Mixtapes, Netflix and Dudus
Notes on compiling a few tunes, watching a lockdown-era sit-com masterpiece and taking a disengaged teenager to the ICA.
The uncertain glory of an April day
If we still lived in the age of the cassette I’d lovingly put a mixtape together for you on a TDK and pop it through your letter box (if, that is, letter boxes are still a thing). Anyway, instead, virtual mixtapes from my ears to yours are available on mixcloud, where there is no need to craft hand-written labels that demonstrate my love and affection. Mostly, these mixtapes are what I’ve been listening to during the week; new releases, tunes I’ve encountered for the first time, old favourites and stuff I’ve dredged up – you know the score, you’ve got your own music collection. Or maybe you haven’t - maybe you just have Spotify, like the young people.
The title of the latest mixtape (and, despite calling them mixtapes don’t expect any majestic beat matching or Double Dee and Steinski-style collages) draws inspiration from a line from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona - “The uncertain glory of an April day.” There’s a bit of a Hull flavour to proceedings, with tracks from The Watersons, Steve Cobby and Everything But The Girl alongside Martin HERRS, TIBASKO, Young Fathers, Pottery, Steve Mason, KUF, KAYTRANADA, Leif Vollebekk, Half Moon Run, Phoebe Bridgers, Leaving Laurel and The Range.
Listen to The uncertain glory of an April day at https://www.mixcloud.com/DaveW65/the-uncertain-glory-of-an-april-day/
When in London
Don’t get to London as much as I’d like to but popped there this week to occupy my 15-year-old on half-term, lest he get stuck to the sofa up north playing on the X-Box. He took me to the ICA to see R.I.P. Germain’s exhibition Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus! which features an ambitious, immersive, multipart installation that examines the complex logic of cultural gatekeeping within Black culture, and the (mis)perception of these dynamics in a wider (white) world. We were particularly fond of the Jesus piece (pictured above), a pendant depicting the face of Jesus, with a crown of thorns, popularised by The Notorious B.I.G. in the 90s and, over a drink in Covent Garden afterwards, spoke of little else.
Late to the Feel Good party
As an eater of stand-up comedy on Netflix, I finally encountered Mae Martin for the first time recently watching Sap, their post-lockdown stand-up special filmed in Canada on a set that may well have been nicked out of a skip containing leftover bits of a production of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (they emerge, David Bellamy-like, through real trees, probably some real bugs crawling on their skin). Martin is a motormouth who has no problem sharing their addiction, emotional and relationship troubles in the most self-deprecating, rapidly vacillating (pessimistic one minute, optimistic the next) but extremely charming manner.
Having been blown away by that engaging hour of television and drawn to their likeable character, I naturally did a google and realised that two series of a sit-com written by Martin and collaborator Joe Hampson had completely passed me by. The first series of Feel Good aired on Channel 4 in March 2020, while the second and final series was commissioned by Netflix, who released it in June 2021. Proper Covid-era TV, for a locked-down audience. I must’ve been busy coughing my insides up or something. The totality of Feel Good comprises 12 half-hour episodes so I made up for the absence of it in my previous life by consuming all of it over four days.
Feel Good is a semi-autobiographical romantic tragi-comedy starring Martin as a fictionalised version of themself, alongside a TV crush of mine – English rose Charlotte Ritchie – as Mae’s girlfriend George.
The fictional Mae Martin’s life is pretty well aligned to the IRL version – they are both from Toronto, both did stand-up as young teenagers, both got kicked out of the family home and both explore gender identity, gender dysphoria, sexual orientation, sexual fluidity, sexual abuse, addiction, rehab, trauma and romance (and the impact of all of the former on the latter). Which, when you look at the list, doesn’t look like the stuff of too much laughter but it is very funny. It is also a moving and heart-warming love story that takes highly complex topics and issues and approaches them with sophisticated levels of intelligence.
Whatever gender and sexuality, Feel Good will resonate with any romantic human that has lived a life and experienced the dualities of pleasure and pain before finding someone that they’d happily spend the rest of their days with, while also battling inner demons and internal and external conflict. Feel Good is a masterpiece of a show that is emotionally mature, emotionally realistic, occasionally painful to watch and packed full of empathy. It will most definitely make you feel something and, more often than not, that feeling will be very, very good.
Mae Martin has written about their own, often humiliating, adventures in sex, dating and identity in their guide to 21st Century sexuality Can Everyone Please Calm Down?, which you can buy at the link below (which will take you to my virtual bookshop on bookshop.org)