The Missive #75
Forgiveness, slowness, Christmas trees.
Here we are at the end of another year. I don’t know about you, but I’m buckling under the weight of year-end wraps and 2025 predictions and truly have nothing profound to offer.
I hope you get the Christmas and New Year break that you want. See you in 2025!
Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.
– Justin Welsh
Reading
This is a read/listen combo, but I loved the audiobook version of Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown”, which is co-written by her daughter Riley Keough. Lisa Marie began writing her memoirs as a series of voice note recordings, and asked Keough to help her stitch them all together. Sadly, she died before she could finish her work, so the resulting book is a mix of Presley’s stories and Keough sharing her memories to fill in the gaps. Why the audiobook? The recording is a mix of the raw, original voice notes from Lisa Marie, Riley reading her own parts and Julia Roberts voicing the edited scripts from Lisa Marie’s work. I think I’ve made it sound chaotic, but it’s actually really beautiful. One of Keough’s goals with the book was to give people a sense of what her mum was like as a person, and I think she nailed it. Also there are some absolutely wild stories in there.
This lovely profile of Shan who runs Jet Black Cat Music in West End (it’s shutting down after 14 years)
Asako Yuzuki - Butter. I loved this book I’d seen a few people saying that they gave it a miss because of the fat phobia in it… but if you persist, you’ll see that fat phobia is one of the many themes that drive the book along.
To change people’s minds, you need to help them dismantle the scaffolding that built their beliefs.
Watching
The second season of Bad Sisters on Apple TV+. The first season is one of the best things I’ve ever watched. It’s extremely stressful viewing, but Sharon Horgan has never let me down before, so I trust her.
This 90 minute long interview with my queen, Tori Amos. I do not expect a single person to click on this link, but I wanted to throw it out there because a) it showed that Tori really hasn’t been given the respect she deserves in interviews because she doesn’t speak in soundbites b) It gives a glimpse of what could be possible with music journalism in 2024. If you do watch this interview or watch Rick Beato content regularly, let me know — I have a lot of thoughts.
I grew up working in Australia’s biggest Mitre 10 (the community owns it, my dad runs it1). I’m a woman married to a woman. I own an older house in the burbs. Put these things together and you might assume that I love visiting Bunnings, but my attitude towards the big green shed is one of grudging respect and obligation. This YouTube deep dive into how Bunnings took over Australia gave me some much-needed context on exactly how they dominated the market.
Music/Listening
My favourite albums of 2024 were:
Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of. Midwest Princess
Floating Points: Cascade
Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard And Soft
Fontaines DC: Romance
Maggie Rogers: Don’t Forget Me
I thought Chappell Roan’s Tiny Desk concert was the best one of 2024, but Doechii’s one blew it out of the water. The first song isn’t my favourite, but if you don’t trust the process, you’ll miss out on the good stuff.
I love hearing what other people have been listening to. Tell me what you’ve loved this year!
More
Something I’m trying to take into the new year
“In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.”
I got to do everything you’d expect a hardware store staff member to do except cut timber. This is why I get so mad when Bunnings staff can’t accurately mix paint or cut keys. I could do it as a hungover teen!