End of the Month: November
What's the right sound to beat the winter blues?
LUKE:
Read: I can’t stop recommending All Fours by Miranda July and that won’t be slowing down at all. It was an experience I haven’t had in a long time – a rush, a revelation, and what I think of now as required reading. It’s a bizarre epic about an artist on a road trip which ends 30 minutes away from her house and the exciting and harrowing potential of following where desire leads. Max explains it well in what he’s been reading and I’ve been loving hearing all my friends talk about it. It changed some of their lives!
Listened: It was great picking up the new issue of BUTT magazine and seeing an interview with Troye Sivan! I wasn’t previously a fan but, after his SWEAT tour with Charli XCX this summer, I'm coming around to him. What really cemented it for me, though, was his episode on Song Exploder, exploring the making of his song “One Of Your Girls”, which is much more layered sonically than I anticipated. His interview in the magazine is similarly revealing and the whole issue is great. Perfect gift for the cool person in your life (yourself included).
Saw: Recently saw Anora (2024) in theatres and honestly not quite sure what I think. Came out feeling blustery, bruised, and a bit bad. It did make me think about Cookie Mueller and her book Fan Mail, Frank Letters and Crank Calls, which holds a similar feeling of touching the underbelly of power, desire and celebrity. It’s an epistolary story told through, well: mail from an obsessed fan, some frank letters to and from concerned parties, and some transcripts of strange calls about a big rug. It’s a pocket sized ride and the Hanuman Edition fits very nicely in the hand.
OLIVIA
Read: Blah blah blah originally I started my write-up telling you I’m behind on my reading goal this year by forty-something books but that it doesn’t matter, except, it actually doesn’t matter, so here are the comics I read and loved from ShortBox Comics Fair last month: Aglæca by Michèle Fischels, The Shit Witch by Lis Xu, Expiry Date by Sloane Hong, and Being Useful by Laura Knetzger. (For the record, I also meant to pick up Jean Wei’s Hearth’s Haunting, but I blacked out and somehow missed it. Hoping to read in the very near future.)
November was a good month for book fairs and zine purchases for me, with a visit to Toutoune Gallery that gave me Lina Wu’s Hellbaby and the Eternal Lethargy, Conor Stechschulte’s Monks Mound, the 86 Surprise Issue of Kiblind Magazine (REMINDER: COOL + FREE!), Powerpaola’s I Couldn’t Stop, and Keren Katz’s Chapter Two. 401 Richmond’s Holiday Open House was a dream, and at Critical Distance’s Turning Tables Art Book Fair + Show I picked up Misbah Ahmed’s Nazar, Yaniya Lee’s Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have To Disappear Every Once In A While, and a pre-order for Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s Property Journal. I know I’m not going too in-depth here about any one read – and I want to! – so just a note that I’m thinking about reading practices, reflections, and how best we can share them with each other, I promise.
Listened: My usual pattern with audiodramas has repeated again: it took me 20 episodes to get truly, deeply invested into The Silt Verses, but the first half of November saw me become consumed by these characters, their fraught gods, their horrifying deaths. I have to listen to audiodramas really really loud to hear the dialogue and foley so I’m perpetually a bit fearful that the person standing next to me on the TTC can hear screams and squelching. But The Silt Verses was worth it. I’m also feeling so blessed to be listening to a new season of Julian Simpson’s Aldrich Kemp series (called Aldrich Kemp and The Rose of Pamir) – only two episodes out as I write this, but charming, witty, and smart, and as always the perfect accompaniment on walks to and from work.
If you prefer less fiction in your listening, I can’t recommend Blueprints of Disruption enough. Lately I’ve found comfort and valuable guidance in their “Masking as a Revolutionary Act” episode, but it is always a worthwhile listen.
Finally, of course, author and organizer Jody Chan’s closing remarks at the Boycott Giller counter-gala, as part of six events nationwide where authors and bookworkers read and celebrated Palestinian writing, has been echoing in my mind since I first heard it via wawog_to’s livestream. Listen here.
Saw: As noted, movies lately haven’t been part of my life – I’m grateful to cousin bookseller Charlotte for getting me to see Mur Murs as part of Saffron Maeve’s CONTOURS screening series. Beautiful. Made me miss my Chicano family.
CASON
Read: This month I read Love, Leda, the only known novel by the late Mark Hyatt, published by Nightboat Books earlier this fall. Illiterate until adulthood, the London-based poet wrote the novel sometime in the early to mid-60s, before the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. The novel follows Leda, an underhoused and underemployed man in his late teens/early 20s, as he ruminates over unrequited love while wandering in and out of bed with various bachelors and housewives. Reminiscent of Diana Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, Hyatt’s novel captures the countercultural fervour of the 60s with poetic precision. Take this string of sentences: “I stare in stupidity at the freedom of the wild flowers. The winds of nature leave my youth hanging at no-man’s level. The sky is diamond blue.” Incredible, right? Instant cult classic.
Listened: Musically I’ve been all over the place this month, trying to find the right sound to beat the winter blues. I’ve been listening to Think of Mist, the latest album by local singer-songwriter Dorothea Paas, which we’ve been playing on heavy rotation in the shop. I’ve also been revisiting the entire discography of Ariana Grande after watching Wicked (more on that later). Finally, I’ve been listening to electronic duo Orbital, whose new greatest hits album I’ve been looping like it’s my job. At the moment I’m particularly mesmerized by the track Beached, made with composer Angelo Badalamenti for the movie The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio. (Is this movie any good? Haven’t seen it, but the soundtrack slaps). Featuring snippets of dialogue from Leo himself, the song is recommended listening for anyone in need of a little slice of paradise.
Saw: I saw Wicked on opening night because, although I’m loath to admit it, I’m a bit of a theatre nerd and I loved the musical in my teens. Big-budget and splashy, the movie was about 20 minutes too long but otherwise I enjoyed it. The songs were so lush and playful, and the (real!) sets and costumes were like candy. Maybe the energy in the theatre added to the thrill. There was clapping and cheers after each song and I’d estimate that 10 percent of the audience came covered in green facepaint. Neither Jeff Goldblum nor Michelle Yeoh can sing, but Ariana Grande is a STAR and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. When the lights came up, I looked behind me and saw a twink weeping, unable to move from his seat, and realized that I too had shed a few tears.
BILLY:
Read: On Trans Day of Remembrance I went back and revisited some of my favourite poems from We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. I earmarked a new favourite (I suspect in a few years, this whole book will be earmarks), “Everywhere We Look, There We Are” from Cam Awkward-Rich. Cam presents this newsclipping detailing the arrest of a “male impersonator” and in the subsequent found poems, Cam constructs new narratives relating to the Black queer experience from just a few select words from the article, lengthy titles, and vast amounts of empty page. My favourite simply reads “o im fine, i m fine”.
Listened: My current binge-listen on long, cold, dark November walks is 99% Invisible’s audio bookclub of The Power Broker. Roman Mars (99% Invisible) is joined by Elliott Kalan (Flop House) and in each episode they discuss a few chapters of the book and invite you to read along and listen along with them. I was slow to get on board with this series, but then a recent episode featured Brennan Lee Mulligan, the creator of my favourite DnD actual play show who once used Robert Moses as his Big Bad Villain in an urban fantasy campaign set in NYC, and my attention has been hooked ever since. If there was an extra-nerdy reason to listen to an already pretty nerdy podcast, I found it.
Saw: Okay, look. I could lie to you and say that I saw some beautiful, moving, heart-wrenching piece of high brow art this month and that it forever changed me. But I didn’t. I saw Venom 3. And I loved it. Is it well written? No. Is it fresh and exciting? Also no. Is it any good at all? Debatable. But you know what? In the middle of the movie Venom turns into a slimy black stallion and races across the desert with Tom Hardy on his back while gleefully shouting “Horsey! Horsey! Horsey!” and who among us can say that if we had the good fortune of being transformed into such a powerful creature that we wouldn’t do the same.
JOSH
Read: I loved The Sound Of Velocity by local author Eric Beck Rubin, a coming-of-age novel that brings to mind the best of Keith Maillard (Canadian novelist and personal hero) – the feelings of unease in one’s skin, a decades-long search for meaning, and the sadness imbedded in the passage of time. A zippy, heartfelt read.
For those thinking of gifts, the best books I’ve read this year are Warlock (a revisionist western from 1959 chock-full of action, courtroom drama, and romance), Dear Dickhead (new from Virginie Despentes, an epistolary novel about sobriety and recovery), Love Junkie (a long out-of-print satire of gay life in NYC in the 80s), I’m a Fool to Want You: Stories (magical stories following trans sex workers), and What If We Get This Right?: Visions of Climate Futures (a climate positive book in interview form, refusing to despair).
Listened: Listening to William Burroughs while also reading him. Sure, the English language borrows most of its locutions from the King James Bible & Shakespeare, but I submit a third player: Burroughs for all his coined culturalisms — Heavy Metal Kids, Steely Dans, & Hamburger Marys. Is the new film Queer gonna bring Burroughs back into the conversation??? To be seen.
Saw: Had a blast with my kiddo at Young People’s Theatre’s production of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. Intermission-free, 75mins of perfect fun, it runs until Dec 30th!
MAX
Read: All Fours by Miranda July. I thought, hey, this here book might have something to tell me about female desire and about my ignorance, naivete, and fear of it. The novel follows the Miranda July-like forty-something narrator as she embarks on a road trip, solo and away from her husband and child, from California to New York City. But instead of following through, she holes up 30-minutes from her home at a motel because she becomes obsessed with a handsome young man working at the local Hertz. All Fours depicts the narrator’s growth from her suffocating conception of domesticity, which she inherited from her family and from the culture and from all of history, to her realization of all that is possible for her, erotically. Her husband, Harris (Jess says he’s probably based on the director Mike Mills), is a bit of a cypher and a dunce and, in a way, I could relate to his blankness, the childlike way he was terrified of his wife being anything except the safe, stony person he thinks he wants.
Listened: “Who Is He (And What Is He To You?)” by Bill Withers, “Tennessee Stud” by Johnny Cash, “Inside My Love” by Minnie Ripperton, “Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by The Delfonics, etc. AKA Jackie Brown: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture. Reflecting on it being the second album I’d ever owned, that I bought with my employee discount when I worked at the College and Crawford Blockbuster Video (membership number still memorized: 20731799902).
See below.
Saw: I wrote about Jackie Brown for the latest issue of Film Fvckers, a zine put out by Brandon Lim who also curates the Black Belt Cinema screening series over at The Revue. He put a call out for pieces about physical media so I had to make something up and figure out why Jackie Brown has so many close-ups of vinyl spinning, audio tapes being pushed into their players, and VHS remote buttons being smashed. I came up with how we usually only interact with physical media when we're in safe places and when we’re being ourselves. So when there's a shot of physical media in the movie, a character, be it a piece-of-shit gun runner or a down-on-her-luck flight attendant, is letting their hair down and showing their humanity (quiet moments of vulnerability a rarity in Tarantino movies). Check out the issue which we'll soon have in-store at The Junction.