october media

[latespring]

Happy month of Halloween! This month really felt like fall to me finally. I started wearing sweaters around the house, it's pretty good. Also felt pretty satisfied by the books I read!

Movies

Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and 3
The continuation of "pirates fall"! I hadn't seen these before and it felt like a cultural touchstone I was missing, so I sat down to do that with a friend this year. I really loved the third movie the most out of these so far. Also Jack/Elizabeth/Will is so compelling as a trio.

Orlando Bloom looks so weird not wearing a Lotr wig, I will just say. (Has anyone ever pitched "Pirates of the Caribbean except Legolas is there" I would like to see it.)

Books

A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

• why I read it: Traded recs with a friend, and read this as the one they recced!


• thoughts: This is especially fun from an urban magic perspective! I think this is one of the most unique takes on magic I've read in a while, and I really enjoyed how Griffin writes about London! Matthew Swift is really soooooo wet cat of a man having the worst day of his life for 400 pages.
  
  This is also a reverse murder mystery, which is fun! (Character comes back from the dead and has to figure out who murdered them.)
  
  (Cw for some fatphobia throughout.)

Tranny by Laura Jane Grace and Dan Ozzi

• why I read it: I saw this when I was going through a bookstore, and Courtenay recced it! I was semi familiar with Ozzi's writing and Grace's music already so I was interested in reading!


• thoughts: I really liked this one. I think it's compellingly written (though I wasn't surprised, given that Ozzi was cowriting). Grace opens herself up in ways that are uncomfortable to read at times in her vulnerability, but also remind you that it Does Get Better.
  
  Read if you've listened to Against Me! or want some more insight into the music scene at the time the book covers, or are interested in a trans memoir.
  
  Heavy content warning for drugs/ alcohol/ etc.

Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

• why I read it: I checked this out because it had a trans main character and I want to read more things I can see myself in. Ended up reading it all in one sitting in the library parking lot because it was due that day haha.


• thoughts: This is the first book I've binged all at once like that in a while. White's writing is really compelling in that way! The theme of religion/ monstrosity/ self and other was sooo good, wow. There's some places where the metaphor/prose gets away from him a little but overall I thought it was a really compelling read if you like trans characters, YA post-apocalyptic stuff, horror, or cults.

TV

Nirvana in Fire and Nirvana in Fire 2
I think I forgot to mention in my last month's round up, but I finished my yearly rewatch of Nirvana in Fire! It's such a solid show imo, and the ending always makes me cry. Started NiF2 with my same group of friends, they have no idea what's coming and I'm so excited to cry again!!!

I think the problem people have with NiF2 is that they come into it expecting the same kind of drama that NiF1 is, which it isn't. I think NiF1 is more of a political thriller with a side of mystery and romance, and NiF2 is more of a personal drama with a side of politics and romance. The difference is in the plot and character beats--if you're not in it for the tense interpersonal politics and character growth, NiF2 doesn't hit as hard. Like, yeah, there's a mystery in it, but not the same way NiF1 had a mystery.

Especially too, I think the difference in main characters is apparent between the two seasons. Mei Changsu doesn't do much development throughout the season in his personal character, a lot of the drama in the season comes from learning about history and the tension of the external plot. In comparison, Xiao Pingjing's whole thing is a big character arc. In my opinion I think this gives you an incredible build up in the last half of the season, but it also means that the first half kind of feels like set up in some ways if you're not entertained by the political bits and other drama going on.

I like each for similar reasons, but I think there's a reason why people who loved season 1 bounced off of season 2.

MISC

The Long Read: Ray Toro on My Chemical Romance, his solo debut and the future by Tom Bryant
This was really fun!!! I kind of expected its tone, given that it's Bryant doing the interview (he was the one who wrote the MCR retrospective book in 2013, this interview was published in 2016).

Love reading anything that talks about Ray's musicality though, so this was a delight.


Normal Gossip (podcast)
A podcast about gossip! I think its introduction episode talking about basically "why gossip" is really compelling, and I enjoyed embroidering to a few eps of it. Sam Sanders (of NPR fame) is on as a guest in one of the episodes??


Malevolent (podcast)
Another spooky horror podcast! This one has spooky (forced) bodysharing, which means I was very excited to listen. I had to listen in small doses because the bodysharing element does veer into dialogue that reminds me of an abusive relationship sometimes (yelling and "do this thing that makes you uncomfortable because I said so"), and that's a lot to listen to. Standard horror cws apply as well.

My friend recommended this to me, so I think I'll try and finish it but it's slow going.


"Why Chiso Kimonos Are So Expensive" So Expensive | Business Insider
I love this series, and particularly this episode was interesting to me.

This whole series really emphasizes how close we are to losing so many types of art, and it makes me wonder! Because I think a lot of people would be interested in preserving this kind of art, but don't have the connections/ chances to do so? And I don't know how to get there.


Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers
This is an actual play D&D show (kind of podcast if you just listen to the audio, but they do have a video component and some visual jokes throughout the season) that's based on the concept of "what if arch fae were in a regency style drama."

I enjoy the regency era tropes a lot so this was SO much fun (the sort of rumor management/ significant hand holding/ duty vs. honor conflicts/ pining things). I was kicking my feet over some of the moments between the players! Aabria is a brilliant DM, and guides the table super well.

In addition to Aabria Iyengar as DM, there's Omar Najam as Prince Andhera, Emily Axford as Lady Chirp Featherfowl, Lou Wilson as Lord Squak Airavis, Oscar Montoya as Delloso de la Rue (<3), Surena Marie as Gwyndolin Thistle-hop, and Brennan Lee Mulligan as Major K. P. Hob.

It's just a ton of fun! I watched all of this (+the after game chats) in a handful of days, which is a lot considering there are 10 episodes at 1.5-2 hours each, with the discussion chats around 20-30 minutes.

It's great background material for doing work and there's a moment with Surena's character near the end that made me actually tear up.

The table has really good chemistry and it's a lot of fun to listen to! A little on the looser side of D&D mechanics, but I've always kind of hated when rules stand in the way of a good story, so I appreciated when Aabria bent the rules for the players. At its heart, I always think of D&D as a lovely style of communal storytelling, and this delivers in the best way.


The Mixed Metaphor: Why does the half-Asian, half-white protagonist make us so anxious? by Andrea Long Chu
Back here with a little self reflection. Reading this article was like a fish hook through my gut. God. I think the author puts it all so much more succinctly than I could.

How is it that the mixed Asian child can seem quintessentially Asian American — as Asian American as apple pie, as it were — while serving as living proof that Asian America does not exist?

…

Asian America is not an idea for [mixed white-asian] authors but a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness; indeed, to read the mixed Asian novel will be to ask ourselves if Asian America can be anything but a kind of heartache.

I try to limit the amount of posting about being mixed I do to this account (which is its own semi-harrowing thought: worrying I'll appear too concerned with my own racial identity, like, how silly. of course it's something I think about. of course I don't have answers.) but I was struck by this article and wanted to note down my thoughts.

Especially I wanted to note down the analysis the author is making:

But what these novels also force us to admit is that there is no racial belonging without the desire to belong, that the desire to reach, not without risk, across differences of physical appearance, personal history, and material circumstance is a necessary, even critical, component of race — not just for mixed-race people but perhaps for everyone.

…

The question is not why a mixed-race person should “get” to qualify as Asian despite, for instance, never having been bullied at school or attacked by a stranger; the question is why we cannot imagine any other way to be Asian. And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be. I do not mean that Asian America will suddenly appear on the horizon tomorrow if enough of us choose it tonight. What I mean is that many people across the country, including many of us who are mixed, are already choosing it, and it is enough for now to ask why.

Lydia [a mixed asian-white vampire] is also of European stock, after all, and it can be difficult to parse the reclamation of heritage from the crime of cultural theft…

These types of anxieties aren't unique to the mixed experience, but I do think being mixed gives you insight into the ways people try and project their own worries onto what you could represent. Which was part of the point of this article! And I recognized what the author was saying—so I wanted to link this.

I don't think mixed asian/white characters are as big of an anxiety as she's making it out to be (at least I haven't seen it that way as one myself and talking to other mixed people) (like, the literary canon has a lot of anxieties) but I also think it's an interesting frame to start a conversation.

Anyway. Hopefully it'll be another year before I post about this sort of again.


An Interview with Andrew Garfield by Esmé Weijun Wang
Have I ever linked this? It's an interview with Andrew Garfield, and I think about the bit about the ocean a lot.

In Progress

This month was good for reading books but also I have so many things in progress. Particularly interested in finishing these:

• Because, Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
• Babel by R. F. Kuang (started this for a book club and I'm pretty close to being done but I keep putting off finishing it until right before we meet… TT)
• Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall (a rec from Courtenay that I had to return to the library before finishing!)
• The Vela by S.L. Huang, Rivers Solomon, Yoon Ha Lee, and Becky Chambers (I'll be honest this one barely makes the list, the opening is not grabbing me.)
• Sellout by Dan Ozzi
• A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

Poetry

I was really surprised, I ended up liking a large majority of the poems from poem a day this month. Usually I'll bounce off about half of them, but this month I liked all but a handful.

Since poem a day is curated by a different person each month, I wanted to look into who had done this month's curation! Turns out it's Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, who teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and Ashland University. I've linked his poetry in past round ups actually, and didn't even know it! (See: Essay on Synonyms for Tender and a Confession.)

Castillo did an interview with poem a day about his curation! This section I found interesting:

Poets.org: I want to talk a little bit more about that theme. How much has that theme of visibility versus hyper-visibility influenced this curation and how much does it influence your work going forward?

Castillo: I think that, personally for me, that has changed a lot. And I think, particularly since the 2016 election, because after that election, I felt like I didn’t have the luxury to be misunderstood. I didn’t have the luxury to be misread or a lot of things that I took for granted. You had offices like the Office of Denaturalization [the Department of Justice’s Denaturalization Section] that were mining for possible mistakes that were done twenty, thirty years ago with people being stripped of their naturalization.

And I guess my personal reaction to just this very particular kind of violence that was done to immigrant communities was [in] being more plainspoken, being more direct and equating, decreasing the distance of the metaphor between A and B. That A could no longer resemble approximate B, but that A had to be B. And with my memoir, I couldn’t, I guess, hide behind metaphor in a way that I did in my first book of poems, of abstractions or lyrical language.

Being nonfiction, I had to write plainly, I had to write directly. And it was very difficult, a new mode that I had never really written in. And I wrote the memoir because there were things that I just needed to say, but I couldn’t say in poems, still. So, I knew that I needed to say the things that I needed to say and talk about my life in a way that I have never done before, both in conversation or in my writing.

So I had to turn to a memoir, I had to turn to an essay, and let the memoir form dictate how I wrote. And I guess that leap has now led me to putting myself on the page, my body and the people around me. So it’s been a journey in learning how to talk about myself. And I learned from poets like Daniel Borzutzky. And that doesn’t mean that my poems didn’t talk about borders or immigration; it’s just that I had my own way of talking about them.

And it’s not a better way. There isn’t a better way, it‘s that I was able to talk about what I needed to talk about at that time. And that’s kind of my curation, is that there isn’t one way to talk about immigration; there isn’t one way to talk about borders, and to showcase so many different approaches to these ideas. Really, I wanted to challenge people’s assumptions of, what are the ways in which we talk about borders? Yeah.

Anna by Samira Negrouche (translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker)

Verses to the Moon by Luis Carlos López (translated from the Spanish by William George Williams)

the poem is a dream telling you its time by Marwa Helal

“Stop. Go put your shoes back on. They’ll know we Okies,” a Lost Image Reclamation by Anthony Cody
The format for this one was really cool.

Wonder Wheel by Wo Chan
it is a miracle to be a tube with legs—it is miraculous (!)
to be a coil in a bag . . . a patty in a briefcase! a living necklace!
a two-legged descendant of clear-boned fish! an optimist!

The Art of Shooting in the Dark by Denice Frohman

Angelica Root by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
What blade pour
howling into our pearltight
mouth. We am diamond in
land’s eye we am rotwitness
moving lightmemory we
tell.

Lord, I Ask a Garden . . . by Alfonso Guillén Zelaya (translated from the Spanish by William George Williams)

My Life Is a Memory by Rafael Arévalo Martínez (translated from the Spanish by William George Williams)

A Blind Spot, Awash by Tobi Kassim
And if I give up on consequences
is that despair
or passion? I can’t protect
myself from either.

from “Dauerwunder, a brief record of facts” by Carolina Ebeid

Barnes & Noble, 1999 by Jesús I. Valles
I was a boy in a bookstore, “a bathhouse,” I’ll joke
when I am older. But then, I wasn’t. I was in a gallery
of things to be cracked open; all their spines & mine.
I tell you, I was a hungry pickpocket, plucking
what language I could from books & men who stood hard
before me. This is what it means to be astonishing;
to thieve speech and sense from the undeserving.

what we did while waiting for the rain by Afua Ansong

For everyone who tried on the slipper before Cinderella by Ariana Brown
Really liked this one.

Mimesis by Farid Matuk

Singing Funeral by féi hernandez
I’ve avoided opening my throat in fear the dead would rise, walk out of me, leave me emptier after their fleeting, and still get deported back into the abyss they climbed from. I don’t think they hunger me.

The Immigrant by Aline Mello
This was a really cool form.

Azaleas by Esther Lin
The top of my head
is hot from sun. I understand
I am two girls. The one my mother
wants and the one who lives only
among her own kind.

Greensickness by Laurel Chen
I also liked Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem ‘To the Young Who Want to Die,’ which this was inspired by.

Lake of the Isles by Anni Liu

Overalls by Alan Pelaez Lopez

On Desire by Dujie Tahat

Ghazal of Oranges by Jan-Henry Gray

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

Lines Written During My Second Pandemic by Eduardo C. Corral

Music

SCROBBLES: 2,835 ▲

SCROBBLES PER DAY: 91 ▲

I was so excited for the music coming out this month, the Pinkshift album was something I've been looking forward to for months and it did not disappoint. The Carly album was also so good!!! Taylor Swift and the Arctic Monkeys also put out albums around that time, but didn't pull me in as much (though I'm in love with Mastermind).

I really loved listening to Dreaming Through the Noise this month, Vienna Teng always has a special place in my heart, but something about this album in particular really clicked for me this month. Also loved Dream Girl Evil by Florence, this wasn't a song that initially caught me from her album, but on reflection I really loved the lyrics. Stick this on a playlist with other songs on idolhood and public image…

The Hades Soundtrack making it on my top albums is so funny to me because it was literally just "played this all day for a day" and then I didn't touch it the rest of the month. S/o to The Amazing Devil for songs that always sound cinematic!

Artists:

1. My Chemical Romance - 304
2. Vienna Teng - 261
3. Stray Kids - 189
4. Florence + the Machine - 175
5. Fall Out Boy - 154
6. Darren Korb - 118
7. Beyoncé - 112
8. Carly Rae Jepsen - 85
9. The Amazing Devil - 79
10. Pinkshift - 75

Albums:

1. Dreaming Through The Noise by Vienna Teng - 207
2. Dance Fever by Florence + the Machine - 154
3. Infinity on High by Fall Out Boy - 139
4. Hades: Original Soundtrack by Darren Korb - 118
5. RENAISSANCE by Beyoncé - 107
6. MAXIDENT by Stray Kids - 99
7. The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen - 80
8. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance - 70
9. Love Me Forever by Pinkshift - 70
10. Hold the Girl by Rina Sawayama - 68

Songs:

1. Dream Girl Evil by Florence + the Machine - 58
2. Easier than Lying by Halsey - 48
3. Frankenstein by Rina Sawayama - 46
4. Love Turns 40 by Vienna Teng - 44
5. Mama by My Chemical Romance - 42
6. Whatever You Want by Vienna Teng - 41
7. Starring Role by Marina - 33
8. Secret Worlds by The Amazing Devil - 33
9. Thnks fr th Mmrs by Fall Out Boy - 32
10. HEYDAY (Prod. Czaer) by Stray Kids - 31

Comments

[kpopwinemom]

Oh, thank you for sharing The Mixed Asian Metaphor, I will definitely read that! The Chiso Kimono video also looks fascinating.

[latespring]

I hope you enjoy!!

[(Anonymous)]

They were both really good - Mixed Asian Metaphor was definitely a very thoughtful piece.