February 12: Don't need a cure for me.

Indulge me for a moment, won't you? It’s our anniversary.

It’s been a year of The Crossover Appeal. I started this newsletter as a way to keep myself connected in the midst of, let’s say, a weird time. Connected to the idea of writing as something I like to do and want to get better at. Connected to people through the medium of pop culture, a space defined online by argument and proxy identities. Connected to any kind of rhythm, anything that feels like stability as the passage of time loses definition with each passing week.

I started this newsletter, in other words, for me.

But I hope you have also come to think of these recommendations as being for you too. I chose the recommendation format because I think that the tentative space of trying things out is when we are most open and least contrarian with each other. I wanted to make something that could be a restful space of discovery every week, something that wouldn’t pull you into still more online arguments, still more swelling occasions for self-consciousness.

In some ways, I think of the work at The Crossover Appeal as being against fandom, or at least, as being alternative to fandom. A way of connecting to stories, sounds, and sights without having to fall into aesthetic camps. I hope for The Crossover Appeal to be a moment of serendipity in a media landscape stuffed to the gills with overdetermined, predestined conflict. If you find nothing in today’s edition to love, I am happy to know that you have simply tried a thing you might not have otherwise.

Fandoms are wonderful spaces where people carve out much-needed belonging for themselves every day - but I have always struggled within them. They stress me out. I am either too awkward, too non-committal, or too bashful to thrive among the dogmas that underwrite The Discourse every day. And so, instead, I’ve tried for something closer to affectionate critique, a way of engaging with good things that prioritizes our own pleasures - and the connections to one another that emerge from them - rather than the sanctity of the good thing itself.

If The Crossover Appeal is about anything, it’s about this: the world is full of wonderful things, artful things, delicious things. And you deserve to have as many wonderful, artful, delicious moments as you can stand.

I hope you’ve come to agree.

Watch: Night on Earth on Netflix

In some ways, recommending one 4K visual extravaganza nature docuseries is a recommendation for all 4K visual extravaganza nature docuseries. With very few exceptions, the prize with these shows is the simple but incredible pleasure of seeing animals, their habitats, and their behaviors photographed in incredible detail and then dramatically narrated by a trustworthy voice. That won’t stop me from recommending Night On Earth in particular, whose high-tech point of differentiation is right in the title. The producers have deployed specialized cameras - infrared, heat-sensing, low-light, the list goes on - to capture nocturnal lives in incredible detail.  If you’re the kind of person who has fond memories of Zoboomafoo or Steve Irwin and who perks up when your local fauna buries a nut in the summer or sings you a song from a nearby branch, give this one a shot. It’s a dramatic and gorgeous delight.

Listen: “Devil” by MAX Changmin

Max Changmin has been a mainstay of the Kpop scene for nearly two decades, debuting back in 2003 on a stage he shared with Korean music legend, BoA and the inimitable Britney Spears. And yet it’s only recently that Max has stepped out from the shadow of his record-selling group, TVXQ, and embarked on his own solo career. With this, the title track from his second EP, Max makes a strong case for his own longevity in a strongly youth-skewed industry as he showcases not only his signature flair for theatrical performances, but a deep and studied affection for a rarely cited musical influence in Kpop: gospel music. With “Devil”, Max unleashes a pathos-laden vocal performance against a backdrop of gorgeously harmonized choir vocals, all of it fuzzed out with distorted guitar riffs and a liberal sprinkle of tasteful electronic production. It’s a track that easily could have spilled over into messy appropriation or an unlistenable collision of ideas, but Max walks the tightrope here to thrilling effect.

Play: Hundred Days by Broken Arms Games on PC

The last vacation I took before this whole... thing... was an anniversary trip to California’s wine country. Wine country, as a thing, is a shimmering projection. A bourgeois fantasy at the intersection of tourism and tradition, adventure and repose, wealth and the working class. Hundred Days, a management sim about running your very own winery in the Piedmont wine region is nestled squarely in the midst of that fantasy. It’s a warm arrangement of activities, asking you to consider what plots of land suit the kinds of varietals you have on hand, to prioritize maintenance activities like cleaning out your tanks against experimentation with new yeasts, and to consider how much you should bend your strategy to the fickle whims of that one big distributor who’s always on your case. Hundred Days is one of those affectionate bits of media that pokes gentle fun at its subject while beautifully showcasing the pleasures of its subject the whole time. I am very much an amateur wine appreciator, but in the passing of Hundred Days’ seasons I found myself sinking - with alarming speed - into daydreams of leaving everything behind for a life among boutique wine bars and strong opinions about terroir.

Listen: The Gods We Can Touch by AURORA

Listening to Aurora Asknes’ latest record as a western pop fan is like looking into the mirror only to find the person staring back at has, inexplicably, decided to wear Bjork’s swan dress. Which is to say, it’s a familiar, pleasant listen that nevertheless retains a strain of icy alienation despite its clear connection to some of our most ubiquitous pop conventions. This effect is mostly rooted in Aurora’s thin yet powerful vocal whose timbre sometiems resembles Swedish pop star Lykke Li and other times hearkens back to Americana twee darlings Eisley. The faint processing on her voice that occasionally crops up, as it does on the closing seconds of “You Keep Me Crawling” enhances the effect of alienation, while acoustic interventions like “Exist for Love” return the sound back to earth. These aural tensions work well with the album’s alternating themes of isolation and connection, a see-saw back and forth between the anthemic independence on tracks like “Cure For Me” and the ghostly metamorphoses of songs like “Exhale Inhale.” It’s the perfect album for these waning winter days, for dancing like in your kitchen like a weirdo who hasn’t had a face-to-face conversation in weeks.

Thank you for sharing a year of this with me. Here's to keeping on.

Jordan Cassidy