Open Tabs: See What The Black List Team Has Been Enjoying in July...

Everyone simply must read Maggie O’Farrell’s latest, LAND. It’s her most stunning novel yet (in my opinion, by far) and I devoured it slowly over the course of several days, not wanting to rush the prose. It is almost reductive to say that it is the story of a family on a rural Irish peninsula in the aftermath of the Great Hunger when at it’s core it is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about each other, and most of all, about the places we are from. How we run from them, how we hunt for them, how we cling to them. It is a novel that makes you feel bound to the roots of a place that has existed long before you and will exist long after. And while it is a novel filled with tragedy, it is also one of bittersweet hope.

Go see THE INVITE! I laughed out loud a lot. I leaned over to happily nudge my friend a bunch because so many of the topics that came up on screen were ones we’d recently discussed. The acting was fantastic. I was thoroughly entertained.

As someone who has spent my entire life loving media from before I was born, it is exceptionally rare that a new song stops me dead in my tracks and makes me ask “WHO IS THAT??” but that is exactly what happened when I first heard “If You Want Me” from the Womack Sisters on my beloved 88.5 FM. I really thought “If You Want Me” was an old song I had never heard before and was absolutely delighted to learn that it was a brand new track! The daughters of Womack & Womack (and the granddaughters of Sam Cooke!) are the best kind of nepo babies — there is simply nothing quite like a family band of singers blending their voices together. The Womack Sisters will release their debut album on August 14, and I cannot wait to hear more of their girl-group inspired neo-soul harmonies.

End of July/Beginning of August is a good time to reassess reading goals for the year, because the end of summer is near. A book to get to if you haven’t already: KIN by Tayari Jones. A book to preorder immediately: THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF FIRST LADY FREEMAN by Deesha Philyaw.

Nobody knows how they’re going to grieve after an earth-shattering and unexpected loss. It turns out my grieving process involves cutting off all my hair and watching A ROOM WITH A VIEW repeatedly. So this month, I recommend one of the greatest films ever made, A ROOM WITH A VIEW.

Ever since visiting the Tate Modern in London last month, I have not been able to stop reliving Tracey Emin’s landmark retrospective, “A Second Life,” which is on display through August 31st. I was lucky enough to visit the exhibition with my best friend, who like me, loves to really take her time walking through a museum — and thank god, for that’s the only way to appropriately appreciate Emin’s work, which is hugely confessional, raw, and unyielding in its many forms. The exhibition includes such well-known pieces as My Bed and I Never Asked to Fall in Love — You Made Me Feel Like This, but I found myself particularly gutted by Emin’s film work, which ranged from her surreal Margate-shot short Why I Never Became a Dancer, to How It Feels, in which she describes a harrowing botched abortion she experienced in her twenties, to the deeply candid Conversation with my Mum, meant to be experienced seated side-by-side with another viewer, stranger or friend, in a pair of child-sized chairs. Emin’s willingness to strip herself bare as the foundation of her creative process is both achingly gruesome and wholeheartedly aspirational, and I will be thinking about her work for the rest of my life. If you’re anywhere near London, I implore you to take the afternoon and see this giant of an exhibition before it closes. I am better off for it, and you will be too.

I’m not sure when earthsignchels first showed up in my algo, but her song “Daddy Died” has basically not left my head. It’s a haunting expression of grief. It’s also really catchy. I get chills every time I hear it (or, as a recent Radiolab episode identified, holy shivers). I am transfixed by this song. Its sounds. I don’t know enough about music theory to articulate why it has this power. But, watching earthsignchels on COLORS Show at least gives me the language of performance to try to make sense of it.

Standing alone against a stark, unmoving backdrop that somehow evokes sky and hospital both, earthsignchels is rooted — as if she’s stuck forever in some terrible moment — to the right side of the stage. As she sings, emotions snap across her face in rapid succession. Her arms reach out and curl around a figure that is not there, over and over, an unghost; all the more horrible for its absence. Her voice can only be as raw as it is because of incredible control and precision…and yet nothing feels planned here. It all feels desperately real and achingly familiar to anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one.

The thing that sticks with me the most, and the reason I prefer this live performance to the official single, is her breathing. There are many performance methods and texts devoted to arguing that breath is one of (if not the) most powerful tools of expression. It anchors the artist in the present. It invites the unpredictable. And, because we are a social species, we-the-audience subconsciously lock into this breath. And so, we are invited into a shared alternate-present with the artist. It’s delightfully, terribly human.

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