WATCHED - Bo Burnham - Inside

I'd not come across him myself till this popped up on my radar via a Guardian review. The set up here is that he's working on a new show, as something to do whilst in lockdown. But as the lockdown goes on and on all his own personal demons come out of the woodwork, creeping into his songs, poems and monologues. 

Much of Inside captures something of the particular flavour of personal distress many have encountered during the pandemic. If you tend to deal with your problems by getting out of your head, sensory hedonism, or simply just going out. Then being forced to stay in and not meeting folk one to one can become like an unwanted meeting with the Dark Lord in a side alley. 

A lot of care is taken here over the staging, so its hard to tell how much here is genuine verite footage or carefully curated artifice.  But there are times when you sense that he is really freaking out a bit here, and not in a good way. Everyone, myself included, have had moments when you wonder quite why you are putting any of this stuff out there, what personal need is this post serving? Is this healthy self expression or just indulging in a narcissistic sense of self importance?

The song White Woman On Instagram caused a bit of controversy. Pointing fun at the superficiality of whats posted on Instagram, is in a way an easy target. Particularly for a man to take the mickey out of women. Whilst the casual sexism/rascism is certainly one way to view this, it also has the ring of truth too. Otherwise the arrow would have nowhere to land, its just not one gender or race that is necessarily prone to this. I've seen universally the type of things listed in the lyrics posted on Instagram. The carefully crafted perfect image and lifestyle that influencers, celebrities and wanna bees, put out there. It is all a bit of an unreal fantasy that is being peddled.

What you get from Inside, is an performer reflecting on his own work whilst it's in progress of being made. There is a telling segment where you view one monologue to camera, that you then see him commenting on, then another version comments on the comment until the cacophony eventually drowns out everything. Burnham's humour works best when it glancingly hits the target on the head, particularly of his own internet obsessed generation. Asking if you aren't performing online then what are you?

Currently available to stream on Netflix

STREAMING FAVE RAVE - Baumgartner Restoration

My love of watching craft makers at work cannot currently be sated by The Repair Shop.  I've watched them all. I've searched further afield for my fix, eventually coming across Julian Baumgartner on You Tube. Currently I can't quite get enough of watching his working process. I am in awe.

The work demands someone who is methodical and patient. Lots of scraping away, thoughtful slow careful preparation, the time he takes over this is simply astounding. These are obviously edited videos, often speeded up filming to fit into a half hour or hours running time. Then there is the cleaning, executed in rhythmic circular motions taking off just the dirt and varnish, but no more. If it won't come off with gentle solvents, then its stronger ones, and if these are ineffective then he scratches the residual old varnish off bit by tiny bit with a scalpel. All of these processes cannot be hurried and may take hours and hours and hours.

All the while he's not getting into a flap. His tables, unlike mine, never get messy or disorganised. He makes sure he takes regular breaks from the tediousness of some tasks. He knows how to look after his mental health. Loves the restoration part but is used to delaying his gratification sometimes for days. Then there are the decisions he has to make about what he is or isn't going to conserve, how far he is going to take his restoration, what his client wants and what he can deliver.

Here is one just so you get the feeling for its fascinating minimalism. Be warned its addictive and some of his videos have several sequences to be watched.

FINISHED READING - Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

As this novel opens we find ourselves on a boat with a woman who has devilish horns. Its 1910 and she's heading for Edinburgh and 10, Luckenbooth Close. She's desperate, she's a surrogate mother with child, reluctantly going there to deliver it to the brutal Mr Udnam. The Close, is a ramshackle of flats in a dank dark tenement block. It inhabits the place of a central character for the entire novel.

Each Chapter heading has a different year, flat number, persons name and short introductory sentence. You move backwards and forwards in time, gradually progressing forward towards the millennium. Initially I was under a misapprehension that each chapter was a separate discrete character in a different era, and the novel a collage of the life and times of those who'd lived in 10, Luckenbooth Close. A hundred pages or so in I suddenly realised that there were now repeating characters. Oh, there is some sort of story going on? Whilst remaining a collage of tales as well? I became still more baffled when the writer William Burroughs turns up to live temporarily in one of the flats. Was there meant to be an actively meaningful link here ? The zeitgeist of this novel is seriously all over the place,I found it more than a tad confusing. Throwing your attention away with every abrupt change of character, period and continuity.

Jenni Fagan's writing style is undoubtedly fecund and fired up with imaginative possibilities. Rough and robust, with a lot of verbal energy on the page to propel the eye onward. Luckenbooth has visual power a plenty too, that could leave viral traces infecting your imagination. It has this bleak underbelly of corruption, violence, murder of the Victorian melodrama type, tinged with Gothic occultism. However, this all left me feeling disappointed, that it really ought to have been more captivating and absorbing than it was, often infuriatingly opaque rather than intriguing with its cloak of mystery. The episodic flip flopping through time causes you to wonder - where the hell are we going? and do I care anymore? Oddly, I decided quite early on that I didn't, whilst still waiting to be shown the error of my ways.

So quite a disappointing reading experience. Was it worth the effort of hauling oneself through to the end? Sadly, No.

CARROT REVIEW 3/8

LISTENING TO - For The First Time by Black Country, New Road

For The First Time - Cambridge based band Black Country, New Road's debut album emerged during the last lockdown garnering a huge amount of positive praise and hype. Mostly of 'the best new band in the world' variety, not that helpful for any band, let alone a seven piece still finding its feet. One can only hope they maintain as firm a grip on their assured sound and compositional style as is evidenced on this album. It opens with Instrumental, which is a very jaunty and upbeat track, which seriously misleads you about what will be following it. Some of this album can be a lot more unhinged and discomforting than this.

Whatever their main singer and lyricist Issac Wood is channelling, it is coming at you from a particularly obtuse angle. Whilst you may not always be able too follow the angular poeticism of his lyrical drift, you can feel what he means.  Fraught with all types of social awkwardness and angst, the world and him seem out if sync. His solipsistic preoccupation and the music behind it all do strangely fall together into a mighty and often moving force. His vocal emoting having the quality of a cracked vessel, that at any moment might completely fall apart

The music lives in its own odd little world. A realm where a klezmer style knees up can dissolve into a mournful guitar or song phrase. Move from a nostalgic feeling for an optimistic world built in the past, to a huge racket of distressed distended sounds in the present. One where Woods raucously declaims  repeatedly ' I am more than adequate, leave Kanye out of it'. This is 'Opus' a gripping ten minutes that takes you on an emotional journey into one person's despair.

On 'Science Fair' any idea that the band might lack musical balls is well and truly dispelled. Crackling along with menacing unease, as if actively following a man who is some type of unhinged stalker, living with his mum, who can only feel positive and in control of himself when he's out running. Guitar feedback, sliding strings and horns, a rumbling keyboard bring to this an out of control shamble, a drug fueled sense for his headspace and movement.

The version of 'Sunglasses' on For The First Time is an altogether more grungier affair than the EP version released a year before. It demonstrates the ongoing maturity and growing confidence of the band that they're happy to completely reformulate a previous release to better reflect the bands current approach and tone. Once again we have a frail man at the centre who only when he wears sunglasses can face and engage with the outside world 

Even the music on this album is unrepresentative of where the band is currently at, its out if date, its over a year old, being mostly recorded prior to the pandemic. Not even toured this stuff because of that. They are currently at work on completing their second album. On this splendid outing I wonder where they'll venture next. Their debut wonderfully blends elements of fire and sophistication, that whilst perhaps not yet achieving greatness, is a superb first grab at it.

CARROT REVIEW 6/8

 

ARTICLE - The Gods of Boredom

Boredom is a god bearing many faces. 

They inhabit realms we want to escape or find relief from. They hang around crossroads where a change in direction is required, a shift in the paradigm of our thinking, beliefs or feelings.

Sometimes we are living unkindly with ourselves, we have become the pain we are in. In such threadbare conditions we cannot sleep well, struggle to function, find our general engagement with life difficult. The world and ourselves becomes that little bit bleaker. No nostalgic sepia toned photographs, just starkly contrasting black and white. The state of boredom sits as this gremlin, party pooping upon our general joie de vivre.

The landscape of boredom is surrounded by bleak horizons, distracting us from seeing what is directly beneath our feet.

Boredom is a place that, paradoxically, we escape too, it diverts our attention away from even more discomforting feelings. Things not yet fully conscious. These initiate a pause in the progress of our desires, with a bardo where nothing else can happen, everything is frozen unable to move. Boredom has the quality of quicksand, the more you struggle the deeper into it you sink.  Frustrating as this may be, there is no point in being angry or pissed off with boredom. That just stokes the fires of it. Be still and let it pass in its own time.

So, in one twist of a moment, we turn around to face boredom once again. That void, always, it seems, worthy of staring deeply into from time to time. When it next happens be more curious about what lies beneath. Boredom might seem just this latest bit of sediment to settle into our conscious awareness. But once you sit with it a while you may detect an aura surrounding it. This isn't a heavenly radiance but the radioactive emanation, agitated, with the toxicity of a dark angel. For you this aura is likely to have a different ombre to mine.

Boredom languishes upon an uncomfortable old mattress sprung with pure panic. 

Now, on this occasion my lack of ease arose close to home in the retail environment of our shop. After weeks of reassuringly good trading, in mid May it all went spookily quiet, deathly quiet. Tumbleweed rolled through the frontier seaside town. My response, was inwardly to despair, as though I were awaiting the arrival of doomsday. This was surprising, because I know retail, Ive survived the closure of my own business in 1997, lived through the demise of Windhorse in 2015. Things do come to a halt, I recognise that things reach their end. Sometimes they naturally running out of energy, or the mental proliferation of purpose running ahead stops. Even in this place of seemingly greatest stagnation, movement is already impatient to be present. Though it never ever feels like that.

But that isn't what is going on here at all. These were just a quiet few days in Cottonwood Home, surrounded by weeks where sales have been more than encouraging. Later in the month, one Bank Holiday Sunday, we had our best days take since we opened two years ago. My response then, was also to panic, but this time about being unable to keep up our making to match any continuous uplift in sales. Both these panics were over reactions, unwarranted responses to an event.  Panic usually appears when we are overwhelmed by something, of a situation seemingly beyond our ability to control it.  Panic bubbles up from underground, it releases the breath of Hades, from a much deeper place than surface conditions might themselves reveal to you.

Beneath this panic of mine lay the cadaver of an old old story. This one goes - everything you attempt will inevitably fail, bound to go wrong because fate decreed this course, fundamentally there is existentially something wrong with you. Boredom disguises my panic over this view reasserting its 'truth'. A self alerting mechanism to failure being near bye, maybe in the next room. It's just waiting to open the door fully so it can walk right in and take over the proceedings. So, that is the usual scenario. Not a great script, rather repetitious and lacking in originality as a film, but frequently being re-released to a cinema near me, none the less.

Boredom is that person wandering in a desert desperate to find the direction of water. 

Our usual sense of purpose, direction and meaning comes from the intermittent, illusory notion that we can be in charge and bring whatever we want to our lives. Yet 'Who is it that is saying this?', 'where are they?' 'What planet do they live on?' Can you locate that 'me' , find its source, one you're so confident is the answer to 'who is it that is saying this?'  'Me' can be such a trickster. You know your arse exists even though you've never seen it face on. Even as we look for 'me' it becomes far too embroiled in the shifty nature of its own self regarding views to reveal where they are coming from. Its like looking for water in a desert. Us you say, they come from Us, well describe what Us is, please do? Us is essentially the homeless hobo kicking sand in your face, then running away.

Our creation stories, perform an important function. They self define, however encouraging or crippling the book category we put them under. Were you to step out of your self-definitions what would you step into - a space of meaninglessness, completely emptied of a sense of oneself?  Unlikely. Without our self views what would we spiritually be or become? Of course we over identify with what we feel, think or believe. Its impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to fully decouple ourselves from them. They are hard wired. When we simply ask 'who is it that is saying this' it is to non-plusse, not just our thinking or emotions, but our self awareness. Where 'We' can be, seems to us to be a bit of a no brainer, we believe we know, but also don't know. Recognising a self deception is important, even whilst we continue to perpetrate it 

Are we tiring of a particular version of ourselves when we become bored ?

Someone once said that in a state of confusion we are in a creative space, a place of possibilities. We all want to be different in some significant way to how we have turned out. So maybe one purpose behind asking the question 'who is it that is saying this?'is to disorient, to kick us off our usual rail track towards a more open ended way of being. Because its an open ended question, not required to even have a definitive answer. There are many answers, like many ways of being. Boredom reveals a vacant space behind the phrase 'Who is it that is saying this?'. 

Boredom is emptied of our habitual refuges. Where you travel to from there is the koan of everyday life.  Do you return to those refuges or venture out into unknown territory?

As a man now approaching his 64th birthday, the sense of my mortality forms its own particular frame to the discussion about boredom, meaning and purpose. What can the search for such things be for, when the ultimately finite nature of your life is coming into ever closer and sharper focus? Every day you start knitting a jumper you cannot be sure you'll ever get to finish. Any notion of leaving something behind as some sort of sedimentary legacy, is a self conceit - that a life working in retail matters in the greater scheme of things. Mistaking our occupation as actualisation.

Most people see their legacy, their gift to the future as their children. For myself, as a gay man, that sort of genetic legacy, surrogacy and adoption aside, is just not going to happen.  A heightened dependence upon sexual identity, career or quite often blind hedonism, are three alternative ways of filling in the blank spaces around meaning and purpose in anyone's CV.  Self indulgence in such situations tends to win out, lives becoming centred around the self regarding, self satisfaction, self pleasuring, self success, the fun and frolics of the self in what happens day to day. So in a simple quiet day in the shop, the feelings of boredom, of things not quite working out as usual or as expected, can rattle that particular delusional cage. Boredom points us towards the vacuity of our notions, lecturing us on the dementia of all self-made things.

Boredom is a state where memory fails us.

We can no longer remember what it is we are meant to be doing with our lives. Boredom is where a sense of loss is alive, we live and breathe a feeling of bereavement, of grieving over what is lifelessly laid out before you. It is a mental space where we cannot connect with who we believe we were, are, or could be, and this is frightening. Floating in this ocean of forgetfulness, we panic.

Boredom is a bit of a grim reaper.

We can become so desperate when we are bored, to get back, to return, to escape its prison, to be that positive person we once were, perhaps only a moment of a day ago. In boredom a version of you wants to expire, but only for a short while.  We feel ourselves to be the product of memory, in both in its movement and in its stasis. If we were to experience our life as an impermanent phenomena, this might more resemble the life of a library book - constantly loaned out, expired, returned, loaned out.  Self awareness as a borrowed book.

Boredom as the rehearsal, for being forgotten. 

In boredom we find ourselves self forgetting, giving up on our history. History forgets all the time what cannot be re-formulated into the cliches of hagiography or myth.  Human history tells us that who we really were ,what we were like when we were alive, will ultimately be forgotten. We will all be forgotten. 

Every single piece of human activity and ingenuity, the daily search for , and assertion of, meaning and purpose is another way of writing - Someone Remember Me Please! - into already shifting sands.

Can any of us live calmly and at peace with knowing we will be forgotten?

As soon as we subliminally sense panic, do we become bored ?

LISTENING TO ~ Love & Hate in a Different Time by Gabriels

 My current favourite ear worm track, since I saw this video on Jools Holland on I Player. This superbly slick modern reworking of the 1970's Philly Sound has all the hallmarks of a Summer hit, if it gets the airplay it deserves. Is the singer one of the brethren? Highly likely.