Metropolitan Mixtape: June 2025

Before the Spotify playlist, there was the mixtape: a homemade selection of hand-picked songs. Each one fastened a moment in time: passions, passing enthusiasms, and shared anthems. So here’s some passing enthusiasms hand-picked for you.

Luxembourg

Tobias Sturt

To Luxembourg, capital of Luxembourg, seat of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Hey, if you’ve got a name that good, why waste it? A tiny little European state, Luxembourg should long ago have been swallowed up by France, Germany, the Netherlands or even Belgium, all of whom have taken bits of it over the centuries. It owes its continued existence to the nineteenth-century attempt to create a balance of power in Europe, which went so well that everyone decided to celebrate by having a First World War.

The population of the city of Luxembourg (not the state of Luxembourg!) is now 60% non-Luxembourgeois; mostly other Europeans who staff the European government offices that run down the dual carriageway to the airport. (EU-related business was also why I was there, to be fair.) The city is mostly well off, mostly safe and mostly a little dull; but it is rather good looking. It took me a while to realise what it reminded me of. It’s a bit like the backgrounds of Tintin comics, all flat colours and belle epoque buildings; but eventually I realised that it is closer to the backgrounds of so many Studio Ghibli films, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, all those non-specific nineteenth-century Northern European cities, filled with cupolas and towers, terraces and shaded streets.

Luxembourg is built on a hill on a bend where the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers meet, and spreads across the valleys and hills around. Rather like Edinburgh, it is a city of many levels, forever surprising you with sudden vistas and lofty city walls. Should you ever find yourself there (presumably on EU-related business) I definitely recommend taking the outdoor elevator at Grund down from the old city into the valley, and then walking north along the river to the glass elevator back up at Pfaffenthal. I did this early in the morning and found myself in a summer wood beside a chattering river, with the glowing city above me at the top of the cliffs.

Also, all public transport is free, so you can ride the Pfaffenthal-Kirchberg funicular as often as you want and visit the tram stop ‘Coque’, just to listen to the little perky, whistling tune on the tannoy just before a very serious voice announces ‘Cock’.

Letterboxd diary

Tobias Sturt

Aftersun (2022)

Let me begin with a confession and some spoilers. Spoilers because I need to include them to explain my confession and also because spoilers, to a certain extent, are what I want to talk about. The confession is that we were watching Aftersun on streaming and I was still looking at my phone as it started. I do feel the need to say that I didn’t pick it up during the rest of the film, which is a twenty-first tribute to how good it is, but that moment of distraction meant I missed something important.

Aftersun starts with the sound of a video tape loading into a VHS machine and then a shot of a TV screen and, in the brief moment before the video starts playing, you can see a reflection of a woman sitting down to watch. This is a crucial piece of context. You are watching the older Sophie watching a home video of a childhood holiday with her father. However, you don’t get told this again, miss that bit, as I did, and it may well take you, as it consequently did me, until the end of the film to fully understand the set up.

Much has been written, recently, on the necessity of television to work in a second screen world and how this results in constant indigestible boluses of exposition and long drawn out plots aimed at background noise rather than crafted storytelling. Aftersun is admirable for many things, and one of them is this insistence on close attention from the audience. However, if it hadn’t been for the second screen, I might never have fully understood it at all.

I eventually understood that Sophie’s father, Calum, had since committed suicide and that part of the story was her attempt to try and understand why he had chosen to abandon her in this way. But of course, what I didn’t realise was that I was supposed to be hunting for clues while watching it, to see Calum’s behaviour throughout the film as indicative of, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘depression, anxiety, and internal turmoil’.

What I in fact saw was behaviour that seemed largely typical of a certain kind of Dad on holiday: alternately larky and taciturn, emotionally inarticulate but nonetheless apparently devoted. I’m sure this says more about me and my generation than it does the film and I should think about that and probably check in on some of my friends. I was, however, struck by that second screen experience, how what I read about the film changed how I had seen it.

Much has also been written about ‘revision entertainment’, all, the various fictional universes and ‘Skip recap’ lore that we’re all required to know in order to watch the next episode or film or TV series spun off from a single sentence in one of Tolkien’s appendices. But this is a feature, not a bug.

Twenty five years ago, in the days when a ‘second screen’ was a beige box in a spare bedroom that had become ‘the computer room’, I had the great good fortune to be working in a wholly new medium, the Web, before anyone really knew what it could do or what it was for. In those days we produced several interactive entertainments, including what I think was Britain’s first ‘360’ TV show. A show, that is, that happened simultaneously on broadcast and online, sort of live, sort of interactive, sort of a mystery game, sort of a drama.

What we discovered in making and running it was that people actively enjoyed the second screen. They didn’t want to interact with the TV show, but they did want to interact with the world of the show, to interact with characters, explore background stories, chat to other viewers about what was going on. This way the fiction of the show leaked out into the real world, the borders between the real and the fantastical became porous and the audience were able to step through the (internet) portal into the story.

This should not have been surprising, of course. This being a wholly new medium we didn’t have any other examples of entertainment in this form to draw on, so we had to look elsewhere. We were inspired partly by a very strange product called ‘Crime dossiers’, the product of a brainwave between pulp writer Denis Wheatley and J G Links, ‘Venice for Pleasure’ fame. These were murder mysteries presented, not as books, but as files of evidence, through which the reader could sort, becoming detective and solving the crime. The other source of inspiration was similar: tabletop role playing games, the descendents of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly investigatory games like Call of Cthulhu, set in the world of the weird tales of H P Lovecraft.

Such games allowed the players to enter the fictional world, play in it, and make a corner of it their own - particularly useful in the case of Lovecraft, whose fictional world is fascinating, but whose personal, racist views were repugnant. These games of course went on to influence computer role playing games, which have now become open worlds, like one of the best selling games of all time: Breath of the Wild (2017). In these games players can roam where they like, exploring the fictional setting as they want, making the experience their own.

Just this week io9 have written about how the Star Wars series Andor was influenced by the Star Wars RPG from the ‘80s. This is perhaps the best way to understand such shows, not as discrete stories, but as modules in a widening fictional setting. This new genre of entertainment, which positively requires Wikipedia, IMDb and an encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘70s comics, is a native creation of the Internet age. We can’t see these productions as discrete, personal and artisanal works of art like Aftersun, we need to think of them as far more diffuse, far less individual, in which the audience is no longer just a reader and interpreter, reliant on the clues left by the artist, but a fellow creator, making their own clues, adding their own imagination to the fiction.

Straight Story (1999)

David Lynch’s straightforward telling of the story of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who drives straight across America on a sit-on lawnmower. The title is usually seen as an indication that this is the most ‘straight’ of Lynch’s films. It certainly feels like it’s supposed to be a celebration of American eccentricity, individuality and chutzpah, as aw-shucks earnest as only David Lynch can be. But this can make it seem even weirder than his more ‘surreal’ visions of America.

At one point Straight offers shelter to a hitch-hiker who, it turns out, has run away from home because she’s pregnant. Straight offers her a story about how a bundle of sticks is harder to break than a single branch, that likewise, families are stronger together. He wakes the next morning to find the girl has gone, leaving behind a bundle of sticks tied together with a ribbon. In other words: a fasces, the symbol of the Roman Republic, adopted by Mussolini and the origin of our word ‘fascism’.

It’s hard to unpick exactly what Lynch wants us to take from this image: are we supposed to be reading it uncritically, are we supposed to be questioning the advice of an old man to a pregnant ‘90s teenager, are we supposed to be aware of the history of the symbolism? Lynch did, after all, appear to praise Trump in the latter’s first term, even if he later walked that back.

Of course, one should always take whatever Lynch said with a critical eye, he was as much an artwork as his artwork. What remains though, is that it is still a fascinating and compelling film, even without Lynch’s customary approach, and perhaps something even more surreal, to an outsider, than his usual work.

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

I got to go to an actual cinema! It’s just a shame it was to see this.

That’s not fair, of course, it’s still amusing, peopled with terrific actors and visually highly pleasurable. But I’m a Wes Anderson fan, and possibly had my hopes set too high. What I’m curious about, though, is why Phoenician Scheme didn’t quite work for me. Why Anderson’s hermetic world suddenly felt airless, why his precious dioramas suddenly felt too artificial. That self-contained artifice is part of the appeal of his films, after all.

I wonder if it was, paradoxically, a lack of artifice. His last few live-action films have had elaborate structures. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) has multiple layers of flashback to get to its core story, The French Dispatch (2021) has its anthologised articles, all filmed in a different style, Asteroid City (2023) has its film within a play within a documentary. These boxes within boxes add layers of meta-narrative and distance to the stories, making their artificiality an intrinsic part of their telling.

The Phoenician Scheme has narrative devices galore: shoeboxes, postcards, infrastructure projects, but does not have a similar frame. Perhaps the lack of one reveals the artificiality too nakedly.

Or perhaps I’ll change my mind next time I watch it, because I will, of course.

Tracklisting

Tobias Sturt

Ten tracks I’ve had on repeat this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Big City Life’ - Smerz. A Swedish duo whose name comes from the German for heartbreak, apparently: herzschmerz. This is an appropriately dark and claustrophobic track for the summer city.

‘Nimerudi’ - Goat feat. MC Yallah. A lot of Swedes in this week’s selection. Here’s masked psychedelic world music weirdos Goat with Kenyan/Ugandan rapper MC Yallah.

‘Gunslinger’ - Natalie Bergman. A lovely, slinky track that sounds like a lost Lee Hazlewood / Nancy Sinatra track.

‘El Nuevo Prometeo’ - Los Pirañas. Colombian psychedelica which, appropriately enough for something that appears to be titled after Frankenstein, sounds like several different songs stitched together and electrified into jerky life.

‘Balinese Fantasy’ - Zahir Hussain. Hypnotic jazz with an intricate, beautiful tabla backbone.

‘I Wanna Be There’ - Evangeline. More sixties inflected summery indie pop, appropriate to the season.

‘Bounce House’ - Gelli Haha. Also appropriate, summery electronic pop, the video for which comes across as a missing Might Boosh segment.

‘Robin’s Egg’ - Iron & Wine feat. I’m With Her. Now let’s all calm down and sit in the garden, listen to the birds and think about folk horror for a bit.

‘Fantasia Pt 1’ - Lloyd Miller & The Heliocentrics. Some grooving Persian flavoured jazz for the long summer evenings.

‘Bang’ - Melenas. I’ve put a remix on the Spotify playlist because that’s how I first heard it, but here’s the original version and it's just as utterly fantastic. I’m going to be playing this all summer, I can tell.

That last especially for friends of The Metropolitan, Sergio Fernandez Gallardo (who provided the music for our podcast) and Barbara Ana Gomez. And Pedro, of course.

The whole playlist is on Spotify, as usual:

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We haven’t covered David Lynch much yet on The Metropolitan, apart from Twin Peaks: