2 Pieces of Art That I Loved in July
A book about New York and a TV show about Madrid
Time itself has become another tool for content creators. We have our ‘monthly favourites’, ‘monthly resets’, monthly instagram dumps. Everyone, it seems, is desperate for content ideas. So am I, I suppose. I am desperately trying to grow this Substack, so much so that I am listening to the algorithm. Want my skincare routine? A childhood trauma? My opinion on Kamala? You can forget about it. But I will give you a July round-up, á la mode.
Money Heist
This was definitely a grower, not a show-er. In the beginning I had doubts. The show begins with gunshots, a two dimensional female character, a allusion to a tragic backstory. Honestly, not much changes. The only way I can describe it is unbearably human. And those are my favourite kinds of things. It hooks you in a similar way as Breaking Bad. There’s a plan, a plan within a plan, a plan that goes wrong so a plan B, a plan C, plan D, until the show has changed so utterly, you’ve forgotten what plan A was supposed to be. There are criminals doing bad things for compelling things, there is illness, disease, divorce, pregnancies, abortions. But the emotion behind it all is where the two shows differ. Breaking Bad is so callous, so unhuman. I was uninterested in watching another intelligent tv show about crime and man’s ego. Walter White is the good guy no one likes, but the characters in Money Heist are the bad guys that become folk heroes.
Money Heist is not intelligent, it is fantastical, it is hopeful, delusional. You have to enter a state of make believe when you watch and allow yourself to be carried along with it. It’s worth it.
In the second half of the final season, the idea of childishness is explored. El Professor is a nerdy socially anxious hottie and his brother, Berlin is a campy psychopath. Berlin wants to do the impossible, rob the bank of Spain. El Professor thinks this is stupid. Berlin explains that you need to have the imagination of a child when following your passion. You need to play magic tricks, do silly things an adult would never dream. With maturity comes a loss of creativity. This, I realised, was the philosophy of the show from the beginning.
The mastermind behind the heist falls in love with the inspector desperately trying to find him, a pregnant torturer gives birth surrounded by ex-convicts, who believe in raising children gender-neutral, hostages fall in love with their captors, an anti-facist Italian chant is the anthem of thieves and the plot is propelled forward by a decision to drink tequila, have a cigarette and sneak out to a festival. Oh, and all the characters try to sleep with each other at one stage or another. That’s life, the show seems to say. Messy, complicated, tragic, absurd.
I love that it’s anti-authoritarian, I love that it’s about young hedonists, I love the cheesy monologues, the massive, complicated sets with fire, bombs, machine guns, helicopters: at times it feels what people wanted the opera to be. Pure ridiculous drama. But with a political dimension. Check it out.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
I’m so annoyed that I really love this book. Soooooo many people recommended it to me, but for some reason I always internally flinched when I thought of reading it. Much like Joan Didion’s work, Just Kids has been woefully commodified by the so-called ‘thought daughters’ of Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. I didn’t want to be associated with the instagramification of literature in any way so I blamed poor Patti Smith for it. And it is such a pity that her book has become a poster child for faux intellectualism, a forced ‘alternative’ aesthetic and the commodification of the artists’ life because actually the book is against all of those things!
I thought the book was going to be about all of the amazing parties Patti went to, the excess of drugs and alcohol she consumed, designer clothes discarded after one wear, having nothing to do all day except for make music and write. I hate those types of stories because they fill me with such hopelessness. How the hell will I make it as an artist if that’s what the lifestyle is?
In reality, Patti Smith is the real deal. And reading her book filled me with so much hope as an unknown, young writer. Nothing was handed to her. But also, she never doubted that she’d make it. In the last year of living in Dublin, I really felt myself caught up in consumerism. I knew it was wrong but you get trapped in a cycle of really believing you need that twenty euro moisturiser (the five euro one is grand, I promise), you need to get your hair cut in the fancy salon (get you friends to cut your hair!), I even started buying on brand oat milk for God’s sake. And it was horrible because I was self-aware of it the whole time but I couldn’t stop feeling like shit unless I bought myself more things…ew!! Already, I was starting to wean myself off of this mindset by living in Spain. I wasn’t around rich Trinity kids anymore who’s outfits cost more than my rent and who can afford to buy lunch, like every day?? I remembered that Lidl shampoo and conditioner is actually pretty decent, I can make my coffee at home and I don’t need to buy a cocktail just because I got good news.
Just Kids really reinforced this for me. She doesn’t romanticise her time in New York when she was dirt poor and surviving off cheap food, times when she couldn’t afford to go to the cinema or visit museums. She worked shit jobs, she paid rent and she worked on her art. She doesn’t romanticise this because she doesn’t need to. She was completely satisfied with what she had. She knew this was the sacrifice you make if you want to be an artist. She had her love, she had her passion, she had all she needed.
When she spent money it was on cheap clothing from Goodwill, a diner dinner with a good friend, a coffee so she could scribble away in a run down café. One of my favourite bits was when she described how her and Robert Maplethorpe spent their two-year anniversary. They took a train to Coney Island, got a hot dog, took pictures in a photo booth and read their books. How wonderful, how cheap, how utterly romantic!!
All this to say, there’s not a lot of stuff being made that makes me feel okay about being broke and totally unknown. Just Kids made me glad of it.