#medialog

books

mona awad, bunny — eh. there were things i liked here, but it was a net negative. what i liked: for better or worse i do relate to being a student at a private college in new england and wanting to kill everyone else there for the crime of being happy, and awad does capture that experience. in general i thought she wrote well about loneliness, and, relatedly, i liked that the book took friendship quite seriously, particularly the way that when you are so lonely you want to die making one (1) friend can transform your entire life. (i’ve seen people say that the queer subtext is unconvincing, but i actually like it better if the reason she feels she can’t say all those things to her friend is not because her feelings are secretly romantic but because grandiosity is culturally permitted in romantic expressions in a way it isn’t, these days, in platonic ones.) did not love the writing overall but she does have a voice. however… okay, so, first of all: writing about a writer—already dicey. writing about a writer not just having graduated from but presently at an MFA program—thinnest of ice; i’m not sure there’s evidence this can be done well although i suppose it’s not theoretically impossible. writing about a writer at an MFA program who gets the kind of critique people might lob at the very novel you are reading—is that a crack i hear? writing about a writer at an MFA program whose travails are proven by the events of the narrative to begin and resolve because of the fact that she actually is the most specialest writer and True Artist and all those other dumb bitches are in fact just jealous? CRASH: you have plummeted into the freezing depths below! absolutely not! are you fucking kidding me? my god. brandon taylor’s self-insert’s coworker crying about his powerful portrait of his boyfriend all over again. bad writing, and more than that: undignified. however the book club chat about it was fun.

sidebar/coda about my experience of this book: so i read it and being the unsophisticated idiot i am i took all the supernatural stuff at face value, like, sure, they’re summoning up these golem-men, whatever. then i go on goodreads (i know) and reddit (i KNOW) and sooo many people are like, actually it’s about how she is mentally ill and hallucinating all of this, you can tell because xyz, and i’m like, oh that literally did not occur to me, because i am stupid. but then i kept poking around and found someone talking about how she went to a reading and awad said she had never intended that interpretation, and also learned there’s a sequel where the bunnies (not worth explaining) tell their side of the story and it’s not “this bitch was crazy” it’s “here’s the Lore of how we did all the supernatural stuff.” so that was funny. one point for dummies.

aja raden, stoned: jewelry, obsession, and how desire shapes the world — this is the kind of pop history book i never read but i picked it up because it was written by the hot and awesome jewelry designer in that diamonds documentary i watched in february. i don’t know that i would have enjoyed it without her vibe in my head, and i don’t know how far i would trust her depiction of historical events, but i did have fun, and also realized that disreputable pop history is about where my tolerance for european history maxes out. there was a moment reading this book where i understood what had gone down with mary and elizabeth and that whole thing but the moment has passed. my favorite thing was learning about the guy who invented cultured pearls, because it is crazy that he did that, and also, by the way, did you know pearls are fucking disgusting?

kazuo ishiguro, the buried giant — tragically found this a huge disappointment! just a fucking chore to read, start to finish, and like—i don’t know, maybe this is an unfortunate consequence of so reliably writing books that make the reader want to kill themselves, but it’s almost like, knowing it was ishiguro, i was kind of bracing myself for the devastating ending the whole time, and then when it came i didn’t really feel anything. but, again, i also really couldn’t get into it at any time before that, so… maybe that’s why. i can’t tell if my tastes have changed since i read what were then his complete works in a year or so in high school, behavior which at that age should be in the DSM, or if i just felt like his whole Thing didn’t work with the arthuriana-adjacent setting… also i think the amnesia thread had me paranoid that it was going to be like the unconsoled. (it wasn’t. thank god.) anyway. i’ll still read klara and the sun at some point.

mary robison, why did i ever — i liked the voice of this SO much that i really wanted to love it as a novel and as a novel i’m not sure it held together so much… but the voice is incredibly fun and really, really, really specifically relatable in some ways i’m not sure i have ever seen before. i liked also that it was a book about a Woman Fuck-Up who’s, like… actually an actual legitimate fuck-up. do you know what i mean? like an actual legitimate unglamorous disaster, despite working in a hollywood-adjacent field. at some point while reading it i was like “oh THIS is what jenny offill was doing in dept. of speculation” and then i googled to see if anyone else had pointed this out and found why did i ever included on a list on offill’s website of books that were important for writing dept. of speculation so… i’m a regular sherlock holmes, clearly. we do a practice of artistic openness! but that book is kind of useful for illustrating what i mean, because dept. of speculation is like, oh no she fights with her husband and their kid breaks her arm and he cheats on her, and then why did i ever is like, well she’s three times divorced and one of her kids is in witness protection and she’s out here violating traffic laws and losing her cat and fucking up her career. i’m not saying one set of problems is inherently worthier of or more compelling in fiction than the other… i’m just saying i found it refreshing.

octavia butler, dawn — the first of three novels i have elected to read in the hopes that they will imaginatively structure this one project that has been stalled for 1 billion years because something i have learned about them makes me think there might be some thematic overlap it may be productive to encounter. this book was… fine, i guess? i mean i didn’t like literally anything about it because i think maybe aliens are like dragons for me and my brain has a hard boundary around engaging with them seriously in fiction (you know, i was never a horse girl, either…) and i found the characters totally flat and while i was sort of vaguely hoping for a different experience than i had had when i skimmed mind of my mind (i think) for the science fiction class i was failing in college the semester i dropped out, unfortunately i think i do just really really really hate butler’s prose, which is like, competent enough but which i find very boring and, worse, very much in what i think of as that science-fiction corniness range that is above anything what chatGPT’s default mode reminds me of, although it has recently occurred to me that perhaps this is common in all kinds of genre fiction and i just associate it with science fiction because science fiction is actually the genre i am most liable to be suckered into reading based on the ideas seeming interesting or because someone told me it was good. but, i dunno, i wasn’t, like, mad. you know how i get mad sometimes? this wasn’t that. this was just like, okay, well, everything this books is doing has nothing to do with anything i like about reading, so… i don’t know if it’s good or not. i’m not equipped to assess this kind of project. did i find it educational in the way i was hoping? there was some thematic overlap but i don’t know that i found it productive.

robert heinlein, starship troopers — space book number two! (i am waiting on my hold for number three.) this book is like… it’s very much a boys’ military adventure that happens to be set in space that is basically an excuse for a lot of dialogue about moral codes bouncing off the thought exercise of the world depicted and also fantasizing about how what if you joined the army to look good in front of a pretty girl (who is also joining the army, to be clear, and is a brilliant mathematical mind who turns out to look pretty cute with her head shaved, which… okay, for a man in 1959, honestly? i don’t hate it) and then boot camp made you a man, a man who knows what it is to stand for something, to fight for something even, actually so much of a man that—i am not making this part up—one day you briefly cross paths with your dad who stopped speaking to you when you enlisted but then after your mom died realized what he had to do was join the army, inspired partly by your example, and who is so proud of you for doing this brave thing that he has now also given himself over to, and then at the end of the book you guys are actually serving on the same spaceship? like, what if? i mean the dad stuff is crazy. you want to be like, “men will literally write boys’ military adventures about what if their dad credited them with making him a man instead of going to therapy” but the thing is you can’t because heinlein has you beat because it’s already IN THE TEXT that his dad is like “sure, i was going to therapy, but obviously that didn’t do anything, because what i needed to do, psychologically, was join the army.” OKAY THEN! true ijbol shit. anyway. all that said—i would actually say that heinlein is an example of the Sci-Fi Nouns Barrage done genuinely well, in a way that i don’t know i would have appreciated if i had not already developed such an allergy to it. the book’s narration feels like this guy is explaining his life and job to someone else in his world, not to “the reader” from our world, and despite the constant nounsing, the voice feels natural, cheesy like a teenage boy in the 50s who mostly wants to talk about how he loves the army so, so much, rather than like a stilted and clunky science-fiction writer aggressively Building World at you. again, if i’d read this twenty years ago i think i would have been like, “lmao, what,” but with the wisdom of age i can see that he did something here that is actually quite hard based on how often other people fuck it up. also Given The Historical Circumstances Of Science Fiction Publishing In The 1950s i’ll go ahead and say it’s rad that his protagonist is secretly filipino and you find this out in the last chapter (although when his dad shows up you do learn his given name is not johnny but juan). i don’t anticipate reading more heinlein but if a trusted source made one of his books sound extremely interesting i’d consider it. and yes, before you ask: i DO feel guilty that it turns out i like robert heinlein more than octavia butler. sorry to feminist jesus.

anna burns, milkman — have said as much already but i loooooooved this book. loved it loved it loved it. the voice was so good, it was like addictively good, just completely delicious, i wanted to swim around in it forever! i could have read another five hundred pages. you can tell it’s really good because she’s constantly using commas “incorrectly” and it never bothered me even once!!!!! miraculous stuff. the structure is incredible too, the mix of compression and expansion, how delicately it’s built while retaining all the while the sense that this woman is simply talking out loud, remembering something that happened when she was young (and that too is expertly handled, the fact that it’s a first person narration with an incredibly clear sense of distance, significant distance, distance enough to grant the narrator language she didn’t have then, but it still feels so close to the story she lived at eighteen). people don’t usually talk about worldbuilding for novels that take place in the real world, but the way she fleshes out the distorted minutiae of life in the troubles made me think of the best of SF/F, this sense that a world already existing is illuminated to us piece by piece. it’s a book about living at a dangerous and disorienting time, about the external complications and internal effects of a life spent under the constant threat of surveillance and retaliation from all possible sides, and it’s also a book about when you’re a teenage girl and an older man is being weird at you and everything in your body knows he’s being weird but he never says anything you could readily identify as having crossed an undeniable line so you never say anything at all. and it’s funny! i can’t stop thinking about how much i loved this book.

stories

c. l. james, “shambleau”; fritz leiber, “a deskful of girls”; & craig strete, “mother of cloth, heart of clock” — i read these three stories because b. d. mcclay, whose writing i like, has been doing a series on genre stories at the point, and i figured it would be a good way to continue poking around the genre world with the benefit that even if i didn’t like any given story i would probably enjoy reading what she had to say about it. (the announced fourth story, vonda mcintyre’s “aztecs,” is more of a novella, and i haven’t decided yet if i want to commit to this at that length, lol.) “shambleau” was a perfectly competent example of two different things i am not likely to be much interested in (westerns, alien stories); “mother of cloth, heart of clock,” a first-person narrative from the voice of a lab animal soon to be put down, was good but also made me so sad i have a hard time saying i “liked” it, which, again, is i suppose a point in its favor; “a deskful of girls,” which i found here on the internet archive and has also been anthologized in the best of fritz leiber collection, was a fucking KNOCKOUT! i could not believe how much i loved it, or how many Things I Loved leiber managed to fit into this story: a sort of chandler-adjacent noirish narrator; name-dropping parapsychological pioneer j. b. rhine; evil psychiatrist; ghosts; and oh by the way the whole story is a commentary on the dehumanizing nature of female fame????? i mean i was thrilled beyond imagining. i liked it so much that i am presently reading leiber’s novel conjure wife and having a great time with that, too. but, i mean, this story—if you’ve got some time i really do recommend checking it out; it’s SO good, and he lands the plane just beautifully. (do i feel bad that that’s two white guys from the 50s whose SF/F offerings i have preferred to the works of octavia butler? i do. i wish it weren’t so.)

marne litfin, “daisies” (published in electric literature) — okay i have to confess that i did look this up because at some point in getting horribly sucked into lindy west discourse i found someone on reddit saying that the third in carmen maria machado’s former marriage had published a short story with a main character who is in an unhappy throuple with a married couple. SORRY. wow i am sinning against feminism all over the place here. anyway. this didn’t wow me, but it did have a nice brisk energy that kept me reading until the end (NOT a given), and, contra my prurient motivations in seeking it out, it’s really just mostly a story about taking a time out on the challenges of life to go hang at the beach with a very good friend, and i kind of like that this was a topic they decided was worthy of writing a story about! it also… hmm, how to put this delicately… it captures a certain vibe, particularly pertaining to the manner in which gender is discussed but also more generally, that some people may perhaps at times find certainly harmless and not anything worth being rude to people about or anything but, you know, kind of precious or corny, but in a way where i was like, yes i am familiar with people who are precious and corny in this way, not in a way where i was like, this story is giving me hives.

movies

natchez — this is a documentary about a mississippi town with a very intense sense of history and tradition around its antebellum mansion tourism industry. i really, really liked it. in many ways it’s a “fun” watch, but it’s also an uncomfortable one, a movie that lets its subjects reveal themselves without ever seeming to aim for any kind of “gotcha” (i actually remember noticing that the movie seemed deliberately edited to avoid “pausing for applause”). the filmmaker also gives space not only to the traditional tours but to a set of mississippians, mostly black, who are working to put out there a more honest history than that which the town tells about itself, and it was very interesting to see them doing that work and reflecting on it; i was particularly interested in pastor rev’s thoughts on how in order for his work to be effective he simply has to meet people where they are to whatever degree is possible, even when it requires demonstrating the patience of job. i don’t know if there are plans for this movie to hit streaming but if you get a chance to see it i would really recommend it; herbert packs a lot into 86 minutes about this deranged country of ours. the scene where the drag queen slips out of the mental health benefit being held at that one really racist guy’s racist antebellum house for some air or a smoke break and there’s a handful of protesters with signs not about the racism but about the gay stuff… america, tbh.

nirvanna the band the show the movie — really fun! gets around my usual aversion to time travel by following back to the future rules i.e. it’s okay if you make it stupid. also i have to imagine that if you’re a fan of the show some of the stuff (like the montage that was presumably clips from the show) hits a little harder, but i thought they did a great job making the movie totally accessible to anyone coming in cold. some GREAT jokes, a story about how friends can be annoying but also friendship is the most important thing in the world (popstar vibes)... i had a great time!

ninotchka — a very serious soviet communist in france on state business encounters a somewhat ridiculous frenchman who is instantly smitten with her; sparks fly—predictably, but it’s lubitsch, so also delightfully. this movie has a very different story and energy from cluny brown, but it shares the central premise of a guy falling for a woman because he finds the fact that she’s a total freak with idiosyncratic passions totally intoxicating, which, like, i dunno, he just gets it. (she falls for him, meanwhile, more or less because he’s kind of stupid… like i said, he just gets it…) i had never seen a greta garbo movie before and i do understand why she was like the biggest star in the world for a while now; there’s a scene where she’s dressed up in a big capitalistic ballgown where despite the fact that she is greta garbo, professional gorgeous person accustomed to attending events in beautiful gowns, she carries herself with a certain awkwardness like she’s a little girl playing dress-up… really good shit. this is also maybe the most palpably horny old movie i have ever seen, in that i have never believed two actors in black-and-white wanted to fuck each other so bad it made them look stupid more than i did with garbo & melvyn douglas in this movie… honestly their chemistry has rarely been matched in the era of color! some people on letterboxd are really mad at this hollywood studio romcom from 1939 for its depiction of communism and the soviet union, which in many regards could not be me but is everyone’s right i suppose, but while you should obviously not turn to this movie for a serious or even fair treatment of the issues at hand, i will say that i liked the direction the movie took regarding ninotchka’s principles more than at a certain point i expected to.

rudo y cursi — rewatched this for the first time in ages because n. had never seen it and for some reason i really wanted him to. i don’t really know why i feel so fondly towards this movie, which i guess is more or less a comedy but also mostly kind of a bummer, but diego luna and gael garcia bernal are so great as a pair of dumb brothers whose moderate soccer gifts seem to promise escape and ultimately mostly just make their lives worse that i’m kind of like… i mean, what else do you need? at one point in this movie gael garcia bernal’s character releases as a single a spanish-language cover of “i want you to want me” and the glimpse of the video we see in the movie truly has lived in my head rent free for what has to be at least a decade now. the specific mustache/hair combo they saddle diego luna with is one of the most successful attempts in screen history to disguise that a movie has cast one of the most beautiful people ever to live as a character who’s not supposed to be that hot. colin farrell in miami vice levels.

project hail mary — i found this very cute! on letterboxd i gave it four stars while saying i felt like i was overrating it and i stand by both of those things… it is basically a children’s movie for adults (i have to assume it is too long and too wordy for most children to sit through, but i can imagine this being a very earnest middle-schooler’s favorite movie for a long time), it is undeniably america-brained, it is wildly optimistic about the learning curve for interspecies communication… but ryan gosling is as sincerely charming as i have ever seen him and that little rock critter who becomes his friend is a real good little movie critter! plus sandra hüller does karaoke and it’s a big effects movie set in space that doesn’t look like a video game. while it was happening i thought it had return of the king endings disease but then the actual ending was so endearingly feel-good i was like well that’s fine then. obsessed with ryan gosling’s parade of nerd t-shirts, some of the best costume work i have ever seen that didn’t involve, like, sewing mirrors onto a gown or whatever. ryan gosling wearing an “i had potential shirt”... hottest he’s ever been to me. i will not be taking questions at this time.

music

i have started to catch up on 2026! for a song, let’s go with the opening track for my favorite album of the month, which i keep describing to people, in true boss baby tweet fashion, as triangulating the spot between different charly bliss albums:

mirah, dedication — was sort of disappointed not to love this because of how i think advisory committee is basically the greatest album by anyone ever, but i did think it was good. the production is very nice and warm, some of the melodies are pretty, and i am happy that she is so happy about being a parent!

yumi zouma, no love lost to kindness — indie rock with a reliably good groove hitting a sweet spot between fuzz and crunch, plus some pretty good hooks; i liked this a lot!

hannah jane lewis, riding in cars with boys — very very pretty hook-driven country from a [checks notes] brit??? alright! lewis has a great ear for melody and her production is really quite lovely, looking forward to a full-length album from her because these five songs were quite sturdy and enjoyable!

liz cooper, new day — this album was extremely cool and interesting… maybe too cool and interesting for me personally to revisit much if at all. but i liked listening to it and i would recommend it to people with more interesting taste in music than i have!

ratboys, singin’ to an empty chair — this album was really great and i LOVE the lead singer’s voice. for shuffle listening i definitely prefer the faster rock-er tracks to the slower country-er tracks but i do think that as a project it makes for a really well-assembled straight-through listen with a very nice album arc.

harry styles, kiss all the time. disco, occasionally — lol. lmao, even. certainly not the worst thing i’ve ever heard but almost spectacularly mid… too shiny to be interesting, too meandering to be fun, too lackluster to be danceable… i don’t know what this guy is doing

PONY, clearly cursed — my aforementioned album of the month! great hooks, sugar-sweet vocals with a slight edge, bright guitars with just enough fizziness that everything feels covered in soda bubbles… simply and truly an Album For Me.

leigh-anne, my ego told me to — this was actually pretty good! way better than her EP last year; little mix is 3 for 3 on alumnae putting out respectable solo projects. not really my thing taste-wise, especially since it does get a little samey at album length, but the production is very nice and a few tracks are intriguingly weird in a fun way!

the format, boycott heaven — i forgot until i listened to this album that i have this thing with nate ruess’s voice and singing and also maybe his whole Deal where when i’m listening to it i can’t figure out if i find it really cloying and annoying or incredibly visceral and compelling or like maybe somehow both at the same time? anyway… so i don’t really know how i feel about this album. but at least some of the tracks have stuck around by virtue of the fact that spending three and a half minutes wondering “do i love this or hate this” is an interesting listening experience (more so than, for example, “do i like this a lot or like this kind of”... being torn between an 8/10 and a 3/10 is more interesting and much rarer than trying to decide if something is a 6 or a 7, you know?). so… that’s something.

lia pappas-kemps, winged — pretty enough but besides “towers,” the song that caught my attention, not worth a second listen

charli xcx, wuthering heights — ok i loved this lmao. it feels like the framework of making music for a story, for perhaps even this specific story (emerald fennell’s “wuthering heights” which i have not seen) in all its excess and melodrama, gave charli some kind of permission structure for tapping into the starry-eyed swooning that so enraptured me back on true romance all those many many many years ago and which she has determinedly remained too cool to ever indulge in again… and while ultimately as documented here brat wound up unlocking her archive for me such that now i finally get vroom-vroom and all the rest, it was still a treat to hear charli playing around with lushness and space again!!! “dying for you” in particular i can’t get enough.

books

susannah cahalan, the great pretender — in her twenties, cahalan developed psychosis that turned out to be caused entirely by an autoimmune illness no one checked her for until very far into her illness. the memoir she wrote about this and the world (of researchers, doctors, etc.) that book’s publication connected her to led her to the famous study about the normal people who went into a bunch of mental hospitals presenting as experiencing aural hallucinations and then a difficult time getting out. cahalan was intrigued by this study because of her own experience of being treated completely differently, and with much more respect, once her condition was seen as “physical” rather than “psychological,” and her attempts to learn more about it and its author, documented in this book, ultimately led her to the conclusion that the study never really happened as described and much to all of the data was fabricated. this is kind of an interesting case of a book that debunks something (not 100% conclusively, as she freely admits, but IMO compellingly) but in a way that doesn’t really like… reveal anything to be actually the opposite of what this false study has led us to believe? two of the major contentions of the study—that the health system stigmatizes and dehumanizes people with psychiatric diagnoses, and that the diagnostic criteria for psychiatric conditions are subjective and not reliably applied—remain pretty undeniably true. but it is an interesting trail (or non-trail) to follow, and while nothing here will be super new for people with even a passing interest in psych history stuff, i did enjoy reading it. (at some point i got excited because marshmallow study guy showed up and i was like OMG MARSHMALLOW STUDY GUY and the person i was telling this to was like, …what, and i remembered that while my knowledge comes mostly from non-scholarly books and new yorker articles i do in fact qualify as slightly more interested in this field than most people.) i also vibed with her perspective as someone critical of psychiatry as practiced but also keenly personally aware of the potential for biology to cause psychiatric symptoms (my own much less traumatic and intense version of her brush with psychosis, as i’ve mentioned before, is the fact that i developed what in retrospect almost certainly qualifies as an anxiety disorder in high school that went away overnight when my thyroid levels were adjusted, which has certainly shaped my perspective). i might read her memoir because she’s a reasonably capable writer and, well, that is a very interesting harrowing experience she had!

jeanette winterson, frankissstein — my first winterson because someone i know recommended it and i was like, why not… i LOVED this book. on paper it sounds kind of hokey, maybe: the story of mary shelley, beginning with the fateful trip to rainy lake geneva, intertwines with a contemporary narrative in which a trans doctor named ry shelley carries on an ill-judged affair with a mad scientist named victor, in a story that weaves in across the timelines AI, gender, embodiment, etc. but i loved winterson’s writing so much that i was totally swept away—atmospheric, rich even when writing in plain language, funny (some parts of the book, especially involving a loose lord byron reimagining who runs a sex doll company, are VERY funny), poetic but not overwrought, sharp… just a sheer unputdownable pleasure to read, start to finish! it’s hard to wrestle with so many hot button topics without coming across as corny, but winterson is interested in resonance and questions unanswered more than arguing for some kind of conclusion, which is IMO what a novel is good for… i also liked how seriously the book told the nigh-unfathomable series of tragedies that mary shelley’s life became in the years after frankestein. you can tell i really loved it because it ends with the kind of weird mysterious ending i usually don’t like but in this case it really worked for me, because so much of the book is about capturing the emotional tenor of a historical moment that feels so much on the precipice of something, so unresolved… ahhhh just delicious. will absolutely be reading her again.

kory stamper, true color: the strange and spectacular quest to define color—from azure to zinc pink — as a huge fan of stamper’s word by word: the secret life of dictionaries, which i am constantly recommending to anyone who likes language, i was soooo excited that she had a new book out and it fully delivered on my very high expectations! i’m not going to summarize the whole history of the challenge of defining color names in merriam-webster and elsewhere, but some highlights for me were: (1) the fascinating unavoidable tension between various scientific schema for defining or mapping colors and the real-world usage of color names by everyone who is not a color scientist of some kind; (2) the chaos added by the era of mass-produced colorful items and mass-mailed catalogues, which created massive volumes of attestations for color name usage that were tainted by the fact that advertisers chose color names based on their presumed appeal; (3) a secret collaborator wife reveal. plus, of course, stamper’s playful style, droll sense of humor, and wonderful ear for cadence remain as delightful to spend time with as ever. yay!

patrick radden keefe, london falling: a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family’s search for truth — this book is craaaazyyyyy and while the story it spins out doesn’t feel as Consequential as the other stories he’s opted to turn into full length books… it’s, like, really really crazy so i didn’t super mind. as far as big issues raised here, i would say that apparently england is not the place to live if you want to piss off a russian oligarch, and this book made me think a lot about how crazy parenting is because, i dunno, i know obviously we only get the perspective of this dead kid’s parents but it really is hard to understand how anything about his upbringing could have led him to be troubled in the specific way he was troubled (constant bizarre lying and an obsession with becoming rich), and that feels to me like it’s almost as sad as his actual death.

virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway — reread, still and forever one of the true true greats of my life, as gorgeous and human and alive as a novel has ever been. lends the most ordinary and mundane aspects of human existence a grandness and importance near the level of myth, which is to say that it accurately captures what human is existence is like in the privacy of our own minds. just sublime, what is there even to say? woolf’s rhythm is unsurpassed. in eleventh grade rezia made me seen so specifically i will never stop being grateful for it. i read the norton library edition and for once actually read both introduction and endnotes (after i’d read the text, partly as a way to relive it again), both by merve emre, and i found them interesting and enjoyable, particularly for the well-selected biographical bits and diary excerpts pertaining to the writing of dalloway and other pertinent topics.

belle burden, strangers: a memoir of marriage — i enjoyed this reading this book. was my enjoyment retroactively dampened by recent revelations in the new yorker that burden never got quite as close to actual financial precarity as she might make it seem? …honestly, no lol. i don’t think knowing that she had a bunch more trusts (some of which it seems like she can’t access, anyway?) really takes away from the emotional devastation of what her ex-husband did, given that we’re already working with an abandonment that literally took place in martha’s vineyard, a short walk from their private beach. also, if you’re exaggerating your financial situation in a way that opens up real conversations about women, marriage, and financial literacy, i’m like… that’s a net positive for society, actually. i think most people who have bounced on this book bounced on it because of how cartoonishly wealthy she is, but i know for me, and i find it hard to believe i’m alone in this, her loving descriptions of the absurd luxury around her at all times were, honestly if a little guiltily, part of the appeal! sorry to belle burden that i found a thread of escapism in your memoir of your harrowing divorce. while reading this book i kept thinking of the crazy ex-girlfriend song “let’s generalize about men,” specifically the line “let’s get super lit and not admit this is some kind of primal ritual we need now and then,” because i do think another part of the book’s appeal is that there’s something weirdly relaxing and cathartic about reading a book where you just get to think Kill That Man over and over uncomplicatedly because he’s being just so unmitigatedly and inexcusably terrible but not in a way that will ever impact your life at all. i also think burden is in fact a good writer and because i empathize with her creative wound of giving up fiction because of one douchebag guy in undergrad i am rooting for her to continue following her bliss and do more writing even if i also find it hard to imagine that someone so rich could really ever have an interesting thought unrelated to her horrible ex-husband.

cindy east, grown-up orthodontia: steering myself normal — amply discussed already lol. better than i expected, but badly in need of some serious edits. wish her the best!

rachel cusk, outline — we have that rare thing here: a book i don’t really have any criticisms of that i nonetheless totally hated. i think cusk is a good writer and the novel achieves the goals it sets for itself, and the goals it’s setting are such that questions like “do this many people really launch into monologues containing their entire life story over and over” are not really relevant or meaningful, but i found no pleasure in it whatsoever. her prose is elegant and clean and her ear for rhythm is good and her eye for images is skillful and yet i never once felt i was encountering anything like beauty in her words. it’s technically impressive i guess(?) that she constructs a protagonist almost entirely through negative space, but i did not enjoy watching her do it or feel that the exercise brought me as a reader anything of value. reading this it was very clear that miranda popkey’s topics of conversation was hugely influenced by it, but i liked popkey’s book much better and i found that the occasional ways she built her narrator more directly were effective and also that the character she opted to construct was such that by the end of the book it made a lot of sense thematically for her to tell the reader her story primarily through conversations and observations. i guess i could sit and come up with a reason for that to be true of cusk’s narrator as well but i don’t care enough to do so!

movies

the smiling lieutenant — our  journey through the early lubitsch musicals continues! this was definitely the best of the three i had seen to this point (and remains the best now that i’ve seen a fourth). the three leads are all adorable and charming, the jokes are good, the energy is mischievous and and cheeky in a fun way, we don’t run into too many gender problems… the only problem is that claudette colbert’s character is too lovable and delightful, so the ultimate happy ending didn’t quite land because i was so sorry to see her go, although i guess the fact that things turn out the way they do perhaps suggests a reading in which what’s really happening is that she is now free to go and find someone boneheaded than maurice chevalier’s character… plus her final scene is basically her giving miriam perkins as sandy-in-grease makeover, which is one of those politically problematic tropes i go smooth-brained and happy for because of my lifelong love for grease.

a new leaf — my final unseen elaine may movie has now been seen! this is a very odd movie about a trust fund idiot with no redeeming qualities who has wasted all his money and decides his only option is to marry a wealthy woman and then murder her. it’s also kind of a romcom? my first thought has become my lingering thought, which is that this movie should not work as well as it does. i’m not totally sure it totally does work, but it really shouldn’t work at all, so the fact that it does even a little bit is impressive… there is a moment near the end of strange, prickly sweetness that should feel unearned and bizarre but totally worked on me through the magic of the movies. it helps that elaine may herself is very adorable as a hapless heiress with a passion for botany. i have to give a shout-out as well to the guy playing the butler, who steals the show in every scene he’s in, and the guy playing the… bank person? financial advisor? i don’t know what kind of jobs rich people come into contact with… anyway he has a line reading early on that made me laugh so hard i’m still thinking about it. 

sirāt — i would say i am equally open to the argument on the one hand that this is a profound meditation on morality and mortality and the journey of the soul that i am too unsophisticated and weak-minded to appreciate it, and on the other hand that it is jerkoff provocateur bullshit trying to shock the viewer into believing it has something to say; people on the internet have made both of these capably! based solely on my viewing experience i would say it was well-made and the soundtrack slapped and it had some great desert visuals and also i did not super care or find myself thinking about it after watching it with a friend.

tekkonkinkreet — someone in the movies groupchat dropped the info that this was briefly screening last weekend and thinking a sunday night seeing an anime movie with some pals seemed like a nice relaxing end to the week i jumped in. i liked it! the animation is SUPER cool, with a distinctive, deliberately clunky style to the characters that is interestingly mesmerizing in front of the lush, hyper-detailed backgrounds, and the use of radically different, often messier styles to set off certain perspectives or key moments… i don’t keep up with or actively seek out anime but whenever i encounter it i am always confronted with my secret inner weeb in that visually i do just Like Anime, like i enjoy the style(s) and the visual language of it, i find it pleasing and compelling to watch the way it moves. the story, about two orphaned street kids in a troubled city, is a little flabby in a way that made sense when i learned it was adapted from a multi-volume manga — i personally could have used about 80% less time with the mob guys — but the core relationship between the two brothers trying to save each other in different ways is painful and sweet and was enough to keep me caring, and i found the ending quite lovely.

music

for a standout single this month, here’s a strange and hypnotizing six-and-a-half minute beauty from the first band on the listening list below, which as of this writing has 21 listens but only because i’ve only listened on spotify:

weird mirror, extant singles — one of you recced this band (via tags that have me erring on the side of anonymity), a small number without a full album yet but in the process of developing an interesting, sometimes haunting, often lovely sound. “everything” is their best so far for sure but their work as it exists so far has me ready to follow them to see what comes next.

lølø, god forbid a girl spits out her feelings — this album is like the platonic ideal of z-list spotify pop… a lil pop-rock but nothing too loud, a teeny tiny country influence if you squint that disappears if you’re not listening to it, lyrics that are confessionalish and peppered with details (“the devil wears converse”) that are all fine but never startle or intrigue, melodies that sound good when you’re listening and then evaporate from your brain, a vocal performance that’s pretty enough but does little interpretation… every song is technically good but nothing is great; it’s easy to like but sort of impossible to imagine anyone loving.

kid sistr, american teenage prophecy — was initially disappointed with this 5-song EP because i always want this sporadically-releasing band to live up to how much i liked their early namesake song (“little sister song”), but it’s been a shuffle-listening grower as i keep hearing songs from it and liking them enough to check the title/band and being surprised it’s this band, so… soft rec!

pina palau, you better get used to it — i thought this was going to be too sleepy and artful for me but then around the second or third song the texture of the recording clicked the sound into place for me and i wound up really liking it! it sounds lovely but also just unpretty enough to have kind of an interesting grain, if sound can have a grain… i dunno, it feels very physical to listen to in the way that films from the 70s feel physical to watch.

daisy grenade, so much to say — daisy grenade remains a reliable provider of excitable pop punk steeped in hooks with a sugary snarl, like what if early paramore snorted a bunch of pixie stix (or as dave once said, what if skye sweetnam cursed). my highlight from their latest EP is probably “emily,” a funny song about trying to mend fences that definitely broke for a reason or several.

tori amos, in times of dragons — much like the rest of the past decade’s tori albums in that it’s produced quite beautifully and her piano-playing remains lovely to listen to, but the lyrics are thuddingly obvious and the melodies are endlessly meandering without anything to grab on to. however i like “fanny faudrey,” a cute little ditty about a rebellious woman of old.

naaz, the sky knows i exist — didn’t captivate me as much as i was hoping from album standout “something good,” but a decent listen with some nice or interesting moments. i like the sweetness of her voice.

maisie peters, florescence — SNOOOOOOOOZE. wall to wall sleepy guitar sounds without a single song anywhere near as clever or fun as “i’m trying (not friends),” the song that put maisie on my radar years ago… in retrospect although i liked the good witch a lot maybe it was a sign about her taste in her own music that she omitted “cate’s brother,” for my money her best song, from the tracklisting. there are some nice songs here, but the FIFTEEN FUCKING TRACKS of whispering over a strummy guitar made it VERY hard to tell on listen-through which of them are worth keeping around… they would be much better served as the downshifts in a more varied tracklist, where they would stand out rather than run together with everything else. glad she’s happy but if this is the kind of music she really wants to be making i am significantly less hyped about the next one than i was about this.

other

love & fury: new york’s fighting against AIDS and act black: posters from black american stage and screen, at posterhouse — obviouslyyyyyyy there was no chance i was ever going to NOT love an exhibit about the iconography of AIDS education and activism in nyc… obviously i cried… some faves i snapped:

act black was really cool too, both for the posters themselves (fascinatingly Problematic as many of them were) and for the glimpse into a set of stories from screen history that are rarely told (partly because so many of the movies themselves have been lost). seeing examples of the kinds of “race pictures” actually getting made in the early cinema days — including the ones produced by a white company — made me mad all over again at damon lindelof’s watchmen, lmao.

books

lena valencia, mystery lights — meh. i was hyped for this one because it came recommended through the same newsletter that pointed me towards television, and because the content of the stories seemed quite up my alley: ghosts! UFOs (not the same as aliens)! creepy folklore! general eeriness! alas, i found this quite mid. there is a certain baseline competence to the stories, in that they move quickly and i never finished one wondering, what the hell was the point of that? or felt like something insufficiently plausible (on the character level, not re: spookiness) had marred the development of the plot. and despite the presence of Stephanie, Their Mutual Friend At Whose Barbecue They Had Met, the prose was as a general rule not overtly clunky. the problem is that it wasn’t anything else, either. the description that keeps coming to mind, as i have previously alluded to, is “YA-adjacent,” but i want to be clear that i specifically mean post-boom YA and also not the good stuff… like, yes this is nominally a book for adults, but i legitimately think as a writer she is nowhere near authors like courtney summers, laurie halse anderson, e. lockhart, sarah mccarry, et al., all of whom write YA but IMO have good ears and cannot be accused of writing prose without a voice. (even francesca lia block, a writer i would mostly not recommend trying out for the first time as an adult, at least writes with undeniable personality — while someone like judy blume, the OG, is not writing “literary” sentences but is out here thoughtfully capturing the believable idiosyncrasies of her adolescent narrators.) when i think of “YA-adjacent (derogatory),” i think of a style that certainly does specific things commonly associated with good writing, such as being specific, balancing description and action, producing reasonably realistic dialogue, etc., but that does those things in very bland way that lacks any real individuality. it’s not bad, per se, and to be honest i would take it over that strand of genre corniness i am so, so allergic too (although corniness can also be found in YA), but there’s nothing particularly enjoyable about the actual reading of it as opposed to the absorption of the story. that’s how i felt about this collection. not much that i can point to as particularly objectionable (stephanie excluded), and some of the ideas felt like they could have been really fun or compelling in the hands of another author, but the writing was such a total nothing that there was no real pleasure in it, the characters felt thinly sketched, the atmosphere was nonexistent (a real dealbreaker in allegedly eerie fiction)... etc. also there was one story with no supernatural stuff about being an unemployed 22-year-old in brooklyn during the blog years that was written in the second person present and while i’m pro–second person the combination of subject and form did make me think “it’s giving thought catalog” as an intrusive thought the whole time i was reading. so… there’s also that. i am also still thinking about that other more recent story where she claims an indie rock musician was once hailed as the second coming of dylan, reed, bowie, and cohen, all rolled into one, which, again, can’t emphasize this enough: No He Wasn’t.

andrew sean greer, less — this was very nice!!! i liked that the voice of the narrator felt very much like that of a “storyteller” in a pleasing, charming, old-fashioned sense, and i found our hapless not-quite-hero very endearing; the evocation of a mostly-vanished gay art scene was convincing, and i appreciated that it was a story about a kind of growth and rebirth at fifty that felt believably happy and optimistic without papering over the difficulties and losses of age. greer found one way to get away with writing about a writer, which is to make him not particularly successful (i would have maybe cut one scene of someone unexpectedly telling him how much they enjoyed his previous work…). i laughed out loud a few times. i did find it a bit slow — sometimes pleasurably, sometimes a bit less so — such that i spent most of the book thinking i liked it enough but probably wouldn’t bother with the sequel, but then the ending made me cry for real-real so now i think i might (unless one of you jumps in to tell me it’s terrible i suppose).

fritz leiber, conjure wife — this book slaaaaaapped. i didn’t love it quite as much as leiber’s “a deskful of girls,” which i am still begging all or any of you to read, but it was great fun. an ethnologist (it’s the 40s) in a stuffy college town discovers his wife has started exploring the practical applications of the witchcraft practices he was ethnographizing in his research; for the sake of her sanity, he demands that she put a stop to this delusional habit, and together they burn all her charms. naturally, his life immediately starts to fall apart. this is a pretty great premise (even better when you add in the other faculty wives also scheming supernaturally on behalf of their husbands — the extent to which this remains a campus novel, with the encroaching menace manifesting as bitter students and gossipy faculty members, is part of the pleasure), but leiber carries it out with real aplomb. he makes really wonderful use of the main character’s status as a social scientist, and there’s a lot of great passages where we, the readers of a novel about magic, watch him re-explain to himself the human mind’s susceptibility to coincidence; even as things grow progressively more undeniable, leiber maintains this fascinating depiction of a man caught between two beliefs — one that goes against everything he knows to be true, one contradicted more and more by his own senses — constantly vacillating between accepting that he’s taking certain steps for magic reasons and maintaining he’s only doing it so that his delusional wife in a psychotic break will continue to trust him so that he can help restore her to sanity. impeccable vibes, including one fantastically creepy end-of-chapter cliffhanger. i also admired the way that leiber constructed a world in which women do magic and men don’t but found a way (IMO) to mostly avoid essentializing about it in a cult-of-nature way. very fun book!!!

iain m. banks, consider phlebas — the third of the science fiction novels i added to my list for Project reasons. did i like this book? no, not at all. did i feel like it had literally any redeeming values whatsoever? i mean, if you like space opera stuff and creative worldbuilding, sure, probably; i am not the person to report on that. i guess i will also say there were two sequences that hinged on some genuinely repellent/upsetting concepts/situations in a way i did not enjoy but did more or less admire because it’s no mean feat to come up with a really disturbing fictional scenario (although i could have done without the attendant fatphobia in one of them). was the writing bad? it wasn’t great. i would say sentence to sentence i hated this somewhat less than i hated dawn, but it was also like twice as fucking long (and suffered similarly from the “nobody here is a real character” problem). there was a pregnancy plot point near the end of the book that made me really mad but then it wound up sort of moot in a way that in some ways made me less mad and in other ways made me feel like, okay well then that was even less fucking necessary, wasn’t it… i have learned that even fans of the ten-book series this kicked off often think this one kind of sucks and is slow and boring but god knows i will not be reading further to find out if things improve.

thomas pynchon, inherent vice — bummed to be disappointed by this! i started it out with high hopes because cali-noir about a huge stoner set during the nixon years sounds sooooo up my alley, but i just could not get myself on this book’s wavelength at all. the whole time i kept feeling like it was trapped between the modes of a very serious literary masterwork on the one hand and a proper noir on the other, and it never seemed to inhabit either of those modes fully enough or integrate them seamlessly enough for me to really click with it. i kept thinking i would rather read delillo or chandler instead of this peculiar hybrid that did not offer me the pleasures of either. in particular, the whole point of chandler, to me, is his sublime gift for Vibes and Atmosphere, and i felt like this book, despite being about a stoner running around california chasing various conspiracies, was curiously lacking in vibes… for such an ostensibly madcap plot, the actual writing felt quite staid, at times even plodding, but also never in a way that gripped me with its depth or intensity, either. the other big chandler contrast that kept surfacing for me was that while i wouldn’t call marlowe a dazzling feat of psychological nuance in characterization, there’s a certain compelling core to the character — the wounded romantic turned reluctant cynic — whereas our hero in vice is really truly just a stoner with no other discernible personality characteristics (i can see people, including pynchon, disagreeing with me, but like a lot about this book, his occasional moments of reflection or tenderness felt clumsily grafted on from some other guy rather than revealing about the person we had been spending time with… i just didn’t buy it idk). i also did not get pynchon’s sense of humor as displayed here at all — there are some pretty good jokes but there was also a lot of stoner/boner comedy that felt more fitting for the screen than for the page? like imagine reading a novelization of harold and kumar go to white castle… it wouldn’t be funny, right? because stoner humor is at heart stupid and requires solid comedic performances and good timing, editing, etc. to work? i also felt like a number of the female characters were written in a very tropey low-key objectified noir way that is forgivable from the midcentury pack but, like, this book came out in 2009… pynchon can definitely write, so i’m not wholly opposed to giving him another shot, and wonder if actually maybe one of his more straightforwardly “serious” works might work better for me… but most of them are like 600 pages long so i’m not exactly in a rush.

patricia lockwood, priestdaddy — i liked this a lot! lockwood is just such a fun writer; i enjoyed all her weird lil similes, her sense of humor, her cadence, etc. even her turns towards preciousness, quirk, tweeness, etc. — i could see some people being put off but for me she rode the line just right! one of the best things a memoirist can be is a person you just like having in your head, and lockwood is that. i did feel like the structure of the book was maybe a little less than wholly sound — i thought i had the rhythm of it and then towards the end we got a couple of sections that felt more like essays in an essay collection than chapters in the book i’d been reading. but i get the impulse to just put it all out there because who knows if you will ever get another chance to write about all this in a book again, and also some of that stuff wound up being among my favorite bits (including the chapter on voice i posted a quote from), so i’m not really complaining. as alluded to before, this book made me really reflect with profound gratitude on how awesome it is to be an estranged daughter and how lucky i am to have achieved this so young. that’s not really a comment on the book but my thoughts on it feel incomplete without it since i did think about it any time her dad did literally anything.

lily meyer, the end of romance — i picked this up because this interview the author gave to emily gould for her nymag newsletter made me curious about this as a book about nonethetical nonmonogamy and a female protagonist with alienating opinions on the kavanaugh hearings. i actually felt reading the book like it was much “softer” and more likable than i had been hoping for based on that — sophie is very straightforwardly a person driven insane early by the misfortune of being a sensitive child born to unemotional parents, a phenomenon i have watched make children crazy in real time, and then when you throw her horrible marriage on top of that everything she does makes total perfect sense — but naturally many goodreaders came away from this book furious at how terrible and selfish she is so i should have adjusted for my own position as a 6 on the kinsey scale of interest in character flaws. i did enjoy reading about a character who makes many bad decisions, some self-destructive and others outwardly destructive, for coherent psychological reasons, including at one point straight-up delusion and repeated lying to herself of a kind i like to see authors bold enough to tackle in fiction because it’s happened to me but it will always be met with a chorus of people mad that a character is acting in such a straightforwardly nonsensical way. i enjoyed other things about this book, too: a story about a woman repeatedly caught between what she believes and what she discovers she wants; her complicated history with female friendship and the narrative weight given to her most important female friend; a viscerally familiar description of being a neurotic bush-era teen who can’t make friends in college; the way sophie is concerned with what it means to be jewish in the world in a way that reminded me mostly of older books (although i’m not exactly actively keeping up with contemporary jewish-american lit lol) — there’s a sequence about christmas at her jewish boyfriend’s parents’ house that was very interesting; the imaginary turtle she carries out internal arguments with; a low-key #triggering in a good way depiction of when the guy you have to keep yourself ungoogleable from keeps sending you derangedly pleasant emails that make you want to kill yourself. the writing was just okay but it moved quickly, which after some real slogs i have come to see as a virtue in itself. i did feel like ultimately the book maybe didn’t totally land the plane, or did for some threads but not for the one it closes the curtain on… it’s hard for me to figure out how much this is a me problem because ultimately sophie’s vision of her happy ending is so profoundly my nightmare so it’s possible i’m being biased… but i think maybe the math of the book is not quite right and can think of a few adjustments that might have sold it to me better. i’m not sorry i read it, though, and i’m curious about the singer novel she says served as her original inspiration.

movies

game night — i feel like everyone says this movie is soooooooo good and funny but it was just okay. rachel mcadams is great though and we always love to see a new girl alum getting work!

the drama — i really loved this one… it has proven Controversial and there are some criticisms i think are valid, some i don’t personally agree with but can’t really argue with (like if you don’t buy the relationship, you don’t buy the relationship and i can’t talk you into that, but i did buy the relationship), and a lot that feel like they come from people who either have a very different understanding of the movie’s goals than i did (tbh some positive reviews also in this category), or have a very different view of the intersection of morality and adolescent psychology than i do. i guess i liked it because this movie made me think of things i did when i was very young or very unhappy or some combination of both that were not the result of reality-based thinking, and it made me think of how totally inarticulable and unreachable the headspace i did those things in is now and often was even very shortly after they had been done, and how in my heart of hearts i cannot believe that the reason i didn’t hurt anyone more seriously than i did (which is not to say i didn’t hurt anyone; i did) is because i’m a better person than other people who hurt people much more seriously when they were very young or very unhappy or some combination of both. i think i am lucky, and only lucky, that the circumstances of my life and certain accidents of my temperament limited the scope of the harm i could perpetuate. i don’t think this says anything about my moral character. and i felt like the drama was in conversation with this kind of outlook. zendaya, whom i have always liked as a screen presence but never before particularly admired as an actor, captures something about a specific kind of shame in this performance that i have never seen brought to life on screen. there’s something about how lost she is, offering the explanation she has for the person she was, almost became, which she knows cannot possibly be good enough, which she knows can only sound hopelessly stupid and inadequate said out loud, that has really stayed with me, on a personal level and in conjunction with what to me the movie has to say, or at least to offer, not so much about violence itself (which the movie, arguably, has nothing to do with — i think the ambiguity of this question is more present in the movie than it has been in the discourse about it) but about our desperate need to explain it. i’ve thought about this movie more than anything else i’ve seen this year, by a long shot, and i’m hard-pressed honestly to remember the last time a movie proved this sticky for me. pattinson is also great, and i did love their chemistry — i found it really romantic (and quite funny, too).

the love parade — an early lubitsch, from his musicals era. the first half of this movie, about an ambassador kicked out of france for excessive horniness who goes home to fall in love with and seduce his virginal yet incredibly horny queen, is a total delight, full of great gags well-balanced between smart and gleefully not, powered by the charisma and chemistry of the exuberantly horny central duo and the energy of the supporting cast. then the second act starts and even before it gets to the dismaying taming of the shrew ending, it just loses all its fizz, fun, joy, etc…. the movie can’t figure out how to keep its tone entertaining, or how to build drama out of its scenario without going so broad the balance of the whole thing just falls apart. love that first act tho! great gag with a dog. some fun comedy-choreography in the servants’ numbers, providing almost enough razzle-dazzle to make you forget about how very 1929 they are re: gender.

the christophers — the latest tiny little soderbergh diorama, guess what i liked it, fish found in ocean, etc. ian mckellan as a crabby, arrogant, cancelled-ish artist delivers some monologues gorgeously and also gives a specific intonation to the line “i was bisexual” that is maybe my favorite line reading of the year. i had never seen micaela coel in anything and was so impressed by her ability to hold her own in what is essentially a two-hander opposite, y’know, ian fucking mckellan; casting her was also critical given that her character necessarily talks much, much less than mckellan’s, and her incredible screen presence makes her feel like an equal partner dramatically even though she’s often “just” reacting. very talky script, giving theater a little bit, in a way film people often dislike but i reliably enjoy. james corden appropriately cast as a guy who’s really embarrassing and annoying. we saw a q&a with cast/screenwriter/director and the best part was how visibly happy ian mckellan was to be able to talk about making a real movie with a real director and a real script after his years in the x-men mines.

mother mary — if i had a nickel for every time this month i saw micaela coel anchor half of a two-person show about artistic resentments opposite an established member of hollywood royalty… i was very excited for this movie and i enjoyed it a lot. is it good? i don’t super know. i sort of want to rewatch it because it revealed itself as we progressed as something other than what i imagined it was going to be — something operating squarely in the realm of magic and myth, but also a much simpler narrative than the green knight was — and i’d like to revisit it and see how it feels knowing now the shape of it. it might be a little underbaked, although there were a couple specific touches i really liked. but i love anne hathaway and i guess i love micaela coel now too and they are two of the most beautiful women in the world and i like ghosts and sparkly costumes and female friendship stories and pop music and that was all happening in my face for two hours very bright and lovely to look at and listen to so i was happy. 

monte carlo — another lubitsch musical and unfortunately the only total dud i have seen from him… a number of problems but most of all the jokes simply aren’t good and what can you do if that’s the case? jeanette macdonald, so lovely and charming in the love parade, tries her best, but the script just isn’t there. alas!

tv

silicon valley (all seasons) — i started putting this on to motivate myself to do my mobility exercises and then as usual i got obsessed with it and had it on in the background for everything until i had finished all six seasons. obviously my feelings on this show are no secret but i do think that it’s just such an achievement. the writing is really intricate in a way you can only get away with in a heightened reality (like a sitcom) but it’s driven by internal character stuff such an impressively high percentage of the time, such that all their last-minute rescues feel like magic tricks rather than cheats (a favorite of mine is the season 4 finale, when the thing that saves them is that a few episodes ago gilfoyle hacked jian-yang’s new fridge out of spite — it’s such an in-character thing to have happened that bringing it back to actually mean something feels perfect instead of cheap). the show is also just so well-calibrated in terms of knowing exactly how much our guys should lose and come across as losers (not always the same thing) vs. how often they should get to win and be cool (ditto)... you can really see this in the finale, where everyone gets their happy ending but with just the right amount of friction for it not to feel sappy. and the jokes remain great. in conclusion, i sure do love this show i have watched start to finish now at least five times. 

music

here’s a recentish single from the band that took over my listening towards the end of the month, because i got legitimately emotional hearing emily haines sing “it makes me jealous of my former self / i had to tame her for my mental health”:

robyn, sexistential — yay robyn :) really liked this, find her as funny and weird and charming as ever (the adam driver/adam sandler line… lmao), appreciated that while it’s not quite body talk it’s definitely more pop-forward/hook-driven than her last project which i respected as Art but did not gel with in the same way… but she’s like kesha in that she’s just someone whose voice and vibe i like having in my earholes.

mary middlefield, will you take me as i am? — spotify girlpop that gets too soupy for me but has some good tunes when it’s not doing that!

taylor acorn, poster child — i added this to my to-listen list based on the earnestness (and hookiness) of the stompclap-adjacent “home videos” and was very pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s an outlier on the album, which is otherwise much more in the mode of breakaway-era kelly clarkson. if you like breakaway-era kelly clarkson you should give this one a listen!

august ponthier, everywhere isn’t texas — soupy mopey tumblrcore theater kid pop that mostly struck me as annoying but harmless and not nearly as bad as the corook album that i hated so much that year even though it’s in a similar Sensitive Theater Kid mode (at least this album for example did not have the actual lyric “i’m a sensitive person”), BUT!!! then i got to the track “angry man” and i got SO ACTUALLY GENUINELY MAD because the chorus literally goes, “i know the saying, but it only hit me now / if you grew up with an angry man in your house / all the time / there’s always gonna be an angry man / in your mind.” which summoned up alllllll of my inner FUCK OFFFFFFF reserves, because: fuck off! i find it sooooo fucking lazy to outsource the CHORUS!!!! of your allegedly vulnerable song about your evil dad to Some Decontextualized Content You Saw Excerpted On Social Media. like, that’s abnegating the literal sole job of the artist, which is to struggle to find words for that which cannot be completely articulated. and it makes me sooooooo crazy to pass off something from someone else’s ART as “a saying.” fuck off. on the bright side it was because i was so mad at this that i looked up catherine lacey’s “cut” which was so good i now have one of her books out from the library!

mitski, nothing’s about to happen to me — is the title a hint that this is a concept album about what if nothing ever happened ever? because wow this was BORING. mitski is one of those artists i’m forever meaning to check out but now i’m like, perhaps my avoidance in this case was telling me something real, because snooooooooooooze.

makthaverskan, glass and bones — have been loving an older album of theirs, loved this one too which sounds exactly the same! love a good jangly indie rock setting for a lady wailing melodically…

imarhan, essam — dave called this “algerian desert blues” which is as good a summation as i can make; this has a cool, warm sound (wait ok that looks stupid but i mean the version of cool that is not opposed to warm… you know what i mean), feels kind of sparse and big at the same time? i wasn’t exactly surprised that i liked it but i was surprised that some of the songs have lingered in rotation past a second listen (not based on quality, based on my own tastes on what i like to jam to vs. what i like to try once as an Album Experience).

julianna barwick & mary lattimore, tragic magic — not quite as magical as the last album that made me think about being an eighth grader who loved enya and loreena mckennitt (that would be disinblud’s self-titled debut, for those keeping score at home), but even at my grown age it is nice to occasionally revisit the genre of Take Me Away To My Home Among The Faeries music.

lia larsson, DUNKA — endearingly annoying europop, fun to listen to something that commits this chirpily to the bit — but just the once.

plash, i live alone — some nice sounds happening, so much so that towards the beginning i briefly wondered if i had softened my stance on dudes with guitars without realizing… but by the end of the album i was so bored it retroactively made me dislike the beginning.

HANA, HANA — i literally cannot remember anything about what this sounded like at all

hemlocke springs, the apple tree under the sea — truly honestly sincerely from the bottom of my heart one of the worst things i’ve ever heard in my life, but in a weird way where i wasn’t mad about it at all. off-the-charts theater kid energy of the kind that reminded me of why i never got into the dresden dolls meets a singing voice that’s like… an abrasive baby voice with questionable pitch trying to be a rock star? really, really, profoundly unpleasant. but, again, in a way where i was like… well, good for you… you have a passion, and a vision, and those are beautiful things to have… i can’t imagine anyone would want to listen to this on purpose but you’re closing in on half a million monthly listeners on spotify so clearly someone does and i think that’s so wonderful… it’s amazing when someone makes the art that comes from their soul and other people’s lives are enriched by it… you could not pay me to listen to 30 seconds of this ever again though.

fif, the lower forty-eight — lots of cool scuzzy indie rock band jamming out sounds that i liked listening to but were not really song-shaped enough to bring me back for more.

snail mail, ricochet — snail mail is another one of those artists i’m always like “oh yeah i should check them out but i’m never in the right Mood…” happily while i wouldn’t say i was blown away i certainly liked this album much better than the mitski one.

jens lekman, songs for other people’s weddings — ok i thought this was like a clever title for an album i assumed would be a collection of, like, love songs, romantic songs, bittersweet songs, elegiac songs, etc., but this is actually something much more awesome which is a concept album about a wedding singer going through a break-up. it’s whimsical and strange, with musical theater overtones in a neutral to good way, and very sonically sweet, and, i dunno, the moment i realized what was actually happening i was just so charmed by the fact that someone had come up with this idea and turned it into music! i would recommend taking a walk and listening to the story unfolding…

WILLOW, petal rock black & thunder wave — willow is never doing my favorite thing, but she’s definitely a best-case-scenario nepo-baby in that she’s just out here surprise-dropping jazz-pop experiments clearly fueled by nothing more than figuring out what sounds good to her and brings her satisfaction to make. that’s exactly what you should be doing if you are the daughter of two extremely famous parents with more money than god. i do find it really impressive that she self-produces and think she’s legitimately extremely good at it… i’d love to hear her produce for other people just because the world would be better with more willow production in it.

mother mary: greatest hits — ok honestly, bops on bops on bops!!!!! antonoff & charli really did understand the assignment here, and i’m so charmed by the way that anne hathaway (who as per the david lowery q&a we saw after mother mary apparently did like 1 million vocal takes on the songs) did the thing that real life pop girls do all the time and aped the pronunciations and intonations of the demo vocalist, channeling charli’s essex accent into some recognizably british “can’t”s despite playing an american lmao. “holy spirit 2” early song of the summer contender, when the chorus dropped in the movie i smiled so wide because for a moment i really felt like i had spent so many years writing insane tumblr posts about real life pop star mother mary and she was out here singing this for us. i mean, “did you ever feel you’re holy? did you ever feel it? did you ever fear it?” would have gone soooooooo crazy #onhere in 2014!!!!!!!!!

metric, pagans in vegas — so like a week before their new album came out i became seized with this desire to only listen to metric that also became a need to go through their entire discography chronologically (minus the uh cosmopolis soundtrack they did with howard shore??? what???????), so first of all i would like to start by publicly acknowledging that i underrated synthetica, unfairly punishing it for its crime of being the first metric album to come out after i spent all of 2009 listening to fantasies while going so so crazy and dropping out of college LMAO. anyway i was still too sensitive after that experience to even give this one a chance when it came out, but it’s also pretty good! i have learned it’s not beloved in the fandom but idk why, i thought it had some bops and brought back a little heft after the haze of synthetica.

metric, formentera II — this one i just like totally missed coming out entirely… it was also good in a way i don’t have much to say about and i should probably return to it at some point (and regular formentera, which i did listen to but was clearly not in the right place for because how did i not bother to save “paths in the sky,” which has since relisten entered possibly my metric top ten) but my listening was soon fully dominated by…

metric, romanticize the drive — yay new metric! i was honestly worried when i learned via reddit that they’d teamed back up with the production team behind fantasies for this one because like DON’T PLAY WITH MY HEART LIKE THIS, but while the specific biographical confluence of album and self that has made fantasies so enduringly special to me will probably never be repeated (or, like, i mean, i HOPE not!), this album is great, very hook-driven but also with a little more oomph and edge than a lot of their recent work, metric at their most pop but still hitting hard. it’s also just crazy that they are TEN ALBUMS IN and still good. this whole journey #MyJourney, which really took over all my listening for like the last two weeks of the month, has really brought home that i do need to start haunting the resale sites in july in the hopes of seeing them on tour even though i don’t care about either of the bands they’re playing with.

other

cherry blossoms peak weekend & nina browne, notice/know/kin, @ the brooklyn botanic garden — first of all, did you know that it’s the brooklyn botanic garden? not botanical. botanIC. don’t you hate that? i hate it. but i love the BBG so i forgive them. second: yay i managed not to miss cherry blossom peak bloom! the last time i went it was during the weekday with someone else with a weird schedule, but this time my tutoring schedule had me a couple subway stops away on a saturday, so i took my opportunity then and was really delighted to discover that the weekend of the peak bloom span brings out tons of new yorkers from all over in groups to see the pretty pink flowers, some dressed head-to-toe in pink thematically, all bustling with a nice kind of unofficial holiday energy. it was very cute!!! one of their buildings also had this cool exhibit up of art inspired by scientific botanical imagery; you can check out the artist here. because the gardens were so crowded i cannot post any of the cherry blossoms pics i took but here are some close-ups of my favorite flowers i saw:

storytelling & mozart @ the morgan library & museum — first of all i had been vaguely aware of the existence of the morgan but had never actually gone and would like to start by saying their building is very nice! the storytelling exhibit was one of those catch-all exhibits with a loose theme that’s an excuse to show Some Of Our Cool Stuff, some of which was indeed quite cool; my favorite of course was the room dedicated to new york stuff :) it included this 1973 stuart steinberg sketch that’s a precursor to his famous new yorker cover on a similar theme:

movies

billy joel: and so it goes — unlike the peewee herman doc, which i enjoyed despite having zero context for him outside the episode of 30 rock where he plays an inbred royal who falls in love with jenna just in time to die, i’m pretty sure this only holds appeal if you already have a certain amount of pre-existing affection for billy joel… but for several months in eighth grade songs in the attic was my favorite album so i am therefore the target demo and i had a great time through all seven wildly self-indulgent hours of this. huge shout especially to his first wife/manager elizabeth, who is impossibly charming and beautifully dressed in all her appearances, past and present. i liked the part where the guy who wrote “darling i don’t know why i go to extremes” and “it’s either sadness or euphoria” talks about how yeah nowadays his mom almost definitely would have been with bipolar disorder and then just connects absolutely zero dots. unselfware king. this doc also provided a lot of support for my half-baked theory that of all the older-gen icons you could compare her to, billy joel is the closest analogue for taylor swift. there are many ways in which i believe this to be true (prone to writing break-up songs about business partnerships gone bad; incurable chip on their shoulder despite massive success; terminal dorkiness; a much more eclectic set of influences than you might expect combined with a certain set of artistic limitations that make everything they do sound exactly like themselves; i mean just go compare/contrast the lyrics to the ballad of billy the kid and last great american dynasty if you don’t believe me) but the moment in the doc where it becomes clearest is when he’s talking about writing “you’re my home” for his girlfriend on tour and is like “i wanted to say to her, you know, you’re my home.” that’s the most taylor ass shit i’ve ever heard from someone who wasn’t ms. swift herself.

redline — this is a very silly but beautifully animated anime movie with the rough plot of “what if wacky racers kind of fucked?” it is about exactly as stupid as that sounds and enjoyable if you want to truly turn your brain ALL the way off and simply enjoy some cool-ass moving pictures in your eyeballs. i didn’t watch this stoned but i sort of wish i had

xanadu — ICONIC! CAMP CLASSIC! no matter how wack and insane you have heard this is you are NOT prepared. also even if you’re aware that gene kelly is in this, you are similarly unprepared for how much gene kelly is in this. gene kelly — like, yeah, THAT gene kelly — is one of the main characters in this. it’s crazy. there’s a roller skating dance sequence that turns into an animation sequence by don bluth studios where the romantic duo keeps turning into different animals. you never have to wait more than like 5 minutes for the next musical number. incredible movie to watch on your friend’s roof 100/10 would recommend

master and commander: the far side of the world — extremely cozy, surprisingly sweet military naval adventure that, like gladiator, taps into russell crowe’s unique position at the top left corner of the warm/hardcore matrix to cast him as the guy you wish was your boss who was also your dad who can also, when necessary, kick so much ass so casually it’s crazy. paul bettany plays his gay little science nerd BFF who supplies most of the movie’s emotional tension. billy boyd also there. dudes rock cinema at its finest. if you’ve ever seen a movie before on at least three occasions you will know exactly what’s going to happen because of the rules of movies but in a way that feels nice and familiar instead of boring and safe. they really are on a giant ass boat and the movie never loses sight of the fact that to modern eyes dudes doing giant ass boat shit on a giant ass boat simply always looks inherently cool as fuuuuuuck. everyone involved with this really knew How To Make A Movie, peak example of what people are talking about when they complain about the kinds of movies no one makes anymore. it’s the napoleonic wars so you don’t even have to feel that bad about rooting for britain.

a different man — we were all literally soooooo fucking correct about sebastian stan and his huge wet eyes back in 2014 and i gain power levels like a pokemon every time the world gets on our level a little more. that said even as someone who has been max sebstan-pilled for more than a decade i was blown away by his performance here, which is by turns sad, funny, quiet, prickly, bizarre, and wildly, delightfully unlikable. i really really liked the movie, too, which was inventive, weird, provocative without trying to “shock,” and good at striking a balance at being a little “writerly” without losing a natural flow in “its” voice. as someone with a less than Normal relationship with my reflection i found that it resonated at some uncomfortable, powerful levels. really loved the look of it too, especially inside people’s apartments… good movie for capturing a certain felt sense of living in new york without ever commenting on its own new-york-ness (these usually, though admittedly not always, go hand in hand).

the limey — just OK soderbergh revenge flick elevated by (1) luis guzman (2) a truly great commentary track where soderbergh and the screenwriter fight about what did or didn’t work in the final product

the sweet smell of success — nick said we had to watch this because i kept reading stuff about famed gossip columnist walter winchell, apparently the inspiration for this 1957 story about a PR agent trying to get in with a gossip columnist by putting an end to his sister’s undesired match. it’s pretty great as a story of two Guys Who Suck, and i liked how unrelenting it was in continuously deepening our understanding of how gross they are. tony curtis apparently got independent financing for this because he wanted a chance to play against type and there is something that works really well about his perfect doll-like features and enormous curling eyelashes being put to nefarious ends even as you understand why movie studios would want to make this guy play a heartthrob over and over and over again while he still had that face.i don’t know when “guy way, way, way too obsessed with his sister” became a trope i liked but i think i do. looks really great throughout!

rogue one — this movie truly sucks ass. i went long over at letterboxd if you want to see my extensive thoughts on why but the short version is that this movie mistakes “starting in medias res” with “not having a structure or any beats where we get to spend time with characters for any reason at all other than to movie the plot forward” and also the writing line to line is quite bad. it also drove me crazy that main character girl had a katniss-ass ponytail that scanned as Generic Twenty-First Century Action Heroine rather than Female Character In Star Wars A Franchise Somewhat Famed For Its In-Universe Cultural Norms Around Women’s Hairstyles. however because i watched this immediately after finishing andor i did almost cry at the end LMAO

psycho beach party — deliberately silly genre pastiche that makes great use of color for how Definitely Made For Five Dollars it is; lots of fun but mostly notable to me and therefore i assume to anyone reading this blog for two reasons: (1) hotch from criminal minds plays a sexually submissive surfing guru who speaks in rhyme (2) lil baby lauren ambrose is the star, way back before even six feet under, and she's phenomenal, which of course mostly made me think wowwwwww girl yellowjackets did not deserve you

tv

criminal minds (season 18 or whatever we’re up to now) — not quite a return to form and i think the first of the paramount seasons is still the best but a huuuuuge improvement over last season. the serialization is still the weakest part and when that took over things mostly got less interesting (and the big reveal was… pretty dumb), but this season had a couple actual cases with some actual profiling in the profiling show (imagine that), an episode where a character in a coma has visions of a dead relative to help them heal which is a trope that will work on me every time, and a character death i have been rooting for on equity grounds for years that they got fuckass MGG to come back for wearing spencer reid’s signature purple scarf, so i can’t really complain.

andor (seasons 1-2) — this show is so fucking good it’s stupid, not least of all because it’s so good in what should be such basic, foundational ways, but… aren’t. the writing is just really, really good: it’s character- and causality-driven, it’s coherent and connected, it reflects similar themes across different storylines, it takes big swings and thinks carefully about the things that must be true within the parameters of the world they’ve established, it follows character psychology to its logical outcomes, it establishes a register where the show can get away with characters doing awesome as fuck speeches without breaking tone but also it flies naturally line by line, it makes sure every character always sounds exactly like themselves, it’s smart and humane and it pulls no punches but never feels gratuitous (have there been three more devastating words in TV history than “i can’t swim”???)… it just does all the stuff. all the stuff that makes TV writing good, it does it. and it looks amazing, both in terms of production design (which to be fair even the worst star wars shit usually nails, shout out to the art team people) and in terms of being shot really well (which not so much lol), and the score is incredible, and the show somehow found like 500 of the best actors you’ve never heard of, plus stellan skarsgaard, to deliver incredible performances from the main cast all the way down to bit parts with a single scene. it was great to watch this in the year that severance and yellowjackets both shat the bed so spectacularly (don’t @ me about severance, i am 98% confident that by the end of season 3 many more people will be singing my tune there) because something people kept saying about both of those shows was, oh, we just didn’t have enough time with [character/storyline/whatever] to care, sometimes as criticism and sometimes as a defense when people complained that characters felt thinly sketched or decisions came out of nowhere, and andor just proves over and over that good writing needs very little time to make you care. by the end of episode three cassian and marva have had maybe fifteen minutes of screen time together? if that? but their goodbye is devastating, because the show has made that time feel so specific and therefore so real that you feel the whole weight of a lifelong relationship between them. and, on different level, the show also is an incredible demonstration that the most important thing for characters to be is not sympathetic but interesting (which, again, starts with being real)... dedra and syril both (i’m not fact-checking ANY of these spellings) are so awful but i was completely obsessed with them start to finish. just incredible. i can’t believe this happened at the disney corporation. i love you tony gilroy if you ever need a kidney hmu. diego luna is the most beautiful man ever to live and cassian andor is my best friend

books

rick perlstein, nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of america — i have obviously talked a lot about this book #onhere… i think the book’s biggest strength and biggest flaw are sort of entwined, which is that perlstein is really good at and in some ways primarliy interested in either capturing or cultivating a vibe. this is part of what makes this billion-page tome, which spans four elections across eight years, so addictive to read and so emotionally impactful; on the down side, “vibes” is not really “history” lol. for all his voluminous research it is tempting to wonder what may have been left out, what complicating ephemera didn’t make it in, or what alternate explanations less emotionally driven histories might find. it’s also the case that perlstein’s fondness for the wacky or memorable historical detail does lead to the inclusion or simplification of stuff that doesn’t have the strongest sourcing (like his quick allusion to banana-smoking which some googling on my part revealed was a hoax that may or may not have briefly become somewhat real among less discerning hippies…). there are also times he veers a little both sidesy, although he also remains clear on (1) which side has more Actual Power and (2) the extent to which the violence of the left (e.g. the weather underground, the panthers) has been disproportionately remembered compared to that of the right. that said… duh, i loved reading this book, and i got a lot out of it, and i personally think it’s pretty solid as a corrective to certain mainstream narratives of america in this period, and it is unbelievably entertaining not least of all because richard nixon is maybe the craziest person to ever be president which is saying a LOT.

eimear mcbridge, the lesser bohemians — LOOOOOOOVED this book. i read mcbride’s a girl is a half-formed thing years ago and was blown away by what it accomplished technically and emotionally but also found it probably the most emotionally upsetting novel i’ve read in my life (or at least tied with the bluest eye), so i was very very glad when my beloved @boundwithpurple started blogging about this one in a way that conveyed that for her second novel mcbride had opted to write a book that would not make you feel so so so so so bad. instead… this is… the feel-good book of the year, to ME (or at least tied with conversations with friends). now, there are some caveats in recommending this book. it is in fact a romance — a straight-up, chemistry-driven, extremely sexually explicit romance — between an eighteen-year-old girl and a man twenty-one years her senior, which i understand will simply be a nonstarter to some people. the book does not pretend this is not weird but it doesn’t, like, “criticize” it either… it owns the weirdness and is kind of like, yes all the weird uncomfortable implications of this ARE part of what’s going on, psychosexually… now what? which i found really refreshing and even moving for the ways that it so wrapped up with the extent to which this is a book about a young woman trying with nerve and determination to start making a life for herself that she likes. and the developing relationship is so real-feeling in both its sweetness and its uglier turns and in the way they fumble effortfully towards being able to be together in a way that’s rooted in kindness and care… it’s partly a book about the courage of trying to reach for happiness even when your life has been really really fucked up, and throughout a book really rooted in an ethic of kindness and care. all of which is sort of related to the fact that this is really the only literary novel i’ve ever read — and it is a literary novel, written in an experimental stream-of-consciousness mode that fucks relentlessly with syntax (it starts out tough and then a few pages in my brain clicked and after that it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like why does anyone else write any other way when someone could just transmit emotions and feelings so seamlessly like this) — that offers the same particular kind of emotional pleasures and catharsis i have previously encountered in only the very best fanfictions. like… the enormous long night of disclosure when her boyfriend finally sits her down to explain why he is so Like That, which he can only do because of the ways their relationship has already changed him and which he has to do in order for them to continue together and become something more real… it was truly giving fanfiction in the best way. (it is usually an insult to compare original fiction to fanfiction… but when it’s NOT i am talking about something VERY SPECIAL.) ditto the book’s treatment of sex, which is first of all EASILY, with ZERO COMPETITION, the best sex writing i’ve encountered in original fiction, and second of all, is like… intimately connected to character and psychological beats in a way that… again… i have read in fanfiction. (there’s a specific scene that literally made me think of like. magicians fics where eliot finally bottoms as a synechdoche for the vulnerability of accepting love or whatever. it… rules.) ALL THIS! AND! the book is also just a real banger about being eighteen and trying to figure it out, great being on the right amount of drugs writing, great being on too many drugs writing… her bro-y roommate is so funny and i was so impressed by the way mcbride’s shattered-prose experimental style remained loose and free enough to make room to bring to life such a vivid exemplar of Some Guy. this book is fucking ALIVE! i wanted to live in it forever and ever and ever. i’m so fucking glad there’s a sequel.

ottessa moshfegh, eileen — this was fun. very “what if a situation was so fucked up?” book, with the bonus that it’s about women. revels in grossness, repulsion, reads in some ways like a book written to respond to the perennial complaints wrt likability with “fuck off forever” which sort of keeps it at an emotional remove but is part of what i enjoyed about it… and it does get really fucked up in a fun way. moshfegh has a good ear and a smart, deliberate style; i’m not in a huge rush to read her again but likely will as it’s always such a relief when a buzzed about contemporary literary novelist is actually decent lmao.

megan abbott, el dorado drive — this one didn’t get under my skin like the turnout or move me like beware the woman, but B-tier abbott is still a place i always like to be. i liked that she set her book about a pyramid scheme barely hidden as a women’s empowerment group in michigan, in the wake of the hollowing out of the american car industry; michigan emerged as central in both the first season of the dream podcast, which was centered on MLMs, and in bridget read’s little bosses everywhere: how the pyramid scheme shaped america. i also really liked the sweet, sad relationship in this book between the gay main character and her gay niece, whose mom (the protagonist’s sister) doesn’t mind that she dates girls but doesn’t get it, either, that these relationships are actually real.

thomas doherty, show trial: hollywood, HUAC, and the birth of the blacklist — i got a lot out of this book, which spends some time establishing the political climate in hollywood and to some degree nationally before the 1947 hearings that created the hollywood ten, provides more or less a blow by blow accounting of the hearings themselves, and then talks a little about their aftermath. it was interesting to read about the ways hollywood was still sore from the wars of dueling unions (which had fought, often, over how radical they wanted to be); and, well, the media circus and the hearings themselves did provide some very entertaining soundbites (like the conclusion by one reporter that bertolt brecht, the only unfriendly witness to state definitively he had not been a communist because as a foreigner he dgaf about the first amendment, had some unfortunate associations but was not a political person… lmao!). doherty is a stylish writer who does not seem inclined to side automatically with the persecuted for political reasons but nonetheless observes what is undeniable, which is that however annoying you might find the communists (and the men in these hearings, unlike some of the blacklisted in the years that followed, had in fact for the most part been and in some cases still actively were card-carrying party members), the government’s actions in this instance were simply unjustifiable, and the immediate caving of hollywood as soon as they wrapped was little better. it was very odd to be at one point reading this book in the waiting area at my physical therapist’s office while the TV played the hosts of the view talking about the jimmy kimmel thing, some time after he’d been suspended and before he’d been unsuspended. in some ways it was an echo; in some ways it reminded me that free expression in mass media specifically has always been at the mercy of the people with the purse strings and they have not historically been first amendment purists; in some ways it did make me feel, especially once he was reinstated, that perhaps certain genies really have been let out of the bottle in ways that at the very least will take longer to put back than the right might hope and the left might fear. but i am no prognosticator. anyway i liked this book!

larry mitchell with illustrations by ned asta, the faggots and their friends between revolutions — a grown-up fairy tale in fragments, a sweet daydream of gay life at the margins of the ruined city, increeeeeeedibly 70s which in my book is always a huge plus. a warm and amusing if also one that made me a little wistful as a person who thinks a lot about community but was sort of born without the neural structures to experience it. in light of certain very annoying trends on tumblr dot com i found it very, very refreshing to read a book from the 70s by a man in which the word “men” is used exclusively derogatorily :) :) :) (and it was kind of anthropologically interesting that, in contrast to what i think might be assumed in certain corners about the ways various words have definitely absolutely always without variation been used [lol], "queer men" are the ones trapped in the prison of respectability)the cute little illustrations are delightful (and also extremely 70s).

aimee wall, we, jane — i really liked this one (wow good reading month for me). i read it alongside faggots & their friends because they were both so short, and it was nice to be reading a pair of books about, respectfuly, gay stuff and abortion. we, jane is, to oversimplify in terms of plot, about a late-twenties woman tired of her rootless life in montreal who befriends an older woman who convinces her they should both go home to newfoundland to become abortionists. it’s sort of wry and sometimes funny and prickly but also at war with its own prickliness; in some ways what the book is really about is about marthe’s desire to grow beyond her habits of irony and distance and commit to something that really matters. the book is not uncritical about this impulse, about her choices, about her or the other women in it, but it’s also ultimately not a cynical book, instead finding a way to hold these imperfections and complexities alongside with a belief that, well, some things do matter. i liked the writing, which was spare but with a very nice cadence (little things but like i love when you can tell an author… has read books and is writing a book…) and often quite sharp, and i liked how much it was a book about women, i liked that marthe was straight and interested in dreams that had nothing to do with men, i liked the way wall wrote about simultaneously wanting to belong and having a personality that makes that kind of inherently difficult (which also made this a good reading pairing for me personally).

music

STREAM JADE THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY TO SAVE LIFE

marina, princess of power — i think the thing with me and marina is i just don’t like for my theater kid energy and my pop music to mix (unless you’re taylor swift because taylor swift is a theater kid who’s not a good enough singer to be a musical theater kid)

marissa nadler, new radiations — probably good and fairly pretty but too snoozy for me

audrey hobert, who’s the clown — HMMMMMM still kind of making up my mind about this one. i think hobert is a talented songwriter who has a distinct voice as a writer and a good ear for hooks. i… want to know what this album sounds like in an alternate universe where jack antonoff never existed. like, antonoff didn’t produce this album, but… IS it his fault that all the actua, like, music sounds so muted and bland? like would that be the style, the way pop chanteuses Signify these days, if not for what he has wrought? i’m not even a diehard antonoff hater, by the way… i’m just like… what if these things sounded a little cleaner… what if we had some more dynamic range… what if audrey hobert had started a band… what if we made it cool again for music to sound like the josie and the pussycats soundtrack… or alternately what if she was on whatever wavelength maude latour is on and made synthpop that’s, like, just slightly weird enough to be interesting to listen to? idk. i’m spitballing here. “sue me” has been stuck in my head this week. i’ll see what she does next. 

alison goldfrapp, flux — airy lovely dance-pop that will probably not stay with me (other than maybe the opener, which is a banger) but sounded great for doing laundry to it once, if also not nearly as great as the time i saw her in concert and realized she has a voice like a supernatural creature and i don’t understand ever since then why she doesn’t do that in the studio

the weekend, beatbox my heartbeat — this early aughts canadian girlband had a song in the closing credits of D.E.B.S that i liked so much i had to track the album down and guess what: it rules if you, like me, believe that one of the highest compliments you can pay music is “reminds me of the josie and the pussycats soundtrack.” guitar-heavy bangers with sugar-sweet vocals with just the right amount of roughness, yes please. also i learned from wikipedia that (1) one of the members went on to write music for iconic canadian teensploitation classic instant star which explains why one of these songs is literally an instant star song (2) the copyright issues created by their name is the reason the weeknd took that last e out of his name. i’m not fact-checking that i choose to believe

sex week, sex week and upper mezzanine — hit play on these because i saw the band name and was like “...okay, you got me.” it was… fine. down tempo indie rock that feels like a college band. are they? i didn’t care enough to find out

JADE, that’s showbiz, baby! — SHE DID THAT! she did do that. i’ve been waiting for her to do that and she did. the best pure pop album i’ve heard all year and it’s NOT close. in a just world she would be as famous and sell as much as chappell roan and sabrina carpenter combined and i would never have to hear either of their names again because we as a cultural would have been reminded through the power of JADE what it actually feels like for pop music to be a slay. this album is just really good. you can tell JADE loves pop music but she’s not trying to craft a song about which people will say “that’s a perfect pop song” (the concept of the perfect pop song has become the enemy of good pop IMO)... she just wants to offer us some bangers, beautifully produced, with her wonderful voice doing its wonderful things. what if pop was just fun and sounded really good? a radical notion perhaps in the year of 2025. as i type this we’re like 30 hours from finding out how mad i am that this is not going to be the most buzzed about showbiz-themed pop girl album of the year. if you like pop love yourself today and stream!

hayley williams, ego death at a bachelorette party — this was… very boring to me. nothing in the melodies, production/instrumentation, melodies, etc. grabbed me at all. perhaps most bafflingly i didn’t even care for the vocals… it’s really crazy to me that hayley williams has like one of the best voices in the kind of music she does and you would have nooooo idea from listening to this record that that is true! idk if she smokes or gave herself nodes or what and can’t do that kind of thing anymore but… idk. big nothing.

wet leg, moisturizer — this was competent but like… either too interesting or not interesting enough for me. not really sure which. like either too cool and interested in doing stuff that’s not Making Fun Music, or else trying to make fun music and not really making it fun enough… not for me.

the beaches, no hard feelings — i feel like objectively this is almost definitely not better than the wet leg album but i loved it way more! i don’t really know why some Pretty Good girlbands/pop girls click with me and others don’t but i listened to this one like three times straight through, thought it rocked except for track “lesbian of the year” which is really soupy and bad but probably got them a bunch of clicks so whatever it’s fine.

arizona, spooky memento — another find from the closing credits of D.E.B.S. this one was too yelpy and abrasive for me to return to but i enjoyed experiencing its spiky energy on a sunday afternoon between sessions

rilo kiley, rkives — i never got around to listening to this because i was nervous about the experience of listening to something that was almost, but not quite, a new album from a band i had loved so much, especially since i had never quite connected with jenny’s solo work after they broke up… but i decided to finally pick it up after the show this month and honestly loved it (probably more than i would have back when it came out, honestly). it’s rilo kiley at their ramblingest and loosest, their most americana-inflected; it sounds lovely and really hit for me after seeing them live.

sydney sprague, peak experience — sweet solid 8-song set that kind of straddles the line between singer-songwriter and pop punk - high tempo and lots of hooks with a mellow delivery

other

rilo kiley reunion tour at summerstage — what can i even say? the opening notes of execution came up and i was suddenly every age i had ever been at once and understood maybe even more acutely than i ever did at the time that this was it for me, this was most emotionally significant band of my adolescence which because of the nature of adolescence makes it the most emotionally significant band of my life. i remembered so keenly why all these songs had meant so much to me, why there was something about them that extended even to the songs where there wasn’t a single line i could pull and say “this is me,” how it was they made me feel seen, feel understood, feel all the things everyone feels about the band that saved their life. i think i’ll go out and embarrass myself by getting drunk and falling down in the street / you say i choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me / maybe you’re right. at every concert you’re surrounded by people who love the thing you love, whom you can maybe surmise love it in similar ways, for similar reasons, but i’ve really never felt the power of that collective devotion like i did standing in central park with a couple hundred other people all screaming better son/daughter at the top of our lungs, because the magic of that song is the way she just says it. all of it, everything there is to say, she put it in a song so bluntly and completely and correctly that i was overwhelmed with gratitude, amazed that she had been brave enough to say it out loud so all of us could hear it when we needed to. i cried and i’m crying again just typing this now. i felt so lucky to have discovered quite by accident that approximately 700 people from the neighborhood were also going and that one of them was my beloved @unbornwhiskeyy and that some of them were people i’m not like besties with but that i’ve gone out with enough that dancing next to each other felt familiar, that i didn’t feel any worries about looking like a dork. the band sounded incredible. jenny lewis, one of my favorite voices in the history of recorded music, sounded gorgeous. she wore a navy blue dress with a collar and white polka dots and she was so right that it never has to stop being 2005 if you don’t want it to. at some point — early on — i realized very belatedly that at least some of my very many jenny lewis feelings are kind of gay. perfect night.

julio torres, color theories — julio torres makes art for me specifically and is extremely high on the list of famous people i’m delusionally convinced i could be IRL friends with and so obviously i loved spending 90 minutes inside his very magical brain classifying things according to what colors they are or are not (not related to what actual colors they are). i laughed a lot, like a LOT, and also just experienced the pleasure of remembering that some people Get It, like they just get it… it’s a wavelength thing, i can’t really explain. everybody should watch problemista. i think he’s only going to get more famous from here (i mean, if there’s any justice this will be true, although it’s also possible his weirdness will place a harder cap on it than the one on, like, bowen yang, no shade) so i’m glad to have seen him live while prices were Still Very Expensive Don’t Get Me Wrong but, like, doable.

doing this combined both because october is so late and because i in november i finished 0 books, listened to 0 albums, and watched all of 3 movies, LMAO

books

lisa morton, ghosts: a haunted history — meh. very broad and written lightly, for a popular audience, but not very engagingly. mostly focuses on ghosts in europe/the west and then does a little with cross-cultural comparisons but i wanted more… but also despite the fact that she did identify several famous hoaxes, some follow-up on some of the accounts of hauntings she provided suggested she wasn’t super thorough about fact-checking so maybe it’s just as well. to be transparent, the reason i find it disappointing to discover a haunting has been definitely solved is because of how much i love an unsolved haunting for that little frisson of “what if”… but you can only enjoy those stories if you trust that had there been a solution it would have been provided!!! i will give her credit for being the only one of the three authors who mentioned the fox sisters to bring up the fact that they did it with their fucked up freaky toes.

mary shelley, frankenstein — would you believe this book is extremely interesting and good? i really admired how weird and dark and miserable it was, and also how much it conveys just how active shelley’s mind was… you can kind of see her finding a way to work in almost every thought she’s ever had about anything into this fucked up nasty little story, from the genocide of indigenous north america (go off?) to an account of giving a false confession that is startingly aligned with what more recent research into the topic reveals about how it is that people come to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. (i also have to give a shout-out to the extremely yaoi-coded element of the arctic framing device… teen girl culture tbh.) from the moment the creature demanded his bride, i could not stop thinking about incel culture, and it really speaks to the enduring power of the tale that more than two hundred years after its conception it has the ability to resonate so specifically with contemporary evolutions of the same cultural currents shelley was contemplating.

mark z. danielewski, house of leaves — i was really excited to read this both for the metafictional conceit and because i had heard people describe it as scary but unfortunately i thought it SUCKED ASS!!!! omg i was soooo mad at this book by the time i was done. part of what’s annoying is that the book comes with a built-in defense against my primary complaint — writing bad — because it’s like, ok well is the writing of the BOOK bad, or is the writing of (1) this loser assistant descending into madness and (2) this weird old man writing a text about a nonexistent movie bad? like i spent so long being like, is this badly written on purpose… if i talked to fans of the book would they be like duh, the prose is SUPPOSED to suck… but ultimately it didn’t matter because the prose was just so unbelievably fucking stilted and dumb and juvenile and corny in the sections about the family, where the closest thing the book has to a plot is happening, that it just broke immersion and i could not hang at all. and i can’t really imagine that danielewski was like, “i WANT the parts of my scary house book about the scary house to read like a literate but not particularly talented high schooler wrote them”... if he’s did he’s even dumber than i think. i mean i could not believe how corny and bad the dialogue was. really, really bad. similarly i guess i know that it’s part of the joke of the book that the academic stuff is not real and sort of parodic… but the fact that it all sounds the same also wears out its welcome quickly. and then keeps going for 700 interminable pages. UGH!!!!

robert louis stevenson, the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde — this was kind of a banger! also a quick read, libby told me i finished it in three hours. the central conceit of the novel is positioned as a reveal, which makes it basically impossible to experience it as the victorians did, but you can still understand as the mystery builds why people would have been like “wow this stevenson guy goes crazy.” and for how short the book is, and how little ultimately we get of jekyll himself on the page, the final first-person confession is really quite tantalizingly thematically dense.

stephen king, carrie — i liked this a lot! choosing his sad teen girl story as my stephen king entry point was a good move for me, and my favorite thing about the book was definitely how much tenderness he writes poor doomed carrie with, and how compassionate he is as well towards sue snell, a kid startled by her own worst instincts and wrestling very humanly with trying to grow up. there’s something very elementally powerful about the conceit of the book, especially its inciting incident, because basically anyone who was ever a child has either been unfairly mocked by other children for something they had no idea was wrong or has joined in with the group experiencing a sense of power through the social punishment of deviance; i would wager, actually, that most people have been both, even if on a much smaller scale than the tampon-throwing of the opening scene (although, of course, the position of these events in childhood means that they often loom larger in our memory no matter how slight in reality). king is an uneven stylist, but i found him competent enough to keep me emotionally engaged, and every now and then he does drop a real bar. (he does also drop the worst description of sex i’ve ever read, which… might be justified by the character POV… but… did we really need this…) it  also rules that the real monster is conservative christianity lmao. this book also does the fictional third party sources thing way better than house of leaves to the extent that it made me think even more poorly of danielewski for transparently ripping off carrie minus the part where he came up with a compelling story.

edith wharton, ghosts — i don’t have a lot to say about these but i found them cozy & atmospheric tales that suited my october mood very nicely!

leo braudy, haunted: on ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies, and other monsters of the natural and supernatural worlds — this was alright, i guess… i dunno. he announced it in the intro as a cultural history of fear, and i’m like… i don’t know that i believe in cultural studies like that to be totally honest. the text felt somehow both too specific and too broad… like, a lot of time was spent on just explaining examples of different monsters across the decades, but since he was covering so much i didn’t feel like he brought much depth to any of them? some of his takes seemed wack, most were fine but not anything special… i think the stuff that was most interesting to me was the stuff about the reformation and the idea of horror as a way of accessing an emotionality rejected by protestantism, which connects to e.g. the frequent setting of gothic novels in catholic countries or the catholic past… this sounds dumb to me now but i had never really thought about how catholicism is, duh, literally older than protestantism, and what you can gain from viewing protestant as self-consciously modern/un-archaic/etc. (he’s weirdly quiet on the catholic stuff in dracula but does spend a lot of time in the dracula chapter on the victorian celtic revival as manifesting a similar impulse to the catholicism stuff, which was interesting to consider… and his dracula takes were pretty solid although at one point he states that blood transfusion fails for lucy but succeeds for mina which is literally not correct? i don’t know how two different published books i’ve read have made basic factual errors about a very fact-checkable book that is one of the most famous novels in the world…)

colin dickey, ghostland: an american history in haunted places — ok now THIS is what i was hoping for with my spooky season nonfiction!!! this is one of those “themed travelogue” books that depend for their success basically entirely on the skill of the author, and luckily dickey is really good, both pleasurable to read sentence-by-sentence and genuinely insightful in his “readings” of various hauntings as he explores the questions of what different kinds of ghost story tell us about cultural anxieties, hang-ups, wishes, etc., on topics ranging from eccentric women (the winchester mystery house) to post-genocidal guilt (the “sacred indian burial ground” popularized by the amityville horror) to the intersection of haunting and race (asking why all the ghosts of this one famously haunted virginia city are white, given its history as an enormous slave market; a standout chapter on new orleans). i thought one of his most interesting ideas came in his discussion of haunted asylums and prisons, which he uses to point out that our ideas about things like mental illness and justice change faster than the buildings in which these ideas play out do. very very cool stuff, and told with an eye that understands both the appeal of a proper ghost story and the pleasure of a good debunking.

ben machell, chasing the dark: a 140-year investigation of paranormal activity — i picked this up hoping for a history of the society of psychical research, but while there’s some background on the society, it’s very focused on one guy in particular, tony cornell, who worked with the society (the UK version) for several decades. luckily cornell falls into one of my absolute favorite genres of people, which is paranormal believers (or people at least open to the paranormal) who spend most of their time debunking. cornell was a guy who got started on this path by a Weird Experience He Could Not Explain Or Shake, and while he collected a few more of those over the years, he also ran over and over into people who were straight up faking it, and one of the things machell openly admires about him is that after fifty years of doing this shit, he remained equally open to both possibilities each time (and willing to fight with others in the paranormal community about it). he also remained agnostic on causality; over time he came to favor a hypothesis involving hauntings as a manifestation of psi rather than as contact with the dead, but he seems not to have been the kind of guy ever to claim that any of his Weird Experiences ever offered anything like “proof,” which again is a mentality i enjoy and tbh genuinely respect. (huge shout out here for his mentor who at one point, unable to find a trick mechanism causing a table to levitate, decided that the only explanation remaining was that he himself was hallucinating.) the book is written in present tense, which i found sort of distracting/annoying, and i did think it could have been more thorough in its context-building (for example it mentions the fox sisters but never mentions their recantation…), but i liked that machell understood that a well told debunking can be as interesting as a story of Weird Stuff, especially since this genre of debunkings includes some fascinating psychology (like the guy who said he was being attacked by a black dog only he could see, with wounds and everything… whom cornell figured out was surreptitiously stabbing himself???), and cornell is just a fun guy to read about; it’s very easy to see why machell wanted to write this book. also, of all the books i read during spooky season, this was the only one that contained the occasional passage that scared the absolute shit out of me, lmao.

movies

one battle after another — i really loved this one. beautiful to look at and thrilling to watch — three hours went by like nothing — and by the end i was so invested in the world of the movie i was really on the edge of my seat, partly because the movie’s mix of cynicism and warmth meant i really had no idea which way things were going to go, and i was deeply moved by how they played out. this is the most i’ve enjoyed leo in like twenty years and also i literally almost cried when i realized we were getting sensei benicio del toro just because i was like wow what a beautiful gift to receive and how wonderful to be alive on earth at the same time as benicio del toro. shout out also to regina hall, possibly our most underrated living actress. i thought a lot about say nothing while watching this — in particular, the scene of the beautiful female revolutionaries with terrible op-sec holding up a bank made it sort of impossible not to — and especially of dolours price being quoted saying something like, “you’re not supposed to admit that it was fun [to be in the IRA]”... there’s some thorny stuff in here and i respect/agree with some critical takes more than others but i do feel like a decent number of people talking about this movie are looking at the world of what we know about real-life self-styled revolutionaries with some rose colored glasses lol (i also think people are like… weirdly underplaying the extent to which perfidia, who in the world of the film is struggling with the iconography of the female black revolutionary, is also a bit of an archetype that is definitely multiracial/often white? also felt like the movie had a tremendous amount of empathy for her and teyana taylor should win an oscar). also it was so funny omg. maybe the funniest movie i’ve seen all year?

the devil and miss jones — this is sort of like “1941 undercover boss” except it’s also very cute as the cantankerous tycoon who joins his own store’s shoe department to investigate the union organizing winds up being sort of friend-adopted by the sweet saleswoman who sees a struggling middle aged man down on his luck. charles coburn gives the millionaire just enough vulnerability that you’re rooting for him to learn his lesson rather than to get his comeuppance, and i had never seen jean arthur in anything but it was very obvious after about five minutes why she was a star — she has this wonderful half-smile and charisma for absolute miles. their chemistry is great and i loved how cartoonishly hot her union organizer boyfriend was… couldn’t do that ten years later! lmao. lots of good jokes and a core sweetness make the most out of the premise even with an ending that reminds you that in 1941 they were still sort of figuring out how movie endings worked.

peking opera blues — a zany tale of three women whose (short-term) fates wind up entwined through the intersection of a local theater and a local revolutionary group. i really loved how much this felt like a live action cartoon while keeping a really tricky tonal balance that kept me invested in the wacky story. it was also beautiful to look at, with so many wonderful bright colors (HOLLYWOOD TAKE NOTE!), and excellently choreographed… “great blocking” is not a thing i usually think about but this movie moved bodies around in space so well i couldn’t help but keep noticing! really great time with this one. also one of the women is the secret revolutionary daughter of a general who spends the whole movie in men’s military attire and she is. SOOOOOOOOOOO hot omg. google “brigitte lin peking opera blues” and thank me later.

black christmas (2019) — i love this movie’s cringe feminism christmas slay. if i had a nickel for every time i got jump scared by camille paglia in october i would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but etc. etc.

this is not a test — i saw the premiere of this teen zombie flick which is an adaptation of a YA novel by courtney summers which (a) is great (b) already held a special place in my heart because it’s an iconic text about hating your dad, strong rec for everybody who wants a book about hating your dad (c) is even more special to me these days because the “hook” of it — what if your suicide got cancelled by the zombie apocalypse — was an inspiration for my magicians bigbang time loop fic lmao. the movie was alright — definitely a canadian teen horror movie made for approximately five dollars, and i don’t know that it really captured what made the book so special given that sooooo much of the book is the protagonist’s internal monologue, but it was decent enough that i felt glad to see this story i cared about on the big screen rather than annoyed at what they did. and i (a horror baby) found some of the scenes genuinely suspenseful and some moments quite affecting. i thought the one “adult” actor in the cast (they were all adults but he was playing one) really brought it for his appearance, and i also hope to see more from froy gutierrez, who i thought was the standout among the younger performers and really captured the particular sweetheart dreaminess of his character from the book. i do need the make-up artists of the world to look into their hearts because why was this already suicidally depressed teen girl wearing a visible beat after three days of living in the high school gym waiting out the zombie apocalypse… it was giving me yellowjackets season 3 flashbacks and no one wants that!

frankenstein (2025) — lol. i have said my piece on this. i do just want to state one more time firmly and for the record that while, yes, every adaptational choice made is somewhere on the spectrum of stupid and baffling, i truly do in my heart believe this also simply sucks ass as a movie taken on its own terms of “is this fun or rewarding to watch for, just to be clear, two and a half fucking hours.” i honestly found the blood & guts stuff more viscerally affecting in this is not a test, a canadian teen horror movie made for five dollars. i genuinely believe that the production design was betrayed by cinematographic choices i don’t have the expertise to understand but that have the outcome of making everything look like shit. it looks like playstation. movies have to stop looking like playstation!

knives out: wake up dead man — i have never not loved a rian johnson movie, and i obviously wasn’t about to start with a benoit blanc adventure featuring josh o’connor as a hot priest! a lot of lbxd reviews of this movie say something along the lines of “hey is josh o’connor actually the best actor working right now?” and i do see why… i liked him a lot in challengers but seeing him in a very different and much quieter role really made me realize he has that movie star Thing where i would watch him read the newspaper and drink coffee. charisma supernova without even doing anything. he also gets a great range to play in this movie, where he’s often very funny but also has moments of sincerity that he makes truly moving. craig is as delightful as ever and while this is much less of an ensemble piece than the others, everyone else is predictably great. we saw an early screening with a q&a from johnson and he talked about how this movie drew a lot on his experience of growing up very religious and now being Not That and i thought the movie did a really impressive job of touching, in its light A Knives Out Mystery way, on what it is that faith actually means for people in their day to day lives, at both its worst and most manipulative and its best and most positively transformational. and it looks absolutely beautiful! so much contrast! so much use of light and shadow! steve yedlin should like teach other people how to make movies for netflix that don’t look like shit!

millennium actress — there’s a very cool conceit in this movie where two guys (one a superfan, one a beleaguered camera operator) are interviewing an iconic actress long retired, and the movie in quick succession places them in her memories as they are playing out and then makes clear that what we are seeing is her life story as told through the roles she played in the movies she made. this is so fucking clever, and the execution is so playful and inventive, that i was having a great time while also feeling like the formal stuff was keeping me at arm’s distance, a little, from the emotional core of the story, which wasn’t necessarily bad but made the movie a very good intellectual diversion more than a powerful story. but!!! then there’s a climactic moment where everything snaps together and suddenly i started crying because i felt like i was witnessing one of the most powerful and profound statements i had ever seen about art and memory and the self the way those things intersect and interact and make each other, an incredible distillation of what it is to be a person and an artist both, just one of those moments where someone condenses an expression of extraordinary thematic density into a few pictures and a handful of words and you can’t believe it… really fucking incredible stuff. maybe the single most powerful emotional moment i have had watching a movie this year. also the animation is beautiful!!!

wicked: for good — lol. lmao, even. the least a movie has felt like a movie all year and i say that in a year that included both marvel’s fantastic four and guillermo del toro’s frankenstein. once again i vented my spleen on lbxd already and will link it to spare you. i do want to say that when people said the first act has all the good songs that somehow still did not prepare me for just how ass the music in the back half is.

music

for a standout track for these two months let's go with maude latour, the people's nepo pop star, who in a just universe would be more famous than both chappell and sabrina, giving us a delightful little soda-fuzz ditty about hooking up with your ex that manages to feel like a charming turn of the millennium throwback and totally fresh and current at the same time!

amaarae, black star — sexy, shameless, and gorgeously produced! not at all sonically similar to blackout but made me think of it a little because it’s in the same genre of “albums about being at the club that sound like they take place during a horror movie”

taylor swift, the life of a showgirl — not nearly as bad as some people are making it out to be, particularly in the context of taylor’s body of work (taylor never phones it in, she just has wildly inconsistent taste), but i just found it very dull. as a straight-through listen i found it more pleasant than rep or midnights, both of which have some awful songs with production i hate, which doesn’t really apply here, but it’s the first album since 1989 where i really don’t think any of the songs are making it into my taylor faves list.

g-flip, dream ride — definitely the best album i have listened to by someone i have heard of mostly for being some kind of gay! this is cute and cheeky and fun (there’s a song about hating your friend’s boyfriend called “cut his dick off” lololol) with some big 80s-ish synth walls. faster songs definitely much better than slower songs but it’s nice to hear a performer with a personality.

world/inferno friendship society, valhalla, definitely — none of world/inferno’s work after 2007’s addicted to bad ideas really clicked with me — i’m not sure i ever even listened to their last album before this — but those aughts records mean enough to me that i was still quite sad to hear of frontman jack terricloth’s passing in his mid-fifties a few years ago, and moved to stumble on this 2023 and notice the title. some digging revealed this is a collection of unfinished tracks completed after his death, and i don’t know if it’s nostalgia turned more bittersweet after terricloth’s passing, or the return of yula beeri on backing vocals, but i was surprised by how much i enjoyed this as a collection of songs capturing the drama, playfulness, and passion that i always loved about them, and have been surprised about how long some tracks have lingered in rotation. (but if you’ve never checked them out and are curious, i would start with 2006’s red-eyed soul, which i rediscover annually or so is still probably in my top ten albums of all time. if you’re streaming it, skip leni riefenstahl at the end of time, cats are not lucky creatures, and we will never another on trains — decent songs, but they’re older tracks not on the CD release i had, and i think they break the album’s impeccable flow and cohesive world.)

maude latour, sugar water (deluxe) — yay a little more maude latour! most of these feel like bonus tracks tbh but “xoxo” is one of my songs of the year

titanic, hagen — really cool and interesting set of sounds to spend time with about which i do not presently remember very much

king princess, gun violence — this was a much more typical listening experience for when i hear of someone mostly for being gay; YAWN. what a fucking drip

cardi b, am i the drama? — i don’t really know enough about rap to say if this is good or i just like cardi b but i like cardi b a lot. i just think she’s fun! “next time you see your mama, tell her how she raised a bitch” makes me laugh!

the starting line, eternal youth — i liked this! hooky and energetic. nick listened to it first and he said it wasn’t that good because the guy had kinda blown his voice out but as someone who is not into emo i actually like it better this way. it sounds less whiny and more grown up!

crushed, no scope — pretty-sounding bleep bloop music that may not be special on its own but did push after (the band) completely out of rotation for me and the female singer has a very pretty voice.

perrie, perrie — i was actually quite surprised by how much i enjoyed this. it’s like… the most basic, uninventive mom pop possible, like one of the songs you can really hear is like “what if we just did shout out to my ex again,” but idk some of these objectively bland uninteresting songs are kinda earwormy to me! and i really have always loved the tone of perrie’s voice. i think this probably has the highest ratio of how much i like it to how much i would recommend it of any album i have listened to all year in that i really just do not think there is anything special about it as an album… but… i really kinda like it! still bumping some tracks!

purity ring, purity ring — also pretty-sounding bleep bloop music that is a little weirder and more out there than crushed but… you know… not that much. i think i prefer this vocal style when it’s chvrches

wednesday, bleeds — sort of thought this was too abrasive for my tastes but saved a couple songs anyway and have been really surprised by how much those songs have had longevity and how happy i remain to hear them come up on shuffle… they’re very interesting sounding! a lot of little things that sound sort of wrong or ugly but in a right or cool way! also has one of the funniest lyrics i’ve heard all year (“we watched a phish concert and human centipede / two things i now wish i had never seen”). would recommend for the indie rock crowd!

gatlin, eldest daughter — spotify D-lister leaves the synth-pop mines for a snoozy mopey country-inflected turn. no thanks!

other

books

steve coll, the achilles trap: saddam hussein, the c.i.a., and the origins of america’s invasion of iraq — this was a little dry to start (perhaps especially if you like me have, and i can’t emphasize this enough, absolutely zeeeroooo prior knowledge going into it) but clearly written and informative, and i got what i wanted out of it, which was a little bit of info about the guy who was (and when i say this i do not intend to minimize how very much Actually Quite Evil he was) such a prominent cultural boogeyman for the US during my adolescence.

bridget read, little bosses everywhere: how the pyramid scheme shaped america —  this is a book by a writer for NYMag so i sort of figured it would cover a lot of familiar territory for people interested in (anti-)MLM content, but it was truer to the historical bent of its subtitle than i was imagining, which i appreciated! read does a good job connecting MLM culture to other recurring american delusions (at one point while reading it i thought to myself “is the downline the new frontier???” which is kind of insane but speaks to the way the book roots MLMs in Stuff Americans Believe), and she does a really good job connecting the dots to lay out how many of these monsters trace their roots back quite directly to a single vitamin company, not in terms of inspiration but in terms of literal, like, the founders worked for the vitamin guy or knew someone who did, etc. this book will also make you want to burn the devos estate to the ground for reasons almost totally separate from betsy! (the part where she’s like, “the display of amway products at their headquarters seems full of normal products until you realize you’ve literally never heard of any of them…” is not the worst part — that would be the active and consequential political lobbying — but it was very funny.) also i was already considering picking up something about goldwater after finishing the hoover book but the fact that he came up in this one cemented that decision so i have the book to thank for that lol.

don delillo, the body artist — bedtime reread of an old favorite; i think there are meaningful criticisms you could make from a disability perspective of this book that is mostly about a mysterious man with extremely limited language use appearing in a woman’s house, but it’s probably in my top ten books of all time for sheer use of language. delillo is reliable on that front, but there’s something about the granularity the novella-length story affords him that really makes this one sing for me. i find it really profoundly moving as a meditation on grief in a way that is more or less impossible to articulate.

rick perlstein, before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of american consensus — this book kinda slaps lol. i’m always a little skeptical of a Narrative History, and at times i did feel like perlstein gets a little carried away with probably not wholly supportable assertions about people’s motivations or reactions (although certainly no individual moment seemed…  implausible… given our cast of characters) because he wants to be fun, but, also… it is fun. in a dark way, because so many evil things plaguing the country got their start here, which is part of why i wanted to read it (and i was honestly personally gratified, as someone constantly annoyed at “why are we so polarized?” convos that don’t even mention the dems losing the south over civil rights & the republicans realizing they could move in, to see a book that lays out in its intro that we should think of the 60s not as a triumph of liberalism but as the decade where the country split), and because, as i talked about earlier, the specific resonances wrt trmp are sooooooo intense. but the 1964 campaign is fucking crazy for like 900 reasons and i had a great time being led through it by someone who clearly has a deep, nerdy passion for the fun historical detail. as someone who really struggles with abstract-ish statements about who was taking power when, i also just really loved and appreciated how granular and concrete perlstein made the nitty-gritty world of politics — like, the recruiting X number of delegates in Y number of precincts shit, or the phone tree to call everyone on your list when the newspapers don’t print the times for the upcoming TV spots, etc. (to say nothing of the total insanity of the convention!)

rachel aviv, strangers to ourselves: unsettled minds and the stories that make us — i can’t remember when it was that i got aviv-pilled, but if you’ve read her recently, it was probably her story on the UK’s lucy letby case; i think she is probably our best living longreads author and recommend her entire new yorker archive with only the caveat that she does have a penchant for choosing topics that will make you want to lie down in the dirt forever. mental illness is one of her recurring topics; her first story for the magazine was about a schizophrenic woman who starved to death in the midst of a delusion after being released without any information passed on to her family, and more recently she wrote about a woman who had come to regret the years she spent taking antidepressants (her story reappears in the book with an interesting shift in aviv’s perspective). i think the fact that the same person was interested in both these stories, which you can easily imagine being wielded for opposite discursive purposes, sort of speaks to the reasons i was so interested in reading her book on the topic — aviv is really profoundly uninterested in coming to a single easily digested narrative of the “truth” of mental illness, which is the only kind of writing i really want to read about it. honestly, trying to summarize this book, which is essentially a series of case studies (or profiles), risks misrepresenting it, because what i appreciated about it was how steadfastly it refused summary or closure. strongly recommend this or literally anything else she’s ever written.

jamie hood, trauma plot: a life — my honest feelings about this book make me feel kind of bad but i don’t believe in lying on the internet so: this was a pretty good memoir that had the misfortune of being only the fourth-best trauma memoir i have read this year. i think the intro got me hyped for it to be more experimental than it was and i was kind of disappointed by the actual book that unfolded… also while i respected the conceit of the most experimental section, which is a riff on mrs. dalloway, i also found the writing in that section a real slog to get through. and the writing in the more traditional sections reminded me a lot of the emily witt memoir i read not long ago which isn’t exactly bad because while i had my issues with that book i did think she was a good writer, as is hood, but did just sort of make me think more about the saminess of writing in the internet era than about the actual writing. i guess i’d say i’d recommend this book — genuinely! — to people who have a specific interest related to the book (memoirs about rape/sexual assault; memoirs engaging with the concept of trauma; memoirs by trans women/trans people with no “trans journey”/transition content), but probably not to people who just want a good read, unlike, say, in the dream house or mean.

herman melville, moby dick — ages ago i briefly signed up for whale weekly because of how much fun i’d had with dracula daily and about as soon as i got to the part in chapter one where he refers to adam and eve as “the two orchard thieves” i was like, oh, fuck, herman i was not familiar with your game, this is too good to read on my phone. having finally read it not on my phone, i’m kind of at a loss for words. melville turns whales and whaling into a series of metaphors for basically every facet of human existence; the breadth he mines out of this single image is just stunning. few people have ever wielded the english language as well as he did here; reading his paragraphs has the pleasure of watching a master at work, just flex on flex on flex, sometimes put to delightfully silly use (the book is, i can’t emphasize this enough, SO fucking funny — at one point he refers to the sperm whale as “the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words”), sometimes reaching the most thrilling heights of high drama, and other times plunging the depths of how completely fucking crazy it is to find yourself alive and existing in a mortal lifetime. obviously there are many learned opinions on What The Whale Means, but for me, its central use is as a stand-in for the inarticulable, which melville spends about 600 pages trying to articulate. just an unbelievable accomplishment and a deep, deep pleasure to read.

movies

miami vice — i’ve never had a bad time at a michael mann movie and while this was not top-tier mann for me it was nonetheless no exception to the rule! had a great time watching jamie foxx be tough and cool and colin farrell be the most down bad a guy has ever been while sporting legendarily bad facial hair.

28 years later — i have never seen either of the previous movies because of my many years spent as a Horror Baby, so i was really not sure what to expect going into this, but… i was kind of blown away by how much i loved it! it kept becoming a different movie but not in a way that felt incoherent, just thrilling and also weirdly grounded in the reality of the emotional whiplash of adolescence because this gross-ass spinal-cord-heavy zombie movie is also a prickly-tender deeply felt coming of age story anchored by one of the best performances i’ve ever seen from someone not yet old enough to drive? like, WHAT, but also, yes! none of the family drama stuff is precisely new but it’s all depicted with care and precision and it felt really alive for me, and i kinda feel like the movie is quite sincerely saying something really important about “masculinity”... and it also looks so beautiful and has jodie comer. one of my favorite theater experiences of the year.

superman — this was no guardians of the galaxy or guardians of the galaxy 2 or guardians of the galaxy 3 or even guardians of the galaxy holiday special but it was cute and i basically had a nice time at the movies. i would have wanted another pass on the draft to tighten up the thematic set-up/payoff stuff (which gunn did so well in the gotg movies but… was missing a bit here — if your climax is going to hinge on the idea that being uncertain and fallible is what makes superman human, you kind of have to put in some stuff in the movie where superman is uncertain and fallible, and i can see where gunn thinks he did that but IMO he… didn’t, or not enough), and it’s also truly crazy that there in the year 2025 a movie was released with no fewer than three (3) Hot Annoying Dumb Blonde Chicks in it… but the performances were good, i laughed for real a couple times, i liked how much superman felt like a Protector, nicholas holt :)

collateral — this one IS a top-tier mann movie and seeing it at the museum of the moving image with @power-chords & @unbornwhiskeyy was another one of my favorite theater experiences of the year :)

fantastic four: first steps — i fuckin HAAAAATED this movie. i vented my spleen already on letterboxd so you can read that if you want, but to sum up the key points: (1) nobody in this movie is a person or has an arc or even a personality of any kind except paul walter hauser as moleman (2) every single actor in this movie gives a bad performance except paul walter hauser as moleman (3) sooooo crazy to make a movie about the idea of Family and then have all meaningful conflict be externally driven like these people’s relationships to each other do not feel real or textured at alllll (4) fuck off for opening a movie with a happy pregnancy test scene in trump’s america and double, nay, triple fuck off for the scene where invisible woman invisibles her belly to show a whole-ass six-month-old nestled cutely in there. i know that movies can’t actually cast newborns as newborns for a million reasons of logistics and cuteness so once it’s born i don’t mind the baby being too old but fully baked cutely fat perfectly human looking unwrinkled baby in a pregnant lady’s tummy is literally anti-abortion propaganda and while i don’t think anyone did this on purpose i did think the fact that nobody thought of this speaks to the fact that this was a movie made by stupid people (5) mr. fantastic’s whole ass thing in this movie is his anxiety about having a baby and then there’s a scene after the baby is born where they’re out in the snow and the baby is in a stroller NOT wearing a little baby hat or little baby mittens or little baby scarf or ANYTHING just a REGULAR BABY OUTFIT when it’s COLD ENOUGH TO BE ACTIVELY SNOWING and this made me really irrationally mad but i think it’s because it also speaks to the fact that this was a movie made by stupid people. (6) worst mcu quips ever maybe which is saying something (7) there are two different scenes in this movie where someone says “i know you, the characters in the world of the movie, know the story i’m about to tell you, but let me lay it out in detail anyway.” if you’re gonna skip an origin story you have to work fucking harder than that!!!!! (8) i just want to say one more time paul walter hauser marked innocent

shorts from the learning corporation — @onihcinimkcin & i went to a showing these because some of them were directed by barbara loden. two of them, the frontier experience & the immigrant experience, were interesting mostly as historical curios; one, the boy who liked deer, is kind of a degrassi-ish (complimentary) story about the perils of acting out that was low key stressful for me as a former teacher lol; two, directed by joan micklin silver, were basically stories about lil’ scamps having adventures in new york city and soooo cute and delightful, both of which you can watch online! the fur coat club was about two girls in a competition to see who could touch more fur coats who wind up in jeopardy and emerge none the worse or the wiser for their mischief, and i loved how much it let them just be kids and also admired the near-silent way its narrative unfolded propelled by visuals and music; the case of the elevator duck focuses on an impossibly adorable and endearing boy detective trying to figure out what’s the deal with the duck in the projects before the housing police get involved over the no-pets rule, and is so so so so cute and sweet even BEFORE the tiniest squishiest hugest-eyed little latino preschooler shows up who is literally the most adorable child i have seen in my life and so cute it like makes me physically upset to think about... just the sweetest little movie!!!

music

for a track of the month let's go with this italian number (via dave obviously) that caught my ear for how it keeps zigging when you think you've understood its zag:

jillian jacqueline, bright eyed baby — opening track of this EP, “year of the dragon,” showed up on one of dave’s mixes and i liked it enough to follow the lead; unfortunately the rest of the EP was nothing to write home about. “year of the dragon” is great tho!

HAIM, i quit — i found this album really enjoyable to listen to but in a way where i feel like i don’t totally respect it? like it’s fun and pleasant and also in a year where a couple really great indie rock albums have caught my ear there’s a part of me that’s like, …this is it? it’s a little easy-listening… or else the juicelessness crisis in pop has given me a mild rockist turn… but i am still listening to some of the songs… but every time i listen i’m like, “is this good or is it just an imitation of good music”... but i do kinda like them…

kesha, period — i feel like nobody liked this album but me but… i liked it! i do think on reflection this is probably the second-worst kesha album but in being the second-worst kesha album it really highlighted to me just how much kesha is one of my all-time fave performers and i just fucking like having her voice and personality in my earholes. i really like pop girls who do a lot with inflection and pose and kesha’s goofball smirk is more or less peak for that.

momma, welcome to my blue sky — this album is great. really sturdy indie rock songwriting that sounds real good, easy to listen to but NOT in an easy-listening way, just a lot of great guitars washing all over the place with solid vocals blending right in. this is the kind of album that came out this year but after listening to it twice i felt like i’d actually known these songs my whole life, you know? timeless shit! really good! listen if you like girls with guitars! “i want you (fever)” is probably my favorite track but it’s a true no-skips!

ex-voïd, in love again — as above, another great indie rock discovery courtesy of nick highlighting the tracks i would like off andy greenwald’s summer playlist lmao. crunchier than momma, with almost incongruously pretty vocals mixed sort of appealingly low and just a great ear for melody — about thirty seconds into opener “swansea” i knew i was listening to one of my songs of the year, and the rest of the album lives up to it. low-key obsessed.

addison rae, addison — i put this off because i bounced hard off diet pepsi but the joint advocacy of dave & @rgr-pop got me to listen and while i don’t know that i’m as enamored of it as some, this is definitely a bizarro little pop album that’s really got something going on. it’s like, all these wispy little ideas of songs produced to sound really lush and gorgeous but also with this constant underlying air of menace and unease? (addison famously a huge britney head… i do see it). really appealingly strange, like a pop album that is trying not to be… music? hard to describe but the vibes are weird and i do like it.

barbra streisand, the secret of life: partners — listened to this out of babs nostalgia + how wild the arrangement of people on the track list was (an album that brings together laufey and bob dylan… ok!). i will not be returning to it but honestly it’s pretty good if this is the kind of thing you like, and babs sounds fucking incredible considering that she is EIGHTY THREE YEARS OLD, holy shit.

renee rapp, BITE ME — rapp is obviously a talented singer but as we all learned from american idol being good at singing is a very small part of what makes A Star… i actually compared this to the album put out by someone who came in third or fourth on american idol but had enough buzz to get a record deal anyway, so they had more time and less pressure to put out something that wasn’t the inevitable garbage disaster the winner was stuck with, but they’re still someone who fell into this through a reality TV singing competition they’re trying to capitalize on so the whole thing feels kind of vision-less and half-baked… it’s like that. not the worst songs you’ve ever heard but nothing really worth coming back for, and her pose as a bratty bitch who fucks is like when you see a college production of rent and some earnest theater kid is trying to portray a nineteen-year-old stripper/heroin addict and it’s like… ok. calm down. i get it.

use knife, état coupable — belgian/iraqi trio, one for the files of “incredibly fucking good, had a great time listening to it, probably will never return to it for reasons of what i want to listen to when i am vibing vs. when i am in the mood to spin something new, but make no mistake, that’s a failure of my taste, this is really good.”

indigo de souza, precipice — i heart “heartthrob” on a radio show we were listening to on the drive with friends back from vermont and liked it enough to look up the album. the album is alright but i wish more of it had leaned into shamelessly ripping off turn-of-the-millennium indie vibes the way that very awesome song did. also i need today’s musicians to understand that affirmations ARE NOT songwriting and SHOULD NOT make it into your final draft!!!!!!!

other