012. Lazed Reliquary
Hello friends,
Today is a day for finishing the eggnog, disposing of wrapping paper, pulling leftovers out of the fridge, or hopping on planes back home. I hope you all had and will continue to have a peaceful holiday season. If anything, my holidays have been too relaxing (this is only a half-truth, I have things to finish they're just in a distant part of my mind at the moment). It's strange slowing down, woken up by sunlight entering my room rather than the shrill of phone alarms, and shifting mental gears into a slower state of mind. Whether you're being hit by the holiday blues, relaxing somewhere warm, or trying to escape the chaos of family fighting, some bits and bobs for a little Internet-fueled TLC (you earned it).
TOUCH
I bought my Guernica long reader at the Brooklyn Book Festival a couple of months ago and finally got around to finishing it yesterday. Honestly, I really love the idea. Guernica, if you're not familiar with their work, exists solely as an online publication covering global arts and politics (this is such an oversimplification basically they post a wide range of writing from poems to longform essays to investigative journalism, the list goes on and on). These readers are the perfect little companions to bring with you if you're sick of staring at screens but want to read some damn good writing. The 'nature' one is about exactly that, and many of these essays consider humanity's relationship to nature from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It's about 100 pages long with 4 essays, short yet sweet. Since Guernica doesn't sell these bad boys online, I'll link to the essays in the book if you want to check them out: "The Fallout" by Lacy M. Johnson (the essay that got me into my obsession with waste and superfund sites), "Going Where the Reindeer Go" by Zach St. George, "The Age of Loneliness" by Meera Subramanian, and "Myrrh in the Time of the Anthropocene" by Anna Badkhen.
I recently got these mirror earrings from Nothing Is Funny on Depop (they closed their shop right after I bought the earrings from them but I'm sure you can find similar pieces on Etsy). I've had my ears pierced since I was a baby, but it's only been in the past couple of months or so that I began playing more with statement earrings. These are perfect not only because they just look awesome (mini mirrors! Hanging from your ears!) but because they can go with pretty much any outfit. A really great, versatile staple for the gal who always forgets to accessorize.
Not a particularly cheery film to watch during the holidays, but I found this documentary on Youtube about Francis Bacon's life, A Brush With Violence. "It was as if art had become feral", one historian recounts.This film is both saddening and fascinating, seeing how his erratic, horrifying painting technique unfolded, providing much-needed context to his violent, unsettling images which shocked Europe just after World War II. To be honest, I wasn't super familiar with Bacon's work going into this. I had seen a few of his pieces and really enjoyed them but I had never learned about him in any of my classes (he has a way of eluding art historical overviews given that he wasn't really tied to any specific post-war movement). In many ways this documentary is painful to watch, from the way he was rejected by his father as a child to his alcoholism. Yet it’s also very necessary since his work is so jarring it can sometimes elude deeper historical analyses. If you have any Youtube documentaries you enjoy, send them my way.
LOOK
Hillary Fayle's medium is foliage and fauna. From delicately sliced leaves to arrangements of snakeskin on paper, there's a fragile ephemerality to her work, something that cannot be held in the palm of your hand in fear of undoing its material body. Her embroidered pieces remind me of specimen boards, where butterflies or beetles are pinned to felt, or videos of art restoration as they seal up tears in paintings, a taxidermy made of leftovers. You can check out the rest of work here.
Recently, I've been thinking about Helen Levitt's street photography in 1940s New York. Working as an art teacher, she would document the neighborhoods she went through (mostly Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side). Oftentimes, her photographs would depict children playing (you've probably seen her photos of children dressed in Halloween masks) and, as the summer came, the various personalities who came out onto street due to the lack of air conditioning including gossiping women, old couples, and adults running errands. There's a certain kind of theatricality that emerges from these photos of mundane, everyday activities. As though these figures become actors in a greater urban drama, she captures these slices of time within these relatively invisible neighborhoods only she saw through her camera lens. You can check out more of her photographs here and here.
I recently came across this archive of an art blog and, after scrolling through old posts, came across Sara Cwynar's Colour Studies series. Each still life is made of objects collected around specific color themes, essentially monochromatic junk art. Maybe it’s a combination of studying 1960's 'trash aesthetic' in class and obsessively looking at still life paintings and flower arrangements, but there's something so pleasing about these pieces. They remind me of the pile of junk and old toys in our garage, a sunbleached menagerie of plastic, faded fabric, and worn cardboard. I had a hard time finding the rest of this series on her website but you can check out her the series here.
LISTEN
I'm not sure how I found Sophie Meiers's music but shortly after I did, I spent almost the whole day looping through the singles she has up on Spotify. With a voice in the vein of Kali Uchis and an assortment of mellow twinkling beats, her dreamy songs are the perfect soundtrack for lazing around the house. If you want to get a taste of her sound, you can check out more of her music on her Soundcloud and Bandcamp.
Shrinking Violet's song "Enactor" is beautiful in its simplicity. Maybe it’s the fact that I'm home for winter break now, but this song has lingered with me. She has such heartbreaking lyricism ("I'm just an actor here / A reminder of the parts that have already been used") coupled by gentle melody. Perhaps the most honest song about isolation and displacement I've heard in a while.
Another track I've had stuck in my head is Kitty Kallen's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels". I first heard the song in one of Jack Smith's experimental films, Flaming Creatures (1963), when it becomes the soundtrack to a vampire in the fashion of an old Hollywood movie star rises her coffin. The original song feels cheesy, as though you'd be expecting it to come out of a jukebox at an old diner rather than your computer speakers, but that kitsch has a way of being quite catchy.
Perhaps one of the most original poetry projects I've seen recently is Voicemail Poems. This publication accumulates their work by having writers call in and leave their pieces in their voicemail. It's really soothing to hear these voices and the poems are so lovely, sometimes dedicated to someone almost like a missed call, others simply about something on the poet's mind. Listen to their most recent issue on their website.
LICK
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a huge snake fan. I've wanted one as a pet for ages but for now I'll settle for a damn good snake Instagram appreciation account. Discover Snakes is one of my favorites. They've posted some of the coolest-looking snakes I've ever seen. If you love reptiles like I do definitely go check them out and if you have your own favorite reptile Instagram accounts to scroll through let me know!
Augury or "taking the auspices "was a form of omen interpretation in ancient Rome. The sky would be divided into quadrants and depending on how many of which kind of bird flew through, a prediction would be formed. The different auspice signs correlated to different kinds of actions by the birds or the appearance of the sky and it was believed that, in Rome, any decisions made within the people's assembly without a positive auspicium first to make sure that the gods agreed with their actions. I would love to write a poem about this practice but, until then, enjoy "Custom" by Carl Phillips.
Lastly, I wanted to include Hungry. One of my new favorite drag performers, they worked with Bjork on some of the visuals in her new album. Name-drop aside, their work is unlike anything I've seen before, with elaborate ornamentation equal parts baroque and something out of a science fiction film. Please for the love of good check out their work here.
CLICK
Real Life has quickly become one of my favorite publications this year. For the holidays, they released a special issue centered around the theme, "Paranoia". There are four essays long covering topics from psychology to politics to nuclear waste. If you want to learn more about "the self-cure for insignificance" as Adam Phillips calls it, go check out these pieces here.
The last reading in my poetry class this past semester was American Artist's "A Declaration of the Dignity Image". In the age of social media, Artist (yes, that's his first and last name) considers the images we choose not to share, and what this means for the digital personas we construct. This essay balances a lot of different ideas about identity within digital space, and I'm curious to see what you guys think.
I remember reading about an exhibit at the Folk Art Museum in NYC about Victorian death portraiture. Exactly what it sounds like, the dead would be photographed in order to preserve their final moments on this Earth. Most recently, my friend Emma sent me an essay, "Death Stares" by Tamara Kneese which examines this issue of death portraiture and our contemporary distaste for photography at funerals. After finishing that piece, I thought of the tradition of Victorian hair art in which pieces such as jewelry were made from hair, either to commemorate the living (such as a romantic interest) or the dead. If you're interested in Victorian mourning practices, I'd suggest pairing Kneese's piece with Lindsey Palka's essay "Victorian Hair Art and Mourning Traditions".
Another magazine I found and enjoyed this year is lit.cat. They just released their 20th issue full of brilliant, talented writers. One particular prose-poem I enjoyed was "I saw Owen Wilson one time from a distance" by Kat Giordano. I won't say more, you just have to check out the newest issue for yourself.
A piece of writing that has stuck with me after the end of the semester is Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" from 1964. In considering 'camp' as an aesthetic unto itself, Sontag looks at how camp is constructed, how camp might experience an aesthetic failure and become kitsch. While Sontag writes about how camp traditionally operates as depoliticized, it's safe to say that, over the years, the camp style is infused with political meaning. In the words of a college student in class discussion, "there's a lot to unpack here" and definitely worth giving a read if you've ever been mesmerized by trinkets inside an antique store or cheesy old Hollywood movies. You can read the essay here.
Since this piece keeps it short and sweet, so will I. If you're looking for new books to read but can't be bothered to scroll through an 8-page New Yorker thinkpiece, I'd recommend checking out American Microreviews & Interviews. This online publication showcases writing from around the world, as well as author interviews, distilling the reviewer's thoughts to about a paragraph. While that might sound troublesome, the writing is quite brilliant and it's the perfect publication to sift through the archives or if you feel like you don't have enough time to read something new or you're looking for a new book to add to your reading list.
Lastly, after spending some time browsing through the Poetry Foundation's website, I came across "Mosquito Music" by Philip Gross. This poem is quite fitting now that I'm back in Florida and slowly accumulating a host of bug bites up and down my legs. This particular poem considers the song and dance of the mosquito, the sticky heat of humidity. // That's all for now folx. I hope all of you are sleeping in or reading the books you put off during the school year or going to see some cool shit wherever you are, whether it be beautiful landscapes or artwork at your nearby museum. Seeing as I've been hounded by deadlines this past semester, I apologize for my delay in sending this out as my brain has softened into putty only capable of consuming Netflix movies and poetry books. You'll hear from me again very soon with my end-of-the year wrap up newsletter. Stay lazy, my friends (for now at least).
Love,
Ellie