Friday Five: December 26, 2025
- Dec 26, 2025
- 2 min read
Side A:
Side B:
Friday Fav:
"One Night Stand - Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963" Every so often you come across someone so perfectly in flow that it's pure poetry to witness. That's what I feel and hear when I listen to One Night Stand. One of the best live albums of all time, and one I revisit frequently.
Dec 26, 2025
Friday Five exists as a little challenge to me: five new albums, five new stories per week. They're here for you to enjoy (or not!) No summaries or in-depth criticism. But here are a few notes:
Mallory Smart's "Dave" stories are among her very best work, and I hope to see a collection of them really soon. If you like the one I've linked here, she released a new one with Little Engines this week, and published one on M7 a few months back.
Daniel O. Bailey's story is one of the funniest and smartest I've read in a long time. Not often a story gets a real laugh out of me but this one did multiple times.
Reading Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and Aaron Burch's Tacoma. Caught between admiring Lam's largely accurate, often dark portrayal of physician life and yelling THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN at certain parts. Whatever else, I do love a linked collection and it makes for good fiction.
Watching Babygirl (brutal), Bad Santa (meh), Marty Supreme (what the fuck?), Casino, and Shoresy. Surprised Marty Supreme is rated as high as it is right out of the gate. Been mulling over why it did not work from a character and story standpoint, but I guess I'm in the minority.
Got stupid excited to hear Rufus Du Sol's "Innerbloom" sequenced into the trailer for Shelter. Picked up that synth over all the noise and dialogue and action, before the vocal even kicked in. It's making me think a lot about signatures—in voice, in production, in narrative, etc.
Happy Holidays, kids.
xo,
Kirsti
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