056: god turn me into a flower

also, can i ask you a question…?

Pour one out for Gawker 2.0 which was unjustly shuttered this week. Gawker was the publication that was curious about the most important things, like how the guy who co-owns a production company with James Corden and directed One Direction’s This Is Us and various music videos (he’s responsible for the “Steal My Girl” video) ended up as executive producer on Hulu’s The Kardashians. To Gawker!

It is my honest belief that if her face didn’t look so bonkers i.e. wasn’t so surgically altered to be unrecognizable, people would take Noah Cyrus AND her music seriously. Because her music is very, very good and yet it gets no attention. This past Sunday, I forwent my usual ritual of listening to Phoebe Bridgers’ entire discography to listen to Noah’s full length EP, The Hardest Part (Deluxe Edition). (The extra stuff on this deluxe is not all that exciting—it’s mostly subtly different versions of the album’s best songs—though her duet with her papa Billy Ray is great.) I sent “Noah (Stand Still)” to a friend because we had been talking about getting older (we both recently turned twenty-five), and she was saying that she wished that she could have a few extra months of being this age. “Noah (Stand Still)” is about the anxieties and fears that come with getting older, especially the feeling that there’s no way you could go on living another minute even if you wanted to. The only solution to that, the patriarchs in her life offer, is to just stand still—to forget that time is moving and to pause in the moment. And while that is probably the most common or familiar advice, there’s something about this song that makes it feel revelatory. Listening to the song, standing still wasn’t just another version of taking a breath—the action (or lack of) felt like a way to pause time, as if by standing still you could make everything else stop as well. I think that feeling is only possible because Noah’s voice feels almost incantatory. It’s not just that the song’s message feels meaningful but that her voice is so rich and grounding that it makes something that could easily be life-coach-cheesy feel incredibly profound.

I’ve also been listening to Weyes Blood’s And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, an album that feels magical and spiritual. I’ve been gently obsessed with the word ‘supplication’ lately and I can’t help but feel that it perfectly describes the tone of this album. The songs move from end-of-world bacchanal to heart-tightening choral to soft epiphany in a way that catches you off guard while totally enchanting you. I’ve especially been enchanted by “God Turn Me Into a Flower” and these lines:

You see the reflection
And you want it more than the truth
You yearn to be that dream you could never get to
'Cause the person on the other side has always just been you

On my birthday, I went to a reading of David Berman’s Actual Air, his only published collection of poetry. I didn’t know anything about Berman at the time, I just thought it would be something interesting and New York to do on my birthday (which also happened to be Berman’s birthday), but I enjoyed it a lot and became a fan of Berman’s poetry immediately. (If you’ve spoken to me at all in the last 6 months, you’ll understand why that’s kind of a big deal.) That’s why I was so excited when I saw that Contemporaries at Post45 were publishing a cluster on Berman’s work. So far, I’ve only read the introduction and the essay by Marie Buck about slippages in the poems in Actual Air. I wanted to read Buck’s essay first because that idea of dissolving borders between spaces and positionalities, the everyday and the corporate/bureaucratic was what struck me the most about Berman’s poetry when I first heard it. A few weeks ago, I watched Manchester By the Sea, and in that movie interiors quickly become exteriors, and vice versa, in a way that undermines the boundaries we put up between ourselves and the outside world. There are so many scenes in that movie where one moment you are looking at an exterior landscape and the next moment you’re in a room or a car, without an obvious sense of how you got there. The concept that the boundaries and borders we construct in our existence are deceptive and unstable, always subject to breakdown, is a common narrative theme but what’s interesting to me about Berman’s work and Manchester by the Sea is how it’s depicted formally, through framing or perspective slippages or whatever it may be. I think it’s this notion of formal slippage that has got me excited and curious about the depictions of screens in movies lately—in Aftersun, in Saint Omer, and in White Noise, especially. Buck’s essay talks about Richard Linklater’s Slacker (which is on my to-watch list) and how that film depicts home video/camcorder footage in a way that brings attention to frames of mediation. In the interest of continuing to follow this inquiry, if anyone has recommendations for writing or work that addresses screens on-screen, you know where to find me!

LASTLY—After talking to RAFTM Hannah¹ earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about putting together another Taylor Swift zine. (You can read the first one, dedicated to Red, here.) It wouldn’t focus on a specific album but it would be focused on her later career. If I went forward with it, it would be something I’d work on slowly starting later this month/early March and then want to publish closer to the summer time, so there would be more time for submissions! If that’s something you’d be interested in reading or contributing to (especially if you’re an artist or designer because it would be cool if wasn’t just a cluster of posts hidden on my website lol), express your interest in the poll below or reply to this email!

Thanks, as always, for reading. This weekend, I’ll be reading about World War I, faith, and will be attending Magasin’s Winter Launch Party. Bon weekend!

1. Reader and Friend To Me