w/e 2021-08-15
This week I’ve been listening to Lucy Dacus’s album Home Video. I’m not sure it’s grabbed me as much as Historian did – some of the music behind her singing isn’t as interesting as her lyrics. But I still enjoy it and a track like Thumbs still has a bit of… deceptively gentle oomph?
But it’s hard to beat the opening line of the first track on Historian though: “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit, I had a coughing fit.”
§ Via this trampolining video in the latest Garbage Day I ended up watching this extract of Yoann Bourgeois’ Celui qui tombe again, several times:
At the start of my first re-watch My Way seemed far too familiar to use, and with too obvious a message. It’s hard to equal the weight of that, I thought. But by the end it had worked, it all seems to fit. The piece makes me smile and feel tears. While I was never in anything like this, watching it makes me miss trying to create something that works, that has some effect on the viewer, through movement alone.
But never mind that; it seems weird just to be that close to other people at the moment.
§ Talking of which, this week I travelled across the country to Essex to visit my parents, with three trains each way. The first, a standing-room-only journey from Abergavenny to Newport was a bit 😬. Too many non-mask wearers, and even a mask-below-the-nose person (still! why?!), even though masks are still mandatory in public places in Wales. Thankfully the other trains were less busy so weren’t too scary.
Both ways I walked between Paddington and Liverpool Street stations, clocking up around 25km, both to avoid the tube and to see some of London again. After so long away I wanted to walk every road I knew well, almost to check that they were all OK. It was so, so good to be back. So much life, so many things, never-ending variety, street after street after street.
There’s probably a German compound word for non-German speakers who say there’s probably a German compound word for some complicated feeling but, nevertheless, there’s probably a German compound word for being somewhere that gives you the over-familiar feeling of home and yet you no longer live there.
It used to be that as soon as I was up on the ramparts of the Barbican’s raised walkways that I felt I was home, entering my village. But now, even though it’s still as familiar as it was after 15 years of living there, it’s no longer home. In general I felt a bit like I’d been demoted from London resident to… visitor? Please, not tourist?! Not yet.
Anyway, even though London wasn’t quite, yet, the old London I knew, what with everything, and I didn’t want to go inside many places, it was lovely to see it again.
§ Continuing the recent Bo Burnham theme (after Inside and Promising Young Woman) we watched Eighth Grade which was excellent and also excruciating. I imagine it’s even more excruciating if you’ve ever been a girl at an American middle school. Eesh. The capturing of the wide gap between Kayla’s own image of herself and the only way she could behave in public was heartbreaking and horribly familiar. A+++ would cringe again.
We’ve also almost finished watching the third season of Ghosts which continues to be an easy-going gentle pleasure.
§ That’s it. Back to the telly with you!