The Checkout Counter #33
July 2025

Offside

Strange Bedfellows

Taiwan Travelogue

welcome, august 👋 i've been steadily adding new pages to my website: /clubhouse, /colophon, and /lists. being upset over the current state of the internet makes me pour a bunch of work into this place, who knew!

thanks, as always, for reading 🤍

Film

  • Offside, 2006 (آفساید)this is the third jafar panahi film i've seen, and i think it's safe to say that he's become one of my favorite directors.

    this movie is so funny and full of warmth for all its characters. the ending is something really special—and to think it would've ended differently if iran had lost the match in real life! how panahi blurs the line between fiction and reality is so deft.
    Drama, comedy. A group of women are apprehended for attempting to sneak into the 2006 Word Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain.
  • Caravaggio, 1986fully expected a semi-standard biopic lol! what a gorgeous and dreamlike view of the 17th century, using the same type of anachronisms that would have appeared in the painter's own works.
    Drama, romance, history. An impressionistic take on the life of the 17th century painter Caravaggio.
  • The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen), 2003i really debated putting this here or not; my watching experience was so painful with constant secondhand embarrassment, i had to reach for my phone and scroll aimlessly on the side just to get some kind of audiovisual break (i usually can't even eat while watching movies—i don't like distractions!).

    this is an agonizingly real portrait of loneliness and what it makes people do that no other quirky-single-woman-in-her-20s story can come close to. i was doing that thing people do during horror movies, when the audience can't help but talk to the characters on the screen ("why did you do that?!", "no, don't go over there!"). i guess this is a horror movie, in a way!
    Drama. After moving to a new city for her first teaching job, Melanie soon discovers that everything is much tougher than she imagined.

Books

  • Bad Nature, Ariel Courage
    Literary. After learning that she has only a few months left to live, Hester embarks on a cross-country roadtrip to do what she's been dreaming of for decades: kill her father.
  • Taiwan Travelogue, YĂĄng Shuāng-zǐ (tr. Lin King)i'm so obsessed with this book. its framing as a translation of a japanese text; the english translator being able to insert herself into the narrative; the relationship between chizuko and chizuru being translated over and over again, the two women immortalized while at the same time becoming more distant from the source text, which itself is only chizuko's interpretation of events…this has it all!

    lin king's note at the very end tied everything together for me in a neat bow (how strange that it only exists in the english translation!): "Surely Aoyama and Chi-chan would be tickled by this: a Taiwanese translator, while bringing the book to the ultimate colonial language of English, has struggled to determine how the Japanese colonial government would have pronounced Taiwanese terms and therefore consulted the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel. Oh dear oh dear oh dear!"
    Historical, literary, romance. A Japanese novelist's account of her year in colonial Taiwan and her inexplicable relationship with her Taiwanese interpreter.

Music

  • Bird's Eye, Ravyn Lenaelove me not is the kind of song i hear once and become instantly hooked. song of the summer 😌
    Alternative R&B, soul

Comics

  • my sincerest wish for Cathy, Madeleine Jubilee Saito
  • Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Riesi've been following ariel ries' work for a long time and it's such a joy to look upon this gorgeously rendered story. the dream sequences are colored in a different style, making them really pop—and there's a certain sequence where the frames seem to melt and fall apart in such a unique and masterful example of paneling. the act three twist got me! didn't expect it!
    Scifi, romance. Oberon discovers that he has the power to conjure his dreams in the real world—including a facsimile of his high school crush.

Articles & essays

  • How to Dress and Undress your Home, Kris De Deckerin the summer, my grandparents in japan use sudare (ç°ž) to shade their windows—i never thought much of it until reading this.
  • Found in Translation, Michelle Kuo"These multiple editions across the passage of time suggest that love, though unconsummated or imperfect, endures and finds new forms. Each time a new edition is released, it’s infused afresh with the longing of the people who bring it to life — writers, translators, scholars and, of course, ourselves, the readers. Each afterword advances the plot, generating revelations, questions and new pleasures. Yet as each new edition appears, the original text becomes more encircled and distant. These two young women who encounter one another in Taiwan will never see each other again. Reduced to a trace of the past, their love — and the missed opportunity that defines it — takes on greater poignancy."
  • How the Religious Right Censor Morally Objectionable Content to Target Queer and Adult Media, Kastel

Blogs

  • I belong in a museum, Laura Michetlol i went to this exact museum last year and didn't pay particular attention to the video game exhibit, but i did ponder at the disco elysium panel for a very long time.
  • Eroticism Forever!, Em Reed

Around the web

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