Something Like #29: The Love Affair of Friendship, w/ Bitsy Knox

How is it that for every song about the special kind of love of friendship, there are hundreds about breaking up? In celebration of Valentine’s Day coming up, this 29th episode of Something Like plumbs acid folk and avant-garde composition alike to search out the love involved between friends, and what that could mean. This is no invective against romantic love but we might take a renewed look at a couple of love songs, asking if they could apply to your best friend too.

• Special thanks to Rosa & Dylan Aiello, Nooa Avo, Oopie Ghosh & Nadia Jones, Orsod Malik, Hoora Sarajan, and Camilla Wills for their excellent input into the making of this episode! Happy Valentines Day, my friends! Will you be my valentine? I choo choo choose you!

• As ever, Something Like’s jingle comes courtesy of my dearest friend, Roger 3000. Check out the precious new release on his imprint Tundra Records by DJ New Smile here.

• HONEY is a riso printed zine meditating on the experiences of friendship. The project was conceived by two friends who recognised non-familial connections were entirely formative to their politics, welfare and identities, but observed a marked lack of attention on modern forms of friendship in print media. Order your copy of Honey here and check them out on instagram.

• Orsod Malik is a Sudani curator, editor and digital archivist. He is the founder of @code__switch, an archive/continuum of radical internationalism and a curator at the Stuart Hall Foundation. His work attempts to draw links between yesterday’s anti-imperial struggles and immediate conjunctures.

• adrienne maree brown is a writer, a pleasure activist, a sci-fi/Octavia Butler scholar, a facilitator (non-active), a speaker/singer (including wedding singer) and a doula living in Detroit. I read an excerpt from their Coevolution Through Friendship (February 5, 2013), which was published in HONEY.

• Cat Cohen is a comedian and writer. Nooa Avo read her poem, poem I wrote after I looked at your jawline and it ruined my life

• Sandra M. Gilbert (born December 27, 1936) is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. I read her poem, Thinking About an Old Friend (1980).

• Emily Brontë was a British writer. In this episode, I read her poem Love and Friendship.