change the pear vol. 9 22 Dec 2022

hello! welcome to the final newsletter of the year! i am scheduling this to send on thursday as usual because i’m unsure of my wifi situation this week, so i hope it gets to you all okay. i’ve felt more reflective than usual as the year draws to a close. i looked back at my resolutions for 2022 and i did very few of them, but i think i’ve grown in unexpected ways this year. it has been extraordinarily hard and miserable at times, but i am proud of myself for not giving up, for refusing to lie down in the hole, for trying my best, for being brave. i’m grateful to everybody who’s held me through the year, and, okay, yeah, i’ll say it: i’m tentatively hopeful about the next one.

on repeat

so i can’t lie, i have hardly listened to anything but indigo since it came out, as my spotify receiptify from the last month proves. but here are some other tracks that i’ve been spinning when indigo briefly releases its grip on my brain.

paradigm by ATEEZ. the real life, high-volume shriek i let out when seonghwa begins this song with the lyrics OH NEW REVOLUTION: undignifying. yet i refuse to be embarrassed because once again ATEEZ have delivered me a marxist (yes, i said it!) anthem about the world we can bring into being through revolutionary praxis.

one by one by LUCY. i have been dying to talk about LUCY in my newsletter, because i am obsessed with them. they’re a four-person band (yechan on violin, wonsang on bass, sangyeop on guitar, gwangil on drums) and their music is always so fresh and fun and bright. it’s impossible to feel bad while listening to them! also, you’ve heard of gay people not being able to sit in chairs properly, but wonsang takes that to a new level by standing like a fruit in every single group photo of them (no, seriously). anyway, this is my current LUCY comfort song because yechan’s violin solo at 2:24 makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.

this year by the mountain goats. you know i had to do it! happy new year.

reading

i took a 16 hour flight last week, so what better time to start reading war and peace? i love a russian classic, but something about the commitment demanded by war and peace has always made me hesitant to start. i’m a fast reader but even so, 1400 pages means at least 2 weeks devoted to it. it’s a big project!

my initial thoughts on finishing volume 1 were that it’s such a dynamic novel already. i always think that russian classics are so full of life, so unafraid to depict people in all their overdramatic indecisive complexity. scenes like the old count rostov dancing after dinner, or sonya crying in the corridor or andrey’s relief at his son’s fever breaking or nikolay gambling away his money feel so vivid and enjoyable, because they are trying to describe something real to you. i love that. i feel like so often i read novels that are saturated with authorial direction, overwrought in the way every detail has been agonised over. less of that and more writing for the joy of telling a story, for the ability to put into words something you see and feel.

last seen

i wandered down to a tiny gallery near my grandmother’s house in kalamunda (up in the hills a short drive out of perth, but everyone acts like it’s in the middle of nowhere). there was an exhibition on by richard and una bell, riparia (meaning: of, or pertaining to, a river bank). i’ll never get used to how different the wildlife is here, and the paintings honoured that beautifully. richard bell’s were more traditional landscapes (which i am always a sucker for): paintings of brooks and rivers and weirs, with their distinctive gum trees and grasses and reeds. una bell’s were a little weirder: bright colours and patterns and botanical shapes, bizarre aquatic creatures that looked right out of a fossil catalogue. it was a good reintroduction to the australian bush: familiar but strange, almost unbelievable in its wild beauty.

currently watching

oh guys i am not feeling good about jackie aprile’s journey further into the mob and the way he’s becoming hungry for power and influence……i fear this can only end badly. same for artie and how he’s becoming ever-more entangled with tony and his crew. same for tony and his new affair with an unstable woman who will become obsessed with him. you hate to see it. it’s interesting to see christopher settle more into his role as a made man—i am excited for adriana and her club but i do miss the depths the show mined from christopher when he was still dithering about whether he wanted to be in the mafia. i hope we see more complexity in his/adriana’s storyline soon (and hopefully not of the tragic kind).

miscellaneous

running out of the house late at night to see the snow falling. the way it made everything brighter and more beautiful the next day. ethiopian food with martha. chinese food with siyang. chicken roasted in gochujang. lying under a blanket with claire and untangling all our thoughts. listening to them read out a poem in progress. hayley’s blog post about namjoon and indigo. the live performances of indigo at dia beacon, which (surprise surprise) made me cry. hareem befriending my parents. a day of strategising with the nejma collective. this poem by mark doty. the purple jacaranda flowers that are blooming everywhere in kalamunda. the smell of the gum trees. sun on my skin. seeing jupiter venus mars AND saturn at the same time in the night sky. reflecting on the past year with friends, and thinking about our intentions for 2023.

thank you so much for reading. if you have thoughts on 2022 or plans/resolutions/ideas for next year, i’d love to hear them. i’ll see you in 2023!