Hi Folks: This is the 11th issue of my Obsessions newsletter. I felt peace after sending the last newsletter to yāall. Iād broken the spell of silence. And I had created content!, oh my. I want to know what you think of my list and if you have your own recommendations, please leave recommendations in the comments. For those completely new to Obsessions, I was writing a tinyletter called raga before this and before that I wrote about yoga at two different blogs that are now offline (thursdayyoga and then blacksheepyoga). Iām not new to blogging, but I am new to believing in my own work. To help me rise as they say, please like the post or you can always go back and like other posts too. Also, you can recommend me on Twitter.
Hereās my version of the lazy writers top ten lists:
Best Hot Cheetos on television: House of Hoās is a show that resembles Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but it is better because the sibling dynamics are more nuanced. If you are interested in what it would be like to be part of a Vietnamese American family where the oldest son is an enabled alcoholic and you kinda like the Kardashians, you may love House of Hoās available on HBO. I highly recommend watching while you drink a bellini while licking hot cheetos off your fingers.
Best television drama: My favorite drama by a long shot would be Killing Eve available on Hulu. I have said again and again that folxs who arenāt queer should stop playing queer or writing queer, but this show is the exception because guess what, I am not an asshole when I am represented well wearing The Vampireās Wife. Yes, Villanelle is a psycopath and yes Eve Polastri is distracted and poorly dressed, but the chemistry and what is said by what is not said is absolutely phenomenal. Women are motherfucking complicated, and Iām like real bored by women on screen who are like beautiful and not that complicated, or who are only complicated in a very, misogynistic way (hello Wonder Woman 1984 thanks for somehow in 2020 producing another heterosexual able-bodied Greek sculpted Euro centric hero whose enemy is basically just another hot woman who is jealous of herā¦..really? really? The gay doth protest, and the gay doth say is white supremacy worse than I thought it was? I mean really you couldnāt have made either the hero or the villain brown or fat or anything but what we always are forced to settle for. Also, being so beautiful is getting old. We need thousands of heros who do not look like Gal Gadot. Because guess what, part of what Wonder Woman 1984 is selling is IF you look like Gal Gadot or maybe Beyonce, then maybe you can essentially rule the world. There literally is no message of hope or resilience or truth. Itās another tired story about how important it is to be beautiful. And itās a joke if you think she could pull off those stunts.)
Best television drama where Mothers are people: Little Fires Everywhere. Kerry Washington. And Reese Witherspoon.
Best queer substack newsletter: The Stage Mirror written by Grace Lavery gives me my dose of Maggie Nelson intellectualism in a new form. Her newsletter on octopuses is quite stimulating. Without being quite as obvious as I tend to be, Lavery manages to illustrate the differences between rainbow capitalism and queer liberation. Whatās so interesting about being queer to me is that the voices that non-queer people are exposed to tend to be rainbow capitalists ā people who get to speak for our entire community, but often have more in common with the 1% than the actual queer community. Grace is brilliant! and will perhaps introduce you to at least a couple of thoughts that are being thought for the first time. To quote Laveryās newsletter On Fucking Octopuses, āStr8 thought, recoiling against the erotic drive, attempts to split desire into different kinds; it understands queerness as a kind of desire rather than a coalitional politics founded on the fact of desire as a prohibited social condition.ā
Best political newsletter: Often, when someone tells me they have an Amazon credit card or see an Amazon prime membership as a simple positive calculation, I start to salivate and stutter. āUhhhhhh, but anti-trust.ā This is where Matt Stollerās Big takes over and allows me to have faith that someone else can explain why Amazon may not only be the earthquake that killed a thousand small businesses, but the company that further created income inequality, contributed to greenhouse emissions, and made humans even more prey to their base instincts. If you are worried at all about what kind of addictions we humans may have in the future, worry about Amazon. Really, is there anything besides toilet paper and diapers that you need in less than 24 hours? And is that extra vehicle on the road and that extra box and extra tape even a good thing? Hereās a tiny excerpt from Big, āAn Economy of Godzillasā: Often, lawyers will justify such defensive mergers as āpro-competitiveā when what they mean is thatĀ theĀ transaction will allowĀ theĀ two smaller companies that merge to operate onĀ theĀ same level asĀ theĀ existing dominant monopolist. And that might be true in one sense; Salesforce and Microsoft will be competing in some lines of business, and neither will be able to killĀ theĀ other. But of course,Ā aĀ society where all competition is Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla, crushing everyone else underfoot, is very different thanĀ one with lots of small nimble businesses and little predatory conduct.
Best song of 2020: I Want You To Love Me. While my chosen song may not be the most unique song, I think my heart is stuck in the 1990s and maybe that makes me some sort of almost 40 year old cliche, but I choose songwriting over beats, and deep dark voices over light and poppy and I choose Fiona because she plays the God damn piano and even though you canāt take a piano on a plane or a train, Iāve never been one really for practicality.
Best book relevant to 2020: Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. Could Portland or yoga teachers or any WASP-y person benefit more from a book than this one? I donāt think so. While the book was written in 2016, I would bet you money that people will be referring to this book the way they do to Judith Butlerās Gender Trouble in 40 to 50 years. This book has been endorsed by Bell Hooks and Claudia Rankine, and it may make you reconsider who we label as irredeemable and what solutions we believe are possible. Ever since #MeToo, I have been racking my brain trying to understand in my own life how to forgive people who feel unforgiveable and how to operate within cancel culture.
Best essay that I reread this year: āI Used To Insist I Didnāt Get Angry. Not Anymoreā by Leslie Jamison. This is the essay I referred to within my last newsletter. This essay matters because Serena Williams matters and because Sylvia Plath is misunderstood and because every woman and non-binary person I know seems to have some misplaced anger that sheās directed inside towards her body or her soul or the witch that sleeps inside of her.
Also, Iām terribly aware that my use of commas, parenthesis, italics, and yadda yadda are all wrong. Yes, I would like some consistency in my formatting, but I just havenāt figured it out. Iām not a virgo so donāt expect Beyonce.
Little hearts to you,
Renee