Hello!
I’m reviving the ‘three things’ format I started this newsletter with. It’s just easier to manage as my novel inches towards its launch date (4th of July!), and as I’m working on some freelance pieces, like this blurb on a Chinese restaurant and karaoke spot in Elephant and Castle for Vittles’ Six of One column. The place is called Galaxy and I recommend it 100000000% percent.
Ultramarine
A few months ago, I had to write some copy about some tableware with a dark blue hue called Outremer, which is French for the colour ultramarine. While doing some research I came across a fascinating article, which begins like this:
Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment, the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat, preferring for his base layers a common azurite; Vermeer was less parsimonious in his application and proceeded to mire his family in debt. Ultramarine: the quality of the shade is embodied in its name. This is the superlative blue, the end-all blue, the blue to which all other hues quietly aspire. The name means “beyond the sea”—a dreamy ode to its distant origins, as romantic as it is imprecise.
Ultramarine was made by finely grinding lapiz lazuli, a stone only available in the mountains of Afghanistan. The stones were ground and mixed with resin, linseed oil or wax to create a ‘dough’ that was kneaded and soaked in lye, which created blue flakes that separated from the dough. These flakes were dried and ground, and magnets were used to remove any residual iron from the stone. Residual pyrite crystals – really really tiny ones – were removed by hand, but since this is impossible to do 100%, some remained in the paint, which is what makes the colour shimmer a little. As if this wasn’t enough the powder was then put through the kneading and drying process again to create a finer, bluer grade of pigment. Not much pigment came out of a single lapiz lazuli stone after all this, which is why the colour was considered more valuable than gold.
Even though ultramarine is no longer made this way, it still feels special (to me, at least). I remember a pair of blue sneakers that belonged to my friend when we were at college. While the sneakers were no Sassoferrato, I was completely dazzled. I would stare at them for as long as I could without it being weird (not very long). To this day whenever I see something that colour I want to own it. I have a Uniqlo shirt in that very same colour sitting in my closet now, but it actually looks kind of bad on me. I think that’s how ultramarine is supposed to work – be inviting but unattainable. Evocative, not evoking. It’s the colour of our idea of the ocean rather than the ocean; the colour of Neptune. The very soul of blue.
Mind Moving Too Fast for Words (or Other People)
My five-year-old nephew has this adorable habits where, while he’s talking, he starts to repeat the same word over and over again, until he finally finishes his sentence. My sister says it’s because his brain is moving faster than his ability to form words.
And then there’s the opposite, where your words move faster than your brain, confusing yourself or other people. For example, I was recently at an event where astrology came up in various conversations (naturally). Someone told a friend that he and his younger sister were born on the exact same day in early June. ‘Twins!’ My friend replied. ‘No,’ the guy replied, slightly irritated; his younger sister. But later my friend said that what she’d meant is that the guy and his sister are both Geminis, a sign symbolised by the figure of twins. So while he may have thought she was being too slow, she was in fact being too fast.
I wish there was a term for this kind of miscommunication, because it the kind of thing that – like answering machines in 90s sitcoms and rom-coms – are amazing plot devices. I think we could probably credit the death of good sitcoms and rom-coms to the death of answering machines, a subject I will happily explore in a larger essay one day, for money.
Someone Else’s Bed, by Hole
My plan to seek out music outside what the algorithm feeds me has been going well, because it led me to Hole. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that the thing that compelled me to do so was an Instagram video by TherapyJeff, who’s always sporting a quippy t-shirt or a band one. Embarrassed not because of TherapyJeff who I love but because I am a huge Nirvana fan yet never considered that I might also like Hole until now.
Someone Else’s Bed is my absolute favourite of their songs, because of its calcified vulnerability – so well captured by Courtney Love. An older co-worker and Hole fan said that Courtney Love was too complicated for the world to handle then; and I think that would still be the case if she got famous now.
Links Links Links
Really intelligent essay on Taylor Swift mania by Freddie deBoer here. I remember this happening with TS in 2014: The success, the over-exposure, the exhaustion, the retreat. It’s a very strange phenomenon that says more about ~the state of America today~ than it does about TS and her music, about which this other essay by B.D. McClay does so well. It’s about the fundamental pessimism lurking under all her love songs.
I loved Rachel Connolly’s novel Lazy City. She’s got a short story in Granta that’s also excellent.
Testing out a recipe for the next newsletter; it involves forced rhubarb. When I said this to a friend she thought I’d said ‘forest rhubarb’, which sounds a lot nicer. Anyway, forced rhubarb, as opposed to regular, is grown in candlelight; isn’t that adorable?