amber can walk

This is not a review. About a month ago, I saw The Shrouds (2024) in the cinema for the first time. After ruminating on it, posting a quick review to Letterboxd and eating some very mediocre sushi, I found myself, periodically crying throughout the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning. This, unfortunately, ruined the unintentional double feature I did with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024), a film I remember very little about, but have the vague sense that I did, in fact, like it. It wasn't for the lack of quality that the details of this fluffy little movie slipped away, but rather due to me having what I will euphemistically call a 'bad turn'. I do spiral. I've been known to dwell. I've sunk to depths of depression that I didn't think I was capabale of. I've been triggered by the innocuous and I've been triggered by the terrifying. I've spaced out for days and been knocked back to reality by something as mundane as a ...

Last year, one of my most rewatched films was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film revolving around four people whose lives become entangled due to their various sexual neuroses. It's a film very interested in infidelity and what it takes to make relationships work. In general, I find the misery of heterosexuality, as portrayed in many a film, tedious. So, I avoided this film specifically because I assumed that it would be another film people enjoyed because it had straight people screaming at each other in it. Sex, Lies and Videotape invited me in through its depiction of loneliness and perversion, both of which are aspects of being alive that are often mocked and derided. The serial killer is lonely and perverted. The stalker is lonely and perverted. Your average middle class married couple are not typically lonely and perverted, not unless the film ends with some kind of violent climax (I'm looking at you, American Beauty !).  The film follows An...

I gave you blood, blood, gallons of the stuff I gave you all that you can drink, and it has never been enough - blood (end credits) by my chemical romance In the middle of 1975, Christine Chubbuck, a Florida-based television news reporter, made history in being the first person to die by suicide on live TV.  As it's become a trend which has made a lot of people money, I've become vehemently anti-'true crime', the genre of podcast/docu-series/YouTube deep dive where the audience is invited to gawk at what is usually the most gruesome and grief-riddled time in people's lives. They often focus on murders and cults, topics that are both taboo and incredibly gendered. We have become more and more obsessed with women in pain and turmoil. Earlier this year, I watched  Christine  (2016) and  Kate Plays Christine  (2016) in succession after I realised they were both about Chubbuck. I don't mean to become fixated on troubled public figures and have become wary o...

The population of Haida Gwaii were some of the first people to watch  Edge of the Knife (2018), a horror film set in the 19th century recounting the tale of a man changing into Gaagiixiid (a wildman figure common throughout their culture's folklore) after committing an accidental act of violence. This would be the first feature film to use only Haida as dialogue, a language with only 24 native speakers . Many of the actors in the film were not fluent themselves and had to attend a two week language boot camp where elders were invited to teach Haida to younger generations. Not only was this film a milestone in its own right, the production and distribution of the film became a way to prevent the language from being forgotten. As Adeana Young, one of the stars of the film, stated:  "Not long after the language is gone, the culture is gone [which] is scary, really scary." In her second documentary feature, Violet Du Feng, along with co-director Qing Zhao, present a sto...

Source: Roger Ebert What's most frustrating about the representation of the internet in films and on TV is how incurious it is. Generally being portrayed as a vapid outlet for teenagers who are desperate for attention, social media, that is pretty much ubiquitous at this point and almost essential in staying up to date on socio-political issues, is villainised in a way that only comes across as insecure from the point of view of the writers. And I don't want to be ageist, but it does seem like the fear-mongering attitudes of someone too detached from young people's lives to even try to understand what it's function is in them. We're All Going To The World's Fair (2021) is refreshing, not just because of its transgressive use of form, but because it was so obviously made by someone who spent hours on the internet as a teenager, like myself and many other people now in their twenties. Jane Schoenbrun's bizarre coming of age story follows Casey as she plays an ...

I originally wrote this for a non-fiction essay competition. I didn't win so I'm just going to post it here. Enjoy x * I brush my teeth with wireless headphones on my head. I try to blast something meaningful into my ears but noise in any capacity is what I need here. The way I know to stop brushing is when my electric toothbrush buzzes three times against my jaw bone. That’s how I know how long two minutes are. When I get into my pyjamas, I have to remove the headphones to get my shirt off my head, or I’ll get stuck. In that silence, my ears buzz for a good 5 seconds before I can hear what silence is. I keep the window open in summer because all of my skin sticks together, and tonight, I can hear bats flying outside, a very small Doppler effect of squeaking. I can still hear the music in my headphones because I didn’t disconnect them. I haven’t decided whether to stop listening to music whilst brushing my hair and then I remember where my hair is. I disconnect my headphones. I...

I wouldn't say I'm a particularly informed leftist. I have a vague idea, due to living in a world that insists on underpaying and overworking myself and the people I love, that things are wrong and that they need changing. I think that on occasion I even do some good things, like donating money and even time to causes I believe in. But I'm not an activist, and I'm not a good source of information when it comes to the technical stuff. If you asked me about the specifics of capitalism vs. socialism, I probably couldn't tell you. But I can tell you that everyone's basic needs should be taken care of by the state and that you shouldn't have to work for 40 hours and still not be able to pay your rent. These facts seem obvious.  Sometimes, I try to think about what my life would look like if I didn't have to work at all. There was a brief trend on YouTube where people would discuss the idea of labour, dream jobs and the idea that we are expected to position o...

I got a first on my dissertation. I don't brag often but I genuinely believe that this project was (and until my poetry collection is published, still is) the hardest I've even worked on a single text and I'm still pleased with that work. This isn't going to be a reflection on how my work was actually terrible and how I regret everything, but more of what the process was like and how I benefited from it.   I studied English Literature and Film but my dissertation had to be on a film topic, because that was the priority of my degree. Beyond this, I had the complete freedom to write whatever I wanted. So I picked something specific and close to my heart: I wrote about the representation of angry women in the thriller genre. I chose to write about angry women because, at the time at least, I was one. I really struggled to get excited about things that I didn't have a personal connection with, so when I picked this topic, it was because I had personal stakes in trying t...

I've been writing poetry for a long time. What's amazing about that is that I was writing it before I could properly define what it was, or what were the constraints necessary to write it. I have studied poetry so I can definitely give you a list of techniques necessary to make a poem and point to the best examples if you wanted to emulate it, but I can't honestly come on here and say that is how I write poetry. That I sit and agonise about form, rhythm and whether or not my work will be culturally significant. Well, I do a small amount but that usually comes in during the editing process. The writing process, for me, feels like an expulsion of emotion, using visceral imagery to create a small story that will gut-punch the reader into experiencing something they've been refusing to feel. Putting these images in just the right order to build tension and making sure that the words you pick are only the essential ones because every line in the poem is itself a poem. It...

These Days With the end of the world comes many realisations - what you can fit in your mouth, you can fit in your hand there is a difference between a fist and a heart they are the same size but when you punch through a chest you kill something when you can feel your heartbeat in your feet you have felt something whether it is true or not you were there when it happened you survived you threw yourself at the wall for days and you survived you circled the empty cage like a starving tiger and you survived you were lobotimised and torn open for scrap and you survived it's interesting how much the body wants to live on days like these when the sirens wail out for the end and you come to terms with what you have been left with I hope you have come to a similar realisation - these days your skull is the best home to have

  Poor Little Rich Girl (after Edie Sedgwick) Poor little rich girl a muse of flesh               and miniskirt quaking youth                rising sun girl born to white heat          all naked heart of gold                   scratching the  back of her throat           looking for pennies Poor little rich girl an extra                          small cameo lying in bed                    at sundown applying lipstick            grey it keeps smudging          reapply it’s ersatz silver              this time Poor little rich girl like a rolling stone         like death both abandoned ...

This blog post has brief mentions of sexual assault and transphobia. If this affects you in any way, I won't be offended if you stop reading. Keep yourself safe. * Living in the world means having your heroes break your heart. This is a fact I have had to learn over and over. Many of my heroes are authors and as it turns out, they aren't always the best people. But I'm a masochist and I love art. I love loving creative works and there is nothing that is going to stop me from consuming as much as possible. However. The conversation about what we can like and who we can like has pushed itself to forefront of pop culture. The internet has allowed artists to become a personal part of our everyday lives, through social media, so the debate on whether we should support those people, especially if those people have terrible views or have done terrible things is rampant and confusing at times. It has become a function of how we consume art that we know who it is that created it. To...