These are a few of my favorite things
The first of 2024!
Look at us.
All here in 2024, my friends. May it be a light and sweet relief, or at the very least, better somehow than what many of us endured this year prior.
I’ve got some wonderful recommendations for y’all. Been hopping in my cinematic bag, returning to some old and newer bops and books, and comedy. But first! My one-sentence response to the anti-nazi campaign on this-here app:
If I cannot tell what you are for (pro-Blackness, liberation of all oppressed people, etc.), I will assume your platitudes about what you’re against (nazis, etc.) are mere performance.
Okay. Let’s get into it.
CINEMA
Gotta love new friends. Delving more deeply into film lately has led me to new friendships, which have inspired me to finally, finally get into Letterboxd again. It’s been my main social network on the internet as of late.
(I’m blkpansymovies on there if you’re interested 💅🏾.)
But hennyways…here are a few movies I’ve logged and loved recently…
Salt of This Sea - dir. by Annemarie Jacir
Salt of This Sea stars poet, Suheir Hammad, as Soraya, an American-born Palestinian woman who returns to her family’s homeland to retrieve their money and house that were taken during Nakba in 1948.
This film came out in 2010. Yet it feels present, current. So devastatingly now. Highly recommend.
Salt of This Sea is available on Netflix.
Bone Black: Midwives vs. the South - dir. Imani Dennison
You’ll be hard-pressed to find much information on Black midwives in any sort of U.S. public school. But I hope people, young and older, find their way to Bone Black. This gorgeous and poetic short documentary shares the history of midwives in the American South and how attacks on Black women birth workers and doulas have led to the Black maternal mortality crisis today.
Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later - dir. by Eric Daniel Peddle
The Aggressives (2005) is one of my favorite films of all time. Beyond the Aggressives celebrates the documentary’s 25th anniversary with follow-up stories on four of its original AFAB queer and trans masculine subjects: Chin, Octavio, Trevon, and Kisha. It was absolutely heavy, then beautiful, then healing to see everyone living a better life today than they ever had in their youth.
Beyond the Aggressives (2023) is coming to Showtime soon. And you can watch The Aggressives (2005) for free on Tubi.
MUSIC
Before we get into these, I wanna give an honorary shout out to Jungle4Eva’s visual album Volcano. The music is fine. Nothing to write home about, but the dancers? That choreo? Iconic. Beginning to end.
“Bull Believer” by Wednesday
Y’all. Loopy-the-fucking-loop. Repeat/repeat/repeat. I cannot stop listening and feeling this song. It’s just too good. Too raw, too firey, too catastrophically emotional, and a little too southern, my god.
It’s from Wednesday’s latest album Rat Saw God that came out this past April. Honestly, the whole record is worth a listen but I highly, highly recommend playing “Bull Believer” first.
“Breezin’” by George Benson
Breezin’ (the song and the album) are some of the best jazz guitar tracks I’ve ever heard. Smooth, rich, good-good music.
I play guitar, by the way. And as far as musician I look up to go, beyond my late Pops who was an iconic Memphis jazz pianist and trumpeter, George Benson is up there. One day, I wanna play y’all a cover of his work.
*Jasper shared the previous sentence to hold themselves accountable.*
“Pretty Hot” by GioFromDaBlock
Babeee, the butch queens are out, okay? This song is one of the cuntiest I’ve heard in a minute. My A-1 calls him the gay man Ice Spice. Fair! I do believe he’s also an Afro-Latino from the Bronx. But I’m not the biggest Ice Spice fan so it’s gotta be something about that gay, gay, gay that got ME.
BOOKS/READING
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
I read 25 books in 2023. This one, Yellowface, was my absolute favorite. It’s an immersive and wildly exciting thriller about the publishing world and all its disparities and issues through the lens of a white woman who embarks on a very fascinating sort of yellow-faced exploit.
How do we survive victory?
I really appreciated this piece by
that asks what it takes to rebuild a nation when it comes to Sudan.
How Men Become Monsters
Stanley Fritz of
wrote a thoughtful, personal and introspective piece about police violence, and how we can all think more empathetically about the Middle East.
COMEDY
The OG readers of this newsletter know I’m a comedy gurlie. Formerly (and briefly) stand-up-comedian-turned-humorist, still so fully obsessed with the more theatrical version of the art form. Indeed.
So I spend a lot of hours on YouTube watching people tell jokes. Its always a mixed bag. Oh, is it. But there’s one place that so far consistently brings the funny, called Don’t Tell Comedy.
Pretty much every comedian that steps on that stage is solid.
Like Eagle Witt, whose joke about Taylor Swift cracked me and bae up the other day.
Really hard to go wrong here, though. Feeling slightly chaotic? A random game of comedy roulette might be cute—Just click on a set. See how it goes. You (probably) won’t go wrong.
PODCASTS
Finally, I’ve enjoyed The Classroom and the Cell. It began as a collection of conversations on education, mass incarceration, love, and life captured in a book co-written by educator and journalist Dr. Marc Lamont Hill and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal published in 2012. Now, over ten years later, the friends converse in 15-minute intervals on this new podcast, because 15 minutes is all the State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania will allow.
Alright, y’all! I hope you enjoyed these recs. Feel free to offer up some below. I stay looking for new art and things to explore, and I’m betting some of the wonderful folks reading this are too!
Thank you all for reading!
-Jasper
Ah, thanks so much for recommending my piece! Also, listening to the George Benson album right now, it's so good! I never really know what to go for when I want instrumental jazz vibes... but now I do :)