FOUNDATIONS: March
Is March a Gemini?
Technically, no. March belongs to the Pisces and the Aries girls, which does make sense on paper. One is all softness, intuition, and poetic longing; the other is fire, impulse, and the sudden conviction that today is the day to reinvent your life. But in practice, March feels spiritually Gemini to me: erratic, charming, impossible to dress for, and liable to change its mind halfway through the day.
It truly has been a blooming fabulous start to spring. Last month’s Foundations was more of a diva’s lament about how horrible fake spring is, and I stand by it. You’ll be pleased to know that this one will be emphatically more positive. I love spring, famously less than autumn, mainly because my favourite colour is orange, but nonetheless I cannot get enough. This particular springtime love affair has been fuelled by the smell of hyacinths and açaí bowls. How West Coast of me. However, March is not for the faint of heart. It keeps you on your toes. A sunshine walk turns into sodden denim, a painstakingly considered jacket flung over one’s shoulder.
March is a month of hope, of chance. I hope it’s sunny, I hope I don’t get hay fever, when there is every chance it will rain and a very big chance I will sneeze. But I kind of love that it’s a month that keeps you guessing, rather than keeping you pinned to your couch like February. God, how British do I sound? I’ve spent the last two paragraphs talking about the weather.
In a marked shift from my January and February habits, I also spent the month away from alcohol. This is something I do every year, in October to fight the damage done in summer, and again in March, as my birthday is in January and Henry’s is in February. It’s funny how the dry-Jan jaunt manages to rear its head precisely when you need it most. In that vein I’ve done a large amount of reading, writing, and watching, paired with a few smug Saturday morning walks around the park. Nevertheless, with March in the rear-view mirror, I can see a mezcal negroni with my name on it very, very soon.
LIFE LATELY
A glacial pace, for the first time ever, actually thrilled me. I think I’m still thawing out from winter and, for once, I’m not fighting it. Hot yoga will defrost me soon enough. Yes, I am a MILF. Please congratulate me in the comments.
Theatre was the entertainment vehicle of choice this month. I saw Wicked for the twelfth time, this time for work, so leave me alone. All will be revealed. I also saw Man and Boy at the National, and I will tell you now: I am a sucker for a play about the American Depression. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s the Tennessee Williams of it all. But it was incredible. The Dorfman Theatre is just beyond. It was my first time there and I really am such a floozy for a play in the round.
I saw Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre; you must go! I'm not saying anything else, just go! I also saw American Psycho at the Almeida. The production was so perfect. The lighting design had my jaw on the floor from beginning to end. They built a whole brick wall to create a portal into the rear stage, restructuring the entire auditorium around it. I’ll reiterate: they changed the whole room. How serious. How fab.
On a less thespian note, I ate some great food. Cafe Kowloon in London Fields, round the back of Won Ton Charlies, is incredible. I had a short-lived love affair with the urban planning of the infamous Kowloon Walled City in my first year of undergrad, so that got me through the door. The interiors and the food will be keeping me there. I recommend the char siu neck and the French toast.§
We also have a new friend who has been meowing at our balcony door for the last few weeks. We have called her Mr. Buppins, as she tends to bupp us with her nose to get our attention. She has changed my world. I am now formally auditioning for the role of cat person.
I also visited Castle Howard for a press trip, which was divine. It is a fabulous example of English Baroque, the same broad style family as St Paul’s Cathedral, all drama and excess, so obviously I was obsessed. It was designed by an ex-playwright, which is literally my ideal career pipeline, so I was enthralled and equally a little bit jealous. If you get the chance, especially if you’re in or near York or Harrogate, take the detour. It is so worth it.
March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring, though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find until you step outside.
V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
MARCH MEDIA
March, true to form, could not make up its mind. Some genuine highs, one spectacular miss, and the annual reminder that I need to stop going to the cinema with expectations.
NEW FILM
Project Hail Mary
This is not a recommendation. This is an explicit warning.
An extraordinary sci-fi premise, utterly squandered by the tonal consistency of a children’s party entertainer sans balloon animals. Fist-bumping astronauts and their dog-like alien companion parade across two hours and forty minutes of clearly expensive, legible, and completely soulless production design. Everything looking as though it had been approved by a committee whose brief was lets make a sci-fi film for people who loved the lighting in Avengers End Game.
Science fiction should be strange. Its for the freaks and the nerds. Its the Glee of pulp cinema. It should unsettle you, make you feel small, or at the very least give you something interesting to look at. This felt like someone had taken a genuinely profound idea and decided the audience needed protecting from it. I was incandescent. Period :p
REWATCH
Boogie Nights
I went alone to the PCC to watch this. Aren’t I such a brave boy, emboldened only by the knowledge that they do, in my opinion, the best popcorn in London.
God, what a film. I went in knowing almost nothing about it, and I honestly think you should do the same if you’ve somehow managed it. The jaw-on-the-floor moment when it shifts is all the more devastating if you’re caught unawares.
Sleazy, sad, funny, nauseating, glamorous, and so deeply American in that very specific late-century way that feels both excessive and hollow. Paul Thomas Anderson has that rare ability to make a world feel so alive that even when you hate being in it, you find yourself watching through the gaps between your fingers. It is impossibly well made. The movement, the energy, the subtle colour shifts, the sense of social architecture, every room thick with ego and desperation. A film full of surfaces, but never only surfaces.
I fear this may be one of those horrible rewatches where you emerge with a renewed obsession and spend the next month aggressively recommending it to people in smoking areas. You have been warned.
BOOK
Private Rites, Julia Armfield
I am still on track with my goal of reading four books a month, which, considering I read three books total last year, feels nothing short of miraculous. I am extremely proud of myself. Thank you for attending my smug interlude.
Private Rites is genuinely beautiful. The atmosphere is extraordinary, damp and uncanny in a way that had me immediately seated, and Armfield builds her drowning world with a quiet architectural precision that makes you feel the water rising before you’ve consciously noticed it’s there.
I just couldn’t finish it emotionally. The characters spend the entire book having conversations I would have dealt with so differently, I can deal with 1 unlikeable character, but I actually dont know if there were any likeable characters? This is entirely a me problem. I can handle a building collapsing but apparently not a tense dinner.
If you are a person who can sit with confrontation without your nervous system saying caio adios, this is a beautiful, unsettling, wholly original book and you should read it immediately.
ALBUM
Moon Safari, Air
If you read my On Living Cinematically post, you’ll already know that I am extremely susceptible to any piece of music that makes my life feel like it has been softly lit and given a better edit. Moon Safari is exactly that kind of album.
There is something so transportive about it. It makes everything feel slightly more elegant, slightly more deliberate, like you are moving through a film in which nothing especially dramatic is happening, but you look fantastic. I love music that creates atmosphere without demanding too much from you, and this does that perfectly. Dreamy, chic, faintly melancholic, and completely timeless.
ARCHITECTURE
Harbin Opera House, MAD Architects
I have been in love with this building for years and I make no apology for it.
Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects and completed in 2015, it sits on a wetland plain in northeastern China and does something I find almost unbearably beautiful: it refuses to impose itself on the landscape. The curves dissolve into the terrain, merging with the frozen river plain in winter, re-emerging in spring as if the building itself is thawing. Which felt, this month, rather personally resonant.
Inside, the main auditorium is timber-lined and warmly organic, the ceiling folding toward the stage like something natural rather than constructed. It manages to feel both enormous and intimate, which is the rarest trick in the book.
One day I will get to Harbin. I have decided.
ARTWORK
The Swing, Jean-Honoré Fragonard
There is something very March about The Swing. All movement, ornament, flirtation, and the sense that things may at any moment turn to scandal. It feels like spring arriving not with dignity but with a dramatic entrance and very little concern for practicality.
It is one of the great images of the French Rococo, all froth, sensuality, and aristocratic bad behaviour. Fragonard turns what could have been a pretty garden scene into something much more mischievous: a soft-focus spectacle of secrecy, desire, and excess, painted just before the world that produced it would begin to crack.
Meow.
March may be impossible to dress for, but culturally, she did not let me down.
Onwards to April. Aperol, allergy tablets, and the demise of the delusion that one light jacket will be enough.
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My real goal is to have a weekly newsletter, two more lifestyle and two more architecture-leaning. If this is something you would read, or at least look at the pictures of, let me know, because my poor little brain only deals in absolutes.
Wicked for the TWELFTH time is sooo funny and congratulations on being a MILF!!!
The Swing!!!!! I love that diva so so much