Here’s what we took in during the last month!

Taylor

Read: Dave Egger’s What is the What and White Girls by Hilton Als

Listened 2: Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Team Dresch, Gap Dream, and a podcast called Expanding Mind on different states of dreaming

Tried to watch Black Fish but internet connection was too poor, still recommend everyone check out.

Hayley

listened: Brains by Lower Dens, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) by Talking Heads (live from Stop Making Sense – David Byrne dances with a lamp. What more could you possibly want?), and Dead Fox by Courtney Barnett.

read: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. I’d been meaning to read it for a year now and I’m so glad I finally did. It’s thrilling and haunting and beautiful. McBride is ferocious and passionate in her debut novel, with the brutal prose reading like a slap in the face. Written in a broken down stream of consciousness, the words wreak havoc on the page. And this lovely/horrific mayhem left me utterly wrecked. GO READ IT.

watched: Iris, a documentary just as charming as its subject: the iconic Iris Apfel. Also season finales of Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, and Orphan Black…Don’t worry, I’m only suffering minor withdrawals.

Elly

I just finished Carsick, John Waters’s book about hitchhiking across the country. The first two parts of the book are the trips he fantasized about before setting out: the best and worst possible scenarios. They’re basically like being inside one of his movies and an issue of Weekly World News, respectively. So good. His actual trip comes at the end, almost as an afterthought, and while it pales in comparison to his imagined journeys he does the nearly-impossible and makes a freeways-and-onramps travelogue entertaining and picturesque. 

Before that I read Haruki Murakami’s new doorstop, 1Q84. The more editing work I do, the easier it is to figure out from reading a book what the writing and editorial process was like (ok, I should rephrase that to say—the harder it is to think about anything else). In this case, I can see all of the effort and care that went into building up this amazing, complex world of books within books and stories within stories and little people within big people…but then maybe he got tired or the manuscript deadline started looming and there was not an equally amazing plan for how to tie it all together in the final third. It says a lot for Murakami’s skill that he wrapped the story up in a pretty satisfying way anyway. But still.

Joe

Manson: I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I’m reading this book. It feels like my Gen X diagnosis is correct after all. The mall-core t-shirts celebrating Manson always annoyed me and felt as inappropriate as the people who wore them. But I did stumble upon David Duchovny’s Aquarius, which was so well done that when I stumbled upon this book for half price at Powell’s with a cover quote from my friends’ grandmother, I had to bite. Spoiler alert: The book is even better than the TV show. Jeff Guinn is very thorough. While there are entire chapters framing a time and a place that is already familiar to me but necessary for the reader to understand its role in the story, he still strikes gold by revealing new aspects, like how the SF Diggers had a sexist division of labor or exactly how the Black Panthers felt like a threat to Charlie or what it was like to live in Appalacha 100 years ago. The most powerful aspects of the story cut into the bone of how Manson attempts to tell his own story. As with anyone who has worry that their concerns will not be taken seriously, Manson has a tendency to exaggerate. At other times his lies are more bald-faced. Guinn chases down so many original sources that you do feel like you receive the balance and nuance of every aspect of the story. While Guinn is clearly skeptical of the countercultural movements that he is depicting throughout the book that frame the Manson story, it’s done with class and fairness. I mean sure, the hippies were bullshit and I was never a fan of The Beatles but it’s nice to see where the myth holds up or not. It’s a powerful story framed like a novel with some of the best writing I’ve ever read. I find myself googling aspects of the story that aren’t central to the theme for more information. Even when I question Guinn’s style or approach, it becomes a fascinating exercise to examine the elements of story and narrative that makes me want to write.

Positive Force: Ten years ago I received an email from Mark Andersen, co-founder of Positive Force. The reason for him to get in touch was because I had written about Positive Force DC in the past tense and he wanted to point out they were still active, more than twenty years later. Next thing I know he’s wearing a Microcosm sweatshirt when he’s interviewed on CNN. Of course his work along with dozens of other stalwart activists was certainly one of my inspirations from a young age and hearing about what they were doing when I was just a teenager was powerful to understand how political will is managed. But until I watched this film I didn’t have a clear understanding of just how impacting and deep their work is. For example, I knew that Bikini Kill lived in DC for part of their tenure and I knew that Riot Grrrl was founded there, rather than in Olympia but the fact that it was done in the meeting room of the Positive Force house under the guiding umbrella of what was going on in that city at that time, largely under the direction of things like Positive Force helped me to better understand the inspiration, place, and moment. While my interest in DC bands is about 50/50%, I’m at a point in my life where I am more interested in reading about the cultural relationships of punk than I am in listening to the music. Granted, the former tends to beget the latter while I’m doing something in the kitchen or trying to remember how it feels to span across a band’s catalog or to experience the liner notes with their proper soundtrack. While this film was very short on criticism for Positive Force, it explains it in the narrative: It’s better to go out and create the movement that you want to see and support those whom you feel deserve it than to tear down and split hairs with the trivial aspects of the scene. Instead, let’s attack some real power structures! 

Red Shirts: While I caught some episodes and movies from time to time, I was never a Star Trek fan, but I know the basic premises of the show and its various eras without holding onto any strong opinions about it. So it was with some curiosity and zeal that I checked out this piece of peculiar fan fiction. This book, telling the story of the world of Star Trek from the perspective of the Red Shirts strikes upon a stupendous concept but the book’s class analysis falls flat. I mean, the characters talk like they are nerdy fraternity boys studying the intellectual aspects of philosophy that make up the audience for the book when the red shirts are essentially soldiers raised as fodder. If it’s not worth the officers’ time to property train the red shirts about how to fight a certain kind of menace, why would the society prioritize educating these soldiers on evaluating the purpose of their existence? While they are comedically getting into trouble at times, it seems like their dialog should have more resemblance to steel mill workers at the bar after work than to dissecting purpose and whether or not their lives are an elaborate movie. While the first two thirds of the story contain many entertaining parts that are great for laughing out loud, the whole thing takes a nosedive as the predictable plot collapses on itself.

Cyn

My sister moved in with me this month, and she’s very much the image of a (neo)millennial, so we’ve been watching a lot of YouTube in my home. She loves Good Mythical Morning, and I’m kind of addicted to Buzzfeed‘s wide variety of videos. Hopefully this trend won’t last too long, though.

We’ve also been re-watching all of Adventure Time and Bravest Warriors—because we can, of course.

For music, I’ve gone back to my list of put-on-repeat songs from last year; Lana del Rey, Babel, and—mostly—Hozier, because “Work Song” pulls at my soul every single time.

I finally finished the audio book of Joe Hill’s N0S4A2. It was fantastic and fun and so well done, but now that I’ve devoured all of Hill’s books, I don’t know what to do with my life!!