Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked cool person Hari Nef to come on Perfectly Imperfect & redistribute her good taste.

Hari Nef is an actress, model, and writer based in New York City. You may know Hari from the Emmy-winning television series Transparent or Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation, but she also tells me that she’ll be on the next season of “your favorite show”, but that it’s still a secret 😉. In the last year she’s penned pieces such as The Agony and the Ecstasy of Getting Mistaken for Cis for GQ, multiple essays for Art Forum, and a fantastic John Waters profile for L'Officiel US. And the next time you’re trying to find something to watch I highly recommend checking out her letterboxd account, it’s been a constant stream of movie recs over the last year. Hari has great taste and lucky for us, she’s here to tell us what she’s been into.

Without further ado

Hari Nef (instagram, twitter, letterboxd)

🤡 "The Fool”

the fool, also known as the clown, is a touchstone of memes concerning the self-reflexivity of one’s own silliness, or more likely her foolishness. no more: silliness is the highest form of morality. i was watching an episode of rupaul’s drag race: untucked recently—season 2, which corresponds to rupaul’s drag race season 3, because the first season had no untucked—and there was shangela: leering, musing whether or not she’d been set up to be “the fool” in the wake of some foul play involving the construction of a gown made out of hair. there is valor in being deceived, shangela! there is even glamour in looking dumb. if you’re reading this you’re uncool: so why fake it?

🎋 Fire Island Pines

the pines have a dubious reputation: a strip-of-a-strip of hamptons-adjacent driftwood crawling with rich white gay weekend warriors desperate to party and play among the island’s native pines and its unethically-imported bamboos. this is not untrue! but i spent a month there this summer, and i found myself amused and even inspired by the pines’ inherent theatricality. every single house—for better or for worse—is a stage set for someone’s idea of gay heaven. the itinerary of every chosen fam on their weekend or week-long excursion comprises a script for a queer friend group at its absolute best: “we cook! we swim in the ocean at night! we take ghb and 2cb! we smoke cigarettes and discuss auto-fiction! we fight about auto-fiction!” the pines are possibilities

💁🏽‍♀️ vernonator6597

i think this person is a film student? i’m not sure! but their videos scratch a very specific itch from a rash i caught years ago on ebaumsworld.com. vernonator6597 splices, scores, and edits abject flights of fancy starring your meme queen favs: wendy williams confronts a murderous tulpa of herself, opening an unclosable void! the riverdale girls dance-off to no music, only the cracking of their bones! lorde detonates a bomb from her phone during a “GENIUS” interview! as they say: describing memes is like dancing about writing about architecture during a performance at MoMA PS1. vernonator, whoever you are, let’s make a movie someday

👯 club carry

club carry is a new york-based nightlife collective built around queer, femme djs of color. club carry manifests chaotic, intentional, ecstatic, decadent, and consummately safe spaces around their music: the hardest, fastest, loudest, cuntiest techno i’ve ever heard in north america. founded by dj antpuke, with a fluid roster of regulars including ariel zetina, memphy, dangerous rose, and sauscha, club carry stands alone and apart within the bottle service hellscape of new york nightlife. trans girls and boys—or, as antpuke ava calls them, “dolls and ken dolls”—get in free. the girls who go all night, and most of them do, wear wrap-around shield shades in anticipation of the sunrise

🧍🏼‍♀️ the new single woman

women watch each other; i watch my girlfriends, and i’m noticing a shift! the waning years of the trump era thrust us—the ones who date men, anyway—into serious relationships. we tweeted about our boyfriends and wore short dresses, espousing an ironic but undeniably effusive allegiance to some kind of nouveau #trad-itionalism. “feminist” became a pejorative and we lost our shit when lana dropped “norman fucking rockwell!” but now? everybody’s breaking up and getting her own apartment! the girls are sleeping around and wearing interesting pants with the tabi boots they bought during the second term of the obama administration. they’re speaking critically of “porn” in hushed tones, or in lower-case letters on twitter. as a friend of mine recently muttered, eyebrow raised: “maybe feminism made some points”

Follow Hari on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd.

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