Harried Hi
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Hello, friends, hello!
This is Zach coming at you from windy, wintry Wellington where the rain is looming and the social calendar is FULL. How are you!
I am writing you in the few calm hours between a bunch of frenzied activities. And, to be honest, writing this letter usually becomes a frenzy itself, my typing sounds more and more like firecrackers popping off as the words increase -- so really I should say I am in the small calm minutes before a set of frenzies.
What's new?!
It is the NZ Int'l Comedy Fest this whole month and my friend Lesa's show is on this week. I am directing the show, which mostly means I sit in the front row and make sure she eats something and drinks enough water. Still, I take the role seriously and will be headed off to the Cavern club with some granola bars soon. Tomorrow is the Wellington Zine Fest --- one of the highlights of the year --- and Angelica and I are tabling with a new zine. Laterh we have tickets for the incredible comic David Correos, and will watch him figuratively, and maybe literally, shit himself on stage (but in an accessibly avant-garde way)!
So in between comedy shows, Angelica and I will be at home frantically binding 50 copies of a comic diary about our 19 hour Fast and Furious marathon. It is a zine that Angelica, currently, is in her own frenzy over, trying to quickly, but accurately, draw all of us as furries in big muscle cars. It is causing her grief as there is limited time to finish it before the copy center closes down, but still she has to get the faces right.
This is all to say that we are in a badly planned, time-crunched creative panic and I love it. It is probably not good, or healthy, to look forward to these panics. To have all-nighters feel like fun holidays. I love them because the panic of a deadline shocks my brain into focus better than the loudest brown noise.
flaaaashback
I have a memory of being 10, on a school night, and my parents asking if we
wanted to go to the theatre (it was dollar movie night). They checked with each
of us kids to see if we had schoolwork, and I remember saying "I got nothing, I
can see a movie!" Then, in the middle of the film, I started crying -- these
silent, stressed tears that I tried to hide but my mom could see quickly. She
asked if the movie was upsetting me, and I whisper-sobbed, "I have a report
due tomorrow."
She took me to the lobby to try to calm me down and asked, "How much more
do you have to work on it?"
"I haven't started it at all!"
"Oh, when were you assigned this project?"
"Four months ago!!" I wailed.
In my young, dumb brain I truly thought I could easily see the movie, then come home and crank out a couple pages about the city of Pasco, Washington before bed. And, you know, I did. I stayed up late, tears flowing, writing wrinkled pages about Pasco's school mascot (bulldog) and early history (railroad) then shakily traced a picture of the city hall as a cover. I turned it in for a barely passing grade, was sick the next day, and learned nothing from the moment. Instead, I seem to cherish it as an early indicator of my fun, cool, nerve-damaging creative style.
BACK TO THE PRESENT
I know there are better ways to live and work, healthy habits to foster and such. To start preparing for sleep at 7pm so that you can wake up two hours earlier than anyone for a calm, mediative, artful start to your day -- but that just isn't my scene.
Last night, before the show, I was making small talk with a friend in the row behind me. She asked what was new, and we don't see each other enough to have a solid sense of what "new" means, so I just said something neutral and dumb about how my work has shifted so I set my own hours more, which is great since I love working late at night and I feed off the moonlight.
Her friend was listening and asked, "do you really think you work better at night"?
I said, "yah, I always get a second wind right at 10pm".
"Do you want a tidbit to help go to bed at 10:30pm"?
"Sure...........?", I said.
"Your body, right before sleep, releases hormones that help repair you physically and mentally. You are then using these hormones to work. That's where the energy comes from, that is all a second wind is, you stealing the nutrients your body needs to fix itself. All so you can work a couple more hours."
"Won't the body adjust?" I asked, "like just release them before my actual sleep? Or does it somehow know to do it at exactly 10pm?"
"Maaaaybe you could reset your circadian rhythms", he said in a scoff, as if it were possible but we both knew I couldn't do it. And I remembered why I found small talk so anxious and precarious.
Anyway, I am now running late for the show, which means it is the perfect time to tell you the thing I meant to tell you when I sat down to write this thing...
I got a show in Christchurch coming up!
I am performing my solo show "Comedian of the Year 2069" at the Good Times Comedy Club on 2nd of June, at 6pm. You can buy tickets here. If you have friends in Christchurch that you think would like it, please let them know! I know very little of the town, except that Lyttleton is cool and it has good minigolf. So, if you have any hot tips about Christchurch please let me know them too!
And, truly, I should leave in the next few minutes, so also...
Zach's Review Corner: The Comics of Yeong-shin Ma
There's a small but passionate subset of y'all that read this email for my Wellington library hot tips, so hot tip: the library is carrying two comics that are so good and you should read.
Artist, by Yeong-shin Ma, is a wonderful, hilarious, earnest graphic novel about three friends who share artistic temperaments, but in different mediums and with different inner goals. It depicts the type of friendship formed by circumstance instead of interest, and how enduring it can be even as you've all gone different ways. In this case, it is three friends who met working as apprentices in an art studio -- one a musician, one a visual artist, and one a writer. The comic started as web comics, I do believe, so it has an easy, open pace as it follows their lives through a set of vignettes. Ma is a great storyteller though, so it is one of the graphic novels that actually feels like a novel, wide scope and interesting, earned changes in characters. It's also gross and tense and v. funny. Highly recommend.
I also recommend his first comic, Moms. It follows a set of moms, and draws from his own mother's experience. He gave her a notebook to write down her day, and then adapted her pages into the piece. So it not only gives a view of life I hadn't really seen much in comics before -- working, older Korean moms in complex, toxic relationships with middle-aged Korean fuckboys -- but it also tells it with this tone that is really charming. Every story has no real beginning or end, just a thing that happens with an ending message that isn't really a moral, but closer to the "so anyway..." sentence that ends an email from a loved one.
So anyway, that's been my day and night and I hope you are well. I gotta run, but will talk again soon!
Your friend,
ZACH!