My New Glasses

I went to Alain Mikli to buy new glasses, and I came away with glasses by his son Jérémy Tarian. Heir vibe, obedient-patriarchal-descent vibe, suffuses my new frames. From the outside, they seem pure black-blue. Take them off my head, however, and look more closely: they’re pocked, variegated with transparent slivers. Schismatic pockets interrupt the monochrome. I’m wearing interrupted glasses: coitus interruptus. The marbled chunk I’ve stuck on my face—man glasses, Mafia glasses, Ari Onassis glasses—gets peppered and made tingly by striations that take away the blue-black area’s certainty-of-self.

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Art curators wear glasses like mine. Once I had a brief crush on a curator from Western Europe. I’d seen his picture in Artforum. I thought, He could be in an Alain Resnais movie. (Not Night and Fog.) Decided I needed to “conquer” him. So I sent him a book of mine, intimately inscribed. The inscription mentioned Adorno. This curator wore boxy dark frames and had sexy, thick eyebrows some people would consider unattractive. (My eyebrows are faint, nearly invisible.)

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The curator with a unibrow never wrote to thank me for sending the Adorno-inscribed book. I no longer have a crush on him. But now my glasses resemble his unibrow, the unibrow that refused to cross the street to say hello or admit blood brotherhood. I can be blood brothers with my glasses instead.

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One of the most exciting fashion transformations in the last half century has been the passage from nerd to chic: call it the transvaluation of nerd. Nerd—if teletransported Star Trek–style into another decade—becomes alluring, like a boner. Nerd remakes boner and gives us the best of the boner, without its mean edge. (Nerd is a softened identity, like butter left out to temper.) My glasses are boner glasses, the kind of skinny penis that doesn’t frighten a first-timer.

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My glasses look like Mondrian paintings. Any nerd glasses look like Mondrian paintings, and therefore like the rediscovery of America, as if the United States had converted from imperial entity into carbonation factory, tonic and non-offensive.

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Maybe my glasses (blue-black rectangles with a perverse undercover striation of nothingness sewn into their hard identity) look like a Monopoly game’s Marvin Gardens and Park Place, or like the beguiling notion of lined-up hotels and houses, Chunky chocolate real-estate tokens.

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The man glasses I’m wearing contain secret boy identity—boy playing man, boy dressed up as man, boy dressed up as Get Smart’s Barbara Feldon. Turn Barbara Feldon’s personality into rectangles I can buy and wear. Turn Barbara Feldon’s sidekick mentality—her underratedness—into a square entity,...