88: September 2024

Welcome to Border Crossing issue #88.

I hope you’re well.

Thank you very much for reading.

This autumn and over winter, I’m available to take on a new project or two (for the first time in a few years). If you want production help on a podcast or radio series, have an idea you want to develop, or your team would benefit from workshops, to help you do audio storytelling yourselves, please get in touch. Collaboration proposals always welcome, of course.

Obviously I also write, speak, produce music, help generate ideas, play piano, all of that shizzle. Hit me up.

Speaking of work work, the second series of The Brighton Paradox podcast has launched and Ep 1 went live last week. Richard Freeman’s investigation show has made a big splash locally, and is helping to frame Brighton & Hove’s current challenges. I produced and edited both series, and composed some of the music, alongside Fatboy Slim and Noraay. If you’re local and/or interested in our city, have a listen.

gems

1

My friend the great Scottish chef Mark McCabe is hosting a run of episodes of Grilled podcast, fascinating conversations about the restaurant trade. The link is Apple Podcasts.

2

Mike Pitt’s summary for The Observer of new science from Stonehenge, proving that the Alter Stone was brought all the way down from northern Scotland.

3

This year the Irish poets Emily Cooper and Jo Burns collaborated on a conceptual collection called The Conversation, which imagines three women talking to each-other in verse: Marie-Thérèse Walter, Françoise Gilot and Dora Maar, all lovers and subjects of the dreaded Picasso. For a hefty taste of this book, here’s five of the poems, courtesy the website of Irish national broadcaster RTE. The book itself isn’t easy to get hold of (in the UK) but here’s a link to the publisher’s shop page.

4

I’ve been blown away by all three seasons of Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo’s low key Canadian queer sitcom Sort Of, which is up on Now TV. We binge-watched it over a few days, until it felt more like dropping into a four-hour indie movie than three seasons of telly. Baig writes and plays Sabi Mehboob, a millennial, non-binary nanny and bartender in Toronto, with Pakistani immigrant parents, who is about to leave for a new adventure in Europe when their client has a dreadful accident, which means they have to stay in town and take on new responsibilities instead.

The show has a plot-driven comedy backbone and struts along, then quickly unfolds into a superb, fully realised family-and-friends piece: chewy characters, empathy for everyone, even when they do stupid, selfish things, powerful emotional heft where needed. And it manages to keep it up consistently to the end. I guess it lands somewhere between Motherland, Master Of None, perhaps Atlanta, and Kim’s Convenience for the Toronto cutaways — also Amanda ‘Pastor Nina’ Brugel shows up briefly, the only actor familiar to me in the whole thing, I love Brugel, she’s a walking kitemark of Canadian quality. Anyway, for me, I swear Sort Of is as good as the very best moments of those shows.

5

Jia Tolentino writes for New Yorker on the Tik Tok-driven pre-teen craze for expensive skincare products, via Sephora.

6

A new Vice profile by Joe Banks of (the often troubling but always deeply insightful) outsider resilience guru and crypto something-or-other Vinay Gupta, who I got to know a bit, years ago, via Dark Mountain, and who I love chatting with, on the rare occasions we cross paths in real life.

7

The excellent, under-sung Hampshire author Oliver Gray’s new travel book Austin Healing is a street-level memoir of two decades at South By South West festival in Texas. As always with Oliver, it’s a wry, funny, deeply humane work and unexpectedly moving. Pre-order details here.

8

The collected final journals of the great poet and educator Refaat Alareer, killed by an Israeli airstrike on 6th December, 2023. Published posthumously by The Electronic Intifada.

9

In the second season of Interview With A Vampire there’s a cute moment where two characters argue philosophically in a Parisian café and ‘Jean-Paul’ on the next table briefly joins in. It’s just after the second world war, so in real life the same time Sartre published Existentialism Is a Humanism. I’ve been wanting more of such easter eggs in this show. Anyway it reminded me of this — Edward Said writes for London Review of Books in the year 2000 (three years before his death) on meeting Sartre.

10

And it also made me think of this: here’s the trailer for Lee (via YouTube), the Kate Winslet film about Lee Miller, out later this month.

potato gem

BBC News Scotland reports on the new potato varietals that are PCN resistant.

This is probably too short notice for you (I can’t go, sadly) but Potato Days UK takes place this Wednesday and Thursday in Lincolnshire and it’s free entry.

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.
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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
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