Worms Weekly
Arcadia Molinas
The GALVANIZING Body Horror of Heidi Klum’s Worm Costume - Naomi Fry in the New Yorker
Because you need to (trust me) read this short article about how Heidi Klum’s worm costume reflects and subverts standards of beauty.
“Consciously or not, the supermodel has helped underscore the endless heavy lifting that a certain kind of femininity requires.” This is the best serious/unserious take on the worm costume.
Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s Twitter
Flea has been sharing what he’s been reading with his following, providing insightful comments into his favourite reads (he loves Cormac McCarthy) even sharing that his wife and he met in a book club (you should join the Worms book club and increase the chances of finding the love of your life too.)
I saw the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s headline Roskilde, a festival in Norway when I was eighteen and Flea kept on doing handstands between songs as frontman Kiedis kept on wheezing for breath.
Arcadia Molinas
A Door Behind a Door (2022) - Yelena Moskovich
I’ve been meaning to read Yelena Moskovich for a long time and I have to say, I’m amazed. Her writing is incredibly dream-like yet so capable of evoking visceral images. Her use of symbols, the sea and water, the knife and the steel from the necklace are impeccable in weaving a loop-like structure around all the characters, intertwining their fates and struggles. The book is tender and at the same time incredibly brutal, mixing murder and desire, in a symbolic journey from Soviet Union to America and queer desire and faith. Death is an in-between place, it’s America, it’s a body, it has a shape. Very powerful writing.
Bad Thoughts (2022) - Nada Alic
I’m cheating because I read this a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t had a chance to share it with Worms readers yet and I really want to because I’ve never read something so consistently hilarious. This is Alic’s first book, a collection of short stories. In them she writes from the perspective of narrators who share their darker impulses and struggle to control their intrusive thoughts. Aka:
“After a while, I couldn’t remember what I was doing there. Everything had lost its meaning and all I could think was Don’t touch anyone’s penis - don’t do it. Imagine what would happen if you did, like, right now. Think about anything else. Look up at the ceiling tiles. What is that… distressed tin? Elegant choice. Very modern. But once I thought it, I couldn’t stop. I fixed my gaze on the assortment of black and gray dress pants before me. They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs. Concealed only by thin layers of fabric. I imagined them as wind chimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual; it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I am and what I’m capable of.”
Every page is packed with laughs as well as acute stabs into the often obscured parts of the human psyche, our desires and all the performances we put on to impress each other and ourselves. Absolutely side-splitting.
And this iconic moment
As for my thoughts, best summed up by the Letterboxd top review
Tromperie (Deception) 2022 by Arnaud Desplechin
I recall hearing a friend run his mouth on Phillip Roth, effusively, passionately and wholeheartedly (“I hate him, I hate him, I hate him”), but I have to say, this adaptation of his novel Deception was, to me, a very romantic, sentimental journey through the creative process and relationship between an artist and their work. I confess I find myself to be part of the audience for whom films solely featuring conversation are catered too (like yes, I liked Malcolm & Marie, sue me, movies adapted from plays, hello The Humans and not to mention the Before Sunrise trilogy). Léa Seydoux’s performance touched my heart-strings.
Pierce Eldridge
Finding Vivian Maier
I can’t believe so much of this brilliant work went left in boxes over decades. Vivian Maier is surely one of the best photography artists I’ve seen, and this remarkable documentary recounts a woman that lived a secret life behind the lens of a Rolex waist film camera. The documentary attempts at reconstructing the narrative of what seems to be fraying at the ends of her photographs, and soon these archival images (whilst refusing institutionalisation) become popular across the globe; now, making Maier one of the greatest artists ‘hiding in plain sight’. There’s something to be said about this, the concealing Maier felt necessary to her work, in the events that aren’t fully addressed in the documentary where she was a lively yet mean character. What’s speculated is that she befell trauma from the hands of a man, and whilst nannying throughout her life, small episodes of her contempt for the insidiousness of masculinity–such as piggish sex, lust, and ownership–came to fruition upon the young children she cared for. She collected and hoarded against the understanding of others, and moved to a coastal town where locals referred to her as the ‘eccentric’ type; never bothering to come to know her. I wonder what thoughts intruded her secret mind, where the full life of Maier we may never come to recount, yet the images offer a perception into how she came to view the world as a violent, twisted, and intimate place.
The Wolf House
Honestly terrifying and gorgeous, the animation of this film is unbelievable. Everything is stop motion, and most of the characters look to be made up of cardboard, tape and some form of foam stuffing to give the object physical integrity. Following Maria, a woman who has escaped a colony, we watch as she enters a house and becomes paternal to two pigs; as they transform and morph each other along the threads of fairy tales such as the three little pigs. Their intruder, the wolf, is always looming beyond the stoop of the house. As I watched, my mind was bending between ‘wow, the animation is phenomenal’ and ‘of course a woman runs away from a dictatorship and those oppressive duties to build her ideal home to then have the home eat her’. It seems wherever Maria goes, no shelter will truly provide comfort when the wolf–as reflected in the final scenes–is actually always within her, waiting for her to plead for her death by his paw. The logic of the narrative felt really sinister, and I feel like emerging from the film has made me consider what the walls of my home conceal. I felt I needed to reflect on what my own wolf was, and if the nurturing in me would one day be the thing that swallows me whole; but I was happy to see a *sparkly* childstory retold through a boogie, nightmarish, tone.
Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me
This is a little off centre for me. When clicking play on the trailer it crossed my mind, during the thirty seconds of seeing Selena crying, that there was a huge problem with the advertising of this documentary; that the producers have administered to its audience–through chic edits–a very sinister dopamine hit of something that feels like celebrity demise entertainment. Relying on what we know of Selena, and the sadness that ensues her life, to pull the viewer into watching. I did some reading around the documentary and saw she had control of ‘sharing this story’, so I felt okay to return to watching, but that as a hook is strange and unsettling. It’s not as if I want to see her ‘okay’, or that I’m initially dejecting the story of mental illness that follows, but more questioning this as the most ‘advertisable’ threadline; when, what follows, is actually more complicated and occasionally (very) cringe. The reason I say cringe is because, the first thing I reflected on about the documentary with a friend was the moment Selena and her friend travel to Kenya. There is a moment Selena is reflecting on not wanting to return home to her responsibilities of being a singer/actor star, and she shares that being here (and, although not disclosed, the way she feels here) is ‘reality’ – instantly I was able to empathise; yes it is, the work is here in the advocacy (however much it is funded by the vanity of pop stardom), but the response from the friend–the most cringe cringe, yukky moment–is simple as it is harmful, ‘this is their reality, not yours’. I pressed pause, gasped, and felt a shiver run down my spine at the insensitivity and strange distance placed between ‘them’ and ‘us visiting’, rendering the reason for their visit as ‘insincere’ and ‘charitable’. Later in the documentary, Selena reflects that she feels guilty about being in Kenya, and I wonder if this is the percolation of remnants from this conversation; where the duality of her life is completely torn as she is trying, almost helplessly, to not be seen as a product but as a person who can offer support, love, care and philanthropic resolutions. It’s not all lost in the documentary, and in fact when Selena breaks down, there are huge glimmers of ‘realness’ that emerge, showing the viewer the extent of her mental health and bipolarity; a very sincere documentary takes shape here. But, the missmash of filming that began in 2016 for her tour, cancelled and picked up again during new promotional interviews for her album in 2019 into 2020, leaves the documentary a little stale in its attempt to be chic on these topics. It might sound a little harsh, but I’m a little lost on how to feel about this without scrutinising the edifice it is built within. No doubt, she is incredibly brave to share, yet missing is reflections on her highly successful directorial debut on 13 Reason Why, her return to acting in Only Murders in the Building, and the successful reality cooking show Selena + Chef. I’ve enjoyed Selena since Disney, but if being an alumni of this industry means mental health issues and anxiety, which debilitate the woman behind the facade, is it worth it? Overall, I closed the film feeling very solemn for Selena and have placed my solidarity in the fans across Twitter calling for entertainment platforms to apologise for publicly ‘attacking’ this woman whilst she is down.
