vegansofdreamwidth | Member Posts

A Spoonful of Murder by J. M. Hall - A delightful cozy mystery about a group of retired school teachers in England who meet for coffee once a week and solve murders. In this one they are told that their also retired former principal died from an unfortunate dementia-related medication mistake, but they have their doubts! This is the first one in the series and I look forward to more.

The Quest for Annie Moore by Megan Smolenyak - Smolenyak is a celebrity in genealogy-world. Her latest is a deep dive into the story of the first immigrant to land at Ellis Island. Smolenyak looked into the records supporting the life story of Annie Moore and discovered gaps and misidentifications. This book is the story of her years of extensive research to correctly identify this impoverished Irish immigrant and trace her life. (Spoiler: Moore spent the rest of her life on the Lower East Side in NYC.) I read it for the Virtual Genealogy Society online book club and I really enjoyed it. I think anyone interested in immigrant genealogy would enjoy it. But it really is about the adventure and thrill of tracking down elusive records, especially since much of the research was done before so much was digitized. So maybe not for the general reader. But the book club discussion was very lively and threatened to run over the time!

Dead Man's Grave by Neil Lancaster - First volume in a police procedural series set in Scotland. It started out really great with a blood-feud-based murder but sort of trailed off into gangster-related corruption in the police force. I don't know that I will continue with the series because I found the Scots accent very hard to follow in the audiobook. This is a personal failing -- I always find Scots accents hard to follow. I suppose I could read with my eyes but I don't care that much about police and their supposed nobility.

Lies Bleeding by Ben Aaronovitch - This is the 6th Rivers of London book. I do really love these but might take a little break because ( spoiler )

Currently reading: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I want to like it but it's uphill. Maybe it will pick up. I wish I had not started reading her autiobiography and learned what a rightwing eugenicist she was because now I am biased against her. (Reading it as part of my Feminist Science Fiction open source anthology project.)

Current Mood: good

egret

In a recent New Yorker (paywalled link to article), Hua Hsu wrote a favorable review of the fanworky film Pavements, which is about the band Pavement. He liked it. But he also considered the big picture:

Just as a generation of young people now picture Timothee Chalamet's wispy mustache when they think of Dylan, it's likely that many fans understand N.W.A., Queen, Bob Marley, and Elvis Presley almost solely through their recent, varnished bio-pics. There are Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson movies due for release this year, as well as four separate Beatles ones slated for 2028. Perhaps pop-music history will soon exist only in the form of authorized, brand-managed hagiographies. Netflix recently announced that a nine-hour documentary about the complicated genius of Prince, directed by the Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman, would not be released, because of concerns raised by the artist's estate. Even in the lower-stakes world of publishing, a celebrity can mobilize her fan base against anything deemed unofficial. Adoring books about hip-hop musicians such as Mac Miller and De La Soul have been criticized by the artists or their estates -- basically for being journalistic endeavors.

When careers are seen as intellectual property -- and when, with the decline of album sales, one's back catalogue becomes an even more valuable resource -- legacies will be guarded with a lawyerly vigilance. Messiness gets edited out in the name of a few key narrative turning points. The possibility that an artist today would ever offer the kind of access that Metallica gave for "Some Kind of Monster," a 2004 documentary that famously featured the band in therapy, seems as likely as the prospect of American politicians welcoming the scrutiny of reporters.

In the absence of friction, contemporary bio-pics are just a series of boring victory laps. Intention and accidents, theft and boorish behavior: it all gets folded into the myth-serving lore. And it makes fools of us fans. The magic of pop music isn't just the star on the stage; it's how the crowd sways, and what fans do afterward with the feelings inspired by the show. All this made "Pavements" feel more exceptional. It seemed to exist adjacent to the band. A true fanatic's take, it aspires to be as heady and as weird as the band itself. Perry's aggressively clever story about Pavement is different from what mine would be, yet I recognized a fellow-traveler. In making something so intensely loving, he points out the banality of modern-day fandom, in which we're all expected to be brand ambassadors, reciting someone else's gospel.

I think he's right about the branding and the IP monetization. I believe musicians should be paid for their work, and paid well. But I also remember making mixtapes, impossible now because of DRM, so we are reduced to sharing playlists and hoping the recipients have a compatible streaming service. Sometimes I feel sad about my long gone vinyl collection which included a significant number of one-off bootleg pressings of various artists. As our individual access to creative technology increases (entire films made on smartphones now), our fannish field of operation becomes more heavily policed and gatekept. Official merch is never as interesting as the fan productions. I wonder how many of our fandomI forget debates are influenced by an internalized version of this policing and gatekeeping? Not to mention the external problem of legal liability.

I forget where I read an article about the cancelled Prince documentary but it sounded like it would have been amazing. I don't really have the heart to look for it.

source: Hsu, Hua. "You're Killing Me: Pavement Inspires a Strange, Ironic, Loving Bio-pic." New Yorker, 26 May 2025, 66-67.

Current Mood: nostalgic

florianschild

The sewing bug bit me last week and now I'm dying to get a few projects started! I have plans/tentative starts on a few things and I wanted to catalog them to set some goals for myself:

1. Sew a pair of summer shorts for my toddler. I've downloaded and printed this pattern. It looks super easy so if these fit well I might try to make a few. I'm most interested in finishing this because I think it will be pretty easy and quick AND I truly do need shorts for my daughter. So it's this or buy some. I bought slightly less than a yard of vintage Mickey Mouse fabric that I was thinking of using, but the print is very big and widely spaced so I'm a little worried it's going to be like... half of Mickey's face on each buttcheek. XD I'll lay the pattern out on the fabric and see how it looks.

2. Sew a party dress for my toddler's birthday party (which is in a little over a month). I got the cutest vintage panel from Jelly Bean Junction that has a bodice design printed and laid out on the fabric so I just need to measure her and determine her size, cut the fabric, make a corresponding skirt, and do the sewing/construction. I bought the panel at a local fabric store, but you can see (or buy) it here if you're interested.

3. Sew a Petal Wrap Dress.

4. Make a matching Lorien Lace Up Skirt for myself. (I bought a set of king-size bed sheets that would be great for a matching set.)

5. Sew this Halter Top, probably in white linen. I bought this pattern years ago and never got around to starting it.

6. Sew some heating pads out of a few vintage pillowcases I bought. I want to try sewing some channels in them and make a kind of "seat cushion/lap cover" style of heating pad. I like to put flax seeds in mine. I read a lot about the different options for filling at some point and flax seemed like the best.

And that's it so far. At some point though I need to start thinking about a quilt for my toddler. She's still in a sleep sack so she doesn't need blankets, but time is ticking! I've made quilts for two other babies so I don't want my own kid to be the one who doesn't get one!

Current Mood: determined

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