touching the cloud
2024 resolutions
Welcome pals & dear readers~
My 2024 Substack new year resolution is to go to more NYC parks, share my 35mm film archive, and fun cocktail recipes. Making more art should be on the list… but that’s a daily, agonizing wish as a creative/artist, let’s be real.
Okay, anyways… That’s all. Parks, Photos, Cocktails. These were the themes the first week of January 2024 screamed at me. Manageable work. There’s no time like the present to just make things you actually love to the best of your ability. To step into and become closer to living the life you groan about wanting to be.
What I seek to do in this entry of my Substack is:
to explain the writing format for these entries
why i chose the subject matter for this year
what i seek to accomplish with these entries + explorations of the subject matters
ON FORM:
Every entry of the year will be as follows: a recounted experience of a NYC park, an image or more from my film photography archive which ranges from around 2018 to 2022, and here and there, a cocktail recipe.
And if the mood strikes me, some music recommendations, restaurant reviews, and author notes.
Isn’t that nice? Something to tickle your mind and senses at every turn, a plethora of cultural connections. Imagination, visuals, taste, and sound. How Taurus moon of me, to nurture that collective aesthetic creature comfort.
ON CONTENT:
WHAT’S THE DEAL ABOUT THE PARKS? IT SHAKES MY HEART!
On the first Saturday of 2024 I went to Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx with my boyfriend, Alejandro, and walked, and talked for hours in the wooded silence till the first snow of the year arrived. All day my eyes would trace the lines, the contrasted silhouettes of branch structures from the barren winter trees.
Marching through the large field across from Manhattan College with flocks of geese and the back of my knees freezing dry in that overcast Saturday, as it usually is: adventuring with Alejandro in an expanse of nature was heart-shaking.
A feeling like I was touching a crucial, rare, raw point of the soul in Van Cortlandt Park. I found this feeling within the 19,000 steps I did that Saturday and it became apparent to me that there is nothing else I would love to do more than to be surrounded by nature.
I concluded: The thing to do in 2024, to jumpstart my dream life, (the year I turn 25,) is to see and explore the top 10 biggest parks in NYC. If you google a list of “best parks in nyc” you’ll get Washington Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, Battery Park, Bryant Park… Fuck that! Seriously. I want the real deal. The acres of land a train rides away, to walk the day away, exploring a natural New York.
And you ought to know about these beautiful parks because parks are for the people. Parks should be funded and enjoyed. City parks especially, serve as unique enclaves of history, architecture, urban planning, and solace in incessant concrete and scattered go-getter energies. Parks act as city life pause.
There’s much to say. Please expect a write-up of my Van Cortlandt Park experience in the upcoming entry.
#FILMISNOTDEAD #35MM
I had gone around the world, at least 3-4 times, collecting light exposed on chemical cell photographs (aka: photographic film) in major cities to be left to collect digi-dust on my hard drive. Untouched and unearthed, I had felt bad for my rolls of film shot and ignored for years. “I have so much unedited film. Plus, it is just too expensive to shoot film. Too expensive to be repairing my Canon AE-1.” Just shit Tiff Tong says. Sitting in shame and guilt about my broken AE-1 viewfinder collecting real-dust on the top of my shelf, sad to say that film photography just too expensive of a hobby to invest in its repair.
I’ve known for a long time that the images are a treasure trove of memory and image making specific to my life.
However, if I spent time with my body of photographic work, archived, breathed life into my snapshot memories, and fully realize the vision of the images I spent years capturing, I could ease this guilt.
I’m not expecting it to jumpstart my lust for shooting on film again but it probably will.
TL;DR: Guilty artist re-visits and does callbacks to her old work to find new work.
MANIFESTING 2024 TT POP-UP COCKTAIL EVENT
My brilliant friend, Mimi believes in me in a way that purely connects to me sometimes. She’d say things casually, matter-of-factly, like: “I just know, not if, but when, you run your own bar, we’re going to look back on this moment and think about this moment” “When is your pop-up going to happen?”
I like cocktails, I like the experience of drinking one, especially at a bar. This year I hope to share my practice of casual cocktail recipe making in hopes of developing my skills. Googling “cocktail shaker sets” for purchase as we squeak in preparation.
Tasty and strong cocktails ensured in this Substack.
ON “touching the cloud”:
This time last year I tried to write on this newsletter but repeatedly typed away thousands of words and deleting them. There is a section recounting a sound bath meditation hosted by my friend Ka Yan for her birthday (here is her Substack if you’re interested) which led me to have a vision of my large-scale painting (a painting I am slowly inching towards completing…)
I had always known instinctually I wanted a painting of a cloud or cloudscape. In that meditative state it blossomed into a metaphor for a resilient, flowing soul.
In my infamous unpublished Substack entry, I had written this:
“In this “light” state, I had imagined my pains and burden as a dark storm cloud. What is left in its place is a scene of a white fluffy cloud in the backdrop of the perfect blueness of an afternoon sky. All the good sits in that white cloud: fond feelings, merry memories, life lessons, the hopes of the many sweet dreams to be realised which are so vividly imagined, teetering on reality. Isn’t that such a nice thought? Metaphorically, I became that lovely cloud, having released all that tumultuous strife in my tears, rain pouring out of me.”
“Like an affirmation from the universe or just my deep subconscious tied to the trajectory of my painting. Brain snaps back. What we’re the chances that my newfound meditative symbol of “what I seek to let go or to let in”, the dark cloud and the fluffy white, had already existed in my mind’s eye?
So that is what a psychic download is. Truly. I only wanted to paint clouds because I found the subject matter pretty. It is like my preliminary vision of my painting existed as a visual premonition of the symbols of my life. Funny, how life sends signs to you.”
To touch the cloud then, shapes the objective of this year’s Substack entries. To focus and balance time to what matters (my creative source, my solace). I’d be reaching the cloud, after it had shed the burden of its greyness, releasing it in tears. Into a state where I can practice the pursuit of my goals wrapped in love and lightness so that I am left floating fluffy, OK, unlimited to my fears and shame to be the person I am.
And the person I am is first and foremost, a creative one.
Yeah this is my “Tiffany Tong as an artist” Platonic form ascension era.
I write to practice finding my art and for the love of sharing worlds in internet communities. To repay my debts of creativity to my own depths by the concentrated channeling of my mental energy. This is my healing, to move towards what my soul asks for.
This project is about the development of the power of my mental frequency. This is all in hopes that in the investment of time it takes to explore the biggest parks in NYC, editing film, and making cocktails, that I position myself with a mindset, a drive, to commit to spending time, money, and energy into the things I love.
This is how I re-wire my brain, to touch the cloud.
This is my part in the void.
See you in the next entry. Thank you for reading or listening. Comments are much appreciated. This is my first rodeo into formal personal writing/ publication so any thoughts that resonated or questions, never hesitate to ask and i’m happy to have a conversation here on Substack <3