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Month: May 2025

Categories
Poetry

Another Elegy in San Rocco, Venice

By Harry Laventure

ALASTRAM DEBET FOIBLE

 

So, 

Lonely man up there, all in rays,

I ran out of wall today.

Tomorrow the faces of yesterday’s grey

Will be entombed as I, utterly, 

Ivory wrung by the ring of a 

Fullstop, the inkblot working on time monochrome,

In rhythm alone with ironed staves and, undying,

Always to find a haunt

In the darker enclosures of my head.

 

Outside is only sound these days;

Now glottal shadows mock and dance around my bay.

My doors are locked but it is they who, impenetrable, 

Tangle themselves as barbed strings.

From the little that drips in, I gather

That broken violins are shrieking lament to

Rejecting skies and loving depths,

And I tell it to you like a blind man, 

Robbed of and in excess of shade,

And no present doctor or nurse:

The hollow blood of a cough heard is 

More crimson than any wound licked clean

In a limp moment, private, paper-cut absurd.

 

What vipers now, I wonder, 

Have weeded the grounds,

And the canals that surround the scents of billowing rubbish,

Tumbling like heads, guillotine-freed, 

Down the licked cobbles of faecal birds, and their 

Two-legged shadow puppets on empty streets. 

Often I long to be suspended as they, 

On the wind’s many nooses, 

To sway without swaying as the next objective.

To be spoken through in folded, gasped parcels of sky-breath’s prayer,

Rather than to speak as my broken hands once did in colour 

To fade on these walls, now full, tongue shrunk in age.

What more have I to say?

 

When, I ask, did dank mustiness become the bedfellow of my nose?

How, I ask, have I sacrificed my wife of May 

To plague days, angels of air circulating replaced 

By penitent husking, bruised and self-flagellated by 

The brooding of this once holy place?

Did her spring blood sing to make my carmine, 

Cast only to drape decadent flaps on my friends frozen 

As they dash this way and that?

A thimble of Chartreuse, jewel-shot, inverse

The floral iron lace of a bar in calligraphy’s shadow

To petal and pave the stems of herbs

In twinned stale, air bored, an ancient 

Summer’s thoughts pull the brows of sinners 

As sows grass, growing Chartreuse, from the ground,

Plucked thinner. 

 

Oh I have not left this place for so long, 

Stranger in the masque,

This mirrorless all reflecting place, 

So please do forgive me, 

Please do forgive me

When, rash as a goat and pagan, I ask 

What has become of my face?

 

Did I leave it by the gates of the palace of the Doge? By

The train station? Has it floated to some island,

Been cast in silver before lusty rot made its claims? 

Did an actor, youth and ambition gilded, bathed, 

Wear it for a little line or two as he boxed with the Dane? 

Perhaps a doctor, a good one, sat it down in his wife’s armchair with a dram, 

To diagnose the glum in the glance, 

A pure saintly and protected face such as this, 

Lips indigo as the rings around wintered knuckles,

Weathered eyes above, look above.

I ask, you see, because

I can no longer. 

 

My mind’s dissonance enough, rendered a walking mausoleum, 

I have curated my little men: 

See how they stand, poised, to a moment’s attention.

We are bound as a brotherhood, slaves to our silence despite best intentions, 

And, whether in strife or adoration, they remain but

Walking gentlemen. 

Intentions. Perhaps in the words of this 

Barren den of dashes and curves 

I build myself a cross for martyrdom, or merely dust 

The road to Calvary with icing sugar. 

 

For how is it, that only in characters’ company,

I am to burn with the concrete breath of my pigment conspirators;

How then, to singe history’s fine, oafish hairs to

A fool’s scalp, hidden by a fool’s hat. My brush

Flailed, flails, poltergeist like, to conjure myself into his Sunday best’s seams 

– Shepherds, come adore! – 

But it is his surgery scrub’s breast pocket I fear he deems the fitting spot for me. 

Oh I have gazed and gazed 

Into the graves of better men than I. Choked 

Myself on the cold metal fonts of typewriters, 

Once graced, and with bludgeoned tongue,

Devoured lobsters with the shell quite deliberately on.

 

I have held lightning in my fingers like the 

Orchestra’s stare below the baton. Maestro! 

Silken blues and greens have, under my watchful eye, 

A tango about a night, in liquid affairs, 

Melted clay-like and brought forth men and eyes

As hands through sheets in morning’s sunlight. To think of 

The sins these walls on my watch have seen!

Perpetual resurrection, agonies evergreen.

The muscular gluttony of mares moulded from the muddy clods that spill onto the streets on a rainy day, drawing with them the strings of plague.

Oh how I see him laughing at my 

Flimsy gallery of spectres, 

Blackened teeth bare 

With the cynical imp‘s incredulity at my throttled despair, longing. 

 

Sometimes memory creaks in with a wincing knee, 

Speaks to me like the springs of a hotel bed, 

Dusts him away,

Residual, a harlot making herself at home 

In this good house, His house, 

This good church, now framed to me, 

As the bars of a stave. 

A life outside

My little kingdom inverted prism on the walls, 

Fades into the oil of this marble spot 

On that drowned man’s stubble, 

face crescent in the puddle, 

a rosary in the sand, 

melancholic and holy. 

Indulgence, indulgence

I simply cannot bear to indulge such potency;

Diseased, for goodness’ sake,

Let them hang ‘til dry

On street lamps from those early, slain nights!

 

But never mind, never mind. 

Time is not mine to flirt with anymore,

Nor is a bowing palette, a hanging seat to

Raise me above the floor. 

The work is done, all motion nailed down. 

The chords of dying hordes still throw 

Their splattered disorder into 

The frail ears of my brittle laws, ridiculous

And speck the motley below. Meticulous

In its asinine obstinance, now sprawled supine on the walls

I hoped would glow. 

 

Goodbye now, kind stranger, may such sentiments chained 

Strain to call in my gilded frames;

May I curse them as unrolled palms of waves, 

To claw and creep in time with tide and never reach,

Never hold. 

The anemone reels from light’s cadence,

And I have become part of my coral.

Goodbye now, kind stranger,

Ecce homo; a weary trundle back to my sloth remains

Upon the revelation that I have not run out of walls, 

But paint

 

Image credit: en.venezia.net

Categories
Creative Writing

Kids Underwater, Or Something Like That 

By Lenna Suminski

In the backseat of this stranger’s car I found out what love was. You thought I was asleep but brushed my hair anyway. I kiss your hands. I don’t ever want to reach my house. My parents say I’ll look back at how much I fought them for you and laugh. Maybe. But right now I can’t imagine a time without you. 

How do we elucidate the ephemeral as eternal? I love you. You love me too. 

That may be clear as day, but up in Linkou the woods are foggy and this is my terrain and all of it is so simple and I never would’ve guessed: love is you stroking my hair when I sleep, I look up at you and we both smile. 

The first time you fall in love you understand what it all means. The lights at the park turning on at the same moment I talk about you to my best friend means something. The butterfly that looks like a moth on the hotel wall that my mother booked for our prom night meant something. Our grandmothers going to the same elementary school meant something. The first time you fall in love you put your ear to the conch shell I retrieved for you and the whole world sings. Nobody has ever heard all this symphony before. The first time you fall in love you cannot differentiate if you are discovering something or if the love you hold is merely materializing. 

The first time you fall in love you think it will last forever. The rawness of its purity is almost graphic. “Youth is hardly human: it can’t be, for the young never believe they will die…” At the parties we used to all use for any incident of celebration, you get drunk and messy. You never let me leave your side. I liked you best in those moments, where you’d unabashedly need me, need to touch me, need to hold me up from getting pushed, need to sing lyrics to a love song to me. Like it was necessary. The primitiveness and disparity of it was always undeniable, I loved feeling uncivilized. And if I left you’d look for me, reach for me from across the room. And if someone sprayed champagne on me and I got mad and wanted to leave you’d give me your shirt to wipe it off. If I left you’d always follow, and the party would be over because everyone followed you. You’d buy me midnight ramen and we never waited in any line. 

The first time you fall in love you feel it before you know it. You remember slices of time that won’t become significant until afterwards. When I climbed out of my bedroom window and down an ancient tree to meet you at a horrible after party. At 3am we left to go to a park to talk, anguished by teenage anxiety or what they call butterflies in stomachs. You didn’t know you could feel so alive without spending anything, I didn’t know it was possible for my mind to go quiet. On that picnic bench under a canopy of trees the soft rain doesn’t reach us. Your hands hover across mine for hours before you dare to hold them. I write about you. 

He feels like water. Is this real? Are we something? Do we dare Knead and mold potential and promise into legend? I feel undignified and brave, like a man who stole fire for some Lovely, O lovely creature–O, you are a lovely dove of a boy! If you want fire to move slow, I will pinch every pine needle, rip, dye Every willow or redwood and there Will be swirls of fog and clouds to eat. You can twirl my hair Away from my face. I’ll bite your Ear, ponder our demise, Wave at skateboarders tailing by and Tuck my virtue in the

concave of your shoulder and head. How do I tell you I’m in love with you like The Arctic’s gentle remembrance of diminishing ancient ice, Dissolving and returning back, To you. 

When I say you feel like water I mean: I love you. 

The first time you fall in love you describe it like an imagery you’ve never experienced. I tell everyone we feel like kids underwater. In a public swimming pool, suspended and submerged and surrounded by women’s polka dot two-pieces and neon swim trunks. In very juvenile terms, love feels like two kids looking at each other underwater, eyes open, bleached, swirling half-bodies all around. 

The first time you fall in love you don’t know any better but to hope. The night before you left for college, in your bedroom and its pitch-black, we have sex for the last time. I start crying when you’re in me. I asked you months ago, Can we just go everywhere together? Yes. Can we just do everything together? Yes. Can we just stay together until we can’t anymore? Yes. What does can’t anymore mean? I don’t know. This was when we can’t anymore. This is the last time, I kept repeating it like I couldn’t quite believe it. It’s not the last time, stop saying that. I feel the wet against my cheek, you’re on top of me and we’re crying together, static. No, but it’ll never be like this again. I stare at your eyes that I couldn’t see in that dark. 

The first time you fall out of love you do crazy things. I did coke in ball bathroom stalls and let a self-proclaimed Maoist prophet take polaroid nudes of me with roses. I smoked cigarettes out of car windows when “Killer Queen” blasts out of a stranger’s car. I almost married a man that likes mean sex. He’d write love poems that weren’t very good and make them about God and deliver them to me like he was bringing me salvation. I got a lower-back tattoo that made me sluttier than I ever was with you. You can always tell if a man loves you by the way he fucks you. 

Over coffee I tell a friend I’ve been going to church a lot. 

Why? 

Because I’ve been having too much sex. 

He spits out his matcha latte at the vulgarity of my bluntness and we burst out laughing. The first time you fall out of love you try to find God everywhere, kneeling before believing until your knees are dented and bruised, quoting lines from Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate and wonder why I’d ever think men would always be gentle. I tried to drown myself in Holy Water. 

The first time you fall out of love you do everything you can to reinvent yourself. You book 3-day stays at your college town’s best hotel and fuck the pornstar you flew in. Luxury Room, One King Bed, Two Adults. Then you wait for her to get dressed, some elegant blue dress probably, fake eyelashes, an Uber Black to your fraternity formal. Was it fun to wine-and-dine a woman your father would scorn at? Was it validating to present prettiness to your friends, proving that you weren’t just a one-hit-wonder?

There are distractions that you use to lobotomize yourself from those withdrawals. Double-vodka lime, double-gin and tonic, double glasses of wine at dinner, double the romance, divide the grief. None of anything I did was original. It’s nice to know heartbreak is universal. Too many first dates and after you fall out of love for the first time you need to explain yourself all over again. 

I blow at every dandelion I see. I like horses, I know the correct way to cut and dry every flower. My favorites are lilies of the valley. No, they are dif erent from lilies. My favorite place in the world is up the volcano-mountain near my old high school. They’d let you get in the mud with rainboots and pick the calla lilies yourself. 

I leave out the part where you’d drive me, Beach House blasting. The picture of my hair wild and head out the window from the passenger seat is the last slide on my Hinge. You were next to me. 

I used to dye my hair black every two weeks. I gave myself stick-and-pokes when I was 13. I was a bitch in high school. My dog’s name is Wolfy. No, I have no allergies. My dad was a writer. I am my grandmother’s favorite. The ritualistic determination ceremony said I would be a writer, too. No, not like in Divergent. Well, maybe kind of? I tried to kill myself twice. I like baking pies. 

I think with every line, every biometric fact I recited about myself I went a little further away from you. Its recreation, pattern recognition. All these things about me existed before you and they continue to live out after you. Plans carry on as they were supposed to. You fly over to the mountains to ski and watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. I imagine us both getting drunk, separately. Champagne or soju with family friends: the men you call uncle who cheat on their wives and the women you call auntie who collect Birkins and lorazepam. You were supposed to open the collage of flowers over our year together with my parents on Christmas, I bailed on your mother’s welcoming invites to go shopping with her below the slopes. 

The first time you fall out of love you think of it as something sudden, you lose sight of the deterioration, the rot. It hits me six months later, I text my best friend when my antidepressants stop working. The water is all I can remember. Even after all those fights, all those pockets of boredom, raised voices, unanswered phone calls. Every ending brings me back to the beginning. And I could’ve made it work. I wanted to see the world and I did I did my time I did my Odyssey but Claire I just want to go back underwater with him. I just want to go back underwater with him. I am absolutely depraved. But I wanted to be his wife I just wanted to stay underwater with him. 

I hug your dad when I see him again and apologize with my eyes for dumping his son. He liked me because I conducted every disastrous performance with well manners and pious politeness. And he always laughed at my jokes, I was always so good with dads–balancing youthful femininity like Old Hollywood starlets with copied stoicism from my own sophisticate scholar-father. Your mother liked me because I looked good next to you and I was a good cook, and kept any harlotry far away from her. I miss them both, I write them a letter, I text your sister on her Sweet Sixteen. 

The first time you fall out of love your family refuses to stop bringing it up. Christmas break was claustrophobic. I escape the family dinner parties where bored housewives tell me about your summer

internship, tell me they saw the pictures of us at prom that your mother proudly presented over brunch. We haven’t spoken in weeks and everytime we do we fight, nastily, like we’ve never done before. I give some sanitary explanations about people growing and well wishes and escape to the library or my bedroom with bottles of Bordeaux. Lying on my princess bed with the mesh drapes, four dried bouquets from you on each corner pole. Your clothes in an oversized Dior shopping bag in my walk-in closet, the purple walls that you helped me paint on my 18th birthday. I want you to die and I want to grow old with you. Nauseating, I give up trying to claw you out of my mind. 

The first time you fall out of love your friends can’t forget me. Sleeping on air mattresses with a girl none of them respect, you make faces when they bring up my name every two hours. You’re too lazy to even fake chivalry with her, she orders her own food at dinner. You smoke a cigarette with our mutual friend and tell her you’re focusing on yourself, she believes you but watches your face fall when you exhale the Marlboro Gold. You pretend the break-up was mutual, you pretend you didn’t send letters and flowers and beg for me back when it was too late. Cashing out on your dad’s American Express card for the only vein of masculinity you know how to give–to give. 

The first time you fall out of love you think it will linger forever. It doesn’t. The second time I fall in love I catch it coming. It happens in the National Gallery, over coffee in Covent Garden, she beats me at Scrabble in an Irish pub. I write letters. She sketches. I phone my mother on a random Wednesday and come out to her. The second time you fall in love you creep with hesitation, you remember the rot. You prolong the fall, I ruin it because I am no longer as brave as I was when I was 17. The first time you fall out of love will be tattooed on you like the seven-stich-scar on my left hand, or like my tramp-stamp you never got to see. 

The first time you fall out of love you let it dilute and fade, you know you’ll wade past it. You ignore my hair on both sides of the pillowcase, you get your dick sucked by someone who dyed their hair the same colour as mine and try not to think about the last time we were together. You stare at my letters in the black box in your closet, sighing with relief that the girl who always had more words will never make you feel so much ever again. But you’ll never throw the box away. I know what’s in there: a red ribbon, a candle, a conch shell, pressed-flowers, stacks of my scrawling cursive you learnt to be fluent in. They reek of the perfume I wear, Moonlight something, you’d recognize it on a storefront shelf but cannot recall the name right now. But you remember. You confess silently, you begrudgingly admit it: I was right. It’ll never be like that again. Kids underwater, nobody will ever be like us again.

Categories
Reviews

Sam Fender’s Long Heady Summer

Image: Bitter Sweet Symphonies

By Esme Bell


I really meant to write this in February, when North-East legend Sam Fender’s most recent album, People Watching, was released. I planned a blistering review, criticising his new trajectory and the album’s general insipidness etc etc – but endless uni work and my diss meant there just wasn’t time, and the vitriol had to wait.

I should mention that Sam Fender is my longest-standing teenage obsession: his was my first gig, my next three gigs as well, and when I saw him in real life (not on stage) in Durham’s Boat Club in my first year, I nearly exploded. I was so excited for the third album – and my disappointment was therefore deep.

But my summatives were (eventually) submitted, and the album – played constantly, understandably, across Durham environs – became a general accompaniment for spring as it bled into summer; I began to think differently, and felt now might be the true time for a review.

I maintain some reservations. Lyrically, directionally, People Watching is less potent than his earlier albums, which can be characterised by real vocal and musical warmth, compassionate anger, and cutting social commentary. Songs like ‘The Borders’ and ‘The Dying Light’ demonstrate this perfectly, painting acute, personal heartbreaks, but in no way moralising or pretentious: convincing instead through their raw and open-hearted narratives; anthems in spirit as well as sound. 

People Watching is still concerned with social issues, but is also more introspective, self-regarding – at points, perhaps more fulfilling for Sam the writer than his audience – and at times it gets clunky, like the songs themselves aren’t used to this change of focus, like they miss addressing the wider world.

Case in point: in ‘Wild Long Lie’, which discusses the disconnect between fame and coming home, Fender sings  ‘And I’ve gone quiet ’cause my heart is still choking up from a love I tore apart’. This line, like a few in this song and the album, feels like it should be about someone else, not the first person: acceptable in a third-person narrative, but oddly dramatising and self-conscious when levelled by Sam about Sam.

Musically, there is also a dearth: gone are the anthemic, crowd-enrapturing, guitar-resplendent “rock” songs that we mostly expect from Fender. Anyone who has seen him live will know the magic of the final performance of ‘Hypersonic Missiles’, as the crowd joins the band to form an ecstatic, eternal-sounding choir. It is hard to imagine such a covenant being formed from this album; the whole sound is gentler, almost tinkling, much less emphatic, and in places, derivative. 

Bruce Springsteen and “Americana” has always been a self-proclaimed influence for Fender: a recent Times article discussed his label of ‘The Springsteen of the northeast’. Springsteen’s influence can be felt not just in Fender’s sound, but in their shared focus on disenfranchisement, the desire to escape, the power of place to impact a life. And while People Watching still calls on Springsteen, it is also more random: there are shades of R.E.M in ‘Nostalgia’s Lie’, shades of Oasis in ‘Rein Me In’, shades even of Fontaines D.C.’s ‘Starburster’ in ‘TV Dinner’. All, individually, are great artists and songs, and artistic appreciation/homage is obviously a major part of all music making, too – often not even deliberate. Across this album though, it comes across as a bit inconsistent: an undecided melange, as though homage were trying to plug the void of individual inspiration, and left some gaps.

But inspiration can never remain the same. Between Fender’s Hypersonic Missiles (2019) and this year’s album, he has moved away from North Shields – the anchor/kite/bone marrow of his earlier work – entered his 3rd decade, been on world tours, performed at Glastonbury, even opened for ‘The Boss’ himself. It is only fair that his music progresses, moves, fluctuates with him; as listeners, we can mourn the change, but shouldn’t ultimately resent it.

And People Watching isn’t an entire disappointment. The gentler tone is not unsuccessful; ‘Rein Me In’ has a deliciously Western, cowboy flavour, and somehow manages to rhyme ‘bliss’ and ‘tinnitus’ with complete conviction. ‘Nostalgia’s Lie’, too, is subtly affecting. Elegiac and reminiscent, it is also aware of the rose-tinted, endlessly summery way we look back on the past – particularly fitting for students, especially those of us in our final year. ‘Remember my Name’ – in touching reference to his grandparents – is a very persuasive argument for brass bands, and ‘TV Dinner’, I would argue, stands on its own: an entirely compelling listen and absolutely one of his best, from any album. 

It is startlingly different to the rest of People Watching, and definitely ‘Starburster’ – adjacent with its slippery chromaticism; it is also magnificent, kind of smoldering and metallic, with persuasive strength in the chorus and a “proper” guitar solo towards the end. Easily on a level with any of his other heavyweights like ‘Play God’ or ‘Aye’, ‘TV Dinner’ is even more poetic, more grown up, more cutting, with sophisticated lyrical layers like ‘the constant spin, the merry-go Round/house-kick into the face,’ (which sounds better if you listen to it!). It feels like a glimpse of the passion of Fender’s early sound, with the control and finesse of a third-album-artist; it feels almost like it could be the prototype sound for a fourth album.

And this is where I stand, now my rage has abated, with People Watching. As an album, it seems to signify a loss of power, of passion and outrage; but, in the quietness, there has emerged a sense of aging, growing wiser, maybe more at peace – and of greater, other, sounds still to come.

And it really does grow on you over the course of a few sunny months: the perfect soundtrack for a long, heady summer. 

Categories
Poetry

Lessons in Fern-Curl and Flight

Image credit: gustav-klimt.com

By Toby Dossett

We get deer in the field over the wooden fence,
Some with antlers that poke out of the tall grass at the start of autumn, 
When the ferns have begun their retreat.
If they’re feeling brave, 
They will vault the fence,
(you can sometimes catch them in the morning)
And they venture to the apple tree that we planted several years ago
And catch the last fruit of the season
Before it rots on the ground and joins the earth and bugs,

In summer we get dragonflies and butterflies and lots of bees,
Once, the bees settled in the panelling of the house and I wanted them to make their home there,
I like the sound of their teamwork,
Another summer, an adder decided the best sunbathing spot 
Was in the middle of the drive, 
I told everyone that if I was an adder,
I would sit on the gravel and soak up the sun much the same, 
He was left undisturbed,

If you stay up late at night, in July
The bats are active just before the dewiness seeps through the ground, 
My brother took a great photo of the dew, 
It’s one of my favourites,
There are badgers that burrow on the little hill near the beds of moss, 
I never see them but follow their intricate paths through the pine trees, 
When I was younger I made a map of the woods, 
It even included the swamp on the other side of the brook, 
(you need big wellies to go exploring there)
Where the big skunk cabbage grows, 
The map is still on our kitchen fridge.

You can collect pinecones, touch the curl of ferns,
Admire the silver birches dappled with lichen, Guess which trees the sparrows are nesting in,
Climb the fallen tree and test your balance, And lie on the plume moss,
You can do all of these things in this place, 
My dog Honey loves the woods too, 
She sprints round and round the loop, 
And when you call her
She bounces like a gazelle through the bracken and gold of the browning fern, 
She chews sticks in the place that’s calm for meditation
And licks her paws when she treads on a thorn,

Not many other walkers have found this place, Because the bridge across peanut butter brook, 
(it’s stained rusty orange with copper)
Is very frail and thin,
You wouldn’t want to fall in,
Which Pop did once,
And he was very grumpy over Christmas dinner,
The holly is becoming invasive there now,
I try and pick out the little shoots before they become too pesty, 
And I always prick my fingers,
And then I’m left with a sting that’s maybe saying, 
Leave the woods alone,
it’s doing what it wants, 
(but I certainly don’t want the woods to be full of holly bushes) 
((that would not be pleasant))
I will think of a solution in the meantime,

The woods help me to watch the seasons
And break up the time of my own
Yearly existence
I know which trees do tree things when, 
And when foxgloves should start to appear,
My mum’s favourites are:
The lilac bluebells
(more things should be lilac in this world)
which blanket the grove on the way up to the field, 
The trainline runs perpendicular to, 
The frosted grass in the winter, 
I like to spot the red-kites
Beady eyed and engaged 
In dogfight and the hunt
We sometimes watch each other in harmony,
Because they know I don’t scare away the field shrews. 

Categories
Culture

A Sit Down With Durham Film Festival President, Val Moreno

By Edward Bayliss

Val Moreno-Alvarado, a second year student, is president of the Durham Film Festival 2025. I caught up with her to discuss all things filmmaking, and to talk about the film festival itself, which in its fourth year, looks ready and set to champion the efforts of student filmmakers around the world.

 
What is the state of student filmmaking at Durham University?

‘When I first came to Durham, it seemed as though student filmmaking was very niche. But this year, at the first session that we had [at DU Filmmaking Society], there were around sixty people, and I realised how much people care about filmmaking, and in so many different fields –  people are into soundtracking, people want to act, to direct. There are film courses available at the university, but they are very theoretical – there’s no field experience – and that’s why the filmmaking society exists. We’ve had a number of films produced by Durham students who are aware of DFF through the filmmaking society.’

Tell me about the character of the film festival itself – what does it involve?

‘It’s a week of events. The main event is the screening on 14th June – we have a panel of judges coming up to Durham, two of whom are lecturers at the university. One is called Santiago, he has a lot of expertise in film festivals – he sat on the board at the Berlin Short Film Festival. We also have someone coming from the British Film Institute, who is the co-president of the London Short Film Festival and has been really helpful in assisting us with our own festival. We will screen around eight films, with an awards ceremony, a Q&A, and a drinks reception afterwards at the school foundation near the viaduct. Leading up to this, we have two events, the first of which is an open air cinema on 10th June at Aidan’s beer garden, with the next event on 12th June at Bar 33, with live music and an old Hollywood atmosphere. The final event is on 15th June, after the short film screening, with a live orchestra soundtracking films at the Masonic Hall.’ 

In unashamed Letterboxd fashion, what are your four favourite films?

‘I’ve been dying for someone to ask me this! I’ll try not to sound too pretentious, but also like I know something about cinema. The first one I have a very emotional connection with, it’s called Güeros, and it’s just perfect – the production and story are both very sentimental, and beautiful, I think. It also comes from Mexico, which lends a further familiarity. My next would be Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red which was amazing, the ending was perfect, and overall, the storytelling is perfect. Then I would say Lovers on the Bridge, by Leos Carax. It’s a love story, but very real and not cheesy or hyper-romantic. And number four, I’m between Dead Poets Society, which I was really shaken by the first time I saw it, or La Haine which has a similar vibe to Güeros, black and white, artsy but unpretentious.’

Is there a particular film set or production you’d have liked to have been around?

‘I think Babylon, by Damien Chazelle. There is this one scene where there’s a party, it’s so chaotic, there’s an elephant, and dancing, the music is perfect. But overall, the whole film is about making films, and how much he appreciates the actual production of films. I think it would be crazy to have seen a production try to capture a production!’

And, a director whose brains you’d like to pick? 

‘I think, maybe Kieślowski. He also has a series of religious films called The Decalogue based on the Ten Commandments, though I hear he is not particularly religious. I’d like to ask him about his motivations there, where that inspiration came from. I also feel as though a lot of his films are characterised by mundanity, and I’d like to know if that came from personal experience. I think in general, filmmakers always put a part of themselves in their films, but I’d like to know to what extent this is the case with him.’ 

Check the Durham Film Festival Instagram account for events and updates, @durham_filmfest

Categories
Culture

Hauntology, Depression and Libido in the Lyrics of Isaac Wood

By Dan Xiberras

Hauntology is a term originally coined by Jacques Derrida. It concerns the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This concept was developed by Mark Fisher in relation to art, who employed the idea to argue that culture in the 21st century is characterised by a sterile, recycled tonality on account of neoliberalism – ‘What it is to live in the 21st century is living 20th century culture on higher definition screens.’ This, he posits, has resulted in ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ and an endemic depression among young people. In this essay I intend to apply Fisher’s analysis of a modern hauntological culture to the lyrics of Isaac Wood, former frontman of the British band Black Country, New Road (BCNR). Wood’s bleak yet witty lyricism takes the shape of an abstracted, cryptic life writing. It is at once deeply personal, even confessional, and at the same time, entirely indecipherable – its imagery able to wholly absorb the projections of any listener / reader. Nonetheless, within Wood’s lyrics the centrality of Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology (and its relation to their depressive tone / a national endemic depression) is evident. 

Isaac Wood is a hauntological figure himself. Following the release of BCNR’s second, most critically acclaimed, album Ants From up There (AFUT), he took a permanent step back from the band stating, ‘Hello everyone, I have bad news which is that I have been feeling sad and afraid too…it is the kind of sad and afraid feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time.’ His departure would plague BCNR’s subsequent releases, with many fans mourning the band’s ‘lost future’ in Wood’s absence. AFUT is an album characterised by the notion of lost futures, its cover featuring an ‘airfix’ style Concorde sealed inside a plastic bag. The Concorde itself features as an extended metaphor in the album’s lyrical content, solely written by Wood. The aircraft, once considered the future of civil aviation and now defunct, acts as the centermost hauntological object in Wood’s writing here – itself pertaining metaphorically to a former relationship of Wood’s characterised by the idea of the ‘Concorde / sunk cost fallacy’. Fisher’s analysis of Burial’s album ‘Untrue’ can also be applied here – AFUT‘s lyrical content similarly ‘seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.’ This evident in the album’s eighth track ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’:

So, clean your soup maker and breathe in
Your chicken, broccoli, and everything
The tug that’s between us
That long string
Concorde, Bound 2
And my evening
The good hunter’s guide to a bad night
Darling, I’ll spoil it myself
Thanks, you’re leaving
Well, I tried just to stroke your dreams better
But darling, I see that you’re not really sleeping

Here we see a slow disintegration of Wood’s fractured relationship induce a depression which is presented in an entirely hauntological light. The lyricist depicts, in Fisher’s words, not ‘apathy’ nor ‘cynicism’, but ‘reflexive impotence’:

‘They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlation in widespread pathologies.’

Wood’s deterministic spoiling of an evening which he introduces not as a shared moment but as his own, ‘my evening’, is an entirely reflexive action, and one which seems to be in response to a similarly disparate, distant and oppositional relationship – ‘The tug that’s between us / That long string’. The observation that his partner is ‘not really sleeping’, furthers this, and touches on the centrality of depression, the bed and libido in Wood’s lyrical life writing, wherein ‘reflexive impotence’ takes on a newfound sexual capacity. For instance, in the track ‘Athens, France’ Wood writes the lines, ‘She flies to Paris, France / I come down in her childhood bed / And write the words I’ll one day wish that I had never said’. We may observe here a similarly sexual ‘reflexive impotence’- it is with a climax in his partner’s ‘childhood bed’ where the seemingly inescapable ill-fated future relationship is conceived. The song ends ‘Won’t give up / Too soft to touch / And how hard could it really be?’, the humorous opposition of ‘too soft’ and ‘how hard’ implying a painful awareness of the ‘reflexive impotence’ at play. This awareness is foregrounded crudely in ‘Sunglasses’, where Wood’s partner is granted a voice rife with impatient distain ordering him to ‘Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet / And fuck me like you mean it this time, Isaac’. Here, the SSRI ‘Sertraline’ is depicted as an early material token of his impotence.

The relationship’s inevitable terminus is outlined on the very last track of AFUT, ‘Basketball Shoes’, in the lines ‘In my bed sheets now wet / Of Charlie I pray to forget / All I’ve been forms the drone / We sing the rest’. They detail a wet dream, the stain of which serves as the final lasting symbol of this sexual ‘reflexive impotence’, a liminal metaphorical emblem of the space between mourning and melancholia, terms which Fisher describes as such:

‘Both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared.’

In understanding Wood’s impotence as both mournful and melancholic, we may observe the hauntological undertones of this lyrical depiction of a sexual relationship defined by depression. Following the tradition of literary associations between food and sexuality, ‘Bread Song’ outlines a libido which is simultaneously withdrawn ‘from the lost object’ and ‘attached to what has disappeared’:

So show me the land you acquire
And slip into something beside
The holes you tried to hide
And lay out your rules for the night
Oh, don’t eat your toast in my bed
Oh darling, I
I never felt the crumbs until you said
“This place is not for any man
Nor particles of bread” 

Yet again, the bed forms the stage for another ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’, and the crumbs on it induce another deterministic profession of the relationship’s trajectory. The bed is not the place for ‘any man’ and the crumbs of toast, analogous to Wood’s inconsumable sexual appetite, amount to an uncomfortable reminder of this. We see this device elsewhere in Wood’s lyrics such as in the line ‘darling I’m starving myself’ and ‘every time I try to make lunch / For anyone else, in my head / I end up dreaming of you’. The extended metaphor echoes ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’, where Wood’s retrospectivity of ‘I tried just to’ enhances the seemingly unavoidable ‘slow cancellation’ of the relationship’s ‘future’- it’s future at once being an ‘already existing’ declination of ‘affairs’, a mourned potential (idealistic) ‘lost future’ and a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. These three manifestations of ‘future’ are evident in the album’s fifth track ‘Good Will Hunting’:

It’s just been a weekend
But in my mind
We summer in France
With our genius daughters now
And you teach me to play the piano

You call
I’ll be there
Once more
I’m scared of
The phone
Don’t ring it
Please know
That I’m just trying to find
Some way to keep me in your mind
And later on
Everyone will say it was cool

She had Billie Eilish style
Moving to Berlin for a little while
I’m tryna find something to hold on to
Never text me nothing
But she wants to tell me
She’s not that hard to find
And message me if you change your mind
Darling, I’ll keep fine

Here we can observe these concurrent hauntological futures – the anxiety Wood feels towards a separated future (‘Please know / That I’m just trying to find / Some way to keep me in your mind’), the mourned idealised future (But in my mind / We summer in France / With our genius daughters now / And you teach me to play the piano), and the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy (‘I’m tryna find something to hold on to / Never text me nothing / But she wants to’). More pertinently, we learn that he is fearful of every single one of them. He is ‘scared of / the phone’, of the inevitable conversation and subsequent termination of the relationship. Wood discussed the centrality of anxiety in his lyrics in an interview titled ‘Making Good Their Escape’:

“I wouldn’t consider anxiety a conscious influence of mine at all really – but it is often felt at times of great importance and times of great importance are naturally things we might choose to write or sing about.’

Despite his statement, a depressive anxiety pervades a great deal of Wood’s lyrical content, and it is expressed in a manner equivalent to that of Mark Fisher insofar as that its source appears external, a symptom of the surrounding hauntological culture. As Fisher puts it:

‘it’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me.’

In Wood’s writing on AFUT, criticism of an external, sterile and recycled neoliberal culture is evident – in ‘Good Will Hunting’ the line ‘She had Billie Eilish style /Moving to Berlin for a little while’ carries a particularly mocking tone. However, in the lyrical content of the previous album, For the First Time (FTFT), it is far more overt, Wood’s tone appearing to be influenced by Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp. More specifically the mood of the opening track ‘The Fear’ from their 1995 album This is Hardcore, which conveys an overtly British sense of class-based hauntological dread. This is particularly noticeable in BCNR’s ‘Sunglasses’:

Mother is juicing watermelons on the breakfast island
And with frail hands she grips the NutriBullet
And the bite of its blades reminds me of a future
That I am in no way part of
And in a wall of photographs
In the downstairs second living room’s TV area
I become her father
And complain of mediocre theatre in the daytime
And ice in single malt whiskey at night
Of rising skirt hems, lowering IQs
And things just aren’t built like they used to be
The absolute pinnacle of British engineering

Here, Wood’s alienation in a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’, one that he is ‘in no way part of’, is not merely anxiety inducing, it is painful – likened to the ‘bite’ of the NutriBullet’s ‘blades’. In the future’s absence, all that remains prospectively for him is to become his partner’s ‘father’, and rehash the same postcolonial complaint that ‘things just aren’t built like they used to be’, himself becoming ‘the absolute pinnacle of British engineering’- a reproduction of history being the ‘pinnacle’ of attainment and the only recourse for a young man existing in a hauntological culture: ‘20th century culture on higher definition screens’. Moreover, Wood’s anxiety is inherently tied to class, as evidenced by the particularly British cultural capital associated with the words ‘theatre’ and ‘whiskey’. The same sentiment is evident in ‘Science Fair’:

References, references, references
What are you on tonight?
I love this city
Despite the burden of preferences
What a time to be alive
Oh, I know where I’m going
It’s Black Country out there

I saw you undressing
It was at the Cirque Du Soleil
And it was such an intimate performance
I swear to god you looked right at me
And let a silk red ribbon fall between your hands

But as I slowly sobered
I felt the rubbing of shoulders
I smelt the sweat and the children crying
I was just one among crowded stands
And still with sticky hands
I bolted through the gallery
With Cola stains on my best white shirt
And nothing to lose
Oh, I was born to run
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there


Here the band’s nomenclature takes on new meaning. Wood realises his own absolute absence of individuality within neoliberal hauntological culture at the Cirque Du Soleil, which marrs his ‘best white shirt’ with ‘Cola stains’. This is especially apt when considering Slavoj Zizek’s argument that Coca Cola is the perfect commodity, representative of ‘the mysterious something more. The indescribable excess which is the object cause of my desire’. As such, we might read this sugared staining as the very symbol of late-stage capitalism and consumer desire staining the oppositional ‘white’ clean slate for an alternate future. This is an especially effective reading of the lyrics when you extend the idea to the refrain of ‘It’s Black Country out there’, which could pertain to the consequential staining of the entire nation. ‘Out there’ becomes juxtaposed with an implied ‘in here’. ‘Out there’ it is ‘Black’, there is nothing- only absence. ‘In here’, at the Cirque Du Soleil, all that remains is the reproduction of an 18th century form of entertainment, one in which the individual is ‘just one among crowded stands’, surrounded by ‘References, references, references’- there is nothing new. The sentiment bears resounding similarity to that of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life- Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:

‘…our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectra’

It is no wonder, therefore, that a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ would possess an ‘endemic’ depression. In ‘Track X (The Guest)’, Wood encapsulates such a bleak ‘zeitgeist’ artfully, positioning himself among the ‘spectra’:

Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest
Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest

Dancing to Jerskin, I got down on my knees
I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi
I told my friend Jack that it could havе been you
I know it was funny, but I was struggling, too

I left my drink on the eighteenth floor
I thought about jumping in your facе when you saw
I thought of my father and proving him wrong
But mostly of Molly and Dylan and my mum

The ‘zeitgeist’ is portrayed as one which is entirely alienating. Wood is not merely now a ‘guest’ in his own culture, he has ‘always been’ such, a fate which causes him to consider leaving his ‘drink’ (referencing the ‘slow sobering’ from the surrounding culture in ‘Science Fair’) and initiating the cessation of his own life in front of a loved one. This pervading sense of alienation is consolidated in the final track of FTFT, ‘Opus’, which ends with the repeated refrain, ‘Everybody’s coming up / Oh, I guess I’m a little bit late to the party’. The lines imply a hauntological reproduction of 90s MDMA addled British rave culture and, in fact, earlier live versions of the song support this, with a dropped verse reading ‘As he talks of his travels, with so much fucking grace / Planning their revenge in basements / Planning their next DIY free party in basements’. The repetition of ‘basements’ mirrors the ‘References, references, references / What are you on tonight?’ of ‘Science Fair’, laying bare a frustration of contemporary British drug and rave culture, which exists in an inebriated splendid isolation, confined to ‘basements’ and matching the ‘passivity’ of Fisher’s cultural diagnosis of a ‘reflexive impotence’. It is not only Wood who is ‘late to the party’, but the party goers themselves. The track’s title ‘Opus’, meaning ‘(as a result of) work’ / ‘labour’ in Latin, embodies this sentiment. The word is most frequently used to refer to the ‘Opus number’, chronological order, of a composer’s work. This is typically presented in the format ‘Opus 21’, for example. Wood’s ‘Opus’ is, however, one without a temporal signifier – it is a suspended eternal ‘labour’, one without past and future, which Fisher terms a ‘(collective) desolation of melancholia’. The very absence of a chronological marker represents the utter emptiness of a society wherein the most one can do is enact a ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’. This disenfranchisement causes, Fisher states, a ‘malign spectre’ of depression. In Wood’s writing, this is neatly summed up by three lines of an Untitled track from his solo project ‘The Guest’- ‘But I was almost something / Yeah, I was almost something / And now I’m almost nothing’.

To conclude, the abstracted life writing of Isaac Wood’s lyrics is entirely enmeshed with the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This is shown not only to induce an inhospitable cultural reality, but a depressive state of being which seeps both into personal relationships and self-perception. Consequently, Wood’s creative output is limited to a kind of ‘observation’ devoid of agency, the futility and staticity of which lends, in hindsight, an almost inevitable sense to the termination of his publicly written work. What remains, therefore, is that the act of actively listening to, rather than hearing, Wood’s lyrical expression has a profound capacity to induce an implicit acknowledgement of one’s own hauntological reality.

Image credit:  the-artifice.com

Categories
Perspective

Grief and Meaninglessness in Asteroid City

Image credit: Awant Medium

By Matthew Dodd

Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature Asteroid City begins with a stark clarification: ‘Asteroid City does not exist’. A television presenter, played by Bryan Cranston, explains to us that, within the context of the film, ‘Asteroid City’ is a fictional play, the production of which has been dramatised for the purpose of a television programme on contemporary American theatre. Its characters are fictional, as are its actors, its writer and its director. As the audience, we fill in the implicit additional reminder: we are watching a film, this is not real. Wes Anderson has always toyed with the conscious artificiality of his films – The Royal Tenenbaums presenting itself as a novel, Rushmore as a play – but Asteroid City sees the director take this notion to its logical extreme. It is a film which plays on at least three narrative levels at any given time, revelling in the complexity of its construction. It’s easy to get lost along the way: we follow Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed photographer who suddenly meets an alien at a junior stargazing event, as well as Jones Hall, the actor playing the part of Augie Steenbeck. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s television host erroneously appears within the play and questions ‘am I not in this?’ On a first watch, Asteroid City may appear a disorienting and ultimately pointless venture, wherein emotional truth is submerged in a mess of muddled narratives and overly quirky stylisation. Yet, it is precisely because of its deliberate artificiality that the film works so well and, in truth, bears such a sincere emotional heart.  

Throughout the film, characters hold the reality of their feelings at a strange, syntactical remove. Tilda Swinton’s Professor Hickenlooper remarks that ‘I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should’ve.’ This kind of overwrought dialogue is typical for Asteroid City. In classically Anderson-ian style, lines of this sort are delivered in a macabre monotone, as though these Oscar-winning actors were amateurs in a small-town production. It is this register of unreality which imbues Asteroid City with its special strength. What could be read as overt quirkiness – something Anderson is regularly accused of – is in fact representative of something deeper, an emotional detachment which dogs the film as a whole. Characters hold their emotions at arm’s length, plays exist within films, nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite says what they mean. 

Things happen in Asteroid City for no apparent reason. First, it’s a car exploding, then it’s an alien coming to steal an asteroid, and then that same alien coming back to return said asteroid. When faced with the unexplainable, humans are troubled. We like to rationalise and we like to understand. The other major event to take place in Asteroid City without a reason, prior to the events of the film itself, is the death of Augie Steenbeck’s wife, the mother of his four children. The alien’s pointless invasion becomes a symbol of her death, a moment in time with no motivation or purpose but which fundamentally alters life as we know it. Photographing it, Augie hopes to have some kind of closure, some elucidation of this bafflingly pointless event, but he doesn’t find it. 

Grief can be a destabilising force, rendering the world a soundstage and the rest of humanity actors. And so, when Augie Steenbeck, in the midst of the heady commotion on screen, turns to the camera and says ‘I still don’t understand the play’ before, quite literally, walking off the set, the layers of over-drawn hyperreality are levelled, and this moment of meta-theatricality becomes, instead, an intensely human moment of derealisation. In the face of grief, he becomes an actor in the play that is his life and, noticing this, decides to leave the stage. The audience’s confusion over what is actually happening – where in the film/play/television programme are we? – is mirrored by Augie’s confusion over what the play is actually about which, in turn, mirrors that deeper, nagging confusion that we all feel throughout our lives: why do things happen the way they do? The exchange between Augie/Jones and his director is, understandably, read as the central illuminating moment of the film. After 90 minutes of confused, deliberately ambiguous drama, our protagonist sits down with the director of his own story and asks the question that we, as audience, feel equally drawn to, what is actually going on? Except, this isn’t quite the question Augie ends up asking. Though he dwells on his confusion – ‘I still don’t understand the play’ – his real question is a much more direct one: ‘am I doing him right?’ 

By now the walls of meta-theatricality have collapsed into a central emotional truth. Jason Schwartzman’s role is, at this point, not quite Augie Steenbeck the character, or Jones Hall the actor, but rather a strange amalgam of the two. He asks his question, ostensibly, as an actor, but on a truer emotional level as a widower, a lost and frustrated man left to care for his children, alone. It is the genius of Asteroid City that these disparate roles are pressed together as one, setting the performance of an actor trying to convincingly play a role alongside the performance of a single father trying to behave as though everything is alright. We search for meaning in life how we search for meaning in a play; we want the alien to mean something just how we want death to mean something. As he walks through the backstage, Augie runs into the actor playing the alien – a magnificent cameo from Jeff Goldblum – explaining how he plays the alien as a metaphor. ‘Metaphor for what?’ Augie asks; ‘I don’t know yet’, the actor responds. Asteroid City very deliberately plays with its own apparent meaninglessness, a parody of a Wes Anderson film, dollhouses within dollhouses. Yet, it is precisely because Wes Anderson constructs Asteroid City so artificially that it is able to be so sincere. Raw human emotion is buried under an endless veneer of obfuscation and detachment. Asteroid City is confusing because the world is confusing. We are all actors in plays with no obvious themes. The question, therefore, isn’t what the play is about, but rather how good our performances are. The simple, revelatory answer that Asteroid City provides, through the animus of Adrien Brody’s role as director, is that it doesn’t matter, as long as you ‘keep telling the story’. 

The emotional linchpin of Asteroid City lies just beyond this moment, however, in the immediately succeeding scene. The actor Jones Hall, having gone for the fresh air his director assures him he won’t find, runs into the actor cast in the absent role of his deceased wife. ‘It’s you’, he says, ‘the wife who played my actress.’ By this point there is no illusion of specificity in the players at hand – both characters are at once the actors and their roles. Whether this is an actress playing a wife or a wife playing an actress is of little relevance, the lines read the same. The two exchange a few words before the actress/wife, played by Margot Robbie, delivers her lines, cut from the play. Robbie, simultaneously the actress and the wife, announces the central emotional torment at the heart of the film in a strange, surreal soliloquy about alien planets and the secrets of the universe: ‘maybe I think you’ll need to replace me’. We know Asteroid City isn’t real, we know the characters are illusory, we know these are just lines being read by actors, and yet none of this makes any difference. This moment is as emotionally direct as they come, a wife giving her husband permission to move on. ‘I can’t’, Jones/Steenbeck responds, to which the actress/wife replies, ‘maybe I think you’ll need to try.’ The camera, having held both characters in a balanced side-on shot now cuts brusquely to Robbie’s face. ‘I’m not coming back Augie.’ This focal exchange is held at a distance, both by the myriad of meta-narratives and the dialogue’s own modality of detachment: the truth – ‘you’ll need to try’ – is qualified by these separations – ‘maybe I think’. There is a desensitisation, an alienation from reality which pervades all the characters and their interior lives. The painful, shameful, impossible decision to journey through one’s grief, to allow oneself to move on, is hidden beneath this labyrinth of confusion. The exchange is, textually, just a recitation of some lines by two actors, and yet it transcends the layers of meaning becoming, out of something wholly artificial, something wholly earnest. Augie Steenbeck, like so many of us, buries his grief deep within and so it only follows that the truth of his feeling should be buried so similarly in this narrative sprawl. Asteroid City is unreal because grief, pain and life are unreal. The effect of the meeting on Jones Hall, the actor, is unclear, but that doesn’t really matter, its relevance is clear, the heart of Asteroid City unlocked.

Asteroid City – the city itself – takes on allegorical relevance as a kind of purgatory for its residents. Every character, excepting perhaps Steve Carrell’s motel owner, is there visiting, and yet none are able to leave. It is a neutral zone in which to deal with traumas unseen. Midge Campbell bears pretend bruises which become an avatar for the implied abuses suffered at the hands of her second-ex-husband. As she runs lines with Augie, she works through the pains of a failed marriage held at the remove of dramatic artifice. As it does throughout the film, art becomes a useful intermediary between ourselves and our emotions. Both her and Augie are afraid to move on from the events which have scarred them: as long as they are stuck in Asteroid City, they are stuck with them. To move past their unexplainable traumas, they can’t just sit with and try to analyse them, they must acknowledge them and let them go. You can’t expect to overcome your pain if you don’t first accept it. Or, more simply, as Willem Defoe’s drama teacher endlessly chants, you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Visually, Anderson employs a register of oversaturated detachment, evoking the paintings of Edward Hopper, the preeminent visual documenter of mid-century American alienation, trapping characters in frames-within-frames, focally positioning the endless flatlands that surround each of these characters. In the end, the characters leave Asteroid City overnight, with little ceremony. Our final image is of that unending desert into which our heroes recede, as an upbeat skiffle cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train plays us out. There’s no true conclusion to Asteroid City in the same way there’s no real conclusion to the desert as it drifts on endlessly, in the same way there’s no true conclusion to grief and no true answer to life.

The characters in Asteroid City are lost, bursting out of the seams of their text to find some answers to the grand mysteries of life. We might imagine ourselves as characters in plays: wouldn’t we want to walk offstage and ask our directors what the central theme of our existence is? Asteroid City understands and sympathises with such a desire but knows all too well that these sorts of questions don’t matter. We’re all playing characters just how they were written, and there’s no point trying to fight that. There is no scholarly consensus on the thematic relevance of death and loneliness. For much of his career Wes Anderson has placed real characters inside doll-house existences, drawing out the rich humanity that can only be truly realised in these hyperreal scenarios. In Asteroid City, he takes the characters out, plays with the fakeness of their existences, before returning them to the dollhouse, accepting after all that life is an incomprehensible play, devoid of morals and structure, but that this is no reason to give up on it. 

Categories
Reviews

The Army, The Navy live at Colours Hoxton

By Edward Clark

The Army, The Navy shine brilliantly live. In the cozy Colours Hoxton, the American two-piece showcased their unique style, which centres the detailed vocal harmonies of singers Sasha Goldberg and Maia Ciambriello. After growing in popularity last year, with the release of projects Fruit for Flies and Sugar for Bugs, the pair cemented themselves onstage as effortlessly talented performers, the audience in the palm of their hands.

The Army, The Navy’s Spotify Bio credits the pair’s ‘consonance’ to their being ‘childhood friends who shared a singing coach’. Live, this consonance was apparent from the moment they stepped onstage. Opening song Gentle Hellraiser – the namesake of the tour itself, of which the London date was the final gig – displayed the pair’s easy harmony. Mics were turned up to amplify Goldberg and Ciambriello’s gentle vocals. Although soft, the pair had absolute control of the room. Vocal lines were not the only thing working in tandem: both lead singers underscored themselves with detailed fingerpicking patterns played alongside one another. The pair excelled in these moments of quiet control. Songs where emphasis was placed on vocal harmony, such as Bookend and Persimmon, were exceptional.

These moments, alongside almost every number in the setlist, were supported by multi-instrumentalist Jess Kallen. Kallen’s addition provided the necessary range which The Army, The Navy’s catalogue demands. Shifting seamlessly from delicate keyboard accompaniment to heavy slide-guitar and shoegazey drone, their accompaniment elevated the live performance throughout. These heavier moments did sometimes drown out Ciambriello and Goldberg’s vocal nuance, an issue more apparent with their performance of unreleased material, where lyrics and melodies were lost. Nonetheless, heavier moments were well paced in the setlist, providing moments of reprieve which kept delicate harmonies fresh and exciting. Akin to their albums, The Army, The Navy had a clear vision for the flow of their performance, balancing subdued tracks with energetic ones and maintaining energy in the room. As the set began with captivating, quieter songs, it ended with the upbeat and dynamic Wild Again, leaving the audience wanting more.

With such a concise catalogue, I walked into Colours wondering whether Goldberg and Ciambriello actually had enough music to properly fill a setlist. I once saw a newly-popular artist play at a festival where they were forced to play all of their released songs twice, and hoped the case would not be the same here. By the third song, I realised I had nothing to worry about. Hits from their two LP’s were supported by unreleased material and personable audience interaction. Fan-favourite 40% smoothly transitioned into an acutely unique cover of Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, 40%’s catchy hook ‘Say my name, say it again’ transforming into the R&B pop banger; the result was endearing. ‘Tricked ya’’, Goldberg joked. Whether the ‘trick’ was the surprise cover itself, or a clever way to avoid having to deal with the heavy breakdown of the song’s final moments, it nonetheless entertained. Sugar for Bugs cut Rascal was transformed into an anthemic moment, as Goldberg directed the audience to sing along with the repeated vocal riffs. The pit’s quiet admiration of the pair’s harmonies seamlessly shifted into audience involvement. Goldberg and Ciambriello’s musicianship was elevated through performance.

Goldberg and Ciambriello’s performance thrives on their chemistry. As human touch in music is no longer guaranteed – the use of Artificial Intelligence in production and vocal ‘cloning’ has received endless discussion online over the past two years – The Army, The Navy offer an enchanting, human response. Moments of light choreography, laughter and connection between Ciambriello and Goldberg placed the two singers’ chemistry and consonance at centre-stage. During one unreleased song, sung a cappella with the two singers in complete unison, you could hear a pin drop in the audience. As the two friends celebrated the final moments of their sold-out first headline tour, I could only wonder as to when they will return to Europe, and doubted that it would be in a venue this intimate again. The Army, The Navy is one to watch.

Categories
Poetry

The Ammonite

By Rohan Scott

 

Over the rump of the windswept moor,

Shale crags kiss the sea.

Petrified within: the stone ghosts.

 

Along the cobbled shore

Cliffs crumble,

Amongst the cut pastry scree

These relics emerge.

 

I remember turning stones,

Plucking, discarding.

Excitement, disappointment.

 

At first, a fragmentary trace,

Shattered by chisel and mace.

Wonder and dismay draw like the tide,

Who recedes to reveal

 

I know what I’m looking for —

The perfect specimen, a galaxy like spiral.

 

Like a wading avian,

Sifting for stone cradles

On the shifting sands.

Time falls away

And light professes dusk.

 

I remember turning stones,

Plucking, discarding.

Excitement, disappointment.

 

Here! It must be this one.

 

I level the iron edge atop this stone,

I raise the hickory in an arc,

One fell swoop, cleaves it in half.

The perfect specimen, a galaxy like spiral —

An ammonite.

Categories
Perspective

Queer Paper Trails: Love in the Victorian Queer Archive

Richard Bruce Nugent, Salome Dancing (1925-1930), The Brooklyn Museum

By May Thomson

There remains an oddly enduring idea that queerness – and particularly Sapphism – came bursting into existence with all its rainbow ribbons at the precise turn of the nineteenth century. With the exception of Wilde, Victorian LGBT literature seems utterly elusive – lost, if it is there at all. 

This is, of course, a myth. And manifold factors work to mystify, omit, and  revise queer literary history. Saliently, many pieces of literature were never actually written, with the queer Victorian fearing the consequences of inhabiting a space beyond contemporary notions of virtue. That said, the Victorian era saw the beginnings of a movement towards sexual emancipation and, despite the dominant current of sexual repression, nineteenth-century sexologists like Havelock Ellis became pioneers in gender and sexuality studies. 

Victorian queer invisibility also arises from modern impressions in the enduring critical hesitance when interpreting literature and primary sources as in any way LGBT. This is an idea Susan Koppelman articulates compellingly in the preface to Two Friends, a brilliant collection of nineteenth-century lesbian short stories by American women. In opposition to queer denialists, who claim that queer identity is being retroactively imposed, she writes: ‘if we read about a man and a woman loving each other in the way… that Abby loves Sarah in “Two Friends” … we would not wonder what the story was about or quarrel about how to label the relationship. We would know.’ Her frustration is clear, and her stance invites a shift in reading practice. She later says, of the stories in the collection, that they were chosen because ‘they feel like lesbian stories to [her]’, encouraging readers to trust their own affective responses – an approach that borders on a reader-response, even phenomenological, reading of literature, with meanings emerging from lived experience and perception rather than rigid taxonomies. 

As a result of both the uneasiness with calling texts queer and the underrepresentation of explicitly queer voices in the historical record, the practice of archiving becomes crucial for the preservation and restoration of this overlooked part of literary history. Creating and engaging with banks of primary sources is essential to the work of LGBT literary recovery, offering the possibility not just of uncovering lost texts, but of contextualising, interpreting, and learning from them. Rooted specifically in the Dickinson College archive, this article will trace some forgotten queer literary fragments and ask what it means to remember that we have always existed – loving, creating, and leaving traces where we were not meant to. Queer love and identity were not absent from the Victorian world but rendered illegible by dominant moral standards. The practice of queer archival recovery, as exemplified by this archive, offers not just historical restoration but a radical reimagining of how we read, remember, and recognise love.

‘The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
     Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore’

Written in the shadow of Victorian respectability, these lines declare an unwavering commitment to authentic love in a world that refuses to see it. They honour devotion and literary vision seemingly powerful enough to fuse two beings into one: indeed, the vow above belonged to Michael Field, the shared pseudonym of lovers and writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley. The pair, though now largely obscure, were acclaimed by contemporaries Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and George Meredith, with Field deemed a promising talent before ‘his’ womanness was erroneously revealed. Whilst analysis of the literature of Michael Field could (and, in my view, should) fill thousands of pages on its own, this fragment is just one of tens of documents in Dickinson College’s Victorian Queer Archive. The archive, established by Professor Joanna Swafford, Professor Sarah Kersh, and teams of their respective students, aims to address the lack of publications of queer texts and to contribute to a fuller picture of Victorian literature. Accessible to anyone and fully digitised, it is one of the very few archives that seek to document and celebrate the often overlooked but certainly extant records of homoerotic desire, love, and identity. 

   ‘There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!). I loved her and even now love her very much.’    

This extract, from 1844, comes from the diary of ten-year-old Emily Pepys, recounting a dream she had the night before. It is an extraordinary little artifact – seemingly unremarkable, yet brimming with emotional and historical complexity. Notably, Pepys recounts her engagement not with shame, but with curiosity and warmth. However, she also makes a specific note of her gender (‘I (a girl)’) in a parenthetical aside, as if trying to reconcile the dream self with the waking self. This seems a moment of cognitive dissonance – a flicker of questioning that complicates gender identity and desire alike. This demonstrates that queer feelings do not emerge from cultural indoctrination or some ‘modern ideology.’ They are – they always have been. But, instead, are often complicated or diminished by the world of heterosexual norms and expectations. Indeed, she later describes hoping she will be ‘let off’  for her dreamy, forbidden affection. 

Whilst from a constitutional perspective the story of Queen Victoria refusing to criminalise sexual relations between women as they ‘did not do such things’ is impossible, lesbianism has been particularly overlooked throughout modern history. This text is a study in the consequences of ignoring queer love and existence, serving as a time capsule of a world that could not conceive of love between women.

‘THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. . . . They say love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth.’

In this brilliant fragment, Oscar Wilde offers us a different but equally rich example of queer desire, existence, and resistance in the nineteenth century. Wilde is a central figure in the gay literary canon, not simply because of his sexuality, but because queerness permeates his work. Although Salome’s desire here appears heterosexual, Wilde saturates his play with queer longing and aesthetics: gender inversion, camp excess, and erotic obsession. Her desire – exemplified through her stream of excitable interrogatives – is excessive, theatrical, and repetitive, even bordering on self-parody in its sheer sensuality. Salome has also been reclaimed in queer readings as a gender-transgressive figure for unapologetically commanding male attention, sharply refusing passivity, and ultimately dominating the male body. Indeed, Wilde’s rendering of Salome was deemed scandalous at the time for disrupting Victorian gender roles and sexual decorum. This is an excellent example of Koppelman’s idea about the ‘feel’ of text. Whilst not explicitly describing a queer relationship, this text exudes the flamboyance and theatricality often integral to gay culture. One example of Salome being viewed through a queer gaze is Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork. Nugent, a gay writer and painter, depicted Salome as a queer symbol of sexual defiance. Ellen McBreen argues that he was influenced by a ‘widespread gay understanding’ of Wilde’s version, further evidence of the value of perception and queer readings.

To trace queerness into the Victorian archive is not to impose modern, anachronistic categories, but to recognise what has long been obscured, silenced, and missed out of history. These texts, however veiled or fragmented, do not simply gesture towards queer existence but assert it, often with more clarity and courage than they have been appreciated for. 

The art of queer archiving is about both recovery and reanimation, making visible that which dominant histories have rendered unreadable. In reading these fragments, we not only challenge a heterosexual canon but honour the reality that queer people have always been here. This archive isn’t quiet. It hums with coded longing, risk, beauty, and defiance. To read – and, indeed, to create – archives of this sort is to remember that queer people were not just present: they were passionate, prolific, and determined to write themselves into eternity.

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WAYZGOOSE (n.)

Pronunciation: ‘ˈweɪzɡuːs

An annual festivity held in summer by the members of a printing establishment.
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