MARCH ROARS IN
You know the deal; I consume something and then you consume me consuming it. What are we? A consenual Ouroboros? Am I making things weird between us?
i hate pisces season i have no water in my chart and i’m fine with that. don’t make me feel an emotion! I do not consent! aha! now it is aries season! the most baby of the seasons, I will throw a temper tantrum at the smallest inconvenience. This month is too long I feel like have lived an entire year. The joke of March Again?! has already been made and yet it is wild we are back where our lives fell into whatever this is. We continue to be failed by our government and many institutions and yet, we are still here. I guess that has to be enough.
BOOKS
Feelings A Story In Seasons 2021, Manjit Thapp
Wow the art in this is really beautiful. I love the textures and the dreamy quality to the panels. It follows through six seasons and is kind of like a very poetic autobio comic. It captures very beautifully how we exist through seasons, how they affect our moods, how it is a cycle that we always grow through every year. If you’re a fan of Misbah Ahmed’s or Linnea Serte’s I think this is a good comic for you.
Butter Honey Pig Bread 2020, Francesca Ekwuyasi
This is a nourishing story. It makes me hungry, makes me think of I love you I want you to eat well. I love how food played a role throughout this story, each character’s own attachment to it in their own way. The last line gave me goosebumps and you really grow to learn and care for these women as the story unravels. I loved the change in pacing towards the end, the themes of a cycle repeating itself. If you enjoyed Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, I’d recommend this.
New Queer Photography: Focus on The Margins 2020, Edited by Benjamin Wolberg
Holy shit this collection of photography is so so so beautiful. There is such a diverse range of photography in here be it style, bodies, orthemes. It’s a hefty tome and I’m so greatful to own it. It’s such a beautiful experience to flip through this book and discover all the beautiful forms queerness takes.
Detransition, Baby 2021, Torrey Peters
god what a delightful messy treat. these characters are SO HUMAN and because of that they are so beautifully flawed I loved. LOVED reading this. Make a powerpoint about why I should let you eat out my p*ssy lives in my head RENT FREE. Sometimes I had to take breaks because of the grief I felt, there are some heavy parts but they are also written with a lot of care, honesty and humour. I laughed out loud so many times, it’s such a witty book and I love Reese so very much. I wish I got to have more of all of their lives, I’m actually disappointed it ended, but I cannot wait for whatever wild creation the TV show will become and I am just so grateful that there will be a TV show at all. I’m also kind of nervous about how that will center white trans women over trans women of colour in the popular media world but for NOW, I am just happy I got to read this book. Everyone should read this book.
Queer Werewolves Destroy Capitalism, MJ Lyons
This is very much a smut zine. Which is great and fine, it wasn’t really erotica I was into because it’s very kind of a/b/o at points and that’s too eyes emoji for me. Not my vibe, might be yours, I don’t know! It is set in Toronto so I did really love hearing about a pack of werewolves destroying banks and fucking up the financial district in places that I know personally. I got it through Glad Day because you can order frozen foods or tubs of chili and a book for delivery which is such an amazing service! I miss going to Glad Day, so I’m glad I can support them!
it was never going to be okay, 2020 jaye simpson
A really beautiful gut punch of a poetry collection. I love love prose poems and jaye’s writing is so good. I’m like obsessed with the lack of capitalization in jaye’s work and would love to listen to them speak about it for hours?? The way stories unfold throughout the four separate sections are really captivating, I absolutely loved it.
I Can Make You Feel Good, 2020 Tyler Mitchell
EUGH. We had this book at work and it was wrapped in plastic and I KNEW, I KNEW if I opened it I would buy it and of course that’s exactly what happened. This tome is BEAUTIFUL, the cover is photo printed on book cloth…the texture of the paper it’s so good but what matters is the photography. It does make me feel good because there are such soft warm bright beautiful depiction of black joy.
Horror Manga Zine Vol. 5, Maria Ngyuen
I love love love love Maria’s work so much. I almost have a complete set of their beautiful Horror Manga Zine series, if anyone could ever bear to part with volume two I would kiss you (after covid). Click the link to get your own! Treat yourself, buy a print! It’s such a beautiful mix of gore and body horror, right up my alley. Maybe up yours? Thanks to Yammy who gave me this as a christmas gift.
The Book of Delights 2019, Ross Gay
Wow what a beautiful book of little essayettes. I really love writing like this, small vignettes into someone’s life. I kind of wonder if I would like an experience of doing small writing like this. I wonder what could push me into making that move. But it’s really full of life. In some ways that’s what the blog is, me capturing that through the media I engage with. I’ve given this book as a gift to two of my friends and I really hope they love it too! I just think it is helpful to see the joy in living everyday especially when it is very hard to be alive most days.
Snapdragon 2020, Kat Leyh
I LOVED this it was such good storytelling, comic work, illustration, characters. Do you love possums? WEirdos? Taxidermy? Witchcraft? Motorcycle Butches? The character design was beautiful and diverse, but each character, even secondary ones got to have a piece in the story. They didn’t seem flat, they were so well developed.
Definitely pick this up from your local bookstore, it was such a feel good read. The highlight of my abysmal day. Would recommend if you liked Witch Boy tbh.
The Werewolf of Fever Swamp 1993, R.L Stine
I don’t know how this book got into my house I have no memory of purchasing it, I’m not surprised it’s there I just can’t remember why. I still enjoy R.L’s ability to end EVERY chapter with some kind of cliffhanger, just to have the resolution be like nothing the next page. You can still feel the joy of that even tho you’re not a kid anymore. BUT, the werewolf didn’t really show up until the last twenty pages which just didn’t cut it for me. Happy for the protagonist…but as a werewolf connoisseur I was found wanting.
Barnaby 2021, Andrea Curtis & Kass Reich
Really cute children’s book about a bird that is too full of themselves but runs away and learns to see the beauty in others and gets over their jealousy to befriend their owner’s new bird friend.
Something’s Wrong 2021, Jory John & Erin Kraan
This really captures the hahaha anxiety you feel when something is off but you don’t know what. Extremely cute, love the ride or die friendship between the bear and his friend Anders. They also gaslight the entire forest… which is a very girlboss of them.
I Hate Men 2021, Pauline Harmange
This is resting on its laurels of almost being banned in France (by one person and it never even went to court or anything) and for what? It’s 2021, white feminism is dead let it rot and decompose and act as fertilizer to theory that matters. wah wah i am a misandrist wah wah wah. If your feminism does not express intersectionality, and relies on misandry then why are you wasting trees to print your books. No clue if this author is a Terf or transmysoginist, but her complete lack of mentioning transgender women and using the word cisgender only once is like ??? She also doesn’t even acknowledge her privilege as a cis white women and at this point in my life cis white women are the same if not worse than white cis men to me.
Also they completely stole I’m Afraid Of Men by Vivek Shraya’s book design, which is a completely better book which I recommend you read instead.
Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937, Zora Neale Hurston
A book I had started a couple of times but this time I made myself commit to it. It’s really full of a life and community. It’s a full book. The way dialogue is written with a black tongue, it makes me feel the way I feel reading Toni Morrison, which is like I am being fed some missing piece of myself. The love between Janie and Tea Cake had me smiling, it was so sweet and tender and I really enjoyed reading about their life together, right to the end. There is just a lot of care towards writing black folks and allowing them to be human beings and it’s always a pleasure to get to read that for me.
Heaven No Hell 2021, Michael Deforge
Nobody is making comics as much as or like this dude. I love his work and Heaven No Hell as a collection is just as good as everything else he’s ever done. The comics are funny and at the same time they’re beating you with a brick while you’re distracted and laughing. That’s a good thing. Out of the whole collection I think Album crawled inside of my skull, but they were all really good stories. Loved it!
MOVIES
The Howling IV
They made this so they would have a film that is closer to the book and like…why did you bother. It was so boring, the first film was a thousand times better even with how it was bad. When the protagonist’s cheating husband turns into a werewolf he MELTS in this very c*m like substance it’s an absolute horrible mess. I’m going to have to blog about The Howling series once I’ve watched them all. I’ve put in the damn work.
Judas And The Black Messiah 2021, Shaka King
There is a Slate article that discusses a lot of what happens and what was just used at the wrong time to add flavour to the film. It is a well acted movie but it genuinely feels like an empty gesture. All in all I can’t watch movies where police shoot at, harass, and kill black people. I just disassociate, it does nothing for me. Who is this for? It’s not me. There has to be, and there are, better ways to make films that center the violence of a police state.
The Murder of Fred Hampton 1971, Howard Alk
It’s a lot to watch to be honest, a lot of archive footage of Fred Hampton speaking at his own trial, at rallies. The end is focussed on his assassination and the attempted cover up. I linked the vimeo if anyone wants to watch it. Just depressing, it feels like we are truly repeating a vicious cycle.
The Old Guard 2020, Gina Prince-Bythewood
Lots of people liked this so I thought I’d give it a shot. It almost lost me at the start, I wasn’t really into it, but when Nile showed up she was truly the heart of the whole thing. Yes I was thirsting for Charlize Theron the whole damn time. Woof. This had a lot of really great moments that built up together, the music was really out of place though. I’m excited for that they will do with the second movie, and I love this gay weird found family.
The Howling VI: The Freaks 1991, Hope Perello
No Howling movie is the same, this is about a traveling werewolf following a carnival that is run by a vampire that looks like an eggplant, or second rate Lestat depending. Our protag is a dashing british rogue who won’t do up his shirt properly and ~loves~ the preacher’s daughter (they fuck) after he fixes up the church that…nobody goes to. He FALLS ASLEEP the night of the full moon and wakes up and is like OH NO and changes into a manwolf. There is a great fingernail transformation, but that’s it. He is also actually really in love with crocodile man and they walk off down the highway together at the end so they can be “freaks” together and if I allow myself a moment I can maladaptive daydream their life together but that is a rabbit hole I cannot afford to be apart of!!! I just hope he is living happily with his southern crocodile boyfriend now. It IS in my top…five of the franchise, but I don’t know what’s that really saying...
The Lair of the White Worm 1988, Ken Russel
this was fucking WILD. SNAKE MILF WITH A STRAP?! GIRL, HELP! Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi out here looking like boy snacks… listen, I don’t even know where to start this movie was a horny romp. Comedy horror perfection. Whoever did the styling I bow to you because everyone looked so…good. Amanda Donohoe….dreamy sigh.
The House With a Clock in its Walls 2018, Eli Roth
This movie makes me feel like what seeing the Adam’s Family on TV in the fall when I was like 8 did. It has the same magical gothic energy that has made me be the weirdo I am today. I think that’s what works in it’s favor and that Jack Black has like solidified his dad/uncle weirdo role which he also does well in the Goosebump movies. I think I’m just in love with the nostalgia. I could critique a bunch of stuff, talk abt how I don’t like Eli Roth or Eric Kripke, but I will just enjoy this for what it was and continue to dream about being an orphan swept away to live in a gothic mansion filled with weird artifacts and learning magic.
I Care A Lot 2020, J Blakeson
they hate to see a girl boss winning the movie in which yea, I did. and I would have rather been queer baited or watched homophobic romance than whatever tricked me into watching this very bad wishes it was written by gillian flynn film. it’s genuinely a really upsetting and disgusting movie asides the fact that it’s badly written, contrived, and everyone has a villain monologue every other scene lmao. PASS
Brother to Brother 2004, Rodney Evans
I would love to read the screenplay for this movie it was really beautiful! It takes a look at the Harlem Renaissance through Bruce Nugent as a homeless man and Perry a younger college student. There is just a lot of tenderness between their art, their community, and their loneliness. It blurs the line of plausibility but I feel like that’s what so much of reaching back to queer elders are, how they speaks to us through their histories like ghost. There is such a tender monologue about wishing to care for someone in this that is going to stay with me for a very long time, I know it.
Blood and Chocolate 2007, Katja Von Garnier
Woof. I wonder if this would have been more successful if it had come out after twilight. I mean, not with me, because it was not good. Not enough chocolate, barely any blood. Will Graham is here. There is a lot of weird sexism that is just like yikes. That’s the thing about het werewolves. It’s always like u must be my mate u must give birth to my litter and continue my legacy rawr rwawrwr and im like no…nobody wants this. I don’t want this.
Relic 2020, Peter Hyams
This movie gave my trauma trauma lmao. I love haunted house horror films, but I love a house that is haunted in it’s architecture, not just ghosts. Bigger on the inside, changing rooms. I love the betrayal of your home failing you. The house is very house of leaves, and if you know what I mean, you know what i mean. It has a slow start, but I watched it twice and appreciate the build up. I think establishing the generation of mothers and daughters, the unspoken traumas we inflict as families was done so well. I am going to think of the final scene for the rest of my life, one of the most tender and horrific things I’ve ever watched.
The Howling VII: New Moon Rising
oh this was the worst one i couldn’t even handle it. there is line dancing I guess…I have one more to watch. I’m so close.
Jellyfish Eyes 2013, Takashi Murakami
I have a hard time vibing with live action films that have the same energy of an anime series because it feels like it should just be entirely animated. I don’t know, I didn’t like it too much. The concept of F.R.I.E.N.Ds was pretty cute though.
Werewolf: The Beast Amoung Us 2012, Louis Morneau
This movie was fun! As a werewolf movie it’s enjoyable, I liked the woof design. There is a lot of Romani racism for no reason and weird sexissssssssmmmmmmmmmmmm. For no reason. It was fun, worth one watch.
Bad Trip 2021, Kitao Sakurai
It was cool to have a prank show that followed a plot while still being a prank show. It’s definitely a new concept. That being saaaaaiiiiiiiiiiidddddddd, if I saw Eric Andre I would run. I want nothing to do with his chaos. Wish I never had to see the gorilla scene. Wish that you never have to see it either.
The Howling: Reborn 2011, Joe Nimziki
I know I said the Howling 7 was the worst but this is up there. I think it’s worse because it’s coherent so you know that you are suffering, that you are in hell. This is life is so hard as a white teenage high school boy wah wah wah and then he finds out he was a werewolf which makes it so much harder. He gets to fall in love with his manic pixie dream girl who he’s been secretly (?) drawing for a whole school year. So guess what kind of bullshit this romanticizes. I skipped their sex scene cos I was good out here. ALSO there is a plot point where his mom, who died, comes back as a blonde and seduces his father (his wife) and he doesn’t know it’s her…HOW DO YOU NOT REMEMBER YOUR BEAUTIFUL WIFE? A crime to MILFS. The wolfs had pointy ears again and good fang moments but this had some of the worst dialogue. Also very canadian because the bottom from Xavier' Dolan’s Heartbeats was there and and Landon Liboiron who later would go be a werewolf in Hemlock Grove. (my fav werewolf transformation ngl)
Andrew Thomas Huang Filmography
Their filmography is so beautiful, I want to eat the visuals of everything. Kiss of the Rabbit God was the first film I saw, but he’s done music videos. He is going to have a film coming out based off this really good short film, Lily Chan & The Doom Girls and I am so excited for it. Go forth!
SERIES
It’s A Sin (5 Episodes), 2021 Russel T. Davies
I don’t even know how to describe this show it like, hurts. It was really good and beautiful, showed such a diverse queer found family and OOF. It is about the rise of AIDS in London during the 80s and follows a group of friends and how they’re affected by it. There is a lot of joy in it, Roscoe my black gay son, pisses in Margaret Thatcher’s coffee. There is a scene where Richie confesses his love to a boy he went to school with and without facing the camera does a small ballet in the car headlights while he watches from inside the car and I think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. SCREAM. And Jill, champion of my heart, what a beautiful character she was full of the most compassion and care. There was just a lot of care put into this series and I really loved it. Nathaniel Curtis has no business being that hot and tall though.
Calico Critters Clover
I have saturdays off which is extremely weird and unusual for me. I don’t know what to do with this freedom so yes I absolutely chose to regress to being five and watched the 3 minute shorts with cgi Sylvain Families on netflix. They’re cute and fun, one of the little rabbits runs away from home because her sister ate the king raspberry and honestly same. This then lead me to something even better which…
Shin Maple Town Monogatari - Palm Town Hen
I have a small obsession with Maple Town in that it is absolutely impossible to find the entire 46 episodes translated. There is Maple Town Stories, about Maple Town and then this series which goes to Palm Town which is some kind of LA utopia. Honestly one day I will snap and create a change.org or gofundme to acquire the rights to Maple Town so someone can re release it because it’s such a good series. These are my soap operas! My Stories! Also the DVD sets cost 400 dollars lmao so…fuck me I guess. I’d love to own a Cel or an artbook…I just want to watch all of their little animal lives unfold. They’re so fun.
MUSIC
You, At The End - LAFAWNDAH
Came up on my spotify shuffle and just had it on repeat for the week.
Greentea Peng
I think she would be chill in a blunt rotation. Just put their whole discography on shuffle for good vibes, loovee the cadence of her voice. also she has a pokerus tattoo?
My Analog Journal
My bestie introduced me to this channel and it’s the best spot to find new things to listen to. I love all the cumbia mixes cos they remind me from when I was a kid.
MONTERO CMBYN - Lil Nas X
I couldn’t leave it out, I’ve watched the video seven times, had the song repeat. Visionary, amazing, revolutionary. I’ve never seen something like this and I know KNOW it is going to give people permission to be who they are.
For very self explanatory reasons the Beast of Gevuaudan is my favourite “cryptid”. This was a great episode of puppet history, but this song is a banger.
As always thanks for taking the time to look at how I spend my time lmao. Today is Transgender Day Of Visibility so please give your money to trans folks and organizations! I love trans people, whether they’re out or not, I love you! Tell me about what you watched and read!
Also I will be doing a reading and you can sign up here: https://fb.me/e/59JMldraO