change the pear vol. 1 2 Sep 2022

hi! welcome to the first edition of whatever this substack is. i thrive off of rigidly-planned structure, so i’m going to organise it into four sections: listening / watching / reading / other. these might stay the same every time or maybe they’ll shift, who knows.

on repeat

reference by lee mujin, which i have listened to it at least ten times per day since i first discovered it. look, hear me out: imagine if jason mraz a) could actually sing and b) made a perfect song. i’m obsessed.

guilty pleasure by key, delivering yet another win for the gay kpop stan community!

guerrilla by ATEEZ, which i still can’t believe actually exists and isn’t something sarah and i dreamed up in a state of fevered hysteria. honestly please just listen to their entire revolutionary uprising concept album. you’re welcome.

(coffee’s for closers) by fall out boy. listen, i am who i am and i’ll never stop feeling insane about the juxtaposition of the lyrics ‘i will never believe in anything again / oh change will come’.

last watch

the last movie i watched was shoplifters which sarah has been telling me i should watch for probably years at this point, but i have been resisting because i find it hard to sit down and watch movies which i know are going to devastate me. it very much did devastate me, but i also loved it. the director said the key question on his mind while making it was, “what makes a family?” i would add to this: how can we make a family when our means and ability to do that are so constricted by having to earn money to live? what are the limitations of the care we can give to each other?

it reminded me of other films about alternative families i’ve seen—dear tenant & take me home. both of those are also about the state intervening in a family unit they consider unfit to take care of children. but i feel like where they differed from shoplifters is that those films are a critique of how homophobia prevents gay people from being caretakers of children and therefore the caretakers themselves are legitimised in the narrative (they have jobs, they’re respectable, they are good for the kids, the children are upset and traumatised by being removed from them). shoplifters is more subtle in that it shows that even the families you choose have their limitations and difficulties. at the end of the film, the “mother” of the family says to the “father”: we’re not good enough for shota, who is one of the children they’ve been looking after. shota’s own feelings on the matter are left up to the viewer to decide. it feels like the film is asking: is not good enough better than nothing? and is it better to try and fail to take care of each other than not to try at all? if all you can teach children is how to shoplift, isn’t that something? is it even possible to have “good enough”, in this world?

current watches

1. the bear. it’s actually ridiculous that i haven’t finished this show because the episodes are so short but i just never know if i’m in the mood for it because i never know what to expect.

2. kinnporsche, a gay thai drama where a mafia boss falls for his bodyguard (i know. elete once asked me, “where do you find these shows?” and the answer is, unfortunately, being a dumb bitch with terrible taste who is terminally online.) everyone on the internet is going insane over kinnporsche so i was like okay let’s check it out and see what the fuss is all about! anyway i’m on episode seven and i think my overriding feeling is that i am being emotionally manipulated into caring about this relationship. maybe this is my cross to bear after spending my formative years cataloguing every tiny wisp of homoeroticism in [insert tv show here], but i hate being TOLD by a show that two characters are into each other. i would like to see it develop with my own two eyes thanks! anyway i will continue to watch because my critique needs to be fully informed by the narrative, but i fear that the girls might be wrong about this one.

3. drive to survive. one thing about me is that i LOVE a sports documentary. the stakes: high. the drama: endless. engines: revving.

reads

after reading tropic of orange i wanted to read more of karen tei yamashita’s work; after reading i hotel i was like well now i need to read everything she’s ever published. currently i’m reading brazil-maru. i think yamashita does social novels so well. i don’t quite know how to put this but she understands what makes things happen for people, and is so adept at describing the way events sequence up to form a life, lives, history. the glaring thing about this book, though, is that it’s about japanese immigrants colonising brazil in the 30s and so far it’s missing a critique of the settler-colonial mindset of “this is new land! we are bringing civilisation to the forest!” even when one of the colonists “discovers” an “ancient indian burial mound”, it’s presented completely uncritically. i’m disappointed because i thought yamashita had better politics than this, but i will reserve final judgement until after i’ve read it.

i also just finished reading a collection of essays about imperialism called the veins of the south are still open. i particularly liked john smith’s essay about super-exploitation, and the patnaiks’ first essay on the value of money & imperialism: both left me wanting to read more on their theories and conclusions. i found this a useful revisitation of marx’s concepts of surplus-value, competition & monopoly, and the limits of marx’s capital in explaining the political economy of today. note that this doesn’t mean a repudiation of marxism, more an extension of it—marx was writing before imperialism had become fully developed as a global system and therefore the task of theorists today is to use marxist methods to extend the ideas of capital into an analysis of the world’s current economic system. i found some of the essays less strong—there was one that outright stated a disagreement with john smith’s conclusions but i was left confused both as to what that disagreement was & crucially whether i agreed with it or not? i also feel like sometimes with marxists, i need to know whether their disagreements are actually diametrically opposed to one another (e.g. john smith and david harvey, who he absolutely bodies) or if they’re oriented in broadly the same direction but are differing on small points of interpretation. more reading, as always, to be done!!

miscellaneous

the cucumber plants on our balcony that are still diligently producing fruit. the “kpop punk” playlist i have been meticulously curating with assistance from alfie, which is a list of kpop songs paired with thematically/lyrically similar pop punk songs. this poem by anne boyer. this poem by dean young. the moment of the day when It’s Time To BeReal. homemade granola. a reel of yunho and mingi dancing to replay. a woman telling me that i could do a V5 route at the bouldering centre and then yelling, “don’t think, don’t think!” as i scrambled my way up there. & finally: if you know you know.

that’s all for this time. see you soon!