Weekend Listening Post got deleted??!!
Jan. 21st, 2022 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricI got a significant chunk through this post and then pressed rong button. Eurgh. At any rate. I'm back at work as of today, and yet, I barely got the urgent emails dealt with. Not because they took 8hrs, but for lack of Cope. I did, however, revisit the conference paper I nearly finished in December, and delete a chunk of not-strictly-necessary waffle. I think I need to completely restart it, AGAIN, to fit everything in, though.
My minor win was fighting off the combo jetlag/despair that wanted to go to bed at 6pm, and eating dinner and sitting down to make A Post. Therefore, I shall repeat what I had drafted and keep going.
Music:
Most notably, I bought, with an itunes voucher I swapped my sister (she'd been given it but doesn't use itunes - crap, I just remembered I was given an AUD gift-visa card, for a modest amount, that I forgot to use, too. I can probably use it online), an album by Kate Nyx. You may recall Nyx from last Listening Post, her song 'Bean's gotta scream' feat. Winslow the Cat. These days Nyx does sort of caberet-type stuff I think? But the Sage and Silver Bullet's album is sorta Americanah. I particularly liked, for its 'huh, that's a neat literary device' value, this song using the 'curse of Eve' to refract a meditation on disordered eating:
Other musical observations:
1. Having finally read Niko Stratis on the queerness of Green Day, I bought and re-listened to American Idiot. I can report that I had never noticed the line about "faggot America". I had always heard /fag end/ America. I understood this to be a classed reference vis a vis the smoking habits of the "rednecks" in the next line - like, the speaker, a fag end, was cast off even by the "redneck agenda" of the next line. But no. Huh.
2. Partner introduced me to the defunct Melbourne outfit 'The Jane Austen Argument', who are basically the Whitlams crossed with Amanda Palmer, but not, AFAIK, arseholes. Reminiscent of The Indelicates (to whom I finally forcibly exposed Partner). NB espkayloulee: when seeking replacements for AP in our respective shuffles, we did not find this group but we ought to have.
Audio Fiction:
Ben Aaronovitch, False Value: powered through in the last few days before flying out. Frankly disappointed with the opening dramatic-irony ploy. Remains worth it for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration.
Rusty Quill Gaming: I'm up to episode 52, past the Inception plot ploy. I particularly enjoyed Bertie's side quest. Listened to some episodes with Shiny in Sydney - particularly Mr Ceiling, one of Shiny's favourites. I enjoyed Mr Ceiling as a character, but no single episode really stands out. I enjoy RQG because, by and large, I don't NEED to pay close attention to entire episodes ("Everything's Fine" being a startling exception).
Other Audio:
I cannot possibly be comprehensive here, so, some highlights:
Contemporary Misc:
How airlines quietly became banks, a YouTube piece recommended by Siderea.
Still plodding through the RTS / SRF news from Switzerland, supplemented with SBS German, and the occasional Radio France and Deutsch Welle learner news podcasts
ABC 'Conversations' with Sue Ellen Kusher, whose father was a (domestic) spy. Parents recommended it, and it is actually pretty damn fascinating.
Queer Misc:
Queersplaining - conversation episode Choose To Live with someone named Eli, whose surname either wasn't mentioned or I didn't gather it. Eli is an apostate from Islam, and the episode is about grief and trauma - due to Eli's background it was SUPER relevant to my specific brand of Queer Angst, but there's a lot of time devoted to "processing this whole pandemic thing: ugh", Unprecedented Times, and other varietes of no-specific-big-bang-moments-but-everything-sucks trauma. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I continued to binge Gender Reveal right up until a few days before Xmas Eve, whereupon I abruptly switched to Ben Aaronovitch because there's only so much Gender a gal can take in December. Still excellent stuff. A sticker arrived in the mail for me, purchased by Partner (aka Shiny) and long in the mail, saying "Gender is a shitty group project", which I 100% wholeheartedly believe to be a more accurate description than either "gender is performative" or "gender is a social construct". If I had my way we'd redo gender theory from about 1995 onwards via Bourdeiu, but I do not have my way, etc.
QueerLit by Lena Matthias - I particularly appreciated the episode on Queer pets. TL,DR, very academic literary scholar type stuff. But good.
History and such:
The Loremen podcast as a whole. All of it. Some bits I love more than others but the standard deviation of my love for it is small. I know I listen to certain episodes and think YES, CLASSIC; but a few days later I can't separate them from the general background of excellence. Mostly 16th-19th c local history and folklore. Both hosts are comedians, many puns.
Forgotten Australia, The Plague Returns Part One and Part Two. Part Three pending. Michael Murray follows the bubonic plague through Sydney, 1902, with particular attention to a. the pollution of the river bays (with offal from the Glebe Island slaughterhouse, eww) and b. the staging of Ben Hur at Her Majesty's Theatre. Murray is often frustratingly apolitical, to the point of lacking *analysis*, but in this case I think his restrained quips about contemporary resonances (I thought I was so clever for thinking of a rats/RATs joke... but Murray had a three part episode devoted to it) and political buck-passing works well. And as ever his archival work is both meticulous and vivid. I'm shaky on my historiographical trends, but I'm pretty sure Murray's methods owe something to both the Annales school and the sub-Ginsberg tradition of microhistory. (Psst monksandbones if you're ever bored, I'd love to know your take on this podcast. Either start with the plague episodes, or if you want to steer well clear of pandemic vibes, there were some good ones on minor seafaring Drama that I noted back in 2020)
I... think that's it. Quite a few other things I got halfway through and vagued out, but these are the things that stuck.
Please accept this offering of Weekend Listening Post.
My minor win was fighting off the combo jetlag/despair that wanted to go to bed at 6pm, and eating dinner and sitting down to make A Post. Therefore, I shall repeat what I had drafted and keep going.
Music:
Most notably, I bought, with an itunes voucher I swapped my sister (she'd been given it but doesn't use itunes - crap, I just remembered I was given an AUD gift-visa card, for a modest amount, that I forgot to use, too. I can probably use it online), an album by Kate Nyx. You may recall Nyx from last Listening Post, her song 'Bean's gotta scream' feat. Winslow the Cat. These days Nyx does sort of caberet-type stuff I think? But the Sage and Silver Bullet's album is sorta Americanah. I particularly liked, for its 'huh, that's a neat literary device' value, this song using the 'curse of Eve' to refract a meditation on disordered eating:
Other musical observations:
1. Having finally read Niko Stratis on the queerness of Green Day, I bought and re-listened to American Idiot. I can report that I had never noticed the line about "faggot America". I had always heard /fag end/ America. I understood this to be a classed reference vis a vis the smoking habits of the "rednecks" in the next line - like, the speaker, a fag end, was cast off even by the "redneck agenda" of the next line. But no. Huh.
2. Partner introduced me to the defunct Melbourne outfit 'The Jane Austen Argument', who are basically the Whitlams crossed with Amanda Palmer, but not, AFAIK, arseholes. Reminiscent of The Indelicates (to whom I finally forcibly exposed Partner). NB esp
kayloulee: when seeking replacements for AP in our respective shuffles, we did not find this group but we ought to have.Audio Fiction:
Other Audio:
I cannot possibly be comprehensive here, so, some highlights:
Contemporary Misc:
Queer Misc:
History and such:
monksandbones if you're ever bored, I'd love to know your take on this podcast. Either start with the plague episodes, or if you want to steer well clear of pandemic vibes, there were some good ones on minor seafaring Drama that I noted back in 2020)I... think that's it. Quite a few other things I got halfway through and vagued out, but these are the things that stuck.
Please accept this offering of Weekend Listening Post.