hello! thank you for being here. as long as is my weekly letter on navigating London (where i recently moved,) studio notes, poem drafts, & money moans. i hope you enjoy reading but if it's not for you — feel free to unsubscribe ✧
the wet etiquette
it’s a heatwave in the UK so i headed to the pool, or the lido as it’s called here. shockingly, i wasn’t the only one to have this refreshing idea. here’s a story of trying to swim along with many other bodies in the slow lane:
seeing and misreading: on concrete, gas, sculpture
the crumbling concrete and laughing gas have been in the news. these are two different stories, but the prominent, bold headlines are close enough on the page to read as a (kind of) sentence capturing the spirit of industrial anxiety surrounding the body — the roof is unstable, the laughter is induced.
the thing to be worried about is reinforced autoclave aerated concrete (the name alone is terrifying.) the substance was meant to last 30 years, but 50-60 years ago was used to build schools and hospitals which are still in use today. i’m typing this sheepishly because i am but a small squish sitting inside the Barbican, a brutalist mountain of concrete built in the same era.
i love coming here because it’s a beautiful labyrinth of curves, angles, and staircases; a memory of modernist optimism (let’s have people live, work, and see art in a massive concrete shape! yes!) it’s an unhurried space — people are strolling at leisurely pace, sitting, reading, eating. the building is large enough to see others from the distance — and they look tiny.
the scale shift is magical*. it feels rare and surprising to experience this kind of perspective — perhaps because so much of what we see today is within the flat space of the screen. suddenly it’s clear that the world is large and we are small. everyone is a doll. even the person that looms the largest in your mind — quite small from a distance.
*it reminded me of the human urge to make figures — puppets, porcelain figurines, busts? that sculpting urge. mine is back i think
3. in the money section today
is a fact about peacock — he has an incredible tail which attracts partners, but that makes him easier to find and eat. feathers are on my mind, in part because i saw a fake quill pen and almost bought it, but then said no, yelena because it’s kitsch, not wise, and not even a real feather. but then there is this other feather, and it’s made with leather.
it’s hardly my style and at severe price of £2,015 GBP would make me homeless and destitute because i would need maybe 6 to get adequate coverage. but i thought it pointed at an interesting reframing of what conspicuous consumption is now — moving beyond the legible branding to an object that looks like it came from a pen organizer. or maybe it came from a beautiful beachfront where the close-to-nature-(no concrete anywhere in sight)-wild-body roams freely with black swans.