change the pear vol. 15 31 Jul 2023

hello! i’ve given up any semblance of a regular schedule for this newsletter. clearly i have very little control over when i have thoughts.

on repeat

BOUNCY by ATEEZ. standing in a stadium in madrid last week watching act after act at a multi-group kpop festival, i experienced a growing sense of fear that i, like the fans going crazy over these extremely mediocre bands, am deluded into believing ATEEZ are good when they simply are not. and then (finally) they came out and i instantly lost all doubt, because MY boys? my boys are talented. they have incredible stage presence, their choreography is dynamic and exciting, their vocals are stable and they are just all around fantastic performers. it’s no wonder that when they brought up their latest single, the entire crowd continued singing it afterwards. mwah! delicious!

the feeling by SHINee. what can i possibly say about shinee? i don’t feel remotely qualified to write about them, but i will say that seeing them live was incredibly special and something i will remember for a long time. they ran so the rest of the kpop industry could walk! and it shows!

##last seen

field notes from the prado museum in madrid. i wrote these while i wandered around, intending to edit them later, but i actually think they’re better left as they are.

el greco: sinuous, surprisingly modern

caravaggio: muscles! chiaroscuro! humanity! beauty in ugliness!

reubens’ apostles: so much character. st thomas is just like me for real

titian’s virgin dolorosas and simon helping jesus with the cross. emphasis on the felt weight of someone taking on your burden

goya: royal portraits bad boo hiss

3rd of may very moving, visceral in bloody bodies on floor, frozen moment in time, shock and confusion and fear on man’s face as he raises his hands, white of his shirt, spotlit almost. anonymity of his executioners. innocence. wide-eyed

the black paintings, named bc of colour palette and subject matter, most of which is debated in meaning by art historians / psychologists. psychologists you ask? well yes these paintings are very creepy, disquieting. devil he-goat. saturn devouring his children. grotesque faces of pilgrims/witches. masses of people crowded together. ugly, disfigured. the fates—controlling, menacing. these were all in goya’s house btw. spooky. imagine walking into someone’s living room and there’s a huge mural of a giant devil goat and a mass of clamouring witches worshipping it. drowning dog what the fuck is going on there it’s just a dog’s head in an expanse of brown canvas, not a comforting image at all. stirred up so much feeling in me!!! did not want a postcard of that one. even the simple reading / laughing paintings have a sinister energy to them when placed alongside all these others. tbh i kind of get it i’d probably have some dark images i’d need to get out after spending a lifetime painting the royal family but man. these are very unsettling

hieronomous bosch: weird. deeply weird. enjoyably so! this guy was painting whatever the fuck he wanted. fish with legs, a giant rat with wings herding people to hell, a house with the head of a woman, people doing god knows what inside an oyster shell, a pig in a wimple, two ears with a knife emerging from them, strange beasts devouring people. although the subject matter is bizarre and disturbing, these aren’t dark in the way goya’s paintings are, probably because of the colour palette being so bright and everything being so dynamic. it’s, dare i say, quite fun.

sánchez perrier: beautiful drawings and ink wash paintings from his travels! i’m a sucker for this kind of art: canals and boats of venice, medinas of morocco, monasteries and bell towers in zaragoza, shepherds in seville. very lovely.

currently watching

abeera and i are back on our bullshit (watching the sopranos). i know you’ve missed it!

because of the darker turn season 3 was taking, i was nervous about resuming our watch, but the episode we started with was the christmas episode, which honestly reminded me of all the things i love most about the show: fantastic character work, family dynamics, slick dialogue, humour, psychological complexity. jackie’s untimely end was horrific, but honestly felt inevitable after the entire season. ralph cifaretto, god will deal with you!!! i found the funeral/wake scenes again very psychologically interesting, in the ways everyone knows what has actually happened but has their own way of repressing it/coming to terms with it. meadow’s defense of her father to jackie’s cousin followed by her running out of the restaurant… hmmm. interested to see what happens with her in the subsequent seasons.

the first epsiode of season 4 made me laugh harder than i’ve ever laughed at the sopranos. after christopher is depicted in the pits of despair over his relationship with tony (side-note: feeling Very Bad about his increasing drug use…) and how he doesn’t feel like tony respects him or likes him anymore, tony tells dr melfi he’s currently in the process of permanently bonding christopher to him. sir you are so fucked up!!! other than that we’re setting up the problems for the new season: namely money problems, and uncle junior’s upcoming trial. also paulie somehow being in jail?! #FreeHim

i am also watching the good omens tv adaptation, which i have avoided up until now. let me explain: as a teenager, good omens was EVERYTHING to me. i loved that book. i read it countless times. i know parts of it off by heart. my first tumblr url was a quote from it (if you know you know). so when the adaptation was announced, my first feeling was i can never watch this, because what if i hate it? i can’t hate good omens. it would unravel a core part of my personal history.

what changed is that mara said this about the end of season 2: “now the entire plot is going to hinge on a tragic and dramatic semi-aborted gay love confession and half-unrequited kiss that constitutes a SEASON CLIFFHANGER FOR THE ENTIRE SHOW” and i immediately messaged her like, what the fuck, and discovered that she a) has the same feeling about good omens as i do and b) loved the show. so i sat myself down and watched the first episode and i had so much fun. is it good? who cares. must a tv show be good? is it not enough to watch david tennant and michael sheen having the time of their lives in an adaptation of a deeply silly, much beloved book? well, it’s enough for me.

reading

i just finished penance by eliza clark and i have a lot of thoughts! the novel is told in the form of a true crime investigation into the murder of 16-year-old joan wilson by her three schoolmates, written by a journalist, alec carelli. from the blurb and on the first page, we’re told that carelli’s book was refuted by his interviewees, which calls the reliability of his account into question. cool, unreliable narrator, i’m on board. but by the ending i was kind of like….okay what was the point of that conceit? the format of the novel is sections narrated by carelli in first person, where he interviews people connected with joan wilson and her murderers, and narrativised sections from the third-person perspective of each of the murderers. so within this, there is absolutely no way for the reader to tell whether the story or interviews are accurate or not. the happenings of the narrativised sections do not contradict each other nor do they contradict the content of the interviews, apart from showing different perspectives on certain actions. that unreliability is an inherent part of any story with multiple points of view imo! so why did we have to make this whole song and dance about “how much of the account is true”. idk, it just felt like a way of making the book feel more exciting and dramatic, but when it’s revealed in the final pages that certain details from one of the interviews were made up, i was like… whatever? sorry but i can’t be bothered to question everything i’m reading, when there are no alternative ways of interpretation offered. i hope this makes sense. it’s like reading a murder mystery and you fall for a red herring only to have information revealed right at the end that proves the murderer was someone else. i had no opportunity to know that!

the obvious riposte to my argument is that eliza clark is making a point about the predatory and sensationalist nature of the true crime genre by having her journalist author follow exactly the path of the podcasters and internet commentators that he claims to hate: removing agency from those involved, turning horrific events into “content” to be distributed for fun and entertainment. but i think the book would do that anyway, without needing to heavily emphasise that carelli lied about certain details!

now for the actual content of the book. i read in many reviews that this book would scalp anyone who was on tumblr in 2014, so i was looking forward to an accurate representation of internet culture. and, don’t get me wrong, the details are accurate. it’s obviously written by someone with an intimate knowledge of tumblr and its users and the way people post/comment/argue on there. however, i found myself increasingly depressed over the way the book portrays the effect of the internet on lonely teens. as i mentioned, the central crime is the murder of joan wilson by three other teenage girls, all of whom use tumblr, albeit for different purposes. angelica loves musicals and glee; violet is interested in creepypastas and horror and anime; dolly is into serial killers, particularly those responsible for the (made-up) cherry creek massacre. what they all share is a crippling loneliness and pain from being outcast from social circles for various reasons, and finding solace in internet communities. what i found disturbing was how clark chooses to portray this act of finding solace as something bizarre and sinister by demonstrating the way tumblr “radicalises” angelica, violet and dolly to commit an unspeakable crime. yes, horrible corners of tumblr exist, yes, the internet is a cesspit, yes, it can exacerbate violent tendencies, yes, oversharing online might not be the best way for troubled teens to navigate mental health issues. i don’t want to deny any of that. but as someone of “was a lonely teen who sought out community in online spaces” experience, i do feel a little defensive over this portrayal! it’s not all bad! sometimes it can be joyful and beautiful to find yourself amongst people who understand you! i grew up alongside my internet friends, many of whom are still in my life, and they have taught me so much about community and connection. i guess it makes me upset to see all the negative aspects of The Tumblr Experience heightened and intensified because it leads to such a horrific murder.

ANYWAY. credit where credit’s due: the book is extremely compelling and gripping, to the point where i read it for 2.5 hours straight on the plane and then immediately got to my hotel and continued reading it. but i think the content of it just wasn’t for me.

miscellaneous

chilled red wine on a sunny evening with saskia. walking with dorothy in regent’s park and seeing the pelicans. swimming in the very windy kentish sea with jun. the margate crab museum. all the tiny cute bookstores. fish and chips. long talks by the beach. cider and watching the queer ultimatum together. seeing seonghwa’s bouncy rap live. a long conversation with hayley by the pool. bread and spanish ham. this poem by samantha fain. this poem by frank o’hara. this poem by victoria chang. cycling around hyde park with shahla. seeing lucy for the first time in four months. the launch of audrey’s brave, brilliant, beautiful book. eating octopus, baby squid and garlic prawns with sarah. 1 year anniversary of ateez guerrilla. abeera’s biryani. shahla and i powering through the horizontal rain on the devils dyke walk.

thank you, as always, for reading. see you next time.