Welcome to the fiftieth episode of The Cut! Begun as an exercise in sanity-preservation in the height of lockdown, we’re pleased to have kept the momentum going, sending our patent-pending brew of links and commentary without pause to our literally dozens of readers for all this time. Of course this means there’s an even bigger milestone looming up on the horizon in a couple of weeks…
This week, we ask important tongue-related questions, introduce you to The Witch of King’s Cross and sing a song for the man who took the loneliest flight of all.
Time check! Now! Location check! Here! This is The Cut!
There are a few pots of seedlings on a warm, sunny windowsill at Cut Command. Tomatoes and a couple of kinds of chilies. Normally, the gardeneers in the office would simply buy plants to pot out in our little patch of ground out past the back door. This year they decided to try and grow from seed. The progress has been slow, a little worrying when we come in to find the plants have gone floppy for no good reason. But it’s such a nice feeling to see that dot of green on the surface of a pot appear, reach out and stretch into a new life, a new kind of potential.
That’s a metaphor for something, probably.
This week, how you can’t walk away from a memory on the internet (even when it didn’t happen), the trouble with vinyl and a real blast from the past.
Is it sensible to ignore a huge breaking news event, given that any response we give is liable to raise hackles?
Yes, Readership, we believe it is.
In this week’s ep, Britfunk and Prog bump up against a very large synthesiser. We look at the quiet still point of a noir classic and wonder just what the heck is up with Trump and Musk. And is Trump and Musk a fragrance brand we should look to market?
This time is adjacent to the place in which you will find The Cut.
It’s all feeling a bit liminal. Although the news improves around vaccination levels and dropping R rates, life still has the frozen quality of a holding pattern. The streets remain quiet, the shops mostly closed. The pubs… better not to think about that lest we dissolve into a puddle of regretful tears. But hey, as the great seer Steve Miller put it— ‘time keeps on tickin’, tickin’, tickin’, into the future’. Bring on the summer.
Today we check out the fun you can have with explosives, consider how a Mars colony might deal with a pandemic and consider the vexed question of American cheese.
Hey, you there! Now is the time, yeah? This is the place, right? What else could this be but The Cut‽
Hotchie motchie! Another wild ride of a week, eh? We feel as if we’ve been shoved headfirst into the bell of a euphonium which is being enthusiastically but tunelessly played by an elephant with really bad halitosis. If you too are getting the hardcore blasts of bad wind blues, then retreat to your safe, quiet space—here at The Cut we will firmly coddle your mollies.
This week we’ve got dragons, William Burroughs putting a coffee bar into a time warp and the story of how the Emperor got his Groove.
Now be the time. Here be the place. This be The Cut.
We made it! Welcome to 2021, the year of hope after whatever the hell that shitshow we’ve just endured was. All is reset, we can begin again as if nothing had happened, secure in the knowledge that the world is now a better, brighter place…
Yeah, alright, maybe not. Nevertheless, here we are at the arbitrary start of a new unit of time measurement. Let’s at least start with a positive outlook, yeah?
We’ll have reports from our film, literature, food and music desks who all have a nod for their favourite thing of the year, as well as some more of the random nonsense you’ve come to tolerate over the last months. Shall we begin?
Now be the time. Here be the place. This are The Cut.
Hail Santa! Ho, furthermore ho, and in conclusion, ho. How fares the day, our delightful Readership? We hope it finds you in an eggnogilicious mood. Ongoing changes to the lockdown rules mean that most of the staff at The Cut have been forced to stay in the office for the season, roasting chestnuts and turkey in an improvised and potentially deadly adapted microwave setup. Oh well, those of us that survive will all be laughing about it this time next year.
Let’s get the festivities started, shall we? Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin’s in a rut. Now is the time, here is the place, welcome to The Cut!
Christmas in Tier 3, whoop de bleedin doo. Like we needed any more excuses to roll up the drawbridge and set the minefields and robot gun emplacements and fill the moat with shark-infested acid and dig into the booze and grub stockpile and drink and eat ourselves into a hibernative food coma all the while singing SKRU U 2020, ENUF IS ENUF.
Ahem. A shorter film-heavy Cut this week as we consider our options for the ‘festive’ season. Christmas Day is next Friday, and we do intend to have a thing for you. What shape and smell it will have is yet to be confirmed. But we’ll be double-dog-damned if we’re gonna leave you hanging just when you need us the most.
Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it. Strike a pose there’s nothing to now is the time. Here is the place. This is The Cut.
So the Cut Xmas deccoes are down from the loft and in a pile in a corner of the office, waiting for one of us to finally crack, declare ‘sod it,’ invoke the spirit of Noddy Holder and start spreading festive cheer around the joint like a dirty protest at all things Covid. It’s been a hard year and the early start to Christmas is a definite sign we’re ready for it all to be over. This week’s issue doesn’t have a whiff of holly but trust us, it’s coming, and soon. Instead, enjoy film longreads on Orson Welles and Jerry Lewis, considerations on time travel and AI and how the Wotsit came to be.
Now is the time. Here is the place. This is The Cut.
As a way to do something with our incessant lockdown-centric web browsing, it’s good to see The Cut is still providing positive and continuing creative energy. Issue 10! A whole two and a half months! We could have written a book by now! Oh well. As displacement activity goes, there are worse ways to spend our time. How this all fares when we’re dragged back to the day job is anyone’s guess. Still, here we are.
Now is the time. Here is the place. This is The Cut.
We begin with another gem from the extensive Brain Pickings archive. As Maria Popova points out, one way for women in the Victorian age to sneak sideways into the realms of science was through art. Beatrix Potter’s observational skills and analytical eye over the details of the Northumbrian landscape led to admiration from many of her peers, regardless of the whole Jemima Puddleduck side-gig. Poet Emily Dickinson also had a keen eye and an urge to catalouge the natural world. Her herbarium is a beautiful and instructional object which, as Maria points out, reflects her sensual art as well. Let’s check it out…
Fanfic has, to put it mildly, a poor reputation in the literary realm. At best, it’s porn or plagiarism. At worst, illiterate trash.
Well, that’s the story. The truth is wildly different. Fanfic writers are passionate about the characters and worlds they write about, and the communities based around them are massively supportive of the best of the work. When writers take established continuity and go wild with it, the end result can be much more fun than the canon. There is some amazing fanfic out there. Lest we forget, writers like Neil Gaiman, S. E. Hinton and the godsdamn Brontë Sisters have all dabbled in the field (yes, ok, and E.L. James). This Input piece on how fanficcers have rewritten and erased a particularly heinous trope in TV writing is an inspiration all by itself.
Get your notebooks out. We howled over this AskReddit thread on the best literary and TV insults. All your faves will be in here, but we guarantee you’ll find some new shots of absolute gold. You’ll be memeing for days off the back of this one.
Matthew Holness is one of our great dark iconoclasts. From comedy writer and performer to creator of the truly brilliant Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (launchpad, lest we forget, not just of Holness but Richard Ayoade, Alice Lowe and Mmmmmmatt Berry) to author and director of work that has flirted, then snogged, then gone balls deep into horror. Haunted Generation has a long conversation with Holness, touching on subjects as diverse as Peter Cushing, Kent noir and just how long is appropriate to find a major location before filming.
(Disclosure: our Rob has a credit on Matt’s most recent feature, Possum, and is proud to claim he was the first person to ever see That Bloody Spider Thing on film).
As it seems mask wearing is a part of all our futures, we may as well make the most of it. Japanese tech is, as ever, at the forefront of how we relate to people outside our immediate bubbles in the future. Introducing a Bluetooth-connected mask that can display speech-to-text and probably emojis in version 2 of the software release. The possibilities are limitless—well, ok, maybe not but we think there’s a lot of fun to be had here, particularly in communicating one’s disdain at the mal-informed offcuts amongst us that believe the act of wearing a mask is giving them 5G and sending the government DNA samples.
We love The Expanse. Seriously. Best SF on the telly box at the moment. Twisty plots, brilliant SFX and characters to stan forever. Although we remain Team Drummer, we completely understand the love for Amos, the Roci’s bulldog. His deadpan delivery and ever-present simmering edge of violence makes him magnetic on screen. If we were writing fanfic, it would be about this guy (or maybe Amos and Drummer hooking up. Damn, that would be hot). The Ringer tells us more…
A couple of announcements from our friends and X&HTeam-mates. First up, our close pal Dom Wade has taken part in an interview on Cambridge Radio’s Behind The Bike Shed show to promote his doco Steel Is Real (But Carbon Is Quicker). A great intro to the film and the British cycling scene he documents so well.
Our Rob intermittently podcasts as one half of the Of Dice And Robs show on KaijuFM. It’s a show of chance, coincidence and conversation in which he and co-host Rob Maythorne use dice to choose the topics for discussion. It’s loose-limbed, easy-going and a bit nerdy, but the Robs bounce ideas off each other with an amiable charm. Worth a go? We think so.
This week’s Exit Music… well, there’s new Bob Mould in the world. And he’s pissed off. Which, when it comes to Bob Mould, is good news. The angrier he is, the better the music. Therefore, Forecast Of Rain (along with American Crisis, the first track from the forthcoming album (Blue Hearts, out on September 25th) which led one observer to note ‘I haven’t heard him scream this much since Zen Arcade’) is the glorious racket of a thunderhead looming. Fast and heavy, and ready to flood us all. It’s great to have him back and raging.
And that’s us. Ten weeks and counting. If you’ve been with us since the start, thank you. If you’ve joined us on the road, welcome. We plan to go coast to coast on this, then deploy the amphibious pack and hit the ocean like Roger Moore and his Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me.
The road goes on forever. Strap in. See you in seven.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 