Mix CDs and comedies
Four Substacks in and I have writer’s block! Here's what I could squeeze from the proverbial toothpaste tube.
I’m on holiday (again) so the wheels aren’t really turning but I’m also hungover (again) so my brain feels untethered and a bit crazy. I’m sat in a café in Paris and asked Wilf what I should write about and he said the change of season.
I was talking to Lucy about this, and how alive we feel now that the dirge of summer is over. Don’t get me wrong, summer is undoubtedly the second best season after spring, but it is decidedly monotone by the end. All that flora has turned the same shade of green and the dread of it ending gives the whole thing a touch of the Sunday scaries.
September feels like much more of a fresh start than 01.01 ever does because other than going back to work, nothing actually changes on the first of Jan. It sneaks up out of nowhere, right in the middle of winter and a long way out from spring. Suddenly it’s all Spotify wrapped and ‘New Years nudge words’ and you feel left behind before you’ve even counted backwards from ten.
Two things that have changed with the season are that a) I’m more into music and b) the cinema is back. I’ve been reading a lot this year but it’s meant that other forms of entertainment have fallen by the wayside. Now that day drinking has taken a back seat there’s more room for ~culture~.
After going to Green man festival I remembered how much I love live music, especially if I can watch it sat down. I find gigs boring because you have to wait around and only get to see two people and get itchy feet and it’s usually a Tuesday. But sitting in a field from noon to dusk with a stream of different acts reminded me why as a teenager I went to so many festivals, and why I like music.
Line up highlights include:
Wet Leg
CMAT
Greg Mendes
Jasmine 4t
Divorce, who invited a kid on stage w them. It makes me cry rewatching it - the lyrics ‘I wanna lift you up’ after they have literally lifted him out of the audience bc they’d seen his dancing at Kneecap. He will remember that forever! I hope he doesn’t watch the video so much that it replaces his actual memories of it, but I’m glad I can.
Back in the day I’d have made a mix CD of my favourite acts, complete with album cover and track listing and give them to friends (if anyone still has one of these I’d love to see it), and later it would have been an iTunes playlist. I downloaded a lot of music from YouTube bc some of it wasn’t even available to buy, and took great pride in painstakingly* adding the album art for every single song so I could scroll back and forth through my musical Rolodex before whacking the Scrubs theme tune on for the fourteenth time.
Now Spotify does most of that work for you but the algo daylists have sucked a lot of the romance out. It’s harder to create a time capsule of what music you listened to and when because you just don’t need to when you’ve got ‘Sad dry toast Tuesday morning’ or ‘Right tube wrong direction Thursday night’ (I keep ending up furious and drunk in Stepney Green).
So I’ve made a playlist of the music I’m liking atm and some I’d like to listen to more of. It’s a fairly eclectic mix but it’s nice to be back on the wagon:
Since then I’ve been talking about music again and getting excited about new albums and swapping songs. Like when people talk about football and that’s them set conversationally for life.
When I’m alone I’ve been a bit addicted to audiobooks, podcasts and YouTube videos to avoid ever being in silence. Without being a full distraction, music is the best thing to get my brain moving from that choice paralysis state at the start of a day. Even while writing this paragraph I got completely stuck and put a song on to get me on my way.
In short, it’s like social and mental lubricant. There, I said it.
So folks you’re not gonna believe this but I’m here to tell you: music is good. Not a hot take, but it felt like a revelation. Is being alive just realising the same 5 things over and over on a loop forever?
Next up I was going to talk about the cinema, the nights drawing in etc but I couldn’t find much to say other than that I went to see One Battle After Another and it was really good. Spookily accurate re: detention centres and the apocalyptic state the USA has managed to get itself into since the film got made, but I guess you don’t need to be a prophet to have foreseen what Trump is currently doing, or what he might do next. I find it strange how little people are talking about the rise of fascism in real life - I see it enough in my own echo chambers but I guess that’s how it gets worse. Frog in water etc.
What I liked about it was that it was brutally honest about how the world is (are characters caricatures if they’re 98% accurate?) AND it was funny. There was room for hope within the narrative even while the backdrop was pretty dire. It reminded me of my friend Mal’s writing on comedy as the best vehicle for diversity - she says it better than I ever could!
If you’ve a free evening I’d recommend seeing it - perfectly cast and scored.
That’s all from me, so I’ll leave you with this little pre-Eurostar snippet:
We’re in the queue at Greggs in St Pancras and the server says
‘I’ve been waiting for you’
To the man behind
‘I’ve been waiting for YOU’
He retorts
They’re friends.
‘I ordered a flat white and a chicken bake’
‘And then you walked off’
They’re not friends.
We order our sandwich and vegan steak bake (which I am already having greggrets about)
‘What’s this attitude’
‘If you order and walk off and go on your phone in the middle of it I’m not gonna serve you’
All the while he’s serving us, politely and well.
‘Have you made my coffee’
‘No. I’ll make it if you’re listening. Not if you’re gonna walk off’
‘Shut up’
‘Do you want to come and shut me up?’
I glance at the saloon door between them, decide that it’s flimsy.
‘If you don’t wanna be served I’ll serve someone else.’
To us:
‘Here’s your coffee. Have a nice day.’
To himself:
‘If you don’t wanna be served I’ll serve someone else’
We escape, fight unfought. Wilf takes a sip. He’s given us the wrong coffee.
*I recently realised that painstakingly isn’t a contraction of pain stakingly, but pains takingly, because you take pains to do something.
FREE PALESTINE 💚🤍🖤❤️