21 / olive branch, baby's breath

Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you [if you are Yayoi Kusama's 'The Passing Winter'] 🌬

Kia ora from July!

First, the latest in publication news. I reviewed:

• Janaye Henry’s Crush Season

• Liv Parker’s Vampires, Werewolves and Harry Styles

• Hannah Tasker-Poland’s The Most Naked

over on bad apple. In terms of what’s coming up in the world of Vaguely Adjacent To Me, Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival is opening in Tāmaki Makaurau on the 19th of this month, after which it will begin its journey across the country.¹ Great programme this year, team—get in touch if you’re after recs x

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'The Passing Winter', Yayoi Kusama (2023 vs. 2018)

Earlier this week, I was telling V how my strange faith in five-year coils of fate may be changing, that there might be something rather more magnetic at play, in which five years have already become four will become three and two and so on, and she reminded me, gently, that we’re still only halfway through 2023. That there is plenty of time for something more miraculous than 2022 offered—that, as Lear would say, and as I (perhaps insufferably) quoted back to her, there’s life in’t.

It feels strange that we’re only just over the halfway point. With the move from AAF to NZIFF² and the far-behind-me-feeling season of Champions, and all else that might have carried over and marked an end, it seems like a trick against the calendar. To look back and consider everything that has come to pass since my move back to Tāmaki Makaurau at the beginning of August last year (coming up on twelve months ago, but pointedly not there yet!) is much the same: almost unfathomable. We talk a lot about how time speeds up as we get older, because each new slice of it cuts a smaller sliver of all the others, but, god, can’t we fit a lot in!

Recently, I used a spare hour on a sunlit Sunday to catch the closing day of Light from Tate: 1700s to Now. It had been hanging over me to go for months. We’d had the exhibition under the AAF umbrella; I had seen a poet from out of town post a picture of the Kandinsky and felt my heart flood with something as the sight of a crush might; and the ads were everywhere. Lots of friends, and friends’ boyfriends, pointing out the common name.³ And yet I’d put it off, and put it off, and put it off, until—of course, as these things tend to unfold—it was the final day of the exhibition, and I was buying a ticket and whizzing across town, trying to squeeze it in before I was due to see my cousins in the NYT production of Cats.

It was a busy closing day, but unquestionably worth it. I ran into V, and T, who was only in town briefly. The Brett was astonishing, for its scale and intricacy; I loved James Turrell’s ‘Raemar, Blue’ and ‘Disappearance at Sea’ by Tacita Dean, and the Eliassons and so many other installations. I stood a minute at the Kandinsky, eavesdropping on public opinion. One woman turned to a companion: ‘I can’t believe that’s from 1925!’ she said. We made eye contact as she moved on, and shared the quick, starry smile of two strangers with a moment in common.

Time was playing on my mind as I made it through the exhibition, and not just because I had limited stock of it. In one of the earlier rooms, I spotted Monet’s ‘Japanese Bridge’ (1924), a later iteration of the bridge depicted in several of his works, and from which we can glean, through its colours and brushstrokes, the effect Monet’s cataracts were having on his vision. I hadn’t known the painting would be part of the exhibition; at first sight, I put my hand on my heart, and weaved through the crowd in the small room to reach it.

The closest analogue I can give to what I felt then would be encountering a relative by surprise, someone you were close to as a child but have not seen in many years, whom you have consequently in the time since been able both to recall fondly and to mythologise. And now you find yourself faced with them, out of nowhere, and you can’t quite believe your luck, and they’re smaller than you thought, but you also could never have accounted for scale, and they are so close you could reach out and touch them; and it brings to the surface some part of you that existed before your enduring conscious memory: a self you have experienced secondhand but can therefore hold closer to yourself, somehow, because those attributes were tangible and evident enough for your loved ones to acknowledge them.

When I was a child, I was given a copy of Linnea in Monet’s Garden. By my Granny, I believe. Not long after—it had to be about the same time—I had a crude, enthusiastic child’s go at painting the same eponymous bridge, and all its accompanying water lilies, across four seasons, in the shifting palettes of summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Over the years since, my memory patched the narrative up and at some stage decided that quadriptych was pulled from a seasonal series Monet himself had done, but I imagine now that if it came from anything painter-related it was the distinct reds and yellows, and then greens and blues, that arose from the aforementioned cataracts. Nevertheless, we used to have four little Fountain-after-Monets hanging in the corridor of my childhood home. Seeing the genuine article—here in Tāmaki Makaurau, especially—at once extended a thread through the intervening years and flat-stacked them: a cosmic concertina.

Encountering Yayoi Kusama’s ‘The Passing Winter’ further along in the exhibition shouldn’t have come as a similar surprise; when I came across it in 2018, it was—where else?—at the Tate Modern. Still, making my way down the hallway between rooms and catching it through the door ahead of me, its cube of cutout mirrors balanced on a plinth, already teasing the fathoms therein, I got the same bloom of recognition as I had with Monet. The same tug of the heart. Not for childhood, this time, but for the step back in that five-year [r?]evolution. For the chasm between that girl, and her world, and me and mine. For, perhaps at the core of it, everything that hasn’t changed.

It’s actually not quite five years since I saw ‘The Passing Winter’—not just yet. Instagram tells me that was the 2nd of August. At this point, five years ago, I was with S’s family in Camelford; I was a month away from turning twenty, which I would do in Edinburgh, walking around other galleries and then retiring to C’s family home, where we would eat marmalade chicken. As it stood, in Camelford that July, S was in the first few glowing days of twenty-one. Dani Dyer was en route to win Love Island, and it seemed like football might come home.⁴ It’s lifetimes ago now. And yet ‘The Passing Winter’, sitting as it did in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki on that Sunday at the tail end of June, reminded me these things did happen. They materially existed, and I made my way through them.⁵ And, in many respects, that time is unrecoverable. You could tee it all up exactly the same and never get it back, and such is the way of things.

But I do find myself hopeful. Not on the basis of ever encountering circumstances quite like those of that summer, or of any other period—but rather that, alongside what perceived loss there has been, the loss inherent in endings and even just in the passage of time, there are ways that the world reaches out for you. There are ways back to these anchors: great loves and inspirations and feelings that exist outside time. All of it generative. Things circle around when you least expect them (cheesy!), so long as you’ve made yourself available to magic.

I feel like we tend to end up here, which may have more to do with optimism and faith than with the universe. I don’t know where it leaves me on five-year cycles vs. exponential orbits, particularly—apart from, perhaps, due a miracle, to settle the point. I can live with that, though. There’s still just about half a year left. I wonder how it might match up to the first one; I’ve been caught by surprise enough not to assume that it won’t. There’s life in’t, after all, isn’t there?

Ah, yes, life—and hope—in it yet.

• Myles Wheeler remains the best of YouTube; his recent five-part series about a trip around Japan with his brother Ryan is gentle and gripping and well-crafted and deeply, deeply funny.

• MUNA’s ‘What I Want’ and ‘One That Got Away’: two big hype tracks of late—brilliant pieces of production, accompanied here by two glorious music videos (classic MUNA fare! 😘), directed by Ally Pankiw and Taylor James.⁶

• Freya Daly Sadgrove’s ‘HORSE POLO TONGUE SWALLOW’, published in Cordite: a hit as a fully formed poem, but also just the greatest, most distilled closing line (in the sense of line, and also sentence and sentiment).⁷

• Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Night That Overflows My Body’: Oh god oh god oh god!

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On the phone to V at the end of May: No act of creation ever comes easily.

On the train home from Te Whanganui-a-Tara: hills like draped linen

In a shot of sparkling, absolute clarity, reflecting on a formative period and the details of that time, details that would demand to be shared if I were ever to recount events properly, to adequately impress upon [whomever] the reasons I cannot surrender what that time gave me, what its hours of dire waiting and walking—hope, heat waves, and no money—came to mean, how foundational it was and is and how much I must hold onto it as something I loved and will love, a time that was everything to me: Oh, that’s—that’s vehement. I mean it: I can’t give them that.⁸

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Red Triptych (Script Club at Coco’s Cantina, King Lear at ASB Waterfront Theatre, dinner with K at Conch) 🌹

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And there we are! July, birth month of many a beloved.

As per: I’m also on Instagram, if that’s your thing; and I have a website (including exactly one [1] Succession Easter egg, if you can find it).

My poetry collection, Short Films, is available directly from Tender Press and in bookstores across Aotearoa. You can also read Starling, full of wonderful work from New Zealand writers under 25, right here.

Hope someone’s out there making you laugh x

🌹 T

1. Full disclosure: I work for this festival! 🤠 It is a joy, as is cinema, and engaging with cinema, and getting to do so every day. I’d be excited for NZIFF anyway, but it is my job, and it felt weird not to clarify that here. All views my own, all views my own, all views my own.

2. AAF: Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki | Auckland Arts Festival.

NZIFF: Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival.

3. Yes, picked partially on purpose. Yes, thanks, Mum. 💕

4. Have I described the summer that way before? It’s what I always reach for. If I have, pretend you’re just in on the joke like I’m a comedian you’ve seen do the same tight five four times, in venues across the city, plus twice on Reels for posterity, and it’s no one’s fault, you’ve just overegged it, you’re too devoted, and you don’t begrudge me for it, you just might not come to every gig, and I don’t blame you for that, because I couldn’t, and perhaps sometimes you’ll squeeze past me when you’re heading in to see a different act, and I’ll be wearing a different piece of weathered casual headwear every time, and you’ll get a kick out of it, and I won’t know, but what if I do, what if I do remember, what if this could’ve been something, what if things were just slightly different, what if I’d switched up my cadence, what if you hadn’t stepped away to make a coffee and left my tired Reel cycling on repeat, almost to the point you grew to resent it, what if—

5. There is a limit to how long these entries can be, so this particular newsletter possibly isn’t the place to go into it, but there is much more to be drawn between what I’m touching on here and ‘The Passing Winter’ itself; I encourage you to read the Tate’s online summary of the work ❄

6. Sure, perhaps the lyrics of ‘One That Got Away’ aren’t exactly ‘hype material’—I hear you naysayers and I raise you sad bangers—HOWEVER! Riddle me this, chaps! IF YOU NEVER PUT IT ON THE LINE, HOW AM I GONNA SIGN! FOR IT!!!!!!!!!!!

7. I love the brazen candour of full-naming someone dear to you in a poem. (It’s the same reason I’m so pro-‘pete davidson’!) I love the duality of it: a big swing and the most stripped-back act imaginable—of course you’re putting their name on it, or in it: they’re already there. They’re the you. And, yes, there’s a safety in that ‘you’, and a kind of boyband-lens commercial viability: anything and anyone can be projected onto a ‘you’; the reader can be both speaker and recipient. But I love cutting through all that. Being straightforward instead. Just laying it all out.

And in the case of a song like ‘pete davidson’ (or any other overt reference!*), I don’t think it matters if it doesn’t work out. I think, if anything, that makes it even more brave. That it might not work out, and you’re here engaging in either the act of faith that it will or the commitment to a lack of pride in the event that it doesn’t. Or both! I think there’s a lot of beauty in such a specific tether. I don’t know. I’m self-protective. I live in the yous and never write anything fun ever.

*Anybody order a ‘Karma is the guy on the screen / coming straight home to me’? [eyes emoji but the eyes are ballooning out of the skull like a cartoon character’s]

8. Which came as a shock to me! The total line that I didn’t realise was there! (Also, classic writer move to be like, ‘as Nora would say, everything is copy, but I simply refuse to give them that’—‘give them that’, like any of you care or have asked for it!!! Baby, get a grip!!! 🤪)