10 Things: Tara Giancaspro
Places to visit, things to do, apps to download, stuff to buy: you got it all right here with our brilliant guest blogger!
Hello Wonderful Readers!
The post below comes to you from the brilliant mind of
, whose Substack is one of the most fun, culture-y, gently snarky (in all the best ways!) places on the internet. She has written nice things about me below, and I’m so grateful; she deserves just as many nicenesses back at her. This 10 things list is better than mine ever are, so I hope you’ll enjoy!With Love,
Sophie
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One of my goals for 2024 as a writer was to collaborate with the one, the only Sophie Lucido Johnson. If you’re here, you also love Sophie: her gentle joy, her vulnerability, her passion for approaching life from a place of “yes.” I love Sophie for an additional reason: she helped me leave my abusive relationship.
I picked up her book Many Love at the exact right time. It was released at the exact right time! I was in a “polyamorous” relationship where both women were coerced into the arrangement against our desires, and the triangulation I experienced had the sharpest corners. Reading Many Love was the affirmation I needed that poly could and should be healthy, that my relationship was not normal, that a hierarchy could exist without subjugation. I cried reading her book, and it was one of the sacred texts I read right as I went no contact with my abuser. It was 2018, and I am still grateful to Sophie today. Her work was a tangible catalyst towards my freedom, and I’d like to take this time to thank her. Thank you. I have recommended this book to people in my life who want to try non-monogamy, and to those who want to expand or redefine their relationships: transitioning from romance to friendship, the other way around, and integrating chosen family in ways that feel right for one but not for many.
I really love this newsletter and I’m not even really into birds like that. If I want to roll with warm-blooded avoidant attachment vertebrate I’ll get back on Bumble thanks!! It’s the wings. Where are you even GOING? But she makes me stop and look at the birds! I have noticed so many starlings since subscribing, and I think of Sophie every time. I’m so honored to contribute a guest entry to this special little space.
1. WATCH Son of the White Mare (1981, dir. Marcell Jankovics)
An early 1980’s Hungarian animated fairytale that I recommend to everyone. It’s the coolest thing about me, that I know and adore this visual masterpiece. Every still of this movie could be framed and hung on your wall. It is resplendent, and it offers the purest and true depiction of motherhood. Treeshaker’s nascence in the embrace of his mother was so intimate I felt a bit wrong observing it.
Watch it for free here, though I recommend buying an HD copy or watching it on a large screen. I’m sober, but I’ve heard it’s wonderful to watch while high.
2. VISIT: Fiore’s
Before I am a depressive, an Italian, a leftist, a lover of leopard print, a Leo rising, I am a proud Hoboken-American. I am the fourth generation of Giancaspro to curse our one-way grid system as I navigate around 17 blocks to turn onto the corner I need to, and I would change nothing. The best part of Hoboken is not the gay dog parade I threw for Pride this year1, not how every single small business here has a photo of Frank Sinatra prominent in the window as if mandated by city ordinance, but Fiore’s, the deli of dreams.
Fiore’s is familial lore: once you endure the line of goombas and tourists around the block (deserved), you walk in and there’s a rendering of my late uncle Vin: a behind-the-counter staple for decades, an angel above the mutz. Every Giancaspro Christmas features an antipast’ and always will.
Hoboken to me is the food capital of the world: delectable Italian, pho, Cuban, Indian, pastry, French, everything you’d want in a mile square, and evolved enough to offer gluten-free dough for your pizza and vegan nut cheeses.
But Fiore’s is the best of it, so much so that if you’re a 30 Rock fan, the Thursday special (also available on Saturdays) is the Teamsters sandwich.
My recommendation is to get the special as it comes (fresh, salty, wet mutz, roast beef, long roll) with the dipping gravy on the side so as to not coat your lil tote bag and entire body in it, and the sun-dried tomatoes, garlic-stewed to send a vampire running for their EpiPen.
I very recently went a bit viral for reminding the public of this on Twitter because I am a wonderful person who loves doing wonderful deeds. I’ll settle for a statue of me, double-fisting two specials, somewhere along 5th Street.
3. DOWNLOAD: SongShift
I’m one of those sick freaks who uses Apple Music, and if you’re one of us, one of us, you know that everyone and their grandmother will send you the default SPOTIFY playlist. This agonized me. And then my friend Mike turned me onto SongShift, an app which lets you convert playlists from Spotify to Apple and back, landing the full playlist, title and image and all, in your library of choice. The only limitations are around which service might not host an artist’s music (cough Joni Mitchell).
4. READ:
One of my favorite favorite blogs on Substack: Sarah is a pink-haired pole dancer and unreal film critic, who writes her film commentary through the lens of scent: olfactory landscapes of the dark, interesting films she watches as well as the perfume she imagines characters might wear and what it says about them. She did a guest post on my blog about the “best eyefuckings in cinema,” to give you a sense of her rich writing. I adore her work and have learned so much about how to weave the sense of smell into my work as a writer.
5. LISTEN TO: Little Hag
Here’s a song about wanting to get your period over with:
Avery’s music is ferocious and New Jersey and a more ribald Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack and it’s perfect. I also interviewed her recently and on top of being this incredibly cool, Buddy Holly-warblin’ kinda Stanwyck dame, she’s so funny and blessedly weird.
6. BUY: Rabbit Brush Shag Spray
This is the only hair product I use. The cedar rose scent is so delicious: it’s not too woodsy, but not too sugary either. It feels like a real floral scent. You can opt in to have the curl spray come with glitter! I never do sponcon, ever, but they reached out knowing how often I buy their shag spray and I was only too happy to make a video to thank them especially as they’re quite a small business. I don’t get anything in return for this, but they gave me one of those codes if you want to try it yourself: TARA at checkout for 15% off.
7. MAKE: a strutting playlist
For when you need that confidence boost. I just watched Saturday Night Fever for the first time in a while and we all deserve our Tony Manero moment. Mine features “Wah-Wah” by George Harrison, Kesha’s “Gold Trans Am,” “Black Betty” by Ramjam OBVIOUSLY, “Gold Rush Pt. I” by the Asteroids Galaxy Tour, and more. Listen here.
8. VISIT: The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore
I visited Baltimore for the first time with my friends The Frogs (the name of our group chat; we share a lot of frog memes but also talk about soup and Frog Amy’s job a lot) specifically to visit AVAM. Thank you to
for recommending the museum in your newsletter!I rarely have visceral emotional experiences in museums. I look at a painting, I look at a bowl, I read a plaque, I look at another bowl, I run Mystery Science Theater commentary over the events of the statue in front of me, I yip with glee when a portrait has a little doggie in it, I hit the gift shop. But AVAM was different. Fifi is what drew me in:
But I found myself weeping, and then turned around to find each of my frogginas weeping, copiously, at the embroidered tapestries of Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family, Holocaust remembrances stitched by the trauma-worn hands of Esther Krinitz. As a proud Jew, the depiction of an elder Jewish man’s beard being sliced away by a member of the SS shattered me. As someone looking on at the genocide of Palestinians in horror, the exhibition was complicated, timely, potent. And mounted with great grace by the museum, who in this and other exhibitions took care to connect the artists to their eras and ours, to establish without pedantry the institutionalized odds against their hosted artists and to create an immersive, distinct viewing ground for each. The Judith Scott wing was a powerful reminder that neurodivergence needs to be not only normalized but rewarded. What an artist.
The gift shop, Sideshow, is phenomenal. Insanely affordable trinkets, books on the featured artists, and so much stuff with John Waters’ face on it. I opened a small drawer in a large chest with the label “Rick Springfield” affixed to it and was greeted with about 17,000 tiny springy coils.
There is a box labeled “Roy Orbison” and it’s just full of big round orbs. I could go on.
I can’t recommend a trip to Baltimore enough to view this museum, and a stop at the marvelous, maximalist Papermoon Diner after, where I had a havarti grilled cheese with mango chutney for which I, weeks later, yearn, pine, perish.
Also, there are so many Pez dispensers. So many.
9. PATRONIZE: Deadly Prey Gallery
A Chicago-based business that employs (and delivers all profits to) Ghanaian artists to create depictions of movies I am not entirely sure if the painters have actually seen. I own this. You could own this. Go look at the available prints in awe.
SING: “ Fantastic Man” to your large, dumb son
Bless David Byrne for many reasons:
That time he got mugged and said “Uh oh!” out loud while being hauled off into shrubbery, as told by Brian Eno
“Road to Nowhere,” my favorite song of all time
Lifting up the music of the late, great William Onyeabor, Nigerian businessman and scribe of the perfect song, “Fantastic Man”
I learned of this artist through a playlist Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! compiled for her Patreon, but David Byrne is the reason Onyeabor’s music was sourced, preserved, and released into the modern era through his label Luaka Bop. Luaka Bop wrote a lovely obituary when Onyeabor passed in 2017 where you can learn more about him and his music. His songs are infectious, but none more than “Fantastic Man,” which is some of the most joyous shit I have ever heard in my little life. You can’t not shimmy and sing along.
I also highly recommend having a beautiful drooly man around to dedicate it to, such as my perfect himbo child Lugosi.
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Tara OMG your hair is AMAZING!!!
Thank you for the song shift mention! I didn’t think there was such a thing and it will be so useful. :)