weekly round up

🥮 monday: wes anderson’s recent netflix shorts play with theater and narrative. the past self speaks to the present. the narrator speaks for other characters. the characters speak up for themselves. structure. form. play. all while walls move and backgrounds shift, yet the story is there. right in front of us.

reading noor naga’s if an egyptian cannot speak english, form is changing with the way this story unfolds. a story has a heart, but it can be bend and morph into many different shapes. how its shape is contained is a ways in seeing how you move time, skip beats, move over the mundane, offer specific details. these are all choices. there is choice in the words displayed in your language, in the way you tell story.

the swan is my favorite out of the bunch. it recounts the story of a boy being bullied by two other boys. much violence exists in the film, but you don’t see it. only aftermaths of it. wes anderson uses theater to tell this, show this, and when it reaches the end, there’s a tenderness to the sadness that lingers in the silent credits.

🥮 tuesday: greg araki’s totally fucked up spiraled me back to listening to beach fossils and the radio dept. i’ve been emo for the week! it opened up a lot old feelings from my youth to interplay with my current minutia. it’s one of those rare moments where my younger self is speaking to my older self, and somehow, my younger self is a lot wiser than my current self.

i first heard of radio dept. from sofia coppola’s marie antoinette. and in recent days, this film has shown up in recent talks with my friends and the tiktok algorithm. kiran was just telling me about wanting to rewatch it because the world is missing a kind of delectability. perhaps it keeps showing up in my fyp because of all the promo sofia is doing for her new film, priscilla. maybe i’ll rewatch it over the weekend. a lot of people shat on sofia coppola for incorporating modern songs in this period piece, but now, everyone does it. so much of media belittled the work, perhaps because they expected some kind of accuracy of the work, but ultimately, it was one of many of the ways she seeks out the explorations of girlhood throughout her work.

to go back to araki’s film, it captures a very niche underbelly of la counterculture. the love for dennis cooper (who was born in pasadena and raised in arcadia, of all places), the need to spend some part of late nights in empty parking structures. loneliness is magnified in these concrete mammoths that seem to be in the most quiet places of blase american geography.

🥮 wednesday: the artist’s way is following me. but one idea from the book that i’ll indulge in is the morning pages. it’s a practice in journaling in the morning just to get into the flow of the day. to leave all the pains at the door before you step out. spending 30 minutes just dedicated to this free-flow writing has actually strained out a few anxieties for me as i realized my last journal entry was from july.

all this writing reminded me how much i’ve neglected the stories i’m working on currently. the characters. these non-real people in my head that live rent free. or if they do pay me, it’s in their insecurities and anxieties. are they also my own?

that’s a question i cannot answer unless i actually do what i claim to be. if i actually claim what i am to be.

write

writer

writing

🥮 thursday: i revisited a draft which is heavily inspired by j d salinger’s franny and zooey. and that’s about as much as i can say about the book for now. it was on this day too that i was listening to an episode of melissa broder’s eating alone in my car on pickled eggs, she was talking about revising a manuscript (which i believe to be death valley in terms of timing) and having to go back to feelings she hadn’t revisited in a long while. in the weeds, she calls it. but being back in the weeds for my current draft has been a unique experience in that my feelings in it are not that far from the feelings i’m experiencing now. it’s funny how this happens. when i hold off on something for so long that it eventually catches up to me. returns to me. the past visits. revisits. and is meant to overstay its welcome. though those overstays are uncomfortable and perhaps the niceties wane. it’s important. the uncomfortabiltiy of it all.

🥮 friday: the work week has come to a close. on fridays, i usually have a good chunk of time to binge on art consumption. i’ve been enjoying the new sufjan stevens album. also, there’s this wonderful interview with henry hoke and melissa broder where they talk about form and the lyricism in writing for open throat. did anyone know sofia coppola had her own brand, milkfed? having seen fran lebowitz talk twice in person, i always make it a habit to watch every interview she is in. here’s a great interview with her on alice neel. lee min ho opens boss fw23 show with an incredible set design that breeds futurism and a severance-esque workplace that ends with a song i’ve been obsessed with performed by fka twigs for vogue world. art is speaking to each other in different inflections and influences that have brought a lot of spirit in the way i’ve been updating myself every day.

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as always,

be well

do good work

keep in touch

<3

N