#27: don't think you're having all the fun, you know me, i hate everyone
In March I spent six days in Berlin, not that you’d know because I've failed to mention it- anywhere, at all, at any time, ever- since being back.
It's hard to quantify really what the city means to me, how it replaced in a very real way my deep infatuation with New York, a place I was fortunate enough to visit in my early twenties, six times in seven years. It’s also hard to talk about liking Berlin without sounding like a meme shared on a Real Housewives of Clapton-style account, so I won’t dwell too much other than to say that coming home (as always) felt heavy, like it was too soon, like we should just uproot our life here and move there. I am embarrassingly attached to the stretch of Friedrichshain in which I’ve spent so much time in the last decade; I like that at this stage I can now navigate my way around the city with ease, without having to panic too much about whether I need to be on the S or U-Bahn. I feel comfortable there; I feel rested in my bones. Beer is cheap, good coffee can be found on most streets, and vegan doughnuts are abundant. It is not a city without flaws- and I don't claim it to be- but anywhere can feel like a utopia if you try hard enough.
It was my birthday in April, and as with every year, I spent the week before feeling anxious and preoccupied with complicated feelings about taking yet another trip around the sun. Nobody seems willing to talk about the abject dread that can appear when you should be celebrating, but I attempted to quell my own panic by making plans with those I love in the days before and days after; things that felt manageable and wouldn’t cause me to overload and fall into crisis (I still had some internal crisis). I went for walks; I watched good movies; I ate good food. I saw Real Lies at Village Underground.
May felt largely work-oriented; career high-points and stress-inducing lows. I still can’t balance needing to be busy with a deep desire to do absolutely nothing and yes, this is what I spend my time talking about in therapy. I listened to too much Charli XCX, lamented the looming demise of one of my favourite Norwich landmarks (Anglia Square) and finally watched The Godfather, which I found to be an objectively “fine” movie.
As I write, we are 27 days into June and it’s already too warm, though the sun has provided me with much-needed vitamin D and mental levity. The summer is my least favourite part of the year even if I still have a childhood picture of it as a six-week long break, free from responsibilities. I work full-time, so that simply isn’t the case; June to August are always hellishly packed for me, September acting as the carrot on the stick to drag me through all those events, activities and school assemblies I have to endure. Three weeks ago, I saw Nine Inch Nails with two of my oldest, closest friends, which felt transformative and awe-inspiring, rattling my insides, my outsides and my brain. I’ve been chasing the post-show high ever since, hooking their discography to my veins in hopes that I can recreate the buzz of that evening. I haven't shut up about it much to my boyfriend’s chagrin (I am reading the subreddits daily). It feels good to care about things so earnestly; everything is bad all the time, a refrain I think I've probably typed in every single one of these newsletters I've sent out- it’s becoming my default. I had forgotten how good it feels to care.
Recently, somebody I know shared an excerpt from a CS Lewis essay titled `On Living in an Atomic Age’. It was published in 1948, but feels prescient given the horrors that seem to loom around every corner these days. I read it not long after I’d seen 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle & Alex Garland’s post-apocalyptic follow up to their 2002 collaboration (starring Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy), in which British life has become increasingly inhospitable (the zombies are smart now; people are even more insane). Notions of what the world would or will be like in the aftermath of disaster were fresh in my mind, but both Boyle and Lewis- below- press the importance of hope, of humanity, and not hiding away:
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds...
Normality- caring- is covetable.
(Across March and April and May and June, I listened to 138 podcasts, watched 115 episodes of television, 47 films and listened to music by 239 different artists).
(Mortifyingly Belated) Five for March, and April, and May and June, 2025:
Film:
Condensing four months of film watching into a handy bullet point seems fairly impossible but I’ll try:
March stand-outs included finally seeing Nan Goldin’s soundtracked slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in a gallery in Berlin, a visceral experience which reminded me just why I fell in love with her work in the first place. I also saw Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider for the first time (not in Berlin, but at my local Picturehouse) and predictably loved it, irritated that I'd avoided it for so long because I had presumed I'd find it cliched and parodic (I didn’t).
More New Hollywood I watched in April: Five Easy Pieces, very, very Cheever or Carver-esque, with such unreal performances- everyone, but especially Jack Nicholson. I got stoned and watched Robert Altman's Nashville, sort of biblical and a fun start to my journey with a director whose work I have very little familiarity with.
Two standouts in May were new releases; The Ballad of Wallace Island, starring Tim Key as a lottery winner who decides to reunite one of his favourite bands for a private concert on a remote island. Sounds twee but it isn’t; Key is the real emotional core here and I didn't anticipate crying as much as I did. I also vibed hard with the new Wes Anderson- The Phoenician Scheme; even "lesser" Anderson to me is far more engaging than 75% of other director's outputs, so I enjoyed this even if it doesn't hit the dizzying heights of some of his previous work.
More Altman in June- Popeye, a batshit piece of art, real fuelled by cocaine stuff of both dreams and nightmares- plus two rewatches of significant pieces of Edward Norton cinematic history: 25th Hour- I think, very underrated Spike Lee, perfect post-9/11 cinema, and not just because Ground Zero is captured on screen full-frontal, in perpetuity; and Fight Club, one of my most favourite Fincher films, which I was sceptical would live up to my adolescent infatuation, but it did (even if my big takeaway this time around was how dumb men are if left to their own devices; self-aggrandising, self-absorbed idiots in a pack, bemoaning problems in the world that they've helped create).
TV:
Like most of the world, we mainlined Netflix’s Adolescence, the plot of which by this point doesn’t need explaining. Season three of The White Lotus preoccupied large swathes of my time in April (Walton Goggins forever) and in May, both The Studio and season two of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal made my anxiety pique in differing ways (I will never be able to listen to Evanescence without thinking of Sully Sullenberger). In June, I binged two pieces of pure millennial bait: FX’s Adults about a group of friends living together in New York, and Overcompensating, Benito Skinner’s semi-autobiographical story of coming to terms with his sexuality at college in the 2010s. Nostalgic in all the right ways (Uffie, Kreayshawn, Sleigh Bells all appear as needle-drops), it’s in direct contrast to Adam Curtis’s Shifty, which posits a very different look at the past and the way history and misplaced nostalgia for bygone days are manipulated in nefarious ways (a must watch!)
Podcasts:
Never not late to the party (because it came out in 2022), I started and am still enjoying Project Unabom, which charts the eighteen years it took to arrest domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski. My favourite show in the world, The Big Picture, has been gradually charting their favourite films of the 21st Century (the Children of Men episode is especially good) and I also finally dipped my toe into another Ringer pod alumni, Bandsplain, mostly because I decided to conquer the Geoff Rickly episode in which he and host Yasi Salek discuss the career (and his love of) Nine Inch Nails. Every one of those almost four hours is utterly worth it.
Music:
When I saw Real Lies in April, it was the day their new album- ‘We Will Annihilate Our Enemies’- was released, a real rager of an LP: ravey, summery, full of wistful looks back at youth and lost love. I have also rediscovered and spent an inordinate amount of time with Charli XCX’s pandemic LP ‘how i’m feeling now’, which turned five years old this spring. Insane to think about really (remember lockdown?), but it’s an album home to some of my favourite Charli songs (‘claws’, ‘i finally understand’, ‘anthems’) and one which works wonderfully walking home on warm evenings. See also on that front: Turnstile’s ‘NEVER ENOUGH’, album number five from them, which I sense I am going to absolutely rinse over the summer in much the same way that I did their previous LP, ‘GLOW ON’ (Charli had it right after all)
Reading:
My inability to read a book has already been well documented here, so it’ll come as a surprise to no-one that I have only managed to finish two books in the last four months. I Love You, I Love You, I Love You by Laura Dockrill, a perennial favourite of mine who writes a fictionalised version of falling in and out and back in love with her real life partner. I also mainlined Holly Brinkley’s Deep Cuts over a singular weekend, a book that felt so relevant to my interests that it almost felt pointed at times (it was all the references to Interpol which did it). I’m currently enjoying every second I get with the new Philippa Snow, it’s terrible the things i have to do to be me: on feminity and fame; she’s one of my favourite cultural critics and I think often of her book Which As You Know Means Violence- so I’m hopeful I end up loving this new one as much as I do that.
Hi. Hope your 2025 is going well. Maybe see you again before Q3 ends?