🍒 CHERRYPICKING #003
Like a Lamb to Slaughter: North West at the Hollywood Bowl and a review of "I Saw The TV Glow"
Happy Pride Month y’all, I recently got called a “faggot” by a middle-schooler on a bike, so the season has officially started!
I laughed this exchange off while walking into a liquor store with two of my friends who were dressed like members of an Indie-Sleaze band from 2007. Yes. We were buying natural wine, did you even need to ask? Afterwards, we met up with more of our friends and fellow queer “Somervillians” to enjoy a picnic in the park at sunset. We laughed and danced and ate ice cream straight out of the carton. And that’s how I’ll remember the night.
It’s funny in a way, the kaleidoscope of queer joy. One moment you may feel like the world is out to get you, and in many ways, maybe it is, but in these small moments of tender intimacy the rest of it doesn’t quite matter so much. In an instant, the words and taunts which once carved their way into your skin like rivulets in a desert, are now no different from the songs of the cicadas humming over the hill in the summer heat. A far-off sound, drowned out by laughter.
💿 Shaina Gilks
Sometimes described as, “the only person who’s videos I actually stop scrolling to watch,” Shaina Gilks is a queer voice you don’t only hear, but also feel. Somewhere between an aeolian wind harp and a heartbreaking memory sits Shaina’s voice, comfortably sure in its presence— beautifully welcoming you to sit along on the piano bench and be still.
As a part of their individual effort to highlight queer music during Pride Month, they are creating one musical cover a week on their Instagram page. “I just wanna make art and help people,” Gilks writes. “That’s my number one goal, but beyond that, I’m really hoping to build confidence within myself, and share some of my favorite songs with anyone who wants to listen.”
If you are a fan of artists like Chapelle Roan, Maggie Rogers, and Steve Lacey, then you will surely love Shaina Gilk’s music. You can see Shaina perfoming at Otto’s Shrunken Head in the East Village, on June 27th. Shaina also teached voice lessons and specializes in creating adaptive lesson plans that focus on the individual’s learning style and interests.
📚 The Guest by Emma Cline, One Year Late
Never one to follow trends, at least not in a timely manner, I finally got around to reading The Guest by Emma Cline. Last summer this book was featured in “It-Girl” tote bags city-wide, often accompanied by a Lavender Latte and Sandy Liang ribbon or two. Its neon-green cover, one of the earliest bits of Brat-promo (you’re welcome Charli XCX), and duotone design worked perfectly in an Instagram post or on a bookshelf where it could sit (at least for me) for an entire year.
The common criticism of this book, and many other female-led and driven stories, is that the protagonist was too unlikeable. Alex, a sex worker who is bouncing from house to house in the Hamptons trying to get back with her ex-boyfriend and classically rich guy Simon, is often regarded as a rather flat character. One who things simply happen to with little action on her part, apart from the occasional snarky self-aggrandizing remark well after the fact.
This same complaint was lauded at similar novels like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, or Bunny by Mona Awad. Passive female-protagonists with a nihilistic tilt who do “terrible things.” But when did all of our protagonists start having to be so nice? Why do we as readers need to relate completely to our POV storytellers? Why is likability so abundantly important when it comes to a novel, and why is it never discussed that this characteristic, like anything else in a novel, is a choice. One which, a skillful author, is electing to utilize to serve a very particular message.
Anti-heros are only effective, it would seem, when they are also a man. And perhaps, a story about the class disparity and options afforded to a woman who can only rely on her body, beauty, and youth, may be—at least in some small part—commenting on this.
📺 I saw I saw the TV Glow and now I’m Gay
Sometimes when pulling on a sock I still envision the transformation sequence burned into my brain from Sailor Moon. The story of an impossibly leggy superhero who kaleidoscopically materializes knee-high boots and a crime-fighting sailor costume, all while ribbons flourish and 90’s power ballads plays, yeah that’s gunna stick with a baby gay. In my mind I am her. And though I don’t think I’d be much help in a monster-of-the-week battle, the transformation sequence and overall aesthetic had a huge impact on me and other queer children my age. This is the effect formative television can often have on young people, and perhaps also the idea that director and screenwriter Jane Schoenbrun hoped to convey.
Their film, I Saw the TV Glow, brings back an early-aughts nostalgia that I can only describe as memory-like. It almost reminds me of those TikToks that circulate every once and a while featuring these liminal clips and photographs from a time before the internet was in its imperial phase. All empty school cafeterias and wood-paneled basements that smelled like Turkish Silvers.
The film follows two characters, Owen and Maddy, as their lives are brought together and shaped by a Buffy-esque show called “The Pink Opaque.” What Schoenbrun does so masterfully is capture the awkward mindset and mannerisms of early-teen outcasts in a way that is’t always reflected— goth kids, anime-nerds, and basically anyone with unfettered access to Toonami growing up.
The film offers a personalistic introspection into these subcultures, and does so with the distance of age. Looking back at the things that affected us when we were younger, we often see that the things we saw in these characters were the things were not yet ready to see in ourselves.
🐑 Like a Lamb to Slaughter: North West at the Hollywood Bowl
There seems to be a current obsession with high profile nepo-babies and Disney’s “Lion King.” Perhaps it is its allegory to divine right monarchists, which surely resonates with these capitalist titans, or perhaps it is its ability to attract attention, with the original film and its “live action” counterpart both breaking box-office records accordingly. No stranger to courting mass attention, and often its accompanied outrage, the Kardashian family has offered up their latest lamb to slaughter: North West.
At only 11 years old, North is familiar with the limelight, even being featured on Kanye’s albums, the Kardashian’s Hulu show, and a near-constant barrage of media saturation. Still, one has to ask? How is any of this ok?
The Kardashian family has been accused time and time again of profiting off of their children, oftentimes capitalizing on some rather unsavory facets of the entertainment industry to get… I don’t know… another haircare gummy brand partnership? Kim has apparently been reading from her own “mom-ager,” Kris Kardashian’s playbook, in placing her daughter front in center of a media storm at the 30th Anniversary Lion King performance at the Hollywood Bowl. North, who was dressed in a bespoke yellow shearling ensemble by designer ERL, has recieved a barrage of negative comments on her performace. Though she portrayed Simba, the lion, it seems in the aftermath of this calculated media move that she was more a sacraficial lamb after all.
In the age of the toddler to trainwreck pipeline, with what seems to be a new accusation popping up everyday from the likes of Jennette McCurdy and her Nickelodeon costars in “Quiet on Set,” having North, just 11 years old, on this global stage seems highly irresponsible. We need look no further than the Kardashian family themselves to see the adverse effects the industry has on young people. With Kylie herself being in a frankly unnacceptable age-gap relationship (allegedly encouraged by mom-of-the-year Kris) with rapper Tyga when she was 17 and he was 25.
Celebrities will likely continue to drag out their children to continue their legacies. This practice in public desensitization is nothing new, with North’s own peer Blue-Ivy performing on the Renaissance world tour, and slated to appear in the new “Lion King” sequel herelf. The whole circus feels a bit like debutante ball, where the elites announce the formal coming-out of their next in line. Only now starting at a much younger age.
I struggle to find sympathy for the lives of the rich and famous, after all, it’s sold to us as the ideal, it’s what keeps us all in our places—perfect little consumers. But I consider myself at that age, at 11 years old would I be able to emotionally handle the backlash that these young stars receive in such massive quantities? What must it do a young person’s psyche to be considered a product before they’ve even fully formed?
Read more from CHERRYPICKING:
🐆CHERRYPICKING #001 | 👽CHERRYPICKING #002 | 🐑CHERRYPICKING #003
AND…
Look out for first chapter of the book I’m working on which should be dropping this weekend. I say should because honestly I don’t want to rush this and want to take my sweet sweet time on perfecting this story. However, just to get y’all a little excited, I am ready to share part of the key art and a working title:
good stuff about kids being thrust into the spotlight too early - fortesa latifi’s series in cosmo about kids of influencers
I love an unlikeable woman