an old-school tag meme from my esteemed colleague @fourpatch:
last song arno greeff's performance of "lisa se klavier" in the last tv show i watched (see below, lmao), which i thought was really strikingly beautiful! i get the sense from the number of covers on spotify that it's like. a Known Song in an afrikaans context, but it was entirely new to me and entirely lovely. (also of course i don't like any of the actual recorded performances as much as i liked the one on the show, which doesn't seem to be available anywhere…)
last movie genuinely it's been so long i have no idea…? i guess this could be my cue to engage in some performative self-flagellation abt the Decline of the Modern Attention Span which has led to my favoring TV over ~whole films you actually have to chew on~, but like. do you ever just feel absolutely exhausted by the constant pressure to calculate how you fit into larger cultural patterns That Are Bad and apologize for it. my interests generally lie elsewhere. next question.
last tv show oof ok so. last night i watched like 4 eps of recipes for love and murder [domestic violence, femicide cw], which is a show that starts out extremely twee and that i fully expected i'd end up turning off 5-10 minutes in—only then suddenly it drops you into this very non-twee abusive marriage and i was like, well, fuck, i wasn't at all braced for this and it's pretty viscerally upsetting but also maybe i actually respect the show now, because of how—i don't know, i keep reaching for adverbs like 'subtly' or 'sympathetically' but i don't think either of those are quite right, i don't think the depiction is actually subtle and i despise the entire idea of talking about abuse ~sympathetically~. but i feel like the woman who's going through it gets to be a real human person and i recognized the like. oases of contingent temporary safety you flit between (and then of course the blowups you just hunker down through). and, idk, it's a show that's got so many women that, like that one post abt the two latinas in brooklyn 99, no one is Representing Womanhood in a way you get alienated by and mad about, they're just, you know, their own people. so, idk. i'm only like 4 eps in but by the time i went to bed i was finding it pretty compelling.
last book hoo boy. what are actual books we just don't know. moby dick is on my nightstand but have i cracked it open yet. no. 😔 it's possible the last thing i actually finished was the second book in robert jackson bennett's fantasy detectives series, which i liked less than the first one because i thought it ended up being a little too clumsily heavy-handed abt the political message it was trying to drive home… not an uncommon problem for me with modern SFF, honestly, which is frustrating and somewhat embarrassing because i am in fact pretty liberal and in favor of social justice! but like. just because your stance is sympathetic doesn't mean the story you're using as a hammer to beat it into me with is actually good art… tl;dr kagathos kalos no realer than kalos kagathos, imo.
favorite color i mean, my username is a hex code… however just to shake it up i'm gonna go ahead and say: a really vivid yellow-orange like marigolds or mangos. (i mean the real answer is that i don't believe in single favorites, i like a diversified portfolio of really saturated neon hues but then also restful faded ones like sage or slate or the soft sooty purple of the night sky after snow. but. shhh.)
spicy, sweet, or savory FALSE TRINARY ALERT however. it's savory.
savory and spicy is the best though.
current obsession oh god i don't know. actually-foot-shaped shoes still, probably—now that my feet seem to have Spread With Age or Frequent Barefootedness or whatever and basically all my existing fall/winter footwear is uncomfortably constraining, i'm doing a lot of thinking about what my ~shoe wardrobe~ should look like going forward, because i need to replace at least some things but shoes are expensive… currently thinking maybe one pair of something clog-ish or similarly slip-on; one pair of sneakers i can hopefully cycle in, and also substitute for converse in specific style contexts; and one pair of Boots i'm prepared to spend more than i want to on (seems like birkenstock makes some that are vaguely doc martens-ish and might be really pleasingly stompy? alternatively there's the extremely charmingly-named danish brand duckfeet, whose fåborg probably shades a little more womenswear than i'd ideally like but at the end of the day looks like a sensible boot with an anatomical shape and natural materials i could feel good about). but for the moment i'm still just windowshopping and waffling!
last search various things pertaining to composing this post, lol; but maybe the one actually worth linking is this article on koos kombuis? #culturalenrichmentoftheday
looking forward to oh this is a hard one. though actually i guess the aforementioned 'acquiring shoes that fit my feet comfortably so i can theoretically Go Places and Do Things' project actually does count, so maybe we can leave it at that and stay out of really existential territory…
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tagged—anyone who wants to be, really! but since that's a copout, how about, uh: [squints at activity page] @adiantum-sporophyte, @aldieb, @batbetbitbotbut, @ghostofasecretary, and @pinehutch? though of course only if it feels like fun. :)
