e, dear friend/frequent presence in this newsletter/my compatriot in Buttondown, sent out a great new issue of her newsletter strange magic which lovingly covers various important topics from her summer including mulch, Jimmy Eat World, keeping a notebook, Bottle Rocket, explicitly defining the person you want to be, grief, a playlist she made when she was 19, and Plantasiafloat_on.mp3another footnote from Nebraska by Monica Datta, which i screenshotted in last month’s stories and finished this month and was so good (and eerily relevant since it has a lot of rhymes with the Lindsay Clancy trial). if you want a substantial and rich “the dream of the nineties systems novel is alive in an era of post-literacy,” look no further! this has Bolaño vibes, the Dickensian fizz and empathetic renderings of interiority of White Teeth era Zadie Smith, and yeah great footnotesi started following Jon Brandt bc of Ashley Gates and he does such great stuff, a combination of John Wilson style “yes i’ve captured something perfectly weird in everyday life at the exact decisive moment” with a still photographer’s deeper compositional sensibility/use of colorbumper sticker of the monthi often fantasize about the universe where i’m a cigarette smoker because it seems so perfect to so many aspects of what i like in life but they have always made me feel horrible so i have to stick with weedwhich this picture reminds me of when i was on a work trip with cm outside Montreal and we were killing a joint in the parking lot of the hotel before the next team-building activity and went into the bathroom and were washing our hands and he said “and i always like to do this for courtesy“ and then did something i have not managed to find the word for (if it exists) but like “motor boating” but instead of breasts it was just his index finger going up and down over his lips with running water from the sink to wash away the smoke smell anyway i try to remember to do that now for Deborah’s sake before i kiss herme collab-ing with the budtenderthe most disappointed i have been by any work of art this monthpretty good but the only real chips ahoy! is the one with m&m’s in itbuldak/spicy seaweed needs to be much more widely available (there is Big Roll (great, Chef Deborah discovered, broken into pieces and mixed into fried rice) but i want sheets)interesting flavor but i haven’t had the source dish it’s representing (though i’d like to)loved this bit about buffets from Ruby Tandoh on Saudi Arabia’s attempt to build a fine dining scene did you know about this Instagram feature?! yes i did rub it in Deborah’s face that mine includes “shiba inu” but hers doesn’tjane manchun wong always on the vanguardalmost an election so now we have another round of discourse from empty centrists about the degree to which they want to throw trans people under the bus in order to try to get elected and i’m just like of course politics involves compromise and of course a candidate running in a red state has different pressures and has to make different choices of emphasis than in a blue state but on the other hand imo at the end of the day like either you believe on a fundamental level in human equality and equal rights or you fucking don’t? and if you don’t, eat shit!Sarah Hagi is writing again!! and among other things introduced me to Edward Said’s critique of the word “terrorist”and fuck israel!in other news, miso finally got to meet legendary newsletterer/writer of one of the GOAT thank you notes m.o. and her husband d.k.!deborah’s annual month of making art about miso, misotober, has started! follow her insta so you don’t miss any, though i will also definitely post some here, since they bring so much joy to my life.like, from yesterday’s comic, this rendering of my dream relationship with miso that i try and fail to attain through bribery and conditioningexcept sometimes when we watch k and t’s dog idgie, miso is more affectionate to me (or at least less resistant to my affection for her, which i read as same) i think out of exhaustion/a desire to put space between her and idgiewhatever the reason, i’ll take it whenever i can get itthe fact that this closeness happened for longer than 30 seconds was wildit’s giving “the creation of adam” / that miranda july movie with the perfect cody chesnutt songthe artist at work on her newsletter with her muselike one of your french girlsaesthetic of this letterkz, who was in town pet sitting, invited us over for dinnerthe wine i picked was good and had a farting sheep on the label (i don’t have a pic of that)kz’s mushroom risottoher lasagnaeven though i’ve seen and touched this dog i still am not 100% if he’s realmy parents texted me the zillow link for the house we lived in my last year and a half of high school and wow the amount of patterns in this one shot of the dining area from the current owner is so insanethe dog sit was near Blick, where Deborah got in some important swatchingDeborah’s knitting instructions which always blow my mindi did my first engineer technical interview call which i was super anxious about and it went really well (the interviewer said, multiple times on the call, “you killed it”)i do really love my computer sorrrrrryalso though me as a software engineer (from Geordie Shore season 7 (previously))this is a great playlist for concentration or meditationi wrote another article at the psychic wound factory and Deborah did a cute comic for it seriouslythis show isn’t very goodbut everybody hits sometimesDeborah, tense before my encounter with the nearby Mexican restaurant i held a grudge against for 6 yearsDeborah and T as we walked home through magic hourwe were early for Resident Evil (excellent!) so did some buck hunting a weird thing about me is my general dislike of breakfast food but this was a really good egg sandwich (though Deborah, who likes breakfast food much more than me, said it was “too salty”)(though i was disappointed bc they had an amazing “Yolko Ono” sweatshirt i wanted but only in an XXL)their culture is not your costume (definitely not mine my heart is made of white bread and i grew up with a father who put extra sugar on Frosted Flakes so i have a permanently warped sweet tooth. frequently as a snack in my childhood i would put sugar on AN APPLE).Deborah’s fried rice (not too salty)malatang is a lifestyle🍻deborah’s latest newsletter about changes (bad and then good) in her mental health during virgo season <3 <3 <3 i know mental health medication isn’t perfect and some people have bad experiences (i have had bad experiences with some of them) and also yes if we lived in an idyllic socialist utopia maybe we wouldn’t need as much of it and also yes we don’t really understand exactly how or why they work or don’t work, but i have seen how much of a radical positive change that the right medicine has made in my life and in the lives of people around me and so it’s very important to me, on like an evangelical Christian-type level (mind-altering drugs are my religion), to be very open about that. your body is your choice (though it’s fucked up some don’t have the privilege of access to the choice) but the degree to which many people who do have the choice just accept living with suffering because that’s “natural” or they don’t want to be “dependent” on a medicine or they’re “strong” enough to get better “the right way” makes me sad. i don’t know man, tell yourself whatever story you want but from my perspective life is hard enough already. (Deborah is really happy to be working with her old psychiatrist (I’m thankful that she was able to go back to her) while for my own health i’m pursuing a more idiosyncratic, improvisational self-directed treatment plan involving various modalities of healing))anyway our household is thankful for welly bi feel like if you read enough about writers and artists in Europe in the early twentieth century you probably have had this fantasy at least a littleHilton Als, obvi “His work thrives on the incoherence of his own restless curiosity” spoke to memy favorite new newsletter is Sex Happens and i especially loved this recent issue by Megan Nolanfascinating detail from Garbage Dayi’ve always loved this corny-ass Paul song but Frank is crazy for this onethe all you can eat buffet episode of Nirvanna: The Band, The Show was so beautiful 😭i don’t really want to have a picture of Mitch McConnell in this newsletter but also this meme won that contest against stiff competition and made me laugh extremely hardhp replied to my story to tell me how much this one cracked her up which made me proudSurvivor is back and for my favorite podcast, i made an edit of Jeff Probst saying inspirational things over the music of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”i loved The Invite, which recently crossed the crucial VOD inflection point from being a $19.99 rental to being a $7.99 rental! i am super sus of “it’s basically a filmed play” type movies but it was really funny and all the performances were great. also the credits sequence has a Graham Nash demo of “Our House” with vocals from Joni Mitchell that i’d never heard and is really beautiful.i hopefully will have a job soon 🤞 and i really want to write about 90 day before that but also there’s just so much to say that the prospect is overwhelmingshaun robinson is the best tell-all hostannie dillard trying to get me to put down my thoughts on 90 daylike i already didn’t write about the season finale of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which was incredible, the richest psychoanalytic text of the yearit’s just SUCH a good vibes time for TV rn with Survivor, Taskmaster, Nigella on Great British Baking Show every week 🥹 i loved The History of Concrete even if not as much as i was hoping to love itlike i could have not been more excited for the Nathan Fielder movie and then they namedrop Stalker (previously) by Dean Young (also i noticed that almost all of the poem screenshots i saved this month were about different kinds of heaven)from tom snarsky’s new chapbook (preorder)
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