22 / gloriosa lily, astilbe, ranunculus
Workdays, off-days, birthdays, sloth-days! 🌕🦋 Or: Are the goodies in the footies? The footnotes? Are they—are they there? Are th—I don’t— Look, you be the judge!
Hello, hello, hello!
Since last newsletter:
I reviewed Peter Burman and Murdoch Keane’s Minnie & Judy over on bad apple
NZIFF 2023 opened x15, and closed x15 (ending last Sunday in Whakatū Nelson, its final city)
My friend Isabella started her own Substack with an entry about Champions
I turned 25 (slightly more on this later)
Two Saturdays ago, K picked me up and we made our way to Cornwall Park. It was a rare day of sun and warmth. I was hours into the first full day off I’d had since mid-July, a day that would be followed by a Sunday of work of a different kind, followed by the first week at a new job—none of which I include in order to glamourise the fact of those circumstances, nor to engender sympathy, but rather to articulate the sweet and, by then, strange sensation of relief at a day free of obligation. A day that was mine to do with as I pleased, with no need to be to hand, or On Phone, or generating.1
We managed to get our order right at the fish and chip shop, a source of low-stakes failure that has plagued us for about four years. I added a close-of-contract oyster after the Denizen article I was consulting recommended them, alongside a note that mirrored the essential outline of our plan for the day. We drove with a soundtrack of Kate Bush [chaise tongue-mandated], windows down, and found a park.2 We delighted at it being lambing season.
As the use of a singular snatched down day goes, this one was a balm. Part of living in the Absolute City is that any excursion elsewhere can feel almost like a holiday, a pocket of relief and stolen time—a world that is either entirely separate from the veins of yours, or else the real one from which you are drawn away, into your own studio universe.
I think this was exacerbated by the beautiful, eclectic marathon of what my previous months’ work had been: hundreds of hours spent in pseudo-plush, low-ceilinged board room bunkers, devoid of natural light; hopping between cinemas, dashing up and down flights of stairs; introducing screenings; interviewing filmmakers in the Civic Wintergarden and onstage at ASB Waterfront Theatre; returning to old haunts in a new pair of shoes; making the novel familiar. In many ways, no experience is as romantic as you envision it to be—but on the same planet are sly, spare Wednesdays that sweep you off to the spectacular. Where what is commonplace shifts, for a while. Moments that have you looking around and thinking, had I known, four months ago—four years ago—ten, even.3
I find there is a lot of that. It’s been true of this past contract, especially, but, looking back through my Substack entries4 and the plain ol’ annals of memory, I think it’s just the nature of time. Time, and life, and continuing to actualise yourself as the path builds in tandem under your feet. And what is new, and sometimes—though not always—frantic, will give way to either another unpredictable, fizzing reality, or to the breath out you have been craving: to something that was once new, something to be felt out in sweaty Symonds Street summers or queen bed voice-notes or shoulders fresh with freckles, that along the way became home and habit, and then, with life, became rare again.
When you encounter the latter, you’ll hold tight to it. To the freedom it represents and to the same quality it makes tangible. And spring, if you can believe it, will have arrived. It will have arrived, and it will stay, and it will leave again.
This month, I’ve been conscious to avoid unspooling too quickly—aware of what can overtake you when the adrenaline finally wears off. I’ve been enjoying little thrills: going to bed earlier; waking naturally on weekends; having breakfast by the window as the sun and breeze roll in. I’m excited by my new work. I’ve grooved through many a live performance.
I’ve spent several of these past silent weeks wanting to write and not succeeding at it. Which I am less inclined to make beautiful. It’s not been for a lack of drive or momentum—I have felt that beloved propulsion, a ravenous thudding of the heart; I think by now you may have gleaned that the whole time I’ve been gone was momentum—but rather a lack of space in the brain. Precisely the kind of thing that happens when one exists too long in ricochet.
I toyed with the idea of it being the fact I would have been writing from ‘within’ something (ostensibly the film festival). Historically, a not-insignificant portion of my impulse to write has been an effort to gain, by way of writing,5 entry into spaces I have felt were barred to me. And now, increasingly, I find myself in the spaces of which I once wrote—and, y’know, where does that leave me? (It’s an attractive prospect. To diagnose it as that, and leave off here with some Tangled quip about how you get to go find a new dream.)
But I really do think it’s more tiredness than a matter of restless satisfaction. For one, you can feel too far from something even looking it right in the eye—watching the light glint off its perfect silhouette, catching the delicate hair of its body. When anything takes up so much of your life that you, even willingly, become a vessel for its delivery, you are by way of that process relinquishing (for a time) an acuity otherwise essential to you. That’s just the truth of it.
I think it is time, though, to be a little selfish with my creativity again. Just in terms of claiming periods where my priority is seeing my own work through.6 There’s been a bit of talk of falling in love of late—I mean, when isn’t there? and rightly so! precious state!—but when it comes down to it I think the devotion I’m most seeking is that required by artistic endeavour. The kind that has you out at dinner wanting to get back to your work, that covers a wall in post-it notes creating Three-Act Structures out of poetry. I miss, and have missed, it. That doggedness. (Perhaps, if I had read the book, this is where I would make a joke about Nightbitch.)
Anyway, I did need to go out and do some living after Short Films. Collect some new points of reference, tumble headlong into new loves. Out of other ones. These worlds we build are always shifting. We’re both architects and products of them.
Wham! (dir. Chris Smith): I watched this in July, and have dipped back in periodically since. It’s bright and warm and insightful as a portrait of both friendship and ambition. It made me think a lot about how love can encourage us to become the best of ourselves, how we can find transformative strength in those around us; how things that draw us apart don’t have to sever us. There are many moments in it that have stuck in my mind.7 (The behind-the-scenes footage of the ‘Last Christmas’ music video left me with the burning desire to be surrounded by genuine friends, caught by delight and disbelief at our career circumstances, engaged in the kind of fun that will eventually be clipped up, soundtracked, and packaged as its own narrative, something large-scale that comes from a reality rather more intimate.)
Past Lives (written and directed by Celine Song): Film Of All Time. Sometimes you see a film that speaks with such ease and precision to an absolute sensibility you hold, and it gives you such hope for the things you want to see, and for the things you are inclined—and driven—to make, and you know instantly that it is a favourite of yours, perhaps even the favourite, if such a thing can be qualified; and sometimes you have these experiences having also just been chatting, in your tiny bunker office in the back corner of an incredible theatre, with your colleagues and friends and the person who made said film, as well as the screenwriter behind one of your most anticipated films of what-was-meant-to-be-2023-and-is-now-going-to-be-2024; and the juxtaposed grandeur of the viewing experience, and the completeness of the film, and the proven, tangible personhood of its creator, coalesce to remind you not only creatively but practically of what is possible, what can really happen, what actively has, and where you find yourself in relation to all of that potential. That nothing is ever as easy nor as impossible as you think it is. That, as I’ve already said, nothing will come about quite the way you imagine it might, which can also be a blessing. And sometimes things just happen, and, actually, you’re good. Anyway, that’s speaking to more than just the film, or those days. Past Lives is in cinemas across Aotearoa now, if you missed it at NZIFF.
Ride with Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone
Hozier’s Unreal Unearth
The The Modern House and Architectural Digest YouTube channels
The Chip Shop in Royal Oak
Further reading.8
Well, here we are, for now, and that’s that.
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.
Love from, and to, the departed August, and September, now in bloom x
🌺 T
Weekend?! What?!
A Park park.
Well, ten is an interesting prospect: I don’t know about ten. I may have said this before, but whenever I think about my current self meeting my teenaged one, all I can think of are the ways her absolutism would find fit to prove I’ve failed her. I think, though, there is a difference between living a life and dreaming of one. Certainly a difference between planning a life and seeing it through. There’s too much you can’t account for. Perhaps I’m not giving that past self enough credit—I know that, now, there are times I can’t actively, pragmatically, predict my path to realising those tightest-held ambitions. Perhaps she was the same. Still, I hope she wouldn’t be too frustrated with me. I hope we could hold each other with equal compassion.
Narcissist! 🤪
—consciously or not—
Otherwise, on a base level, where does all this inspiration from facilitating other people’s work go? I cannot appreciate anything without generating energy to expel! (Bring! back! skipping down the street! like a girl who is a galloping horse!)
SIMON. Contrary to what most people had to say, that Andrew had no part in Wham!, it was totally the opposite. Wham! was Andrew—and George, when he was younger, copied Andrew. It was Andrew and Andrew, the real Andrew and the fake one. But as time went on, I think George, partly because he really did feel that the group wasn’t him, uh… he put more and more effort into the songwriting and production, and Andrew was reasonably indifferent to that, and was an easy-going person, so he let George do it.
ANDREW. By this point, we could both see that his songwriting was taking him in a direction that was different from mine, but he was my best friend, and to be part of that evolution would be a great thing.
From left to right:
Figure I. Birthday bouquet from A, captured in the car en route to Pici. The irises and the lilies unfurled in the filtered light of my living room over the subsequent week. It was a beautiful sight, and a source of constant, unfettered, quiet warmth—and then, as is the nature of things, it receded.
Figure II. 💘 to A, 💘 to V, 💘 to Pici, 🎂 to T!!!!!!
Figure III. The birthday gift wrapping from K, which was a present in itself. Opening it revealed a gorgeous beaded handbag that—we are committing to being sincere here, fair warning—took my breath away, slightly, for its level of artistry and its gentle noise and heavy straps and flat base and the fact K had managed to give it to me rather than hold onto it. They are generous in this way.
I was also touched because it delivered the same jog that arises sometimes when you [I] remember you’re [I’m] a fully realised person, and things happen to you [me] that happen to people in the stories of others and on television. This is, as a statement, both farcical and true (and here we catch a descant on the wind, and it’s Florence Pugh and Saoirse Ronan as Amy and Jo March: writing doesn’t confer importance it reflects it I don’t think so writing them will make them more important). And I stand by it.
I don’t think it’s surprising necessarily that all my philosophical talk of ‘having the thing’—‘the thing’ itself undergoing constant metamorphosis—is reflected in a practical sense. Something about receiving this object, about being a lover of beauty and artistry (and of a good handbag) now in possession of such an item, felt almost like a stroke of permission. You’re not just having to coast along on an approximation of life. It doesn’t have to be like that time your teacher had everyone design model bedrooms in Year 6 and it didn’t occur to you that you were allowed to ask for materials to put it together to your tastes, or even just to your understanding of what would have been good or fitting, so you tried to sneak a box of Mum’s friend’s tarot cards and a folded up tea towel to make the bed, and then that didn’t work and you had to return them, so you ended up just using bits of Ello and, as much love as you had for Ello, all those hours you spent playing with it on your own time, employing it on this occasion left you with an outcome that felt brittle and incongruous and wanting, and it doesn’t have to be like that. If anything, it’s more like being in your first year of university and taking time to properly research how a chiton works so you can head to the toga party wearing something with a bit of structural integrity. Sometimes permitting investment facilitates ease.
Perhaps it’s that there’s a time for ‘good enough’ and there’s a time for straight-up ‘good’. Perhaps it’s just a matter of not dining out on self-denial. There’s enough going to be denied—or being presently denied—already.
Anyway, thanks for the bag, K. It’s ace and remarkably spacious. Public opinion has also been pro.