constellations #30: anxious tweets, familiar accents
Hi again.
Things that have made me anxious lately: seeing, without warning, a huge block of text in the family group chat; hanging up after video calls with friends and remembering very personal things I shared; getting a couple replies from men I don’t know on Twitter; waiting all day to order a takeout sandwich before the 3 p.m. cutoff time and then not remembering until it’s 2:59 p.m.; an airline company emailing me and warning me not to let my miles expire (?!); not knowing what to write in this week’s newsletter.
Things I have learned lately: what sfogliatelle is (after hearing Carmela pronounce it a thousand times over the course of The Sopranos, which I finally finished); how to tell the difference between various types of holiday cacti (mine, as it turns out, is a Thanksgiving cactus); that the groundbreaking electronic composer Wendy Carlos grew up two towns over from where I grew up (many years earlier, though); what cashews look like when they are growing and what the process of harvesting them is like.
I keep thinking about this tweet, which I got too anxious to retweet for various reasons but I think is useful to consider:
The men’s replies, by the way, were about Phoebe Bridgers smashing her guitar at the end of her Saturday Night Live performance, which my tweet said felt “really good” to watch. They wanted to let me know they didn’t feel that way. (Fine!) I regretted posting the tweet immediately, obviously. And then when I realized that Phoebe Bridgers’ guitar was quickly becoming the main character on Twitter that night, I regretted it even more.
To celebrate watching the Sopranos finale, my housemates and I got takeout Italian food from a small, wonderful Italian market down the street, which sells frozen entrees and made-to-order sandwiches and a million kinds of pasta sauce and various pastas (including bucatini, despite the recent shortage) and desserts, of which we got many. This is just a windup to say that I know not everyone had an aunt who would make your family, and indeed each family in your extended family, big stacks of powdered-sugar-covered pizzelle around Christmas every year, and promise to buy you and your sisters pizzelle irons and teach you all her secret recipe once you got married, and that maybe you’ve never even had and/or heard of this cookie before. So this is just an endorsement — if you ever come across pizzelle, you should try them.
I found myself looking up where Wendy Carlos grew up after watching this video where she talks through the basics of modular synthesis; her accent sounded so lovely and familiar — she drops the “r” in “marked” about nine seconds in, that’s what tipped me off. (I felt similarly when I watched this video of a coffeeshop owner in Southie, especially the way she says “it’s like just so bizarre” at the end of the clip just like nearly every woman who was ever maternal towards me as a child.)
I didn’t even stake a serious claim on Twitter, like, SNL is good or What a radical act of rock and roll gender subversion — actual claims worth debating. And for the record I don’t think a woman smashing her guitar is a radical act of rock and roll gender subversion. There was a time when watching rock performers who aren’t men stake out the same space, inhabit the same gestures, as male rockstars did feel genuinely subversive and exciting to me: giving different kinds of people access to the narratives and accolades previously denied them. Now I think I’m just more interested in different narratives, different accolades. Otherwise it starts to feel, I don’t know, like trying to be the most interesting person at someone else’s birthday party.
On the other hand, something doesn’t have to be radical to feel good. Certainly things don’t need to be radical to look cool. And maybe sometimes having different types of people occupy well-known archetypes can feel like a bridge to reconsidering the archetypes altogether? Maybe.
But mostly, I’m tired and angry and scared and anxious, and maybe so are you, and maybe even so are rock musicians who get to play on SNL, and lately I don’t usually stay up until 1 a.m. anyway, so maybe that’s why watching the act of destruction felt good.
Wait, you found the whole Twitter conversation about the guitar thing annoying and now you’re dedicating most of your newsletter to it? That seems strange. Well.
The other tweet I cannot stop thinking about is this 30-second clip of an outrageously good “Babooshka” cover
(I’m sorry, I’m just going to tell you because I don’t know if you’re going to click the link: Cashew nuts appear to grow out of the bottom of a piece of fruit, which looks surprising and strange, and also when you process them, you have to remove the cashew meat from its shell while avoiding the “very dangerous, caustic liquid related to poison ivy” in which it’s encased. Maybe this is common knowledge but it really surprised me!)
Thanks for being here. I’m grateful for you. (If you want to disagree with me on Twitter, I welcome that.)
xo,
M