fabric from another life

This is a newsletter written before, and after my trip to Birmingham and London, during which I spent time working on stage for the first time in a long time, and also, staying with friends I love very much. This first bit is about the debacle I had while packing, then I'll talk to you about some sauces, then some short stories.

In and around writing this newsletter, I've been packing for a couple of days of away-work, and staring into the stacks of clothes I've been dutifully ignoring in favour of leggings and big t-shirts for the last... well. Three years almost to the day, actually. If I think about that too hard I start to feel cold under my skin, so I won't dwell on the distance between then and now, but instead, I feel like I have a bunch to say about clothes. Me? A style blogger? Yes. Yes, as of this moment.

I don't really have a personal style, especially here in the late-Pandemic. Prior to the lockdowns, I was committed to a wardrobe of exclusively black clothing, a habit I picked up living and working in San Francisco. It felt like an attempt to dissolve into the background of a very vibrant city, an attempt to be unremarkable and consistent. Almost like a disguise, a uniform. I had five pairs of identical black jeans that I wore until they came apart: some still surivive to this day. Though, they are skinny jeans, which are, decidedly out of style at this time. As, inecplicably, are side partings in your hair. I've reluctantly made the necessary adjustments: the skinny jeans are folded away, for when they come back in again, in about six years. I migrated to softer, easier clothing during the lockdowns and ensuing lifestyle change the pandemic brought down on me: I am an animal of leggings and sweatshirts and enormous tshirts. My body ebbs and flows in size all the time, and this kind of fabric is gentle, and accomodating. There is nothing digging into my flesh. The clothes I wear now do not leave red seams in my skin, or make me feel like I am a bag of water, poorly constrained by denim.

When I have to get dressed to go out, or to teach, or chair, I find myself at a loss. I am thirty five, and I don't know what I'm supposed to look like. There's a video by a Tiktok influencer called Becca Murray, about dressing like an Octegenarian Art Teacher that I try to refer to: all big fabric, all statement and softness. I find myself going towards tent-like dresses, big necklaces. The uniform, large white runners I have been dedicated to for around a decade refuse to quit, though.

I think because I have spent so much of the last few years living inside, and away from the city, up in the suburbs, I have forgotten the part of myself I want to show to people I meet, or what I want to express. I don't know where she is anymore, the comitted soft-goth who wore a lot of Adidas statement pieces. I can't help but think that if I was a man I could just show up to lectures and teaching events wearing nice jeans, an interesting tshirt and a good flannel shirt - and the aforementioned large white runners. You know, that whole graphic-designer thing they do, where they look well put together, even though they're dressed really casually? I really envy the simplicity that is expected of men in this regard. It's really not that simple down this end of the gender spectrum: I dream of the absolute lack of pressure, of getting to just wear jeans, a tshirt, and a flannel when I show up to public-facing-work, but I... don't feel like I can. I feel like I will appear too casual, undone and not in the way of a model or ingenue because I am starkly, hilariously neither. Maybe this is weird logic, and I'm wrongfooted with all this, but it is where I am, as I sort my clothes into what I believe I can wear outside the house, and what I can't.

A little bit of this is because I truly do have an amazing t-shirt and sweater collection, and I like wearing them, and perhaps this is as close as I get to feeling like dressing 'authentically', rather than as a social character I am clumsily portraying. The t-shirt and sweater collection come from places I've been throughout the last decade. They are all, almost exclusively, souvenirs.

I am such a mark, you know. If I am in a bar and having a nice drink and they have a tshirt? I am buying that tshirt, and wearing it. Restaurant, same. Almost any tourist attraction, same. My most beloved tshirts are from places, or times that I treasure. From an old underground speakeasy cinema-room under a video shop on Valenica Street, the Cine-Cave, black and long, depicting a woman with film-reels rolling out of her mouth. An (incredibly soft) sweater from the dim-sum place in Chinatown in New York we had Christmas lunch in this year, and celebrated a friend's wedding in way back, too. A shirt from a knife and condiment shop, also on Valencia Street, which simply has a knife across the chest, and BERNAL CUTLERY written above it (this one is getting a lot of wear lately). Another sweater, from Mitchell's Ice Cream, also near my old flat in SF, their huge pastel logo emblazoned on the back. A simple black shirt from Trax, which was across from my old bookshop. A Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time shirt from the Nintendo Shop in New York, navy blue, a perfect cut. A shirt from Super Potato, a video game shop in Tokyo, my Sopranos Duck shirt, which get a little less wear due to being white, but still, I love them. The aforementioned bookshop I used to work in - The Booksmith, Haight Street, released a line of tshirts and sweaters on Bonfire this month designed by Amy Stephenson, and for the love of my time working there, I've bought one in two colours and sizes. It's funny that so much of my wardrobe comes, and comes back to my life in San Francisco - three years almost to the day of my life. Here I am, three years almost to the day since the lockdowns - a strange symmetry in those periods. I look to my life in SF as the most important, interesting and fulfilling I've gotten to walk though, or at least the ones I carry the most joyful resonance from. I still wrap myself in pieces of that time, even if those pieces belonged to a version of me in 2012, long gone, and long outgrown. You can leave something behind, a version of yourself, or a city, but still love it with all your heart.

Anyway. Look, dream wardrobe situation. I want to wear a costumed a version of myself that works in a nice little video game or record shop in 2004. That is my ideal public presentation. Flared jeans. White Osiris skate shoes, or a pair of Adidas Superstars. A good tshirt. A flannel shirt. A cardigan. I want to dress like a man who is a graphic designer, who can get away with this assembly while looking chic and expensive. I can see this version of myself really clearly, but I feel if I showed up dressed as her to a talk or a panel, I would be read as unserious, an imposter, immature and thus, unqualified. This strange set of rules applies, by the way, only to me, not to the women who pull this off immaculately. (Isn't it funny how we set distinct, rigid rules for ourselves that apply to exactly nobody else?) So instead, I at least try to look like... I don't know, whatever the cultural idea of a woman who is a professional working artist looks like? I remember working as part of a residency with a man, and we both showed up to a venue to co-ordinate an event. The women working at the venue, while talking to me, took time to coo over how much 'like a writer' the man looked. I mean, he did, to be fair. Long coat, leather bag. I stood, pink hair and denim jacket and backpack, feeling like a child, and agreed with them.

I don't feel like a child very often anymore. I feel very much grown, which is mostly fine. I do feel, though, in that, like I don't understand how I am supposed to look. I love wearing my hair pink, and purple, but I feel hesitant around it lately, like I'm not supposed to do it anymore, that those looks belong to other people, and a part of myself I've left behind. I think this is probably something a lot of Millennial women are stumbling upon, this moment where girlhood is far behind us, but we are still working out how to look as grown as we feel and as we must be and as the responsibilities on us demand, but still retain an expression of some of that... spirit, or something. Maybe it's just me.

This is all best resolved, I think, by the echoes of the voices, assuring but brusque, of the older women around me as a teenager, insisting, 'Sure nobody is looking at you, why do you care?' and honestly, I think I could do with paying that old advice a little more heed.

And look, when I was working on stage last week (interviewing friend and comrade V. E Schwab, for the paperback release of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue), I forgot all about the clothes worries, and just listened, and asked questions, and felt the warm glow the audience brought with them to see V speak. I like chairing a lot, you know? I like listening to smart writers speak about their work, I like the rumble of a happy audience.  That feeling is far more important than the fabric we sit in.

Let's talk about sauces for a bit. I don't think I'm much use at being a fashion blogger, but thank you for tolerating the puzzling out of things.

I have a couple of good old empty jars/packets to talk about this time. I feel like makeup vloggers do this all the time (see, I'm still fashion blogging) - talk about things they 'hit empty' on, or 'hit pan' on. Well! I have hit empty on several delicious things recently, so take that as proof of their use in this house!

Now, we haven't hit empty on this one yet, but it's getting an honourable mention as Sauce of The Week! My very kind neighbor Hannah (who has two lovely dogs, Peggy and Sid) dropped this off to me as a surprise gift, because she knows I'm a sauce-enthusiast. I have found several really fantastic uses for it. I think synthesizing gravy and mayonnaise, frankly, is brave, and we shouldn't be afraid of new frontiers.

While in Birmingham, I took a walk to a gorgeous, enormous Sainsbury's. With all the self control in the world, I bought a single sauce. I will report back. The lunch I am eating as I write is a bowl of rice with sardines in tomato sauce straight from the tin: truly simple, truly good, though there are two notable meals from my trip that I'd like to mention.

My friend Kate brought me pastries from Greggs (my most beloved staple of the larger island) that I woke up to on the morning I left her house, and a big coffee. She'd left the pastries warming in the oven so they had a coziness, a freshness to them. I ate them and felt very cared for. Then, in London, when I woke in Caro's, she made me some toast with bread that Gav had bought in the local bakery an hour before. To be warmed by good bread, good pastry, good women. Being given a bed and breakfast is one thing, but being sheltered and nourished, is another altogether.

In the evenings, I'm doing a really solid revisit of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the lead up to the hotly-anticipated sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. I'm not really concerned with saving the world as much as I am with riding horses around plains, slaughtering the giant ancient machines that blight the landscape, and cooking a lot of banana-based dishes. I'm doing a lot of side-quests. In these rainy, cold-slush filled days, it's nice to feel a little escapism, and because I was all but reared in various Hyrules, it's even nicer to spend time in a digital world I feel deeply familiar with. I blink and hours have passed, it's 1am, it's time to turn in. CB and I narrate our play, discuss needless detail of what we're seeing. It is pure vacation. On Saturday, before I flew out on London, I sat on Caro's couch and did the same thing. Just moseyed around Hyrule with her. Looked at the map. I get such enormous peace from spending time there, in that other place.

Book-wise, since I finished Naomi Alderman's The Power, I have been hopping between three short story collections, which feel to me to be a steady tripych. I'm reading Weave, by Deirdre Sullivan and Oein DeBhairduin (who wrote a set of beautiful stories each) and designed and illustrated by artist Yingge Xu. I'm still reading the forthcoming Eyes, Guts, Throat, Bones by Moira Fowley, drawing it out, savouring each story - I wrote a little about it in one of the last the S Tier newsletters, because it is so textured and powerful and strange. And, I'm doing the same thing with White Cat, Black Dog, by Kelly Link, which frankly, slaps. Each book is concerned with ritual and with the ancient and the new - they feel like a really strong set of companions for springtme.

I'll get into them more deeply when I'm done with all three, or in the creative writing class newsletter: but mercifully, my reading streak is still going strong, and joyful. I was so worried it was like, going to be fragile or temporary or something, but it isn't. The further I go into the books, the better I feel when I come back out. A stressful, intense life and the weird scoop of the pandemic totally warped my relationship with reading, as I've written about here before. I want the love I have of books to be robust, to keep my curiosity, to stay nourished by the pure magic that comes from the act of full psychic transportation that comes from reading something great, or in this case, three great things at once, woven over eachother, like a braid.

Now. That's it from me. I'll be back at the end of the month: thank you for your patience on this one, doing the work travel and tangoing, continually with the Skeleton Issue (as written about a few newsletters ago) means I'm a little all over the place. I'm really enjoying keeping this newsletter buzzing along, and I'm really glad you're here - it feels amazing to be met where I'm at, in what I want to write about. Though, I doubt I'll try fashion blogging again. Probably will stick to sauces. If you like the vibe, please tell a pal, or share a screenshot, or a link, or just... pass it on. Word of mouth is the only way, as far as I'm concerned. Consider telling a pal - it is the equivalent of buying me a pint, or a really lovely cup of coffee. Or a bottle of sauce. To my S Tier class, I've something coming for you shortly, keep an eyeball out - thank you for holding tight. The class has some connecting threads to what I wrote about here, today, too, and I've loved putting it together.

Take care of yourselves, friends. Though I'm sending this just after the equinox, every day from here on in is just a little longer than the night that follows it.

This, or better

Griff x

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A usual apology for any wonky tense or grammar issues: this was written over a course of literally weeks. Also, spellings: I am doing my best out here and will fix them in the archive if any come up! Thank you for your patience with my crap sentence construction, I'm many things but a good speller ain't one of them.

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