Hello friends,
In the past month, I’ve gone upstate to a renaissance fair, camped in the woods for four days at a music festival, visited the off-site storage facilities of one of New York City’s largest museums, quit a job, celebrated a print publication, and cut my bangs. To say that I’ve been all over the place would be an understatement.
The weather outside has been doing its own erratic dance, not quite cold enough yet that I can commute to work without sweating through my jacket, not quite warm enough to feel like we still have some leftover summer to hold on to. It feels like everyone’s coming down with some kind of cold and I, too, have had a constant itch in my throat since the weather started changing. While we wait for the impending cold, other parts of this country are bracing themselves the wet rage of hurricanes. Every where, the slow careen into winter takes its toll.
It feels appropriate, then, to keep this letter short and sweet by focusing on what’s brought me comfort and relief from the stress of this month. I hope these also bring you joy and intrigue you the way they’ve done for me.
TOUCH
*NEEDS PICTURE*
When my lovely friend Tova started selling some of her handmade crochet pieces, I knew I had to get my hands on this adorable little shrug. I ended up wearing it on the beaches of Lisbon and, now that the temperature’s finally dropping here in New York, I can’t wait to keep layering it so I can match the colors of the changing leaves. There’s something truly so magical about wearing something made with love.
*NEEDS PICTURE*
I've been subsisting off a smattering of perfume samples all summer, but when I finally had the chance to smell Ded Cool’s “Taunt,” I knew I found the scent I’m going to wear for the rest of the year. I haven’t used a perfume with vanilla in it since I doused myself in a cocktail of cheap body spray and Dior’s “Hypnotic Poison” every morning in high school. This feels like a mature upgrade, adding dimension to the vanilla’s sweeter notes through the warmth of bergamot and amber. Ded Cool has been the Internet’s favorite genderless perfume brand as of late, and this fragrance shows how their clean, minimalist strategy lives up to the hype.
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s post-apocalyptic novel Manhunt is one of the most biting political satires I’ve read in a long time. Set in a not-so-far future America where a pandemic has turned men into literal predators, the book follows two trans women trying to survive by killing men to sell their body parts on a synthesized estrogen market while also dodging a growing fascist TERF military. Felker-Martin’s critique of gendered violence and transphobia is razor sharp and ruthless, entangling social monstrosities with biological ones while also giving serious attentions to issues about race, fatphobia, and class. A warning: this is a work of horror, so scenes of physical and sexual violence are something you should prepare to encounter.
LOOK
When I was in Berlin last month, I got to saw Leonor Fini’s 1939 oil painting, “Two Women” at the Neue Nationalgalerie. It felt like something out of a dream, seeing one kneeled in front of a closed door while the other in mid-stride with her hair lit up with an ornamental array of candles. This has become one of my favorite paintings, and an opportunity to learn more about the Surrealist force of nature that was Fini. Fini lived her life with a fiercely independent flare for the magical and the dramatic. An outspoken critic of the misogyny of her fellow male artists, she challenged conventions of the day by painting her subjects in stereotype-defying, gender-bending scenes, and she was an outspoken proponent of eroticism and sexual freedom when other women in the avant-garde were expected to be quiet muses.
With Halloween season quickly creeping up on us, I had to revisit the photography of Nina Leen. There’s something so eerie about her photographs with her polished female subjects, a sense that the appearance of perfection is just an absurd illusion. Her photos are stunningly beautiful and deeply haunting. Maybe you’ve encountered her work on the witchy sides of Tumblr and Pinterest, or you might know her quirky animal portraits. Either way, her body of work will dazzle and unsettle you.
LISTEN
Back in 2019, NTS Radio show “Death is Not The End” dedicated an episode to music from pre-revolution Iran. Recorded in the 1960s, this selection features a mix of Persian pop and psychedelic and garage rock. I’ve come back to this radio show again and again as a way to learn history through music. Now, in light of the ongoing protests sparked by the death of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody, I revisited this particular episode as a reminder of the co
This Ends At Prom is not your average film podcast. Hosted by wives BJ and Harmony Colangelo, they spend each week talking about popular teen movies and reflecting on their experience watching them as, in Harmony’s case, a trans woman who spent her childhood living as a teen boy and, in BJ’s case, a queer cisgender woman. They’ve covered nostalgic faves like A Knight’s Tale (2001), But I’m A Cheerleader (1999), and Grease (1978), and also talked about more contemporary indie hits like Shiva Baby (2020) and Assassination Nation (2018). Each episode is a wonderful balance of critical analysis and hilarious jokes about the drama, realness, and absurdity of teen cinema.
What happens when a U.S. Army base becomes home to a rare species of butterfly? This is the question at the heart of Radiolab’s episode, “Of Butterflies and Bombs.” In one of those I-can’t-this-actually-happened moments, the episode follows ecologist Nick Haddad as he tries to rescue this endangered butterfly around active bomb ranges, and learns more about nature’s amazing capacity for survival along the way.
LICK
CLICK