burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

• [ASP] Seven Guitars (part of August Wilson's Pittsburgh/Century Cycle)
  
  I didn't like it as much as the other plays in that cycle I've seen (Gem of the Ocean live at Tufts, and the Fences film -- both back in 2016), but I do appreciate that ASP is doing the ~sequel next season ("Nearly forty years after the blues of Seven Guitars, the American Shakespeare takes on the Reagan Era."). Gonna be hella depressing, but...

• read Abby ~5 picturebooks
• [work book club] Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid 
  
• read on the flight to California: [feminist sci-fi book club] Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden (I liked it less than I had hoped -- though it's doing some interesting stuff, and I did enjoy a lot of it -- so I'm likely to skip its sequel, Symbiosis)
• On the return flight, I finished:
  • A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change by Dolly Chugh
  • Queer: A Graphic History written by Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele (which is more a graphic history of queer THEORY, to be clear)

• Naomi Campbel [part of the Harvard Film Archive's program Remapping Latin American Cinema: Chilean Film/Video 1963-2013 -- "Chile’s cinema remains the least internationally known of Latin America’s major cinemas. Often overshadowed by the historically larger and more widely distributed cinemas of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the rich history of Chilean filmmaking has also been obscured, paradoxically, by the long history of political documentary to which Chilean cinema is all too often reduced."]
  
  This was okay?  I appreciate that a 2013 film treats a trans woman very matter-of-factly. She wants bottom surgery but is generally happy with her life and resists the narratives of tragedy from the gatekeepers. But the blurb about the film feels to me like it really over-states much of what it's doing (also, despite the blurb, I did not read the woman who wants plastic surgery as trans at all; I very much read her as cis).
  
  
• Framing Agnes [Emerson Bright Lights -- Co-presented with Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival and GlobeDocs; independently, Abby had heard about it on Twitter]
  
  This film was so good!  Lots of interesting stuff about the history of trans people, their interactions with the medical establishment and the media, the tradeoffs of visibility, etc.  Highly recommended.
  
  Available to rent or buy on (at least) AppleTV and KinoNow. Also Kanopy (which you can probably access through your local library).

• Ted Lasso's 3rd (and final) season started, and we're currently caught up (3.01-3.03)

• "For The Love Of Birds, featuring original artwork with the subject of birds, real or imaginary, wild or not so wild for a juried exhibition that takes place during Chico’s 2023 Snow Goose Festival, which celebrates the glorious migration of snow geese on the Pacific Flyway." at the Museum of Northern California Art -- with Abby and Sarah, during our trip out there for Abby's dad's memorial service
• Portraits of Pride: A Celebration of Queer and Trans Lives in Boston (Abby wanted to go for date night).  It turned out to only be 3 portraits, which was disappointing -- and there was a panel we didn't know about, which we missed most of because we arrived about halfway through the 4:30-6:30pm window. (You can see some of the original portrait project here.)
  

• Ezra Furman at the Sinclair with Abby (opener: Alex Walton -- the opener went on at 8! on a weeknight! I am Old ... but I love my partner, and went to this show that ended ~11pm)

• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery with Abby on Netflix (we missed the theatrical release window, because it got pulled so early. We ended up pausing the movie at one point because she needed to be a kid chauffeur -- which meant we then spent a whole while speculating with each other about the movie before we returned to learn how it actually happened.)

• [feminist sff book club] Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
• [local library LGBTQ+ book club] ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer
  
• Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz
• read Abby 4 picturebooks
• This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley
  
• The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr

• [CST] Young Nerds of Color with Thom

• [Medford LGBTQ+ book club for March] The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya -- South Asian Canadian female characters; about music, friendship, etc.
• [feminist sci-fi/fantasy book club] Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey (novella) -- billed as the author "reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer identity."
• Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (novella) -- alt-history in which some members of the KKK are literal monsters, and women of color fight them
• [Medford LGBTQ+ book club for April] Shadow Life written by Hiromi Goto and illustrated by Ann Xu (graphic novel) -- one reviewer said the protagonist "is a bisexual Japanese Canadian woman in her 70s who is stubborn, quirky, funny, and independent."
• 4 board books

• Turning Red on Disney+ with Thom -- which I found delightful. near the end, Thom noted the theme of generational trauma  *waves at Encanto* also: ( small ~spoiler )

• more Ted Lasso with Thom -- episodes 5+6 of season 1

• NWSL Challenge Cup: Angel City FC vs. San Diego Wave (inaugural game for both expansion teams) with Thom

• 7 picturebooks -- highlights:
  • [Persian New Year] Seven Special Somethings: A Nowruz Story written by Adib Khorram & illustrated by Zainab Faidhi
    
  • [India, bedtime -- beautiful] Goodnight Ganesha written by Nadia Salomon & illustrated by Poonam Mistry
    
  • Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder
    
  
  
• [middle grade] Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff
  
• [middle grade] The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf -- draws on Malaysian legend
  
• A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark -- and the first of the prequel novellas/short stories: "A Dead Djinn in Cairo"

• Christmas Revels with my parents and Thom (we streamed the digital version) -- I mostly didn't like this year's production very much, but I do appreciate that they're thinking intentionally about the choices they're making, about traditions and diversity...
  
  To remind myself, the blurb this year was:

  ( Welcome to the George & Dragon! )

• I told Thom about that terrible NYT article and in the ensuing journey through the Quote ReTweets, they said:

  I think my favorite QTs are the ones that model her “marriage requires amnesia” paragraph and just make ridiculous lists of things. They make me think of “That’s What The Ninjas Use” by Irritating Rainbow, which everyone should listen to at least once bc it’s fucking brilliant.

  So they played that song for me on an ensuing date night.
  
• We also rewatched WoodRocket's The Loin King (and then stopped when we got to the sex, as one does). The joke "that package is my dick" led to me referencing J-T/Lonely Island's "Dick in a Box," which Thom didn't know?!, so I showed them the SNL skit, followed by "I Just Had Sex" (ft. Akon) and "Jizz in my Pants" -- true love is letting me torture you?
  
• We watched Shakira - Can't Remember to Forget You (Official Video) ft. Rihanna as a palette cleanser (it had been on our to-watch list for a while, after Thom had used a reaction gif in Discord of Shakira in that red dress and eventually tracked down its origin to that music video).

• Thom wanted to show me another Ted Lasso episode, so we watched "The Signal" (2.06)
  
• I (finally) watched both seasons of the Netflix The Baby-Sitters Club on the blizzard weekend (they're like 25min episodes -- 10 episodes in S1, 8 episodes in S2) -- I was impressed at how they updated the concept for the present-day, appreciated the increase in diversity, and appreciated the familiar stories I had grown up on

• Thom messaged me:

  Just discovered a new girl fronted rock band because Siri misunderstood my request.
  
  Asked for Minusworld, got World Minus One.
  
  https://youtu.be/k6p4NTHvsQY

• Thom posted Shamir - Cisgender (Official Music Video) to FB, saying:

  [CW: blood, implied violence]

  So, Elizabeth and I once had a fight over my use of the phrase “most queer music video ever”*. And of course it’s complicated, because there are as many kinds of queer as there are queers. But this kind of amazing music video just landed on my list as a really strong contender.

  [ETA, the CW is for the video. There was neither blood nor implied violence in the fight Elizabeth and I had.]

  * Babe, I did not fact check my wording. I’m sorry, but we both know that Messenger search is terrible.

• Thom also showed me the music video for Rihanna, Kanye West, Paul McCartney - FourFiveSeconds because it came up in conversation
  
  
• One of Thom's friends posted about Frank Turner's song "Miranda," so Thom listened to it and then played it for me.
  We have assorted thoughts and feelings.
  Thom, later:

  Oh, I played “Miranda” for Den.
  
  Den: “I like that song. Don’t love the misgendering, though.”

• Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey
• 5 picturebooks on worry/anxiety (trying to find books for a friend's kid)
  
• 2 pronoun/gender picturebooks
• [feminist SFF book club] Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (and its prequel novella, Rolling in the Deep -- which I belatedly realized was actually published first)

• Hadestown with Thom (Broadway in Boston -- I had seen the New York Theatre Workshop show in 2016, but hadn't seen the Broadway staging yet)
• a virtual poetry reading and conversation with H. Melt, author of There Are Trans People Here
• EP release of a musical that got canceled at the beginning of pandemic -- Songs From Beloved King: A Queer Bible Musical with Thom

  from the event description:

  Don’t miss this one-night only EP release and preview! The event will feature a live band and the original singers performing each tune, interspersed with conversations on the inspiration and origins of the songs, including how closely they relate to the biblical text and scholarship about the queerness of the Bible, as well as the themes of identity found in the Bible, and how current societal dialogue around these themes and the shared experiences of the queer community can be traced back throughout human history.

  You can listen to the EP here, and you can watch the EP event here.

• the first 2 episodes of Marvel's What If...? - E01 "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?" & E02 "What If... T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?"
• the first 2 episodes of WandaVision -- E01 "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience" & E02 "Don't Touch That Dial" (reminder to myself to read the comments on musesfool's post about those first 2 episodes)

• the Posten Norway ad When Harry met Santa ENG SUB

• The Matrix (1999) with Thom
  -- Our plan is to (re)watch all the Matrix movies in advance of the new one coming out later this month.
  -- This is the only one we had seen before, but not for years.
  -- Given where we are now, we expected it to feel more like a trans girl story (and were also surprised* that the closing credits hadn't been edited to say the Wachowski Sisters The Wachowskis, etc.).
  * Edit: We both noticed it, but apparently only I was surprised. [Edit2: I was thinking of this about Netflix and Elliot Page -- though I guess that's just the in-platform metadata and not the credits within the shows/movies themselves.]
  You can Google "matrix trans allegory," and you'll get plenty of quotes from Lilly Wachowski from this short video from 2020. The video (around 0:55) says "What do you think of fans discussing the Matrix's trans allegory?" and she says, "I'm glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention, but the world wasn't quite ready yet -- at a corporate level -- the corporate world wasn't ready for it." She also says (around 1:45), "The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view."
  

books

• 5 picturebooks
• Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns by Andrea Gibson [(spoken word) poetry]
• [Newton SFF book club] Babel-17/Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

• [Youthquake] The Tempest -- outdoors, only a little over an hour long but I didn't feel like anything was missing

• [fannish movie night] F9 -- "F9 (Fast and Furious 9)! Cars... in space?" <-- That's how D. billed it to the movie night crew, and it's kind of a misnomer, since it takes like 3/4 of the movie until we get to space and it's not even the most interesting thing that happens?  But it does maybe stand in for just how Extra the movie is.  Secret Family Members! Faked Their Own Death! Magnets!  I'm not kidding -- this movie leans in hard with the magnets, and the ridiculousness is really delightful.
  There's some lampshading, but there's also technobabble and plot-physics.The movie starts out slow, but there's an extended section that is super-delightful.  And Charlize Theron is gr9 (her haircut is unfortunate, but she still manages to look amazing).  Also, Helen Mirren is back -- and learning that she's in this franchise is maybe what got my partner to wanna watch it? 😂

books

• [work book club] Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
  
  The author recommends this review.  Excerpt:

  In this way, Sharks blooms into a tale about colonialism’s rippling effects and the pains of diaspora. When Washburn’s characters return to the beaches and valleys they left behind, they encounter reminders of a time when Native Hawaiians lived cooperatively and self-sufficiently on their land—before white settlers stole everything, before the plantations closed, before there were any plantations at all. In a vision, Nainoa sees “Waipi’o Valley, its rivers, then lo’i paddies of kalo stalks growing plump and green, swarming the valley bottom, and there my family is among it all, with many families…” Washburn contrasts this history of collectivism with the Western mandate of individualism that infects Americans today, many islanders included. As the kids’ mother, Malia, describes, that mandate was a catastrophic development. “[Ships] from far ports carried a new god in their bellies,” she reflects, “a god who blew a breath of weeping blisters and fevers that torched whole generations, a god whose fingers were shaped like rifles and voice sounded like treaties waiting to be broken.”

  Nimbly rotating between Nainoa’s, Kaui’s, Dean’s, and Malia’s stories, Washburn intertwines their perspectives like the strands of an intricate lei. In this way, he wraps us up in their personal struggles to figure out if they have what it takes to set themselves apart—from their family, from their underprivileged home, from their widely misunderstood ancestry. But right when you find yourself rooting for them the hardest, Washburn unravels what they’ve built, reminding us that setting oneself apart is inherently a selfish pursuit. At the end of Sharks, Washburn leaves readers to wonder if the Western values we bring to the reading experience—for example, an investment in personal growth and achievement, which the bildungsroman has taught us to expect—lead us to misunderstand who the protagonist has been the whole time. Through a subtle bait and switch and a fantastical portrayal of Native Hawaiian culture’s communal spirit, Washburn gracefully pushes us to rethink our understanding of what makes a character meaningful to a story. In doing so, he rethinks storytelling altogether. Ultimately, you may also ask yourself if you’ve misunderstood your own narrative all along—and if you’ve had the audacity to think you’re the savior when really you’re one small part of a much larger and longer story.

• [Bi+ book club] Outlawed by Anna North -- though our protagonist is a cis het woman (she spends much of the book in a community of folks of various genders and sexualities)
• [novella] Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor (apparently in the same universe as all her other SFF)
• 4 picturebooks about kids with incarcerated parents
• 3 additional picturebooks (and one more that was read to me on a virtual reading/Q&A)
• The Joy of Being Selfish: Why You Need Boundaries and How to Set Them by Michelle Elman -- recommended by my friend Holly
• Trans-Forming Proclamation: A Transgender Theology of Daring Existence by Liam M. Hooper -- Thom likened this book's writing style to Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother's Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (author of the 1996 classic Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype), which makes me not want to read anything by that author
  

• Hornography at Belmont Porchfest

• [fannish movie night] The LEGO Batman Movie

• Ted Lasso S2E9 "Beard After Hours"

( Read more... )

Okay, going to brush my teeth and head to bed. It feels wrong to say this is my favorite episode of Ted Lasso because it’s not even an episode of Ted Lasso. It’s like a random romp through weird shit in London feature a handful of bit characters from the series. And the feel of the episode is completely different. And I kind of loved it.

I’m mildly tempted to show it to you, because it is an almost stand-alone piece of artistry. Like, I could give you all the background you need to understand it in like 2 minutes. And it’s just very wow.

• 10 picturebooks
  
• Pansy by Andrea Gibson ([spoken word] poetry)
  
• [Feminist SFF book club] Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock -- which maybe reads more like literary fiction?

• "Prison Heat" episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  
• "The Worst of the Worst" -- short documentary about a supermax prison in Connecticut

• [ART] Alice in Rainbowland [short dance production]
  
• In the Heights
  
• [ArtsEmerson @ RoxFilm] A Tale of Three Chinatowns [documentary]

• book club books
  • [feminist sci-fi] The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell
  • [Comicazi] 2 graphic novels: Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale by Tim Fielder and After the Rain by Nnedi Okorafor
  • [work] The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• picturebooks
  • 7 trans(ish) picturebooks & 2 other queer picturebooks
  • 5 Muslim picturebooks (one with disability) #RamadanMubarak
  • 2 Asian food board books

• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga -- I think it was thedeadparrot who lamented that every Will Ferrell movie is about a man child has to grow up. This movie would have been so much better without him. Sigrit (his musical partner and love interest) could have had her own solo movie, being a weird kid who wants to win Eurovision and having similar hijinks and personal growth along the way. I would also very much watch a supercut of this movie that is just all the fake Eurovision songs.

• book club books
  • [feminist sff book club] Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 
  • [Medford LGBTQ+ Book Club] Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
  • [DRFD (work) bookclub] Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
• Fucking Trans Women #0 (an 80-page zine) by Mira Bellweather
• 7 board books (Nibling #2's second birthday is in early April)

• J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints because Thom had been talking about it.
  When I said I was gonna start watching it, they said:

  I will not be offended if you don’t like it. It’s just really working for me for some reason.
  
  Like, I low key love her presentation, and the systematic unpacking of bigotry is totally my kind of intellectual jam.
  
  It’s very much the perfect intersection of snarky and thoughtful for my current state of mind.

  I wasn't that into it, but there were some bits I really appreciated.
  
• I also appreciated that YouTube was pandering to me by offering me "Sex Work | Philosophy Tube" in the sidebar (Abigail Thorn, who does Philosophy Tube, had recently come out as a trans woman, though this video is from May 2019 and uses her old name).  I did in fact watch that -- though (unsurprisingly) I didn't learn a lot new from it.
  
• While I was watching that, Thom said:

  I’m watching the Philosophy Tube video on Queer Theory (because I’m me). I’m impossible to watch it now without realizing what’s going on, so I have no idea what I’d have thought then. But it screams “I am a Queer” pretty loudly in the first 10 minutes.

  So I watched that next (Queer ✨| Philosophy Tube [Oct 2019]), and it is a _delight_.
  Unsurprisingly, lots of folks had gone back to this video after her coming out one.  Comments included: "The galaxy brain required to be a woman playing a man playing a woman, is like Abigail-level acting. Only on philosophy tube."
• I watched her coming out video (Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story | Philosophy Tube ★) on a date night with Thom, because Reasons (#HoldYouWhileYouCry).
• comments about "mouthfeel" about girl dick in Abigail's "Queer ✨" video referenced Tiffany Tumbles | ContraPoints, so I watched that -- Natalie says in comments, of the video as a whole: "You wouldn’t be wrong if you said it’s about the politics of self-loathing, power dynamics within LGBTQ communities, how bigotry becomes internalized and how internalized bigotry becomes the alibi of external bigotry."  (For the "feminine penis" bit -- which was honestly my favorite bit -- start watching at about 8:42 and watch for about one minute.)

• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Season 5

• [fannish movie night] Happiest Season -- the KStew f/f Christmas "romcom" on Hulu [we then watched the Totino's with Kristen Stewart - SNL as a palate cleanser]
  
• [fannish movie night] The Princess Switch: Switched Again
• [Bright Lights] Queering the Script -- a "fast-paced history of queer women’s representation on contemporary television," per the blurb
  
• Wonder Woman 1984 -- with Thom (omg it was SO BAD) and then at fannish movie night

• picturebooks:
  • 7 ~queer picturebooks -- some from a Publishers Weekly "Reading with Pride: LGBTQ Books 2020"
  • 6 disability picturebooks (3 of which had Asian protagonists)
  • 4 other Asian picturebooks (I was gonna count How to Solve a Problem as "other", since it's not about Asian-ness but about climbing, and then I remembered that Ashima Shiraishi is Japanese American 😂)
• finally finished Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown -- which I wish had been an article, rather than a full-on book

• Kinsey Scales Virtual Winter Extravaganza on FB Live [queer acapella] with Thom
• Christmas Revels with Thom and my mom