Quick housekeeping up top: I might start doing a mid-month roundup. It’s a little out of hand for a once-monthly. We’ll see.
Reading
Books / audiobooks
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. I’ve had this on my tbr for a long while and finally picked up a copy. Poetic, personal, and political with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of music. I’ll read anything Hanif Abdurraquib writes.
Best American Poetry 2022 & 2023. Mixed bags, as with any anthology, but lots of gems.
Chain Gang All Stars (audiobook) brutal and sad. It feels inevitable that this will get made into a show or movie which will be very hard to do without undercutting the whole point.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (audiobook). A magical realism office drama about how capitalism cannibalizes our dreams. I feel like I would’ve found this guy grating if I read it but was more charmed by him in the audiobook.
The Artist’s Way 😒 I am not digging this but I committed. I just got to the chapter where she recommends a week of “reading deprivation” because many artists are “addicted to reading” and “words are like tranquilizers” to creatives. Lady…aren’t you supposed to be a writer? What are you talking about?
Articles
I had 75 tabs open on my phone at one point this month and that’s simply too many links for a round up, so here’s a small handful.
This recap of the electrifying Maison Margiela couture show (by known POS Galliano), along with the full video of the show. The audience kept up a thunderous applause with feet pounding on the floors for at least five minutes.
Ladle me a bowl of the Midwestern good stuff. Always love when the Midwest snags a bit of the spotlight.
- ) certainly didn’t make me feel better about the divide in how people believe technology can and should fit into, supplement, and augment our lives, bodies, and realities.
For related media anxiety, see also: Everyone’s a sellout now; Coming of age at the dawn of the social internet; and Girl blog (
)For related enshittification-of-everything anxiety, see also: How will the golden age of “making it worse” end?
All good sex is body horror. Complements my horny poem round up from earlier this month pretty well, and in The New Yorker no less! It was incredible, I thought, that a lust like mine could go so wholly undetected. Didn’t it have a weight and a color? Couldn’t passersby tell that I was feral and filthy, dripping beneath my dress?
The baseline scene in Blade Runner 2049 was written by Ryan Gosling. (Here’s the scene.) I now need to rewatch the movie and finally read Pale Fire.
- ). I love reading and thinking about the signals we send through the clothing we wear. Even if we think we don’t care about fashion, our clothes say something about us. Styles, textures, silhouettes, patterns…all of it has meaning! And I think that’s really cool!
A life of splendid uselessness. Our living, to be sure, depends upon an adequate measure of these kinds of things, and of the material goods necessary for maintaining biological life: the schoolchild’s triad of food, clothing and shelter. But to live well, in the last analysis, we need uselessness.
See also: You don’t need to document everything (
). Free yourself!
Surfing
Surfin’ the web, baby. I’ll be better about remembering where I found the things in this section, mostly other newsletters I’m sure. But I’ll use this when I come across something that feels like the old internet, like something you’d find through StumbleUpon in the 00s.
Watching
We finished our rewatch of The Americans. A perfect finale. I love that it answers the big question (will they get caught) but refuses to answer literally anything else. You can’t help but wonder what comes next for every single character, and I love that they don’t tell you!
We saw a screening of Casablanca with a live symphony. It was a full house and at the end I felt like we were applauding for the movie as well as the musicians. It was great.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Soderbergh edit. Someone posted about this on twitter and every clip I saw was cooler than the last so eventually I had to watch it. It’s Raiders in black and white, all sound removed and replaced with the score from The Social Network and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Idk how it’s legal (or if it is legal) but it’s awesome. Spielberg really knows how to make a movie.
Fall of the House of Usher. It was fine. Funnier than Flannigan’s other shows, like he lightened up after getting Midnight Mass (great, of course) out of his system. He’s well suited to the style and melodrama of Poe but I wasn’t really feeling it. I will of course continue to watch whatever he and his amazing cast do next.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Slice of life documentary that feels like you’re paging through a photo book. A mood piece that you’ll either find totally engrossing or a total snooze. It really worked for both of us.
Los Angeles Plays Itself. Another atypical documentary (Wikipedia calls it a video essay) pieced together entirely with snippets of various movie scenes, all set in
LA— excuse me — all set in Los Angeles. It’s part film history, part local history, part love letter, part screed. It’s almost 3 hours but we were totally captivated. If you have recommendations for something similar to this, I’m all ears.Inherent Vice. My favorite PTA. Not his best, maybe, but my favorite. So much rewatch value.
Also rans: Glengarry Glen Ross, The Killing, Saving Private Ryan, The Verdict, The Irishman, Casino, Mad Max: Fury Road, Bottoms
Listening
Felt like a bit of a dud listening month for me. Tried lots of new albums but wasn’t really taken with many of them. A few that stuck, though.
Music
TANGK, Idles. Reviews are mixed…but not here! Love it.
Drop 7, Little Simz.
Greg Mendez, Greg Mendez
Pods
Poetry Unbound - been working through the backlog and am loving it. Hard to go wrong with a smooth Irish accent reading you poetry.
Sound Matters - revisiting for the first time in a few years. I first found this podcast in the early pandemic days and loved putting on the best headphones we had, laying down, and just immersing myself in the soundscape of another city.
Still working my way through 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s. So good.
Making
I’m missing the structure and routine of my 100-day challenge, but I haven’t been able to decide what I’m doing for the next round yet. So in the meantime I started doing 5-day mini challenges until I hit on something I want to commit to. So far I’ve done: pen and ink drawing (hard!) and am in the middle of a colored pencil week now. I’ll probably stick with this idea for at least the next month until I find a thread I want to keep tugging at.
Writing
ICYMI, a round up from the month:
Otis of the Month
So much goodness in here! Thanks for including me. :)