111: Little black sculptures

Sep 30, 2025

Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one one one, an excellent milestone to have reached, I hope everything is well with you.

Thank you for reading. A very warm welcome if you signed up recently, perhaps via my ‘Thursday Murder Club’ rant in the last issue. I hope you’ll enjoy these emails and stick around, though my essays aren’t always spent slagging off terrible films.

At its heart, I think of Border Crossing as a zine: if it was remotely viable, I’d be typing this out on a clacky old typewriter, gluing and stapling the thing together onto A5 card, then posting it to your house. I guess try to imagine that’s what you’re reading.

Whatever, I hugely appreciate you. On we roll.

appearances

• Brighton/Sussex friends: this Thursday I’m a guest on Guy Lloyd’s live Slack City radio show ‘Radio Blah Blah’, broadcast from The Actors. I’ll sing a few old Chris T-T songs and chat about the vinyl reissue project. There’s a live audience, so come along, say hello? Also appearing are The Roebucks and Who We Are. I have a friends + fam discount code for £5 entry: just type in ‘COOLDOG’ at checkout.
TICKETS

• UK, March 2026
Jim Bob has just announced a UK full band tour for next Spring.
TICKETS

gems

1

Food teacher, broadcaster and chef Samin Nosrat has finally released a second book, after the genre-reinventing Salt Fat Acid Heat. The new one is called Good Things. Samin really is the best out there. For a fun introduction to Good Things, check out the latest episode of Home Cooking, the podcast Nosrat makes with Hrishi Hirway (of SongExploder) — recorded live from a book launch event in San Francisco.

Also Samin went on Fresh Air.

Also, last month’s episode of The Dave Chang Show has both Hrishi and Samin as his guests. Chang isn’t always for me (gets too bro-cast-y) but once the three of them are in the room it’s a really good convo.

Samin has three UK shows in March next year, in Edinburgh, Bristol and London. No Hrishi, sadly.

2

Paul Foot’s stand-up special Dissolve is free to watch in full on YouTube or Prime. It’s extraordinary.

If you want to learn something of the story he tells (at cost of spoiling some the show’s power and surprise) here’s a good interview Paul did in July with The Guardian. Though I’d obviously say watch the show first.

Also, for Brighton/Sussex folks, on 9th October Paul is a guest on Guy Lloyd’s other show, his podcast The Portrait Guy, where he interviews a guest while they paint each-other’s portraits, in front of an audience. Counterintuitively (given the visual aspect) it’s a super-fun podcast.

3

Writing in Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates demolished Ezra Klein’s (weak, equivocating) response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, to my mind, correctly. Klein and Coates are acquainted privately, so when they disagreed so vehemently, Ezra Klein reached out to Coates to talk it out on his NYT Opinion podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. It’s an interesting, worthwhile conversation. To me, Klein is wriggling and opaque, while Coates is civil but unflinching and bang on. I don’t know how others will interpret it.

4

My inspiring friend Professor Gilly Forrester contributes a big chunk to the second episode of Jim Al-Khalili’s new BBC series (I think part of the Horizon strand) Secrets Of The Brain. It’s a fascinating exploration of the latest insights of neuroscience. If you can access the iPlayer, give it a go. Professor Gilly’s work with apes (where the animals take part in the wild, only in a voluntary, collaborative, non-exploitative fashion) has some absolutely incredible potential.

5

Natasha Stallard’s excellent cover profile of American author Ottessa Moshfegh for Kinfolk.

6

Musician and writer Meaning Of Everything’s brilliant 900 word spoken essay on ‘clocky dolls’ — sort of a compassionate explainer of that experience for cishet folk — delivered 3rd September at Write Club Atlanta. It’s a YouTube link (audio plus stills) and just seven minutes long.

7

We finished The Pitt, the John Wells and Noah Wyle emergency room drama, where the whole series lasts just one day in a Pittsburg A&E, following four student doctors’ first shift. Some of the most impactful telly of the year, with stunning slow burn performances. Frustratingly, you can’t yet watch it legally here in the UK, so you have to use a VPN, or steal it via filesharing (or wait until they fold it into an upcoming British platform launch). But if you like your medical procedurals and have stomach for gore, seek it out, it really is a doozy. Thanks very much Stef for the hard recommend.

8

On Thursday afternoon, on my long drive up to Edinburgh for Lost Evenings festival, I swung by Yorkshire Sculpture Park at teatime to check out William Kentridge: The Pull Of Gravity, a major show for this South African sculptor and mixed media artist. I was blown away: it has landed firmly in my top three art shows of the year.

Comfortable occupying both the beautiful outdoor expanse and YSP’s underground gallery, Kentridge’s work is large-scale, drenched in personality to the point of quirkiness, yet never falling into the trap of the humour equating to swimming in the shallows. Sometimes the pieces have an almost Disney-like quality of anthropomorphism, yet they also reminded me of Paolozzi’s angular takes on form. Not this one though.

I was shocked how — quite physically — I coveted the smaller pieces, grouped on shelves on the wall. They each capture such feeling and personality, even glimpsed in passing as part of a large group.

This triggered a thread of thought: in realising how much I adore plain black, domestic-sized sculptural objects. Like, last year, at home, I painted a couple of modest-sized personal items (and picture frames) this very dark shade of black, Stuart Semple’s fourth edition of his blackest black (the paint he developed to troll Anish Kapoor, after he greedily bought the rights to ‘vantablack’). I do enjoy Semple’s hustle and his blacks are terrific. These shades swallow up the light. I don’t truly understand what’s going on but the way one’s eyes and brain fall into the darkness, like it’s a hole, even while one still instinctively tries to define edges and texture of the object, leaves me deeply satisfied.

So. I haven’t wanted to steal any sculpture as much as these Kentridge pieces, for a long, long time. Though actually I have been fantasising a bit recently about stealing sculptures. That’s another story though, I’ll let you know (obliquely!) if I pull off a heist.

Finally, I hadn’t clocked that Kentridge’s pandemic era film series, Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot is available to stream on Mubi, so I’ll watch those in the next few days.