Tag: queer

You or Someone You Know

I’m just going to go out on a limb here: You or Someone You Know by Worriers is my favorite record of the year. Such a perfect punk/power pop record – I listen to it when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m sitting in the sun on my balcony, when I have to work too long once again. Headphones, speakers, smartphone – it always sounds great. The production is flawless. So warm, so smart, so great.
The opening track, “End of the World” is the song of 2020:

Set my sights on the life that you get when you put the hard work in.
Only to be told, keep your fingers crossed that they vote you a person.
I apologize; you’ve been trying to go with the safer bet.
It’s true I didn’t think that far, but how do you plan for the death of a safety net?

What can I possibly say, is it me or the end of the world?
Cover your eyes and ears and hope I don’t notice and nothing hurts.
It must weigh on you a bit, but it’s not me that has to fix it.
Could you just hold on to me for now?

And their account is one of my favorites on Instagram, too.

You or Someone You Know is out on 6131 Records.

Onsind – Immature

Feminist punks ONSIND released Immature, the first single off their upcoming album We Wilt, We Bloom. It’s about, like, millennial dissent and stuff. 

(All proceeds from the bandcamp single go to Salvage Collective, supporting women (cis, trans & intersex), trans & non-binary survivors & activists)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

ALL THE DEAD BOYS LOOK LIKE ME

A poem by Latinx poet Loma, which they wrote in the aftermath of Orlando, expressing grief, outrage, frustration and love in the queer poc community. The piece connects the personal and the political, and puts the Orlando attack in context of the other forms of violence (recent and historic) that target the community.

ALL THE DEAD BOYS LOOK LIKE ME

Women are supposed to be the ones on the balcony, not the ones down below professing their love. We don’t think the female romantic is romantic. We think she is a predator. We think she is desperate, unstable—Fatal Attraction, the cougar, the spinster, the troublemaker. But deep emotion in this age is a radical act.

Masha Tupitsyn in this incredible Bitch interview on Love Dog (via marginalutilite)

I already had a quote from the interview on my blog last summer. I can still recommend it. Masha Tupitsyn’s work is great.

First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies,
just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done.

Great quote from Dean Spade’s essay “Dress to Kill, Fight to Win” from a few years ago. When checking to source, I stumbled on this good discussion of the article by   Mimi Thi Nguyen at Racialicious.

strangeasanjles:

mariekpascual:

Mark Aguhar (1987-2012)

Artist Statement (from markaguhar.com):

“Mark Aguhar’s work is a continuous exploration of queer expression and what it means to have grown up gay on the internet. Aguhar collects visual artifacts from queer online communities and uses them in their work to define and redefine who they are and what their body is. Aguhar’s work that combines porn, fashion, textile patterns, optical effects, trans identities, and queer jokes. They not intend to make teaching work, or art to represent the entirety of the LGBTIQA community, they express their situated experience of the spectrum. ”

rest in power

Fascinating stuff. Her death is a great loss.

Update: Okay, I’ve mulled over this. I can’t find appropriate words, even “is a great loss” sounds too much a) like a loss of value, which is possessive and bullshit and b) focused on me, a cis whit person who just discovered her and her art an hour ago. Go read other people’s texts, even the comments under the pretty queer text lined above, if you’re interested. Hat tip to @land_unter for the pretty queer article.

Mary Lambert is probably (definitely) best known for writing and singing the hook for Macklemore & Lewis’ “Same Love.” She is breathtaking on her own. This KEXP session includes the song the developed out of the Same Love hook, and the entire thing is so charming, so wonderful, so heartwarmbreaking, including the spoken word piece at the end.

(Content note: Lyrics, esp the spoken word piece, mention body harm – but are body positive!)

(Video by kexpradio; thanks Magda for sharing the KEXP session)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)