114: brat

I'm a little late to the literal party: I started listening to Charli XCX's brat this week after watching my corner of the internet talk about it for the past month. It's the heat of summer and everything feels lazy and sticky; time to pump up the club music. (But not too much—I tried doing cardio to brat at the gym this week and was unable to keep up with the pace for more than a couple of minutes.)

I appreciate just how straightforward brat is. It's an album about want, which is to say, it's figured out that brattiness isn't just about willfulness, but about being stubborn about getting precisely what you want, when you want it, and misbehaving when things don't go your way. This could have been repetitive—which to be fair fits the club music genre—but Charli XCX peppers in some quieter songs to temper the relentlessness of the anthems. The softer songs sound musically more anemic than the bangers do, and the bangers sound a little empty if you listen to the lyrics too closely, which actually proves the point of the record. You can't want something unless you don't have it. brat isn't fulfilling, but it is about a search for fulfillment, and I appreciate the line Charli XCX draws between the two.

What I wrote:

A piece for Bright Wall/Dark Room about Finding Nemo, disability, and whether or not we're obligated to ask permission.

I also reviewed the deeply unsettling Longlegs for Seeing & Believing.

What I'm watching:

Midyear movie catch-up continues apace. Friday night I watched Fancy Dance, a drama about a Seneca-Cayuga woman (Lily Gladstone) watching after her niece while searching for her missing sister, the girl's mother. The movie's plainspoken and direct, good, but not great. The parts that worked best were careful observations that don't explain or draw too much attention to themselves, such as a moment when Gladstone's character cuts up a diaper to improvise pads for her niece, who's just started her first period.

What I'm growing:

The heirloom tomato plants are heavy with fruit. They're all green, but they're growing, and I'm expecting them to start to turn sometime this week.