BEYOND THE HARD TIMES FROM NOW
Place, food, and the perils of sharing online.
I grew up without TV channels; we had such bad reception that even CBC was barely watchable. Our VHS tapes and, later, DVDs were load-bearing for my cultural literacy, such as it was. I particularly loved Linnea in Monet’s Garden, a thirty-minute animated short from 1992. The tomboyish protagonist Linnea is an icon of once and future outdoorsy transmasc aesthetes.
Though it reinforced my interest in art history, the film's real highlight was the animation and sound design of the food Linnea and Mr. Bloom interact with on their trip to Paris--baguettes and cheeses and the like. It always made me hungry for fancy food and an idealized experience of urban modernity.
My mom acquired a slew of Newbury Medal books that I had to read in order to earn lower-brow reading material from the library (perhaps you are beginning to understand my parents' approach to childrearing; why yes, I was homeschooled), and books like From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler likewise impressed upon me the glamour of city life--imagine being able to take a used train ticket all the way to the Met! When I tried to run away from home, I only got about a kilometre away before I realized there was fuck all around but trees!
I resent geoguessing as a cultural phenomenon, since it's hard for me to read it as anything but a disturbing normalization of the omnipresent threat of stalking and doxxing that being a poster inherently presents. More frivolously, I like to romanticize my own life by taking note of the place I live in, its rhythms and particularities, and I wish it were less fraught to share those things online. I'm now a grown-up who can go to the museum and eat baguettes with cheese whenever I want, but since I don't have a commute, my haunts tend to be hyper-local. I know it's naive, but I wish I could broadcast tidbits about my daily life without accepting as a trade-off that any details I provide could lead to bad actors showing up at my house.
I would love to include a photo of what my street looks like when the cherry trees bloom, but I'll refrain. Spring took its sweet time, but it’s here now. Thankfully, the same scene is in view on half the residential blocks in Vancouver at the moment.
READING
- It's okay if child liberation & family abolition make you uncomfortable. - Devon Price doesn't always hit for me, but this did.
- The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick - an oldie and a goodie
- The Worst Magazine in America - satisfying, infuriating food for the Atlantic haters (which I hope includes us all.) Makes a good pairing with Taylor Lorenz's video essay The Rise and Fall of 'the Resistance', as well as about half the catalogue of If Books Could Kill.
- for the TTRPG-inclined: Tenacious Clocks
Hades II has eaten a lot of my real-book reading time for the past month. I have quite a bit more to say about the game than I expected I would, but I will refrain until it's complete.
EATING
- Lemonade with hot cross buns and plain salted potato chips on a crisp, sunny Sunday in April after working on your deck? It doesn't get better than this.
- I threw together some weird little DIY cake pops out of a Frankenrecipe--this classic birthday cake from King Arthur Flour (use a generous hand with the almond extract) sans icing, frozen and defrosted and then beaten together with the frosting from Sally's homemade cake pops, rolled and frozen again before being poked with a toothpick and dunked in melted semisweet baker's chocolate before being gently deposited on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and chilled yet again (in the fridge, this time.) Be generous but quick with the chocolate dunking, for structural integrity.
- Japanese milk bread dinner rolls - my first outing using tangzhong was very successful. I'm attempting a pantry cleanout for #austereapril and I have a fuckton of powdered milk that needs using, so I expect more milk breads in my future.
LISTENING
- tardy, but: 1hr30min of what I listened to in March. Highlights: new Leon Vynehall, Circuit des Yeux and Gaga (good again); Amy Winehouse, eternally relevant.
- otherwise, still quite enjoying Diossa's Feb 11 HÖR Bogotá set.
- the first OP to Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam has been stuck in my head incessantly and is a fun watch if you've ever been curious what a city pop Neil Sedaka joint would sound like paired with grimy 80s anime sci-fi aesthetics.