Everything's Coming Up RENT and Book Reviews
The Good Links coming at you approximately 525,600 weeks late!
Featuring microwave cooking, Tavi Gevinson, and a sitcom keeping me sane.
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Talkin’ About Some Generation (Microwaves)
Microwaves! Born just before the boomers were (WWII), the victims of many a faux wellness craze, microwaves simply don’t get their culinary due from any generation. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner does a quick recap of her experience with microwave cooking and the 1987 Barbara Kafka cookbook “Microwave Gourmet” and concludes that we should all be using our microwaves way more for cooking.
I especially enjoyed this little analysis of our work hard, play hard, live hard, die hard society:
Humans have a psychological need to tie together visible effort to value: when things happen too quickly, too easily, they come across as unbelievable, or untrustworthy. (User-experience designers, capitalizing on this quirk of psychology, are known to build soothing, reliable, and entirely unnecessary loading screens and faux progress bars into Web sites and apps.)
Plus, there’s a whole delicious-sounding artichoke recipe at the end of the article (don’t worry, the cook time is still like 20 minutes).
It’s me, Helen Rosner, and this rando from Wife Swap.
P.S. I am choosing to believe that, ultimately, this article means those people who choose to cook microwave foods using the 55 minute oven option instead of just zapping them for the 6 minutes it needs in the microwave deserve our ire.
A Less Serious, More Incredible Item (RENT!)
You know about RENT. RENT: the 1996 musical filled with the most earworm-y musical songs of all time. RENT: the origin of the one, the only “Seasons of Love,” a song whose reference to 525,600 minutes haunts even the most number-averse listener.
Well, writer David Carliner also knows about RENT, and wrote the funniest post I have read all year that begins with 7 people on a “2019 Spotify Community thread” who “railed against the music platform for losing the Original Broadway Cast recording of RENT” and ends with the most hysterical middle school choir performance of “Seasons of Love” I have ever seen (funnier even than when my sixth grade choir did “Defying Gravity”).
P.S. Get used to me sending you to other Substacks! I started a Substack newsletter first, but now all these journalists are copying me (read: finding that sometimes Substack will get them a much better income than a mainstream journalism job, or at least good supplemental income), and good links are now often journalists’ Substacks!
This Week’s Theme: Literally Just Two Book Reviews My Friend Sent Me That I Think Are Great
The first link is a book review written by author Elizabeth McCracken about the debut novel of a woman named Jackie Polzin. The book is called Brood and it’s about a woman who has a miscarriage and becomes obsessed with the chickens she’s raising in her yard. It starts out like most book reviews — explanatory and evaluative, but then it takes a turn about halfway through. McCracken didn’t like this book, and it’s not the author’s fault, but she just really didn’t like it. So then McCracken has a little breakdown about her own life and book reviews and how she doesn’t like books where nothing happens. One of those short pieces that leaves with you such a sense of everything in it.
The second, more splashy book review (that’s more of a retrospective but whatever) was written by actress Emily Mortimer about Lolita. She tells a hilarious anecdote about how while doing a press tour for a movie where she plays a book shop owner she kept saying she had read Lolita, but she was really talking out of her ass and remembered nothing about the book. Then, after the book tour, she really did read Lolita and fell absolutely in love with it. I have never once wanted to read Lolita. I know the plot (old man is fully in love and obsessed with a 12-year-old girl he regularly rapes) and I’ve thought “sounds gross” because it does. Emily Mortimer has fully convinced me to place a library hold on Lolita, that’s how good this book review is.
Shout out to books for spurring reviews.
Politics (“Work Sucks, I Know” - Blink-182)
I enjoyed this piece from Jezebel about “nonessential work” and the ways the pandemic has made us realize that we should care anywhere from 1 to 1,000% less about our jobs. Starting with a delicious recap of the way the movie Monsters, Inc. is about capitalistic drudgery as much as anything, and ending with the reminder that now that we’ve realized something has changed, we actually have to change it. I was also obsessed with this quote about how the dream is really to not work at all:
Yacine Niang, a 23-year-old who just lost her first post-college job said her ideal job is none: “I dream of being able to go back to work, pay my bills and build my own company so I can eventually leave that job,” she said. “But really my dream job is no job.”
Very random of me to have never actually seen this music video.
P.S. The piece doesn’t even get into the crux of the American labor issue: health care is tied to employment status. The most nefarious labor structure in the known universe, if you ask me. It’s impossible to live the work life you want when your health is tied to not just whether you work, but to where you work.
A Celebrity Thinger (Britney Spears, Agency, Control, Etc., Etc.)
I have been thinking about Tavi Gevinson’s piece about the Framing Britney Spears documentary since I read it a full month ago. Titled “Britney Spears Was Never In Control,” Gevinson discusses her own experience being a young, white woman in New York City who was supposed to feel sexually empowered and how the documentary’s insistence that Britney Spears had total agency over her sexualized celebrity persona is massively off-base. Her analysis includes nuance about sexism and misogyny that has been missing from the more recent conversations about Britney Spears, and, I think, about patriarchy, gender dynamics, and society at large. She points out the following about Spears and her conformist persona:
Sad and high on feminist ire, I didn’t think the doc was lacking any perspective until I texted with my friend Laia. Laia was a teenager in the “Baby One More Time” era and said she didn’t understand why the doc was rewriting Spears as a feminist icon. “She was the Establishment! She was what we were supposed to be: sexy and young. Not a paragon of independence.” Laia also pointed out the faulty argument Kaiman [a PR woman who worked with Spears] tries to make, that only boy bands were popular at the time, in order to cast young Spears as a gender warrior. “She was a response to Alanis and the rise of the ‘angry woman.’” Not only angry women, but women across the genres of pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop who were singing more openly about sex than Spears was — sexual feelings, sexual experiences.
She eventually moves beyond the framework of the documentary to comment on the predatory society that young women and girls have to navigate when they’re constantly being (falsely) told that their youth and their supposed sexiness really makes them the ones with all the power. She also delves a little bit into pretty privilege and the beauty industrial complex we all operating within that values thin, young, white women above all else. She reminds everyone that Britney Spears (and all young girls), by virtue of being 16, couldn’t have had power over the people and institutions that were exploiting and criticizing her.
P.S. #FreeBritney, of course.
Would You Rather? (Coronavirus Masks Edition)
Would you rather be EmRata’s beautiful boy or Coco’s boob cubes?
A Recommendation (100% Late to the Game)
I have been absolutely ripping through episodes of Superstore (streaming on Hulu AND everyone’s favorite ad-filled free streaming app Peacock) since last week when I started watching. It’s about the staff of a Walmart-style superstore and their daily shenanigans. It’s absolutely one of those shows that you see a commercial for and are like “ok, looks fine,” and then never watch, but boy have we all been mistaken. I don’t think I’ve laughed out loud this much since Veep went off the air (RIP Veep), plus it follows simple sitcom rules so you can sort of fall asleep a little (the pandemic rages on!) and not be confused at all.
Here’s the assistant manager, Dina, bringing titties back and exhibiting whatever the exact opposite of empathy is.
Donation Corner! (For You to Ignore or Engage With As You Please!)
Here are your donation opportunities for the month:
Mural Arts Philadelphia - never a bad time to donate to Mural Arts, Philly’s premier public art org that makes Philly beautiful and has a bunch of awesome community programs (including reentry stuff).
Homies Helping Homies - a mutual aid fund in Point Breeze (which is in South Philly). Venmo @homieshelpinghomies. They also accept a number of item donations.
Sourced from VietLead (an activist org that advocates for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian communities), a group of Vietnamese refugees in the Philly area were deported by ICE and they’re collecting funds to support one of the deported refugees and his family. Venmo @claireman0 to help.
P.S. If you have an organization/mutual aid fund/individual in mind that you think would be good to highlight, feel free to email me directly with information about it!
P.P.S. Why three places each week?
The first donation opportunity will always be a a 501(c)3 organization that I have done some due diligence around to try and ensure they’re a real non-profit organization that 1) does good work and 2) is tax-deductible!
The second donation opportunity will be a mutual aid fund (s/o to the politics good link!), which FYI is probably not tax-deductible.
And the final donation opportunity will be an individual in need of funds who has a GoFundMe or a cashapp (or however the kids are accepting funds these days) where you can donate. Also likely not tax-deductible.
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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