The Crit
unclench your jaw — it's summer, baby.
Hi—
Happy June and Happy Pride, my sweet summer cherry tomatoes! It's finally hot here in Brooklyn, and I can feel my outer shell opening like the birth of a half-Mexican Venus. This newsletter is a little bottom-heavy, so bear with me.
Critiques
Books
You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue: After seeing the psychedelic green cover of this book on display at every bookstore, I finally gave in to the pressure. Partly because I love the idea of retelling the colonization of Tenochtitlán and partly because I entertain the idea of staying up to date on new literary fiction. I wanted to like this much more than I did. The ideas were there, but the writing felt clunky and confusing.
Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash (Currently) Another Country by James Baldwin: I love James Baldwin, I really do. Although I’m not yet finished with this book, I already know it's going to break my heart to the depths. Every character is a challenge and an existential question. His writing continuously blows me away. Baldwin has such a knack for describing intense, nuanced emotions and scenes without a heavy hand. He catches the fleeting, probing questions I ask myself when I’m staring out a bus window, dissecting my reality.
Photo by Charles Loyer on Unsplash
Digital Media
The Wild Robot: I’m forever eons behind on the Oscars’ watch list, so, of course, I’ve just now seen this. I loved it! I’m a sucker for heartfelt animated movies involving animals. I cried (Easy personal trauma bingo stamp: I cry easily when animated movies show tough, shifting family dynamics). It was a great movie, but yeah, I’m still so glad Flow won the Oscar because it was more original.
LOVE ISLAND: I’m bandwagoning the USA version after last year's great success. I’ve been a devoted fan of Love Island UK for a few years, but the last few seasons have felt a little blah, so I’m going to attempt the impossible and watch both US and UK simultaneously. With LIUS, the game is to take a shot every time someone uses a therapy buzzword or has TikTok voice. With LIUK, it's a shot every time someone's accent is unintelligible, vaguely English gibberish. Shit, I’m already in the hospital. I’m planning to watch it daily (except for a vacation in early July), so pleaseeee tell me your thoughts as they come to you.
RHONY – I am c r a w l i n g my way through this show, but it doesn’t mean I love it any less. I just finished Season 7 and saw the 100-episode special recap. In a weird turn of events, I’ve come to love the ridiculous BS from this show. They’re all bad people 100%, but they’re excellent TV. Ramona’s crazy eyes on the runway, Scary Island, LuAnn and the pirate, Aviva’s leg, Sonja (general) – I can’t help it, it’s incredible TV.
Foods
*crickets*
I have not been dining in my usual extravagant fashion lately. Restraint and I are becoming acquainted. All I can offer at this time is that it's picnic season. Here’s a picnic dinner I threw together for Scott and me a week ago.
It ain’t much, but it’s honest. Potatoes, shishito peppers, and hummus. Sourdough crackers. Strawberries. Peach Caprese salad. Chocolate almonds and dates.
Other crap
To the joy of anyone under 40 and the dismay of anyone over, I got another tattoo! Well, two, technically, but one is right next to the other, so it feels like more of an extension to an existing piece rather than an entirely new one. You’ll have to see me in person to see them, though. I have a few tattoos, and even though I’m familiar with the process, each one feels like the first time. I stress myself out: What if I regret the placement of it? Is there another piece I like more? Does this track with who I am as a person, or will it forever publicly mark me as deeply ignorant of my own nature? And inevitably, I come back to a common reason many people never get tattoos: My mom’s going to tell me I’m trashy and disgustingly unemployable. But, like the leftist Gen-Z/Millenial cusp that I am, I remember that 1) My body, my choice! and 2) I was never going to be a tax attorney or an FBI agent. I’m the opposite of that. I run a stupid little newsletter, and I’m going to grad school to ~*be a writer*~ so actually, being a tattooed degenerate is just the entrance fee.
But after I have this micro-crisis, right before the needle touches down over the stencil—It’s cheesy, I know—I’m reminded of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old celebrity mummy with sixty-one tattoos. Although they were maybe done as some kind of pain relief or therapeutic practice, my point is that tattooing has been around for THOUSANDS of years in numerous cultures around the world.* WOMEN have been getting tattooed for thousands of years. Arbitrarily constructed Western values claiming that tattoos are “low-class” likely have racist, colonizer roots, meant to dehumanize native populations and vilify poor people. Still, 5,000 years can pass, and something as simple as a series of lines hand-poked with a sharp animal bone can make a stranger stop in their tracks and recalibrate everything they’d envisioned of the past. I’m unlikely to be an archaeologist's career-defining discovery, but I’m enamored with the thought of growing old in a body that shows the life I lived in it—scars, broken and repaired bones and joints, tattoos, and all. I’d love for my body to be adorned like the beloved home it's been for me while on Earth. It’s my house, I can paint a mural on the walls if I want to. So I do.
*If Smithsonian Mag is an unreliable or otherwise problematic source, I apologize (and let me know). It’s just the most accessible source I could find for things I already knew but wanted to prove I was right about. Lol.
Critical Thought
First, I just want to say how proud I am to see so many people protesting ICE raids all around the country. Next, I’m about to get a little intense, so step out now if you need to. I can’t organize thoughts very well right now but fuck ICE forever. No human is illegal on stolen land. There is no world where enforcing an arbitrary borderline does not necessitate violence. Our country was built on genocide, and we’re patriotically recreating that whenever we can. In truth, when it comes to humans being ripped away from their families, mothers and children kidnapped and separated, I could give less than a shit about a car burning. A car is not a living being, and just because it costs money does not equate it to a loss of life. If someone snatched your child out of your arms and said, ‘It's okay, here’s a car instead,’ would you accept that? No, right, because a car is not your loved one. So I don’t want to hear people complaining that the protestors deserve to be rounded up and shot because they made people uncomfortable by burning a car. So many Americans have pride in the Boston Tea Party and Revolutionary War, but balk at the practice of keeping a revolutionary spirit alive or destroying consumer products to prove a point. And in what world do we accept military forces being used on civilians? Oh, right, the world where brown people are not considered civilians, or people. The US government has a nasty history of gutting social movements, like cutting out the seeds of a pepper, through propaganda, assassination, and misinformation. When I see videos of protestors trying to speak to the cops on the front lines, sincerely begging them to consider the harm they're doing and to find another occupation, I wonder what goes through the cops' heads. Many of them hide their culture behind black bulletproof vests, put on a stoic face, unflinching and sterile despite the violence it purveys. Do they hear the words being said to them? Do they think they’re on the right side of things, fully able to convince themselves they are the righteous exterminators of a plague-ridden rat infestation? Do they plead with the protestors in their head, beg them to kneel in obedience so they don’t have to club them over the head and leave them bloodied and bruised, because they really don’t want to? Do they think that if they’re on camera as being particularly vicious, caught salivating at the mouth for a chance to ‘set someone straight,’ that the president himself will bestow a badge of honor on them, forever cementing their legacy as the brave officer who killed a 20-year-old for holding a brick? One of them probably had a Star Wars poster in their childhood bedroom – Are they still struggling to figure out who the bad guy is? Embarrassing! Ew! Yuck! All I know is that when I see Mexican flags wrapped around the shoulders of someone dancing in the streets; when I see heads and hands held high in the face of fascism; when I see passionate life pouring out of my people’s mouths, voices hoarse from resisting with everything they have, my body shivers and my toes unclench. We have to keep fighting. Kneeling to fascism won’t save anyone.
Crit Pic
Drumroll please… Introducing this week’s beloved Crits… They’re the size of domestic housecats… They’re speckled… They’re natives of the island state of Tasmania… They’re medium-sized carnivorous marsupials… It’s the Eastern Quoll!!! Round of applause for the Eastern Quoll, everybody. Eastern Quoll, take it away.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for this week’s Crit Corner! If you made it to the bottom, you have my sincere gratitude. Like, subscribe, leave a comment, whatever else YouTubers say. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
Are those critters real? Too cute!