Recommended Reading #10: Hip Hip Hooray
Recommendations, musings, and your next weekend's recommended reading, lovingly curated by Aida Baghernejad.
Hi and Hallo dear reader,
this is the tenth issue of Recommended Reading! I’m usually not very good in keeping focused on a project I’ve started (so many ideas! So little time!!), but the lovely feedback from so many of you has kept me going. I love that writing this newsletter forces me to keep reading (and even more importantly, actually finish what I started reading!), keep watching new films, keep listening to new records and podcasts, even when I’m in a slump and feel like succumbing to comfort. So, thank you for subscribing, for reading, for writing me lovely, lovely emails that encourage me to continue – and for buying me a coffee from time to time to fuel my writing. You’re all very wonderful and I’m grateful you’re here.
Because what is a writer without an audience? As much as writing is a way for me to process information and actually properly think things through, it’s also nice to write for and to others, to communicate, to step into a shared space instead of being all stuck in your own head. I’m a pretty excitable person, if you haven’t guessed by now, and half of the fun of digging up something interesting is actually telling someone else about it to share the excitement.
And I hope this week’s finds excite you! I have a hilarious film for you, tons of good music, a conversation amongst friends about changes, and a read or two that may or may not linger with you. They certainly did with me.
In a little over two weeks, my time in the city of angels will have come to an end, and truth be told: I’m already mourning. My time at the Thomas Mann House was an incredible gift and I’m so grateful for the time I have had here to let my mind wander and come up with new ideas, thoughts, and plans. I don’t know which, if any, will ever come to fruition, but I’m excited for all there may be coming? Excuse me being a bit cheesy, but: seeds were planted. And I’m eager to see what they’ll grow into.
First and foremost however I’ll try to make the my last few days in Los Angeles a blast. If you want to help me, why don’t you come to the radio station Dublab’s studio on the 19th? I’m going to be in conversation with Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart (cue shrieking! Also: new record dropping in two weeks!!) about their musical influences. It’s free, it’s going to be fun, and we can hang out after. Sign up here, I’d really love to see you there.
But now, back to the newsletter. Standard disclaimer: don’t feel bad about not catching up on all the stuff I’m posting here. You have my *explicit permission* to simply skim this email until you find something that speaks to you. We don’t do a bad conscience here, just good vibes.
And now, off we go!
Opinion: Men who like women
I stumbled upon this substack piece a few days too late for the last newsletter, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since – and shared it with quite a few friends. Celeste Davies builds upon an Anne Helen Petersen piece, and while its matter – Glenn Powell and other Hollywood actors – may sound banal, it digs at a deeper truth: a lot of men may want to get women, have them, or even love them, but that doesn’t mean they like women. It may sound bizarre, but once I read it, it absolutely clicked. And put a lot of interactions I’ve had with cis men in perspective. Not always in a good way, as you can probably guess.
Film: Filthy fun
A few weeks ago, I go to see the John Waters exhibition at the Academy Museum – a true joy! And I realised that I had never watched Serial Mom, and I need to remedy this grave, grave mistake. This 1991 slasher comedy is a piercing (in more ways than one) little absurdist satire about suburban life and social pressures. Kathleen Turner is simply perfect in the role of Beverly Sutphin, an uber-wholesome seeming housewife – who revels in revenge, violence, and murder.
If you’ve grown up in suburbia like I did, you may agree that even in the most perfect-seeming setting, there’s always something unsettling under the surface somewhere. The mum who has a substance abuse issue. The kid who collects knifes. The father who’s a creep. The family with the very high fence and the not very cute attack dog. You know, the unsettling feeling of suburbia. And Waters skewers the superficiality of certain suburban dwellers and the darkness behind the flawless hedges (and recycling bins) excellently.
As it is Waters, however, expect ample campiness (I mean, what’s not to love there), and quite a bit of gore. I’m pretttty violence-averse, and I could just about cope with it, maybe the over-the-topness of it all helped stomach those particularly bloodcurling scenes.
Sidenote: my new housemate Johannes went to a debate watch party of the Republican Women of Santa Monica and was taken aback by the nastiness of the crowd. I kind of imagined them all looking like Beverly with her perfectly coiffed hair and barely hidden contempt for anyone who’s not behaving the way she wants them to.
Music: Back to the record shop
Ah, summer is truly over – as evidenced by the flood of new releases by favourite artists old and new. Let’s dive right in!
I was already excited about Nilüfer Yanya’s third album being announced when I heard Like I Say (I runaway) a few months ago – and it’s as lovely as I hoped it would be! My Method Actor is nothing if not sublime. Her warm, deep voice layered above subtle guitar harmonies and soft drums feels laid back, yet never boring. Maybe I could’ve done with a few dissonant, noisy moments. But honestly, this is a beautiful record that will help you to slowly say goodbye to summer and transition to fall – particularly Ready for Sun (touch).
I can’t tell you much about MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks except give it a spin right now. It kind of feels like folk for hopeless, mildly depressed, yet very cynically funny priced-out urban young-ish adults? It’s witty, noisy, melancholic, and charming. In the subscriber chat for his music newsletter Deep Voices, Matthew Schnipper wondered if the lyrics were too cute, and well, yes, but it’s exactly what we may need at this point in time?
New Molchat Doma! Wasn’t it really weird that this obscure Belarusian band suddenly became a Tiktok phenomenon a few years ago? I mean, good for them – and us, Судно (Борис Рыжий) was a bop and the band was so fun live. If you’re into really gloomy post-Soviet synth, that is. Obviously immediately had to listen to the new record Belaya Polosa – their first written and recorded in exile in LA after they left Belarus in 2022 – as soon as I got the presslink in my inbox. And let’s just say: they know what they want to do and they do it well, although it can eventually feel a little bit same-same over the length of a whole album. Really enjoyed the little Vincent Price-moment on the opener Ты Же Не Знаешь Кто Я / Ty Zhe Ne Znaesh Kto Ya!
Let’s stay with gloom for a second, because Die Nerven released their sixth record Wir waren hier (“We Were here”). A few months ago, in issue six of this newsletter to be precise, I wrote that their sound may not fit well to the sun of Southern California. How wrong I was: it feels in fact very apt, particularly when driving across the parts of the city which can only be described as a beautiful and ever-enticing urban hellscape fueled by hopes, greed, inventiveness, mismanagement, and humanity’s hubris (perpetual reminder to read Mike Davis’ The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, especially with wildfires raging across town right now). And Wir waren hier delivers what I’ve always loved about Die Nerven: sincere world weariness paired with an equally sincere love for punk, noise, and pop. I’m still not sure I love or hate the broken sort-of-ballad Wie man es nennt (“How it is called”).
If that’s all too dark for you, may I suggest some therapy in form of Nala Sinephro’s newly released second record Endlessness? Ambient jazz at its best. It feels like the sonic equivalent of a beautiful blooming garden full of interesting flowers from all four corners of the world.
Floating Points’ name was more tied to jazz in recent years as well, but with Cascade we get a blissful return to the dancefloor with a lot of references to 00’s club sounds, jungle-y moments, or acid house, and it makes even a blasé homebody like me feel homesick for the ease of going out-out in Berlin. That’s at least one thing to look forward to!!
Book: Grief and Science Fiction
Obviously, it was the artwork that first drew me to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California when I spotted it at Book Soup, and then, again, at the open library we have here at the Thomas Mann House (I don’t know who left it here, but thank you???). This picture can’t even begin to capture it! But while its title and the pulp-referencing graphic design may suggest a crime novel (and regular readers already know how much I love them), it’s everything but. Instead, it’s one of the most interesting and unexpected explorations of grief, masculinity, and loneliness I have read so far. Coral, our protagonist, finds her dead brother in his apartment and kind of… falls into pretending she’s him? Between balancing her own life as a science fiction writer, flashbacks to the siblings’ past, and texting as her dead brother, she begins dissociating – as we’re told through the perspective of Coral’s literary creations. I’m still in the midst of it, but if you have the mental space at the moment to let this extraordinary story wash over you, pick it up by all means. In some moments, I get whiffs of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (published as The Abolition of Species in English), but with more pain, more humanity, more soul.
Opinion: What does safety mean to you?
Following the news these days isn’t easy. I mean, when is it ever, but right now it all feels particularly deranged. Germany’s nominally “progressive” (LOL) government is fulfilling basically every dream of the hard right and talks their talk while ignoring every single real problem we have (infrastructure! Housing!). The pictures and testimonies from Gaza and so many other regions of conflict continue to haunt me like the haunt so many of us (and here’s the regular reminder that I compiled a list with a few suggestions where to donate to), and while the presidential race is keeping us all here on our toes, the US doesn’t cease to be, well, the US. The other day, Tyreek Hill, a football player for the Miami Dolphins, was violently arrested on his way to a game – on the 10th anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson at that. Jimmie Briggs’ short piece Tyreek Hill’s Week—and Ours (accessible link here) in Vanity Fair does a good job by putting this one occurrence in context – and by asking what safety may mean for a racialised body, here, but also anywhere.
In the same issue, there’s a new David de Jong investigation on Klaus-Michael Kuehne, Germany’s richest man, and the Nazi origins of his wealth, which I haven’t read yet but definitely will over the weekend. You may have heard de Jong’s name before, as he wrote the brilliant Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties (published as Braunes Erbe in Germany).
Interview: Friendship, change, and jokes
Well, I didn’t expect Will Ferrell to be the one comedian who turns out not to be stuck in the past, but very, very pleased it is him. When his old friend and writing partner Harper Steele came out as trans to him, he behaved like a normal functioning human being would: continue to love his friend because duh, what else (unfortunately, we only have to follow the discourse to see what else, but I digress). Well, almost like a normal human being, because it’s still Hollywood, baby, so of course they went on a roadtrip across the US together and turned it into a documentary for Netflix that’ll come out in two weeks. But its promo machine has already gifted us the interview Change Can be Beautiful. Just Ask Will and Harper where they talk about the film, their friendship, but also about jokes they wrote, and jokes they wouldn’t write today. Consider it a pleasant antidote to those lazy writers who still like to whine that it’s impossible to be funny today (looking at you, Germany).
This week, I had a beautiful horchata latte (!!) in Highland Park courtesy of Kerstin, and a salty (!) coldbrew at Dogtown Coffee courtesy of Matthias to keep me caffeinated enough to keep writing. Thank you both so much! If you want to buy me a coffee to fuel this newsletter, you can either head to Ko-Fi, or buy me one next time you see me in real life ☕
My parents just arrived in LA and I’m going to show them around in the next few days and celebrate my upcoming birthday with them. Fun! Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to hear from you. Don’t you just love Nilüfer Yanya’s new record as well? Or do you absolutely disagree with Petersen’s Glenn Powell-theory? Let me know! Also, feel free to leave a like or comment on Substack which really helps with visibility, tell your friends and foes about Recommended Reading, and all that stuff that’s currency on the internet – you know the drill. Oh, and again, if you are in LA – COME COME COME to our little listening session at Dublab!!! My last event at the Thomas Mann House, a live recording of a special episode for 55 Voices for Democracy with Wonderwoman director Patty Jenkins, was fully booked and so, so much fun. So sign up rather sooner than later, I’d love to see you.
I’ll speak to you soon,
Aida