It’s a joy to have people visit you. A specific kind of joy. A specific kind of celebration. Where you get to experience the things of mundanity around you through a lens that is much harder to grasp onto when those people aren’t around. At times it can feel like your city, wherever that may be, is to hard to understand, impossible to get a bearing of. As if you are an old timey ship captain being buffeted by head winds that you hadn’t foreseen, and now your boat is blowing somewhere you weren’t prepared to be. When people come to visit they can be the lighthouse, to reorient you in your surroundings, because for them you have to be the steady roll of waves, the introduction to so many more newnesses for them then for you. It is a gift to find the lighthouse, but a greater gift to attempt to steady your ship.
Watching:
ITS WEAPONS WEEK YOU FUCKS. SOUND THE ALARM.
For the unprepared for that rude awakening, the new film Weapons released this week. I got to see it on Friday with my sister on IMAX. It is a gift of a film, especially in a theater. An electrical shock. A groundswell. The eruptive force of horror is the reason I fell in love with film. Because the genre allows for such ingenuity, such profound exploration of deep emotion, through the basest of human feelings.
What is so fucking sick about Weapons is that it operates as an unlocking story, where you are lead into believing it will be one thing until all of the sudden, you have been swung in a totally different direction, and you have to hope to stay on board. I’m not gonna write about what happens, only about what it made me feel because if you are up for a bit of scare, a bit of summer fright, go see it blind. Let it take you away. The power of movies is their ability to transport you, the feeling of being in a theater and slowly, microscopically, you are teleported into a new life, a new town, a new set of people, and you get two hours of bliss.
Reading:
I read more substack notes than anything else this week which feels pretty unfortunate because substack notes are just like tweets but for the most part a lot worse because of the fact that the person making them knows that twitter sucks now and they want you to FEEL that they know that in their note. Avoid them if you can.
The other thing I read that stuck with me was this odd variety story about how one of my favorite directors Park Chan-Wook got kicked out the Writers Guild of America for scabbing (i think) during the writers strike.The strange thing about the article is that it feels like they really didn’t have one damn interesting thing to say after the headline. Like they didn’t have enough information to write the real story so you could have just stopped reading after you read the title. More of small thing I noticed but it did piss me off.
Albuming:
ANOTHER of my very dearest friends released music this week, this time its the band Jack Rabbit. Shoutout to Mo for being such a fucking cool ass friend to me for one, and for two making music that is such a satisfying listen.
The whole album is worth listening to, as Jack Rabbit is a true blend of genre, making it worth so many different kinds of music enjoyers time.
The opening song, “Thats all, right?”, is that type of blending song that could make anyone who listens to it happy. It reads like a indie pop song, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but its hearty and harmonic chorus whirls around you, and the first time I listened to it I was transported to being a 16 year old kid, sitting on the roof of my moms house, smoking a badly rolled spliff with your best friend. The song has an energy, brought on by some really sweet guitar that hums especially well in headphones, and the dueling harmony vocals that make Jack Rabbit tick. It isn’t easy for a song to remind you so specifically of one thing. But every time I listen to “Thats all, right?” I feel like a kid again, hoping that I am doing okay, enjoying the fact that I get to feel free.
The second song I want to highlight is “Easy”, probably because it feels like Jack Rabbits take on a indie-pop-rock song which is a genre that I adore. The kick of the drums in “Easy” drive a song forward that tells the story of moving on, leaving a person, a place and a time behind. It is a song that reflects on how it feels to be the one that thinks about things after the breakup. It asks you to remember who you are. All the while sweeping you off your feet with an ear-worming frenetic chorus.
I love my talented friends and I love getting to love their work.
P*:
P is for preschool this week. Or really, for the observation that I have found walking around my new neighborhood in Glendale. The observation being that there are A TON of preschool and childcare signs, mostly that seem to be just at peoples houses. They all use the same logo pretty much, a semi circle of kids playing on a field or patch of grass, with a rising sun behind them, in a cartoonish and odd style, and all seem to be for Ukrainian or Armenian families because of the fact they have the name written in either Ukrainian or Armenian. All in all, that makes sense to me. But the thing that really intrigues me is the amount of options. I swear just walking around i have come across 5 different preschools in the mile and a half radius of my apartment. Are there enough people for that?? Are there enough kids for that? Am i just totally off base on how many people need childcare? I am very happy to be the ignorant idiot, but it just feels like a lot of options.
Wrapping Up:
The apartment is really coming together now, mostly due to the fact that my partners family is in town and they have been helping us with so many projects and have literally decked us out with someone things we needed because they are the sweetest people ever. While I am deeply grateful for all the material benefits they have given us, the real gift are the little moments of getting to be together. For example my partner fell asleep on her mom tonight while we watched “Just Go With It” or getting to get appetizers and drinks at a restaurant all together. Love you all, xoxo, see you next week.