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The last month has… certainly been about thirty days and though I have been chugging along through it all, I have very little to say about anything, which sucks because I love saying stuff. I, in fact, live for saying stuff. And yet!
Books I’ve read lately: Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball (Fine to good), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (Bad to embarrasingly bad), Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well (Great). Yaffa As’ Blood Orange (Desperately wanted this to not be Good but it was Bad), Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Almost Very Good, but disappointing instead), Lexi LaFleur Brown’s Shoot Your Shot (So Bad I DNFed at 25%).
I watched What’s Up, Doc? and reviewd it glowingly but truly, my god what a movie! Movies used to be fun! We used to believe in laughs! Shirtless men used to have chest hair and not look like they were dying of dehydration! We used to get to fall in love with Barbra Streisand!
This month’s donation went to the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance which is a North Dakota based charity working to close the news gap for Indigenous communities in the Great Plains.
Okay, spring is here! We’ve had snow and rain and sunshine and (already) too warm weather all in a couple weeks but the world is still turning and there are buds on the trees and though things may be no less fraught, I have felt a cool breeze on my face and the sun will rise again, etc etc. We must keep on truckin’.
I just finished listening to the Beastie Boys Book which is great. Lots of good behind the scenes of album and personality making and a fun cast of narrators and a great bit where either Adam Horovitz or Mike Diamond will be saying something and the other one will pop in to correct/argue/say something smart-assy. I am also reading Thurston Moore’s memoir and Crystal is reading a Keith Haring biography and if you ever need two people on tap for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, we’re here for you.
Because I’d been listening to the book, I have also been listening to the Beastie Boys’ discography more than I ever have before. I would say I was a casual listener and will probably only continue to be one, but I have enjoyed sort of listening through/putting on a song when they’re done talking about it so that I can appreciate what they said about it and there are just some real bangers in there! A lot of it reminds me of my childhood/adolescence but not in a way that would (for some people) make them feel ~cringe or whatever, but I also think I have a better appreciation of them as distinct personalities.
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Vera Sola and My Brightest Diamond and St. Vincent and Ocean LeClair and JOLENE which has also been very enjoyable. Last year I listened to one new song a day, emulating one of my oldest internet friends, but I found that it inexplicably stressed me out and made me feel like I was listening to less new-to-me music, so it’s nice to be back to my old ways, bumbling and bumping my way into new sounds.
As previously mentioned, I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy which was a much better time than I expected and I do feel like I could be really obsessed with it under the right circumstances. I’m glad I waited so long to watch it though because I am no longer an irony poisoned jerkwad so I could actually really appreciate it.
I think that’s it! I feel like everyone I know is kind of operating with their brain partitioned — a piece for the nonstop onslaught of dumb and terrifying shit going on in the US and the world at large, a piece for work, a piece for interpersonal stuff, a piece for escape — and it’s a little exhausting and a lot demoralizing, so I hope you’re finding ways to take care of yourself through it.
January has been a mixed bag already (as they kind of always seem to be? What’s that about!) with some great success working on my resolutions etc whilst watching the only place I have ever truly thought of as home suffer through horrific fires and loss.
First, some music:
Mabe Fratti’s Sentir Que No Sabes which is kind of like a very current Rasputina that I can only a third understand.
Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal which of course everyone knows is a banger and has been listening to before I got to it.
I’ve also been obsessively re-listening to International Pop Overthrow by Material Issue ever since “Very First Lie” came on shuffle a couple weeks ago. What an album.
Second, some reading:
I’ve still been enjoying The Mountain in the Sea and I am suffering through This Will Be Funny Someday by Katie Henry on audiobook which is kind of a learning exercise for me, re: learning to hear things while my hands are busy which is going better than I expected! I also read and loved Navigating With You by Jeremy Whitley.
Third, some watching:
I finally watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings and I had a really fun time! For reasons previously detailed I did not think this would be my thing at all, but now that I am old and have a more open heart, it turns out it was.
Finally, some other stuff:
If you’re able, some places to donate: the Anti-Recidivism Coalition – you can include ‘firefighter fund’ in the payment box to ensure it goes to the incarcerated people who are fighting fires in LA and any of these compiled GoFundMes which are specifically for Black families in Altadena and eSims for Gaza.
If you’re unable to donate more than your time, this video tells you how to report landlords who are illegally raising rent prices in the wake of the fires.
Alright, I hope you’re doing well out there! I hope you’re succeeding at the resolutions and goals that really matter and ditching the ones that don’t. Don’t do shit you don’t want to do just because you feel like you should. Life’s way too fucking short.
As a kid, instead of being normal and hanging out in the toy aisle at the grocery store while my parents shopped, I would camp out in the school/office supplies ogling all the pens and markers (and usually managing to go home with something new). As an adult, nothing has changed! Though I guess I do it mostly virtually now. I love stationery and I am always convinced that this new pen will be the perfect one, the one I’ll buy over and over again for the rest of my life. It never is, but I have a ball with the process anyway. On the eternal search for highlighters that won’t bleed through my Moleskine planner pages, I recently grabbed these Sharpie S-Note markers and I like them a lot! They work in my planner great and they’re saturated enough to write with and they’re also excellent in the one coloring book I own and use maybe once a quarter. Highly recommend.
My Spotify wrapped was atrocious so I won’t bother you with any of that (This is what happens when you fire all your people! You need human people to make things that are worth human time!) but it was nice to see that I listened to the Decemberists as much as I thought I did and I’ve been listening to my top songs for the year a lot despite the lackluster wrap-up. Anyway! Other stuff I’ve been listening to a lot: Boys Go To Jupiter’s “Virginia,” All Saints, “Never Ever,” Beach Weather, “Seth Cohen,” and a lot of Daft Punk.
I haven’t read anything I loved in fooooooooreeeeeeeeeeverrrrrrrrr which sucks, but I’m having an okay time with Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, so fingers crossed!
Okay, that’s it! Happy holidays! I hope you have exactly as much fun as you can handle and an excellent new year. We can make it through this (and that and the next thing) together. <3
To be honest, the last month has been a little bit of a mess in ways I had not exactly expected and though I did listen to, read, and watch some stuff, my ability to retain whether or how much I enjoyed that stuff is… less than stellar.
I listened to a lot of Aurora on purpose which was a great choice. I’m particularly fond of The Gods We Can Touch but have not not enjoyed anything I’ve heard.
I read The Talented Mr. Ripley and had a pretty great time, thought it was significantly less gay than what I’ve seen/heard of the movie led me to believe. I also read and liked Kate Leth’s Mall Goth which hit me with some real good nostalgia in the midst of a good, though hard, story.
I watched Pretty Woman for the first time and had a great time! I get why so many women of a certain age are Like That about it and also seeing Jason Alexander be a gross little weasel was so unsettling to me.
In non-media things I’ve enjoyed recently: making canned cinnamon rolls by baking them in cream (The whole internet’s doing it! But this time they’re right!), our new laundry basket that was a little annoying to put together but rolls fantastically and holds a lots, putting a heating blanket just across the foot of the bed so I can tuck my feet into it when they get chilly but not get too hot to sleep, sleeping with my window open even though it’s in the 30s most nights, this little rechargeable Drew Barrymore lamp that I got for our newly renovated bathroom where after six years of living in this house we can finally shower which would also be a thing that I have enjoyed recently (and is of course to some extent) except it cost three times what we were told it would and was a shitshow from beginning to end, Abbot Mojave which does somehow remind me of home, and these little shower curtain clips that install easy and seem to hold the curtain well even if when I ~scanned the QR code to get installation instructions (They’re stickers, I thought I probably had it handled, but it never hurts to check!) it told me the company’s account had expired from non-payment.
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