February
I failed totally at keeping track of things over the course of the month to share in here, because February has been 10% birthday fun and 90% toil, deadlines and relentless illness. I would like to be prescribed a seaside rest cure with a blanket over my legs. I know the sun would blast the neon gunk right out of me and I would emerge a sparkling new Cadillac. In lieu of that, the things that got me through:
Roy Montgomery – Guitars Infernal
What a perfectly Roy title. Absolutely delighted to see Roy Division back, with this 2016-recorded collection of splintering static. He recorded it in a dark personal time and saved releasing it until this dark global time, which is very generous of him. (I was delighted last year to do his majestic 1995 album Temple IV for Pitchfork’s Sunday Review.)
Field Commander Ali – The Next From Field Commander Ali
FCA is Australian songwriter Ali Mollica. I hadn’t heard her before clicking on a link from the fantastic World of Echo record shop newsletter – they also run a label and are putting out this album soon. The song Prefab Moon reminds me of the feeling of hearing Angel Olsen’s earliest work, spooky and gorgeous.
Morgan Nagler – I’ve Got Nothing to Lose and I’m Losing It
Grassoline is a perfect twangy, accepting sigh at bucking up and getting through shit however best you can.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Gift Songs
I loved this last year but have been coming back to it a lot while reading, which I can apparently no longer do to anything with a beat, let alone words.
Representative image
Yes, I went to Disneyland Paris for my birthday, 33 years after I turned four on my first trip there. There’s a sad lack of Postman Pat trainers and Happy Meal in the 37-year-old shot. I tried to explain some of how I feel about the place for my esteemed pal Shaad D’Souza’s Shaad magazine. (You should read my other esteemed pal Oli Franklin Wallis’s very good interview with Shaad about his mag and approach to work, too.)
On the way home, I looked again online for a copy of the book The Architecture of Reassurance: Building the Disney Theme Parks, which I have only ever seen listed for hundreds of pounds: there it was on eBay for £30, paired with Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture. Finally, a harvest in the world.
The former contains Greil Marcus’s essay on Disneyland, which I have always wanted to read but somehow never got around to. Finding that that was now paywalled online sent me on a journey to discover John Jeremiah Sullivan’s delightful essay on getting stoned at Disneyland. I am yet to read Andrew O’Hagan’s The Happiness Project and have it saved up as a post-deadline treat. I believe Michael Pollan almost wrote a book on Disneyland and I wish he had. I’ll never forget discovering the existence of Disney’s Florida town Celebration via this report on a murder and suicide in an otherwise largely crime-free place.
Well done if you’ve read this far. My justification for all this is that Disneyland is an amazing lens to think about entertainment, power, politics, the clash of utopia and capitalism, etc etc. It’s also just an utterly seductive place. A day or two after leaving, I read a headline about Ozempic, something I am always trying to keep out of my mind, and thought, gosh, I didn’t think about that the whole time I was there.
Misc
After slogging it out through Wuthering Heights (first half good, second half punishing) I am back to reading everything that Laurie Colwin has written. She was so heartfelt but pithy, so insightful but casual with it. I love her self-possessed leading ladies, she writes from my favourite milieu (young adults trying to be sophisticated in 80s/90s New York; see also Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan) // Violently hated If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You – incoherent, enervating, seemed so much like a man’s idea of a woman’s undoing that I was surprised to see a woman had directed it; loved The Chronology of Water so much; half-baked thoughts here but Kristen Stewart’s vision of PTSD felt so deeply feminine by comparison. Also got an early peep at Erupcja, which made me immediately want to be hanging out in a sunbaked European city committed to aimless pleasure, and made me excited for Charli xcx’s film career // Related: it was the 10th anniversary of Vroom Vroom this week, and I made my as-yet only foray into the Pitchfork comments section to redress my garbaggio original review //
The total lack of sympathetic characters in Industry (maybe aside from Sweetpea, tho she only exists to untangle the plot) means there’s no skin in the game for tomorrow’s finale, no? I don’t want Harper to win, I want Tender to go down, I don’t care about the naive junior minister, Henry will probably die. Who cares? I think they’d be better off rebooting for S5 with a new class of graduates in another bank // My friend and I like to nominate “Top 5 feelings”, of which there can in fact be infinite amounts; recently among them: a good bench press, successfully keeping virulent self-loathing at bay, buying the FT Weekend and trading photos with a friend of the most comic bits in How to Spend It, making peanut butter cookies on a whim, the kindness and effectiveness of actual human customer service from 1. train station staff, 2. flower company // On a Velvet Underground kick //
I couldn’t recommend my wonderful friend Lee May Foster-Wilson’s Substack more. Lee makes gorgeous art as Bonbi Forest, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and writes so beautifully about the nature around her home in Cornwall that it makes me feel like I’m back home too. I love love love her sense of colour // I also truly recommend my brilliant friend Hazel Sheffield’s debut book Frontierlands, on community regeneration of abandoned and neglected places. It’s so well reported and full of hope
Work of note
Only this review of the great new Mandy, Indiana record, tho fruits of my Feb labours will start appearing next week.
Quilts made
Finally finished! It was abandoned for weeks (see, deadlines) but I really enjoyed some pure quilting time the other night. My brain always feels like Times Square – not in a particularly anxious or stressed way, just a constant blast of earworms and chatter – and quilting really mutes that for a bit. It’s in the post to its new infant owner now. I am glad babies can’t see well enough to clock the slightly chewed up stitching on the back.
Love reading your posts! Thank you for the music recommendations!
WOE is an island! Thank god for them. And thank you for another rich Snapeslist. Don't stop!