Extreme metaphors
Hello again,
Well, sorry for the radio silence. Life got a bit too much in a load of tiny ways. And if nothing else, the pandemic has been a fantastic magnifier of stress - everything is just that little bit harder to deal with. Either practically, because of lockdown restrictions, or emotionally, because we’re all operating with a background level of burn-out already. So it’s been that, for a good few months.
And I took an extended ‘out of office’ from all non-essential elements of my life. And now I’m finding my way back into a routine. But it’s slow going. For example, the draft of this email was started in the last weeks of June. Which shows where my productivity is at the moment.
//happening
A month or so ago I sat by a pool on an east London roof terrace. It’s maybe lazy to consider things Ballardian these days, but we couldn’t resist. We agreed that the thing that most reminds us of High Rise is the sky pool, open to Embassy Garden’s residents only. (Apartments in Embassy Gardens start at £1,015,000.) Fully expect to see the body of a snow-white Alsatian floating in there above the city.
Thoughts of the sky pool reminded me of Iain Sinclair swimming on the 52nd floor of The Shard.. And it seems right to mark the closing of Ballardian.com here too. It will be missed.
//fragments
For as long as I can remember, I’ve collected scraps of words and images. As a teenager, my wardrobe door was a collage of quotations, art, runway images from Westwood shows, posters of musicians with scars and eyeliner. When I moved to London, it was my bedroom door that got decorated this way. Now it’s the noticeboard above my desk. The subjects and symbols changed, but the impulse was always the same.
And I’ve not really thrown any of this away. There’s a box in the loft that has it all. Everything I’ve ever collected to tape to a wall.
I have a digital version as well. Stored across hard drives, old Tumblr accounts and various Pinterest boards. So I thought maybe I could start sharing some of these here. Sometimes I’ll share new aesthetic pleasures, other times I’ll share fragments from the past. I find sometimes it helps to immerse myself in these old, fundamental obsessions when trying to get through a stuck, blocked or stagnant time.
Here’s a fragment to get us started:
Leonard Cohen slogan being worn by Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. I think I found this image through The Quietus. I like the slogan and the unexpected collision of Cohen and Coil.
//read
++ I’m currently reading How to do nothing by Jenny Odell and I’m loving it. Really getting me thinking about our time and attention has become a commodity in our world of algorithms and addictive apps. It’s really got me thinking about my attention, what gets it, and how I can use it more intentionally.
++ We visited the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford this week, and I was interested and impressed by the ways they are actively ‘decolonising the collection’. Lots of organisations talk about this sort of thing, but Pitt Rivers was the best example I’ve seen in action. They openly acknowledge their colonial roots and the supremacy, they removed all human remains from their displays, information throughout the collection examines how the labelling of items reinforce a white European point-of-view. It’s really exciting stuff.
They have info about their process and plans here. And then I read about the struggle that the National Trust are facing as they try to do similar. This detailed and nuanced examination of their anti-slavery, decolonisation work comes from The New Yorker. I wish the UK press could be so considered in their coverage.
++ I mostly find the outrage around the idea of ‘trigger warnings’ to be utterly ridiculous. And I mostly think it does no harm at all to give a note about any potentially difficult content ahead of your show/performance/film/etc. But I’m also nervous that overzealous application can become another form of censorship and control. This newsletter-slash-essay is one of the best things I’ve read on the subject.
++ Isabel Fall is mentioned in that essay and if you’re not familiar with her story then check out How Twitter can ruin a life. It’s not great. Then let’s consider that the real victims of so-called cancel culture are often not actually the guys ranting about it on twitter all the time…
I’ll be back soon, x //Hellen