Now Playing: Part 11
Our April issue goes live tomorrow. We can't wait for you to dive into the wonderful work we have in store for you. For now, here's a preview of April's contributors and what they've been playing:
Hanna Rosenheimer
I’ve been listening to That Time of the Month by Harley Poe on loop since a friend recommended it to me. It’s the shouty werewolf love song I didn’t know I was looking for. I listen to all kinds of things passively; it's rare that I bother to skip anything Spotify decides to offer me, but if there's a genre I like best, it's sad people shouting over acoustic guitars. Banjos, sometimes, too.
Todd Morgan
Last watched: Isle of Dogs, a stop-action animated comedy by Wes Anderson. It’s a fast and funny story about a boy searching for his dog with an all-star cast doing the voices. The packed house on Saturday night gave us the perfect communal experience of going to the movies – laughter from different parts of the crowd at different points in the movie, ohs and awws when something touching happened.
Last listened to: New Yorker Fiction podcast of The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Mohsin Hamid. The story didn’t grab me. But in discussing it, Hamid briefly described a mystical strain of Islam called Sufism, in which spirituality and being attracted to the divine is likened to the moth being drawn to a flame. In other words, making a connection with the divine entails losing oneself. Yowsa.
Anastasia Stelse
I'm currently watching the final season of White Collar. There's Art! Intrigue! Crime Solving! What more could you ask for?
Melissa Ragsly
I keep watching Young Adult scenes throughout the day. I don’t want to be in it for a straight run, I want to dip into this story of Mavis, a writer of teen romance novels, who becomes charged with schemes when she sees an old high school flame has just become a father.
She listens to Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept,” over and over on the way back to her hometown. This song, released on the almost-palindromic 11/19/91, becomes hypnotic as it’s restarted, a cassette scrolling around in a car stereo as if she is willing it to be 1991 again, back to when she was a queen bee and Patrick Wilson’s girlfriend. Charlize Theron. She’s intimidating and maybe that’s why I like her. I wonder if her breakup with Sean Penn influenced him to write Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, but I don’t want to blame her for that.
I saw Teenage Fanclub play, it was probably 1991. It was NYC. In the audience, we all held hands while we danced. We were young enough where a stranger’s hand could feel like some sort of answer. There’s a lot of ugliness in Young Adult, but hearing “The Concept”, the chorus is only the line “I didn’t want to hurt you, oh yeah,” repeated, begged forgiveness.