038. New Year, New Reliquary
Let’s begin this newsletter at the end.
Hello friends,
Let’s begin this newsletter at the end.
I’ll spare you the sentiment, mostly since I’m sure many of you are nursing hangovers and sleep deprivation of varying degrees of severity. This year was challenging. Not good, not bad, just challenging. For me, it was one of scary decisions, big life changes, surprising myself, a peculiar tangle of hope and disappointment.
Before I go into the things that inspired and brought me joy in 2021, I’ll share some things I’m proud of: reading 52 books, submitting my writing (and embracing rejections), learned how to bind books, became a member of the New York Mycological Society. I published my first book review, wrote about one of my favorite climate activists, and kept this little newsletter going.
Thank you for reading, old and new friends alike. I’m so happy you’re here.
TOUCH
All We Can Save was one of those books that defined my year. I can’t recommend this anthology enough, with its collection of essays and poetry tackling the climate crisis from so many different perspectives all unified in the call for collective action. From developing green economies and the fight to close coal power plants to the need for Indigenous stewardship and addressing environmental racism, there’s something new to learn about environmental justice for everyone.
I’m not a foodie by any means but I’d be remiss If I didn’t include the best meal I had this year: vegan Eastern European food at Apteka in Pittsburgh. I really wish I had taken better photos of their pierogi and gołąbki, but we devoured that whole meal so quickly and over the warm conversation of friends. Anyway, it just gives me an excuse to go back and continue eating my way through their menu.
Besides having one of the prettiest covers I read all year, Won-pyung Sohn’s Almond was a small force of nature of a book. The novel follows Yunjae, a teenage boy born with a medical condition that it almost impossible to feel anger and fear, leaving it up to his family to try to teach him how to mimic these emotions and appear more normal. When he loses the two people who helped him navigate the world, Yunjae begins to make his own way and opens himself up to new friends who begin to challenge this state of emotionlessness. A dreamy read sleek enough to put in your pocket or your bag wherever you go, it’s a refreshing take on coming-of-age stories.
This past year, I spent a lot of time diving into scent, from the the chemical architecture of building a fragrance and the way notes and materials can tell stories and evoke memories to the history of perfumery and the cultural preservation of fragrance. It was also the year I became obsessed with finding a signature scent. I was gifted a bottle of Juliette Has A Gun’s Not A Perfume by a dear friend, and I haven’t stopped wearing it since. Made with a single note of cetalox (a synthetic form of ambergris which, fun fact, has been used in perfumery for centuries), I love the way it sits on my skin in such a deliciously androgynous way.
LOOK
This year, I kept accidentally stumbling upon Hassan Hajjaj’s work in exhibitions, like his solo show at Fotografiska and Cooper Hewitt’s exhibition about contemporary Muslim fashion, and in articles and magazine covers. Hajjaj’s photos come alive with vibrant colors and textures influenced by his experience living in Marrakech. Traditional North African textiles and patterns clash with Western logomania in his stylized, pop culture-infused portraiture. Yet his attention to detail extends beyond the flat surface of his photographs, with custom frames decorated with soda cans, tins of motor oil, and canned food found across Morocco, clashing patterned wallpaper, and seating for visitors made out of repurposed Coca-Cola crates.
I have been following Eva Henderson for a while now, and I’m always so moved by the way she captures the abstract beauty of the natural world through such delicate topographies of line work. I was lucky enough to go to her tattoo studio in Beacon, New York, this past summer. It was amazing to hear about how her walks out in nature, foraging for mushrooms and finding textures and patterns in the local ecology, have shaped her creative practice. Her wealth of botanical knowledge and her keen eye for natural wonder made it such an amazing, enriching experience. I can’t recommend checking out her tattoos (and getting one if you live in New York!), as well as supporting her visual practice.
I don’t remember how I first found Amy Bravo’s gorgeous paintings, but I could spend all day getting lost in the stories they tell. Inspired by her own experiences with queerness, and her familial connections to Cuban culture, works such as Ritmo de Luna (2018) and Strays (2020) are electrified by these iconographies rooted in power dynamics of gender, politics, and sexuality. These lush compositions dance through lore and mythos, childhood memories, found objects and imagery, all amalgamated onto surfaces entangled in raw devotion.
LISTEN
Rachel Chinouriri’s Four° In Winter was one of my favorite pieces of music of 2021. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve lost myself in her haunting vocals and her delicately heart-aching lyricism with melodies that feel so cinematic and dance-worthy in one moment and breathtakingly lonely the next. The songs I’ve kept on repeat the most: “I.D.R.N,” “Darker Place,” and “Give Me A Reason.”
Chris Stedman’s 4-episode series, Unread, was one of those podcasts I found this year that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first listened to it. After his friend Alex took his own life in 2019, Chris spent the time after his death tracking down Alice, a women Alex had recorded conversations with after he befriended her in a Britney Spears fan forum. As Stedman unravels this mystery, the heaviness of grief lightens under the tender love of community.
LICK
The beauty of Landscapers is that it breaks every possible rule in true crime storytelling. A dramatic retelling of the 1998 murders of William and Patricia Wycherly, which went undiscovered until 2012 when their son-in-law and presumed killer Christopher Edwards confessed to the crime after spending almost 15 years committing pension fraud with his wife and their daughter Susan, Landscapers focuses less on the violence of the crime itself and questions of guilt and innocence, and more on the very delusional) lives of the old Hollywood-obsessed couple. This is a show that is perpetually breaking the fourth wall with jarring cuts to the show’s set pieces being broken down and pans to the behind-the-scenes of each episode’s filming, a reenactment of the crime directed by one of the detectives, and escapist jumps into scenes styled after classic Westerns—directorial choices that remind us of the precarious fragility of the stories the Edwards created, lying to protect themselves and to maintain their innocence despite all of the cracks in their blissful romance.
2021 was the year I fell in love with the Center for Book Arts all over again. I started off the year by participating in their Creative Publishing seminar, where I got to learn the basics of bookbinding and book design, and hear from artists and publishers about their relationship to book and zine-making, distribution, and their own creative experiments in printing and binding. After that, I loved seeing their exhibition on “Interspecies Futures,” tackling the non- and post-human in book forms, and I continue to follow them on Instagram to see highlights from their amazing collection.
My sincerest apologies to all of my friends who heard me rave about The Green Knight throughout this year. With each viewing, I fell in love with it a little more, catching little details in the film’s gorgeous costumes and whimsical storytelling. I won’t get into it too much because I think so much of The Green Knight’s surreal hero’s journey should be experienced firsthand but I will say this: as someone who has read and loved medieval art and literature, I love how this movie strays away from fairytales at every turn, embracing the strange, the nonsensical, and the fantastical.
CLICK
Celine Aenlle-Rocha’s short story, “Strange Gifts,” collapses generations of loss and power into such a poignant story of magic, ghosts, and one daughter’s search for her father’s soul in the afterlife. The dead never stay dead in this story, displaced in time, gifts inherited and spirits lingering in limbos of grief and what we leave behind. As one character notes, “‘Honey, you can’t be raising the whole world back from the dead,’ she said. ‘You keep calling these ghosts back and they won’t ever leave you be.’”
2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Among the tributes and memorials, David Klion’s essay, “The 9/11 Museum and Its Discontents,” stood out to me as one of the sharpest reflections on how we remember this tragedy within the context of modern American history, and one museum’s failing to reckon with the politicization of this collective trauma. I have never been to the 9/11 museums, and certainly have no plans to do so now. Like many kids from my generation, regardless of what varying degree you remember that day, we grew up in the shadow of the War on Terror, learning about the Patriot Act, haunted by nationalist specters of Islamophobia. Speaking as someone who has worked in museums, the power of institutions to establish historical narratives can’t be overstated, and I really appreciated Klion’s attention to the museum’s exhibition design both in what is included and what is left out from that day and its political aftermath.
In thinking about the essays that moved me this year, Irina Dumitrescu’s “Tongue Stuck” continues to stay on my mind. Dumitrescu captures something I have struggled to put into words growing up bilingual as the child of immigrants: trying to keep that language of homeland alive, even as you struggle to express yourself in words you don’t know or have lost over time in a land where that language isn’t really spoken. I remember crying with relief after, that someone else also feels like they sound like a stranger, reaching for what is untranslatable. One line hit me especially hard: “I speak a Romanian that is antiquated, out of fashion. It’s the language of diaspora and nostalgia. The language of grandmothers.”
Thanks for taking the time to read! Feel free to share this little project of mine with your friends, lovers, and enemies. If you like what I do, you can help feed my leopard gecko through Ko-Fi or check out my website to find more of my writing. You can find a list of books by the people I mentioned on Bookshop (I get a small commission through this and any other affiliate links in this letter).
Until next time,
Ellie