Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #79.
I hope you’re well. We have a large burst of new readers this past two weeks, so a warm welcome. Whether you’re new here, or been around for ages, thank you very much for supporting my writing. It means a great deal.
News. Refigure pod, the arts review show I make with Rifa, is back for Season 7. Here’s an Apple link and a Spotify link. The first episode has a Japanese vibe, we check out Yoko Ono’s major retrospective at Tate Modern and the Disney+ reboot of Shōgun (with mentions of Netflix animation Blue Eye Samurai, the Brighton indie band Lime Garden, and the Joel Morris book Be Funny Or Die that I’ve already banged on about here).
More news. This week I’m on the road around the UK, playing piano with Jim. If you’re coming out to a show and/or you spot me in the wild, come say hello. I’ll be in Norwich (Wed 24th) Cambridge (Thur 25th) Margate (Fri 26th) Southampton (Sat 27th) Sunderland (Wed 1st May) Glasgow (Thur 2nd) Manchester (Fri 3rd) and finally Birmingham (Sat 4th).
Finally, on Monday it’s my Mum, Heather’s 80th birthday. We celebrated with something we knew she’d find hugely daunting but did it anyway: we threw a small surprise party on Saturday at my sister’s house in Hampshire. Heather is an amazing woman and the only one in my family uncomfortable with being centre-stage. A quiet, deeply thoughtful (too anxious) person, who raised a family of loud performers.
gems
1
The great comedy actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep) has an interview podcast, Wiser Than Me, talking to older women. It’s now into its second season of free-wheeling, frank and spikily joyful conversations. After each interview Julia phones her mum to chat about it, which is a very clever way to recap.
2
I was taken aback by Netflix adult animated series Carol & The End Of The World, at first I struggled with its low energy bleakness but as the characters bedded in, it became very transporting.
In fifteen years we’ve gone from almost nobody in culture thinking about impending apocalypse, and therefore almost none of us doing anything about it, to every fucker in the culture banging on about impending apocalypse the whole time, across film, TV, drama and comedy, music, art, and still almost none of us are doing anything about it.
3
The Powell and Pressburger classic A Matter Of Life And Death is up on the BBC iPlayer.
4
The cut scene from Wizard Of Oz (on YouTube) where Dorothy — imprisoned by the witch — sings a tearsoaked reprise of ‘Over The Rainbow’. It was cut because it Garland’s performance was deemed just too sad. The film stock is lost but the audio survives. There are a lot of explainers, also on YouTube, about the various edits to Wizard of Oz.
5
Electronic music pioneer Richard Norris (The Grid / Beyond The Wizards Sleeve) has written a fascinating, off-kilter, rather beautiful memoir, Strange Things Are Happening, which has caught me out (and drawn me in) with how vivid it is. It’s published by White Rabbit.
6
If you fancy a potted, yet deep-ish dive into the history of measurements, Andrew Côté (@andercot) wrote this great Twitter/X thread explainer on the chaotic history of standardising the metre and the yard, and especially the ambitious attempt to make one metre equal to the length of a pendulum with a ‘swing period’ of two seconds.
7
The Atlantic runs a newsletter called ‘One Story To Read’, where they (obviously) pick one of their articles each day and mail it to you, Substack-style. Quite often they’re just bog standard Atlantic waffle but it’s how I stumbled on Valerie Trapp’s very enjoyable piece for The Atlantic, ‘Welcome To Kidulthood’, about adults who still sleep with and anthropomorphise their childhood stuffed toys or blankees — and even documenting a resurgence of soft toys in adult lives.
I’m all in on this conversation. Though I no longer sleep with any stuffed toys (unless you count Rifa) I do still have three of my closest childhood friends on my bedside table. They’re pretty worn now, forlorn and (to my shame) dusty, after a decade in the attic. But I still know their names, and wholly, immediately understand the identities and personalities they’ve held for me since young childhood. I used to have many, many soft toys and sleep with a lot of them. Long into my teens I used to play a game at night where my bed was a large Star Trek-style spacecraft and the toys the crew, and I was (kind of) the ship’s computer. I think it often involved an interstellar race, and the peril of launching quickly, while still trying to close the doors.
My stuffed toys all had highly evolved identities, super-powers and inter-personal relationships, which scored hard across my memory, because I can remember many of them now. Sometimes these were weirdly sophisticated for the basic premise and age at which I developed the ideas. For example, I had one near-spherical gerbil called Ounce (now long gone, sadly) whose super-skill was the ability to change his mass at will. Looking back, I think that neatly sums up my chaotic blend of intelligence and naiveté.
The toys by my bed are Grey Bear (beige, not grey), Small Orange Bear (very floppy and delapidated now) and probably my life-long favourite (sometimes Bert) Badger, with his Fonze-like red jacket get-up. I used to take Badger on tour and he once got left behind onstage at Truck Festival and was rescued for me and posted home by Darren Hayman and his friends. An act of kindness I never forgot. That’s another story though.
potato gems
Thank you very much Rosie Clarke for alerting me to this absolute gem: Italian star Rita Pavone sings ‘My Name is Potato’ from 1977, duetting with an animated potato, of course. What a chorus. One of the finest potato-themed songs I’ve heard.
There are also a lot of warnings out there across mainstream potato media this past couple of weeks, claiming that spud harvests are be in trouble, because of this year’s unusual weather patterns so far. Gulp.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
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always there
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Look after yourself and your people.
All my love. Have a beautiful week.
Christopher
x
Happy birthday to your mum!
I too have my most-beloved stuffed toys overlooking the bed rather than in it, nowadays. Mine have equally imaginative names: Brown Bear, Grey Bear, and Minda the Panda (who was named by my little sister, the creative one).