107: Best culture of 2025 so far
Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and seven, I hope you’re keeping well.
Since we’re halfway through 2025, this issue I’ll do my favourite arts and culture of the year, so far. It’s a mixed bag as always but writing it down has left me pretty positive about this year’s experiences.
On we roll.
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but first, gems
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Courtesy the great film critic Dana Stevens, I’ve only just discovered Bright Wall/Dark Room, terrific website of literary essays on films.
Two to get you going: Amber Sparks writes quite brilliantly about the notion of community in Hayao Miyazaki’s work, ‘Coming from a Place’ and the essay Dana recommended, Elizabeth Cantwell’s ‘It’s Only An Island If You Look At It From The Water’, on Jaws. They have a podcast too.
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Virginia Heffernan interviews Jon Ronson for What Rough Beast podcast, about the end of the ‘culture wars’.
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Ágata A Timón writes for El Pais about teenage maths prodigy Hannah Cairo, who, while still in high school, has solved a forty year old conjecture.
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Download the Centre for Media Monitoring full report proving shocking BBC News bias in favour of Israel, based on analysis of 35,000 pieces of BBC News content.
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The Channel 4 player has Gaza: Doctors Under Attack available to watch on demand. This film was commissioned by the BBC, then sat on for many months, before finally being rejected by the Beeb. Obviously, watch only if you’re prepared for it: it is graphic and shocking, perhaps to an overwhelming degree. That the BBC didn’t screen this is unforgivable.
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Fascinating investigation by Daniel de Simone for BBC News, reveals repeated, orchestrated lies in court by numerous (including senior) MI5 officers, as they attempted to cover up sexual abuse by an MI5 agent. Also proves that Sir Jonathan Jones KC, commissioned by Yvette Cooper, undertook a whitewash, rather than a real investigation.
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John Wilson interviews children’s author and John Donne biographer Katherine Rundell, for This Cultural Life.
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potato gems
• A lot of news items in the past week about Russia’s potato inflation problems, as a marker of that country’s economic fragility right now. I can’t bring myself to link to the (accurséd) Telegraph, so here’s Potato Pro.
• In time for the next Border Crossing I’ll be harvesting (hopefully) the spuds I’ve been growing with help from Charlie Peverett of Sussex Wildlife Trust and Birdsong Academy. So, fingers crossed for some photogenic (and tasty obviously) potatoes.
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My favourite culture of 2025 so far…
It’s that time of year again. I haven’t included music here — over on Double Chorus I wrote a parallel (rather brisk) article a few days ago, covering my favourite albums and gigs and such, for the first half of 2025.
Now, here’s everything else.
As usual I’m way behind on CINEMA and tangled up, trying to define which films count as 2025 releases. I’ve never found a satisfactory solution to this, except that I ought to watch a lot more good movies, then it would matter less. Haven’t seen Wallis Island or Hard Truths yet, nor Pepe, hated Nickel Boys and gave up bored with A Complete Unknown. So my favourite films are still Conclave (watched well before Pope Francis died), A Real Pain and the Latvian animated film about a post-apocalypse cat, Flow. It’s not as great a movie as these, but conceptually (and in terms of filmmaking audacity) I loved Grand Theft Hamlet, where two actors try to stage a production of Hamlet inside the video game Grand Theft Auto.
TELEVISION in 2025 is easier (mainly, we’ve watched a ton of it). Three shows sit head-and-shoulders above the rest, in the 9/10 scoring range: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s beautiful, austere Japanese family period drama Asura, Tony Gilroy’s peerless Star Wars prequel series Andor and — more obviously for British telly watchers — Stephen Graham’s intense exploration of toxic masculinity Adolescence, each episode captured in bravura (for real) single shot. Though if I’m honest about what captured me most of all, it’s clearly been Andor, after which we immediately did Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One, then piled onwards into the original Star Wars trilogy (in fact, I’ll admit I’ve done this whole process twice in the past two months). The quality dips steeply once you’re back in the eighties with Luke and Leia, so I come unglued halfway through Return Of The Jedi and struggle to finish it once they’re partying with the Ewoks. This is sacrilege but I’d adore to see the original trilogy remade (!!) with Gilroy penning them in Andor and Rogue One style.
My favourite post-Andor re-watch has been going back to the four seasons of Star Wars: Rebels, a spectacularly fun, unexpectedly complex and multi-layered animated series, which overlaps chronologically with events in Andor (and lays the groundwork for the less good telly show Asohka). That final Rebels season is a revelation, up there with the very best Star Wars stuff and sets a precedent for some of Andor’s peerless nuance and scope.
And don’t get me started on my pet theory that Luthen Rael must have met Grand Admiral Thrawn at some point, likely chatting over some piece of precious antique art.
Enough Star Wars talk.
Once again this year, I’m compiling a separate DOCUMENTARIES list. At the top are Boty: I Am The Sixties, inevitably Gaza: Doctors Under Attack once Channel 4 screened it, though it’s an impossible watch, delightful South African film Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey and Questlove’s Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music which, now I come to think of it, ought to be re-categorised into my ‘music on television’ section.
I’m halfway through Adam Curtis’ Shifty and don’t think it’ll make my top five, though he’s still a unique voice. Somehow, this time around, the lack of urgency in his observational ‘offbeat history lecture’ tone isn’t gelling for me, versus the visceral pace of our actual reality. I think Curtis works best when we’re soporific and comfortable, helping to wake us up from out of that stupor. Right now, none of us need that. I’m also struggling through Pavements, despite being a big fan of the band. The film’s quirky ‘high concepts’ are really annoying.
My favourite LIVE ONSCREEN (non-musical) performances of 2025 are Ronny Chieng’s standup special Love To Hate It — my outright favourite standup show this year so far, even ahead of Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years (I think a younger me would be flabbergasted how much I’ve come to love Burr, despite our vast political differences), then Josh Johnson’s free special Why Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Is America posted to YouTube. After that there’s the sole UK entry, Jack Saunders interviewing Chappell Roan for BBC Radio 1. I also love Conan O’Brien’s Mark Twain Prize ceremony, as a bunch of superstar comics do fantastic short bits in tribute. The show was broadcast from the Kennedy Center, shortly after Trump took control of that organisation. It acquired a freshly subversive texture that otherwise wouldn’t usually be present at such an establishment beanfeast. Finally Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue at the Golden Globes is great stuff, and Michelle Buteau’s special A Buteau-ful Mind is very funny. Buteau’s NYC-set sitcom Survival Of The Thickest is up near the top of my telly chart.
Back in the real world (yay, screens off) and 2025 has been a strong year for LIVE PERFORMANCE helped along by a busy, very enriching Glastonbury Festival. My favourite non-music live shows so far couldn’t contrast more from each-other: Naomi Wood performing her one-woman Gobbess poetry and acrobatics show at Glastonbury. This is an outstanding piece, I’ve not seen narrative poetry and movement blended better. Professor Gilly Forrester’s inaugural professorial lecture at Sussex Uni was a bona fide mind melter. I went along presuming it’d be a pleasant, interesting friends and family celebration of her academic success. Instead I came away knowing Gilly’s doing crucial science with fierce ethics and major real-world potential, and she knows how to convey that clearly.
Then there’s Eun-Me Ahn Dance Company’s dance show incorporating mixed media Dragons at Brighton Dome and Shon Faye and Torrey Peters’ shared author event at Brighton Corn Exchange, both from Brighton Festival in May. The poet Brian Bilston was very enjoyable at Glastonbury, despite appalling noise bleeding from a (dreadfully located) nearby stage. Also, the great author, cultural historian (and friend of this newsletter) John Higgs needs a mention, with three appearances in my top ten. The American anthropologist and ‘sexy animals’ comic Natalia Reagan, who I got to know at Glasto, has two sets on my list. And finally Robin Ince on superb chaotic form is in there a couple of times too, both being hilarious and doing thought-provoking poetry, though I did end up onstage with him improvising acoustic guitar, so he may get disqualified from inclusion.
My favourite BOOKS list of 2025 is still very untidy. Currently I’m two-thirds through a new, as yet unpublished (possibly unfinished) David Bramwell non-fic in draft form that is one of the finest, most fascinating things I’ve read this year — but I’ll only list that when it’s out properly. Meanwhile my top end includes: Boff Whalley’s un-categorisable (sort of a creativity self-help) book But, then Julia Raeside’s scathing debut novel about the toxic comedy world, Don’t Make Me Laugh, Daniel Spicer’s perfectly pitched, exhaustive biography of free jazz legend Peter Brötzmann, John Higgs’ Exterminate / Regenerate, the story of the making of Doctor Who, Ian Penman’s Erik Satie Three Piece Suite and Adam Zeman’s The Shape Of Things Unseen.
I have categories for ‘essays’ and ‘email newsletters’ with lots of entries in and notes about stuff, but they’re currently so disordered and mixed up I can’t share fairly. I’ll only say for certain that singer-songwriter Laura Marling does make the final list. Otherwise, I’ll leave those til December’s final lists.
2025 has been a weaker year for ART EXHIBITIONS than last year, probably because we haven’t done a full week staying at Jen and Lainey’s in London, checking out all the art, as we did in 2024. That added more than twenty shows in a few days.
Only this week, we made it to the entrance of Jenny Savile at National Portrait Gallery but couldn’t wait ninety minutes for the first available slot, then the same afternoon — heading home via Waterloo — we diverted to the Hayward for Yoshitomo Nara and it was closed, because Monday. I swear we’ll get to both.
At this point, Barbara Walker’s retrospective at the Whitworth in Manchester tops my list. I wonder if anything will touch her, because I find her work and vision overwhelming. She absolutely should’ve won the Turner a couple of years ago, though it scarcely matters. Others near the top include two in Barcelona: seeing the stunning permanent collection at Fundació Joan Miró for the first time, and a retrospective of a pioneering (criminally unsung) young post-revolution Cuban filmmaker, Sara Gómez, in a show called My Contribution at La Virreina Centre De La Imatge. Just this week, I got a great deal of inspiration from the long overdue Ithell Colquhoun solo show at Tate Britain (it’s paired on one ticket with Edward Burras, though they’re hung separately — I think I prefer this to fully paired exhibitions, as Tate did last year). Also in June, I got a lot from the unusual Art Is In The Street exhibition at Musée d’Orsay, about the explosion of advertising posters in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Lastly, Charleston House scored the long-term peppercorn rent deal, for their warehouse space in Lewes, and the smaller of the two inaugural shows there, American artist Koak’s The Window Set, is quite mesmerising.
My three favourite single episodes of PODCASTS (or radio) in 2025 include Neal Ascherson talking about the journalist Claude Cockburn on the London Review of Books podcast, Scriptnotes episode #672 with Jesse Eisenberg and, best of all, the episode of BBC Radio 3’s Arts & Ideas all about wolves, which was a truly transporting listen. Just below these, I was blown away by both Kate Nash and CMAT on two episodes of Adam Buxton Podcast, while Sufjan Stevens eviscerating himself ten years on for his supposed lack of artistic integrity making Carrie & Lowell, on All Songs Considered, which became a culture news item of its own. Plus, there’s another phenomenal episode of Scriptnotes with Tony Gilroy chatting to Craig Mazin about the pressures and opportunities of writing a second season. Though funnily enough, we haven’t ended up watching Mazin’s The Last Of Us season two — and maybe we won’t — I have no appetite left for its inevitable bleakness.
I’ll hold off sharing my overall favourite podcast series until the end of the year — that’s another list looking like total chaos right now.
Which brings us hurtling out of the arts, onto food and drink stuff that makes up my last couple of sections. Kicking off with EATING OUT. Phew.
My favourite meals so far are: Bonsai Plant Kitchen audacious Gen Z plant-based Asian fusion barbecue in my corner of Brighton, Zia Carolina a Napoli family-run neighbourhood Italian joint in Poblenau, Barcelona — pics of Maradona everywhere — which easily beat the much posher places we tried in Barca, then Bayte in St Leonards-on-Sea and Guasa Arepas Venezuelan stall near West Holts stage at Glastonbury Festival. Yes, a festival food stall in my top eats for the second year running. I was still finishing that when Bob Vylan came onstage.
Overall, we haven’t done much fine dining in 2025, though I’m unsure why. Partly it must be economic and time constraints, but I suspect we’re going through a phase of preferring informal street food and pop-up oriented eating. Less pressure and such. We’re tireder, and posh nosh does require social energy, right? A sign of the times. Like, the modestly priced veggie meze takeout from my local Mediterranean deli Sunbirds on London Road, Brighton, is more casually delicious right now than whatever high-end experiences I’ve had lately. Good baklava and lentil soup. In fact, now I’ve written that, I must going there as soon as I hit ‘publish’ on this.
BRUNCH in 2025 has been all about the hotel breakfast at Hyatt Regency in Manchester, old favourites Can Dende in Barcelona, Round Egg Buns in Paris and our Monday regular Moksha in Brighton (which absolutely 100% should’ve come ahead of Oeuf in Hove in local food awards ‘The Bravos’, Moksha’s food is always, always, a step nicer — and vibier, if that’s a thing — than Oeuf’s brunch and I have zero clue how more people don’t realise). Another unexpected festival stall entry too: Truly Crumptious the homemade crumpet caravan in the Avalon Field at Glastonbury.
Some time in Autumn I swear we’ll get back to Tony’s Starfish & Coffee in Queen’s Park, Brighton, which historically does super-well on my lists, but we didn’t eat there at all in 2024 and not yet in 2025. It’s up a hill, that’s why. Hashtag “lazy”.
My favourite PUDDINGS in 2025 are led (by quite a margin) by my brother-in-law Al’s rhubarb clafoutis, which he conjured up on a family gathering mini-break in Spring, in a house rental on the seafront somewhere near Bognor. I’ve not heard of clafoutis but it balances a perfect tightrope between sponge and pancake. Behind Alun sits the white chocolate and pistachio ice cream at Platform One railway station cafe in Shawford, Hampshire, takeout pastries from La Colmena at Jeume 1 in Barcelona, and the white cream and cherry choux from the above mentioned Italian restaurant Zia Carolina.
My best DRINKING experiences in 2025 need a lot of tidying up and going back through, so I’ll just list one experience for now: Richard Freeman’s Tipples & Tunes night in Worthing, whereby Rich curates a very small bunch of guests, who each bring an album and a drink to share. I contributed homemade cocoa with Manx spiced rum and the other guests shared Postopoma orange wine (2023) from Podravje in Slovenia, Burning Sky Saison de Fete beer from nearby Firle and a Rojo Clásico Spanish vermouth served over ice with blood orange. That was a delightful night with people I didn’t know.
Oh god, and now I think about vermouth, the red vermouths on the beach in Mataro with Oisin and Marie, what a gorgeous afternoon.
And I’m done.
I’d love to know your faves, if you fancy sharing. If I get a few, maybe I’ll do a follow-up in a future issue, though I ought to get back to the ‘proper’ essays that are gestating. But whatever, do come back in December for the big final lists.
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Home from Glasto, in some despair at political realities, I wrote a short, sad thing on Facebook and LinkedIn. On Facebook I got a bunch of replies, likes and shares and debate ensued. On LinkedIn I got no reaction (positive or negative) though I did get four emails and texts about it, from people who’d read it but who (understandably) didn’t want to react publicly.
I’ve updated what I wrote, to (hopefully) remain within the law:
Away from the politicking and hyperbole, there is a gigantic question now pending about how morality works, which I think is both fascinating and scary:
How does one stop morally supporting a group that one does morally support, when that support suddenly becomes a serious criminal offence?
Surely, we believe what we believe? It’s not a choice? That would require a profound (perhaps inhuman) transience of integrity.
So what must we do? Is the government demanding we lie in our hearts, in submitting to their newly imposed stricture?
I cannot just switch off my support [for any particular group] the split second they are falsely defined as a terrorist group, that’s a ludicrous notion. Yet, to be open that one still might emotionally and morally support them, is now so seriously illegal that writing this afterwards — indeed addressing this important moral quandary in any way — could lead to a fourteen year prison sentence.
There is something so incredibly soul-deep ugly about what Yvette Cooper has achieved here, with the support of the vast majority of MPs, that for me it genuinely challenges comprehension. She is ordering us not to be ourselves, or at the very least to hide it, to fully suppress it, under threat of incredible punishment.
My truth is: next week, if it’s a crime, of course I’d still morally endorse and support what has been done.
They have not hurt anyone. They have not even scared anyone. Their only damage is economic. Their cause is just.
A moral value does not shift internally when somebody orders it to, however forcefully they do so.
This is an appalling, appalling state of affairs that should scare us all, whatever our own personal politics or ideology. However comfortable, pragmatic and/or apolitical we perceive our life to be.
It’s nothing less than a crack in the basic framework of our freedoms, which tilts us towards Orwell’s ‘thought crime’.
Actually, it is terrorism, in and of itself.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
always there
Try my other (irregular) newsletter Double Chorus which is what I think about when I think about music.
Refigure podcast has returned for series eight, with me and Rifa.
Check out the Border Crossing Press shop.
If you could do with a creativity/life balance reset, check out my Creativity Counselling service?
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• mid Sept: MANCHESTER / LAKE DISTRICT (one slot left)
• late Sept: EDINBURGH / LOST EVENINGS FESTIVAL (three slots)
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Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Chris
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