I feel like I stepped on a treadmill at the beginning of June that never slowed down… if anything, it’s just running faster and faster as the days have gone by. We’re rushing gloriously head-first into summer!
Best Of The Month
Back in May, when the city was still locked down, some of my friends decided we all needed something to look forward to. So we decided we would have a boat party in June, either on a weekend (if we weren’t locked down) or on a Friday. Turns out Saturdays were free days in June, so we had our boat party… and it was just GLORIOUS, a full day of sunshine and booze and hugs. Pure elation.
I took a very quick two-day trip with a friend to Gaziantep, a city in Turkey’s southeast that I passed through back in 2014 and have always wanted to return to. Gaziantep is most famous for its food, and we ate our way through the city, inhaling katmer and cherry kebab and beyran soup and pistachio baklava.
I signed up for an open air sketching class at Nadas this month…and no one else did. So I went to Nadas anyway and ended up having a little weekly nighttime party with the sketching teacher and whoever else showed up. We started calling it Church, our holy little break in the middle of the week.
Worst Of The Month
The problem with everything speeding up is that the end of the month was just insane. A lot of work came in, which is objectively great, but in reality it meant that I worked like a madwoman in an attempt to finish it all up before July.
I have a friend visiting in July, and we realized mere days before his flight here that his ticket itinerary had been completely changed without notice– including an impossible layover. (The second flight left before the first flight landed.) After two days of high stress and two nights of no sleep, we finally got it all straightened out… but until then, we thought the trip might be canceled, which would have been terrible.
What I’m Loving
Reads: I read a book I’ve had my eye on for years, ever since I read a New Yorker article about the topic: The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. Turns out the history of the superhero is kinkier and more overtly feminist than anyone ever knew, with explicit ties to the early birth control movement. I don’t want to say too much because it’s such a wonderful, wild ride. You can find the New Yorker article here.
I also read a sequel to a book I read a few months ago: One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson. Like the first book, it had interlocking melancholy mysteries that pay off in unexpected ways. I have the third book in the series too, but I am hanging onto that for now.
Music: I loved the songs “Shine Your Light On Me” by Natalie Bergman, “Oye Nicola” by Los Zafiros, and “Lansana’s Priestess” by Donald Byrd. All terrific jams.
TV/Movies: I saw a movie IN A MOVIE THEATER for the first time since this cursed pandemic began. It was a German film called Next Door that was showing as part of the Istanbul Film Festival, and it was very good, but the best part was just being in the cinema again.
Podcasts: The end of this season of The Last Archive continued to be as consistently good as all the episodes before… I feel like I recommend this podcast every month, but I love it and you should really listen to it.
Radiolab is airing an interesting mini-series called “The Vanishing of Harry Pace”, about the man who founded the first Black record label and then disappeared, deliberately. It reminded me a bit of my favorite magazine story that I have ever read… something about early music pioneers vanishing clearly strikes a chord with me.
Outlook’s episode about Rupa was a favorite, because her song Aaj Shanibar was my absolute favorite song last year and the story about how her album Disco Jazz was forgotten and then rediscovered is delightful.
I listened to both the May and June episodes from Hit Parade this month, and they were both great (unsurprising, since the show is so consistently excellent). One is about Milli Vanilli (and was way weirder and wilder than I expected) and the other is about the blurred lines between singing and rapping, with an emphasis on Jay Z and Beyonce. Both are just great.
The Film Files
I shot very little this month, but I did finish up a roll of double exposures I started in California in December AND we got a beautiful roll back from our Dreamspace project, so I feel like I’ve been slightly more active than I actually have.
Ephemera
After watching them struggle, both of my monstera plants gave off new leaves this month! It’s a minor thing, but it made me very happy.
Upcoming
My friend Chris comes to visit, we go to Kas, and later in the month, maybe there will be a road trip! Summer is here and I plan to have as much fun as humanly possible.
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