Obsessions This Week: July 30-August 5, 2023
Does anyone remember Mindy Kaling's "Stuff I Bought That I Liked" blog? This is kinda like that, except I don't have money or a TV show.
🪩 Everybody movement!
I’m not alone in being completely and totally obsessed with this fake-Europop earworm from comedian Kyle Gordon:
If you have somehow missed it, a 50-second clip called “Planet of the Bass” went viral last week. Though intended as a joke, Gordon (aka DJ Crazy Times) is releasing it as an actual single on August 15, and I can’t wait. Today in Tabs called it the song of the summer, which makes absolute sense to me as someone who still plays Rebecca Black every Friday.
🐎 There’s a new gay cowboy movie comin’ to town.
Nearly two decades after I saw Brokeback Mountain in theaters four times (including once with my literal grandparents!), and two years after that dumb Benedict Cumberbatch vehicle I absolutely could not stand, Pedro Almodóvar is releasing a soapy gay western of his own. Before you get too excited, it’s a 31-minute short film (not a full-length feature), and we’ll have to wait until October 6 to see it in theaters.
It’s still big news for fans of Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, and isn’t that all of us?
👚 Girls on Tops x Barbie
As a sporadically-employed adjunct instructor in a film department, I have not yet been able to assemble the true “film professor” wardrobe of my dreams. However, for the purposes of wearing a relevant tee-shirt under a blazer— which is the classic film prof look— I just splurged on the special edition Barbie-pink GRETA GERWIG tee from Girls on Tops. I’ve liked that brand for years, not least because they made my forever-favorite CARRIE FISHER tee, but also because they claim to fund female filmmakers with their profits. Also, I get to low-key cosplay as hometown hero Tracy Letts during the press junket of Lady Bird.
As for my thoughts on Gerwig’s Barbie, which I finally saw for the first time this past week, Leslie Jamison captured my ambivalence in this essential New Yorker piece:
“This is the fantasy of an artist or an analyst—this faith that giving voice to something will rob it of its power—and it gestures implicitly toward the larger aspirations of the film itself: that a corporate-sponsored film about Barbie could repair the damage she’s done by describing it, the brand equivalent of a carbon-neutral flight.”
I liked Barbie, and I obviously love Gerwig, but I do wish people my age (and younger) still talked about the idea of selling out. Maybe it’s not a useful or relevant discussion (or distinction) anymore because we all wish we COULD sell out and, like, make enough money to live our lives. But Mattel has made $27.2 million laundering its reputation, and it’s fair to wonder what it means for the state of the art.
Unrelated: I enjoyed the BBC getting into the Barbie spirit:
👩🏼🏫 Teaching is the best.
If you and I are in each other’s orbits IRL, you may know that I’ve been working three very different jobs this summer.
The best of these by far is co-teaching a Zoom romcom writing class with my friend Alanna Bennett, who has kindly offered me the chance to continue teaching remote adult learner classes through her Spring School. I’m really grateful because teaching is the family trade, as well as something I dearly love doing, and while it’s cliché to say it, I really do learn as much from my students as they learn from me.
Having said that, I’ve learned the most from Richard Curtis, who was a magical guest speaker in Alanna’s class this past week. What an absolute highlight of my life. If you want to know what it was like, I will direct you to this Notting Hill moment:
My next round of classes already sold out (wow), and I’m trying to pace myself given all the other work on my plate, but bookmark https://www.alannabennett.com/classes for when I run it again in the fall.
🔥 My year of romance novels continues, and I am not ashamed.
I never meant to ignore the romance genre, but only in my middle thirties have I allowed myself to get obsessed with it, and specifically the author KJ Charles. I’ve tried other authors, but no one comes close to Charles, who writes queer, inclusive, and sometimes supernatural erotica set in Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian times. These are definitely not for everyone, but they are extremely for me.
How can I explain these books? They’re as if Bridgerton delivered on its promise of diversity, with well-developed characters who are immigrants, disabled, poor, socialist, Tory, gay, Indian, Jewish, Black, trans, etc. Their identities, and why they’re in England at that point in history, are never incidental, and always carry narrative weight.
I’ve read over thirty romance novels in 2023 (it sounds excessive, but I take many hours of public transit in L.A. and also, yes, it is excessive). If you’re ready to dip a toe in, I recommend The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting, about a lower-class sister-and-brother duo trying to marry for money but falling in love with the wrong people.
🥗 My favorite summer salad!
My friend Matt put out a request on Twitter for impressive dinner party dishes, and it reminded me of my favorite summer salad, which came to me via either my mother or our friend and neighbor, Maggie Losek. There was a year both of them were making it often, and it really is a treat. Everyone loves it! I asked my mom to make it on my birthday.
Here’s the recipe for the internet’s so-called “Best-Ever Farro Salad”.
✍️ A poem to send you off this week:
I love a love poem, what can I say! Actually, I just love when people love— books, people, movies, food. To that end, one nice thing about this newsletter is how many of you have DM’d me things you love with which to become obsessed that you recommend I check out. Please keep it up!
From Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, by Richard Siken:
Everybody moooovement! (Did you also notice that his hair is an overdyed burgundy, which was popular among both men and women at the time. See Seth Rogen, Can't Hardly Wait.) Thanks for pointing out Rebecca Black, who I do not know.
I also had mixed feelings about Barbie. It was referential in a fun way, but got a little literal when approaching modern gender role dynamics. I did like lines like: "I don't know if patriarchy is for me. I thought there'd be more horses in the patriarchy."
Congratulations so much on your teaching career! Here's to sold out classes, and here's to teaching writing that has made the industry some of its biggest money, because hey--we all like to laugh.
Woof, that Barbie article! Can’t believe that’s the first fleshed-out Eden comparison I’ve seen. Thanks for that, and the rest!