We Have to Talk: A Fork in the Road
Open for a Paul Mescal exclusive
Welcome to We Have to Talk, a fortnightly newsletter in which Sam and George exchange their most pressing and ridiculous reflections on pop culture. Subscribe to get a hot mess of tepid takes directly into your inbox, twice a month.
This week, the boys reflect on life, love, and Daisy Edgar-Jones dropping her fork at a carvery last weekend.
S - Bonjour George! Due to work related events (a trip to Cannes) my cultural diet has been slim pickings this last fortnight, beyond digesting Britney’s biography via one-minute Twitter videos narrated by White Michelle Williams. I am therefore left confronting an existential issue for this newsletter head-on; maybe we don’t have to talk this time? Or perhaps you’ve just caught me in something of a blue moment. After spending the last week gallivanting around the Cote D’Azur (when not in meetings) I’ve returned to rainy, miserable London. The spitting rain was a hard crash landing after a total Marsleille (pronounced Mar-slay) of a weekend spent taking in Corbusier’s La Cité Radieuse and swimming in the stunning Calanques on the edge of town. It’s got me thinking; what on earth am I doing back in soggy-old London? As an international transplant here I feel you may have the inside track; why do we keep coming back to London even though it’s kind of shit?
G - Hello, Sam. There has to be some sort of psychiatric term for this feeling. I remember the last time I returned from a trip back to New Zealand (I’m a climate criminal), and the plane began to descend slowly over Kent, I felt an overwhelming wash of doom. Following the Thames upstream, the plane windows were being slapped with pathetic little squiggles of rain, and the landscape was either muddy brown, dull green, or concrete grey. I couldn’t believe what I was voluntarily coming back to.
Not the cheeriest way for us to kick off this week’s edition, but I think we all know the feeling of schlepping back to London from some time away and feeling like you’ve been dragged back to hell. But then I often wonder, are we all just Sylvia Plaths, clambering back into our bell jars - as in, would I feel this anywhere? Is it less about London, and more about the fact that London happens to be the locale in which we’re physically experiencing the repeat beating that is late capitalism, with 40-hour working weeks, exhausting commutes and expensive lives? I think of the oft-referenced Samuel Johnson quote - “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” - but I suspect Johnson didn’t realise that in a few hundred years, we’d all be tired of life, and it’s not just London’s fault.
This has been on my mind this week, because, as you know, I quit my job, which has triggered complicated emotions. Quitting felt amazing, given my job was wearing me down like no other had before, but because this job sponsors me, it may well spell the end of my time in London if I can’t find other employment. And despite happily joining in the chorus of London hate in any conversation, that has already started to feel like grief.
That’s primarily, of course, because of the wonderful relationships I have here - as is true of any densely populated city, the people are the best part. But last weekend, the kind of London miracle we all live for happened to me: I was enjoying a roast with my friends at the Hemingway near Victoria Park, when Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones and other cast members from Normal People sat at the table behind us (we overheard Paul saying he’d had a big night).
But also - and I’m going to sound a bit insane here - even that sighting left me feeling a little melancholic about London. Namely, in that after having to leave film journalism for my current job, I’ve been finding it really hard to break back into the culture industry, be that because London is competitive, my visa gets in the way, or my time gets sucked up by my 9-5. Something about this brush with successful celebrities felt like it encapsulated one of London’s great paradoxes: one can rub shoulders with celebs, but still go to bed feeling like an unsuccessful loser. For a TL;DR, read Rose Matafeo’s monologue about this in Starstruck season one - albeit ironically, given Matafeo’s great success.
S - Thank you as always for being our roving reporter and bringing our newsletter only the juiciest of scoops; a morning after the night before with Mescal himself. That’s an EXCLUSIVE, reader! Alas though, I fear an issue of oversupply is rapidly devaluing the currency of an East-London Mescal sighting; the man is hurtling towards Dua Lipa levels of “do they have a house?”
It’s a very sad state of affairs that you’ve felt it necessary to pull the escape chord on London, but I remain hopeful that good karma will win out against the evil forces at work at the Home Office. If you do leave, London will certainly be poorer without you, but I know you will have an incredibly glamorous time globe-trotting between Europe and Oceania, racking up milestones in your enviable climate criminal career.
I think you hit the nail on the head; London can be a relentless slog and the rain keeps on coming, but I know I’ll feel differently come March when I’m staring down the barrel of a six month run of tinnies in the park, music festivals and canal walks. But the feeling of being on the cusp of something great but never quite getting there always pervades, and I think a heavy feeling of weightlessness can come to settle on lives lived in pursuit of selfish ambitions and bottomless brunch.
On to sunnier topics, as a fellow Polachekeslovakian, I want to know your thoughts about her performance on Stephen Colbert of new single, ‘Dang’: I can’t accuse her of not executing a vision, but it sent my mind back to an interview last year where she flatly denied irony played a role in her work. To me, her cognitively dissonant memeing somehow connects with the scramble for purpose we experience in our day-to-day lives. But can this disposability really light the way to deeper meaning?
G - I’ll find meaning in anything, Sam. I’ve been telling everyone that I saw Daisy Edgar-Jones drop her fork on Sunday like it’s as essential as the weather forecast. (She asked for a new one.) I liked Polachek’s performance, and it’s interesting you mention that interview about irony - remember a month ago when we got annoyed at Doja Cat for her insincerity? I think that Polachek/Sydney Morning Herald interview reveals more about her method than the product - for example, the Colbert performance is ironic, in that it’s bizarre and funny, but I don’t think Polachek is doing it ironically, if that makes sense. She’s committed to the bit - she needs to be, for the performance to be so meticulously constructed in its chaos.
It’s something I really love about Polachek’s artistry, and why I think that interview went astray. While her music might be laced with humour and irony - like, sure, getting Dido and Grimes on the same track is a bit of a laugh, and so is flying through her legs in the ‘Door’ video - she’s also always reaching for the extraordinary, chasing the sublime, broadcasting the beautiful. (“An itch for the transcendental,” to use Lorde’s favourite Joan Didion quote.) There is no irony in Polachek’s approach - none of this is a joke to her. I think it’s why she finds every opportunity to caterwaul in her songs - she knows it’s god-tier, she’s feeding us! Give me chills, send me to heaven!
To link this in a clunky way to our London malaise, do you ever feel like sometimes that’s your only option? Life is a grind, so you have to chase beauty. You have to be mesmerised by rainbows in the gutter oil slicks. You have to listen to your favourite song three times while hurtling through the tube. You have to pretend you’re Greta Lee in Past Lives every time you see a guy you dated five years ago post a new story. The alternative is unthinkable!
S - You’re so right, George, and I couldn’t have said it any better. And with that I’m skipping off to repeatedly stream ‘One of Your Girls’ while careening down the central line. Till next time!
From the Drafts
A natural high I’ve been chasing for two years: In the midst of my last visa woes in 2021, at a spin class, the instructor cut the lights, told us to forget about our stresses, and played ‘Sweet Disposition’ by the Temper Trap. I cried! (G)
On spin classes: Are spin instructors our strongest soldiers? Who else is being asked to DJ while also cycling for their lives? (G)
Bold for LVMH to so aggressively spon-con this PinkPantheress video about how conspicuous consumption is the enemy of happiness. (S)
Who is the 45-year-old woman writing Netflix loglines? Ben Whishaw will play “Sam, a suave, champagne-drinking assassin, [who] also has problems of his own.” You can just say gay, Susan. (G) (Leave my biographer alone, George! (S))
Whenever life feels like it’s falling apart, I remember that in 2019, a New Zealand duo that began as an overly-earnest Lorde knockoff came back with one of the greatest indie-pop albums of all time, out of nowhere. Every single track bangs. (G)
The Week That Was:
George is watching: The Dark Knight, which I hadn’t seen since I was young. It’s good! But it’s always been hilarious to me that in the next one, Bruce Wayne has a framed photo of the late Rachel Dawes in his room - and it’s an on-set still from The Dark Knight.
Sam is reading: I just nabbed the very last copy of The Woman in Me from TCR’s Foyles. Love to see Britney having a hit!
George is listening to: ‘Soak up the Sun’ by Sheryl Crow is one of the greatest songs of all time, mainly because she rhymes the title lyric with “I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up”. I’m currently lightening the fuck up by listening to Soccer Mommy’s incredible cover on repeat.
Sam went and saw: Other than my aforementioned visit to La Cité Radieuse, I can’t wait to finally see the retrospective of my long-time photography hero, Daido Moriyama, at The Photographer’s Gallery this Friday. 8pm closing-time, baby! And they say London isn’t a 24 hour city…