i like to watch
on the queens keeping me afloat
sometimes the algorithm serves cunt.
tonight i’m sweaty, and my left hand smells like shrimp juice because I had to re-arrange the freezer drawer to get it shut tight. freezers loooove to leak in 90 degree temps. just love to make a puddle on the floor. this weekend felt like the first days of summer for reals but it’s still May. Casey said we only had a three-week spring. I’ve never thought of tracking spring in weeks before.
i am here to give some minor updates and share with you my current micro obsession which are the drag queens Trixie Mattel and Katya, and all of their media spots.
i am now a major consumer of youtube and I don’t really know how that happened except that some of my smartest and most weirdly talented friends have loved youtube for years so i finally caught on and paid for premium bc no ads is amazing. i was looking at my youtube homepage one day and THIS came up and I was intrigued by the bright colors and the bald heads…
so I started watching Trixie & Katya’s re-caps of Netflix shows which are gold every time, and then I started listening to the Trixie & Katya Bald and the Beautiful podcast which is also darling every single time, and now I am a late-in-life drag race convert because I started with Trixie’s all-star season and I’m going to move onto Katya’s first season very soon.
we all know that drag queen lingo, neologisms, and sayings coined by Black and brown queens in particular have fully permeated plain english. “slay” “eat” “serve” “fierce” “fish” etc etc etc. in fact, once you get thinking, you can link drag and the ingenuity of queens to most major beauty & fashion trends. queens and strippers and misogynist show-runners are really generating the culture.
that is one thing i love about T&K, all the new words and newly used words i encounter. more than the language, i love their excess. queens are excessive! dragoons flow forth. it’s an overflowing that i find i need deep in my bones. it’s a huge bubbling pot of affect and emotion and exclamation that Jose Muñoz would applaud.
before Trixie and Katya worked for Netflix, they had their own smaller comedy show UNHhh also on youtube. UNHhh is devastatingly good and weirder than the Netflix stuff. the queens have tackled important life topics such as: summer, moving, confusion, men, and theft.
how youtube knew to serve these bitches up to me, we will never know. but this time, i’m not mad. i hope that this post will spread the T&K madness beyond my grubby little keyboard.
tomorrow i depart for Spain and will definitely write about it soon.
Reading
Sketchtasy by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (like taking drugs and growing up)
Watching
above-mentioned and not much else
Listening
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (creepy, banality of abuse, satisfying, kinda annoyingly arranged in little fragments)
in this newsletter we…
learn about our employment / union contracts
put plants in the ground a little last minute
always want an ice cream
re-instate cold calling as OK to do
feel called back to earth every time the whipporwills call at dusk
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SF