Category: Culture

By Matty Timmis

It seems a long way away now, but for a little while the rhythm was clave. Life then was verdant, thronged with vistas burgeoning with delicate blossoms. Flaxen sands and purled, fizzing oceans gasped under the creaseless sky’s allure, as rays of sun slunk louche cross chestnut skin, laid out in listless, sultry bliss. This was the languorous pulse of Ipanema beach, where I was first seduced by the elemental disjunctures of Clarice Lispector. 

A true original, Lispector was at once a peerless wordsmith, a quixotic bohemian, and a figure of sheer tropical chic. Resoundingly international yet recognised only in the felicitous stupor of Brazil’s remarkable climates, her conceptualisation of literature nonetheless rings out distinct to me even now. Hers is a writing that is almost uninfluenced, a curiously profound game with the very parameters of character and narrative that glimmers with beauty and insight. 

Under the influence of a strong caipirinha, a camel yellow and a brandished sunset, her final and most famous novel The Hour of the Star, absolved me of reality. Even today the memory of this strange divinity, this complete luxation, still teases some awe from my mind stuck in dim days of drab and drizzle.

Born in Ukraine but raised in Northern Brazil, Lispector created an oeuvre unlike any I had and have since encountered. Sprawled across the sand, browned, blonde and careless, the delicate wisps of a revelation were conjured. As the gorgeous world promenaded before me, and as I gazed gently out across the décolletage of the bay, I was dazzled by a piece of writing I could not have comprehended had it not been in my very hand, rifling through my mind. I was utterly beguiled, transfixed by the gentle sway of the palms and the swirled, daring questioning of Lispector’s fresh formulation of language. That pearled sand enveloped my draped figure in a citrus, sun kissed lacuna; a fresh vision of what it means to live and  to write.

Make no mistake however, The Hour of the Star itself is in many ways reluctant to be beautiful. A psychological account of a disturbed writer struggling to tell the tale of a plain, poor Northern Brazilian girl living in Rio, our unorthodox narrator Rodrigo S.M. does his best to condescend and dismiss the subject he has been enraptured by, almost as Breton was with Nadja. The beauty and implicit value of Macabea and the life she leads is stammered out nonetheless, wavering with an oddly authentic charm, replete with the hopes and heartaches that constitute living.

It is a surreal enchantment then – The Hour of the Star – a strange sort of disconcertion, a swooning detachment from accepted reality. Akin almost to how I felt in a far flung corner of Ipanema beach, charmingly aware how very far I was from home. For a fleeting week my concepts of literature as well as the means by which I ought to live were inveigled.

Now distance is inevitable in literature, and it’s implicit in the very word ‘holiday’. No matter how profound, penetrating or encompassing a story is, it cannot replicate lived experience. Irrespective of the enlightening, revelatory, or otherwise wondrous qualities of a holiday, it cannot be a life. They are not however facile, a great holiday and a great book linger for a long time precisely because of their distance.

So this is the story of the time I felt furthest from home, more than physically – when the strict tempo of artistic preconceptions was loosened. The green and pleasant land seemed a wasteland to me for that week – I could hear the bells of Elysian fields tolling through my mind to a different lilt. Jolted out of my slightly stale conceptions of life and literature, my venerations fluttered fickle. Out flew my Graham Greenes and Virginia Woolfs – my freewheeling love of Kerouac and Faulkner gone – Lispector had a greater enlightenment. I desperately wanted to learn Portuguese.

But I hope this is more than just the tale of an exotic holiday where I read a genius but esoteric book. In many ways it is, as nothing changes really. I remain convinced that Lispector exists beyond the realm of genre and that it is impossible to write like her, and I can speak no more Portuguese than ‘obrigado’,and ‘bom dia’, so I shan’t be moving to Brazil anytime soon. Lispector’s reverence is worthy, found in her enchanting toying in what fortifies the constitution of  ‘the novel’, her narrative skipping and flowing, gamboling in a new patter of life. That week I spent sitting on Ipanema beach with a dear friend, drinking, smoking, and listening to this new patter unfold around me will surely be one of the most wonderful weeks I had the fortune of passing through. 

And that moment smoulders, flickering to a foreign pace in the richly coloured swirls of the irises. It’s a delightfully compulsive cavity, a refuge in the mind; the moment you peer above your sunglasses and your eyes drink in the fumes of discovery. Refreshing as a crisply inebriating drink, it thickens your blood with a rich and smokey dew. So brief but so potent, it is the insouciant rapture of a great holiday. 

Life beats on, but in these moments still the rhythm swings slow and asymmetric. Hear it drum as you unpack your bag after a trip and sand pours to the floor, feel it echo in the fresh creased spine of an enthralling book now dustless on your shelf. Your bag’s contents then are almost identical and you barely notice an addition to your shelf, but something has changed. Now some sand will long languish in the carpet beneath your bed, now an inflection will forever sway through your perception – that is the faint thrum of a ravished dislocation.

As a footnote, a slightly less ravished dislocation was the woman whose leg I watched unfortunately get bitten off by a shark as I was reading on Ipanema.

Image credit: Brazilian Embassy

By Mopsy Peel

Cinema Paradiso spills across the screen like the golden dust of a distant, sun-soaked summer in Italy. I find myself almost anticipating the yellow, looping cursive of Guadagnino to unfurl across the landscape. Released in 1988 and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, it begins in the glow of memory, weaving a tapestry of nostalgia that lingers long after the credits roll. Tornatore’s direction unearths the way cinema represented joy in post-war Sicily, where the screen was not just an escape but a vital thread in the fabric of community life. This was a time when cinema demanded presence, when a moment on screen was unrepeatable, and each viewing was a communal act of devotion. Tornatore captures this with an aching sincerity. Cinema Paradiso revels in the sentimental power of recollection. It insists that even when you leave a place, the past remains, so fulfilling, so irrevocably tied to who you are. The heart, it seems, is always anchored to the place it first beat.

For a brief time, Italian cinema had wandered from its post-Fellini heyday of the 1960s, leaving the world with a quiet longing for the flamboyance and creativity that once buzzed through its film industry. But Cinema Paradiso, in all its dusty nostalgia and unflinching emotion, allowed the world to witness not just a return but a reawakening. This film, a heartfelt love letter to the magic of cinema, clinched the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, reopening the door to Italian cinema. 

Cinema Paradiso tells the story of Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita, a successful filmmaker who returns to his childhood village in Sicily after the death of Alfredo, the local cinema’s projectionist. The film moves between Toto’s present-day life and flashbacks to his youth in the 1940s and 50s, when he formed a close bond with Alfredo. As a young boy, Toto was fascinated by the magic of cinema and spent much of his time at the Paradiso Theatre, learning from Alfredo and becoming involved in the projectionist’s work. Cinema Paradiso explores the interplay between memory, personal growth, and the transformative power of film, echoing the ways in which cinema shapes both personal identities and collective histories.

Yet, beneath its surface, this is also a film steeped in the ache of unrequited love – not merely the romantic strain that pulses through Ennio Morricone’s exquisite score, but the quieter, more elusive yearning for places and people we are fated never to return to. It is a love that resides in fragments, in the unsaid and unfinished, much like the stolen kisses from the film reels – those moments deemed too passionate, too indulgent, and ultimately cut from the frame, yet kept hidden away by Alfredo, locked in secrecy for Toto’s eyes alone. These excised pieces of desire mirror a generation ravaged by war, deprived not only of their romance but of the very space to express them, casualties not just of conflict, but of sacrifice’s quiet brutality. The concept of erasing all that is romantic, of removing the fullness of feeling, is turned on its head in another of Tornatore’s works, Malèna (2000). In this film, the societal gaze reduces the figure of Malèna to mere fragments of desire and shame, as though the censored moments from Cinema Paradiso have been resurrected, now thrust into the limelight of this secondary narrative, their absence in one film becoming the entire essence of another.

A critic, in their wisdom, once claimed that Cinema Paradiso is a movie you show people to highlight ‘why you love film’. It is as if Tornatore carved the very essence of cinema into this story – a love for its power and the bittersweet ache of its passing. Watching it, I am filled with a strange, distant longing, jealousy, perhaps, of the Italian ability to not just feel but to display it so openly, so freely. There they are, whole rows of people, tears cascading, without a trace of the British restraint or shame that so often clouds our own expressions. No uncomfortable irony to dull the sincerity of the moment. It is this unabashed expressiveness that allows connection to others. The emotional depth on screen, uncensored and real, is a power I envy and admire.

Tornatore suggests, through his filmmaking, that great art is a product of rupture. The need to move away, to feel fear, to be uncertain, is essential for creation. Comfort, it seems, is a poor progenitor of greatness. It cannot coax the soul into the wild, restless pursuit of true artistry. To me, this begs the question, is it possible to produce something of significance, something that resonates deeply, without a devotion to something larger than the self? As Toto ventures out into the world, seeking greatness and adventure, he leaves behind a part of himself – a piece of his heart still in the village, still in that cinema. 

On paper, Cinema Paradiso could easily be dismissed as another coming-of-age tale, but to do so is to miss the very heart of it. This is not merely a boy’s journey from innocence to experience, nor a bittersweet meditation on the passing of time. It is a film about film itself—a metacinematic reflection on the art form that has both shaped and been shaped by generations of dreamers. As I watch Cinema Paradiso today, do we, the Netflix generation, feel removed from the magic of a packed cinema, its seats filled with an entire community feeling together? Are we too comfortable now to understand that collective pulse? Have we lost something in our relentless individualism, the constant hum of distraction at our fingertips? Cinema Paradiso is not just a film but a testament to the undying love for storytelling, for those darkened rooms where emotions were felt in unison, where stories were imprinted on the soul. 

Image credit: cinememoir

By Benjamin Mendez 

“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… so far so good. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!”

If La Haine were a religion, it would be the fire and brimstone reality: the kind that doesn’t deal in salvation but in cold unflinching truths. It is The French film (capital T). If you’re an admirer of international cinema or a committed francophile, the chances are you’ve heard its name. A raw portrayal of the activities of three disenfranchised Parisian men – Vinz, Saïd and Hubert – the film simmers in themes of anger, violence and loathing. 

Through a Buddhist lens, the film takes on an even deeper resonance. One of Karmic significance, etched into the very walls of the Parisian suburbs. First, consider the bleak black and white colour grading – an intentional choice, one that would leave viewers with questions as to why it was undertaken. The absence of colour strips the film of distractions; it makes both the film and the message it conveys feel timeless. Like the Buddhist concept of Samsara, the struggles of the banlieue aren’t just a moment in history, they are cyclical and repeating. As we follow the lives of the three protagonists, it is clear that their experiences are bound to be repeated eternally. 

The camera work, excellently done by Pierre Aïm, re-affirms this idea. The slow, controlled tracking shots act out as if observing the film with a sense of detachment that mirrors Buddhist observation. The film doesn’t run towards its destination. It instead meanders slowly, leaving the viewer to question everything they’re watching. There is a sense of karmic inevitability as the film subtly drags our characters towards their deaths.

This idea of “Karma” has become so common that it would be easy to assume it as part of the English lexicon. In its true Buddhist form, the philosophy aims to explore the cause and effect that surround our everyday lives. It’s a rigorous system – a cosmic chain reaction where deeds, good or bad, come right back at you. La Haine is rife with the theme, most notably through Vinz and the repeated image of the ever present, ominous gun. 

Vinz represents the inherent violence found in the forgotten parts of Paris. His constant obsession to kill a police officer exhibits the restless anger of an individual left behind by society. The gun, found by Vinz, becomes a symbol of contention throughout the film. He parades it like an amulet of power, convinced that it will give him the control he desperately seeks “with this, I feel like a real tough guy”. Vinz believes it bestows upon him respect and masculinity, something he is denied by the crushing weight of French society. It gives him the illusion that through violence comes control. His fantasies of killing a police officer, his casual threats, his violent posture reinforce these ideas deep within the audience. In the final scene, it is all but confirmed that Vinz will act on his anger and kill. Yet in his final moments, Vinz reconsiders the cycle of violence he perpetuates, and he spares a police officer. Alas, his karmic retribution is already set in motion. When he tries to break free from the cyclical Buddhist universe, he is killed. His obsession with violence attracts it back to him. The chain reaction commits its final act.

Vinz and Saïd’s characters also explore Buddhists concepts of Annatta or self, specifically the idea of a lack of self. Vinz constructs himself around violence and anger, emblematic in his idealisation of Tony Montana. Yet his final scene reveals his true self: he is not a killer. His entire sense of self is not real – it is hollow, a construct. In a different vein, Saïd’s sense of self is imposed externally: the racial prejudices of French society create both his external and internal image. His name alone indicates how he will be treated. Both characters ultimately highlight the Buddhist notion that the self is not a fixed notion, but a fragile construct imposed upon the receiver.

Unlike Vinz, who is trapped by his own self-gratifying violent attitudes, Hubert makes his own attempt to escape the tragic samsaric cycle, though it ends in tragedy. His aspirations to run his own athletic club are stripped away as the building burns down, in an event that symbolizes how external forces pull the individual back into suffering. Try as he might to avoid the ills of the material world, without true enlightenment he is pulled back into it. At the end of the film, he finds himself caught in the same cycle of violence and retribution. His death affirms the cyclical message at the heart of the film. It is proof the wheel keeps turning, no matter who tries to step off.

In La Haine, there is no neat redemption arc, no Hollywood ending. There is only how you fall, and the landing.

Frank O’Hara, Sensitivity, and American Art

By Harry Laventure

Ah nuts! It’s boring reading French newspapers
in New York as if I were a Colonial waiting for my gin
somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a sketch of the sky
where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine
stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch
while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him
not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets 

• Les Luths, 1959

Frank O’Hara. Somewhere between the consonants and the syllable count and the ink, there is always a lining of jazz. This retains its tuning on and off the page. Cinematic close-ups dripping with cigarette smoke, darting from object to still and place to space with the flicker of a Red-Spotted Purple Admiral’s wing-blink. The poet, tethered by personality to an infinite ricochet of cocktail parties, New York intellectuals, lovers, and the avant-garde. “Les Luths” epitomises the rarer alleles in O’Hara, those that permitted the most microscopic of attentions to encounters with people and things that most would not endow with profundity beyond the happenstance. An effortless habit of admiration that comes when the reservoir of an ardent spirit laps over the brim and spills itself on an outside no longer collateral. More morbid – he would himself remark that the slightest loss of attention leads to death.

O’Hara’s sprezzatura of the soul flaneurs through the arteries of his corpus with an insouciance which never loses its natural ancestry from the heart. Indeed, it is this love and elevation of the quotidian which elicited poet Ron Padgett to choose his “A Step Away From Them” for the Library of Congress as an encapsulation of American Identity. Written shortly after his friend Jackson Pollock’s death, O’Hara opts for no grandiose lament, no hagiography, no tender confessions. Instead, he choreographs a historical record of his experiences during a lunch-break trundle. From yellow hats, to cats playing in sawdust, to a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER, the parade of the random betrays circumlocution of the most dazzling sadness – these are not distractions, but elements of grief incarnate in the places he’s left to inherit without those he’s lost. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

Riotous in his energies and replete with artistic force, it is no surprise that this attentive, charismatic socialite would exert a particular magnetism on the cultural elite of the New York intelligentsia. One privilege of being so close to so many artists is that one garners an innovative, thoughtful armoury of compliments across dozens of different media. Jane Freilicher and Elaine de Kooning executed portraits that projected their respective styles onto O’Hara, carving out his idiosyncrasies amidst great slashes of the palette knife in tropical technicolour. Grace Hartigan attempted to translate his 1953 poem cycle of Oranges onto the canvas, even embedding his words in their abstractions. Alfred Leslie would personally request subtitles and translations for his short film from O’Hara. We cut to Frank, drinking again, bumbling into yet another atelier, in “Why Am I Not A Painter?”

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says. 

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange.

To consider the perpetual stimulation proffered between these individuals, whether in the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists or any other self-nomination, is to learn the currency of O’Hara’s central, artistic voltage. The exchange rate is as generous as a drunken handshake. Guston recalls being air-lifted from a creative pit after a brief poking in of the head and a few suggestions. In this gauze of compliments, we must deliberate how much of Frank seeped into the art itself. On numerous occasions, we hear of spontaneous collaborations in the litter of summer afternoons. My favourite anecdote comes from Norman Bluhm: the pair sat in the velvet of October 1960 and listened to a Prokofiev sonata in chatter together. What begins as Bluhm attempting to demonstrate his understanding of the musical theory employed culminates in a moment of cerebral confluence, and – music still playing – him and O’Hara conduct an improvised set of sketches, complete with poetry composed entirely off the cuff. 

It is this fashion in which he is to be remembered by those he is most loved by. Not in the poetry that he hid in his drawers only to be lauded for now, nor the grand exhibitions he facilitated as Assistant Curator of the MoMA (a position which he’d attained having been promoted all the way from the front desk), but as the charmed, sparkling artistic intoxication with which he seemed to adorn the dance in his footprints. For all the compliments paid to him in his lifetime, 1999 saw a posthumous congregation of a most fitting collaboration. Brought together by the meticulously fervent work of Russell Ferguson and the Museum of Contemporary Art, In Memory Of My Feelings wove the literal personal effects of O’Hara and his clans into something that was simultaneously biographical, panegyric, and aesthetically instructive. Between many of the artists already mentioned and other titans such as Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock, there lies the inexorable inability to amputate O’Hara’s life from the story of his generation’s artistic trajectory. Artist and poet, friend and critic. Those four nouns can be reconfigured as adjectives or adverbs to each other in any number of iterations without any loss in accuracy of expression. A tip of the hat in malleability. 

Lest we take anyone else’s word for it, let us return to O’Hara’s own work. I hope that he would not find it too offensive to suggest that, for all its brilliance, Frank never really saw his poetry as anything beyond another outlet. But what an outlet. He had been immensely experimental in his time as a Harvard student. I won’t try to rival Ferguson in eloquence of catalogue: 

… a striking diversity of forms that includes ballads, songs, a blues (so-called), a madrigal, musical exercises such as a gavotte, a dirge (complete with strophe, antistrophe, and epode), and even more exotic forms such as the French triolet. There are also an imitation of Wallace Stevens (with a touch of Marianne Moore) titled “A Procession for Peacocks”; a strict sonnet; a litany; poems in quatrains; couplets, and heroic couplets; poems with faithful rhyme patterns; and various prose poems.

Left in the company of such technical virtuosity, it is touching and telling to witness the consistency of his voice in the bare, casual, and sentimental tones of his main corpus. Drawing on the lesser-known greats of Reverdy and Apollinare, there is something confessional in O’Hara’s declared objectivity, and an unmatched sensitivity to the theme in the random or circumstantial. It sounds blisteringly blatant, but his poetry possesses a curation of contingencies which is almost musical in its cadence. Now That I am in Madrid And Can Think//I think of you. Such thoughts could only balloon to bloom at this very moment, in this very place, under these very auspices. The American air is only to be enjoyed because his lover is sharing [his] share, and the lungs that do so have sonorously subside[d] to greet him each morning with the flutter of your brown lashes. We then move to Toledo, where the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver like glasses like an old lady’s hair. The apprehension of the sheer number of happenstances that lead to the moment of observation is disarmingly beautiful in its appreciation. Even in his agony, O’Hara sounds grateful just to soak it up. This Personalism is immensely difficult to pin down or define, precisely because of the vast swathes of experience that the poet can cram into a matter of lines. In but one, then, his capacity to seek objects and scenes for what they meant rather than what they were retains a complexity which borders on abstraction only elsewhere found in music. Rothko gunned for the same in his colour-fields; Pater had previously observed all art’s aspirations to ‘the condition of music’. It makes sense that O’Hara was an exceptional pianist before he ever picked up the pen. Oversaturation by example to the point of the universal; when enough ostensibly random facets are showcased together, it is their key centre that is transmitted to us over the material. For this reason, we cannot trust O’Hara in his assertion that My eyes, like millions of glassy squares, merely reflect. It is not reflection, it is not projection – it is appreciation by address rather than praise. William Carlos Williams conjured no ideas but in things, Ferguson refined it to no ideas but in people, the obvious truth is that O’Hara is both. A kind of ventriloquist, bound to autonomous puppets. They are inseparable by their strings, the themes, though they still operate independently. It is a demonstration that the act of creation and the finished creation are the same, to poach from Ashbery. All this written down whilst sneaking out from the MoMA to type a few thoughts in the Olivietti showrooms. That is true sensitivity – or rather, Feldman would say, the dialectic of the heart. 

So poetic a life could only come to an end on a similar theme. Tragically, O’Hara was struck by a jeep just off the Fire Island beach in the wee small hours of 24^th July, 1966. He was 40. I daresay the absurdity would have made him chortle. Profound exactly because it was engulfed by the everyday. In Larry Rivers’ funeral speech, he observed that at least sixty people would have known him to be their best friend. I do not think there is a better testament to O’Hara, in all his tenderness and personability, than Jasper Johns’ Memory Piece. In 1961, Johns made a plaster cast of Frank’s left foot. Two years later, in a poem dedicated to Johns, O’Hara wrote When I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand. I leave it to Ferguson to close: In 1970, four years after O’Hara’s death (…) Johns completed the sculpture he had envisaged making. The cast is attached to the lid of a box that contains a layer of sand. Each time the lid is closed, a fresh footprint is impressed into it. The sculpture makes an intimate kind of memorial, keeping O’Hara’s physical footprint in the world in an echo of the way his poetry lives on in the minds of his readers. Rather,

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

By Matty Timmis

Believe me, I am not a fan of Instagram. It’s the closest fit I can think of to a ‘Babylon machine’, except maybe something like a credit score, but who the fuck really knows what that is. The strange thing is though, when examined honestly, Instagram’s Babylonian currents have been a powerful force for moulding who I am today, how we all exist in this strange new age, and where we all think we’re going. I’m not quite sure that’s the tragedy everyone would have you believe.

Now I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, in fact I can sometimes be a bit suspicious of those more abstract sciences, so this is not one of those tiresome researched or sourced papers. As an insufferable arts student, I much prefer to triangulate my sense of self and reality with the medium of other people’s creative expression. The other week then, as the clock on my phone taunted me with the grandiose digits of the evening, through midnight’s crescendo of zeros and onward to the meek little numbers of the pre-dawn morning, I stumbled upon something genuinely interesting. Amidst the chintzy buzz of the search feature, trapped in the gaudy mosaic, between tiles of hideous car crash videos, offensive memes and plastic surgery was a strange post that genuinely struck me.

What I had stumbled upon, in the suitably unpalatable hours of the morning, was a collection of ten paintings by Egon Schiele. These were like nothing I had ever seen before – piercingly raw, expressive, and tormented in their vivid simplicity. A protege of fellow Austrian Gustave Klimt –  Schiele led a suitably troubled, bohemian existence. Dead by twenty-eight following a twisted, reckless life – pursuing an incestuous relationship with his sister and having a less than healthy relationship with alcohol, he bore well the stereotypes of a troubled artistic genius. This however is not an article about such a blackened bolt of lightning – this is an article about me, and hopefully about you too.

To start, what I think is so interesting about this unlikely discovery is the way in which it speaks to the power of art to occasionally triumph over the patter of the mundane. I certainly did not search for this, or any other kind of artistic revelation, and I’m certain my dastardly algorithm is not skewed to present me with anything so profound. Yet when I glimpsed it amongst the discards of empty degradation I was affected deeply, enraptured with the power of a few lines.

Those lines, those bewildered, tortured faces Schiele summoned, were strangely prescient to my online experience. I feel those wailing lines, sketched in a kind of visceral flow that would often see him fix his manic pencil to his paper for the duration of the piece, can be traced onto the minds of the digital age. There seems to smoulder in the singe of those brandished pen strokes, a very strange kind of symbiosis. Between those warped, shrewd sketches and the pale flame of our minds that flicker so fickle at every swipe, burning to the pace of the digital age.

There’s a desperate kind of compulsion lurking in our digital presence that, when considered, is fundamental to our conceptualisation of ourselves. That kind of stupefied, arresting gaze that we fix to our screens for interminable periods lingers in Schiele’s lucid, striking faces. I suspect Schiele’s inspirations stemmed seldom from contented individuals or joyous experiences, heaven knows he wasn’t a beacon of certitude. But he had the cogency to articulate a particular facet of those prosaic lives, to reveal the swirling mire of darkness that beckons us, that we have always escaped into. 

I, for one, have never desired any relations with any of my family, nor do I have such a harrowing relationship with substances, but all of us I think remain ghastly consumptives. Instagram is often referred to as addictive, but I think the connotations of that word constitute a slight misunderstanding. We know that Instagram works almost exclusively to our detriment, yet we cannot resist complicity. We are not helpless to the ravages of addiction, we are engaged in creating our own snare. We not only consume but contribute. There is a darkness implicit in that, and that twisted human agency is written with crushing lucidity across these seemingly regular, strangely devastated faces. Like any true piece of art they are an accompaniment, a mirror in which looms a charmed derangement – the frantic consumption of our lives.

The elevation of beauty is scrawled over all of our Instagram feeds, and it sucks us into a strange semi-reality, ogling the embellished truth of lives. We too cannot help but project a vision of a life in its most favourable terms, but the depth lies in our desire to do this, which Instagram feeds off. What is so striking in these works then is their undressing – their candid presentation of our sparser, but more emotionally complex minds. Something that lies not in our mere projections onto Instagram, rather in a far more layered embodiment of our interaction with it. What I read in those warped lines of lives is far more complete than a post – it is the murmurs of all live’s choruses, crushing us and contenting us. In our age those strange figures, leering so tormented from the page, are more than glossy holiday posts or a ‘chronicling of memory’ , they also gape for our mindless hours of swiping. They know of the strange curse of existence, of our idle, ivory desires.

Schiele’s paintings, particularly those portraits that I first discovered, are exercises in that damnation, quantified in the digital age. They are portraits of the humdrum, of the menial and the uninspired, but they throb with a macabre revelation, one fuelled by the hopeless forces of consumption. They sing for the looming twilight churn we are so often ensnared in, scrolling to the conclusion of our wits, right out to the precipice of our contact with reality.

So whisper it, but maybe there’s something true in the Babylon machine. Maybe it has moments of brilliance, where the hard swing of the numbed chisel unearths a little vein of gold that courses through our minds, when the miasma is illumined by an eerie brilliance. I am aware Zuckerberg has actually managed to get worse recently, as though he were in some fiendish race to the base of man’s ineptitude. Would the world be a better place if he had kept his churlish woman rating creation in his virginal notepad? Probably. Does there remain however glimmers of creativity’s timeless capacity to reflect personhood and inflect reality even there? I think there may well be.

As a footnote, Instagram can’t be too terrible, chances are that it is the means by which you found this pretentious crap!

By Sam Unsworth

“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at four o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an Oyster. Have a Negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.” – Anthony Bourdain.

Is it really possible for one to be effortlessly cool? Appeal to all? Understand and be understood by those with lots and those with little? Only one man, I find, has this connection. The late great Anthony Bourdain. While Parts Unknown and A Cook’s Tour used to seem to me of the genre of Ice Road Truckers, River Monsters , or whatever everyone’s dad was watching in the late 2000s, they are in fact some of the most insightful perceptions of what it means to travel and embrace culture. I would expect that most readers are familiar with the opening quote, no doubt plastered on an eccentric French teacher’s wall at school, but find it means far more now than it did at the time.

The beauty of Bourdain’s work truly lies in his honesty. Whilst the Clarkson, May, Hammond trio, Michael Palin and even Richard Ayoade have inspired prospering travellers to engage in great feats and navigate the globe purely for thrill and interest, they fail to capture the same intimacy as Bourdain. The audience feels as though they know him, that they are experiencing his strange escapades alongside him, both the good and the bad. We are invited into the very workings of his brain, as though every episode is a tell-all about his multitude of experiences.

I was recently rewatching Parts Unknown, procrastinating whatever essay was sitting in my due folder gathering dust, when I came across an episode I had not watched for a long time. The Sicily trip. This episode is utterly thought-provoking as Bourdain circles into a state of manic depression after a staged diving trip to “capture” some seafood for dinner.. Bourdain swimming along the vibrant coral with octopi falling from above, hurled from a fishing boat not ten metres away. With each splash, and falling fish, the shock and disappointment crept across his face. We, the audience, are then taken through the rest of his travel, and hearing the voiceover we feel as though we are experiencing the trip alongside Anthony. He admits in the voiceover that he had proceeded to get so drunk after the fishing trip that he did not remember the interactions and meals that were filmed after it. He states that had he not been filming he would have returned to his hotel room, mixed up some medicine, drank, and flicked through the porn channel. This kind of gritty honesty is what makes him such an engaging character, we see him through thick and thin.

In Parts Unknown, we are introduced to a slightly older, more mature Bourdain, already a seasoned traveller but now lacking his signature cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. On a side note, I have been meaning to find an interview between Bourdain and Marco Pierre White and count who smoked more cigarettes during the interaction. Bourdain’s early work is what drove his mantra of “enjoy the ride” as we see him eating anything and everything, challenging the new and mysterious with an open heart and mind and firing Kalashnikovs whilst sipping on a Tiger in a Cambodian bar. Interestingly, at said bar, you don’t pay for drinks but for ammunition. Bourdain personifies the traveller, willing to talk with anyone and do anything such as his graphic discussions about bondage in Tokyo. Having grown up in the kitchen, Bourdain is aware of a tough life and hard work and made his name in the culinary field working in Michelin star kitchens. He was a man who knew how to eat, but, more to the point, he knew what he liked to eat. Whether that be at roadside cafes or famously the meal he shared with Obama in Hanoi, there is a refreshing lack of snobbery in his ideas on food. He narrates with a quick wit and humility, dealing with the culinary delights of the world, whilst also dealing with very intense and very real problems facing many people today.

So, if you find yourself at a loose end or simply need some inspiration for your next travel or adventure, then there is no better place to start than with the master himself: Anthony Bourdain.

By Edward Clark

Via her Tumblr, ‘mothercain’, Hayden Anhedönia (releasing music under alias Ethel Cain) repeats the phrase ‘Perverts is for every-body’. Yet her ninety-minute EP Perverts, released in January, has divided her fanbase. For newer fans born from Anhedönia’s success on Tiktok, the drone and ambient-heavy EP lacks the catchy melodies and vocal expression found on 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter and 2021’s Inbred. For dedicated fans of Ethel Cain and Anhedönia’s worldbuilding, Perverts is a departure from the Ethel Cain character and mythology. Anhedönia stated on Tumblr that ‘this next little project has nothing to do with ethel cain lore’ and has no connection to the narrative developed in her previous work. Perverts instead functions as something closer to a thematic set of character studies of different ‘perverts’, initially inspired by Donald Ray Pollock’s book Knockemstiff. Anhedönia has acknowledged that the end product has shifted away from this case-study-like structure, but the initial form grounds it; the project is thus a total separation from her previous album.

Anhedönia’s most recent venture is seemingly a result of her changing mindset. In a May 2022 interview with the New York Times, she expressed how she was happy to embrace celebrity and ‘play Miss Alt-Pop Star and … parade [her]self around’ for the release of her ‘first record’, with the aim to earn a legacy where she can remove herself from the mainstream. Now that Anhedönia’s first album cycle is over, her ‘parad[ing]’ seems to be over. During an interview with the Guardian, Anhedönia stated that she ‘would really love to have a much smaller fanbase’ than she did post-Preacher’s Daughter. Frustrated with her audience ‘joking’ about her work, Anhedönia expressed a desire to be able to ‘turn off the memeable internet personality thing’ where she can move away from being ‘funny’ or ‘relatable’ and, instead, have an audience based on appreciation of her art. Six months later, Anhedönia appears to be somewhat succeeding. Fans of hers have expressed confusion about the direction of her new sound on social media, with comments such as ‘ETHEL WHAT IS THIS??’ and ‘this new Ethel Cain album is just machine noises … what even is this’. 

For these fans, Perverts lacks the anthemic and catchy memories of American Teenager or Crush; the lead single Punish is a dark, brooding, nearly seven-minute piano ballad. Anhedönia’s vocals are accompanied by creaking noises, as she sings slowly, enunciating every syllable, providing the minimalist space for the repeated refrain ‘I am punished by love’ to slowly and effectively resonate with the listener. As Anhedönia lets her voice and the piano become swallowed by harsh guitar riffs and feedback, her chorus blends into itself, the melody repeated and repeated until the guitar cuts out as the song returns to sombre piano chords, accompanied by an eerie, panning drone. Despite its harshness, this is arguably the most accessible song on the album. It is followed by the thirteen-minute ambient track Housofpsychoticwomn, which pairs the repeated, artificially monotone call of ‘I love you’ with a building sample (or reconstruction) of a pregnancy scan. Behind the clear repeated vocal, Anhedönia quietly mutters a spoken-word extract about the magnitude yet un-explainability of love. Eventually this is overridden by the overbearing drone. ‘I love you’ is perverted from a plea to a threat.

Although Perverts’ dark ambience is at odds with any previous framing of Anhedönia as a pop artist and the ‘stan economy’ she found frustrating in interviews in 2023, her new style is not a complete diversion from Preacher’s Daughter. Repeated vocal melodies, brown noise and heavy guitar riffs are reminiscent of harsher moments on songs such as ‘Ptolomaea’ and ‘Family Tree’. Further, Anhedönia’s new material, like her previous work, has ample room for interpretation and analysis. The fifteen-minute Pulldrone details the ‘12 Pillars of Simulacrum’, Anhedönia’s own theory influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra, which concerns the difficulties of dividing reality from media representation in modern society. Anhedönia’s interpretation of Simulacra is grounded in spirituality and a connection to ‘hell’ and the ‘great dark’, which Anhedönia developed in a YouTube video titled ‘the ring, the great dark, and proximity to god’ released in anticipation of the departure of Preacher’s Daughter. Proximity to God is of consistent thematic importance throughout the entire album, and there is an implicit comparison between the perversion of love and perversion of reality. Through a perversion of reality, the listener finds themselves against God. Further, the title of Pulldrone itself refers abstractedly to the pull of humanity between spirituality and the apathy of the modern age, yet also functions as recognition of the ‘drone’ accompanying the poetry. The ambience is uncomfortable and distorted; strings develop and become more grating as the song progresses, stuttering and dying out in its final moments. Anhedönia stated that this ambience alongside the base texture for the album is entirely developed from field recordings of Niagara falls. A connection to nature and thus a spiritual connection to the physical world is embedded in Perverts; this natural connection is distorted beyond recognition throughout. Not all of the ambient cuts on Perverts are deliberately abrasive, however. Thatorchia is a standout example, with developing vocal riffs which expand to an atmosphere that is eerie rather than claustrophobic. Even this, however, is uncomfortable. 

Perhaps the decision to state that Perverts is an EP (Extended Play) whatsoever is Anhedönia’s recognition of the album’s stylistic departure from Preachers Daughter. An EP is usually considered a shorter album, with the length nearly never exceeding 30 minutes. Perverts is longer than Anhedönia’s debut album. The decision could reflect some acknowledgement that this is a side-project or not the direction of her future sound. In a Tumblr post, Anhedönia brushed off the question ‘is it true you’re trying to push away from the more mainstream sound to draw in a closer and intimate audience?’ by saying that she ‘just really like[s] drone music and wanted to make some’. Despite this, it is surely naïve to suggest that Anhedönia did not believe that her newest release would ostracise some fans – a reduction of her fanbase she has previously been all in favour for. 

I am not intending to argue that Anhedönia’s newest release is a deliberate attempt to ‘weed out’ fans who discovered her music through TikTok or other social media. But she is encouraging her audience to judge her music critically and engage with it, instead of rejecting it upon first listen. Anhedönia regularly posts and thanks critics for reviews of her music even when not entirely positive: when the listener properly considers the merits of her music, the feedback is appreciated. Ambient and drone are not genres which resonate with everybody; through the release of a challenging, incredibly detailed drone record, Anhedönia encourages her audience to properly judge the music they hear. 

Perverts is for every-body.

By Matthew Squire 

I was 12 years old, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, with a budget Crosley facing me, a record placed carefully upon it with the black already spinning . Next to me lay a sleeve, a man staring up at me, hair tousled and eyes glaring, daring me to look back, challenging me and inviting me in equal measure. The record caught. ‘That snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind’. Now I agree with Bruce Springsteen on a whole number of matters (there is a reason we call him “The Boss” after all), but this quote I hold as gospel, it encapsulates hearing Bob Dyan for the first time. 

When I heard there was to be another piece of media made about the man himself, I cringed to a degree. Having already taken in so much music, writing and film, I figured this new picture was simply a Hollywood money grab, an opportunity to introduce Bob as a new figure to stand at the altar of the social media generation; I realise now I may have been mistaken. The film I watched tonight was not a commercial, nor was it a mindless piece of film celebrating an era so pined after. No, what I watched was a picture that celebrated a man who has given so much to art and the world, whilst holding close to heart the most important feature of the story, Dylan’s music. 

However, you may take this with a sizable grain of salt. Such high praise is to be expected from such a big fan like myself, someone who holds some of his dearest memories in the same arena as the catalogue of Bob Dylan, and in the same cage as some of his worst. I feel praise for A Complete Unknown extends beyond the expected fans, such as myself. This is an old story told in a new way, made accessible for a new generation to unlock and appreciate the music that has affected so many. 

 However, this is where the problem will lay for some of us; the ability to let go of our ‘ownership’ of Dylan’s music. Music that has become synonymous with our own personalities, our own moments and memories. But, it is imperative that the message and the sound continues to reach new ears and new minds. I myself have been guilty of trying to hold this experience out of reach to those unfamiliar with Dylan’s music, as I’m sure many have. Many times I’ve allowed his songs to do their job too well, coming too close to my heart and pushing me to gatekeep them with a vigour not reserved for other music. This is why A Complete Unknown is such an important film, it forces us ‘pure’ Dylan fans to a noble defeat and drags us gladly kicking and screaming into a new age, one where we must be ready to accept his universal appeal as a positive. 

Although I’m not quite ready for a Blood on the Tracks era biopic, I think we must accept the fact that it is more important to share music than it is to keep it to ourselves, as important lessons and myths lay within. Let us not be the ‘lone soldier on the cross’, but push others ‘down the road to ecstasy’.

By Harry Laventure

The Internet. Noun, “a harrowing whirligig of rot”. Defined by example: scroll, Lebron James’ smiling face transposed onto a pumpkin with a spectral version of the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ playing from the digital wings; scroll, the grinch, coloured blue, enormously excited about a certain kind of patella-themed medical procedure on the following day; scroll, a small dog AI rapping in Chinese; scroll, a rotund young man now known to the world as The Rizzler; scroll, Ian Hawke; scroll, Hawk Tuah; scroll, Talk Tuah; scroll, Talking Tuah. Has the great gallery of gibberish ever had so little wall space? Certainly not. 

After the pinted pretension of a Christmas quiz’s revelry, a friend of mine described influencers as our era’s answer to socialites. Having wept for Madame de Pompadour for a little while, I reflected on the sparkling offerings of the zeitgeist. Are we cooked? Perhaps, but it’s not all bad. I present the panacea: LondonDeadPubs. Real name, James McIntosh. Street, Jimmy Mac. 

Sycophant that I am, it is a labour of Herculean proportions to pin down this cultural aficionado in but a few lines. He is at once a musician, an underwriter, and a journalist, alongside more serious endeavours. Published on Spotify, in the FT, and editing for The Fence, there are many strings to the bow of this Zythophilic Robin Hood of content. Above all else, punctuated by various homages and tips of the hat, one theme has been prevalent in his corpus: yes, the nominative determinism speakst true, his muse is the humble boozer. 

LondonDeadPubs offers the premium service of criticism for every kind of public house, from the shop-conversion cavalcades of quaffage on the estate to the anachronistic debauchery dens of the Dorset village. Spliced between shots of sips and sips of shots, soundtracked by vaguely alienating ambience, Jimmy Mac has flown far and wide in search of the perfect place for a perfect pour. Adorned with a sartorial armoury of herringbone jackets and 70s collars, his quizzical insouciance has peppered pub after pub, pint after pint, with a narration that is at once lucid, referential, enjoyable, and directly informative. Structurally, his arenas of merriment are judged on four parameters by number: ambience, interiors, drinks, and the ever-delightful DPF (Dead Pub Factor). According to these barometers, each inebriation station is ranked and depicted in a fashion that is faithful to their identity, for better or worse. 

From Moranos of Canons Park to Albert’s Schloss of Piccadilly, we meet no conceit or alcoholic martyrdom on this tour. Criticism is humorous but candid. The care and attention to detail of each review coagulates with the frothed collar coherence observable atop a well settled stout. The fact is, Jimmy Mac seems to me the perfect influencer. I sincerely know nothing about him beyond his LDP character. His content is consistent but enriching, niche but entertaining, and it stems from something sincere. This is a man who not only loves to drink, but knows and treasures the very English reverie that is a simple pint in a pub, whatever the context. 

At the end of it all, we must concede the comforts in the anchor of a damp coaster. The concentration of a country’s attitudes to the seasons, bleak and golden; the shadows of sodden-boots on old stone floors post-countryside-walk, whisked away by the glowing fuzz of a cast-iron hearth; or the light chime of parasols in the creaky rattle of beer garden benches. That particular hieroglyph of the pump-badge, and the second sunlight of an IPA’s contents refracted and projected on a table of your choice… I digress.

At the risk of sounding like a git, he is one of the few actively positive things that I have encountered spontaneously through the algorithm’s radical wisdom. I implore you to find him on Instagram or TikTok. 

On the mystical metric known as the DPF, it’s a ten from me. 

By Maisie Jennings

David Lynch (1946-2025) was an American filmmaker. 

I discovered David Lynch as a teenager – I was discovering cult classics, “arthouse” films, Murakami novels, and drinking red wine without grimacing. I watched Blue Velvet and was spellbound, nearly hypnotised. Masterfully, Lynch enmeshes American, white-picket-fence suburbia with dangerous and seductive forces – a distinctive thematic quality across his body of work. The terror Lynch constructs is existential; it probes the fragility of the everyday, piercing the mundane with ostensibly unnatural evil. At the same time, he locates this fear within, arguably, some of the most beautiful shots in cinema, and amongst whimsically playful moments of campy humour. This, I think, is why Lynch’s work, transfixes and intoxicates like a lucid dream and, simultaneously, reverberates in our minds like a terrible nightmare. He undercuts horror with glimmers of hope, offering some light in worlds that seem bereft of it. For me, he completely transformed the way I interacted with art, and taught me that strangeness could be a boundless repository of creativity. 

In an interview with the Guardian in 2018, after the release of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, Lynch speaks plainly: “I was never a movie buff. I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.”. Expressed in typically gnomic fashion, Lynch’s blithe response is somewhat unexpected from one of cinema’s greats. In another interview, he lists the films that inspired him: the works of Godard, Kubrick, Fellini, and Bergman. However, Lynch, delighted by the ephemeral slipperiness of ideas, explains that inspiration is often captured in the “24/7 movie” of life, and not conjured or created by the realm of film. “The whole thing”, for Lynch, “is translating that idea to a medium”. His 2006 book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, outlines his creative approach: 

‘Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.’ 

It is a characteristically elusive metaphor. Lynch goes on to elaborate that ‘going deeper’ means to access an expanded state of consciousness via Transcendental Meditation, a practice he began in 1973 during the production of his first feature film, Eraserhead. Though Lynch certainly did lean towards the wacky persona he became associated with, his wisdom is gentle and serious. More than anything, Lynch lived for his work – the deeply introspective process of art-making. 

David Lynch was born in Montana in 1946, and his childhood was spent mostly in transit due to his father’s job as a tree surgeon with the United States Department of Agriculture. It was an all-American upbringing; Lynch was a Boy Scout and his family pinged about happily between towns in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Virginia. He reminisces, however, on a particularly striking image from his childhood: 

‘[My youth] was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it was supposed to be. But then on the cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions and millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and it’s all red ants’. 

This memory constitutes the opening scene of Blue Velvet – a bright blue sky, white picket fence, and pristine red roses subsequently disturbed by the camera’s focus on the squirming insects on the ground below. Lynch’s surrealist Americana had always been implanted from the landscapes of his childhood – doubtlessly his time spent in Spokane, Washington influenced the mystical lumbertown of Twin Peaks – as ever, it is reflective of his ability to catch the big fish of ideas and translate them into works of art. 

In the 1960s, Lynch went to art school in Philidelphia. He found the city to be a sort of industrial hellscape – ‘There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest inspiration in my whole life was that city’. After his daughter was born and Lynch moved his family to Los Angeles in 1971, it took Lynch another five years to complete his first feature-length film Eraserhead; he dubbed it his ‘Philadephia story’. The success of Eraserhead lead Lynch towards a brief, but phenomenally impactful, foray with mainstream, blockbuster cinema. He was approached to direct Jonathan Sanger and Mel Brooks’ The Elephant Man – a biopic starring John Hurt as Joseph Merrick, a severely disfigured man who became a Victorian object of curiosity. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, and Lynch was hired to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune, kickstarting his collaboration and enduring friendship with actor Kyle MacLachlan. Dune was a notorious commercial and critical disaster – Lynch was unhappy with the heavy postproduction cuts of his footage and the experience further alienated him from pursuing a conventional Hollywood career. 

In 1986, Lynch released Blue Velvet – cementing him as cinema’s psychosexual and surrealist auteur. The film also established Lynch’s use of recurring cast members and his small, exclusive pool of creative collaborators. Most notably, perhaps, was his partnership with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who created the dreamlike scores to Lynch’s most iconic projects. After Blue Velvet, Lynch got to work on Twin Peaks, extending Lynch’s visual corpus into prime-time television. Twin Peaks aired in 1990, and since then, I think, it remains the most enchanting, thrilling, and entirely matchless American TV drama. The series follows FBI Agent Dale Cooper (another role played and shaped by MacLachlan) to the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks as he leads the investigation into the murder of high school sweetheart Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Its release and sensational reception marked a decisive turning point in television drama – the deliberate, steady pacing, uncanny tone, and surrealist turns influenced other iconic shows like The X-Files, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, to name a small few. Although it was precipitously cancelled after the second season, Twin Peaks proved that television could be a challenging, provocative medium. 

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature-film prequel to the series, was released in 1992; it cast much darker, devastating shadows than the off-kilter folksiness of Twin Peaks. The film signified Lynch’s refusal to satisfy his audience’s lingering questions, instead, he unearths the true evil within the town – rather than the cosmic, metaphysical forces in the woods, the horror of Fire Walk With Me is found in the home, inside the torment of Laura Palmer. It is a shuddering crescendo of sorrow, and, in my opinion, Lynch’s masterpiece. 

Lynch returned to the psychological thriller in 1997 with the release of Lost Highway, starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette as a couple who receive mysterious videotapes of themselves inside their home. The film is labyrinthine and dense with potential explanations, and potentially Lynch’s coolest, sexiest mindfuck. In 2001, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive further disturbs the conventions of the neo-noir – deconstructing fantasy by layering dreams and illusions. Initially, Lynch has intended for it to be a series and a pilot was shot, immediately cancelled, and then adapted by Lynch into a feature-film. Despite its shaky start, it proved to be another enormous critical success – owing, I think, to its endlessly interpretive nature, and Lynch’s frustration of the audience’s desire for diagetic narration. We become the detective, and Lynch’s neo-noirs do not so much defy interpretation and explanation as they mire us in them. 
In recent years, Lynch had retreated from making feature-films. 2017 saw the release of the third season of Twin Peaks – a powerful 18-hour nosedive into the depths of surrealism, beginning with the endless reverberations of Laura Palmer’s bone-chilling scream. It underscores, for me, how woefully insufficient language is to express the mysterious forces of existence that Twin Peaks reveals and obscures. I was deeply touched by Kyle Maclachlan’s tribute to Lynch in The New York Times; he explains that Lynch was not just a filmmaker, but an artist concerned with languageless mediums, existing within the world of feeling and the unconscious – the deepest depths of a unified, creative ocean. It’s why Lynch’s films are so brilliant. He was a painter, and he was enthralled by the idea that you could add texture, sounds, and smells to an image. Almost, I think, like experiencing the senses in a dream.