Four...Months...Later
CoTW 103 Thinking about dreams, talking about summer, music, reading, and crying.
Hello! Have you missed me? yeah…barely enough posts to warrant feeling the absence, I get it. But I have missed you !
New here? Welcome! I am so glad you are here, and I hope you enjoy your time with me today. While I recover from the shock and awe of time passing, enjoy this installment of Collage of The Week :)
The temperatures are slowly inching upward, the sun is getting lazier as it arcs across the sky, and I am searching my wardrobe in vain, willing it to give me something fresh and new in the form of good warm-weather outfits.
All of this can only mean one thing y’all…Summer is here! New York is a wild place to be in the Summer. Attempting to keep everyone from whisking off to their upstate cottages, air-conditioned abodes in other states, or weekend rentals at the Hamptons, the city vibrates with free concerts, block parties, Lincoln Square dance lessons, and lines for ice cream cones that stretch around the block. People are *out here* and I find myself energized by the sheer presence of life as I walk around. For someone who really dislikes Summer, New York is really giving me a run for my money with all this merriment.
A few weeks from now I will be laughing at myself for this optimism as I begin to accept the belief that I just might sweat for the rest of my life, never knowing what it is to be cool without the aid of my window unit. But for now, I can be seen trying to spend as much time outside as humanly possible. Catch me Citi-biking with buds, splaying across a picnic blanket with a book in hand (trying my best to squash the powers/influences that seek to stop me….see essay recommendation below), and strolling Central Park like I have nowhere to be and nothing to do even when I very much have things to do and places to be!
Would you like a basket of music a.k.a. a playlist?
I come to this newsletter bearing musical gifts/musings to make up for how long it has been since you have heard from me. Also, I am listening anyway, might as well share the joy! A playlist containing all these bops can be found below.
Some artists that have been on repeat lately:
As I type this up, I am swooning over Yo La Tengo, playing their entire catalog on shuffle like an animal. It is all too good not to give you some stray songs I caught in my joyful listening.
Trevor Powers a.k.a. Youth Lagoon just put out a new album Heaven is A Junkyard —his first in eight years under this moniker—which I have found to be fabulous in its tender lyrics and lovely instrumentation. Rabbit, Mercury, and Helicopter Toy have been personal favorites, but truly the album is succinct and coherent enough as a unit to enjoy in its entirety a few times over.
A friend shared De Todas las Flores with me last month, an album by Natalia Lafourcade, and truly there is no situation where pressing play on this beautiful, sophisticated, soulful, calming album wouldn’t elevate the experience. Taking a walk in the park? Cooking with friends? Scrambling to make dinner with whatever you have in your pantry? Deep-cleaning your apartment? De Todas las Flores will pair perfectly with all of it, trust me!
One song everyone should just sit back, relax, and let wash over you is Silvana Estrada’s Milagro y Disastre…so easing.
I added two songs from the new Bully album, Lucky For You. This is going to sound odd but the songs have this chewy quality that just fits perfectly with a mid-afternoon walk. If there is a better word for what I’m talking about…I almost don’t want to know, let me live in ignorance and continue describing music like I would describe mochi ice cream.
CoTW 103 PL baby!
Reading About Reading
Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?
This essay written by A.O. Scott (linked above to read paywall-free) calls to the forefront a thought that has been floating around my own mind for some time now; why does it feel like reading is less and less common? Furthermore, why does it feel like people are increasingly celebrating *not* reading? I admit I am reading fewer books than I ever have to my chagrin. Whenever I stare longingly at my bedside table piled high with books to be read, more often than not I catch myself pressing play on a podcast, streaming a show, or glancing at social media instead.
As with most phenomena worth our inspection, there isn’t just one root cause to blame, nor is the decline new to our generation. Reading is a source of pleasure to humanity and it is also a source of intellectual expansion beyond what society deems acceptable, a fact that powerful systems seek to diminish as best as they can. I hope you click through and spend some time with Scott’s analysis in full, as he takes his time building quite the case that will stick with you…below you will find a short excerpt:
While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading … A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
Here is a GQ piece about why it is good to cry at the movies:
An ode to crying at the movies
Speaking of crying at the movies…if you are reading this, please go watch Past Lives so I can talk about it with everyone I know. TYIA
That’s all for this issue, friends!
Hoping you have thoroughly enjoyed the collages in this installment…my mind must want to be in the sunshine, seeing as three out of four pieces here contain a glowing orb of some kind.
Take care of yourselves, your neighbors, and your attention, see you next time :]