culture consumed (February, 2024)
Mar. 1st, 2024 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hermionesviolin- [middle grade] Zia Erases the World by Bree Barton -- a Greek American sixth-grade girl (Zia) has always loved words but can't find a word for the feeling that a dark room of shadows has crept into her chest (she makes up a word: Shadooom); she then finds a magic dictionary that lets her erase words (and the concepts they represent) from existence, consequences and learnings ensue
- read Abby ~16 picturebooks
- Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong -- a 2022 novel about a 21yo Korean American from L.A. who goes to college in NYC and gets involved with the Black Lives Matter movement around the time of the killing of (Black) Akai Gurley by (Asian American cop) Peter Liang, and then comes home while his grandmother is dying and learns about his parents' activism in L.A. around the time of Rodney King. Er, that makes it sound a lot heavier than it actually feels. The blurb says: "How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful—and funny—debut novel of generational change, a mother’s secret, and an activist’s coming-of-age."
- How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
As I've mentioned before, Abby has been wanting me to read this since she finished it in early January, and I got work book club to agree to read it for February (as a follow-up to the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, which has an octopus as one of its POV characters).
Abby and I had this conversation at one point:Abby:
I liked the book less than Abby did, but I did like it.feral goldfish.
me:
That's what sold Nancy on the book!
Rebecca, who sort of runs the book club: "So, next month the octopus book?"
Nancy: "I think you mean, the feral goldfish book."
Abby:There is also an octopus, but the feral goldfish are in chapter one, and you’ll know by the end of that chapter if this is a book for you. (The general “you”. I can tell you personally that it is a book for the specific you.)
The weaving of memoir and sea life works better in some chapters/essays than others. I wasn't expecting the heavy topics in some chapters (toxic pressure to be thin in "My Mother and the Starving Octopus" and sexual assault and ~alcoholism in "Beware the Sand Striker"), but you can skip chapters without missing out on necessary context for later chapters. - [feminist sff bookclub] Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather (novella) nuns on a living spaceship
(I then read its sequel: Sisters of the Forsaken Stars.)
MCU
- Echo 1.04-1.05 (finished watching the miniseries with Abby)
- finished watching/watched with Abby [The Daily Moth] Interview with Douglas Ridloff and Toj Mora on “Echo” -- FB blurb:
Interview with two Deaf professionals behind the scenes of “Echo” – Douglas Ridloff and Toj Mora. Douglas was a consulting producer and the ASL master. Toj was a second assistant editor. Both describe the important work they did to ensure the show’s presentation of ASL went smoothly.
- Crys Matthews, with Jessye DeSilva opening
Abby took our friend Bridget to see Crys Matthews back in November (I, like Bridget's partner Jo, am not a big live music person) and Bridget was a big fan and had been trying to get me to go to the next Crys Matthews show with them (Jo was coming to this one, so it would be like a double date) and eventually I decided it would be fun to hang out, even though I'm meh on Crys.After the opener, Jo and I were both like, "We could have left after the opener and that would have been a great concert."
We thought we might go to one of her upcoming shows on March 1, but I realized later, when I actually looked at my calendar, that we had plans for a theater triple-date that night. Oops.A few days later, Abby emailed our pastors:
Elizabeth and I saw Jessye deSilva, a local trans/queer musician, recently when they opened for a friend of mine at City Winery. I was listening to her most recent album this morning on my drive to and from Kickstand, and I thought y'all would appreciate this song that has "There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood" embedded in the middle of it. (There's a lot more religious imagery and references in this album than I expected, honestly. The next track has some religious content and the opening line is, "Someone conjured up a nightmare and called it 'The American Dream'. It's just a white man with a weapon and a pocket full of cash to burn.")
["This song" = "Sundays" from their album Renovations. I listened to that, and the next song -- "Let it Burn" -- and eventually the whole album.]
Apple Music (pay artists!): https://music.apple.com/us/album/sundays/1683111410?i=1683111416
Spotify (because I'm a realist): https://open.spotify.com/track/7eRWpuQ00pCIkySRKcW60K?si=ade44d91df0f4f83***
Feb 10, Abby posted to a Discord we're in:
Abby:
***
Elizabeth and I were reading picture books and ended up…here, at Depressive Suicidal Black Metal:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/nagonting-ar-fauligt-fel/1189440086?i=1189440459
Like, we just listened to this song after finding a chart of the song structure in someone’s Masters Dissertation.
[...]
me:
Like, we read this picturebook and in the Author's Note the author refers to herself as "a nêhiyaw woman," and I Googled that word (turns out it's basically the Cree word for Cree) and Google wanted to give me the Canadian First Nations indie rock group nêhiyawak, so I was reading about them, and their Wiki says "Their style blends dream pop with shoegaze," so I clicked on "shoegaze," which led me to "blackgaze" (black metal + shoegaze), whose Stylistic origins included "depressive suicidal black metal". That Wiki section has 3 citations for all of the DSBM bands it lists -- and citation 192 isYavuz, Mehmet Selim (September 2015). Dead is dead: Perspectives on the Meaning of Death in Depressive Suicidal Black Metal Music through Musical Representations (MMus). University of London. Archived from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 18 August 2018.
Abby:
It is unclear why the name of the song differs on Apple Music, but the section changes lined up, so we’re confident it’s the same song. - "Texas Hold ‘Em" - the first single off Beyoncé's new country album Act II (thanks, Rhiannon Giddens [idk if you can access that without a FB account, so here's the same post on IG and X-Twitter])
I told Abby about it about a week later (surprised she hadn't already heard about it, because Rhiannon Giddens), and the next day she told me she'd heard that Beyoncé had two singles out but couldn't find the second one. Later, she texted me (voice-to-text while driving, hence the lack of punctuation/capitalization):
Have now confirmed that Beyoncé does, in fact, have two new singles out.
So I also listened to "16 Carriages."
I think I like Texas hold them more than 16 carriages, though
I'm not sure that I would've called 16 carriages country, if Beyoncé wasn't wearing a cowboy hat in the album art.
short stories
fanvids
- watched the 4 Moby Dick vids in the most recent Festivids -- thanks to skygiants saying
I did not have time to make a Festivids rec post this year before reveals for anything but my own gifts, but it's really an incredible collection this year -- the several fantastic Moby Dick vids and the several fantastic Shakespeare vids alone would be enough by themselves to make this feel like a banner year to me tbh even without the various other delights I've come across -- and I recommend taking the time to roll around in it!
eruthros made all of them, and here is their(? idk pronouns) post about it - From that post we also watched eruthros' Janelle Monáe vid: I Like That -- about Monáe's "Age of Pleasure glow up."
theatr
- [A.R.T.] Becoming a Man -- stage play adaptation of P.Carl's memoir of the same name (he wrote and co-directed the stage play). Abby and I are less interested in stuff about trans men than trans-femme folks, but Bridget was gonna go with her trans man friend Julien, and was really excited about it, and so we ended up planning a triple-date (Bridget+Jo, Julien+his girlfriend, Abby+me). And then Cate had the opportunity to get free tickets to select dates, so Abby and I opted for that (opening up Mar 1 for above-mentioned live music -- though we ultimately decided not to go to that show). Cate ended up sick that night, so it was just us.
We didn't love it (though Abby liked it more than I did), but we're interested to hear Julien's take on it. (I know a non-binary coworker of mine and their partner loved the play.)A.R.T. was doing Act 2 dialogues afterward (about 20min). Someone in the audience commented that they appreciated that the play spends time on Carl's toxic masculinity -- that often the representations we get of trans people are of ones who are doing everything right. I thought of how
thene talks about messy, flawed, "bad" queer characters. And I think that's really valid. But I also didn't like Carl a lot.
other
- the opening ~7 minutes of the Lucy Sante episode of the Gender Reveal podcast -- the "this week in gender" section ... which was about Cecilia Gentili's funeral at St. Patrick’s. (Abby had texted me the previous day, after she first listened to it: "It feels like it's been a while since Gender Reveal made me cry while driving, but to be fair, Tuck did warn me")
which had led to Abby posting to FB (after she first listened to it):
Do I have any friends who would give me the unemployed-friend rate on a commission of a Lindsay van Ekelenburg ish beatification icon of Cecilia Gentili, with some version of this text from her funeral mass?
An artist friend pointed to this IG post -- by Gabriel Garcia Román for his Queer Icons series“la Santa Cecilia, la madre de todas las putas”
As a sidebar, I looked up Sante's upcoming memoir on GR, and it's on a 2024 Transfem Books GR list ("A list of books, fiction and nonfiction, that came out in 2024 (co-)written by transfeminine authors."), and I was surprised by how many titles on that list I didn't recognize -- despite having read 3 LGBTQ Reads lists of "Most Anticipated Queer [books]." Though, okay, looking back at that entry, (1) it was just January-June 2024 (rather than the whole of 2024), and (2) it was just fiction. Oh, and despite the fact that I felt all those lists were incredibly long, (3) it was "most anticipated" (by some definition).
But, like, Dulhaniyaa by Talia Bhatt* (May 8, 2024) is on the GR list (but not the LGBTQ Reads list) -- an Indian American woman agrees to an arranged marriage, returns to India, and falls for her (female) dance instructor. ("A Bollywood-inspired desi lesbian romance, 'Dulhaniyaa' is a story of class, queerness, and the struggle to accept your identity even when it seems to be in conflict with your family and culture.") Which partly made me more interested to get back to Sorry, Bro (which is by a cis woman, but is an Armenian American sapphic romance).
* "Talia Bhatt is a trans lesbian and a romance and fantasy author from Mumbai, India."
***
Currently reading:
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.
From the blurb: "Written, edited, and translated by a female and non-binary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy." I haven't been blown away by it so far (I'm about a third of the way through), but I appreciate its existence.
Reading next:
Not sure. My March book club books (both non-fiction) are for the end of the month:
[climate change] The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh (March 20)
[work] continuing the sea creature theme: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks by Susan Casey (March 28)