change the pear vol. 7 25 Nov 2022

hello and welcome to volume 7. november currently has its foot on my neck so i’ve been struggling to have any thoughts at all that aren’t oh god can somebody please remove the pins they’re stabbing into my wax doll, but here we are anyway!

on repeat

a selection of songs from my ‘navigating the horrors (autumn 2022)’ playlist:

1. everythingoes by RM. i love this song for its resoluteness, the determination in the refrain (it shall pass / everything everything everything goes), but also for its melancholy. no feeling is final, and there’s hope in that. but you lose something in the passing, too.

2. jack in the box by j-hope. i love hobi so much and i will tell you exactly why if you ask me who my favourite BTS member is at a function. one thing i especially appreciate about him is that he’s never afraid to show how much effort and thought goes into everything he does. in this project he wanted to show us his darker side, the difficult feelings he’s grappling with: his fear of the future, his search for a safe place. i have been taking a lot of comfort from it over the past few weeks.

3. famous last words by my chemical romance. no further questions at this time!!!

4. spirit boy by gang of youths. one day i’m going to listen to this song walking through a park on a swelteringly hot london summer’s day and this winter will feel so far away. until then, i’m holding onto the lyrics: and i wanna live it like it’s worth something / in time, gotta give it time, give it time, give it time.

##last seen

on kallie’s recommendation, sarah and i went to the fundació joan miró in barcelona. the museum itself was designed specifically to host his sculptures and paintings, and it’s a delight architecturally. there are unexpected windows, terraces looking out over the city, a rooftop with sculptures hidden around every corner, nooks and crannies, staircases, rounded curves and sharp edges. i loved the feeling that the space itself was part of the curation, that someone had thought carefully about the placement of everything, down to where to add a little window so you could observe the details of a big sculpture from above.

and the art itself was a joy! i wasn’t familiar with his work beyond a big poster alex has of his, but from that alone i knew i would like it a lot. in the first room, i couldn’t help but feel that the pieces reminded me of poems in some way (a big tarpaulin entitled woman encircled by a flight of birds in the night, a painted stone) and in the very next room the description talked about miró’s paintings as poetry. i loved the way he titled works (song on white background, the lark’s wing encircled with golden blue rejoins the heart of the poppy sleeping on the diamond-studded meadow), loved how he painted birds, loved his weird, often very funny sculptures.

there was also a paul klee exhibition on which had a lot of his sketches of the natural world, starting from his early anatomical sketches. i always find it interesting when abstract artists start from such detailed, precise beginnings, and slowly start to break the rules. love how preoccupied he was by fish and strange little creatures.

currently watching

the sopranos has taken a much darker turn as we go into season 3. [spoilers ahead] with tony’s mother’s death (which to me was very unexpected, surprising in how anticlimactic it was), one of the principal antagonists of the first couple of seasons has gone, and i feel like the show is now beginning to explore the uglier side of the mob. the episode i just watched had a dying old man forced to try and kill someone who has been acting out, which obviously ends in extreme violence and hammers home how being part of the mafia is a duty you can never escape from or turn away from. a particularly brutal episode was dr melfi’s sexual assault and her subsequent grapple with morality over whether to tell tony about it. i hate sexual violence being used as a plot point but i think the show just gets away with it. during a time when dr melfi is struggling with why she feels compelled to keep treating tony, she goes through something incredibly traumatic, is failed by a system that supposedly keeps her safe, and therefore thinks about where she can find protection and revenge for what has happened to her. the final scene of that episode where tony asks her if he can do anything and she pauses before saying “no” gave me chills. another fairly dark plotline is the slow pull of jackie jr into the mafia despite his late father wanting a different life for him—i feel this may mirror tony’s own journey into the family business, which has only been hinted at so far. will have to wait and see if there are parallels there. oh and also artie’s marriage failing and how he’s getting into business with tony…my dad said artie was a “tragic character” and i’m beginning to sense things are only going to get worse for him.

also of course young royals continues to have its foot on my neck. i love these emotionally confused but ultimately communicative teens!!! when simon channels his sad feelings into his songwriting….that’s my emotionally intelligent son!!! and wille taking slow steps towards being more emotionally open and resist his mother’s authority….i know you can do it king!!!

reading

one of the seven books i got out of the library this week was river by esther kinsky, which i thought i might write about but honestly i feel like it was unfortunately simply too overtly racist for me to really comment on it in a positive light (main character visits tel aviv in the context of “searching for a place of belonging”; describes india as a “fecund country”; the race of anyone who isn’t white is always remarked on and their behaviour continually commented on in a way that i found uncomfortable and voyeuristic). hate it thanks! also imo kind of weird for fitzcarraldo editions to publish a book which affirms zionism and israel’s existence when they’ve also published minor detail by adiana shibli, which expresses the painful violence of settler-colonialism so explicitly. idk.

& just today i moved onto the city and the home by natalia ginzburg, an epistolary novel—let’s hope i get on with this one better!

miscellaneous

the sun setting through the mist on walthamstow marshes. pubs with fires burning. jongho: best friend to the working class. mistakenly ordering pineapple juice at the gang of youths gig; siyang saying “well……i now have a far deeper understanding of australian masculinity” after the show. reading a book set in the pyrenees as we flew over the mountains. running up a hill in barcelona and seeing the city rooftops laid out before me. being able to put our feet in the sea in november! the way the air felt warmer and gentler there. anchovies with fresh citrus zest. good bread and good olive oil. getting out seven books from the library. orange wine. lying on arenike’s sofa with a mug of mulled wine. namjoon ft erykah badu(?!?!?) this bernadette mayer poem. and this one.

thank you as always for reading. i love you. see you next time.