The Weekly Croissant: Art Hoe Roundup

What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to this week.

Hello My Croissants-

Here’s some deliciousness I’ve been enjoying this month, for all of your art hoe needs!

Books: 

ART HOE FAIL… I’ve been trying very hard to love this book that everyone says is amazing

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, but I just find it so slow.  I don’t feel like I know enough about the narrator to sympathize with her, I don’t care about horoscopes… there’s a lot of beautiful writing but I am really struggling with it.  I’m about 2/3 through so I will try to finish it so that I can give it my best effort in understanding.  I also read a lot of Tokarczuk’s “Flights”, which I found both mind-numbing and mind-blowing.  It worked really well when I read it in small spurts before falling asleep… and some of the short essays within the story I loved.  But, there’s no overall plot that I could discern, and in the end I couldn’t finish it. 

In frustration with that, I picked up Annie Proulx’s short story collection Wyoming Stories and was immediately taken in.  I wanted to read Brokeback Mountain (on which the movie was based), because it was mentioned in another substack I follow (@magical mystery catalog).  Brokeback is the last story in the collection, and I ended up reading the whole book backward, a pretty fun exercise for a collection of short stories.  It’s like listening to an album end-to-start, it gives the work a whole new tone.  Then again, it would probably really piss off the author who spent a lot of time lining up the order of stories, sorry Annie! But the book is incredible backward, and I imagine it would be frontwards as well.

TV Show: The Bear

I just binged the entire season 2 of this delicious show.  This story and the diverse array of characters are a wonderful display of humanity trying its absolute best.  I have always loved an enormous project; making an album, renovating a house, redoing a camper… etc.  And I love watching these fictional characters in a similar scenario.  The process is forcing them to face their internal demons, which are different for each of them and manifest at different times in the process.  But in the end, they are all immensely lovable characters who you want to root for. 

Listening To: 

I can’t stop listening to Leif Vollebeckk, specifically a song called “Long Blue Light”, but also his most recent fun length album “New Ways”.  I have done a lot of flying in the past could weeks and this soundtrack has brought be back to calm repeatedly.  I’ve been working on some new music and taking a lot of inspiration from the production on these tracks.  It’s a gift that keeps on giving! Bonus is that he has several collaboration’s with Melb’s Angie McMahon, of whom I am a fan! 

Hope you are all doing well! I’m out in California at Valley of the Moon camp, gearing up for some Fall Tour Dates.

Have a wonderful week!

-Rachel