April 1: If nothing can be known, then stupidity is holy

We’re thawing finally. Kind of. As I’m writing this it’s 65 degrees out and the sun is shining on my porch in Syracuse. In five hours it will be 38 degrees and raining, but that’s spring bay-bee and frankly, I’ll take it.

I don’t have much to say this week - I’m sure you’ve noticed there was a lot out there to deplete the soul since the last newsletter. I’m very lucky. If I close my eyes and put the headphones on, the world leaves me enough alone that I can pretend the transphobes, the guns, the Floridian governors, the NIMBYs, aren’t all real.

Of course, they are. But right now there is sunshine in central NY, and I hope there is where you are too. It’s not cowardice to take a moment and find the soul at the bottom of your coffee cup.

The Recs

boygenius - The Record

We’ve got to talk about The Record. It’s only been with us for 24 hours or so, already it’s announced itself as 2023 classic. Comprised of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius makes music that is a testament to frank affection and heartbreak. It’s a love letter to hard won intimacy and the way that intimacy reshapes all our bumpy aches and traumas into handholds for someone else to nestle in with. The Record sees Baker, Dacus, and Bridgers settling into a powerful musical collaboration, each voice and style distinct (I’m partial for anything Lucy writes, and you can always tell when the distortion comes in that Julien was involved), but gorgeously interlocked with the next one. Listening to The Record is like being invited to dinner by a bunch of old roommates who can’t stop gassing each other up and you just end up hoping somewhere along the line you’ll find your own home like that.

John Wick (2014)

It’s been nearly a decade (!) since the first John Wick film hit theaters and it’s still as fresh and bracing now as it was then. With the fourth installment now arriving to rave reviews, I’d recommend going back and revisiting this one if it’s been a while. Lean, direct, and a little menacing, it created a badly needed new template for the “anti-hero with a special set of skills” sub genre which had run terribly dry thanks to the declining imagination of Taken and its ilk. Keanu is of course wonderful as he powers hand-to-hand combat sequences more thrilling than anything this side of the earlier Bourne films, but it’s the smaller character pieces that help bring life to an otherwise spare narrative. Ian McShane, Willem Dafoe, John Leguizamo, and of course, the recently departed Lance Reddick, all hint at an expansive, fantastic underbelly which has ultimately kept the series going for as long as it has.

Coffee Talk by Toge Productions

Booktube and Booktok have been wild about “cozy fantasy” for a while now, and while I don’t know if any connection actually exists between Toge Productions’ fantasy barista simulator and the current discourse, it really feels like it. Coffee Talk invites you in as the owner and sole barista for a Seattle coffee shop that unuintuitively operates at night. You make your orcish, elvish, and trolling guests the drinks they want and then listen to their stories, getting to know them better and occasionally offering just the right words to get them through another tough night. Themes of prejudice and overwork run beneath all these stories, so it’s not a complete escapist fantasy - instead it sort of therapizes the whole experience by giving you one thing to control, the drinks, and opening up the rest of the space to just listen.

100 gecs - 10,000 gecs

Take all the most abrasive, reviled pop musical styles of the late 90s and early 2000s, slam them through a thick haze of zillennial post-irony, and energize it with Tom and Jerry level antics, and you’ll get this latest record by the producer wunder-duo, 100 gecs. Across ten blistering tracks you’ll get a wild sampling ska, pop punk, rapcore, numetal, and brostep, all painted with a sparkling coating of hyperpop glitter. It’s the kind of music that might sound like a joke at first, but ultimately wants you to be in on it, or to simply agree that all this pop trash was good the whole time. And here, at least, it is.

Thanks for reading. We'll see you soon.

The Crossover Appeal