tax write off #7

This is a little heads up that we are on a main-text-hiatus while we edit our book over August. We posts big main texts on Sundays, and little odds and sods here on the blog on other days of the week. The blog posts will continue sporadically, posts such as this:

Welcome back to my tax write-off series where I write about culture I consume so that I can in fact write some of it off. I’m so sleepy. Been a hard week. Good and worth it but wow, my arms are vibrating. But let’s talk sex, drugs, murder and… mission impossible.

Lately, I’ve read:

Trip Where you Stand: Towards Psychedelic Liberation, which is a conversation between Priya Sharma and Kiara Mohamed Amin about how psychedelics can ‘open us up to ways of knowing that disrupt capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist systems.’ I hadn’t considered drugs in this way before and… I get it. I don’t often read academic journal articles either, but I also get it. I’m glad this one is open for everyone — the in convo format makes the ideas easy to follow along with. Plus, all the content is referenced, which kinda makes all the anger and upset feel completely, objectively justified — and that’s exciting to me. I love rigour!

I also read:

The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet. One thing I enjoy about being a part of a community of other artsy people is that we can fill in each other’s blindspots. No single person can know every artist’s every artwork, every writer’s every book, and so on. But together, we know a lot. And anyway, I enjoy reading books about sex. Erotica and otherwise. Idk. Gossipy and animalistic and secretive and affecting. I was chatting about this with someone and they started talking about the Sexual Life of Catherine Millet as if it was a given I’d already read it because it’s a non-fiction account of an art critic’s sex life and I — oops. They gave me the memoir for my birthday and idk, I didn’t love it but I also couldn’t put it down. It made me feel better about the world, question mark, question mark. I liked knowing a French art critic has sold millions of books writing about all the group sex she’s had. I simply cannot imagine an English art critic pulling it off, question mark, question mark. I enjoyed certain moments of imagery and memory, and fantasy images she draws on so often that they feel like memories. And her writing on pain, too (as she suffers from chronic migraines).

‘There is such a perfect feeling of well-being when you have, so to speak, left your body behind in accesses of pleasure with someone else, but you can recognise some aspects of that well-being when you leave your body behind in the opposite circumstances, in abjection or even the most intense pain.’

Anyway, I liked wondering how much art influenced the way she interpreted sex versus how much sex shaped the way she interpreted art. But yeah, the not-loving it part. There was a stream of consciousness-element to the book that dragged a bit, even though it was sorted into sections including Numbers, Space, Confined Space, Details.

Lately, I’ve watched:

Less scandalous, while the foyer was full of school children in pink queueing up for Barbie, I let my boyfriend take me to Mission Impossible 7, part one. This is a real testament of love because Tom Cruise’s face annoys me so much. He looks like a PE teacher. He looks like a third-wheel. The film was very uptight, and I don’t know why everyone is doing stunts on top of trains nowadays. It’s almost boring. It’s been about two weeks and I don’t remember much about this experience, besides the one note I made afterwards, which was ‘the film was so loud that I burped and nobody heard me.’

I also watched:

Deadloch. It’s an 8 episode series set in New Zealand, a ‘feminist noir comedy’ lol, some detectives trying to figure out why loads of people in a tiny tiny town keep getting murdered. It was great. The cast were great. The script had loads of moments of absurdity built into it, like, comedic moments that the camera lingered on for an almost awkward amount of time. I also appreciate it when tv manages to make a character annoying without putting me off the entire show. It’s a fine lineeeee.

Youtube:

Besides that:

I’m in a music lull, and the only game I’m playing continues to be Apex Legends. I shouldn’t lie, I did also watch a shitload of true crime episodes one night when I was staying in someone else’s flat and I wanted to listen to something while I was knitting. I much preferred Deadloch to the hours of true crime I accidentally watched on someone else’s Netflix account. A lot funnier.