Jan 5, 2023

off we go

griffnotes 00: a primer

ceri, on the snowfield, late one night. i love this picture of him. i loved how the snow felt.

look, before we get into it, i think it's best i put down a small plan. not a strict one. not a set of rules, not a set of precise expectations for you to hold onto. the reason i'm motivated towards the newsletter is this: i think the work i make isn't really... general, and i think when i aim broad, i fall short. i'd like to get specific, get weird, and i think this is the medium to do that in.

i think social media and the urge i have to share things there - the contents of my notes app, photographs i take, tiny videos, or things i find - gets sort of neutered, or something, my voice flattened out by a sense of being surveilled, as opposed to read. those are different things, you know? i love ephemera, but i would like to build something - if you can imagine - a little firmer, a little realer than an image that flashes by you for seven seconds. i also actually really like writing, you know? i forget this all the time, as the thing that was once my escape route became the road i work on. the rocks in my hands are diamonds, actually, i just sometimes forget to look at them like that. writing is the work i prayed in the dark to get to do as a young person. it is the ladder i built, sometimes incorrectly, but always with my heart, up into the life i wanted. it is also, actually, a lot of fun, and not terribly serious all the time.

zines returned me to the thrill of the old escape route feeling for a while, then changed for me. i am going to use this space in replacement of my old zine patreon, a system that sort of worked - in that the readers were kind and interested, certainly - but it wasn't necessarily fit for purpose for what i wanted my zines and little envelopes to do. which was, essentially, act as a newsletter.

when i would regularly haul myself up to the village to post my bags of zine envelopes - two deep totes full - i was always running slightly late, nose to nose with the last post of the day. the postman, unloading other, more serious paper correspondence from the big green postbox would sometimes just look at me with my party coloured envelopes and ask, 'what are they?' and i would say, i write a newsletter. because that was, technically, what those zines acted as. especially during the pandemic - a dispatch, a report, a newsletter, more letter than news. much easier than trying to explain what a zine was to a total stranger - which seems to be something i find myself doing pretty regularly, but still would prefer to avoid in real life at all costs.

i want to get used to my writing voice again, beyond the brevity that instagram insists on, that twitter requires, that tiktok hates but i do anyway. i'd like to tell you about my life, the things i see, the things i feel about them. i would like to use images, too. i write and never post dozens of instagram stories, and i think there's something to the text/image format, so i'll use them in patches in this newsletter, too.

this image is from a bus station on manhattan. i went there to look for a very specific snoopy christmas ornament for my best friend, and not only found said ornament, but found the mall at said bus station was strange and gorgeous and trapped in the eighties. i love mall architecture. you'll probably see a fair bit of that here.

this image was taken at the bottom of the staircase of dim sum go go, in chinatown, manhattan, on christmas day this year. it is the same restaurant we ate at after an old friend's wedding at city hall, before the pandemic.

this is just a crosswalk. i don't know why i took it. probably because i was very impressed by new york: i am pathalogically impressed by other cities. i say 'wow' out loud, a lot.

i found a mary in williamsburg. my sisters. my girls. my besties

this is the green hallway in the house we catsit in, bo & ben's. i always like how the light comes in and hits the paint, then disappears into shadow in the stairway.

i tried to install a video here, regarding 'all sauces', but please, instead settle for the audio. it is from a tiktok, a person opening a fridge, to discover, well. heads up: a big scream. sAUCES.

how about, only sauces

0:00

/0:05

multimedia. the internet. progress. all sauces. trust, there'll be sauce talk ahead. maybe i should have called this newsletter sauce talk? maybe i'll call the subsection, 'sauce talk.'

anyway,

this is from a snowy day in catskill. i really did feel lifted, alleviated of the sludge of depression, during this trip - especially here. i stood outside the chocolate shop and said, 'wow'. again, i do a fair amount of wowing.

my friend jeffrey's garden. that isn't a well, it's a firepit but i like that at a distance it could be either. i loved being upstate, but the sheer size of it kind of took my head off. fields on fields. roads on roads. there are bears, you know? whole bears

right. back to writing. caro replied to me, by the way, and said that she loves newsletters, and that made me feel a bit braver. i also love newsletters, i love letters, more than news, and as i've said, i think this medium lends itself really more one-way correspondance than a dispatch of News, as we think of it today.

so today, i woke up late. i'm still jetlagged from being in new york, but i'm happier than i was in early december, both because being abroad fills me up with a sort of wildness that comes from being around beloved friends, and amongst different architecture, and visiting more exciting supermarkets. i also love the fresh year, the early numbers of january. i will have News, as mentioned above, in the traditional sense, soon, and until then you'll have to forgive me for talking around it, especially when i'm talking about writing, which i'll likely do a fair bit of.

this week, i'm rewatching The Righteous Gemstones, which makes me laugh, and want desperately to visit a megachurch. surely my childhood years spent in horror of a catholic god owe me at least the spectacle! i'm going to talk about what i've been reading in a different newsletter, because there's Much To Talk About (Elaine Feeney, Kirsty Logan, Moïra Fowley, all fresh arcs that have given me big hope under my ribs about work that is to come in the new year), but on the plane - between naps, and the 1955 musical Guys & Dolls starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando - i read the museum art book, Never Alone, from the MoMa exhibition on video games and interactive media. i loved the exhibition - there's almost nothing like finding yourself having a small cry in the big halls of a museum, to be honest. i find the medium i love the most being treated with this kind of sincere appreciation and investigation deeply moving. to stand in front of a projection of Katamari Demacy on the wall of the American museum of modern art felt like witnessing a strange splintering from the privacy of playing video games at home to the participation in a wider cultural act. it's not only me that feels this way. upstairs, Mondrian, Picasso, O'keefe, and here, just inside the door, Sim city. Portal. Myst.

i push this game into people's hands like it is made of bread. eat this. eat this is it is delicious

while i'm doing my big january reset on the flat, i'm listening to the audiobook of Cultish, by Amanda Montell - which is more a discussion of linguistics around cults than gorey, scandalous cult urban legends, and the podcast Imaginary Advice, which is enormously good, and difficult to describe - which is exactly what i'm looking for from my podcasts, tbh.

i'm playing Sports Story on the Nintendo Switch, which is a delight, and i'm trying really hard not to just keep playing Hades until all the blood drains from my hands and i'm dreaming in three headed dogs and whatever is going on with Dionyseus's thigh jewelry. i know it came out years ago, but i think, in terms of cultural texts and video games and what i offer you here, you can expect me to be either staggeringly ahead of the curve or quite seriously late to the party.

please explain this thigh bracelet to me

i can't stop thinking about a show i saw in London in november - The Burnt City - to the extent where i am going to see it again at the end of this month, and will write about it then, once i've been through it, once i've collected more emotion and detail from the space. i am also making some friends come with me, given that CB and i talked about almost nothing else for days after seeing it the first time. i'd like to get into it now, but look. we're just doing an introduction. just laying the land.

here is ceri at the big neon sign in the foyer. there are simply no other pictures to take, as your phone is locked into a little wee purse at the start of your journey in. it's one of those, baby

so that's it, for now, i think. i'll hit you up again next week with something different, but in the same buzz, and if you subscribe, you'll get in on the first Zine Club style creative prompt vibe over the weekend. i'm feeling this out, folks, so thank you for feeling it out with me. i'm going to put on my boots and go walk the dog up the hill and listen to some more of this Cultish book. it's warm out, which, though it's a little early, means spring is coming.

this or better,

griff

p.s: it was not warm out. it rained. but that's alright. signs of life. thank you for being here, friends. x

Subscribe to griffnotes