Björk in concert

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Cinema

Poetry I cry in the cinema Or not cry So hard that my head aches with the holding back Not in the film When those beside me weep Manipulated by...

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Non-fictionYoung and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

An image of a lush forest at sunrise. The tall, thin trees are cast in shadows as the sun rises in the background.

From the hills of Killea

Non-fictionShe lived alone with five horses, five dogs, three cats, three geese and two ducks. She had escaped Manchester under Thatcher, gone off the grid in Tipperary and never returned. She said mass suicide was the only answer to climate catastrophe. She was the most interesting person I had ever met. Before dawn, I would write. By daybreak, I would find a pair of wellies and then muck out the stables, wheeling huge barrows of horseshit across her yard to a pile the size of a fire truck. There was little time to rest. The stove needed to be fed, constantly, with bricks of peat to keep the house warm. The horses needed to be given hay five times a day. The geese needed guarding from the foxes. I learnt to care for animals, to give them my attention.

A freer state of being

Non-fictionToday, we live in a time in which self-worth and value are often signified by a numerical figure – how many followers we have, how many likes we receive, what level of traction our posts incite. We live in a time in which this numerical figure equates to social capital, with digital ‘celebrities’ gaining varying levels of access to places and perks on the basis of their following. We live in a time in which the aesthetics and metrics of this burgeoning digital realm pervade and influence not only the way we live our lives but what we perceive to be reality. We understand ourselves and the world around us through the cultural codes, signs and symbols we consume. We depend upon and wield such cultural codes, signs and symbols to inhabit narratives in which we wish to belong, fashioning them like an armour that tells the world who we are. Appearances are everything.
But hyperreality is an unstable landscape. When our cultural codes, signs and symbols give way, so too do our carefully curated identities, which inevitably implode.