Some Recent Work
Bend It Like Beckham (and Strength) + Bhaji on the Beach + more.
Hello,
I thought I’d share some stuff I’ve been working on outside of this newsletter. But because digressions are my MO and I am here to talk about tarot, there are also some musings on the Strength card.
Bend It Like Beckham on Sentimental Garbage / Strength
I recently went on Sentimental Garbage to talk about the Bend It Like Beckham – you can listen to the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A few days before recording, I consulted the tarot for advice on how to not get nervous and tongue-tied and paralysed with fear of saying something stupid. I pulled the Strength card.
I believe this card asks us to make friends with anxiety; to tame but not subdue, to direct but not micromanage. It asks us to whittle down nervous energy – which tends to run in 100 different directions – into plain old energy, channeled to run in one single direction.1
I did this by watching Bend It Like Beckham two more times, taking copious notes, and reading lots of trivia. (Did you know it won an award in Pyongyang International Film Festival – for Best Music?) I showed up at the studio with a little spiral notebook a la Elle Woods on her first day of law school, except my brain was more like Elle Woods in that montage where she is studying all the time.
I think the only way to deal with anxiety – that molten hot lion – is to give it permission to growl, and do your best to contain it. For me, that meant zeroing in on the movie itself, and setting aside (but keeping an eye on) my worries about people thinking my voice is annoying, or my hopes that people would think I was smart, or my fears that an opportunity like this would never come my way again. Basically, I had to make it less about myself and more about the movie.
In the reversed position, the Strength card reminds me of Sigfield & Roy, the Las Vegas act featuring a illusionist, an animal trainer, and a big albino cat. The act stopped after Roy was mauled by a tiger named Mantecore during a performance in 2003. (I went down a truly fascinating rabbit hole looking up the show’s Wikipedia page, then Roy’s astrology chart, and then the transit chart of the day he was mauled – a topic for another post.)
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When you take an animal out of its natural habitat and put it in the most unnatural habitat ever, it will bite you. That is just what all animals do when they are scared. So in the reversed position, I think Strength is saying: Stop trying to prove everything is under control. That is a spectacle and an illusion. Everyone suspects something weird is going on behind the scenes anyway, so there is no point keeping up the charade.
By visualising anxiety a molten hot lion – as opposed to an impossible-to-grasp noxious gas that gets into every nook and cranny of our psyche, we can contain it, maybe even make friends with it.
That’s the power of tarot, isn’t it? It turns something as overwhelming as anxiety into a symbol you can work with.
My Essay on Bhaji on the Beach in The Asian Cut
Around the same time I got to speak about Bend It Like Beckham, I was working on this piece for The Asian Cut about Gurinder Chadha’s debut, which also contains four letters and two alliterated B’s.
Bend It is a lot of fun, but I prefer Bhaji on the Beach. You can read about why in the article here.
A Ghost Chilli Playlist
I do not listen to music when I write because I am one of those annoying people who needs total silence. This is why I can’t write in cafes or libraries either. If I do, it’s usually just writing down conversations I am eavesdropping on, or random questions like is reality TV just improv comedy? or Is ChatGPT the real-life version of Tom Riddle’s diary?
But when I worked on Ghost Chilli – and as I’m working on my next book – I collated songs that capture some element of the project, a character or a scene. And when I need to get back into the groove of the project, or I feel like I’ve lost the plot, I give it a listen and it sets me right again. I had so much fun condensing my Ghost Chilli playlist, and writing snippets about each song, in this article for Large Hearted Boy. You can also listen to the playlist here:
It kicks off with How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths – Ghost Chilli pretty much emerged out of that song’s head like Athena from Zeus.
Until next time,
Nikkitha