strawberry moon
a spring wrap-up of sorts
I have been feeling a little interior lately, and that extends to my writing. I am basically a burning reserve of heat trying to form a diamond, if you know what I mean. Consequently, I have been thinking more than I’ve been doing, even though I’ve been running around constantly, half-assing everything. I recently realized that I am just not a very disciplined person, at least not in ways that count, though I extol the virtues of discipline all the time. For example, I refuse to use Face ID or Apple Pay or generative AI or TikTok, but I am addicted to YouTube. Anyways it’s nearly summer, so I decided I should get this blog out before the 90 degree days stretch uninterrupted and I am too hot to even type. I’m also leaving for the Badlands in a week, and I plan to pretend my phone isn’t real for the majority of the trip; publishing this before my road trip-inspired Satori turns me into a luddite felt pertinent. Isn’t it funny how months ago I said I’m striving to use my newsletter as a more casual space for my writing, and then I published a fairly long essay about body image, a topic I swore I’d never speak of again? I’m a born liar, not by intention, but because what I mean always changes.
What I Watched:
1) The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) - Criterion BluRay
At heart, I am kind of a bro, in so much as I no longer resist my gut belief that Malick might be one of our most spiritual living directors. Obviously he is fucking crazy, but so was Simone Weil. I cried embarrassingly often at this film despite its ideological flaws. He unpacks the colonial impulse to mark and scar, and yet he can’t help but romanticize the ‘relationship’ between John Smith and Pocahontas — who was a kidnapped child. What makes the film so astounding in spite of the thorniness is Malick’s lingering camera. He is more interested in meditating on a field of grass than the human activity occurring just out of frame. This tendency led Christopher Plummer, who plays Captain Newport, to demand that the director “get himself a writer.” He’s probably right, but I still think the film is beautiful. The spiritual love story between the characters and the planet itself is made all the more tragic by their determination to destroy it. The New World made me think about the fact that I will probably never in my life see truly untouched land.
2) Revelations of Divine Love (Caroline Golum, 2025) - Anthology Film Archive
I’m not including this merely because of my Catholicism or for the fact that it’s my “Mr. Demille, I’m ready for my close up” moment — though yes, I do appear as a Weeping Penitent (with anachronistic winged eyeliner) in the crucifixion scene. Revelations’s protagonist is real-life medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English. I was floored by the miniatures and set design. You can tell that so much care went into all aspects of production. It is a true labor of love, and it serves as an antidote to the doomerism and secularism that plague our society.
3) The Black and the Green (St. Clair Bourne, 1983) - Maysles Documentary Center
The Black and the Green is a short but potent documentary about the Troubles in Ireland, and the Black American activists who travel to Belfast to learn from and assist the Catholics as they suffer under Protestant occupation. You all know how I feel about most Protestants — except for Episcopalians, or as my mom called them ‘Catholic Lite’. I was shocked by how measured and nuanced this film is despite its short runtime. It truly is an instructional documentary about solidarity and coalition-building, both of which seem to require the courage to admit one’s shortcomings. It’s moving but never maudlin.
4) Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005) - Philadelphia Film Center
I visited the great city of Philadelphia over Memorial Day weekend, and though it rained the whole time and I was still technically recovering from Adult Strep Throat, it was all worth it to see this beauty in a packed house. Linda Linda Linda is a cult classic Japanese film about a girl band preparing for a performance at their high school showcase. It’s hard to describe the film without making it sound extremely mundane, but it is mundane, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. It reminds me of the slice-of-life anime that was so popular when I was in middle school; they both have a potentially aspirational quality for lonely teenage viewers. There’s a dream sequence featuring The Ramones that made me laugh out loud.
5) Wildwood, NJ (Carol Weaks Cassidy and Ruth Leitman, 1994) - Low Cinema
I was pleasantly surprised by the lovely and vibe-less experience I had at Low Cinema. I don’t know what I was expecting. My boyfriend loves John Wilson and is a perfectly pleasant person. In fact, I met Wilson at a birthday party as a drunk and high 25-year-old, and he was also perfectly pleasant. But for some reason I bristle at anything new in film culture, because I have a suspicious constitution (Irish + Italian). Wildwood is more archival document than documentary. The filmmakers interview women and girls who spend their summers in Wildwood, New Jersey — down the shore, as locals would say. As someone who literally did fall in love at the Jersey Shore despite the instructions of Ronnie Ortiz–Magro, I have a fondness for the region. The film is very moving and funny, and there is one interviewee who looks and sounds like Lana del Rey to an uncanny degree.
What I Read:
1) Superstars - Ann Scott - The L train Brooklyn music scene truly is just a pale shadow of what was going down in Paris in the early 2000s. This lesbian novel, recently translated from French to English, was a recommendation from Alana Johnson, who writes one of my favorite newsletters that I click on embarrassingly fast each time. It’s narrated by a 30-something French techno DJ, who chronicles her messy gay friend group with tenderness and snark. She meets a much, much younger woman (it’s France, duh), and the rest is history. A very fun, seasonally appropriate read.
2) Lonely Crowds - Stephanie Wambugu - This book has been on basically every ‘best of’ list, and for good reason. It puts a lot of recent debut novels to shame. Wambugu chronicles an intense and romantic friendship between two young women over the course of a couple decades. The girls meet as two of the only students of color at a Catholic school in the Northeast, and they follow each other to New York City, where they both try to become working artists (with varying success). I loved how wordy this book was, which sounds dumb, but try picking up a novel published in the last few years and let me know what percentage of it is just dialogue, or worse, transcribed texts/social media posts. Lonely Crowds reminds me of Brideshead Revisited or A Separate Peace, a bildungsroman of a previous generation that unspools slowly and carefully rather than all at once.
3) A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Obligatory warm weather Hemingway pick-up. I’ve slowly been working my way through his entire oeuvre, and I’ll be quite sad when I finally have nothing new to read from him. Hemingway is a writer that I return to all the time, especially when I have read too many bad books and need to remind myself what a good book looks like. This might be my favorite so far (besides A Moveable Feast). I am such a sucker for the American ex-pat novel, though unlike the author-insert protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, the ambulance driver male lead of A Farewell to Arms seems to lead a legitimately stressful life. My favorite chapters are the ones where he’s on leave in the hospital and drinking smuggled liquor all day long with his beautiful nurse lover. There’s a passage in this book so gorgeous that I think about it every day:
4) The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner - Everybody knows that Rachel Kushner is my favorite author of this century, and I desperately try to emulate her. She is so good at writing about the past in a way that is sentimental but doesn’t lack feeling. After the first 50 pages of The Mars Room I thought it was good but not mind-blowing like The Flamethrowers, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. I was wrong. The Mars Room is so good that it helped break a month or so of writer’s block. Kushner details the lives of several incarcerated women, interweaving their narrative with that of a young male teacher who works in a prison and feels increasingly sympathetic toward the Unabomber. Kushner’s prose is truly perfect, but her engaging style doesn’t detract from the political nature of the novel. I do think a fence-sitter could read this and start to understand the argument for prison abolition. It is so well-researched and thorough.
And coming up… Joyce Carol Oates’ Fox, another Alanaland recommendation with a daunting page count and very disturbing subject matter that will hopefully last me through the majority of my trip out west.
What I Smelled Like:
I used to talk lots of shit about this brand because of its gimmicky (and kind of hideous) packaging, but Seahorse and Camel are both standouts. Seahorse is by no means adventurous, but it is beautifully blended and evocative. It smells like baby sunscreen and shower gel, with a gritty seaweed note that prevents it from falling all the way into body spray territory. I won’t say much more, as this review sums it up perfectly:
2) COME - Bogue
I bought this for the cheeky name, but it did not disappoint. When I first smelled it my boyfriend said he watched my eyes go through an entire scent memory journey. I still cannot place the scent association, but I’ll keep wearing it until I figure it out. As with many of my favorite perfumes, the recommendation came from audrey robinovitz. Upon first spray COME smells like the basement level of a Sears, where you would wait while your dad had his car serviced, trying to find something entertaining to do amongst the aisles of coolant and tire irons. Let it develop and it starts to smell like the leather couch you sat on with your friend at her drug dealer boyfriend’s house in high school, gun on the table, Inglorious Basterds on the TV. But all of these impressions dissolve into a sort of sweet and sticky bedsheet haze, just like… you know what…. never mind. It smells like errant father figures.
3) Thumbsucker - Stora Skuggan
Functionally and conceptually Thumbsucker is the polar opposite of the perfume I described above, even though it also has a honey note and a cheeky name. Inspired by the Hindu myth that purports to explain why children suck their thumbs, Thumbsucker is the only perfume I bought with me to Paris in 2024, and so I have a special fondness for it. The beeswax and almond base notes are exceptionally rendered, and the dry down is almost better than the initial application. This is a scent that manages to be both inoffensive and unique, appropriate for the office or for springtime revelry. It smells like what eight-year-old you thought being 28 would be like.
Digital Odds and Ends:
Tumblr - I’ve officially had my blog for half of my life, which means if I continue to use Tumblr I will have spent more time with it than without it. It has gone through many iterations and periods of dormancy, but I am really enjoying it again as a sort of moldboard for my writing, or just a place to catalog beautiful images. It’s nice to use a social media app that is not directly linked to my identity, though I am happy to share my blog URL with trusted confidantes and fellow Tumblrina lifers.
“A Brief History of Nightcore” by Randy Moon - I learned a lot from this video by Canadian YouTuber Randy Moon. I believe we are exactly the same age and spent time on similar corners of the internet during our youth, so I enjoy many of their videos. The one linked above was particularly informative. I love Grimes (sorry) and thus listened to a lot of nightcore remixes on YouTube when I was in high school. This video in particular introduced me to many new artists, and maybe one day I will decide I am cool enough to listen to Jane Remover.
nightcore ❤️❤️❤️ wasn’t expecting that shoutout at the end lol
Aw thank you, and so glad you enjoyed Superstars! Can't wait to hear what you think of Fox