Hello and welcome,
I consider myself pretty adventurous but I know there are so many things I have put off in life because I didn’t know where to start. Moving somewhere else… Driving a car… Other kinds of writing. That sort of stuff. A newsletter-blog should not be one of them. So on I go.
I’m calling this Jenn’s Obsessions because my obsessions fuel my writing, my listening, really my life. My obsessions direct my attention. They’re my inexhaustible mysteries. I write through my obsessions and because of them. To me obsession is really a sister to inspiration, holding me in what I often think of as a forcefield of wonder. The poet Dorothea Lasky once said:
“I don’t feel like myself unless I’m truly obsessed with something or someone or just in some sort of enthusiastic zone… When you’re truly obsessed with something, you don’t have any ego and you would do anything for it, and you are of course devoted enough to it to want to write about it or think about, and turn it over and think of all the possibilities around it.”
And here’s Eileen Myles, just this summer, on how to write a book:
“It seems to me something has to become an obsession.”
I started collecting email addresses for this list back in 2017 when I was in the throes of one of my deepest creative obsessions: thinking about, writing about, and turning over all the possibilities of The Raincoats. If you signed up for this letter around the publication of my Raincoats book, thank you! I hope to archive some semi-recent Raincoats-adjacent writing here soon. In the meantime, here is my latest interview with Kathleen Hanna surrounding her memoir, Rebel Girl, published back in May, which includes a beautiful chapter about how The Raincoats helped instigate the Bikini Kill reunion. Here is a picture of me with the chapter at Kathleen’s book launch on May 14 at Kings Theater and, for fun, one I took the next night:
Thinking back to Kathleen’s book event, I’m happy to be remembering how personally inspired I felt this past spring. I had just gotten back from a week on tour with one of my favorite artists of my lifetime (story forthcoming) and while I’ve been on tour a few times, in various capacities, this was different. It was both mellower and more overwhelming, vivid and exhausting. Never quite adjusting to the bus, I spent the week in a sleepless adrenaline-fueled dreamstate. We went to the Dylan Center in Tulsa and I thought, Wow yeah, my weariness does amaze me.
I am almost always taking in a tremendous amount of live music, especially in the summer, and it can feel like a precious blur if I don’t pause to document it all. Maybe I’ll do that here, too? The highlight of my summer was seeing Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play two sets, two nights in a row, at a tiny bar in Northampton, Massachusetts called the Iron Horse. The previous week I watched Bikini Kill play live on “Colbert,” then saw Hurray for the Riff Raff twice — first, a solo acoustic set following a brilliant Q&A with Hanif Abdurraqib; the next night, a perfect midsummer outdoor show in view of a fire-pink sky and those lights from New Jersey on the Hudson River. Sometimes the universe just conspires in your favor because that week I really needed music that made me feel strong. My same luck in early August, when I took a ferry to a highway then a cab to a water taxi with my family to attend the Newport Jazz Festival, where poet Aja Monet and Luke Stewart’s Silt Trio blew my mind.
So — I’m using this newsletter to offer commentary and footnotes to my published writing, to link recommendations, maybe to archive some lost stories or stray thoughts on whatever else I want. Last weekend I saw Zia Anger’s “My First Film” at the Roxy Hotel. I first became aware of Anger through her collaborations with the heroic Jenny Hval. The movie, based on a 2018 performance of the same name, follows an autofictive Anger going back to her rural hometown in her early 20s to make her “first film” with family and friends, and as the trailer warns us, that process was bad. Towards the end of the film, the real-life Anger appears on-screen, calmly hugging and consoling the younger, messier version of herself, who is perilously lost in her own creative vision; they cry together over her abandoned “first film” as it goes unreleased. During the post-screening Q&A, Anger stood up, cradling her sleeping newborn daughter, and told us, “The character you see as me at the end of the film is the person I became through making the film.” I like this idea now: offering a glimpse of the person who the work turned you into.
JP
So glad to see mention of Aja Monet—! Love her works! I recommended her album “when the poems do what they do” to so many people last year. Excellent. Happy to see you here and looking forward to reading more!
I loved ‘My First Film’ - as wacky & hilarious & strange as it was, it was so full of heart about the compulsion to create & I found it really moving. So glad you’re here, I always love your writing.