Papango's Interesting World

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's book is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (2016) by Marina Abramović.

I listened to audio book, which was read Abramović herself. It was so good.

Her life is amazing. I knew about 'The Artist is Present' (the big retrospective of her work in 2010, where she sat in the atrium of MoMA, still and silent, for 77 days, 10 hours per day. and people could sit opposite her. But I was surprised how much of her work was not just conceptually interesting, but required incredible physical endurance.

The below is the setting for The House with the Ocean View (1997). It's interesting to look at as it is, especially the knife ladders. But the piece is actual Abramović 'living' in it for 12 days. Moving very slowly through a set routine.

You can see more images of her performing this at Sean Kelly Gallery.

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's movie is The Death of Stalin (2017). Directed by Armando Iannucci. Starring Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough, and Jason Isaacs.

It was good fun.

I read Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman last year, so I was primed for General Zhukov to be the loudest and boldest, in dress and action, and Jason Isaacs really brings that.

You should watch the whole movie, even if you don't know anything about Russian history it's still very good (and it gets more relevant every day). But, if you don't want to do that, you can still give yourself a little treat and watch this cut of just the Zhukov bits.

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's album is Coastal Grooves by Blood Orange (2011).

Blood Orange is Dev Hynes, or it's a project he works on. He does non-Blood Orange stuff as well. But Coastal Grooves by Blood Orange is the album I listened to.

Being from Aotearoa (and a citypop fan), I came in with a 'pacific breeze' idea of what a coastal groove is, but this isn't that. This is a New York album.

The first clue is the cover, it's a 1996 photo of Bianca “Exotica” Maldonado outside Sally’s Hideaway, the Times Square club where Paris is Burning (a documentary I have somehow seen), was filmed.

I didn't recognise it, but once I realised that the cover photo wasn't of Blood Orange themself, I was interested in who it was.

Bianca's niece, María José Maldonado, was a 2023 Research Fellow at Visual AIDS and researched her aunt. I found her essay is worth reading and adds loads of context to this photo, and the album.

I liked all the tracks on this album.

Give yourself a little treat and have a listen to Blood Orange performing Champagne Coast in 2026.

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's book is Four Eids and a Funeral (2024) by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar.

Recently my mother noted that all the books I read and enjoy are pretty bleak. That's a fair comment, I do tend towards desolation. But, not this one.

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's movie is Pumping Iron (1977). Directed by George Butler. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno.

It's a documentary about Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno preparing for the 1975 Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition in South Africa.

I joined a new gym recently, and the algorithm must have seen me looking up the timetable because I have been inundated with videos warning me about the dangers of steroids and 'performance enhancing drugs'. (Full disclosure: I am a middle aged fat woman who swims daily and does yoga. Closest thing to being offered steroids was a colleague I bumped into after swimming buying me a coffee on the way back to work.)

Anyway, this came up and it was pretty good. Wholesome, even, compared to the teen influencer takes cattle steroids and has heart failure in his twenties stories I've been seeing.

My new thing is to listen to one new album, read one new book and watch one new movie every week.

This week's book is The Near Witch (2011) by V. E. Schwab

It was pretty good. Plot moved nicely, characters were good. And I liked that the 'villains' were motived by recognisable fear and ignorance. They are people in the village and not cartoon monsters twirling their moustaches. Which made them scarier, and raised the stakes.