I've told you about this album before, that was in February and this is still my album of the year, no question. It's about being a middle aged lady and I love it. What's been cool about this year is seeing people's lockdown projects, which this apparently was - Anaïs Mitchell and her friends did a "song a day" project during lockdown and that's what this album came from. Here's a live version of Brooklyn Bridge:
I don't know if Koffee's lockdown project was making this album, but she does have the song "Lockdown" which was a bright spot in actual lockdown and now her album, "Gifted" has been a bright spot in 2022. It's a good one to put on when you are getting ready for the evening proper and want to transition to party vibes from chilling out. Here's Shine:
Okay but if it's party vibes you are after, and it definitely will be at some point, I have no higher recommendation than TSHA's Capricorn Sun. If you are in AUS for the new year, she is playing at Byron Bay on the 31st. I know that Australia is a big country and you might not be able to make it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be listening to TSHA at new year and I think you'd enjoy that too. Here's Dancing In The Shadows:
If you go to Sudan Archives' website now you will see that it looks like a MySpace page, to the level of detail that she is using the marquee tag. This is a combination of the best of her being an ethnomusicologist and also her having made a loud shouty album about being a prom queen. If you get the chance to see her live, absolutely do that, she's extremely fun. Here's Home Maker:
Assuming you are listening to all of these albums in full in order, now is a good time to chill down with Fiona Soe Paing. This is a lovely ambientish folk album and if you want some otherworldly vocals in your life, I recommend it extremely highly. There is also a walk you can do, that goes round the locations that inspired the album! Here's Maggie Machlin:
YOU BETTER BELIEVE it's time for my books of the year. What it's also time for, though (and this is about my job not Fem Fri) is setting OKRs for 2023. Guys this is so difficult. It's like writing poetry, trying to cram so much meaning and resonance into an incredibly restrictive structure and already so few words to play with. I've just done ONE this morning and already feel like T. S. Eliot probably felt after he wrote "The Waste Land." Don't @ me about this, I know that's not how "The Waste Land" got written.
If you don't know what OKRs are, I'm happy for you. If you know what OKRs are but don't know how they're different from, say, KPIs or SMART objectives, please do @ me and we can just be together at this time.
As long term readers will know, one of my favourite genres of book is rich people being terrible to one another. Louise Candlish, though, has opened my eyes to a new and related genre, South East London try-hards being terrible to one another. Those People is one of several books that will have you doing little whoops of delight as middle class parents just TIP OVER into incredible wrongness. Great plotting, great central mysteries, and her calm, principled insistence that nowhere north of Tooley Street or south of Bromley exists should be an inspiration to us all.
I've already written about Mendelson in Fem Fri, and here's another chance to get on that train. I'm recommending Daughters of Jerusalem as a book that manages both incredible charm and a properly rancid undercurrent. It's set in Oxford and she really plays with the closeness of the city versus the fragmentation of a family. She is also extremely funny, I laughed more at her books than at any others this year. I'd recommend that you buy this now for an easy and fun ACANYNY read.
The only non-fiction book on my list this year! I read it for work expecting it to be full of facts about life sciences, and it was, but it is also about family and faith and what we mean when we say "life." There would have been numerous temptations for a journalist writing this book, and Skloot steers away from all of them. It's so incredibly light touch, all of it, and since I read it there's not a week that's gone by that I haven't thought about some of the ideas that it touched on or made me think about. Incredible book. If you want to know the absolute basics about Henrietta Lacks, here is a decent place to start.
This book is very short and packs a lot in, which are two things I respect in a book. It's also, although not a comedy, full of very good jokes, as in you will read this book an laugh aloud several times. I suppose I'd describe it as the story of a young woman, who is an absolute mess, learning how you can be an absolute mess in many different ways and at many different life stages. You will gasp in horror several times while reading this and leave the whole experience very emotionally satisfied.
SO EXCITED to recommend to you a collection of short stories by long term friend of Fem Fri, E. Saxey. I know that you've loved it when they have guest edited this newsletter and I know you'll love their fiction even more. One of the things I've always really engaged with about Saxey's writing is the incredible sense of place and of setting. As I think back to these stories to write this for you, it feels like running through my own memories, that's how vivid their work feels. And the lovely thing about a collection of short stories is you get so many settings - foggy coasts and creepy libraries and sweet villages with bridges over rivers - and so much weird stuff happening in those settings. You want to get into Saxey's work because they've got a novel out next year so now is the time.
It's! The! Weekend! I hope you are excited. Well, it's as close to the weekend as makes no practical difference where I am, and if you're not there already I'm sure you will be soon.
It will be books of the year next week so let's make our way into this weekend with some women (obviously), wine and song.
Let's start with the wine. Ntsiki Biyela is a chemical engineer who fell into winemaking and is making a gigantic success out of it:
I started studying in Stellenbosch [University] in 1999. I came from the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and everything was different. I didn’t know the language, and I didn’t know the culture, which made the studying much more difficult. I had no idea that wine existed! I applied for a scholarship that said if you study winemaking we’ll pay for it. And I knew I wasn’t going to go back home. So I dedicated myself to this.
I'm going to do my albums of the year as well, probably in ACANYNY, but here's a teaser - it's Koffee and her absolute anthem, "Lockdown". Be sure to crank it:
How are you doing? Very well, I hope. I went to a terrific exo at the Hayward last weekend, there was tons of amazing art and loads of it was by women. So if you get the chance, do go the the ceramics thing while it's still on. And if you don't get the chance, don't worry, because the best of the women in that show are right here at Fem Fri!
Let's start with Emma Hart and her ceramic windscreens, showing one image on one side and one on the other:
Here's some useful context on maybe why windscreens that I did not have until, like, thirty seconds ago:
the artist retells the story of a near-fatal car accident on the M20 motorway that she endured some 20 years earlier. In the installation, clothes irons and empty soap-dispenser bottles act as unlikely stand-ins for cars and people, acknowledging their presence without the need for photographic record. Similarly, in Car Crash (2011), Hart interviewed various people in cafés and other locations about car crashes they had been involved in. If the interviewee spontaneously used objects (e.g. salt cellars, teaspoons or cigarette packets) to demonstrate the position of cars or bodies, she photographed the table-top arrangement
I was also a great fan of Magdelene Odundo's shapely pots. This one looks like it might like to nuzzle you out of curiosity:
I want people to take away from the exhibition the love of material in my work, the notion that actually making things comes from years of practice. There’s complexity in reaching a status where you can actually be more fluid. I wish I could say that I’ve made the perfect piece – if I’d done that, I probably would have stopped making years ago.
When you go to this show, you're going to want to touch the art, and I regret to inform that you're still not allowed to touch the art. Lubna Chowdhary's work doesn't even seem particularly tactile in this image, but there's something about the intensity of the colours that made me want to interact with these pieces physically:
The legacy of Loos’s campaign against ornament endures in “sophisticated” minimalist design of the present day. Underlying Loos’s [Alex note: Not Anita Loos] objections to the exploitation of labourers and the obsolescence of fashionable designs, was an explicit connection between ornament and “primitive” cultures: “the natives, the Persians, the Slovak peasant”. Chowdhary’s riposte comes in swooping forms and blazing colour.
I love this suspended sculpture by Rachel Kneebone. So delicate and perfectly caught up in itself:
I do not think porcelain is any more demanding than I am of it! We have developed a form of truce. Its nature and consistency change the longer it is subjected to air, which means that I have to continually be aware of this and change tools at specific points. It is more about understanding timing, as the porcelain body becomes less malleable due to time while becoming stronger, so you need to wait until certain 'states' are reached before building more onto that area of the work, unless, of course, you want it to collapse. This knowledge of the limitations of porcelain thus becomes a source of possibilities, because once known you can work with or against what is known.
Finally, this is a tiny photo from a much larger installation that I cannot recommend highly enough that you see in person. I tried to take the most Fem Fri appropriate photo possible for this one:
DID YOU KNOW I have actually read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It was, of course, bad, but I also got one (1) good bit of advice from it, which is when you want someone to do something be sure to start your sentence with "please would you." Now you don't need to read a word of the book and I have shared with you how I go about expressing my desires as an action for someone else. Here's an interview with Lindsey Mendick:
Because of the tactile nature of clay, they feel like extensions of me, I work so closely with them and it feels so much depends on their survival. But yes, I find making in clay so therapeutic and helpful to staying calm and grounded. Because clay is so unforgiving and has so many ingrained rules, you have to be relaxed and give the medium the time and attention it needs, and learning to slow down and switch off is so important when your mind is prone to torturing you just for the hell of it.
I've been having a really difficult time lately. The sort of time where I think "mmm I'm crying in public a bit more than normal," totally eliding that actually crying in public at all is usually a "bad sign or whatever" and that if you have a "normal" level of that… well, it's not great. Anyway, I'd been coming out of it a bit over the last couple of days, and last night I was making myself dinner. Just a packet of that nice fresh-ish tortellini, but it occured to me that I could fry some butter on the side, and then fry the cooked pasta in the butter for a bit as well as having it with stock like I normally would. I did that and (1) it was great and (2) it felt sincerely like a step towards joy that I'd not been able to take for weeks. So I hope you're doing okay and I hope you're looking forward to a Fem Fri about butter and the foods that go better with it.
Obviously my first port of call was just to search "nigella lawson butter" and she did not disappoint. The mercury has really dropped these last few days and I know you would love making this colcannon tonight or at the weekend:
brown butter is one of life’s great joys. It’s easy enough to make: all you need to do is heat butter in a (preferably light-coloured, such as stainless steel) pan until it turns the colour of a hazelnut, which for the amount here should take around seven minutes. And yes, there is a lot of butter […] remember that colcannon is not just a dish that celebrates potatoes but also exults in, not apologises for, the butter.
I've sent this to you before but it still means a lot to me; here's Kylie Taylor talking about her own difficult time and the tiny things that got her through it. I thought of her phrasing, "failing myself and losing my mind," a lot lately, because that is what it feels like. You can always trust a comms person for a pithy phrase. Put butter on that toast:
I was going through an intensely difficult period in my personal life and thought I would never survive it. I was trying to cope in various ways, when a friend said to me that I just had to focus on taking baby steps - one tiny step at a time… Small, little victories, micro reasons for gratitude, such as getting out of bed, or making a piece of toast, putting one foot in front of the other. I felt like I was failing myself and losing my mind, but this conversation changed my whole outlook and I truly think, saved my life.
Okay look - do you remember when Miss Piggy launched a line of water that was mostly butter? Piggy Water. Here's a lovely defence of Miss Piggy as a character by writer and fat activist Lesley Kinzel, which might also serve as a reminder not to get in the way of other people's joy. Let her have her Piggy Water:
She is a character who has to fight against the pressure to internalize the negativity that surrounds her; she refuses to allow the assumptions and aspersions of other people to influence her opinion of herself. Nor does Piggy contain her rage; she resists, sometimes with violence, a fact of her portrayal that is no doubt complicated enough to warrant its own essay. Miss Piggy is not beyond criticism. She is often unlikeable and unsympathetic, and a lot of the time the personal and professional crises that befall her are caused, directly or indirectly, by her own insecurity and her over-the-top narcissism.
Here's something I'm profoundly glad I do at work. Any time someone says (in writing) something good about something that my team or I have done, I save it to a notepad file called nice.txt. Then when I'm in need of a boost I will open nice.txt and read what people have said in descending date order until I feel happy again. If you think there is a possibility that this would work for you, I really encourage you to try it, it's been a tonic for me more than once and is so easy to do.
I also write Fem Fri in notepad so if ever instead of this email you get just a load of stuff that's super positive and nice but appears to be from the interior of a life sciences company… now you know. Anyway I'm too far down this path now to do anything other than a Fem Fri of work stuff, I hope you enjoy it and if you're currently on Thanksgiving maybe save this one to Monday. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
I really enjoyed this interview with Teresa Torres. A lot of product thinkers seem to be totally divorced from practical reality and it's so good when someone can see clearly that… innovation is hard, and lots of it is about the unglamorous work of talking to people more, listening to people more closely, showing your working more thoroughly:
"for the rest of our lives, we’re gonna be getting good at the existing stuff," she tells me. "And I don’t mean that the existing stuff is the endpoint and the be-all-end-all, but it’s going to take so long to get good at this stuff."
It's always interesting to read about other people's jobs and the traditions and rituals in industries not your own, so please enjoy George Voss going to a concrete expo. If you already work in concrete, hope you enjoyed reading about digital product management at the last link. SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, the Fem Friday promise:
In the convention center’s Central Hall, the 200-foot robotic arms of a gang of sugar-pink and lime-green concrete pumps are entwined in the rafters, like diplodocuses snuggling together. Squeezing them all into a photograph proves impossible, so I head to the booth for EarthCam, a company that specializes in image capture at a construction scale. EarthCam shoots time-lapse footage of building sites, filleting years of slow work into short balletic films where cranes and scaffolding delicately swoop around each other. Their videos of a clinic in Abu Dhabi took so long that they inadvertently captured the construction of the rest of the city behind it.
I was listening to a podcast about American Noir, and it had a really good section on women noir writers, including some that I had not heard of! Maybe you would like to meet them as well, or maybe you'd like to be reminded of them.
One of the earliest women to write noir thrillers was Dorothy B. Hughes, who fairly cranked then out in the 1940s/early 50s. I say "cranked out" but that understates that some of them were genuine classics and genre changers, as here:
Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) set up a template for hundreds to come, anticipating even Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) by bringing the reader inside the killer’s fevered head. But, unlike Thompson and many later writers, Hughes directs her gaze inward only to then direct our gaze outward. She has in mind something larger […] about the complicated, freighted environment of America just after World War II.
Vera Caspary's big novel was Laura, which was made into a very successful film as well. I was also extremely taken with this fun and slightly grifty detail in her biography:
Caspary also created two successful mail order campaigns. One offered dancing lessons with a fictitious authoritarian dance master–a Russian refugee from the Communist Revolution, no less–named Sergei Marinoff, proprietor of the equally fictitious Sergei Marinoff School of Classic Dancing. Marinoff’s letters to his students–typed on gold embossed letterhead Caspary had found in the company’s basement–began with an admonishment to recalcitrant students: “Why have you not sent me your examination on lesson one? What is the matter?” Sergei Marinoff proved so popular that “Pupils fell in love with Marinoff, baked cakes, knitted mufflers, autographed photographs and wrote love letters to a man who did not exist,”
How are you doing, you good? I hope you are well. I hope you have fun plans for the weekend. Ahead of that, I have a Fem Fri that hits truly the bullseye of the FF Venn - it's feminism! it's modernism! It's anti-fascism! Women of the French Reistance let's goooooo
Of course I'm going to start with Josephine Baker. One of the best sentences I read last year was about Josephine Baker, and it went along the lines of; when she moved from New York to Paris she went from being the funny goofy girl in the chorus line to being the horniest sex symbol of all time without changing her act one bit*. I think about this often, about how it would feel to have people respond to you in such a fundamentally different way when you still feel like exactly the same person. And of course, as well as being funny and sexy she was also brave:
“France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything… I am ready, captain, to give them my life. You can use me as you wish.” Josephine housed resistance fighters at her chateau and supplied them with visas. She attended parties and diplomatic functions, including parties at the Italian embassy that brought her in the orbit of high-ranking Axis bureaucrats. She collected information on German troop movements, and what harbors or airfields were in action. Josephine was confident that her celebrity and connections would protect her, and that no one would suspect her of espionage. She wrote down intelligence on her hands and arms, pinning notes inside her underwear.
As well as dance, the visual arts are represented in the work of curator Rose Valland, who kept meticulous records of what belonged to whom. She played a substantial part in returning what could be returned as well:
“In this disturbing chaos the beauty of the ‘safeguarded’ masterpieces’ beauty was nevertheless revealed. I belonged to them, like a hostage.” As the Allies were getting close, suspicions increased. When things were missing, she was accused of theft. Four times she was sacked, four times she returned. Every day, she had to muster the courage to face a “constantly renewed anxiety.” She even was accused of sabotage and signaling to the enemy.
Simone Segouin AKA Nicole Minet was also a woman of action, and as you can see in this photo, not averse to a photo opp or two:
Simone Segouin was involved in armed actions against enemy convoys and trains, attacks against enemy detachments, acts of sabotages, etc. The French newspaper Independent Eure-et-Loir on its August 26, 1944 issue described her as “one of the purest fighters of heroic French Resistance who prepared the way for the Liberation”. She was present at the fall of Chartres, on August 23, 1944, and at the Liberation of Paris. She was promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Croix de Guerre.
This week's Fem Fri is a tribute to cities, thanks to this tremendous poem by H.D. - the below is just an extract, click through for the whole thing. She is so good:
Now here's the fantastically named Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, who has had an outsized influence on both her city and - as the head of an architecture school - many others:
We learn that Lemco van Ginkel, as a young woman, talked herself into the office of the Swiss titan Le Corbusier, and wound up designing some of the Unité D’Habitation – among the most important buildings of the 20th century. Then she […] helped shape Montreal in meaningful ways before she became head of the architecture school at the University of Toronto.
I have had a busy week and what I would really value would be quiet and some soothing pictures. Maybe that's you as well! I hope so because it's what Fem Fri is going to be:
I've not tended to go in a lot for photography here, but here's a true woman innovator - it's Julia Margaret Cameron!
A well-read, educated woman, she often pressed her subjects into posing for pastoral, allegorical, historical, literary, and biblical scenes, such as in Madonna with Children (1864). In this photograph, she transforms Mary Kellaway, a local dressmaker, and Elizabeth and Percy Keown, children of a gunner in the Royal Army, into figures in an enduring art historical scene.
If you love Ab Ex - and I do too - here's Mary Abbott. I also like her approach to collaboration:
One of the most representative collaborations for Mary Abbott’s style and work was a project she had with Barbara Guest in the ‘50s. Just like Mary’s mother, Barbara Guest was a poet – in fact, she was a first-generation representative for the New York School- and their collaboration aimed to create what Abbott referred to as “poetry paintings.” Mary Abbott had to translate to painting what Barbara was able to put into words.
I want people to take away from the exhibition the love of material in my work, the notion that actually making things comes from years of practice. There’s complexity in reaching a status where you can actually be more fluid. I wish I could say that I’ve made the perfect piece – if I’d done that, I probably would have stopped making years ago.
