Moving Pictures
Interlude - news, films, thoughts and theatre
Rock and rocks
A week has evaporated. The monumental task of sorting a year’s art materials boxes hastily marked ‘to sort’ took two full days but had to be done before I could pack crates of coloured rocks, fine ochres and oak galls destined to become paints and ink, for April’s students. I don’t mind, what a pleasure it was hefting gift-rocks and fragrant bark, topping the rust-plant up with bits and bobs of iron, talismans of my peripatetic1 life during 2024. Alcest, Caspian and Mogwai provided the oomph.2
2025 seems a different bird altogether, non-migratory, at home in the south west. I am glad of it. I will migrate back and forth to York, and sometimes to Scotland, but probably not further afield for the first time in many years. I feel myself breathe out deeply, but it is too soon to completely relax.
This week, I would like to share some recent events, plus things I have been thinking about or mulling over. Perhaps we could share them between all our minds, like a wash of indigo blue for windswept sky. Welcome and thanks for reading.
Refresh rate
I have been consciously working on my long term aversion to video. The irony of it (my partner is a filmmaker) was becoming too much to bear. I began with his insightful film about Em Strang3 (film still above), and took it from there. I followed it with a moving film about Stephen Jenkinson by Matthias Olsson. It is probably over two years since I deliberately sat down to watch any moving images other than Robin of Sherwood with my partner, so the novelty of clicking play makes me feel very old fashioned. I imagine the first members of the public, stepping aboard the passenger trains that followed Stephenson’s Rocket. Fainting, dizziness, headaches - inner tempo inner giving way to a machine’s enforced rhythm. That’s been the relationship between me and video for a decade or so.
But something has changed. I still have no desire to watch anything with any sense of jeopardy or any fast cutting techniques at all. Much as it has been a boon to never feel the pull of the television, in truth, I have missed watching great films with others and the lively discussions that they can provoke. In February, I started gently enough with the second series of Wolf Hall, and although it was magnificent in staging and acting, it was quite enough for the month. A brief visit to the BFI has made me want to dive into great films again, so wish me luck mindfully reacclimatising myself to film and television. Suggestions, suitable for someone returning slowly to enjoying the art forms, are welcome.
Mulling over
Walk away from words for a while, if you one day want to value them again. Turn your back on signs if you want to know the real. Return to words only when you know, wordlessly, what it is you are attending to.
AI as the left hemisphere of digital human culture. Confident despite being demonstrably wrong most of the time.
Insisting liberation is conditional on happenstance is a sickness.
The pledge, the turn and the prestige. The set-up, the story and the punchline. A life well-lived has a shape reminiscent of a successful magic trick or joke. Extra kudos for making the audience gasp and laugh.
We all die on stage, if we are lucky.
Question shards
Adversity is my maiden aunt. She gave me my hearth-riddle.
The question of 'our own question to carry'4 is so important, and not only to ourselves.5 I watched
‘s second in-between video this week, circling this. I feel we each carry a shard of the huge, shattered, question-vessel that is perhaps part of the anima-mundi. All our questions together form the shape of our not-yet-knowing, but I feel they somehow describe the shape of the great potentiality we all carry and express, together.Of course, words fall apart at this point. I mull this over while unpacking lapis lazuli and pestles and mortars with which to make hard-to-extract ultramarine pigment. A better pairing of words and actions I am unlikely to experience this week.
Unhomely
Second homes are like gaping holes in a mouth where teeth should be. Like a mouth, the community of people in a street must work together somehow. Each house that is bought up for Airbnb, mothballed ‘for investment purposes’ or becomes the occasional holiday home of the6rich, is like a tooth knocked out of the face of real, in-place, community. And like a mouth with only a few teeth, these places, devoid of any real street life or neighbourliness, are reduced to subsisting on the simple soft cultural pap of what the machine provides, instead of the chewy, sometimes gristly, real embodied life of the people who live there. We begin to forget how to have conversations in the street. We might look away when the old man across the road says hello. We start to lose the ability to laugh things off, or get impatient at an old-fashioned turn of phrase.
The rich people who hoard the housing7 in my town, county and region make it almost impossible for people like me to rent let alone buy anywhere affordably. But sure, why not buy your third investment apartment? The sea views are delightful.
I look forward to a time when my county of Dorset applies the same up-to-300% surcharge on second homes, as is starting to happen in Wales (where rich English people often have their ‘holiday homes’, yet wouldn’t dream of actually learning a word of Welsh…)
Houses should be homes, not ‘magical money-making machines’.8
This week’s good thing: Oedipus at the Old Vic Theatre, London. I hugely enjoyed this production, but I am certainly biased, as I am a long-time fan of the choreography of Hofesh Shechter. This was the forth of his works I have seen on stage, and the best. Music and dance devised by Shechter take the place of the Classical Greek chorus in this modern English language adaptation, a twist which works tremendously well. I read a review that said the lead actor, Rami Malek, shuffles and drawls, but this was not true, he was the perfect reasonable man to Indira Varma’s rational woman. The drama of their shock at the gods, oracles and curses on the land which could not be bargained with, nor explained away felt apt and rich to me, especially given the civilisational wars of the current times. Interestingly, many years before the action that we see in Sophocles’ play begins, Oedipus’ father Laius gravely broke the sacred rules of hospitality. The curses that rained down on him and his family stemmed from this. Hospitality has been on my mind a great deal this month, especially the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, and
has written a great piece about it all here.
This post was human-made without the use of AI.
Peregrine and peregrinations.
My go-to ‘heavy but uplifting’ choices.
what I am now calling a hearth-riddle
The reason I, and so many of my fellow undergraduates, made so much bad art in the nineties, is because we were told to already know what we wanted to create, in effect, to already have our product ready. This is a ridiculous method of education but is now widespread. Aged 20, one does not yet know oneself or the world. More importantly, we cannot yet know, or have not yet been given, except in very rare cases, the question that is ours to carry.
parasitically
and wealth and opportunities
attributed, I think, to Charlie Brooker.
I just love this. Especially close to mind and heart this morning is the 2nd home and vacation rental surge. I am reading 'Remembering Peasants' by Patrick Joyce. He describes abandoned peasant homes becoming sites of affluent leisure, and the older generation watching the tragedy unfold. Thank you for writing.
Your posts are a rich smorgasbord of ideas. I heartily agree about second homes. Symptom and consequence of the gross inequity of our society and the sickness of ‘every man for himself.’