everyday is a child with teeth #5: vulnerability
I’ve yet to find the right music vibe for 2024. Generally there is one record that I listen to all the time to and from work for a month or two at a time (baseline vibe) and then according to mood things can shift this way or that way. In December I was feeling Radiohead’s OK Computer which was really appealing to my most Gen X tendencies and put in my head the idea that I needed a “Fitter Happier” tattoo which I fully understand is a cringe admission and yet I haven’t completely discarded it. (I won’t tell what part of the song tho some things are better left unsaid.) But back to the music conundrum, I can’t decide if I want to get into something old that I missed, something new by someone I already love, or something new by someone new. I don’t think I can remember this ever happening before, considering that at all times I use music as a marker of time.
It could be that this is a cause or an effect of the fact that I’ve mostly been reading on the train, (which means I haven’t really ben listening to music—the headphones are in but the music stays off). I read four books this month: Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, Diana Athill’s Don’t Look At Me Like That, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, Muriel Spark’s Idling With Intent. The Employees is written in short missives from the titular employees about what’s going in their workplace. I found it to be full of accidental(or maybe not) poems (see below).
Then the Muriel Spark which absolutely floored me in its goodness. I think she is my favorite writer but I don’t want to binge her books, I want to wait for each to find me when it needs to find me. Overall it was a good month for reading. A very Mitski I cry at the start of every movie/I guess cause I wish I was making things too, which to me remains one of the most fucking real feelings when seeing/hearing/experiencing art whatever. (The first time I heard this song I was like Jesus Christ give a girl a WARNING!) I thought about this when I was reading Paige K. Bradley’s piece on the Kaari Upson show at Sprüth Magers (which you should read even if you are not familiar with Upson’s work—I wasn’t!), especially this quote by Dorothy Allison she included in the text:
“If we were to reveal what we see in each painting, sculpture, installation or little book, we would run the risk of exposing our secret selves, what we know and what we fear we do not know, and of course incidentally what it is we truly fear. Art … is the projective hologram of our secret lives… . Do you dare say what it is you like?”
I love radical transparency in love. It’s easy to go off about the things you hate (ask the internet), but to completely sublimate yourself to the things that you love that bring you joy that make you feel alive that make you feel like a child that make you feel like a sensual being that make you feel human part of the cosmic force that is the universe… well that’s another thing entirely. (You feel guilty about your pleasures but not about your discontent.)
(Case in point I wrote and then deleted and then wrote the Radiohead part and then I wrote and then deleted and then wrote the Mitski part — am I revealing too much?)
One of my favorite things I saw this week at the Jean Paul Gaultier Couture show, which this season was designed by Simone Rocha. A model walked with arms behind her, each adorned with crystal flower embellishments. Her hands gave the illusion of being bound together yet her fingers were barely grazing one another. I thought it was such a wonderful take on Gaultier’s penchant for bondage; a suggestion of that was nonetheless just as seductive. Alma saying to Reynolds in Phantom Thread: I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help…