Girl dinner for the mind

capitalist catharsis

I’m a newsletter snacker. I subscribe to 50+ and consume them through the day. This is probably too many newsletters, but it's preferable to social media or my preferred form of social media, however you want to look at it. I think the world would be in better shape if we’d all started newsletters instead of Twitter accounts back in 2008 or whenever.

I’ve made peace with reading less than half of what’s in my inbox, since most professional/aspiring newsletters come out too frequently for me to keep up, but I still want to support and receive them, for them to exist. A genre of newsletter I will always read is the smorgasbord--a little of this and that curated by someone with good instincts and taste (e.g.

Jessica Stanley

). Part of the joy of reading is the anticipation of reading, and it’s satisfying to have a spread of good writing open on my phone. So I think this newsletter is gong to be that: an assortment of light fare for a summer day. 

First, movies. The Barbie discourse was giving me flashbacks to a drunk fight with a choice feminist in college, so I felt I needed to see it for myself. We also didn’t have childcare long enough to see Oppenheimer. Barbie was also overly long, but it made me feel things. I cried at one scene in the way I cried over commercials when I was pregnant. Some commercials are made by artists, and this is one of them. It’s capitalist catharsis.

I have since heard from multiple trustworthy sources that Barbie is better than Oppenheimer.

Michelle Tea

says, “Next to sports, war movies and movies with mostly men in them make me want to die”—and I strongly relate. I’m also slightly face blind, so when a movie is all white dudes of a certain age, I have trouble telling anyone apart. I now regret telling Joe I would see Oppenheimer with him and hopefully can save you from making a similar mistake. As we stood in line for popcorn, he said sadly, “I wish we were seeing Oppenheimer,” and I heard another guy lament the same to his girlfriend on our way out of the theater. Maybe they can all get together and see it without me? 

The moment I came onboard the Barbie movie was when the collision of realities is first exposed in the character of Weird Barbie, who reminded me of decapitating Barbies in 7th grade with my friend Lydia (our Weird Barbies were just heads on sticks). Lydia has an extremely topical book out today called Mobility, which will appeal simultaneously to people who love Barbie, hate Barbie, or are too smart to think about Barbie. 

Mobility engages modern consumption in a manner that is both entertaining and incisive, unlike Barbie which is mostly just the former. It probably would have made me feel like I was trapped in a room with a freshman choice feminist if not for the clarifying and essential work of

Jessica DeFino

, who has radicalized me on the topic of beauty culture/consumption. I still buy certain beauty products, but she’s made me think far more about which ones and why. She’s not advocating for the banishment of beauty products so much as the banishment of the argument that they are somehow empowering. Read this if you want to see Barbie without feeling like you’re being gaslit. 

I thought momentarily that the new Little Mermaid might be a good candidate for Eva’s first movie theater experience, but she still wants me to fast-forward all scary scenes, so I decided to delay that for at least another year. Then the Little Mermaid came out on Amazon Prime, where I had a credit, so I was able to buy it for $5, and I wouldn’t recommend paying much more for it than that. I found it to be very watchable on land and less so underwater, although my underwater standards are very high, since I’ve seen some amazing things underwater (a topic for another day) and this movie did not do them justice. It seemed to mainly interpret underwater as "very dark," when one of the coolest things about being underwater is actually the light? Maybe it’s because mermaids live really deep underwater? But then why was there a manatee in the dance number?

The experience of watching it with Eva, though, was top notch, the stuff of girl mom fantasies--the way she wants to cuddle up during the romantic parts because our relationship is the closest analogue she has to anything romantic, although I’ve explained we can’t get married, so the possibility of future romance has a kernel of loss in it as well? Also what a fucking retro story the Little Mermaid is, probably one of the least empowering fairy tales of all time—and yet I’ve always loved it because underwater. We consumed an enormous bag of kettle corn over two viewings since the movie is, like every movie made this year, way too long. By the time Ursula turned into a giant, Eva was really excited, saying “I want to see this!” despite having made me fast forward other parts, so we got to talk a little about what a cool villain Ursula is (maybe she can get her own movie like Cruella?). Eva also asked at one point why Ariel was naked, by which she meant why does Ariel get a bra while Triton gets body armor, and I said that was a very good question! I thought it might be a good launchpad for a lesson about patriarchy, but she just wanted to watch the movie.

patriarchy in poor visibility

If you want to watch some less retro mer-content with decent underwater cinematography, I was pleasantly surprised by the Netflix documentary Merpeople. (Was Netflix marketing this to anyone else or just me? It kind of made me suspect they’re artificially engineering shows specifically for me, now, like in that new Black Mirror episode.)

Well, I made it through movies and nothing else, but I want to get outside because the heat finally broke here, leaving us with the kind of clear beautiful weather that makes me rave to my children about how RARE this kind of weather is and how we need to take advantage of it. So I’ll leave you with some recommended reading:

I devoured this essay by Grazie Sophia Christie on envy in The Point, in which she confesses to having made envy “the secret passion of [her] life.” Envy is not currently my secret passion, but it has been at times in the past, and it makes a very good one precisely because of how cloaked it is in shame and longing. I’m starting to think envy might actually be one of the bravest subjects a person can write about, and Christie’s essay reminded me of this amazing one by Kathryn Chetkovich on being in a romantic relationship with Jonathan Franzen (which may have seemed a more appealing prospect 20 years ago when this was written?).

Which brings me in a roundabout way to this essay by Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace, since he and Franzen were buds. I will read anything Lockwood writes, and this is particularly delightful. She may have actually convinced me to try the Pale King? I don’t think I’ll ever finish Infinite Jest (that’s kind of the point, as she points out), but I would happily read Lockwood riff on Infinite Jest for the length of Infinite Jest.

Ok, time to get outside. Hope your weather cools off or you get to spend some time underwater!