good news is on the way
Alllll floooaaat onn..okay!
But people never stay for long. The turnover rate can be good or the turnover rate can be bad but no one ever stays. Some things do not change. The small things remain and always do: a bin bag stretched over a scrubbed-clean knockout drawer two hours before closing time, the smell of a particular brand of mop soap. How one blend of coffee smells seeped into your shirt versus another. Hot milk coagulates in the air and smells like sweet, wholesome vomit; getting into bed feeling like a tall, employable baby. You run for the bus or find you don’t have to. And then it’s done. A boy leaning back over the iron railings at the back end of summer. Sitting in the park in the middle of winter, wondering how it ended so quietly. Three shifts left. Two more days waking up at 6 a.m. I unlock the shop doors and hear this poem trickling in. She wasn’t writing about passing through a place where you had a permanent contract, but it’s nice to pretend that she was. Something can speak for anything if you just stand still for long enough with a hand outstretched. Let it come to you. Don’t scare it away.
Tonight by PinkPantheress: sampling a weird deep cut from a weird band from the 2000s, crediting them on the track, pitching up the strings and slinging to them the kind of hook which can only come to a musician through a beam of divine light splitting open the night sky: You want sex with me? Come talk to me. It’s so blunt, so forward that it feels like landing face first on the concrete. In some ways it’s so vulgar that it loops coyly right back around to being shy. I love it. I wish I had anything more articulate to say. I love PinkPantheress. There is nothing now which could save us but she might come close. Pushing her songs on the short-form video-sharing platform with references to Zarry. Wrestling with the strange experience of growing up on the internet as no generation ever has before and domesticating it into something which can be spoken over the rippling beats which mark her songs. Last summer the world turned lime green + laid itself down on the train tracks to die. That album was like a weak shadow on the wall in comparison to what PinkPantheress has been doing for the last two years. Coquettish allusions to a half-remembered club culture, an attempt to define a room you were outside of as if you were inside it as an adult rather than as a 14 year old with a set of decks, versus the giddy abandon with which PinkPantheress does not even attempt to pretend she was there but simply imagine a better, happier year 2000, which to her (and so, to us) sounded even then how we know it sounded now. I <3 PinkPantheress I <3 being a child of 2004 I <3 that we are old enough to make art + have it mean something.
This spring I cannot stop thinking of who I used to be. Beauty is not enough, Millay intones above my head. I know what I know, and that has turned out to be very little. I didn’t know anything about the world then and I still don’t now. Large swathes of the land still unknown to me: seen only from a distance, lit one instant and then dim again in the next. But what can you do about something like that? I was 16 in a bedroom high in the air above the Vietnamese coast. At night the lighthouse on the hill would swing a long beam of light our way and then swing it back across the other side of the mountain. The lights of the ships stretching out for miles and miles. Time collapses in on itself inside of me. I hold my hands against the walls but it doesn’t stop them coming down. Later, 19 with sweat everywhere it is possible to sweat, lying on a concrete building in the center of a roundabout, pouring FamilyMart-brand ambrosia into a cup of ice. Now at 21, in the park, elsewhere, watching the dozens of lives which brush up against mine and then go again, so warm my whole body feels flushed. Where do we go from here? The words are coming out all weird.
March drags then April races. I turn 21. I restring my guitar for the first time in months. One of the new strings snaps and the old ones refuse to budge from the fretboard. Last summer I found an old Spanish guitar in the back room at Oxfam. £40 counting the price of a pack of new strings. You can tell a whole epic on six strings, three nylon and three metal. But I would hate to bore you. So I won’t. I adjust my bra at work where it rides up or digs in. Feel dirty for doing so. To touch the bra is to acknowledge the breast, and to acknowledge the breast is to acknowledge the orifice, and to acknowledge the orifice is to surrender. You cannot change it now. Some things written into the body in the places it was split apart. I try to sleep and can’t. I listen to talk radio. And that’s fine. I think of the middle-aged commuters driving their children home from school listening to Katie Razzall while I sit on the bus. Somehow it makes me feel at home in the world. And still time runs out with new and unprecedented velocity. Turning and turning, the man bellowing for his bird, etc. Oil mixing with water. Oh well, Guildenstern says with his feet on the gallows, we’ll know better next time.
Jailbird by AK Patterson: and speaking of telling a story with just six strings. I’m a true believer in the load-bearing melody—a riff or a vocal line strong enough to hold up the whole structure of the song and keep the storm out where it batters against the windows, to keep the house standing and the rain from getting in.1 Patterson’s voice drifts up from the scrum of history and floats above and below the octave and throws out to the world the despair of three men stuck in small rooms by things much bigger than you or me. Building barrel wagons made of match sticks. Playing with guns instead of toys. There’s not much you can do about a system which seeks to incarcerate and destroy, but you can stand beneath the prison with a guitar and sing up at the open windows if you can bring yourself to. Joey, Antonio, Rob: three ghosts, named by Patterson where they stand in a system which wants to anonymise them, holding their shape even now, spilling out from their allotted 58sqft and into the London air. The guitar so muted it resembles a bass and actually might be. The melody a reminder that the voice will go anywhere you want it to + you should let it carry you along with it. The storyteller picking at the frayed thread. Coming apart in pieces.
Three things:
I don’t want to write unless I’m being honest.
I want to write about what moves me.
I want to put things here which I would be okay with having drawn back to me should somebody pick them up for the first time.
This is a triangle whose shape I struggle to hold. At the back end of February I was being moved by things which I wanted to write about but which I did not want to enter the story of, nor put other people onto for the first time. I get scared writing this blog in a way I never get scared writing fiction—I don’t get scared writing about bad people when I feel as though it isn’t me. But this also isn’t me, not really. Then again, of course this is me, in the exact same way my fiction is also me. But there’s no time for that now. In short: I feel bad writing about sexual predators just because they did a good cover of Never-Ending Math Equation. This is my little house full of my little pictures and little words and things I want to hold close to my heart and stick up on the wall. I don’t want to sully that. But nothing can ever really be washed clean.
A few weeks ago I was asked to write a bio directing readers to where they can find my writing, and I knew as soon as I saw the message that I would not mention this place. It is, to me, as close to holiness as rarely-updated Substacks can ever get.
I guess I am trying to say I want to keep the world from getting in. I am trying to say that I can’t.
Some things I thought were cool over the last few weeks:
Gertrude Stein: “Any change was in the ends of the centre. A heap was heavy. There was no change. Burnt and behind and lifting a temporary stone and lifting more than a drawer.”
Cameron Winter, Love Takes Miles music video + how he almost falls behind the backing track just on “I need somebody sent down from above that talks to me how you used to.” + You’d better start a-walking, babe.
dir. andy swartz, 2024 A passing description on Radio 4: “Advertisements are machines for generating your heart’s desire.”
The sound of children in the park & parents calling them to the gate to go home for tea now + always. Blue tits in the trees above.
The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats by W.H. Auden
That's all. I sound very sad but I am actually very happy!!!! I feel bowled over by my life this spring. I send you all my love.
xo
tunes for the sun coming through, at last: mushaboom by feist, bless the telephone by kelis, let’s save tony orlando’s house by yo la tengo.
See also: Nina Simone’s My Man’s Gone Now, any version of The Bonny Lass of Anglesey, the band which must not be named and their song The Headmaster Ritual.
always grateful for the snapshot pieces of writing you put out. I want to stick them to my wall like a polaroid. Utterly beautiful!
i enjoyed reading this so much. i was nodding my head and also feeling a sense of nostalgia for the internet that once was. hope ur spring goes fantastic well into summer