Guide for Quiet Storms & Staring Out at The Sea
Quiet Guide #2: More on sea-staring.
A lighter iteration of my weekly newsletter — testing a curatorial format. Welcome back to Quiet Parts, my space for black girl interiority and intricately subversive culture. Each week I publish a poem I’m working on (with working notes for paid subscribers), a longer form essay about art history, politics, and pop culture, and of course I share my Quiet Patronage newsletter rounding up media, visual culture, inspirations, and musings from the week past.
This is a test of bite-sized curations around my week’s theme. Instead of focusing on migration and the sun I’m somehow back to the sea. Here is LG’s guide for Quiet Storms and staring out at the sea!
sounds of the sea <3
packing for the sea!!
If you find yourself headed toward the sea… here is how I generally approach packing:
Wait until the day before you leave, the condensed timeline will force some grave decisions about what’s needed and what’s not.
Set aside your documents & ID’s, keep these in your carryon luggage
Outlet adapters and devices
Three beauty bags: skincare & essentials (toothpaste, soap, the like), haircare (for maintaining straight hair, backup protective style supplies, natural hair supplies—for after swimming in the sea ofc—and a bonnet), makeup
Pre-planned outfits, location-based capsule wardrobe, moodboard moodboard moodboard
Swimsuits.
Cameras.
Binoculars.
At least five books.
In carry-on keep some makeup and skincare minis, wallet, passport, headphones, books, and your retainer
Plan airport outfit and plane work
Run out of the house because you are somehow late, it makes the airport experience far more dramatic and somehow far more efficient
My favorite hair combo atm… gently journeying with natural hair #keepingitsimple especially in the summer
Obviously I’m no packing expert. Here is Joan Didion’s packing list I return to often.
LG’s favorite seas >.<
Top three seas of all time based on no science but instead on my experience and fantasy:
The Tyrrhenian Sea
Last summer I was living in Italy, and before I moved back home I took a brief trip to the town of Sabaudia where I spent a great deal of time discussing life at Sabaudia beach, which was fairly empty and completely free of Americans. I drove around observing rationale architecture and thinking about all the moments in my life that led to that moment with that person. I swam and built things in the sand and caught other peoples’ dogs running loose at the shore. Everything was fake and everything was so real. Great sea.
The Brazilian Coastline
The 16th longest national coastline in the world, Christo was visible from every point of the beach we accessed. Urban expanse, mountainous terrain, gorgeous beach. Açai never more than five dollars a bowl, caipirinhas for less. Too busy to be meditative in a melancholic, metaphysical, existential way. Pensive in a: the world is beautiful, I’m so happy I’m alive way. Not enough pause to do too much thinking at all. The essence of being alive. Do not buy a coconut to drink from, the meat will clog the straw. Sounds better in theory than it looks. The best sea after sunset.
The Western Interior Seaway
Which no longer exists, but used to stretch from the Rockies east to the Appalachian Mountains. Once warm and tropical, this sea has left fascinating fossils across the Great Plains. This sea was a sea for 34 million years from the late Cretaceous to the early Paleocene, and then it disappeared due to “tectonic uplift,” I do not know much else. I stumbled upon this sea in researching the technical definition of “sea,” itself. Delightful to imagine, sublime in its necessary invocation of the Geological Time Scale (#scary) and all its gorgeous fossils and the monument rocks it made.
eSEAntial viewing o.O
poem i could’ve written but didn’t →
From @SOTCE on Instagram, found after I left Sabaudia, felt like I wrote it in a dream.
i’m in the netherlands thinking about the week that you and i spent at the beach. missing that shore week and wishing i could be your twin again. it had to be love in this life, didn’t it? we weren’t so good at fighting. something about the ocean when the water’s warm, something about the little urchins popping up in our hands, looking up from the depths with adoring google eyes. animals always followed us around. the seaweed, its smoky tendrils. the jellies. your back breathing against mine. the way you never got angry at me, for any of it. you gave me a lot of fish, so carnivorous, the ocean, deep and blue. i’m gonna miss you.
the actual poem is represented on a t-shirt and stock background, and her work is so formally inventive and avante-garde it thrills me. Essential visual poetry, the kinds of esotericism this page is built upon.
Food for thought. Go look at some water.
-LG