Leaving aside the sexism in this article, I feel like it’s articulated a lot of things that have been bothering me subconsciously. My job is 100% remote and I work from home, so there’s a sort of expectation in our house that I’ll do almost all of the the cooking. And that’s sort of fine, because I genuinely enjoy cooking. But it’s also extremely stressful because it’s not just cooking. It’s the planning (two small picky-eating children who even smell garlic and complain “it’s too spicy!”), it’s the shopping, it’s the prepping. It’s the mental and emotional labour around cooking that makes it so stressful.

# 25 October 2019

Inside the Tiny Bedroom Where Finneas and Billie Eilish Are Redefining Pop Music

Over the summer, I watched the Showtime documentary series Shangri-La, which is all about Rick Rubin and creativity and inspiration and his Malibu studio, which is treated like some holy place by everyone in the documentary. For example, when they are between artists, Rubin has his interns repaint the studio floors – I dunno, to make it feel like some blank page for the next artist that’s going to use it?

By contrast, Billy Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was produced in her childhood home, by her brother, using prosumer-level equipment. And, for my money, it was one of the best-produced albums of 2019.

This video is a really great companion piece to Shangri-La – both emphasise how important the space is to the creative process, but they approach the topic from entirely different ends of the spectrum.

# 24 October 2019

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: The Final Rodeo

I wasn’t fully taken with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (On my letterboxd ranking of Tarantino films, it’s second from bottom), but Priscilla Page makes a pretty great argument for the film, explaining a lot of the smaller details that idiots like me might have missed, such as:

… their front gate opening to him like the pearly gates of heaven as Maurice Jarre’s “Miss Lily Langtry” plays. (When this song plays in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, the title card reads: “Maybe this isn’t the way it was…it’s the way it should have been.”)

# 1 October 2019