CASON
Watched: I watched Pixar’s Inside Out 2 in theatres this month “as a joke” (in VIP no less, because sometimes it’s best to watch a children’s movie in a venue where no children are allowed). Turns out anthropomorphizing anxiety as a jittery perfectionist in a pair of flare jeans and the voice of Maya Hawke was a very effective gambit. I went into the theatre ironically and emerged tender, having cried twice.
Listened: Like many of us out there, I’ve been entranced this month by the neon green behemoth that is BRAT. An album for sensitive party girls, Charli XCX’s latest output finds the singer at the centre of the dancefloor surrounded by early 30s angst—bittersweet friendships, faded romances, and an emergent desire for motherhood. Alongside Charli’s thoughtful musings, I’ve been listening to Tove Lo and SG Lewis’s HEAT EP, which collects a series of more straightforwardly party-ready tracks (for the unfamiliar, Tove Lo is a Swedish popstar in the vein of Robyn—think sexy, uptempo Europop). For me, the soundtrack of Pride 2024 is just these two albums back-and-forth in an endless loop.
Read: This month I read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, a title met with nods of approval from my coworkers. Translated from the original Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori in 2018, the slim novel tells the story of a woman in her late 30s pressured by friends and family to find a husband and some kind of fulfilment outside of her beloved job as a convenience store clerk. Whimsical and darkly comic, the book immediately reminded me of Supermarket Woman, a Japanese movie from the mid-90s about a woman who whips a failing supermarket into shape after years of managerial neglect. A nice little cinematic-literary double-bill for lovers of workplace comedies and unconventional social satires.
JESS
Watched: I had the attention span of a gremlin this month but I loved watching An Unmarried Woman (1978) at the Paradise, the first hour of How to Be Single (2016) and the first episode of season three of The Bear. Ayo Edebiri hive, rise up.
Listened: It was a big month for live music and sounds. Fred Moten visited Toronto for a performance with bassist Brandon Lopez at The Music Gallery. It was lovely to see the subtle choreography of Lopez’s bass-playing alongside Moten’s elucidating poetry: “Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between wanting and having.”
Weeks later, I finally attended an iteration of the Listening Room music series. Inspired by the Soulquarians movement – the days of musicians such as D’Angelo, J Dilla, Questlove, and Erykah Badu – the series brings local jazz musicians together to improvise reimaginings of songs from artists working across genres. Solange Knowles was this month’s featured artist and it was spiritual. Not to be like, you had to be there but you had to be there. The locomotive charge that is inherent to jazz’s improvisational framework gave me so much life. Attendees were beautifully dressed and so present, singing, swaying back and forth, head-banging, and embracing each other through the night. Black joy is healing.
Read: Ended up in Hamilton for a few days this month to be with family. I was in rot mode for the most part but there was a nice afternoon where my little sister (also a bookseller!) and I sat in the living room, reading across from each other. She flipped through Swimming in Paris by Colombe Schneck, a coming-of-age narrative told in three strokes, as I devoured Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists. We read lines from our respective books out loud to each other until we fell asleep.
OLIVIA
Watched: House of The Dragon and then the accompanying 3 hour long Alt Shift X livestreams breaking them down at 10pm every Sunday night ok!
Listened: TANIS and my eternal relistens: Julian Simpson’s projects and Mirrors.
Read:Through the Vitriol: Exploring Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Representation in Western Cinema by Bug Shepherd-Barron, Sally Rooney’s forthcoming Intermezzo, Anna by Mia Oberländer (trans. Nika Knight), Ayşegül Savaş’s forthcoming The Anthropologists.
JOSH
Watched: I’m rewatching some of my favourite movies, reevaluating them. And for this I’ve chosen DVDs (they’re baaaack!), sourcing them from my old and dear friend the TPL. On deck this week was the 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt at making Don Quixote. Generally I believe that to make a movie (or create anything, really) you need to be delusional. And this movie is a spectacular example of how a group of men who believe in their abilities come fully unravelled. What goes wrong? Everything. A perfect pick for Climate/Insurance Disaster Junkies.
Listened: Shout out to my favourite record store Neurotica Records. In the wake of Donald Sutherland’s passing I’ve been spinning a lot of Fellini’s Casanova, a superfuckingvibey soundtrack by Nino Rota, as well as some other instrumental records I scored in Scotty’s underground: Amarcord (also Nino Rota, 1973), Night Dreamer (Wayne Shorter, 1964), Somethin’ Else (Cannonball Aderley, 1958), Porgy & Bess (Miles Davis, 1959), & Stravinsky’s Firebird (my version’s Royal Philharmonic, 1978)
Read: I’ve been reading Playground [Sept 24, Random House], Richard Power’s upcoming book about oceans. His previous novel The Overstory (2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and totally changed the way I think about trees.
With Playground I was seeking those nuggets of scientific information that, when framed by Powers, would blow my mind and change my perspective on our planetary crisis. And Powers delivers those moments, to be sure. But the most compelling portion of the book, for me, was surprising: a diver takes a solo dive off of Truk Atoll, documenting the wreckage of warships sunk in WW2. The diver thinks of the unaccounted munitions among the wrecks, the toxins leaching out, and yet from all the steel is growing this bountiful and diverse ecosystem of life, an underwater rainbow of biodiversity.
Now, I’m skeptical that humans can respond in any way that isn’t destructive of nature (after WW2 we responded with nuclear proliferation, suburbs, plastics, gizmos, allowing consumerism to kick into a whole new gear and for Big Oil to sink their hooks into everything). But in his new article in The New Yorker, Bill McKibben does his best to prove my skepticism wrong. This is the kind of climate news I live for. There’s so much good news here–from California powering itself nearly entirely on renewables, to the prospects of magnesium as the metal of the future, and Solarpunks!!
MAX
Watched: Season four of Couples Therapy: Orna and four couples doing deep work and letting us witness. The trauma these people are dealing with – past abuse, the heft of religion and faith, some community shunning – are some doozies and, of course, impact their relationships with their partners. Many of these couples describe their conflicts starting to come to a head about two to three years ago. Doing the maths, accounting for production and pre-production, that makes it about 2020 when shit really started to go down for them. Perhaps the pressures from a certain pandemic might still be at play and showing up in their lives.
Listened: Sarah McLachlan. I see all you Gen X/late-Millennial (often white) ladies in the store jamming and singing under your breath as you peruse. Regarding Sarah: I'm just like you. When I hear, say, Adia, World On Fire, or Building a Mystery, this thing happens in me that happens when I hear certain hip hop, my head nodding and my face screwing up (I mean, Sarah, “You're so beautiful / A beautiful fucked up man / You're setting up your / Razor wire shrine”, you don’t need to come that hard with it). At her Budweiser Stage show last week, she opened and announced her presence with that electronic ba-ba ba-ba ba of Sweet Surrender . And when she closed with Angel, my grieving friend Matt left his work-post selling triple-priced cans of mojito, wrapping one arm around me and one around Cassie as we swayed, the flashing CNE sky threatening rain. Matt’s worked dozens of shows at the venue over the years and he said this was the first time he joined some friends to take in the encore. That Sarah is working some powerful witchy magic.
Read: I'm going through my notes on Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir (you might notice her as a member of Orna's very twee and very severe peer group on Couples Therapy). Nuar describes her experience learning clowning which grounds her meditation on primal, bodily, soulful joy, often difficult to find in this everyday-life of cultural norms and remote office work. (I read the book two years ago and I still keep thinking about the study she cites showing that only 10%-20% of smiles follow something actually happy or humorous, the rest all social script.)
There's a new article in The Atlantic looking at the present rollback of diversity hiring in book publishing after a growth spurt, part of a cycle that seems to happen every twenty years or so: spurt, then roll back; spurt, then roll back. Apparently, after #BlackLivesMatter and George Floyd's death, this was the biggest peak ever, which maybe means we’re right in the middle of the biggest rollback ever. So that impacts what books are getting written and what kind of communities are being reached out to. I'd like to add, in my own experience in book publishing, there's an actual lived, physical impact when you're brown or Black and working in a field that operates on quotas, rolled-back quotas, and the performance of bleeding heart. A toll on the body and spirit from doing that 80%-type smiling for 8-hour-days on end.
BULLETIN BOARD
To those who have kids ages 0-12 months: Read & Rhyme Baby Time with Carmen is back this Tuesday July 2nd (10:45am - 11:30am). This happens in store and participants get 10% off purchases after the class. Space is limited, so please reserve your spot by emailing musicwithcarmen@gmail.com.
Also join us Sunday July 14 at 1:00pm for Creature Feature storytime with Vikki VanSickle, reading her books Anonymous and If I Had A Gryphon.
And Sunday July 21st at 6:30pm for the launch of Only One Survives by Hannah Mary McKinnon.