72: A last glance over your shoulder
Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #72 and thank you very much for your continued support. It means a great deal.
Happy new year. Despite the bluster and flooding, we made it down to the beach for chunky waves: I love early January in chaotic weather, in a drained half-empty tourist city. But also, this week I drove west, parallel to the coast, and the sheer volume of excess groundwater across the landscape was unsettling.
news
From now on, I’ll publish Border Crossing emails in a more regular pattern. Twice a month is the plan, on the first and third Sunday of each month. Let’s see if I manage to keep that going. However, Border Crossing won’t always necessarily include a full-length essay, as it has in the past. This email will always have some waffle and the gems, alongside any other new / regular features I think to add. If I’ve got an essay to share, it will be in here, first, as before. But I’m not going to squeeze essays out of myself for every email, if they’re not asking to be written.
Partly, I allowed that process to become a burden instead of a pleasure. Partly, I’m working hard to break the back of the non-fiction book(s) I’m writing at the moment, while at the same time trying to fit in actual life. The mental wrangling it requires to force an article, when nothing’s forthcoming, is silly — but I’d rather still send you an email and not leave another long gap. So it goes.
I hope you’ll continue to find value in Border Crossing, even when they don’t always have the long-read. In parallel, my Double Chorus music newsletter has good energy, I believe. I find it easier — more carefree, sort of — to slam out those shorter, opinionated things about music, than other kinds of writing. So I’ll keep chucking them out, as and when they pop into my brain.
That’s the sketch, for now. I hope, as it takes shape this winter and through the coming spring, it’ll work nicely for you, as well as for me.
gems
1
Not exactly obscure, but Rambert’s beautifully staged contemporary dance show Peaky Blinders: The Redemption Of Thomas Shelby is available on BBC iPlayer and well worth a go, whether or not you’re into modern dance, whether or not you’re into Peaky Blinders.
2
The cute story of how 13-year-old lad Blue Scuti recently became the first ever human to defeat Tetris, as told by aGameScout’s channel on YouTube.
3
A powerful essay on being ‘stealthed’, written by Girl On The Net, the excellent sex blogger. Be warned: this is livid, vivid writing about sexual assault. Also I ought to mention that Girl On The Net publishes her adult content and audioporn on the same site as this essay, so I guess even visiting her website may be NSFW if your W is prudish. On the other hand, if she turns out to be the exact kind of naughty narrator you’ve been seeking, you’re welcome!
4
Just before Christmas the Scriptnotes podcast with John August and Craig Mazin dropped a full-length interview with Christopher Nolan, packed full of process nuggets and fascinating details.
5
Unbelievably fun story on Slate about how the American 1990s prime-time TV soap opera Melrose Place was infiltrated by a subversive group of radical leftist artists.
potato gem
This week, several newspapers (mainly the worst ones) are reporting that potatoes are brilliant for defrosting car windscreens in cold weather (this link is to The Metro). Apparently you can rub your windscreen with a potato — so therefore it’s worth keeping one with you in the car, if you’ll be driving in bad weather. I guess you need to replace it when it starts to go rotten.
I think if you can fall asleep without listening to stuff, hold on to that.
— overheard advice from one Gen Alpha to another on the train
matters arising
I owe an apology to my friend Oisin Lunny, who makes the fantastic Geek Pie Radio show for Slack City. When I copied across my favourite radio/podcast list, from a Pages doc into the ‘Best of 2023’ email, I accidentally missed out his show and didn’t notice. I spotted that there were only 24 things, but instead of realising something was missing, I just wrongly added in what was in fact my 26th favourite show of the year, The Rest Is Politics: Leading onto the list. Well, fuck those guys, Oisin’s show was in my Top 10.
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A last glance over your shoulder
Now we’re here, I discover that “2024” — the phrase itself, spoken aloud, “twenty-twenty-four” — has some unexpectedly potent, symphonic resonance. I hear it with swagger, the declamatory heft of Chuck D shouting “nineteen eighty-nine!” — that greatest ever bellowing of a year out into the world. It feels even bigger, even, than 2020, or 2012. An internal swirl of ASMR. I cannot remember vibing like this on how a year might trip off your tongue when you say it in these first few days.
I write those cultural lists obsessively. Throughout the year, on a Pages doc beneath a pile of categories, I write everything down. Categories themselves shift and weave and flow. Should I include older films? Should there be a separate category for documentary? What happens if I watch a piece of dance, theatre, or opera on television — is that a ‘TV show’ or a ‘live performance’? Should I prioritise specific episodes of radio and podcasts, as I did in 2021, or keep it simple and just list the series, as I did in 2023?
This relentless increasing complexity of categorisation, in a world where presupposed categories of all kinds are breaking down, cannot be entirely self-directed. It has to be instinctive and wracked with inconsistency. Does that matter?
We — or at least, I — cling to things long after they cease to have meaning.
My friend Ben loves the arts as much as me (with wildly different taste) yet he doesn’t write it down at all. He makes no lists of culture that he’s experienced, nor does he use any socials (or other media) to share his viewing habits. He claims zero interest in (formally) remembering what he’s seen, heard or read — and doesn’t mind if he forgets things. I cannot fathom it.
So, do I consume too much culture?
Or, do I share it too keenly? Or both?
Without wanting to, I begin to see and define the year gone by in terms of magic spells cast and recast. Pause and make a “woo-woo!" noise, waving your arms in front of you, like a 1980s television dream sequence…
•
Did I tell you about the three weeks I spent lost in the online video game Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds? Late March, early April, soon after Rifa’s birthday adventures, when I got glue-ear out of a relatively mild cold. Up til that point I’d had an excellent 2023, but glue-ear is fucking horrible. I couldn’t hear anything properly. I couldn’t produce or edit audio, or hear clearly enough to create sound design, which is a major part of my livelihood. There’s no cure, either. You wait it out and if you still have glue-ear symptoms twelve weeks later, they can operate (fucking operate!) to cut a tiny hole in your eardrum for the gloop to escape out through. Fuck me. Given there was no actual physical pain, I was unfeasibly — pathetically — knocked down by it and left in the most fragile mental state I’ve been in for several years.
Then I discovered that, though I couldn’t hear the real world, I could still hear a certain kind of video game, abrasive and buzzing through tinny smartphone earplugs. In fact, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds sounded more realistic than anything out in the world. Such brightness and thinness and heavy weaponry, cutting through the muffle. I played and played and
played and played
and played. This is a ‘battle royale’ format game, which is to say you parachute onto an island with a hundred other players from around the world, then you run around trying to kill each-other with whatever weapons you can loot, while the play area gradually shrinks. The winner is the last to survive. This format is how Player Unknown made his fortune. Brendan Greene, an Irish photographer stuck in Brazil, first built his game career by modifying pre-existing online survival games to run this format and made his mods available to anyone. These were far more fun than whatever the original format of the games had been. Player Unknown’s impact on our culture can barely be overstated: the reason the game Fortnite became a global phenomenon is the game makers used Greene’s idea and added a ‘battle royale’ format onto their game’s original structure, modelled in his image. That’s the version of Fortnite that took off. That’s the one millions of people still play every day.
You may already know, the phrase comes from the cult Japanese film Battle Royale, where an unruly group of school-kids are made to fight each-other to the death on an island, to make an example of them and encourage other children to behave better. Many years ago, I was commissioned by the Halloween Society to perform a live re-soundtracking of that film at a cinema in Soho. Not many people showed up, but it was a hugely fun experience and I wish I’d done more of them (and especially recorded it somehow, I didn’t have the resources back then).
Anyway, April 2023. Playing PUBG relentlessly, I hid from life, which turned out to be remarkably easy: my commitments were lightweight and peripheral. I learnt which guns and ammo and strategies I prefer, which locations have good loot, what terrain I like, where was most likely to be dangerously crowded at the start of the game, how to hide and snipe and use different types of cover. At the same time, I learnt how unnecessary I am to the functioning of other people’s lives, including those close to me.
I ghosted myself in real life in favour of a digital fight to the death, over and over again.
A couple of days before two Big Thief gigs, which I’d fretted about missing, my glue-ear started to ease, gradually, then quickly, then gradually again. I still had the tail-end of it for both nights of my favourite band, but it was minimal enough (and the gigs loud enough) that it didn’t spoil the music. And the moment the glue-ear started to go away, my veil of distress lifted, in relief, realising I’d be fine.
After that, I played PUBG only a few more times, fewer than ten games the rest of the year, I reckon, and never more than one game at a time. Without glue-ear, it meant less, became instantly of little importance. Its flaws as a game (played alone without friends on low quality equipment) suddenly poked holes through the earlier impact of the game’s mechanic.
Yesterday and today I parachuted back in, to play five more times and try to remember what I got out of it. I came second, then three consecutive goes I got killed fast, landing amidst crazy crowds at the start, not being quick enough to loot a decent weapon, or a helmet, or plain panicking, faced with more than one enemy at once. Then I won a game. That felt good. Then I got rid of the game off my computer.
But there’s an awful bit, I mustn’t miss out, although I’d like to.
In March we lost someone, young, fairly close. Close to my other half, and someone I liked a lot but didn’t know especially well. Fantastic company over dinner at our house, funny and complicated, beautiful, ambitious, much younger than us. She’d moved cities, then, later on, took herself away altogether. So, this young woman had a particular look. When I chose and customised my in-game PUBG character, I replicated her. Then, swallowing up chunks of the day with it, channeling my own (moderate, entitled) mental anguish, I found myself imagining me as her, and her huge, terrible decision being undertaken over and over again, by an avatar’s journey through a game’s landscape.
There’s a terribly clever, traumatic sci-fi idea in Gareth Edwards’ film The Creator, whereby you can, if you find someone who recently died, with the right equipment, briefly re-animate them, to access a few extra seconds of consciousness. It’s used not for compassion or to say farewell, but in battle, to glean last nuggets of information from them. Then they are abandoned once more to the ocean of oblivion. As I watched that film last month, my mind flickered guiltily backwards to PUBG landscapes and watching a digital woman’s back, as she frantically gathered weapons for survival.
One day perhaps we will wake up lost people, not to give them a second chance, but to skip-dive fragments of them as game pieces.
Oof.
•
In the east of Paris, we walked around Pere-Lachaise, the iconic hillside cemetery, for about three hours, seeking out the tombs of icons and heroes. We left two madeleines on Proust’s grave.
In Reykjavík we went to a tiny label night in the basement of a record shop and one electro act turned out to be a member of Pussy Riot, and then we realised Björk was there, in a crowded space not much bigger than our living room. We didn’t say hello — no selfies — we respected her space, in fact we almost ran away, already feeling out of place. She looked incredible.
My single most powerful magic spell was cast in rural Norfolk, towards the end of recording Ben’s album, which I’ve been producing all year. Despite how much of my life I’ve worked in music, I have never before composed and scored parts for professional strings. But in September, I created the string section music for some of the songs. One wrinkle was, working on them at home, as I tried to hear the reference audio, the sampled orchestra sounds in digital form weren’t effective, because they didn’t have the ‘attack’ — the notes don’t come in quickly enough — to capture the melodies. So, in order to check my score was functioning properly, at that demo stage, I had to use other sounds — mostly synth flutes and organs — to hear the string parts against the backing track. Of course, it sounded horrendous.
So, when our proper studio session came around, with real musicians, I’d still not heard any approximation of how my string parts might sound, in real life. I knew that the parts worked, technically. I knew that the notes were basically correct, and the harmonies held up. But I didn’t have even a hint of what they really sounded like.
Then, the magic spell: I sat for half a day in the control room at Sick Room Studio, while these players, members of Norfolk’s renowned quartet Chaos Collective, performed the parts. They were utterly fantastic musicians. The score worked exactly as it was meant to for the songs. Of course, it’s not earth-shaking scoring or anything — it was my first go, I kept it simple and made sure it supported the song, I didn’t permit myself any craziness — but this experience was so pure rewarding, moment by moment, that I will never forget it. It was a spell of joy, enough to overwrite any number of repetitive, un-useful emotional dips in a year.
Obviously I got home and spent days — weeks now — composing lots more string and orchestral things, exercising a new muscle.
Imagine, you regularly travel on foot between two familiar places. You take the same route each time. There are good things about that familiarity and routine: it becomes intimately knowable. But also, there is a kind of nothingness about it. Over and over again. It becomes a video game of your life. Then one time you take a different route, which you’ve not experienced before. Strangely, the feeling you get is near-identical to that of being on holiday. Just walking down the unfamiliar street is enough to trigger the heightened senses of your vacation self.
So you eat somewhere new. You meet new people. You behave differently. It’s all fresh neural pathways.
If remembered moments are all we have, then routine is our mortal enemy.
Now I’ve forgotten what I was actually writing about.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @thebordercrossing @cjthorpetracey @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton | @lofiarts
always there
Try Border Crossing’s sibling newsletter about music, Double Chorus.
My Chris T-T complete annotated lyrics book Buried in the English Earth is still (just about) available via the Border Crossing shop. One last box to sell.
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Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as always.
Chris
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