The Missive #70 - I'm back, baby!
Welcome back to the Cher/John Farnham of newsletters
Hi everyone! After 10 years of doing this newsletter, I suppose it’s not too surprising that I needed a bit of long service leave. Thanks to all the new people signing up every week via
and ’s newsletters - now you’ll finally get something worth signing up for (hopefully). I missed you all! Please reply and say hi!So, where have I been for the past year?
Doing
I got the biggest, fanciest job of my life. I needed to make sure it got all of my attention for my first year or so there. Also, honestly? After a big week in the corporate mines, the last thing I wanted to do was get on my laptop.
I got married! It was the best weekend of my life. The best part was having so many people that L and I love in Newcastle all at the same time.
In the past 5 years I’ve done health crises → career change → pandemic lockdown → interstate move → bought a house → scary new job → wedding. My nervous system is absolutely fried. I’ve been trying lots of different things to heal it and learning a lot about my body in the process.
I tried to do this missive as a list of things I’ve loved over the past year, but it got too overwhelming. So, here’s what’s been sticking with me over the past few months.
Reading
My mum loves literary fiction, so I was surprised when she suggested I read Paris Hilton’s new memoir. Yes, it has weapons-grade name-dropping and reminiscences on what it was like to be a socialite in the late 90s and early 00s. But, it also goes into great detail about how her undiagnosed ADHD led to her parents sending her to one of those “scared straight” schools for “troubled” kids. She was starved, beaten and psychologically abused for nearly two years straight — and lives with lifelong PTSD as a result. I learned a lot including that the “dumb baby” voice everyone associates with her is not her real voice, and Stars Are Blind was originally written for Gwen Stefani, which makes perfect sense.
Kyle Chayka - Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture. Do you feel like everything kind of looks and feels the same wherever you go? Well, smartphones and social media are probably to blame. This excerpt from the book about the algorithm’s effect on cafes gives you a good idea of what Chayka’s talking about.
Max Easton - Paradise Estate. A really enjoyable read about a group of 30-something strangers who end up sharing a house as they grapple with grief the limits of the ideals of their 20s. It’s more fun than I’ve made it sound, I promise.
Charlotte Wood - The Weekend. I’m a few years late, but God, I loved this book. It’s ostensibly about a group of women in their 70s who spend Christmas cleaning out their recently deceased bestie’s beach house to get it ready for sale, but it covers so much more. The characters have been friends for decades, and I love how this Wood captured the feeling of “I’ve been friends with this woman for so long and I’m sick of her shit, but if you hurt her I will kill you.” It had me pondering aging, parenthood, and the dynamics of long friendships for weeks after finishing it.
Online
This year marks the boundary between me being NOT a professional journalist longer than I was one. Journalism is crucial for a functioning democracy, but it’s not a big money maker for anyone. I miss the work every day, but leaving the industry was the right choice for my mental, physical and financial health. This curation of 27 first-person pieces by journos on why they left the industry was sobering.
Sarah Leavitt’s commencement speech to the UBC School of Creative Writing is a tonic to the doom and gloom of the retiring journos.. In it, she speaks about approaching art as an act of “joyful persistence”:
“I don’t think it’s news to anyone that it takes a certain kind of resilience to be a creative worker. There’s so much rejection. So much losing, so much not getting the award or the grant or the job or the likes. It’s hard not to get super jealous, to wish you had someone else’s career, to despair about your own work. That’s definitely been a huge struggle for me. So how do we avoid being full of envy for others or condemnation for ourselves? Maybe it helps to think about what will happen if you never win anything. No awards, no grants, no millions of followers. Are there other reasons that will keep you going? Maybe the discipline of being a worker, maybe joy. Maybe being super aware of how it feels to make your art – in your body, in your heart.
Maybe also it’s about feeling like you’re part of a larger whole. So that when someone you know wins an award you feel joy for their achievement instead of – or maybe at the same time as – sadness about not getting it yourself.”
This fun fact below shouldn’t have blown my mind, but it did.
“All this information that is now digitised is actually us… Tech companies have scraped from us a database of human intentions, as well as our hopes and dreams and knowledge and questions about the world.”
Kara Swisher talking about AI in her memoir, Burn Book.
Music
We’re living in a golden era of music for the girls and the gays. Pop music is finally fun again!1.
It took me a little while to get into it, but I’m loving Charli XCX’s new album Brat. The music is straight from the club, the lyrics seem like they’re straight from Charli’s group chat. Can’t wait to pretend I’m in the Von Dutch film clip as I catch a red-eye Jetstar flight from Newcastle to Brisbane this weekend.
I still love Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso even though it is literally two cheap samples from Splice. Is it fair that Vaughan Oliver, who made the samples, doesn’t get royalties from this omnipresent song?
If I was 14 years old, I would devote every waking moment of my life and every part of my personality to being a Chappell Roan stan2. I never thought that I’d find an artist who mixes sad girl music with camp so seamlessly. If you’ve never heard of her before, I’d like to recommend her Gov Ball entrance, her joyful Tiny Desk concert and the songs HOT TO GO!, Casual and Red Wine Supernova.
I saw The Beaches in Sydney and it was so fun! If you like The Pretenders, Best Coast and 80s new wave, you’ll love this.
Nile Rodgers and Chic’s Tiny Desk concert
Nobody has shaped popular music like Nile Rodgers, and this is one of the best Tiny Desks I’ve ever seen. Incredible setlist covering his work over 40 years with his own band Chic, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Daft Punk, and of course, Rapper’s Delight.
Glass Beams are a (mostly) instrumental trio from Melbourne who play Indian and Thai-influenced psychedelic music on vintage Maton guitars, while wearing beaded masks. They’ve sold out their most recent Aussie tour - I’d describe their music as groovy and hypnotic.
One Step Closer are a bunch of Gen Z guys who make music that sounds like everything I listened to between 2009 and 2012. For Fans of Title Fight, Defeater, Touche Amore.
The fact that music is fun again makes me think that we’re finally going to be in for a recession.
I basically did this with Tori Amos, so I know I have it in me.
So good to have you back!