“Wherever I go, wherever I end up, I got there from here.”

I like to do the same things over and over again. I like to have my coffee first thing in the morning. I like to run the same circular laps. I like to eat two za’atar naan. Maybe it is boring, but people have been doing these things since classical antiquity. They are time-tested and true. Walking past the UFO graffiti near Trent Kebabs in Nottingham the other week, JJ asked me what home meant to me. On the spot I gave an unconvincing answer, but it’s a good question, and one that, I think, is answered for me by this amazing video, RAGAMYFF, a faux documentary about the life and philosophy of a MC from North West London called Kibo. As well as serving as a promotional video for a wave of singles by him, it is a short but comprehensive opening up of a world (Harrow, HA3) and a worldview (“Kwengletarianism.”) “They say u can’t polish a turd, innit,” Kibo says in one of the interview segments, “but u can find paradise on a park bench.” Harrow is a bit of a “shithole,” he says, but it is his home. For me, home is about familiarity, a kind of sense of belonging that comes through attrition, through so much repeat exposure to the same mundane elements that they soak into your skin and become a formative part of you. It is about having an innate and intimate understanding of something, a familiarity with localised landmarks and reference points—that which Kibo calls “da constellationz u build from red starz”—and a shared lexicon that speaks intrinsically to a specific place and time. It is a kind of assimilation into the boring essence of a town that can’t be faked or short-cutted. I am not really much like Kibo but I can’t explain how much of myself I see in this video, and how much I understand everything he is saying here, even when it’s tongue-in-cheek. (“Murkin is cool, but u can't just murk forever. Therez more 2 lyf than murkin.”) It’s not only the generational shared reference points (the Sam’s Chickens, the Blue-Eyes White Dragons, the Jet Set Radios, and the like) or the imbecilic humour. It’s the whole mentality of being born into a landscape of totalising suburban ennui, and transcending that mundanity through an appreciation of all the asinine infinities that have contributed to the makeup of the resultant you. “If u bash ur head against da wall 4 long enuff, u’ll see da glow.”

WATCHING

Watching that Kibo video reminded me of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s Essential Selection (1999-2001), a trilogy of short films about London made by two young artists at the turn of the millennium. I learned about these videos about a year ago via the book of writings by Ian White, This Is Information: Mobilise. He refers to them as a “direct engagement with spectacle, ‘entertainment,’ and expressions of boredom, beauty, and lyrical resistance” and upon looking into them and finding a copy online I became instantly quite obsessed, specifically with House and Garage. Since then, I’ve had a sort of nostalgic half-fixation with signifiers of the millennium era—Nokia phones, the Millennium Dome, Michael Owen, The Streets, Robbie Williams etc.—currently unresolved. Driftwood, the first video, is a very clearly Patrick Keiller inspired essay film about skateboarding and architecture, that begins from the Southbank skate park and then moves outwards from there. House and Garage is a mock home video thing about the relationship between central London and suburbia and further, exploring teenage (male) identity at the nexus of urbanism and rurality. And then Jungle goes further out, looking at the eerie and weird side of the British countryside, from UFO spotting in rave fields to pagan rituals by bonfire, in the form of what White calls “a stunning formal collapse as the artists move further from home-base.” I am a bit of a sucker for anything like this, about youth culture and Eng-er-land, crystallised in that very particularly scrappy 240p realism that you get with the Risky Roadz era digital handicam, and, like with RAGAMYFF, I can see something of myself in all of this. I emailed one of the artists to try to organise a screening of the trilogy at the start of last year but never got any response, so instead I’ve uploaded the DVDrip I found here (for a while anyhow). I hope they don’t mind. From what I gather, both artists left London a long time ago and moved to America. The one I emailed seems to have rejected the world of moving image art entirely, favouring making independent video games instead. I definitely get it. But these films, while juvenile, are still really great.

PERSONAL

I wrote a few bits so far this year. The first was a short essay for the ICA about Isiah Medina, focusing on the films he made up to 2020, primarily the short films and 88:88 (2015), a film I have a great affinity for. The second was an interview with the autobiographical filmmaker Ross McElwee for Notebook, which I recorded last October at Doclisboa. It was quite an intense chat as the film he was showing there, Remake (2025), his first in fourteen years, is a crushing reflection on the death of his son and what it means to turn the camera towards those closest to you and then back at yourself. And then lastly, also on Notebook, the latest in my column on the moving image and video games, which is an argument against the cutscene. The point I was trying to make with this one, via a short history of the in-game cinematic, was that video game storytelling is better served through forms of interactivity and ingenuity that are derived from video game systems rather than an approximation of film language. It was fun to take on a kind of polemical form for once. Also, issue 8 of Notebook magazine is now out.