September Gloom
Highlighting art, music, literature, and film for the month of September in the year 2024.
Art
Danja Akulin
Drawing, (b. St. Petersburg, Russia, year unknown)
Danja Akulin creates conceptual drawings, which he calls “aesthetically minimalist”.
I first came across Danja Akulin's minimalist landscapes while searching for artists to feature in a print journal. At first glance, I assumed they were photographs, so I was stunned to discover they were drawings. Nature, particularly landscapes, is a well-trodden subject for many artists, but the way Danja renders these scenes feels distinct. While the compositions are minimalist, the artwork itself is rich with detail and energy. Each piece captures a depth and power that transforms the simplicity of the landscape into something far more profound and compelling.
Drawings on large sheets of paper look like pictures...They are very simple black and white images - landscapes, portraits, windows, signs...For some reason, they compel you to stop, to peer, to become involved - to prove to be in the ephemeral present. Behind extensive line movements of the pencil, behind concentration and dilutions of light and shade - associations, sometimes free, but often programmed by the author, are revealed layer by layer. — Danja
Danja's work masterfully blends light and shadow to immerse you in what feels like an infinite expanse of nature, captured in a deceptively small fragment. Each drawing strikes a balance between vastness and intimate detail, leaving you unsure if you're looking at a sweeping view of a forest or a close-up of its intricate textures. This contrast is both intriguing and soothing, evoking a sense of calm, wonder, and serenity—a refreshing pause in an otherwise anxious and fast-paced world.
All illumination has its share of darkness...
weak and unimportant feelings might easily resurface, while other strong ones might live in perpetual obscurity: a dim light cast into near darnkess stands out more than bright light in full sun.
Light is a metaphor for truth. Light, like truth, can be dark.
Visit artist website
Visit artist Instagram
Literature
“Heroines” by Kate Zambreno
First published in 2012
On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.
In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor" and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. — MIT Press
You can find this book easily online.
Music
“No Depression in Heaven” — Midwife
Released in September, 2024
Recommended if you like shoegaze, pop metal, experimental pop.
Midwife’s No Depression In Heaven, her fourth studio album, was written primarily in the back of vans while on tour, endlessly, over the course of the past few years. The record engages with the contemplative spirit of rock n roll from within a body in motion. No Depression In Heaven explores themes of sentimentality, the interplay between dreams, memory, and fantasy, and a familiar subject seen throughout all of Midwife’s work: grief. Madeline Johnston takes a look at the tender and transcendent underneath a hard exterior of leather and studs, exposing a different side of the heavy music scene, where Johnston’s project has been living and evolving.
Midwife is one of my favorite musical acts. I discovered her music on Bandcamp a few years ago and have been a dedicated fan ever since, attending several of her live shows. One of the most memorable experiences was a small, intimate performance where she played entirely unreleased material—many of which later made it onto her latest album. There’s something thrilling about hearing new songs from an artist you love, like being part of a secret. One track, in particular, stuck with me, thanks to its incredibly catchy chorus. For over a year, I kept thinking about it, hoping it would make the cut for her next album. Thankfully, I was right, and it was released as a single ahead of the album drop. That song is called "Vanessa," and I’ve included it in this post.
Poetry
“Duluge” by Leila Chatti
Published in 2020
Again, as mentioned in last month’s newsletter— I’ve been struggling to find newly released poetry books to recommend so I’ve been going back to classics and more popular poets to either reread, or read collections I’ve missed.
In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction.
Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
Here are two favorite excerpts of mine:
“After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says you deserve that which has happened to you. I see what you do with your long, terrene hands.”
—
Like suns I could not lower
my gaze from.
I admit I liked
the warmth of them— tongues
in the dark
of my ears like secrets,
palms
splayed upon
my thighs like stars.
—
Check your local bookstore for a new copy or purchase from Copper Canyon Press.
Film
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” directed by Celine Sciama
Released in 2019
Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.
—
We're in a time where nothing new or exciting seems to be coming out, film wise. I'm tired of the big-box Hollywood drivel like reboots or yet another superhero film. It feels like everything is a prequel, sequel, or remake—an endless churn of recycled content. Even A24, a studio once known for its originality, seems to be grappling with its identity. So, once again, I’m turning to a slightly older film, and arguably my favorite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
This film has inspired me countless times, and it continues to haunt the recesses of my mind. I’ve never thought about a film as much as I do this one. When I first watched it, it wasn’t recommended to me. I stumbled upon it while browsing Hulu after searching specifically for Criterion films. It was a French film set in France—an instant draw for me, given my weakness for French cinema. Thirty minutes in, I was online, buying the Blu-ray at 50% off on the last day of one of the Criterion semi-annual sales. I didn’t even need to finish the film to know it belonged in my collection. To this day, it remains in my top four on Letterboxd, and it’ll be hard to dislodge it from that spot.
With its breathtaking cinematography, stunning landscapes, unique color (which is not something I often praise), romantic dialogue, and the deep, intimate connection between its characters, this poetic film ticks every box on my list of what makes a favorite. It also boasts one of the greatest endings in filmmaking—a stab to the heart, followed by a salt-in-the-wound twist, and then a sucker punch to the gut. An awfully and disturbingly beautiful ending, I both loved and hated it in the best possible way.
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The drawings are amazing!!
This movie is top