I was ten years old when I first tried my hand at screenwriting. The premiere attempt was an episode of “ER” in which I planned to play the part of a homeless teenager (sex trafficked, if I recall) rushed to the hospital after an altercation on the street. Dr. Carter—Noah Wyle,1 my childhood crush— took care of me and also fell in love with me. Cancelable offenses all around, but I had barely begun the fourth grade, so I hope you’ll excuse it. I wrote my second script within the same couple of months. It was historical fiction, set during the Civil War. I played a girl who wanted to fight for the North so badly that she pretended to be a man to enlist. Noah Wyle would play a fellow soldier; my character got injured, and he took care of me and also fell in love. In fifth grade, I wrote a script for my friends to perform at recess. We were hippies who got locked up after a bomb went off at a protest, and the bulk of the story was centered around a jailbreak. (#Long time writer, long time rabble-rouser.)

That’s my last memory of a screenplay attempt in childhood. Throughout middle and high school, I wrote a lot of fiction, and started secretive drafts that would later serve me in my Livejournal, blogs, newsletters, and memoir. (Yes, I’m referring to a “diary,” but I gave it pizzazz, I brought craft, even then I think, to the retelling of my days.) Then, in college, I took several creative writing courses, including a screenwriting course. I wrote a very Manic Pixie Dream Girl story that involved a veterinary clinic, a British love interest, and a dash of magical realism. I was one credit short of a creative writing minor, but chose instead to minor in Peace and Social Justice Studies. Writing was beginning to feel frivolous. I was deep into radical politics, hanging out with punks and organizing against the war, and would soon decide that academia was a much more realistic path for security, and one that might also enable me to make significant change (lol).

I never stopped writing, but grad school promptly sucked the fiction out of my life. I would go almost two full decades not writing—and for almost as long, also not reading— a single lick of fiction. My work, though varied, has lived exclusively in the realm of nonfiction: academic writing, reporting, cultural criticism, analysis, memoir, an occasional poem. My reading material was a mirror of this. This has been really fulfilling work, and I will always consider Real Life to be a great muse. I will likely always feel compelled to write some kind of life account and, often humiliatingly, feel equally compelled to share it with strangers.

But something died in me when I gave up fiction, and I didn’t realize how big of a loss it was until I let myself explore it again. For a month or so I’ve been working on a pilot with a dear LA-based writer friend, and for two weeks I’ve been in a screenwriting class. As I told my partner: “this is more potent than any inner child work I’ve done in therapy.” Fellow nonfiction writers: do you remember what it’s like to just make things up?2 Even if you never wrote fiction, surely you used your imagination as a kid, and wow wow wow, do you know how good it feels to play pretend again? Though our show concept is vaguely autobiographical, as soon as we got into fleshing out the story we entered the land of character development and backstory and world building and it was electric. I am experiencing a creative rush that I haven’t felt in years and years; I’m floating. It’s wonderful.

That I’m turning towards fiction (Hollywood-targeted fiction, no less) in this moment of political crisis and quickening collapse is something I considered feeling guilty about, but I’ve become too convinced of art’s power to let myself succumb. Which is not to say I think a corporate-streamed television series is going to guide the revolution, but rather this: when artists do the work that makes them feel alive, the struggle for a better world will be gentler for it. More pleasurable. Dreamier and more imaginative. And my greatest revolutionary ancestors have taught me that those qualities are the most indispensable of all.

As a post-script and tiny commercial: taking this new work seriously would be a lot harder if I wasn’t enrolled in a Zoom class that allowed me time, devotion, and commitment. I run workshops, classes, and containers, and I also take workshops, classes, and containers, because I believe in the power of structured, community-rooted devotion. I hope you’ll consider registering for eight weeks of structured, community-rooted devotion in SUMMER CIRCLE. Work on your manuscript, your screenplay, your sculpture, your small biz plan, your garden plot and corresponding zine of poems about it….Your art and practice deserve this space and commitment. <3

Commit to your art. <3

Are you an academic or creative who finds the lack of structure in summer to be a barrier to your work? Do you always find yourself regretting lost time once August arrives? Do you struggle to stick to routines?

SUMMER CIRCLE offers community, accountability, & structured support for accomplishing your creative goal.

Tuesdays are for group coaching: checking in about projects, working through challenges, setting goals, and co-working as time allows. Thursdays are for concentrated co-working. But this is not just a co-working group, you will be a treated like my writing clients, just in a group! (There will also be time for 1:1 conferencing during the co-working hours.) Worksheets, exercises, and planning materials will be provided, tailored to your needs. This is not meant to be a casual drop-in, this is an eight-week intentional community that offers you the opportunity to show up for your work with routine, commitment, and loving devotion. <3

AND, some weeks will include (incredible) guest teachers who will guide us through supportive somatic & energetic exercises.

Examples of things you can work on and accomplish in this container: an article, an essay, a book proposal, a book chapter, a painting, a business plan, the creation of launch materials, a newsletter editorial calendar, a painting, a sculpture, refreshing your website, updating your bio and promotional materials, a screenplay, a zine.....

JUNE 2nd-JULY 30th

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It’s going to be great, and I really hope you’ll consider joining us! Until May 11, paid subscribers to the newsletter will get $100 off! So you should probably sign up today. :) Discount code is below the paywall. Also, if you’re an academic and you have research money, this would count for that! Siphon those funds! Also also: if you’re an academic and you have research money and you want to sponsor a low-income creative, please email me and we can arrange that!

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READING.

For , Jesse Roth wrote a thorough and thoughtful history of Yiddish anarchism. So much to learn from the successes and failures of the past. It’s a beautifully written must-read piece for anti-Zionist Jews, anarchists, and liberation-minded folks of all types: “From the ashes of these systems, anarchists seek to build a world based on mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, direct action, and collective decision-making. Yiddish anarchism, in particular, came from the Jewish experience of statelessness, of being a diasporic people who always lived (until the invention of “Israel”) outside of and beyond the nation state.”

I very much appreciated The Baffler series on how difficult it is for most writers to earn anything close to a living wage from our words: “A side hustle can be treated as evidence that one has not been ‘successful enough’ with her creative work to survive on it as her sole source of income. In this way, silence conceals from a collective narrative not only the privilege of wealthy writers but also the side hustles that underwrite the creative work of writers who aren’t wealthy, those dubious gigs so many of us have had to do at one point to pay the rent and buy groceries while trying to survive the MFA program, waiting on the late magazine fee, burning through the book advance.”

Kawante Harris’ dispatch from a women’s prison in Texas is a brutal but important read. The title says it all, with a built-in content note: “How Prisons Turn Traumatized Women Into Unpaid Crisis Workers.”

ICYMI, I read and loved Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural, a story of the horrors of rural-poor girlhood and pop star celebrity-dom. It’s a sort of magical realist Britney Spears retelling that begins in Appalachia and ends in a jaw dropping nightmare. Still, it’s got so much heart, and the female friendship that runs throughout is so potent. I talked to Candice about the themes of sex work, patriarchal control, femininized survival strategies, magic, and more— check out our conversation here.

I also read (listened to) Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, and my heart was really full the entire time. I am just two years older than Dunham but I was a solid four years older than her character on Girls, and I remember feeling both significantly older and more politicized than ‘the ladies.’ I scoffed my way through the pilot, unsure I could really watch a show about someone whose parents bank rolled her for two years after college. But I’m so glad I stayed with it because it became one of my absolute favorite shows. Dunham’s sensibility makes me emotional about artists because it’s clear she has something if not innate, then supernatural, of the daimon. Did she have her finger on the pulse of young millennials? Sure, but more magical than that, she had an ability to translate feelings into scenes in a way that makes clear that she moves through the world, like Anaïs Nin says, to live life twice. She is on the lookout, which is to say she is observant, and the best art comes from the auteurs who pay attention. Her memoir is testament to this too; the things she remembers and/or decides to highlight for us are poignant, little flashes of meaning-making from the banal, illuminations of the quiet parts in the extraordinary. (That Bruce Springsteen anecdote!) I often describe “One Man’s Trash”—one of my favorite episodes of Girls—as ‘literary’ and, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘cinemantic’ is a word I’d use to describe her book. None of this is to say that Dunham isn’t still a flawed figure (obviously/aren’t we all), nor that her powerful writing about fame, love, and medical trauma somehow redeems her of her mistakes of the past, but she did give us context, and that counts for something. I loved spending time with it, and I sure did watch that Adam Driver audition clip about a dozen times since.

WATCHING.

I’m still working through the three series with sex work themes that I wrote about last week—Beef, Euphoria, and Margo’s Got Money Trouble—and we didn’t watch any movies this week. Hilariously, the other series on rotation is Hacks, and they also had a sex work storyline in the last episode. It was, hands down, the best narrative yet: they make tons of jokes around the (male) sex worker introduced, but the joke is always on Ava, who is desperately trying to be a Good Ally. (And when the joke shifts to him, it has nothing to do with SW.)

I also realized I never wrote about DTF St. Louis, which I finished a couple weeks ago. I found it absolutely bizarre and loveable. David Harbour was a revelation and Jason Bateman’s go-to quiet-talk thing he does translated so beautifully to this romantic friendship love story. I did think to myself “I think the writers might hate women?” because I struggled a lot with the Linda Cardellini character, and I also did not like the reveal at the end (didn’t buy it!), but other than that, I had so much weird fun with the show. This is a good piece from Alex Schwartz on gender in the show. Did you watch it? Would love to know what you thought!

LISTENING.

I know this might surprise you, but I’ve been listening to….another twangy Americana album. Shocked, I’m sure! This is a brand-new-to-me band that I discovered through their song “Plains of Ohio” that truly sounds like how my heart feels on road trips through the flat cornfields I love so dear. The band is from Cincinnati, comprised of two long-time friends who describe their music as “music for introverted farmers.” It’s dreamy, it’s country, it’s earnest, and it’s going to be on rotation for front porch sittin’ all summer long.

JOY & ATTENTION.

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Content note for discussions of sexual violence, and also some mentions of explicit sex that’s not at all related to violence. Take care as you need!

I considered explaining my lack of substantive essays lately as a symptom of writer’s block, but really I have been more in a writer’s freeze, which I know because it’s not about creative stagnation, it’s more that I have a lot to say about things that are very much my beat, but I am, unfortunately, having a trauma response to getting the words on the page. I spent the first months of the year finishing my book, which includes analysis and theorization on responses to sexual violence, and put the finishing touches on it in the midst of heightened Epstein news. The headlines of sexual and gender-based violence didn’t stop—never stops—and most recently we were inundated with news of a “rape academy.” (In this same week, I read about the man who tried to kill his wife but ended up instead murdering eight children, seven of whom were his own; I also read more details of the systematic sexual violence that takes place in Israeli prisons. Didn’t stop, never stops.) Often in the discourse surrounding horrors like these, the subjects of porn, sex work, and kink will get tossed in, almost always as examples of symptoms of patriarchal violence.

I have been, decidedly, frozen. Every time I try to write about these subjects, if I can get any words out at all, I eventually just take the act the news does not, and I stop, close the draft and never open it again.

We’ll see what happens with this one.

Here are some things I want to say: I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I am a survivor of thankfully few incidences of sexual violence as an adult, primarily in my “civillian” life, but two of which occurred while I was on the job as a sex worker. That the news reminds me of all of my experiences with this kind of harm is a major reason I am frozen. When surrounded by triggers, frozen is an extremely common response for a nervous system to have.

But I have also been frozen in more abstract fear of my decidedly unpopular views about ways we might respond to the reality of this harm. I have felt very lonely, very meek, in responding to these things so differently from my peers. I do not, for example, believe more draconian laws or harsher prison sentences will solve the problem of patriarchal violence. I do not think anyone will be safer if we do more kink shaming. I do actually think we need to talk about men’s mental health (alongside patriarchy), and that it’s worth naming the distinction between men who act out of conscious ideological commitments to domination, verses unconscious internalizations of domination. And I know that state censorship of porn and criminalizing sex work do little beyond make it more dangerous for sex workers to do their jobs.1

This is tired territory. Feminists have been fighting about these questions for decades. My book digs into the ‘why’ of these (evidence-backed) beliefs, but let me be clear here too that my pro-sex, anti-state, prison abolition frameworks are always centered in a commitment to keeping survivors safe, preventing future harm, and building toward a world in which these kinds of horrors are less and less imaginable. I hope you will read the book when it is available to do so. It was grueling to write, but it will be worth it if I can engage in meaningful conversations with readers and thinkers in the aftermath. One thing is certain: I don’t have the answers, but I want the book to be an excuse to think through—together— the many pathways to a safer, freer, more pleasurable world.

…Okay, I am still typing, check out this thaw! My brain is chugging along because it knows I want to talk about TV now. My stories, what a sweet anchoring security blanket! It’s not a total non sequitur though, because the three shows I’m watching right now—Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Beef, and Euphoria—all include storylines about sex work (and OnlyFans is specific to them all, though Euphoria extends beyond online cam work). I don’t think I have it in me to summarize more of my thoughts on abolitionist responses to sexual violence and the importance of sex radical pleasure politics (again, that’s in the book!), but I do have it in me to write about sex work representation on TV! Hooray!

---

BEEF

A remarkably hateable Oscar Isaac plays Josh, the increasingly stressed manager of a country club. He is in a sexless marriage with Lindsay (Carrie Mulligan), a (terrible!) interior designer. One night after a big event, they have a violent, terrifying fight that is caught on video by lower-rank employees from the club. Part of their fight involves mentions of their decreased physical intimacy and his recovery from “pervert shit.” Instead of watching porn, Josh now listens to porn addiction recovery podcasts while jogging and thinking about optimizing his physical and mental health. Admittedly, the snippets we get from the podcast are not nearly as egregious as some anti-porn rhetoric; the host says something along the lines of not all porn being bad, but still, it is reminiscent of the branch of the manosphere that is committed to eugenics-lite through sexual purity. Later Mulligan asks angrily, rhetorically: “Is it either sexual deviant or celibacy?” Later we see Josh “slip” again—he has live cam sex with a sex worker he paid for ten minutes of verbal jerk off support.

In general, this season is weaker than the first, and despite avoiding extremely intense whorephobia, the entire storyline of him trying to better himself away from porn certainly doesn’t help reduce stigma. Now listen: I am not trying to say that it’s impossible to have a relationship to porn that feels unhealthy and I support people making choices about their time, energy, and money in whatever way feels best. But it is a loaded choice to present a character who has such a relationship when there are so many people who have a perfectly lovely relationship with adult content. Many things have the ability to create a negative impact on our lives—substances, overwhelming crushes, food, video games, our phones, and so on—and the acute and concentrated attack on porn is not because it is worse, but because the combination of Christo-fascist purity culture and its cousin, hyper-sexual consumerist culture, construct an enemy to distract us from the real causes of alienation (capitalism) and sexual violence (patriarchy, the nuclear family, the church, hierarchical ideologies).2

EUPHORIA

The only thing that’s made me feel more shame about being a sex worker than Sam Levinson is feminism. 🤪 (SWERFs, to be clear.) But yeah, the first two episodes of Euphoria season 3 were pretty rough! In under two hours we experience: intense shaming of OnlyFans (Nate is extremely upset by the idea of Cassie being nude, Maddie’s boss says no one will respect her actor client if he’s seen with an OF model, the montage of Cassie’s photos for the site are intentionally humiliating), see flagrant physical and verbal abuse of strippers, and see the slut-coded accessory of a stripper (Tish) in a trash can where her dead body is also shoved, which Rue then sets on fire. “Wow, the 90s really are back,” I say to my partner while covering my eyes. Jules is implied to be a sugar baby, which Maddie first says is no big deal, but then explains she’d never do herself because “[she’s] not a fucking hooker.” Meanwhile, in a scene I also covered my eyes for, actual former-OF model Chloe Cherry is seen swallowing a ball-sized bag of drugs with a camera angle that mimics a deepthroat shot you might see in porn. Let me be clear: I think it’s just dandy for people to deepthroat cocks in sex and porn if they are having a good time,3 but I don’t think it’s neat when people are sexualized while doing degrading labor under threats of violence (which the drug ring leader always hovers over her mules). There’s a major difference between these things!

What I was grateful for is that they actually gave a lot of space to the aftermath of the death of Tish. Her best friend, Angel (another stripper), is incredibly worried about her disappearance and when Rue finally admits she overdosed, Angel’s grief is enormous. Because the bar is in hell for treatment of SWers on screen, I was moved by and grateful for this! Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that Angel is also going to be killed off, as Rue drops her off at a “rehab center” that is likely a front Alamo uses as a cover to dispose of girls who cause too much trouble.

A thing to make clear: the depiction of stigma and abuse of sex workers is a fair and legitimate thing to portray—many (though not all) sex workers are mistreated, and stigma is everywhere. But Levinson seems to have a desire to exploit multiple things at once: the sexualization of his actresses, the stigma of sexuality when women control it for transactional purposes, and the sensationalism of violence against sex workers. And that’s a really bullshit combination.

MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES

I have only seen the first two episodes of this David Kelly series, but I did read the Rufi Thorpe novel upon which it’s based. The series is not particularly impressive in terms of the writing, but the actors (including Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicole Kidman) are doing their best with it. Margo is a struggling new mom; her child, Bodhi, is the result of an affair with an absentee married professor who won’t give Margo a dime until their son is 18, upon which Bodhi will receive a trust of ~$300,000. Margo is let go from her server job and has no luck at the temp agency. When Margo’s former pro-wrestler father (Offerman) mentions that one of his former colleagues left wrestling to make more money on OF, Margo decides to give it a try.

Both the book and the show are exceedingly compassionate to this decision, and Margo’s OF persona is far more silly than sexual. In the series, it takes nearly two full episodes before OF is introduced at all, which allows the audience to see Margo’s normalness and humanity. There is also an intentional attention to nudity that is explicitly desexualized (many shots of Margo breast feeding, for example).4 That her OF experience (in the book, TBD in the series) is relatively harmless is also refreshing (and, for many of us, very accurate). Additionally, this storyline calls attention to the very real demographic of many cam models: moms who need to be able to stay home with their kids and still make money.5 As always, it shouldn’t be the quest of the artist to portray (nor the barometer of the critic to seek) “good” representation, but I will say, it is really nice to get a break from the images and narratives of incessant violence and male gaze-y shots.

Unfortunately, if the series sticks to the book completely, there will be a really frustrating turn at the end. Another thing I don’t love is that they got such big-name stars to play working-class characters, which is, like, what happens in Hollywood, but it is, to me, and in this story in particular, distracting! They all look like they are wearing class costumes, ya know? Anyway, it’s ultimately a very feel-good story, and I shall keep watching.

- - -

If you want to read more of my thoughts on sex workers in media and politics of representation, here’s another piece I wrote a few years ago.

There is a joke about poets and the moon, and sometimes “poet” gets replaced with “lesbian,” and in either case, the idea is that [poets/lesbians] cannot resist her [the moon]. I am a writer who sometimes writes poems but I don’t consider myself a poet, and I am a queer who has dated women but I don’t consider myself a lesbian; still, I feel implicated in this relationship to the moon. I was a killjoy about space travel for a long time and to be frank, I do wish that NASA’s budget could be redirected to food and housing for people who need it, but given what else is happening in the world right now, I let myself indulge the romance of the recent Artemis II mission. The moon as a home for our grief, the awe of the moon as a reminder for the awe-worthiness of Earth….

Opportunely, the readings on my syllabus for this past week included a poem from Noor Hindi called “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying,” which includes the lines:

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

We read it out loud, with each student taking a line. I am always grateful for the confrontation of it.

All of it’s true. The moon is so beautiful, and juxtaposed to this, Trump threatened to annihilate an entire population and most people I know are struggling in one way or another. Hindi’s poem is a righteous condemnation, but it’s also self-aware, a show of ironic evidence of the moon’s power on the poet. She is writing about it even as she says she cannot. The moon is not the point of the poem, but it’s still there overhead.

This morning—after exchanging gardening tips, as we’ve been doing lately—the barista says, “I’ve just been so obsessed with plants. And also video games. I feel bad, but it’s like, for a distraction from everything.”

“I’ve been obsessed with plants and movies, and also the moon,” I tell her in response.

There are worse distractions, we decide, than helping things grow. And, we agree, it’s not such a bad thing to pay attention.

- - -

Below: essays against sloganeering, for welfare fraud, and more; my review of The Drama and a rec for a decidedly better comedy; and a tip for some spring time bluesy country from a late singer who never really got her due.

Reading +Podcasts.

Charlotte Shane’s essay on Dead Language this week echoes the J.P. Hill essay I shared a couple of weeks ago about the hollowness of a lot of Leftist writing. I’m grateful for the people who are articulating the problem of repeating empty talking points that keep us spinning. From Shane: “...words like “solidarity” and “mutual aid” and “liberation” lose their impact. That loss occurs in communication between people, but the impact dulls in one’s brain, too. Thinking becomes stagnant.”

Absolutely loved the writing, history, and analysis in Maia Silber’s piece on welfare fraud in The Drift. Silber provides a history of tropes of deserving and undeserving poor, then explains how the system today relies on some people cheating it, and, of course, how some must cheat it in order to literally survive. As someone who has seen the violence of state “support” bureaucracy up close, I was so grateful for this breakdown.

Barnard released recordings of panels from this year’s “The Scholar & Feminist Conference,” and I am slowly working my way through the richly brilliant talks. Of particular interest to me is “Protectionist Feminism and its Legacies: From the Sex Wars to Carceral Feminism,” featuring Lila Abu-Lughod, Lisa Duggan, Greta LaFleur, Sophie Lewis, and Amber Musser.

On deck: I’m finishing up Candace Wuehle’s dark and moving (and very working-class femme) Ultranatural and am excited to say more when I’m done!!!

Watching.

This section contains spoilers for the film The Drama. In the new Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario (2023); a creep essay (2012)) film, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a couple we meet in the week before their wedding. The first thirty minutes play like a romantic comedy: Charlie is writing his wedding speech with flashbacks of the couple’s meet cute at Tatte,1 their first kiss, Emma’s laugh, and steamy sex. Emma is trying to do the same, but we get less of her, and thus the film establishes, cognizant or not, that this is really a film about Charlie’s journey. During an evening of food and wine sampling with their best man and maid of honor, the four friends share the worst thing they’ve ever done. We hear about the time Mike (Mamadou Athie) used a girlfriend as a human shield against an angry dog, when Charlie cyber bullied a kid in high school, and when Rachel (Alana Haim) locked a disabled kid in a closet and didn’t tell anyone during the search for him. People respond with appropriate incredulity but also shrugs, especially since they were mostly young when these discretions occurred. Then, a very drunk Emma shares that, at 14, she planned to do a mass shooting at her school. Like, had the plans and the gun all ready to go. She didn’t end up doing it, not because of a change of heart, but because there was a mass shooting at the mall the same day. The change of heart came shortly after though, and she ended up becoming an anti-gun activist for the remainder of high school. Everyone is shocked, but Rachel is furious. Her cousin was shot at a school shooting and is paralyzed because of it.

I need you to understand that this scene is played for laughs. The tone of the movie—like Borgli’s Dream Scenerio—is borderline absurdist. He wants to create a vibe, and the vibe is stressful tensions that make people laugh out of deep discomfort, and he succeeds. It’s an intensely uneasy film, all built on what happens when a wedding party falls apart the week before the ceremony, and also Charlie’s sweaty spiral about marrying someone who was capable of planning mass murder.

People are upset by this, as you can imagine. The father of a child killed at Columbine said casting Zendaya as the would-be shooter “humanizes” school shooters in problematic ways. Other people are just confused, expecting a more traditional rom com and instead enduring a weird and tense film with a heavy plot pivot that more so becomes a showcase for Pattison’s performance of an anguished lover holding multiple truths.

I do not think art should be censored from engaging with tragedy in tonally mismatched ways, and I think the impulse to cancel a film based on a plot line like this is a real showcase of the death of criticism. However, I find it incredibly annoying when irony-pilled writers act like anyone who wants to dissect movies through a lens of power and oppression are idiots. Surely there is something between “cancel this Problematic movie” and “these dummies who care about liberation have failed to consider that Robert Pattinson is hot”2 or whatever. (I’m throwing a little niche media critic circle shade here, sorry!)

Anyway, what I think is worth interrogating about the film is the toothlessness of a race-blind script that ends up casting a Black actress as the lead. Especially if that character is supposed to have carried out a school shooting, a thing that is notoriously executed by white men. On this, Brooke Obie writes: “...’what would make a Black girl plan a school shooting and then never follow through because this is some white boy shit?’ would have been a fascinating undertaking. And if Borgli wasn’t interested in that undertaking, or doing the work in the script to make Emma a biracial Black woman beyond casting a Black man as her father for 90 seconds of screen time, then Borgli should’ve just cast someone white.”

Given the absurdist comedy that grounds the entire second and third act, it’s clear that Borgli isn’t interested in deep political commentary, but he does make a few efforts at criticizing American culture for being a place where really anyone, so alienated, could be compelled to shoot their peers. I suppose this is sort of his thing though—he’s a bit of a ragebaiter edgelord, giving us the surface of political engagement without any substance. This annoys me, too.

Still, all this said, a film that asks interesting questions without ever answering them still gives us something to talk about. And talking to other people about the movies is always my favorite thing about the movies. After seeing it, over drinks and fries at our favorite neighborhood bar, P and I had a great discussion about gun violence, liberal responses to it, race/gender/alienation, and masculine rage. Cute, tbh! Plus the acting was great and it was lit like Materialists was lit, which is a lighting I dig. I’m glad I saw it, and/but always I am dreaming of a day when A24 (etc) greenlights films that—more than just vibes and tone—have something to say.

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Speaking of films that have something to say and that are decidedly not race-blind, another thing I watched this week was the absolutely delightful One of Them Days. A lady buddy comedy written by Syreeta Singleton and directed by Lawrence Lamont, starring the always-exquisite Keke Palmer and the utterly watchable SZA (in her first acting role), that has so much heart! This movie crushes an ‘adventure day of mishaps’ formula while still feeling fresh, and brilliantly portrays the banal violence of poverty through comedy. I laughed and cheered and highly recommend it.

Listening.

Karen Dalton is warm spring music. Her bluesy country feels like a rickety front porch and an open field, and sometimes a dive bar with the windows open. (There’s a documentary about her I’ve been meaning to watch, though I think her life was a sad and hard one. Has anyone seen it?)

That’s all this week, ily & hope you have a good weekend! <3

Reading.

Because it lives at the intersection of sex and politics, I’ve been following the Bryon Noem “bimbofication” scandal closely. I haven’t seen any substantive writing about it yet, but I appreciate the sex educator and SWer content creators who are working to make several things clear: 1) kinks and fetishes are not inherently harmful nor deserving of ridicule; 2) it IS harmful when right wing “family values” Christians married to fascist politicians feel entitled to engage in the same communities they criminalize and violence, and it’s pretty fun to make fun of those assholes; 3) “bimbofication” is distinct from “sissy fetish” and neither of those things are necessarily related to transness/trans identity. Bimbofication doesn’t have to be explored in a fetish or kink capacity; many bimbos just want to inhabit the aesthetic in their everyday life, and it’s not directly related to a sexual turn-on (though is frequently linked to their sexuality, the way a lot of femmes understand their gender as overlapping with queerness, for example). There are also cis men who get turned on by being feminized by a partner (hired or otherwise), and for Noem, it appears that he desires a feminization that is bimbo-like. Fwiw, I don’t think Noem is trans, but I do think gender is a socially constructed spectrum, and so he maybe also isn’t entirely cis (whatever that means). Still, it’s important to make these distinctions during sex panics, which are historically and contemporarily wielded against people on the gender and sexual margins as a way to distract the public’s attention away from real perpetrators of harm. (There is a whole chapter about this in my forthcoming book!) Last thing I’ll say because I think it’s important: SWers are usually incredibly discreet and trustworthy with client info & photos, but the cam model who exposed him said she was frustrated by the Republican husband’s hypocrisy. Understandable since the Noem family is part of a regime that protects actual rapists while making it harder for SWers and trans people to stay safe.

This week my students read about the Guerilla Girls, anonymity, and feminist agency; and also about Alisa Shvartz’s controversial abortion performance art. (And if the school hadn’t lost power during the storm, on Wednesday we would’ve also been watching and discussing Born in Flames!)

Friend of the newsletter/femme writer extraordinaire sent me a gorgeous care package full of seeds and magic and love and also a copy of Open Throat: A Novel. I had heard of this book about a queer mountain lion and felt skeptical. I’ve only recently allowed myself to enjoy fiction again and as a “I prefer real human things to sci fi and spec fic” person, I thought a mountain lion POV would be too weird for me. But the cover was hot pink, and my sweet femmeship offered it, so I dove in. And goodness, I was blown away. The prose are terse and poetic and somehow all at once simple and complex. The affective tenor, though, is so potent. I was gripped by the unsocialized observations of this creature who explained humans so plainly, so accurately. I was absurdly moved when our protagonist faced environmental and human devastation, when they felt love, when they felt vengeance. It’s a quick read and such a powerful one. I know I’m late on this, so please comment if you’re another lover of this simultaneously rageful and tender little book!

Watching.

Babe, huge news. (Pick your generational reference) New Heathers just dropped/ new Jawbreaker just dropped/ new Jennifer’s Body just dropped. Forbidden Fruits is the Zoomer femme girls behaving murderously comedy-horror, and I am so happy for all the teens who get to claim this as their cult classic. The story is familiar: a tale of young women trying desperately to find belonging within and against the backdrop of patriarchal violence. Unfortunately, all that patriarchy (and capitalism & white supremacy & general family trauma) has led them to sometimes be not so nice to one another. We learn early on that there is usually a team of four salespeople on the floor of the boutique fashion store, Free Eden, but they are down to three, with the fourth (Pickle) mysteriously gone. The remaining staff includes Apple, Cherry, and Fig. Auspiciously, the mall’s pretzel store sample girl is named Pumpkin and is invited to join the Free Eden crew, which turns out to be a coven. Pumpkin is initiated by drinking blood and tears out of a rhinestone bedazzled cowboy boot. Natch. The jokes begin immediately and almost don’t stop—nearly every line is a quippy zinger and somehow it doesn’t feel like too much. Or maybe it is a bit too much, but in a femme excess way; an intentional piling it on, just like Cherry’s lipgloss. (supplemental reading rec: “High Femme Camp Antics”.)

It becomes clear that Apple is the ring leader and Pumpkin is trying to do some detective work about her by earning Fig and Cherry’s trust. We learn that Apple doesn’t let the girls have boyfriends (they can only communicate with boys via emoji), and though she tolerates that her friends have sex, it is forbidden on Wednesdays. Though the camp never wanes, we also feel a depth to the characters—there is dark pain in their respective pasts, and all of their bad choices and codependency and controlling behavior is so clearly a result of trauma.

No wonder it ends in horror. I won’t spoil anything, but for the fellow scaredy cats, I will say that the paranormal scares are extremely low (they are spooky witches, but no ghost conjuring, other than their weekly confessions to the spirit of Marilyn Monroe). But it does get extremely bloody and gory; however, none of the gore comes until the third act. I closed my eyes through a lot (especially through the acrylic nail scene, ugh, the femme nightmare), but it was very manageable.

I absolutely delighted in this, and was so happy to see it with my long-time witchy pal, K. I can’t wait to watch it again! There is so much to think through regarding girl friendship, trauma, men, control, desire, and magic. And wow wow wow is it absolutely beautiful to watch: femme havoc is always so aesthetic. <3

Listening.

My dear friend Sage recommended Annahstasia, describing her as a mix of Nina Simone and Tracy Chapman. A super accurate description, and an incredible combination!

Joy & Attention.

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love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading + Podcasts.

Vera Blossom writes about the benefits of transactional relationships — from therapy to sex work — in a piece for the cool new-ish pub, Sixty Inches from Center.

Orion featured the introduction to Denali Sai Nalamalapu’s HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance, and it got me choked up & eager to read the book.

In class this week, we talked about the art that fueled ACT UP, with a focus on Gran Fury and Greg Bordowitz. As usual, if I have an opportunity to screen the Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard documentary, United in Anger, I do it. The film moves me, inspires me, and makes me cry every time I watch/teach it. It’s free on YouTube and if years of me semi-annually reminding you to watch it hasn’t worked, now’s the time!

I read Amber Husain’s Tell Me How You Eat via a recommendation from Alicia Kennedy, and I really loved the book. Husain grounds the book in her experience through anorexia recovery and from there journeys her reader through histories of food and political movements. Husain reflects on questions about bodily autonomy, the role of refusal in social change, the necessity of organized food movements, and focuses on food-specific anecdotes related to figures like Simone Weil, Diane DiPrima, and Audre Lorde. It was an excellent example of autotheory done well, and an inspiring one, too. Also this week, I jumped in Alicia’s salon where we got to hear her in conversation with Husain. It was such a generative and smart discussion!

& some podcasts recs from the week: Conner Habib did an episode on Epstein and childhood sexual violence, and I so appreciate the nuance he brought as a CSA survivor and as a fellow queer who knows that the conspiratorial rhetoric we’re witnessing is more likely to harm sexual minorities than protect women and children. I loved Dean Spade’s conversation with Benji Hart about art, the imperfect results of transformative justice processes, and more. For anyone following the Taylor Frankie Paul domestic violence allegations and subsequent cancellation of The Bachelorette, this episode of Love to See It provided thoughtful and compassionate reflections. I’m also excited about psychoanalyst scholar and Palestine liberation activist Lara Sheehi’s new podcast Psychic Militancy.

Watching.

Listen, I can call myself an “ex” academic all I want, but the truth is that if there is new faculty-centered campus media, I am going to watch like a member of the directly-impacted class. Out of kindness, I chose to dig into a new academia-rooted dramedy while Peter is out of town so he didn’t have to hear me guffaw in ‘that would never happen,’ or groan in ‘oh god, that’s exactly what it’s like.’ Netflix’s Vladimir (based on Julia May Jonas’ novel of the same name) made me do both.

In Vladimir, Rachel Weisz is our unnamed protagonist, a horny middle-aged professor whom we are supposed to consider not incredibly hot (okay), and who reveals early on that she is an unreliable narrator. Her husband (John Slattery), another professor, is in a Title IX suit for his frequent habit of sleeping with undergrads. Turns out they are in an open marriage, and both Weisz and her husband understood these as consensual affairs. Meanwhile, Weisz is absolutely lusting after a new junior faculty member, Vladimir (played hotly by Leo Woodhall). The representation of lust—or maybe more specifically, ‘limerence,’ for anyone who has been so absurdly crushed out on someone that google led you to learning this term—is spot-on. Meeting interrupted by fantasies, the feverish inspiration to write….It’s all there. I was kind of weirded out by the affect of Weisz’s performance, but she nailed the portrayal of obsession. There are moments throughout the series that are both fun and funny.

The other thread of the story—the husband Title IX stuff—felt complicated, and I suppose that’s the point. But I didn’t love it! All the people in positions of power are blasé about the accusations, including Weisz and Slattery’s lesbian daughter (and lawyer), Sid. It’s clear the novel and the show are interested in illuminating the problems with abuses of power, and that we’re not supposed to be rooting for our protagonist, but it was jarring. At the same time, however, I found myself appreciating a speech Weisz’s character gives to her students explaining that she, after growing up hearing that sex spoiled women, found power and pleasure in a variety of affairs, including ones with complicated power dynamics. Who is ever on equal footing?, she asks in response to a student who said consent isn’t possible when power dynamics are present. I suppose this mix of conflicting feelings—a distaste for the casualness of the lecherous professor’s response to accusations alongside an admission of agreement with the Gen X lady prof’s insistence that all sexual encounters involve power, and that doesn’t have to mean they are harmful—is a sign the show was successful. But also: unpleasant!

Wanting to think through my complicated takeaways, I went looking for writing about the series. In an essay in The Cut, Natasha Lasky argues that campus #MeToo narratives like in Vladimir and other recent media (she dissects After the Hunt; Sorry, Baby; Tár; The Chair) leave things too ambiguous. Lasky takes to task the representation of killjoy Zoomer students, often portrayed as caricatures of woke queers. There are a number of points Lasky tries to make in the piece, some that I found to be confusing and contradictory, but this part of her argument is clear:

“Earlier movies like Bombshell, Spotlight, Promising Young Woman, and She Said told straightforward stories of crime and punishment that chart the winding process of bringing abusers to justice. Newer campus-set narratives seek to complicate that moral clarity….But does this onscreen complexity actually deepen our understanding of sexual misconduct?”

I have critiques of several of the campus films she cites (though I think Sorry, Baby is such a clear outlier here), but I am disappointed to see this thirst for more examples of “straightforward” violence (and don’t get me started on how Lasky thinks the end of Promising Young Woman is “bringing an abuser to justice”). There are, certainly, men with enormous power who do inarguably bad things; the news cycle of early March reminded us of that every day. But we will not get to a world free of sexual violence if this is the only framework from which we understand harm; most harm simply isn’t so black and white. Insisting on the carceral logics of “crime” and celebrating the easy morality of stories about undeniable villains (e.g. media conglomerate CEOs like in Bombshell) runs the risk of reverting back to a different version of “rape is committed by strangers in dark alleys.” We oughtn’t wish our way into more “straightforward” violence; the truth is that most of us experience harm in much messier ways. If film only offers simple fables, so many of us won’t see ourselves in them. And as frustrating as some of these campus stories can be, the complexity they insist on is so deeply realistic.

I still don’t know that I can say I liked Vladimir, but I am glad it prompted an engagement with these questions. (And even if Lasky’s takes didn’t quite land with me, I’m glad for her writing on it too. Media can always be an opportunity for us to keep trying to figure things out together. Thank goodness.)

Listening.

A confession that will revoke my #1 Waxahatchee Fan card: I had NO IDEA that Katie Crutchfield covered Jessica Simpson’s “With You” for the Girls soundtrack. How did I not know this???? I am an unapologetic Waxahatchee superfan and a slightly more apologetic Girls superfan….I really should have known this. I continue to not love Apple Music, but it was their algorithm that offered the song to me, for which I am grateful. I had never heard the Simpon version, but when I listened to it this week, I appreciated the cover even more. Simpson’s version, musically, is straight-up bad, and the fact that Katie saw something in it—I’m guessing the lyrics were enticing—is impressive. The result is an incredibly creative rendition which she made before she was fully leaning into her country roots. The sound is loud, gritty rock— almost Pixies-like. I’m so so into it!

The reason the algorithm fed me the above is because I was listening to the latest Waxahatchee single, a collaboration with Brennan Wedl covering Kathleen Edward’s “Six o’ Clock News.” I was really underwhelmed on my first listen, but then I listened to it about sixty more times and now I can’t stop. Lyrically, it’s tragic; musically it’s a back porch country bop.

Joy & Attention.

birdsong. ⇼a sweet visit with my momma. ⇼the big lake & the little lake.⇼ my students & their thinking-together. ⇼driving on the warmest day of the week with the windows down & realizing the moment called for Liz Phair’s “Never Said,” on blast. ⇼hot chaotic bisexuals. ⇼getting through tax filing. ⇼the sweetest cats & their sweetest snuggles & their silliest shenanigans. ⇼watching a pregnant mama groundhog strategize her way under my neighbors porch.⇼ a wild movie & girl-talk drinks with K. ⇼& all of you, thank you for being here, truly.

Dear friends,

Catching up with friends lately I have been able to say that “I’m doing well!” with sincerity. Astrology promised me that a long period of challenge was going to ease a bit, and as we approach the Spring Equinox, I am feeling the lightness of a shift, the lightness of the chance that this might be a life chapter in which things feel pretty okay.

…Then I read the news.

The US and Israel are murdering people at home and abroad every day. The planet is being tortured. Billions are spent on bombs and data centers while GoFundMes for rent and hospital bills continue to fill our feeds.

For years I felt like my personal life mirrored the state of the world, at least emotionally. We got Peter’s cancer diagnosis four months before the genocide in Palestine began, and two months before I started a fulfilling but extremely draining and stressful job. Then Trump Pt II, worsening economy, increased stress with my landlord and duplex neighbors, and so on. I also dealt with the worst physical health issues of my life: fibroids and the many symptoms they exacerbated, perimenopause, fibroid surgery and the violent aftermath of it, and the subsequent worsening of a chronic connective tissue disorder I had since childhood but only learned about when it moved into stage two. Until very recently, I felt as bad as the news.

For many months now, those burdens have been easing, thanks to a stable home, a new approach to managing my illness, and getting back to a work situation to which I am much better suited. And when I finished my book last week, I finally had time to notice just how much more gently life was landing.

This is not the first time I’ve written about the challenge of feeling okay when so much is decidedly not okay, but anytime things feel good I’ll likely return to considering it. Often I get philosophical: what does it mean to feel joy in a world of hurt? Always I get superstitious: if I write about this, I will jinx it, and this good period will absolutely go away. (I am literally knocking on wood rn.) Today I am sitting with something more practical: what more can we do when we’re feeling resourced? How can we utilize times of ease to bolster our people and our communities? How can I show up more? I am trying to do right by this moment of relief, not by diving back into burnout, but by being honest about having a little more to give…..And giving it.

–

Below! A hearty reading roundup including a smart updated analysis on conservative family values, a nostalgic essay on Counting Crows, an illuminating profile of the founders of an anti-porn app, and more (including my reflections on Lindy West’s Adult Braces and the corresponding discourse). Also: my South by Southwest reportback! Plus: a transition-to-spring music rec, and other things from the week that got me through.

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading.

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Greetings from Austin!1 Thanks to the local Cleveland film network, I got a free ticket to SXSW, so I’m here to see movies like an official Critic. But before I do a report-back on the festival, there is another important cultural event to be discussed: the Oscars, of course. I’ve only reviewed a handful of the nominated films, and even of those, my opinions changed on several over time. I love when art shape shifts upon more reflection! Below are my informed insights into the race (for better or worse, Hollywood punditry is my comfort-podcast genre of choice), and my updated and evolving (kind of stream of consciousness) reflections on the nominees.

Also, if you are a new subscriber who found me through my recent appearance on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, hey hi! Thanks for being here. I’m sorry if an interview about criminals and sex work and labor organizing made you think my newsletter would not be about mainstream-ass popular culture, but If You Don’t Love Me at My Unbridled Obsession with the Movies, You Can’t Have Me at My Radical Sex Worker Theorizing. (or, like, you can, just skip the newsletters I talk about pop culture if it’s not your thing lol.)

Best picture

One Battle After Another (most likely winner)

One Battle was the front-runner for the early part of awards season. People lost their mind over it in the first weeks of its release. (Remember all the PTA bro Halloween costume videos?). I defended OBAA, mainly by saying two things I still mostly believe are true: 1) it’s really an exceptional action flick; a propulsing story, sharp cinematography, super solid performances, and a compelling narrative backdrop; 2) that ‘compelling narrative backdrop’ is the radical underground network, and while YES it was deeply underdeveloped, I excused that because I don’t trust Paul Thomas Anderson with substantive radical analysis. The TLDR of my review back in September was: no it’s not radical, but how cool that it’s inspiring so many people to think and learn more about actual radical movement work?

As the months pass, I’ve really soured on OBAA. Though I don’t necessarily think we ought to expect great politics from Hollywood, I *do* think we ought to expect that someone who is profiting off the story of militants who, among other things, liberate immigrants, would say something about ICE raids and murders. PTA had multiple chances in early awards season to use his acceptance speeches to say literally anything (including when he won an award at the Globes four days after Renee Good was killed), and he simply didn’t. I think that’s pretty bullshit!

If you’re the type to roll your eyes about woke criticism, don’t worry, there’s more. As a film, OBAA doesn’t stick. I won’t deny that I had a wonderful experience watching it in the theater (twice!), but as the months pass, my memories of it feel hollow. It was so well-executed, but, like its director,….sort of substanceless? What should I still be thinking about in relation to the story? As a film, it is so much more interested in the action of rescuing a kidnapped daughter than it is on the question of how to approach revolutionary change. And though I can give that a pass for all the reasons I named above, it’s allowed me to conclude that perhaps a film as un-sticky as this maybe should not be considered the best of the year?

The Secret Agent

I was so moved by this decidedly non-US-centrically-paced film. The thing I want to say most about it is a spoiler, so, if you haven’t yet, go watch it and come back to read what I think…..[Spoiler!] I realized this film worked is when it hit me that there was a moment we saw Wagner Maura for the last time and I was devastated. Like….it was so slow and so odd and disjointed, and yet somehow the pathos hit so fucking hard. I made an audible noise, a ‘wait, no! He’s gone?! We aren’t going to see him again?!” That’s a testament to the film and to Maura. It won’t win best pic here, but has a shot in Best International Feature.

Sentimental Value

Skillful. Well done. Still: I was left fairly cold! The performances were exceptional though.

Sinners (also a possible winner)

Like OBAA, I had an awesome time watching Sinners. Our theater audience was electrified, and it was the kind of experience that Hollywood really wants to reward right now, because it was really fucking cool to see it on a big screen in a theater. The story was compelling, the performances were engaging, and the music thrilled me. That said (because this is really a race between OBAA and Sinners): I don’t think Sinners is as well-executed as OBAA—it’s messier, there are parts that drag, the script could have been stronger, and some aspects feel a little….cheesy? But gosh it’s fucking beautiful and thrilling all the same. And unlike OBAA, I had so much to chew on! (Bite on?). I listened to tons of Ryan Coogler interviews and was fascinated to hear him talk about how he viewed the Irish vampires….It wasn’t a 1:1 cultural appropriation story (though of course there’s an aspect of that); he was actually a lot more interested in the similarities between Irish oppression and African American oppression (see: colonization of land at home or of a peoples displaced across an ocean). So, is it the best film of the year? I don’t think so, but that’s because I’m a Sorry, Baby evangelist. But would I prefer it to win over OBAA? Yeah, I think so! Coogler and the Sinners crew also have substantive things to say in speeches.

Train Dreams

Very pretty! Beautiful cinematography! A great line about trees! I cried! Not a best pic though.

Bugonia

I’m going to gush more about Bugonia in the Best Actor category, but it wins for movie upon which I did the biggest 180. I cannot stop thinking about this movie! When I watched it a second time, all my initial criticisms felt assuaged. I think it’s super smart and requires viewers to think through a lot of deeply important things: class, US medical neglect, the opioid crisis, incels, conspiracy theories that are unfortunately sometimes correct, etc. The script is sharp as a fucking tack, and as you’ll see below, I think Jesse Plemons gave the performance of the year.

F1

I shall not spend my one wild & precious life watching Brad Pitt race the kinds of cars I grew up thinking were bougie. (For folks who don’t know, my very early life was full of NASCAR races).

Frankenstein

This movie was pretty bad, but gosh Guillermo del Toro is so freaking sincere and I loved watching the Making of Frankenstein. Also I’m an Elordi stan! Somehow Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac all did a bad job! It was also ugly, design-wise, which is a bummer because GdT and the crew put so much thought and labor into it! Cool costumes though.

Hamnet

This movie is Not Very Good! Chloe Zhao, like Guilermo del Toro, is so earnest and thoughtful, but they both feel like they are doing movie versions of AP English essays. Zhao’s attempt at ~symbolism~ was both incredibly on the nose and also sooooo gender essentialist (she told Paul to act like a Penis and Jessie to act like a Vagina. I am not kidding). The ~emotional scenes~ were so offensively manipulative, and I am a person who recognizes that all movies manipulate our emotions, but this was like a poetic honors student sledge hammer and I hated it!

Marty Supreme

As I said in my review, this movie needed more heart. More on Timmy below, but in general—though Safdie did a lot right in terms of cinematography and script and general direction—I just didn’t like this. (And this from someone who loved Uncut Gems, so it’s not that I can’t hang with an unlikable protagonist, nor am I put-off by an intensely fast-pace.)

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme (was #1 until about two weeks ago, so I think he still has a shot)

He did a great job. He’s consistently good at his job. See above for why this is annoying.

Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another

Timmy and Leo are so similar. Both men who could have been such decent humans, but both chose violence (e..g Bezos, Kardashians, 25 year olds, Israel, etc.). Anyway, they are both great actors, and tbh, I fucking love this Leo performance. He won’t win but he’d deserve it as much as Timmy.

Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon (a chance!)

Aw, he was a delight! Blue Moon was very sweet and worth the watch. He was in the every single scene and it would be sweet to see this hard working long-time actor win.

Michael B. Jordan, Sinners (strong chance winner)

Playing twins who are frequently in the same scene must’ve been exhausting to shoot, and Jordan did a really solid job carrying Sinners. I do not think he is an amazing line reader and tbh I think his best work was The Wire, followed closely by Fruitvale Station. But I would be thrilled for him to get the win!

Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent (unlikely, but a maybe upset win)

See above! And SPOILER again: the pain of his off-screen death illuminated how potently he won us all over!

NOTE: My actual favorite Actor in a Leading Role performance is Jesse Plemons. I agree with Kirsten Dunst who both celebrated her husband and threw shade at Timmy. Jesse Plemons, Landry Clarke, I love you forever, I think you might be my favorite living actor, you better fucking win an Oscar before I or you die.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

Adored his performance and learned that he shaped a lot of the underground immigrant support storyline in the film. It’s pretty unlikely, but I’d be delighted if he won.

Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein

He won’t win and this was an uneven performance, but I’m sorry, I love him! “Is he hot or is he just tall?” is a question I’m implicated in especially re: Elordi and Adam Driver. Sorry! Anyway, his physicality in this was pretty fucking cool, no? I hope he keeps getting juicy roles, I trust him to do right by them.

Delroy Lindo, Sinners (possible winner)

To be entirely honest with you, this performance didn’t stay with me, but from what I remember, he was—as he always is—incredibly charismatic on screen. I’d be happy for him to win the way the Oscars sometimes give awards for “you’re old enough that you might not get another chance at this.” He has a wonderful career and deserves to be honored.

Sean Penn, One Battle After Another (likely winner)

I was impressed with him on first watch, but on second watch I thought it was over the top. I know he has both a sordid and admirable past, so idk man, he might at least say something political in a speech?

Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value (small chance)

He was good I guess. Idk, I guess now is a time to say I’m so glad he didn’t hit on the Elle Fanning character. The bar for men and male characters is in hell!!!!! Anyway.

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet (winner)
She wailed and drooled and got mad and had a traumatic birth, and I won’t deny that she fully understood the assignment. She’s gonna win, she was good for what this Not Good movie asked of her. But idk man, I’m annoyed! (Update: when looking for an image for this section, I found this clip of her explaining the scream, and I cried, so I’m not heartless, okay?!)

Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

I did Not Have a Good Time in this movie, but she full embodied that feeling of being a shell of a person and I would love another speech about Bobby Canavale going to lizard expos.

Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue

You guys. I LOVED THIS MOVIE. Sobbed and heart-expanded and hugged P so tight. It is so much better than you think it is and Kate did a really, really good job! I’m honestly so glad she got a nom!

Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

What a face, what a great dang face. She’s really good in this, but won’t win. Glad she’s being recognized by US audiences though, I wanna see her in more things.

Emma Stone, Bugonia

Honestly, my least favorite part of a movie I’ve grown to really love. She was good, she is always good, but Jesse outshined her.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

A solid performance. I didn’t really understand it as nomination-worthy though.

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

She was exceptional. Best part of the film. So subtle yet so potent. Of these nominees—and even though I didn’t love the movie— I think she’s actually my favorite.

Amy Madigan, Weapons (strong chance winner)

I really disliked Weapons (you can hear me talk about it on my very short-lived FlimTok), but Amy, I suppose, did an excellent job straddling the border of campy and terrifying. This would be one of those sort of “good job at your whole career, sorry you never won before” wins, and I guess I’m fine with that.

Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners (definitely possible winner)

She was mesmerizing on screen and her performance lingered more than anyone else in the cast. Would be happy for her to win.

Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another (possible winner)

I appreciate the debate around the character of Perfidia, and I am happy to amplify the critiques from Black women who found this role to be utterly objectifying. I also appreciate the pushback on that (including from Black critics, and especially from Taylor) who understand Perfidia’s sexuality to be a sincere aspect of her ultimately nuanced character. Taylor was incredibly memorable even if the character was, at times, uncomfortably written. Wouldn’t be mad at all if she got the win.

Achievement in directing

Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler, Sinners

This is between Coogler and PTA and I echo what I say above about the films. Coogler brings a messiness that still ultimately delivered a spectacular experience, whereas PTA brought an exceptionally skillful precision in a thrilling but ultimately hollow movie. Both wins would make sense by academy standards, but I’d definitely prefer hearing Coogler on stage.

Original Score

Bugonia, Jerskin Fendrix
Frankenstein, Alexandre Desplat
Hamnet, Max Richter
One Battle after Another, Jonny Greenwood
Sinners, Ludwig Goransson

No one can see Bugonia and not think of the score when Jessie Plemons is riding his bike to work. Absolutely floored by Fendrix’s moves. Unfortunately OBAA was also really really good. I don’t actually remember the score in Sinners very well (I remember the songs though, obviously). Cannot believe they reused the Richter song from Arrival for the last scene of Hamnet. Cheap! I think this win will go to either Greenwood or Goransson.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Bugonia, screenplay by Will Tracy
Frankenstein, written for the screen by Guillermo del Toro
Hamnet, screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell
One Battle after Another, written by Paul Thomas Anderson
Train Dreams, screenplay by Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar

I truly think Bugnoia is most deserving, but OBAA will likely take this and despite wishing there was more substance, I still think the script was remarkably crisp.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Blue Moon, written by Robert Kaplow
It Was Just an Accident, written by Jafar Panahi; script collaborators: Nader Saïvar, Shadmehr Rastin, Mehdi Mahmoudian
Marty Supreme, written by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
Sentimental Value, written by Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
Sinners, written by Ryan Coogler

Sorry, Baby should be here. </3 In lieu of that, this will likely go to Sinners, and I’ll be happy for Coogler. I also think Blue Moon deserves accolades since the movie is almost nothing but the script (takes place almost entirely in one room, no flashy special effects besides Ethan Hawke sort of obviously standing on his knees/a drop out floor). And I’m very sorry to say, I still haven’t seen It Was Just an Accident.

@a24Sometimes you just need a really good sandwich. Sorry, Baby is now available to watch on @hbomax.

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Achievement in cinematography

Frankenstein
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Train Dreams

This will probably go to OBAA, but my ranking would be: Train Dreams, OBAA, Sinners, Marty, Frankenstein.

Achievement in costume design

Avatar: Fire and Ash
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
Sinners

I really liked hearing Kate Hawley, the costume designer for Frankenstein, talk about her method, so I’m rooting for The Creature and his crew.

Best International Feature

Sirāt

I have not seen this! Peter and some folks he watched it with in Catalunya did not like it though, fwiw.

The Secret Agent (possible winner)

Really loved, see above! I would strongly prefer this to win over Sentimental Value.

Sentimental Value (likely winner)

See above!

It Was Just an Accident

I haven’t seen this, I hear great things!

The Voice of Hind Rajab

Also haven’t seen, but plan to, and: Free Palestine.

Best Documentary Feature

Come See Me in the Good Light

I absolutely adored this movie about one my favorite poets, Andrea Gibson, and their partner Megan Falley navigate Andrea’s cancer treatment. (We lost Andrea in July; I wrote about it here.) It was such a quiet and tender film, and just like Andrea, it confronted the hardest and the most joyful aspects of a life, all at once. As many queer folks are saying, it is a very straight Oscars year, and we’re really glad to see such a wonderful queer family being honored. This definitely won’t win though.

The Perfect Neighbor (likely winner)

I don’t think I ever cried more watching a movie, but I understand the critiques of the possible ethical issues with this mostly body cam footage doc that focuses largely on a white perpetrator of racist violence. It doesn’t necessarily reveal anything new about the reality of racism in the US, and anyone who needs to see children experience the grief of losing a parent in real time to gain ‘empathy’ must’ve been ignoring the news for the past (hundreds of) years. Absolutely gutting story, though, and I suppose a somewhat unique approach to telling an all too common tale.

The Alabama Solution

I haven’t seen this doc about a prison in Alabama, but I’ve heard critics rave about it. I haven’t heard much from explicit abolitionists, and so often films that are sympathetic to incarcerated folks still land on reform as an answer, so I’m curious to watch and find out what it’s all about.

I also haven’t seen Cutting Through Rocks or Mr. Nobody Against Putin, but I don’t think either have a chance at a win tonight.

Okay I’m running out of steam and I have to go pick up snacks to take to my annual viewing party with my mom and uncle. As I’ve written about before, we’ve been watching the Oscars together for literally as long as I can remember, and it’s a tradition I love. <3

Dear friends,

THE BOOK IS DONE! I turned the final manuscript into my publisher last night and the metaphor to describe how I’m feeling is “like I was just put through the spin cycle in a rusty washing machine.” I am exhausted and emotional, but also very relieved and feeling excited to have more time to dedicate to the newsletter and other upcoming creative projects.

Thank you for your patience with my recently inconsistent publishing. We’re back to regularly scheduled programming!

Below: the things I managed to read other than my manuscript, my review of Pillion, a perfect new country-ish album I’m dubbing “nerd-twang,” plus things from the week that got me through…..

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading.

Read more

Dear friends,

I am two weeks away from turning my manuscript into my press. I have been in a revision cave and full of the very distinct kind of anxiety that emerges when one is nearing the end of a big project (I’ve experienced this as I wrapped my thesis, dissertation, and memoir); it’s a very un-fun time, especially since a lot of what I’m writing about is sexual violence.

But even the worst part of the writing process is better than a life absent of getting to do art. All work includes stress, and as harrowing as this flavor of it is, I would take it any day over other jobs I’ve had. I feel tired and depleted, and I also feel lucky.

- - -

Below: my review of Wuthering Heights! also: a couple of great book recs, plus what I’m listening to, and other things from the week that got me through.

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading.

Mostly I have been re-reading my manuscript. My brain is mush!

Outside of that, I have been reading two books.

Read more

Dear friends,

It’s a compelling time to be teaching a class called Art & Social Change. I structure the class beginning with early theories of the culture industry (Adorno/Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School into Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School), then dig into debates surrounding representation (José Muñoz, the recent-ish Trap Door collection critiquing ‘visibility’), then move into subculture studies, and onto various social movements’ use of art in their organizing. The Grammys, the Super Bowl, and the opening of Wuthering Heights landed during and after our lessons surrounding the debates between the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School, providing a number of rich texts to unpack in real time.

The Frankfurt School theorized popular culture as a capitalist product that distracted the masses from revolutionary aims, whereas the Birmingham School conceded the materialist view that culture is a product, but argued audiences had agency to make more subversive meaning of what they were given; pop culture, as Stuart Hall wrote, “is a site of struggle.” The students vibed with both views, finding it hard to deny hot takes like this from Horkheimer & Adorno: “Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.”

But these students (at an art institute) are also fans, and found it hard to reconcile that the music and stories they loved were all just “rubbish.” Hall was helpful here: “One of the most significant political moments….is the point when events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading.” Here Hall is naming that audiences can reject subtle or overt hegemonic messaging; indeed, a viewer might even watch AI slop commercials during the Superbowl without being convinced by a digital de-aged Ben Affleck to buy Dunkin’s coffee.

Even more helpful to this moment, I think, is how Muñoz expanded on Hall. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz offers a form of negotiated reading that allows for both pleasure and survival. Muñoz gives several examples of the ways in which minoritized subjects have to practice partial methods of identification. Take a queer person of color reading the revolutionary thinker Franz Fanon only to discover that amidst his powerful anticolonial writing exists homophobic sentiments. Or consider the young queer person growing up in the 70s and clinging to any gay character he found on TV, even if they were full of unflattering stereotypes (Muñoz is talking about himself here). This method of engaging with a problematic text while also benefiting from it is the practice of ‘disidentification,’ which works “on and against dominant ideology.” Certainly it is possible, Muñoz’s theory helps us see, to critique the NFL and also honor the powerful experience documented by thousands of Latino and Caribbean viewers across the US who watched a performance in Spanish that both drew attention to the violence of colonialism and also invited a group of people being terrorized by ICE to have a moment to dance.

I saw a number of people make finger-wagging Instagram posts to remind everyone that nothing that happens at a corporate NFL game can be radical (their soapbox on Meta is apparently given a pass); this is not an incorrect conclusion. But I wonder now about culture industry critiques at the end of the world (or the end of a world). What to do with the pleasure of monoculture amidst quickening collapse? Some echo the Frankfurt School and say reject it entirely, divest from celebrity and Hollywood at all costs. Others say embrace it, that art can transcend commercial packaging, and is indeed the thing that will nurture the humanity we need to survive. I make it pretty clear where I land (the art! even from hollywood!), but my head isn’t in the sand. Something’s gotta give: those of us invested in a better world can’t rely on pleasure in between commercials for gambling, weight loss drugs, and AI. Still, I don’t begrudge anyone for seeking it (and as for the Bad Bunny performance, especially Latino folks, and especially folks from Puerto Rico, for whom the show was really for).

Pleasure in and (dis)identification from popular culture is a survival strategy in terrible times, but this pleasure demands rigor, a commitment to critique and an awareness of profit-motives. And most importantly, this pleasure demands alternatives— both making and engaging with independent writing, film, and music. If we let it, art in end times will require a lot from us (discernment, critique, new models)... And in a system trying to convince us that it is better to do and think less, I am rooting for anything that requires a lot from us.

***

Below: an anti-ICE panel that locates the problem in borders, a feminist take on ‘natural’ and ‘modified’ bodies, the new dystopic punk novel from Cristy Road Carrera, and more; some thoughts on the wonderfully similar Blue Moon and Peter Hujar’s Day; a new indie pop album to lighten the end-of-winter blahs; and other things from the week that got me through.

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading + Podcasts.

I haven’t listened to this panel with Silky Shah, Harsha Walia, and Beatrice Alder-Bolton yet, but I’m a big fan of Walia’s work, and I’m already sold by the title: “Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border.” The violence of borders is getting lost in the resistance against ICE, and I’m glad these thinkers want to center the bigger picture. (Thanks C for the share.)

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Dear friends,

I downloaded an app that helps me delete pictures from my phone so I don’t have to pay for more storage. I have disproportionate levels of anger when I am prompted to upgrade space on my devices, and am consistently enraged by the monthly $2.99 apple fee that I swear is attached to nothing. So $7.99 for a month of making room, as it were, felt worth it (I am excellent at free trials and/or paid months followed by immediate “cancel subscription” action).

A second cold virus in thirty days had me on the couch more than usual this week, and I used that time to keep clearing photos. The app, like all apps, tries to incentivize you with reward stimulants. They separate photos by year and month and you move through the process of “Keep” or “Remove” until you’ve completed a whole month and then year. I’m working backwards, with the earliest photos on this phone dating back to 2013. I have moved from Minneapolis to Boston back to Minneapolis and now I’m in Cleveland in 2022. Photographic evidence of my life in Chicago exists in some other realm, and my early life in Cleveland doesn’t even register in my brain the way memories of digital archives do. Many of us have memories of photographs over real events, but at a certain point those memories of photographs really turned to memories of phone screens.

You can imagine I’m feeling nostalgic about it all. I’m also noticing periods of hesitation in my picture taking after moments of individual or collective crisis. I remember, of course, the dates of when my friend died in jail, of when Heather Heyer was killed, of when Peter got his cancer diagnosis, of the first news of Covid. In the photos surrounding those dates, there is always this heavy pause. This, when is it okay to take a picture of a flower again? or worse, a picture of a meal, or worse yet, a picture of us having fun? I can see that period of waiting in the (lack of) photos. Maybe even more noticeable in my decluttering project than the pause are the pictures that finally come on the other side. I keep feeling this strong sensation of relief when I see that I start documenting again. It’s proof I was able to show up better for myself and the people around me. It means I was paying attention to more than just the terror.

January felt a bit like this pause. It’s good and right to disrupt business as usual to focus on and grieve concentrated harm. It’s also good—and necessary—to keep going.

***

Below: a report back from a nurse in Minneapolis, essays and a podcast on art and Bad Men, the 2012 abolitionist essay I assigned my class this week that is as relevant as ever, and a nonfiction book that made my brain more alive than it’s felt in a while. Also: my review of The Housemaid, reactions to the Grammys, and other things that got me through the week. <3

love & solidarity,

raechel

PLUGS.🔌

There are three preparedness happenings I’d love to put on your radar. First, if you’re local to Cleveland, there’s an Emergency Kit Assembly event taking place on February 7th from 1-3pm. will be helping out with this, and her newsletter and old podcast Live Like the World is Dying are also good resources. If you’re interested in learning go-bag type skills but aren’t in Cleveland, I highly recommend you register for Binyamina’s one-day class, PREPARE: an ecological bug out bag class. Her perspective and experience is invaluable. Finally, Nic Antoinette has started a Collapse series on their newsletter, and already I am feeling held by their thorough approach to exploring the topic practically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Also: you can still register for my Anti-Capitalist Money Workshop, which will provide a 101 of finance things for anti-capitalists who grew up without generational wealth and/or hung out with punks too long and were taught they shouldn’t care about money and/or people who just want to figure out basic money things in truly uncertain times. It will be a space for learning and venting, practical tips and liberatory imagining. February 28th; 1-3pm EST. Sliding scale $0-55.

Reading + Podcasts.

This episode of Final Straw features a Minneapolis nurse talking about the daily reality of folks under ICE occupation. Really powerful insight, and despite news outlets saying that agents are leaving, kidnappings are still happening everyday.

I spent time with three smart texts this week that engaged questions about art and Bad Men, and appreciated all of them so much:

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If you’re interested in the anti-capitalist money workshop for folks who grew up without generational wealth, register here.

&A note on the note: from a ~content~ perspective I feel like I need to apologize for writing something so similar to what I wrote last week. From a human perspective, what else was I to write about other than coping with another ICE murder?

Dear friends,

Today is my birthday* and another person was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. I am working all day at an event for the local literary organization, and I’m glad to be with people compelled to make art, but I am reeling. It’s hard to know what to say or to write. I spent six years of my life in Minneapolis, on the south side, blocks away from where George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were all murdered. All those memories of donut shops or where I got my gas or my friend’s duplex turned into execution footage on my phone. I was still in Minnesota in 2020, was able to participate in the tragic and invigorating organizing that happened that summer, and it’s entirely unsurprising to me that the community is showing up in the same way; with dangerous love. Love for your neighbors—the kind of love that fuels solidarity— is dangerous to ICE, to the state, to the narrative that we are all safer in isolation. And Minneapolis has that kind of love, in droves. Plus years and decades before that of organizing against colonialism, prisons, nazis, and police. Years of practice in the kind of collective grief that demands more life. Again and again: our hearts are broken, our hearts are stitched back up.

When I get home from work, I cry in bed. I can’t get a hold of Peter and I am so anxious. I am gutted with news of every new death and disappearance, but I’d be lying if I said that the losses don’t hit me uniquely when people are murdered in moments of rebellion. I am sobbing because I know that some of the people I love the most have targets on their backs, with ‘anarchist’ a federal equivalent to domestic terrorist. Peter is probably safer where he is across an ocean, but it doesn’t matter, I am scared, and everyday more worried about him getting back into the country. I feel despair creep up through my toes.

The social center Signal thread suggests a meet-up. Even in the face of the impending storm, we want to create a space for grief and maybe planning. It is hard to leave the house in the cold, but I do. I cry while I embrace my friends there. I can’t help but imagine each of them riddled with bullets. I stand at the altar we have in our space for our local lost comrades. We’ve only been open for three and a half years, but we have collected so many ghosts. I think of all of them greeting the new comrades to wherever it is the spirits go, that collective force that I am certain helps the living keep going. At the front is my Minneapolis family, Jesús, who would have been leading the fucking charge this weekend were he still there in human form. But again: I think in some ways, he still is.

The meet-up isn’t a cure, and some things we mess up, and some things are annoying, but god it still felt good to be together. I re-read a zine on how to de-arrest someone, I make some tea. We connect people to rapid response threads who aren’t already on them, we share resources. I stare at the phrase we’ve had on our wall for years, and I know it’s true:

Here are some actions you might take:

• Find your local ICE watch/rapid response network, get tapped in.

• Attend this Street Medic 101 training.

• Donate to any of these Mpls fundraisers and/or look for fundraisers in your own community and support those.

Rent Support for neighbors in Phillips

Rent Support for neighbors in Central

Rent Support for neighbors in Powderhorn

Supplies for Political Art Making

PPE for legal observers

Diapers and Menstrual Supplies

Abolish Ice Shirts

Northstar Front Line Street Medics

• Cook food for someone who you know is involved in movement work (or for a tired parent, or someone working multiple jobs, or taking care of elderly parents, etc. etc.).

• Regulate your nervous system.

• Determine risk of ICE raids at your workplace and organize there.

• Pray, make art, cast spells, sing (in a group if possible), snuggle animals, learn your neighbors names and needs, help shovel snow.

• Don’t let this be temporary. One reason we’re here is because not enough people give a shit when the same (or similar) things happen under the Dems. Stop believing in the state, start believing in each other. Forever and ever amen.

***

I really wanted to be writing about the Oscar nominations this week, but that wasn’t in the cards. For my readers who like the pop culture component of this newsletter, never fear, I am all in the game this year, with many thoughts!! More soon on all of that, and more. (Newsletter glow-up this year is happening on a pagan calendar, not a Gregorian one.)

Below, a movement elder you should really be reading, a podcast rec, a roundup of my favorite Minneapolis musicians, and more from the week that got me through. Also, finally: my review of Marty Supreme. (preview: ughhh)

Take care of yourselves & each other, please.

love & solidarity,

raechel

*I wrote this part on Saturday, obviously.

Reading + Podcasts.

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Dear friends,

This week I recovered from jet lag, recovered from a sinus infection, and didn’t recover from the state terror I witnessed on my screen. Most days were filled with unhealthy amounts of phone time and compulsively checking Signal threads, some with folks on the ground in Minneapolis, others with my neighbors gearing up for the likelihood of increased ICE presence in Cleveland.

It’s important to remember that the state kills people everyday; Renee Nicole Good is one of many people ICE has murdered, and one of even more that the broader state has (whether by police or inaccessible medical care or any number of deadly side effects of poverty). But it makes sense that the past week left most of us in a heightened state of distress and urgency—it is meaningful that a real-time video of an execution still has the ability to fuck up our nervous systems. There are many people and institutions who would benefit from our numbness, or our avoidance. These same people and institutions also benefit when the urgency hurls us into burnout. Learning the rhythms of liberation work is a lifelong process, and when the stakes are life and death (the stakes are always life and death), it is understandable that we will never get it exactly right.

I had a week of urgency and Signal alerts and then freeze and then ‘what can i do besides Venmo, i guess i will venmo,’ and then read and read, and then avoid with substantive things (art) or avoid with slop (scrolling), but then yesterday I unfroze through real life connection. I hosted a meeting at my house to plan for the equinox celebration at our local radical social center and I got to be in a room with people who care deeply, who I see show up every day in big and small ways. It was like medicine to be in that room, to remember all the roles and layers and moments of struggle—to remember that struggle is sometimes burning death squad vehicles in righteous rage, and struggle is sometimes brainstorming kid-friendly crafts to include at the community gathering. Being involved in movement work is like this: soberly confronting the most extreme situations of state violence, letting our hearts break and our rage boil, getting to work in the streets and in our meeting spaces, and then…..stitching back together. Breaking bread and planting seeds and laughing hard, and letting those moments of ordinary and indispensable connection nourish us for the long haul.

I used to write things about ‘movement work’ and know that only a small portion of people would see themselves in it. Worlds of activism and organizing have often been internally and externally branded as exclusive; but my gut tells me that the majority of you reading this could consider yourself part of the movement now. The streets are full of unlikely agitators, first-time protestors, really anyone whose heart still works. Anyone whose heart still works—who knows none of this is okay— is on the side of liberation now. And there are still more of us than there are of them.

***

Below, some more anti-ICE related reading (above the paywall), a podcast rec, an anti-capitalist horror novella worth a pre-order; a new movie that felt like the best of indie 90s rom-dramedies; some late 2000s music nostalgia; and other things that got me through the week.

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading.

An overview of the shifting nature of the Minneapolis rapid response network that’s been mobilized to fight ICE, and a great reminder that we can’t just copy models of response to the needs of the particularities of our local communities.

Danez Smith writes an elegy to Renee Nicole Good.

Various newsletter writers whose reflections and insights have felt grounding in response to this acute moment of horror: Margaret Killjoy, Nic Antoinette, Amanda Montei, Ann Friedman who handed the newsletter over to Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, and Sara Thankam Mathews’ smart and moving “snuff film political economy.”

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The essay below is in part about a new workshop I’m running, but if you don’t have time to get to the end, click here to learn more & sign up.

The essay below is also about art, and if you want to do your art in 2026, I hope you’ll take one of the remaining four spots of the EXCAVATIONS memoir workshop.

Shortly after her death in 2022, I was listening to a podcast episode about Bernadette Mayer. It was December; I remember I was wearing a green sweater and sitting on the floor of my bedroom applying makeup in the mirror. My phone was resting on the corner of the bed, and Mayer was introducing herself in the interview, saying, “I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done, but I figured, ‘let’s do it.’” The producer, Rachel James, clearly had great reverence for the celebrated poet, but rather than focus just on her work, James wanted to talk about Mayer’s life, and specifically her financial situation. James explained that despite winning prestigious awards and regularly speaking at esteemed universities, Mayer lived in poverty nearly her entire life. In the episode, her son, Max Warsh, reflected on being raised by broke artists. He described the sort of romance of collective poet microeconomies in New York City in the 70s and 80s, but also growing up in apartments with roaches, and seeing his parents desperate for rent money.

I started crying, hand on my belly. I was pregnant and fairly sure that I was going to have to have an abortion. To my surprise, I didn’t want one. But Peter and I were, like Mayer and her husband Philip Good, on some kind of starving artist spectrum. I hadn’t had a stable paycheck in nearly two years, and the adjuncting, SW, and freelance work I was doing was never guaranteed. Peter worked part-time at a composting company (and, of course, he wrote) but we just didn’t have enough consistency. Not to raise a baby. (We didn’t end up having to decide; I miscarried shortly after.)

Warsh clearly had a lot of love for his mom, and seemed to understand her. “My mother could have stopped being a poet, but she couldn’t have stopped being a poet,” he said.

As an anti-capitalist, I know it is the system itself that creates poverty, not people’s choices. I am also someone who believes in agency, a concept that is ultimately about access to choice. Some people—like my mom, single after a drunk driver hit her husband, and raising a kid alone—don’t have a lot of access to choice. She had to raise me and work multiple low-paying jobs that wrecked her health and contributed to current disabilities; there wasn’t mental or logistical space for much beyond that. For Mayer, who chose almost exclusively to write, she technically had a choice, perhaps, to get a different job early in her life, but at a certain point, choice becomes a lot more difficult. For some people in a field with dwindling employment, they might consider going back to school for something else, but that’s only an option for people with the time and resources for more education. For others, like artists—like Mayer—they do the thing they do because they have to. It’s like Nick Nolte says in New York Stories (1989): “I mean, you make art because you have to, ’cause you got no choice. It’s not about talent, it’s about no choice but to do it.”

Like me, Mayer was an anti-capitalist. She didn’t want to find a meaningless high paying job—and I would argue that most (not all) high paying jobs are meaningless1—she wanted a world where everyone’s needs could be met. My favorite poem of hers makes this clear:

Walking Like a Robin

take 3 or 4 steps then stop

look smell taste touch & hear

is there anything to eat?

oh look, there’s some caviar

it must be my birthday, thanks

i must be very old, like seventy

i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just

sew myself back together but will it last?

please take a piece of me back home, each piece

is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact

remember: property is robbery, give everybody

everything, other birds walk this way too

from Works and Days (New Directions, 2016)

I get emotional every time I read it. Partly because I love birdwatching and she captures robins so well!, but also, of course, because of the dreamy motioning towards a better world. James explains that Mayer and other poets in her circle (like Alice Notley and Eileen Myles) had a version of this. “In the 1980s, like today, artists living on the economic margins felt like they didn’t have enough of a legal or governmental safety net to protect them from falling into poverty. So these poets had to figure out ways to survive and support each other.” This is, in so many ways, a beautiful demonstration of mutual aid; of anarchy! But, as her son notes, recounting the roaches, “It became harder for people to live that way.”

Mayer’s daughter recounts that her parents didn’t have a bank account. Mayer kept cash in a copy of Shakepeare’s Sonnets. How romantic! is a thought I had. How heartbreaking, is another.

This podcast episode came to me again a couple of weeks ago. I was wearing the sweater I wore that day applying makeup in the mirror, and I remembered the tears and fear I felt— that although in many ways it would be a dream to grow up and be like Bernadette Mayer, it would also be terrifying. Three years later, in many ways, I still feel like Mayer’s life is both aspirational and cautionary. Three years later, Peter and I are still precarious workers, but also: we own a home.2

Many of you know my story, but the TLDR for new folks: I grew up poor with a single mom, I got a PhD that I thought would help me attain financial security but without a tenure-track job have had a string of on and off non-permanent positions that pay anywhere from $12-60k a year, most of them without benefits or retirement.3 Alongside this, I was firmly rooted in punk and Lefty/anarchist/activist spaces, where I learned that capitalism was Bad (something I knew from growing up) and that having money is Bad. The former is simply true and I have never wavered in understanding that a capitalist economic system relies on the existence of an exploited class of people; this is, indeed, Bad. But as I got older it became clear to me that some people in my circles weren’t struggling as much as I was. There were many reasons for this, and I genuinely don’t have judgement about any of them—some people did get high-paying jobs, some people didn’t have any student debt, some of them got money from their parents regularly, some of them inherited money. What I did have judgement about was the lack of transparency and the performance of being above Having Money while still having money. For those of us without generational wealth or high paying jobs (and, relatedly, with student loan or other kinds of debt), we watched some of our comrades move forward while we stayed stuck (in shitty apartments, in stress, in helping support family members).

Still, when I finally abandoned hope in academia, I decided to focus on my art. A choice, kind of, but one that felt impossible not to make. I have tried to be more responsible by applying to full-time jobs, but I generally don’t get them (and when I have, they have been temporary positions). And of all my adult years since grad school, the best ones were when I didn’t have a full-time job—almost always making less money, but feeling so much less stress and so much more whole. Making art and hustling side gigs (teaching, workshops, sw, etc.) is a good life for me. But it’s unacceptable that this should necessitate a life of poverty; it’s unacceptable that artists (who contribute to keeping alive the last shreds of humanity in this world) can’t afford to raise children, but AI tech lords (who are the enemy of the last shreds of humanity in this world) have seven houses or a ticket to Mars. Fucking unacceptable.

It is thanks to the wake-up call of wishing I could afford to have a baby, and also to the lived wisdom of anti-capitalist sex workers that I got comfortable with Having Money. And to do that, I both worked a lot of jobs and also started looking into the world of personal finance—a world that previously felt extremely off limits for me, as an anarchist with morals. But the more I realized people got money from rich parents, the more I realized they too were benefiting from playing the game of capitalism and the more I refused to keep falling behind. If I had money, I could share it. I could better support my mom, I could better support myself, and I could better support my community. So I dove in: I learned about High Yield Savings Accounts and IRAs and brokerage accounts and credit card points, and I wanted to throw up in disgust but also kind of in relief. More knowledge about these systems — and the permission to engage them — has been life changing for me.

To be clear, this is not an answer to the problem of capitalism. Having a bunch of people with good hearts and values become rich4 and share money is just bullshit trickle down economics in even more hyper-individual form. I am not proposing this as a solution to the ills of this system. But I do want more people—especially people like me who don’t have family money and were taught by their radical communities that they shouldn’t care about money—to have the choice of perhaps a little more stability.

The real metric of not losing yourself in the game of capitalism is to determine if you are putting just as much effort into its demise. Can we have economic stability while simultaneously trying to destroy the economic system? In truth: no, not all of us can. To reiterate: capitalism requires that not all of us have access to economic stability. But I think it’s likely that if you’re reading this newsletter, you might have a shot at it. And I very much want to say that you’re not Bad if you want stability. Especially if you grew up poor, especially if you know that if you had more stability you’d do more sharing (with family and friends, with bail funds, with gofundmes…).

“Bernadette has lots of great ideas about how to solve the problems of making money. And a lot of them involve getting money for no reason, just for existing,” Mayer’s daughter says on the podcast.

“But wouldn’t that be so great?” Mayer responds. “If we had our guaranteed annual income, so we wouldn’t have to fucking worry about, you know, what to do for money!”

I agree with Mayer that people should be paid to live. Better, of course, we abolish capitalism and the money system altogether. But I do wish Mayer had had an interest-accruing bank account. And I also wish more people could learn from the way she lived with her poet friends: taking care of each other, sharing, living new worlds in the shell of the old.

When Mayer told James, “I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done, but I figured, ‘let’s do it,’” she was doing a form of magic. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” the Situationists say. The impossible dream that we ought to live anyway is to care for one another. And in that process, I want my fellow working-class femmes and queers and artists with radical hearts and wild imaginations not to worry about paying their rent.

I am teaching a workshop for anti-capitalists who want to learn the basics about not being broke. This is a little off-brand for me (not that I’m not always talking about class, but that I’m not in the personal finance world), but I have felt pulled to do it ever since I realized I had saved enough to make a down payment house, and I want other people who assume that economic security is impossible for them to have the knowledge of some tools. We’ll also talk about abundance outside of banks and stocks—things like sharing economies, the value of time over money if you have unstable work, and “how much money is enough?” (h/t to my wonderful friend Nic who is my absolute favorite person to think alongside in anti-capitalist money questions). This will be explicitly anti-capitalist but also a shame-free space for questions that punks and poors aren’t supposed to ask. This will be a space to talk transparently about money, and emphatically about our dreams for a better system. “Let’s do it.” <3

February 28th

1-3pm

Sliding scale $0-55

On Zoom

Register here

Anyone who thinks they would benefit from this is welcome to join. I know that not everyone who “comes from money” has access to wealth, and I imagine there are a wide variety of people who never got personal finance info or a space to talk about money and dreams beyond it. That said, the free and lower-cost tickets are for low-income folks. And if you are secure and abundant in cash, you’re welcome to send some money to sponsor the free slots.

I decided to do a travel blog/diary-style post covering the weeks I’ve been in Europe with P where he’s been temporarily living for work. We’ve both been vague about the details (he’s a pretty private person, and believe it or not, there’s quite a bit I’m private about too), but I share more below about how and why we’re here. I write about the magnificent and mundane, the feels-profound observations any writer is bound to have in a new city, and also the pop culture we consume (yes, this includes my thoughts on Heated Rivalry).

The documenting of my days is an impulse of the memoirist in me, which conveniently reminds me to remind you that the second round of EXCAVATIONS is now open for registration. The first round was so transformative, thanks in large part to the incredible group of writers who gathered to be in community for it. This is a legit reason to sign up for workshops with me: my audience is full of the coolest, most brilliant, witchy, radical weirdos and I run these to cultivate connections as much as I do to enhance writing skills (you’ll get both, and more). I cap the workshop at 12 people which means it’s small and intimate and you get to know your cohort. It’s a powerful container and I trust that if you’re reading this newsletter, you’d be a perfect addition to it. The early bird price is happening through January 1st, and paid subs of the newsletter get an even bigger discount. (Code is at the bottom of this post.) The newsletter cost is increasing in 2026, so there are so many reasons to sign up for the $33/year slot today. Thank you for considering, and either way, thank you for being here. <3

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7 december:

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Dear friends,

2025, on a collective level, was one of the worst years of all the ones I’ve been alive for. Two ongoing genocides, fires in LA, brutal ICE raids; more AI slop, more annoying internet fights, more cultural shifting rightward. In my own life, I lost my last living grandparent, I navigated persistent chronic pain, I worried a lot, and I grieved (for all of it, for everything). I also had many beautiful experiences that brought me so much joy. It is a trite but true refrain that joy and suffering can co-exist, and I will always keep repeating it.

When I look back on the work of my year, it is clear I did a lot of it. Half of it was spent still on a full-time Visiting Professor line (and a couple of side gigs), and the second half I was part-time teaching with a lot of additional side jobs, and through it all, I was writing my book. I also saw a lot of movies and did a lot of birding. I mention all of these things together because I think all three are examples of coping mechanisms that exist on a spectrum of generative to problematic. I definitely needed to work a lot in order to cobble together a living wage. I definitely needed time in nature. I definitely needed to engage art and storytelling. But I also definitely wanted a distraction from the horrors. Work and time in the woods and the movies nourished me and also they helped me avoid everything else. Some days I think what matters most is the attention we give to our smallest corners of the world, to the relationships we tend to in our closest units, and other times I think that is an excuse not to do more. I still feel torn on this question.

What I do know is that I am grateful for what is clear to me after this cataloging of my labor: I am finding ways to do my art. And in these harrowing times, thank goodness that others are finding ways to do their art too.

- - -

Writing.

I finished another draft of my book, and I think this one is actually pretty stinkin’ close to done (minus copyedits and citations). This book has been a steady mix of intense passion and dreaded slog. I am resolute in the argument I’m making — that the reactionary ghosts of the feminist sex wars are haunting our contemporary movement in troubling ways, that framing sex (and men) as always-already dangerous will ultimately serve Right-wing agendas, that a truly liberatory approach toward sexual freedom must insist on pleasure— but the labor conditions of book writing (read: working for free) have worn on me and I am very ready for it to be off of my plate. I’m also very ready to once again pivot away from more academic writing; the exhaustion I feel is very akin to how I felt after completing my thesis and dissertation, a sort of deep love-hate with the intense research I’d poured myself into for years. With my memoir, I didn’t feel such contempt, because, even when the process was hard, the writing really fed me. I think I’ve hinted at this before, but I’m 98% sure my next project is going to be fiction (!) and I’m so excited. Anyway, I probably shouldn’t speak so ill of the thing I’m going to want you to buy in a year, but I trust very much that this break will help recharge me and I’ll be genuinely stoked to talk about it again when the time comes. Pre-orders will likely begin summer 2026, and the book will be in your hands by the very beginning of 2027.

I published 50 newsletters, which is one more than I sent last year. The top three (most read) included: “a feminist rant in response to feminist rants,” the “anarcho-tradwives” conversation I had with Margaret Killjoy and Hazel Acacia, and “the state is the enemy of care” which is a short bit on the nuances of family abolition. I love the newsletter, though the general state of the newsletter ecosystem has been feeling a bit grim this year. I’m not sure how much longer this platform will be sustainable for anyone who isn’t a celebrity or a brand or willing to generate slop to meet the AI moment, so I’m just going to double-down on my gratitude for the days we have left and for all of you for being here (and for all of the newsletter writers who add so much nourishment to my own life!).

I interviewed Niko Stratis for Xtra about her absolutely beautiful book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. We talked about gender, what it means to make political music, how work and class intersect with music and identity, and more. Niko is one of my favorite people and writers, and I hope you’ll check out her newsletter and this book!

& just in time to include it in 2025, I got a dream byline in Playboy! Digital, but still, I think I can now keep aspiring in the footsteps of James Baldwin (who wrote for them) and my beloved Pamela Anderson. And even better than the byline is the fact that I got to raise awareness about a topic close to my heart: I wrote about International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, the many forms of harm sex workers face today, as well as the powerful organizing and resistance against it.

Readings/Talks.

It was a dream year for live readings and talks. Though I admittedly love the introvert isolation for which a writing life allows, I am also thrilled for opportunities to connect with fellow writers and readers. This year, I was part of such nourishing events, including:

• In March, I read this piece at the Unruly Bodies reading in Los Angeles, organized by the tender and talented Margeaux Feldman as an off-site event for the AWP conference. It was a really special night in a very special week.<3

• In June, I read and talked with the lovely Adam Gnade at Blind Rage Records in Dayton. I was so moved after hearing him read that I binged a bunch of his books immediately after our event. I absolutely love how he sees the world around him with such detail and devotion, and how he tells us about it.

• In July, a real dream came true when I got to open for one of my all-time favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, at the Starlight Elsewhere special event in honor of Joy David’s birthday. I read this piece (and a bit from my book) and Hanif read work from a forthcoming project. He was as magnetic and mesmerizing as ever.

• In October, I was in conversation with the brilliant Dan DiPiero and we had such a generative discussion about his beautiful book Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. You can listen to it here.

Teaching.

In the spring, I wrapped up my last semester as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin teaching Intro to Feminist Studies, Intro to Queer Theory, and Queer(ing) Media. (My time at Oberlin also put Queer Prison Abolition, Reproductive Justice, and the Feminist Sex Wars classes under my belt…I did a lot of course design and prep!). Though I was ready to go, I am genuinely so grateful for my two years at the school, mainly because it put me in community with incredible students and colleagues. One of my colleagues, Leila Ben-Nasr, a VAP like me and a fierce Palestine solidarity activist, recently unexpectedly passed away. I’d love for you to read what her students wrote about her here; she was a remarkable person.

In the fall I started teaching at the local art school in Cleveland and was delighted to acclimate to the new culture of visual art students. I love how their brains work and I love being around young people so devoted to creativity. I taught two sections of Writing Across Gender and we had a great reading list (if I do say so myself).

Also in the fall: for Lit Cleveland, I taught Intro to Creative Nonfiction. And also in the fall, I facilitated EXCAVATIONS, my six-week memoir container. It was a truly transformative six weeks, digging into style, ethics, dialogue, memory, and so much more. Everyone closed the container with a full essay or memoir chapter, and we all left feeling a bit more sense of writerly community. (The next round of EXCAVATIONS starts February 1st, and there’s an early bird discount until Jan 1. Paid subscribers get an even bigger discount (email me for the code). Payment plans are available & there’s one scholarship spot left. Join us!).

And in August, I started teaching fitness and yoga classes again. I love this kind of teaching and after doing it from 2012-2020, I had a sad five year hiatus. It’s been a joy to get back to making playlists and planning workouts and sequences, and I never tire of the peacefulness of an empty early morning studio.

Miscellaneous

*I was a guest speaker at Tulane (via Zoom) once about my memoir and once to give a workshop on AI and Feminism (in my version of feminism, we do not intentionally engage with ecocidal and soul destroying tools).

*I was a guest speaker at St. Francis Xavier University on the topic of prison abolition and gender/sexuality.

*I mentored two new writing clients and got to witness such impressive accomplishments. (I am shifting my coaching work a bit, so if you’d like to work together, please email me to find out more. I have two folks lined up for 2026, and I’d love to add another 1-3 people for the beginning of the year!)

*I maintained my involvement as a collective member at our local radical social center, though like the year before, my participation was lower than I would have liked. I continue to be inspired by the space that’s created partially by our crew of collective members, but really by the community who makes it its own through shows, reading groups, potlucks, clothes swaps, and so so so much more. Fighting alienation through social gathering without any expectation for money exchange is a beautiful goal that I know this space accomplishes. And even though it also comes with challenges and frustrations (and perhaps truthfully this is why I am including it in the ‘work’ roundup), I am humbled and grateful to play a small role in it.

Tell me in the comments: what work did you get up to this year? Where did you put your time? What do you dream for your time in 2026?

Happy end-of-year-list season! This week, my favorites from art & culture. (Next week, a reflection on my work/personal happenings of the year.)

A note on the curation: First, obviously, I stuck to things that were released in 2025. Second - these are my favorites, I’m not declaring what is or isn’t “the best of” the year. 2025 did not bring me a press pass to film fests (but crossing my fingers for 2026), so there are still a number of films that are getting buzz that I haven’t yet been able to see. I’m sure some of those would be included. And ditto for books, movies, and TV. Because I write about it for the newsletter, I treat media consumption as a sort of part-time job, but I just can’t match the same quantity as the full-time critics. This is what I loved from the relatively small (okay, medium) pool I swam in. <3

FILMS

Sorry, Baby

Honestly, obsessed. A favorite of the year and maybe of the decade. I’m resharing my initial review, in full.

Something bad happened to Agnes. This is what we know at the start of Sorry, Baby, the new A24 film from former Reductress writer and content creator, Eva Victor. We meet Agnes during a visit she gets from her best friend, Lydie (a lovely Naomi Ackie), with whom she went to grad school. Agnes still teaches at the small rural liberal arts college where she and Lydie got their PhDs. The tenor of the cryptic “bad thing”— along with dialogue that reveals a male professor had made an abrupt exit—make it pretty clear that Agnes experienced some kind of sexual violence during her program. Act Two of the film confirms this — an awful and tragically common experience unfolds wherein Agnes’s advisor, Decker, coerces and then forces her into sex. We do not see a second of this on screen; instead we witness, from the outside, the house where it happens (the professor conveniently needed to reschedule their meeting from his office to his home). The early evening turns to dark, the house lights turn on, the streets get quiet, and then suddenly Agnes is rushing out the door, carrying the shoes she doesn’t want to stay inside to put on. Next we are in Agnes and Lydie’s home, where Agnes explains what happened in choppy detail; Lydie holds this, affirms this, offers comfort. Act Three and Four are the aftermath: a mix of healing moments with a gentle but sort of dopey neighbor, enriching teaching moments, coupled with triggers, activations, and a panic attack. At the end of the film, Lydie and her partner (E.R. Fightmaster) are visiting Agnes with their new baby. During a moment Agnes and the baby are alone together, Agnes delivers a casual but stunning speech that probably won Victor the screenwriting award at Sundance. Bad things happen sometimes, Agnes explains, “it’s just like that sometimes. Sorry, baby.”

I am certain I would have been marveled by this film regardless of my background as an academic, but it didn’t hurt that this story was extremely familiar. I, thankfully, have never been raped by an academic advisor, but my dissertation advisor was accused of sexual harassment and was in a sexual harassment suit during my last year. It was awful for everyone. As an undergrad, I did have a sexual relationship with a different professor (beginning a week after class ended), but I still, to this day, do not feel harmed by that experience. I do think it is, as Isle McElroy put it in their sharp Sorry, Baby essay, “loser shit” on the part of the professor who hit on me. But I was fine, it was seriously a tiny nothing blip in my relationship history. Sorry, Baby is interested in nuance like this. There is no doubt that what Decker did was horrific and that it has led to unshakable lingering trauma for Agnes, but in one decidedly abolitionist scene in the film, Agnes explains that she doesn’t want Decker to go to jail, she just wants him to stop being a person who would do what he did. If he went to jail, he would just be a person who does something like that “but he’d be in jail,” Agnes explains. We also learn later that a different grad student had consensual sex with Decker; she feels fine. None of that takes away from the truth of it: Decker raped Agnes, and it wasn’t okay. This delicate presentation of complexity in situations of sexual violence didn’t detract from the magnitude of the harm—instead, it legitimized the severity of an experience in its specificity. I genuinely believe we need more of this in our collective approach to combatting sexual violence—treating everything as black and white is a disservice to actually addressing the particular needs of victims.

In not showing the actual moment of rape, Sorry, Baby does something profound: it requires us to believe Agnes without proof. And just as importantly, it protects the audience from a potential moment of re-traumatization. The entire movie is exceedingly gentle; we feel held by Lydie, we feel comfort in Agnes’s new kitten, we feel grateful that Agnes’s new boyfriend-type-person always asks permission. And in the moments we are confronted with the aftermath of trauma, we know there will be places to turn (for Agnes, and for ourselves). Unlike recent “feminist” films like Promising Young Woman and Blink Twice, both which include absolutely brutal scenes of rape and other forms of violence, Sorry, Baby doesn’t make a spectacle of Agnes’s pain. Films that show horrific scenes of sexual violence in the name of keeping women safe remind me of Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin tried to protect women by giving speeches full of the most horrific details you could possibly imagine, traumatizing audiences, and also dehumanizing the women (especially sex workers) she spoke about. It is genuinely baffling to me how people think it’s feminist to show rape scenes in movies, but think it’s anti-feminist to show a woman enjoying rough sex in porn. BAFFLING.

But I digress; back to Sorry, Baby. Victor is refusing easy trauma porn in favor of a lingering tale of a multifaceted woman’s life. A life that persevered before, during, and after a traumatic event. The slow, Kelly Reichardt-esque film style reminds us of not just the banality of evil, but also the banality of healing. Before, during, and after the rape, Agnes puts on boots, feeds her cat, has a best friend. What a powerful reminder for all of us who find ourselves processing the unthinkable while still having to brush our teeth, go to the grocery store. So many of us holding a horror, so many of us who just keep going.

This movie is a miracle, and I am so grateful it exists.

One Battle After Another

Sorry not sorry! I saw this twice. Here’s an excerpt from my initial review.

“...To be clear, I do not think Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another makes revolution irresistible. In fact, if I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, it is because he is so hyper-aware of his absolute futility as a Hollywood director to be a driver of radical social change that he includes Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as a central reference-point for the characters. And it is once I leaned into my own advice to not expect nor look for revolutionary guidance from Hollywood that I was able to take the movie for what it was: an absolutely phenomenal film featuring extremely shallow engagement with radical movements and ideas that allows for a moment of cultural discourse to center around questions related to liberation struggles. And I, for one, am fucking here for that.”

Die My Love

Especially when looking back at the buzziest films of 2025, I start to appreciate Die My Love even more. It was a pretty dude-heavy year (surprise surprise) and this film felt fun and painful and wild and woman-centric. HORRIBLE B-PLOT, but otherwise….loved???

“But in Die My Love—despite being full of incredibly uncomfortable moments and intensely distressing outbursts of psychosis—I loved being in it. (Admittedly, that started to wane about 20 minutes before the ending, but I think that was likely intentional). I loved seeing Jennifer Lawrence crawl around like a cat, lick glass, I loved seeing Robert Pattinson be all at once a concerned husband and an asshole who was not doing enough to support his wife and child. I loved seeing Sissy Spacek represent Jackson’s mother as a new widower who both understood Grace’s motherly rage and also deeply grieved her own (likely sometimes shitty) late husband. Some reviewers think all of this was flat and cliche, but I still found depth here. At the risk of sounding essentialist, something I kept thinking throughout the film was: this was clearly made by a woman. That’s not even to say that I think it captured postpartum so well (I am not a mom to a human child, so I have no ability to say), but just that I felt somehow more held in the distress than I did in, say, Bugonia.

Additionally, the stylistic choices were glorious. The soundtrack (and specifically the volume of it) was a character in the story, the colors were incredible (the night scenes were dystopic dreamlands), the jumpscares….”

Honorable mentions: Bugonia (as my friend N astutely notes, Yorgos is an edgelord, but this movie is great despite his provocations; also: Jessie Plemons 4ever); Come See Me in the Good Light (bring yr tissues </3); Sinners (duh); The Smashing Machine (should have been better, but I feel very tender about The Rock’s performance!); Materialists (I get the critiques, but I am too romantic and too working-class for this not to vibe with me!); Pee-Wee as Himself (<3). Others I enjoyed thinking about (and look for my reviews of most of them on my TikTok): Train Dreams; Frankenstein; Sentimental Value; After the Hunt.

TELEVISION

Dying for Sex

Well, this gutted me. Based on a podcast series of the same name, the show follows Molly (an always-elegant Michelle Williams), who, after receiving a Stage IV cancer diagnosis, leaves her marriage to explore her sexuality through kink. Her best friend, Nikki (an excellent Jeni Slate), steps in to be her main caretaker. The show is a bit tonally all over the place (some raucous comedy and some deeply intense drama), but what a testament to (end of) life. It was a sexy, funny, painful, joyous, and deeply loving portrayal of friendship, desire, and mortality. I can’t recommend it enough.

Task

Sunday night HBO got its groove back with Task, baby! Mark Ruffalo plays Tom, an ex-priest-turned-FBI agent who has just endured a majorly traumatic event—his adopted son, in an episode of psychosis, murdered Tom’s wife. But he’s called back into work to investigate a series of robberies targeting a local gang. Thus assembles his team of hardworking Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), scattered-but-dedicated Alison (Elizabeth Stover), and charming and savvy Grasso (Fabien Frankel). Meanwhile, we get to know the “bad guys,” who are, of course, not bad at all, just down-on-their-luck garbage men, one of whom lost a brother to the gang in question. Robbie, played by the magnetic and indelible Tom Pelphrey, is the father of two young children who are mostly raised by his niece, Maeve (an excellent, mullet-clad Emilia Jones), the daughter of his late brother. There are other characters in the wings—Tom’s entire grieving family, the FBI boss (an always-watchable Martha Plimpton), the entire biker gang (these characters fell flattest to me, but Jamie McShane did a very good job as the villain), and Sam (Ben Doherty) the sweetest, gentlest child whose parents Robbie accidentally kills. Tom chases Robbie and Robbie tries to figure out how to protect the people he loves.

Both men are navigating grief, fatherhood, and faith, which sounds a little cheesy, but Ingelsby’s writing makes it poignant and intimate without getting saccharine. Ruffalo and Pelphrey do an exquisite job demonstrating male pain without it veering into a boring Suffering Man trope, or at least I didn’t need to read it as such. My heart was full of both these characters, in all of their loving warmth and terrible mistakes. It is for certain the most moving show I’ve watched this year and maybe in the last several years. If you like classic Prestige HBO, give this one a shot.

Hunting Wives

This show was a ROMP. A campy, soapy story about MAGA-coded MILFs in Texas who are disproportionately bisexual and who love their guns enough to use them, and on humans if necessary. I mean, that sounds bad, right, but somehow it is NOT BAD. It is the opposite of bad— it is SO GOOD. The plot develops through the fish out of water: Sophie, a New England girl transplanted to Texas because her husband got a job with an oil tycoon. They are East Coast Liberals™ but Hubs really wants Sophie to try to fit in. So, she does, by shtooping Margo, the oil tycoon’s gorgeous seductive wife. To be fair, Margo seduces most people around her, and Sophie is only human. Meanwhile, the teen girl dating the son of one of the women in the MILF crew is found shot to death in the woods. From there we are launched into a classic murder mystery, but one that is punctuated with deranged sex (laudatory), tradwife-meets-Vegas clothes, and every Texan cliche you can think of (mechanical bull-riding! so many shot guns! cowboy hats!). The real thrill of this is that the script is actually good; this does not feel like AI Netflix slop, it feels like a substantive genre series, and I can’t wait for season 2.

Very honorable mentions: The Pitt! It’s a little tokenistic, but otherwise, incredibly moving, with unreal-good performances; Hacks! Season 3 started pretty weak but ended EXCEPTIONALLY. The last episode had me crying and cheering. Also very happy to root for a show starring an actress who is unapologetically in support of Palestine and against ICE. The Studio; another industry show that I—someone not in the industry, but aspirationally adjacent—really enjoyed. Classic comedy antics & fun inside baseball that lay people can still tap into. The second episode was excruciating gold.

ALBUMS

Snocaps (Snocaps)

From my initial review: At an event last week where I was in conversation with Dan DiPiero about his new book, Big Feelings: Quer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, I said something along the lines of feeling about new Waxahatchee albums the way it seems Swifties feel about Taylor’s releases. This goes for any project Katie Crutchfield is a part of, not just her solo stuff, which makes sense because I first fell in music-love with her not through Waxahatchee, but through P.S. Eliot, the band she had with her sister, Allison Crutchfield, in the late 2000s. P.S. Eliot was this incredible blend of the twee bedroom indie-pop I’d been obsessing over all through college, but with a few extra layers—some pop punk, some grunge. It was, as Dan describes in Big Feelings (of which P.S. Eliot is an early example), “this combination of beautiful and boisterous….simultaneously bitter and sweet, because it’s made from every feeling and memory and relationship and place and thought articulated or not, every exuberance and heartbreak and banality and tenderness and violence and experience of the whole bundle’s transience, already gone.” Yes, that.

I often used to shorthand P.S. Eliot, early Waxahatchee, Emily Jane Powers, Mirah, and others in the early and slightly pre-Big Feelings genre Dan describes like this: “it sounds like the way my heart feels.” This gritty punky girly glory that was like a mirror. It’s music that Dan describes as inspiring Lauren Berlant’s concept of “good non-sovereignty,” which is a sort of agentic relinquishing of control. “We give up control because we desire to be attached —to the music, to the feelings elicited by it, to one another.” (That’s Dan again, buy the book.)

Anyway, guess who dropped a surprise album on Halloween? Katie and Allison Crutchfield, now in a new band formation called Snocaps (also featuring MJ Lenderman). Reader when I tell you I cried, I mean I really cried. I adore Katie’s turn to country in her more recent Waxahatchee albums, and that sounds like a part of my heart too, but with Snocaps the Crutchfield sisters are back to their gravelly punk roots and all of a sudden I was in my 20s again. Katie said this about the process: “Every aspect of this project has felt nostalgic in a sense that it felt direct and joyful and easy. Allison and I synced up on a shared vision for the first time in forever, starting a band with our dear friends, keeping it all simple, realigning with the earliest, purest versions of our music-making selves.” Nostalgic, joyful, easy, purest version of ourselves; yes, that’s how this album feels.

Ken Pomeroy (Cruel Joke)

Ken Pomeroy is a Cherokee singer-songwriter from Oklahoma who stole my heart when I heard her on the Twisters soundtrack. I’m shocked every day that she’s not a bigger name. At just 22-years-old, she brings a soulful depth to some of the prettiest and saddest country songs ever played. I am awed by her voice, her lyrics, and the haunting gorgeous sounds she makes on her guitar. Cruel Joke is her third full-length album, and I love her first two albums just as much. My favorites on this 2025 release are “Days Getting Darker,” “Cicadas,” and “Coyote,” a heartbreaking duet with John Moreland.

Wednesday (Bleeds)

Wednesday (another Big Feelings band) is making me hopeful that they will have the kind of staying power of a band like Big Thief. Every album is as good or better than the last. I absolutely adore their blend of classic indie rock with absolute unhinged, 90s-harkening grungey screams and epic roars. On Bleeds we get a little more country (surely in part thanks to the addition of MJ Lenderman), which obviously delighted me. My favorites on the album show the farthest ends of the spectrum on which the album exists: the delightful back porch diddy, “Elderberry Wine” and the gutteral rock screaming that ends “Pick Up That Knife.” Ugh, so good!

More-than-honorable mention, because these were all absolute bangers: Bon Iver (SABLE, fABLE); Bad Bunny (DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS); Emily Jane Powers (Earnest Jamming Partners); Chance the Rapper (Star Line); Big Thief (Double Infinity); Carmen Perry (Eyes Like a Mirror); Joshua Burnside (Teeth of Time); Samia (Bloodless); S.G. Goodman (Planting by the Signs)

BOOKS

Love in a Fucked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook-Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade

I have thought about this book nearly everyday since January. In a highly accessible, smart, and engaging little read, Dean takes the best of self-help, removes the really shitty aspects of it (the racism, classism, ableism, the neoliberal bootstrapism), and encourages us “to do work simultaneously both inside ourselves and against our oppressors.” Dean addresses so many common patterns and familiar experiences: trying to numb alienation through romantic (or other) highs; putting unfair expectations on an individual partner; letting childhood trauma hijack our nervous systems in romantic, friend, and movement relationships; putting blame on people or groups without asking how we contributed to a particular dynamic; and so on. Dean’s background in prison abolition and transformative justice spaces is evident in how much compassion he brings to his advice—-he refuses to do the neolib self-help thing of blaming individuals, insists on illuminating the context for why people do things that are out of alignment with their values, and also says we have responsibility to reduce the harm we bring to our relationships and communities. A common misunderstanding of abolition & TJ movements is that we’re only about forgiving people for doing bad things, but actually it’s a movement that says we need to learn how to stop hurting each other, and in the meantime set up barriers to protect ourselves from harm without the state. Dean’s book gets into practical tools for learning to stop hurting each other. Essential work!

Touch Me, I’m Sick: A Memoir in Essays by Margeaux Feldman

Was lucky enough to help doula this book into the world as Margeaux’s writing coach. Blurbed it too! “In Touch Me, I’m Sick, Margeaux Feldman explores cultural responses to trauma and illness through a brilliant tapestry of research, criticism, and narrative. At once impressively rigorous and deeply personal, Feldman’s gorgeous debut is a love letter and a guide toward radical care, healing, and belonging.”

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot since picking it up a couple months ago. A stunning and detailed graphic novel charting Black resistance in the US from slave rebellions through the riotous aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Graphic novels are not my go-to, but when I spend time with them, I always feel such reverence for the artist-writers. They have to put so much thought into each frame, it’s truly remarkable. And the history lessons throughout Passmore’s latest are inspiring and indispensable.

Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl by Dan DiPiero

As you can see from my Snocaps review above, I loved this book! Also blurbed it! “Big Feelings is a gorgeously written, fiercely intelligent exploration of the emotional landscapes salient in a beloved niche of contemporary indie music. Blending music theory, cultural studies, and personal narrative, DiPiero rigorously considers the intersections of sound, selfhood, and queer/feminist (be)longing. From lo-fi bedroom ballads to riotous distortion, DiPiero theorizes a distinct affective tenor that sets apart the millennial and Gen Z music so many of us passionately obsess over. This book is all at once an indispensable subculture history, a necessary intersectional lens on a traditionally white genre, and a love letter to the kind of music that hits in our bones. A must-read for anyone who takes seriously femme feelings and the possibilities of the melodic noise that carries them.”

Also!!: Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis; Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood; The Guerilla Feminist: A Search for Belonging Online & Offline by Lachrista Greco; Thank You, John by Michelle Gurule; First Time Long Time by Amy Silverberg; Why Christians Should be Leftists by Phil Christman.

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Okay, your turn! What did you love this year?