tax write off #1

the good thing about not having an editor is that I get to decide what I write about in the main Sunday texts we post here on the white pube. good and bad. I try to see lots of culture because I hope that one of the things will make me want to say things back to it, like the art is a conversation-starter and my job as the critic is to keep the conversation interesting, or something like that. As it happens, I don’t have words for everything. Sometimes I only have one sentence. Sometimes the art feels like it said everything for me. Sometimes the art actually asked me to keep quiet. So, there’s all this other stuff I see that I never post about. I keep thinking, what if the tax man asks me why I am claiming a receipt for Mike Wozniak. Well, tax man, here is that wide net I’ve been casting made manifest:

I watched Aftersun on Mubi and I think the main actress Frankie Corio should have been nominated for an Oscar, not just Paul Mescal

Yes I did see Mike Wozniak at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool. I’ve never seen comedy live, ever. It was… good but mostly it was just hard to keep up with. And then a woman in the front row got the hiccups and that made me laugh more than the routine itself.

I watched Batman Returns (1992) on Netflix - or no, I lie. My boyfriend was watching it. I was “working” on my “laptop” but then I was so captivated that I closed my laptop and watched the film. A few days later, my friend sent me this essay about how ‘everyone is beautiful and no one is horny’ in cinema anymore, and yes! that’s what struck me about Batman Returns, how HORNY it felt. Catwoman, horny. The Penguin, even hornier. Filthy film! Excellent. Can’t believe I’d never seen it before

I went to see Josh Coates' play Sunday Morning, ‘a walking tour of the internet,’ at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool. I enjoyed it, I felt like the audience was being give a chance to get organised in a good solid fair Political way, and I liked the spirograph effect that looped around the performer’s head at one point using projection onto a translucent screen

I also went to see Mother Goose because Ian McKellen was in it, and my cousin said we should see him before he dies. Good reason. It was silly. I liked the Lord of the Rings references because honestly that’s what I was there for. And it was mostly good-hearted fun, except for the bit when John Bishop delivered a line about a donkey identifying as a llama and the scary middle aged women in the audience shrieked with laughter… nopeeeee

I have listened to so much Wolf Alice in the last year on Youtube Music that I had to have a word with myself. I ended up buying their album, as in a physical CD that I will probably never play (because unfortunately I use Youtube Music via my friend’s family plan), and two t-shirts (which you could argue are not tax-deductible but the way I see it, I am now a Lorraine Kelly sort of character on the Internet and characters need costumes)

Got 100% on Hard mode on the Happier Than Ever, Billie Eilish level on Beat Saber and last night I did Extra Hard (or whatever it is called) and got A on my first go. I keep going to mod my Oculus but I see very mixed results and I’m sort of, too stressed right now for the possibility of it breaking or ending up in a sort of technology-purgatory, so I am just eating the costs of new songs right now. Wonder if they get a better cut than they do on YouTube music. I also mention this because when I write, my hands get more and more numb as time goes on – I’m just about feeling pins and needles in them now – and so I keep breaking up my writing by playing single levels on Beat Saber in order to reset my circulation. Kind of hard because if I do too much, it makes me too fatigued to write. But if I do too little, numb hands. A balancing act! Going to 100% Extra Hard* mode next!

And what’s one more thing while my blood sinks, errrr, oh I did spend the weekend at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. But I won’t talk about that yet because there’s a whole video on the way soon.

Love to be a freelancer. Goodbye