FINISHED READING - Fractured by Jon Yates

 

We all sense that our society is currently not in a good place. We feel the divisive nature of our political discourses, the increasing racism and intolerance, and we bemoan the lack of community, as though  that were something that has been robbed from us without our say so. In Fractured, Jon Yates takes a cool look at why our society feels this way. Suggesting how this came about, what the primary causes are. Though at times sobering, the book actually has a strong vein of optimism running through it, that we can and must find a way to reverse this drift towards division and uncivil conflict 

These days it's quite common to blame it all on social media, but Jon Yates says that really is simply another symptom of a social move towards individual isolation, that we already had become people living within bubbles of the like minded. People Like Me syndrome has had a long presence within human society. Our liking to surround ourselves with folk we agree or are in sympathy with, are educated similar to us, have similar tastes, social status and aspirations to us, is not in principle a bad thing. But, if this is the only thing that binds us then it becomes a major social driver, where we are unable to talk with people from a different background, class or race, and may even find ourselves feeling instinctively hostile towards anyone who is remotely different from us. We all bare a measure of responsibility for how this situation has arisen. For what Yates encounters as he reviews our parlous state, is a society lacking in much sense of a shared common life. 

In past eras, when we lived in smaller villages and social contexts, we moved around less, so you really had to get on with the folk around you, even if you disagreed with them or they lived lives very different to oneself. This rubbing up and along with individual differences is actually good for us, and it's vital in cultivating a more cohesive sense of society. In the past they also shared the common religious context of a faith. In this country this was Christianity, this gave everyone a sense that despite our differences there was something else that asked us to work at getting over them, of even transcending them. Such rural communities were effectively torn apart during the population exodus caused by the Industrial Revolution. This produced a huge amount of social disruption and divisiveness. And there was a period when this newly urbanised society was in danger of falling apart and tipping into revolution. What in the end stopped that from happening, was an explosion of community based voluntary organisations,charities, clubs, societies, associations, social and political initiatives that brought together all types of individuals, and this slowly brought into being a more cohesive sense of urban society emerging.

Post World War 2, this network of social voluntary organisations has been in gradual decline. People don't join them in quite the same numbers anymore. Television means we just don't go out and socialise as much, if at all. Pubs are not the local focal point they were, we don't join voluntary associations, we live a more singular and socially isolated lifestyle, even from our neighbours. Before the internet arrived a shared communal life was already endangered. Social media has merely accelerated this pre-existing trend. But like the period of change and upheaval post the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, we are, in Yate's opinion, in an interregnum, where we painfully feel this lack of cohesion and don't know if it can be restored, or how. Any social movement towards correcting this lack of a shared common life has not yet formed itself. Human society, however, can not survive without closer communal relationships, so Yates is confident it will eventually emerge, but whether it will arrive in time is the question.   

As you look down your street at the people who are your neighbours, are they pretty much the same class, race and education, with similar aspirations to you. If so, this has not happened by accident. We might believe we live in a multi-cultural society, but the UK is quite effectively socially, economically and racially segregated. Analysis says its as segregated as some of the the worst cities in the US.. Racists may complain about immigrants not learning English and living amongst their own culture, but fail to notice that, regardless of race, everyone is separating themselves off from people that are not like them in cultural, social or economic ghettos of one sort or another. Yates says this is all an expression of People Like Me syndrome, and an ever increasing demand to have a choice where, how and with whom we live. Racial homogeneity in a culture is not really the solution to creating a sense of a common life that some people believe it to be. Humankind is generally too full of a radically wide range of different, potentially difficult people. We can all be a bit of a pain in the minds of other folks.

There are two drivers then, that are slowly destroying the shared sense of a common life, and a sense of connection with people not like us. First, a major social or economic upheaval or crisis, and second increasing choice about where we live, where we are educated, and who and how we socialise with other people. Left to choice, People Like Me rules everything we do. And collective communal contexts become habitually avoided, because we fear conflicts, of encountering differing viewpoints to our own. 

The knock on effects of this expands outwards. Innovation requires us to be open to working with other people and their ideas, productivity needs us to be able to work effectively in teams with all types of people, schools which are not substantially mixed in class and race, don't cultivate the sort of skills and abilities to network and work well together.. Instead we are hurtling towards further division, as the gap between richer and poorer widens, and equality of opportunity becomes stifled. If our economy is currently stalled, its because when wealthy people become wealthier they tend to bank their money and live off the interest, whilst working class spend money as and when they have it. The later is a major driver of our economy. Too much money is currently in too few very wealthy hands and our economy is stagnating as a result. It's no wonder the very poorest in our society are sick of the constant struggle to make ends meet, and are getting angrier and more disruptive with every passing year. So the lack of a shared common life is actually a much bigger deal than we give it credit for.  

Yates concludes his book by outlining a few options for a way forward, and their pros and cons. We could just sit this current phase out and wait for the backlash and a more communal focus to re-emerge. Or we could try to engineer more communal initiatives. A characteristic of the emergence of charities, societies, clubs and associations was they were entirely voluntary, which is both their strength and weakness. There are very few mandatory communal requirements placed upon us these days, jury service is probably the only one. But what if, at a pivotal moments in your life, in childhood, adulthood and retirement there was an obligation to explore ways you could serve your society in the company of a wide range of people. It maybe the time is not yet right for such ideas. So lacking such initiatives currently, Yates concludes his book by outlining - Thirty two things you can do right now.

Fractured is accessible and brilliantly written with an immensely convincing exposition for how we got here, but it's also clear what direction we need to start heading in to turn the situation around. I found this has already affected the way I view the turbulence of our era. It's an inspirational book, that has set me thinking about many things, a lot of the time it's what small step I could take, to break out of my little retirement bubble?

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

WATCHED - Nine Perfect Strangers

 

Nine people arrive at the Tranquillum retreat centre. Each of them has chosen to come here not really knowing what to expect, but all have reached a moment of crisis in their life. They need some time away from all that. The retreat centre is directed by Masha (Nicole Kidman) a woman whose immoral high flying past came to an end with someone trying to murder her. There are elements in this previous life that are still unresolved, even though she has developed this therapeutic retreat on the basis of her own experience and route back to psychological wellness. 

All the retreatants were hand picked by Masha, some paid through the nose, others a discounted price. As the series progresses the turbulence in their personal lives comes into sharper focus, as well as Masha's reasons for choosing them. But her therapeutic methods are highly unconventional. if not illegal. And its clear that things on previous retreats did not always go well. Masha is receiving threatening texts and emails,someone from her past has it in for her.  

With Micheal Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Samara Weaving, Luke Evans and Regina Hall amongst the cast, this is packed with star performers. The script is witty and often playfully irreverent. As the retreat progresses elements of backstories get pieced together. Relationships fracture and mend, people's motivations become mixed or morally dubious. As a whole Nine Perfect Strangers is quite effective, with a low key 'who done it' element to it. Kidman, Shannon and McCarthy in particular shine out here, primarily because a large part of the drama circles around them. Samara Weaving and Melvin Gregg's characters are woefully underwritten, and could easily have been written out at no loss to the dramatic narrative. Luke Evans does his best with an unappealing character, whose story arc never quite becomes fully rounded or his eventual turn around explored or explained.

Nicole Kidman is having one whale of a time playing the slightly spooky, maybe unhinged, Masha, her accent is light, its audiblity is slightly variable. But without her ability to dominate the screen, its clear this dramas creaking old tropes would have rattled a bit too noticeably. On the whole I enjoyed watching it as a drama, though it never quite became gripping essential viewing. They made a second series, I can't imagine at all why they thought that would be a good idea, but I wont be setting aside any time specially for it.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

READING ALOUD - W.S.Merwin Reads - The Love for October

 

When you read W.S.Merwin's biography, you see very little that tells you what sort of a man he was. Extremely productive and driven as a poet, the delicate thoughtful nature of his writing, is often like turning over and examining a tumbling stone. A common trope in his poetry is to see everything as if viewed through the framing of a particular window. There is a certain unknowable insularity to his character and writing, I can't imagine he was ever the life and soul of a party, did he ever get drunk and out of control? Married three times might indicate he could've either been difficult to live with, or was drawn towards women that he really was incapable of fully meeting. 

The Love of October, reflects on youthful perception. saying in its first line

'A child looking on ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than all the months of spring'  

As indeed he once was. Born right at the end of September, October was indeed Merwin's first month alive in this world. So his choice of this poem as one to read aloud, has some strong personal links for him.

MY OWN WALKING - November Journal 2025

Like most folk, I sometimes get far too caught up in the intricate tangle of my self justifications. The finely woven warp and weft of my own terribly tedious self story. So much so that it can be one devil of a job putting a stop to it. To cease the constancy of my weaving it. And then, comes the day when I can for some reason, after some directional wind change, I see through it just one tiny little chink. How the intensity of any perceived injury to ones selfhood, is firmly embroidered into it with sutures of my own making.   

I say this, full knowing one of the Buddha's wisest utterances, urged us to become closely familiar with the pain caused by 'the second arrow.' The first arrow being our experience of suffering, the second arrow our response to that suffering. That second arrow being by far the more dangerous to life, because it is entirely a self-inflicted wound, ever so easily embedding itself into 'that story of our self'. Usually with the help of a charitable variation of  'poor me' narrative. And, once ensconced, it sits there like an AIDS virus, waiting for future suffering to provide advantageous circumstances for yet another virulent outbreak of self pity.

With this years extended prolongation of Autumnal mildness, I'd became prematurely lulled into thinking that Winter's onset this year was hopefully delayed. So the arrival of damper, chiller winds and turbulent storms, arrived like an unwelcome salesman at my doorstep. After months and months from spring through to an indian summer, I'd got used to milder weather and the consequent low level of bodily discomfort. Then over the matter of seemingly a mere few days the weather changed, and that discomfort cranked up. Furiously aching joints and muscles, most tender particularly in the hips and lower back. Voltarol gels could do too little to pacify its inflamation and soreness.

One morning, post another fitful incomplete nights sleep, I arose in one cross patch of an internal bad mood. I did not feel well disposed towards my usual morning routine of practice, and this had been increasingly so for a couple of days. I'd sort of struck a deal with myself, to take the level of it all down by a peg or two. To maintain a morsel of connection with the continuity of practice. But by this particular day, the most I could persuade myself to do was to meditate, and that was after quite an extensive period of coercive encouragement. Once I did sit down to meditate, it was clear there was a job of work to do, cultivating a more loving and kinder relationship towards myself. Bring on the Metta bomb.

A Metta Bhavana meditation practice,is most usually a progression of five distinct stages. But this can be stripped down to the simpler mode of it radiating outwards, which given my current level of resistance, was probably advisable. So I began with as much gentle encouragement I could find, to cultivate loving kindness for myself, my body, my mental states, my overall state of being, and then gradually expanding that out to the people surrounding me, to the area, county and country, to the world, to the universe and the cosmos. Wishing all to be existentially well, to be happier, more content and less suffering beings. All its usual generic elements were there, where paradoxically, I was placed at the living centre of my own mettaful cosmos. But by the end, when I got up, the discomfort in my hips and back had quite dramatically diminished. 

All of which caused me to reflect more deeply on the role of the second arrow in suffering. Now I do have osteoarthritis present in some major joints, there is no getting away from that, nor the consequences thereof. And its certainly been my experience that changes in barometric pressure, the severity and depth of weather fronts, can sometimes put my whole body physically on edge. But what this meditation experience pointed out, was how much the depth and prolongation of my bodily aches and pains, can also be due to, in my very being, hating and loathing them on almost an existential level. The self antagonism, once I noticed it, seemed quite obvious.

So much of the intensity of any suffering is down to how you feel about the suffering, not the suffering itself. Now this infinitesimally small insight, does not in itself take away the original cause of the pain or discomfort, but just encourages me to turn off the bloody megaphone. Whenever I start writing about physical ailments and how this or that particular part of this body of mine is aching or aging, it makes me hyper aware of how frequently I use the word 'my' as I write, That I take my body, and my osteoarthritis, and my pain, and my suffering, and my advancing age, and turn them into the largest badge I can wear. One that declares a technicolour statement - 'look on the size of my suffering, you bitches, and despair' .

And there, right there, I stop myself to further remark - my goodness me, how unkind you can be, just in the general castigating tone in which you converse with yourself.  Listen to how the purpose of words dance around from reactivity to insight, then back to reactivity again. It's also to recognise the heavy rainfall that the second arrow brings with it, and how that precipitation forms the precursor and resplendent rainbow of a third, maybe fourth or fifth bit of self injury - should you let it. 

PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Autumn Leaves ( 1855-1856 )

 

John Everett Millais,at the precocious age of eleven won himself a place at the Royal Academy Art School. By the time he was twenty,in 1848, he was a founding member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His painting Christ in the House of his Parents (1849-50) provoked accusations of blasphemy. This fueled his rise to fame, wealth, establishment respectability, a knighthood and eventual baronetcy. However, as is often the case, artistic child prodigies take their 'genius' far too much for granted

It has been frequently said of Millais's artistic career, that he squandered his talent for money and status. A view based upon subsequent work as an illustrator, the paintings executed for commercial advertising, the drained palate of his later painting used to such emotionless effect. All would indicate some truth to this opinion. The early colourful effervescence of his talent, didn't just fizzle out and die, it carried on afterwards as a deathless ghostly apparition of itself. But by the mid 1850's, when he was painting Autumn Leaves, Millais had become the leading light and acceptable face of the Pre-Raphaelites. A transgressively vivid painter of allegorical literary or biblical scenes,with often this sense for the transient,elements of mystery and complete mastery of the mournful mood. Autumn Leaves was the first in a sequence of paintings to explore that season as a metaphor for impermanence. Two other paintings in this occasional series The Vale of Rest(1858-62 ) and Chill October (1870) were to follow.

In some respects the progression of their subject matter exemplifies the slow malformation of Millais's artistic muse. The Vale of Rest appears, at first glance, to echo the sentiments of Autumn Leaves. Taking place at twilight, where two nuns are very hurriedly digging a grave before it gets too dark to see what they are doing. What was perhaps merely suggestive in Autumn Leaves, is made emphatically plain in Vale of Rest. The allegory is presented with a much heavier handed intent, earnestly reaching out to make itself known. It drives home its evidently mordant moral undertow. The seated nun on the right, looking pointedly straight out at the viewer, as if to say - remember this. As a painting this is not subtle.

By the time we reach Chill October fourteen years later, what we are presented with here is a rather bleakly plein-air painting of a Scottish loch, boggy and windy and cold hearted. No figures, allegorical or otherwise, are present, just a vague sense of an underlying mood from the earlier works resurfacing.The place is desolate, lost of any sense of direction for its soul, devoid of human context or frailty. Its not then unreasonable to question why this shift in focus happened ?

The original seven members of The Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood were an unwieldy mixture of like minded young painters and poets. For all their stated idealism, it is in the nature of such artistic movements to be internally fractious, loosely aligned and inherently fragile collectives. Holman Hunt and Millais, were the visual realists, whereas Rossetti and his artistic acolytes were the more seriously aligned medievalists. Both sides dedicated to restoring the spiritual to art. The religious controversy over Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents in 1850 proved too much for the devout Stephen Collinson, who left the group.

This was the first, but not the final straw for the Brotherhood, but that too would be supplied by Millais. John Ruskin had been the sole vocal champion of The Brotherhood, keeping them financially and artistically directed. Millais went to paint a portrait of Ruskin at his Scottish home, over the Summer of 1853. Ruskin had married Effie Grey in 1848 when she was nineteen, and he was twenty eight. Yet five years later when the handsome dashing Pre-Raphaelite Millais turns up, Ruskin had yet to consummate that marriage. Millais and Effie fast fell deeply in love and literally ran off together. The marriage to Ruskin ended up being very publicly anuled, bringing a degree of shame and disapproval into Ruskin's revered orbit. Though he continued to financially support Hunt and Rosetti, The Brotherhood was summarily ripped apart by the ensuing public scandal.

Three years later Millais married Effie, she has since been unfairly made to take the lion share of the blame for Millais’s declining artistry. Yet here he is in that very same year of his marriage painting Autumn Leaves. The two central young girls,dressed in the modest dark blue clothing of the middlingly wealthy, are Effie’s sisters, Alice and Sophie. The younger children are meant to be peasants, as they are wearing poorer styles of dress. They’re making a bonfire. All look upon the smoldering pyre of autumn leaves the girls have been gathering, collectively transfixed. The background sky has sickly sulphuric slashes of yellow and bruised purpley blue. It is twilight, the landscape shadowy, all we see are the barest of outlines.

This painting has a Chekovian air, of trapped lives with limited future prospects. The faces of the elder girls bare concerned strained faces. For some reason this bonfire building is not eliciting any childish playfulness, or sense of this being a fun thing to do. The girls look on instead rather sombre, with bowed depressed demeanours. It is as though something has died, and no one here feels willing to openly enjoy even a simple task. Whilst lost childhood innocence is a recurrent Millais theme, I’m not sure that is precisely what is being conveyed here. Its meaning feels more multi-layered than that. It is as though they’re mourning a loss, ritually burying someone or something underneath this huge pile of bronzed leaves. The tone is sorrowful, emotions just about staying contained. The littlest girl with the red bow is holding an apple, frequently interpreted as a reference to Eve and the temptation of the snake. What is the simmering symbolism of a smouldering pile of leaves? This is portraying life requiring death, as a cycle within life itself, of recurring moments of cremation. Millais understood all too clearly, what he had lost, destroyed and sacrificed to secure his love.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - More Songs About Buildings And Food by Talking Heads - 1978

And so we come to the concluding album of this current seasons My Most Loved Albums, and we near the end of the 1970's, certainly a seminal era in my musical explorations. Every subsequent musical enthusiasm I have ever had, you will find has its roots in this decade.

Talking Heads are another interesting example of the idiosyncratic US punk band who smoothly morph into post-punk. After the edgy angular psychopathy of their self titled debut, Talking Heads brought in Brian Eno to produce the ''difficult' second album. Second albums become troublesome, because the freshness of their debut is now gone. All their best early songs, which they've performed endlessly and finely honed through live performance are now mostly used up. The compressed time to write fresh material, plus the added pressure to produce another winner, often means a band plays safe and reproduces more of the same. And on many levels this invariably disappoints. Bringing in Brian Eno was an astute move. if anyone was likely to encourage a band to shake itself up, to playfully stretch and subvert its existing paradigms, it would be him. It both was and wasn't going to be, just more songs about buildings and food, as the album title announces with its tongue firmly in its ironic cheek 

More Songs About Buildings And Food, is the album where Talking Heads began to move away from being a punk band who cut their teeth in the New York underground scene, and venture into more experimentally artful territory. Playing with mashing up their frenetic choppy guitar style with funk stylings, and open up further that more plaintive reflective tone to David Byrne's lyricism. Byrne's song writing style tends to start with the recognisably everyday and work outwards towards the universal. No album begins with so much committed attack, than this stirring opening track, a mass assault of guitar rhythm launches Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, which comes charging towards you like this galloping brigade of pounding horses. Into which Byrne enters whelping like a cowboy high on speed.

Eno's role on this album appears to have been to direct already existing temperaments, and where needs be to sprinkle a bit of standard Eno magic over a track. The latter arrives in its most recognisable form on Found A Job, probably my favourite track off the whole album. It starts as a simple hearted typical David Byrne song about a couple in the middle of a domestic argument, both searching for a vocation in life. The song motors along, and then two thirds of the way through Byrne shouts 'hit it', which kicks off an infectiously off beat stepping counterpoint rhythm that instantly elevates this into a wholly new musical level of joyful brilliance. It takes Talking Heads rhythmic drive, and forces it to take a sideways step out into unknown peripheral vision territory. Its utterly fabulous.

The album concludes with The Big Country. Byrne is in an airplane looking down on the quintessentially American landscapes of urban and rural life. He observes other people living simple conventional lifestyles, but finds he wants none of it - 'I wouldn't live there if you paid me, no siree' But nonetheless he still wants to live and belong somewhere, just not there. Encapsulating the ennui of Byrne's tired alienated persona, whilst also being a curious elegy to the very thing he most reviles. Its an emotionally conflicted, yet reflective song. Where we want, but don't want, what modern society has to offer us. The universality of Talking Heads songs are founded on quite plain and simple human yearnings for love and belonging. I've felt many of their songs spoke directly to my own past aspirations and struggles, which imbues them still with an enduring fondness, etched as they are with personal meaning.

So, that concludes this first series of My Most Loved Albums. In the end ten became twelve, and ended up at sixteen albums. These are in no way definitive, but they represent this moment in time and are a reflection of my enduring tastes, both then and now. At some point I may do one on the 1980's, but I need a break from a commitment to completing lists for a while. So when the spirit moves me, then maybe you'll hear some more.

LISTENING TO - Iconoclasts by Anna Von Hausswolff

 

'I came to take you back. To where you came from. But that's not what you want.'*

On 2018's album Dead Magic, Anna Von Hausswolff took one approach towards unhinging her vocal expression to quite an extreme degree, one where there was perhaps no point in pushing further at that particular doorway. Her response two years later, on All Thoughts Fly was to return to the simplicity of her own organ playing. Denuded of any need to vocalise, it was a series of dynamic instrumental pieces that conjured a sonically rich range of imaginative atmospheres. And so, after a five year hiatus, we now have, without much trumpeting fanfare, this new album Iconoclasts. Where has her music progressed to arrive at, in the meantime?

Well this sixth album is certainly bold as brass with confidence. Most of all this is truly BIG music. Its not lacking in extraordinary ambition. Iconoclasts is over an hour and a quarter in length, which might sound daunting or that someone's ego needed its feathers trimmed. But once you start listening time accommodates you and you become part of what feels like one huge musical piece with different intervals and tones touched upon. And it is full on right from the start. Once you are launched on Iconoclasts, its hard to put down and walk away, or cherry pick your way through your favourite tracks. Its just not that sort of album. sit down and listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and if you can't do that then go do something else for a while. This warrants your whole attention. This is not remotely suitable to be played in the background.

Whilst her earlier work was stuffed with sombre drone work and was certainly dramatically gothic in tone, it was never really conventionally goth. And Von Hausswolff never courts that association, nor presents herself as such. She has quite a quietly understated outward appearance, like a primary school supply teacher. Iconoclasts begins as it means to carry on. The Beast contains a distinctive motif from avant garde saxophonist Otis Sandsjo that resurfaces fully fleshed out later on, in Struggle with the Beast. Sandsjo's playing is splashed judiciously all over this album, providing all sorts of unusual colourations and angular tones. His free flowing style reminding me of the late Evan Parker. 

This album has been loosely framed as her 'pop' album, which I would say is only so in spirit. There are  magnificently ravishing tunes and pounding drumwork galore, but there is also an experimental edge, a willingness to go completely musically off piste if necessary.  And what pop album has twelve tracks, an hour and a quarter running time, only two tracks which are under three minutes fifty and they are instrumentals, five tracks are over seven minutes long, and the title track Iconoclasts luxuriating in its eleven minutes fifteen seconds? It possesses a pop sensibility for sure, with an accessibility most notably on the duet with Ethel Cain -Aging Young Woman. If one were looking for something evidently mainstream and radio friendly.

However, if you are looking for massive slabs of sound, and emotions to match, here it all is. It's interesting that Florence & the Machine has a new album out the same day as this. In many ways they share a similar trajectory and liking for the grand emotional statement. Whilst Florence tends towards shrill bombast when she over reaches, Anna can have a greater impact as a result of taking it down a peg or two. Its hard to pick out favourite tracks from Iconoclasts, so I've made a selection that I thought best represented its range. This album is a huge achievement, and it has assumed the top of my best of 2025 already. Nothing else is going to quite match this, because this is magnificent.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 132 - The Early Morning Scroll

We headed out to Hunstanton for our usual twice yearly visit. This year, in March before the season really kicked off, and late October when it's in the last half hearted pangs before closing up. A lovely vegan lunch in The Old Town Beach Cafe, Old Hunstanton, was an excellent preparation for the mile or so walk along the front into the main 'newish' Hunstanton. 

Hunstanton is your classic working class seaside town. Beautifully kept formal gardens, with fun fairs, amusement arcades galore, numerous chippies, fast food outlets, scuzzy pubs and cafes. Off season, its quieter and you get the sense of a place more than two thirds dead to the world. Each time we visit, another cluster of shops have closed. Gradually Hunstanton's High Street offering, outside of the tourist orientated area, is in rapid decline. Locals with real money live in the villages outside it, further inland. Most likely frequenting the posh shops and restaurants of Thornham and only, if really needs be, a venture into the urban scuzziness that is Kings Lynn. 

The further west you travel in North Norfolk, the flatter the landscape becomes and the more sparsely populated. As you drive through them you can tell these are not thriving communities. Beautifully kept and regularly valeted perhaps, but essentially the majority of houses, nay, entire villages, have become picture book holiday lets or second homes. This means these surrounding coastal villages, though preserved to an enviable level of perfection. are sterile, idealised versions of a North Norfolk village. Basically uninhabited deserted places outside of weekends and holiday periods. The local economy is virtual, and thus in practice non existent. The sort of place that has no independent shops, no village store, but does have a Bespoke Kitchen Design outlet. The whole idea of their being local people inhabiting here, has completely vanished. Swallowed up by a glossy holiday brochure.

On the way back, we travelled, not along the coast road but further inland. This cuts about half an hour off the return journey. And here you pass through villages that do seem to have a bit more going for them. They have their focal point in the village hall, either an old converted nissen hut from the war, or a larger knapped flint shed big enough to house a hundred villagers, at a push. As we passed through one village, my eye was caught by a poster advertising a Race Evening. And the perverse quality of my mind given the present zeitgeist, briefly imagined and outrageously flirted, with the idea that this was where all the local white folk gathered together to share their collective solidarity, receive some vital white culture nourishment and support each other in the fight against multi-cultural wokism, plus to co-ordinate a plan action against a chinese takeaway opening by the village pump. But, no, its actually an evening of betting on the races, still probably entirely populated by local white folk, but come together to have a bit of a flutter, a natter, get pissed, then drag themselves home via the pristine sanctum of their pure white Audi S7.

'Talking of Thornham, only bloody well in the news again. Local Thornham Deli, not as small as you might think, by the way. Has absolutely pan loads of customers flying in on their ruddy helicopters to buy their favourite tipples and nosh, from the savoury meat counter. There bye circumventing the convention of a long and arduous journey via the unpredictable agency of a road. Local gammons hence, in vertiginous uproar at the sheer efrontary and tech millionaire gall of the blighters. Its a bit like queue jumping, don't you know, never liked that sort of inherent lack of decency. The sense for one's true place in the hierarchy of things. Arrive in a car, and go to the back of the queue, you self entitled nouveau riche twats.'

I'm making a conscious effort to read a compendium of poetry by the US poet W.S.Merwin. It is a gargantuan volume. I've had it for a number of years, and my progress through it, despite a lot of the poetry being extraordinarily good, has been slow. But now I'm dedicating a moment everyday to reading a poem or two. I've tried reading poetry in bed before sleeping, but the imminence of slumber tends to detract one's attention far too much. In the mornings, before or after meditation and Tai Chi, I appear to have my poetry head on, have opened up my receptive heart, and hence they tend to speak much more directly and meaningfully to me. They become these tiny reflective gems, short multifaceted journey's into another way of seeing and being. And the more I read the better attuned to that I become.

This is unlike today's ragamuffin collection of controversy and stories of imminent catastrophe that You Tube offers me most mornings. Is there really ever a time for such things? My off then on experience of an internal state of alarm, that can seep into my life and slumber record. That existential panic, is the result of one too many morning scrolls through the doom laden streets of this sort of fucked up media. Not engaging with any of that early in the morning, at the very point where I've just awakened and got up, sometimes the very worst for not sleeping well, is proving healthier for my mental well being, to cut out completely the early morning scroll. That's my new campaign slogan - Abandon the Early Morning Scroll!

My woolovers photo shoot

I'm not the fast or dextrous knitter that I used to be. My hands, its my hands darlings, there's a limit how much faffy knitting they can handle these days. So its little and often.. But I have recently finished my first completed garment in many a decade. Its a men's sleeveless waistcoat, which has come out the right size, fits me well, and has blocked nicely. Just in time, as we are on the early storm slopes of winter, so its already getting a lot of wear. 

The new sleeveless I've started

I've had another waistcoat project hanging in abeyance. It was a gansey style knitted sleeveless waistcoat. It was really intricate stitching wise, and had three pattern elements too it, that did not run in parallel. Now in the 1980's this would not have phased me at all, the more intricate the pattern the better. Nowadays, creative hurdles need to be more carefully moderated, to be achievable. Whenever I took a break from this project, if that were to turn out to be months long, returning to it became a tricky learning curve to reestablish quite where I'd left off. Well, I decided to abandon that and frogg what I'd knit so far. My interest in it as a project, was not there anymore. Hubby has found me a simpler, but still interesting, cable waistcoat pattern that I'll be starting soon. 

Cower at my cowl

Meanwhile I have a cowl to knit in a thick grey aran, that is, unsurprisingly progressing rapidly towards being wearable.  

Smile for Barbara

Have you ever thought whether your car appears friendly or not? I hadn't until the other day we were in Fakenham walking back to the car, and I looked at the front of our car and had a revelation. I remarked to Hubby how our car 'Barbara' had a Welcoming Disposition. Because some cars do not, their front grills, frown and gnarl at you, with their hooded angular lights and pronounced black network of slit vents. Some high performance cars have this sinister aggressive scowl, like they were made to reflect the character of an evil Marvel comic book villain. Others simper or look like someone's punched them in the face. Take a look, I guarantee you'll be intrigued...or unnerved.

POETRY - W.S. Merwin's - The Flight

The Flight

At times in the day
I thought of a fire to watch
not that my hands were cold
but to have that doorway to see through
into the first thing
even our names are made of fire

and we feed on night

walking I thought of a fire

turning around I caught sight of it

in an opening in the wall

in another house and another

before and after

in house after house that was mine to see

the same fire the perpetual bird.

Taken from W.S. Merwin - Migration - New & Selected Poems
Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

FEATURE - W.S.Merwin (1927-2019)

 

'What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass' **

As I'm reading his poetry at the moment, I thought I'd see what I could unearth about W.S.Merwin and his life. Whilst there is not an awful lot of detail, he nonetheless had a long and extraordinarily productive creative life. By the time he died at the age of ninety one, he'd published thirty four volumes of his own poetry, plus twenty eight translations, three plays, nine prose works and edited two poetry anthologies. He'd been given most of the poetry awards available in the US. Winning the Pulitzer Prize twice, for the Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) being most significant. And was the United States Poet Laureate, also not once, but twice, in 1999-2000 and 2010 -11. So he was no bohemian slouch. 

I Have Been Younger In October Than All The Months Of Spring

Sweeping in to New York to be born on the last day of September 1927, William Stanley Merwin always had this rhapsodic appreciation for the welcoming in of October. In 1936 his family moved from New Jersey to Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Uncannily precocious by the age of five William was already writing hymns and illustrating them. His love of nature was also apparent, coupled with an instinctive mind that found history embedded in the fabric around him. Providing a sense of the ancestry of a place. 

By A Swooning Candle, In My Porchless Door.

After finishing a degree at Princeton, William then embarked on the first of his three marriages, number one was to Dorothy, moving with her to Spain, where there were two significant meetings, one with his hero Robert Graves and the other was with Dido Milroy, his second wife, with whom he later live with in London, where he was actively sought out and befriended by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, followed by much Trans-Atlantic flip flopping, till recently divorced from Dido, he relocated to Hawaii, later to marry Paula Dunaway, with no biological offspring to bring up, but inheriting her two. 

I See Only The Flatlands And The Slow Vanishing of Windmills
Poetry rarely feeds and clothes you. Merwin like every jobbing poet, took other associated work or adjunct literary commissions, such as playwright in residences, poetry fellowships, poetry editor at The Nation, and became a respected translator of literature in nine different languages.  Meanwhile, privately, he continued writing his poetry, which began by being influenced by Robert Graves with epic thematic verses on mythological legends. But by the mid 60's his poetry had become strongly autobiographical, political and ecological in focus. Never afraid to campaign and protest, he became a significant strong voice in his opposition to the Vietnam War and environmental degradation.

Inside This Pencil Crouch Words That Have Never Been Written

His poetic evolution required an ever shifting emphasis on the exploration of poetic structure, abandoning the conventions of punctuation altogether, dito standard line breaks and sentence structure, imagery folded half between lines, or snapped in two mid sentence. Sometimes his poetry stretches its long limbs across many a page. And then there are those concise freeze dried poems that expand once your eyes land upon them. Merwin's poetry never seeks to force feed you an idea, but opens up an exploratory space, where your imagination can make its own compositional sense out of what it is reading. Sometimes, it's as though he opens up a crack in the ceiling and you briefly glimpse a brighter sky.

On The Last Day Of The World I Would Want To Plant A Tree
In his later life living in Hawaii, Merwin would spend his mornings writing and his afternoons planting out palm trees, bushes and a wide variety of other plants. There was always a deep appreciation of nature and ecology running throughout his poetry. Capturing his momentary feelings and responses, as they flitted from noticing one thing to another, encapsulating how he was struck by it, what it had communicated to him. This was one characteristic of his constantly evolving writing style, it was so intimately personal, though this often remained half opaque to the reader. That all this wonderfully colourful imagery you bathed in, was sometimes left without a frame of reference the interpreting explanation of Merwin. They are snapshots of an experience, that then is move on from. Sometimes you just receive perceptions unadorned, and at other times you do receive the full multi-dimensional perspective. What a glory that is when this happens.

Where Did You Come From This Late Morning?

In 2010 Merwin turned eighty, and ideas about how to preserve his legacy began to be pondered. His papers, a collection of 5,500 items and 450 printed books were housed in The University of Illinois. He and his wife Paula were primarily concerned to provide a means of maintaining his eighteen acre property. Which over the decades he had transformed from a rough piece of scrubland, into a beautiful dense jungle like reserve, where the largest bio-diverse collections of rare palm trees in the world resides. A non-profit organisation The Merwin Conservancy was formed to preserve his hand built home and surrounding estate. His last book of poetry Garden Time, published in 2016, was a meditation on the loss of his eyesight, aging and living in the present moment, dictated to his wife.

Even Our Names Are Made Of Fire And We Feed On Night

Legacies are a difficult thing to plan for and sustain. Books and manuscripts once filed in libraries gather dust. Merwin has undoubtedly been a significant poet and influence upon US literature in his time. It remains to be seen how long after his death that survives. His name is hardly known at all here in the UK, or Europe. Partly I suspect, that in the sixties the Beat Poets somewhat over shadowed his work. His poetry is not overtly counter cultural, its far less vocal, attention grabbing and decidedly un-flashy. Its thoughtful, though often really paired back, almost as if its trying to evade you capturing it alive. We all want to comprehend what any poet is attempting to express. And sometimes, W.S Merwin just will not spoon feed you one single morsel.  Quite prepared is he to leave your hunger unfed.

'Some day it will rain

from a cold place

and the sticks and stones will darken their faces

the salt will wash from the worn gods

of the good

and mourners will be waiting

on the far sides of the hills' ***

***

Taken from the poem As Though I Was Waiting For That
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems 

By Copper Canyon Press. 2005.

**

Taken from the poem A Contemporary
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems
By Copper Canyon Press. 2005

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Horses by Patti Smith - 1975

 

In this the penultimate album of the first series of My Most Loved Albums, we find ourself once more circling around and back to 1975. It was at this point in the Mid -1970's when the previous music press murmurings about punk finally landed at our shores. And so we have the intriguingly malformed beast that is Horses, and the arrival of Patti Smith. Not on the musical surface sounding all that trad punk - a very arty eclectic version perhaps. But her insouciance, well its all there in its stylish album cover. This iconic immaculately executed Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, captures the essence and feral spirit of his close friend. The look of indifference in those eyes stares straight at you, the confident swagger of that the jacket slung over her shoulder conveys. This is the quintessential performance poet and musician. She might have rode in on the wave of punk, but she doesn't feel remotely beholden to it, nor to anything really. Much more closely affiliated to Rimbaud than to The Ramones. She introduces a feverish level of artistic expressiveness into rock'n'roll that hasn't quite been matched since, by anyone, even by her.

I remember, on first hearing I was not at all sure I liked this alien species. Where was this woman coming from?  Introduced to punk in the UK by The Damned and The Sex Pistols, the New York CBGB's punk scene was producing these really idiosyncratic counter cultural punk bands, as diverse as Jayne County and Suicide. These weren't quite what anyone here thought of as punk in the UK. But they were defiantly so in attitude, and that made them interesting. I'm noticing as I comb through my music collection, looking for My Most Loved Albums that US Punk bands are still present. But UK punk. not a whisper, because our home spun version of punk was orientated towards independent singles, self promotion, punk magazines. There was an alternative ethos at work, in which albums felt middle aged and so out of fashion. Albums in the UK became closely associated with the corporate record industry, the behemoths of Progressive Rock and the West Coast hokey earnestness of singer songwriters. US punk bands seemed instinctively to be Post-Punk, years before anyone here understood what that might mean. Because punk, though it moved fast, became tired and ran out of road very quickly.

And here we have Patti Smith singing, well, more screaming, whelping and drawling, her half sung half spoken surreal hallucinatory poetry. Wildly expressive outbursts triggered, as though in the midst of a psychotic episode. 

'The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,

but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames.'*

So, yeah, that felt challenging. Patti Smith sounds so permanently wired throughout the entire proceedings, really worked up and pumped. These days when I listen to albums from this early punk period, I hear lots of potential, that generally is never subsequently fully explored. Rebellious creatively tends to have a very short fuse, before it inevitably enters the dominant mainstream. This is what punk did, quickly become a convention, and disappear up its own anally retentive clenched buttocks. And then, when I listen to Horses, I think, more music as as radical and as experimentally out there as this, that would have been really good.  Ah, the persistence of dreaming of what punk might have been.

Fifty years later Horses has attained and is now firmly grounded in its seminal, much lauded, status. In the same way The Velvet Underground and The Stooges had become godfathers of punk from earlier eras. You have to hand it to Patti Smith, she did single handedly make performance poetry legit, and launched a whole host of other performers as a result. Her subsequent artistic career is more than admirable, so today she is revered as this no nonsense rebellious feminist icon. Nothing, however, has quite equalled the derisory drawl of Gloria's much quoted, opening coda, being transgressively thrown in your face -' Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.'*

*Lyrics by Patti Smith taken from the album Horses, released by Arista Records November 10th 1975.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW - No 38 - It Comes In An Effin Tin !

 

Friends of ours sent us a What's App message saying they had bought something specially for me, fresh that day. This was the mild level of teasing mystery we have come to expect. Then another message said - we've left it on the patio in your back garden. So, by the time we got home later that day our curiosity was fully roused. What exactly had they left 'for me'. We found a bag from a North of England  cafe/bakery chain called Heavenly Desserts, singularly devoted to serving desserts, cakes and confectionary. Inside the bag, was the gift of a tin with a label declaring it contained a carrot cake within. Ah, now I understood what all this was about. A subsequent message confirmed the intent with a - Looking forward to the review! I was being goaded into assessing this -carrot cake tin thing. 

Well I was, initially, tempted to not deign to respond to such blatant arm twisting. But my response to this confection in a can, did create a near compelling need to cough up a bit of catharsis. This could not pass uncommented upon, surely! Of course the 'in a tin' concept is essentially a gimmick. But it did have one very practical application that I don't really have to vex my imagination much with. You can buy a tin sized piece of cake, and without having to ensure its carefully packaged in a confectionary box or nurse it like a delicate vase, travel all the way down the A1 with it.  As a concept this evidently does work.

Whilst on holiday I'd seen probably the very same thing on sale in York, and was quite frankly dismayed at its mere existence. I mean how much further could you descend in turning finely crafted traditional confectionery, into a travesty? Well, not far, because that particular benchmark has frequently been transgressed. Read past reviews I've written, for the tawdry road of shame full sized proper carrot cake confectionery can drag you kicking and screaming down. 

The tin is aluminium, about the size of a small tin of car sweets. Once opened, what you discover is not a neat piece of cylindrical cake in a tin, more a chaotic melange. The cake and the frosting roughly mixed up. It is in essence not a proper carrot cake, no layers, no fine finishing touches, more cake rubble shoveled in. It appeared to have all the right carrot cake ingredients, though definitely not in the right order.

You might say, does this really matter Stephen? After all this was a kind gift, so let us be kind about it. Aren't you just being a bit too prissy here? What does it actually taste like? Let us hear the review. Well, to my crestfallen surprise, the cake was not awful. In fact, if I hadn't actually been wolfing it down out of the said tin, my enjoyment might have been excessively perked. The cake mixture tastes as if its got a reasonable amount of carrot, and hence texture, to it. A sufficient suggestion of a spice mix, but not overwhelmingly so. It felt to have the right amount of weighty heft,  perhaps teetering mildly onto the wrong side of doughy. The frosting was an effective butter cream. You could casually encounter bits of catering quality chopped nut, of an unspecifiable origin, without being unduly alarmed by flavour. Dried fruit? Well, I really can't remember being struck by any shrivelled moistness, so I want to say none. No marzipan carrots, which is forever a blessed relief.  In a blind taste test, this would clearly have ticked some primary boxes suggesting approval might be to follow.

Begrudgingly, I have to admit this tinned carrot cake spoiled things, by taking the sting out of my desire for a vitriolic outpouring. To unreservedly and publically castigate it for its self-evident horrors. So I will restrain myself to emitting muted approval, the classic English equivocation of - it was not bad. If you're willing to completely overlook the tin that it's in - which I'm not. So with (qualifications ) the scores are in.

CARROT CAKE SCORE (Without Tin ) - 5/8

CARROT CAKE SCORE (With Tin) - 2/8

PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Long Grass with Butterflies (1890)

Van Gogh is recovering in the psychiatric hospital in San Remy. He'd taken himself there of his own volition after a serious mental health crisis, which had resulted in the infamous incident of self harm. So far as documents tell us, he was there for around a year. But definitely left in the May of 1890 once his doctor deemed him 'cured'. Within two months of him leaving San Remy, he was dead. The result of a, possibly accidental, gun shot to his chest. Nothing in his written communications immediately prior to this, to his brother Theo, indicate that he was having suicidal thoughts. But given his history of mental instability perhaps this was just assumed.

Van Gogh before going to San Remy

It maybe Van Gogh himself spoke of it as being accidental, but no one really gave this statement that much credence. Why was he carrying a gun about his person anyway? How do you accidentally shoot oneself in the chest?.Whatever the explanation, Van Gogh lived on for two whole days after the fatal shooting, before he died. Time enough for brother Theo to hurriedly come down to see him. So surely they must have talked between themselves about the hows and whys of itl. And there are after all, Vincent’s poignant last words, as reported by his brother ‘The sadness will last forever’ Which points towards a sort of eternal fatalism existing inside of him, feeding his disturbed psyche.

Dr Paul Gachet

Long Grass with Butterflies, was painted during his stay in San Remy. Its dated 1890, so we have a clearly short time frame of a few months within which he was to paint it. Dr Paul Gachet, his doctor whilst at San Remy, was a huge art lover, and had actively encouraged Vincent to begin painting again. He saw it as a vital 'creative' remedy to passify his agitation. He painted Doctor Gachet and his daughter Marguerite. The latter, yet another example of a women with whom Van Gogh developed an unrequited dependence upon. He wasn’t so much a man unlucky in love, but a really clumsy one in romantic relations, often inappropriate or weak, with an underlying need to save supposedly ‘fallen’ women.

Marguerite Gachet

Apart from these portraits, he primarily painted views from his hospital window. Mostly looking down upon the garden and the meadows that surrounded it. It was a recurring theme in his late paintings, to find expressive force in the wilder untamed undergrowth of woods and countryside. The possible simile with his own mental state could perhaps be too easily retrospectively applied to this. However, whilst in San Remy, he was always inside, looking down upon a far less controllable existence than even his own. Engaging with such a rough cut form of nature and painting it, he might well have found this in some way consoling to his febrile nervous system and heightened sensitivity. This externalising of an internal response in oil paint, was inherently a cathartic act to him.

The painting itself, is 25 x 32 inches and perhaps easily overshadowed by its eight other companion pieces hung in The National Gallery in London. Containing the more famous cypress strewn Arle landscapes, Sunflowers and Van Gogh's Chair. Long Grass with Butterflies on a casual glance, seems a lot humbler, perhaps of less significance artistically. But as you draw your attention in, perhaps bending down to examine it in closer detail, you enter a wholly different world of insight into it, an expressive reinterpretation of what the concept of landscape could include. The surface of this literally fizzes with the electric energy contained in those inimitable brush strokes. Slashes of purple blue suddenly appear from in the midst of the coarser green blades of the long grass in the foreground. He indicates with a flock of fluid white dashes in the background, that a wind is forcing the undergrowth to undulate and flicker in the blistering sunshine.

This landscape is an uneven cleft, with a scumble of hedge and yellow gorse visible in the far distance. It is an unkempt coarse meadow, suitable only for grazing sheep on. A grey path scratching its way across the top left of the painting indicates that this was not a place to idly or romantically wander through, but to pass by quickly on your way to somewhere else. It’s not especially beautiful in any classical sense. On a practical level Van Gogh, as ever, is making the best of what he has infront of him, as he was unable to go anywhere else. Such limitations are often the prompt to greater creativity. Being forced to look more closely, Van Gogh identifies qualities in the view that he appreciates and attempts to highlight.

The primary thing to remind oneself of here, is what this painting is called - Long Grass with Butterflies. That is the dynamic Van Gogh saw most visibly at play here. The foreground of the painting is a scruffy, half dried out scrap of the meadow, where the darkest of greens fights against the encroaching parched ground. The vigorous implacable grip these grasses have upon the ground they are growing in, is dense with wide spreading roots. The blades of coarse grass are sharp edged. Hovering over these well established mounds of grass are white butterflies. They are almost too light and insubstantial, one could imagine them being blown out of existence by a strong puff of wind. They flutter and flounder and flutter, rising and falling in out of the grasses. They may only have a brief few days of life, but their efforts to propagate and feed themselves are slow but assiduous. This coexistence of the long life and rugged nature of the long grasses with the light short lived ephemerality of the butterflies, feels like this painting is a metaphor for human existence. We posit ourselves as substantial influential beings, but we come and we go, our flickering conscious awareness is soon lost, Whilst the long grass of reality carries on doggedly still harbouring new instances of life.

SCREEN SHOT - Civil War (2024)

 

Civil War has broken out in the US. States wanting to leave the union have formed their own army known as The Western Forces, and all the indications are that they are on a final winning frontier. But the President is holed up in the White House, making encouraging announcements to camera that his forces are effectively pushing the rebels back. A small group of a photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and a couple of journalists Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), are travelling across dangerous and still contested terrain, trying to get to Washington to photograph and interview the President. Along the way they pick up a young adult photographer Jessie ( Caliee Spaeny) a bit naive and green, but who idolises Lee's work and wants to be like her. Lee, much to her frustration, is forced to take her on and teach her how to operate and stay safe as a photographer, when combat and fatalities are going on all around you. The personal civil war here is to stay alive and still sane.

I've seen Civil War twice now, and each time I am struck by how this film does not pull any punches in showing you the horrors of war. The political set up is believable, particularly with the current US political regimes behaviour. But the film, however, is not really about why the civil war is happening, or the rights and wrongs of it. Its really concerned with what documenting it does to your mental state. Primarily its what this has done to the photographer Lee. Whose character traits bares strong echoes of what happened to Lee Miller. She is as hard as nails, battle hardened. Very effective as a photographer in difficult situations. She sees something of herself in Jessie, but steadfastly resists romanticising what war photography requires of you. You can see that some part of her is emotionally inactive, deadened almost. You are given a palpable sense for how oddly inhumane the war photographers task is. People are suffering and dying right in front of you, and rather than help or console them, they are taking a photograph of them in the process of dying. Its uncomfortable to watch, because it shows you just how weird that is. A tragedy happens later in the story, and only then does Lee completely lose her stern composure and mentally falls apart.

Alex Garland wrote and directed Civil War, and it has all the feeling for prescience and character led drama one expects of his movies. A pivotal scene, is a master class in show not tell, where the group encounter a White Supremacist (Jesse Plemons) in the midst of committing an unspeakable atrocity, and this is the most nerve wracking unsettling scene in the entire film. Very few words spoken, but the tension is absolutely unbearable. The films scenario is extraordinarily believable. Civil War echoes contemporary issues and dilemmas without turning its entire narrative purpose into a political piece of propaganda or moral tub thumping.  Kirsten Dunst's performance is the real cold hearted, yet mesmerising, hub of this entire movie.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8