27 / peony chrysanthemum, orchid, eucalyptus
Lots of HITS, lots of love, lots of living.
Tēnā koe!
Since last newsletter:
Starling Issue 19 was released (and the new editorial committee announced!)
Another cycle of Festival delivery has come and gone!
Life has changed, and changed, and changed again x
They make for a calm expanse, really: the patchily-painted, buttery bare walls; the odd clinging kiss of Blu Tack where art used to be. I’ve begun the task of disassembling the home I built in 2022, which was itself, with a half-year hiatus, inherited from the one I built with K in the last light of 2020. I’m leaving the apartment I’ve spent much of my adult life in—this time, I am certain, for good.
The move is still weeks away, sandwiched as large, broadly unanticipated shifts tend to be between fixed plans that exacerbate the stakes of them. It’ll be a quick relocation, because it has to be. But the reasons are good. I have chosen to leave, and am embarking on the project of building another home:1 one to suit me-in-2025, and especially one to suit me as I am (and have become) in the past couple of months. By the turn of April into May—and this is true for several of my most beloved—this year has already held so many lives in it.
As we did in 2024, my best friend and I went looking for words to take as talismans into 2025. My first-thought-best-thought, selected whilst sat at the end of a bed in Fitzroy (where I spent the turn into January),2 was ENJOY. It built on the ‘presence’ of the previous 12 months; it expanded on the ethos I had been gradually folding into my life, investing in experiencing the world rather than denying myself a place in it. I wanted to continue prioritising the having. The doing. The making-the-most-of. (And I thought I’d benefit from not overthinking it too much.)
In hindsight, looking back at Q1-and-a-half, I do think I’ve held to the philosophy. There have been concerts and croissants and coffeeshops; swims and long, sweaty walks; new recipes, new friends, new obsessions bridging the mundane and the fantastic;3 an enduring commitment to coming home to myself, to cultivating and loving life as it unfolds every day—to wanting better, where necessary, but never wishing it away. To being brave! And despite my Substack radio silence, I’ve been writing, and doing so in earnest.
And simultaneously, as I alluded to earlier, so many lives in five months. So many years in the still-running top half of this one. By virtue of what I do for work, the calendar year is also often split into a pre-March and post-, and that’s certainly felt true.4 In many ways, every week since has heralded a kind of reinvention. I couldn’t imagine at the beginning of April where I’d be halfway through, nor from there where I’d be by the end of it. A lot of that is as a reward for openness, for showing up and—if we’re being honest—exercising a kind of presence where previously I have been a not-aloof,-but-certainly-unavailable operator. Unquestionably, I’ve benefitted from diving in.
Of course, sometimes—perhaps oftentimes—the gift, or the lesson, isn’t what we initially think it will be. Precious little comes without shades of disappointment. But I think I’ve landed in the right place, and certainly where there has been redirection, the navigation of that has come (blessedly, as a gift in itself) without real harm. There are so many ways to upend a life, and it’s rare that it happens so cleanly. Rare that it can be so easily resolved; rare that the universe continues to deliver with such grace in every other aspect, and in so many ways that were catalysed by, and integral to, the core of the initial upending. To show you how to live the way a loved one would want you to. To give you the chance to make good on it. To reward you for your open arms, and let you run.
So, in a few weeks’ time, I’ll be taking my lounge suite and my houseplants and my coffee machine and all the gallery shop detritus5 and trading in the walls of my life as they have been since I was writing my Master’s thesis. A new home for the future of the woman. There wasn’t meant to be such a strong physical-philosophical congruence in the container of this newsletter, but sometimes synergy and saccharinity are two clasped hands—and here we are. Both reaching for the world and living in it.
With it all stacked up, I’m pleased to report that there is a lot to enjoy—a lot to love, a lot to be fired up about, a lot to be grateful for. I hope each new day is showing you the same.
Staring into the Sun by Luke Foley-Martin
Bound by Maddie Ballard
All the President’s Men, dir. Alan J. Pakula6
The rollout of JADE’s solo singles (and her appearance in the Live Lounge!)
Having faith in the new, holding firm to the fundamental
Imogene Strauss’s creative direction,9 particularly as seen on Troye Sivan’s latest tour, which was a somewhat unexpected Night Of My Life at the beginning of last December10
Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
The drink of the summer, Remedy’s Dirty London Fog
A Succulent Chinese Meal, Ate Ate Ate’s most recent pop-up at Ozone
Senna, dir. Asif Kapadia11
Watching good fortune come to beloved friends
Goodspace’s VENDOR installation for the launch of Let’s Talk About Death
Sharp, rich shades of red
So many great F&B experiences in Naarm12
Auckland FC13
Louise Glück’s Meadowlands
Following through on plans made half in jest (and which are guaranteed to be challenges, and to open one’s world wider)15
A special preemptive, anticipatory HIT designation to Hana Pera Aoake’s new book, Some helpful models of grief, which will be out in late June. A book of poems in seven acts! With an intermission! And each with its own ties to other forms, artworks, writers, webs—visuals (illustrations by Priscilla Rose Howe!)—strong work—gorgeous design—I know nothing about this book beyond what Compound Press has released, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so obsessed with an Instagram post. I love a high concept poetry collection!!!!!!!! I cannot wait to live in the world of this book!!!!!!!!!
And why don’t we leave it there, for now—arms wide open to the gifts of the universe. Let’s make it you and me both.
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.
luv u, kiss kiss!!!!
🌶️ T
Read: fashioning a happy life in a rental property.
And whilst applying for a writer’s residency that I—say it with me, girls—did not get!
Gentle-eyed baristas! Lurching around on the top floor of a bus! Dogs with distinct gaits! Sales on ceramics and silly handbags!
At a push, I could split it down to the date, but I think that’s a sentimental tendency, informed by what followed and probably in a broader sense dishonest. However: still a night for the books!
I watched this film for the first time on a plane last August. It occupies a similar spot wrt genre to Official Secrets—another of my favourite films—and, of course, holds its own space in culture, so it’s unsurprising that I thought it rocked. Alongside the narrative of it all, though: I still can’t stop thinking about (a) the menswear, (b) the apartment, (c) Redford and Hoffman in those looks in that apartment, (d) how in an another world there is a film [which I may have made?] wherein they are simply rocking about living together in that apartment and perhaps I am also their flatmate.
BEVERAGES OF ALL TIME.
Isabella’s recent Substack activity more broadly, actually. Isabella more broadly, actually. Isabella—
This feels almost trite: Imogene’s work is all over the best in music right now—but for good reason!
I was so compelled I walked out of Spark Arena and into the merch line and bought a t-shirt that I now wear all the time—excellent electric blue, gorg printed painting of Troye on the front. And shout out to Nick Ward for one of the best opening sets I’ve seen in a long time (incl. video-cassettesque YOU ARE WATCHING A PERFORMANCE BY NICK WARD visual—loved that).
A really beautifully assembled documentary. The arrival at the inevitable is still so unbelievably tragic—as a result of such love and skill and strength of character. Truly one of the greatest to ever do it.
I love you, Patricia (white coffee, a transcendent croissant); I love you, Good Measure (Mont Blanc; also an excellent croissant); I love you, Embla (for the whole experience, but extra-specially the white country sourdough and herb cultured butter I split with A); I love you, Pinto Thai Food opposite the Comedy Theatre; I love you, Pidapipó Gelateria (the salted caramel; the pistachio; the bacio!); I love you, Salad Servers Green Goddess Salad from the supermarket; I love you, feta and spinach borek from The Borek Shop in Queen Victoria Market; and yes, just because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas we tell the truth), I love you, LUNE.
Friends in Naarm—or those with opinions—please send me your recs! I’ll be back around soon and always want to know about SPOTS!!! xxxx
To make a small thing of a huge thing by listing it like this, tbh.
My Anna Wintours! I live in them.
Read: On the platform at Avondale Station last year, after a Letterboxd screening of Seven Samurai at the Hollywood, a friend and I decided to sign up to jog Round the Bays. And then March came and we did! 8.4km Round the aforementioned Bays, and 8.4km on foot back to the CBD, with a treat-on-the-beach pitstop in Mission Bay. (I looked it up and we’d done more steps by the end of that day than Frodo and Sam would have averaged on their journey to destroy the ring—which isn’t a metric I’d gone by before, but I suppose sometimes you think differently when you’re walking that distance with someone you would carry if you couldn’t carry the ring for them, Mr. Frodo, etc.)
I looooved this a lot!!!!
woohoo! here’s to your post-march adventures :)