4/2/2023 - It's 46° Out
Good morning, friends and readers! Today I have a simple potpourri for you - some tv shows, some music, some articles. Hopefully, everything you come here for.
Yellowjackets
I was very brave and started watching Yellowjackets season one last weekend. I recently listened to the Flight 571 episode of You’re Wrong About, so I guess I’m on some sort of plane crash survival kick. Anyways, what I saw of Yellowjackets was pretty good and very bloody. I loved the casting and the soundtrack and the teen girl soccer team of it all, but unfortunately after the first three episodes I was somehow both too scared and too bored. Obviously I still wanted to know what happens, and who’s alive, and who gets eaten, and if Melanie Lynskey is going to cheat on her husband or not, so I read all of the episode recaps on Vulture. Sounds spooky! I’m excited to follow along with season two via the general zeitgeist, but I will not actually be watching. Also, I thought it had a lot of dead bunnies— a LOT of dead bunnies for a few episodes of a tv show.
boygenius - the record
Damn dude! This album is beautiful and I can’t stop listening to it. I’ve listened to it thrice (and counting) while writing this! Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julian Baker are the voices of our generation, both in terms of the devastating lyrics they write and the angelic sounds their vocal chords make. My current favorites on the album are True Blue and Not Strong Enough, as well as both the opener and the final song.
Where were you when you realized Letter to an Old Poet was mirroring Me & My Dog, and how did it irreparably change your life? “I wanna be…happy” shook me to my absolute core, and still makes my breath catch in my throat every single time I hear it. It also reminds me of the One Man’s Trash episode of Girls, which I have discussed in therapy more than once. I do want to be happy. They got me!!!!
Poker Face
Poker Face, Rian Johnson’s crime-of-the-week tv series starring Natasha Lyonne, came out way back at the end of January, but Phillip and I finally watched the first episode yesterday! It was delightful. What I especially liked was that when Charlie went on her episode-ending monologue revealing how she knew who killed her friend, all of the evidence she cited was stuff we (the audience) had clearly seen, or at least been shown. Whether or not we noticed them, or registered their significance, doesn’t exactly matter. What’s important is that she gave us all the clues, mister policeman. (I’ve written before about how much it annoyed me while reading Murder on the Orient Express that the reader isn’t really encouraged or empowered to solve the mystery themselves. Agatha Christie, the original girlboss gatekeeper?)
There are eight more episodes of Poker Face for us to watch, and the pilot ended on a minor cliff hanger, so I’m excited to see where it goes and what celebrities make cameos. I was tickled to see Noah Segan (Rian Johnson’s best friend who is in everything he makes - the dorky cop in Knives Out, Derol in Glass Onion, etc.) make an appearance as a county sheriff. This show gets a Recommend from me! But no spoilies if you’ve already seen it or watch it faster than we do, which is extremely likely.
Emptying My Pocket
Here are three saved articles that I cleared out of my Pocket this week:
Will Ozempic Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin?
This is by my favorite serious writer, Jia Tolentino, and I am reading it in very small portions, because it’s hard to stomach (no pun intended I stg)
I Went on a Package Trip for Millennials Who Travel Alone. Help Me.
This is by my favorite humor writer, Caity Weaver, and I devoured it immediately. It really spoke to my love of vacation planning.
My Marriage Was Never the Same After That
The woman who wrote Good Bones (a now-cliche poem that I still unashamedly love) got divorced because of it!!! And also because her ex-husband sounds awful.
Alright, it’s time for me to take a long walk (it’s FORTY SIX DEGREES here) and then settle in for some women’s basketball. Happy Sunday; go Hawkeyes!
xoxo
Ali