lena valencia, mystery lights — meh. i was hyped for this one because it came recommended through the same newsletter that pointed me towards television, and because the content of the stories seemed quite up my alley: ghosts! UFOs (not the same as aliens)! creepy folklore! general eeriness! alas, i found this quite mid. there is a certain baseline competence to the stories, in that they move quickly and i never finished one wondering, what the hell was the point of that? or felt like something insufficiently plausible (on the character level, not re: spookiness) had marred the development of the plot. and despite the presence of Stephanie, Their Mutual Friend At Whose Barbecue They Had Met, the prose was as a general rule not overtly clunky. the problem is that it wasn’t anything else, either. the description that keeps coming to mind, as i have previously alluded to, is “YA-adjacent,” but i want to be clear that i specifically mean post-boom YA and also not the good stuff… like, yes this is nominally a book for adults, but i legitimately think as a writer she is nowhere near authors like courtney summers, laurie halse anderson, e. lockhart, sarah mccarry, et al., all of whom write YA but IMO have good ears and cannot be accused of writing prose without a voice. (even francesca lia block, a writer i would mostly not recommend trying out for the first time as an adult, at least writes with undeniable personality — while someone like judy blume, the OG, is not writing “literary” sentences but is out here thoughtfully capturing the believable idiosyncrasies of her adolescent narrators.) when i think of “YA-adjacent (derogatory),” i think of a style that certainly does specific things commonly associated with good writing, such as being specific, balancing description and action, producing reasonably realistic dialogue, etc., but that does those things in very bland way that lacks any real individuality. it’s not bad, per se, and to be honest i would take it over that strand of genre corniness i am so, so allergic too (although corniness can also be found in YA), but there’s nothing particularly enjoyable about the actual reading of it as opposed to the absorption of the story. that’s how i felt about this collection. not much that i can point to as particularly objectionable (stephanie excluded), and some of the ideas felt like they could have been really fun or compelling in the hands of another author, but the writing was such a total nothing that there was no real pleasure in it, the characters felt thinly sketched, the atmosphere was nonexistent (a real dealbreaker in allegedly eerie fiction)... etc. also there was one story with no supernatural stuff about being an unemployed 22-year-old in brooklyn during the blog years that was written in the second person present and while i’m pro–second person the combination of subject and form did make me think “it’s giving thought catalog” as an intrusive thought the whole time i was reading. so… there’s also that. i am also still thinking about that other more recent story where she claims an indie rock musician was once hailed as the second coming of dylan, reed, bowie, and cohen, all rolled into one, which, again, can’t emphasize this enough: No He Wasn’t.
andrew sean greer, less — this was very nice!!! i liked that the voice of the narrator felt very much like that of a “storyteller” in a pleasing, charming, old-fashioned sense, and i found our hapless not-quite-hero very endearing; the evocation of a mostly-vanished gay art scene was convincing, and i appreciated that it was a story about a kind of growth and rebirth at fifty that felt believably happy and optimistic without papering over the difficulties and losses of age. greer found one way to get away with writing about a writer, which is to make him not particularly successful (i would have maybe cut one scene of someone unexpectedly telling him how much they enjoyed his previous work…). i laughed out loud a few times. i did find it a bit slow — sometimes pleasurably, sometimes a bit less so — such that i spent most of the book thinking i liked it enough but probably wouldn’t bother with the sequel, but then the ending made me cry for real-real so now i think i might (unless one of you jumps in to tell me it’s terrible i suppose).
fritz leiber, conjure wife — this book slaaaaaapped. i didn’t love it quite as much as leiber’s “a deskful of girls,” which i am still begging all or any of you to read, but it was great fun. an ethnologist (it’s the 40s) in a stuffy college town discovers his wife has started exploring the practical applications of the witchcraft practices he was ethnographizing in his research; for the sake of her sanity, he demands that she put a stop to this delusional habit, and together they burn all her charms. naturally, his life immediately starts to fall apart. this is a pretty great premise (even better when you add in the other faculty wives also scheming supernaturally on behalf of their husbands — the extent to which this remains a campus novel, with the encroaching menace manifesting as bitter students and gossipy faculty members, is part of the pleasure), but leiber carries it out with real aplomb. he makes really wonderful use of the main character’s status as a social scientist, and there’s a lot of great passages where we, the readers of a novel about magic, watch him re-explain to himself the human mind’s susceptibility to coincidence; even as things grow progressively more undeniable, leiber maintains this fascinating depiction of a man caught between two beliefs — one that goes against everything he knows to be true, one contradicted more and more by his own senses — constantly vacillating between accepting that he’s taking certain steps for magic reasons and maintaining he’s only doing it so that his delusional wife in a psychotic break will continue to trust him so that he can help restore her to sanity. impeccable vibes, including one fantastically creepy end-of-chapter cliffhanger. i also admired the way that leiber constructed a world in which women do magic and men don’t but found a way (IMO) to mostly avoid essentializing about it in a cult-of-nature way. very fun book!!!
iain m. banks, consider phlebas — the third of the science fiction novels i added to my list for Project reasons. did i like this book? no, not at all. did i feel like it had literally any redeeming values whatsoever? i mean, if you like space opera stuff and creative worldbuilding, sure, probably; i am not the person to report on that. i guess i will also say there were two sequences that hinged on some genuinely repellent/upsetting concepts/situations in a way i did not enjoy but did more or less admire because it’s no mean feat to come up with a really disturbing fictional scenario (although i could have done without the attendant fatphobia in one of them). was the writing bad? it wasn’t great. i would say sentence to sentence i hated this somewhat less than i hated dawn, but it was also like twice as fucking long (and suffered similarly from the “nobody here is a real character” problem). there was a pregnancy plot point near the end of the book that made me really mad but then it wound up sort of moot in a way that in some ways made me less mad and in other ways made me feel like, okay well then that was even less fucking necessary, wasn’t it… i have learned that even fans of the ten-book series this kicked off often think this one kind of sucks and is slow and boring but god knows i will not be reading further to find out if things improve.
thomas pynchon, inherent vice — bummed to be disappointed by this! i started it out with high hopes because cali-noir about a huge stoner set during the nixon years sounds sooooo up my alley, but i just could not get myself on this book’s wavelength at all. the whole time i kept feeling like it was trapped between the modes of a very serious literary masterwork on the one hand and a proper noir on the other, and it never seemed to inhabit either of those modes fully enough or integrate them seamlessly enough for me to really click with it. i kept thinking i would rather read delillo or chandler instead of this peculiar hybrid that did not offer me the pleasures of either. in particular, the whole point of chandler, to me, is his sublime gift for Vibes and Atmosphere, and i felt like this book, despite being about a stoner running around california chasing various conspiracies, was curiously lacking in vibes… for such an ostensibly madcap plot, the actual writing felt quite staid, at times even plodding, but also never in a way that gripped me with its depth or intensity, either. the other big chandler contrast that kept surfacing for me was that while i wouldn’t call marlowe a dazzling feat of psychological nuance in characterization, there’s a certain compelling core to the character — the wounded romantic turned reluctant cynic — whereas our hero in vice is really truly just a stoner with no other discernible personality characteristics (i can see people, including pynchon, disagreeing with me, but like a lot about this book, his occasional moments of reflection or tenderness felt clumsily grafted on from some other guy rather than revealing about the person we had been spending time with… i just didn’t buy it idk). i also did not get pynchon’s sense of humor as displayed here at all — there are some pretty good jokes but there was also a lot of stoner/boner comedy that felt more fitting for the screen than for the page? like imagine reading a novelization of harold and kumar go to white castle… it wouldn’t be funny, right? because stoner humor is at heart stupid and requires solid comedic performances and good timing, editing, etc. to work? i also felt like a number of the female characters were written in a very tropey low-key objectified noir way that is forgivable from the midcentury pack but, like, this book came out in 2009… pynchon can definitely write, so i’m not wholly opposed to giving him another shot, and wonder if actually maybe one of his more straightforwardly “serious” works might work better for me… but most of them are like 600 pages long so i’m not exactly in a rush.
patricia lockwood, priestdaddy — i liked this a lot! lockwood is just such a fun writer; i enjoyed all her weird lil similes, her sense of humor, her cadence, etc. even her turns towards preciousness, quirk, tweeness, etc. — i could see some people being put off but for me she rode the line just right! one of the best things a memoirist can be is a person you just like having in your head, and lockwood is that. i did feel like the structure of the book was maybe a little less than wholly sound — i thought i had the rhythm of it and then towards the end we got a couple of sections that felt more like essays in an essay collection than chapters in the book i’d been reading. but i get the impulse to just put it all out there because who knows if you will ever get another chance to write about all this in a book again, and also some of that stuff wound up being among my favorite bits (including the chapter on voice i posted a quote from), so i’m not really complaining. as alluded to before, this book made me really reflect with profound gratitude on how awesome it is to be an estranged daughter and how lucky i am to have achieved this so young. that’s not really a comment on the book but my thoughts on it feel incomplete without it since i did think about it any time her dad did literally anything.
lily meyer, the end of romance — i picked this up because this interview the author gave to emily gould for her nymag newsletter made me curious about this as a book about nonethetical nonmonogamy and a female protagonist with alienating opinions on the kavanaugh hearings. i actually felt reading the book like it was much “softer” and more likable than i had been hoping for based on that — sophie is very straightforwardly a person driven insane early by the misfortune of being a sensitive child born to unemotional parents, a phenomenon i have watched make children crazy in real time, and then when you throw her horrible marriage on top of that everything she does makes total perfect sense — but naturally many goodreaders came away from this book furious at how terrible and selfish she is so i should have adjusted for my own position as a 6 on the kinsey scale of interest in character flaws. i did enjoy reading about a character who makes many bad decisions, some self-destructive and others outwardly destructive, for coherent psychological reasons, including at one point straight-up delusion and repeated lying to herself of a kind i like to see authors bold enough to tackle in fiction because it’s happened to me but it will always be met with a chorus of people mad that a character is acting in such a straightforwardly nonsensical way. i enjoyed other things about this book, too: a story about a woman repeatedly caught between what she believes and what she discovers she wants; her complicated history with female friendship and the narrative weight given to her most important female friend; a viscerally familiar description of being a neurotic bush-era teen who can’t make friends in college; the way sophie is concerned with what it means to be jewish in the world in a way that reminded me mostly of older books (although i’m not exactly actively keeping up with contemporary jewish-american lit lol) — there’s a sequence about christmas at her jewish boyfriend’s parents’ house that was very interesting; the imaginary turtle she carries out internal arguments with; a low-key #triggering in a good way depiction of when the guy you have to keep yourself ungoogleable from keeps sending you derangedly pleasant emails that make you want to kill yourself. the writing was just okay but it moved quickly, which after some real slogs i have come to see as a virtue in itself. i did feel like ultimately the book maybe didn’t totally land the plane, or did for some threads but not for the one it closes the curtain on… it’s hard for me to figure out how much this is a me problem because ultimately sophie’s vision of her happy ending is so profoundly my nightmare so it’s possible i’m being biased… but i think maybe the math of the book is not quite right and can think of a few adjustments that might have sold it to me better. i’m not sorry i read it, though, and i’m curious about the singer novel she says served as her original inspiration.
game night — i feel like everyone says this movie is soooooooo good and funny but it was just okay. rachel mcadams is great though and we always love to see a new girl alum getting work!
the drama — i really loved this one… it has proven Controversial and there are some criticisms i think are valid, some i don’t personally agree with but can’t really argue with (like if you don’t buy the relationship, you don’t buy the relationship and i can’t talk you into that, but i did buy the relationship), and a lot that feel like they come from people who either have a very different understanding of the movie’s goals than i did (tbh some positive reviews also in this category), or have a very different view of the intersection of morality and adolescent psychology than i do. i guess i liked it because this movie made me think of things i did when i was very young or very unhappy or some combination of both that were not the result of reality-based thinking, and it made me think of how totally inarticulable and unreachable the headspace i did those things in is now and often was even very shortly after they had been done, and how in my heart of hearts i cannot believe that the reason i didn’t hurt anyone more seriously than i did (which is not to say i didn’t hurt anyone; i did) is because i’m a better person than other people who hurt people much more seriously when they were very young or very unhappy or some combination of both. i think i am lucky, and only lucky, that the circumstances of my life and certain accidents of my temperament limited the scope of the harm i could perpetuate. i don’t think this says anything about my moral character. and i felt like the drama was in conversation with this kind of outlook. zendaya, whom i have always liked as a screen presence but never before particularly admired as an actor, captures something about a specific kind of shame in this performance that i have never seen brought to life on screen. there’s something about how lost she is, offering the explanation she has for the person she was, almost became, which she knows cannot possibly be good enough, which she knows can only sound hopelessly stupid and inadequate said out loud, that has really stayed with me, on a personal level and in conjunction with what to me the movie has to say, or at least to offer, not so much about violence itself (which the movie, arguably, has nothing to do with — i think the ambiguity of this question is more present in the movie than it has been in the discourse about it) but about our desperate need to explain it. i’ve thought about this movie more than anything else i’ve seen this year, by a long shot, and i’m hard-pressed honestly to remember the last time a movie proved this sticky for me. pattinson is also great, and i did love their chemistry — i found it really romantic (and quite funny, too).
the love parade — an early lubitsch, from his musicals era. the first half of this movie, about an ambassador kicked out of france for excessive horniness who goes home to fall in love with and seduce his virginal yet incredibly horny queen, is a total delight, full of great gags well-balanced between smart and gleefully not, powered by the charisma and chemistry of the exuberantly horny central duo and the energy of the supporting cast. then the second act starts and even before it gets to the dismaying taming of the shrew ending, it just loses all its fizz, fun, joy, etc…. the movie can’t figure out how to keep its tone entertaining, or how to build drama out of its scenario without going so broad the balance of the whole thing just falls apart. love that first act tho! great gag with a dog. some fun comedy-choreography in the servants’ numbers, providing almost enough razzle-dazzle to make you forget about how very 1929 they are re: gender.
the christophers — the latest tiny little soderbergh diorama, guess what i liked it, fish found in ocean, etc. ian mckellan as a crabby, arrogant, cancelled-ish artist delivers some monologues gorgeously and also gives a specific intonation to the line “i was bisexual” that is maybe my favorite line reading of the year. i had never seen micaela coel in anything and was so impressed by her ability to hold her own in what is essentially a two-hander opposite, y’know, ian fucking mckellan; casting her was also critical given that her character necessarily talks much, much less than mckellan’s, and her incredible screen presence makes her feel like an equal partner dramatically even though she’s often “just” reacting. very talky script, giving theater a little bit, in a way film people often dislike but i reliably enjoy. james corden appropriately cast as a guy who’s really embarrassing and annoying. we saw a q&a with cast/screenwriter/director and the best part was how visibly happy ian mckellan was to be able to talk about making a real movie with a real director and a real script after his years in the x-men mines.
mother mary — if i had a nickel for every time this month i saw micaela coel anchor half of a two-person show about artistic resentments opposite an established member of hollywood royalty… i was very excited for this movie and i enjoyed it a lot. is it good? i don’t super know. i sort of want to rewatch it because it revealed itself as we progressed as something other than what i imagined it was going to be — something operating squarely in the realm of magic and myth, but also a much simpler narrative than the green knight was — and i’d like to revisit it and see how it feels knowing now the shape of it. it might be a little underbaked, although there were a couple specific touches i really liked. but i love anne hathaway and i guess i love micaela coel now too and they are two of the most beautiful women in the world and i like ghosts and sparkly costumes and female friendship stories and pop music and that was all happening in my face for two hours very bright and lovely to look at and listen to so i was happy.
monte carlo — another lubitsch musical and unfortunately the only total dud i have seen from him… a number of problems but most of all the jokes simply aren’t good and what can you do if that’s the case? jeanette macdonald, so lovely and charming in the love parade, tries her best, but the script just isn’t there. alas!
silicon valley (all seasons) — i started putting this on to motivate myself to do my mobility exercises and then as usual i got obsessed with it and had it on in the background for everything until i had finished all six seasons. obviously my feelings on this show are no secret but i do think that it’s just such an achievement. the writing is really intricate in a way you can only get away with in a heightened reality (like a sitcom) but it’s driven by internal character stuff such an impressively high percentage of the time, such that all their last-minute rescues feel like magic tricks rather than cheats (a favorite of mine is the season 4 finale, when the thing that saves them is that a few episodes ago gilfoyle hacked jian-yang’s new fridge out of spite — it’s such an in-character thing to have happened that bringing it back to actually mean something feels perfect instead of cheap). the show is also just so well-calibrated in terms of knowing exactly how much our guys should lose and come across as losers (not always the same thing) vs. how often they should get to win and be cool (ditto)... you can really see this in the finale, where everyone gets their happy ending but with just the right amount of friction for it not to feel sappy. and the jokes remain great. in conclusion, i sure do love this show i have watched start to finish now at least five times.
here’s a recentish single from the band that took over my listening towards the end of the month, because i got legitimately emotional hearing emily haines sing “it makes me jealous of my former self / i had to tame her for my mental health”:
robyn, sexistential — yay robyn :) really liked this, find her as funny and weird and charming as ever (the adam driver/adam sandler line… lmao), appreciated that while it’s not quite body talk it’s definitely more pop-forward/hook-driven than her last project which i respected as Art but did not gel with in the same way… but she’s like kesha in that she’s just someone whose voice and vibe i like having in my earholes.
mary middlefield, will you take me as i am? — spotify girlpop that gets too soupy for me but has some good tunes when it’s not doing that!
taylor acorn, poster child — i added this to my to-listen list based on the earnestness (and hookiness) of the stompclap-adjacent “home videos” and was very pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s an outlier on the album, which is otherwise much more in the mode of breakaway-era kelly clarkson. if you like breakaway-era kelly clarkson you should give this one a listen!
august ponthier, everywhere isn’t texas — soupy mopey tumblrcore theater kid pop that mostly struck me as annoying but harmless and not nearly as bad as the corook album that i hated so much that year even though it’s in a similar Sensitive Theater Kid mode (at least this album for example did not have the actual lyric “i’m a sensitive person”), BUT!!! then i got to the track “angry man” and i got SO ACTUALLY GENUINELY MAD because the chorus literally goes, “i know the saying, but it only hit me now / if you grew up with an angry man in your house / all the time / there’s always gonna be an angry man / in your mind.” which summoned up alllllll of my inner FUCK OFFFFFFF reserves, because: fuck off! i find it sooooo fucking lazy to outsource the CHORUS!!!! of your allegedly vulnerable song about your evil dad to Some Decontextualized Content You Saw Excerpted On Social Media. like, that’s abnegating the literal sole job of the artist, which is to struggle to find words for that which cannot be completely articulated. and it makes me sooooooo crazy to pass off something from someone else’s ART as “a saying.” fuck off. on the bright side it was because i was so mad at this that i looked up catherine lacey’s “cut” which was so good i now have one of her books out from the library!
mitski, nothing’s about to happen to me — is the title a hint that this is a concept album about what if nothing ever happened ever? because wow this was BORING. mitski is one of those artists i’m forever meaning to check out but now i’m like, perhaps my avoidance in this case was telling me something real, because snooooooooooooze.
makthaverskan, glass and bones — have been loving an older album of theirs, loved this one too which sounds exactly the same! love a good jangly indie rock setting for a lady wailing melodically…
imarhan, essam — dave called this “algerian desert blues” which is as good a summation as i can make; this has a cool, warm sound (wait ok that looks stupid but i mean the version of cool that is not opposed to warm… you know what i mean), feels kind of sparse and big at the same time? i wasn’t exactly surprised that i liked it but i was surprised that some of the songs have lingered in rotation past a second listen (not based on quality, based on my own tastes on what i like to jam to vs. what i like to try once as an Album Experience).
julianna barwick & mary lattimore, tragic magic — not quite as magical as the last album that made me think about being an eighth grader who loved enya and loreena mckennitt (that would be disinblud’s self-titled debut, for those keeping score at home), but even at my grown age it is nice to occasionally revisit the genre of Take Me Away To My Home Among The Faeries music.
lia larsson, DUNKA — endearingly annoying europop, fun to listen to something that commits this chirpily to the bit — but just the once.
plash, i live alone — some nice sounds happening, so much so that towards the beginning i briefly wondered if i had softened my stance on dudes with guitars without realizing… but by the end of the album i was so bored it retroactively made me dislike the beginning.
HANA, HANA — i literally cannot remember anything about what this sounded like at all
hemlocke springs, the apple tree under the sea — truly honestly sincerely from the bottom of my heart one of the worst things i’ve ever heard in my life, but in a weird way where i wasn’t mad about it at all. off-the-charts theater kid energy of the kind that reminded me of why i never got into the dresden dolls meets a singing voice that’s like… an abrasive baby voice with questionable pitch trying to be a rock star? really, really, profoundly unpleasant. but, again, in a way where i was like… well, good for you… you have a passion, and a vision, and those are beautiful things to have… i can’t imagine anyone would want to listen to this on purpose but you’re closing in on half a million monthly listeners on spotify so clearly someone does and i think that’s so wonderful… it’s amazing when someone makes the art that comes from their soul and other people’s lives are enriched by it… you could not pay me to listen to 30 seconds of this ever again though.
fif, the lower forty-eight — lots of cool scuzzy indie rock band jamming out sounds that i liked listening to but were not really song-shaped enough to bring me back for more.
snail mail, ricochet — snail mail is another one of those artists i’m always like “oh yeah i should check them out but i’m never in the right Mood…” happily while i wouldn’t say i was blown away i certainly liked this album much better than the mitski one.
jens lekman, songs for other people’s weddings — ok i thought this was like a clever title for an album i assumed would be a collection of, like, love songs, romantic songs, bittersweet songs, elegiac songs, etc., but this is actually something much more awesome which is a concept album about a wedding singer going through a break-up. it’s whimsical and strange, with musical theater overtones in a neutral to good way, and very sonically sweet, and, i dunno, the moment i realized what was actually happening i was just so charmed by the fact that someone had come up with this idea and turned it into music! i would recommend taking a walk and listening to the story unfolding…
WILLOW, petal rock black & thunder wave — willow is never doing my favorite thing, but she’s definitely a best-case-scenario nepo-baby in that she’s just out here surprise-dropping jazz-pop experiments clearly fueled by nothing more than figuring out what sounds good to her and brings her satisfaction to make. that’s exactly what you should be doing if you are the daughter of two extremely famous parents with more money than god. i do find it really impressive that she self-produces and think she’s legitimately extremely good at it… i’d love to hear her produce for other people just because the world would be better with more willow production in it.
mother mary: greatest hits — ok honestly, bops on bops on bops!!!!! antonoff & charli really did understand the assignment here, and i’m so charmed by the way that anne hathaway (who as per the david lowery q&a we saw after mother mary apparently did like 1 million vocal takes on the songs) did the thing that real life pop girls do all the time and aped the pronunciations and intonations of the demo vocalist, channeling charli’s essex accent into some recognizably british “can’t”s despite playing an american lmao. “holy spirit 2” early song of the summer contender, when the chorus dropped in the movie i smiled so wide because for a moment i really felt like i had spent so many years writing insane tumblr posts about real life pop star mother mary and she was out here singing this for us. i mean, “did you ever feel you’re holy? did you ever feel it? did you ever fear it?” would have gone soooooooo crazy #onhere in 2014!!!!!!!!!
metric, pagans in vegas — so like a week before their new album came out i became seized with this desire to only listen to metric that also became a need to go through their entire discography chronologically (minus the uh cosmopolis soundtrack they did with howard shore??? what???????), so first of all i would like to start by publicly acknowledging that i underrated synthetica, unfairly punishing it for its crime of being the first metric album to come out after i spent all of 2009 listening to fantasies while going so so crazy and dropping out of college LMAO. anyway i was still too sensitive after that experience to even give this one a chance when it came out, but it’s also pretty good! i have learned it’s not beloved in the fandom but idk why, i thought it had some bops and brought back a little heft after the haze of synthetica.
metric, formentera II — this one i just like totally missed coming out entirely… it was also good in a way i don’t have much to say about and i should probably return to it at some point (and regular formentera, which i did listen to but was clearly not in the right place for because how did i not bother to save “paths in the sky,” which has since relisten entered possibly my metric top ten) but my listening was soon fully dominated by…
metric, romanticize the drive — yay new metric! i was honestly worried when i learned via reddit that they’d teamed back up with the production team behind fantasies for this one because like DON’T PLAY WITH MY HEART LIKE THIS, but while the specific biographical confluence of album and self that has made fantasies so enduringly special to me will probably never be repeated (or, like, i mean, i HOPE not!), this album is great, very hook-driven but also with a little more oomph and edge than a lot of their recent work, metric at their most pop but still hitting hard. it’s also just crazy that they are TEN ALBUMS IN and still good. this whole journey #MyJourney, which really took over all my listening for like the last two weeks of the month, has really brought home that i do need to start haunting the resale sites in july in the hopes of seeing them on tour even though i don’t care about either of the bands they’re playing with.
cherry blossoms peak weekend & nina browne, notice/know/kin, @ the brooklyn botanic garden — first of all, did you know that it’s the brooklyn botanic garden? not botanical. botanIC. don’t you hate that? i hate it. but i love the BBG so i forgive them. second: yay i managed not to miss cherry blossom peak bloom! the last time i went it was during the weekday with someone else with a weird schedule, but this time my tutoring schedule had me a couple subway stops away on a saturday, so i took my opportunity then and was really delighted to discover that the weekend of the peak bloom span brings out tons of new yorkers from all over in groups to see the pretty pink flowers, some dressed head-to-toe in pink thematically, all bustling with a nice kind of unofficial holiday energy. it was very cute!!! one of their buildings also had this cool exhibit up of art inspired by scientific botanical imagery; you can check out the artist here. because the gardens were so crowded i cannot post any of the cherry blossoms pics i took but here are some close-ups of my favorite flowers i saw:
storytelling & mozart @ the morgan library & museum — first of all i had been vaguely aware of the existence of the morgan but had never actually gone and would like to start by saying their building is very nice! the storytelling exhibit was one of those catch-all exhibits with a loose theme that’s an excuse to show Some Of Our Cool Stuff, some of which was indeed quite cool; my favorite of course was the room dedicated to new york stuff :) it included this 1973 stuart steinberg sketch that’s a precursor to his famous new yorker cover on a similar theme:
the mozart exhibit was also cute and i liked that it seemed to convey that the impish characterization of mozart in amadeus was to some degree true to life—he was a jokester! (although shout-out also to the one placard that really wanted us to know that joking about bodily processes was extremely normal in upper-class german society at the time.)
