The name Night Toast is in honor of my grandmother, Mimi, who in my mind's eye is perennially in bed reading a book with some sort of late-night snack on her nightstand. Some classic hits include a cluster of green grapes wrapped in a napkin, McVities digestive biscuits, or sliced tomatoes on a piece of wheat toast. I always dreamed of growing up in the kind of house that had various heights marked in a well-worn doorway, and Mimi's apartment was the closest thing I had to that kind of childhood home during a pretty transient upbringing. When we stayed with her in Glasgow each summer, you could always smell the toaster working around bedtime.
The name felt right for a project that, whether I realized it at the time or not, was a bid to restore some sense of belonging during a period of in-betweenness. In the past 12 months, there’s been a mind-bending amount of upheaval: packing up belongings, moving cities, reconfiguring domestic identities, professional identities, social identities — honestly, no identity was left unturned during this…unprecedented year. Night Toast is an ode the power of place — both physical and psychic— and how an orbit of people, objects, and sensations can make you feel right where you should be in the larger order of things. In other words, at home.
During a year where uncertainty became a near universal language, the importance of home has taken on a renewed significance. Our homes, after all, can be vessels of fantasy, or emblems of the self. They are the structures we imbue with our ideas about security, or happiness, or a life well-lived. For a privileged class, the prospect of remote work has opened up new realms of possibility in this sense. It has also scrambled for some the personal calculus of what gives a place purpose. Affordability, access to nature, proximity to loved ones — these factors always mattered, but were sublimated (perhaps for far too long) by a cultural decree that your profession should be the animating force of your life, often at a great cost. The slowness and stakes of this year have invited reassessment of so many facets of modern life: What conditions do I accept as normal? What parts of myself have I neglected? What does a meaningful life look like after the stark realization of this year that nothing is certain?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, a story about a community of roving travelers, resonated so deeply with audiences this year. “Home: is it just a word? Or is it something that you carry within you?” says a friend of Frances McDormand’s character, quoting a Morrissey lyric to describe her commitment to rootlessness. I’ve seen pandemic couples set off to starry new cities together, growing families move to greener pastures where washer-dryers abound, and friends who have embarked on a new chapter alone, indulging in the freedom of simply being able to do that. We are witnessing a mass redefinition of what it means to make somewhere home — and with that comes so much unexplored terrain.
In the spirit of this, I’m delighted to share a photo series shot by my friend, Charlotte Rea, from a temporary home she found this year in Arizona. A few weeks ago, we were sitting in the park together talking about the places we had been since we last saw each other. Her photos always brings a sense of poetry to the foreground of experience — and though I’ve never been to Arizona, the place she captures in her photography I feel like I’ve been to many times before.
In her own words:
“These photos are from in and around Saguaro National Park, taken in the early days of the 2020 pandemic after what was supposed to be a 3-week trip to Arizona snowballed into close to 3 months of hiding away from a crumbling world in a quiet desert.”
“There’s a lot of tension guiding most of these photos. On the one hand, I had free rein to wander around one of the most beautiful places on earth— a dream for pretty much any photographer, and an unspeakable privilege during a dangerous global crisis. On the other, I felt crushed by isolation and its nauseating emptiness, longing for purpose while watching my motivation and sense of self dry up by the hour.”
“I do not feel much connection to these photos— they’re more of a creative dry heave than anything else—but inwardly they do still represent a kind of fumbling cry against circumstance, a weary grasp for belonging in the form of lonely walks, alien hues, and unheard whispers.”
— 🌙 Some Bookmarks
*More of Charlotte’s photography here.
*This tweet that came across my timeline at the very beginning of the pandemic, which, arrives in my mind whenever I feel myself getting too reality-clingy
*The Anxiety of Influencers; Educating the TikTok Generation - Barrett Swanson for Harpers. I immediately ordered the author’s book of essays after reading this because it was so perceptive and devastating and so, so funny.
* The Elemental Strangeness of Foxes - Zito Madu for Plough Quarterly on the fated feeling of seeing late night foxes in London
* Voicenote ~ NYC ILU CU L8R - from Hawa Arsala’s Substack, Reality Streaming, on leaving New York to move back to her hometown on the West Coast