April 3: This is the blessing of my thirties
The Crossover Appeal
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
Rebecca Solnit
This week I got my first dose of the Pfizer cocktail. Here in Syracuse, a lot of the vaccine distribution is happening in our convention center, The Oncenter, and the place was buzzing. Tons of folks wending their way, a little cautiously, through a series of checkpoints to their ultimate destination, a hypodermic pinch and the renewed promise of being in public. It got me thinking about that phrase: being in public. That there is a thing or a place called public and that for more than a year, our means of accessing that thing or place have been radically altered. We have been online and we have been telepresent, which are both ways of constituting a public, but standing there in the convention center which, two years ago, I had visited for a communal celebration of retro gaming along with thousands of other people, that loss of being in public really dawned.
You may have encountered this weird sense of loss most acutely when you've been masked up at a grocery store or picking up coffee or laboring at your essential workplace (itself a new sub-designation within the world of being in public) and seen someone you knew from-the-before-times, as we (not) jokingly have taken to saying. There's a moment of recognition and then you reach for the parts of you inside your brain where you stored the protocols for being in public and found them dusty, crumpled or maybe missing entirely.
I think my recommendations this week are coming to you from that gap, that tripping pause where I have forgotten about how exactly to be in public. There is music here that calls you back to intimate togetherness with revised scripts that might work better than what we had before. There's a playlist which you could reasonably read as a desperate cry for engagement (and not the google analytics kind!) by yours truly. There's a video game that shows us a way of being in public that will feel uncomfortably revealing about how tenuous the whole project really is. And it really is all so tenuous - is there any lesson that we've learned more thoroughly this year?
When it was my turn to get the shot, the nurse at the table smiled beneath her mask. Her eyes crinkled up so tightly that I reflexively grinned. She asked how I was and I returned the question. And friends, when I tell you that what she said next filled my eyes with tears, I am telling you that, with a few short words, she transfigured this brief, sterile encounter into a moment of brilliant hospitality.
She said, "I'm great. I'm so glad you're here."
Read: No Good Grief: Ecstatic Counter-Mapping Amongst Usable Facts - Knar Gavin
Knar Gavin: No Good Grief: Ecstatic Counter-Mapping - Annulet (annuletpoeticsjournal.com)
I've already shared this on all my social feeds, but I wanted to take a little more time to talk about what makes this piece so freaking good. It stopped me in my tracks this week - if you read, listen, or play nothing else from this edition of The Crossover Appeal, it should be this. Knar is a poet, writer, and activist working out of Philadelphia - who is also just a fabulous person. I was lucky enough to share space in Syracuse's English graduate program for the couple years we overlapped, which is why I couldn't be more pleased to introduce you to their work here, which is both animated and incsisive. If you don't often get a chance to interact with literary essays or criticism, you could do a lot worse than starting here.
The essay itself: it's urgent, passionate, and clear as ringing bell. Like all the best writing in this form, Knar weaves their analysis of a complex concept - in this case, the soporific notion of grieving for a world lost to environmental collapse - into a dense network of personal histories, literary references, and political investments that comes off as both strident and sound. The prose here is flexible, playful almost, somehow carrying the sober weight of it subject lightly on its back. It's a piece that urges you to rouse yourself and gives you the energy to do so at the same time.
Listen. For me, a good essay is the most magical form of writing on this planet, and "No Good Grief" practically vibrates with that magic. Read it. Read it, read it, read it.
Listen: DEACON, serpentwithfeet
Josiah Wise, the creative heart working here under the name serpentwithfeet, has been circulating in experimental R&B and neo-soul circles for a while now, working with everyone from Haxan Cloak to Ty Dolla $ign. It's easy to see why his work hasn't landed cleanly in any buckets up to this point - DEACON is church music for a new kind of family, full of biblical allusions and queer ecstasy, the sounds of sanctuary itself. At 32, Josiah draws on his opera and choral backgrounds to imbue these silky tunes with a tone that shimmers with living energy. It's sexy and wholesome. Quiet and full. Grounded and winding. Listen to the closing track, "Fellowship", where serepentwithfeet declares "This is the blessing of my thirties / I'm spending less time worrying and more time recounting the love." God, wouldn't that be nice.
Read: Everyone Loves the McElroys, So Why Is Everyone Mad at the McElroys?
Everyone Loves the McElroys, So Why Is Everyone Mad at the McElroys? (vice.com)
This is one of those pieces I hesitate to recommend because of how many messy things it rubs up against: fandom, cancel culture, performative allyship, family dynamics - Gita's work here for Motherboard isn't shy about what's going on here. But, for better or for worse, intersections in and around those topics characterize a huge swath of online life, and this piece is one of the more illuminating forays into how affection, ownership, and creativity work themselves out in those spaces.
If you aren't familiar, the McElroys are a charming set of brothers who have, over the past decade or so, forged a niche but mighty media empire via their podcasts (My Brother, My Brother, and Me being the flagship), their Youtube productions (Monster Factory in particular is great), and their writing. This article primarily concerns a recent arc on their "real play" Dungeons and Dragons podcast, The Adventure Zone, of which Travis, the middlest brother, is the Dungeon Master. I won't get into the details here, but suffice it to say that Travis' run as the driving creative force behind this season of TAZ has been a little rocky, and that rockiness has revealed some of the cracks that form when your brand is your family and your popularity comes from how good you are at making your fans feel like they're your buddies.
Even if you aren't a big McElroy head, this is a sharp read that cuts to the heart of why even really nice things can start feeling so damn hard.
Play: Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, PC, Playstation (Xbox and Switch later)
CW: representations of racism, police violence, sexual assault (none explicit)
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut on Steam (steampowered.com)
I've tried to write about this video game a bunch of times, but it's hard because everything comes out sounding hyperbolic, elitist, or some combination. Disco Elysium is a weird, exhilarating, experience. On one hand, it's structured like a very standard throwback to classic isometric PC rpgs like Baldur's Gate or Planescape. You click around a space, leading your character through a bunch of narrative quests and side quests until twenty or thirty hours later, you reach the end. But as is often is the case, the devil is in the details. Playing Disco Elysium means spending a lot of time with its lead character, a wasted, exhausted, addicted detective within whom a dozen and a half conflicts play out. Disco Elysium is an intense sojourn into the oblivion of interior life - what it means to be "inside your own head", so to speak, and what it looks like to find your footing again. It helps that this is one of the more gorgeous looking games you'll ever play, and the voice acting - which in this new final cut version extends to every single one of the million plus written lines - is uniformly superb. The characters are strange and complex, Kim Kitsuragi in particular stands out as your pragmatic, weirdly caring partner. On top of all this, the world you're exploring is so richly detailed, so lovingly crafted, that when it presents you with the choices between communist and fascist principles, they feel grounded and thoughtful rather than pandering or surface-level. And at the end of the day, one of the most powerful emotional moments unfolds on a karaoke stage, and what more can you ask for than that.
Listen: My Q1 2021 Playlist!
Q1 2021 Shoutouts - Apple Music
If you follow me over on my Instagram (which you should! It's @playinginthebinaries) you might have seen me dropping some tracks from the first three months of the year that I thought are worth checking out. Check them out here on Apple Music and Spotify, whichever is your preference. Let me know what makes it into your regular rotation, too. I'd also love to hear what I missed, so send your recommendations my way on Insta or Twitter, or drop them in the comments here!
Thank you for reading. Keep your hope sharp and at the ready.
Jordan Cassidy