I'm in Kissing Prison
Valentines, Al Pacino, Ethel Cain, Audre Lorde and Abolition.
So i’m in Kissing Prison. A term thrown at me through a voice note with Laura as she responded to my gooey gushing about my new boo. ‘Omg i’m so happy you’re in kissing prison!!!!’. What started off as a joke has now seeped into every part of my being as I prepare for valentines day (as a lingerie maker not a lover) while being in love (and not heartbroken) for the first time in many years.
Lock me up and throw away the key.
My way of life is romantic. Everything is romantic. But not in a Charli XCX holidaying in Sicily with her rich tattooed man kind of way, but in the way I perform my daily rituals. Everything is decanted (you will never spy a lemon still in it’s yellow plastic netted prison atop my kitchen counter). Sheets are embroidered with love notes. Tiny bowls contain tiny snacks that could be mistaken for puddles of beads or other such nick-nacks. Fairy lights, photos and books - a messy girl aesthetic but everything is curated. Classical music plays while I shower. You will NEVER see a main light on unless it’s an emergency (and even still, something pretty awful would have to have happened to condone the ceiling bulbs lighting up the room). Things have to look beautiful to belong in my space. Even if it’s cluttered and dusty. It’s my clutter and my dust - other people’s clutter and dust, no thank you. Flowers and trinkets. A morning winter candle etc etc... So when real life romance comes into my life in the form of a real life human person I try my hardest not to be earnest because the romance is built so deep into my soul.
And so kissing prison….
Potentially the most perfect description of falling in love, for me, when everything has to have an edge of silliness. I don’t want to TMI everyone who ask me how I am - so I just tell them “i’m in kissing prison”. They either get it or they don’t. It’s silly and a bit stupid. What’s kissing prison? You got locked up for too much kissing?
It’s accidentally getting yourself all riled up before bed from too much giggling. It’s the feeling when no kiss is deep enough you want to crawl up inside them and eat up their heart. It’s the feeling when they’re in the room you don’t even need to see them to feel their presence. Strange telepathy and long gazes. Plans being made for hypothetical futures. Hands searching in the duvet cover. Their eyes are your prison. Bed is our prison.
I recently watched Scent of a Woman (1992). Al Pacino’s Oscar winning role about a scholarship private school boy (Chris O’Donnell) who gets a job looking after Frank (Al Pacino), a bitter old blind ex-army colonel, for Thanksgiving weekend.
Frank is the kind of man no one can get along with. He’s lost his love for life, his joie de vivre, and it seems like he was probably a bit of an arsehole even before he lost his sight. He’s fallen out with his entire family and lives in his niece’s glorified shed. She’s taking a weekend off with her husband and kids, probably to get respite from Franks cranks. Enter Charlie. Charlie is sweet but shy and is used to being a bit wide eyed and pushed around as a teenage boy from a lower class background with conflicting family dynamics in a school full of entitled rich boys. When Frank (Pacino) whips the two of them off to New York for the weekend (which was not the original plan) on money he’s saved from his benefit cheques, Charlie follows him knowing he can’t leave a blind man alone in the big city, as well as needing to do the job to buy him a flight home for Christmas.
On the flight to New York Charlie realises he’s going to have to go home alone if this stubborn old man won’t come back with him. Charlie and Frank’s entire relationship throughout the film is one of Charlie growing so tired of this old miserable bastard that he threatens to leave, until Frank shows him an ounce of humanity which makes Charlie unable to abandon him. On the flight they get onto the conversation of things that make Frank feel alive;
‘Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls and wanted to go to sleep forever?… or lips when they first touched yours [that] feel like the first swallow of wine after you’ve just crossed the desert … Tits! Big ones, little ones. Nipples staring out at you like secret searchlights’
‘I guess you really love women’ Charlie says with an embarrassed laughed.
‘Above all things’ says Frank.
Frank is a man who loves women and cars. This didn’t yuck me like it usually does in representations of men of this calibre in fiction or real life. Firstly, I resonated deeply with his sentiments. I listened to this monologue and thought about the smell of my girlfriends shampoo and the kisses we have when we haven’t seen each other for days (inevitable earnestness bare with me).
Secondly, what slowly transpires in the film is that Frank is pulling out the big stops before he plans to kill himself at the end of the weekend. One final weekend of the finest wine and cigars, a posh hotel, and the pursuit of the warmth of a woman for one final time.
Stories about suicide will always get me as my dad also killed himself, 10 years ago in April. Albeit, in a much more chaotic way than Frank was planning. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also in Scent of a Woman, a talented beautiful actor who died in a dark drug fuelled situation. So while being whipped up in a frenzy of love while watching a film about, and starring, sad men - it got me thinking about how interlinked love and grief are. To me they are the same thing. They bring on the same overwhelming feelings that are similarly hard to put to words. I’ve been writing about grief here in this Substack for the past two years so it feels a bit more natural to articulate. The love writing is new. And writing about love can be so awful that I am shy, for now.
So, love and grief are interlinked. It’s the same thing. Grief is just loving someone when they are not there physically to love and then experiencing the pain from the absence of them. I’ve also been thinking about the intersections of love and grief a lot right now as i’m at the stage of introducing my new love to all my friends and my family. Not being able to introduce my boo to my dad is a bittersweet feeling I will have throughout my whole life as someone who lost a parent young. So many firsts. Moments that should be filled with pure joy that have a soreness. I’ll come across these moments my whole life. Houses, children, jobs, haircuts, partners that my dad will never know. He’ll never know me as a queer woman (although I do remember him calling it/ enquiring as a teenager with my gaggle of girlies always emerging out of my room half dress even though I didn’t even know it yet…). He’ll never be a silly billy with my silliest billy boo. I’ll just have to write about it all instead and hope it gets through to him somewhere.
While watching Scent of a Woman I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad - and not just because he killed himself. Frank loves women. More than anything. He’s a flirt. And before he dies he just craves the touch of a woman next to him. My dad loved women. He was a bit of a flirt. A complex man when it came to fidelity but also had a lot of stuff going on in the old brain-box. I love women too. Not just flirting with them and loving them (which I am very much enjoying loving and flirting with one in particular right now), but making their lives beautiful. Maybe it’s why I do what I do. I want women to feel themselves, romance themselves, love themselves, be sensual with themselves. Be their own valentine.
Some things I’ve particularly enjoyed recently:
SCENT OF A WOMAN - The tango Scene
This incredibly romantic song by Ethel Cain from her incredibly creepy but sexy new album. I am very new to Ethel and she has apparently almost become a meme of herself but I think it’s perfect. My 14 year old emo self is dying with adoration. The whole album is a big yes.
Richard Dawson is back. I love him so much. If I could choose a replacement dad to my dead one (which I think about ALL the time) it would be Richard Dawson. PLEASE just tell me stories, Richard, forever.. about life in Newcastle and getting fish and chips.
This essay by Audre Lorde - The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Some highlights, but I suggest you read the whole thing…..
‘The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information’
‘The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.’
‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.’
‘Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.’
ALSO OBVIOUSLY OBSESSED WITH EVERYTHING DOECHII . THE MUSIC. THE FITS. THE CONCEPT. THE GAY. SHE IS PERFECTION.
And finally this chapter in Deborah Levy’s new book, The Position of Spoons, about lemons:
I fear I may have been speaking about prisons so much in my kissing prison valentines dialogue so I must put out my thoughts on the prison system as it stands in the world we live in today - I don’t believe in them.
So here is some reading i’ve been diving into the past couple days…. I found this substack that expands on Angela Davis’ abolitionist book about care centred rehabilitation. It’s all under the same trauma research umbrella which I feel like we all need to delve into.
ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE - Angela Davis, 2003
Ok I did a beautiful shoot for valentines day which I won’t be releasing on time for actual valentines day because I’ve been too busy sewing and kissing and sleeping after my KISSING PRISON POP UP SHOP last weekend but my heart is full from the trust people have of me ( ie: coming to my house for a filmed snog).
<3 Jody & Katie <3
SENDING LOVE & KISSES TO EVERYONE BUT ESPECIALLY TO POPS
XXXXXXXXX
Have a look at my new El Bras Valentines drop too if you fancy a new carabiner or a pair of knick-knocks MWAH <3
