Digest

February

Play

‘Undetectable’ @ the King’s Head, Islington.

A bizarre array of willies and woefully bad dialogue. All my gay friends slated it. One for the crinkly gays who use Grindr vicariously and say ‘yass’ with a giggle like naughty schoolboys. A bit of a shame because it felt genuinely exciting going to a fringe play with nudity in Islington.

Opera

‘Don Giovanni’ @ the Shelley Theatre, Boscombe.

Some very beautiful voices in amongst the fray, but at times hard to take seriously. Putting a fat man with a pony tail in a venetian mask and asking him to slav squat was a comically brilliant but deeply flawed choice by the director. Massive kudos to the one man orchestra, who played Mozart’s masterpiece in its entirety on a small upright piano.

Night

Cabin Fever presents Anthony Naples, etc. @ Corsica Studios.

An objectively flawless line up in a London clubbing institution…Ben UFO was on the guest list along with other dance floor luminaries…Sets left right and centre were on point…BUT perhaps it was a little oversold and a little too impersonal. The usual crowd was scattered, eccentrics squashed into dark corners by yopros and tourists. I’ll go again but I’ll be in mourning.

Talk

Diseases of Modern Life @ The Lighthouse (Light Up Poole)

A very engaging series of lectures from a happening Oxford research group. The premise being something like: Stressed? Overstimulated? Constipated? Impotent? Think modernity’s fucked you up? You wouldn’t be the first! In all seriousness, we were presented with four interesting research topics on aspects of Victorian life that bear a strikingly similar resemblance to talking points in 21st Britain. The group started with virility, before moving on to telecommunications, gut health and wonder drugs. At times the talks could be a little dry and quote heavy, and predictably the discussion wasn’t super academic, but my god those postdocs gave it a shot.

Meal

Ping Coombes’ Supper Club @ Tonic Social, Bournemouth

Masterchef winner Ping’s first supper club outside of Bath, boasting four Malaysian courses with with wine pairing. Four main points. Food was slightly underwhelming, especially the main course. Wine was big and brash, and definitely not suitable for Malaysian. Setting was firmly hotel-land (soulless), try as they might to create any intimacy. I was definitely unprepared to be thrust in front of someone my own age and locked into a impromptu double date with my parents…But actually found this very entertaining. Especially as my surprise dinner date was taking her ex to court over the dog.

Festival

Short Sounds Film Festival @ Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth

A really excellent little film festival organised by lecturers at Bournemouth University putting sound at the centre of things. Attended by an array of BU/AUB students, other trusties like myself and those chosen ones, film professionals. Tickets were a little on the steep side, but we were rewarded with a well curated selection of shorts, a feature about the history of sound editing in Hollywood and a Q&A with a legit Hollywood insider, Bobette Buster.

Films

Bait, The Lighthouse, Uncut Gems, Joker, 1917, Parasite, Dark Waters, Chungking Express, Unrelated, Archipelago, Midnight Express, Parasite, Love Streams.

The one I want to talk about is Zama, directed by Lucretia Martel. A hugely accomplished piece of visual storytelling. We follow the somewhat stale, pathetic existence of a Spanish colonial magistrate at the edge of the known universe, subtropical Argentina. He tries, time and time again to leave, to be reposted, to move further up the slippery hierarchy, and fails.The colours swirl in this film, some scenes have a dreamlike quality, malarial almost. It cusps on the visual equivalent of a Marquez novel. Trapped in a sweaty purgatory, our anti-hero is eventually enslaved in a last ditch attempt to make his name but returns empty-handed. In an insightful bit of narrative, he alludes to the moral vacuity of his mission, dragging a four poster bed onto the beach for his bastard child and his indigenous mother.

TV/Documentary

David Simon’s ‘The Deuce’ (HBO), Storyville: Fishing for Love: How to Catch a Thai Bride, Storyville: The Queen of Versailles, Storyville: The Gene Revolution, Changing Human Nature, Three Films by Mark Isaacs (Lift, Calais: the Last Border, Travellers), Age of the Image (BBC Four)

Lift was a bit of a revelation. I couldn’t believe how much could be achieved in a lift! Isaacs spends ten hours a day in a lift filming people. The lift plays lots of roles. Principally, it becomes a sort of confessional, where people can speak honestly about their lives. They often want to finish what they have to say, holding the door a little longer to finish their sentences. Perhaps because they’re on the verge of some self-realisation, perhaps because they are too polite to call cut. People chew over his questions, waiting for the next opportunity to speak. They care for Isaacs, bring him food, look concerned, ask after him, sympathise with the difficulty of his task…We look forward to meeting people again, we wonder how they’re getting on, we don’t care what they do, we just like being in a lift with them.

And another…

Dr. James Fox has done us a real solid here. This new series on BBC Four is very necessary. It’s easy to forget that little over a hundred years ago photographic images didn’t exist and the word was deemed the most valuable form of communication. As he reminds us, more images are taken every day than in the rest of human history combined. In a world where images saturate our consciousness, art cannot simply ‘show’, it must excavate, explore, play with images, etc. An entire generation of artists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Futurists knew this. In our own times, Werner Herzog argues that are lives are oversaturated with images. Of course they have been plenty of arguments over the years that TV is the devil, but never one on quite so hard aesthetic ground.

Manchester

Rudy’s, Soup Kitchen, Mackie Mayor, Real Camera, Partisan, Takk, Idle Hands, Pollen Bakery. 

Gosh that was a sublimely well curated weekend. Partisan being/taking the biscuit for newness/its homage to Mancuso’s 70s loft parties. Pollen perhaps a little overrated. Mackie Mayor a little overpriced but architecturally luminous, especially on a bright day. Real Camera a veritable treasure trove of high quality used camera equipment: picked up a F1.4 vintage Nikkor lens for my FM3A. Soup Kitchen always a honeypot for all the trendy worker bees. Takk delivered in spades: ndjua with a delicately poached egg bleeding its gooey yolk all over a rough crusted sourdough, heaven on a slate plate…Surprise, it was bloody ceramic. Fussy for all the right reasons.

What I listened to writing this: