Metropolitan Mixtape: 2024 September

The sweet smell of silage

In

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Tobias Sturt

: Yet again, something I’ve been repeatedly told is brilliant turns out to be brilliant. I know, I know. The plot is ludicrous, lurid and melodramatic, and would sound absolutely dreadful if read aloud from a Wikipedia summary; Rowan, who was reading in the next room and only hearing scraps of the dialogue, thought it sounded awful. But in Alexander Mackendrick’s hands this is a true film, a visual experience in which the dialogue is simply one part of the narrative.

What’s more, that is what the film is about: the squalid gossip in which the dreadful columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) trades, and the people whose lives are spun and unravelled to produce it. The visuals, in merciless black and white, spare no one: Tony Curtis’s sweaty, desperate PR man Sidney Falco and Lancaster’s impassive and terrifying Hunsecker (his eyes permanently blank within his reflecting horn rim specs) are both pinned to the celluloid like captured insects. Alexander Mackendrick does to ‘50s New York what he did to post-war London in The Ladykillers (1955), diving beneath the surface charm and glamour to discover the stark, seedy reality.

Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon, 2021–2024)

Rowan Davies

: You will already know whether or not you are minded to be indulgent of the Jeremy Clarkson Entertainment Complex, and I won’t try to change your mind about that. I know the prosecution has a strong case, but there’s something about Clarkson that’s compelling; he probably has the biggest personal audience in Britain, and his movements tell us a lot about what’s going on in our collective unconscious. And what our collective unconscious seems to want right now — see also The Detectorists — is gentle rural bliss with a modern filter (and a farm shop).

Tobias’s nostrils flare dangerously at the very mention of Clarkson’s name, so when the dog and I were left alone for a couple of nights we gulped down the first two series of this constructed reality show, in which Clarkson and a carefully selected team of telegenic ‘personalities’ try ‘their’ hand at ‘running’ a farm. There are too many laborious semi-scripted scenarios in which Clarkson gives himself minor injuries with heavy machinery, but you don’t get very far into the series before realising that you know absolutely nothing about how farms work. This business of growing and rearing the food we eat turns out to be more difficult, dangerous and unprofitable than you ever thought possible.

During the post-Brexit trade negotiations lots of us suddenly developed strong opinions about chlorinated chicken without really knowing how and why British farming differs from the giant agricultural corporations across the Atlantic. Clarkson’s Farm explains a lot, so it’s a shame that most of my fellow anti-Brexiteers won’t watch it because of their understandable dislike of the main character. Thirty years ago, this series – with its contemplative shots of the Oxfordshire countryside, fearless explanations of cow impregnation and lambing processes, and practical glimpses of abattoirs and cattle markets and barns full of chemical fertilisers – would have been on the BBC, and we’d all have been a bit better informed as a result. (Also, the BBC probably wouldn’t have let Clarkson give quite such a one-sided account of his vicious squabble with his local council.)

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Tales From The Loop (2020)

Tobias Sturt

: I’ve rather slept on this show, which I shouldn’t have because I’m a big fan of the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. Stålenhag’s work sits in a little uncanny valley where the landscape and stylings of suburban ‘80s Sweden exists alongside science fictional megastructures, robots and dinosaurs. He has the precise, detailed design approach of a Syd Mead or a Peter Elson, but with a period palette and an admirable taste for vintage Swedish design. His work, though, has somewhat obscure and elliptical settings and I couldn’t quite figure out how someone would make a TV show out of it.

But it turns out they did a rather good job. They’ve kept the look and feel, setting it all in a small town seemingly stuck in the ‘80s but with extraordinary technology, giving it a retro technology feel that it shares with shows like Severance and Marvel’s Loki (which I’ve written about before). But they’ve also rather cleverly kept the approach. The episodes are loosely bound together but it also works as an anthology show, each story being a little, self-contained sci-fi story. And they’ve also kept the low key approach to plotting, favouring personal, twisty, thoughtful stories over big sci-fi nonsense. A time loop causes a woman to meet her child-self and re-evaluate how her life has turned out; two friends accidentally swap bodies, changing their self-perception.

I’ve only just started watching it, so it may yet go off the rails, but it’s very good looking, it features Jonathan Pryce as a regular cameo and the episode about the body swap features the two kids learning a cover version of ‘A Figure Walks’ by The Fall (Dragnet, 1979), so I’m in.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast (2017–2024, BBC)

Rowan Davies

: The UK is in the middle of a run of incidents that expose the mendacity, greed, incompetence, cowardice and murderous indifference of private organisations and public bodies: the Post Office/Horizon scandal, the contaminated blood inquiry, a seemingly endless list of scandals in NHS hospitals and in the Metropolitan Police. But even in this context, the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 stands out. The death toll (72 people) was high, and the nature of their deaths was nightmarish. Many of those who died had been told by the Fire Brigade to stay in their flats rather than try to escape. Almost all of them were social housing tenants; most were first or second generation immigrants; and many were very old, very young, or had disabilities. Grenfell’s residents had specifically warned that they believed their building to be unsafe in the event of a fire. The disaster was intensely visual, broadcast in real time, and was instantly comprehensible to everyone as a catastrophic failure. And, of course, it all happened in the middle of the richest borough in London. One week after the bitter political farce of the 2017 General Election, the flailing response — as one minister admitted to the journalist Tim Shipman — made the government look ‘like puny shits’. Grenfell seemed to symbolise a country that had lost not only its capacity for competence and its bearings, but its soul. 

The final phase of the public inquiry into the course and causes of the disaster reported earlier this month. Its findings – which are very long but written in admirably plain English – make astonishing reading (as does Pete Apps’s book Show Me The Bodies.) The BBC’s ‘Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast’ produced an episode for each day of the public hearings and in the last couple of months has pulled everything together into a short ten-part series. You can listen to the whole thing in an afternoon. It’s calm, measured, crystal clear and absolutely chilling. BBC Sounds produces a lot of brainless identikit pap, but this is brilliant journalism. 

Out

No Man’s Sky (2016)

Tobias Sturt

: Regular readers will know my predilection for rocketships and so won’t be at all surprised that I was very excited about the game No Man’s Sky: not only because it features design work from the aforementioned Simon Stålenhag, but because it promises the ability to boldly go where no man has gone before, to explore a computer generated universe full of strange new worlds and new life. And to tick boxes in a variety of sub-menus, like a kind of space Excel. I’ve written before for The Metropolitan about how I’m quite a fan of ‘god’ games like Civilization: a whole genre consisting, essentially, of very fancy spreadsheets. In No Man’s Sky, though, it just doesn’t suit. Sure, you get the glorious experience of jumping into your little freighter and shooting up through the atmosphere into outer space with the glorious insouciance of a Star Wars character; but then you spend quarter of an hour drifting as you try and figure out which menu options to select to restart the fusion drive. I suppose it's realistic, given the actual travails of space travel, but it's not fun. I’m just going to have to wait for the Switch port of Star Wars Outlaws.

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Shake it all about

Tobias: Here’s this month’s playlist. It's basically what I’ve been listening to for the last few weeks. The playlists will all be on Spotify.

‘Soulful Dress’ by Sugar Pie DeSanto. According to Wikipedia Sugar Pie is not even five foot tall. She sounds bigger.

‘Best Behavior’ by Gustaf, which is a splendidly spikey piece of New Wave funk/punk

‘Un Déluge’ by Bertrand Belin. Warm, slinky and hypnotic, there’s something quite Autumnal about this.

‘Pining’ by Via Mardot. Yep, Autumn is definitely approaching and a Halloween mist is starting to curl between the trees.

‘Heart of Gold’ by Leyla McCalla. Speaking of Autumnal, this has the dark edge of a warm, thickening twilight about it.

‘Cold in here’ by Lil Ugly Mane. A little darker still, wonky hip hop with a slightly queasy tilt.

‘Yaykatekar Dub’ by OKI. And now hypnotic and queasy, with this strange musical bland from Ainu musician OKI.

‘Ingoina Le Nyathi’ by Intombi Zephepha. Somewhat more upbeat, something from ‘60s/’70s Soweto about which I can find out nothing, other than the obvious fact that its terrific.

‘Do I Ever Cross Your Mind’ by Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton. This appears to have just been tossed off as a piece of fun, full of chatter and giggling, but something tossed off by such geniuses is always going to be wonderful.

‘Thatcherie’ by Sven Libaek. It’s been my birthday this month, so, as a present to me, here’s one of my very favourite tracks.

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September means the start of term time, so this month’s podcast is

Rowan Davies

reading her piece about the empty nest: Blank Space