burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Okay, I did not get January written up, so here, have 2 months.

---

January, 2025

books

• [Jan 9 MPL LGBTQ+ Book Group] Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle (2023)
  "A searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down." -from the blurb
  Not how I would have thought to describe it, but also not wrong.
  
  In January, I was hearing about Kyle Lukoff's upcoming middle-grade novel A World Worth Saving (Feb 4).  From the blurb: "A discovers that SOSAD doesn’t just feel soul-sucking . . . it’s run by an actual demon who feeds off the pain and misery of kids like him."  Which echoed Camp Damascus in a bunch of ways.
  
  It also reminded me of Andrew Joseph White's 2022 YA novel Hell Followed With Us ("Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population."), so I got that from the library.  Am I gonna read it in my busy February?  Who can say.
  
  
• [middle-grade] Paige Not Found by Jen Wilde (2024) -- autistic queer protagonist [which the Chuck Tingle book is as well]
  
  
• read Abby approx 6 picturebooks -- still making my way through Betsy Bird's 31 Days 31 Lists
  
  
• [Jan 29 DEI book club] The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Colombian descent) - memoir (2022).  I enjoyed this a lot.
  
  
• [Jan 31 work book club] Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)
  
  The blurb says, "Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with."
  
  It starts with the McConville case and then pulls back and introduces us to various other characters (Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, etc.).  This all becomes relevant later, but I definitely struggled at times with trying to keep track of the various characters and time/plotlines (especially since I had very little background knowledge to start with).

live music

• Catie Curtis with my mom+Abby and Bridget+Jo
  
  Bridget invited us, and my mom likes Catie Curtis, so I invited her as an early birthday gift.  There were only 2 seats in Bridget+Jo's preferred section, so they bought tickets without us, but we all got dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant beforehand.  Well, not my mom, because she was sick.  But I remembered about the livestream, so my mom watched that way.
  
  The first song Catie Curtis played was "Patience" -- which Abby knew from the "that place can be where you are" themed music mix I made her ~2 months into Not Dating, so that was nice.
  
  She played "Radical," which is arguably Catie Curtis in a nutshell -- "I'm a lesbian, but an assimilationist not a radical; love is love." (This is my summary, to be clear; not her actual words.)
  
  I had a big Catie Curtis phase in college -- thanks largely to my first-year roommate -- but I haven't kept up with her stuff much. But in addition to various songs I didn't recognize, she played a bunch of songs I knew (in addition to the 2 above): "Saint Lucy" (from Dreaming In Romance Languages, 2004), "Kiss That Counted" (from My Shirt Looks Good On You, 2001 -- as was "Patience"), "People Look Around" (from Long Night Moon, 2006),  "World Don't Owe Me" (from A Crash Course in Roses, 1999), "Troubled Mind" (from Truth from Lies, 1996 -- as was "Radical"), possibly others I'm forgetting.
  
  (I had us listen to "Elizabeth" -- also from My Shirt Looks Good On You -- on the drive home. Catie has since split from that partner, so I wasn't expecting her to play it, but I have a fondness for this love song directed at someone with my name, and I also think it's a genuinely well-crafted song.)
  
  She had Sam Robbins with her some.  (As well as Jamie Edwards -- keyboardist to Aimee Mann and other big deals; we quite liked him.)  White dude from New Hampshire, who lived in Nashville for 5 years.  He played a song "So Much I Still Don't See" (from his new album of the same name) -- which I liked more than Abby did, though I thought it would have been stronger with more specific stories.  Abby and I both thought of Crys Matthews, and indeed he knows her. He also played "What a Little Love Can Do" -- written after a shooting in Nashville -- which I was a little eyeroll about.

theatr

• [CST] S P A C E with Abby, Allie, Mark, Sarah V., and Bitsy+Matt

  The thing about space is, you have to contend with earth.
  

  At the dawn of two different Space Races, aviators traverse time, generations, Newtonian physics, governments, political bodies -- and human bodies -- to reach beyond our star system for a radical re-start.
  

  S P A C E intertwines imagined scenes with Congressional transcripts and feats of endurance with the historical record, to illuminate the story of the Mercury 13 female pilots and their ancestors - Bessie Coleman, Hazel Ying Lee - and descendants - Mae Jemison, Sally Ride – over the course of a national Civil Rights Space Race that has spanned our past century.
  

  S P A C E asks: How do you forge a future for everyone?

  I felt like the first half (the historical part) was stronger than the second half about an imagined future.  I also hadn't realized how much the first half was going to be just about the Women in Space program at the beginning of the Space Race -- given the inclusion of other people (shout-out to Bessie Coleman and Mae Jemison, who I know from picturebooks). There was also a bunch of cross-casting, which sometimes made it difficult to keep up with who was who (especially in the second half).

***

Currently Reading:

[bff book club] Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender by Joy Ladin (2024)

I really liked Ladin's 2018 book The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, but this book is intended for a cis audience in ways that make it not a great fit for us.

[Feb 23 feminist sff book club] The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty -- I'm enjoying this.  It's like 500 pages, but it reads quickly.  We thought it would be nice to have a more light/fun book for the December/January stretch, and that has felt accurate.

Reading Next:

Well, I have a bunch of upcoming book club books I'm probably not gonna read.

[Feb 12 climate change book club] Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler -- fucking everyone is reading this book these days (I got the email on Jan 22 and the listing in my library network for the hardcopy said "66 copies, 78 people are on the waitlist. 1 copy on order."), so I am unlikely to get a copy to read before book club.  I read it back in March of 2017, so I'm mostly just gonna coast on vibes.  I did get the graphic novel adaptation from the library to maybe refresh myself some.

After the facilitator was sick for a while, we have a slate of books for the next few months:

[fiction] February 12, 2025 - Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

[nonfiction] March 12, 2025 - The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2015) -- this is by an Inuk woman and is probably the one I'm most excited about

[fiction] April 9. 2025 - Hum by Helen Phillips (2024) -- sff

[nonfiction] May 14, 2025 - Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin Wallis (2023)

[Feb 13 MPL LGBTQ+ Book Group] Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst (2023)

The blurb says, "debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and pens a searing manifesto about racism in the industry."

It's gotten a lot of low reviews on GR, and I'm not feeling particularly enthused to read it -- but I also feel a sense of obligation since I'm 1 of only 2 regular attendees (plus the facilitator). [Ed. note: I ended up going to the book club meeting, not having read the book, which was fine -- and there was even a new attendee.]

[Feb 19 DEI book club] A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)

I read this in like 7th? 9th? grade and am not super-excited to revisit it.  But someone in book club said we should also watch the Sidney Poitier (1961) film, so maybe I'll just do that?  There are rumors of a watch party, but idk if planning for that will actually pan out (or will work with my schedule).

February is Black History Month, and idk if "history" made people think classics or what, but the books that got nommed were:

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
  
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
  
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
  
• All About Love: New Visions by bell books (1999)
  
• Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2019)

[Feb 28 work book club] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley -- This is a book we're considering for feminist sff book club, but there's also a big waitlist for it at the local library networks.

People at work book club wanted something lighter (as noted above, we had just read Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe), and I was like, "Is this light, though?"

Skimming the GR reviews wasn't super-helpful -- though I did note it's an agent of the British Empire from 1845 brought to the "present."

I only later thought to pull up the FSFBC ideas doc, where I had noted:

One review says, “it's a book by a British-Cambodian writer in which a British-Cambodian woman explores themes of colonialism/postcolonialism. [...] Time travel and government drama are the backdrop here to some truly marvellous characters. Imagine what you would get if you put a near-future British-Cambodian woman and a man who was raised at the height of empire together in a house. [...] It is primarily an introspective novel and slow-burn romance, at least until the last 25% or so, but the scenes are driven by dialogue so the pacing doesn't lag. Bradley explores themes of colonialism, slavery, language, being mixed-race, being white passing, exoticization of other cultures, and inherited trauma. The MC carries the inherited trauma of the Cambodian genocide with her and it sneaks into her everyday life and thoughts in unexpected ways.”

So, yeah, not necessarily light.

---

February, 2025

other

• JOHANNE SACREBLU "el musical" un homenaje a EMILIA PEREZ -- thanks to this skeet, and with English subtitles on this Tumblr post

live theatr

• [ASP] August Wilson's The Piano Lesson with Abby and Mark (Cate had covid risk, alas)

   Actors’ Shakespeare Project is thrilled to continue and deepen our dedication to August Wilson’s American Century Cycle with one of his most celebrated titles: The Piano Lesson. 

  Tensions are crackling under the floorboards of Doaker Charles’ household when his fast-talking nephew Boy Willie blows in from Mississippi with a scheme to set their descendants up for generations. The plan: sell the family’s ornate antique piano carved by an enslaved ancestor and use it to buy the land where his ancestors were enslaved. But half of the piano also belongs to Berniece, who refuses to let her brother pawn off the heirloom. As the siblings dig in their heels, they will search deeper into their lineage and uncover shocking revelations that will change them both forever. 

  Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a 1990 Tony Award Nominee for Best Play, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is an explosive and incisive inquiry into the struggle between what we owe to our past and how we build our future. 

  This one is set in the 1930s -- so earlier than the ones we'd seen at ASP so far (Seven Guitars and King Hedley II are set in the 1940s and 1980s, respectively).  It's very much reckoning with the aftermath of enslavement.

  There's more explicit supernatural elements than in those plays.  (Ghosts/hauntings and dreams are recurrent themes in the plays in the cycle.)

  ( vague-ish spoilers for the ending )

books

• [Feb 19 DEI book club] A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959) -- we didn't end up doing a film screening, but I did read the book (Modern Library edition, 1995). It was less depressing than I was expecting giving the emotional tinge of my memories of having read it in school.
  
  
• [Feb 23 feminist sff book club] The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (first in a series but totally stands alone -- also, it's the only one in the series yet published, 2023, ) -- I enjoyed this.  It's like 500 pages, but it reads quickly.  We thought it would be nice to have a more light/fun book for the December/January stretch, and that felt accurate. It's the first in a series (the only one published so far) and definitely sets up for continuing adventures but also really works as a stand-alone book.
  
  
• read Abby 1 picturebook
  
  
• [Feb 28 work book club] The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley -- this was lighter than I had expected (see commentary above) though the end is kinda rough (er, emotionally, I mean)

***

Currently Reading:

[bff book club] Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender by Joy Ladin (2024) -- which continues to not be for us.  But we have read+discussed 8 of the 11 essays, so we're almost through.

I did just last night start reading Kyle Lukoff's new MG novel A World Worth Saving -- 14yo Jewish trans boy during mid-covid times; it feels weird to say "supernatural" elements when it's literally stuff from Judaism, but, like, the book blurb references "demons."
I continue to really enjoy Lukoff's work.

Reading Next:

Once again, who knows how many book club books I'll read?

[March 12 climate change book club] I was excited for The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2015), but it turned out the library system didn't have enough copies (amateur mistake, not checking in advance; there are 5 copies in the system).  So instead we're doing All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson (2020).

[March 13 local library LGBTQ+ book club] The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara (2018) -- I've heard this is Paris Is Burning fanfic (1980s NYC, House of Xtravaganza), and I'm not super-interested. (One of the main characters is a trans woman but the author is a cis man -- who I assume is gay?)

[March work DEI book club] I think Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (2015) by Laura Jane Grace -- which was my top vote, though we haven't finalized anything, including a date (this is partly because the main organizer missed our February meeting and then was on vacation this week, and partly because I have a medical procedure around when we would normally meet -- colonoscopy, because my mom had polyps at her recent one).

March is Women's History Month, and one option we had previously floated was a memoir by an Indigenous woman (our book for Native American Heritage Month was a very dense, academic history), but then it was late January and we'd picked our February book so I was looking ahead to March, and trans people were very under attack, so I suggested we could do a book by a trans woman.  We ended up deciding to include both in the poll [as discussed here] -- except by February's meeting we had 5 trans woman books suggested [A.D. had suggested the additional trans women books] and I suggested that was enough to vote on (it's about how many books we usually have to vote on) and the (lol) 2 other people at the meeting agreed with me, so I put together a poll:

• She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2003) by Jennifer Finney Boylan
• Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Third Edition, 2024) by Julia Serano
• Detransition, Baby (2021) by Torrey Peters [fiction]
• Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality (2018) by Sarah McBride
• Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (2015) by Laura Jane Grace

[Mar 30 feminist sff book club] The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste (2018)
I have in my head that Abby's the one who suggested this, but she has no memory of this.

I said in my email to book club: "more horror/paranormal than much of our usual fare (but also very urban -- Cleveland, Ohio, in 1980; a steel-based economy area in economic collapse)."

***

Reminder that the #TransRightsReadathon is coming up Mar 21-31.

I made it through my month of So Much theatr & book club books & film festival.  Do I have the energy to talk about any of that stuff?  Lol. [Edit: To be clear, feel free to ask questions about anything you wanna hear more about, and I will attempt to oblige.]

theatr

• [Huntington] Sojourners w/ Abby & Fiona (first in the 9-play Ufot cycle)

  Rising star playwright Mfoniso Udofia launches her sweeping cycle with a family’s origin story. Marriage, migration, and the pursuit of education collide when a young and brilliant Nigerian couple arrives in Houston, looking to earn their degrees and bring insights back to their home country. But when Abasiama discovers that her husband has been seduced by Motown records and American culture, she has to choose between the Nigerian Dream and her obligations as a matriarch. Director Dawn M. Simmons helms the lively and funny Sojourners at the historic Huntington Theatre following her acclaimed production of K-I-S-S-I-N-G at the Calderwood Pavilion.

  
  
• [Central Square] Galileo's Daughter w/ Abby & Mark

  When a playwright's life is turned upside down, she travels to Florence to study the letters between Galileo and his daughter Marie Celeste, who is forced to join a convent after her father's earth-shattering controversies. Captured in the letters are her strength of will and own genius as she secretly assists her father in furthering his discoveries about the shape of the universe, inspiring a path forward for the Playwright. Alternating between Tuscany of present day and the 1600’s - and the liminal space between playwright and audience - Jessica Dickey has crafted a play examining faith, forgiveness, and the cost of speaking the truth.

  There was more of the Writer in this than I wanted -- in part because I didn't really care about her/like her.
  
  (Someone I know commented, "This conceit has become very popular of late: Modern woman goes in search of information about a historical woman. The play/novel then goes back and forth between portraying the two, and the narrative aims to show how the two stories dovetail and how they contrast. This trope can be quite interesting, but I'm wondering whether it's run its course.")
  
  The play did play up Maria Celeste's special nun friend Louise, so I got the Dava Sobel book (which the online program says inspired the play) from the library to see if that's forreal. (I did not find it via an initial skim and will maybe end up reading the whole book, since it seems like it would read quickly.)
  
  Apparently Maria Celeste's younger sister also went to the convent with her? I understand that including that would have lessened the "it's us alone together against the world" kind of feel of Maria Celeste and her father, but it does feel like a major dramatic license to take to elide her.
  
  
• I didn't watch much of the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: a New Play Festival, but I did watch one of the short films -- "Poly Pockets" by Morticia Antoinette Godiva (Partner: About Face Theatre, Chicago).
  
  I knew it was a virtual festival, but I had assumed it would be recordings of staged performances, but all the short films were done via Zoom (the full-length play, which was maybe also the feature of the festival?, Shape Shifter by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, Long Wharf Theatre, was a staged production, but I ended up not watching it that Friday night -- I definitely struggled with the short viewing windows: Access Window 1 | 7 Short Plays: Mon Nov 18 at 7:30pm - Wed Nov 20 at 11:59pm; Access Window 2 | Shape Shifter: Wed Nov 20 at 7:30pm - Fri Nov 22 at 11:59pm).  I will probably still try to hold time on my calendar for this festival next year, but I'm glad to have a better sense of what it entails. 
  
  
• [ASP] Emma w/ Abby and Cate

  Screwball antics and wedding fever have struck Highbury in this high-octane adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved romantic comedy!
  
  The precocious Emma Woodhouse has sworn never to wed – and instead is intent on staking her claim as a matchmaker with an incomparable track record. As her machinations upturn the lives of her friends and rivals alike, Emma will need to navigate a minefield of proposals, love triangles, and extravagant balls to play Cupid… and perhaps find that love has been under her nose all along.

  With humor, heart, and a whole lot of amorous hijinks, audiences of all ages will swipe right on this Regency comedy of errors.

  I read a bunch of Jane Austen in college (Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, etc.) but don't think I read Emma. Abby hadn't read it either, and messaged me a few weeks before the play:

  So, I have started the audiobook of Emma because I've never read it, and wow this book is super gay. I mean, at least the opening is.

  Yes, that felt true of the opening of the play, as well.
  
  Cate noted that this play broke the fourth wall more than the last Kate Hamill we saw, which feels true to me as well. I think it worked well, though. I definitely enjoyed this play a lot.
  
  I was really interested to rewatch Clueless after seeing this, to dig more into the similarities -- like Harriet felt so much like Tai, there's literally a character in Emma named Elton... I hadn't watched the movie in probably 20 years (I know I saw it around when it came out, when I was an adolescent, and I maybe rewatched it in college in the early 2000s), so I only remembered some parts of the movie and definitely spent a lot of the play like, "Okay, I can't remember how this part is done in Clueless."
  
  I hadn't realized the director was a Black woman until a promotional email on 11/8 (about a week before the show opened).  In an IG video, she says:

  This past week, I found myself reflecting on the first time I read this play. When I read Kate Hamill's adaptation of this amazing Jane Austen novel, I was struck by 3 things: the sharpness, humor, and wit of the language; its simultaneous fidelity to, and irreverence for, the source material; and the clarity with which I saw and heard Emma in my mind. Possessed of broad knowledge and deep potential, as much of both as she was possessed of charm, personality, and wit... the Emma I saw was a woman of color. And she wasn't infinitely strong, or patient, or full of unceasing wisdom. She was flawed and fallible. Soft and vulnerable. Beautiful and annoying. Kind and self-centered. She could have easily accepted the small nook society had relegated her to. But instead, she aspires to more. Her ambition is a testament to an awareness that she can have a role and purpose beyond society's expectations and limitations. Sure, she has to learn some lessons along the way, but don't we all?
  For me, Emma is a story of a woman who comes into her full, authentic, powerful, sovereign self through female friendship and engagement with her community. She learns to reconsider not just what she is entitled to as a full living person, but also to whom she is obligated, for whom she is responsible. This woman is the lead and a real, full human being. To me, that's the most radical portrayal of a woman of color there could ever be. As a Black woman, that idea excites and inspires me. As a Black artist, it empowers me. And so that's why this play now, and in this way: with a woman of color in the lead, centering the stories of women and their relationships to and with each other, creating a community that uplifts and supports each other, a community of joy and camaraderie. That's what we need now. It's what we need always.

  Except Emma was played by a white woman?  Jane Fairfax was played by a Black woman, but the cast was generally white (see).

other

• Gender Reveal live show w/ Abby

  The Gender Reveal podcast

  Three transsexual friends/morons present a night of comedy and games. Imagine if a variety show was actually good!

  For seven years, Tuck Woodstock has hosted the beloved trans podcast Gender Reveal. Now, we dare to ask the question: What if instead of “interviews” and “guests” and “thoughtful analysis,” Gender Reveal was a series of high-concept games and bits presented by Tuck and his two most available friends? Expect comics (both kinds), historical personal ads, lightly coerced transitioning, and something called “Jeremiah AFAB Sweatpants.”

  Tuck Woodstock is the host of the podcast Gender Reveal and the co-editor of 2 Trans 2 Furious. mattie lubchansky is a cartoonist and illustrator, and the author of Boys Weekend. Calvin Kasulke is the author of the novel Several People Are Typing.

  We were definitely skeptical about how much we would enjoy this, but we actually enjoyed it a lot.

books

• [Nov 13 climate change book club] This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein (2014) -- Okay, despite my statement last month, I ended up powering through reading this.
  
• [Nov 14 local library LGBTQ+ book club] You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (2020) -- novel about a queer Palestinian-American woman.  I wasn't super into this.  It's kind of litficcy, maybe?  idk. I was engaged reading the book -- but also the character doesn't grow or change much.
  
• read Abby approx 2-5 picturebooks
  
• [Dec 1 feminist sff bookclub] The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (2023)
  
• Lucy, Uncensored by Mel Hammond and Teghan Hammond -- YA, trans-fem (authors are sisters; Teghan is trans, she/they)

tv

• finished watching WandaVision (1.08-1.09)
  
• Abby and I started watching Agatha All Along (1.01-1.04)
  I gave her context from WandaVision a bunch during Episode 1, but I think you could come into the show cold and catch up as you go (though one of my coworkers said she tried to do that and then looked up lots of stuff on the Marvel Wiki because she was confused). If you do come to it from WandaVision, you will ALSO be confused -- though that confusion gets sorted by the end of the episode.
  
  Abby was not prepared for just how hot Aubrey Plaza was. The Internet had maybe oversold to me how much of the show Aubrey Plaza is in? Though at the time of this writing we have seen 6 episodes, so there's still more show left.

film

• [WQ: Docs] Short Film Program Queer In This Together: Stories of Communities and Iconoclasts

  Join us for five stories of how our community lifts itself up for survival, for success, and for our future. From preserving the political history of elder lesbians to learning how to know yourself and others through role play, these five stories from across the planet put a spotlight on those who bolster themselves up to thrive in this world.

  
  
  • Pup Perfect -- about puppy play; I learned a bunch but was also somewhat disappointed that it was only about gay men and didn't even really nod to the fact that the community/kink extends beyond that
    
  • The Kiki House of Vase -- about a ballroom house in Taipei
    
  • Trans Heaven Pennsylvania -- about New Hope, Pennsylvania; this was really interesting, and I was sad that the venue that had been at the heart of this got sold and the developer turned it into a parking lot :(
    
  • Old Lesbians -- about the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project; I cried a bunch; I also don't think I'd realized that Smith has the collection?
    
  • Alok -- I only knew of them prior to this and I have learned that they are not really for me.
    
    For reference, here are the full blurbs from the WQ:Docs website: ( Read more... )
  
  
  
• [WQ: Docs] Reas

  Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison.
  This film is presented in Spanish with English subtitles.

  I was pretty meh on this.
  
  
• [WQ: Docs] I streamed A House is Not A Disco

  A surprisingly intimate and humorous doc that peers with empathy and curiosity into one of the world's only "homo-normative" communities, the island "paradise" of Fire Island Pines. Told through home video, archival footage, and eccentric character portraits of the vibrant present, A HOUSE IS NOT A DISCO finds a Fire Island in transition; confronting diversity, inclusivity, gentrification and the frightening and growing peril of coastal communities worldwide...climate change and rising seas.

  The documentary does touch on all those things listed, but it felt to me largely like we were only sort of skimming the surface.
  
  I did appreciate that some trans women get featured. (Early on in the film, people were talking about how it's such a queer haven, but, like, it was basically all white cis gay men -- so I appreciated that the film dug into that some.)
  
  Watching it I kept thinking of Lesvia (Λεσβία) from Wicked Queer's spring festival -- about the evolution of the queer community in the birthplace of Sappho.
  
  
• I did not catch Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story during WQ: Docs, and it wasn't streaming during their virtual encore, but it was streaming through DOC NYC I saw on Bluesky, so I watched it that way.

  WQ: Docs:
  A lost R&B star who eclipsed Etta James and Little Richard, trans soul singer Jackie Shane blazed an extraordinary trail with an unbreakable commitment to her truth. Forty years after vanishing from public view, this 20th century icon finally gets her second act.
  
  DOC NYC:
  Groundbreaking trans soul singer Jackie Shane was on the cusp of stardom when she turned away from the music industry and the world. After her death, family members who never knew their pioneering aunt, piece together her remarkable life, uncovering her personal struggles, immense talent, and unmistakable voice. Through never before heard audio recordings and beautifully expressive animation, Jackie tells her own story, in her own words. – Brandon Harrison

  This was in so many ways such a well-constructed documentary.  (And it tied with Janis Ian: Breaking Silence for Runner Up for Audience Award Winner at Wicked Queer Docs -- I learned from an email today.)
  
  Elliot Page was one of the executive producers -- probably in part because it was a Canadian production (Jackie Shane was from Nashville, but found a home in Toronto).
  
  Among the various talking heads in this documentary, there were a couple Black women who I only partway through realized were also trans. The credits indicated that they were also the re-enactment actors: Sandra Caldwell & Makayla Walker. (The former was pretty easy to find online, but I struggled to find the latter until the Wiki for Jackie Shane informed me that she is also known as Makayla Couture.)
  
  Someone else in that bsky thread said, "This fall, Nashville installed a historical marker, memorializing Jackie Shane and her role in the city's queer history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgbOgQTyzik " so I watched that news clip.  It included a (very brief) clip of Crys Matthews covering "Any Other Way" (of course, because Nashville).
  
  
• Clueless with Abby -- after we saw Emma
  
  It has not held up as much as I would have liked, but I still enjoyed it (and I think Abby did, too?).
  
  I did appreciate seeing it so soon after seeing the Emma play. Not only did I get to match up things like Christian is Frank Churchill, but right out of the gate we have Cher trying to get her dad to drink orange juice, which is the reversal of Emma's father trying to get everyone to eat "gru-el."

***

Currently Reading:

Working my way through the second half of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (2023) for December DEI book club (I powered through Part 1 for November book club -- November is Native American Heritage Month, and we're taking 2 months for the book because it's so long).

I've been finding Part 2 easier than Part 1? Though I've also had so little reading capacity that I'm still stalled pretty early in Part 2.

Reading Next:

Not sure.  I haven't been wanting challenging reads (in part because I was so slammed in November and the Blackhawk book was really dense), so I have some lighter stuff out from the library/on its way to me via interlibrary loan.

I'm not actively participating in Bethany's December Trans Readathon, but I've definitely been upping the number of trans books on my TBR because of following her on Bluesky.  The struggle is often that I wanna read books with my partner, and she generally has less time/energy to read than I do (and tends to do audiobooks, to listen to while driving, and lots of stuff isn't available in audiobook, especially from the library).

Also, it's December, so that means Betsy Bird's 31 Days 31 Lists, so I (will) have many picturebooks coming to me via interlibrary loan.  (Which I will only subject my partner to some of.)

I got behind trying to write up some August stuff, so here, have 2 months' worth:

August, 2024

podcasts

• [The War on Cars] "vehicular cycling" Part 1 & Part 2 (episodes 131 and 132)
  
  I have now looked up what a "stroad" is (a term used a couple times in Part 1), though I can't say I actually "know" what it is now.
  
  
• and then 125. When Driving Is Not an Option with Anna Zivarts -- I streamed the second half of the Train Lovers for Harris Walz Zoom on YouTube, which included this author, and in Googling her (book), one of the first hits was this podcast episode, and I interspersed listening to it and was reading the book.

books

• How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church by Lamar Hardwick -- as I said while I was reading it: The author (Black, autistic, male, pastor) was a plenary speaker at the 2024 Institute on Theology and Disability, and I wanted this book to be better.
  
  
• read many books with/to the niblings (who are now ages 8 and 5, and the older one voraciously reads herself but also enjoys being read to)
  
  
• Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
  I had told Abby about it a while ago since it seemed like her jam -- queer Pakistani-American girl coming of age in 1980s NYC -- though the queerness takes a while (like 2/3) to be really evident. So when she started listening to it on audiobook, I got a hardcopy from the library. It was fine.
  
  
• [Aug 25 feminist sff book club] The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington -- Abby DNFed this one, which is very understandable. I was surprised that the rest of book club liked it so much.
  
  
• [July Indian Food, Indian Fiction Meetup -- which I didn't make it to, but which book I started reading on my flight home in August] A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao -- a historical (1914) fiction ~mystery
  
  
• skim-read a bunch of picturebooks and early reader chapter books for the niblings; ~read Abby 3 queer picturebooks & 1 other picturebook
  
  
• [Aug 27 DEI book club, topic: colorism] Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex by Marita Golden
  
  
• When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency by Anna Letitia Zivarts -- I streamed the second half of the Train Lovers for Harris Walz Zoom on YouTube. ("Hey, friends! This is tonight and it's not just for train lovers. If you care about safe streets, better buses, cycling, walkability, accessibility and all forms of sustainable transportation, please RSVP!" [said the skeet I heard about it from]) and the author (who was on the call) has a vision impairment, so I was hopeful that the book won't erase disabled people in the way that pro-cycling folks sometimes can (which was correct -- the book keeps disabled folks at the center, while also talking about racial disparities, children, etc.).

sporps

• I watched sporadic bits of the Perpendiculympics* while visiting family, and watched all of the Women's Breaking (aka, breakdancing) after some friends posted enthusiastically about it.
  
  I was bummed that Raygun (the Australian woman who got zero points) got all the Internet buzz. I wanted to talk about so many of the other competitors/matches -- like how Logistx was robbed in the round robin.
  
  * A friend was making daily posts for Disability Pride Month in July and one day posted:

  For today's Disability Pride Month, I'm going to start getting excited for the Paralympics, which begin three weeks after the end of the Perpendiculympics. (Most people just call them the Olympics, but it's not like they're the only game in town, y'all). It surprises me every time I have to explain this to people, but no, the Paralympics are not the Special Olympics, and the Para stands for "parallel" and not "paralyzed", just like with paratransit. The Paralympics are an elite sports competition using much of the equipment and facilities used by Olympians. They include many analogous sports to some of the Olympic events (wheelchair basketball, 14 classifications of swimmers participating in a huge variety of swimming events, sled(ge) hockey in the Winter Paralympics, etc.), and some unique to Paralympians (goalball, wheelchair rugby - aka murderball, which is not just rugby in chairs). Some sports are specific to particular disabilities; for example, Paralympic judo is an event for blind athletes only. These days, there's usually at least one graduate of my guide dog school competing in any Paralympic games; this year swimmer Anastasia Pagonis will return after winning gold last time. (I don't know if her dog Radar will be there, though). In 2028 the Paralympics will be in LA, and I have every intention of being there and screaming my lungs out at the murderball matches! The Paralympics are somewhat controversial, partly because the entire Olympic franchise tends to screw over poor people wherever it's being held, and partly because a lot of people believe that athletes with disabilities don't need to be segregated into their own games. I don't have a problem with either of those viewpoints. But since they're happening, I take them as a celebration of disability culture and athleticism rather than a model of segregation or advancing the expectation of supercripdom.

theatr

• [Queer Artists & Players] "The Rude Mechanicals Showcase: selected scenes from the bard made gayer"
  
  I had heard about their shows previous summers but hadn't been able to make it work in my schedule (or had only heard about it after the fact), so I very much wanted to make it this year and signed up for their mailing list to make sure. So I had the dates (Aug 24 & 25) on my calendar for a while, but as the dates approached was increasingly like, "So, what times?"
  
  I did not love that it took my partner on Tuesday (Aug 20) seeing a Share of a FB post of a photo of a physical flyer for me to find out the times of a show this weekend whose email list I literally signed up for. (Abby speculated that they'd lost access to their website/email. I did finally get an email from them on Friday. Apparently times went up on Instagram on July 27. I do not do well with IG as a platform, and it seems terribly ineffective for trying to actually be sure to reach people -- since it's so easy to miss posts or for them to get buried -- so I did not love this.)
  
  The production was fine? It was mostly just a bunch of famous scenes but mixing up the gender of the actors relative to the characters. Some of them read very queer and some of them I was kinda shrug about.
  
  Also, a bunch of it was very camp -- which is not a thing I often love a lot of.
  
  thedeadparrot said "extremely uneven" (how she described the show after she'd seen it) is about par for the company, so I had maybe had my expectations set too high.

video essays

My day recovering from getting triple vaxxed (covid, flu, TDAP), I watched I'm What the Culture Feeling (The full story of Kendrick Lamar Vs Drake) by F.D Signifier (and his 7 hot takes I had to leave out of my Drake video), which I had heard about from musesfool

I still did not care enough about Drake to have watched that much otherwise, but I did learn some interesting stuff.

***

Currently reading:

:shrug_emoji:

Reading next:

I think I only have one September book club book I'm gonna read?

September DEI book club book (for Hispanic Heritage Month) is: Revenge Body by Caleb Luna

The Latinx Affinity Group at work referred us to one of the Harvard librarians when we reached out for book suggestions -- which is valid.

The gay librarian gave us a nice set of books, including this one (which won the group vote), of which he said the author "self-describes as a light-skinned, superfat Latinx non-binary person"

---

September, 2024

books

• read Abby 9 picturebooks
  
  
• finally finished The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, which I had started back in February and then put down for a while and finally finished.
  
  The blurb says, "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," but it's much more fantasy//myth/folklore than science-fiction (and only 2 contributors are she/they -- everyone else is she/her).
  
  
• [Sept 23 DEI book club] Revenge Body by Caleb Luna (for Hispanic Heritage Month; poetry -- the Harvard librarian who recommended it for the book club said the author "self-describes as a light-skinned, superfat Latinx non-binary person")
  
  This book is so short! The poetry ends on page 58. (There's a Reading Guide afterward.) At least one of the blurbs said they read it all in one sitting, but I definitely read it in pieces intentionally. There's a lot of heavy content (er, no pun intended) and I often wanted to sit with stuff.

theatr

• [Central Square Theater] The Hound of the Baskervilles w/ Abby & Allie

  Master sleuth Sherlock Holmes and trusty Dr. Watson unlock the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles! Enter the world of deductive reasoning and elementary logic, absurd accents and ridiculous puns as the inclusive, gender bending cast of three actors inhabit more than a dozen roles in this Central Square Theater favorite. Helmed by Artistic Director Lee Mikeska Gardner, leave your cares at home and join us this fall for a laugh out loud farce!

  I somehow thought this was a Bedlam production? But I seem to have been making that up. It was a lot goofier than I had expected, and it was great.
  
  Three actors, all female (one East Asian).
  
  My dad read me lots of Sherlock Holmes stories as a kid, so I expect I had heard this story at some point, but I had no memory of it.
  
  Online program here.
  
  
• [White Snake Projects] Is This America? -- a fully staged 90-minute opera about Fannie Lou Hamer, with Abby's FB friend Shane (where she found out about it from) and Shane's partner Cam [online program here]
  
  I appreciate White Snake doing contemporary (they only do world premieres, apparently) activist opera, but I think the opera format is not particularly for me? Someone, I think during the talkback, talked about wanting to tell Hamer's story in the grandest of formats, and I guess there's an argument to be made for that, but personally the opera style doesn't inherently feel "the most grand" to me -- I feel like I have been more immersed/moved/impressed by other media I've experienced than this one. (Oh, it occurs to me that it's very me that I'm like, "You are repeating these lines and taking a lot of time to sing them; do you know how much more content you could include if you weren't doing this style?" Which is not a complaint I have when I'm enjoying a musical.)
  
  It's very much about her work on voting rights -- which is valid and important. I did wish the beginning of the opera had done more work to explain why voting rights were so important. Her non-consensual hysterectomy is named as one major motivating factor, but it's not like you can directly vote your way out of that. Like, I can figure it out, but it would have been nice if the opera had done some of that work -- especially since these days there's so much discourse about electoralism. (Speaking of that discourse, Abby and I cringed when, during the talkback, the librettist said if you don't vote you don't have a right to complain.)
  
  I had read the picturebook biography Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement back in (checks notes) 2016 and really liked it. I reread it to Abby that afternoon before we went to the opera. I didn't love it as much as I apparently did in 2016 when I gave it 5 stars.
  
  In the poem about the 1964 DNC, it says, "We had not come nine hundred miles for two seats. / I threatened to slit our chairman's throat / if he took the deal." (Which, btw, that goes hard for a children's book.) I was delighted that the opera retained that threat.
  
  It's only in the backmatter of the Voice of Freedom picturebook that we read, "Beyond the civil rights movement, Hamer helped start a Head Start preschool program and ran a farm project to reduce hunger in her community." But the 2023 picturebook The Light She Feels Inside focuses on that work. When our protagonist is connecting with her ancestors, "She plants carrots with Fannie Lou Hamer to feed a whole neighborhood." And the backmatter says:

  Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
  
  Fannie Lou Hamer carried her glow from the voting booths to the farms. She was a farmer, teacher, and community organizer who fought for the expansion of voting rights for Black people all over the South. In 1964, Hamer organized Freedom Summer, a project to register Black voters in Mississippi. Then in 1969, she raised enough money to buy forty acres of land and began the Freedom Farm Cooperative, so that Black people could grow food for themselves, have land, and start new businesses.

  The opera does retain the story from Hamer's childhood (also in the Voice of Freedom picturebook) of white people poisoning the animals her family bought (gotta keep those freed Black folks from getting ahead) when she was a child, so there would have been a way to segue into that, but I understand why the opera kept its focus where it did.
  
  The music director teaches at Mt. Holyoke, and a bunch of his students were in the audience the night we went, which was nice.

tv

A friend said the Agatha All Along trailer looked gay, which motivated me to get back to finishing WandaVision (because I'd like to finish it before watching Agatha All Along).
I have not quite finished it, but have watched WandaVision 1.03-107.

other

• [Smith College Poetry Center poetry reading] torrin a. greathouse, followed by conversation with Jina Kim
  
  Abby and I watched the livestream during a date night.

  torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet, essayist, and educator whose work blends myth and biography to uncover profound truths. Described by poet Danez Smith as a reluctant formalist, her collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), showcases her inventive use of language to explore trauma, memory, and selfhood. As a trans, disabled, neurodivergent woman and survivor, greathouse offers nuanced insights into the body, which she describes variously as kindling, an unfinished moth, and a repeatedly revised rough draft of a coast. Her work affirms the intrinsic value of every body, demonstrating that irregularity is a doorway, not a defect. In addition to her debut collection, greathouse is the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity.
  
  Co-sponsored by the Department of English Language & Literature, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and the Smith College Accessibility Resource Center.

• 26th annual Harvard Powwow

***

After having almost no September book club books, I have a lot of October book club books.

Currently reading:

[Oct 9 climate change book club] Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

The writing style on page 1 was A Lot, and I would have quit there if I wasn't reading it for book club.

The first while of the book has a lot of ~unlikable characters and stressful situations. Many of the characters reveal more complexity later on, but it was rough going for me for a while.

And it took until 10 or 20% of the way in for the narrative to really get going. (Which is a lot of pages, since the book is 436 pages long.)

[Oct 17 local library LGTBQ+ book club] Pageboy: a memoir by Elliot Page

Abby DNFed this, which is valid. There's a bunch of trauma in Elliot's life. And we agreed that it's a solid trans memoir, but (at least as far as we'd gotten so far) not a lot felt particularly new to us.

Reading next:

[Oct 20 feminist sff book club] The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (Maori trans woman author) -- book is very not copaganda despite the main character being a cop; my partner did not recall being warned and was not fully prepared for the queerphobia in this book.

[Oct 23 DEI book club] Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista -- October is Filipino American History Month

books

• read Abby 4 Palestine picturebooks, 2 Learning About Bodies picturebooks, 6 Muslim picturebooks, 1 Pride picturebook [and read 1 other picturebook myself, and skim-read some others]
  
  
• [feminist sff book club] The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei -- fast-paced, largely a locked-room mystery; I didn't think it got into Issues as much as I was expecting from some of the ways it was talked about
  
  
• [work book club] Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera -- a fast-paced mystery
  
  
• Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. (a pseudonym, and she/they pronouns) 
  This had been on my TBR for a while, and Abby started listening to it on audiobook (I didn't know the author had been on Gender Reveal)
  In one IG post, the author describes the book as, "a memoir in which I retell stories from the Quran as queer brown immigrant narratives alongside stories from my queer brown immigrant life." Unsurprisingly, I liked it a lot.

other

• Abby showed me "I'm You From the Future" on Nebula ["A dramatic scene we shot for an episode of Philosophy Tube, presented here in full without the video essay bits in between."]
  
  She had said: "It's beautiful; I laughed; I cried"
  I think it's fine?

theatr

• [CST/Front Porch] next to normal

  Dad’s an architect. Mom rushes to pack lunches and pour cereal. Their daughter and son are bright, wise-cracking teens. A typical American family. Except Mom’s been battling bipolar disorder for 16 years. With Front Porch Arts Collective (Ain’t Misbehavin), we bring you the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning, energetic pop-rock musical through the lens of a Black upper middle class family. Experience this emotional powerhouse at the intersection of mental health and race, gender and class.

  The original cast was white, and while this cast was Black (with the intentional exception of the health care professional), I don't think that added a racial element the way the dramaturg note asserted (especially since nothing about the musical was edited otherwise).
  
  Our friend Mark said, "It is one of my favorite musicals ever." (& "Trigger warning might be relevant. It is about bipolar, and I have known bipolar people who find it so intense that it was maybe a bad idea to watch it")  Though it turns out that's in part because of the times in his life he's seen it.

movies

• Nope & Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion -- a double-feature as part of the Brattle's series on Jordan Peele's influences
  
  Re: NGE, thedeadparrot was like, "Wasn't that a tv show?"  Well, the website said, "The incredible conclusion to this cult favorite series was remade as a theatrical feature"
  
  One of the other Nope companion films was Buck and the Preacher (a Black Western from 1972), which Abby ended up watching the previous weekend.  That wouldn't have worked with my schedule, but might have been a better choice.  I think NGE:TEoE would have made more sense if we'd seen the 24 episodes preceding it (Abby was not so sure), but the big influence on Nope isn't actually in the 2-episode movie we saw (I'm not sure if that's because the movie was a rewrite of the original final 2 episodes or not, but it feels like a poor choice on the Brattle curators regardless).
  
  Abby really loved Nope, though.  (Her first Jordan Peele film -- since she is even less of a scary movie person than I am.  I had previously seen Get Out and Us.)
  
  I shared a friend's Substack [which, Abby notes, "once the essay leaves direct discussion of the film, it doesn’t come back. This is a brief (but interesting) commentary on a film, followed by a long and rambling commentary on the nature of art criticism."].
  
  Abby commented:

  Unrelated to this substack (other than reminding me of the thought I had during the movie), I fucking loved the cinematography, and thought multiple times something along the lines of “this is how you film Black people.” Like, I could watch it again just to watch how they light (or don’t) the scenes in ways that would have very different results with a white cast.

  Speaking of lighting, our friend Hartley (who we saw Nope with) had mentioned during the film that the night scenes were shot during the day.  I later came across a Tumblr post about that.  (I would also recommend that poster's "nope movie" tag after you've seen the movie.  The lighting post isn't spoilery, but other posts in the tag are.)
  
  P.S. The Tumblr post doesn't cite its sources, but I Googled "nope night lighting" and immediately got hits from places like CineD and /Film interviewing cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema or the film's editor, Nicholas Monsour, so yes, it's legit.

live music

• Kinsey Scales (queer a cappella) Pride concert

***

Currently reading: 

Books I started reading in June:

A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice by Katie Tastrom -- while I was at the Institute for Theology and Disability

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson -- for July 17 climate change book club

Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics by Linn Marie Tonstad -- our Queer Pastoral Resident Michael suggested it when someone (Chelsea A.) posted to the private FB group, "If I wanted to learn more about Queer Theology, is Patrick Cheng's Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology still the recommended place to start? (Should I call out hermionesviolin by name?)" and I've owned a copy for some time but hadn't gotten around to reading it.
I'm only about one chapter in, but I'm really liking it.

A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson -- because my library hold came in.  This book I'm struggling much more to read.  It's a lot denser?

Reading next: 

I mean, I'm kind of busy, per above.

Though at some point the new DEI book club a coworker started will pick a book for July (Disability Pride Month), and so far I've liked most all the suggested options, so I'll probably actually read the book?  (As opposed to June, when I was not interested in the Pride Month book that won the popular vote -- Bath Haus by P. J. Vernon.)

I'm also maybe gonna read A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao for the July 13th meeting of the Indian Food, Indian Fiction Meetup group I never go to.

films

• As promised, lots of Wicked Queer -- 6 programs live and 11 streamed; 10 features and 7 shorts programs (2 only partial); 13 with Abby and 4 on my own -- most of which I haven't written up yet (so feel free to ask questions in comments, since who knows when I'll manage to finish writeups)

  seen live:

  • Reel Queer Stories: People Have the Power (documentary shorts program) Saturday, Apr 6 @ 12:00 pm [written up here]
  • The Queen of My Dreams | Saturday Apr 6 @ 6:30 pm -- "Pakistani Muslim Mariam and her Canadian-born daughter Azra come of age in two different eras against the backdrop of a shared obsession with Bollywood fantasy." [written up here]
  • I Will Be There Every Single Night (Toda Noite Estarei Lá) | Monday Apr 8 @ 6:30 pm -- documentary about a Brazilian trans Assemblies of God woman [written up here]
  • Peafowl | Saturday Apr 13 @ 7:30 pm -- South Korean trans woman [written up here] went to this one on my own
    
  • G.T.F.O. (shorts program, weird films) Sunday, Apr 14 @ 4:00 pm [written up here]
    
  • The Devil Queen (A Rainha Diaba) | Sunday Apr 14 @ 9:00 pm -- 1974 Brazilian film [written up here]
  
  streamed:
  
  
  • [feature] Fire (1997, 104min, India/Canada, English) [written up here]
    
  • [feature] Close to You (2023, 100min, Canada, English) -- the new Elliot Page film
    
  • [feature] Desire Lines (2023, 81min, UK, English) -- trans-masc archives documentary, mostly 1970s/80s-present
    
  • [feature] Throuple (2024, 90min, USA, English)
    
  • [feature] Tongues Untied (1989, 55min, USA, English) -- experimental documentary by Marlon Riggs about Black gay men -- I watched this on my own
    
  • [feature] Lesvia (Λεσβία) (2023, 77min, Greece, Greek) -- documentary about the contemporary influx of lesbians to the Greek village of Eresos, where Sappho was likely from on the Isle of Lesbos -- I watched this on my own
  • [short film program] Latinx 2024 - Forever Young (85 min) -- I watched this on my own
    
  • [short film program] (Trans)portation: Transgender Stories (92min)
    
  • [short film program] QBIPOCS: STILL. WE. RISE. (102min) -- we watched 2 of these
    
  • [short film program] Wicked Queer Selects -- "A showcase of all the shorts that were paired with features" -- we watched some of these
  • [short film program] Emergence: Queer Asian Stories (105min) 
    
  
  
  
• also, The People's Joker with Abby -- which weirdly, all the pre-movie trailers were for horror/thriller movies? except the first trailer, which was for the Beetlejuice sequel.  Though it showed at opening night of the Salem Horror Fest, so shrug emoji.  And one of the trailered films (I Saw the TV Glow) apparently has queer content -- it's one of the Wicked Queer co-sponsored films at the upcoming Independent Film Festival of Boston. [edit: And apparently it has trans themes. /edit]

  The Wiki was helpful for checking on all the characters (yay, hyperlinks), though I would recommend watching the film before you read the Wiki, since I think there are some nice surprises.

books

• read Abby ~6 picturebooks
  
• [local library queer book club] The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde [edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay]
  
• [climate change book club] How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue (fiction)
  

theatr

• the HBS show -- this year's theme was the Barbie movie (the show has lots of HBS-specific content -- my friend Jo [who's a theatre professional but not an HBS] who told me about it because she was hired to work on the show said didn't know it was funny until the show actually opened and an audience laughed -- but usually parodies a well-known media property), so I bought a ticket and generally enjoyed it.  It's kind of impressive how thoughtful they are about some things.

***

Currently reading: 

[for May 9th local library queer book club] The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo -- riff on The Great Gatsby with a queer Asian woman as the POV protagonist, plus fantasy elements

[for May 19th feminist sff book club] The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan -- I was reading this first, and have been generally enjoying it, but I then pivoted to The Chosen and the Beautiful since that book club meeting is sooner

Reading next:

[for May 22nd climate change book club] Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer -- though I'll actually miss the book club due to pre-existing concert plans.  This book is way longer/denser than I had expected, so who knows how much I'll get through it and when (especially given all the other demands on my reading time this month).

and maybe also [for May 16th work book club] She and Her Cat: Stories by Makoto Shinkai

books

• [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:

  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.)

  I liked the book less than Abby did, but I did like it.
  
  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.

(live) music

• 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.")
  
  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
  

  ["This song" = "Sundays" from their album Renovations.  I listened to that, and the next song -- "Let it Burn" -- and eventually the whole album.]

  ***

  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 is

  Yavuz, 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.

  
  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.

  So I also listened to "16 Carriages."

short stories

• [Clarkesworld] "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

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.

Because Carl was kind of assimilationist, it was kind of amusing that my next culture consumed, the next afternoon, was:

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?

  “la Santa Cecilia, la madre de todas las putas”

  An artist friend pointed to this IG post -- by Gabriel Garcia Román for his Queer Icons series

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)

books

adult


• the first 2 books in the Pies Before Guys mystery series by Misha Popp: Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies and A Good Day to Pie
  
  
• [December local library LGBTQ+ book club] Fine: A Comic About Gender by Rhea Ewing
  
  
• Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo -- the third novella in The Singing Hills Cycle -- after Abby read it [Abby: "I think it’s my favorite of the 3 I’ve read, which is saying something considering one story is about a sapphic tiger and her nerdy girlfriend."]
  
  
• [January work book club] Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (even though it is not How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler -- which I have not yet read, but which Abby is currently reading)
  
  

  easy reader

• skim-read the first 5 Colt Lane "Monster and Me" early readers -- I don't super love them.  ( largely because they're set on a ~mystical mountain in Nepal but written by a white dude )

  Per Mombian, we do meet a new friend in Book 4 (Too Cool for School) who's casually trans (she discloses on page 49) and returns in Book 5 (The Impossible Imp -- where she mentions her transness on page 57).  I appreciate that moment in the 5th book for the part where she discloses to someone and says, "[So-and-so] didn't say anything to you?" and the other person says, "I'm sure [they] thought it was your story to tell."
  
  

• I read the next 2 Jo Jo Makoons books (Fancy Pants and Snow Days) and still don't love them.  [Jo Jo is 7 years old, and Ojibwe, and somewhat Amelia Bedelia-ish.]
  
  
• skim-read the Yasmin books (written by Saadia Faruqi & illustrated by Hatem Aly), which I continue to generally enjoy (I'd read Yasmin the Fashionista back in July, checking out books to maybe get for 5yo ~nibling J) -- Yasmin is a second-grader; her family is Muslim, Pakistani-American, and speaks Urdu and English.
  
  
• the 3 Too Small Tola books (written by Atinuke & illustrated by Onyinye Iwu) -- young Tola lives in an apartment building in Lagos, Nigeria.

  picture books

• read ~8 picturebooks myself -- and skim-read ~17 more (shout-out to Betsy Bird's 31 Days, 31 Lists for populating the bulk of that -- here's the 31st list, which has links to all the preceding 30 lists at the bottom)
  and read Abby ~10 picturebooks (7 of which were ones I'd read myself previously)
  
  highlights:
  
  
  • Wombat by Philip Bunting -- which I was meh on just skim-reading, but then read to Abby (in advance of showing it to my mom, who has a fondness for wombats) and enjoyed it a lot more
    
    
  • Big Bad Wolf’s Yom Kippur by David Sherrin, ill. Martín Morón -- also has some nice Hebrew puns :)
    
    
  • Latke’s First Hanukkah by Alan Silberberg [board book] -- maybe more fun to read as an adult, tbh (we had a lot of fun deep-diving into the illustrations)
    
  
  

art

• [Peabody Essex Museum] As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic with Abby -- "On view June 17 through December 31, 2023" and we managed to get in the last weekend before her son's top surgery (at which point she'd be pretty housebound)
  & Bats! (On view September 9, 2023 to July 28, 2024, but I wanted to see it), which was more science/conservation education, but did also include some art

trailers

• Furiosa (the Fury Road prequel) with Abby

YouTube video essays

• Fri Dec 8th I finally watched the Dec 3rd (?) Plagiarism and You(Tube) by hbomberguy -- intending to just watch the first half about plagiarism generally, but ended up watching all of it (so including the James Somerton takedown)

  lol @ 39:21 "Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills *as* skills because eventually they feel like second nature. And they don't feel real and practical like building a house or domming."
  
  

• from the sidebar: A Man Plagiarised My Work: Women, Money, and the Nation by Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorn) -- which is much more about the development of society such that a man took credit for work that Abigail did rather than about plagiarism per se

  "What is a woman? A scam invented by the Chrysler company to get free labour!"

  
  "What is a woman? A scam invented by white people to get free labour! Or to put it in technical philosophy language, sex/gender can be understood as an economic and sociopolitical construct that determines people's access to resources. It intersects with race, which does the same thing."
  
  "What is the family? A scam invented by rich people to get free labour!"

  about 35min in is where it got really interesting to me, about the appeal of fascism to (white) British women in the mid-20th century

  I later saw this Tumblr post, which talked about conservatives thinking of the Other as truly Different -- which feels related.
  
  

• from H's recs in his video: TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis by Alexander Avila -- which is far-ranging and I should maybe watch again when I'm less tired?

  In addition to the expected stuff about how the DSM criteria for stuff like autism is really subjective, Avila talks about how (in the West) "madness" and "reason" being opposites developed in the 17th century (in earlier centuries, "madness" was considered a kind of esoteric, spiritual knowledge ... not necessarily desirable, but still a form of knowledge) -- and gets all the way into, "What even is the self?"  
  
  

• ToddInTheShadows' I Fact-Checked The Worst Video Essayist On YouTube (a fact-checking rebuttal of all of James Somerton's false claims)
  
  
• About a week later I learned that Somerton had done a video on the Barbie movie, so I tracked down the archive of his videos to hatewatch it (it's #74 there).  I messaged a little bit of live commentary to Abby while I watched and at one point:

  me:
  Why so many digressions, James?
  Plagiarize yourself an editor!
  Reference: Abigail Thorn, re: a different clip: "I realise this is besides the point but this clip is also so overwritten? He should try plagiarising an editor"

  Abby:
  I watched like 20 seconds of the clip she’s responding to and god, babe, why do you hate yourself?
  

• (I also watched JS' Dec 21 apology video.)
  

***

Currently reading: 

[feminist sff book club] The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia (shout-out to thedeadparrot for the recommendation) for this coming Sunday.

Also, GR claims I'm still Currently Reading: When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (because Abby) & Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni (sapphic Armenian-American romance), and I sort of am; they've just been kind of back-burner-ed.

Reading next: 

Local library now has a climate change book club, and the Jan 10 book is The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, so I will maybe read that.

Wow, this was a low-consumption month.

tv

• with Abby: Ahsoka 1.08 (season finale)

books

• Abby read me the picturebook I got her (various places bill it as having a queer woman protagonist, but nothing in the text makes that explicit -- or even, imo, particularly suggests it)
• ~read Abby 3 picturebooks with they/them protagonists & 1 other picturebook
• Dear Mothman by Robin Gow -- middle-grade trans

art

• We went to my best friend's wedding, and our last night in KC, Abby and I stayed at the 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City -- which has art on premises.  The lobby (and up to a second floor) has a big themed exhibit, and then there's also art by local artists on the guest floors.  (The local artist part is "Elevate" -- the website says, "Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding Kansas City. Elevate provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.")  One room of the lobby also has a local artist exhibition.

  There were also penguins -- which we were not entirely expecting.  “Any visitor to 21c Kansas City will encounter a member of the flock of Sky Blue Penguins, created exclusively for 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City by Cracking Art.”  (From the digital guide -- which says lots more words about the fact that they're sky blue, etc.  Apparently other 21c hotels have penguins in other colors -- Chicago and Bentonville [Arkansas] are green, Louisville and St. Louis are red, etc.)

  Huh:

  21c founders Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson purchased the sculptures after seeing them perched around the city at the 2005 Venice Biennale as part of a public art project.
  
  “The public really chose the penguins,” says Wilson. “They were part of our opening exhibition in Louisville and people couldn’t help but interact with them. They would move them around, take photos with them, take them to dinner and to their rooms. They have really become an icon, and emblematic of our mission to make thought-provoking contemporary art more accessible to the public.”
  
  -"The History of Our Penguins: How the Red Penguins started it all" (2019 article -- which lists the 8 hotels at the time and their penguin colors; but Oklahoma City and Nashville both stopped being 21cs this year [2023], and 21c opened hotels in Chicago [Feb 2020] and St. Louis [Aug 2023] since that 2019 article.)

  Oh, and that digital guide reminds me that Site-Specific Art at 21c Kansas City includes Ken + Julia Yonetani (Japanese, Australian), U.S.A.: Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, 2013-15 which I thought I maybe saw at a nuclear exhibit when I was in Toronto in (checks notes) 2015 (for my second ASA conference).
  
  The blurb says, in part: "This is the largest work in the artists’ series of chandelier sculptures, introduced at the 2013 Singapore Biennial. Entitled Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, the installation was comprised of 31 uranium glass chandeliers. Utilizing the rarely employed material of uranium glass, the size of the chandelier corresponds to the scale of each country’s nuclear power capacity."
  
  Which definitely sounded familiar.
  
  I Googled and yes, the Camera Atomica exhibit at AGO [Art Gallery of Ontario] -- where I saw the Canada chandelier (see, e.g., the last paragraph of this review).
  
  We also saw Brad Kahlhamer, Super Catcher, Vast Array, 2017 when we went to the bar for our complimentary Angel's Envy bourbon samples, and Luftwerk (German, American), Linear Sky, 2018 in the entryway.  I was a little side-eye that the Kahlhamer text says vague things about his complex identity or something (I apparently didn't photograph the sign, so I can't quote it exactly found it -- "His work often features motifs of Native American visual culture such as totem poles, teepees, and hawks, while weaving in elements of popular culture that interrogate his own, complex, multilayered identity.") but doesn't list any tribal affiliation for him (which I would expect for an actually Native person) -- especially since it explicitly says that dreamcatchers are "Associated with both Ojibwe and Lakota traditions" -- but then I Googled and apparently Kahlhamer was born to native parents but adopted by German American parents in a closed adoption, so he doesn't know specifics of his ancestry and isn't eligible to tribally enroll anywhere (see this Artsy article, cited on his Wikipedia).
  

  Anyway, over the course of 3 stages (there was so much art! I was not prepared!) we saw all the exhibits:

  • Elevate – Guest Floors: Lauren Phillips & Katrina Revenaugh (On display from July 2023 - December 2023)
    
    "Lauren Phillips is a queer, neurodivergent visual artist based in Kansas City." Her one piece (an LED "Touch Me / Don't Touch Me") was on our floor, near our room. Though I think she also had some pieces on the public part of the second floor (our floor). It was a little confusing because at first we thought the public part of the second floor was more of the local artists, but in retrospect some of it was definitely part of the themed exhibit (currently "Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art"). Though the hotel was also playing music in that second floor hallway (unrelated to the exhibits! even though at least one of them was a video you put on headphones to listen to and the outside noise bled in), which I found really annoying. (It did not help that I am not a background music person to begin with.)
    
    We walked upstairs to the remaining accessible guest floors (3-6) and each of them, near the elevator bank, had 3 pieces by Katrina Revenaugh ("Extracting color and imagery from her photographs she combines them with botanicals and insects she’s photographed into an alternative printmaking process where nature is imbued with the color from graffiti walls.").
    
    
  • Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art (On display from March 2023 - March 2024)
    
    There were lots of cool things here -- and a wide range of interpretations of the theme. I am not gonna attempt to write up any of it rn (though you can read about some of it at the exhibit link).
    
    
  • Elevate – The Savoy Lounge: Brittany Noriega (On display from July 2023 - December 2023)
    
    I had not realized initially that there was a room in the lobby of a local artist, and I think this was the last room we saw -- after finally getting through all the other art. I was expecting more art in the guest floors than there turned out to be, but also less art in the lobby than there turned out to be. At one point Abby said something about "2 more rooms," and I was like, "What?!"
    
    Anyway, I think this one was the last room we saw. The artist does graphite pencil on canvas, and the images look simple and low-key and then upon closer inspection are kind of unnerving -- like you'll realize a figure has vines growing into/out of it, body parts are severed, etc.

other

• SWANA Creative Non-fiction Panel at RAWIFest 2023

  A friend of mine had posted:

  Super excited about RAWIFest 2023! On Friday, October 27 at 3pm EDT, I’ll be part of a virtual panel about writing non-fiction, alongside Maha Ahmed, Barrak Alzaid, Sarah Aziza, and Abdelrahman ElGendy! If you want to hear me read a short essay about Halloween, SWANA monsters, and gender queerness, register now—the virtual conference is free! Link is in the comments. Hope to see you there!
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/miznarawifest-2023-tickets-671668016117

  So I registered to Zoom in for that panel. My friend was great, predictably. I also cried during the last two readings. The last of which was Sarah Aziza, reading excerpts from her recent Baffler piece, "Doomsday Diaries" (about being Palestinian in the USA, Oct 7-17, 2023).

theater

• [Front Porch Arts Collective/Huntington] Fat Ham w/ Abby

  A (brief! 90min) modern variation on Hamlet, with a queer Black man in the U.S. South as Hamlet.
  
  I was largely sold on this from Stevie Walker-Webb, director of this show, during a "Reimagining Shakespeare through the Black Lens" panel.
  He said it has a lot of joy.
  He praised how the women in the play get to write their own narratives. (Which I took to mean they get to be fully actualized characters with their own stories -- as opposed to just being undeveloped side characters.  Which is true, but watching the show, the actual thing he said is more true than I had expected.)
  Quote from him: "It's a coming out story for everyone except the gayest character. Everyone has to come out of something."
  
  There were definitely some lines I missed during the performance, but they were selling limited edition scripts for $20/each, so Abby and I each got one :)

***

Currently reading: The Witch King by H. E. Edgmon -- YA fantasy with a trans masc protagonist
Abby started reading it, so I started reading it. She finished yesterday and I'm almost done. We both enjoyed/are enjoying it.

Reading next: The Fae Keeper by H. E. Edgmon -- second in the duology

Next feminist sff bookclub is Nov 19, so I also need to read the book for that -- The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei (Translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich), originally published in 1995. Speculative sci-fi written by a queer Taiwanese author.

live theatre

• Shakespeare on the Common's Macbeth with Cate -- which was fine but not necessarily doing anything particularly interesting?
  
  The witches' potion-making scene is them making Molotov cocktails in an abandoned Jeep that has very Gulf War vibes, which is cool -- but the play doesn't really do anything with that sort of vague set dressing.
  
  The witches first appear, rising from the bodies of fallen soldiers -- which is an interesting bit of double-casting. Cate suggested (based on something she had heard/read) that the witches don't have the level of autonomy we tend to think of them as having -- that they have to do the things they do (compelled by some force).

sports

• watched the Saturday Aug 5 round (7pm Chicago time) of the 2023 U.S. [Women's Gymnastics] Classic on Peacock because FB had informed me Simone Biles was returning to competition -- watched her on all 4 events (I mean, I watched the whole thing ... but I was particularly glad to get to see her on all 4 events)
• Abby watched the Spain World Cup quarterfinal match (against Netherlands), and I watched a little. Got to witness Salma Celeste Paralluelo Ayingono (#18)'s excellent goal-scoring.

trailers

• the "Masters and Apprentices" Ahsoka trailer -- which I feel like almost doesn't count?

books

• read Abby ~8 picturebooks -- incl 2 mediocre trans fem books & 3 Flamingo Rampant books & 3 they/them picturebooks
  
• read M ~15 picturebooks (plus a whole bunch of 5-Minute Princess Stories) and read O 2 picturebooks
  Alas, we did not get to the drag queen books I'd brought, but when I was reading the Flamingo Rampant queer zoo tour book It's a Wild World and read the line "Remember the book And Tango Makes Three?" M was like, "We own that book!"  Indeed they do, because I bought it for O last Christmas.
  • Had a happy proud aunt moment the week after our visit when my SIL texted us the kiddos' first-day-of-school photos, and 7-year-old M said her favorite book was How The Sea Came to Be -- a library book I had brought with me on the trip and read to her ... interspersed with many questions from her, some of which led to looking things up on my phone.
    
• The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed (2020) -- YA about an upper-class Black girl who's a high school senior in L.A. during the 1992 riots; I thought this was quite good
  
• Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky (2023) -- queer non-binary horror graphic novel (it was fine?)
  
• It All Comes Down to This by Karen English (2017) -- middle grade about an almost-13-year-old upper-class Black girl in L.A. at the time of the 1965 Watts Riots (though most of the book takes place in the summer leading up to the riots).  It was interesting to me how many of the same beats as The Black Kids it hit -- upper-class protagonist with a nanny/housekeeper and an older sister and a white best friend(s), whose parents protect her somewhat from the realities of racism out of a desire for her to have a better life, swimming pools as sites of segregation...

tv

• Suits 2.13-14 while on vacation with the fam
  
  Given my Tumblr gifset fannish osmosis (probably from musesfool's Tumblr tag), I was thrown that the show wasn't just Jessica and Donna being awesome.
  
  Also, most everyone is kind of terrible? And when I Googled to figure out which episodes we had watched and what the context was, I learned that stuff just keeps getting worse as the seasons go on.
  
  A friend posted to FB around the same time:

  Suits is a show about really bad people who earnestly think they’re good people. As the show gets on they just get worse and worse.
  
  It’s a really good show about how professional ethics breaches are slippery slopes. But it never seems like it knows that’s what it is. It’s like Mad Men without the self-awareness of its moral ambiguity.

  In amusing news, during the opening credits of the first episode we watched, I was like, "Oh, I forgot Meghan Markle was in this show."
  
  Abby: 👀
  
  me: "Yeah, I assume we just watched her.  Do I look like I know what Meghan Markle looks like?"
  
  
• the first two episodes of Ahsoka with Abby

sketch comedy

• Abby and I watched the 2017 SNL "Fire Island" skit on the recommendation of a lesbian friend and wow, this was so not good.
  It contrasts Fire Island with lesbian ... moms? who are on vacation with their partners?  So, like, an entirely different set of participants (beyond just the gay men vs. lesbians difference).  The jokes aren't very good/funny (off-the-cuff after watching it, we listed off a bunch of jokes they could easily have made).  I felt like way more time was spent on the "Fire Island" bits than the "Cherry Grove" bits -- which was weird, since it had been recommended to us for the "Cherry Grove" thing (and the only actual jokes are in the Cherry Grove part -- the Fire Island bits are just there so that the Cherry Grove bits can contrast with them).
  
  
• Inside Amy Schumer - Last F**kable Day (ft. Tina Fey, Julia Lous-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette) after a friend linked it, because she'd posted something about "the height of my last fuckable years" and a whole bunch of us didn't realize it was a joke reference.
  It was ... fine?

***

Currently reading: I've been reading some YA/MG since that's about what I have the brain for, but I was reading Troublemaker by John Cho (2022) (about a 12-year-old Korean-American immigrant boy in L.A. during the 1992 riots) and I was interested to read a story about the 1992 L.A. riots with a Korean-American protagonist, but then the kid made a choice which I think means the entire rest of the book will stress me out, so I'm not sure I wanna keep reading it.

Reading next: Not sure.

I have stacks of picturebooks, per usual.

Next feminist sff book club is Oct 1, so I have the book for that out from the library (A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys).

Okay, I was out of town June 29-July 5, so this is delayed.

***

books

• [feminist sff book club] The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (and the sequel short story "If You Take My Meaning")
• read Abby ~11 picturebooks -- incl
  • Every Body: A First Conversation About Bodies written by Megan Madison and Jessica Ralli & illustrated by Tequitia Andrews -- explicitly fat-positive, anti-BMI, etc.! (which does still have a bunch of "every body can be healthy," which I don't love -- like, not all bodies are, or even can be, healthy; the book in other places is very intentionally trying to be disability-aware, but I think it doesn't realize it's being problematic in this way)
• [work book club] Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (which had been on my TBR list for years, but which I had no memory of being a short story collection)
  
• DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right by Lily Zheng
  
• quickly read the 4 "Little Senses" picturebooks

theatre

[ASP/TTO] a very queer As You Like It with Abby, Cate, and Allie

tv

• Ted Lasso 3.12 (the season+series finale)

short stories

• as mentioned above:
  • Charlie Jane Anders' "If You Take My Meaning" (which won't make much sense if you haven't read the novel The City in the Middle of the Night it's a sequel to)
  • Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
• the freely available Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalists (which is almost all of them -- thanks, yhlee)
  • "Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal" by Derrick Boden (in Apex Magazine, Sept. 2022) will fucking haunt me
  • "Toronto Isn't Real and Other Metropolitan Anomalies” by A.D. Sui (in Augur Magazine, Dec. 2022) it turns out only the first part of the story is available for free and then you have to buy the issue (Augur Magazine Issue 5.2); I was sufficiently hooked that I did (8 CAD -- which was $6.31 USD at the time I made my purchase), though ultimately I didn't love it as much as I had hoped to.

trailers

• Nimona -- coming June 30 on Netflix

music albums

• Janelle Monáe's The Age of Pleasure -- which I wasn't super into, but this NPR review is good. Also, lol. And Janelle's both non-binary and non-monogamous (the latter via this them piece my partner saw, which cites a British Vogue interview).
  
  Because my last Janelle Monáe was Dirty Computer, an emotion picture, it was weird to listen to this album without accompanying videos. Which also made it harder for me to pay attention/catch the words because of how I often struggle to focus on auditory input if I don't also have visuals/often struggle to make out lyrics.

movies

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse w/ Abby (whose daughter had warned us it ends with a big To Be Continued cliffhanger; this movie was initially gonna be "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One)," but since they changed the name I hadn't been able to find any info about whether it was still a two-parter, so I was glad for the heads up, and also feel like it's kind of cheating.  
  
  Vulture informed me that "The next movie, which will be titled Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, is slated to come out less than a year from now, on March 29, 2024"  Though the author of a later Vulture article said, "Across the Spider-Verse animators say Phil Lord drove them crazy with relentless revision, seeming unfamiliarity with 3D anim, 6 months of indecision and demands to redo finished work 5X. They say no way is Beyond the Spider-Verse coming out in 2024.")

***

Currently reading:

I recently started reading Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, after livestreaming the virtual book launch on Tuesday, June 27.

Reading next:

The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope for feminist sff book club (which is July 23, so I'll probably start that as soon as I get my library copy)