When Sam Fender was announced as the 2025 Mercury Prize winner for People Watching, it felt like something bigger than just another music award. As someone who frequently gets involved in the North East music scene, hearing him call our area the ‘best region in the country’ and show pride in his roots felt more inspiring than most musical milestones in recent years. For the North East, the award could be seen as a symbolic turning point: a recognition of not only Fender’s talent, but also the cultural energy of the North East finally getting its time to shine.
People Watching was praised by the Mercury judges as standing out for ‘its cohesion, character and ambition’, which couldn’t ring truer. Songs like ‘Chin Up’ and ‘TV Dinner’ are deeply powerful due to both their melodic qualities and their raw honesty. Personally, however, the highlight of People Watching was the use of the Easington Colliery Band for the accompaniment on ‘Remember My Name’. The use of this brass band harkens back to the North East’s industrial roots and gives voice to his family’s working-class heritage; it is therefore all the more important that he chose to use a County Durham band, granting visibility to North East musicians and musical tradition.
For the first year, the Mercury Prize celebrations were held outside of London, instead being held at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena. This is incredibly significant in recognising that the North East is often overshadowed. The region has long produced talent such as James Arthur, Sting, and Maximo Park, but is rarely framed as a cohesive ‘scene’ in the same way as places like Manchester. The region’s industrial decline and economic inequality have often shaped its identity, with musical output often framed as isolated success stories rather than evidence of a living, breathing (yet underfunded and overlooked) ecosystem.
There is a possibility that this could become a catalyst for wider improvement. Firstly, visibility in itself matters. When a globally recognised artist succeeds without abandoning his background, it validates the ambitions of those in his wake, changing the idea of ‘making it’ from a dream into a feasible possibility. Moreover, this visibility could attract public arts funding and more touring investments, giving venues like Newcastle’s Cluny, Sunderland’s Independent and Stockton’s Georgian Theatre the help they need to nurture the next wave of talent. The Mercury Prize itself has directly facilitated this through their 2025 Mercury Fringe, creating workshops and performance opportunities for upcoming local artists. A highlight of this initiative was seeing Middlesbrough’s Finn Forster, fresh off supporting Stereophonics on tour and playing the main stage at Kendal Calling, both perform and discuss the importance of support for North East creatives on BBC Look North.
However, we must remain realistic in our optimism. A single win for the North East cannot overturn decades of centralisation within the music industry. Many labels, media outlets, and funding opportunities still lie in the South; without investment in North East musical infrastructure, there is a risk that this victory will remain as a symbol rather than cause tangible change. We must, then, turn our heads towards the projects creating positive opportunities that are already present within the North East. For instance, regional festivals The Gathering Sounds and Stockton Calling occur yearly, bringing big names in the indie scene to headline local venues, such as Keo and Circa Waves, therefore bringing paying music lovers into local music venues. In doing so, they also generate gigs for upcoming musicians, such as Newcastle’s Labyrinthine Oceans, Teesside’s Marina Josephina and Durham’s own Jam Tub. There are also groups such as Generator, an organisation committed to uplifting the North by providing opportunities to grow and progress for those pursuing music.
In an interview following his win, Sam Fender was asked what this achievement means for other North East musicians, to which he told the interviewer to ‘ask them’, placing the conversation back into the hands of grassroots artists. This year’s Mercury Prize encouraged critics and audiences to look beyond the centralised creative hubs and reframe the map of British music. Whether this moment becomes a watershed or a footnote depends on what happens next and whether the industry decides to finally act. But, for now, support North East venues, stream local bands – and who knows? Not only might you get bragging rights when your new favourite artist blows up, but you can help facilitate the dreams and livelihoods of talented creatives who may have been overlooked otherwise.
That was the most beautifully delicate film I have ever seen. I do not really know how to put into words how I feel about that film. The beginning was slow and I was afraid to eat my popcorn. It was so quiet, and I am quite loud. God bless the casting agent – Buckley and Mescal gave two of the best performances I have ever seen grace a screen. The rawness, the pain – I am sure I have never felt such pain. The cinematography alone was wonderful, the coupling of silent and perfectly still wide shots with shaky and personal and painful close-ups brought us into an England that doesn’t exist anymore. We saw the colours of Spring, we saw the black of death, and the red that exists in between those two things. The carefully crafted narrative, and the lack of focus on the work of Shakespeare, was phenomenal. We see him as absent, frustrating, and at times aggressive. We are with Agnes wholly until the play and then, like her, we are united once again – we see Shakespeare’s grief on stage. And we get to stare into the eyes of a mother losing her child once again. And suddenly everything I knew about Hamlet is unwritten, everything I thought I understood of the play, nay, the world, is undone. I once wrote in an essay that Hamlet is “a passive canvas on which the world around paints”. I think I still agree – but for a different reason. Hamlet is our grief, Hamnet is theirs. In the film the child chooses to give his life for his sister’s. The viewer is put in the position of death – we gaze at the boy, who gazes back at us – perhaps mirroring the idea that Hamlet is aware that he is merely playing a part in a play. Hamnet never got to live, but his parents refuse to believe he is gone, or in heaven. William wonders where he is: Anne sees only nothing. Death is presented as inevitable – Shakespeare’s mother lost three girls, and Anne has a vision of dying surrounded by two of her children. We know death must come, as we do in Hamlet, we just hope it will not. Regardless, death is projected onto Hamnet and Hamlet alike. We see the illness shake Hamnet, paralleled in Claudius’ writhing as he drinks his poison. We see Agnes’ pain, her shocking pain, watching her child die once more on stage. It is almost too much to bear. Shakespeare, who, as he states at the beginning of the film, struggles to put feelings into words, redeems himself for being the absentee father – or perhaps, he at least finds a way to show his wife his own grief, his own pain. I will be shocked and outraged if Jessie Buckley does not win an Oscar – she truly suspended my disbelief. Like in Hamlet, we hope that little sweet child who sacrifices himself will not die. We pray to a God we don’t believe in; we bury our head in popcorn; we cover our eyes with tears. But the boy dies and in his final moments, he is cradled: Hamnet by his mother, Hamlet by the audience, and we, in the cinema, are left alive, but alone. We almost feel envy, for one who is truly loved. I was waiting for Horatio’s famous last couple of lines, but we did not need to be told ‘Goodnight, my sweet prince’ for we saw the farewell. Some things are better felt than said.
I’d love to speak with Leonard. He’s a sportsman and a shepherd. He’s a lazy bastard, living in a suit. – Leonard Cohen, ‘Going Home’
In 1994, the Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen escaped to the mountains outside Los Angeles to study Zen Buddhism with the monks at Mount Baldy Zen Center. He lived there five years, becoming himself an ordained Buddhist monk, drinking whisky and writing poetry, before returning to civilisation. “I wasn’t looking for a religion,” claimed Cohen, “I already had a perfectly good one of those.” The abscondment to the mountains was, to Cohen, the only logical way to escape the hard-drinking, depressive malaise into which he’d fallen during the early 90s. Failing to find answers in psychoanalysis, Cohen “bumped into someone who seemed to be at ease with himself and at ease with others” and headed for the hills. Many of the poems Cohen wrote during his time at Mount Baldy would appear in Book of Longing, his first book of poems since the 80s. The five years at Mount Baldy did not grant Cohen inner peace but nevertheless exerted a manifold influence on his post-millennium work. In 2023, eight years after Cohen’s death, his song Anthem was invoked on boygenius’ track Leonard Cohen, in which Lucy Dacus quotes his observation that “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” before adding her own, that “I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry, but I agree.”
In the years since his death, Leonard Cohen has only continued his elevation to the saintlike status that had begun being afforded him in life. The prototypical poet-singer, the image of his steeled jowls half-covered by the brim of his fedora, grimly crooning his way through one of a lifetime’s worth of sung reflections stands firm in the popular consciousness. He is, alongside friend and contemporary Bob Dylan, one of the true folk heroes of modern culture. He is synonymous with a style of confessional, dreary talk-singing; the standard bearer of a genre which would be picked up by everyone from Nick Cave to Fiona Apple to Cameron Winter. This mystique, however, has always been steeped in his reputation as one of music’s pre-eminent womanisers. Joni Mitchell, his one-time lover, recalled him as a ‘‘boudoir poet’’; his numerous attachments to various artists, musicians, and actresses remain the stuff of musical legend. It was an infamy Cohen himself disavowed: ‘‘my reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone’’, he would later reflect. And yet, it is Cohen’s steadfast commitment to cataloguing life’s sordid physicality which sets him apart from the bulk of his peers and embeds his influence into the firmament of popular music.
When Taylor Swift released her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, much criticism was levied against the song Wood and its metaphorical allusions to the penis of Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce. The song, which compares said appendage to everything from a ‘redwood tree’ to a ‘hard rock’, was described by Guardian critic Alex Petridis as one which ‘‘clambers on a table in a Wetherspoons pub with a skew-whiff bridal veil on its head and an L-plate around its neck and favours everyone in earshot with a loud paean to the size of her fiancé’s penis.’’ As Swift learnt, to write well about the realities of sexual life is no mean feat. In this arena, Leonard Cohen is an unparalleled talent. A poet before a musician, Cohen revels in marrying off the sacred and the profane with wry aplomb. On Chelsea Hotel #2, a beautiful ode to fleeting love that recounts the author’s short-lived affair with Janis Joplin, Cohen offers music’s prettiest account of oral sex: ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / you were talking so brave and so sweet / giving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street.’ Cohen finds no shame in confessing his sexual exploits. Heroic couplets and the lilting internal rhyme of ‘bed’ and ‘head’ sublimate the awkward physicality of fellatio into a scene of both aesthetic and emotional gentility. It is as proper to describe one’s lover as ‘so brave and so sweet’ as it is to describe them ‘giving me head’: for Cohen they are two clauses in the same sentence. Cohen does not parse out the beauty from romance, deeming the physical unworthy of poetic attention, but instead accepts the whole.
The body is the central vessel of human expression, in Cohen’s world. Poetry is not the dominion of ideals, but should derive from the hands, mouths, legs and shoulders of the poet. ‘I locked you in this body / I meant it as a kind of trial / you can use it for a weapon / or to make some woman smile’ , a father – whether the connection is one of patrilineage or divine creation is unclear – tells his son on Lover, Lover, Lover. This liturgical notion of life as a ‘trial’ on how to use one’s body is essential and the album at large, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, finds Cohen at the crossroads of this crisis. Written and recorded at the onset of the Yom Kippur War, Cohen is wracked by the spectre of violence. The first verse of Lover, Lover, Lover sees Cohen implore the Father, ‘change my name / the one I’m using now it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame.’ – his nomic allegiance to Kohenism becoming itself a summons to arms. Performing on the battlefield in Sinai, Cohen told audience members “I don’t care if their war is just or not. I know only that war is cruel, that it leaves bones, blood and ugly stains on the holy soil.” The question, then, of using one’s body as ‘a weapon’ is not mere poetic speculation. Physical love is the Other to physical violence and, by extension, the imperative. In no uncertain terms, Leonard Cohen is a lover, not a fighter.
Deleuze wrote that “to desire is to become delirious in some way.” Few artists have been as delirious as Leonard Cohen. For him, desire is debasement, the utter annihilation of the self. Voyeurism and the painful art of yearning are as much a part of Cohen’s system of desire as sex itself. With I’m Your Man, Cohen brings to the fore the inherently animal nature of passion – ‘I’ll crawl to you baby and I’d fall at your feet / and I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat.’ On Paper-Thin Hotel, a jilted lover listens through the wall as the subject of his affection makes love to another – ‘the struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb / the grunt of unity as he came in.’ This non-adultery is, to the speaker’s surprise, a relief: ‘A heavy burden lifted from my soul / I heard that love was out of my control.’ Without the bodily specificity, such a song fails in its object. It is the realities of physical love, the grunting, struggling messiness, which knock the speaker out of his poetic revery. Life moves on whilst we wax lyrical. Indeed, Cohen’s most enduringly popular love song centres on a woman with whom he never actually had a relationship. Suzanne Verdal, with whom Cohen walked Old Montreal and drank Constant Common tea, was a woman Cohen only “imagined” having sex with. The lack of physical intimacy is no hindrance, it would seem, as the bodily connection extends to a mental-spiritual one: ‘you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.’
boygenius’ ironic half-dismissal of Cohen the horny poet speaks to the gross missteps of our modern musical luminaries. It seeks, with superior morality, to extract the poetry (‘there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in’) whilst distancing itself from the old man who wrote it. The truth is, of course, that we can’t have one without the other. The same Cohen who wrote Bird on a Wire also wrote Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On. More urgently than that, though, is the latent desire on the part of many artists to painfully over-correct from the hyper-sexualised misogyny of the pre-MeToo cultural sphere by sanitising life to the point of sterility. For many contemporary artists, the reality of bodily existence is a messy inconvenience, best kept at an arm’s length. Artists like boygenius’ component parts are at their best when they front the truth of human connection in all its seediness – ‘you are sick and you’re married and you might be dying / but you’re holding me like water in your hands’ – but too often resist the grotesqueness that it is to live and love in a human body. Self-described Cohen acolyte Cameron Winter seems to understand this, mentioning feet in no less than six of the songs he’s released in the last eighteen months. Humanity is inescapably bodily, in its beauty, frailty and vulgarity. Any artist with a claim to understanding life must see the beauty in this as Leonard Cohen so effortlessly did. Bring on the perverts.
It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star I guess you go for nothing, if you really wanna go that far – Leonard Cohen, ‘Death of a Ladies Man’
The English language has been used consistently in the United Kingdom for over 1,500 years. When Germanic dialects were brought over by Anglo-Saxon settlers in early medieval England, what we know today as “Old English” was born. Celtic languages which dominated the country, those known collectively as “Common Brittonic”, which themselves are ancestors of modern-day Cornish and Welsh, were soon replaced by this Germanic influence. However, despite both being given the name “English”, how similar is today’s language to the Old English of the past?
The switch between Old and Middle English
A well-preserved jewel of Old English is the opening line of the famous poem “Beowulf”, which reads, “Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon”. As an English speaker in the 21st century, you likely skimmed over that; it is simply illegible to you. However, it might make you wonder just what happened over the centuries to make Old English so different from the version we use today.
It is widely considered that the two are separate languages. Many factors shaped modern-day English into something unrecognisable when put next to Old English, a major one being French and Latin influences that came about after the Norman Conquest in 1066. The ruling class in 11th century England swiftly adopted Norman French due to the influence of William the Conqueror; for around 300 years, it was considered the prestigious language of law, government and the court in England. However, it was only being used by a certain elite, leaving a large majority continuing to use English. This ultimately led to a major linguistic split, serving as a catalyst for the development of Middle English, a new variation of the language which was heavily influenced by French. Due to the split, a drastic flood of French vocabulary was stirred into the midst of a developing language, creating an immense semantic shift from Old to Middle English.
How Middle English evolved into Early Modern English
Middle English’s life span is accepted to be between 1100-1500. A major differentiation between this form and its predecessor is the extreme pronunciation differences caused by the Great Vowel Shift. Taking place primarily between 1400-1600, this was the process through which vowel pronunciations in the English language underwent several significant changes. Its exact cause is debated, however many linguists believe the phenomenon could be attributed to the Black Death, natural language change or social class differences. The Black Death, for one, triggered a massive population migration to Southeast England and London. This huge shift involved mixing a range of dialects from all over England, encouraging middle-class Londoners to distinguish themselves from newcomers by changing their vowel pronunciations. In this way, Middle English slowly parted with its traditional features, evolving into what is now known as Early Modern English, commonly referred to as “Shakespeare’s English”.
The Evolution of Modern English
Early Modern, or Shakespearean, English is not considered a distinctly separate language from that which we use today (Late Modern English). And yet, despite this, many modern-day English speakers would much prefer studying Romeo and Juliet with a 21st-century translation running down the side. Bearing in mind that Early Modern English was a bridge between Middle and Late Modern versions, there are notable features from both variations of the English language throughout Shakespeare’s works.
If you’ve ever stepped foot in a GCSE English classroom full of students studying Romeo and Juliet, you have, without a doubt, heard several students utter that famously mistaken line: “wherefore art thou Romeo?” The present-day usage of the adverb “where” typically results in many people using context clues and guessing that Juliet is asking about Romeo’s location. However, the archaic term “wherefore” generally translates to “for what reason” or “why”, showing Juliet is asking why Romeo has to be Romeo, a child of the Montagues, her family’s generational rivals. Shakespeare also famously invented, adapted and popularised words to create meanings when he felt pre-existing words were too weak to describe the intense plots and characterisation in his work. For example, he popularised the modern-day meaning of “addiction”, which stems from the Latin word “addicere”, signifying to devote or assign.
Over time, the archaic features of Shakespearean English faded out, leaving the 19th century with a new version of English that is largely similar to that which we use today. We might think of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.” This version of English is generally legible to a present-day English reader without the support of a translation. But are we really, in the 21st century, in the same linguistic stage as that of Dickens and the Victorians? Some might argue that the digital era and the advent of other technologies have transformed the language once again. Nowadays, many individuals communicate over the internet using nothing but emoticons and emojis. Instead of “I laughed at this!” a simple “😂” can say the exact same thing with no words used. A debate that can often become heated is whether these features are “killing” the language, but if this article has shown us anything it is that English, in short, loves to change. Features of language brought in by technology are simply new and telling developments – not a threat. One of the oldest symbols of communication were cave paintings and rock art, which date as far back as 30,000 BCE. Given that, could we argue that in using emojis we are going back to our roots, reconnecting with humanity’s earliest forms of communication?
“Oddballs dancing, leering at camera, guy shaving a nontraditional part of his body and man ripping his own throat out, woman stabbing herself to death.”
The synopsis above pertains to Richard Kern’s Submit to Me Now (1987). Recognised as a thematic symbiote to its older sister short, Submit to Me (1985), and fashioned with the genre description as a ‘no-wave erotic horror’ that explores the aesthetics of kink, sadism, mutilation, and suicide. The sequel differs from its predecessor with the introduction of one Lung Leg, nee. Elizabeth Carr.
Portrait of Lung Leg, taken by Richard Kern
Lung Leg emerged in the 1980s as one of the defining symbols of New York’s ‘Cinema of Transgression’. When asked to define the word transgression and its applied use within the ‘Cinema of…’, director Kern uses a royal ‘we’ to describe himself and a loose collection of like-minded creatives who sought to make films that put people outside of their comfort zones, emphasising their intention to make the audience feel as though they were seeing something they weren’t supposed to.
“Basically, taking a person’s established ethics and morals and trying to get them a little bit beyond it… to transgress their boundaries”. What this manifesto created was an action painting of experimental film, angry punks, and cow’s blood in place of the human stuff.
Lung Leg first met Kern while he was on set for Sonic Youth’s music video, Death Valley 69.“Lung Leg was just… well, I had never met anyone like that before. I think I was 30 by then and I had met a lot of people, but I had never met someone as weird as her.”
Lung Leg on the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1986 album, EVOL
Together, both director and actor participated in a culture that embalmed the no-wave era, working on projects such as You Killed Me First (1985), Worm Movie (1985), and Fingered (1986) -making any other attempt at transgression look emaciated in comparison.
The concept of a plot doesn’t really exist within these movies, from my viewing experience anyway; what audiences watch instead is a tableau of sadism and masochism and self-mutilation. Having watched a handful of low-quality clips of his work online, I can attest to Kern’s claim that his work transgresses the average viewer’s comfort zone. I also wouldn’t go out of my way to personally recommend his work to the casual viewer. On the surface, his films consist of young women rolling on the ground, making faces at the screen, and handling an array of bugs and reptiles – sometimes men are there too, wrangling themselves into bloody messes. There’s no dialogue in most of them, only the riffing of multiple instruments, making his work easily mistaken for a low-budget music video.
“You work a lot with violence and drug abuse”, asks one interviewer. Kern simply laughs.
When watching Kern’s films, it would be easy to make this association too. The 1980s, New York City, and the underground scene all evoke explicit drug use. In terms of violence, one just needs to refer back to the synopsis for Submit to Me Now. However, beneath the grime, gore, and grain, Kern’s depiction of “women in their 20s” unravels as his self-proclaimed subject matter. It has been the primary focus of his work since Kern himself was a 20-year-old filmmaker in the 80s, and it remains so during his current career as a photographer. Now, it’s through Lung Leg’s jagged persona that I turn towards Kern’s early depictions of women. In You Killed Me First, Lung Leg plays a demented daughter who finally snaps and guns down her family at the dinner table. In Fingered, poor Lung Leg again gets subjected to a spree of sex and violence enacted by Lydia Lunch and her partner. The tagline for Fingered even warns that some may find it “unnecessarily VIOLENT, SEXIST, and DISGUSTING”.
In these reactions, I recognise what literary theorist Julia Kristeva coins as ‘the abject’, that which society casts off in order to hold itself together. “It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order… the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. The women in Kern’s filmography embody what we’re not supposed to see: female anger, female cruelty, female mess. They vomit, they bleed, they brandish weapons. The daughter is flesh of her mother’s flesh and a murderous stranger; the pin-up model is a punk. I think of Lung Leg’s character shrieking at her WASP parents in You Killed Me First: “I’m flesh of your flesh… and you’re just as disgusting as I am!”
To mistake this subject matter of 20-something-year-old-women as perverted and typical for a now 70-year-old man is plausible for anyone all too familiar with the creative industry’s voyeuristic eye. “Just not when it comes to Kern”, I argue to myself.
Medicated (2010-2013) – my favourite modern-day project of his – is a photo series of models staring straight into the camera, holding up the prescriptions that they take and, as the visual narrative develops, depend upon to survive in an ever-confusing adolescence. Most of these women are half-naked, but that’s not the vulnerability Kern wants you to look at. Your eyes scan over the pill bottles in each hand. What’s the prescription? Is it one I know, or will I have to look it up? The bathroom settings are undeniably human and lived-in, each product a glimpse into these girls’ routines and habits. The variation of bodies, faces, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, amphetamines, attention-deficit drugs, sleeping pills, and birth control (etc.) is enough to make any like-minded and medicated 20-year-old-girl see herself as being a part of this compilation.
“Klonopin/Relpax”, 2014, Richard Kern
“My mom put me on them—no second grade kid is gonna say “I want to go on drugs”. The reason they put me on it was they would tell me to put stuff in my cubby and go sit down and I would just wander around cause I was always thinking about other stuff. That’s what kids do. I’ve only taken this maybe two times in the last year so I can’t say I really think about quitting. I’ve seen too many friends ruins their lives to want to use it much.” – Quotation from Medicated Series, by Richard Kern
Portrait from Medicated – Richard Kern, 2014
Each image is accompanied by a continual written transcript. The dialogue loses its rhythm beside the page’s respective model and her respective prescription. Soon, nothing aligns, and their voices become one.
Kern uses the phrase “since the internet” in one of his interviews as if the establishment of the World Wide Web were some cataclysmic event. This is true, in a way. For someone like Kern, the sudden interconnectedness between everyone and everything made it nearly impossible for transgressive cinema to exist as an underground medium. “I don’t know what underground means… in today’s world”, he states.
During the 80s, Kern’s work was genuinely underground: passed around on VHS tapes, shown at seedy clubs or tiny galleries, utterly removed from the mainstream… a great assault on good taste. Now, those once-scandalous films are readily available: remastered on Blu-ray, streaming online, even screened at MoMA. The taboos that made the ‘Cinema of Transgression’ so bracing have seeped into mass culture. Murder, gore, sex, blasphemy. “Basically all of the shock tactics they employed are all part of the mainstream now,” one blogger notes. He’s right. What was subversive art in 1985 becomes an internet aesthetic this century. The underground didn’t so much disappear as get folded into an algorithm. When every teenager can find extreme horror clips, BDSM imagery, or the latest outré performance art with a quick search, what does transgression even mean? Is transgressive art even possible in a world where nothing is underground for long?
Kern’s own evolution offers one answer: context is everything. He once said, citing John Waters, that it’s fine to be an “angry young man,” but if you carry that rage into old age you just look ridiculous. Times change, and I guess shock must change alongside it. In an era where explicit content is ubiquitous, perhaps the new transgression is to expose what we habitually conceal. With Medicated, Kern turns his lens to the kind of private despair that normally plays out at home or in a psychiatrist’s office. He shows it clinically, yet not without empathy. We, the viewer, are confronted with the epidemic of medicated youth, the normalisation of psychological distress. No cow’s blood is needed here.
Still, I can’t help but feel a twinge of loss for the old underground’s gritty camaraderie. Kern’s was a tight-knit group of punks, artists, and weirdos who needed some form of a transgressive outlet (and were willing to go to physical, often grimy spaces to find it). Today, those spaces have been supplanted by digital ones. To be transgressive now often means pushing into interdicted zones of identity, politics, or morality, which is a different game altogether. Present-day artists have to find new pressure points to press. Some turn the provocation inward, some turn it outward to social critique, and some simply escalate the shock.
So, what remains when the dust settles? For me, it’s the women – Kern’s women. There’s Lung Leg. There’s Lydia Lunch. There are all those dead-eyed girls and their prescription bottles. The raging daughter, the self-destructive punk, the dissociated depressive. Aren’t these all facets of the collective female psyche that society has struggled to acknowledge?
Perhaps that’s why, decades on, these figures still hold a semblance of power… dragging the abject into view, and doing so with women at the centre-frame, in a way that forces a reckoning with how we view that form.
Cover Photo – Richard Kern
Works referenced:
“Abjection.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 23 Oct. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection.
Interview with American Underground Filmmaker Richard Kern. YouTube, uploaded by Film&Clips, 22 Aug. 2018,https://youtu.be/yqakhvFdrDo.
Morris, Gary. “Snapshots from Hell: Richard Kern – The Hardcore Collection on DVD.” Bright Lights Film Journal, 1 Oct. 2001, brightlightsfilm.com/snapshots-hell-richard-kern-hardcore-collection-dvd/.
Reinoos, Dana. “Films by Richard Kern.” Screen Slate, 11 Dec. 2017,www.screenslate.com/articles/films-richard-kern.
Supervert. “As Needed for Anxiety: Richard Kern’s Photographs of Pharmaceutical Chic.” Please Kill Me, 12 Jan. 2021, pleasekillme.com/richard-kern-photographs-medicated/.
Storm, Christian. “Richard Kern’s Films Are Still Shocking as Hell.” VICE, 7 Dec. 2012,www.vice.com/en/article/richard-kerns-films-are-still-shocking-as-hell.
The Bloody Pit of Horror. “You Killed Me First (1985).” The Bloody Pit of Horror, 23 Oct. 2020, thebloodypitofhorror.blogspot.com/2020/10/you-killed-me-first-1985.html.
Videowave. 1985 Interview with Richard Kern. YouTube, uploaded by Videowave, 6 Jan. 2018, https://youtu.be/8HXpmk-7NaM.
It’s a never-ending pursuit, and I think that’s the point. When you start thinking differently is when you’re going to get yourself into trouble. – Braxton Haugen
Let us go then, you and I, and enter the technicolour world of Braxton Haugen. It is rather easy to find his rabbit hole, and chances are you have stumbled across it before. Braxton’s niche corner of the internet that he inhabits is one of poetry, carefully made props, hotel stationery – asked very politely for at reception desks across the world – and curios, the music of the 1960s, and most importantly film. Taking the form of the artistic polymath for the 21st century, Braxton has dabbled and triumphed in art and film-making in its myriad forms, yet his colourful, twee, vibrantly personal series The World of Braxton Haugen has catapulted this filmmaker onto the cultural radar. It is with this world that we are reminded of what makes our own world so dear; the ability to hold things, the ability to personalise our spaces and the ability to be an individual. In a time of increasingly digitalised, uniformed existences, Haugen’s world embraces the tangible, the uniquely man made, and is an ever increasing reminder of the necessity for art and artists. Haugen’s world is a culmination of and testimony to all that he has learnt, seen, done and forayed in other years; it is the attention to detail of place, character and identity that has given us these glimpses inside a life as nourished with artistic endeavour as Haugen’s. Drawing on one of his many artistic inspirations when asked to introduce himself, “There’s that great Dylan line off ‘Farewell Angelina’ that goes, ‘call me any name you’d like, I will never deny it.’”, Haugen encapsulates his world and his artistic story in Dylan’s line. The World of Braxton Haugen is one of experiment, of trying a new name when called to and never denying the character you are working with, quirks and all. Fascinated by the world Braxton has carved out for himself, I spoke with Haugen to get to the core of his world, and discover what it could teach ours.
“There were ten years before the sun came up” on Braxton’s seemingly “overnight success” with the World mini-series, ten years during which longform film, feature films, poetry series and being suspended between Los Angeles and London all had to happen in order for Braxton’s world to finally reach us. The series started in June and quickly rose to reel prominence, but like the emergence of a new star in the sky, his light had always been there – it just took us time to receive it.
BH – World was initially a difficult project to get off the ground. […] I guess I was looking for something I could do that was of a smaller scale than the kind of work I’d done in the last year. I actually made three prototype episodes in January, but they were missing something. I wasn’t ready. Some of the ideas were there, or rather the seeds, but the execution was underdeveloped and lacked vision. I watched the rough cut of the first part and didn’t buy it. I ended up scraping that early version and put the entire project on the shelf.
In the meantime, I went back to London and kept myself busy with a couple of new writing projects. But I wasn’t especially happy with anything that was coming out on the page either. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind the idea of World had stuck around long enough that I began scribbling down little ideas for it while I was supposed to be writing. Around May I knew I had to make a decision about getting serious about a project. It felt like one of those fork-in-the-road moments. What I was writing then and the short films I imagined comprising World were very much two separate things and I knew I couldn’t do both, and I knew once I’d started on one sincerely that I wouldn’t want to change horses midstream. So I just said to myself: “World is going to be your next project, come hell or high water. You’re going to make these movies.”
It began as a way for me to document some of the people, places and things that were meaningful to me. I found the process challenging and rewarding enough that I’ve just kept making them. It was also the first project I’d ever received attention for right out of the gate. I’ve been publishing movies like these on the internet for almost ten years. I’d gotten used to people not really caring about me, so it was validating to see these movies connect so quickly with an audience. I’m incredibly grateful for that. But it took me showing up in the right place and in the right moment for that to happen. I guess I’d always resisted showing up in these places for one reason or another. But my girlfriend really encouraged me to think about sharing my movies on Instagram. So I started an account. At the time I posted the first part of my series, I don’t think I’d ever seen a Reel all the way through in my entire life other than the ones I was making for Van Neistat. So the whole thing was new to me. I think it gave the impression that I was some kind of overnight success, but of course there were ten years before the sun came up. That’s how the story goes.
However, World wasn’t the first time the phone screen had seen Haugen. Answering also to the call of ‘poet’, In His Own Words saw Haugen publish his poetry using film. The words are zany, there’s a frenetic strength of delivery and energy held in the lines, and a spontaneity worthy of the Beat Generation’s urgency of feeling. Filmmaking and poetry aren’t foreign entities, explains Haugen, but rather he “look[s] at it as the same dance, but with a different partner”. It’s all part of the same creative process, vision and world.
BH – I write, I paint, I make movies, I build sculptures, I take pictures – and when you put it like that, it can seem like these are separate mediums, but I choose to look at it all as more or less the same thing. I think it all comes from the same place. But film is my native medium. Even in my written work, I chose to visualise my manuscripts as opposed to binding them in a book. So in that way, filmmaking is at the core of my creative life.
The four written collections were initially born out of a dissatisfaction I felt with filmmaking at the time. It was 2020, I’d dropped out of university, I was living on my own I’d just come off making 50 short films in a row for my series The Home Movies. I was disappointed and disillusioned with the reception, the film festivals, the whole scene really. I just didn’t feel like there was much space left for me to grow. I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with the self-obsessed, attention-seeking spirit of the times and I think I was curious what my life would look like if it didn’t revolve around making movies. I needed to step away from everything for a while to figure out what it was I had to say next. I wanted to push myself as an artist.
So that was where my head was at going into COVID. It was a strange time. It was a strange time for everyone. I was pretty isolated for the lockdowns. I spent most of it reading. I became fixated with blues music, the Beat Generation, and the films of the French New Wave. I would read all day long and write through the night. Looking back, I don’t really know where all that energy was coming from. I felt this fire in me to learn as much as I could about the things I was interested in. I was hungry. I just soaked up everything I could get my hands on about the lives of writers, poets, painters, musicians and filmmakers. I saw myself in that whole bunch of people and figured I was going to need all the help I could get along the way. I was giving myself an education. I was doing a lot of writing just for the page, which is something I’d never really done up until that point; I’d always just written for the screen. That feeling of newness and the challenge that came with it sustained me for those collections. I feel like, in the end, I more or less said everything I had to say with them.
Writing is still at the cornerstone of how I work now, but it just takes on a different final form. What I am doing now has more in common with what I was writing when I was seventeen than what I was writing when I was twenty-two. I’m really proud of some of those stories. I read them today, and I don’t really know where a lot of them came from. I’m interested in eventually putting some of those years of experience writing prose and poetry towards a fictional screenplay. There are a few ideas that really excite me, but right now I’ve got my hands full as is.
It is not only Haugen’s hands that are full, but his past credits. Since turning to filmmaking as a child, Haugen has worked on personal projects aplenty, but has also collaborated with some of his greatest inspirations. Van Neistat’s The Spirited Man series was a reflective, poetic series, and gave Haugen the chance to work with a hero.
BH – Working with Neistat was the thrill of a lifetime. He was one of my formative influences growing up, and to be up close and personal with a hero was nothing short of a life-changing experience for me. Maybe life-affirming is a better word for it. It was the ultimate validation to work so closely with him for the last few years. It was like going into battle with an old samurai master. I learned a lot from Neistat, and I think he learned some from me too. We worked really well together. Even though there’s an entire generation between us, our approach to things really wasn’t dissimilar. It felt as if we both sort of came from the same place out of the earth. There was a shared language of our tastes and references that I think came as a surprise to both of us. When we met for the first time, I felt as if I’d known him all my life. I’ve never felt that way about anyone before or since.
Haugen’s experience on the eclectic set of The Spirited Man enriched his creative vision further. Neistat’s embrace of the tactile and tangible within his films and general life – he is a keen repairman and tinkerer – has revitalised an interest in the physical in an increasingly digital age. Impersonal consumerism, new apps set on making our lives vaguely better and a common acceptance that nothing is built to last anymore. Neistat and Haugen’s physical media revolution feeds into a wider desire to return to a time when the physical, the real and the held was top dog. Armed with a garrison of props, collections, prized possessions and curios, Haugen is an advocate for the handmade and handheld.
BH – The handmade ethos is a really important part of my filmmaking. It goes beyond just aesthetics for me. I think it’s a way of celebrating the human touch in the arts. Filmmaking can be such a magical and mysterious medium, and I am drawn to seeing just a little bit behind the curtain. It’s also an attitude as much as it is a technical kind of thing. It’s Springsteen choosing to put out Nebraska in the format he did. That record has got a sound and a quality to it that no amount of studio polish could possibly capture. I feel the hand of the artist in every one of those songs. It’s like seeing the brushstrokes of a master painter. It’s part of the composition. Nothing is concealed. It’s all right there in front of you, in all of its beauty and contradiction. I think in our time, with the age of artificial intelligence upon us, that’s the kind of humanity that should be at the centre of the arts.
His penchant for the handheld is not a mere quirk or flourish of artistry, but part of his success. Episode 4 of World saw Haugen reveal his hotel stationery collection. Keen observers of his work will have already noted the apparition of these headed sheets – with their monolithic crests and elegant typefaces – throughout Haugen’s work, acting as part of his utilisation of everyday objects to transform his vision into tangible art. The dissection of his stationery habits and rituals resulted in his videos being brought to prominence online, reminding us that there is still a fascination in the physical object despite the intrusion of the digital.
BH – It’s so funny to me that was the movie which really introduced people to the World. Hotel Stationery was the fourth part of this new series and very quickly took on a life of its own. I had no idea that many people would be interested in this thing I kind of thought was my own weird little hobby. The stationery community really came out for it, and God bless them for it. It was really cool to see the positive reception. There’s a comment on that video with something like four thousand likes by the designer who is working on the Hilton’s stationery redesign, and all kinds of people are chiming in with their suggestions and preferences. I think I responded that the best ones give plenty of room to write with the letterhead not eating into the page too much. I definitely prefer unlined stationery for drawings and a little extra paper weight is always appreciated. Oh, and absolutely under no circumstances is it acceptable to put social media icons on stationery. I think even a website link is pushing it, but we do live in the 21st century. Other than that I’m not too picky. Good typography, tasteful logos – I suppose just your basic tenets of good design.
Palpable visualisation is at the forefront of Haugen’s world, allowing the creation of a world for us on screen that is colourful, carefully curated, exudes personality and revolves around the tactile and the textural. For a dyslexic, like myself and Haugen, the visual becomes all the more important when articulation can be a stifling endeavour. When words frustrate but the nag to tell stories still persists, the visual and the tangible become all the more vital to artistic expression and conveying what words fail to reach. “As a little boy all I wanted to do was tell stories”, Haugen says, “I had a lively imagination, but it was restricted by my ability to read and write as fluently as my peers. I can remember I would get so worked up over not being able to spell that I would just start crying, and I’d get so upset that I would forget the story I wanted to tell. I had all these ideas and pictures in my head, and getting them out was a painful process”. A tumultuous relationship with reading and writing led to Haugen discovering filmmaking at a remarkably young age: “When I discovered that I could tell stories through the little movies I made in the backyard, it was like discovering a loophole. I suddenly didn’t feel stupid. I taught myself to edit when I was seven years old. I embraced those skills as some kind of superpower or something.” With a talent for vision and articulation, Haugen has refused to let his filmmaking be stopped, and wants his films to reflect the “humanity and truthfulness” that is at the heart of all his endeavours. Each film is not another chapter in a manifesto, but rather a search for the humanity and truthfulness that lies at the core of each of our worlds.
Haugen refuses to walk the road for humanity and truthfulness alone, and his scripts, poems and soundtracks all ring as an homage to the artists that shaped his artistry and individuality. An avid reader, his library is an eclectic menagerie of genre, perspective, time and thought.
EBP – You talk about living for stories and making a living from stories – what pieces of literature have inspired you the most, and what is it you look for within a story? What do you want your story to say about you?
BH – I guess the books that come to mind first are what I was reading during the pandemic. My library is really all over the place. Those early Hemingway novels, particularly A Farewell to Arms, really struck me. Edith Wharton’s beautifully written novel The Age of Innocence. I also really fell in love with poetry in that time. The Inferno and Paradise Lost. The Odyssey. Everything Rimbaud ever wrote. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience made a big impression on me. Ginsberg’s‘Howl’ and Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Baldwin’s essays. I read all the big Dylan biographies. Patti Smith’s stunning memoir Just Kids. Those are a few that come to mind off the top of my head. I just picked up Patti’s new memoir Bread of Angels, and am really looking forward to reading that. Just Kids is probably the book I find myself recommending the most, especially to young artists. I think it’s maybe the most generous book I’ve ever read. What a gift she shared with the world in writing that book. It’s a masterpiece. I’m completely in awe of her artistry and her spirit. I’m not really sure I’m looking for anything specific from stories beyond some kind of truthfulness. But I certainly found what I was looking for in her writing.
In a world where individuality is increasingly obscured, where digitalisation is prioritised before human experience and truth is lost within a murky echo of voices, Haugen’s artistic vision strikes an urgently compelling, charming note within this chaotic symphony. Taking a chance on your vision and developing your own world to explore and share is what drove Haugen, and something he believes any artist should hold dear to their pursuit. Putting life and humanity back into the arts is essential, and acts as a rebellion against the noise of the art world. Life should be vast, vibrant and – most importantly – human.
BH – Read a lot. Watch a lot. Listen to different music. I hope I’ve mentioned enough in this conversation that there’s a reading list or a watchlist someone could pull out of this. Getting an education doesn’t mean going to school. I’m a dropout, and I care more about learning now than I ever did sitting in a classroom. I think that talent can only ever be as great as one’s curiosity. And in the beginning, your curiosity is the thing powering everything. I’d say travel. Fall in love. Take big risks. Do things that make you feel as if your life depends on it. When you’re scared or nervous, that means you’re growing. It means you care. If you want to be an artist or a writer or a filmmaker, don’t put ‘aspiring’ in front of it. Just be it. We live in a time where anyone reading this interview has what they need in their hands to tell great stories. So there’s no reason to diminish yourself by placing a label like that in front of what you want to be. These are vocations which consume your life. You’re going to need to learn to live with it sooner than later; you might as well give yourself the head start. Life is about becoming who you want to be. I don’t really like the connotation that once you make a film or get a paycheck for your art, that somehow that means you’re no longer aspiring, because great artists are always aspiring to something more. It’s a never-ending pursuit, and I think that’s the point. When you start thinking differently is when you’re going to get yourself into trouble.
Get out, make art, live and – most importantly – be as generous to your art and to others in order to make your world as human and vibrant as Braxton Haugen’s.
‘In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable.’
– ‘Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists’, 1999
The visual culture of Catholicism does not naturally derive from an appetite for ornament. The earliest occupants of its interior life were men who fled from it. In the deserts of fourth-century Egypt and Syria, the first Christian monks stripped worship of every available excess, reducing religious life to silence, fasting, prayer and the barest material conditions requisite for survival. That this tradition of radical asceticism lies at the root of Catholic theology already complicates any easy association between worship and sensory indulgence. Indeed, Catholic form does not intrinsically lend itself to illustration nor to expression nor even to the beautiful – but crucially it does not refuse these as byproducts of the sensible mediation of grace. To beg the question Why does Catholicism look like that? is to interrogate the means by which the Catholic church makes belief legible – why it translates scripture into bodies and things and space and craft, and why it continues to argue that beauty, when shepherded by the proper hands, is not betrayal of truth, but one of its modes.
At the root of Catholic visual representation lies the doctrine of the Incarnation: the assertion that the Word became flesh, and so the divine enters and inhabits matter without diminishing Creator or elevating creation. Catholicism habitually locates revelation in the transubstantiation of things: bread, wine, oil, water, fabric, light, gold. It is obsessed with the material, the corporeal and the kinaesthetic. The science of Catholic sacramentality firmly insists that the sign is not necessarily signifying in the semiotic, Saussurean sense of things, but efficacious, meaning it both points to and communicates what it signifies. The icon is allowed and venerated not for its own sake, but because it points beyond to the subject which it stands for. It is the sacramental telescope by which we see that which is invisible. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa made this clear: ‘Creative art, which it is the soul’s good fortune to entertain, is not to be identified with that essential art which is God himself, but is only a communication of it and a share in it.’ (Dialogus de Ludo Globi) Communication, then, lends itself to teaching, does it not? The imagery of the church, as is possibly rather plain, once primarily served a practical purpose as the visual vehicle of catechism. For much of Western history, the fluctuating Catholic population remained largely illiterate. Pictorial gospel allowed for the narration of salvation to the faithful who could not consume the inaccessible Latin of vernacular texts. For this reason, such figures as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Pope Saint Gregory the Great endorsed the theological basis for an aesthetic that privileged intelligibility.
Madonna and Child, Duccio di Buoninsegna, ca. 1290–1300 / Madonna and Child, Il Sassoferrato, c. 1650.
If the visual culture of the Catholic church is solely fashioned for ‘the instruction of the uneducated’ (Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences), why then do we begin with the dull, painfully emblematic representation of the Madonna and Child in the sacred catechistic art of the Middle Ages, and how do we burgeon into the diffused and delicate, near-ethereal proto-Baroque style of the Counter-Reformation? What necessitates and rationalises this shift? Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar understands beauty as entirely inextricable from the glory of God, claiming that ‘beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters’. (The Glory of the Lord) Beauty is thus the manner in which earthly creatures manifest that glory, and thereby invite love and prayer. This synthesis of ideas finds parallel claim in the more classical, Greco-Roman metaphysic of beauty put forth by Plato: ‘The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful.’ (Philebus) It is also an idea agreed upon by ecclesiastical authorities of our contemporary day – the late Pope John Paul II concurred: ‘beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty’. The virtuous and the picturesque are essentially tied-up; that which is more lovely to look at is more noble by nature.
Early Christianity inherited from Judaism a deep suspicion of sacred imagery, shaped by Old Testament prohibitions against graven forms (‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’, Exodus 20:4) and made sharper by the ever-present danger of idolatry (‘Confounded be all they that serve graven images, that boast themselves of idols: worship him, all ye gods’, Psalm 97:7). Under the Roman Empire – where Christians were a persecuted minority and pagan visual culture was both ubiquitous and polytheistic – Christian imagery emerged furtively, under a cloak of ambiguity. The earliest surviving artefacts of Catholic art are to be found in the subterranean caverns of the Roman Catacombs. The grapevine, the peacock, the Good Shepherd – each illustrated motif throughout the tombs deftly held a secondary latent meaning, operating as polyvalent signs intelligible to the initiated, yet inconspicuous within a familiar pagan visual economy.
‘Good Shepherd’ fresco and ‘fish and loaves’ fresco from the Catacombs of San Callisto in Rome.
It was only by way of prolonged doctrinal discourse – finally culminating in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 – that the Church formally resolved the iconoclastic crisis, and confirmed that honorary veneration of images was permitted, though true adoration was to be reserved only for God Himself. With this conciliar decision, the image was finally affirmed as a legitimate participant in Christian devotion: not an idol or a mimetic attempt at rendering the divine, but a relational object and instrument of worship. This hesitant and cautious quality of early Christian iconography reflects an aesthetic history rooted in vigilance and restraint – certainly not in excess – whether due to fear of persecution or of deceiving one’s own faith. The legitimacy of the Catholic ‘look’ has always been something earned with time.
As Christianity travelled from the margins of Roman society to its imperial centre, its aesthetic posture necessarily shifted. The legalisation of Christianity under Constantine in the early fourth century precipitated a dramatic change in scale: worship moved from the domestic home and secreted altars into public space. And with this transition arrived architecture.
Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano in Rome. Once a private home and site of covert Christian worship in the first century, now a public basilica since the sixth century.
The earliest monumental Christian churches did not invent a new architectural idiom so much as appropriate one already embedded within Roman civic life. Ancient temples or civil buildings, such as the Pantheon in Italy or the Baptistère Saint-Jean in France, were common targets of conversion. Though it was the Roman basilica – used for legal proceedings, commercial exchange and public assembly – which offered a site uniquely suited to Christian worship. Unlike pagan temples, which functioned antithetically as enclosed dwellings for deities and were often visually inaccessible to the populace, the basilica was designed to hold bodies in common, encouraging ritual and interaction. This distinction is paramount: Christianity did not require a house for God, it sought a space for divine encounter. The basilican plan with its longitudinal axis, central nave, flanking aisles and projecting apse embodied the Church’s self-consciousness as a gathered community of people rather than a cult of contained divinity. Particular attention is paid toward space and orientation because this inscribes certain eschatological expectation into the building itself. As clerical hierarchies developed, so too did the structure of the church; the bema, transept and eventually the Latin Cross plan emerged among sacral architects to accommodate liturgical complexity whilst embedding salvation history into the body of the church.
Yet even as scope increased, imagistic restraint largely remained in situ. Early basilicas such as the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran exhibit an almost paradoxical sobriety. Exteriors relatively plain, often brick, resisting the monumental façades of surrounding imperial architecture. Interiors luminous though hieratic: figures hovering static rather than occupying space as you or I might. Saints rendered frontal, flattened, deliberately dimensionless and disembodied by virtue of theological caution. The sacral image was not yet trusted with naturalism.
Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1775). Founded in 324, it is the oldest basilica in the Western world.
With the emergence of Gothic architecture in twelfth-century France came a decisive aesthetic turn towards aspiration and height – both literally and religiously. The introduction of such iconic features as the pointed arch, rib vault and flying buttress reconfigured the model understanding of how the Catholic church presents itself. By redistributing structural weight outward and downward, Gothic architects freed interior walls, allowing for new height and light. Churches rose vertically, straining upward as though neck vertebrae, their skeletal frames reaching into dizzying spires and dissolving into expanses of stained glass. Worshippers were bathed in truth and righteousness, God’s presence streaming in from the apertures, cradling faces with long, kind, coruscating fingers.
Characterised by immense human labour, intricate geometrical design and centuries-long construction projects, the building of a Gothic duomo or cathédrale must be understood first and foremost as an act of worshipful tribute, not an indulgence in creation itself. The church was a collective offering on behalf of the people, a sustained and painstaking liturgy enacted across generations of effort and attempt. Effigies grew increasingly vivid, rose windows with intricate mullions and tracery impressed the eye, detailed frescoes spilled marvellously onto lofty cross vault ceilings. The Church was no longer the self-effacing provider of a place of worship; it had now begun to shape the Catholic’s sensory imagination. Still, the visual of the Gothic remains vertical, gestures heavenward; it does not yet engulf. That shift only comes on the heels of crisis.
Duomo di Milano, John L. Stoddard, 1893.
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century saw an attack on sacred material culture. Images were condemned as distractions, the splendour of structure as a corruption of pure faith. Iconoclasm was the logical terminus of reformist zeal, the consequence of a faith-branch which understood entitfied religious practice as an obstacle to worship rather than its vehicle. In response, the Catholic Church was forced to articulate – explicitly and defensively – the core principles which had long undergirded its aesthetic culture. The Council of Trent reiterated the legitimacy of sacred images as pedagogical and pastoral necessities: art was reaffirmed as the endeavour of teaching, moving and converting. The Counter-Reformation – soon to be followed by the Baroque – had settled upon the Western religious world.
Intensely concerned with the bodily, the Baroque church is the church of the corporeal. It is a space – elastic and kinetic where it was once static and axial – engineered to produce affective response. Awe, disorientation, intimacy, rapture, overwhelm. Columns twist and hurtle upward. Ceilings open into illusionistic heavens which collapse the now-foggy distinction between the earthly and the divine. Perhaps most critical is the dissolution of inherited boundaries between artistic mediums in order to overburden the spectator’s capacity for detachment. Architecture frames sculpture; sculpture erupts into painting; painting bleeds into the calculated orchestration of light itself. Nothing remains autonomous, nothing stands in solitary. The gesamtkunstwerk of the Baroque church constitutes a single persuasive apparatus, calibrated to render theological abstraction experientially irrefutable. Devotion is no longer confined to the mind or mediated primarily through scripture; it is staged as a transcendent encounter unfolding in real time before and around the worshipper. God feels proximate, inconceivably so.
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1652.
I ask you to consider Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa as a prime instance. The collapse of the body, the slackness of the jaw, the give of the posture inviting divine invasion. Hidden windows flood the chapel with golden light; marble becomes skin before you; architecture frames the allegory of revelation as a spectacular event. Grace acts upon the body. We are less observer and more witness here, are we not? Hand over mouth, breath held, frozen in this theatre of the ecclesiastical.
At the risk of sounding impious, when one steps into a seventeenth-century cathedral at times it does very much feel like stepping into an opera house. The Baroque is infatuated with theatricality, with staging and motion and chiaroscuro and synergy with the senses. Gold leaf and incense and marble and mosaic and choral polyphony and monastic chant and processional banners. It adores texture and lustre and materiality. Urges lavishness as well as durability. And what of scripture – the written Word? ‘Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God’, the New Testament insists, ‘we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device’. (Acts 17:39) I remind you that objects of sacramental action command honour, serving as intermediaries between heaven and the earth. What are the vestments and vessels of Catholic worship if not the Church’s firm and concrete assertion that the sensible is our only means to communicate the eternal? To signify the worthwhileness of the world God has created? Gold cannot make God more precious.
Apse of St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
One of our greatest popes, John Paul II, wrote a deeply galvanising letter addressed to the artists of our day in 1999. Within this letter, he asks the question ‘Does the Catholic Church need art?’ He responds in the affirmative:
‘Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.’ (‘Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists’)
Though perhaps more of interest and quite remarkably, he also begs the question: ‘Does art need the Catholic Church?’ On this dynamic, he says ‘it has been a great boon for an understanding of man, of the authentic image and truth of the person’, and invites artists to ‘enter into the heart of the mystery of the Incarnate God and at the same time into the mystery of man.’ In our contemporary cultural economy, it is compelling and tremendously significant that the Catholic visual language survives in secular culture.
Its aesthetic vocabulary of precious metals, brocade, embroidery, architecturally-informed silhouette and sacred motif continues to resonate, particularly in the world of fashion. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute hosted an exhibition titled Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Curated to explore the intersection of sacral visual codes and haute couture, it featured creations from Dior, Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana among many others, highlighting how liturgical chasubles, conical mitres and bejewelled reliquary crosses may function as purely visual language, divorced from worship though still inviting conversation and commemoration.
Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at the Metropolitan Museum of Art / John Galliano for Dior: Evening Ensemble, Autumn/Winter 2005–6 Haute Couture.
Catholic imagery seems to thrive in this postmodern cultural afterlife because it carries an almost preternatural formal logic. For non- or nonpracticing Catholics, its characteristic verticality, hierarchy, symmetry and ornamentalism are legible even without contextual doctrinal framing. Gold filigree retains its connotations of sacredness, authority and value whether it is found in the Igreja de Santa Clara or the bodice of a John Galliano gown. Crucifixes and rosaries become motifs in jewellery, home decoration, graphic design. Even sans liturgical function, they signal drama, gravitas or a sense of ritualised performance, making them attractive to visual directors and cultivators of culture. The potency of Catholic iconography persists – whether celebrated or critiqued – independently of explicit belief, and its visual lexicon continues to exert cultural influence even in a world that may no longer consciously acknowledge its origins.
Featured Image: ‘María Santísima de la Aurora’, Francisco Romero Zafra, 2008
Even if you have never heard of the Durham Revue, you most likely have heard from them. Modern-day British comedy has an odd habit of churning out, ad nauseam, future stars from a single sketch comedy troupe in the North East. Ed Gamble, Nish Kumar, and Stevie Martin – all ex-Taskmaster contestants, yes, but also esteemed alumni of the Revue. Add in Jeremy Vine and Ambika Mod for a smattering of extra sweetness, and you have yourself a tasty dessert made entirely of successful comedians, whipped up by Durham’s premier sketch troupe.
Founded in 1974, the Revue have put together a troupe of writer/performers for the last 52 years that form a tight-knit group, developing and finetuning sketch material throughout the year before a month-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. A place in the troupe is hard to come by: they operate an annual three-round audition process, assessing not only candidates’ skill at performing comedy, but also writing it. And with only seven or eight troupe members every year – and only five or six of them as performers – it is an illustrious gig within the student theatre scene.
It was with all this in mind that I headed to the Collingwood Arts Centre on Sunday the 18th January to catch the Revue’s first show of the year: A Day at the Durham ReZoo. Co-president duo Samuel Bentley and Jude Battersby open the show to sinister music, recounting the aftermath of their Fringe run last year: critical acclaim (the troupe’s Derek Award on full display), but a bank balance that suggests otherwise. The solution? The troupe are now working as part-time zookeepers to get some extra cash. Makes sense.
Cue the introductions. Bentley and Battersby return alongside Alice Barr and Nat Pryke, joined on stage by newcomers Ollie Painter, Miranda Pharaoh and Bea Pescott-Khan, with Isaac Slater joining Pryke as a writer. In typical Revue style, they introduce themselves one-by-one, displaying a touch of their individual comedic styles, before Battersby rousingly instructs us to give them a big round of applause after every sketch, whether they “deserve it or not”. Before the sketches even begin, I am struck by the troupe’s rapport; for their first show, they seem immensely comfortable together, and the humorous asides and awkward interjections are a testament to their tight-knit quality.
And the sketches are no different. Battersby and Bentley have electrifying chemistry, the former’s energetic facial expressions and command of physical comedy complementing the latter’s supremely dry wit and fantastic control of comic timing. This was on full display in one of the night’s standout sketches – a humorous take on ‘Noah’s Ark’ which provides several laugh-out-loud moments from the duo’s antithetical dynamic before the gag even lands. Together they also parody the randomness of the term “knee-slapper” in a sketch full of dad jokes that pits homoeroticism against maternal resurrection.
Likewise, in a sketch that satirises drama teachers taking a school production all too seriously, Bentley pairs well with Painter. The production in question: Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot – here, performed by their Year 3 class. It is a sketch that drives forward with its joke from the beginning, each comment funnier than the next. Painter, throughout the evening, is fantastic with his naturalistic approach, his delivery uncompromisingly measured to extract full comedic punch.
Alice Barr has some excellent intensity throughout and great diction – her lively characters in ‘Parakeet’ and ‘Gender Reveal Party’ are among the highlights of sketches where the gags don’t always land. Her best moment of the night is in the ‘Ides of March’ sketch where Caesar and his (ex)comrades are transposed into the modern world on a ‘girlies’ night; Barr’s commitment and characterisation are sustained brilliantly. Pharaoh is equally good here as Brutus, delivering one of the central one-liners, “You know you’re my ride… or die”, fabulously.
Indeed, Pharaoh establishes herself as a talented performer – balancing sombre, dry delivery with self-aware wit. She is part of some of the evening’s more experimental sketches, exhibiting a masterful command of awkward humour in a meta sketch where she gets stage fright and messes up her line as she sits in a hot tub and in a particularly peculiar anti-joke vignette involving a glass of milkshake (or is it Gaviscon?).
Bea Pescott-Khan has some similarly memorable moments: as prisoner 24602 in a Les Miserablés parody that delighted the theatre-loving audience, she is fabulously quippy and utterly deadpan, ensuring that the momentum of the joke resounds throughout; whilst in one of the evening’s simplest, but best sketches involving a forgetful goldfish instructor, her wit is razor-sharp – a notable gag despite its brevity.
Some other highlights include Battersby dropping a rhyming Lin-Manuel Miranda – (malfunctioning) fake goatee and all – into the Chernobyl disaster and letting the cultural mismatch deal the comedic punches, and a succinct homophonic gag involving not ‘Mock the Week’ but ‘Mock the Weak’.
Still, it doesn’t all work. Painter’s deliberate, faux-sincere delivery of a sermon whilst chomping down on corn doesn’t quite land (though his corpsing does provide some entertainment – it is as if he feels as silly as he looks), nor does a sketch involving a doctor’s checkup where the patient has soiled himself, a premise that outstays its welcome long before the punchline does. At times, diction falters, even in the contained venue; the impact of sketches involving wordplay or quick delivery, therefore, is diminished.
On the whole, many of the sketches are just too long – though, I concede, it is best to trial their material in this context before some of the upcoming shows. But look, as a first show, this is an immense achievement for the new troupe. (A special mention, of course, must go to Pryke and Slater for their writing achievements, despite not being featured on stage.) The Revue are clearly veering off in new directions this year, developing sketches in the realm of the absurd or abstract – eager to diverge some of their material from their orthodox gags.
“Last year, at Edinburgh, we maybe got a bit of criticism for playing some of our comedy a little bit safe,” remarks Bentley, chatting to me after the show. “I think we wanted to include stuff here that started working towards a creativity that appealed to that kind of comedy-going crowd that you see in Edinburgh.” I agree with him. But for student sketch comedy, especially, the question of creative risk is nowadays inseparable from the financial realities of getting work seen.
The climate of student sketch comedy at the moment is a tense one – with the cost of living meaning that month-long stints at Edinburgh are becoming harder and harder to fund. Just last year, the Revue had to fundraise £7000 to afford their Fringe run, a number that was achievable partly thanks to generous alumni donations. For groups without such a rich history, the financial shortfall is impossible to overcome.
This is precisely why it is so important to go and support these groups. Sketch comedy remains a unique space where student voices can be rough, ambitious, and occasionally wrong, but also unique and utterly original. Go and support it; you won’t regret it.
The Durham Revue are performing ComedyFest at the Gala Theatre on Saturday 7February 2026, alongside The Oxford Revue and Leeds Tealights. Tickets are available here.
A bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut firm On the top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock. Elms gold and half-leafed Early autumn morning, hesitated Rain-flirt leaves, guttering Snub and clot of the last brown cones When speaking of birches, The white of their bark As cool and suffused as a satin dress
Head on hip and hand on heel I took the path to settle myself November prospects Matter in its planetary stand-off, Dulled dark argent, roundly wrapped And pigeon-collared in the drifting light, Aporia, reticence, deleterious thoughts Wielded thin as wind
A passing year, wily dovetailing The way swans coax you into deep water There was never a moment When I had it out with myself or with another, The loss occurred offstage And yet I cannot disavow words like Host, or prayer or gratitude They have an undying tremor and draw Like well water far down
A cold clutch, a whole nestful All but hidden In the starting autumn leaf mould And I knew By the mattress and the stillness of them, rotten Making death sweat of the morning dew That didn’t so much shine their shell As damp them I was on my hands and knees down there in the wet Breath beaten and rapt in resquiescat
I prefer my heroes a bit shit, thanks very much. Dour and perturbed out on the peripheries, frankly I’d prefer it if they didn’t even save the day. Leaning against an oblique wall, my beau ideal cups their crooked fag against the jetsam and bluster of the battle they slope to inattention for.
David Berman leant this way, I think. He seemed, wearily, to be laboring against something; in a costume of faded jeans, an unwashed shirt and a cape of stale cigarette smoke fluttering behind him, he fought strange fights of hearts backfiring and red-rusted souls. With a smoked southern drawl of weary nonchalance and jagged pain, he seemed to be drenched in the idiosyncrasies that one finds watching a beautiful sunrise from a motorway flyover, completely off your face.
His main band, the Silver Jews, sputtered into existence sometime in the late 80s, someplace in upstate New York, and started life recording shambling tunes into peoples answering machines. Working as security guards at the Witney museum, Berman and his bandmate Stephen Malkmus were, I imagine, immersed in the post-modern abstraction and rarified boredoms of a conceited new culture. If I were pretentiously inclined I may say they strove to redress the exploding of structure’s ensuing isolation and other such brave new bullshit. Abandon your post-structural theses and assaults on the continuity of comprehension here, however, as we see before us a layman’s group in the most beautiful possible sense.
Releasing seven studio albums over fourteen years, the Silver Jews charted the course of the weirdos and wanderers of the American landscape. Despite holding an MA in poetry and being a published poet, Berman’s group was not an urbane exercise in the oddities of parochial backwaters and faltering dreams. His was a true and trembling band of somewhere in-between. Lyrics spun out of Kenneth Koch and William Faulkner’s acid infused dreams, and a group of musicians who played like their trousers were falling down, made a group that seemed too weird to live, too rare to die. Their loping shabby songs of lo-fi indolence and ingenuity were too piercing and too perverse to ever take center stage, too poignant and profound to be relegated to the annals of indie landfill.
Cruelly then, it is fitting that the 90s music press maligned them as a side project to Malkmus’s main group Pavement, darlings of the alternative era. Fulfilling your own prophecies I should imagine is seldom an enviable position to find yourself in, and in this sidelining David Berman got rather too close for comfort to the reflection of the half forgotten worlds about which he wrote. That intimacy with the inverse of the American ideal, however, gave birth to what is generally considered Silver Jews’ defining record, American Water. The album epitomized the wit and wonderment, the gothic and the absurd, with sardonic disaffection, a disillusioned prophet incanting his drole wisdom, merely glimpsed through the creaking screen door of a tumble down honky tonk.
I shan’t say though that they triumphed over adversity, for the opulent sweep of a triumph seems an anathema to their elegizing of the down at heel and just plain peculiar. Rather I imagine it bought Mr Berman a step too close to embodying his subject matter. Hailing from West Virginia, our raffish hero did not come into this world as an introverted troubadour or baleful soothsayer of a forgotten world of rickety dreams. Berman was the son of one of the most egregious and hateful lobbyists in Washington, so grew up for all intents and purposes affable and affluent, far from suckling on the American dream he came to find so disreputable. So maybe there’s the tension, the catalyst behind his catalogue of slackers and outcasts. When Berman disbanded the band in 2009 he claimed, defeatedly, that his music couldn’t begin to undo the enormity of the damage his father had done to American society.
I suppose that clung to him and his art throughout his career, peppered with depression and suicidal thoughts. You can hear it in the conclusory song ‘Pretty Eyes’ off 1996’s The Natural Bridge, his voice ringing hollow and profound with the unearthly anguish of an extreme sleep deprivation he was hospitalized for the moment he finished the song. Post-American Water, in a scene that veers between the prophetic and the melodramatic, he crawled into the Tennessee hotel suite Al Gore watched his 2000 election loss from to overdose on painkillers, proclaiming his wish to die where democracy did.
Berman took his own life in 2019, days after releasing his final album, Purple Mountains, pre-empting grief and bereavement with his unique amalgamation of insight and deflection, repartee and honesty – the funniest and most wrenching suicide note one could possibly conceive of. So where does that leave me and my languid sage? If nothing else, the wonderful immersion of his curling lyrics proved invaluable to me when I was looking for someone to rip off when writing crap angsty poetry as a teen. I suppose the appeal lies in that mercurial world of catharsis, for I can imagine him saying that the view from the second place podium is a tonic of bittersweet wist. I don’t want to hackney the sentiment that he makes one feel sufficient in place of inadequacy, so I posit that he speaks to the clouds drifting across the sun, of the erroneous beauties whispered through the battles of each day. He seems to me to be the hero of what could have been, of falling short of the mark, of an unusually vivid humanity.
‘Repair is the dream of a broken thing, like a message broadcast on an overpass, all my favourite singers couldn’t sing’.
David Cloud Berman, never a truer word was spoken. God knows you can’t sing, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
As a footnote, that is the only lyric quote I have included here because I cannot bring myself to spoil the visceral poignancy you may find in them when you are particularly low.
