16 / zinnia, speedwell, calamint
Some synergy, some nifty links, some overwhelming love [as per], and the second FLORET | FEATURETTE.
Hello! How are you doing!
As per the order of things:
This week, I reviewed I Get So Emotional Baby by All You Can Eat Productions for bad apple [tl;dr: it’s good!!!]1
I was also very fortunate to be a guest on the Poetry Snaps podcast, and to chat to the wonderful Sarah about fruit and comedy and community and experiences that happen to you, as well as about Short Films, and that episode is out now! You can listen to it here, and also in other places, if you would like 🍊
Short Films—not sure if you’ve heard of it?—is out in less than two weeks. Under a fortnight. I’m going to hold back the h-heavy what because I imagine it must get tiresome, even if it never gets any less true. Thirteen days away still counts as preorder season, though. Have at it, baby!
The book is launching in Tāmaki Makaurau on October 27, 6pm at SOAP Dance Hall, 12 Beresford Square (off Karangahape Road/Pitt Street)
With an introduction by Maddie Ballard and a reading by Jackson McCarthy—and I’m giddy again! What a release day gift!
The book is launching in Te Whanganui-a-Tara on November 1, 6pm at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 211 Left Bank (off Cuba Street)
With an introduction by Francis Cooke and readings by Claudia Jardine and Sinead Overbye—a pre-Verb assembly of greats! [ah!]
We’re kicking off very bulkily with the bullet points, aren’t we! Ah, well. When it rains, it pours. (And when it pains, it ro[u/a]rs!)
This week has flown by, dotted with delights and kindnesses. Yesterday, in particular, was dense with them.
The printed copies of Short Films arrived with the Babies, and I got to see a whole box of the books. I also got to see the cover of the book on said box of books, which somehow thrilled me more than the books did—perhaps because it was so incidental. And I received a very thoughtful email from the aforementioned Maddie Ballard. It brightened my day, as M tends to.2
After work, I went to visit C at the stall she was running, selling her ever-expanding-but-entirely-cohesive catalogue of wares. I ended up staying four hours. It was four hours well spent, too: whispering silly jokes; putting items in bags; adding up profits; running to nearby shops to break $50 notes against a $3 purchase (once a donut, once a pair of Vitasoy soy chocolate milk cartons—the latter a half disaster, when C’s paper straw promptly dissolved).
C—straw aside—was in her element. She was approachable, and charming, and sitting there with her amidst this bustling market, when people were consistently and enthusiastically admiring her work, engaging with it, purchasing it to keep, filled me with a degree of joy I tried (and ultimately, I think, failed) to express to her. I couldn’t help thinking about all of the aspects of the people we love that we don’t get to see. In the same way our families—in a lot of cases—get the worst of us, there is a kind of reversed love-blinkering that happens with friends. We are too close to the canvas, almost. Because part of what I love about C is that she swings big and sees things through when they matter to her, and I knew that—I had never forgotten it—but getting to see the physical manifestation of it was something else. It was like watching a play from the wings for weeks, then stepping out into the auditorium.
All this to say: I, like Kris Jenner, Love My Friends.
FLORET | FEATURETTE, vol. 2
As promised, the second FLORET | FEATURETTE. Teaser, trailer, soldier, spy x
i.
ii.
The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.
Wassily Kandinsky (qtd. on pg. 7 of Hajo Duchting’s Kandinsky, 2007)
iii.
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v.
More soon. Enjoy your weekend. I hope you have some source of excitement whirring away within you. Be well.3
T
A few hours prior to seeing I Get So Emotional Baby, I read Janaye Kirtikar’s Pantograph Punch essay, ‘Alternative Routes to Love’. To distil the essay into a choice couple of quotable lines would do the all-encompassing absolutely yesness of it a disservice, so I recommend you go and read it in full. I felt understood—and bolstered, and spurred on—by Kirtikar’s writing, in the same overwhelming way I did listening to Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever album. Where the latter made me want to tear my jaw off its hinges, though, and claw my heart out of my chest, ‘Alternative Routes to Love’ produced a glow: a kind of raspberry liquorice crimson, bright and whole and good.
I sent the link off to friends immediately: here are the conversations we are always having, and someone else is having them, too, and how full and powerful and right, and the love I have for you and for the fact we have each other and choose each other is too large for any of our bodies to contain, held too closely for any embrace, and oh YES dude that lil creature guy IS K and also my condolences abt the snack situation in ur house [obnoxious number of screaming/crying/throwing up emojis]. I had a similar response to I Get So Emotional Baby, wanting to call my friends and tell them about it, about seeing ourselves presented externally, albeit with a complex delight and grief necessitated by the subject matter. To experience the essay and the show in such rapid succession was like watching a precious mineral undergo compression, from liquid to solid, refined right down to its core. Big themes! Big feelings! I am so lucky to be alive!
M released a new Field Notes instalment today, by the way. Our closest mutual friend is securing a contract for their own Substack Cinematic Universe as we speak. (💌💞)
BeReal. Bee Movie.