‘Hello Stranger’ unpacks the possibilities of flirting
‘Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies’Published by CatapultAvailable Jan. 14; hardcover $27 Two strangers lock eyes across a bar.
Or maybe they reach for the same book on a shelf in a bookstore. Or maybe they’re a model and artist, exchanging nervous smiles as the artist tries to capture a piece of the model’s soul on canvas or film.
In a Hollywood film, we’d be led to believe that these moments are laden with momentous importance – a flicker of sexual charge and desire, a chemical reaction that leads inexorably to life-altering romance and happily ever after.
But in his new book of essays “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,” queer Colombian film and culture critic Manuel Betancourt unpacks the notion that flirting needs to be anything more, suggesting that flirtation can be a worthwhile endeavor in itself. “One of the things that if you read any kind of love story or watch any kind of rom-com, you’re constantly encouraged to think that flirtation is sort of like preamble to something else,” Betancourt tells me over cookies outside of Levain bakery in Larchmont. “Actually, flirtation doesn’t need to do that.
