Diary entry: June 2025
A month of: new kitchens! bad wigs! sweat!
I meant to write an introduction for this month at some point but I kept putting it off. Oh well! Did you know that The Comeback is coming back?!?!?!?!
Thank GOD! If you haven’t seen it do but also watch Lisa Kudrow’s TV academy interviews. They’re all on Youtube and she’s really articulate about what has and hasn’t worked for her in her career.
OK, glad we got that out of the way :)
Sunday, June 1
On a late May evening, the London Renter’s Union hosted a talk entitled ‘Abolish Rent’ with authors and organisers Tracy Rosenthal and Nick Beno. The night was named after Rosenthal’s (and their cowriter/ organiser Leonardo Vilchis’) newly released book: Abolish Rent. The book is stirring and profound and grounds the theoretical language of “housing is a human right” in the real lives of LA tenant’s union members. I was furiously highlighting my way through and can’t wait to lend this out and buy it for many of my friend’s Birthdays to come.
Thank the LORD And Just Like That… is back. I often say this but this show is one of the most profound, thought-provoking, enlightened sci-fi shows of our time. Not one of these women makes a single decision rooted in explicable human logic, so I am led to believe they are aliens, infiltrating New York one bad date at a time.
To clarify my theory: Carrie and Aidan decided they needed to take a break at the end of last season so that Aidan could raise his teenage son. Reasonable on the surface, and the break was even helpfully given a timeline of…five years. Five years? So Carrie is obviously like: “OK :-)” and just agrees to not date anyone else and not see him for one, two, three, four, five years. OK…OK? OK!
I actually really like Carrie and Aidan but do feel that that observation needs to be prefaced by a startling revelation: I’ve never actually finished Sex and the City. Why might a person watch And Just Like… with no prior investment in Sex and the City (a far superior show)? Mostly because I’m scared of being left out. Also at this point I really like Aidan and I know how he’s treated in the original run of the show, so as Valerie Cherish might say: “I don’t want to see that!”
I also recently found out that Sarah Jessica Parker owns every single one of Carrie’s outfits from the show and its sequels, which struck me as a genius move on her part. Did everyone already know this? It’s surprising more iconic actors don’t do this. Can’t wait for SJP’s twilight years where she hosts an installation of archived outfits. I’d go! Maybe I will have finished Sex and the City by that point.
Monday, June 2
June was dramatically kicked off when my friends Ruby and Kion moved into the flat and Kion and his friend Callum immediately started refurbishing my very old kitchen (this was pre-planned tbc…not just like spur of the moment!) You think it would be kind of fun to displace one room of your flat into other rooms, living mostly off of batch-cooked food that you reheat in a microwave on the floor of your living room. “It will be like camping!” I told myself in the leadup, but I forgot something crucial: I hate camping. All that complaining aside, it is a gorgeous kitchen! Kion and Callum did an excellent job! Ruby and I mostly sequestered ourselves in the living room and watched old episodes of Girls. Occasionally I would slip on some flipflops and lift incredibly heavy kitchen appliances up four flights of stairs. “It’s not safe to lift a van full of kitchen units up the stairs with slippers on” you say, well if you can dream it? You can do it <3
(Gaby Hoffman is unbelievably good as Adamn’s weird sister in Girls!!!)
I watched Final Destination 5 in the evening. I love these movies! Charli xcx recently filmed a TikTok arguing for an “it girl” Final Destination which I don’t want, but I do agree with her that these films are basically about how hot people can never escape death. Every scene is a “Where’s Wally?” of what will kill this next person, will it be this fish tank? This spatula? This curtain rod? So fun!
As I haven’t seen the newest one I won’t attempt to rank all the films, but my favourite grisly deaths (in no particular order) are:
This guy getting sliced by flying barbed wire in Final Destination 2.
This laser eye machine blinding this girl who then falls out the window (Sex and the City “nobody’s fun anymore!” style) in Final Destination 5.
The whole opening sequence in Final Destination 3. If I were these guys in these films I would never get on a rollercoaster but that’s just me I guess.
The bathroom death in the first Final Destination (which is randomly the only film where Death as a character is actively trying to set up our protagonist for murder).
And finally, that log truck! We love her!
As a final note: I do not enjoy the tanning bed death scene. These films walk a tightrope between stressful and exhilarating and that is the only point where Final Destination veers into stressful territory for me.
Wednesday, June 4
Carole King’s 1972 album Rhymes & Reason is one of my favourites. It’s not necessarily packed with any of the singles that solidified her as a hit-maker but it is a true no skips album and I listen to it over the course of the morning. ‘Come Down Easy’ is such a sweet, heartfelt, low-energy way to slip into an album. Her singing “God bless the children / God bless us all” is me when one of the 20 year olds who works front of house at the theatre looked at my second hand iPhone 8 and went “what exactly is that?”
New Ethel Cain!!!!!! Need I say more?
(Side note: but the definition of a perfect set list is this cover of ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ sliding seamlessly into ‘American Teenager’, which you can hear right at the end.)
I put on Meet Me in St. Louis to fall asleep and the last thing I remember before I drift off is the opening trill of ‘Trolley Song’...is this the best feeling in the world? I love this movie! If you haven’t seen it, it's on BBC iPlayer and features one of the best onscreen performances of all time in Judy Garland!
Thursday, June 5
I watch Gerald’s Game before heading to a screening of The Life of Chuck in the afternoon. I like Mike Flanagan, but I think his more saccharine tendencies are best tempered by his ability to ramp up tension and horror. Ultimately, The Haunting of Hill House is his masterpiece - mostly because it's such a perfect balance between jump scares and emotion. I’m just not sure if any source material will ever suit him so well again!
Gerald’s Game is OK! It features this scene of a father manipulating his daughter which is so breathtakingly ordinary in its awfulness. You can foresee every manipulative turn before it happens and it still feels just as bad when it happens.
The Life of Chuck is ambitious and moving but falls apart a bit for me upon reflection. Ultimately though, what matters even more than any opinion on the film is that I got a free latte when I saw it. A win is a win is a win.
Saturday, June 7
It was a rainy day so I spent the afternoon watching The Truman Show. It was my first watch! Wonderful, creative and an easy way to spend an hour and forty minutes. Peter Weir!!!! He is the thinking man’s Ridley Scott!
In the evening my friend Sarah and I go and see the Cowboy Carter tour 🤠 ! I generally abhor stan culture and see it as the enemy of art criticism, but Beyoncé is someone whose work I have followed passionately and care about implicitly and often against my better judgement. Performance-wise, she’s slowed down since her heyday - her shows are less dance-y than they were and, as such, it’s going to be hard for her to ever top Homecoming (which, to be fair, is the height of pop performance), but even still, Cowboy Carter was so fun!
It’s hard to compare it to the Renaissance tour because I don’t know how much recency bias is clouding my judgement but I think I enjoyed this show more than the last one. Cowboy Carter is a longer, less focused album but I think the somewhat misguided ambition of that translates to stage so perfectly. Somehow it's a tour that manages to be both elegant and sloppy. There are so many songs that could have been cut but everything that’s there flows together effortlessly. Even ‘Diva’, which I’ve never been a huge fan of, is the perfect fit for a show of this scale!
Highlights of the show: Blue Ivy’s in this even more than the Renaissance tour and she’s got great stage presence; I don’t think the repurposing of the American flag with this album is smart thematically or aesthetically, but ‘AMERIICAN REQUIEM’ is such a good album/ show opener; ‘II HANDS II HEAVEN’ is one of my favourite Beyoncé songs ever; ‘Irreplacable’!!! What a classic and not what I expected of her older work; ‘HEATED’ bridge is truly an all-timer.
Apparently the inclusion of ‘BREAK MY SOUL’ in her setlist was new for London. Cool, I guess! It’s like a 10 second long interlude. Truly nothing beats the Renaissance tour version of ‘BREAK MY SOUL’ mixed with Madonna’s ‘Vogue’. I know this Youtube recording of it hates to see me coming.
My phone is the oldest in existence so you’ll just have to take my word for it that that’s Beyoncé and she is flying around the stadium in a velvet car. I actually found this section kind of stressful because I don’t understand how they can securely do that. Also it had been raining all day so what if the wires suspending it were wet or something? Scary stuff!
(OK UPDATE: the flying car did break at her Houston show! Let this be an end to the madness.)
Monday, June 9
My wonderful friend Hannah recommended I read Lorrie Moore Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? And I love love loved it! There are so many observations and turns of phrases that feel novel, inventive and energetic enough to stick with me for a while.
Watched Totally F***** Up. Baby’s first Gregg Araki! Funny and bright and compositionally very beautiful while still maintaining a certain griminess appropriate to the time.
Tuesday, June 10
I rewatched The Prince & Me with Ruby before heading to work. Growing up my family and I would go to the film store every Sunday after church and pick out a range of VCDs (very, very low quality DVDs that only seem to be sold in Manila) to watch. I guess I first watched this after one of those outings!
Julia Stiles was such a fun and unlikely big star back in the day! Weird movie though. I guess all of us have to choose between going to med school or being the future queen of Denmark - be it literally or metaphorically.
OK time for me to ‘fess up: one of my increasingly unpopular opinions that I hold very dear is that Friends is a solid TV show and a very good sitcom (different things with different metrics obvs). The jokes are funny, the cast chemistry is compelling, I truly believe that the episode where Ross and Rachel break up is one of the most ambitious episodes of mainstream American TV. Think about it: a whole episode basically on one set, where the main couple/ narrative force of the show just argues and then fizzles out, no resolution achieved, just people sad and lonely on a soundstage…tune in next week!
As someone who grew up pouring over the box set of this show I am embarrassingly attuned to the difference between the versions that aired originally on TV and the versions that Netflix edited down. It’s a few seconds of material - a joke here or there, a silent interaction between actors - but it's been driving me crazy trying to fill in these moments when watching episodes on streaming. At first I went seeking out the extended versions on Youtube but I couldn’t find them there. I tried to look up episodes online from alternative sources but those were also the edited down versions. It was literally so hard to find these original versions that I started to wonder if this was all a ploy designed to drive me crazy (watches The Truman Show one time and goes on an existential tailspin). And then I found the oldest website ever constructed; a forum wholly dedicated to cataloguing the differences between these two versions of Friends. Thank God for these likeminded freaks. It’s on this website that I learned that for Friends’ 100th successive rerun or whatever, Warner Brothers agreed to cut down each episode by a minute or so (sometimes less) in order to make more space for advertisers. These are the versions that Netflix (and HBO Max in the States) purchased and there’s been no real push to reinstate the longer versions, despite the fact that the whole premise of streaming is that episodes needn’t be constrained by time stamps, act breaks or budget cuts. However this website gave me hope; the DVD box set was never subject to these updates, so any physical copy of the show will still have the longer version.
Cut to: me in a charity shop purchasing the second season on DVD. Hurray! Success! I can now watch the extended versions! I called Ruby to try and brag about my find but in a cool and casual way that suggests I just stumbled upon this relic from my childhood and she immediately calls me out with: “you’ve been telling me about this for years, don’t pretend you didn’t go out looking for those DVDs.” OK…rude…it’s sometimes the people who know you the best who can hurt you the most…
Anyway, this is all to say we watched a few episodes of Friends in the afternoon.
Thursday, June 12
I’m writing a piece on geography and friendship and how a whole relationship can seem to revolve around one place. I’m seeing Sorry, Baby in a week which is what the piece is actually attached to, but ahead of it I rewatched Frances Ha. What more can I say? It’s great!
Friday, June 13
In line with the aforementioned mission, I watched Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood for the first time. It’s slightly too long and there is a plot twist that stands in as representation for the transition from girlhood to womanhood, and I found it to be too broad. But there are moments that transcend any of the plot – specifically the ‘Diamonds’ singalong scene! It’s one of the best expressions of onscreen intimacy I’ve seen!
I can’t remember reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and I’ve never seen it on stage but I am obsessed with this video of Tom Felton explaining how emotional it makes him to return to the HP universe as Draco Malfoy. I’m not going to link it because I don’t want to give the official Instagram page any traction (and needless to say I think Felton’s a coward for effectively lining JK’s pockets with even more money) but when the video popped up on my ‘For You’ page I laughed and laughed and laughed, particularly at the part where he dons this ugly, blonde wig and starts to cry.
Sunday, June 15
After a full Saturday in the sun, socialising, our house was struck down by the Sunday scaries. I figured it was best to avoid this and cycle into central with the aim of seeing Blow Out at the Prince Charles. Unfortunately I’m an idiot and my bike is in desperate need of repair, so by the time I show up the showing was already sold out. Instead I head to a location so cursed it is only fit for press screenings and Sunday afternoon showings of Final Destination: Bloodlines: Cineworld Leicester Square. I walked in to find one poor man dressed in safari garb, carrying an electronic dinosaur. He was promoting the new Jurassic World film, or he would have been, if there was anyone else in the foyer.
Final Destination: Bloodlines was…incredible. You think you know all the ways that a human head could explode and then you’re proven wrong. :)
Got home and put on the first half of The Sound of Music! Kion had never seen it before and Ruby and I were honoured to offer him the 4DX experience (singing along to every single song).
Monday, June 16
I watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall over lunchtime. Netflix is truly a cesspit of the worst things ever put to screen, but this movie is unexpectedly good. Paul Rudd mockingly asking “are you from London town mate?” made me laugh aloud. Perfect use of Jason Segel and Kristen Bell!
On the walk to work I finally listen to Addison Rae’s debut album, Addison. Rae’s music feels in conversation with Kate Bush and Bjӧrk and the fun, weird pop girls of eras past, but I actually think her cultural appeal is most comparable to Taylor Swift. Two incredibly earnest try-hards (that isn’t an insult! It’s my favourite thing about both of them) whose appeal isn’t their singing voices but their ability to embrace whatever “era” they’re in with intimidating forcefulness. They are one another’s Mario and Wario (I guess you can make the call who is who). But there’s an open, airy, non-specificity to Rae’s writing that I find enriching and colourful and very un-Swift in a good way!
I finish reading Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? By Leah Cowan. This is a stirring exploration of why abolition is the only common sense response to an actively harmful police force. It moves through the different waves of feminism to explain how carceral feminism arrived, ugly and insidious, into this moment.
Tuesday, June 17
In the afternoon Ruby and I watch I Walked with a Zombie which is a 1943 horror film that deconstructs the zombie formula and reassembles it into something really odd and compelling. It has these gothic sensibilities that I found really fun (especially in the images it produced) and I also think for a small film (it has a contained cast and a runtime of 63 minutes) it is kind of ambitious in what it's trying to say about gender and marriage.
Why don’t any of us sleep in dresses like this anymore? Ruby and I go to a press screening of Sorry, Baby in the evening. At the point you read this I will have written about it for Paste but I do just want to say I am so grateful for the friendships that persist past the moment where they’re easy or comfortable and transform into something hard-earned and beautiful. I have always been a best friend person rather than a friendship group person and while there are pros and cons to either mode (and whatever lies beyond these two arbitrary interpretations), I have never been more grateful for being the former than I am in this phase of my life. Don’t know if that makes much sense but it’s something more generally I’ve been observing in myself that Sorry, Baby gave me the language for.
Wednesday, June 18
Finally we finish The Sound of Music! When you split this movie in two, the turn from musical into historical drama really jumps out. It’s old fashioned, schmaltzy and over-long but it’s also so, so lovely and Julie Andrews is so good!
Friday, June 20
I watch a few episodes from the third season of Couples Therapy, and I do think the hype around this show is correct. It’s kind of revelatory in its simplicity and really effectively expresses the usefulness of therapy and the limits of its capabilities as well. There’s this one couple who so clearly feel overwhelming disdain for one another’s feelings that, in my non-professional opinion, their money would be more productively spent on a divorce. Regardless of whether Dr. Orna (the therapist) agrees with me, she can’t say that – it would be counterproductive to the work she does. It’s not all that different from charities' paradoxical relationship to capitalism, even if they believe truth lies outside of this ideology, their existence is dependent on the uneven distribution or resources. That is a very simple summary of a complicated problem and ultimately the show is interesting for the very simple reason that it is interesting to see people try and name their problems, even (especially) when they’re wrong.
Saturday, June 21
I watch Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, a film about solidarity and friendship surviving in unimaginably frigid conditions. There are so many gorgeous compositions in this – really stark explorations of human physicality. It’s not a fun or easy watch but I highly recommend!
Sunday, June 22
Later this week, I’m set to review M3GAN 2.0 so in preparation I watch M3GAN. It is surprisingly boring but Allison Williams is genuinely great.
Me when I don’t even take care of my own plants.
Monday, June 23
Kion has also never seen Star Wars, so we watch A New Hope. What more can you possibly say about Star Wars? It’s a strange and wonderful thing! Personally for me the original trilogy gets better and better and better but there really is something about that first iteration that feels so potent with newness, every corner of the world is embedded with side characters that feel so fully realised and complete, like you could make a feature film from any given extra who wanders onscreen.
Like I always think about this guy from Return of the Jedi who is the rancor keeper in Jabba’s palace. Obviously Luke has to kill the rancor to save himself but the little cutaway to him crying is such a compelling little nugget. He’s been caring for this monster for years maybe, he’s grown attached, he cries. Not to be a complete freak nerd, but wow, that’s kind of what cinema is to me.
Tuesday, June 24
My friend from high school comes to stay with her husband and I have to break the devastating news to them that I won’t be able to join them on their first morning foray around London because I have to go see and review M3GAN 2.0. They take it on the chin.
M3GAN 2.0 is kind of great and then so, so confusing but…whatever!
Wednesday, June 25
A few of us take a day trip to Hastings and on the way back to London we play a rousing round of “Tell us your third favourite thing from blank”. Stoness and I invented it one evening and the rules are fairly simple; someone picks a category (“songs from Wicked”, “podcasts”, etc.) you have to then tell the group your third favourite thing from that theme, and based on the third favourite the group then has to determine what your second and first favourites are. It’s a surprisingly difficult but fun way to pass the time. And before you ask, ‘Everyday’ is my favourite song from High School Musical 2.
We then finish Grease which we had started the night before. Wow. This film has the juice. Not a single flop number in the whole runtime. As Stoness pointed out: everyone in the film is a 40 year old playing a teenager not because of poor casting but because Rydell High transcends time itself.
Me and all my age-appropriate friends having dinner together :)
Thursday, June 26
On Lindsey and Jon’s last day in London we watch Hadestown on the West End with her parents. I’ve seen this show twice before, once on the West End, and once with the original Broadway cast who toured it at the National Theatre. It’s a very, very special show and I am, in my heart of hearts, an aspiring theatre kid (all of the ambition, none of the talent).
Saturday, June 28
From this date onwards, London is unfathomably hot. It might not seem hot when you just check the weather app but it is the kind of heavy humidity that coats you whenever, wherever. It’s what my friend once described as “back of the bus heat”, but everywhere. This kind of weather thrusts me back to growing up in Manila. During hot season, in the middle of the day, when the sun was highest, everyone was irritable and snappy but then the sun would go down and a slight chill would sing in the air and it was like everyone breathed a little deeper. I unintentionally further embed myself in this nostalgia by watching Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Leonor Will Never Die. In it, a retired action film writer in the Philippines falls into a coma and imagines she is the star of one of these 80s-esque capers. Escobar really carefully threads the needle of enjoying the pulpiness of the genre and gently poking fun at its self-seriousness. It’s a great watch! And the film within the film was so reminiscent of the movies I would catch when flipping through channels growing up.
In the evening Ruby and I settle in to watch the Sex and the City movie. Wow. This film is actually very avante garde in its structure. If you try and explain each character’s arc you will lose your mind. But whatever! I enjoyed!
Me explaining how Carrie goes from happily in a relationship, to moving in with her partner, to engaged, to jilted at the altar, to going brunette, to having Jennifer Hudson as her assistant, to giving her the ugliest bag in the world, to reuniting with Big, to getting married, to writing another book, all in the space of one feature film…
—
This month proved trying, both personally and also generally in the world. At this point, why bother distinguishing between the two. Earlier in the month a young girl hosted a vigil after her sexual assault case resulted in two young men being charged with attempted rape. The vigil was disbanded and the town erupted in racist rioting (a mangled, barely conceivable response to the fact that the men charged were not from Ireland), with locals targeting immigrant families in the area. This all happened in Ballymena, a town down the road from where I’m from (and the place my friends and I would first travel to after passing our respective driving tests in 2015/2016 - a funny suburban pilgrimage to the nearest McDonalds’ drive-thru). Police were called in, water canons were fired and as I write this a continued police presence provokes areas stoked by far-right rhetoric.
I love Ireland, it’s where I tell people I’m from. It’s where my Dad is from and, while my Mum is English, it’s where her paternal grandparents are from and where both of my parents live now. It was a wonderful place to do some growing up and when I tell others “I’m going home for a week or two”, that’s where I go. A few months ago I attended a talk on the history of anti-fascist resistance in East London, and someone mentioned that we must not make anti-racist arguments within the framework of the state. So that means never positing pro-migration arguments on the basis of how much they serve the country, or how much money they bring to preexisting institutions. No one is inherently “legal” or “illegal”, no one is born lacking “a right to work”; people are people, and the borders they cross may leave a material mark on their lives, but they are only politically relevant in our joint pursuit to dismantle them. This is especially relevant in the North of Ireland, where British loyalists cling to a government that doesn’t want them, a king who outright dismisses them, and an English populace who (I can confirm, having lived here for just under a decade) don’t know anything about them. Any thinking that bends to the will of the state accrues them more power, and they have enough - don’t give them your minds as well. A limited capacity for imagining new solutions is a lack of free thinking and freedom is an absolute, to take away a portion of it is to take away it; once it's gone it can’t be reinstated, not as it was and not as it should be. As Filipino journalist Maria Ressa explained to Democracy Now, “what rights you lose today you will not get back. Right?”
I worry for this young Ballymena girl, entering into a judicial system not designed to secure justice for her. I worry for the families that hid in their homes, only to find stickers of their nationalities pasted to their front doors. I worry for this place that I love and know, effectively abandoned by their representative, who explained the violence was a result of “unchecked immigration into the town.” None of us will be safer with less immigrants living in our country’s made up borders, none of us will be safer with more police on the streets, or higher security prisons. The questions that face us are complicated but any answer that presupposes we would be best served to forget that an entire population exists will only make us smaller and stupider.
It’s a bit of a jump scare to be writing about this in a newsletter I promised would be a funny, silly cultural jaunt, but what can you do? The things I care about have all blurred into one and what appears to be a single, contained subject, spreads and fills the space of logic, coherence and fact. The world is awful, awful, awful and maybe the varying quality of art we find and the people we find it with are how we make sense of everything. We’ll be in real trouble if art is how we try to fix everything, but that’s for another newsletter maybe.
For now, here’s a part of a passage from the last pages of Cowan’s aforementioned book. Her words really moved me and I hope they do something for you too!
“Many of the strategies we use to journey into freedom are already tried and tested; others have not yet even been dreamed of, and so the abolitionist feminist imagination is a precious resource we tend to. This fertile field will not produce delicate and vibrant ecosystems if we deny the potency of its existence - if we constantly and joylessly relegate our struggle to the field of pragmatism and disenchantment without surrender…
…After all, in our dreams we can fly; our childhood toys morph into deep-sea creatures, and rooms have endless exit doors. The praxis of dreaming nudges us outside the enclosure of neoliberal time and space, and into wide forests, deep lagoons and endless possibilities for different worlds that are, in their varied and numerous components, already shimmering all around us.”
Everyday!! Of our lives!!!
Your writing has so much life and emotion and is funny, silly AND important and incisive