🎵
As a young queer there were certain experiences that struck me as intolerable and yet held a certain horror-fascination for me — like fisting, or listening to a Xiu Xiu album. And I do think a Xiu Xiu album, especially A Promise, feels like the sonic equivalent of being fisted. The raw, unabashed emotionality of Jamie Stewart’s vocals, the discordant intensity of the arrangements… by opening myself up to what once felt impossible to bear, I encountered sublimity.
Related Recs
〰️
There’s a limited selection of poets that can move me to tears without even reading through their stanzas but allowing the recollection of their words to pass over my mind — the aforementioned Bachmann is one of the real ones, T.S. Eliot is another; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on occasion; sometimes-too Hölderlin, Herbert, Hadewijch; at least one Donne piece has this power, at least one Brecht; perhaps-too I would add cuttings of Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible — contemporarily, the lines of Paris Reid, an absolutely gorgeous young Canadian I discovered several years ago (her first published prose piece can be found in the most recent Heavy Traffic) certainly effect this movement upon me time and again … who else? — well, the only other living writer to fall on this list, and quite honestly my most exalted favourite of all-above, should be obvious to anyone who knows me … yes, yes, of course: singer slash poet slash emotional-genius Lana del Rey, my personal saint and hero … truly, her words either brought to sound or put to page surpass the Scripture to me and this I would not say if I did not mean it violently. She has held aloft my life: she is probably the third factor to my continuance. You know — as I type this — I can hear the lyrics to Venice Bitch, perhaps the greatest lyrical song ever written (though a strong case could too be made for Video Games!) echoing within and my vision swims — so overcome with emotion am I! Good God. My friends, it’s unbelievable. And everything she does is fantastic, of course, but lately I have been really been spiralling about in her demos and bootlegs and regional exclusives dating around the release of Ultraviolence, her third studio album. Pray listen; I’ll leave you with this. Say Yes To Heaven: breaks my heart. Fine China: breaks my heart. I Talk to Jesus: well, you know, onward and onward, from here to eternity…
May 10, 2023
Impossible to pithily summarize the force of this artist (in which any isolated "scream" is merely another register of space across a VERY complex vocalic spectrum), but I like this one-liner from RYM: "The world isn't a pretty place and sometimes people don't want to hear the truth." Also, if you live in NYC and have *read* about the 80s/90s AIDS crisis but aren't sure you can *feel* it, listen to her work.
Mar 22, 2024
As we embark on this new era of American apocalypse, I have found it helpful to look back at how artists have navigated the bowels of hell before. I find enduring inspiration in Diamanda Galás, especially her album Plague Mass (1991), a live recording of her performance at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a howl of anguish and rage at the indifference and hypocrisy of the church in the face of AIDS. Galás lost her brother, the experimental playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, to AIDS in 1986, and was herself a member of ACT-UP. In Plague Mass, while covered in blood, screeching, ululating, and speaking in tongues, Galás becomes a conduit for the voices of the dead, who in their suffering at the hands of their moralist torturers, remain defiant - “Give me sodomy, or give me death!”
5d ago
Top Recs from @jordan-tannahill
5d ago
I’m far from alone in claiming Sebald as my favourite author. His deeply melancholic books are a blend of fiction, non-fiction, and travelogue, interspersed with these oblique, black and white photographs, meditating on time, exile, and the impact of historical events on collective and individual memory. Dig it! My suggestion is to read his work in chronological order, to follow the evolution of his thought and style, starting with Vertigo (1990), then The Emigrants (1992), and The Rings of Saturn (1995), and finally his masterpiece Austerlitz (2001), a work of staggering beauty.
5d ago
Every kink is, by nature, a little obnoxious and embarrassing, and either you have what it takes to push past that or you don’t. But let’s not lie to ourselves here, furries are fun. And I want to cuddle them. Their superpower is shamelessness. They don’t give a fuck what you think. I think my kink is other people really committing to their kink.
5d ago