Best Of 2021

This is not a newsletter

‘Fuck You Haiku’ by Kristina Grish

We made it! We might be exhausted in our hearts and spirits, but we’re alive! Thank whoever you want to for that. That being said, survival isn’t easy. I’m looking at my cat now, half asleep and drooling on the couch, and I envy her. Ignorance truly can be sweet. Imagine not knowing what a latty flow is?

Anyway, I’ve hardly had the attention span to read this year, let alone do much else - 2021 may have *officially* been the year my attention span truly went to shit. A deficit IS in place here! Like, I’ve almost been incapacitated, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. Art, culture, film, music - however you want to define the categories - have in large part got me/us through, acting as the healthiest route to escapism I’ve engaged in all year.

I bought so many short story books this year - it really helps when your attention span is failing to be able to read stories that are 10 - 30 pages long, etc - it makes the whole process less daunting and far more digestible. One stand-out was Man Hating Psycho by Iphgenia Baal. 

Starring 13 London-centric stories about fuckboys, house raves, the horror of seeing the Grenfell Tower post-fire, gentrifiers, Carnival… You can really taste London when you read the book. Some of my favourite stories are called: 

I just want to pull down your panties and fuck you

Married to the streets (put that on my gravestone)

Man Hating Psycho was definitely the book that spoke to me most this year (I named my last newsletter after it). London is rarely written about from the viewpoint of a person with immigrant parents without making that the centre point of their identity, and it’s tiring. Baal is a rare unicorn in how her stories focus on her humanity plain and simple, and not her as an ‘other’. She captures our lives by diving headfirst and it’s absolutely reckless and unapologetically niche. It’s the perfect love letter to the city in the way I see it and so to me, it makes it an unprecedented (worst word of the year?) piece of work. 

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Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement is not a book of short stories - more like diary entries that tell the love story of Suzanne Mallouk and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Spanning New York City from the 70s to the late 80s (up until Basquiat died from a heroin overdose) this was another book I could not put down. Basquiat was a name I’d heard but knew little about; he died one year before I was born, was a part of the 27 club, and his impact is still felt today in art and rap - Jay-Z still name checks him decades after he passed. 

“It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean-Michel, surrounded by Warhols, my whole team ball!” - Picasso Baby, Jay-Z

The book focuses on his main muse Suzanne, who was called Widow Basquiat for a long time after he died. She beat the shit out of Madonna outside a club when she saw the soon-to-be ‘Vogue’ singer flirting with him and went for lunch with Andy Warhol, who was said to be a little in love with Jean-Michel. Reading the book, it sounds like everybody was.

The first line of the book is: “She always keeps her heroin inside her beehive hairdo. The cops can’t find it. The drug addicts can’t find it. Suzanne holds her head up high.” 

It’s unhinged literature on core-shaking love; fights and drugs and affairs and love spells and flights to Europe with packs of cocaine braided in their hair. He calls her Venus and paints her body, and she idolizes him in return.  

A short passage from Suzanne’s arrival to New York for the first time: 

There are three middle-ages prostitutes in the lobby of the Seville Hotel. 

“What’s gonna ruin you, girlie?” the one in the blue dress asks. 

“What do you mean?” Suzanne answers. 

“What she said,” the one in the yellow dress interrupts. “What’s going to ruin you? A man? A job? No job, no man? Your babies? What?” 

“A man’s gonna ruin her, for sure,” the one in the red dress says. “Let me tell you, everybody gets ruined by something - even if you’re a queen in a castle - something’s gonna say, you’re mine.” 

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NGL, I saw Fuck You Haiku by Kristina Grish in Urban Outfitters. I’m not usually one for an UO selected book (due to my own pretentiousness? that ugly, toxic part of me that says things like “I was depressed before it was mainstream”), but this book of short poetry got me for its humour on heartbreak. It starts from the breakup and moves to the deliciously painful period of desperately holding onto memories long gone. It treads through the icky details of regretful sex with said ex, the post-break-up fights, the struggle of coping with a loss of a person who is very much still living, and the process of finally, actually moving on. 

Grish doesn’t take herself seriously - some of the haikus read as Rupi Kaur parodies.

Example 1: 

I thought I felt seen

I gave you too much credit

You needed glasses

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But honestly, if you’ve ever had a breakup (and I think that makes all of us), you’ll relate to all of them, whether you laugh or cry whilst reading them.

You’d lie and then lie

You big, dumb, stupid liar

Go lie in a ditch

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I pluck the petals

He loves me, he loves me not

Eh, who gives a shit

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You might have heard about the short story The Husband Stitch, which has been analyzed in literature classes ever since its release. The story features in Carmen Maria Machado’s debut book, Her Body & Other Parties, which is another book of short stories. Oooh I don’t want to ruin it but it’s batshit insane, stories of lesbians with demon babies and ladies who heads fall off, gastric band surgeries with ghostly twists, r*pe victims who develop supernatural powers… its main theme is feminism, dressed and packaged as horror. I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights thinking about the girl with the green ribbon… I’ll say no more. 

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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is by Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez and while they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, the cover is the reason I bought it. The book is based in Buenos Aires and was only recently translated from Spanish to English, and I’m so glad it was!

Groupies who eat the flesh of their idol, obsessive masturbators that can see ghosts, cursed little girls visiting witch doctors, ouija board games gone wrong…. “When I make horror,” Enríquez said in a recent interview, “I try to make it Latin American.” Maybe that’s why I’ve never read anything like it in my life. 

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Lockdown meant no flying, which meant lots of trains - trains to Scotland, trains to Oxford… which is where I saw the Tokyo exhibition. I picked up the book Tokyo Street Style by Yoko Tagi there, which is basically the bible of all things style in Japan. The exhibition closes on January 3, 2022, check it out if you can but I appreciate we’re close to out of time for that, so I’m sorry init. But the book alone is worth a purchase if you’re into Japanese fashion, and who isn't? I’ve long held the belief that they are literally the most stylish people on earth, and this book and the exhibition offer a mesmerizing glimpse of that world.

Honourable mentions

Mind & Body by The School of Life - mental exercises for physical wellbeing and psychical exercises for mental wellbeing 

C+nto & othered poems by Joelle Taylor (she hugged me at the book signing and I freaked out!)

Unreal Sex - an anthology of queer erotic sci-fi, fantasy and horror

Keisha the Sket by Jade LB (a London cult classic from the noughties brought back to life thanks to Merky Books!)  

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Film wise… what was your favourite film of the year? I don’t think it was my favourite per se, but Malcolm and Marie made me feel strange, and that feeling stuck. The film was shot in black and white, in one location, and only two people ever feature - Zendaya (Marie) and John David Washington (Malcolm). Debates raged for days on social media and WhatsApp group chats about toxic relationships and boundaries after the film debuted on Netflix. It got me thinking about how when you’re in love you often give yourself away - likely with no intention to do so - but little by little you serve yourself up in chunks of vulnerability, and by the end of it you’re at the mercy of someone who knows all your weak spots. Of course love requires trust on a fundamental level, but for more reasons than just faithfulness. Putting your raw self in the hands of another has many outcomes, and I was gripped watching their outcome play out. 

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My favourite albums this year was Ghetts ‘Conflict of Interest’ and Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’ because honestly, they are my two personality types. I’m either ‘Mozambique’ or ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’ - there is no in-between.

Also Dave’s ‘We’re All Alone In This Together’ really summed up the times we’re in, and the album will surely stand as a historical reference of this era long after we’re gone.

But right now we’re still here! Breathing! Sometimes thriving, always surviving! This is the rollercoaster you were destined for! You are divine and there is no literally NO other you! It’s all gonna work out. The only new year’s resolution I’ve made for 2022 is to improve the quality of my breathing. In and out, nice and slow and deep (that wasn’t meant to be an innuendo, ffs), and take it one step at a time. I wish the same for you - some quiet, kindness, stillness, and rest before the merry-go-round starts again.

Happy new year x

P.S Please share your book, music, art, film recommendations with me, I’ll need them to survive the winter tbh x

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