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Month: November 2023

Categories
Reviews

Walkabout Productions’ Antony and Cleopatra: Review

By Cosmo Adair and Emma Large

For a more thorough explanation of Immersive Theatre, please refer to Max Shanagher’s article “Teasing  the fourth wall”: A short Immersive Theatre manifesto,” pub. 6 November 2023.

Alexandria

Cosmo Adair

“Well, Fuck,” I thought to myself as the bouncer — the Roman one — confiscated my notebook and said, “That’s contraband.” This being immersive theatre, and me being supinely hungover, I didn’t want to interrupt his flow. I tried to discern whether this was a part of the play: in my head, I cursed the name of Max Shanagher (the co-director alongside Harry Threapleton) and pondered why he should invite us to review the play, only to pull off some cocky stunt and have one of his actors mug me and thus stymie my pen. 

By the time I’d reached the bar (their very own bar, with Rome/Alexandria-themed cocktails: Red Roman, Nile Iced Tea, and Death by Passion), I started to think, “You know what, I really need that notebook. In fact, there’s no way I could possibly write a review without that notebook.” And so, I ordered myself one “Death by Passion”, drank it quite quickly, and then returned to the bouncer and spoke with the proud authority of a tipsy critic: 

“Excuse me. I really hate to trouble you. But, you see, that notebook, I kind of need it actually. Of course, if — um —- only if that’s alright with you. But yes, I’m supposed to be reviewing this play.”

“What play?”

“Oh yes, sorry. Aha — I see now. It’s a Roman play, I believe.”

“Well, I’ll trust you this time.” Throughout our interaction, his face of cold, Roman hardness had not wavered. Lips sealed assertively, black moustache and dark sunglasses: he was Rome, or, rather, Rome-meets-humourless-celebrity-bodyguard. He was not  going  to break character. Generously, he handed over my notebook. And I immediately wrote this down: I thought it quite emblematic of the uniqueness of the experience offered by immersive theatre, and the challenges it poses both to its actors and to rather shy, awkward audience members such as myself. 

Antony and Cleopatra is the second piece of immersive theatre which Tully Hyams and Shanagher’s Walkabout Productions have put on, following the success of last year’s A Wilde Night. On entry, each theatre-goer is presented with a choice: Rome or Alexandria. In effect, this is a choice between politics and romance. I chose romance: I got love and Cleopatra, whilst Emma had to suffer the steely machiavels of Rome. Only four others chose Alexandria, whilst about fifty travelled to Rome: either, they are more serious, or else they haven’t read the play, I thought. Given that most of the last two acts happen in Alexandria, I assumed those in Rome wouldn’t catch the play’s ending. But they did: at the Battle of Actium, the divider between the rooms opened and I caught a glimpse of Rome through the red mist of Actium. 

Not only does the audience have to choose between Rome and Alexandria, but so too does Antony. That, to me, is the most successful element of the play’s staging: Ed Clark’s Antony flits between the rooms, endlessly, until he opts for a drunken Epicure Alexandria. But the characterisation of Antony, here, allowed for no doubt over his eventual choice: he was soft and effete, with a pony-tail, jewellery, and Doc Martens. He was always going to opt for Alexandria. This was effective when he was in Alexandria, but it did mean the central conflict of the play was slightly lost. Then again, I wasn’t in Rome; perhaps there, he was different. 

Cleopatras have always infuriated me. Shakespeare’s characterisation of her temperamental nature lends itself to shrill, shallow, and over-acted performances. But not here. Alexa Thanni was excellent: the swift mood-changes were carried off with a subtlety I doubted was possible — not least in a student  production. In Act 2, Scene 5, where Cleopatra beats the messenger, I usually switch off out of sheer irritation. Here though, Thanni  delivered a scene which was not only comic but possessed a psychological realism. Another such moment to note was just after the interval when Antony and Cleopatra kissed. It was so genuine as to make the viewer speculate as to whether Clark and Thanni might be following the lead of their forebears Burton and Taylor. 

Cleopatra was complemented by her supporting cast. Charmian, played  by  Clara Dammann, was especially good. The Alexandrian court is difficult to pull off – especially  given how most of the talking is done by Cleopatra, and so the courtiers have to show their presence and attention without much chance to speak. Dammann’s raised eyebrows, rolled eyes, and covered smiles all accompanied well the depictions of Cleopatra’s whims and hysterics. 

It was an interesting, thoroughly thought-out production, which made me consider these familiar characters and themes in a different light. I suspect it might be the first ever production of the play to take such an approach. The very feat of making the play work in an immersive fashion was impressive enough, but to do so with a student-sized budget and a student cast is yet more impressive. So, congratulations to all involved: not least to Shanagher, Threapleton and Hyams. And now, as Caesar says, “to Rome…” 

Rome 

Emma Large

​​The consequences of consuming several Death by Passions at 3:00pm on a Sunday afternoon hit me, rather unfortunately, during the launch of the Battle of Actium.

“Get away from the wall!” Caesar turned to us with a startling passion. “Get away from the wall!”

I, like the rest of the bumbling, bemused (potentially drunken?) audience, blundered uselessly to the left and stopped to await some further instruction from our ruler, as if the first hadn’t been clear enough. None of us had moved even remotely away from the wall.

“GET AWAY FROM THE WALL!” he roared.

Christ, I thought, we need to move. We scattered to the other side of the room to watch the partition, once deceptively solid, be rapidly drawn back, marking the dissolution of the geographical boundary between Egypt and Rome. The fourth wall and its tangible counterpart broke alike with dazzling intensity: the golden lights and secrets of Alexandria were revealed at last, like the glittering opening of a treasure chest. Those of us who had been cloistered in the purpled privacy of the Roman council room, envisioning Cleopatra from across the continents (summoned by Enobarbus’ famous lines, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne…”, still resonant in our ears), scanned the room for the Egyptians that we had heard rowing mutedly, from the other side of the wall. The play was not even at its interval, nor its dramatic climax; I had another Death by Passion yet to consume, but it was at this moment, the stage membrane shifting and permeable, that I understood the absorptive power of an immersive performance.

The stagnancy of the audience is fairly absolute in traditional theatre; we know our role is to sit quietly and to observe, to laugh and cry accordingly. In immersive theatre, I realised while stumbling to the other side of the stage during Max Shanagher and Harry Threapleton’s Antony and Cleopatra, the audience has no clue what their role is and what part they will be expected to play – and this is precisely its thrill.

In Rome, we were drawn from the margins to eavesdrop on the political quarrels of a fraught Roman council – until formally welcomed, by handshake, to the ‘Roman side’ – becoming equally complicit in their plot to win Antony back from Egypt’s seductions. Caesar (Olivia Clouting) simmered palpably with cool pride, his sudden flashes of fury both startling and exhilarating the audience, who were drawn into unnervingly close quarters in the small assembly room. The sultry, brooding movements of Octavia (Daisy Summerfield) provided relieving feminine contrast on a stage clustered with hearty Roman generals – to the credit of the all-female Roman cast (Antony omitted.)

Watching the performers flit around the central meeting table while they gesticulated and debated, I recognised that adapting Antony and Cleopatra into an immersive production had perhaps rendered it more open to interpretation than a traditional, more static performance. Each audience member, dispersed around the room’s edge, beheld every scene uniquely. As the actors circulated like the hands of a clock around a vital heart, the ever-darkening face of Caesar shifted in and out of view. The easing countenance of friendly Enobarbus (Francesca Singh) moved into my eyeline, before his back was then turned; I watched the left side of Mark Antony’s face (Ed Clark) as he protested indignantly to Caesar’s accusations, then tracked his right-hand side as he fled across the room. The dynamism afforded by immersive theatre electrified both the performance unfolding in front of us, but also our collective imagination. We wondered about the faces of the characters flashing out of our sight lines; about the events occurring in the neighbouring Alexandria; until the wall broke and all sprawled out before us as a figurative battleground between two nations, the room now bearing the strangely unifying quality of a no-man’s-land.

The play culminated in a thrilling final few scenes – the suicide of Cleopatra and her courtiers, I thought particularly moving. But as I left, I felt oddly guilty. Why? In his dying breath, Antony had reached out to me with his hand, a desperate supplication for help. I had stared back at him rather stupidly and recrossed my legs. You bitch, I thought to myself. Such a hopeless sentiment, I suppose, implies both the emotive power and incapacitating effect of immersive theatre – if I could have, I would have, Antony.

Categories
Perspective

Carnivore Diets and Catholicism: Reactionary Chic in the Digital Age

Credit: Getty Images

By Maisie Jennings

First, a confession: I’m probably chronically online. I’d like to think that this is a result of some novice cultural observation instead of a routine frying of my dopamine receptors, but I also believe I can extract something discursively valuable from my endless scrolling. The internet, particularly social media, has become the largest bureau for cultural exchange and political discourse. For third-wave feminism, it is its digital beating heart – providing the framework for social movements of global magnitude and significance. In 2017, MeToo, spearheading the largest campaign against sexual violence and harassment, propelled awareness of rape culture into collective consciousness – on and offline. It seemed to solidify  – despite its many hazards – that the mainstream internet is largely progressive, and can function as an empowering and expressive space for women and girls. 

There are, however, several new trends that resist the forward-thinking, liberal ideology of contemporary internet culture. A few weeks ago, I liked a video about historical fashion – it appeared, to me, totally benign. Moments later, my feed became a tirade of videos about using beef tallow as sunscreen, the dangers of seed oils, the benefits of unpasteurised milk, and the overarching importance of submitting to one’s husband. What I’d stumbled across was the content created by members of the ‘tradwife’ online subculture – a large, and growing, community of women who believe in traditional conceptions of femininity and gender roles within marriage. Of course, this may sound like a bizarre fringe movement – situated at the internet’s peripheries – but videos under #tradwife have amassed 266.3 million views on TikTok. At its most sinister, traditional homesteading and lifestyle content quite clearly advocates for the political alt-right. However, it is the more ostensibly innocuous aesthetics surrounding the movement that disperse broader ideological implications regarding feminism online. I’m not suggesting that every video of a woman endorsing the benefits of raw liver is some sort of insidious far right dog whistle, but the recent surge in women adopting ‘carnivore diets’ is part of a growing scepticism towards the nature of modern life – manifesting in new age dietary fads and holistic lifestyle changes.

The shift to an idealised hearkening back to an earlier time is, surprisingly, not inherently right wing, but is also a viewpoint shared by some of those associated with the political left. Vegan wellness influencers are eschewing chickpeas for chicken – attempting to seek a lifestyle uncorrupted by the inorganic mechanisms of modern day capitalism. We might see this represented on social media as ‘cottagecore’ – a kitschy imagining of rural life through photos of women in floaty dresses wandering through fields and dappled sunlight. A digitised nostalgia for pre-industrial society is one that appeals to women regardless of their individual political stances, rather, it suggests a broader disenchantment with conspicuously modern ways of life. For third-wave feminism, it reveals a dissonance between corporate ‘girlboss’ culture and its potentially unsustainable, dissatisfying reality. This is due, in part, to a reevaluation of how we should live and work after the pandemic. COVID-19 ignited a reactionary desire for escapism; a pastoral fantasy of slow-paced, bucolic simplicity. In the fragile post-pandemic landscape we currently inhabit, locating ‘alternative’ wellness and dietary practices in the mainstream media is, perhaps, an exacerbation of the anti-vaxx movement that garnered support across the political spectrum. Connecting tradwives, carnivore influencers, and cottagecore enthusiasts is an aesthetic objection to modern life; it’s this aesthetic quality, overriding any background ideology, that makes reactionary womanhood so pervasive on social media. 

There is also a significant religious element to a lot of the content that advocates for a return to ‘natural’ or ‘ancestral’ rhythms of life through heavily aestheticised, mock subsistence farming – most videos are overwrought with Christian hashtags and captions that vehemently promote Evangelical purity culture. Female Christian influencers are certainly popular, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers, but they surely aren’t at the cutting edge of whatever’s trending online. However, Catholicism has become an unlikely, transgressively chic fashion statement. In Instagram bios, where there once was an astrological symbol, the internet’s cool girls are now adorning their profiles with crucifixes. Brandy Melville, the controversial ‘size zero’ clothing brand, has released a series of t-shirts depicting Jesus Christ, and Praying, a smaller label that cultivates grungy pop culture references, sells ecclesiastical motifs on bikinis and crop tops. Fashion, particularly fashion on the internet, has always been subversive – perhaps the edgy photos of scapulars and rosary beads are merely pastiching the cheekily iconoclastic Catholic schoolgirl aesthetics seen in the 1990s. I think this is largely the case; Catholicism is a natural counter-cultural symbol, it has been since the emergence of goth subcultures in the ‘80s. 

Arguably, there is somewhat of an ideological background to the rise of this subversive aesthetic. Dasha Nekrasova, a co-host of the Red Scare podcast, is a Catholic revert and a dryly critical voice against liberal feminism and ‘woke’ political culture. She is credited with leading a coolly cynical, post-ironic discursive vanguard – flirting between shrewd criticism of neoliberalism, arch academic discussion of Camille Paglia, and a close proximity to the new right. Nekrasova’s world-weary vocal fry attracted significant criticism and admiration after she denounced MeToo as a superficial liberal performance; ‘this seems’, she said, ‘like bullshit’. Since then, her personal coquettish style of babydoll dresses and obliquely ironic American flags (reminiscent of the hyper-feminine tradwife uniform) have made her a Pinterest board staple for the vaguely alternative. It’s easy to dismiss this kind of frisky, reactionary rhetoric as simple provocation, but Red Scare’s popularity and online cultural impact do reflect the new perspectives towards feminism in the digital age. There are debates, on the left and right, about hookup culture, the empowerment and objectification in online sex work, and the effectiveness of social media based feminist activism.

I don’t think the rise of reactionary behaviours on the internet signify some kind of cataclysmic tectonic shift, across an online political landscape, towards an anti-feminist new right. Women on social media aren’t slowly rejecting feminism. Rather, the increase of tradwife content, the popularity of carnivore diets, and the aesthetic appropriation of an ancient religion reflect natural, anxious responses to the confusion of 21st century life. The trends themselves, like most things on the internet, may have a fleetingly short lifespan – however, the interrogation of modern cultural and political conditions will surely remain. 

Categories
Reviews

Scorsese at 80: Blood and the Sacrament in Martin Scorsese’s Filmography

Credit : Mario Tursi, Universal Pictures

By Ed Bayliss

“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.” 

(Martin Scorsese)

There exist three films in Scorsese’s portfolio that are explicitly tilted towards the lives of religious figures. This unusual trinity of films consists of The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence, and Kundun. The latter drifts from the bloody trials of Christianity into the meditative stillness of 20th C. Buddhist Tibet, perhaps providing a refuge for the three times divorced Scorsese and the guilt of his lapsed Catholicism.   

In The Last Temptation of Christ, the titular Christ shockingly states: “I’m a liar. A hypocrite. I’m afraid of everything. I don’t ever tell the truth. I don’t have the courage. When I see a woman, I blush and look away. I want her…” While screening this film in 1988, the Saint Michel cinema in Paris was bombed and set alight. Scorsese’s rendering of Christ as a man wrestling with his own capricious animalism and a life scripted by a distant and unknowable God became indigestible for many. 

The filmmaker’s most recent ‘religious’ film, Silence, took us on a heavily theological journey through Christian persecution in Japan. The central question asked is one of the literal ‘silence’ of God and its relation to theodicy. Slow and brooding, but ultimately rewarding, this contemplative film, I think, mirrors a director who has recovered some sense of religious direction. 

What interests me most, however, is the veil of Catholic doctrine that falls lightly but definitely over Scorsese’s remaining films. I would like to expand upon what critic Roger Ebert has spoken of as “Redemption by Blood” and the centrality of blood itself to transformation – a fundamental tenet of Roman Catholicism. Scorsese lifts this Catholic mass inspired image, mangles it, and drops it into the avenues of the Bronx as he remarks in Mean Streets, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home.” For directors like Tarantino, violence is style, but for Scorsese, it’s sacramental.

Critic Barbara Mortimer has identified a specific character type in the Scorsese oeuvre, the “postmodern person”; someone whose identity becomes a “matter of impersonation”. Such characteristics can be seen in Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Jake La Motta (Raging Bull), and Charlie Cappa (Mean Streets); all of whom attempt cleansing and redemption through the spilling of blood.  

For La Motta, a man who sees himself in the mirror but doesn’t know himself, the altar rails of the Catholic mass become the ropes of the boxing ring. The camera pans to blood dripping from the ring rope in an extreme close-up. Jake, having abandoned his wife and his brother, takes to bloodshed and endures physical punishment, a symbol of the sacrament, in a bid to effect a spiritual awakening of sorts. A passage from John’s Gospel closes the film resulting in images conjured which are very much in line with the act of redemption by blood. 

Alternatively, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, self-described as “God’s lonely man”, attempts to map himself as the hero of the narrative. At the climax of the film, we see Bickle stalk through a brothel wielding his Smith & Wesson handgun whose bullets rip through every man he comes across. We follow behind him as he is shot several times while blood, sacrificial blood, issues from all over his body. The words “Jesus loves you” are graffitied on the staircase wall as he ascends. Bickle sees himself as the postmodern-martyr; a title that necessitates death, so he attempts suicide, but his revolver is out of ammo. The ‘hero’ sits on a sofa, blood-soaked, with his head tilted upwards while closing his eyes acceptingly. Jodie Foster’s character collapses to her knees, weeping before Bickle, much like Mary Magdalene at the scene of Christ’s crucifixion.

Harvey Keitel’s character in Mean Streets seeks his redemption not in church but through sacrificing himself for his friend Johnny who is in debt to loan sharks. He admits: “Ten Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, ten whatever … Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words …” One can’t help but hear the pained voice of Scorsese through Charlie Cappa’s (nicknamed St. Charles) moral musings. At the concluding stages of the film, we watch Charlie’s efforts to drive Johnny and his cousin Teresa out of town as they are pursued by hostile ‘debt collectors’. Charlie crashes the car as he is shot in the arm and bleeds while kneeling beside the cleansing spray of a fire hydrant. This is, as critic Joel Mayward recognises, “religious cinema for non-believers.”  

Scorsese has said that he “wouldn’t presume to be God’s point of view.” And so, ultimately, he accounts for the loftiness of Christ’s trial by bloodshed in terms of the hardships of the everyman in search of redemption.         

Categories
Poetry

Absynth’s Flaw

By Celia Bate.

 

Prologue

 

On the thousandth Red Moon the world had seen,

Three Witches bore Satan’s baby from a tiny bean.

Marinated in a big black pot of evil water,

The bean grew into a little girl, the Devil’s Daughter.

A bellowing voice poured from the sky, jacinth,

“The girl’s name shall be Absynth!”

 

From birth, Absynth grew up in Hellfire Marsh,

An upbringing you might think rather quite harsh.

But Absynth liked the melancholy of the place,

Swaddling between reeds, shoving mud down her face

By day she’d dance amongst the fog,

By night she’d lay under a blanket of bog.

 

She lived like this for a very long while

The watery flats did her beguile.

Until the day she turned eighteen,

Where she found herself, lusting, intellectually keen.

With the brains of the Devil (kin of divinity?),

She managed to make it to the Great College of Trinity.

 

******

 

Abby wanders along the Liffey

She, like the river, meandering free.

Her careless steps taking her crest and trough

In her trainers, with their straps broken off.

Laddered tights, black eyes, short bleached-blonde hair:

A tough girl with a kill-a-man kind of stare.

 

As she walks, she sees a boy,

All tall, slim, gaunt, goofy and coy,

Spiky hair, too-small clothes.

The kind of style Abby’s Father loathes.

As he approaches, his pace slows,

Will he trespass within her throws?

 

He strides three steps forward and one to the side,

Aligns himself with Abby, his smile smiling wide.

“Shall I throw you over into the river?”

The sound of his words made Abby shiver.

She shot him a cutting black-pupilled glance

But she saw no falter in his prominent stance.

 

A flash from the future blinds Abby’s sight.

She sees forming between them a bond of great might.

Together, in bed, entangling limbs,

The platonic love, up to the bedside table, brims.

Secrets shared, affectations bestowed

Though in these actions, no love there was sowed.

 

His name was Lemon and from that day forth,

They became best friends, always headed north.

Until one day, with a change of the wind, 

Things went south, the sunlight dimmed.

O’ to return to that perfect friendship, all-consumed,

But alas, no! Predetermination always had it doomed:

 

Abby marched from her lecture to the benches outside,

And lit a cigarette, “ah, carbon monoxide!”.

She looked around campus, “what a beautiful day”,

Then she saw her best friend, Lemon, and it started to rain:

He was sat down laughing, doing some silly gestures, a dance,

Then she spied Fair Sally, on his lap, with a second, indifferent glance.

 

“Oh how nice, one more friend!

Another person with whom time, Lemon can spend”.

Abby smiles, and then suddenly stops breathing,

She falls to the floor, violently shaking and teething.

With something new in her body annealing,

She realised what it was: it was a feeling.

 

On coming to, Abby opens her eyes

To lots of people gazing over her like flies

A dead carcass. “I’m dead to the Devil

I had an emotion. Hey Dad! I’m a rebel”.

“Absynth, are you okay? What happened?”

She gets up, brushes the dust off her lap and

 

Is taken up in a warm hug by her sweet, blond Lemon.

“I’m fine thanks Lemon, who is your new friend?”

Fair Sally was stood behind him, the little earwig,

Absynth imagining stabbing the little lamb with a twig

That lay by her foot on the ground.

“This is Sally, you’ll love her. She’s sound”.

 

Abby had felt a feeling like a human,

It was now high time she acted like one.

As Lemon hung out with Fair Sal more and more,

Absynth was convinced his “pure angel”, a whore.

And so she started a most vile, retalliant rumour,

That Sal was a prostitute.

 

******

 

Epilogue

 

Absynth is a good girl, though perhaps a bit scary.

Her beautiful complexion, devilishly lairy.

As a specimen looked carefully upon with a lamp

There’s nothing could be said she ought to revamp.

Though au contraire, from the preceding tale’s vault,

Exposéd, you’re introduced to her sole one and only fault.

 

Unlike her Father, Absynth could feel –

Arguably a trait with more sex appeal –

Though Poppa Devil sees only an Achilles’ heel.

Throughout her life, she worked hard to conceal

These foreign emotions. But when greatly suppressed,

She found herself anxious and stressed!

 

Passions ‘come problems when what’s wanting is took away:

Bob, Roger, Dean, Lemon, Jerry and Clay,

Bachelors listed in what order they may.

Like a baby; her boy-toys confiscated from play.

Her quick quips, jests and wit

Fall down to darkness, a junk pit,

 

Where they lie redundant and eventually decay.

Her once steadfast rationality wains away.

 

The sensible, calm, charismatic, young girl

Becomes an aggressively provocative churl.

 

 

By Celia Bate

 
 
 
Categories
Perspective

An Interview with ‘You Look Hot’ Founder, Sophia Ponsonby

By Emelie Robinson.

As we approach the colder months, you’ll be hard pushed not to spot somebody wrapped up in a classic You Look Hot scarf as you pass through market square. I sat down with the brand’s founder, Sophia Ponsonby, to discuss her experience and what it takes to balance being a small business owner, employer and Durham University student.

  1. Tell me about yourself and what motivated you to start your business?

I am a third year studying Spanish and Italian at Durham, currently doing my year abroad in Siena. I’ve always loved fashion and making clothes and took the leap to launch my knitwear brand, You Look Hot, in December 2022. I thought university would be a good time to start as there was less pressure for it to work out and would allow me to get stuck into lots of different things like marketing, social media and product development because I had no idea what I wanted to do for work!

  1. What does the concept of ‘looking hot’ mean to you?

I knew I wanted to create something that people would like wearing and feel good in, so the idea of ‘looking hot’ for me means clothing that makes people feel confident. Like they say – when you feel your best, you look your best! I also like the play on words as knitwear is so  warm. Especially as Durham gets so cold, I found it difficult to find clothes that were both warm and looked good!

  1. What are the core values of your brand?

One of my biggest aims is sustainability. As I started off with all the pieces being made-to-order, I’ve always avoided any mass production. However, since moving to Siena, I have taken on a team of knitters based in the UK that hand make everything in small batches for our drops. It’s also important to me that our clothes are for everyone rather than a small demographic, unlike some brands which only have a one-size fits all approach that just doesn’t work. My new team of knitters are more skilled than I am to make a range of sizes, so there’s lots more scope for the future to stay inclusive and keep creating pieces that look flattering on every body type.

  1. How important do you think it is to have experience in the industry you want to get into and did you have any yourself?

Experience is never a bad thing and can definitely help you figure out what you like, but not always necessary. I had no experience of owning a brand myself – there was a lot of trial and error. I had made clothes before doing textiles at school, but hadn’t actually done much knitting so that was a spur of the moment decision! I’m really lucky to have watched my mum start her own clothing brand six years ago, so she has been a fountain of knowledge to answer all my questions.

  1. What is the hardest part about owning a small business?

I think my biggest challenge has been staying motivated when I wasn’t selling as much as I’d like. Particularly doing something as seasonal as knitwear, it can get frustrating. I definitely worked harder than ever during the summer to keep the momentum going. It was also difficult when I was making all the products myself since I’m a pretty amateur knitter, so there were times when I would mess up a scarf right at the end and have to start again. The exam period last year made it difficult to balance everything, but since I enjoy working on YLH so much, I usually find it’s nice to have something to break up my day.

  1. What would be your biggest piece of advice to anyone thinking about starting their own business?

Just go for it! I spent so much time thinking about it instead of actually doing it. I would also suggest setting up a website early. Initially, all my sales were done through Instagram, which was great to build a following but wasn’t the most efficient for selling. Since launching my website in September, it’s much easier for people to follow a link on adverts or social media directly to the product. I created mine using Shopify which specialises in e-commerce and although it did take some learning, it wasn’t too difficult. Another thing I’ve learnt is how valuable it can be to reach out for advice from other brand owners, it is something I wish I had done sooner. Also be prepared to make lots of embarrassing TikToks!

  1. How do you think being a student with direct access to your target audience has impacted your brand?

It has been super helpful, especially in a small city like Durham where it’s easy to spread the message. It also means I can easily send my products to friends at other universities for them to wear and help spread the brand elsewhere. Although, I do think Durham in particular has an advantage because of all the events going on. With all the societies, fashion shows, charity fairs, I’ve been lucky to get involved in a lot. The DUCFS market takeover was one of my favourite memories of YLH and was our biggest day in sales so far. Cat and Eliza did such a great job running it!

  1. What is your vision for YLH?

Just keeping it growing – I have a whole Pinterest board of ideas! I’ve recently taken on some amazing brand ambassadors and have lots of Christmas fairs coming up, so the last few months have been really exciting. Ideally, I would love to do this as my job and keep bringing out new products – maybe one day something that isn’t even knitwear!

Categories
Creative Writing

Cassis

By Tom Edgar

There is a restaurant in Montmartre, a few hundred metres away from the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, down a backstreet where the narrow concrete road is flanked by two raised pavements, and the low shopfronts open to the Parisian sky. The restaurant is a weathered crimson, with intermittent patches of flaked and ochreous wood — and, above the fusty windows, in a gilded, antique font: MAISON PIERRE. 

Every year, in the first week of August, when the city is hot and the bin-bags fester on the street corners, and the tourists swarm the haunts where Hemingway drank and Camus questioned suicide, Pierre, the Maitre d’, leaves the now unfamiliar city and travels to his farm in Burgundy where he harvests blackcurrants. 

It is always the same. He arrives at the farm, nestled in a shallow vale between two low hills, and sees the overworked sun spreading its tired white fingers over the clusters of deep purple blackcurrants, hanging on the etiolated bushes. He sets about his task; the rusted blades of his scissors osculate on each strig of currants, which Pierre tosses into the old feed buckets, where a few docile bugs attempt one last, decadent feast. Once clean, the currants are crushed: their bruised skin torn, the brutalised flesh falls into his ensanguined hands. He soaks the flesh in Eau de Vie, the water of life, whereby it delicately resurrects into Creme de Cassis, a sweet, heady liquor, which is mixed with chilled white Burgundy. It is for this, the Kir, that Maison Pierre is loved by its patrons. 

In the early nineties, John’s parents happened upon the restaurant as they hiked through a quiescent, autumnal Paris, on their way to Sacré-Coeur. Tired, they paused in a backstreet, next to an old-fashioned brasserie, with red-and-cream woven chairs and heavy white table cloths, the romantic kind John’s dad so detested. He interrogated the menu, like a priest confronting an heretical mass, doggedly questioning whether or not it was done ‘properly’ here. Deciding it wasn’t, he turned away, started walking off, when his wife grabbed his shoulder. “Darling,” she said, with unprecedented authority, “we’re eating here.” They did. They drank sweet, heady Kirs, and ate foie gras and bavette steaks. 

They were happy, briefly. They never returned. 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Dad,” John spoke, drawing out the monotone syllable in expression of his otherwise latent tiredness. “How much further is it?”

They had walked for two hours, now, through the mid-August’s disquiet heat. Most of the restaurants which they had passed were closing for the afternoon. The blackboards, with their lists of chalk-scribbled specials (Escargots x 12 –  €18 Steak Frites – €25), were being hurried inside, tucked under the arms of waiters who had rolled up their sweat-heavy sleeves.

John’s top was damp and it stuck to his chest. It was blue-and-white and stripy. He had always wanted a top like it. At least, always since they had arrived in Paris, earlier that week. The day before, when his father had bought it for him, he had put it on immediately, tearing off the one he was wearing with such alacrity that the shop-assistant rolled her eyes. That it was Dad who had got it for him made it that much more special. Dad, who he so rarely saw, who could be so reserved and so cutting in his misbegotten efforts at fatherly love. But now the t-shirt was sodden and by tomorrow it would smell. He wouldn’t be able to wear it again all week. He tried to contain his frustration but it made his head sore. 

“John, will you shut up? It’s around here,” he paused. “Somewhere.” Even if John’s father’s words expressed doubt, the tone was always certain. It was as if he had a subjective concept, or rather contempt, for natural law. What he said would come to pass. And, if it didn’t, then Nature was to blame for not allowing herself to be beaten into the requisite shape. His lips were parsed tightly. Pensiveness, frustration, anger, or absence? John could never decide. To him, his father’s face was an illegible scroll, its features an unremitting cuneiform. There was a drop of sweat on his untrimmed beard. He beat it away with one swift brush of the back of his hand. 

“What you mean is, you don’t know where it is. That’s it, isn’t it Dad?” Alfie, John’s older brother, retorted, his eyes alight with the prospect of battle. 

“If you’re that hungry, Alfie, we’ll eat here.” He pointed towards a Tourist menu with an inflated photograph of a grey steak and soggy fries. “Perfectly good, don’t you think?” Alfie didn’t reply. He looked down at the floor, sheepishly, content with the reaction, but now wary of provoking anything more extreme. 

“No, Dad. Don’t worry. We’ll find it soon.” John smiled timidly, with the eyes of a told-off Spaniel: a sense of hurt and sadness glinting beneath the still dependent gaze. “I’ll help. Pass your phone and I’ll see if I can find it.” 

“Thanks, John. At least one of you is helpful,” he said, passing his unlocked phone to John. 

Looking up, John asked, “What’s it called?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

John pursed his lips, unwilling to say anything, but unsure how he could help any further without that crucial information. 

“Well, Dad,” Alfie said. “It’s your restaurant, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Alfie. Fuck off.” He turned away. “Useless prick, you —” he paused. A tour group was walking past, a militia of cargo shorts and baseball caps, chattering away happily and unaware, clearly, of the consternation they had caused as John’s father was made to back into the wall to let them past. He glared at them, sternly. “Bloody…” He sighed. “Well, the restaurant. Yes. It’s Paul’s? No. No. It can’t be.” It was a moment of unusual interest to the children — a brief exhibition of their father’s internal monologue. “It’s um. P – something. P. It’s Pierre’s. That’s it. Pierre’s. Maison Pierre.” He raised his hand, limply, to gesture to John to get on with it. 

John tapped away at the screen with his small fingers, so pared and bitten that their tips were like cratered moons. He pressed on the search bar and started to key in the word. The screen was so damp from his clammy hands that the keyboard wouldn’t respond. He rubbed the phone and his hands against his shorts to dry them. He started again. P. The first letter. He paused. A list of suggestions appeared. 

Pornhub

Private Escorts, Hungary — visit Budapest in Style, V.I.P.

Peace — Find Help Now, near you

The phone shook in John’s hands. He was sinking, sinking, inhumed by the weight of a thousand fallen stars. He trembled. And Dad …. And Dad … And Dad. Lurid images flashed before his mind. He was sinking, back into the long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor at home — so little, and so unsure of the voices, the loud voices, which scratched at his eardrums and wet his eyes. And then. It faded — to a blankness, a blur; and weight, the weight of it all. Absently, palely, he stared at the pavement, his heart and breath and all his innards wobbling and shaking and uncertain. 

He looked towards Alfie. On his t-shirt, there was a woman posing for some 1950s edition of Vogue. The woman. Not that woman. She would be Hungarian and pale, a prostitute, much paler than the woman in the black-and-white photograph, pale and wearing deep, black eyeshadow, which was maybe just her tiredness and sadness and not eyeshadow at all. John couldn’t speak. His eyes failed. Trembling, the phone fell out of his hand and it hit the floor. “Sorry,” he stuttered. “Dad.” 

John’s father leant down to pick the phone off the floor, passing John’s line of vision as he did so. There was a crack in the top right of the screen, a snowflake on a pond at night. He sighed, spoke quietly: “You fucking moron.” He paused, looking at John, and then waved his hand in John’s direction as if to bat away an impertinent fly. 

He continued the internet search which John had started; either he didn’t notice, or was simply unaffected, by what John had seen. “Oh well. It looks like the restaurant’s closed. Sorry. Let’s eat here instead.” He gestured to the Tourist menu from earlier. “They can’t fuck up a steak haché, can they?”

“No, Dad.” John stammered.

“God, what’s got into you?” He paused to think. “You probably haven’t drunk enough water. I told you this would happen. Some food should sort you out.”

He signalled the waiter. “Une table pour a tres.”

“Ouais.” The waiter pointed them towards a table. Alfie was about to sit down, but their father shook his head, and said, “I’ll sit there.” 

The waiter returned with three menus. But there was no need to look since John’s father had already decided. “Tres kir, pour entre; tres steak ash, oon carafe de vin roug avec duh there.” The waiter was confused and asked John’s father to repeat the order, which he did; only this time he said it much quicker. The waiter, it seemed, partially understood and hurried back to the kitchen. 

“He must be from the South. They don’t speak French down there, you know?”

Alfie lit a cigarette. “Oh please. Don’t get smoke in my eyes.”

The kirs came. They were sickening, saccharine. John’s father smiled, his yellowing teeth bared fully. “Typically French. Poor Cassis, the wrong wine. I told you it’d be awful.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

John and Alfie were standing in front of the Basilica de Sacré-Coeur. Their father was ‘doing business’ on a shaded park bench, interrupting the flirtations of the German couple with whom he shared it. He was speaking to a colleague on his phone’s loudspeaker. The Germans looked at one another, not with love, but with a newfound awkwardness and silence.

“What’s up, John? You were quiet all of lunch,” Alfie asked. 

“Nothing. It’s really nothing.” He spoke quietly. “Just dehydrated — like Dad said.”

“Really? I don’t believe that.” Alfie lit a cigarette and passed it over to John for a puff. He coughed. He was fourteen. John moved his eyes to look at the view. Paris stretched into the horizon. There was too much of it, simply too much of it for him to make sense of. He saw but he could not feel. He turned back towards Alfie. 

Their father looked over, saw the cigarette in John’s hand, and didn’t seem too concerned. Then he waved to them and shouted, “Go inside. I’ll catch up with you. I’ve seen it plenty of times before … Sorry about that, yes — the kids. You know how they are … Yes, 14 and 16 … Not the best age.”

John and Alfie walked into the church. “Alfie, I’ll talk to you later. I just don’t feel like it now. That’s all. Please can you leave it.” The church was not so busy as the crowds out front had led them to expect. There were a few tourists, unaware that you should look away from Sacre-Coeur rather than at it, who were now struggling to determine why the place was so esteemed by their guidebooks. An American family, pondering the same question, decided it was big. “Hey, look kids,” their father spoke adoringly. “This is ancient. It’s from way back in the Renaissance. Would you believe it? Heck, that was like five hundred years ago. And there’s Jesus, too — watching over all of us.” He said, pointing above the Choir, where a vulpine Christ scowled down at them gallically. 

“Hey, John. Listen to these yanks. So cringe.” Alfie said. 

John wasn’t listening, and if he was, he was listening not with his brother’s scorn, but with a kind of envy of the loving simplicity of those transpontine innocents. 

“John. Listen to them. So irritating, I mean really.”

“Yeah,” John replied blankly. He could only really think about his father. He felt so terrible and alone and isolated in his knowledge. That Dad fucks prostitutes — poor, mistreated Hungarian ones; that he wanks and watches porn; and that he’s unhappy too. And could he really say these things? Could he tell anyone? Wouldn’t that be unfair? To tell people things which would make them think differently about his father. It is a lie to say that knowledge is freedom. Knowledge is a burden, one which can rarely be offloaded without consequence. He could tell his mother, but then she’d just hate his father more. 

He was sitting in one of the front pews, looking up at the mosaics. He felt so alone that, impulsively, he kneeled down to pray. It had been so long since he’d done this. He leaned forwards, his knees pressed reassuringly against the kneeler, and felt a big whoosh of relief. It’s alright, he thought. It will be alright. It is fine. God is with me, and God will help me, even if Dad won’t. John had been drowning and, he thought, God had fished him out of a cold and Arctic deep. 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

John was standing in the gift-shop queue. There was a thick black-string necklace with a cross on it in his hand. He wanted to buy it. He felt good, now — close to God and reassured. It will be alright, his thoughts incanted, it will be alright. His father had given him ten euros earlier that day and he was going to spend it on the necklace. The cross was metallic and it felt smooth in his hands. He wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted. More, even, than the t-shirt; it was like a hug from his mother, or the corridor light which would glow through his slightly-opened bedroom door on cold Winter nights. It made him feel safe. As he neared the front of the queue, both Alfie and his father joined him.

“There you are,” his father said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you. What are you buying?”

John didn’t speak. He showed his father the necklace. 

“Well, get on with it then.”

The woman at the counter scanned the necklace. John handed her his ten euro note.

“Mais non. C’est quinze euros.”

John hesitated and then turned to his father. “Dad, please could I have five more euros for this?”

“Really, John? You spend so much money.”

John turned to the woman at the counter and said, in a hushed voice, “Sorry.” She snatched it back, putting it under the counter. He looked down at the floor, briefly, and noted how the cheap white lights reflected on the fake marble floor. 

“Come on, then. You didn’t need it, anyway.”

“Yes Dad.”

“Besides, it’s not like you believe in any of that crap.”

Categories
Culture

‘Teasing the fourth wall’: A short Immersive Theatre manifesto 

By Max Shanagher

Sitting on the DLR to Woolwich, I started to question the life decisions that I had taken six months previously. Six months ago, at the Library bar in Durham, my friend and I decided to start an Immersive Theatre company. My only problem was that I didn’t really know what immersive theatre was. In my head, I must admit, I had a hipster version of the London Dungeon where over-confident actors are followed by over-pretentious audience members.  

So as I sat on the DLR to Woolwich, I was questioning whether it was wise to get involved with a theatre company that specialises in it. These questions were finally given an answer when I reached my destination: Punchdrunk’s ‘The Burnt City’.  

Now, these four words may not make any sense to you (they certainly didn’t to me) so I shall define both ‘Punchdrunk’ andThe Burnt City. Punchdrunk is an immersive theatre company that was founded in 2000 who hire large venues and convert them into elaborate, multi-room spanning plays. In New York, they perform a play called Sleep No More that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel, an abandoned hotel from the 1940s. Sleep No More is a Noir adaptation of Macbeth, and audience members are allowed to explore the hotel and to decide which rooms they want to stay in or which actors they want to follow.  

The Burnt City is this premise of audience autonomy brought to two large arsenal buildings in Woolwich Dockyard. The play takes place over two spaces and is set at the time of the Trojan War, with one building being designated to represent Greece and one to represent Troy. I went with my family and was excited to see their reaction to the completely converted arsenals. 

Entering the arsenals, I was struck by the scale and detail with which the set was constructed. I was able to wander into rooms and read letters sent from soldiers back home. I lost my family quite quickly, as encouraged by the actors at the start, but once entering the wide expansive room representing Greece, I saw a man who seemed to have found the only seat in the whole venue, and I assumed it to be my dad. You are not allowed to talk in Punchdrunk performances, but I approached this strange figure and asked him what he thought of it so far. Thankfully, it was my dad, but I wasn’t thankful for his one-word response: ‘bizarre’. I suppose it was bizarre. All the audience were wearing masks and were dotted around the different rooms searching for meaning in these choreographed spaces. That was the joy I thought though, the feeling of being able to choose my experience and choose what I get out of the play was unlike any other theatre I had been to. 

It seemed fresh and new to me, and reinvigorated my passion for theatre. It may have felt fresh, but it wasn’t particularly new. In the 1980s, Laura Farabough wrote and directed Surface Tension which took place in a swimming pool, first performed at UC Berkeley Campus. In India, there have been performances of Ramlila since the 19th Century, the play having been inscribed into UNESCO world heritage status in 2008. In a performance of Ramlila, according to UNESCO the ‘audience is invited to sing and take part in narration’ and the audience take active roles in the production. This is the blueprint for immersive theatre: audience autonomy and transforming spaces into theatrical realms.  

Why this type of theatre feels to me particularly relevant to modern times is because of the theatrical potential for virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI. Virtual reality has almost the same premise as immersive theatre: transforming the virtual space and allowing the participant to have autonomy in their decisions. Augmented reality similarly is about transforming space and AI may have the potential to change the ability to improvise in theatre. Immersive theatre allows for audiences to have real, lived experiences where they might have otherwise had a virtual experience. Making the effort to see a play in person and seeing the dedication that actors and the crew put into creating a performance is unlike anything that can currently be achieved by these technological advances.  

There is no hiding in immersive theatre but that is the joy of it. Seeing live performances, with their brilliance and their mistakes is what makes theatre, to me, so great. The allure of being able to decide your own journey does not have to be limited to the virtual world, but can also be physical and present. All this I realised on the slightly less bleak return journey from Woolwich. 

Which brings me to Antony and Cleopatra, a play I’ve been directing for the past few months. We have hired Durham’s Student Union Ballroom, and for three performances, are transforming it into Egypt and Rome across two rooms. The audience can decide at the start whether they would prefer to be in Egypt and Rome, and from that point on will have different experiences. Getting actors (some of whom specialise in classical theatre) to imagine the audience in rehearsals and work on their improvisational skills has been a joy.  

Thanks to Hetty, Kate, and Teagan, our student writers, we have been able to create a simultaneous script for Egypt and Rome, inspired by Shakespeare’s script. Shakespeare’s language is key, however, and supports our reasoning that the play would adapt well to immersive theatre because of its focus on space and the occupation of different spaces. One of my favourite lines from the play is Enobarbus’ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale | Her infinite variety’ in describing Cleopatra. In many ways I see these lines to describe theatre as well, immersive theatre, in my view, currently contributing a small but important part to theatre’s ‘infinite variety’. 

Antony and Cleopatra will be performed on the 10th and 11th of November in Dunelm House. Find out more via @walkaboutproductions on Instagram.

Photo Credit: westendtheatre.com

Categories
Culture

The Last Words of F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Cosmo Adair.

“All romantics meet the same fate

Some day, cynical and drunk and boring

Someone in some dark cafe.”

Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

Hollywood Boulevard, 1940. Two lovers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, are strolling along as the blue sky fades to pearly darkness. He recites a poem. They notice an advertisement outside of a record store which reads: “Make your own records — Hear yourself speak.” They enter, and he begins to speak into the microphone, reciting John Masefield’s “On Growing Old”, before reaching its final couplet: 

“Only stay quiet while my mind remembers

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.”

That second “beauty” gets caught in his throat. He reads on, now his favourite poem, the one whose words have found their modern reimaginings in so many of his works, John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. He dwells, quite lovingly, on each delicate syllable, before tailing off at the close of the third stanza, where he misquotes and says: “And new love cannot live beyond tomorrow … Or beauty cannot live.”

Herein lies both the biographer and the critic’s dream — a moment of recognition, as a percussive sadness sets in, one which turns back with vague glimpses of the past, and looks forwards, ‘beyond tomorrow,’ and sees the exit-lights dully flashing. As Jonathan Bate questions in Bright Star, Green Light was Fitzgerald, here, moved by a sense that Keats was not only writing of his own fears of mortality, but with an “uncanny anticipation” of Fitzgerald’s own fears that his twilight relationship with Sheilah Graham would soon end, and that the beauty he had sought in his novels would not survive? After so many miserable years of alcoholism and depression, of “the process of breaking down” as he calls it in The Crack-Up, had he now found an aesthetic close, an ending befitting his characters — those great Romantic heroes, all of whom are cut-down or beaten or embittered by the realities of an unforgiving world, but who receive some restitution of dignity in the recognition of the beauty of their dream. 

Throughout his life, Fitzgerald suffered from prolonged bouts of depression and from an indefatigable alcoholism. An early literary career, imbibed with phenomenal talent, which had promised so much — with This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, all published within five years of each other — tailed off into alcoholic black-out, with only one more novel, Tender is the Night, published in the next fifteen years. There is, throughout his life and works, a sense that the impossibility of squaring his romantic pursuits and ideals — of beauty, of love, of Art — with the real world condemned him to sadness and a presiding sense of failure. 

In The Crack-Up, a candid sequence of three essays dealing with his depression, he writes that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and yet still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This seems a fitting guide to both his life and to his characters: that despite the hopelessness and futility of life, you need to keep the dream alive — of Daisy, in Gatsby’s case, or else of Beauty in Fitzgerald’s — so that life might remain bearable. 

That’s at the heart of The Great Gatsby’s famous conclusion: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Had Gatsby not been killed, he would have navigated a disillusioned 1930s in much the same way as Fitzgerald did: as soon as the ideal of Daisy has been shattered that elusive green light loses its meaning. Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, would have adhered to Joni Mitchell’s words in the above quote: “All romantics … [become] cynical and drunk and boring.” The child whose sandcastle has collapsed becomes an advocate for the futility of sandcastles. So it is with our dreams and ideals — but ours tend to be smaller than Gatsby’s, smaller than Fitzgerald’s, and we must ‘run faster, stretch out our arms further’, even if all we meet is failure and futility. 

For Fitzgerald, the dream’s death was like the death of the sun; after it, he could only declare, “I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous.” But in that recording of 1940, as he stutters over ‘Beauty’ and misquotes Keats’ “Nightingale”, there is a sense that — somewhere, between the mists of depression and booze, under the influence of a beautiful but fleeting love with Sheilah Graham — he recalls that dream which once so enthused and justified him and his life’s work, and that there is a sadness, an inenarrable sadness, in the recognition that he so easily relinquished his dreams and that so much beauty was wasted. And so, that year, as the bombs began to fall in London and Europe shrunk to the size of a map, Fitzgerald drank himself to death at the age of only forty-four, taking him with him a little bit of the Beauty and the Romance so needed in a world which, day-by-day, was self-flagellating into ugly and brutal deformity. 

Categories
Poetry

A Jade House

By Emma Large.

Twin Lantau houses swelter empty

Most of the year round, even their walls

Never touch. Named like siblings,

Green and White Jade; in equal spirit, 


In perpetual, feverish row. Air like anger

Ripples between them, too heavy

To hold itself straight: crumpling under

Heat and water, the kind of weight


That billows out like an oiled flag, the way

It rose up in the dusk. Then we wait

Until their edges dissipate to a truce

By darkness; all our gentleness


Comes back in the instinct, the grazing

Fingers against her knee,

The quiet vows in kitchen light.

My father hates this house, I think;


The insects purr too thick

In the garden, our anklebones

Are stubbed with bites. And I suppose

He felt its daylight loneliness,


The fury of a body’s ritual

That takes it blind, by night; the same

Rites that soften the longest fall,

The heart’s sweat and rise


Through old tides, its struggle to the drop down.

Same walls make quiet passage for love:

Slips, goes, no sound.

Categories
Culture

Autumn Playlist

I’m often asked why our magazine is called Wayzgoose or what it means, and upon further inspection, I found that a Wayzgoose was a party that “marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight.” And so, with the Autumn equinox having passed and the halcyon days of summer receding quickly in the rearview, I have curated an autumnal, or Wayzgoose-themed playlist, if you will. Put this on while walking to lectures, cooking supper for your friends, or, fittingly, working into the wee hours. I’ve picked each song perhaps for a specific autumn referencing lyric, or maybe the album art looks as though it was photographed in October – I’m a simple man. But beyond that, all these songs have a particular warmth and introspection to them that, to me, is reminiscent of this season. Autumn is inherently transitional, often prompting a bit of reflection or solipsism (whatever you prefer to call it). So have a cup of tea and wander around the bailey, romanticising the oncoming chill and its accompanying heating bills and colds.

  1. Summer’s End – John Prine 

To kick us off, we have perhaps the saddest song on the playlist. Prine’s rich and wise voice imparts words of comfort to the listener. A wistful ode to lost summer love and reminiscing upon happy memories best sets the tone for this playlist.

  1. Color Song – Maggie Rogers   

At this time of year, the clocks change, and the days grow shorter; Rogers opens this track singing, “now that the light is fading”, her crystalline Appalachian harmonies ebbing and flowing like a mountain stream – the perfect accompaniment to a walk along the river at dusk. 

  1. Friend of mine – Whitney 

This song from Whitney’s sophomore album sounds like a rollicking road trip through Northumberland as the leaves change, creating avenues of burning colour. The guitar and brass post-chorus sound like the low harvest-time sunlight sliding through the tree line, bathing everything in amber.

  1. These days – Nico

Full of regret and longing, this song plays in Wes Anderson’s ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’. Set during “fall” in New York, ‘Margot’ steps off a bus, wrapped in a mink coat, exhaust fumes steaming around her in the cold, and locks eyes with a past love. For those who think Anderson’s style is unemotional and too focused on the aesthetic, watch this scene; the choice of song may just change your mind.

  1. Smoke signals – Phoebe Bridgers

I’d be remiss not to include Phoebe Bridgers, queen of autumn, for her melancholy comfort and recurring ghostly imagery. With a title evoking images of bonfires, she writes of a week in the country, where she and a partner played at being Thoreau in ‘Walden,’ a book alternatively titled ‘Life in the Woods.’ It affirms the craving many of us have during October to be more in tune with the natural world.

  1. Girl from the North Country – Bob Dylan

Dylan sings of a time,

“When the rivers freeze and summer ends

Please see for me if she’s wearing a coat so warm

To keep her from the howlin’ winds”

Thematically, this track is a perfect companion to ‘Summer’s End’, bottling the hazy nostalgia of a bygone romance. Moreover, the cover art with Dylan and his girlfriend walking down a street, bundled in jackets, on a characteristically bright and crisp autumn day, is rather appropriate.

  1. Harbor – Clairo

Recorded at Allaire studio, in the mountains outside Woodstock, during October of 2020. The rustic setting of the recording: log cabin, candle-lit dinners, open fires, and long hikes through the woods permeates the track sonically. Seventies Wurlitzers and pianos eddy beneath Clairo’s voice as her lyrics and melodies unspool like a ball of tangled wool.

  1. Old Friends / Bookends Theme – Live in Toledo, OH – November 1969 – Simon and Garfunkel 

Posed in polo neck jumpers on the cover, this pair sings of two old friends recalling memories, wrapped in overcoats on a park bench as the wind pushes fallen leaves under their feet. This live version specially marries the tracks together and has a profound intimacy.

  1. Blackberry Stone – Laura Marling

Laura Marling’s pastoral folk is particularly suited to this season with its traditional old-English melodies. I have often put on her music whilst rambling through the Somerset countryside, where apples (it is the home of Thatcher’s cider) and blackberries are in abundance at this time of year. 

  1. Harvest Breed – Nick Drake 

Anything from Nick Drake’s oeuvre is worth mentioning here, but I’ve gone for the most literal choice to close out this playlist. His bucolic music is the perfect accompaniment to Autumn.

“Falling fast and falling free you look to find a friend

Falling fast and falling free this could just be the end

Falling fast you stoop to touch and kiss the flowers that bend

And you’re ready now

For the harvest breed”

Other worthy mentions:

Hammond Song – the Roches

Shelter – Ray LaMontagne

Hello rain – The Softies

WAYZGOOSE (n.)

Pronunciation: ‘ˈweɪzɡuːs

An annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment.
wayzgoosemagazine@gmail.com

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