amber can walk

There is a moment early on in Luca Guadagnino's After The Hunt where Maggie, a vocal and enthusiastic philosophy student, and Frederik, a wry and airy therapist, share a kiss. Our four main characters are saying their goodbyes after a slightly drunken salon held in the home of Alma (and Frederik, her husband), and in attempting to kiss each other goodbye, Maggie and Frederik briefly lock lips. No one comments amongst the chatter. Frederik looks slightly taken aback and Maggie asks if he's okay. It was an accident, after all. No fuss is made of it. Barely a beat later, Alma and Hank, a swaggering mess of a man (and also a professor), kiss as well, like muscle memory. Neither look apologetic. This is blatantly their dynamic and no one has anything to say about it. This one moment, the physicality, the ease of it, tells you everything you need to know about these people, and how their inability to confront what is directly in front of them will cause everything to implode. Often,...

Fear #1 - No matter how much I scream, no one will ever really hear me Every act is a communication and in genre cinema, the filmmaker is confined to strict parameters, where they are encouraged to frolic but not transgress. My stance, considering how much I have engaged with Ed Wood's work and criticisms of it, is that what caused audiences to sneer and mock his malformed creations was how close they were to resembling a 'real' movie. Wood did not intend to be avant-garde. He was no Kenneth Anger. He knew what a movie was and moulded one together through the disparate parts he had to hand and liberated the rest from the movies that raised him. My favourite entries in Wood's filmography are the horror pieces: Plan 9 From Outer Space , Bride Of The Monster , Revenge Of The Dead , Final Curtain , Meatcleaver Massacre . Hell, I even like Necromania , his horror-porn flick about a man who can't satisfy his wife and enlists the help of some satanic women with vague but d...

I close my eyes to conjure up something But it's just a faint taste in my mouth - Dum Dum Girls, Coming Down  The reappraisal economy, as Jacob Lambert in an article for The Week puts it, is a recent phenomenon that has made it incredibly difficult to distinguish between a genuine admiration for an unfairly maligned piece of work and fodder for the dreaded think-piece machine, which seems to exist to garner clicks from polarising headlines. What is the function of trying to find clarity and meaning in work that has been firmly established as terrible, especially when the people who made it  turn out to have caused significant harm to others ?  The Canyons (2013) is a hard film to like.  It has a consistent yellow and green tinge, like stagnant pool water left to stew on the hottest day of the year. Everything is over-lit and cheap looking, empty and un-erotic . It's dry, garish and much too close to the sun. The dust settled on the cinema seats is hot to the tou...

If you're reading this, it means that my second poetry chapbook, MY MOTHER CALLED ME A HERMIT, is being released today. Unlike my first collection, which felt like a distillation of a depressed person soaking their brain in the internet during a moment of worldwide crises, these poems are very recent. I spent the last year of my life writing, editing and compiling them together. They are, in a sense, the most present version of my writing, which is a sentence I am typing out right now in this moment, a full 3 weeks before I intend to release it. I've thought a lot about the creative process as labour over the past couple of years. Living by myself, working full time and trying to squeeze anything artful from the few hours I have before I go to bed are all elements in this process, but more than that, they cost me time. Any time I don't spend writing something meaningful and cogent feels wasted. I feel the past on my back constantly and even doing something successfully brin...