I CAN SEE YOU FROM HERE [557]

“What is a video podcast?” is a question for which you might accuse its asker of ignorance, but I only ask it because the term has risen as something that we all apparently understand. We all know what a podcast is, so a video podcast is surely just one where you can see who is talking?

But just as podcasts, as a form, are similar to existing half-hour and hour-long speech-led programmes found on UK radio, particularly magazine programmes on BBC Radio 4, video podcasts seem to me to be too close to television, or just a video of the type you find on YouTube. At worst, it reminds me of what Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in their famous interview, that he believed cinema should avoid: “photographs of people talking”.

At the time of writing, a video podcast is currently being watched by an average of four million people in the UK because it is also being broadcast in primetime on standard over-the-air television. Admittedly, this is because it ties in to “The Celebrity Traitors”, BBC One’s wildly popular reality game show immediately preceding it, but “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” features presenter Ed Gamble interviewing his guests, massive condenser microphones on stands before them all instead of lavalier mics clipped to their clothes, our view cutting between unmoving cameras. The visuals are entirely superfluous to the programme, which the BBC also makes available as audio-only podcasts, but those pictures are there if you want them.

Having previously talked about Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, describing television as a “cool” medium, owing to the amount of attention the audience needs to give to make it “warm”, I am wary of the “warmth” of the sound of a podcast being attached to the “coolness” of an optional picture. If it is optional, it can be dispensed with entirely. If it cannot be, then you have crossed into a different media, whether that be television, competing for an attention in a room or, if you move to prioritising visuals over the picture, cinema.

My guess, and it is only my guess, is that podcasts are a more intimate media than radio: both can be listened to individually through headphones, but you will still find radio more frequently in social settings, if only as a background to them, than you will with a podcast. This bifurcation of audio broadcasting is what I think has led to the BBC announcing that its replacement for the long-running BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs show “You and Yours” will be “a refreshed consumer programme, designed to work both on air and on demand”, although the mechanics of how it will work were not elaborated.

Admittedly, other chat shows look similar to “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” – episodes of “Parkinson” from the 1970s also have microphones on stands, trailing wires out of shot – but these can be more obviously made as television shows, recorded in a TV studio in front of an audience, with operators moving the cameras. The kind of convergence being attempted by treating a video podcast as a television programme is a point when neither medium is being used as effectively as it could be, just like the act of putting a film in a TV schedule and not expecting the audience at home to turn the lights out and be quiet.

I’M ON THE ROAD AGAIN [556]

148 inches versus 206 inches

Nearly two years since Jaguar Cars announced an even-more-upmarket rebrand under the phrase “copy nothing”, and ten years since I first wrote about the Citroën 2CV, a car as far away from a Jaguar as you can get, two new cars were announced within a week of each other.

On Tuesday 6th October, the Jaguar Type 01, a four-door, four-seater grand touring saloon, and an evolution of the Type 00 coupé concept shown in 2024, was unveiled by JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) at an event in New York, with a starting price of £129,995. Five days later, Stellantis unveiled their own concept car, a Citroën 2CV reimagined as a modern supermini-sized city car, alongside a new version of the “Fourgonnette” van, aiming to be among the cheapest of available new cars, a tenth of the Jaguar’s cost, when the eventual production model goes on sale in 2028.

The timing of these cars’ launches was not the only reason for me considering them together, as the owners of both Jaguar and Citroën are using these new cars to reposition our perception of these brands. Jaguar is deliberately being pushed away from “premium mass market” Mercedes-Benz and BMW customers towards Bentley, Aston Martin and, well, Range Rover drivers, with an imposing design and price to match. Meanwhile, the outright quirkiness and excitement of Citroën car design arguably began fading after it merged with Peugeot in 1976, before becoming part of the even-larger Stellantis in 2021 – the current Citroën C3, sitting above the 2CV in size and also originally a 2CV-inspired design, can also be bought as both a Vauxhall/Opel Frontera and Fiat Grande Panda, with cosmetic and dashboard changes separating them.

Importantly, both the Type 01 and 2CV only have electric drivetrains. Jaguar had already stated their range would be electric-only by 2025, by which time they had stopped production to prepare, while European emissions rules had added enough to the cost of producing a new petrol-driven small car to make their price too high to be viable, already ending in the production of cars like the Peugeot 108, Citroën C1, Volkswagen Up! and even the Ford Fiesta. However, the Type 01 will be far less frugal with energy than the 2CV, with one electric engine in the front and two in the rear, producing an expected one thousand horsepower. I could not find details for what engine or batteries Citroën have planned, other than they want to keep the 2CV’s weight to under one metric tonne – a base Mini Cooper from BMW is 400kg more than that these days – so it won’t match the Jaguar’s expected range of four hundred miles on a single charge.

The Jaguar Type 00 concept was a two-door coupé, with my expectation being that a modern E-Type would appear. Instead, with two extra doors and a “grand tourer” description, the Type 01 is not a new XJ6 saloon either. Armour-plated XJs had often been used as British ministerial cars, but since Jaguar ended XJ production in 2019, its replacement in this capacity has either been the Range Rover, or even the Audi A8 – the Type 01 is too ostentatious for a politician to be seen using it in an official capacity. 

My having mentioned Aston Martin earlier is because the car the Type 01 reminds me of the most is the 1976-90 Lagonda, a cutting-edge design plied with computers and touch controls and, having been built by hand, made exclusive through its increased expense – they are even about the same size.

The Citroën 2CV, however, will only remind me of the original 2CV – every styling choice, from the tiny door handles, corrugated bonnet and headlights sticking out from above the front wheel arches, is a nostalgic exercise, and not just an inspiration like the original C3 from 2002. Coming from a mass-market car company with multiple names, the 2CV concept looks so much like the original 2CV that I cannot imagine the final version looking so close, as the platform on which it is built cannot be then shared for other cars – a very rounded-looking Peugeot or Vauxhall city car will just look suspicious.

That said, one other small car had a similar rounded design and protruding headlights, selling in huge numbers: the 2002-10 Nissan Micra. Nissan had already made retro cars like the Figaro convertible and a 1989-91 van inspired by the Fourgonnette, named the “S-Cargo” – the 2CV had already been nicknamed the “tin snail”.

But the new 2026 Nissan Micra is why my original point stands. Based on the Renault 5 E-Tech, with Renault having also dipped into its back catalogue for its small car range, along with the Renault 4 and Twingo, the new Micra has only a restyled front and rear, and even that doesn’t stop it from looking like a Renault 5. Renault has since insisted other cars using its platform need to look more distinctive, as a new Ford Fiesta will be based on it too.

What I was surprised most about was the new 2CV’s spartan yellow interior with front and rear bench seats, a tiny heads-up dashboard display and a central console made from a wicker basket. The nicest touch of all is the on-screen control system that uses illustrations from Belgian comic book artist Jean-Luc Delvaux, a hand-drawn touch I have not seen on any other car, while I hope the removable “Radioën” sound system makes it to the final car, because that means I could by one for myself.

I anticipate seeing a new Citroën 2CV on British roads before a Jaguar Type 01, despite the former still being two years away. Both JLR and Stellantis hope these cars will revitalise their brands, but that is a question that will be answered by what cars follow them. Neither the 2CV nor the Type 01 can afford to be a one-off.

KING OF THE HILL, TOP OF THE LIST [555]

Continuing my unexpectedly enjoyable mission to clear a loft of my possessions, I concluded that a particular collection of magazines I have built up over fifteen years would, like so many others, also need to go. However, for all times’ sake, this pile will be earmarked for a charity shop more than for recycling, because they were not easy to find.

Whenever I have picked up a copy of “The New Yorker”, on the rare occasion a UK newsagent had one for sale, I have treated its mix of essays, cultural reviews, fiction and cartoons as a portal to the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, noisy and outspoken city that acts like a far-away playground for my mind — I have always seen Los Angeles as more a place of industry, even if those are film and music, and London is too near to elicit the same kind of anticipation. Its art direction is second to none, its illustrated covers having been given away by me as birthday cards on a few occasions. Its pages saw the first appearances of James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a ghoulish family depicted in cartoons by Charles Addams, and articles on which the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Coyote vs Acme” are based. The nearest magazine to that mix that is published in the UK is the satirical “Private Eye”, which I have been reading for decades now. 

However, I the nearest newsagent to me that still sold “The New Yorker”, which is least ten miles away, has now closed. Adding to my need to create space, I have inevitably decided to subscribe to the magazine online, rather than risk being cut off altogether. Knowing the origin of its source material, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” always hit a weird note with me when they sing, “we can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man”, but I should have realised that can reference New York-based media as a whole, having read “The New York Times” for years for a similar vantage point, although one more reactive and with less time for consideration than a weekly periodical can afford itself.

My first action upon subscribing to “The New Yorker” was to look at their archive, which turned into my looking at a gallery of thousands of vibrant covers, in all manner of styles, portraying political events to everyday life, punctuated every February by a reproduction or reinterpretation of Rea Irvin’s portrait of Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s mascot, a dandy with enough time to examine a passing butterfly with his monocle. The magazine has been a butterfly for me for quite some time, but will that change now I have finally pinned it down?

NAME IT, READ IT, TUNE IT, PRINT IT [554]

I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy the Canon TR4750i combination inkjet printer and scanner, I am just saying that using one is never straightforward.

I needed to print out some tickets, sent to me by e-mail, for a visit to an art gallery, a standard failsafe for me because the last thing you want to do is rely entirely on your phone to hold the key to visiting places – the same has gone for airline boarding passes. 

I bought my first inkjet printer when I was completing my A-Levels – carrying on into my degree, I remember the satisfaction of submitting coursework and essays without the added worry of finding somewhere to print them first.

However, that was a time before wi-fi. Attempting to print the tickets from my phone via Apple’s AirPrint standard did not pick up the printer at first, necessitating my restarting the printer. Once my phone finally connected, the printer just fed the paper through itself without making a mark. 

Two further attempts at printing, with the same outcome, led me to shine a light, literally, on the LCD panel on the printer – it is not backlit, and I have put the front-loading printer on a shelf due to available space, which obscures my view of this display – to be told that the device needs to complete a firmware update before it will do anything else. You would have thought Canon could have sent such a message to the print properties screen on my phone, or even print it on the paper I was trying to use.

I later turned on my desktop computer, reasoning I can better see and control what is going on, which made no difference to what the printer was doing. The QR codes showing on the tickets were not appearing in the preview screen, which led to my finding they were being treated as part of the document’s background, instead of as the main reason for doing any of this. Finally, having changed all the settings I could see, I printed the tickets off, and got on with my life.

Rather than the usual gripe about inkjet printer cartridges being so expensive that buying a new set of black and colour cartridges could set you back as much as the printer initially did, a comparison per millimetre of ink with the price of champagne, mine is with the actual ability to print. I let two months pass from the purchase of the tickets until I could sum up the energy to print them out, knowing it will never do it how I want the first time.

I think I may have also expected too much from it for the money. The printer loads and feeds out its paper from the front, meaning you can place it on the shelf, but more expensive models have its control screen on the front flap too, meaning you will be able to see if it needs a firmware update. I also have my suspicions that its ability to print double-sided leads it to spew out an empty page if processing the request becomes too difficult.

Admittedly, the scanner was my main reason for this printer’s purchase, intending for it to eliminate more sheets of paper than it will ever be expected to print. Somehow, I have had no software problems there so far, so perhaps Canon is encouraging me to reduce my use of paper?

TIME TO CLEAN SOME HOUSE [553]

I have spent the last forty minutes filling two Ikea “Pappis” boxes with DVDs I had been keeping in a loft. I will always support owning your own copy of something, but with Blu-ray having now existed for twenty years, my having joined that bandwagon in 2011, looking at these discs has either made me think, “I’ve got this on Blu-ray now,” or, “I’ll come back to this eventually”. Then in the box it goes, to be taken away. VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray, most people will have had this discussion with themselves.

I had an enormous amount of trepidation at beginning to clear out this loft, which I had filled with (most of) a life’s worth of books, comics, CDs and DVDs, especially as it had reached “where do you even start?” levels. But I had been asked to start because the heatwaves that made the summer of 2026 so uncomfortable also highlighted how combustible people’s houses became in that heat, and so much paper in a room without climate control was now asking for trouble.

With limited space elsewhere at home for me to use as storage, I was confronted with the option that immediately confirmed I had too much stuff, leading me to reject it very quickly: paying for a self-storage facility. I could not see myself maintaining an off-site memory hole, being held in conditions even further out of my control.

I had needed to something about this at some point, which had always been “later”, but being asked causes you to reconsider your priorities. Once I had come to terms with having a collection that made me look like a budding hoarder, I could find a way of turning this experience into a positive one.

After tiring myself out on the first weekend by bringing out the items I clearly had no use of like exercise equipment, old PC peripherals and wires, and a typewriter, I established a routine of coming home from work, eating dinner, then clearing out two bags or boxes of items, mostly books. By the weekend, not only could you tell yourself you made a good start, but you also would have spent a week considering whether you ever going to get around to reading, watching or listening to that, and could that question have been asked at the time of acquiring the item?

I now look forward to having this moment of catharsis each evening, and I haven’t gone back to retrieve anything so far. These books, films, TV shows and so on do not become lost just because I don’t have access to them. Remembering that has made parting with them that much easier. 

What this ongoing process has also done is highlight where I used to be hastier in getting rid of things, like having none of my school exercise books because I only deemed the end of term grade as important. Likewise, I had re-bought, some time ago, two books I thought had gone years before: “The Saga of Erik the Viking” by Terry Jones, with painted illustrations by Michael Foreman, and a 1975 book titled “The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History” by Franz Rottensteiner, which had been a case of searching online for a book that could match my memory of what was in the pages. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

YOU TOLD ME, PEOPLE LIKE TO SUFFER [552]

Every glowing review received by the film “Coyote vs Acme” has acknowledged the act of having been able to see the film at all, and while I could add another thumbs-up to the pile it has received, the film’s commentary on corporations and the law make it a far more prescient release in 2026 than if Warner Bros had not shut it away as a tax write-off in 2023.

Having now read the original 1990 “New Yorker” humour piece, by Ian Frazier, on which “Coyote vs Acme” is based, presented as a dry opening statement by Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer at a trial, you can see how the film has expanded upon the apparent absurdity of applying cartoon logic to a real-life court case – the gag of an injury on “Mr Coyote’s” body turning him into an accordion being of a “distracting and embarrassing nature” which “has been a major impediment to Mr. Coyote’s pursuit of a normal social life” – while his exclusive use of Acme products is explained as their being the only domestic supplier of rocket sleds, spring-powered shoes and giant rubber bands, exploiting its advantage in the market: “One can only wonder what our trading partners in Western Europe and Japan would make of such a situation, where a giant company is allowed to victimize the consumer in the most reckless and wrongful manner over and over again.”

I loved how the film of “Coyote vs Acme” expanded upon this. With the courtroom relocated from Tempe, Arizona to Albuquerque, New Mexico, now depicted as the home to all Looney Tunes characters, we have a situation where “Human Law” and “Cartoon Law” is delineated separately: Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Road Runner is defined as a line of work “pursuant to Sylvester vs Gonzalez”, in what might be the most clever wordplay I will come across this year.

However, the elastic nature of cartoon characters has led to a callousness in the practice of the law: the lawyer Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, initially described Wile E. Coyote’s case as “a run of the mill $300 rocket skate case”, having already told Porky Pig, having had a window smash on him, that he could get $250 for that accident. Meanwhile the Acme Corporation, whose CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and with legal counsel Buddy Crane played by John Cena, has separate human and cartoon product ranges, but has engaged in practices where products designed to help cartoon characters, like erasers to remove visible stink lines, became more recklessly made, using the data from real-life cartoon injuries in order to provide testing for its human product range, under a scheme named Project Sisyphus, confirming why Acme Corporation is happy to pay out a few hundred dollars here or there each time.

I was surprised that this was put in the mouth of a cartoon character, or that Foghorn Leghorn is played so meanly in “Coyote vs Acme”, but for the head of the Acme Corporation to say that pain is the price of progress, and cartoons are not important enough to care if they get harmed, leading to a very affecting moment where Road Runner testifies about the pain he has witnessed being inflicted on Wile E. Coyote, before asking, through Morse Code, “when are you coming back?” I had wondered if this had any correlation with Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, which he coincidentally coined during the time of this film’s production in 2022, but while that is more about an online service degrading the experience of its service for its users to benefit its business customers, then doing the same to them to take all the value for itself, it does play into how that term has been more widely adopted to indicate a deliberate degradation in services, products and experiences.

That said, “Coyote vs Acme” is easily the best feature film that the Looney Tunes characters have appeared in, is the best animation/live-action hybrid film since 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, a tribute to how world-building and strong characterisation makes such a Looney world believable, qualms over the use of 3D animation to look 2D notwithstanding. The oddest part of the film, for me, is how the often-used caricature of Peter Lorre is an official Looney Tunes character now, and married to Granny?

WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE FREE [551]

In the week since writing about “Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma”, I have remedied two wrongs. 

Firstly, I am now aware that the prevalence of fried chicken and sweets was not a comment on the “empty calories” of slasher horror film franchises, but more of the human experience, of having something comforting on hand during unsettling experiences. With horror not been a genre I frequent all that much, I guess I haven’t seen enough to make the connection as intended.

Secondly, I have now seen “It Happened at the World’s Fair” - a Blu-ray of the first in Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen” trilogy was on order but hadn’t yet arrived. Given that Schoenbrun was willing to make “Camp Miasma” on a smaller scale if unable to secure its full $10 million budget, “World’s Fair” is an example of what can be achieved on a principal photography budget of only $100,000.

Casey is a teenager shooting a video, announcing she is taking the “World’s Fair Challenge”. In a single seven-minute shot, we are Casey’s screen and camera as she begins the video, starts over, says “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times, pricks her thumb until it bleeds, watches a video that sends strobes of light across her face, then says she will provide updates if there are any changes - her channel name, “CaseyWorldsFair”, suggests it has been set up as a (public) vlog or journal. These “changes” are shown in videos from other people - one person’s body no longer feels pain, and another feels they are turning into plastic. 

Usually, online “challenges” don’t last beyond the video the participant makes, but expecting the challenge to have consequences is an interesting extension. Before online content creation became professionalised, there was a sense of wanting to belong to something in posting videos online, of making your mark, or at least a dent, in the world. It was helpful to be reminded of that vulnerability.

Casey’s videos attract the attention of another poster, “JLB”, who sends out a video on their channel - not one directly - “you are I trouble, I need to talk to you”. When they do, via Skype (2003-25), he claims to be worried, but advises her to keep making videos to record any further developments. Keeping their camera off during the call, we, and only we, then see JLB is a middle-aged man, seemingly obsessed by the “World’s Fair Challenge” and watching other people’s videos about it, as the YouTube-like streaming site plays videos from other people inspired by it to make dramas and video games.

Casey’s own videos are slices of life, like most vlogs, interrupted by sudden actions – sleepwalking, screaming while dancing, and ripping apart a teddy bear. Some videos by others undergoing the “challenge” mainly talk through the experience, although the one time I got the feeling that this was “real” was when one person’s vlog about a skin condition cuts to an angle where we already could see there was no camera, as they pull out a roll of “Admit One” tickets from their arm.

At no point is the “World’s Fair Challenge” explained – we are only shown how it is done, and what “effects” are reported, not what happens there. One video showed arms reaching out from a screen and pulling someone through it – the “World’s Fair” is a stand-in for somewhere you don’t want to go. Ironically, the 1964-65 World’s Fair, held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York City – one shot of the Unisphere, which remains at the park, made me think they could be referring to this World’s Fair – was notoriously under-attended until its last few weeks, as people suddenly had a fear of missing out.

The real world is difficult, lonely and boring. Casey is never shown interacting with anyone, except with her father shouting from off-screen. JLB, seemingly a rich man with a large, expansive house, is left watching videos either on his phone or in his bedroom. The signs of life are in the videos made by Casey and others, through which we experience them for much of the running time, and our perception of them is therefore moderated by them. Indeed, Casey cuts off contact with JLB when she makes it clear he is taking it too seriously, telling him that “Casey” isn’t even her real name. 

A postscript of JLB recounting their meeting Casey in real life in New York City a year later, after she spent time in assisted care living, later starting in a theatre program. JLB suggests that, when Casey said she had re-entered the World’s Fair after cutting off contact with him, it was his prayers that had helped to pull her back from the brink. But, we had just seen a shot of Casey, one year ago, looking at a strobing screen and saying, “I swear, some day soon, I am just going to disappear, and you won’t have any idea what happened to me” – she could easily be speaking to the audience on her channel, as that channel simply stops posting new videos, or is deleted entirely, leaving a mystery for the “lost media community” years later.

I can see how “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” speaks to a dysphoria, an incongruence between a life lived online and the real world. Schoenbrun is on record as saying this was based on their experiences of the internet during the 2000s, being able to exist without a physical form. I didn’t have that same experience using the internet, perhaps because I already knew that everything I saw there was a representation of one thing or another, and I am only on the other side of the screen. It was what I took away most from this film, and I am glad to be reminded of it.

STILL, IT’S SO MUCH CLEARER [550]

When a film about a horror film confronts you with the position that intellectual explanation and discussion get in the way of expressing emotion, presenting it both as a cinematic theme and as a real-life truth, that film is going to stay with you for a while. For that reason, expect spoilers as I recover from watching Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”.

There is a scene past the half-way point of this film where Kris Williams, played by Hannah Einbinder, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a problematic slasher film franchise, “Camp Miasma”, becomes very emotional during a call with executives at describing her new vision of the story. This does not go over well with people that just wanted a revival of a dormant intellectual property with “woke” credentials and a queer voice to paper over the cracks, and you feel her idea has been dismissed as much for her as its merit.

By this point, reboots of slasher films have been shown to be an intellectual exercise, finding ways to repackage what has been as mindless violence or tired tropes: “Camp Miasma” had one in the 2000s, alongside “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, the latter having already been given the postmodern, metatextual treatment in 1993 with “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, starring the franchise’s original “final girl” Heather Langenkamp as her real-life self. I don’t remember the “Scream” and “Scary Movie” franchises being mentioned, but they hardly needed to be. The opening titles of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” place its fictional franchise as much a part of cultural landscape as the others, through VHS tapes, posters and merchandise to reviews and news articles depicting its decline and reboots, while positioning it as a mirror to “Friday the 13th”, down to using the same font for its title.

The call with executives followed Kris having travelled to meet Billy Presley — played by Gillian Anderson, who can do no wrong —who was the “final girl” in the original 1980 “Camp Miasma” film, never acted again, and has since bought the real-life camp used by the production as their home. Already compared to Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” before Kris meets her, Billy is a much happier and well-adjusted person than given reason to expect, especially as she contends with Kris’s intellectual positioning of both “Camp Miasma” and of her own life: Kris describes ­herself as both polyamorous and in a consensual throuple, to which Billy immediately assesses that Kris does not sound happy about that arrangement.

Breaking through layers of emotional repression is at the heart of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”. Billy is an artist, but her works are of concentric squares, mirroring the box on the head of the franchise’s slasher villain. As Billy and Kris watch the film together, Billy forcefully draws the same arrangement.  A sign already seen among the other artworks reads along the lines of, “if it becomes too much, you can switch it off”, and the film is switched off, albeit by a power cut. Billy says that the sex scene in the film in which she participated turned into a sexual assault, something she overcame by imagining the killer watching them, then killing them after climax. Kris later admits she imagines being pursued and killed as what enables them to do the same, put down to having seen the film at too young an age. 

The slasher villain of “Camp Miasma” is named “Little Death” – la petite mort. Once a child at the camp marked out by their changing of gender expression each day, rendered into a boogeyman through successive campfire stories, they were killed and thrown in the lake, coming back to take revenge – the “Sleepaway Camp” series is also referenced, as are Felissa Rose and Pamela Springsteen, both actresses that portrayed the transgender killer Angela Baker in that film, a character similarly singled out as “other” through the emotional reaction of the other characters, and perhaps the intellectual explanation of the filmmakers. The feeling I got was that “Little Death” was more complete as a person, but in a way too unconventional to be allowed to live.

Upon Billy first meeting Kris, Billy tells her that “there is a hole at the bottom of the lake, where the movies come from...”, which is then laughed off as a joke. By the end, this is true: “Little Death” really does live at the bottom of the lake, in a room decorated like a video rental shop, ready to come to the surface and take revenge, the climax of the “final girl” delivering a VHS tape of the latest instalment in the franchise to their shop-room. “Little Death” is the filmmaker, the arbiter, and we are the surreal fodder, to be killed off at a rate of one every 7-8 minutes, if “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”, is anything to go by – I did feel the gore shown was more than would have been allowed in 1980. After breaking through layers of repression with Billy, Kris delivers that latest instalment through the killing of what frustrates them, the victims being the executives, agents and lovers that have inexplicably arrived to find them. The title of the new film is the one we have been watching.

And yet, the following morning, Kris and Billy wake up – covered in blood, the literal spear of “Little Death” having been removed from them both, but it’s a new day, and they are full of life. They go to the local store to stock up on more sweets and candies, a recurring motif through the film that I took to be as much of an enjoyment of “empty calories” as the real-life slasher films being parodied here, but they talk about them with such joy and knowledge, just like an audience of slasher films would.

There is a question in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” I feel like I have watched one answer to that question. This film completes Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen trilogy”, begum with “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021), about a video game, and “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), based around a TV show. I have yet to see the first of these films, but we are drawn “through the looking glass” in this latest film just as with “I Saw the TV Glow”, the film grain and dust of film entering “real life”.

Schoenbrun and their team do as good a job of making “Camp Miasma” a “real” franchise as is done with the teen drama “The Pink Opaque” in “I Saw the TV Glow”, playing with our idea of nostalgia – we recognise its footprint, and we acknowledge that the constant reinvention of that nostalgia is not new either, shifting our memory and interpretation of it. Indeed, Schoenbrun was apparently asked about rebooting the “Leprechaun” horror franchise, although I perceived the problems with executives coming from A24, the production company that funded “I Saw the TV Glow”, turning down this film, leading to its eventual funding by the British producer (and streaming service) Mubi. When their novel “Public Access Afterworld” is published in October 2026, continuing the same themes of identity and self-discovery, I will most likely be reading that too.

I don’t know if this will make me want to watch a 1980s slasher film, as I rarely have before now, but they will allow me to understand why they persisted, and still endure.

I SEE A KEY ON THE GROUND [549]

“If you’re not using your phone, put it in your pocket,” is what I should have told myself, as I left the building, tipping through the exit, and launching my device in an overarm throw into the car park. The protective glass I put over the screen wasn’t going to help anything, as the face landed face down. 

 

A freak accident caused by not thinking in the moment smashed the screen of my phone, and my reliance on the device meant I could only see the cracks, the black mirror reflecting someone declaring themselves unlucky in the moment. My only fortune is that only the surface cracked, the screen itself remaining functional – I could still use it to catch the bus, and sign into programs at work – but green and purple lines would make themselves known, perhaps exacerbated by taking the phone out of my pocket and putting it back.

 

I would book a repair of my phone on the day of the incident, but that was set for Saturday – it was still Tuesday. On Wednesday, as the first few lines appeared, I realised I would need to cradle my device in my hands as I walked, the exact opposite of what I should be doing in order to prevent any further damage, because who would ever keep a spare smartphone at home for situations like this? This keeping myself aware of my phone’s new-found fragility also bled through to the preparations for its repair. 

 

In short, if you do not have a plan for backing up your data, find one, and find it now. I was faced with the advice to complete a backup, because the diagnostic processes to be run on my phone may result in data loss, and following multiple transfers of data from one phone to another over the years, a sidestep had never been needed before now. Perhaps that was one level of trust too far in the range of phones I prefer.

 

With my phone made by the manufacturer of my desktop computer, it would be very easy to back one up to the other – as well as their making stronger phones that have bouncier screens – but when they both have the same 256 GB storage capacity, that option is rendered impossible. I ultimately had to move some items to other devices, like thousands of unsorted photographs and screenshots that I will get to eventually, while paying for cloud storage to hold vital items like phone messages and contacts, and ultimately delete episodes of podcasts that were saved, deciding that they can be downloaded again if I need them later – they won’t become “lost media” if I don’t have direct access to them for a while.

 

Fortunately, the replacement of my screen, while costly, was performed without my hitch, and no data was lot. The manufacturer must warn of data loss because they are ultimately not responsible for your data, the same way that manuals for calculators contain disclaimers confirming they are not responsible for the answers generated by their machines. The user must know their answer has been calculated correctly, and the user must look after their data – I have just realised that may apply to the cloud storage as well.

 

In all, I spent under two hours without my phone, an experience that cannot now generate that level of anxiety again, through having been experienced once. Losing your phone is now like losing your keys, because that is the level of security and importance now expected by this Swiss army knife of devices, a level of convergence that risks becoming unhelpful. It may now be more useful to spread some use requirements across separate devices – your keys cannot be your camera, or your watch, or your calculator. Your clothes may need bigger pockets in future.

WHEREVER THERE'S A HANG UP [548]

Art by Steve Ditko from "The Amazing Spider-Man" #5 (1963)

I will freely admit ignorance to anything that isn’t important so, to that end, I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” was, despite having been a reader of comic books for over twenty years.

This apparent revelation came about due to the release of the new film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, the fourth film in the franchise with Tom Holland in the title role, the ninth made by Sony under Columbia Pictures and officially the thirty-eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I have read the Spider-Man stories I want to read, and the same would go for Marvel Comics as a whole. I am more a fan of DC Comics, but I haven’t really watched their films either for the same reason. Comics are already their own form of visual storytelling, and don’t have to become storyboards for another medium, even if you are trying to increase exposure to the characters and their stories.

Despite all this, it appears I hadn’t been reading the Spider-Man stories closely enough. I have mostly read the 1960s and 70s run of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, mostly written or co-plotted by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman among others, plus some of the 2000s run from J Michael Straczynski. However, they are Marvel comics, led by action, and Spider-Man is a character that demands to be drawn dynamically, as demonstrated by co-creator Steve Ditko to John Romita, both senior and junior, to Ross Andru and Sal Buscema’s run on the companion book “The Spectacular Spider-Man” in the 1980s. All the posing, the composition of frames, the economy of the storytelling as average page counts for the main story declined across the industry during the 1970s, but I should have been paying more attention to some wavy lines.

The story apparently goes that, when reviewing the pencilled artwork for the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” Stan Lee, in his other capacity as editor, had asked Steve Ditko how Spider-Man knew the story’s villain, the Chameleon, was in the same room as them. Ditko drew lines around the hero’s head, explaining that Spider-Man had “spider senses”, much like a bat can use echolocation. Similar lines were drawn around the character, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker, in earlier scenes to add credence to the device.

Now, what I had apparently done was think of these lines as acting like a visual approximation of being startled, like you had just been woken up to the presence of something. You don’t see speed lines or the energy of a “Kirby Krackle” in real life either, so I thought this was just the way the story depicted being startled. Upon realising my omission, the next thing is whether “Spidey Sense” – I am too self-effacing to call Spider-Man “Spidey” – is a “sixth sense” or some sort of precognition, and depending on its use in a particular story, the answer is yes, it is.

If it hadn’t been for two other people being in the same room as me when I said I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” really was, I would have been given no more reason to think about it. Yes, superheroes lead our current folk tales, or at least those from the United States, but no, not everyone knows these characters inside out. I am still more of a reader of Daredevil, the only Marvel Comics character whose book I pick up each month, and to be honest, his powers are easier to remember: the toxic incident this time around made him blind, but heightened his other senses, so anything about strength is down to training. As far as I know, that’s it.

LET'S RUN OR IT'S SURE TO CHASE US DOWN [547]

The Toyota Corolla is the biggest selling car in history, but I had to remind myself of this because, in its twelve generations over the last sixty years the car is, if not boring, then ubiquitous enough to blend into the urban background. I can reliably see three of them within five minutes of leaving the house one early Sunday morning, namely the one which I posted this article, one of which was a taxi. If a police car had passed me, that would likely be a Corolla too. “The car in front is a Toyota” was the company’s advertising tagline in the 1990s, but is more often true now.

I have noticed the wedge shape of the Corolla estate more recently as it has become more seen in the UK as a police car and taxi. The “Police Authority Specification Corolla”, only available as an estate, appeared in 2024 with a 1.8 or 2-litre hybrid petrol engine, and fully kitted out for police use by Toyota themselves, rather than by the police constabulary themselves or an intermediary, which I though had been the case to now.

Special rates are also offered for the Corolla estate, in a “Sports Icon” trim level, through Toyota’s fleet and business portal, which appears to be the source of the prevalent Corolla taxi. I have twice been in the back of these, at either end of trips to and from an airport, and they are perfectly serviceable as a taxi for hire, with enough rear room for four suitcases, although I do not agree that it can sit three people in the back. A “Corolla Commercial” is also sold on Toyota’s website, the back seats of the estate removed to install a flat floor, the remaining rear doors and windows not stopping them from describing it as a van.

The Toyota Corolla appears to be the only estate car still made in Britain, at Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, with engines made in another Toyota factory in North Wales. All Corolla 5-door hatchbacks and estates sold in Europe are made in the UK, and while a slightly smaller Japan-only version of the estate is made and sold there, it is based on the European design. From 2020 to 2025, the estate was branded as a Suzuki Swace, under a five-year licensing deal Suzuki made with Toyota that seems only to have changed the badging, as it was one of my airport taxis – I guess it filled a need for Suzuki at the time.

Estate cars – or station wagons, if you must – are not endangered as a category of car, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) proving the versatility of their form. But the shift towards SUVs by car companies has reduced the availability of “regular” cars that used to form fleets of company cars, taxis and police cars. The Ford Focus and Mondeo have ended production in Europe, the Volkswagen Golf is only sold as a hatchback, but the Vauxhall/Opel Astra continues to hold on, their prices are undercut by other manufacturers, including VW’s own Skoda and Seat, and by Toyota.

I could have easily written this article about Skoda, although their use as a service car is split: the Octavia, similar in size to the Corolla, is also often used as a taxi in the UK, the result of good word of mouth and competitive deals, but the next car up in size, the wonderfully named Skoda Superb, is more often used by the police on motorway patrols, most likely replacing the Volvo V90, another discontinued estate car. Both cars make good use of parent company Volkswagen’s parts bin and service network, which also readies their models for police use, but my guess is that, as the inventors of “just-in-time” manufacturing that saves on storage expenses through having parts ready only at the right moment, Toyota is passing on value in other ways.

DON’T ANSWER ME, DON’T BREAK THE SILENCE [546]

“Why would I ask a computer how to do anything?” My family could argue I do this all the time, especially if something piques my interest – I am not looking up information to prove what one of them said is correct, it is to find a citable source if I make use of it here later.

Asking for information, rather than just searching keywords, used to be the preserve of the search engine Ask Jeeves, later known as Ask.com, which accepted queries in natural language, the site picking the key words from the sentence. I did not know that Ask.com, since 2010 just an aggregator of results from other search engines, had only closed on 1st May 2026 – Jeeves had largely been dispatched with twenty years before.

If I want to look for something online, I prefer to be shown it. I certainly don’t need the computer to interpret it for me, for that will be my job. Research skills are far more than deciding whether certain words have been used lead to the correct answer, it is deciding whether a whole source is even relevant to begin with, something a computer cannot do without human input. 

I am veering back into feeing crotchety about A.I., despite previously pronouncing myself bored of talking about it. But the wagon will keep going until all resources have been devoured, from concerns about data centres affecting water supplies, to the manufacturing of Random Access Memory (RAM) chips being prioritised towards equipping these centres at the expense of consumer products, an issue that won’t see demand being balanced by supply until 2027-28.

What concerns me is that the increased cost of computers, smartphones, TV streaming boxes and so on will not come down when RAM chips become more readily available. More RAM will still be needed than before if the expectation of these devices is to run A.I. programs locally, instead of acting as a terminal to send and receive results from a data centre. The gallop towards A.I.-centric services will irrevocably change the expectations of the devices we buy – I say this as someone who has never turned on “Apple Intelligence” on my iPhone 17, leaving me with a fast phone with a decent amount of RAM.

I am slowly realising is that the interface most often presented by A.I. programs, namely just asking your device to do something, could become the expected way to interact with it. Forget your keyboard, mouse, or your fingers on the screen, for the microphone may soon be all you need.

I already ended a previous article by saying, “I don’t know what point I want to make, as this is my reacting to something that doesn’t sound right, but what helps others to work changes how I would work, so therefore, I’m not doing it.” However, I wrote this in 2020 about preferring to use a keyboard when writing on a tablet computer, because my “daily driver” at that point was an iPad. That is just how I work, as trying to type on a tablet screen will become uncomfortable – writing longhand with pen and ink is preferable.

But I could never dictate my work into a computer, or ask it to edit my work. I might say a sentence in my own head before typing it, but attempting to say it out loud before typing it is just anathema to me. This may not have been the case when, in previous decades, the device of choice would have been a human secretary: the level of mutual understanding in talking to someone is much easier than talking at something that, no matter what you are sold, will not think.

I know I shouldn’t be so worried. I am using my computer for “productivity” purposes, not something general. People would rather talk to something if it feels enough like talking to someone, and if this is presented as a preference over choosing apps from a screen, or filling in details yourself, then ease of use will win every time. There is every possibility that Microsoft Copilot, introduced as an element of Windows, could supplant Windows altogether. What I want a computer for, as someone who retains a subscription to use a word processor program – Microsoft Word, like most other people – is a “specialty” case, in comparison to general consumer computer use. I just resent having to pay more for wanting that.

WE SHOULD BE ON BY NOW [545]

The offending item...

Sometimes, rabbit holes lead to nowhere.

The major appeal of the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow”, for me, has been the level of detail provided by its experts about the featured items, both about their origin and place in history. Their monetary valuation is inconsequential – if the sentimental value is higher, it’s just a number.

But one item left me perplexed. In an episode recorded at Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, first broadcast in May 2025, expert Adam Schoon shows three brass items to host Fiona Bruce, inviting her and the gathered crowd to guess their use. The largest item is a clock dial, with one large hand, but instead of a standard twelve-hour face, this dial counts to sixteen. The engraved “P” on the face links to an either/or guess: was this dial used to record the number of partridges dispatched by a shooting party? Or is it an early 19^th century dial used to display the departure time of a stagecoach to prospective passengers? Why a 16-hour dial? Schoon said, “it didn’t go all night”, so therefore must only show the hours at which that specific stagecoach would leave.

That was all the information given, apart from confirming it was a stagecoach departure clock - apparently partridges could be killed in higher numbers. The clock dial is intricately engraved with a pattern between the dials, but they do not show increments of an hour – you can only indicate the “top” of each hour, from 1 to 16.

But this just refused to make sense to me. Another brass item shown in this guessing game was an Elizabethan (16^thcentury) laundry tally, used to count various items in and out of the laundry process, but this is also done using ten dials that count to 12, like a regular clock. Remember that counting to twelve was more prevalent until decimalisation in the UK – twelve pennies make a shilling, twelve ounces in one troy pound, twelve inches make one foot. Until the advent of computing, I can’t think of a previous need for a hexadecimal counting system, at least in my part of the world.

Describing the time using a twenty-hour hour clock, from 00:00 to 23:59, also only gained more widespread use in the 20^th century, even if clocks with 24-hour faces had existed for centuries before. Could it be that, wherever this clock came from, the only possible departure times were between 01:00 and 16:00? Without being told where it was displayed, I can never know.

Searching any of this information online proved to be a dead end. Searching “16-hour stagecoach clock” only confirmed that the Royal Mail stagecoach from Bristol to London eventually reduced its time to just sixteen hours before steam trains took over from then, accelerating the journey time even further. “Stagecoach clocks” only reveal pictures of similar brass clocks that show standard twelve-hour faces, or ornamental clocks being drawn by ornamental horses, while “carriage clock” creates a minefield: am I looking for a departure display clock, or a hand-held watch that is buffered by metal or wood to prevent its mechanism from being knocked during transit in a stagecoach, or did I want one of those little ornamental carriage clocks that your grandmother had on her mantlepiece?

Even worse as a search term is “stagecoach”: since the deregulation and privatisation of bus services in the UK in the 1980s, the Stagecoach Group has become one of the largest bus operators, and any search for information about stagecoaches from any period in history, or even the 1939 western film “Stagecoach”, will have to try to exclude services that are available right now.

What I am left with here is either a mystery, or nothing at all. It may be just a quirk that this clock face, made to display very particular times in a very particular location, made its way onto television, and left me feeling a little too intrigued... So the coach wouldn’t depart after 4pm, but it could leave at 1am...?

ARE WE NOT MEN? WELL, ARE WE? [544]

The full story of my vertiginous journey into the music of Devo will be told in full detail one day, but until then, an infamously mythologised moment in the group’s history was finally unleashed in full on Friday 19th June 2026, and I was of course ready – I had it on pre-order since the end of March.

“Nitrous Nightmare” is a double-vinyl album (or double-CD, in my case) of one of Devo’s first few live performances, on 31st October 1975 at a private Halloween party in support of the jazz and avant-garde artist Sun Ra, recorded by them to a four-track reel-to-reel tape. Accounts of this event are of Devo’s setlist running so long, having refused to stop playing, that the audience became openly hostile, threatening the group, with their instruments finally being unplugged for them. Another account was Devo overran so much that Sun Ra would never get to perform, and that a rendition of their signature song “Jocko Homo” approached half an hour in length.

Some of this performance appeared in 1990 on “The Mongoloid Years”, a compilation of early live recordings, but “Nitrous Nightmare” is, as far as I know, the entire extant recording of the set, all one hour and twenty-two minutes of it. The British label Futurismo have given this release the full treatment of photographs, artwork and Halloween imagery, collaged together in a sickly green and yellow, with secondary oranges and pinks.

The title “Nitrous Nightmare” was chosen for this release by Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, as nitrous oxide turned out to be a major ingredient of the evening for the audience, along with alcohol and other drugs, and store-bought Halloween costumes. For their part, dressed in grey overalls, blue hard hats and face masks, Devo appeared as normal. Mark Mothersbaugh as “Booji Boy” on keyboards is the enduring character from a line-up where all then-four members adopted personas: Gerald Casale as “Chinaman” on bass, Bob Mothersbaugh as “Clown” on guitar, and Jim Mothersbaugh as “Jungle Jim” on self-made electronic drums. 

With fifty years of mythologising now over, it is time to listen. The recording wobbles into life with the one “cover” Devo would perform that evening, as Bob Mothersbaugh sings Mark’s reworking of “Secret Agent Man”, followed by two more songs before Casale calls for a DJ to come to the stage, seemingly as a way to seal approval for the group to continue playing: “I know everyone’s looking at their programme right now... there’s a change in the programme... after that introduction, Murray reminded us that we’d better do it now”. That song, “Buttered Beauties”, is one of the initial “Hardcore” Devo songs that would not make it to later albums, although “Secret Agent Man”, “Smart Patrol” and “Auto Modown” soon will.

The Devo sound here is bluesier, rockier and noticeably slower, led by Casale’s bass and Bob Mothersbaugh’s guitar, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s punctuating keyboard sounds feel like a starting point with no tradition before it, although I still think the effect played in “Jocko Homo” sounds like a tiger. Jim Mothersbaugh’s electronic drums are interesting: while they do not match the force and drive that Alan Myers would later produce for Devo with a regular drum kit, you remind yourself that you normally hear electronic beats like these when they are regimentally programmed, not played manually like they are here. It is a tribute to Jim Mothersbaugh that his skill as a drummer is not overshadowed by his having built the kit.

The audience is not heard all that much on the recording up to now, with distant clapping, whistles and the odd comment. It sounds like the evening is running well enough until Casale, commenting on whether they have cleared the auditorium, says that “you just can’t take it... OK, here’s a man song, no Booji Boys”. To that end, the first public performance of “Jocko Homo” turns into eleven minutes of goading the audience. I remember the first time I heard the album version, thinking “oh, come on” upon hearing “we must repeat” after enduring “are we not men / we are Devo” sixteen times in a row. This time, I know what is going on: keep asking “are we not men?” until you pierce the surface of those who think they can say “no”. The moment one of the audience yells, “you’re not men, you’re fucking assholes”, the song then becomes, “is he not a man?” and “they are not men”. The sheer length of this version of “Jocko Homo”, which doesn’t yet include the middle section of “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it”, will begin to grate, until you laugh at how irritated you became. This is now my favourite version of the song, fully appreciating why “we must repeat”.

From then, you can hear the audience deteriorating, scandalised at their tastes being confronted, the sounds of beer cans hitting the stage. Devo’s answer? “We came here to observe your hatred.” After three more songs, proving they could rock as well as anyone – notably, the synth melody intro to “Chango” would be reused in 1988 for the song “Plain Truth”, on the “Total Devo” album – the question “want anymore?” ends the recording – nothing sudden action, and no popping sounds of plugs being pulled. Devo apparently decamped to a fish restaurant across the road for dinner, returning in their regular clothes to watch Sun Ra, no-one realising who they were.

For what I have heard about how badly this performance apparently went, “Nitrous Nightmare” was a rather good listen. If you have listened to Devo’s older pre-1978 material, recorded mostly in the seclusion of a basement, hearing them being performed in such a confrontational manner, with the audience reacting entirely as expected, is fascinating. You imagine the disparaging voices belonged to people who left before the end, satisfied they had maintained order, provided they were still able to think clearly. Other groups have been called worse, and had larger things thrown at them, but Devo made people look, then look again.

Gerald Casale’s liner notes for this release are much more extensive than those he gave to re-releases of the albums “Total Devo” and “Smooth Noodle Maps”, and read like it could be turned into a theatre or film script at a moment’s notice. I guess you had to be there, but if you did, the adrenaline worked better than the laughing gas could.

To clear up some inaccuracies I found in the notes, it was the album-oriented rock radio station WMMS-FM that held the private party at WHK Auditorium (now known as the Agora Theater & Ballroom) in Cleveland, Ohio, from which the radio station operated alongside the medium-wave WHK, then operating a hybrid country-talk format. Seemingly lining up with the “de-evolution” mindset, WMMS introduced “The Buzzard” as its mascot the previous year, a “scavenger” whose existence commented on the economic decline of its own city. 

The DJ who comes to the stage after the opening songs, yelling “it’s Friday” and “you gotta go low with Devo!” is not “Murray the K” Kaufman, as implied in the liner notes. It is really the WMMS-FM DJ Murray Saul, who yelled “it’s Friday” in the same guttural way on his radio show – I guess “Murray the K” was a much less annoying Murray to remember. Murray Saul does not have a Wikipedia page, but “Murray the K”, who during the 1960s insited upon calling himself “the fifth Beatle”, does.

This Devo line-up was preserved in their later short film “The Truth About De-Evolution”, before Alan Myers joined as drummer, and Gerald Casale’s brother Bob joined on rhythm guitar, the “Bob 2” to the lead guitar of “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh. Jim Mothersbaugh left Devo to continue in electronic engineering, joining the Roland Corporation during the 1980s to help develop the MIDI technology standard that allowed musical instruments to speak to each other, something Devo had been able to benefit from for some time.

I only discovered Bad Company was a British band while writing this article, and I still cannot name any of their songs. Their first album was recorded in a former workhouse in Hampshire. 

IT’S NICE TO BE ALIVE [543]

Having spent as long as I had last time talking about the 2003 anime version of the “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World” series of novels, the following is proof that I was apparently not done. To be more specific, you would have thought, for as much of a fan of Devo as I have proved, I would have mentioned their song “Beautiful World”.

One of Devo's very best pieces, remaining a persistently perfect closer to their concerts, “Beautiful World” is ironic, sardonic and angry, and I love it more now than ever. Having last time considered my sense of place, I realised how quick some people are to define that place without me, and what a “wonderful place” they make it. I never quite understood when Gerald Casale sang of “the way they show they care”, and especially “the way they comb their hair”, but I feel it now. Of course, the payoff of this being a beautiful world “for you” is that “it’s not for me” but, to tie this back to “Kino’s Journey”, witnessing the world at its worst makes encountering the best of it feel that much sweeter.

One sentence I should have included last time when discussing the “Land of Prophecies” was when one character tells Kino why a proclamation is happening: “The book is prophecy because the priest says the book says that it is.” I appreciate how clunky that line sounds, each clause serving to halve the credibility of the prophecy, if that ever existed for a neutral bystander.

Kino’s use of male pronouns in the light novels was something I carried over in discussing the anime, even though the novels established this information after the anime was completed. However, a follow-up half-hour film was produced in 2005, “Life Goes On”, that depicts how a runaway girl, from a country that was about to dispose of her, becomes a traveller. Only since completing my initial research did I find a copy of this film that included English subtitles, and I am happy I did: this is a story of someone learning how to become a different person, one for a different world, because they must.

But a crucial scene happens as Kino prepares to go to sleep, getting used to a name that was not their own. “Kino. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel like it’s my name. I am Kino... I guess ‘I’ fits Kino better after all.” It doesn’t come up again in the film, but this moment resonated with the series I watched – we are seeing someone who is only themselves, and is defined only by themselves, amongst groups of people in countries with identities ascribed to them, ones that must be witnessed.

This makes the final episode of the 2003 anime, with Kino considering staying a further night in one country that resonates with him, more heartbreaking. He is told he cannot break the agreed duration of his visa, but staying would have meant sharing the same fate, buried under a volcanic eruption the country accepted was coming. Kino discovers the country has purposefully left him with their memory to carry forward, carrying what was a beautiful world with them. “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is”, and so is the memory of what had been, if not what could be.

SO, THE BEAUTIFUL WORLD [542]

“Traveller, where are you… where are you headed too?”

I can now say with authority that if you have chosen to create something an average of once a week, every week, for ten years, without anyone asking you to start, that is now something you are, not just something you do. There may be goals and destinations along the way, but no endgames... only the journey.

Saturday 30th May 2026 marks ten years since the first article on this website was published, and if you have read any of these at any point, you have my thanks, because whatever track I am on, I feel it is the right one.

I wrote about what began this journey when I reached the five-year mark and, at that point, it felt like I reached a checkpoint: I talked about doing more videos instead, meaning the rate at which written pieces appear would decline. That ultimately didn’t happen because making videos became too much of a chore at the time and too prone to compromise, so I gave myself an increasingly long break from it. The only reason I never corrected myself since is because I am finding ways of making the video-making process more fun for me, and because I never stopped having ideas for videos. The point is to keep putting things out there, in any form.

 

Having made enough allusions to travel, I want to talk about a story.

 

In a land of countries separated by landscapes and forests, and known by characteristics very specific to them, a teenage traveller and their talking motorcycle venture to learn what is important about each country, and what makes its people unique. Limiting each stay to three days and two nights, exploration taking priority over thoughts of settlement, the traveller experiences the full range of human experience, from generosity and compassion to oppression and prejudice, even visiting countries to witness these extremes. Acknowledging the worst of the world to appreciate its best more wholeheartedly becomes this story’s theme: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”

 

Rarely am I captivated by a story’s premise as much as by “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World”, the 2003 anime adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series that began in 2000, of which there will be spoilers here. Most of the stories from the novels remain not adapted or translated from the original Japanese, which is a shame, although fan translations of most stories exist online. For me, “Kino’s Journey” is almost the inverse of “The Prisoner”, where Number Six is trapped in one extreme place, one deliberately beyond comprehension. When events and the news threaten to overwhelm you, knocking your sense of place, it turns out I turn to stories of strong-minded, stoic individuals in remarkably specific settings.

 

The land in the story, while fantastic enough to allow for tracts of explored but unclaimed land to exist between countries, appears set during the 20th century, according to the level of technology displayed in the show. The countries portrayed in “Kino’s Journey” feel like our own – indeed, the walled states look very European – but each one invites scrutiny. In one land, all adults conduct their work, whatever it is, with good cheer, because children are mandatorily lobotomised at age twelve to become “perfect” adults. In another, everyone lives far away from each other to avoid hearing or feeling what each other is thinking, an empathetic scientific advancement driving everyone apart because they know too much, the pain of others driving them over the edge. Two countries resolved a decades-long war by turning it into a yearly game where they instead bomb a third, indigenous group. Another country practised the rule of the majority until the last of them was sentenced to death. A further country’s ancestors were travellers, who chose to settle for eternity in one place.

 

My favourite episode of the series involved visits to a few countries. In the “Land of Prophecies”, its people are getting ready for the apocalypse to happen the next day, because a priest has proclaimed that a book, which originated from a faraway land, but a “miracle” had sent it to them, has predicted the end of their world. When the sun rises the next day, another priest reinterprets the book to proclaim the apocalypse won’t happen for another thirty years. Passing through another land that ejected its former king and its traditions, unsuccessfully using travellers to test new traditions, like wearing cat ears, Kino and Hermes come across the “Land of Sadness”, where a lament has been recited on a bridge for decades, one that plunged the country into melancholy and withdrawal. It so happens that someone wrote the lament into a book... The episode ends with an army approaching the “Land of Sadness”, a prophecy telling them they must invade it.

 

What I was most struck by was how you are being invited to make up your mind about the events shown alongside the lead characters – we are passing through as much as they are. Pertinent lines of dialogue will be repeated as text on screen, but the on-screen patterns and sound design suggest a fleeting moment to reflect before cutting back to the scene – observations and realisations are highlighted by a soft bell sound. 

 

Acting as a guide without feeling didactic, the effect created by these decisions, alongside a more muted colour palette than early 2000s digitally-painted anime usually suggests, creates a calming and contemplative feeling in me as I watched. This is also aided by the constant presence of lines across the screen, in imitation of a cathode ray tube television showing us a story from another place, and another time, with its own alphabet.

 

Kino, the traveller, is stoic, straightforward and dispassionate in how he approaches each place he visits, helping if required, but not there to interfere. A quirk of Kino’s character design, barely shared by anyone else in the series, is a slight triangular cut from each pupil to make them look slightly “pie-eyed”, to use the term previously applied to Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, but giving the impression of someone mentally putting themselves at a distance from what they are seeing. Hermes, the novels and the series using the German term “motorrad” for a motorcycle, is more a sounding board for Kino than comic relief, and is sympatico with him – one provides speed, the other balance. (Hermes is modelled on a Brough Superior motorcycle, multiple models of which were owned by the explorer T.E. Lawrence.) However, we do not discover this fully in the first episode, your impression of Kino building with time. His level of resourcefulness as a traveller, plus prodigious use of guns and knives – the sound of a “persuader” pistol being drawn is heard many times, Kino continuing to practise their reactive speed – suggest that, if not for Hermes, and indeed the “Master” they supposedly learned under, they would be completely alone.

 

This is because Kino comes from the land where he was expected to have “the operation” at age twelve. The arrival of a traveller at his parents’ hotel led to questioning if they could become an adult simply by being themselves, causing his parents to label him “defective”, and triggering a “right of disposal” – the traveller gets in the way of the father’s knife, killing them, leading to an escape from the country on the motorcycle built during the story, and taking on the name of the traveller who died - “Kino”. Kino was originally a girl whose unsaid name was that of a beautiful flower, which became an insult when one letter was changed. Kino later decided that male pronouns suited them better, during his training with the Master described in the first seventh volume of the light novels, the first published after the TV series aired – perhaps this was a clarification by the author, or one more journey taken.

 

“Kino’s Journey” was a story that made me question my sense of place. I have lived in the same town all my life, but I don’t believe I belong to it – it is by the sea, which always helps, but this may have left something I need to explore, alongside physically leaving its boundaries, if only to work and shop. I am not defined by where I live, but does that mean I could live anywhere? Would I still be the same person if I arrived in another place? Why would it take so long for me to think about that? I have no answers right now, but the series, the stories, and its premise have, intentionally, left me with many questions.

 

Travel has been important to this website over the last ten years: I have written about being caught in the orange sky that descended on New York City in 2023, I have witnessed the work of Hieronymus Bosch in Belgium, and I essentially made a pilgrimage to Liverpool to see the work of Keith Haring. This will continue, and I should continue to make room for opportunities.

 

This may sound silly, but I once had a short trip in 2021, for three days and two nights, to a place that was known to run things its own way, but turned out to be a place where this was tried once, and seemingly never again, due to cost or indifference – it was Milton Keynes. 

 

Perhaps it explains why I have found myself thinking about Milton Keynes since: the grid system, separating pedestrians and cyclists from the roads becoming a place of wheeled robots and abandoned scooters for hire; buildings and trees kept to a maximum height, a rule since abandoned by new developments; a shopping centre so iconic in its design, it has now been preserved as a listed building, unable to develop further. 

 

Indeed, my trip to Milton Keynes was to look at an exhibition of postmodern Memphis furniture. I have joked that I would like a square of Milton Keynes to call my own, but just because it is a place I have visited, doesn’t mean there are other places where I could settle better – Oxford comes close, but again, it is not near the sea.

 

With the twenty-third and latest volume of “Kino’s Journey” published in 2020, I found no information online to confirm if this was the last. Going so far as ordering a copy of it, resolving to use my phone to translate the conclusion for my benefit, volume twenty-four was announced before it arrived, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journey goes on.

 

Once again, thank you for the last ten years – let’s keep going.