60. New Year, New Reliquary

I always love to kick off another series of reliquaries with a look back at the sights, sounds, things, and experiences that defined the previous year for me.

Hello friends,

I always love to kick off another series of reliquaries with a look back at the sights, sounds, things, and experiences that defined the previous year for me. 2023 was a chaotic time, to say the least. I have no idea how I managed to do as much as I did yet, even in the face of the world's looming instability and uncertainty, I ended the year with a stronger sense of who I am, what I love, what I'm fighting for, and what I hope to accomplish in 2024. Of course, a lot of that growth, knowing when to give myself grace and when to slow down, came from the support of the people around me.

Most of all, I am so grateful for all of you. At times, drafting a newsletter can feel like shouting into the void, but it's been amazing to see new and familiar names join the subscriber list, to receive your financial support each month, and to hear your thoughts about these silly little essays and recommendation lists on social media and IRL. In a time when so many of us feel alienated and isolated, these niche digital spaces can be a way to connect, share knowledge, find common ground and mutual obsessions even when there's so many miles between us. Thank you again for reading.

TOUCH

The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan. Hands down best book I read all year. It charts the history of the New York Women's House of Detention, a prison that operated in Greenwich Village from 1932 to 1974, and the lives of the inmates who passed through its gates. Ryan gives space for his incarcerated subjects to share their struggles and experiences. It's a book written with great care, tracing the emergence of communities of resilience and how prisoners resisted the systems torturing and imprisoning them. While police brutality and gender-based oppression in criminal justice is nothing new, this read felt especially timely as queer identity is heavily policed and censored, poverty continues to be criminalized, and rates of female incarceration have skyrocketed. Ryan charts the dangerous rise and failed promises of the prison industrial complex and uplifts powerful intersecting fights for justice, abolition, and queer liberation. I walk by where the House of Detention once stood every time I’m at school, and I now see what’s left of the old facility with new, appreciative eyes.

2023 was when I finally caved and acquired a pair of hooved shoes. A secondhand pair of white Nike Air Rifts, to be more specific. As I spent the year reflecting on my personal style and my consumption, I found that got much more joy out of being more thoughtful with my purchases, collecting weird and unique pieces, rather than trying to keep up with fast-moving trend cycles. These had been on my wish list for years, having seen them on feet of fashionable friends and cool Internet people. And honestly, they exceeded expectations! I loved wearing them in the summer where I could pair their chunky, split-toe shape with so many different kinds of silhouettes. The Japanese Tabi style is iconic, and I got to dress these up even more with socks I got in Japan from brands like SOU SOU. I’m happy to be a horse girl.

All of my BAGGU bags served me well last year, but my favorite one was their Cloud Carry-on in the, duh, cloud print. This accompanied me on all of my travels, from upstate to Canada and all the way to Japan. It’s the perfect size for a weekend duffle but also light enough to tuck into my suitcases every time I needed more space for my luggage. Listen, if I'm going to be miserable when I fly or be exhausted by running to catch a train, at least I can look cute doing it.

If you follow me on Instagram, then you already know that I spent 2023 smelling a lot of perfumes. As I distilled my favorites (pun intended) into a shortlist, indie darling Universal Flowering became the undeniable winner. It's rare to find a brand where you love just about everything you sniff, yet I ended up sampling my way through nearly their entire collection and was left awe-struck by the fragrance accords I encountered. Each of Courtney Rafuse's thrilling, otherworldly concepts rooted in myth, music, culture, and ephemeral memory are vividly rendered. I ultimately got full-size bottles of the fizzy sweet Venus in Tuberose and downright feral Pleasure Portrait. Holy Hell's unusual blend of beach ball and ambergris and Heliotrope Milkbath's dreamy glow of apricots and almond milk are also worth testing out.

LOOK

Wangechi Mutu's New Museum exhibition "Intertwined" stayed with me since I first saw it at the start of spring. An ambitious collection of sculptures, collage, drawing, and film, it's hard to pick just one artwork that resonated with me. You had these monumental surreal bronze sculptures, arrays of flowers and mutating bodies. Nods to interspecies folklore, feminist power, and Afrofuturist science fiction all rendered through her skillful hybrid blends of material. Her practice sparked a transformative fire in my own approach to alchemical storytelling.

I have so little documentation of American Artist's Security Theater (2023) because, to participate in the artwork, you have to surrender your phone. Created for the group exhibition Going Dark, American Artist installed a camera at the center of the Guggenheim's rotunda that tracked visitors around the museum. When a friend and I got to the piece’s entrance, a gallery attendant told us that we would have to lock our devices pouches to go in and see the camera's live-streamed footage. By the time we circled our way back down to the entrance to get our phone cases unlocked, many questions were swirling my mind: How is the museum a site of hyper visibility? Of policing? How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to surveil others and be surveilled ourselves in the name of 'security'? It was an unforgettable experience.

Back in October, I got to see a selection of paintings by illustrator Jeremy Sorese for his first solo show Pleasure Principle at Auxier Kline. Each painting is a playful scene of queer expression, at times laden with nods to kink communities and pop culture. His subjects search for intimacy and belonging in these delicious chromatic compositions. In one work, sweat beads on languishing figures, in an other food and drink are seductively consumed. During a time of year when everything felt endlessly gray and dreary, Sorese's vibrant style was a much-needed shock to the senses.

LISTEN

From 1995 to 1998, the set of Melrose Place became the site of a radical art intervention in culture jamming and subliminal messaging led by conceptual artist Mel Chin. Titled In The Name of the Place, Chin assembled a team of artists in Los Angeles and Georgia (the GALA Committee) and convinced the show’s set designers to hide unusual artworks made with images of political unrest, viruses, and other motifs of leftist subversion. The epic saga of this ambitious project was the subject of one of my favorite podcast episodes from this year from Decoder Ring. I don’t want to give too much away, just know that you’re in for a wild tale of intrigue and hi-jinx.

Author’s Note: To be honest, I barely listened to any new music in 2023. Having spent most of my time hunched over a computer writing or on long stressful commutes, I found myself more drawn to DJ mixes than ever before. These were two that made my year:

Razrbark’s mix for Distant Signals is described as “the last known transmission from the Spaceship Bark. Long story short, there were no survivors.” This is a science fictional odyssey through chuggy rhythms and ethereal electronica. The kind where you can put your headphones on and get lost in the weird little corners of your mind.

Then there’s Colored Craig’s mix for Resident Advisor. The amount of times I listened to this mix walking around the city are too many to count. His selection of house tracks will get you dancing no matter where you are and his playful smatterings of old school vocal samples immediately bring an instant smile to your face. So rarely do you hear DJs have fun with the music they love, and this mix is an absolute treasure trove.

LICK

I didn’t expect to watch my favorite movie of the year on a 14 hour flight from Japan back to New York but Suzume had me sobbing by the time the end credits rolled. Directed by Makoto Shinkai (of equally as devastating Your Name fame), the film follows a young girl who becomes tasked with stopping disasters across the country by closing a series of magical doors. Shinkai’s story draws influence from the devastation of the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and, through a cast of otherworldly characters like a sentient two-legged chair and a mischievous cat, it becomes a moving reckoning with grief and healing in the face of destruction.

In these end-of-year lists, I always love to include a favorite space I visited. Sometimes it’s a museum or a restaurant, but this time I had to talk about Codex Books. Nestled on the border of SoHo and The Bowery, Codex is one of the best bookstores in the city. Their selection of exhibition catalogs was incredible and you’ll find a wonderfully curated selection of hot new fiction releases, rare poetry titles, and a great array of non-fiction books from essay collections to niche academic texts. I always joke about opening a bookstore one day, and visiting this place has definitely my dream alive.

I’m still processing Telemarketers months after I watched it. Like many, I was drawn to the 3-part documentary series because of its ties to the Safdie Brothers only to end up sucked into an insane story of scams and exploitation. The show follows Sam Lipman-Stern as he works a job at a call center collecting donations for police organizations. As he investigates his boss Civic Development Group, and watches his co-workers battle addiction and prison reentry, he uncovers a history of shady behavior targeting some the country’s most vulnerable communities both inside the workplace and out. It’s a difficult, but necessary watch that defies the genre conventions of true crime.

CLICK

The tradwife, one of 2023’s most contentious pop cultural symbols. Gaby Del Valle’s essay “Land Ho” is a master class in criticism, tackling the tradwife’s performative gender politics with surgical precision. Beginning with the notorious influencer Ballerina Farm and ending with far-right Great Resetters, Del Valle reckons with the extremist fantasies emblematic of a nation in deep socioeconomic crisis. She writes, “They have enough money to live glamorously; instead, they choose to live a simple life. That this simple life might be an expensive illusion is never considered.”

“No roads lead to the waste plant.” So begins Arushi Vats’s piece of environmental contemplation, “Exiting The Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi.” Navigating through toxic histories of pollution across her own body and Delhi’s broader industrial landscape, Vats takes up the issue of legacy waste as an opportunity to engage with new states of time, matter, and being in a post-purity world. How do we co-exist with waste? How does the breakdown of their chemical compositions reveal the limitations of extractive capitalism? From the detritus of the waste plant to flows of contaminated groundwater, Vats merges art and global histories with hyperlocal ecocriticism.

I came across Martti Kalliala’s essay “Club Ruins” while researching a project on the role of scent in nightlife culture and it sent me into a rabbit hole about nightclub architectures and their sensory infrastructures. Kallaila untangles the club’s complex histories of gentrification and marginalization, exploring how their spatial constructions build up precarious momentums of economic, cultural, and political power. As Kalliala ruminates, “clubs are one of the very few types of architecture, besides maybe public bathhouses, which are so intimately involved with the staging and directing of human bodies interacting—sight, sound, smell, intimacy, inclusion and exclusion. And maybe these qualities, when embodied in architecture at a great enough resolution, could also reconcile the incommensurate timescales of a building that might last several centuries and an individual club that lasts less than a decade.”

I’ll end with a poem that moved me this year: “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Matthew Olzmann. On first read, it took my breath away. I love Olzmann’s thoughtful line of inquiry, how it meanders through ecological wonder, challenges our impulse for violence. His poem invites us to care “to discover something primordial and holy.”