Good Cry

What I enjoyed in January

Reading

Open Throat is one of those books you shouldn’t know too much about before reading it, which you can do in one sitting if you’re particularly hungry. It’s a climate critique, a satire of American culture, a interrogation of humanity, an ode to queerness, and it’s fucking funny besides. Just read it.

On the academic side, I’ll recommend an article that I found evocative and educational both, but separately: where the text itself unfolds as a series of so many open-ended questions—thoughtful and unsparing, dedicated, it seems to me, to examining key concerns and themes from a variety of angles even difficult—the footnotes undergird those ruminations with their own almost separate review of literature, for those who want to dig deeper, have evidence, follow conversations. In both cases, the article is concerned with a kind of literature review on questions of queer-crip identity—what it does, who it’s for, and beyond. Alison Kafer’s “After Crip, Crip Afters” was a compellingly readable update on key themes in queer and critical disability studies, one that could also serve as an introductory text for the less familiar.¹

I have more, so much more that I was fortunate to find time for this last month. But the time for peaceful digestion has passed. I’ll be back with more as soon as I’m able.

Listening

Every year, there are a handful of records from Hanif’s top 10 that I hadn’t known, and which make it into heavy rotation once the year breaks new. This year there were two, and only because I didn’t have time to track down the dozens of others I’d never heard of. The first is anaiis’s Devotion & The Black Divine. The second is Maya Blainey’s A Room with a Door that Closes.

In some ways, I love both for the same reason: they are equally wide and deep in terms of the sounds they reach for, the genres they metabolize. But where Blainey switches from Aphex Twin breakbeats to death metal catharsis track by track, anaiis blends and mixes—up now with the strings, back off a bit with the Hiatus Kaiyote—within a single performance. My favorite track, “Call Me (a) (B)” evokes Prince, a little, when the vocals fist enter in earnest; you’d never expect getting there from the abstract and hollow opening. “My World (beyond)” is more like easy 70s soul, equally dreamy.

With Blaney, it just feels like she can do anything? Including the Big Feelings thing, with the telltale chord progression (see “Recognize Me”)? This record is all over the place and all of it is compelling.

Cry hard.

1. As always, with anything, email me if you want a copy and can’t get access.