When I’m talking about things I like, I draw a lot of references, and I hope it feels playful & not pretentious!

One of my very favorite things to do is draw comparisons even if they are tenuous at best, because I think it’s so exciting to notice similarities between media. The thing that would make me happiest is if you click through to any of those references and then tell me — do you agree? Do they feel related? Or, even better — other things you are reminded of? Comment or text me :)

Listen of the Week

Other than Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, this week I have had Bon Voyage (Portuguese Version) by Allie X on repeat basically nonstop.

Allie X is a creepy-crawly synth soprano and her music is, in my humble opinion, earworm pop perfection. Her album Cape God was an early pandemic miracle, a lighthouse in the fog — June gloom/ in my room/These days, I like to stay inside/Watching the kids get high/June gloom, oh, doom, doom/And we're feeling a bit decayed/So put up your hands and say/June gloom.1 Cape God is a docufictional album about opioid use in a coastal town, and it’s a crunchy, glittery, cohesive record with features by Troye Sivan and Mitski. Hell yeah.

Her most recent album, Girl With No Face, has been a slower burn, but it’s truly grown on me, maybe a bit like a parasite. It feels vampiric2, campy, 80s3 — I wish it were part of the soundtrack to Love Lies Bleeding. And while the English version of the song Bon Voyage (on the deluxe album, which is fully dropping on Oct 31) is already excellent Fleetwood Mac/ABBA4-esque melodrama, the Portuguese version has something special in it. As the kids say…someone cooked here. And also ate.

Watch of the Week

Andrew Garfield & Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date is finally here and I’m…speechless. The people on Twitter have started commenting on how Fleabag-coded it is, and, again…speechless.

Read of the Week

I read this a while back, so it’s not necessarily ‘of the week,’ but I cannot recommend Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad strongly enough, especially to my fellow Shakespeare-heads. A character-driven novel about a production of Hamlet staged in the West Bank, this book renders Palestinian heartache and resistance with so much beauty.

Media Meal Prep

• I’m early on in the book Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman and so far…yes.

• Gonna go see Anora next week, want to come?

• I have to find someone who will come to Wicked with me and sob until we’re nauseous, even though Jon Chu will inevitably have made a lot of wrong decisions like he did with In the Heights.

• Watching Below Deck during actual meal prep.

…Live from Denver, it’s Friday night!