sillylilly_bird

102 °F, said the forecast this afternoon. 106 °F, said the car when I got into it. I have no difficulty believing it felt like 109 °F. The sun clanged. The electric grid of the Boston metro area was not designed to run this many air conditioners at once.

I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.

Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.

For the hundred and thirteenth birthday of Alan Turing, spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?





I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.

If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)

Thanks to the effects of prolonged illness on my body, I have even more difficulty with it these days than in previous difficult years, but spatch took a picture of me on the way down the hill of Powder House Park that looked like I could still be the prow of a ship.



Listening to the radio in the car and tracking down songs at home, I seem to have amassed a small collection of music videos, more recent than not. I had never seen the studly single entrendres that accompany the blues-rock boasts of Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" (2015). Rob identified the scratchy guitar chug in Sarah Barrios' "Thank God You Introduced Me to Your Sister" (2021) as a callback to Fountains of Wayne and thence the Cars, but it is a sapphic banger in its own right. It is generationally lovely to have the London Gay Men's Chorus backing up the acoustic version of Isaac Dunbar's "American High" (2024). Jean Dawson's "Pirate Radio" (2022) rocks like an Afrofuturist anthem and an autobiographical chantey at the same time. If it ever crossed your mind to wonder about a cross between the Preacher in True Stories (1986) and the High Voltage Messiah of The Ruling Class (1972), there's John C. Reilly in Jack White's "Archbishop Harold Holmes" (2025). The vintage riot grrrl of Halsey's "Safeword" (2025) is enthusiastically not safe for work. Patrick Wolf's "The Last of England" (2025) has so much Jarman in its DNA, it is almost gilding the lily to have filmed at Dungeness except that it feels like the correct acknowledgement. I just like the oneiric stop-motion of Witch Prophet's "Memory (feat. Begonia)" (2023).

For Juneteenth, we left stones at Pomp's Wall on Grove Street and poured out a jigger of Medford rum for the man who built it, whose name on his bricklaying has outlasted the house in which he was enslaved.



WERS has been showcasing Black artists all day, which meant I switched it on and got the back-to-back fireworks of Koko Taylor's "Wang Dang Doodle" (1965) and Richie Havens' "Motherless Child" (1969).

Especially because I left the house yesterday at a quarter to eight in the morning and after four appointments and two visits returned home at a quarter to eight in the evening, I appreciate a known benefactor sending me five pounds of peaches and apricots from Frog Hollow Farm. They taste like the height of summer.

Allison Bunce's Ladies (2024) so beautifully photosets the crystalline haze of a sexual awakening that the thought experiment assigned by its writer-director-editor seems more extraneous than essential to its sensorily soaked seventeen-minute weekend, except for the queerness of keeping its possibilities fluid. The tagline indicates a choice, but the film itself offers something more liminal. Whatever its objectivity, what it tells the heroine is real.

It's more than irony that this blurred epiphany occurs in the none more hetero setting of a bachelorette weekend, whose all-girl rituals of cheese plates and orange wine on the patio and drunkenly endless karaoke in a rustically open-plan rental somewhere down the central coast of California are so relentlessly guy-oriented, the Bechdel–Wallace test would have booked it back up 101 after Viagra entered the chat. The goofiest, freakiest manifestation of the insistence on men are the selfie masks of the groom's face with which the bride's friends are supposed to pose as she shows off her veil in the lavender overcast of the driftwood-littered beach, but it's no less telling that as the conversation circles chronically around partners past and present, it's dudes all the way down. Even jokily, their twentysomething, swipe-right femininity admits nothing of women who love women, which leaves almost literally unspeakable the current between ginger-tousled, disenchanted Ruby (Jenna Lampe) and her lankier, longtime BFF Leila (Greer Cohen), the outsiders of this little party otherwise composed of blonde-bobbed Chloe (Ally Davis) and her flanking mini-posse of Grace (Erica Mae McNeal) and Lex (Tiara Cosme Ruiz), always ready to reassure their wannabe queen bee that she's not a bad person for marrying a landlord. "That's his passion!" They are not lovers, these friends who drove down together in Ruby's SUV. Leila has a boyfriend of three months whose lingering kiss at the door occasioned an impatiently eye-rolling horn-blare from Ruby, herself currently single after the latest in a glum history of heterosexual strike-outs: "No, seriously, like every man subconsciously stops being attracted to me as soon as I tell him that I don't want to have kids." And yet the potential thrums through their interactions, from the informality of unpacking a suitcase onto an already occupied bed to the nighttime routine of brushing their teeth side by side, one skimming her phone in bed as the other emerges from the shower and unselfconsciously drops her towel for a sleep shirt, climbing in beside her with such casual intimacy that it looks from one angle like the innocence of no chance of attraction, from another like the ease of a couple even longer established than the incoming wedding's three years. "He's just threatened by you," Leila calms the acknowledgement of antipathy between her boyfriend and her best friend. It gets a knowing little ripple of reaction from the rest of the group, but even as she explains for their tell-all curiosity, she's smiling over at her friend at the other end of the sofa, an unsarcastic united front, "Probably because he knows I love her more than him."

Given that the viewer is encouraged to stake out a position on the sex scene, it does make the most sense to me as a dream, albeit the kind that reads like a direct memo from a subconscious that has given up waiting for dawn to break over Marblehead. It's gorgeous, oblique, a showcase for the 16 mm photography of Ryan Bradford at its most delicately saturated, the leaf-flicker of sun through the wooden blinds, the rumpling of a hand under a tie-dyed shirt, a shallow-breasted kiss, a bunching of sheets, all dreamily desynched and yet precisely tactile as a fingernail crossing a navel ring: "Tell me if you want me to move my hand." Ruby's lashes lie as closed against her cheeks as her head on the pillow throughout. No wonder she looks woozy the next morning, drinking a glass of water straight from the tap as if trying to cool down from skin-buzzing incubus sex, the edge-of-waking fantasy of being done exactly as she dreamt without having to ask. "Spread your legs, then." Scrolling through their sunset selfie session, she zooms and lingers on the two of them, awkwardly voguing back to back for the camera. She stares wordlessly at Leila across the breakfast table, ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν to the life. Chloe is rhapsodizing about her Hallmark romance, but Ruby is speaking to her newly sensitized desires: "I just really hate that narrative, though. Pretending that you don't want something in the hopes that you'll get the thing that you're pretending that you don't want? Like, it just doesn't make any sense." It is just not credible to me that Leila who made such a point of honesty in relationships would pretend that nothing had happened when she checks in on her spaced-out friend with quizzical concern, snuggles right back into that same bed for an affectionate half-argument about her landlord potential. "I'm sure there are dishwasher catalogues still being produced somewhere in the world." Still, as if something of the dream had seeped out Schrödinger's between them, we remember that it was Leila who winkled her way into an embrace of the normally standoffish Ruby, who had her arms wrapped around her friend as she delivered what sure sounded like a queerplatonic proposal: "Look, if we both end up single because we both don't want kids, at least we'll have each other. We can have our own wedding." The last shots of the film find them almost in abstract, eyes meeting in the rear view mirror, elbows resting on the center console as the telephone poles and the blue-scaled Pacific flick by. It promises nothing and feels like a possibility. Perhaps it was not only Ruby's dream.

I can't know for certain, of course, and it seems to matter to the filmmaker that I should not know, but even if all that has changed is Ruby's own awareness, it's worth devoting this immersive hangout of a short film to. The meditative score by Karsten Osterby sounds at once chill and expectant, at times almost drowning the dialogue as if zoning the audience out into Ruby. The visible grain and occasional flaw in the film keep it haptically grounded, a memento of Polaroids instead of digitally-filtered socials. For every philosophizing moment like "Do you ever have those dreams where you wake up and you go about your day and get ready and everything feels normal, but then you wake up and you're still in bed, so you're like, 'Oh, was I sleeping or was that real?'" there's the ouchily familiar beat where Ruby and Leila realize simultaneously that neither of them knows the name of Chloe's fiancé, just the fact that he's a landlord. Whatever, it's an exquisite counterweight to heteronormativity, a leaf-light of queerness at the most marital-industrial of times. I found it on Vimeo and it's on YouTube, too. This catalogue brought to you by my single backers at Patreon.