2023-08-01

hermionesviolin: an image of Alyson Hannigan (who plays Willow Rosenberg) with animated text "you think you know / what you are / what's to come / you haven't even / BEGUN" (Default)
2023-08-01 02:14 pm

culture consumed (July, 2023)

books
  • read Abby ~12 picturebooks -- incl:
    • Weather Together by Jessie Sima
    • The Good Hair Day written by Christian Trimmer & illustrated by J Yang -- a boy wants long hair but struggles to ask his parents
    • The Wishing Flower written by A.J. Irving & illustrated by Kip Alizadeh -- elementary school girl with a crush on another girl! (and it's all about the tension of the crush itself, not about it being queer)

    We started out strong; those are the first 3 books I read her this month (on the flight back from Indianapolis).

    Another highlight was Big by Vashti Harrison.

    We also went through 5 drag queen picture books to help me pick ones to bring to STL to normalize drag queens for the niblings & 3-4 Brazil picturebooks (for same nibling trip -- though sadly we didn't particularly like any of the Brazil picturebooks we looked at).

  • [feminist sff book club] The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope
  • Monstersona by Chloe Spencer
  • Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

concerts
  • Ezra Furman solo show at the Rockwell with Abby -- having now been to one punk-ish show and one more folk sounding show, I can say that while I like a lot about Ezra Furman (see this article, for example), I don't actually enjoy listening to her music all that much.

trailers
movies
  • the Barbie movie with Abby
  • Nimona on Netflix with Abby

sports
  • watched the USA/VIE World Cup game (Fri July 21) with Abby and a friend

    Was charmed that the person who scored the first goal has the same name as the founder of my alma mater (Sophia Smith -- albeit pronounced differently). And the second goal. And an excellent assist for the third goal (by Lindsey Horan). Honestly, Sophia Smith the soccer player seems lovely and excellent and I like her.

music
  • Barbie The Album (Best Weekend Ever Edition) because of my partner's FB post/comments about the movie.
    It has come to my attention that there is Some Discourse about the new _Barbie_ movie. As a Professional Trans Person*, I have decided to weigh in.

    Yes. _Barbie_ is a trans allegory.

    Because you asked nicely, I will grant you a bonus opinion: "Choose Your Fighter" by Ava Max is the most trans song on the soundtrack.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Te5KRtYsvU

    * I am a person. I am a professional. And I am trans. Ergo: Professional Trans Person.

    Also, "Push" really is an extremely uncomfortable song. And while I don't enjoy Gosling's cover of it, I do appreciate that he leans into the uncomfortableness.

    Brandi Carlile's cover of "Close To Fine" is inferior to the original in almost all ways, but I do appreciate that it cranks the Lesbian to 11 by making it a melancholy duet with her wife.

    The soundtrack generally slaps, is what I'm saying, and you should definitely listen to the Best Weekend Ever Edition at least once, because the bonus tracks are worth having heard.

    "(What follows contains spoilers both for the 2112 B.C.E hymn and the 2023 C.E. film.)" [h/t [personal profile] hermionesviolin] https://wildhunt.org/2023/07/barbie-is-the-new-inanna.html

    Okay, so here's the thing. Barbie is an allegory about life and death and change and living deliberately. And that makes it a trans allegory. That also makes it an allegory about a LOT of things. Because here's the trans secret B3n Sh4p1r0 doesn't want you to know: being trans has a lot in common with just fucking being a human, especially if you're trying to be a thoughtful and good human.

    That's it. That's the tweet secret.
    Had not realized until the soundtrack that the Nicki Minaj "Barbie World" was almost entirely a new song, rather than a remix of the original Aqua like I had thought. (I feel like it played for a hot second in the credits, but since I didn't know what to listen for, I might be wrong.)

tv
  • Netflix Street Food Brazil episode (E2S2) with Abby

    This show is apparently overall well-liked/-reviewed, but we felt like it wasn't well done? There were 4 foods/storylines in the episode, but 1 of the storylines took most of the time, and we spent way more time on that one woman's life story than on learning about the foods. There was some cultural education woven in, which I appreciated -- but they left out a critical part about capoeira (that it also functioned as self-defense, disguised as dance), and I felt like we should have gotten more about food in Candomblé (we're told that food is how you communicate with your gods -- but the women are just selling this food on the street, presumably to anyone who walks by, so how does that work?).

    This article talks some about the show/season overall (Season: Latin America) and some of the criticisms (some of which we noticed ourselves -- like "Everyone is equal on the beach"). Abby said she wouldn't say the food-explainer was white, but that Brazil definitely has color hierarchies, and that woman was definitely light-skinned.

***

Currently reading: GR claims I'm "currently reading" a whole bunch of books, but I'm not actually reading anything rn.

Reading next: I have a bunch more picturebooks coming to bring to STL -- chicken picturebooks (the niblings visited some chickens recently and loved it), biographies of Wangari Maathai (because trees), biographies of queer women, etc. We're leaving for STL next week, and I anticipate doing some reading-to-kiddos while we're there -- though M is a big reader on her own now.

After I started reading Riot Baby, I got a bunch of YA books about the Watts rebellion (because I looked for the one I'd recently heard about -- The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds), so I will maybe read some of those?