling so optimistic about the future I don’t even bother putting on my seatbelt.

“Oh, they’re not really that different from a standard sports car, except the big flat screen on the dashboard,” John chuckles. He’s driving with his left hand and leaning on the center console with his head turned to the side, like he’s trying to make sure he can hear everything Lenora and I whisper to each other.

“I have a friend in Orlando who has a Tesla, and he took me for a joyride once. We were flying and everyone was honking at us. I was scared but it was so much fun!” I have only known Lenora for about forty-five minutes, but she seems like the type of person who has never experienced a negative emotion in her life. If a disgruntled ex-boyfriend slashed her tires while she was in the salon getting a mani-pedi, she would probably say something like ‘Oh it’s fine, I was gonna have to replace them soon anyway.’ She had walked up to me in the hotel, both of us in a sea of other women in the lobby dressed exactly the same as each other, and greeted me like we were best friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades. I asked where she was from, and she said “Mee-ahm-ee” and I gasped, excited that the only two Florida girls in the building managed to find each other. We exchanged numbers and hugged, and agreed, about three minutes into our friendship, that we would carpool back to the suburbs together. 

Peering over my sunglasses at the screen on the car’s dash, I sucked my teeth in feigned disappointment. There was hardly anyone else on the road, and I wanted to see what this little Muskmobile could do. 

“John, we’re on the highway and you’re barely going 45? I’m sure you can do better than that.” 

“No way, I’m not getting pulled over today!”

“Oh, pleeeeease, just for a few seconds!” Lenora begged, batting her eyelashes at him in the rear view mirror.

He paused, sighed, weighing our words. Drive politely and be a bore, or barrel down the highway and maybe win a kiss on the cheek from one or both of these pretty ladies?

We egg him on, clapping and whooping, wriggling out of our blazers and kicking off our shoes. John adjusts himself in his seat and looks over his shoulder, smirking at me as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands. 

“So, you girls wanna go fast?” 

“Floor it! Floor it! Floor it!”

V.

I saw the homeless man a couple days later, in front of the beachside 7-Eleven. I never drive east on International, but I did that day, for some reason, listening to Black Sabbath when the stripes of his shirt caught my eye. He was hunched over, digging in the trash can with both hands for something to eat, surrounded by other barefoot and crispy-skinned drifters with their bikes, all sharing one 64oz Big Gulp and smoking menthol 305s. I didn't see anything that he could've been keeping his things in, and I regretted not suggesting he buy a nice tactical backpack from Bass Pro Shops. Where had his new clothes and all the money gone from just 48 hours ago? Did he really not have enough left over to buy an Arizona tea and taquitos? Had he gotten so scared of the pressure to be better that he'd gone binge drinking for a whole day, waking up at sunrise in front of the ocean, achey, depressed and wet from pissing himself again? I felt guilty, like it was my fault he wasn't able to be the man he wanted to be — the person he knew he could be. I knew when he said those things about letting go of the past that it wasn't the first time he'd said it, but I really hoped it would be the last. 

XVI.

“You see that really tall peak off to the right, all the way over there?”

I follow with my eyes the northeast extension of Zane’s index finger, his whole arm stretching across the passenger’s seat toward the Rocky Mountains, backlit by the sunset against a purpling sky. We removed our sunglasses in unison just moments ago, and I can tell from the height of his surgery-scarred knee beside the steering wheel that he is tall and brawny, a mountain man. I sit up in the backseat of the Toyota Highlander, craning my neck to get a better view of the Northern Front Range.

“That one sticking up above the overpass? Yeah, I see it.”

“That’s Longs Peak. It’s what we call a fourteener, as in, the elevation is above 14,000 feet. Colorado has 58 of them. We’re kinda famous for it, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

I try to imagine Zane plodding the steep incline and forcing the exhaustion away, eyes determined behind his Oakley shades, supporting himself with his walking stick and trying to ignore the swelling pain in his right knee as he ascends. At the start of this Uber ride, once I’d realized I’d mistakenly called him Jeff twice, I told Zane I’m a writer, and that I was riding from the suburbs to the city in search of a story to tell. He told me about the National Western Stock Show that’s been held here annually for more than 100 years, and about an unforgettable Foreigner concert he went to with a friend on a whim, and how he is taking his wife to Telluride for the weekend, but that the Air B&B she’d fallen in love with didn’t have A/C, so he was going to surprise her with a couple box fans.

After a few quiet seconds listening to Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” playing low on the radio, I ask Zane why he’d called my attention to Longs Peak.

 “Well, I climbed it a couple years ago. Started at 2am, got to the peak around noon, and even with the sun so close there was still quite a chill up there. It was pretty tough, but I got through it alright.”

“Impressive. Is that the only fourteener you’ve completed?”

“I’ve done maybe ten or twelve,” Zane says, blushing proud, before locking eyes with me in the rear view mirror and winking. “There’s something to write about.”

West of the Halifax River sits a four-block strip known as Beach Street, home to an assortment of shops, bars and restaurants, and though its ten-year tenure was brief compared to that of businesses like Atlantic Sounds, the entire downtown district seemed to revolve around Moxie Vintage. Even if you hadn’t set out to visit the store after a solo lunch at Tia Cori’s, it was hard to resist Moxie’s ever-open doors and the subtle throb of deep house music pumping out into the street. Stacked televisions and disco balls sat in the windows lined with silver tinsel, beside a mannequin dressed in sexy steampunk garb, and once inside the 1,600 square-foot store, every shelf and rack was filled with surprise after obscure surprise. In a boutique like Moxie Vintage, there was no telling what you might find: Jim Jones t-shirts, men’s Prada loafers, hot pink lingerie sets, piles of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, mink hats and scarves, wedding dresses from the 40s, framed Marilyn Monroe prints and Harley Davidson biker vests. Moxie Vintage was a playground for self-expression with garments so unique and jewelry so beautiful it was hard to leave the store without an egg roll pouch full of silver rings.

I was fifteen the first time I visited,” says Sarahbeth Mitchener, an artist and avid skater whose family moved to Florida from Colorado in her infancy. At the time of interview, we are trespassing, sitting in a driveway across the street from Trilogy Coffee in Deland. It’s windy and I wait as Sarahbeth lights her American Spirit, leaving only one remaining in the pack. She describes her personal style as aimless, unorthodox and fluctuating. “I felt that intuitive sensation you get when you enter a new, hip place and you know it’s legit. I was inspired.” 

I first learned of Moxie Vintage before I cared much about the clothes I put on my back. As a senior in high school, I wasn’t interested in straying from my t-shirt and jeans uniform just yet, and on the few occasions that I passed Moxie and peeked in from the sidewalk, I was too intimidated by the glimpses of eccentricity I caught to actually enter the store. I was curious, no doubt, but didn’t feel I could handle what lay before me. Once I worked up the courage to go in, alongside a friend who’d started collecting jackets, velvet cloaks and fingerless gloves from Moxie, the sheer number of options held within that tiny store was so overwhelming it was impossible to make a selection. Sitting on private property that February day, Sarahbeth echoed my sentiments, stating she didn’t make a purchase on her first visit, but returned shortly thereafter and fell in love with a pair of tan and brown colorblock bell bottoms that she wore for her high school’s decade day.

“Everyone else wore predictable shit, like those cheap afros from Party City, but I knew I wanted to do something different, and I knew where to go to find it. I got so many compliments and felt so good wearing them, even though they were way too tight,” she giggles. 

Throughout the greater Daytona Beach area, there are countless thrift stores and vintage shops to patronize, but none are comparable to Moxie Vintage in the least. “Thrifting is fun in its own way, because you don’t really know what you’re going to find, or if you’re going to find anything at all,” says Becky Van Mersbergen, 27, a first-generation Indonesian painter whose work focuses on feminine psychedelia and metamorphosis. “But at Moxie, you’re always going to find something. It could be the most random thing that wouldn’t normally be on your radar, but something about seeing it at Moxie makes you feel like you have to have it, even if you don’t take it home with you.”

Hale McCormick says the presence of Danny Scott himself, the owner and operator of Moxie Vintage, is what makes the store stand out from shops of a similar ilk. “Danny remembered his inventory and his customers and what they liked, and he shopped with you. He was constantly teaching style and showing you how to think outside the box. Even little things, like the way he had the antique gowns in the back room sorted by decade, and the handwritten tags, and how he was never trying to hide a broken zipper or missing button on an item. That store was so well curated it was like a museum almost, like Danny’s ten-year art installation.”

Through the chaos of liquidating one’s business and moving out in under thirty days, it was difficult to arrange one-on-one time for a proper interview with Danny, so I emailed him thirteen questions (truncated from my original list of about 30), and when asked if he considered himself an artist, he rejected the notion. (I like to think the most talented artists are also the most reluctant to accept the label, but that’s a subject for another day.) 

“I opened the store out of sheer necessity. I really didn’t have some great vision for it, I just needed it to work. I was extremely broke and had to start making money, so I had to set up the store in a way that I could pretty much guarantee it would be successful. I stopped paying my bills and credit cards so I could use the money to purchase inventory. It was a wild time for sure!”

But in hindsight, Moxie was rich with ingenuity and a level of creativity that one cannot simply reduce to a need for function and profit alone. Yes, the store worked, but that’s putting it mildly. Per month, Moxie Vintage cycled through three to four thousand pieces of merchandise, acquired both from Danny’s quick pick-up trips out of state with his mother, Babs, and in intake purchases from people of all ages right in our community. After my own erratic closet purges, I would take laundry baskets full of wardrobe rejects to Moxie, certain Danny would be interested in at least half of what I’d brought, but he would only buy the sweater I thought he’d hate and the one pair of shoes I was still on the fence about parting with. Danny was highly selective about his inventory at Moxie Vintage, and he knew not only what would sell, but what items enhanced the overall aesthetic of the store so that it always looked like an interactive showroom. There was no online store, but a very active Instagram account with over 10,000 posts that teased new merchandise, all edited with funky backgrounds that garnered comment after comment of fire emojis. If you hesitated to make your trip to Moxie, odds were that pair of Demonia club boots you saw online three hours ago wouldn’t be there once you arrived. These things, combined with the no returns, no holds policies made every item you purchased feel like a treasure meant for you alone. Even if you got it home and learned it fit poorly, you could hang your new shoulder-padded jacket with beads and lace somewhere your friends would see, eager to tell them where you got it from.

____

For the past year, I’ve worked for a fast fashion brand in the same mall I grew up in, the first place I remember noticing the myriad ways one could express themselves through clothes. In the food court sat a table full of goth kids, wearing Tripp pants with chains and mesh shirts, glowering at their Sbarro four-cheese calzones. Leaning on the wall in front of Finish Line was a small ensemble of black boys in their red caps that matched the stitching of their denim shorts, dapping each other up and stepping carefully so as not to crease their brand new Air Jordans. And every time I walked past Abercrombie & Fitch, I had to stop and stare at the giant poster of the shirtless guy in the entrance for just a moment, my view interrupted by private school girls drifting out of the store in their Ralph Lauren polos and mini skirts.

But now, that Abercrombie & Fitch is no longer there, and neither is the Sbarro, and two of the five anchor stores have left, with JcPenney hanging by a thread. The food court is abysmal, consisting of two identical “Chinese” food establishments that serve over-fried chicken and gray mush cylinders that are supposed to be egg rolls. (Mr. Dunderbak’s Restaurant & Deli still remains after 47 years, though, and may she never die!) Many of the well-known retailers have been replaced by chintzy shops that sell three-piece tuxedos for $49.99, and much of the diversified, youthful energy that was present 15 years ago has been exchanged for a safe, homogeneous substitution for style.

When I get to work on a shipment day and sift through our new inventory, I often find formaldehyde-scented rip-offs of designer pieces I just saw on Vogue Runway. The colors are all wrong, and the mini dresses are made of stretch polyester, and when I see someone raving over the 20-dollar version of Balenciaga’s Le Cajole bag, I have to fight the urge to recite that Meryl Streep monologue in The Devil Wears Prada. In the modern day, where social media tells you how you should present yourself, getting dressed is more about keeping up than it is about understanding fashion as an art form, or moreso, wearing what makes you feel like you. Perhaps that’s always been the case, but the rate at which it occurs is accelerating now that fast-fashion brands release thousands of new garments every week, modeled by a girl whose features have been so augmented she is a neutralized template onto which anyone can project themselves. Fast fashion is transient and intentionally fickle, and it teaches individuals that style comes from some moving target outside of themselves that they can never catch up to. In some way or another, we all chase clout or the need to feel like we belong somewhere, but in the digital age these tendencies are exacerbated by the dopamine-fix of instant gratification: likes mean love, follows mean friendship.

“I see girls trying to do the Kathleen Hanna look, just like a mini skirt and a tank top, and it looked so cool the way she wore something even that simple,” Sarahbeth muses, “but now when I see it, it doesn’t feel the same. Something gets lost in translation, there’s not really any swag to it. People wear these things to fit in instead of because of how it makes them feel.”

Not only is there a disconnect between consumers and the way styles and trends come into existence, from underground to runway to department store to Forever 21, but individuals also forget that they can be purveyors of their own style, for themselves and for those around them, no holds barred.

“I pay attention to trends, but I put my own spin on them,” says Becky. She tells me her favorite color is “rainbow,” and her favorite number is 420. “A lot of people don’t know how to look like themselves. They think they have to follow the trends exactly. There’s nothing wrong with liking those styles, but they become overplayed easily to the point of almost feeling ironic. Sometimes I’ll see someone wearing something and I’m like, ‘Are you being serious or sarcastic right now?’”

“In my senior year of high school, I moved in with my aunt and cousin, who had a bedroom full of clothes, and she told me I could wear whatever I wanted,” Hale reflects. “So I made it my mission to wear something different every single day. My cousin and I had different body types and the clothes were too big on me, but I made them work. That’s when I started using safety pins a lot, or sometimes I would just let it hang, and it was freeing in a way, wearing things that weren’t always so tight on my body. I knew I looked out of the norm, but not necessarily goofy. People made fun of me for days after I wore these pinstriped suspenders, but I really didn’t give a fuck. I felt good as hell in my baggy clothes. Actual style is craftsmanship and performative and conceptual, versus convenient and immediate. It might mutate over time, but if you’re doing it right, the same subconscious energy will be present throughout transitions.” 

Sarahbeth feels most like herself when her clothes are bloodied and sweaty from a hard day’s work at the skatepark. “It’s rewarding to put all my effort and energy into skating or painting and then see the results of that in what I’m wearing. I’ve never been like ‘Oh my God, I just ripped these jeans, I paid $25 for these vintage Tommys!’ If I busted ass trying a trick ten times before I landed it, that's ultimately what matters.”

Personally, there are only three things I require in order to really feel like Lindsay: braided hair, several silver rings, and flashy eyewear. For the past two and a half years, I haven’t left the house without my oversized tortoise shell frames. I have 20/20 vision, and thus, there is no prescription in them, but when the first pair broke, I went straight to Dillard’s to replace them, not ready to face my face without the comfort of the glasses to make myself look more sophisticated. I have Moxie Vintage to thank for this, as the first purchase I made there was a pair of round sunglasses with futuristic gold arms, the first sunglasses I ever bought, and now my collection of frames stands at about fifteen different styles. 

I asked all three of my subjects how one develops their style, and they all agree it is a practice of trial and error. Just like trying to listen to Björk for the first time, you might have to bounce around from album to album until you find the one that works for you. “Wear whatever you want, whenever you want,” Becky answers. “Work with what you got, but that’s the thing: you have to work it, don’t let it work you.” 

Even if Danny doesn’t consider himself one, he is certainly a friend to the artist, allowing photographers like Tre Crews and Victoria Zeoli to borrow items from the Moxie Vintage inventory to style models with. In 2019, Mr. Scott collaborated with Hale McCormick on assembling a wardrobe for their (Anti)fashion installation, a live performance piece occurring at Downtown Arts Collective in Orlando, Florida, in the middle of a fashion photography showcase. It was in this collection of Moxie pieces that Hale found two items they loved so much they purchased them once the installation was over. First, a handmade, sterling silver necklace designed with chainmail and stars: “When I took it off after the show, I felt like a part of me was missing.” Then, a pair of navy blue crocheted gloves with tiny white flowers that traveled from the fingertips to the wrist. “For a little while, I lived my whole life in those gloves. I wore them to work, I texted in them – they were thin enough that they felt like a second skin. When I’m buried, I want to be stark naked except for that necklace and those gloves.”

For Becky, who creates her artwork under the name Eclectic Cogitation, her personal style and art are one in the same. “I’m eclectic, and so are the things I create,” she says. “The two encourage each other – they really go hand in hand. I create art to turn my whimsical daydreams into reality, and to process my inner wounds. It’s a meditative process that can hopefully teach others to become more open-minded and in touch with themselves.” 

Having just printed the first edition of her zine, Sarahbeth’s personal style echoes the origin of ‘Streamz’, which she calls a “junk-drawer zine.” “I’m inspired by a multitude of people, ideas, and styles… I can dump all the contents of my creative brain into [my zine] and hold it in my hands, in all its imperfect, messy, mixed-media collage glory.”

A theme that presented itself in all conversations I had with Becky, Hale and Sarahbeth is that personal style is determined only after the individual is willing to sit with themselves and ask real questions about who and what they are. These answers are subject to change through new experiences, influences and time, but the means through which we find them remains the same. Style, or in more general terms, art, is a process of releasing the inner self as a means to learning oneself more. That means releasing the need to be perfect, or the thinnest or smartest; releasing the need to keep up with others, letting go of the past or anything that interferes with the purest form of you, right now, today. Once freed from these shackles, you might be surprised to find how smart and funny and sexy you are, to yourself alone, without comparison: weird body hair, hyperpigmentation and all. And in no time flat, you could find yourself in a store like Moxie, picking out alligator skin platform boots and a green fascinator hat to wear to the family reunion, whether your look is appreciated by relatives or not. “Moxie Vintage was more than just a store, it was all about expression and creativity and individuality,” Sarahbeth adds, finishing her watered-down cold brew. “It was the clearest example of these concepts we had available to us here. It’s a place like that that even makes you think about these qualities. Nothing will ever be able to replace Moxie, ever.”

_____

Four days after the close-out announcement, I parked my Nissan Maxima behind Nicole’s Beach Street Market and walked to Moxie, my stomach already in knots. Relieved there was no line, I followed the deep house soundtrack inside, hopeful it might still look like the Moxie I remembered. But as I crossed the threshold into the store, my heart sank and I felt a headache forming in my left temple. Due to limited post-COVID hours, the store was only open Thursday through Sunday, 12-4pm. It was only 1pm on Friday, and hardly anything remained. Customers shopped frantically, desperate to find anything to take home, just so they could have one last piece of the Moxie pie. Entire racks were empty, display dressers had been sold, and all the leftover belts and ties were condensed to a cardboard box. For the first time ever, I could see the bare wall on the north end of the store. The back annex of antique clothing was almost empty, save for three or four hats, and when I reached for a Jeff Gordon t-shirt with a trembling hand, someone swiped it off the rack and turned away, unwilling to look me in the eye. My heart pounded in my chest and the ominously empty room spun, the same room that had once possessed so much life and potential. Vultures, all of them, I thought, hurt that even in a time so heartbreaking, in the wake of the end of a place so sacrosanct, peoples’ greed still overrode their instinct to revere Moxie Vintage for what it was: the only place you could go in Daytona Beach to find yourself. I saw nothing but carnality and flesh, the same impulses that drive fast-fashion, the very antithesis of what Moxie stood for. 

In the end, I bought two brown leather belts with large buckles and a heart-shaped ring. Danny stood at the register, cashiering with a smile on his face as always, showing incredible resolve as his beloved store came crumbling down, perhaps at a faster rate than he had expected. I tried to think optimistically, glad that Danny wouldn’t have to worry about money for a little while. He told me he was moving to California, but I’ve heard rumors that he’s still living in Volusia County, relaxing and making plans for future projects that will rock the townsfolk of wherever he finds himself next. Still, it stung, watching the ravenous way in which people shopped, feeling like they didn’t really get it – Moxie, style, identity – if they felt good about hoarding like this. The items I purchased had been on my shopping list for a couple months, and I told myself I would only buy if the desire was sincere. Moxie Vintage was about more than the stuff, it was about the entire experience. People from all over – Miami, Tallahassee, New York City, LA, Stockholm, Berlin, Houstatlantavegas – had visited Moxie and been struck by it, a one-of-a-kind thing of beauty. On that last visit, above all, it was frustrating to see how many people still held the ideology that trendiness and hype are synonymous with a stable sense of self. The things you wear and the shops you frequent and the friends and Instagram posts don’t have anything to do with your identity, not really. “We want to buy everything we see because we think it will define our individuality,” Hale remarks, “but nothing you buy can make you any more or less of who you are.” Moxie Vintage was a lesson in curation, and it allowed people the opportunity to explore their interests and learn about themselves, but its absence is a reminder that anything you wear, say or do should be an extension of what’s on the inside of you. What matters most, more than the right haircut or the name brands in your closet, is learning to adore the naked, bloated, wide-hipped, flat-footed, big-toothed, cellulitis-ed You.

View more photos on my Instagram.

In the final verse of her new song “Heated”, Beyoncé raps the line “Drinking my water / Minding my biz / Monday I’m overrated / Tuesday, on my dick”, and in that moment, I knew she was targeting me directly. I can admit to being a flip-floppy, wishy-washy fan, tweeting screenshots of Mrs. Knowles-Carter wearing an unflattering bob with the caption “It’s not working sis :/”, only to change my tune the moment she posed for Instagram in the same Alessandra Rich tartan skirt I’ve been coveting for months. I’ve been a loyal follower of “Queen Bey”, as it were, ever since I received a Destiny’s Child album for Christmas as a first grader, but I have never let myself become a diehard fan with no standards: I’ve always had one foot in, one foot out of the Beyhive, positioned to bolt at any moment. I am what’s known as a Beyoncé opportunist, professing my undying devotion upon thrifting a pair of gum-sole Adidas from her Ivy Park collection, then rebuking her whole discography after those ultra-chic sneakers gave me plantar fasciitis. 

So, when Renaissance was announced, I was skeptical and pessimistic. I’d listened to Lemonade and her soundtrack for The Lion King: The Gift and found them both very forgettable, edging on corny, and felt Beyoncé was becoming too affluent, old (in pop star years) and out-of-touch to produce anything worth getting excited about. At midnight on July 29th, the night Renaissance was released, I stretched out across my bed with my headphones on, already rolling my eyes at the tracklist’s names, glad for the chance to be excessively critical of every single moment across the album, and by 12:13am, I was stunned, caught by surprise, eating my words and repenting for trespassing against Beyoncé, an artist who has more tricks up her sleeve than I like to give her credit for. Renaissance is 66 minutes of nonstop dance hits meant to be played in a packed nightclub at 2am, and it is Beyoncé at her best, brightest and sonically speaking, her youngest. Every song is its own party, every horny, bossed-up lyric is clever and modern and sung/rapped with untempered charisma, and every beat is crammed with the dense history of black dance music, from a Donna Summer sample to a boisterous Big Freedia feature on the lead single “Break My Soul”. 

Since its release, I’ve had to force myself to take tolerance breaks from Renaissance, listening to radio static and Kim Wilde’s 1981 self-titled record on my drive to work instead. But still, I find myself returning to the record’s phantasmagoria and, as I wait with bated breath for the music videos set to accompany every Renaissance song, I’ve conducted my own research into her stacked videography, taking notes and steeling myself for what’s to come. After days spent watching Youtube at work, on the treadmill, and in the airport, I have compiled the official, comprehensive list of Beyoncé’s ten best videos. Please, humor me:

10.) “Get Me Bodied [Extended Mix]”, B’Day (2007)

No Beyoncé best-of list is complete without this video (not that you’d need any list other than this one, as “Lindsay’s opinion” is a synonym for “hard, cold fact.”) With Beyoncé in Cleopatra-esque eye makeup, appearances from Solange, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, and delectable choreography from the bridge through the outro, this video is quintessential for wedding guests who rely on songs that tell them exactly how to dance (ie “Electric Boogie”, “Cupid’s Shuffle”, “Step in the Name of…” never mind, scratch that last one…)

9.) “Party”, 4 (2011)

As someone who prefers house parties that feel more like kickbacks than all-out ragers, “Party” (a la Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop”) feels familiar and down-to-earth. The backdrop of extended-stay motels and mobile home communities add to the humble realness of getting just tipsy enough to put on your snazziest coat and let your best friend take saucy photos of you in the bathroom while full-bladdered strangers pound on the door outside.

8.) “Me, Myself and I”, Dangerously in Love (2003)

I know I said I don’t care for Beyoncé wearing a bob, but this video is the exception. I, too, have cut my hair off in response to a break-up, though I’ve never done it after keying my ex’s car, or repeatedly kicking him in the gut, or throwing a coffee mug at his head. I’d be willing to give it a shot, though.

7.) “Ghost”, Beyoncé (2013)

Directed by Belgian visual artist Pierre Debusschere, this video matches the stark minimalism of the song’s production and vocal performance to a tee. It possesses a German expressionist flair, even evoking dance numbers by the late Pina Bausch, a dancer and choreographer instrumental in establishing the über-experimental genre Tanztheater.

6.) “Ring the Alarm”, B’Day (2007)

I saw this video for the first time while staying the night at my grandfather’s house, up before the sun because I couldn’t get comfortable on the itchy couch. At the bridge of the song, there is a close-up of Beyoncé’s makeup-less face with a tear quivering in her left lash line. I remember being in awe of how beautiful she looked in that three-second frame, hoping I looked that pretty when I cried too, and this video has stayed with me for fifteen years for that moment alone. Also, I love when pop stars wear gloves, an oft-neglected accessory in modern times.

5.) “Why Don’t You Love Me”, I Am… Sasha Fierce (2008)

Movies and music videos about beautiful, bored, lonely women succumbing to alcoholism and/or psychotic breaks are among my favorites, as it makes me feel less weird about sometimes having a small meltdown while shaving both my legs. (Honestly, I’m lucky if I can get through one shin before I’m thrown into a trichology-triggered ennui).

4.) “Grown Woman”, Beyoncé (2013)

The uncanny valley effect of the CGI’ed lips on childhood footage of Beyoncé does make me a bit queasy, but the appearance of her mother Tina, and noticing the falling-off of Beyoncé’s necklace during a dance number makes up for it. Also, the last third of this video looks an awwwwwwful lot like Rihanna’s video “Rude Boy”, but let me mind my business…

3.) “Sweet Dreams”, I Am… Sasha Fierce (2008)

All of the uptempo songs on I Am… feature exceptional choreography, black and white coloring and minimal set design, but “Sweet Dreams” offers the juxtaposition between soft, flowing motions and percussive pops that mimic the drums of the song. The video feels like the direct inspiration for “Ghost”, a song that was released five years later as Beyoncé began referencing her own oeuvre on her self-titled album, and it includes an archived Thierry Mugler corset in all its gilded glamour.

2.) “Check On It”, The Pink Panther Soundtrack (2006)

All pink everything!

1.) “Blow”, Beyoncé (2013)

The glossy red lip, the neon costume-clad dancers gyrating under blacklights, Les Twins, the hardly-opaque lyrical innuendo, the skating rink, the 80’s hair metal vibe at the bridge: what’s not to love? Of all the bones I periodically have to pick with Beyoncé, the most common one is that she is often stiff and over-rehearsed, like she’s trying too hard and takes herself too seriously at times, and it comes across in her work, making a song or video feel awkward and dated as soon as it is released. Many of the videos on Beyoncé and Lemonade feel this way to me: it’s hard to enjoy watching them because they don’t feel like Beyoncé enjoyed making them. “Blow” is certainly the outlier, though, as it’s not a video that has the “proving myself”, “I’m the queen” quality that so much of her more recent work does. I return to this video more than any others from Beyoncé or anyone else because it has everything a music video needs: sex and dancing and fun and cars and guitars. It’s youthful, but still salacious, and just like the song, it feels fresh every time I come back to it.

HONORABLE MENTION: “Telephone”, The Fame Monster (2010) - Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé

If the music video for your weird Midwestern emo band doesn’t include Lady Gaga and Beyoncé riding around in Tarantino’s Pussy Wagon, wearing telephone-shaped hats and dancing in designer American flag outfits after poisoning everyone in the local diner, I will not be watching. This is, point blank, the fourth best pop music video of all time.