84: Best culture of 2024 so far
Hello, I hope you’re well.
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #84, being issue #1 without Tories in charge. No delusions about the challenges still to come, but it feels good.
Thank you so very much for reading these. It means a huge amount, I appreciate you.
Since it’s July, this issue has my usual ‘halfway point’ rundown of my favourite arts and culture, covering the first six months of 2024. It includes film, tv, books, art, spoken audio, live performance. I haven’t included music in here — I already wrote that up for the Double Chorus. I also just decided to leave out the food and drink for now, because otherwise this email is seriously too long. I’ll share them in an upcoming Border Crossing, or leave it til the end of the year.
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Everyone you’re looking at is also you.
— James Baldwin
gems
1
One of my favourite gen z podcasts is Slate’s ICYMI, which dissects online culture. This week they’ve done a deep dive into the online history of actor, comedian and star (also now director) of The Bear, Ayo Edebiri, who has a lengthy, often hilarious, pre-fame resumé of Internet silliness. This is how I first knew of Edebiri, for her bonkers Letterbox film reviews and very funny — culturally on point — stand-up snippets. It’s also a decent taster episode for the vibe of ICYMI.
2
Content Rising 2024 is a one day conference on Thurs 12th Sep, at Wakehurst (Kew’s wild garden site) in Sussex. It’s about connecting creativity to environmental work, so it’s for planet-minded storytellers, communicators, general creative types. Terrific speaker lineup, very reasonably priced. Organised by my friends Charlie and Tamsin at Wilsome — and they still have sponsorship spots, if that sounds like your business.
3
Stewart Lee, the ‘Stewart Lee of stand-up’ has his latest show Basic Lee: Live At The Lowery broadcast on Sky Comedy on 20th July, 9pm (UK time) and then it’ll go up on NOW TV. Here’s a clip on YouTube.
I know this gem is quite far ahead but it’s one day before my next Border Crossing so I needed to flag it today. Basic Lee is the first Stew live show I’ve missed in a decade, so I’ll be watching.
4
Here in the UK we barely noticed last week’s US Supreme Court ruling that the President has immunity for crimes committed in office. Slate legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern wrote a Twitter thread explainer, which is very unsettling.
5
‘They Didn’t Spare Anyone’ — Kavitha Chekuru and Laila Al-Arian investigate in depth for The Nation a massacre of civilians (back in December) in one particular Gaza apartment complex. It’s a tough read, obviously.
6
7
Full-length interview with the great theatre maker Simon McBurney, of Theatre de Complicité, speaking with John Wilson for the BBC’s always excellent This Cultural Life.
potato gem
This week potatoes made it onto the fashion pages: manufacturing start-up Fibe has won a Fashion District Innovation Award for developing a technique to turn potato harvest waste into a textile, useful for garment making.
The other main potato-ish news story is veteran actor and Twin Peaks icon Kyle Maclachlan starring in a quirky advert for Arby’s where he’s a cult leader. Honestly, it just made me feel sad.
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Best culture of 2024 so far
There isn’t a ‘sector’ called culture, there’s no ‘sector’ called the arts: it is who we are, it is the solution we bathe in.
— Simon McBurney
film
Same as last year, I’m not watching enough new films. Dune Part 2 and Civil War are still my top two, though it’s July. I saw both in actual cinemas and enjoyed Spaceman and American Fiction at home. Overall, cinema-going appeals less and less, except for very particular occasions or moods. I’ve written about that before, so I won’t bang on. I just don’t relish film as a communal experience anymore, which is sad.
tv
The gorgeous, very violent, slow-paced, Japanese adult animated drama Blue Eye Samurai is the best thing I’ve watched on television this year. If you don’t mind getting drenched in blood and some serious sex, honestly it’s a must-see masterpiece. Especially if you dug the Shōgun reboot, since Blue Eye Samurai is set in the same era, with overlapping themes and (for me anyway) it’s markedly better. I was caught unawares by Issa López’ True Detective: Night Country, having not watched previous True Detective series beyond half of season one. Night Country is an audacious, ice cold (Alaska-set) crime noir tour-de-force, with mesmerising performances (thrown together cop duo Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are ferociously good) and a suitably batshit denouement. We won’t go back to those earlier seasons — clearly not worth the bother — especially not since the original show creator Nic Pizzolatto spouted off like a bitter ex on his Instagram about López’ reinvigoration of his stodgy sausage-fest format.
Series three of Slow Horses involved first binge-watching the previous two seasons, on Jim Bob’s recommend, but actually it may not make the end-of-year chart: officially it came out last December, so it’s ineligible if I’m strict. Perhaps they’ll release season four before the end of this year. Assuming it’s still great, it can stay high up on my chart. We haven’t done season three of The Bear yet.
I loved another Netflix animated show: the low energy and tonally sardonic, yet in the end deeply affecting Carol & The End Of The World, which Rifa found. A rogue planet is heading towards Earth, so humanity knows we’re all going to die horribly in a year’s time. In the background, chaos reigns, with people fighting, partying, or travelling. Everyone is off finding themselves. But Carol seeks solace in a meaningless (totally unneeded) office job, along with a bunch of others who choose that same way to occupy their final months. I started off being all like what is this shit? but by halfway through episode two I was locked in. It’s superb on what we can and cannot face, and how we find comfort and safety in the banal.
Finally for telly, at the moment I’ve got ‘documentary’ as a separate category. I don’t know if that’ll stay (depends how many we watch) but I want to mention Ken Burns’ very moving mini-series The Great American Buffalo, which takes the European settler annihilation of that great wild beast as a narrative framework, upon which to hang out and dry the colonial lies that white America calls its ‘history’. Compelling, measured, unflinching storytelling that centres American first nations’ own narratives in a way I’ve not seen.
live
I’ll mention three contrasting non-music live events. After we’d got obsessed by the long-running American network TV drama Elementary (re-imagining Sherlock Holmes as a CSI-style police procedural) we needed some more of Jonny Lee Miller’s energy. So Anna and Tom took us to the production of Sam Holcroft’s play A Mirror that JLM led at Trafalgar Theatre, up London. It’s hard to judge, because I don’t watch much West End theatre, but without context it was a very clever, involving production. Miller was (of course) a powerhouse.
Then the super-smart comedian Olga Koch brought her Prawn Cocktail stand-up show to the tiny Komedia Studio. She went on holiday with a stranger she’d picked up at a wedding. It’s bonkers how much stand-ups really do put themselves at risk to gather material. Koch’s long bit about para-social relationships punched me hard with how badly I build those, especially with podcasters, for example, listening regularly over many years. I laughed at myself later, when my first instinct was to dive into Olga’s DMs to tell her how blown away I was by that section of the show. Duh.
Finally, I very much enjoyed writer, academic and activist Sunny Singh discussing her book A Bollywood State Of Mind at Dome Studio for Brighton Festival. Singh is dryly funny, a very inspiring speaker, and she was interviewed by another terrific writer, Monisha Rajesh. They were a fun pair.
Overall though, Brighton Festival annoyed the piss out of me in 2024. Despite being near the front at that gig, in a swanky, newly renovated venue, we couldn’t see anything. They’d put four rows of seats on the floor but then there was no raised stage. That’s basic shit. Also, while I’ve remembered something I wanted to rant about… I bought a bunch of Brighton Festival tickets. I’d purchased them early, at full price, like a good live events customer. But then, when shows weren’t selling well enough, festival organisers started advertising two-for-one deals everywhere. You don’t need me to say how irritating this is, when you already got your tickets full price. It’s so stupid, because even if they assuaged the problem in the short-term, putting some extra bums on seats, they also taught us all not to trust them in the future; not to buy so quickly next time, but to wait and see. They alienated their most enthusiastic customers, and gave preference to casuals, both at the same time. Surely a better solution would be to email ticket-holders offering extras at a big discount, or even freebies. Not only would they save on advertising the discount, but this process would see their ticket-holders advocating and ‘selling’ the event to friends, on the festival’s behalf. It’s not rocket science. Rant over.
books
My three top books of 2024 so far are all (to an extent) polemic-tinged non-fiction by great intellectual feminists: Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid Of Gender? applies Butler’s visionary clarity and unswerving polemic gifts to the disgusting, manufactured bullshit of ‘gender criticism’. Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book on one of her key topics, Hannah Arendt, We Are Free To Change The World is magnificent. I get so much from this kind of sharp-focused history storytelling, more akin to a long essay on the subject and their ideas, than a bog standard biog (though biographical essentials are there, when needed). Stonebridge wears her academic chops lightly. Finally, Grace Blakeley absolutely goes for it, bringing up-to-date verve and freshness (and crucially, clarity) to dense hard-left economic arguments with Vulture Capitalism.
After those three, it gets briefly awkward. My next three favourites are by people I know and admire in real life. My favourite novel so far this year is still Hester Musson’s country house mystery meets horror show, The Beholders, though I read it back in January-ish. I was moved by Roxanne de Bastion’s haunting The Piano Player of Budapest, she’s thought-provoking on cross-generational inspiration, telling of her Hungarian musician grandfather’s survival through the Nazi era. Thirdly, I’ve already banged on a lot here about Joel Morris’ exceptional analysis of comedy, Be Funny Or Die.
Mikaela Loach’s It’s Not That Radical, a clarion call for environmental campaigning to be understood as part of a broader intersectional activism, will end up on my list but I haven’t yet finished it — and I had to put it down to read (to review) Kathleen Hanna’s sharp, rough-edged memoir Rebel Girl. I’m digging both a lot.
zines
For the first time in twenty years, I subscribed to New Internationalist, as in, actually getting a paper magazine posted to me like it’s the 1990s and actually reading it from cover to cover. Partly this was to get familiar with their house style and sections, ahead of pitching them some global arts shizzle. I haven’t ended up doing that (yet) but NI is a consistently peerless, challenging read. It covers a lot of ground and, unlike most paper zines, feels as if it lasts a while. Alongside it, for now I’ll mention Patti Smith’s newsletter, John Higgs’s Octannual Manual newsletter and Stewart Lee’s regular mailout.
pods
‘The Belgrano Diary’ mini-series re-investigated the great British war crime of the Falklands War, for London Review of Books. It unfolded like a true crime show, meshing 1980s political and naval history with the present-day challenge of revisiting something that’s still controversial to those involved.
I’ve also loved The Rest Is Football’s recent (off season) full-length interviews with Gazza and Eric Cantona, Emma Stone’s interview on Fresh Air around the release of Poor Things and Greg Davies’ absolute sweetheart episode of Desert Island Discs. By the way, what Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger company is achieving in mainstream podcasting, with ‘The Rest Is…’ brand is remarkable, if a bit disheartening for small independent producers. I currently listen to their football, entertainment, occasionally politics strands — and I notice that even if one of the presenters says something that upsets or annoys me (which the non-sport ones regularly do) I’ll keep listening. This means they’ve achieved being a lot ‘stickier’ than many podcasts.
I must also recommend looking up Dua Lipa’s YouTube interview for Service95 Book Club with the heavyweight investigative non-fiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe, on his book Say Nothing about Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’. For pop superstar cosplaying literary journalist, Dua Lipa is super-impressive.
art
In Paris, we did just one fine art visit, to Centre Pompidou for the Brancusi exhibition. That was wonderful, the first sizeable show of the influential Romanian sculptor’s work that I’ve encountered, and gorgeously curated. But that same afternoon, in the same building, stumbling on an exhibition to introduce the rediscovered — very troubled — Paris-based 1950s painter Bernard Réquichot was a brutal, frantic, revelatory art highlight for me. It remains my favourite show of the year, even ahead of Yoko Ono’s exhaustive Music Of The Mind retrospective at Tate Modern, which is off-piste and interactive as you’d imagine. Hanging out between vermouths with Ben in Barcelona, we ducked into photographer (and evocative photomontage specialist) Jeff Wall’s show Contes Possibles at La Virreina Centre De La Imatge. The venue is a big, quiet old townhouse, which despite being close to Las Ramblas, tourists don’t seem to notice much. A very romantic art space.
Almost done.
On tour, Dave, Jim and me went to The Baltic in Gateshead. They had good exhibitions on, including their annual open call. The steward pointed out one painting and said “here’s how open it is, we’ve even got an artist from Sunderland!” — but it was a magic womble round, beyond the art: up on the external viewing terrace, high above the Tyne, several hundred breeding pairs of rare kittiwakes just hang out, right there. Back home in Brighton, the new-ish selling gallery and cocktail bar Helm is exactly the injection of pace our city’s myopic art scene desperately needed: surprisingly rangy over two storeys, operating at the right scale, between the plethora of teeny commercial spaces (often tourist tat traps) and the rare, larger, establishment rooms such as Fabrica and the upstairs temporary space at Brighton Museum. Helm has already hosted a big selling Margo in Margate show, launched a successful annual open (I don’t think anyone submitted from Sunderland) and is right now running a fabulous, somewhat edgelord — in a good way — themed group show, ‘Mr Men and Little Miss’, with the approval of the Hargreaves estate. This exhibition may well survive inside my top ten right through to the end of 2024. Oh man, I badly coveted an unwieldy, globby painting by Evan Roberts called ‘A Bigger Slice’ but can’t quite justify the two and a half grand, despite knowing in my heart it will only ever appreciate in value.
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email: chris@christt.com
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All my love,
Christopher
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