FOUNDATIONS: MAY
The Recalibration situation
Welcome to Foundations! Come on in! Each month I gather the cultural footings that underpin my life, the films, music, architecture, books and odd little discoveries that quietly shape the structure of the month.
April was loud, all of it pulling outwards: Milan, dance floors, bleach! May saw that and politely closed the door, not a dramatic door-slam, nothing so theatrical. A month conducted largely indoors, at low volume, while something rather important recalibrated.
LIFE LATELY
I am telling you this because this newsletter has never pretended that my brain is a minimalist interior: in May I started Elvanse (hold for applause) ADHD medication! The real deal, the full Monty, prescribed by actual professionals after an actual process, and the deal I made with myself was that I would actually take the adjustment seriously. I know I was surprised too!
So I locked myself away for a stretch while I got used to it, and girls, I do not have the full vocabulary for it yet. I would be suspicious of anyone who finds the words for something this big in the first mont. Yet here is the early report: I have been editing videos I filmed in 2024 and forgot about? I feel like i have been living the life of Sisyphus but the boulder was a perpetual to do list. I am not going to make any grand claims (only a greek myth comparison), everyone’s brain is its own little building with its own planning permissions. But the hibernation was not lost time. It might have been the most important thing I did all year. The word of 2026 is SLOW, and May took it quite on the nose.
And then, mid-month, with the new brain software installed I went to Madrid. I flew in, picked up a hire car, and gave myself to the city, and I need everyone to know that Madrid is an AMAZING city, the kind of city that makes you walk slower on purpose. The full Madrid guide is coming, it deserves its own post and it is getting one, so I will save the itinerary. Do not fear, I will give you the crown jewel now: the Reina Sofia is quite seriously one of my top three museums on earth!!
I got sent the Gentle Monster Vegetable collection (gifted, i’m also gagged dw), and I am OBSESSED with the collection. The little monsters (paws up). Eyewear with a point of view, sculpture you can wear on your face, could not be more up my street. I shot it with my bestie Connor and the pictures are fab!!
MAY MEDIA
Somehow every single thing I consumed in May was about dream states, well all the things of note. The film is about a man who survives bureaucracy by daydreaming. The album is a dream montage. The painting is the litteral second before waking.
I promise I did not plan this, but given that May was the month my own head changed states, I have decided the curation was being done by my subconscious so you have it to blame
FILM
Brazil (1985)
That, Movie! This retro-futurist masterpiece is like if 1984 collided with Spamalot! It’s the best film about paperwork ever made, physical media yay! The world is a strip-lit bureaucratic machine of ducts and forms and tiny grey men (Canary Wharf prophesied) the protagonist survives it by dreaming he is a flying, white winged, silver armored… warrior?
The production design alone deserves its own newsletter tbqh. It was filmed at a now demolished cooling tower in London, it’s beyond. Then there are the ducts, the bloody ducts, every interior strangled by its own infrastructure the metaphoriality of it all, the future as imagined by a filing cabinet. Watching all this in my quiet little May, I realised that the film refuses to treat the daydreaming as a malfunction. The dreaming is the only working part of Sam, the machine is the malfunction!! Hello my own brain??
ALBUM
RAY OF LIGHT, MADONNA
Have become fully, completely besotted with this album. It came out of no where (henry recommended it) and absolutely blindsided me. This is Madonna’s great rebirth renaissance record, a 90s trip-hop dream state from start to finish. Shimmering, weightless and somehow slightly underwater, pop music that has done its yoga and has considered an ayahuasca retreat.
Favourites are - Nothing Really Matters and Little Star
If April’s album, Symbol, was your life as a meadow of wildflowers, then, Ray of Light is your life at dusk from the window seat of a plane. Everything below you turning to glitter, floating above your own life, a dissociation that is somehow grounded. It has soundtracked my entire recalibration and I know she knew what she was doing
ARCHITECTURE
TORRES BLANCAS, MADRID. Francisco Javier Saenz de Oiza, completed 1968
The building of the month was always going to be from Madrid, duh! Because of that it was always going to be this one: the great concrete tree at the entrance to the city. Its like avatar and Blade runner had a concrete baby! Torres Blancas is a residential tower that is pretty much a middle finger to all residential towers. No corners, no grid. Its “just” stacked cylinders sprouting round balconies like growth rings, mushrooming out at the crown into a circular penthouse halo, the patron saint of brutalism.
It is organicist architecture at full blast, Frank lloyd Wright’s ideas put through a Spanish poet’s filter. A vertical garden city that looks less built than grown even more likely, dreamed.
ARTWORK
DREAM CAUSED BY THE FLIGHT OF A BEE AROUND A POMEGRANATE A SECOND BEFORE AWAKENING, Salvador Dali , 1944
This painting was my laptop background for years (can take the boy out of artschool), it’s my favourite painting and in May whilst in Madrid, I finally stood in front of the real thing. In this moment i am quite upset with Jedward for tarnishing the word Epic because thats what it is. Fk it it is Jepic.
I am here to report that no one does blue skies like Dali. The colour is a blue that makes the sky outside the museum look like a sketch, nay, like a first draft. The title is the whole painting: it is the second before waking, the instant where the dream is still fully constructed. Another dreamscape I happened to fall upon this month… How serendipitous!
I am kind of happy to see the back of May? Its just a bit of a random month, but deosnt quite have the transitional pleasure of say… october or movement, no amber hues to soften the blow.
You can also watch my May Favourites on yt
AND if you want to see the full Milan Vlog from last months foundations here it is!!
Onwards to June, which is Pride, and which is NOT quiet and something five parts long and extremely close to my heart coming out of the drafts drawer at last. The queer space dissertation is going public, girlies. Bring tissues and eyeliner.
See you next week!! Bisous x
House of D’vey is for all the architect girlies who just haven’t realised it yet. Fifty percent lifestyle, fifty percent architecture, and absolutely none of it boring. Promise.
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