74: February 2024
Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #74.
I hope you’re well. I’m finally emerging from cold snap hibernation (yes, it’s still cold) a couple of weeks later than expected, a tiny bit ashamed of myself and starting to consider possibly doing some actual stuff, instead of just watching telly under a heated blanket. For a start, with four months gone since it began, I’ve only managed to tick off nine items from my ‘fifty things to do before I’m fifty’ list. I need to pick up the pace.
No-one is better at marking the borders of a terrain than the person who walks around it from the outside.
Hannah Arendt
gems
1
Rebecca Jennings writes for Vox on the extent to which artists are now required/coerced to relentlessly market ourselves online, which has unfolded into an epidemic of bullshit, swallowing the creative industries.
2
Last year, my dear friend, the arts and cinema writer (and indie rock drummer) Ben Murray launched a Substack where he is primarily publishing his episodic experimental novel Oh, That Such More Flowers May Come Tomorrow, which cleverly weaves an anonymous narrator’s desperate personal travails with those of the French novelist Marcel Proust. We’ve had 24 chapters so far, and it’s an intense, labyrinthine, sometimes dryly hilarious work, in prose that nods to Proust’s own.
3
Here’s a near-impossible task, entered into with (I think) honest intent: the political and legal journalist Emily Bazelon moderates a panel of historians for New York Times Magazine, to try to account what actually went on in Palestine in the early twentieth century. They disagree quite a bit. The result is in no way perfect, yet it’s a sincere, honourable attempt — especially for a mainstream American publication — to knit some truth through that awful history and the current utterly horrifying time. I’m not remotely neutral on Israel and Palestine, and deeply skeptical of US media coverage, including that of New York Times. But I think this is an unusually useful middle-ground primer, which in itself is no small achievement. I’ll say I’m a long-time admirer of Bazelon’s work and trust her good faith. Also, the extent to which post-imperial Britain is to blame (as with so many of the world’s most fractious conflict points) quickly becomes shamefully plain to see.
4
I’m deep into Lyndsey Stonebridge’s new book We Are Free To Change The World — unpacking the life and thinking of the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
5
Ken Burns’ new two-part doc The Great American Buffalo is on BBC iPlayer. It documents European settlers’ commercial harvesting of that beautiful species to near extinction in the 19th century, in parallel to — intimately connected with — their oppression and near genocide of the first Americans. As usual with Burns it has languid pacing, gorgeous footage and gives lesser heard voices (people of the first nations) a chance to tell their history. Watch in parallel to Killers of the Flower Moon. In February, alongside these, I’ll be revisiting Dee Brown’s devastating book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, which I read (probably too young) as a child.
6
You’ve got five days left to visit Corin Johnson’s marble sculpture ‘Lawrence in Fitzrovia’ at The Fitzrovia Chapel in central London. It’s a bust of the veteran outsider music artist Lawrence of the bands Felt, Denim, Go Kart Mozart and now Mozart Estate. The bust is precisely costumed (sunglasses on, hoodie up) so it depicts a character, rather than a person. It made me think of Gorillaz. Of course, Lawrence shows up to the launch event wearing the exact same outfit, his ubiquitous iconoclast stage get-up, carefully blurring lines between character and person, or perhaps just firmly disguising the latter. Anyway, photos of him with the sculpture have glorious symmetry to them, while everyone else at the event, even the rock stars, appear normcore by comparison.
As this was a one-off artwork focused on a deeply eccentric musician, I planned to write about it at greater length for Double Chorus. Lawrence has big name artist and critic fans and friends, from Nick Cave to Primal Scream to (inevitably) Stewart Lee. For thirty years Lawrence’s work has been wildly lauded by critics, yet gained only a very modest audience (and I know how that feels). But in the end, I found this sculpture and its surrounding kerfuffle impossible to think clearly about, without a more cynical angle on proceedings poking its nose in: I realise I can’t dance with that sense of self-absorbed cosplay, even when the determinedly outsider aesthetic is wholly sincere. Lawrence isn’t posing, he’s being. So both Lawrence himself and Johnson’s genuinely strange, unsettling statue deserve deeper consideration than me getting all irritated at a distance. Old Bobby Gillespie stood up and spoke at the launch event and, well, honestly, if I’d been in there, I’d’ve been out of there. Still, worth a look if you’re in London. And even if you miss the statue, I’d recommend the 2012 documentary about him, Lawrence of Belgravia, which is available to rent.
potato gem
Last week Walkers lost their appeal at the VAT tribunal, which had debated the potato content of their poppadums, essentially arguing over whether they constituted ‘food’ or just a ‘snack’.
Also, since it’s the beginning of the year, I thought I’d helpfully include this primer on developing seed potatoes for planting from The English Garden website.
matters arising
In the last email, which you got on Sunday 21st Jan, I banged on about how much we’re loving Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu’s Sherlock Holmes series Elementary, which ended back in 2019, but which we’ve been binge-watching for the first time this month. Just two days later Paul F Verhoeven writing in The Guardian says all the same stuff about it. If I was grandiose or paranoid, I’d write what I thought, but instead, imagine some side-eye between the lines. We’ve now finished all seven seasons of Elementary. This totalled 154 episodes, with an average length of 44 minutes, so we spent 113 hours of January watching it. Indeed, we paused it last week to quickly whizz through three seasons of Slow Horses on three consecutive nights. Though that’s only 18 episodes in total. Overall, a successful month’s emotional hideout.
Last week Jim Bob announced he’ll be his own support act on the Spring 2024 UK tour, which means I’ll be playing two sets: first as piano/banter accompanist to Jim, then in the band for the rock’n’roll headline blowout. It’ll be a blast. No London or Brighton this time but we’re coming to four towns we’ve not played before with the band: Margate, Norwich, Southampton and Sunderland, as well as Birmingham, Cambridge, Glasgow, Manchester and Bearded Theory Festival.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @thebordercrossing @cjthorpetracey @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton | @lofiarts
always there
Try my music newsletter 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 half-a-box to sell.
My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too.
Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as always.
Chris
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