I rang in 2017 drunk and crying. I left a party a New Year’s Eve Party where all my friends and I drank down the clock and M and I went home, and I had been obsessed with “Love More” for a few weeks so as soon as we got back to the house I put it on over the stereo. Anyway about ten seconds in I started sobbing and I couldn’t, for the life of me, explain why. (I wasn’t even sad! It’s just such a beautiful song!) M just put his arm around me and kind of half-laughed and told me it was going to be okay in a quizzical but very convincing way and eventually I stopped crying and the song played itself out. I think that about sums it up.
Anyway I think we can all agree that 2017 was a weird year in a grand sense, which I don’t feel compelled or equipped to speak to. But it was weird in a personal sense, too. The year started in that mass of feelings for me; I dyed my hair pink; I lost someone I cared about deeply, which hurt in a place I didn’t expect or understand. The other side of that month was the Women’s March: housing twenty friends from Boston and Brooklyn and elsewhere in a spirit of earnest and viable and real solidarity that nearly broke my heart.
In the spring I worked a lot, and eventually got to travel across the country and fall in love with a couple different cities: New York (Life After Youth, celebrating my 25th); Seattle (Bois Naufrage, fancy coffee, riding the bus); Austin (freeways, rental car, KUTX, wildflowers). In the summer, Keeper put out a tape – bittersweet timing, just before Sam moved back to Texas – and I got a few days on the Cape with the crew. I worked weekends and drank green juice and read novels. In the fall I got really into that Fever Ray song and memorized the opening passage of The Argonauts and finally made it to DIA: Beacon.
Overall, I think, it’s been a head-above-water kind of year for me, where I mainly got caught in a cycle of exist-process-react-exist without creating much. I spent a lot of time thinking about my feelings but still can’t exactly mark the growth. Sometimes stillness is a sign of change, though; maybe I’ll count that one as a win. So here’s a list of 10 things (big and small!) that I saw, heard, watched, made, felt and loved in 2017, that helped me get through the year.
Before this year became the kind of dumpster fire in which you hear everyday about new ways that powerful, prominent men treat the women around them terribly, The Heart was talking about consent in a genuinely nuanced, genuinely feminist way. The “No” season was four episodes long, during which host Kaitlin Prest stared down specific instances in her own life where consent’s gray area reared its fucked-up face, and explored where the experiences left her – how they influenced her sense of self, how they shaped and informed her future sexual (and non-sexual!) encounters. And then she broadened the scope, ignoring the easier narratives – “yes means yes,” “no means no,” “consent is sexy!!!!”, rhetorical devices so exhausted and exhausting – and instead asked harder, realer questions about the intersections of desire, fear, gender, pleasure, and autonomy. It gave me language I didn’t know I needed and set a model for a kind of audio storytelling I didn’t know was possible. I wish they played this at every college orientation across the country.
What if we appreciated women’s art apart from maleness entirely? What would it look like to tell the story of popular music through only women’s greatness? That was, crudely put, the mission of the list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women that NPR Music published this year. Being part of this project was huge: it meant absorbing massive amounts of history, rethinking canon, getting to be an editor(!), working with some of my biggest professional idols. Mostly, though, it meant devoting much of my working life to the intersection of radical feminism and rock and roll. What a dream.
I was drawn to art that felt genuinely subversive this year, but it mainly played out in moments of surprise: disappointment from expectations I didn’t realize I held being left unmet; utter radiant joy when this need I didn’t know I had was fulfilled. Maybe the most memorable time it happened was in June, at GAY/BASH, a monthly experimental drag show in D.C. It was the first time I saw drag IRL, which would maybe have felt subversive no matter what – but probably few things would have matched watching a drag queen in a red white & blue housewife dress penetrate the eyeholes of a Trump mask with a strap-on. Incredible! Tell me you can watch that and feel unmoved. My friends and I went back to GAY/BASH every month after that. The music was always perfect: The Knife and Paramore and No Doubt and Cher, etc. But mostly what felt so powerful was the company: being in explicitly gay spaces full of gay and queer people, where abject expressions of sexuality and of gender trouble felt neither like threats nor invitations to violence.
There was also, of course, Sasha Velour, the cerebral art-queen who was crowned this year’s winner of Rupaul’s Drag Race. I saw her on tour with other season 9 queens this summer; her lip-sync of “Praying” by Kesha was perhaps, no lie, the most moving musical performance I saw in 2017. She embodied and embraced the reality so many of us face as women and queer people: victims and victors, agents and acted-on, mired in both hope and fear on a near-constant basis. It was transcendent.
On a less serious note, D.C. is, like many cities, in the midst of a ramen craze right now, and if I’m honest I spent an inordinate amount of the year benefiting from it! And from the fact that a few places will even deliver ramen right to your house if you have the right app! (Also, there’s a lot to be said about cultural appropriation, the devaluing of non-Western food traditions, etc. in these contexts; I am trying to keep learning and will leave the explanations to folks smarter than I.)
I called this band the “best band in America” all year and I meant it. Their Tiny Desk concert was both an exhale (after the stress of running the Contest itself) and an inhale (before an unrelenting and enthralling month of tour with them). I saw Tank and the Bangas perform eight times in 2017; their positivity never got stale, their exuberance never felt forced, their passion never wavered. They sound like no one else I know. Goddamn, I love this band. The best band in America!
I went back to therapy this year after not really going since childhood but thinking about finding someone to talk to and being jealous of friends’ casual off-hand remarks about their therapists for years. I went mostly because of this thing that happened last December involving some brutal unkindness from a loved one that was so vicious yet unexpected it left me feeling startled and knocked off course, like having been shoved from a great height and, after shaking off the dust, finding myself very alone. I thought it was a minor disturbance but it actually burrowed pretty deep into me and I wound up freaked out about a bunch of stuff, so long story short: I finally found someone to talk to.
I will save my breath about how mental health care should be accessible and de-stigmatized. I will say that therapy made my year better in a lot of ways; mostly, in that I had a dedicated time and place to work, patiently, on some things that felt really paralyzing. (It also taught me some useful concepts, like the idea of psychological safety and the Buddhist teaching of the “second arrow,” which I then snuck into some of my favorite writing I did this year. Win-win.) Nothing is fixed, obviously; therapy has felt mostly like a drawn-out emotional root canal all year, which is to say, I still nurse the same ache that sent me. But I’m grateful and I am learning and it’s starting to feel less self-indulgent to want to address my bullshit. I recommend therapy to everyone! If you’re interested in talking to someone, here are some affordable resources.
There are precious few things that get M out of bed early: the promise of imminent skiing; a genuine emergency; and coffee. I’ve relied heavily on the third one this year to squeeze in a half-hour of quality time with him before I go to the office. Listen I know this is cheesy as h*ck but it truly improves the overall quality of my day! Anyway the iced coffee at our corner coffee shop is not for me but the baristas take great care with their espresso shots so I started getting iced americanos instead and now I have been converted to an iced americano grrrl, even in winter (true to my New England roots). And a morning-coffee-with-your-boyfriend grrrl. Gross! I can’t help it.
Madeline Zappala is both a dear friend of mine and a total badass artistic inspiration to me. I was so glad she asked me to help edit her magazine, Reflections on the Burden of Men – and that she (and her co-creator, Laura) accepted a short piece I wrote about being disgusted by sexuality, or maybe more so by the insistence that women perform it for patriarchy, feeling isolated from my body, wanting to not want what I want. Editing the writing in the magazine was a dream! And watching it come together was so instructive. Go get a copy! (Or just pick up some unsolicited dick pic stickers, a real thing they made.)
2017 was a pretty exciting year for Keeper, too. Between January and August – when Sam moved back to Texas and Keeper became a project with a less coherent identity – we played amazing shows and put out a tape and met a lot of really lovely people. I learned a lot.
I never got the appeal of using the phrase “work wife” to describe a lady BFF in your office before this year (too close to “girl crush,” which, I maintain, is basically homophobic; plus, who wants to replicate the capitalist heteropatriarchy of the marriage-industrial complex in your office friendships, of all places?!) but now I have two and I totally get it. There’s really something special about working alongside women like me, and having them be people who are willing to take a lunch break or walk to Starbucks (lol) so we can encourage each other through weird career stuff, or vent about male incompetence, or gush about new music, or interrogate what it means to care about feminism or justice or epistemology or whatever in 2017, which is mostly what we did. Some of the most enriching and important conversations I had this year were these; we often joked about the positions of authority we’d have, the raises we’d get, the articles we’d be assigned if only the People In Charge heard the conversations we had around cafeteria lunch tables!
Of course, there was also the mere fact of having lived with three other women throughout this year, creating a home that was a constant space for frank discussions about shared oppression; there were days of 8+ hours of GChat sessions that formed a virtual safe space; there were the year’s albums that spoke to the bizarre, incredible realities of womanhood. And all of this happening in the context of women coming forward about sexual assault, women journalists reporting on it, all of us whispering #MeToo on the internet. It was a year that, for me, fostered a consistent and palpable sense of solidarity among us. I needed it.
Lastly: this is, maybe, the most wonderfully terrible music video I have ever seen. I first heard about this on the now-defunct podcast This Week Had Me Like, which I sorely miss, and now it’s rare that my housemates and I go more than a month without watching it communally. It’s histrionic in the best way, nonsensical, totally delightful. Thank you, Ansel Elgort.
theartofmadeline
stormborns
discoholicmusic
tangentwithtanner
jacobvanloon
andulkaphoto
