Friday Links: Punk Rock & Fairy Tales Edition
"Another way in my ever-expanding / list of ways to feel less American. // Which is to say, elegant in the face of / my boorishness." - Alina Pleskova, "ALIGHT"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with two poems from Adam Gianforcaro microwaving blood in our literary Nostromo.
What can community do for us? I know this blog spouts out “find the people who hold you” and “live happily in spite of the way the world is” stuff all the time, but dudes—we recorded The Line Break with a guest this week and I just finished a book by a former guest before writing this, and I feel so lucky to be able to make friends with poets and write about these books each week for y’all. What a mood I’m in. I’ve also had two cups of coffee, so.
Hey speaking of community and The Line Break,
started a Substack! We’re about a year out from the release of his new book from Game Over Books, and until then, you can subscribe to to get updates!What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Not gonna lie, I somehow wrote every other portion of this column before this graf. Honestly, I had a lot to say about both these books and the links. So let’s get straight to Children Of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo and Toska by Alina Pleskova! Click here for Alina’s appearance on The Line Break!
Toska by Alina Pleskova: yeah hell yeah this is what I want from a book of poems. There’s vulnerability and coolness, there’s sex and working class politics, each line is like watching a musician you’ve never seen before take a song in places your ear didn’t expect. I read it in three sittings and wrote at least one poem after each reading.
This isn’t exactly the highest literary criticism, but I came away from this book thinking Alina and I are sentimental about the same things (“but I’m into bittersweet reverbs: // how objects, like nicknames, / stick around long after their sources / how people don’t vanish / when you stop loving them”), anxious about the same things, (“& all the wrong details creep in: // debt down to the cent, cherished faces / of those long or recently gone, // what my body withstood / felt again as a literal muscle memory”), disgusted by the same things (“Among the many natural predators of poets, / mine include developers, executives, khaki-wearers, / talking appliances, & the people who respond”), and wish the world could be different for the same reasons (“A hand on my knee while curving around a coastal highway begs the question: what sort of sickos invented offices & economies?”). Intellectual reading or not, what an exciting experience in a book.
Children Of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo: look, we got a book about Humboldt Park written by a native Humboldt Parkian that is playing with fairy tales and supernatural murder—I’m going to be interested. Scares and grotesqueries abound. We’re relishing gore but still gonna protect the kids from it. Paragraph to paragraph, the story is incredibly kinetic. Characters move in and out of reality/fantasy/visions of horror in a way that is always surprising. Another book I can close my eyes and visualize as a movie and get excited about—hey, we need more movies with half-decent care paid to Chicago’s geography and an honest accounting of neighborhoods (two things The Bear is emphatically uninterested in, fwiw).
That brings me to something a little tough about this book—it sometimes felt like the research was copy/pasted into the text of the narrative without going back over to smooth over the shift from “what’s happening, described with musical prose” to “a cool fact I learned.” A father does not merely watch sports, he watches “the Bears, Bulls, Black Hawks [sic], Chicago Cubs, or White Sox on his large screen television.” Chicago does simply have a history of killers, “Chicago had many known boogeymen: serial killer H.H. Holmes, who tortured and killed potentially hundreds in his murder castle, Richard Speck who murdered eight nursing students in a single night, the Ripper Crew, who kidnapped, ritualistically mutilated and killed over a dozen women, John Wayne Gacey [sic] who worked as a construction worker and a clown for children’s birthday parties and went on to murder and store the bodies of thirty-three boys and men beneath his floorboards, and today’s Chicago Strangler who has killed over fifty girls and women in the South Side of Chicago, and is still operating.” There seemed to be a somewhat stilted attempt to cram as many Chicago facts and/or examples into the narrative in a way that slowed down the prose. In fairness, I can totally relate. This city is magic.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Children of Chicago is a love letter to Humboldt Park, a traditionally Puerto Rican neighborhood under 21st century threats of gentrification. My favorite Chicago punk band, Los Crudos, hails from Pilsen, a traditionally Mexican neighborhood under 21st century threats of gentrification. Here’s Los Crudos live in North Carolina:
Can’t pretend I didn’t get wistful reading Dave McKenna at Defector turn a gamer of a shitty Wizards game into a retrospective on Gilbert Arenas, the creation of the “Agent Zero” nickname, and the era of internet where a basketball blog could be mostly fictional (featuring feuds between Arenas and Werner Herzog, for instance) and be called “Wizznutzz” without assuming a Barstool connection. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “a woman seated behind us in an Arenas jersey told me she’d just paid a stranger sitting nearby $40 for her “Agent Zero” cap, because she’d shown up too late for the giveaway and couldn't bear going home lid-free. I told Morris about it, and asked for his reaction to hearing the Wizards were still propping up the nickname he came up with in 2006—a brainchild old enough to vote, and one that people other than me apparently still love. He said he not only “never made a dime off 'Agent Zero,'” but also had never even met Arenas.”
Speaking of pining for a time when everything was a little less branded, here’s an old-but-great Chicago Reader piece from Leor Galil about Thing, a Black and queer zine that captured the birth of House music. Not only that, though, this description of the zine’s contents is such an exciting collection of topics: “Thing’s vision was large enough to encompass club gossip, Black hair-care tips, erotica, poetry, film and literature reviews, and personal essays on homelessness, anti-gay violence, and AIDS.” It’s an absolute treat to get this much of a deep dive into pre-internet zine culture, to see how excited these geographically separated groups were about each other’s projects. The internet would connect everyone like this now—theoretically at least—but it’s a great reminder to seek out the cool, outside-of-capitalism stuff people are doing.
Late to including this but it’s worth talking about how allegedlyallegedlyallegedly
Boeing executed a whistleblower in a hotel room while he was in the process of testifyinga man who had worked Quality Assurance for Boeing for decades and then had to retire due to injury and spent the last few years calling attention to the fact that Boeing was not a company who cared about quality right before pieces of planes started falling out of the sky all the damn time has ~~~died~~~ of an APPARENT “““self-inflicted””” _g_U_n_S_h_O_t_ ‘wound’ in a HOTEL ROOM. See how silly things look when you can’t say what we all know is true? Here’s Theo Leggett at BBC reporting.Embarrassing confession time: I’ve been a condo owner for around six years. As such, I’ve been around condo people, and I kinda knew Bring Chicago Home was doomed to fail on Tuesday. Even my loveliest of neighbors will bitch about property tax like Brandon Johnson came to their own home and called their own mother ugly to their own face. It sucks that people have “do something about homelessness but don’t raise my property taxes” views, because those views are small-minded, selfish, and a slippery slope to fascism. The other way our government knows to deal with people who have been unhoused is policing. Here’s Heather Cherone at WTTW reporting that police pursuits cost Chicagoans more than half of what the Bring Chicago Home measure was going to raise.
End on something cheerful? Here’s Peter Yeung in Reasons To Be Cheerful about how the city of Medellín installed a bunch of “green corridors,” beautifying the city, creating jobs, and—get a load of this—cooling the city through natural means. No carbon capture, no “buy offsets” bullshit, just—responsible care for your environment. Political will. People trying.
BONUS SIXTH LINK because The Daily Zeitgeist interviewed Professor David Wengrow about how a series of recent archaeological discoveries has the potential to completely change our understanding of human history. Namely, how we can learn from Indigenous history and maybe re-organize our society into something more equitable and environmentally sensible. I’m definitely picking up The Dawn of Everything soon.
BONUS SEVENTH LINK, THURSDAY 9 P.M.: sorry this essay on how to eat and growing up biracial (Black and Filipino) and keeping cultural practices alive in the face of both genocide and the manosphere from Nicholas Russell in Defector IS SO GOOD. SORRY EVERYONE FOR YOUR TABS THIS WEEKEND. HERE’S A PULL QUOTE: “Across cultures, across dining customs, a given person's reason for following that custom is usually as simple as ‘That’s how my [insert relative here] did it.’ Which is to say, these dilemmas of understanding tradition don’t always bear out as distressed feelings of cultural isolation or, conversely, maudlin romanticizations of hearth and home…[paragraphs]…Part of any genocidal project is destroying historical and cultural traditions of a community, which can often appear most visibly around food. Palestinians are fighting to salvage not just physical places or inherited customs, but the small, idiosyncratic habits and proclivities specific to any family…the growth of the Supplement Lifestyle is merely stupid.”
What’re you still doing here? Are you in shape for kayaking season? Lake Michigan, she calls!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Alina’s book has this benediction in the Acknowledgements, and she’s given me permission to reprint it here. It’s the sentiment I hope this last paragraph carries each week. A dedication to “The queers, poets, freaks & weirdos, burnouts, whores, punks, & fellow travelers who showed me that we can carve out slivers of the world just for us. As Diane di Prima wrote, ‘…remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything” Here’s to more.”
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
.jpg){kind=link}