The Awe beyond the Rising Curtain
Immersive wonder that’s been creatively sustaining me through winter
A familiar sight at our table during cold evenings
Hello friends! I’ve been away from Substack for a couple of months as I felt a need to keep things simple. I had been feeling guilty for not sticking to my plan to write a newsletter every month, but then I thought, hang on a minute: the reason I started this Substack was to transition into a slower, more thoughtful way of putting my ideas into the world, and resist the demands of endless ‘content creating’ that abound on instagram. As Talking Heads would say:
You start a conversation, you can't even finish it
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it again?
I’ll have a bigger newsletter coming next month with a really exciting announcement that I’ve been building up to for a while.
Now that spring is here, I’m feeling like the heavy curtain of winter is lifting, but I’d like to share with you some reveries / ruminations on things that have inspired me while I was curled up in winter’s lint-filled jacket pocket. The common threads seem to be: things falling apart, spewing debris, and the wonder of “how did this get made?!” - I guess this says something about where I’m at currently - things being taken apart and re-made; both the work and the wonder involved in that.
An Inspector Calls
Stephen Daldry’s award winning staging of the JB Priestley play came to Plymouth Theatre Royal in March - I’d never studied the play and had no real expectations of what I was going to experience. As the lights went down, a young boy snuck under the heavy velvet stage curtain and tugged it upwards; slowly the curtain started rising, my jaw dropped and my eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing - rain and smoke cascading around a half-scale townhouse with lights on inside and the chatter of a dinner party from behind curtains.
What evolved over the next couple of hours was totally spellbinding, and without spoiling the plot for anyone unfamiliar with the play, things fell apart literally by the end, with the model house exploding into flames, swinging off its hinges, tipping forward and spewing crockery which smashed onto the ground like vomited debris.
I left the theatre feeling that fantastic thrill of “wow, I’m so glad someone had the vision to make this happen, and that there’s money out there to commission and support this” - my experience of working in the arts sector has often been that things have to be done on a shoe-string budget, and when I have an immersive creative experience like this where it feels like there has been no holding back, it fills me with energy and a sense that anything is possible.
Stalker
One Sunday afternoon my partner and I went along to a screening of Tarkovsky’s Stalker at Exeter Phoenix - a special screening that had been put on to coincide with the RAMM’s Witches of the Anthropocene exhibition, connected by a shared theme of mysterious environmental forces.
The film was hard work, over 3 hours - some immensely beautiful compositions (as there always are in Tarkovsky’s work) and almost-unbelievable scenes of murk, sludge, and oozing. The following day I hopped on a train to Penryn with my colleague Sarah to deliver a workshop, and she revealed some extraordinary facts about the film:
Stalker was shot originally using Kodak 5247 film, but the Soviet laboratories didn’t know how to process this type of film properly, so it was almost totally destroyed! A large amount had to be entirely re-made, and ended up being very different to the original, to which apparently Tarkovsky commented "no mother gives birth to the same child twice".
All the scenes of industrial decay were shot in real locations in Talinn (Estonia). At one point the characters encounter a body of water covered in undulating, toxic scum, and it turns out that this was real industrial pollution, that had seeped downriver from a chemical plant. The actors are seen trudging through all kinds of polluted slime, filthy water, rotting sewers and industrial buildings, and the choice of filming in this post-industrial wasteland ended up being fatal: many crew members suffered terrible allergic reactions on their faces, and the film’s sound recordist Vladimir Sharun was convinced that the deaths of Tarkovsky in 1986, his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) were caused by exposure to the chemical pollutants.
There’s something mind-bending about being so committed to a vision for making a film, that it actually kills you!
Music I’ve been Listening to Lately
My partner and I have been working our way through the Pitchfork end-of-year lists for 2022 (100 best songs and 50 best albums) which is a ritual we’ve had since we’ve been together. One song from this list that I keep coming back to for a little dance and a pep in my step is Tonight by Phoenix ft. Ezra Koenig
And here are some albums I’ve been into over the last few months:
God Save the Animals by Alex G
Janky Star by Grace Ives
Nothing Special by Will Sheff (of Okkervil River)
An old one, but new to me: Holiday by The Magnetic Fields
And I’ll never stop listening to
Women in Music Part III by Haim
All of Car Seat Headrest’s music
And finally:
Enjoy these “masculinity crisis crisps” that made Sam Rowe and I laugh:
They’re so STRONG that they are on FIRE and have DANGER STRIPES - can you HANDLE THEM?
I’ll be back soon with news of a launch of a thing I’ve been working on all year! Till then I’d love to hear what’s been sustaining you lately - send me a reply or a comment.