3x3ish: December 3, 2023
the category anarchy edition
Hello from my very cozy bed on a very gloomy day—with three weeks left until official winter, I have been intensely introspecting, which I guess is extrospecting now that I’m writing for you. It has been a slightly scattered month—lots of major pendulum swings between days of chaos and freneticism followed by absolute stillness for hours on end. This is my excuse for presenting a collection of recommendations that defies the established form—instead of old/new/offline this is albums/poetry (collections)/miscellaneous, which does not exactly roll off the tongue but which does capture the essential consumption of my November. These are basically all new to me, if not quite to the world. Many credits to my friends, as named below—love those guys! I would be squalid/immobile/unambiguously cloutless without them. Also they have really good taste.
ALBUMS
Stu, George, and I have a group chat where we send uncaptioned, unjustified individual songs every three days and manic, thousand-word exchanges of love every four months. Recently Stu sent “Swimmer” from Helena Deland’s Goodnight Summerland, and it was so lovely—like the leitmotif of a forest nymph—that I had to listen to the rest of the album. “Spring Bug,” a buoyant (I wanna say “springy” so bad but that feels so stupid) little ditty, will surely be my auditory SAD lamp through the next months.
Anna introduced me to Last Splash by the Breeders, which recently celebrated its 30th birthday. The band is a saucy, smirking Pixies spinoff; the album spans the dominant axis of human emotion: from unabashed sass (“Cannonball”) to gnawing vulnerability (“Do You Love Me Now?”). A warning to everyone else: From here on out, do not send me music unless it encompasses all of these things! I am done listening to music that does not encompass all of these things!
Justin sent me Horse Jumper of Love’s Horse Jumper of Love, a phrase that makes me realize the word “love” is in every paragraph of this newsletter so far, and three times in this sentence. More on love to come, including right now: A self-titled album rich with sludgy, nostalgic angst—simply put: what’s not to love? Especially enamored of “Bagel Breath” and “DIRT,” in case you’re looking for a starter pack.
POETRY
Nova recently introduced me to Elisa Gonzalez, whose debut collection Grand Tour came out this fall. Ever since reading it, I’ve had the last lines of “Epistemology of the Shower” playing on loop inside my head:
It feels stupid to say more about what these lines mean to me in the inelegant anti-economy of prose, but for better and/or for worse the ruling principle of my life has been restless interest in how else I can live—what other, as-yet-unnamed-or-explored values I might internalize as my own. It is both liberating and misery-making, inextricably so.
I have now read Couplets by Maggie Millner twice in two months. On the one hand it’s insufferably on brand to recommend this book, which centers the two themes I’ve agonized over the most in the last year (open relationships/moving to Brooklyn), but on the other hand, Catholicism bred me hard to crave singular relationships premised on unconditional love, and as a result, I am insatiably curious (see above) about the messy necessity of independence at the heart of earthly care and commitment—i.e., how true love might manifest beyond worship & devotion; how to coax a fearful or jealous heart toward love that is additive instead of competitive; how other human beings, not being God, must love you without knowledge of the inner sanctum of your mind, instead forced, gorgeously, to rely solely on trust. Whatever the social trappings of the scene, I cannot resist a book that takes seriously the question of how to be the most magnanimous version of yourself in intimacy with other people, how every act of care we perform is an inheritance from the thousands of people whose care has made, however indirectly, a potent and irrevocable impression on us.
If I had to live on one poem for the rest of my life, it would be “Re-entry” by Michael White.
& MANY MORE
George recommended Mike Birbiglia’s latest special, The Old Man and The Pool, which is a masterclass in comic setup and narrative composition. A delight to see Birbiglia, whose comedy I grew up on (I mean in high school, lol), so at ease in the leisurely grooves of his craft; a relief to be in such self-assured hands.
Sorry but The Dark Knight is still really fucking good and so is my 2021 pandemic PowerPoint about how much I love Heath Ledger:
I discovered Water/With/Water, an experimental publishing project, at the Printed Matter zine fair at the Brooklyn Museum, and have ever since been haunted by the absolute force of their design. Look at this photo from one of their (many, rightfully) sold-out zines, and then lose yourself in their website.
Nolan discovered the only thing Spotify Wrapped is good for: forcing people to sing their #1 song of the year at karaoke, then collecting their gripes about how “this is only my number one song because it’s on my sleep/running/working playlist,” and “I feel like I’ve barely even heard it before.” Luckily this was not a problem for me, because my #1 song of 2023 was “Chosen to Deserve” by Wednesday—which I have known would be the case ever since I played it 37 times on one day in April—and my innate/culturally ingrained (see below) skill at karaoke, combined with my scary, syllable-level knowledge of the song’s lyrics and vocal delivery, meant I was only too eager to sing all six minutes of it, even though nobody else knew or liked the song.
Cooking semi-chaotically—a vat of risotto, made early in the morning, as a gift for 9 people that none of them asked for—reminds me, so joyously, of the extravagant gifts of Camp, the community’s rallying generosity resurfacing in me.
Jewish Currents has been a reliably excellent source of reporting on the ongoing war on Gaza, especially their dispatches from Palestinian residents in Gaza and the West Bank, as told to journalists, and their context-rich archives.
Free Palestine; protect their children; end genocide—
Izzy