Hello! Of course, I failed to get my act together this week to start early on preparing this week’s letter, but I think this is probably a good sign that these letters will have to be bi-weekly rather than weekly. Judging by the weeks of work ahead, I’ll need the extra time.
Another thing is that I Went On Vacation this past week, a much-needed break away from massive screens and responsibilities in general. My sisters joke about my Emotional Support Laptop, but it’s only funny because it’s true. I haven’t done a Lazy Vacation in a while, the last year’s travels were activity-filled bonanzas which—while fun—were exhausting. I was ready to rot on the beach for a few days with some books and cold Cokes, and some stolen beers (sorry, Nick!) I’m home, sun-browned and surrounded by cats. It was a beautiful time.
didn’t you hear? it’s my birthday!
I.
Someone I loved died a few days ago, suddenly and unexpectedly, while I was on vacation. She left us far too young.
I didn’t know her for very long, but here’s an incomplete list of things about her: she loved unreservedly, welcoming strangers and old friends with equal fervour. She loved a good cuddle. She loved looking at cats and exploring slightly dangerous corners of the world. She’d listen to you while you were crying incomprehensibly about something, not really understanding what’s going on. When you wailed especially hard, she’d sit so close your limbs would touch; even if you didn’t feel like it, she’d initiate a small game to cheer you up. She danced like a drunk. She was so beautiful it sometimes hurt to look at her. She liked tomatoes and soft blankets. Really, she was just happy to be here.
II.
It’s odd to have to come to terms with her death as I turn 30 today.
It’s probably putting too much egg on it to say that I’m surprised to still be here, but it’s not totally wrong. There were days when I watched a red bus roll by and thought about, what if? I know how to sneak up forbidden staircases in high buildings, and of course, now I live in an apartment. Pills have never interested me, and neither have knives or car exhaust fumes, but I understand them in theory. The logistics may be challenging but they’re not impossible, is what I’m saying. These thoughts were easier to entertain when I was younger and more prone to partying irresponsibly; now, at 30, there’s the weight of the people around me and the cats to keep me in place.
I don’t want to die now, and I am a little shocked at my surprise at being here, still. It’s an awakening thing.
At the Illustration Fair over the weekend, I got a portrait done of myself. The artist painted my face in blues, greens and pinks; my hair is a riot of curls, I had them cut before I went to the beach. My cleavage is a sly wink at the bottom of the page: “can’t miss them,” the artist joked.
I don’t usually go for these kinds of things, but with so much heaviness in the air, it felt like the right dose of beauty I needed today. I want to remember myself like this, at 30. That there is colour and life and joy in aging. I am thinking about my younger self, the one who wanted to die all those years ago, even as I think about my lost friend.
IIII.
Remember when I wrote last week that I didn’t like The Tortured Poets Departments?1
Turns out it took much less time than I had originally expected, and I actually really like it! What a weird turnaround.
Not all of it is, good good, though. Some of it is pretty mid, and the biggest challenge has been figuring out which parts are the most mid. The album’s sprawl makes it “dense” thicket to navigate, but it’s been catnip for my literature student’s brain. I’ve been listening to the songs closely, reading the lyrics for allusion and connection. The most boring part of Tortured discourse has come from either ends of the spectrum, where people are comparing notes to figure out which song is connected to which person.2
To me, there is much more of the fictionalising of folk/more in this album than at first blush. The swampy heat of “Florida!!!” has “no body no crime”’s fingerprints and “But Daddy I Loved Him” is like a “Wildest Dreams” redux but with Taylor’s Old Hollywood persona transfigured into Scarlet O’Hara or Brontë’s Cathy Earnshaw or poor Maggie Tulliver. There are plenty of gothic ghosts haunting the album, and it’s Taylor and also not Taylor. It’s fiction, baby!3
There’s some truly breathtaking poetry in this, but the sounds are getting a little old. I do like the paralleling/undermining of sounds she’s used before, but I don’t think it’ll work if it follows her into a fourth (fifth?) album. For now, I am content to sink into the music, and I’m conducting some Very Important Research.
Other half-formed thoughts:
“The Albatross” is definitely a reworked “willow”, but I like how we’re back to capitalised letters. The abundance of epithets is interesting, and I haven’t thought about it long enough to come up with a theory, but they’re there.
“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” feels like it borrows something from Lorde’s “Man With the Axe.” Likely nothing, but a hint of a vibe or a spiritual third-cousin.
The way “The Prophecy” reshapes the sounds and images of “seven,” which I think is probably the most successful attempt in the album. The coda/bridge is so effective, I want someone to let her soundtrack the new Greta Gerwig Narnia movies.
Truthfully, sometimes her lyrics are pretty cringey (sic: Guilty As Sin?) but remember.
IV.
This clip from @subwaytakes about “Candid Girl” that I’ve rewatched like 20 times now. As a recovering pick-me-girl,
V.
I’m taking the rest of today to myself, off work and missing the beach. Leonard is curled up next to me, half-asleep, as Arthur attacks my laptop wire. Life can be beautiful, I am only just now beginning to understand.
I am a big birthday person, and I love little gifts: receiving them and (more so) giving them. So, I leave you with this poem and I hope that, whilst I away, that the last hours of April held you.
With grief, gratitude and much love, Sam.
it’s (almost) my birthday, you’re kind of obligated to subscribe
Writing about Taylor Swift can often feel like you’re writing from a defensive crouch. Any wonder, considering she also produces music that often feels like it comes from a defensive crouch. Anyway, you love the music you love.
Yes, I know Taylor is herself guilty (as sin?) for capitalising on public’s hunger to decode her lyrics for salacious details about her personal life. She isn’t perfect, and certainly not above gossipy impulses, the first commandment of realistic Swiftism is to remember that she is a snake, but who amongst us etc etc.
hi! I knew I was already way behind when I started drafting this, but then I did like 60% of the writing and sat on it as I got even busier with work and life. So, apologies in advance! I had a lot of life to live. But as Taylor demonstrated with her pretty lacklustre new album, you kind of have to live a bit more life to make good work — in many ways, the work only benefits from it.
That’s my mea culpa, and I’m sticking to it.
I know this is pretty late on a Monday to send this, but I’m procrastinating on a boring article I have to edit for work. indulge me.
and, I’ve missed you.
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I.
The Chinese New Year busyness got me good.
But I suppose it’s dishonest to only blame CNY, especially now that it’s more than eight weeks in the rearview mirror and I’m gearing up for my birthday season. I don’t have a good “mea culpa,” only requests for forgiveness. I can’t even promise that I won’t fall away from the keyboard again quickly — life has been immense and all-consuming, and the empty page even more so. I’ve found myself beginning and not-finishing four different drafts, overwhelmed by how much I feel like I need to say and also unable to say much of anything at all.
It was a fucking hectic opening to the year — I don’t think I remember it ever being this exhausting before. I’ve chalked it up to my big sister being home and having to now partake in the annual relative convoy because after my grandmother died, our family has tumbled down the pecking order.1 We schlepped across Petaling Jaya and Cheras, pilgrimaged to Setia Alam and Subang. There were endless dinners, then clean-up, then mahjong, and people people people people — like I said, it was hectic.
Good, but exhausting.
II.
I wrote this like 3 weeks ago, so it’s definitely out of date, but I’ve been paying attention to the continued massacre. I am thinking in particular about the horrific news coming out about the mass grave found in the freshly-destroyed Nasser Hospital, already on its last legs when the IDF besieged it for the second time. I am also thinking about the fact that the West Bank is being slowly and painfully transformed into a second Gaza, with far fewer attention paid to it.
Last year I binged the first season of the great Empire podcast on the British occupation of India and the gradual destruction imperial power can enact on a people and its culture. Watching Israel do the same to Palestine — with greater levels of impunity and firepower, albeit equal amounts of cruelty — has been stomach-turning. I’ve learned a lot about empire by living in the world left in its ruins; it’s something else entirely to watch it function so blatantly in world that insists that it has moved beyond it. Free Palestine.
I have been thinking incessantly about Gaza, staring long into the night at its ruins. I think images from Al-Shifa Hospital — rubble still hot to the touch and stinking of acrid flesh — are now burned to the backs of my eyelids. Every morning I wake up and I check the same accounts to make sure they are still alive: Bisan, Hossam, Suhail. Then I check on Wael Al-Dahdouh and Motaz, unconvinced that being outside of Gaza means they are safe. I think about Motaz constantly, how he’s now being paraded out in front of a million cameras and speaking events, trying his best to advocate for the city he has physically left behind. I imagine that every night his mind remains trapped amid the bombs and screams, stress fossilising into benign tumours and phantom stomach cramps that doctors can’t seem to pinpoint.
I’m familiar with many of these names now: Deir al-Balah. Rafah. Gaza City. Beit Lahia. Jabalia. Today, I watched a video about the destruction of Khan Younis, Bisan’s hometown. I think about Motaz’s grandmother in Deir al-Balah, and Bassam Youssef’s in-laws living alongside 25 families in a cramped building.
I’ve been trying to think about write about Gaza — I’ve tried before this, but it all felt trite in the face of all this horror.
So, instead, I think about Hanna. I think about Hanna, at least once a day, and wonder if she’s living in the West Bank in a home stolen from a Palestinian family by settlers. I think about her husband, who I met once in 2016, and I think about the Bedouin tents where they were married after knowing each other for a year. Some days, I run my fingers over and over the memory of the three of us lying in Molly’s bed, watching the Oscars, and realising that she didn’t think Palestine was a country. I wonder how many children she has now — the last I checked, there were two. Likely there are more now, because I remember how convinced she was of its importance to God. Because I remember that Hanna had an iron-clad conviction in herself and what she believed to be true in the world — how could something as soft as a half-formed friendship and proximity shake that? I envied those qualities, inasmuch as I felt they made her hard to like very much. I think about how when she came back from Jerusalem after leaving university to be married in the middle of the desert, she said, “Not Hanna,” like you’d say “Anna,” with an Americana under-twang — more like “KHAN-na,” like you were West Asian, like you weren’t White from Europe, like you slept in a house haunted by its dispossessed residents.
Once, when I was on Facebook, I saw that she’d shared of paintings she’d made of the view from her window as she underwent whatever the Israeli version of confinement was. This was maybe five years ago now. I had always liked Hanna’s eye for colour and form, thought there was an elegance to her person that I envied — she was the kind of person who made a secondhand duffle coat look effortlessly chic, who had beautiful fingers adorned with thin bands of silver that made you imagine you too could pull it off (be real, you couldn’t). Once, she painted a tablescape, layers of blue-and-white cloth, a bright yellow vase, a mezze of greens, whites and pinks — hands reaching forward. In another image, there was a rolling hill, thin scrub and cloudy bursts of twisting orchards, sky like a blue banner in the wind.
Were these in Palestine? Was that occupied land? Was this a life built from blood and ash and rubble? I don’t know.
III.
While I was away, Iron & Wine collaborated on a new song with Fiona Apple, “All In Good Time.” As regular readers will note, anything Fiona is a big +++ in my books, but I don’t think many (any?) know about the I&W obsession I nurtured as a young woman looking for music to love. I used to listen incessantly to “Passing Afternoon”, lullaby-like and presaging the deep grief of pre-empted loss that I wouldn’t understand until I was much older.
I was discussing music tastes with a friend recently, which got me wondering about what music actually soundtracked my younger years. In primary school, the year-ends were bookended by frenetic “biodata book” sessions, during which we filled our hard-backed notebooks with dossiers on ourselves — name, birthday, birth place, zodiac signs, favourite foods, films, books — before closing out well-wishes to friends for the holidays and beyond.
Thinking about it now, I’m in awe of how such rituals trickled their way down the levels, year to year. How did we know what on earth to do'? What were we even trying to achieve with these books? Inscribing our memory into our friends’ lives, like even at ages 10, 11, 12, we knew how fleeting these connections would be? How friends can fade in and out of our lives? You could do really well or shit in the exams one year, and find yourself in an entirely different class the next, a whole new friend group environment. Losing friends and gaining new ones with a single rotation around the sun. Within those pages, were we trying to convey the entirety of who we were (are?) to our friends in some vague hope of pure understanding, one that would transcend physical proximity and shared class time? Did I give them my email address so they’d continue to reach out even after we didn’t see each other anymore?
Maybe.
The sentiment is not far from the ground I fall on nowadays, striving to be understood by saying too much — saying everything — because maybe then someone would get it. Maybe then someone could look beyond the flaws and bad decisions to see to the bottom of me, maybe see the thing that could be maybe worth loving. Do you see my trick? I’m doing it now. Call it a performance piece. Call it an object lesson.
Biodata books now seem like precursors to social media, more reminiscent of the early days of Facebook than its current Hydra-headed form. Slivers of information, likes and dislikes, a handwritten message board, a litany of bands and books and movies. I liked American alternative emo-rock bands that I discovered on LimeWire like Motion City Soundtrack, but I also liked the tween ABBA cover band A*Teen and Aly & AJ. I taught myself to love Fort Minor because my friends were bonding over it, learning all the words to Switchfoot songs for all the same reasons.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how carefully we can mould ourselves into forms most pleasing to the people we love. We are multitudes, layers of our own delusions and truths, as well as those of other people, beloved and not. Formed in affinity and opposition.
Why did I hate Taylor Swift when I was a teenager? Because K and T thought she wasn’t cool. Why do I love Taylor Swift now? Because K and T think she wasn’t cool, and Nicky taught me that what you love shouldn’t matter to anyone else but you though it does help to find friends to weave academic treatises on the nature of time in her discography. Why do I love romances? Because they spoke to a quiet longing inside me, but also because I loved loving something other people found trashy. I loved fun. in their odd, left-field “Walking the Dog” era, and hated them when Glee began incorporating their songs into their show. We love what we love, and often we love to love what other people hate.
Sometimes it’s fun to be hater.
IV.
I initially started writing some thought about the “Tumblr circa 2012” vibes of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, but it’s hard to describe it. You just kind of had to be there. I started writing it as a think-bit about how much Swift is a product of that by-gone site, one that does still exists though it’s missing the frenetic (and, frankly, insane) energy that fuelled the young, intensely nerdy and terminally online. But, again, I sat on it for so long that the album came out and now I just gotta say that I don’t like it. Maybe it will grow on me like Reputation did — it’s become probably my second favourite Taylor Swift album — but I have my doubts. The writing sort of holds up, but the music is so one-tone that I can actually write to the sound of it. Smooth brain nothing music.
So, anyway, I saw Taylor Swift in Singapore in March 2024, and it fucking rocked.
Concerts, I’ve come to realise, are just one BIG KARAOKE SESSION, and it was a deeply intense experience. I’m not pleased about how much money I had to spend to make this happen, but I’m glad I went. I couldn’t see anything really, being the height that I am, but being surrounded by that much joy was amazing. My throat hurt by the end of the night, sweat-dampened and grinning. I’m shocked by how many Swift lyrics are hanging out in my head — my mouth shaped to the words even before I could process what I knew. We dance-jumped until my hair ties snapped and I clambered up on a chair to get One Good Photo.
I cried so many times, something I really didn’t expect. Cried when she did the heart hands to “Long Live”, SOBBED my way through the entirety of “All Too Well (10-minute version)”, teared up during Reputation.
Midnights is not a Swift album I love all that much (it’s good though) but I do love the pain-ache of “You’re On Your Own Kid” — and when she paired that with “Fifteen”? Swift gets a lot of flack for never quite growing up beyond who she was when she became famous — “So High School”, I’m looking at you — but I think it’s not so much a problem of perspective than of vocabulary. Swift’s lexicon is deeply informed by those dynamics, and for good reason! They’re handy, they’re immediately legible to her mainly-American core demographic (though this is ill-conceived given her international influence) so they’re just convenient (and, admittedly, thin) tools for illustrating character. But it’s ungenerous and myopic to boil that down to simply a stunted point of view, though I can understand why that might be the case (it also reeks a bit of paternalism).
The “Fifteen”/ “YOYOK” mashup suggests to me that Swift does actually have a really layered, adult understanding of experience and time — time, to me, is Swift’s real thematic preoccupation, but that’s for another … time … — one that aches with the knowledge of growing up. There’s real pathos there. “YOYOK” is, to me, a really bitter song, despite its triumphant musical underpinnings, and I think you get a lot more of that in Tortured Poets. The music Antonoff gives her fails that mature sense you get in the writing, though the writing itself needs a lot of work (and a strict editor). Paired with “Fifteen”, “YOYOK” acquires the sweetness of nostalgia that’s always been a signature Swiftian motif — looking back in time to a period when you were constantly casting your mind forward into the future, even as you’re forever lingering on the past. Sweet and toxic. Swift is constantly consumed by remembering, and the inevitable loss of time. “Envious and calumniating time,” Shakespeare writes in Troilus and Cressida. A “great-sized monster of ingratitudes,” collecting cash for oblivion. (What a great speech, what a great play!)
no Five Things essay today because I’m taking my own advice and doing a proper break. I’m in the middle of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, which is about cooking but also life and using up scraps and doing things imperfectly but consistently — it’s so relaxing and I love it deeply.
Sorry for being late! It took only two weeks to fall off the bandwagon, but I promise that the hellish week that I’ve had has been to blame. CNY 2024 is proving to be insane, and I almost wish it was how it was last year when a death in the family meant we had absolutely nothing to do but play mahjong. I have far too few brain cells left to write much this week, so here is a post full of photos instead.
If you’re celebrating this year, Gong Xi Fa Cai! If you aren’t, I hope you get all the rest you crave.
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I.
It’s been a harrowing few days, so the fucks-field I tend has gone fallow.
The kitchen sink and fridge have given up on me, the cats (Arthur) are peeing in protest, and there is too much to clean before Chinese New Year, and anyone I could have hired has already gone on holiday. I’ve had cleaners and couriers cancel on me, and the minor inconvenience of a broken ticketing machine nearly brought me to tears. I had had a little piece about my office window planned, but instead, please have a picture of the cat tree I built when I was so angry that I couldn’t sleep.
II.
In my newsletter about pulping your unwanted books, I mentioned Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” back in 1899. What I didn’t mention — or know — was that Veblen was hot.
The slouch! The giant moustache! The perfectly angled arm suggesting an insouciance that is completely absent in the face of the laconic intensity of his stare! Eyes that seem to peer straight to the bottom of the world, shadowed by cynicism but also the immense wisdom beyond his time! The artfully rumpled clothes of a university don, but on the body of a recluse living in the Swiss mountains! The weird, greasy centre-parted hair, that pretends to imply schoolboy, but all you can think of is a dark room in a Soviet-era prison lit by a single hanging lightbulb, a white tank and grey trousers, nothing but a bench, leathers, and maybe a drain! The size of him! This s what people want Adam Driver to be but what he desperately cannot achieve!
If you knew he was hot, I am offended you didn’t tell me.
If you weren’t on Twitter during the 2024 Grammys, you might have missed the outpouring of love for Tracy Chapman, who performed her classic hit “Fast Car” alongside Luke Combs, the white country dude who helped bring the song back to mainstream consciousness before immediately benefiting from a TikTok bump.
I don’t have much to say about it except that I watched the clips of Chapman perform like 20 times, and the radiance of her face!!! I kept crying!!! Luke Combs!!!!
I was — how would you put it — extremely excited about a new Taylor album and I have more I want to say about it next week, but the immediate thoughts are: “When did we get catapulted back to 2013?????”
V.
Over the last three years I’ve lived with at least 1 cat, and this last bit is dedicated to Smudge, who was a real one the whole time we were housemates. I’m a little sad that I don’t get to see him everyday now that we’ve both moved, but I hope he’s doing okay and enjoying his new home.
We’ve not moved far from each other, but it’ll be different now that we’re not living in the same space anymore.
When I published the “escape to sala besar” essay on Friday, I had this niggling feeling that putting out another newsletter on Monday would be A Lot. And, honestly, I’m not done with it yet hahahahahaha
So, this is just a note that I’m going to briefly move the five things essay to Tuesdays. We’ll keep an eye on how that will work out.
In the meantime, DID YOU KNOW TAYLOR IS RELEASING A NEW ALBUM THIS APRIL IT’S CALLED THETORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT SHE’S DEPRAVED I CAN’T STAND HER I’M REALLY EXCITED
Much love,
Sam.
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