Hello! I’m coming at you from the beginning stages of my second interstate move in four years, which means my brain is frazzled and I’m listening to a rotation of musical comfort food (Deftones and sad girl music).
This month, I’ve found myself interested in stories about human scale and human speed, and the impacts on the human psyche of deprioritizing them. The idea of doing things fast and cheap for maximum profit, maximum acclaim and maximum scale has eroded respect for craft across most of the things that make life worth living: food, the built environment, work, art, and ultimately our relationships. When you erode respect for craft, you erode respect for people’s humanity — the time, the thought, the care that goes into making something — which leaves us all worse off spiritually.
Reading
“As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach. For years, we allowed immediate gratification to blind ourselves to the reality that making something cheaper and more accessible almost always makes it worse. It didn’t matter if the shirt fell apart or the couch collapsed — you could always buy a new one and survive on the glow of its novelty until it had to be replaced as well”.
- Anne Helen Petersen, “Are people bad at their jobs, or are the jobs just bad?”
Alice Munro was a Nobel Prize-winning author and literary giant. She also allowed her husband to sexually abuse her daughter Andrea. Worse than that, she took the story of what happened to Andrea and re-purposed it in her own creative work. This essay in New York Magazine by Rachel Aviv is brilliant — she interviewed Andrea and her sister Jenny at length, and she balances the impact of Munro’s own traumatic childhood without minimizing the horror of Andrea’s experience.
Rufi Thorpe’s “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” has got me out of a reading rut. The titular Margo is a teenager who turns to OnlyFans to make money after getting knocked up by her college professor. It’s funny, sharp and extremely contemporary — it’ll be interesting to see how it ages.
Father Karine’s (anonymous) Substack is funny, entertaining, and most importantly, not trying to sell anyone anything.
“It can be tempting to view individualized work as something paltry or unimportant. It doesn’t help that people whose work can scale get access to fame, wealth, and power that will rarely be available to people operating at an individual level. And yeah, sometimes small-scale work is just wasted effort, the result of being too proud to see that the same result could be achieved with less work.
But sometimes things can’t scale without changing. Care doesn’t really scale without becoming something else. Thinking about this has helped me reframe how I feel about things like parents looking after their children, things like my friends taking time to chat with me. It’s not that I cynically didn’t think those things were important; it’s just difficult to shake the sense that people, that I, should be doing bigger, better things.”
Care doesn’t scale
Watching
The new season of Hacks is brilliant, as you’d expect. I love watching Deborah and Ava’s relationship morph, and seeing what happens when two people who are always only out for themselves are forced to be vulnerable and work together.
I’m not a big fan of renovation/restoration shows. There’s only so many times you can see clueless rich people set money on fire in the pursuit of a nicer house. However, I loved the episode of Restoration Australia about the multi-million dollar restoration of Brisbane’s historic Lamb House. The 120-year-old home (with Brisbane’s best view) was built by a prominent architect in 1903, and was at risk of being demolished for apartments before the current owners snapped it up. The current owners have deep pockets, passion for architecture and heritage protection, and a respect for arcane trades and skills. The result is absolutely stunning. Such attention to detail! You can watch it on ABC iView and see the before-and-after pics here.
Pic from the Courier Mail. I was SWEATING watching the trades install the laylight, which took thousands of hours to painstakingly restore.
Listening
The new Parkway Drive song mixes a verse and chorus that’ll get dads hyped to mow the lawn with the filthiest breakdown they’ve written in years. Keep an ear out for the eagle call.
I’m deep in a Lady Gaga hole, still. I loved this rendition of Poker Face, where she goes head-to-head in a dance battle against her holder self… on a chess board.
Spoken word poet/rapper Kae Tempest samples his younger, pre-gender affirmation self on his new track Know Yourself. Taking testosterone does affect the vocal cords, and Tempest’s current deeper voice is almost like a duet with the higher-pitched vocals from past Kae. It’s poignant given the track’s subject matter, and uncommon to see. Love a bit of trans joy!
Kelly Clarkson covering Melbourne’s own Angie McMahon.
"I've been learning 'bout letting go
How to do it without my claws
Scratching the surfaces
I've been learning 'bout wasting time
And closing some doors
Hoping to open more, down the line”