97: February 2025

Hello m’doofus, welcome to Border Crossing issue #97, I hope you’re well.

At the end of January I wrote for Simon Warner’s Rock and the Beat Generation newsletter about Luca Guadagnino’s film Queer (starring Daniel Craig) and William Burroughs’ source novella Queer.

gems

1

Stephen Dowling writes for BBC Future about the elusive colossal squid — and his own real-life encounter.

2

Thank you very much Sean Carroll for sending me this powerful poem by Emily F. Gorcenski, ‘The Time of Cowards’.

3

Brilliant Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or in 2018) has had a second go at creating a TV streamed drama for Netflix, with a gorgeous, languid family drama called Asura. Adapted from Kuniko Mukōda's novel (which first became a Japanese television show way back in 1979) Kore-eda’s new series retains the setting and unfolds as the seventies turn into the eighties.

Asura works stunningly well as a period piece. Four sisters uncover a secret about their ageing father, which starts to reconfigure all their relationships. This is carefully paced, atmospheric realism, which ignores all the usual expected beats of boxset telly. It’s deeply refreshing. Kore-eda’s previous series The Makanai (about a maiko house where girls train to be geisha, in modern-day Kyoto) was right up the top of my favourite television in 2023 and is also still available on Netflix, if you haven’t seen it: previously I recommended it as an unexpectedly perfect pairing with The Bear, because it uses the preparing of food in a parallel way.

I’m sure Asura will stick similarly in the memory.

4

Vaguely connected… Ani Freedman writes for Fortune on the loneliness crisis among elderly Japanese women, in particular that they’re apparently deliberately getting themselves imprisoned in order to find a community.

5

I just discovered Marc Fennell’s super-fun Aussie history TV series Stuff The British Stole, which is into a second season. Watch for free via U.

6

Bloomberg’s investigation The Second Trump Presidency, Brought To You By Youtubers digs into the online ‘manosphere’ and its role in his re-emergence.

7

Bec Shaw writes for her Nonsense Newsletter on lazy antiwoke comedians.

8

David Foster Wallace talking to Charlie Rose in 1997 on David Lynch, Blue Velvet, being entirely your true self and such. Clip via YouTube.

potato gems

Nicola Davis writes an interesting Guardian piece about the roots of Ireland’s great famine in a potato pathogen from the Andes. It steers clear of the actual cause of that devastating famine (yup, the English) to focus on potato science but that’s okay in context.

This past weekend was Seedy Sunday with similar seed market type events across the UK, so a ton of seed potatoes were being sold. I like Stroud, where they’ve branded it Down To Earth Potato Day.

Watch this space next Border Crossing for a major potato-based announcement. Exciting spud times are coming.

•

get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey

always there

Try my other newsletter Double Chorus

Check out the Border Crossing Press online 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.

Thanks again. Look after yourself and your people.

All my love,
Chris
x