Weather Review: Melbourne, November 4, 2024

Exactly what it says on the tin(?)

Nov 05, 2024

In January of 2018, The Awl (RIP) ran a short-lived column of weather reviews. Not forecasts. Not report. Reviews. Capsule criticism, complete with star ratings. I loved this concept. Not only is it funny in a deadpan way—the kind of thing they used to build episodes of 30 Rock around—but it also led to some genuinely beautiful pieces of writing. Take this passage from the final review, January 30, New York city:

The snow traced the branching, multiplying twigs of the still-bare trees, narrowing yet holding on all the way out to the tips, and it stuck to the sides of balcony railings, for now. None of it would last; the streets and sidewalks had remained black and clear. Things moved on their usual paths. The flakes were almost too tiny to see individually in the early dimness, but they hid the river and brought the city down to the near and middle distance. An upright dark line floated in the sky, like a hawk perched on nothing. It took the binoculars to sort it out: It was the center post atop a water tower, left alone on a blank background as the conical roof below had gone white and vanished.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at weather reviews, but never found the right opportunity. I have no interest in just rehashing the concept—it’s already been done once, perfectly, so why do the same thing again—but I’ve struggled to find a new ‘in.’ How does one find a unique way to talk about the weather? Humans have been talking about the weather for all of known history, without much variation, because, let’s be honest, we kind of knocked the concept out of the park the first time around: today is hot, but yesterday was cold, so now I’m wearing a jacket I don’t need; perhaps tomorrow will be hot too, best dress light, no?

Another thing that’s warded me off weather reviews until now: I don’t think I’m terribly qualified.

This, of course, is an absurd thing to say. How can one be ‘unqualified’ to talk about weather? Well, for one thing, the store that I work at is located in a basement. Five days a week, the most outside time I get is the fifteen minutes it takes me to walk to work, and the fifteen minutes it takes me to walk home. The weather, then, does not feel like the amorphous thing that it is; there are no tiny evolutions, there are no permutations; there are about-faces: this morning it was sunny, this evening it is rainy, I have no context for how it went from one to the other but it has and I have no umbrella.

But even if I didn’t work in a basement, I still fear that I wouldn’t be well-equipped to review the weather. The reality is that I am an indoor person. A house cat. My days off are usually spent at home, or quickly moving from my home to some other interior space—a movie, a restaurant, a friend’s house.

Sometimes, I think about my work and hobbies and projects and passions with a kind of loathing. Moving from indoor space to indoor space, screen to screen, book to book, story to story. When I am not working I am writing—my novel until recently, these blog posts now—and when I am not writing I am usually consuming other people’s art. Plato would have a field day with a guy like me. Days—sometimes weeks—lost to shadows on cave walls.

Of course, I am not just passively consuming the shadows. I am engaging with them critically, I am producing something. I write reviews about the shadows, I make Substack posts about the shadows, I observe the shadow’s patterns so that I can make shadows of my own. This, perhaps, is another reason it seems silly to say that I am not particularly suited to a weather review: if I can review a movie, surely I can review the weather?

The answer to that (rhetorical) question depends, I suppose, on one’s conception of reviewing as a practice. In my mind, there are two schools: closed reviews and open reviews.

The former views the subject as more of an object. It is a self-contained entity. The film is just the film, the show is just the show. This mode of review doesn’t interest me much because it reduces the subject to component parts: you are assessing quality based purely on functionality: does the narrative beat work or not, that sort of thing.

The latter—the mode I’m interested in—views the subject as, well, a subject. It is an active thing, with intention. The question is less ‘Does the narrative work?’ and more ‘Why did the filmmaker design the narrative this way?’ It is about following the subject where it wants to lead you, being receptive to what it had to say. Merit-based open reviewing asks ‘What was the creator trying to accomplish and did they succeed?’ Understanding-based open reviewing asks ‘What does this subject, when we consider the influences that led to its creation, and the intentions of the people who made, teach us about the wider context in which it exists?’ Regardless of the intention of your review—to rate, to analyse, or both—the approach is the same: as the reviewer you are not trying to impose meaning on the subject, you are trying to meet the subject where it is.

You can’t do an open review of the weather. The weather has no intention. You cannot meet the weather where it is. The weather simply is.

Part of the reason I wanted to do a weather review is that I’m feeling a little stuck in the mud about what else to write. I have ideas. I have loads of ideas. I want to write an essay about Intermezzo and Challengers. I want to write a one-year retrospective on The Boy and the Heron. I want to write about chess. I want to do a post about Wicked: Part One when it comes out. I want to collaborate with friends. But I’ve left it too long since the last post, and now all these ideas have gotten backed-up: creative gridlock.

I didn’t mean to leave it so long between posts, but life just got in the way.

First there was MIFF. I was going to write a summary of that, but then decided against it, because I was already doing some reviews for Rough Cut, and didn’t want to overextend myself.

Then there’s my book. I’ve been working on it for the last year-and-a-half. Closer to two, depending on how you count. Every day—for at least five minutes, sometimes for hours—I’d chip away at it. I’ve been doing this for so long that I kind of began to believe I’d be writing it forever. Then there was a moment in September when I realised that, if I knuckled down, I could do a very shambolic redraft and have something I was willing to share with people for feedback by October.

This meant that I spent even less time outside. Who has time to notice the weather when they are writing? But it also meant that I wasn’t engaging with the world around me the way I you’re meant to. Even when I wasn’t writing I was writing. At work, with friends, when I woke up, before I fell asleep, somewhere in the back of my brain I’d be turning over one question or another: How do I fix this line of dialogue? How do I make that bit of description sing? What’s missing? What’s missing?

I say I’m not a closed reviewer, but the last few months I have been. Whenever I’ve engaged with anything—film, television, music, a podcast—a lingering question in the back of my mind has been what about this works or doesn’t work, and how I can transfer that to my book? The last few months I’ve taken to saying that I’ve ‘become a hater.’ I’ve been less generous with my Letterboxd ratings; I’m more likely to DNF a book after a few chapters. Sometimes I think this is because I’m becoming a better reviewer, more capable of interrogating a subject; my taste is certainly more esoteric than ever, and I do think I’m fairly capable of articulating the rationale (if not logic) behind most of my opinions. But sometimes I think this is a sign that I am becoming a worse reviewer. Sometimes I think that, in trying to learn writing lessons from the media I engage with, I have also become less willing to follow it where it wants to go, less interested in letting it ask the questions it wants to ask, and more interested in how it can answer mine.

The book is finished now. The first draft, anyway.

I was asked, the day after, if I felt lighter knowing that it was done. And I replied that yes, I did, where there had been a weight on my shoulders and in my stomach, there was now lightness. What I did not say, however (because I did not want to be a huge downer), was the lightness was also emptiness.

I’m not working on the book for the rest of the year, not thinking about it at all, except the habit-forming part of my brain doesn’t know that, the memory in my muscles doesn’t know that. I keep observing human behaviour, and thinking it would make for a good character beat, only to catch and chastise myself for thinking in those terms; I keep going to open Google Docs on my phone, just a quick bit of redrafting while I’m on break at work, only stop myself at the last second, and force myself to read instead.

Except I can’t read anymore, not the way I used to. I can’t stop thinking about what lessons I can glean from the text, what tricks I can steal, or—if the book is bad—trying to figure out how I would fix it. This is a time that I wanted to spend enjoying, relaxing, but I’m struggling. I wanted to watch a movie the way I used to watch a movie. I want to spend time with friends that I haven’t seen in a while, but I feel like they’ve all grown and changed while I’ve had my head down.

The weather changes regardless of whether you’re there to observe it, and it’s been so long since I’ve gone outside.

This substack is not going where I thought it was going.

For me reviewing is not just a critical act. The Substack posts I wrote throughout the first half of this year really cemented that fact for me. Looking back through them—cringing through the typos—the thing that jumped out was how much they were a diary. I’ve always struggled to articulate my feelings. I know them, I can identify them, but articulating them into words is a whole thing.

Reviewing allows me to bypass that blockage. Talking about the subject is a way for me to talk about myself. Sometimes, this connection is overt. It’s the confessional elements of my Haikyuu!! essay; it’s the framing device of my I Saw the TV Glow review. Other times, most of the time, it’s a bit more covert, something that only I can identify, and only if I look for it. Secret messages that I’m sending a future version of myself—just like Tenet, in a way.

This, really, is why I’m worried about having become a hater. Perhaps, I’ve been holding my book too close for too long, and when I let it go a bit of myself went with it. When I say I’ve become a hater, what I’m really saying is that I’m worried I’m not a lover anymore. I’m worried that all the people who have been patient with me as I chip away at this stupid book—my family, friends, coworkers, and boyfriend—that they’ve been patient for nothing. I’m worried that now I’m done, and I’m ready to give back to them, to make up for all that time, I’m not really equipped to do that anymore.

I’m aware how stupid this all is. How self-indulgent. That I’m worrying about it proves that I’ve got nothing to be worried about; that’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I’ve been listening to Collapsed in Sunbeams by Arlo Parks. The title track—which is really more of a spoken-word piece—has this line that I’ve been thinking about a lot: ‘We're all learning to trust our bodies/Making peace with our own distortions.’

I wonder if, by the time Christmas has passed, and it’s next year, and I pick up my book, or start a new one, I’ll go through this whole process again, but in reverse. I’ll have spent so long being a person that I’ll have forgotten how to write a novel.

I still want to write a weather review. I still lack an original spin. But I’m starting to think that wanting a spin is a sign of a my misaligned mindset.

The weather isn’t a closed object at all.

On my balcony, enjoying my morning coffee, surrounded on all sides by high-rises, the only piece of sky in sight was above, a blue door at the end of a grey hallway. The sun had not risen to a point where its beam could cut through the sprawl, but it was not cold in the shade.

Direct sunlight would not arrive for another hour, well after I left the house, and when it arrived I found it to glaring: an off-white that washed out every colour it touched, so that the world appeared monochrome, and the faces of the people I passed in the street were not faces at all, but luminous circles, lanterns bobbing along.

A few minutes past midway the sky wrinkled with unexpected cloud cover. A reprieve from the heat, which was clinging to the hairs on my forearm. In the heat’s place there was now brittleness: a not-quite-cold, as if the day had, for a few moments, been put on a pause.

I met a friend for drinks, and then a movie. When we emerged the clouds had moved along, and the day had resumed. The sunlight had softened from white to gold. It diffused through trees to create the effect of an internal glow. It reflected momentary corneas of light off the windows of passing cars.

The clang of a tram; the laughter of uni students laying on the grass in front of The State Library. Sound rising up into the air and vanishing into the blue stillness.

★★★★☆

Random Stuff

As I mentioned above, I’ve done a bit of reviewing since I wrote here last. So if you want more me you can check out this review of Armand, this review of Motel Destino, and this review of I Saw the TV Glow (which I linked above but it’s also my favourite of the three so I’ll link it again!)
I also have been doing reviews for The Big Issue (no. 719 and 724) but those are print-only and just 170 words long each so, ya’know, no pressure with those ones.
Ok, one more review: as a bit, I reviewed the film-tie-in novelistation of Despicable Me 4. You can check that out here.
I have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and all I have to say is: Shadowheart.
Like everyone else on Twitter, I have been enjoying the editorial stylings of Adrian Chiles.
I also need to update my summer wardrobe—shorts especially—so if anyone has some not-too-pricey links, please send them through :)
I can smell your sickness/I can cure ya (Cure)/Cure your disease

Real, If True

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