75: Miller, Arendt, Glazer, a dying elephant
Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #75.
I hope you’re well and you’re enjoying these days of false spring.
Thank you very much for supporting Border Crossing and my writing. It means a great deal to me that you’re reading these beasts, I appreciate you like mad. I think I’m headed into the final straight for my two non-fiction books, so maybe 2024 will be a watershed year for my writing, one way or another.
Right, there’s a pineapple to chop up.
gems
1
The unusual, poetic, intellectual comic (and sometime Broad City writer) Jacqueline Novak’s acclaimed off-Broadway show Get On Your Knees (which she first developed back in 2018 on Edinburgh Fringe) has just gone up on Netflix, in a 2024 version directed by Natasha Lyonne, but released without much fanfare, in the annoying Netflix way. It’s a masterful penis-themed show, biological and wordy in the best ways.
“It blooms and it withers and it blooms again.”
2
Television critic Julia Raeside publishes I Dare Say, a newsletter analysing the industry and unpacking noteworthy shows. I’m biased (Julia is a friend) but her writing is insightful, fearless, witty, always worth your time.
3
Ben Hunte in Vice magazine exposes how the Tories have secretly shut down the NHS’s (cost effective, successful) LGBTQI+ diversity program.
4
If you’re into electronica, this Electronic Sound live video sessions series is amazing, it’s kind of like a brutalist ‘Tiny Desk’ for bleepy sonic explorers. I especially loved the Lomond Campbell (he produced Kathryn Joseph’s album that was one of my favourites in 2022) and the Nik Colk Void set (she used to be Nikki from Kaito, indie pop fact fans).
5
Patrick Radden Keefe’s long article in New Yorker about a young man lost in the London underworld. Partly a fascinating story, partly it’s just intriguing to read a deep, dark dive into London, written for Americans, by an American.
6
Adam Buxton’s meandering podcast interview with Werner Herzog finds both these men, maybe unexpectedly, at their best.
potato gems
A date for your diary: Thursday 30th May, 2024 marks the inaugural International Day of Potato. For real. Set your calendar to repeat annually and we can celebrate together. I’ll be in Catalonia, so potates bravas will flow.
Also, if you’re anywhere near Ipswich in Suffolk, UK, a new shop called “Just Potatoes” opened this week in the Sailmakers Centre. To my knowledge it is the first and only shop in Ipswich to solely sell potatoes.
matters arising
Quick correction: in Border Crossing #74 I wrote that Bobby Gillespie spoke at the launch for the ‘Lawrence in Fitzrovia’ sculpture. This was wrong, he didn’t speak at the event at all: I’d mistaken a photo of him lurching around for him actually talking.
In response to my Lee Miller piece (Border Crossing #73) I got this brilliant email from the great Yorkshire-based writer, musician and theatre maker Boff Whalley (of Commoners Choir and Chumbawamba).
Boff writes —
I have a question – why do you find the Lee Miller bathtub image annoying?
We have it on a wall, large, in our bathroom, next to the bathtub of course. To me it's a perfect photograph: the photographer washing off the dirt of the war in the dictator's own bath, the muddy boots on the floor, the whole thing utterly staged like a piece of theatre.
My two children grew up getting bathed with that picture looking down at them, and we taught them about Lee and why we had the photograph up there. My wife Casey is a photographer, so it all makes sense in our house!
Anyway I had a song which I sang to the kids, pointing between Lee and the kid, with a singy-songy melody –
Johnny in the bath
Lee in the bath
One goes splish
And the other goes splash
Who's that man with the little moustache?
It's Hitler –
Kick his head in!
The last line was played for laughs. Now I'm writing this down, it sounds like maybe we're a weird family. Honestly, we're not...
Magic. Thank you so much to Boff for this.
Apart from a being gorgeous family snapshot-in-song, Boff’s question is a fascinating challenge: why do I have a casual knee-jerk negative reaction to that iconic Lee Miller photo, when in general (as I wrote) I greatly admire her work?
I thought about it. Objectively, I had no argument: Boff is absolutely right that this is a sublime, perfectly observed bit of theatrical performance art, rather than a simple exercise in photography. He’d spotted an opinion of habit (of mine) not a fresh thought.
I think my instinct was always to regard the image as trite, or overly casual. And I took that staginess as a negative, rather than a positive (as if taking the piss out of Hitler somehow isn’t enough, falling short of “seriously" engaging with what he’d done).
But the moment it’s challenged — and thinking about it, to try to write a reply to Boff — I realise how surface-level a reading of the photo this was, on my part. Rather than permitting Lee her much more nuanced intent and process, I’ve judged it for what it wasn’t.
Not long after writing back, I finished Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s magnificent new book-length essay on Hannah Arendt, We Are Free To Change The World. And of course, this same kind of thinking became one of the great controversies of Arendt’s working life, after the New Yorker published her accounts of the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann.
It’s where Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ comes from.
She was widely criticised at the time for refusing to elevate Eichmann to a kind of ‘mystical monster’ status, instead focusing on his uselessness, boringness and smallness of mind, as a petty bureaucrat administering the uniquely vast, evil enterprise of the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, unflinchingly humanising him, to take a broad meaning of that word ‘humanising’. Many of her contemporaries (wrongly) mistook this for Arendt somehow exonerating Eichmann of responsibility, reducing his personal blame, in the name of focusing on the system he was a part of.
So this sits right there, perfectly placed, alongside Lee Miller’s selfie in Hitler’s bathtub. People’s reactions (that I’ve long known to be essentially wrongheaded) to Arendt’s arguments actually kind of mirror — in tone at least, if not in scale — my own habituated po-faced reaction to Miller’s image.
Coincidentally, all last week I kept freeing up time to go see a daytime screening of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest, by many accounts a successful, devastating attempt to convey on film the impact of Holocaust via Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ motif by showing the domestic life of a Nazi family living just outside the walls of Auschwitz (wow, I can spell Auschwitz without hesitating or google). But I didn’t buy tickets in advance, then when the moment came, knowing enough of what Glazer does and doesn’t put onscreen, over and over again, I couldn’t bring myself to actually leave the house to go watch the thing.
How we react to these things emotionally has such minuscule connection to how we react to them intellectually — and basically we control neither. By which I mean specifically, how we react to creative people’s attempts to engage with and reflect upon that greatest atrocity of the twentieth century, both at the time and later on. What I think bears no relation to how I feel about Lee Miller in Berlin in 1945, or Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem in 1961, or Glazer’s film whenever I see it next week.
Also, I suppose Gaza is a blood-soaked, trunk-and-legs-hacked-off elephant in the room here: arguably, by watching The Zone Of Interest on a Tuesday afternoon, alone, on a plush red seat in a warm, dimly lit cinema, I am myself drowning out the screams of dying children that I know lie in bombed out hospitals, that exact same minute. To be clear: that is in no way written as a comparison of different world events, eighty years apart. Only as a plain observation of my emotional preoccupation and a film’s presumed power of allegory.
Dark.
By the way, one of the best things about Stonebridge’s book (I felt real relief as I got to these passages) is that she in no way gives Hannah Arendt any kind of pass for her racism. In fact Stonebridge clarifies and frames it deftly, as part of a rich and deep account of Arendt’s whole.
Arendt’s New Yorker pieces were consolidated into her book Eichmann In Jerusalem.
•
One of my favourite people (my sister’s bff) Steve Ackroyd, who edited Sex Education and other TV shows you love, is fighting brain cancer. He’s being kept alive and has been given hope by a new-ish treatment, not yet available in the UK, nor yet funded by the NHS. Which means it’s horrifically costly. Steve’s family and friends (not me) are doing a sponsored walk in London, dressed up as Sex Education characters.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @cjthorpetracey @doublechorus
Twitter: @christt | @doublechorus | @lofiarts
always there
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Look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as ever.
Christopher
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