The Missive #74

Rewind the internet. Let the ocean take m̶e̶ my phone.

Earlier this year, my longtime friend R came to visit. After a quick breakfast, we went straight to one of the most magical places in town: the Bogey Hole.
It’s the oldest swimming baths in Newcastle, originally carved out of the cliff face by convicts so that the penal colony’s commandant had a private space to bathe. Discovering the Bogey Hole and nearby King Edward Park planted the original seed of wanting to move to Newcastle more than a decade ago, and swimming there at sunset on a calm day is how I hope heaven feels.

See? Magical.

Like most magical things in life, the Bogey Hole also has a frisson of danger. The water can be like glass or like the inside of a washing machine depending on the conditions, and sadly a few people have died there over the years.

On this day, the water was calm and the tide was out. We blissfully floated for around 15 minutes, chatting and bobbing around. Then, out of nowhere, a powerful rogue wave crashed over the side of the Bogey Hole, the current pulling us under and trapping me beneath a metal platform. I’m a weak swimmer and a panicker, but fortunately I’ve poured a lot of time and money into hypnotherapy and singing lessons over the years, so I tried to keep my heart rate down to save oxygen as I figured out how to get out from under the platform. I re-surfaced, gasping, and clambered on to the platform yelling out to R asking if she was ok. She was alive but shaken… then we realised our clothes and belongings had gone into the water. R swam around trying to save what she could. Our towels, some of our clothes and our sunglasses were gone forever, but R spotted our phones, my Apple Watch and my car keys on the bottom of the rock pool. Full of adrenaline, we laughed while trudging up the hill to the car. R’s phone was fine, but a crack in mine let the saltwater in and after a couple of hours of overheating, it was dead for good.

Dispatch from the group chat

Maybe it was the calm and appreciation for life that comes with a near death experience, but I felt grateful that the ocean took my phone. Those two phone-less days gave me a sense of peace and focus I hadn’t had since the pandemic kicked off and triggered a gnarly phone addiction. I’ve been chasing that peace ever since, and this month I’ve been thinking about what will give it to me.

“About 10 years ago, Katy Perry was talking to me about the internet armies of all the girl singers, and how cruel and rancid they were. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the internet.” She said, “So, who are your rivals?” I just looked at her. It was my steely look. I said, “Katy, I don’t have rivals. I have friends. All the other women singers that I know are friends. Nobody’s competing. Get off the internet and you won’t have rivals either.”

Stevie Nicks in Rolling Stone. I can’t get enough of her. Also, does this interview hint that her affair with Lindsey Buckingham was back on again in the 2010s?! I love mess.

“I want to cast a wide net so I get the really freaky fish in there, along with the workplace perfectionists and the steady heroes. Courting the weirdest fish requires a slight relaxing of stringent fisherwoman standards.”
- Ask Polly, “My magic is disappearing!”

“Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?”
- Maria Farrell and Robin Berton, “We need to rewild the internet”

“Do the well-meaning digital divide boosters know that everyone sees a different internet? That it doesn’t take long for the online algorithms to curate a virtual geography that, ironically, rather than freeing a person from their class, identity and others’ prejudice, can hold them captive?”
- Anna Krien, “The people who mistook their lives for an app”

“We'll get a lot more done as a community of music-lovers/artists if we instead of trying to 'break into' the industry and/or reform it, we kind of ignore it or refuse to engage with it.  I like the idea of one of the pillars of transitioning to a 'living democracy' is to simply withdraw consent from the systems & ways of thinking that support extractivism.”

- Tim Shiel, “It’s not just me, it’s everybody"

“Do we *actually* not want people to go through what we went through….or do we secretly think what we went through is foundational to good work?”

- Anne Helen Petersen is on fire in this piece about the toxicity of media workplaces, specifically when it comes to old boomer journalists whinging about the work ethic of Gen Z journalists.

Phoebe Paradise has done it again. There are t-shirts too.

Reading

• Kasey Chambers’ memoir, “Just Don’t Be A Dickhead, and Other Profound Things I’ve Learnt”. I recommend listening to it as an audiobook — I felt like I was catching up with a friend.

• Coco Mellors — Cleopatra and Frankenstein. This book was so enjoyable that it made me want to swear off screen time altogether. I know the plot doesn’t really seem that compelling, but you should add it to your holiday reading.

• Liam Pieper — Appreciation. A fun satire about a controversial artist who gets “cancelled”, only to find out his career wasn’t how it seemed.

Watching

• The second half of the four-part Netflix documentary on gymnast Simone Biles’ journey to the 2024 Olympics after she bowed out of the 2020 Olympics for mental health reasons. This was stressful viewing and I already knew that she won!

• Is it just me, or is Saturday Night Live having a real purple patch at the moment? Domingo, Sassy Michael Myers, the diner lobsters singing Les Mis, and Chloe Troast’s incredible musical skits as Little Orphan Cassidy (that song!!) and being a girl power country singer with Chris Stapleton. Can’t believe Lorne Michaels booted someone so talented after one season.

@makingstuff on Instagram

Listening

• My October playlist. This was a bit of an eclectic month.

• Maggie Rogers singing Night Changes as as tribute to One Direction’s Liam Payne, who tragically died last month. I also just found her Bonnaroo festival set — I love her big entrance and joyful daggy white girl dancing.

• I went on a big Kasey Chambers kick after reading her memoir, and found her cover of Eminem’s Lose Yourself that went viral a couple of years ago (sorry I’m late on this one). It’s an 8 minute long gothic folk re-imagining that just builds and builds. It gave me chills. “Success is my only motherfucking option, failure’s not!”