85: Loose threads
Hello, I hope you’re well.
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #85.
Thank you so very much for reading.
I’m not sure what this issue’s essay is about: a chaotic grabbing of connected thoughts, similar to the things it was inspired by, which include the word ‘vermin’ graffiti’d near my house, French author Annie Ernaux’ sexy affair diary, Trans Pride as seen from high above, and the Netflix comedy Loudermilk. It gestated for many months, then yesterday suddenly changed completely. I hope it’s okay.
There’s a thank you note for my friend Richard as well, which I also published on the dreaded LinkedIn.
•
They had this cathedral, right near the train station, and it’s magnificent. I’m not really into those type of things if I’m honest, but it… stood out.
Alan Shearer visits Koln
gems
1
Terrific TV actor Gillian Jacobs (‘Mickey’ in Love, ‘Tiffany’ in The Bear) presents the oddball history of the LA River, for 99% Invisible podcast. Los Angeles is profoundly strange. This year, I’ve missed it badly for the first time in a while, despite everything awful going on in the USA. Perhaps by the time we get back there, it’ll be the capital of an independent country.
2
Katy Wix writes beautifully for The Observer on her childhood school bully and the complex notion of forgiveness.
3
Writer and Americana musician Willy Vlautin interviewed by Ricky Ross for his Another Country music radio show (on BBC Radio Scotland).
4
Published just before the terrible draconian sentencing but Damien Gayle writes for The Guardian on the chaotic trial of the Just Stop Oil activists.
5
“More fucking pricks coming in late, there. And I’ve already done the bit I do when people come in late.”
I flagged it ahead of the live broadcast but Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee show is now available to stream (for a month I think) via Now TV.
potato gem
Much anticipated by the potato / videogame crossover scene, new Colombian game, Sopa (which means ‘soup’) is ready to go. It’s a beautiful magic realist treat, about trying to locate a potato for your grandma’s dinner. Here’s a link to the game on Steam.
More disconcertingly, an agri-business puff story did the rounds this week on how Bayer and Solynta have joined forces to enter the potato seed ‘developing markets’ in isolated parts of, for example, India and Kenya. They’re shilling actual seeds, rather than seed potatoes, for easier storage and transport. I don’t understand the technicalities of that world enough to dig in, and capitalists may welcome this kind of globalised shiz. However, if it’s profitable enough for two huge corporations to collaborate and the buyers are rural farmers in the global south, well, for me that rings alarm bells.
•
This will come off a bit LinkedIn suck-up (and I actually put it on my LinkedIn, like a bellnose) but fuck it...
With my professional audio producer hat on, I want to say a big public bearhug all caps THANK YOU to Richard Freeman and his crew at Always Possible, my longest continuous clients at Lo Fi Arts.
We’ve wrapped the series 'The Possibility Club: Practical Bravery' (already online) and I’m cutting the second season of Rich’s acclaimed 'The Brighton Paradox' investigation show (online soon). Which means, for the first time in more than half a decade, I’ll no longer be editing Richard’s work (his voice and his writing, his conversations with fascinating people) on the regular. I’m sure we’ll do more pod adventures in the future: Rich has insatiable curiosity and it's super-fun unlocking new ways to express that in audio. Still, I should acknowledge the change, as Always Possible restructures.
Hanging out with Rich and his team has been brilliant, for long-term learning, taking on a crazy-rich variety of topics and voices, owning the glorious churn of ongoing regular creative output. The best possible kind of client work. From Colchester to Belfast, to all corners of what’s now being called the 'Sussex Bay'. From straightforward zoom chats to ninety minute, multi-location, fully sound-designed narrative arcs. From cabinet ministers, business leaders and storied academics, to Michael Rosen, Fatboy Slim, Charlotte Church, many other familiar names — I think we’ve averaged more than fifty episodes a year, four years running. It’s been wild.
Without formal training, Richard has become a phenomenal audio presenter, writer, narrator and interviewer, on a par with longstanding broadcast professionals, achieving that almost as a side-note to running his business.
Rich, thank you very much for being a friend, a fascinating, always curious companion, for becoming a much better creator of radio than you realise, and for taking me along for the ride.
This sounds disconcertingly like he died — when he’s just getting going. Anyway, here’s to more.
•
Loose threads
We use the adage ‘blood is thicker than water’ the wrong way round, when we say it to mean ‘family is the most important bond’. The phrase originates from the blood ‘of the covenant' being more important than the water ‘of childbirth’, so its intended meaning was something like: those you choose to stand alongside (in battle, in faith) are more important than your birth relatives. It was meant to be a bonding, class-based, leveller — we’re all soldiers together here, forget everything else, forget your upbringing. Historically, one could ascribe to this a cult-like sense of an organisation (church, state, army) coercing a person away from home, hearth, family and work.
Alternatively, in a more modern context, it takes on a gorgeous updated (particularly queer-friendly) positive meaning: that your chosen family is important, where your birth family need not be, if they aren’t there for you. This was a nugget from the third and final series of Sweet Tooth on Netflix. I did check the etymology and it stands up, the screenwriters didn’t invent it.
We just binged a very different kind of TV show: the Seattle-based Netflix comedy Loudermilk, about an obnoxious Gen X former rock critic, who is now sober and lives a humble if cynical life, running an addicts’ recovery group. We’ve done the show’s three seasons. Loudermilk is tonally chaos, veers from odorous slapstick, unexplained red herrings, soap opera plotting, to schmaltz, to serious, intense adult drama, sometimes shot by shot. Partly, it explores the notion (that I still recall best expressed by Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax) of the vast difference between being nice and doing good. Lead character Sam Loudermilk is an Esme Weatherwax himself, an irritating arsehole, yet devotes his life almost singularly to helping others and trying to do good, to a point that is almost witch magic.
I’m not sure if Loudermilk is an amazing show, or a car-wreck. Throughout the run, the casting and wildly off-piste stories often appear to be focused on giving contributors an excellent experience doing the show, more than satisfying the viewer. Fair play to that. The ending leaves you hanging in many ways, as if they were expecting a fourth series.
If you don’t want Loudermilk spoiled (heh) skip this long paragraph, you’ll be fine. At the end of the show, three plot-lines got skewered deeply into my chest: two open doors to redemption and one redemption denied. There’s extraordinary acting from the veteran Florida stand-up Brian Regan. Regan’s ‘Mugsy’ (deadbeat dad, works in pest control, daft as a brush) began as a broad, reactionary, two-dimensional fuck-up character in the recovery group. Some of those addict characters never develop beyond basic avatars. But especially near the end, Regan leverages Mugsy towards somewhere near Saul Goodman level pathos. His eventual relapse — a vicious self-demolition without closure — is shattering and would’ve fit fine into a much harder-edged drama. He reminded me of John Spencer’s White House Chief-of-Staff Leo McGarry relapsing in flashback, on The West Wing). So, yes, our writer gets his publisher, and a musician who quit because of a bad review gives it a second go. Some couples get together. But others are left as loose threads, or vanished altogether. Even if it’s just the untidiness of a show that unexpectedly ended, it brings balance — and for me, this provoked a major emotional reaction: the frayed edges felt so much more real and powerful than if they’d had longer to plan a final few episodes and created a more polished, conventional TV outcome.
Last year, in the Feminist Bookshop in Hove, I picked out a random Annie Ernaux book to introduce myself to her writing. I’m drawn to Fitzcarraldo Editions, with their pale, minimalist, tactile paperbacks — and that imprint publishes Ernaux in English translation. She’s a Nobel laureate, yet I’d only read one short story of hers, long ago, so I decided to fix that. But I should’ve done the homework. Getting Lost is one of the most rawly, intensely sexual books I’ve encountered. I cringe at the memory of ostentatiously buying it. God, I fret to myself, what if the two young women behind the counter knew the book and I was… found out. Laughing behind their hands in coffee break.
A novel that Annie Ernaux is famous and acclaimed for is Simple Passion, the fictionalised account of her love affair with a younger, married Russian man, attached to the Soviet Embassy in Paris in the 1980s. That’s not the book I picked out, yet now, I know all about that man.
Getting Lost is a much more recent book, many years after the great success of Simple Passion. It comprises Ernaux’ unexpurgated, extant diary account of that same real-life affair, on which she based the novel. Her diary entries blend desperate philosophy, unedited prose notes of the most insightful, literate quality, with a pure, obsessive, incandescent horniness. The sex is as real as the struggle.
She writes: Now, I no longer seek truth in love, but the perfection of a relationship, beauty and pleasure. … Truth can only rule in writing, not in life.
This sentence lands immediately after a dazzling, dizzying bout of obsessive cock worship.
Don’t worry, I won’t write much more about sex, though thinking about its philosophy and chemistry and physics, I’ll admit to being a (whisper it) sex person, and some of my favourite writers do operate in the sex world. But there’s something ickily unattractive for me about anyone who presents as all the things I present as — a man, middle-aged, heterosexual, cis gendered, overweight (there’s a biggie), married, relatively vanilla — writing in any detail whatsoever about s.e.x. stuff.
Come on, we’re the worst. Also, we made it worse for everyone else in the world. Also, we already had our say.
Like any published diary, versus a plotted novel, Ernaux’ Getting Lost doesn’t have a tidy ending. Her affair winds down and, being a diary, it just stops. Loose threads, though more insular.
A friend recently mentioned she’d been reading John Updike and my brain flew straight to his description of first-time anal in one of the later ‘Rabbit’ novels, and how it knocked me down with mortified, immature cringe, back when I was eighteen or nineteen, when that kind of male gaze was so incredibly dominant in literature (not saying it isn’t still, but it was moreso then) and at the same time so breathtakingly imprisoned by naïveté. Surely there’s lots more to Updike than that, stupid brain? Something you can say out loud? Obviously, we (that is, men) deserve liberation and joy as much as everyone else. Equally obvious though: if we could only help with sliding our civilisation beyond patriarchal coloniser capitalism, yes, such escape would cast the same spell of liberation and joy for us, too, just as much as for every other kind of person. Not ‘casting’ a spell, rather, this would be the undoing of a great spell. We undo the great binding to the phoney moral hegemony that was already writ aeons before, as we developed — and so brutally implemented — lasting notions of hierarchy and power.
My convoluted point is: decolonisation, liberation, equiality, is not some act of altruism, we all benefit. Of course that’s what intersectionality is. However — definitely! — it’s not my turn to be centred or platformed on the topic. So, um, all of that really. And (again) a dreadful fear that writing anything about sex risks being somehow… found out… as somehow… lesser.
Okay. ‘Good’ versus ‘nice’. Liberation, including sexual. Chosen families. What the actual fuck?
Earlier this year, nearby on my street, a house was being renovated and they boarded up the ground floor windows. Onto the hoarding, someone spray-painted the single word, “vermin”.
Without context, it can mean anything, or nothing. It could be personal to someone living there — a full-on assault — or, at the other end of the scale, just someone’s random graffiti tag. Seeing it there, sprayed up onto a home, especially in the current febrile climate, it threw me off balance every time. The same dehumanising propaganda used by those in power, down the ages, time and time again, to divide and rule and keep people in check. At the same time, well, that word is not explicitly anything: without further context, the word “vermin” is not racist, not a swearword, not an attack. But here we are: it has become loaded by everything else. Lately, that malignant rolling process of dehumanisation foregrounded far too much. Eventually, of course, it just went away. The boards were removed, and new windows installed. And anyway, it wasn’t ever an attack: it turned out to be just another tag.
Nothing is an ending, except death.
And even that isn’t an ending, for everyone else.
There’s a joke in the new Stewart Lee comedy special that carefully uses that same word, “vermin”. It’s still funny, though.
In Loudermilk, was it a deliberate metaphor, a sophisticated point about dehumanisation, that the recovering addict Mugsy’s day-job was exterminating vermin? I have no clue.
We spent yesterday afternoon with lovely friends who we don’t see often enough, who are raising their children high above central Brighton, with a delightful view. Below us, Trans Pride unfolded. Marching, picnicking, shared culture, mutual aid, activism, partying. The biggest in Europe, big enough that earlier, Brighton had diverted its main bus route along the seafront. Witnessed from high above, the joy and strength carried through the air. Probably the most chaotic, frantic edges were smoothed out. Last night, the parties soared and dived. Many folks won’t be recovered yet, or will have changed their lives overnight, encountering kindred spirits, gathering new family, getting closer to themselves. You’re not alone. Powerful, deeply necessary grass-roots solidarity, against one of the most singular, unhinged, toxic, cult-like backlashes we’ve seen. Against real people, not two-dimensional avatars. One of many reasons I’ve come to understand and support the struggle for trans rights and equality as unwaveringly as all human rights, as all gender and racial and class equities (and in fact, to connect those directly to the battle to rescue our planet from capitalism’s climate catastrophe, as Mikaela Loach outlines so well in her book It’s Not That Radical) has been that great learning of intersectionality: that in the end, their liberation is your liberation, is my liberation too.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
always there
Try my irregular music newsletter Double Chorus
Listen to Refigure podcast, the bitesize DIY arts review show I make with Rifa. It’s series #7 and there’s a new ep every fortnight (roughly) just search “refigure” where you get podcasts.
Spotify | Apple | Instagram
Purchase my book of complete annotated lyrics Buried in the English Earth
which is still (just about) available via the Border Crossing shop.
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.
Look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Christopher
x