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It’s too hot! Climate change is bad for so many reasons it’s nearly impossible to consider recounting them all and the damage it’s doing to this planet is nauseating, but also it! is! so! hot! I am also living through real humidity for the second time in my life (Shoutout to KCMO summer of 2011 from which I learned that it does not naturally cool down like 20-40 degrees at night everywhere and also it can be pouring rain and 98F at the same time. Who knew! People not from southern California probably!)
Anyway, you are probably also too hot wherever you are (Is the southern hemisphere’s winter unseasonably warm? Maybe you’re comfortable! I shouldn’t make so many assumptions, sorry!) and it’s boring to hear about so here’s some stuff I’ve liked recently!
Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open which feels very much like an album meant to be enjoyed in the summer. I like “100,000
” and “Die Young” and “Dandelion” in particular. The whole thing makes me want to write stories about small towns and the last summer before something big changes and the way it feels to ride air waves with your hand out a car window.
Widowspeak’s Roses is also a winner and has a lot of that same summery energy with an almost Mazzy Star-esque flair in the delivery. I like the slow, twangy singsong of the titular “Roses,” and the sweet soaring of “If You Change,”
and the reverb-y guitar and waltzy drums of “Hourglass.”
I have also been obsessively listening to Timmy T’s 1991 hit, “One More Try,” which made an appearance in Snack Shack (which I’ll discuss shortly) and launched me through time and space in the way that only music can. A song I have probably not heard since I was seven years old and I was sitting on my couch singing every word as it played in the movie. An absolutely banger of a song with a perfect early 90s synth and a real classique talk break at the end. Also makes a great pairing with “Independent Love Song” from last month’s list.
Snack Shack was a fucking delight. It was of course nerfed a bit by the men who make movies getting confused about romance, but what a fun ride! I saw a lot of reviews complaining about the ending not meeting the rest of the movie’s energy/premise, but like… I don’t know, that’s kind of what growing up is like, man, and it sucks! But there are still people who make it suck less! Anyway, those fellas were revved to the red playing those youths and it was well worth the watch. And the soundtrack ripped.
I also watched and loved and wept at The Long Walk. I should’ve trusted this would be good because my friend Brenna loved it and there’s no one I generally trust more, but I don’t know, man! The premise is dumb! The premise was dumb as a book! But then you listen to a bunch of guys talking for 90 minutes and it’s like, well yeah of course that was incredible.
Apparently if I just watch movies about two guys talking to each other a lot, I have a great time? Who knew! (Me, I knew, I definitely knew. I spent my adolescence obsessively rewatching Kevin Smith movies. I know who I am even if I sometimes forget.)
Alright! Good stuff this month! Except for the heat, but we’ve already talked about that. Our donation money this month went to Gaza Soup Kitchen and likely will this month as well.
As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate or if you want to recommend me some pop culture or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail. Love you!
We got a new car recently, a switch to electric because we’re driving more than we did before we moved and it felt both more polite (we do a lot of idling and I hate the noise and the waste) and more ecologically kind and also more economically kind (to ourselves) and it’s nice! It’s quiet! It’s zippy! it’s actually mostly more comfortable than our old car even though it’s smaller! (Something we also wanted, being back in a city again!) It’s a really fun teal color! Everything about the process was heinous and our dealership was awful, but! We persevered! New car! Also you can watch tv on the dashboard which seems like it should be more illegal than it is! (Must see car tv is not for me, the car is for music!!)
I’ve been listening to Humbird’s Right On a lot and I’m looking forward to her new release coming in September. I bought a bunch of music from Minnesota/Minnesota-affiliated musicians on the last Bandcamp Friday and this was one of those albums and it was a great choice. I am particularly digging “Child of Violence,” “Right On,” and “Cornfields and Roadkill,” but I do really like the whole album and listening to it as a whole!
I also got served Scarlet’s “Independent Love Song” on Spotify after I had listened to the album (You know how it just keeps feeding you songs after you finish something that have some Algorithmic Commonality or whatever? That.) amongst songs from a bunch of other artists I like and I remember adding it to my liked songs and listening to it a few more times and then, like usual, I forgot about it, but I keep seeing it at the top of my liked songs and listening to it and for the first one minute and eight seconds I’m like, ‘Okay, this is fine, but why do I remember liking this so much?’ and then 1:09 hits and I’m like, OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HELL YEAH. And I somehow keep repeating this every couple days as though my brain just gets wiped clean between listening intervals. Magic! Also, upon searching for the lyrics because I’ve never understood one in my life, learned it’s very gay!
Other than that I’ve been listening to books (Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur earlier this month, now Neko Case’s memoir) while playing Pokopia way more than I really like to be playing video games, but it has been a Difficult time in many ways and doing stuff that doesn’t actively make me feel bad is sometimes the best I, and any of us, can do, so I’m trying not to be weird about it. It itches the same part of my brain that playing The Sims used to, but without the ‘just close enough to realistic’ element that sometimes made me spiral about all the wrong choices I had made/how much better my life could be if I was just doing everything differently. Doing my little Ditto world-making does not make me feel bad for being a relative failure in my real life.
Okay! This month I will be donating to some local funds for legal assistance and rent relief as well as Gaza Soup Kitchen, and Bull Press which makes and donates tabletop-style games for and to people who are incarcerated.
As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate or if you want to recommend me some pop culture or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail. Love you!
I’ve been listening through Built to Spill’s discography since that was a band I just kind of missed entirely when they were of the cultural zeitgeist. You in Reverse makes me understand what made them such a big deal, but I’ve been enjoying the journey as a whole!
I rewatched Singin’ in the Rain while my friend and her daughter were in town and not only is it really a banger with so many incredibly funny and delightful bits — holding Lena Lamott’s voice reveal as long as they do is so perfect — I was also delighted to find out that kids also love old timey musicals! Adults would basically never get up and dance along with those characters with reckless enthusiasm! At least not without prior training.
We’ve been rewatching Masters of the Air because I guess when you don’t really want to take in anything new, you might as well pick an overall kind of hopeful but still ultimately depressing miniseries about WWII to rewatch. I know the internet has exhausted the concept of iPhone face with thinkpieces, but it really is such a useful metric for historical set pieces. Most of the faces in MOTA are solidly of the era — none better than Nate Mann and Matt Gavan — with really only Isabel May as an egregious misstep and that’s frankly pretty impressive with such a sizable cast.*
I recently liked You Should Be So Lucky and After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian who continues to write solid, enjoyable queer historical romances. (I’m not done with her new contemporary one yet, but it’s not my favorite thing I’ve ever read, which is fine!) I also really liked Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson but then immediately read a review that made me question my own literacy, so there’s that.
Technologically, I recently got a Kobo Clara B&W because I am trying to be on my phone less and I guess I convinced myself that if I had another ereader on rotation in order to juggle airplane-moded library books I would stop staring at my phone and while that hasn’t entirely happened, I do love the device! I picked it because it was well-reviewed and because I haven’t spent any money with Amazon since 2024 (and will continue not to!) but it is remarkably faster than my not-really-that-old Paperwhite and obscenely faster than my very, very old Oasis. Also the UI is better! And you don’t have to spend more money to not have ads! Which is an insane thing to have to feel good about!
More importantly though, in my quest to detach from my phone I have removed it from my bedside table to charge elsewhere, mostly to try to break myself of picking it up when I inevitably get up to pee in the middle of the night and less because I have trouble putting it down. And I’ve been successful! And sleeping better! And dreaming more! Probably because I am sleeping deeper, but I do think I’ll adopt some kind of conspiracy theory about cell signals causing brainwave interference. Just for fun. I still check it first thing in the morning, but I do think it’s guiding me toward fewer mindless pickups during the day too and that’s nice. I don’t think the phone is bad! My friends are in there! But I do like the feeling of being more ~intentional about it.
Okay, that’s it! This month we gave to some rent relief and mutual aid funds in the Twin Cities and I think this month we’ll be doing the same. I also donated to Buffalo’s Fire last year and it’s become one of my most read news sources, so I highly recommend it!
I hope you’re doing well wherever you are. As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate or if you want to recommend me some pop culture or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail, as always. Love you!
*: While we were watching Lord of the Rings, I had to pause and go off on a probably too long diatribe about how I couldn’t stand looking at Karl Urban in it because he just looked like some guy in a wig, absolutely zero believable fantasy face on him, and Crystal was like, “It’s funny that you like him in Star Trek,” and I was like, “That’s because he has… That man has tricorder face, is what he has.” This is now our default usage of this concept.
Since we moved, Crystal has become obsessed with a Japanese stationery store nearby-ish and in turn has gotten me hooked on the Uni-Ball One gel pen in both the .38 and the .5 because it is a smooth, quick-drying, and easy writing delight as all pens should be tbqh.
We have also gotten hooked on Tous Les Jours because their iced tiramisu latte is bomb and also who can resist cases full of very beautiful fresh pastries? I love the strawberry croissant because I am basic and fine with that and also anything that has a sausage in it because they are making hot dog experiences I had never previously considered. Oh and the milk cream/cream cheese bread/danish type thing. And their milk bread loaf. Cloud cake also great… I actually don’t think we’ve had anything we haven’t liked except the egg tarts but that’s because I am not that much of an egg person and Crystal thinks she is, but actually isn’t.
I just re-read (well, listened and boy did I think that narrator was goofy) Heated Rivalry because I have been having a hard time reading in general and Spotify offered it up to me at the start of November (probably because I was listening to a lesbian hockey book that I ended up DNFing boo) and it was nice to revisit the story again because it is very soothing and very charming. I had kind of forgotten that the show was coming out, which we are now also watching and mostly enjoying (I would enjoy it much more if I never had to see/hear anyone else talk about it, but what can you do!!) and as I made acquaintance with Rachel Reid waybackwhen (She told me I should write a book!) I am absolutely thrilled for her so will continue to overlook the most annoying people in the world and their opinions.
Also I cut all my hair off! I have been experiencing insane emotional distress around my hair for like, I don’t know, five or six years at this point that I am sure is connected to all kinds of things, but I also developed an insane… not fear, but aversion to getting a professional haircut, so it’s mostly amounted to Crystal hacking off between four and ten inches of my ponytail every six to twelve months and calling it good, but as soon as we moved, I knew I needed to just suck it up and cut it and I went in and I did it even though I was freaking out and it was totally fine (Thank you, Hope!) and I got a pretty cute cut that even looks fine when I don’t style it and I am sleeping better because my hair isn’t driving me crazy and I don’t have a headache from pulling it back and I cannot believe that I lived with it for so long for no real reason. Feel free to take this as your sign to do something you’ve been putting off! Your life will probably get better!
Alright, I think that’s it! This month we donated to Anti-War Committee MN and to help our friend Tabby get back on the road, which, if you happen to have some extra cash and donate, I would appreciate with my whole heart! As always, please let me know if you have a charity you’d like to share: ashrocketship [at] gmail.
I hope your holidays are as busy as you want and as bright as you can manage. I know it’s rough out there, but I believe in us and if you need to take a break from believing for a bit, I’ll save your spot. ♥
One miserable day you decide you want to change your life. You’ve tried it before in all kinds of different ways, each time deciding that a different thing is the problem and attacking with vigor. And things change and they get better and they don’t change and they get worse. You succeed and fail, more the latter than the former, and you give up and you try again.
One miserable day you decide that, if you must be miserable, if this is an intrinsic part of who you are, you can, at least, try to do it in a different place.
You have done this before also. It did not go well. It did not make you who you wanted to be. You came home with your tail between your legs and a well-rehearsed line about how it just wasn’t the right place for you. It haunts you, but life goes on, and you end up somewhere worse because sometimes that’s how it shakes out, but there are people you love with you and you find people to love in that worse place and you keep living.
One miserable day you decide that maybe you’re not as miserable as you think you are. One day you realize that, actually, living in that worse place even with people you love, is making you worse too. Colder and meaner and smaller, less enthusiastic when that was your entire brand as a person for most of your life. And you think: I can get the fuck out of here and I can try again.
Anyway! I got recommended “I Don’t Love Nothing and Nothing Loves Me” from Dinosaur Pile-Up’s album I’ve Felt Better and I’ve been listening to it and the whole album ever since. I like that it’s pretty homage-y — from AC/DC to Nirvana to fucking Bloodhound Gang, I have been having a GREAT time figuring out whichever tenuous little connection is tickling my brain at any time and adding them to my Sounds Like playlist — and I’m especially fond of “Big Dogs Eat for Free” and “‘Bout to Lose It” and “Big You and Me.”
I know I’ve talked about Mac Glocky before, but here I am doing it again because his covers/reinterpretations are some of the most fun I’ve had with music this year. I’ve been obsessively listening to his Smashing Pumpkins take on “Everlong” and I can’t get over how good the “Cherub Rock”-ification of the “Everlong” riff works and it makes me insanely jealous of his ability to break apart a song and understand what makes it. I also got obsessed with his Alice in Chains version of “The Man Who Sold the World” earlier this year because it sounds so much like it belongs in their episode of Unplugged and I also LOVE his Idles-ized version of “Once in a Lifetime” and especially appreciate that the video turned out so charming! Oh to have a single musical cell in my body!
I read You Gotta Eat by Margaret Eby this month and loved it! I have a hard time thinking through what to do about food when I am physically/emotionally drained and she has lots of great strategies for getting through those times that I’ll for sure be implementing. Also she’s funny! And never condescending!
Alright, that’s it! I haven’t made all of my donations for September yet, but if you have any extra cash a friend of a friend could very much use some help — Stand with Fredy — and as always if you’ve got a favorite charity, let me know about it: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
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