(Belated) Weekend Recommendations
This was supposed to go out on Saturday...oops! Here's what I watched/read/thought about last week.
Our House demo by Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell
The perfect April song. It captures the feeling of the beginning of spring, Los Angeles at its best, the dream of home ownership under late-stage capitalism, and love itself. I recently learned Graham Nash released the official version (sans Joni) after he and Joni broke up which is…so sad? In a way, though, the fact that Nash released something so beautiful and warm about their time together after their split makes the song even better.
Going analog
This week, I purchased a film camera and an actual alarm clock in an effort to spend less time on my phone and avoid looking at it first thing in the morning. I’ve started referring to my phone in my head as “The Orb” like it’s a mythical, powerful object that saps my life force every time I harness its mystical properties so I’m less tempted to scroll. Also, when you have a film camera everyone wants you to take a picture of them. I often want to take a picture of my friends and randomly find it mortifying and creepily formal to be like, “hey, can I take a picture of you guys?” even though I personally love to indulge in the sin of vanity.
The Dreamer’s Dictionary by Stearn Robinson and Tom Corbett
This is connected to going analog, but I just thrifted this dictionary of dreams published in 1984. My dream life tends to be bizarre, terrifying, and pretty metaphorically unsubtle but sometimes I get one with an elusive meaning. Instead of touching The Orb when I wake up, I’m going to turn off my Real Life Alarm Clock and find some very prescriptive and 70s interpretations of my dreams the night before. Also, I remember not so long ago there was Discourse about how it’s annoying to share your dreams as an adult and I think that’s crazy? I want to know the dreams of loved ones, friends, acquaintances, nemeses. Drop some in the comments if you feel so inclined.
Ramy
I know I’m so, so, so late to the party with this one, but I finished all three seasons in three weeks and now I’m in mourning. Ramy is my celebrity crush–respectfully, he’s so hot and has so much integrity and even as I’m typing this I’m like PLEASE don’t make a fool out of me because you’re still a man in Hollywood–and I avoided the show in the same way you avoid actually talking to your middle-school boyfriend. It’s extremely good, and I’m looking forward to watching More Feelings once I remember my HBO password. As a fairly non-observant person, there’s something very meaningful about watching someone imperfectly and hilariously search for God, trying so hard to be good but hurting themselves and everyone around them in the process. It made me think a lot about the systems I subscribe to and why, the way I bristle against restrictions and obligations. What kind of person would I be if I embraced rules and scripture and submitted to a higher power? I feel wiser for having watched someone else try to sort it out for themselves.
Googling who someone’s parents are before you get upset about an article
Yes, this is about that essay in The Cut which I unfortunately will be writing about here more later.
Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing traces the legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud and Marx who popularized the idea of “muscular armor”, the notion that there is a connection between emotional tension and physical tension in the body. Reich broke the conventions of psychoanalysis, which at the time still looked like a patient lying on the couch facing away from the analyst, by incorporating therapeutic massage into his practice to address these emotional blockages. Unfortunately, his theories got wackier as he aged–the photo above is one of his “orgone boxes”, essentially a wood-paneled chamber he (falsely) claimed accumulated “life force” that could, among other things, cure cancer. Nonetheless, he contributed greatly to the pursuit of bodily freedom, the movement against fascism, and brought an attention to politics into psychoanalysis. Laing follows his theory of the mind-body connection through history, tracing its afterlives in liberation movements, and more broadly writes about the body as a source of freedom, its capacities for pleasure and pain, power and peril.
This thing Jemima Kirke said:
And with that, have a great week, and if you’re on the Line of Totality (lucky you) don’t look directly into the sun during the eclipse!
Oh analog, what would we do without these mechanical wonders. I use a typewriter to feel like I can zone out of my laptop when I want to write letters or film stuff (because writing by hand would be too basic?) but I never thought about a physical alarm clock — great shout, fuck the orb. I love Our House, and I had no idea he released this after they broke up… this breaks me. I wonder if she also released anything during that time… I’m ashamed by how much pleasure I derive from work by celebrity breakups, like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation coupled with Spike Jonze’s Her. Please send more recs this way.