constellations #120: darkness, trash, sincerity
thoughts on an exhibition and a movie and a song
Hi again.
This month I am cribbing a format from the immense wave, the beautiful newsletter written by my friend Marianela D’Aprile, which she calls “some things i’ve seen or read or heard recently” (subtitle: “and some thoughts on each”). Pretty self-explanatory, I guess. Thank you Marianela for inventing the form.
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This Will Not End Well
Nan Goldin; Grand Palais, Paris
Madeline and I went to Paris earlier this month and, aside from jogging past Notre-Dame one morning, we hit precisely zero classic tourist attractions. But this exhibition of Nan Goldin’s work, at the Grand Palais, was the one must-do activity we assigned ourselves. In particular because Nan’s work has been really influential on Madeline, and also because of Nan’s connection to Boston—where we are from, nominally—and New York City, where we live now. (If you are not already familiar with Nan’s work, or even if you are, I really love and recommend the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about her that came out in 2022.) The show comprised six works, most of them slideshows of photography, each projected in its own tiny “building” (this is the word the exhibition description uses) within an expansive room. We only saw five of the pieces, actually, because the sixth was located in a different part of the Grand Palais. Anyway, to name their themes—friendship, love, abjection, community, suffering, mythology, art itself—would make the pieces feel unbearably ponderous, but Nan’s work is so intimate, so filled with life, so close to the bone. Mad and I staggered around from “building” to “building,” trying to absorb the work like trying to drink the ocean, kind of spellbound by how packed with people the room was—feeling moved by all these viewers who, like us, just wanted to sit quietly in the dark and watch the slideshows click, click, click through their images.
I, regrettably, spend so many braindead hours every week swiping through social media galleries and flicking through short-form videos; the patience I summoned to sit in the dark and be in the thrall of this work, to let it lead us, patiently, photo by photo, through the story the artist was telling: it felt like the antidote to all that noise. Its images are still pinging around in my memory weeks later, shifting the frame of how I see my own life.
Fucktoys
dir. Annapurna Sriram; 2025, 107 min.
I love when a movie has a really well-defined color palette, and also I love when a movie examines the labor of sex work without being didactic, and when a movie treats queer friendship with seriousness and tenderness, and when a movie exists in a just-slightly-alternate universe, and when a movie treats trash as a valuable aesthetic, and when a movie has Big Freedia pop up unexpectedly in a perfectly cast role, and you know what? This movie had all of that.
“A Long Walk”
Jill Scott; Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, 2000
I wasn’t familiar with this song until I saw a drag king perform it last week. They were the last performer in a salon-style suite of acts that each mixed some level of sincerity with a heavy dose of surreal absurdism—a slideshow about a suitcase-stealing scandal; a spoken word poet screaming at the top of her lungs; an essay about bodily autonomy preceding a lip-synced mashup of “The First Cut Is the Deepest” and “Last Resort,” among other songs—all except the closing performer, who simply came on stage and sang the hell out of this song, before and after which they exhorted us to love ourselves and one another. Often when a song seems perfectly suited to a drag performance, it’s because the track benefits from a little irony or recontextualization. But that didn’t seem to be the case here—a relatively straightforward love song, sang passionately but without much embellishment—which only gave me less of a handle on the performer’s intentions. Was that totally earnest or totally satirical? I asked my friends as we left—a question I perhaps wouldn’t have asked were I already familiar with the song—and they all said it was 100% the former. Still—and maybe even regardless of the performer’s intentions—I always like walking away from a performance with that question hanging in the air, and I suppose now I will think of that drag artist forevermore when I hear this song.
Some new writing from me: a review of Alicia Kennedy’s On Eating for the Conversationalist; a review of MUNA’s Dancing on the Wall for Pitchfork; also for Pitchfork, a Sunday Review about Fanny’s 1972 album Fanny Hill
And here are some other things I have been consuming lately: three perfect days in Paris (other highlights included: a fantastic meal at Recoin; pastries from Mamiche; a beautiful run through the Bois de Vincennes); the beginning of WNBA season; Court and Spark on repeat; “Hammond Song” by the Roches on repeat; “Brain Problem” by Krill on repeat; A Complete Unknown (totally decent plane movie imo); this essay about love and Burial; a za’atar & cheddar croissant and a cardamom bun from Nick + Sons bakery in Brooklyn; a lot of miles run along Hudson River Park and Riverside Park
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This time last year I was: circulating a list of endorsements from my friends; and before that: suffering (lol), drinking Diet Coke, and thinking about self-respect
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Thanks for reading! À la prochaine <3
xo,
M