023. New Year, New(s) Letter
Hello Friends,
It’s been a long time since an email-sized vessel of myself materialized into your inbox like a small, opinionated ghost. I never really processed how long my hiatus from this project was (nearly a year) until I logged on to begin this draft and I am so, so happy to be back.
When we last spoke, I was beginning to graduate college, juggling my last semester of work with keeping my sanity intact and shafting all of my writerly pursuits. 2019 was a beast of year, full of changes, new experiences, moments of stress, of joy. But more on that (and the future of this project) at the end of this letter.
Now, with a new year in front us and having just turned 23 yesterday, it’s time to get back to our (semi) regularly scheduled programming. And what better way to greet you once again than with a list of 23 things that inspired me, thrilled me, and pushed me to out of my creative comfort zone throughout the very formative year of 2019.
TOUCH
I'll be honest with you, 2019 was not a good reading year for me. Besides reading texts assigned for class, I only clocked in 33 books in 2019 (which is a personal low). This is to say that while I lacked in quantity, I made up for in quality. One book in particular stuck out to me: As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now? I first learned about this book from a fellow intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (thank you, Sloane!) and, after tracking down an elusive copy of this book, I devoured it in a matter of weeks every morning I commuted to the museum.
I cannot stress this enough: IF YOU HAVE EVER WORKED OR WANT TO WORK IN ANY MUSEUM, ART INSTITUTION, CULTURAL SPACE, ARCHIVE, ETC, READ THIS BOOK! This collection of interviews and essays is comprised of people from all different facets of museum and art world, with backgrounds in working for large-scale institutions like the Queens Museum to smaller artist-run organizations like the 18th Street Arts Center, all writers and artists and curators and educators alike. The sheer breadth of voices, different (sometimes contradictory) perspectives, and experiences with art institutions that span gender, race, and class was both inspiring and challenging to my own pre-conceived notions of working in non-profit creative spaces (like administration is in itself a creative act). I think of a series of questions posed by Kemi Ilesami, executive director of the Laundromat Project: "In order to be in line with your most authentic institutional self (a combination of your mission, values, communities of accountability, and nodes of empathy), what are you willing to change? What are you willing to give up? What are you willing to share?"
It's hard to put into words just how formative this book was. I began school thinking I would work as an editor in some high-brow publishing job, but time and time again I found myself gravitating towards museums and smaller cultural publications, towards art-makers (with a sprinkle of writing here and there) away from the traditional literary world I thought I had always wanted. While working at the Met over the summer, I had that post-grad life crisis moment of realization that working in art institutions is where I have always been most comfortable. There was no point in denying myself that enjoyment in pursuit of some lofty, stereotypical English major goal I thought I wanted but had, in reality, ended up far away from. This is all to say that this book was formative in that personal revelation and I am so, so grateful for it.
One of the most compelling works of art I saw this summer had to be Oliver Beer's "Vessel Orchestra" at the Met Bruer. This was an installation which called for repeated viewing. First, with my mom on a weekday when she came to visit where we sat, after a long day of walking, listening to the gently droning hum of each vessel's unique, musical frequency each microphone placed inside was activated in turn. Then, twice I got to see the installation (a playable instrument made of vases and containers spanning thousands of years of art-making) activated by a host of musical guests curated by Beer himself: the Lebanese band Mashrou' Leila and the jazz artist John Zorn's ensemble on its closing day. Each experience was illuminating, a fresh engagement with the Met's own bountiful collection, and I would give anything to experience it again.
On an unusually rainy day over the summer, Eugene and I ventured out to Williamsburg to visit one of New York's strangest museums: The City Reliquary Museum. Started by an avid hoarder of bits and bobs of ephemera from around New York, the collection has grown to contain vials of subway dust, pins and photographs from the World's Fair, old school uniforms and a dunce cap, a backyard full of old signs from long-shuttered bars, a diorama recreating a Brooklyn barbershop where the barber sold photographs of his clients' first haircuts and kept copies in an album. A community-curated case housed one woman's confetti collection from different parades around the city, although that may have rotated out by the tine you visit. In all of its cramped, walls and shelves-filled-to-the brim-with-memorabilia-glory, you'll find yourself learning about parts of New York City that have been lost to time.
Ling Ma's Severance is a novel about an apocalypse, but one that unfolds so slowly within the monotony of late capitalism that Ma's protagonist continues to go through the mundane repetitions of her 9-5 job until there's almost no one left in New York City. In a time when many of us find ourselves in mind-numbing office jobs, Ma's book presents an unusual approach to a genre that both reflects the state of today's workforce and the disconnections of social media, and questions the lengths we will go to try to preserve and perpetuate increasingly toxic cycles of labor.
Hannah Black has been a favorite of mine since I first encounter her essay "Value, Measure, Love" in The New Inquiry. Last February, Black presented a video installation at Performance Space titled "Beginning, End, None." A fusion of 3D renderings of Foucault's panopticon, found footage of pet scorpions pulled from Youtube, representations of the transatlantic slave trade, Black begins with the cell and its industrial-like productions of life and explodes that out into critical analyses of biotechnology, the body as a factory of labor, and the dehumanization of Black Americans at the ends of slaver and in today's era of mass incarceration. With three screens stacked one on top of the other, the experience is a dizzying medley of history collapsing in on each other. You could watch each loop one after the other or try to take them all in simultaneously, but the cacophony of history remains inescapable.
It feels a little funny to talk about skincare in this letter, but I would kick myself if I didn’t mention the brand whose (nearly entire) range of products I reach for every morning. For all my talk of trying to resist the machinations of capitalism, I first learned about Blume from a subway ad. At the time, my skin was a sensitive mess, prone to random breakouts, itchy and irritated by everything (probably stress and summer heat-related) and I was ready to try something new. Blume has the same soft Millenial feel as Glossier, but I find that the ingredients are of much higher quality, leading to more effective products that won't upset even the most sensitive of skin. Are all of my skincare problems magically solved? Hell no (genetics is to blame for most of it), but it's nice to know that my face now feels smooth and soft like a baby's butt.
Andrea Lawlor's Paul takes the form of a mortal girl is a debaucherous epic through queer subcultures across America from lesbian communes in Providence to the streets of San Francisco still reeling from the AIDS crisis in the early 90s. Her protagonist, Paul Polydoris, has the unusual ability to change gender at will by shapeshifting his (although sometimes her) body. Paul becomes a flaneur meandering us through these different communities and trying to place his/herself within the ambiguous power structures of gender binaries. It's a book that doesn't shy away from examining how we present our bodies to the world, how our bodies are read by others, with Paul's own inner monologue rich with speculation on the construction of gender and more than a couple of tangents into sexual fantasies. It would be easy to say that this is a book about finding one's self, but this book is so much more than that with its raunchy humor, vibrant (yet so human that they defy tropes of queer literature) characters, and concerns with zine-making. It was one of the funniest, hottest, and downright devious books I've read all year.
LOOK
I first encountered Chakaia Booker's 2001 sculpture, Raw Attraction, in the corner of the Met's contemporary art gallery. Its monstrous, feral plumage caught my eye, a sharp contrast to the massive wall-spanning works of collaged abstraction and oversized minimalist paintings around it. Each time I studied this work, its meaning grew more complex. The Met's own curators note its vaginal form, echoing Surrealism's fascination with the concept of 'vagina dentata,' the monstrous woman whose estrangement is brought about through the destruction of material. But beyond that, there's a story that lies within Booker's medium of choice, discarded tires she procures from auto repair shops around New York or she found along the highways of her native New Jersey (apparently, according to critic Charlotta Kotik, Booker's studio feels more like a mechanic's warehouse). The rubber of the tires, worn by time and destruction, takes on the form of skin, a surface inscribed with the vibrant history of inequity and the quest for social mobility that has plagued America's working classes for generations, and speak to a return to wilderness in today's polluted, post-industrial state of economic decline across many parts of the country. While this piece is not on view currently, I highly suggest checking out more of her work.
I don't usually include poets or writing I've read in this section, but I can't resist talking about Brenda Hillman's multi-sensory experience of reading ecopoetics. Hillman's work is rooted deeply in the processes of the natural world, linking together today's political turmoil with the cycles and timescales of various non-human species and environments (like this selection from the titular poem of her newest collection, Extra Hidden Life, Among The Days). While every writer would be concerned with trying to render visual transformation and experience into printed language, Hillman incorporates images (many taken on her own phone) between and footnoting her poems. Some are of patterns of lichen, her father's home in Arizona, or images of protestors and her fellow poets like the late C.D. Wright. Hillman's most recent body of work wrestles with the complexities of living on a damaged planet, but doesn't let that examination be funneled to the sole perspective of one medium of expression. LISTEN Death, Sex, and Money is a podcast determined to confront the uncomfortable and transformational moments of life. During my own personally tectonic year, this podcast offered a great deal of catharsis and life education, not to mention the impetus for some reckoning with my own choices and emotional/mental well-being. No one episode, and the guests from truly all walks of creative life, is ever the same. Listing to a new episode feels like you’re getting special access to another secret to self-growth. Some personal highlights: Saeed Jones, their multi-part series on student loan debt and debt collection, Carrie Mae Weem in conversation with guest host Tayari Jones, and Jane Fonda.
Music-wise, I didn't do a lot of exploring this past year. Besides a smattering of random songs I'd find through Shazam and my friends sharing them on their Instagram stories (yes, I'm that lazy about seeking out hew music) that I would add to my monthly Spotify playlists, there were only a couple of artists whose new releases I devoured. This is all to say that no one's music sums up 2019 for me quite like Charli XCX. I revisited her older albums ("What I Like" from True Romance still slaps) and music videos ("5 in the Morning" is an underrated bop), and couldn't stop listening to her self-titled album Charli after it dropped (highlights: "Gone," "Silver Cross," "Official," and "2099").
Girls, Guts, and Giallo only began as a new podcast in early 2019, but it's already become the show that fills my personal void given the lack of film-related podcasting. This is a podcast about perverted movies, movies rich with camp and kink and perverse debauchery, slick erotic thrillers and graphic horror films alike. With each guest that Annie Rose brings to the show, expect a thoughtfully researched, nuanced critical conversation about not only the film's history and legacy in American culture, but how her guests viewed those films in the context of their own gender, race, and sexuality. The beauty of a podcast like this is that you tune in to hear about shows you've already seen and loved (like Jennifer's Body) or get introduced to your next obsession (like The Hunger or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). Cannot recommend it enough, especially since so much of film media tends to be dominated by white, cis straight men.
While we're on the topic of the gothic and the horrifying, the last podcast I really loved this past year was Snap Judgement's spin-off show, Spooked. Usually something that was always released around Halloween, the show has plans to publish more episodes throughout the coming year. A couple of my personal favorites: a story about military vets haunted by an unseen entity and a man's recollection of his mother's powerful confrontation with a ghost haunting their new home. Each of these stories are narrated by the people who experienced these hauntings, bumped up against the unexplained and the supernatural, which will add a layer of goosebumps you'll never be able to quite shake off.
LICK
God, where to begin with Parasite. Without hesitation, I told anyone who asked that this was the best movie I watched in 2019. I’m going to try my best to sum up why I enjoyed this movie without giving anything away (because the best way to experience this movie is to enter with no prior knowledge). Ira Madison the III, host of the Keep It podcast, summed it up best when he said that this movie felt like watching 3 movies in one. My first time watching this movie I genuinely had no idea what would happen next and none of my fellow moviegoers could take our eyes off the screen. It’s a tightly-written, emotional chandelier of turbulent plotlines, vibrantly developed characters, rich visual vocabulary, and a scathingly poignant critique of modern-day class divisions and labor, balancing moments of biting humor with grotesque horror.
This past year, I fell down a rabbit hole of food-related content, and one of the most intriguing publications to come out of that obsession was Mold Magazine. Mold describes itself as a magazine about "the future of food." Its unconventional approach to contemporary food production systems and culinary design from the meals we eat to the spaces we use to consume them is wonderfully accessible, featuring the voices of chefs and scientists alike. Since they only publish twice a year, I suggest keeping an eye out for their current issue in your local book or specialty cookbook store (I found them at Archestratus in Brooklyn). If you're unable to find them in print, here are just a few articles to get you started.
Shirkers is a movie about the making of a movie. Director Sandi Tan, along with her ambitious friends growing up in Singapore in the 90s, decide to make a coming-of-age film with a motley crew of local amateur actors and the help of their film class teacher Georges, an expat from America. After a grueling summer of filming what could possibly be Singapore's first road movie, Georges vanishes with the rolls of film he promised he would help the young girls edit. 20 years later, in the wake of Georges's death, the footage is returned to Sandi, prompting her to make a documentary about her childhood on the island, her complicated relationship with Georges, and the many mysteries that made up his life pre- and post-Shirkers. This movie was deeply affecting to watch. Besides the gorgeous footage of the original movie, Tan implicitly taps into a long history of threatened masculinity and the theft of power from young female creatives.
Euphoria is a visual feast of a show. Even if you have yet to see it, I'm sure you've encountered the hundreds of makeup looks inspired by the show or spent your time scrolling through the Instagram accounts of its makeup artists. It doesn't set out to present to us a wholly realistic, accurate experience of life as a high schooler in Oakland (neither did Skins in the early 2000s), but rather toys with the mythologization of American teenhood through a visual language saturated with bacchanalian shine and a camera forever warping the audience's perception by taking on the qualities of the drugs the characters consume. It's a show that is acutely aware of social media's double-edged sword as a tool of pain and insecurity perpetuation, but doesn't try to prostelyze to us like a chiding adult, accepting it as part of everyday turbulence. Each character wrestles with their predisposition to self-destruction and histories of trauma, from drug addiction to threats of sexual and domestic violence to body-shaming. You end up seeing parts of yourself in each of these characters, even if the way they behave was so far from how you were in high school. With one of the best T.V. show soundtracks of the year, I promise you won't be disappointed.
Satoshi Kon’s animated film, Millennium Actress, did not come out in 2019 but I got to watch it for the first time surrounded by friends at a local theater. This movie is a heartbreaking, genre-crossing movie that traverses Japanese film history as a long-retired actress recounts the pursuit of the man she loves. In Kon’s usual trippy style of animation, the viewer is hurled through these magic, at times nostalgic, spaces that test the durability of love and the threat of loss across one’s lifetime. It’s a beautiful film and will definitely leave you weeping at the end.
God, Killing Eve. Its premise is relatively simple: an MI5 agent accidentally comes across one of the world's most dangerous assassins. One bloody encounter leads to another and they begin to chase each one another, forever out of reach yet deeply, dangerously obsessed. A cat and mouse game with lots of designer dresses, grisly murders, and a sense of humor so dark sometimes you'll feel a little wicked when you chuckle. Sandra Oh is, well, Sandra Oh in all of her earnest, explosive energy, while Jodie Comer plays Villanelle's psychopathy with such fine, expressive detail that even the lightest of moments can become brutally dark with just a shift in her facial features. Prepare to binge, prepare to laugh, prepare to be a little horrified.
CLICK
Last year, my friend Emma excitedly explained that she had found this new social-media-but-not website and that I should join her on there. Because of its inherent decentralization, the best word I can use to describe to Are.na is mycelial. Users create channels (like little homes for ideas, research projects, themes) then connect blocks (images, text, PDFs, videos, etc) to those channels, both their own or in collaboration with other users. Are.na has become my favorite place to go for inspiration, for learning about niche conceptual subjects in architecture and design, and a place where I have been able to compile readings for writing projects I’m working on, sharing my personal library, or deep-diving into a topic I’ve always been curious about. For New York-based female-identifying and non-binary folks, look into coming to the next Are.na meetup! It was an eye-opening experience and a chance to meet the faces behind some of my favorite Are.na accounts. Consider joining and give me a follow!
Blame it on the college reading assignment burnout, but I didn't read a whole lot of long-form investigative news pieces or essays in 2019. One story, however, has been on my mind since it first came up on my Twitter feed. "The Jungle Prince of Dehli" follows journalist Ellen Barry as she travels deep into a forest at the heart of New Dehli in search of one of the last living relatives of the Oudh family. Barry's documentation of her experience and her interweavings of the royal family's contentious history with the modern Indian government, their obsession with courting international journalists, their isolated life in the ruins of an abandoned palace for nearly 40 years, and the impact of one woman's decision to claim royal lineage on her children culminates into a poignant, heartbreaking story of family loss and turbulent legacy. The New York Times's digital spread is rich with archival photos and drone footage, but reading this without also listening to the raw audio of interviews and field recordings would make this experience incomplete.
Many magazines and news outlets described 2019 as 'the year of the scammer.' While I too was sucked into viral tales of theft and fraud, it was Natalie Beach's autobiographical essay on her ghostwriter relationship with influencer Caroline Calloway that, to this day, lingers in the back of my mind. Regardless of whose side you're on (to this day, Calloway disputes some of the claims Beach makes in her piece), this essay reads like a contemporary cautionary tale of the pursuit of a popular, authentic self on the Internet and, personally, brought up one too many memories of toxic friendship dynamics full of exploitation and perpetuated low self-esteem over the years. I left Beach's article feeling as though neither party was entirely the victim nor the perpetrator, rather each feeding on the insecurities of the other in a way that could only lead to attempts at mutually-assured discussion. Maybe the fact that I follow Calloway on Instagram speaks to my own bias in the end, but Beach's essay was a reminder that we all need to be honest with our selves and kinder to each other.
If there's one person that I will forever associate with 2019, it has to be New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Tolentino brought a fresh voice to the oftentimes pretentious publication, examining bizarre and viral phenomenons like vaping, Shen Yun, and Outdoor Voices's perpetuation of fitness inspiration with a sharpened wit and relatable Internet voyeurism. Looking to procrastinate from whatever you're working on or a sign to finally take the plunge into her writing? You can check out all of her clips here.
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In 2019, I graduated college, went to my first K-pop concert, finally attended my first wedding where I wasn't the flower girl, went to Egypt, got to work my dream internship, and now, with another rotation around the sun, I’m finally settling into a post-grad job that I enjoy and that I feel like I can grow into and taking my creative projects off hiatus.
Going forward, I have lot planned for this newsletter (literal pages of notes and documents collecting material for upcoming themed collections I can't wait to share with all of you) and I'm going to try to get them out into the world on a semi-regular basis on Tuesdays.
If you would like to support the human bean behind these letters, you can buy some stickers I designed! You can also help me feed my new pet leopard gecko through Buy Me A Coffee. Or you can show your love by sharing this little project of mine with your friends, lovers, and enemies.
Until next time (and there will be a next time, I promise!),
Ellie