Staunchly, vol. 120: The Revolution Will Be Televised in Digital Fur Technology
1/8/20
It’s weird to celebrate a new year when it feels so much like the end of things. Entire ecosystems. A tenuous peace with Iran. A world without Taylor Swift’s quivering cat breasts. The assumption of JK Rowling as a seemingly decent, or at least not obviously hateful, person. Koalas?
But soldier on we must! This is Staunchly and there is retinol to talk about. And midcentury feminist lit. And a psychic in Britain who predicts the future through (/with?/alongside?/on behalf of??) asparagus!
Well, Asparagas up your cars, Ladies! Let’s get into it.
[PS You may notice that this is the first normal Staunchly in a while. In the fall I took a three-week trip to Transylvania, Bucharest, Vienna, Paris, London, Berlin, and Baden-Baden, a spa town in the Black Forest of Germany to celebrate my 30th. When I returned, we were right in the middle of the holiday season, and it was hard to get my bearings and reestablish a sense of normal. It was also hard because I had planned my trip specifically with the intention of obliterating my sense of normal. It feels like I’m trying to build a new sense of purpose—as a writer, a woman, a member of a family, a human being in a burning world—from scratch. So if Staunchlys take longer, are less frequent, or just plain weirder, this is why. There is so much different work to be done.]
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On the fires in Australia:
Everything you need to know about this apocalyptic climate disaster.
The Cut has a great list on how to help and where to donate money.
Murdoch is even worse than you can imagine.
@vivmakes on Instagram made these two graphics below that I found very useful.
More from the heavyside layer:
This is a good primer on the unfolding crisis with Iran.
Isaac Chotiner interviews David Nirenberg, dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, on the rise of anti-Semitism, or anti-Judaism as he calls it. I found the conversation thoughtful and sobering: “Anti-Judaism is actually a system of thought that people can use to explain many of the challenges they face, even when there are no Jews around.”
Raising the minimum wage by one dollar could prevent thousands of suicides.
I’m sad to see Castro out of the race, but happy he made the correct endorsement. It’s so wild how he was criticized for seeming too angry in the debates, like, how the hell else should a person be?
Everyone needs to read this expose on the pattern of racial discrimination in the South Bend Police Department under Buttigieg’s watch. I will be troubled if you’re not troubled.
My friend Molly wrote a beautiful essay about the passing of her friend Elizabeth Wurtzel, writer of Prozac Nation and iconic woman of difficulty. (I took my fluoxetine with extra reverance today).
The lighterside layer:
I’m excited to finally admit I never understood the point of the Lingua Franca thing. I don’t care as much about the absurdity of paying $380 for a “poverty is sexist” sweater, because I, myself, am a hypocrite (a woke lil bitch from an extremely privileged background c’est moi), but how did a bunch of white women wearing ORIGINAL GANGSTA sweaters not raise all the flags?
Jemima Packington for PM: “A fortune teller who correctly predicted Brexit and England winning the Cricket World Cup using asparagus has revealed her top tips for 2020. Jemima Packington, 64, the world's first and only Asparamancer, claims she can peer into the future by tossing the veg in the air and interpreting how the spears land.” I don’t even care what her predictions are, I shall live and die by them.
I adore Florence Pugh, even if I have to actively keep forgetting that she’s dating Zach Braff.
All you need to know about Chet Haze is that I took a cinema studies class with him in high school and one afternoon after we finished watching The Graduate, he simply raised his hand and said, “This is my dad’s favorite movie.”
Finally, RIP artist John Baldessari. Here he is on The Simpsons.
Stella Bugbee posted a “More/Less” list on her Instagram and I was inspired to do the same. In lieu of traditional resolutions, here’s just some stuff I want more or less of.
And also here are some more traditional resolutions:
Get really fucking good at needlepoint
Be content with less
Write something substantial
Feel more connected to my neighborhood
These are the books I loved most last year (in no order):
Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Collages by Anais Nin
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
(Amazon links added for convenience, but please consider purchasing from your local bookstore)
I love award shows. I love how dumb they are. I love when my favorite people win and I get to pretend like it has something to do with my taste and enthusiasm and is not actually a predestined result of the intractable Hollywood power matrix as determined by the cabal of CAA agents who meet every full wolf moon in the basement of Au Fudge (REST IN POWER) on Melrose to establish the country’s entertainment agenda for the year.
That said, I had no problem sitting out the Golden Globes this week. It’s bizarre and painful that the powers that be chose as host a man who once likened the legitimacy of trans identity to his own right to declare selfhood as a chimpanzee. How…modern? I understand that we are going to war in the Middle East and I’ve been spending a lot of time at Color Me Mine, but that does not make it 2003 so don’t fucking act like it.
The end of the year felt like a tornado, and typically “best of year” lists give me hives, even though I participate in them because they are ***clickable***.
I sometimes have complicated feelings about this section of the newsletter, since it implicitly* links joy with consumerism in an era of climate disaster fueled, in part, by unchecked consumerism (*jk, it’s very explicit). I want to be a more conscious consumer in 2020, but I also have to acknowledge how much small, material pleasures lift my mood. There’s no consciousness when my mood is so dark, as it has been recently, that I can’t see past myself. Also, as a fundamentally stubborn person, there is a limit to how much I will participate in restrictive behavior based on an individualistic, neoliberal, ***bullshit*** concept of change, when the only real path to climate justice is a complete restructuring of corporate power and a revolution against entrenched affluence. I guess what I’m saying is, a little quick and dirty materialism is ok. Shopping at Daiso, with its aisles and aisles of flammable dollar treats individually wrapped in probably something worse than plastic is fine. It’s fine!
Yes, that whole paragraph was just a massive digression to justify the fact that I went to Daiso on Sunday and it brought me joy and that sometimes I buy more things than I need and that brings me joy, too—all of which puts me in the perplexing position of trying to honor an instinct I am also trying to unpack.
Retail therapy is real, buying things feels good, it is a trick to think any pack of individual actions comes close to a single company’s decision to stop, idk, ejaculating coal onto daisies, but there is also tremendous power in the shared experience of trying to be less wasteful, more sustainably-minded, and just a little better.
With that, welp, here are the eleven best things I bought this year*
*(excluding books, food, and “experiences,” because we’d be here all day)
1. A313 retinol, which costs less than five euros at City-Pharma in Paris. American friends: I highly suggest catfishing a Frenchie and scamming him/her into shipping one to a nearby PO box. Or, I suppose, you can buy it on Amazon for $30. I wrote about this product at length in an issue of the Saturday Staunch, but basically it’s a no-fuss, beginner-friendly vitamin A (retinol) unguent that delivers the fastest, most noticeable results of any single product I’ve ever used. It smoothes lines, shrinks pores, clears skin, etc.—all those mostly bullshit results so many creams promise but never actually provide because they’re too busy giving you a rash. I hesitate to earnestly call anything a “miracle product” but...........
2. A rechargeable Mighty Bright reading light.
3. This pocket mirror I bought in the bazaar outside Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, which somehow captures the entire style and spirit of my Euro trip.
4. Stationery from Benneton Graveur, which I got to hand-pick at the atelier in Paris, filling up a box with as many of each design as I wanted (as opposed to pre-boxed sets). Fancy correspondence cards of thick stock, lined with hand-painted borders and brushed stamped with the likeness of an apex predator, are my kink.
5. Cerave Healing Ointment: I read about this on some perioral dermatitis survivor blog and it really has been a game-changer for me in the last quarter of the year. It’s lanolin-free, unlike Aquaphor, so you can use it on your face without fear of breakouts. I use it every night and sometimes during the day on any spots I’m noticing a little PD flare-up or experiencing irritation. It calms and moisturizes the area brilliantly without creating any new nonsense to deal with. This + A313 + quitting my formerly beloved Tatcha oil cleanser (I loved her but she was hurting me) has basically cured the dermatitis. I have now absolutely, extremely jinxed it.
6. These J. Crew heart earrings in a very happy blue.
7. meo fusciuni perfume in Luce, which I bought at Song, a gallery and concept boutique in Vienna. Hard to describe the scent except to say it’s layered and androgynous and both sweet and smoky and like how I want to smell always.
8. A London Review of Books tote from the London Review of Books bookstore in London, which instantly communicates to all that I am smart and traveled. Did you guys know I went to Europe last year?
9. Perfect black oval Alaia sunglasses, seen here.
10. Cheeky mash-up stickers from Devin Mireles. I bought RuPork and Super Golden Gals.
11. If I was god-fearing, or Usher, this would be the subject of all my confessions: I spent $200 on a MAKEUP PRIMER last year and honestly, I’d do it again. Double Tenseur by Sisley purports to use oat seed extract to create a “3D mesh on the skin's surface,” which in turn inspires “an immediate lifting sensation.” I have no clue what that means, but this baby smooths, holds makeup, and glow-enhances, and think about it: would I really be out here like a little tsarina at the dawn of a great economic revolution admitting to spending $200 on a completely superfluous beauty product if it wasn’t really, truly, great?
Honorable mention buys: this eye mask from my hotel in Baden-Baden which is too precious to actually sleep with, Weleda and Olbas bath oils, everything Buly, Lait VIP 02 and Creme Placenta from Biologique Recherche, Cle de Peau Radiant Corrector concealer, my Kaweco pen that I already lost.