Penny does not expect to hear the roar of an invisible dragon on the path on the edge of a potato field. It takes a moment for her to think to look up.
The hot air balloon passing above her head is too low and too large. Its white sphere stands out sharply against dense black clouds.
Should it even be in the air on a day like this, with a gale blowing up and rain beginning to spot the cracked soil? Penny misjudged the weather for her walk but is dressed for it in waterproof trousers and hooded jacket. Perhaps the pilot of the balloon also misread or ignored the weather forecast. Or has a deathwish.
The wicker basket beneath the balloon is only a few metres above her head. She stops and waits for it to go by, and to progress beyond the line of red-studded bramble bushes ahead. She knows very little about balloons but understands that they have little control over their direction, being at the mercy of layers of wind at different altitudes. She hopes this one, this colossal pearlescent object, will avoid the fourteenth century tower of St. Leonard’s Church which lies a mile or so ahead.
As the balloon moves ahead she expects to see its pilot come into view above the edge of the basket. This does not happen, though someone must be there to trigger the burner, which turns the pearl orange for a second. The balloon does not rise.
In fact, even as the wind whips at the synthetic fabric of her waterproofs and pulls strands of her dark hair across her face, the balloon seems to slow. Then it stops altogether, fixing itself in the air, as if a pause button has been pressed. The hawthornes to Penny’s left are shaken by the growing gale and lurch forward. A torn cement sack tumbles across the field to her right, a tangle of white, brown and blue. But the balloon does not move, at least not forward, because, yes, like an elevator, it is descending gently.
The basket rolls slightly on contact with the pale brown earth, rights itself, settles flat. The structure of the balloon sits solidly, neither sagging nor swaying.
Penny takes a few steps and calls out in her high, nasal voice: ‘Hello? Is everything okay? Do you need help?’ She can barely hear herself and knows that her words have been lost.
The balloon waits.
Rain comes harder, tearing across her rucksack and back. She moves instinctively towards the balloon hoping it might offer shelter, skipping awkwardly over ruts in the ground, stumbling in her sturdy boots.
Close by, the balloon has the bulk of an office block. Its perfect white shell throws out a soft internal light, as if the sun itself has fallen, weakened, from the sky.
The burner exhales flame and it sounds like a weary sigh, or an exhortation. Penny is overcome with a sense that to ignore it would be rude, or hostile. The rain lashes her forward as she hurries to the basket, throws her rucksack over the worn leather of the rim, and climbs in after it.
The basket is empty. There is no pilot, no flask of hot tea, no warm blanket. Here, though, the wind is diminished, and the rain cannot reach. She feels like a child in the arms of a great mother.
Flames rise above her head. Mother sighs. The balloon begins to rise.
They – that is, the bastards that would grind you down – cannot stop you making music.
They can stop you from making a living from it, though.
Think of all those bands who somehow never seemed to get paid despite multiple hit records. Steve Marriott of The Small Faces ended up collecting 7-Up bottles for the deposit, and stealing to feed his family.
Thirty years ago, the standard fee for a gig in a pub was around £200. In 2025, it continues to be around £200.
Spotify has automated and perfected the business of ripping off musicians, paying them very little for their work and sometimes nothing at all.
Still, you make music for the love it it, right? As long as you’ve got something to pluck, bash or blow into, you can still make a noise.
Until they take away your instruments, of course.
School music services in the UK, which used to supply many working class kids with their first instruments, have been eroding for decades. A 2019 survey found a 21% decrease in the provision of music lessons in state schools while, of course, with bloody inevitability, provision increased in independent schools.
Musical instruments are also among the first things to go when poorer families need extra cash. Go into any high street pawnbroker and you’ll see rows of guitars hanging on the wall, along with keyboards, string instruments, saxophones, drum machines…
At least pawn shops used to be an affordable place to acquire instruments, too, although the internet has changed that. We live in a world where there is no longer any such thing as a bargain, because every second-hand item is priced at its theoretical maximum market values, pegged against eBay.
Still, music software has done away with the need for real instruments, hasn’t it? Apple’s Garageband is a free app that comes with loops, virtual drummers, a library of instruments, and multitrack recording capabilities.
And I’ve just paid a few pounds for Koala Sampler which puts an incredibly powerful, easy-to-use sampler on my phone and in my pocket.
And entire careers have been built on hacked and cracked music software – complete production studios running on bedroom PCs, for which not a penny was paid.
Unfortunately, they, the bastards, can also make sure you never have the time, energy or focus to practice or perform.
Work takes up the best part of your brain and leaves you hollowed out. I say that as a privileged desk worker with one steady, regular job. Imagine trying to fit music in around shift work, or multiple jobs?
That’s before we get into the multiplying distractions of modern life, with a thousand algorithms competing to break your flow and steal your attention.
I’m writing this partly because I’ve been thinking about my dad again. A year ago today was the last time I saw him, at a hospital in Weston-super-Mare. I wrote an obituary for him last year while still in the deepest pit of grief.
Now, still missing him but less painfully, I’m able to feel inspired by his passion for making music.
His real job, his real identity, wasn’t as a factory or warehouse worker. It wasn’t even being a dedicated father, sweet as it would be to be able to make the claim.
No, he was, with a capital M, a Musician.
That he found time to learn to play the bass guitar, to form bands, to rehearse with them, and to play so many gigs over the course of decades, is a miracle.
Like many men of his generation, he started out with skiffle – the ultimate expression of working class musical ingenuity, with tea chest basses and kitchen sink percussion.
Later in life, he bought cheap bass guitars with bent necks and bad actions and battled with them until they sang.
He prioritised practicing in draughty church halls over watching TV and rehearsed until his fingers had grown armour.
He overcame his natural introversion and social awkwardness to approach other similarly gruff working class men and say: “Will you be in my band?”
When I think of Dad in full bloom it’s on stage in a pub, wrists strapped with support bandages, with fingers scarred from years of turning pistons moving up and down the fret board just as they’ve been drilled to do.
He couldn’t make his living out of music but he lived music all the same. They couldn’t stop him.
Watching the film Hundreds of Beavers and a product of Shakespeare’s Henry V in the same week was something of a crash course in the suspension of disbelief.
Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022) is a slapstick comedy about a fur trapper (Ryland Tews) using ever more elaborate methods to catch beavers.
Except the beavers are people in cheap beaver costumes and much of the action was conjured up using deliberately unconvincing digital effects.
Even if we allow the excuse that it’s supposed to resemble a cartoon, the quality of the animation is often so janky that it jars. More South Park than Snow White.
Does this in-your-face fakeness matter? Clearly, in this case, it’s intended to be a selling point, with phrases like “lo-fi” being used to describe what, in other contexts, might be referred to as “shit”. But whether it’s a plus point or not, it certainly doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the story.
If there’s one thing human brains are good at, it’s working with the limited information they’ve been given to create sense from chaos.
In this case, once you’ve been told a person in a beaver costume represents a beaver, and that a paper cutout style animation represents a man climbing a tree.
After all, what do you need to know to follow the story? That the man is climbing the tree to catch and kill the beaver. They could almost be represented by boardgame counters or, indeed, plain text.
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Insane Root’s production of Henry V employs similar tricks to evoke crowded, chaotic 15th century battlefields with a cast of seven, minimal sets, and a handful of props.
What’s interesting about Henry V in particular is that Shakespeare addresses the question of suspension of disbelief head on, in the text. He has the Chorus (the MC, or narrator) address the audience at the beginning of the play, urging them to get on board:
…pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth; For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning th’ accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass; for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like, your humble patience pray Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
In both the 1944 and 1989 film versions of the play this preamble works brilliantly, highlighting the artificiality of the filmmaking process while also gaining a note of ironic self deprecation.
Because, of course, film can have a broader canvas than theatre, and better special effects, and hosts of extras in period costume.
But watching the Insane Root company shrouded in smoke, swinging swords in balletic slow motion, mimicking the hunched posture of mounted soldiers, I can’t say that I missed any of that.
I played along.
I accepted that (hiking boots and sunglasses aside) we were in 15th century France on a field strewn, horrifyingly, with butchered corpses – even if those corpses were nothing more than scattered red tennis balls.
A third strand in my accidental study of suspension of disbelief this week emerged from reading German Expressionist Cinema by Ian Roberts, published in 2009. It’s a slim volume designed as primer on the subject and includes observations like this:
The Austrian novelist and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal [claimed] that “all the working people are looking for in the movie theater is a substitute for dreams”… Yet with hindsight we can acknowledge that this oneiric quality, the ability of film to transport the viewer to a world of dreams, is precisely why cinema went on to confound its critics, and why the films of the Weimar period contribute to our understanding of the process whereby cinema was transformed from a vaudeville sideshow for the masses to a global entertainment industry and a major art form in its own right.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene in 1920, is perhaps the most famous example of expressionism on film. Its obviously, unashamedly painted sets aren’t intended to feel real. They use contrasting paint to create light and shadow, and forced perspective to imply depth. They are intended to read as beyond real, as dreamscapes, or as projections from a troubled mind.
The lack of realism isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It’s style. It supports the themes and mood of the film. And it’s one of the main reasons people are still talking about Caligari more than a hundred years after it was made.
If audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief and play along, filmmakers should feel more confident in doing things the cheap and dirty way.
Not everything needs to look cinematic or hyperreal, especially if that aspiration becomes a barrier to making anything at all.
Being aggressively handmade and imperfect might also a way to push back against the rise of computer generated imagery (CGI) and images generated with artificial intelligence.
I’ve got a limited supply of paperback copies of both Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness ready to ship to anyone in the UK who wants to buy one.
They’re £13 each including delivery in the UK, or you can get both for £25.
They’ve each got a selection of weird stories and ghost stories, with Intervals of Darkness being the more recent of the two collections.
“Impressively eerie and packed with shocks, Intervals of Darkness ushers the reader through 1970s grime and Gothic opulence, with moments of powerful poignancy and startling strangeness. You’ll want to linger over these stories.” – Verity Holloway
“Housing estates, factories, tower blocks and caravans, nowhere is safe from Ray Newman’s dark imagination. Existing somewhere between Robert Aickman and JG Ballard, these blackly funny tales are sure to chill you, no matter how high you turn the central heating. It’s every bit the equal of Municipal Gothic, and if anything it’s darker and stranger.” – John Grindrod
Contact me to sort out payment and delivery, and to let me know if you want the books signed or dedicated.
If we’re already connected, you probably know how to reach me, but otherwise…
A key feature of popular music is the use of artificial echo and reverberation to make small ensembles sound big, to complexify simple arrangements, and to turn poky studio spaces into wide open landscapes.
Listen to ‘Isi’, the opening track of Neu! 75, by German band Neu, for example. It begins with a simple sequence played on a piano. But a reverberation (reverb) effect sends each of the three basic chords out into a big blue sky – one that exists only in a studio box of tricks.
Echo and reverb are such a part of the background to recorded music that most of us don’t notice they’re there. We would notice, however, if they weren’t.
The same piano chord ‘dry’ and then with reverb and echo.
When a piece of music is described as ‘epic’ it’s probably reverb, often paired with echo, that is creating that impression.
Echo, or ‘delay’, is a subtly different effect. It’s about the repetition of distinct sounds rather than their washing away into space.
Play a single note, add repetitions with delay, and play that into reverb and, in an instant, you have music. A sound that can make you feel things.
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Psychedelic music was largely built on the use of reverb and echo. Think of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles and its associated single, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and how often John Lennon’s voice in particular is adrift in a swirl of its own tails, haunting itself.
To psychedelic and progressive musicians, reverb and echo perhaps seemed to mimic the opening up of their own minds through the use of psychedelic drugs, or their discovery of esoteric spirituality, or both.
These effects turn the performer into a god, their voice calling out across all the lands – or, alternatively, allow them to become as one with the universe. At any rate, they allow them to cease to be themselves:
“With ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ I’d imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting.”
John Lennon quoted in The Beatles by Hunter Davies, 1968
What we rarely acknowledge is how strange it is to be able to create these auditory virtual realities from loops of magnetic tape, wobbly springs, sheets of metal suspended in boxes, electronic circuits or, most recently, lines of code.
Before reverb and echo devices, these effects were created by playing in real spaces such as halls, churches or water tanks. Then studio technicians worked out that they could pipe sound into those spaces, record the echo remotely, and blend it with the mix. But, still, you needed big, empty rooms to play with.
Spring reverb was an early breakthrough. It achieved the impression of space by channeling sound through a box full of springs and recording their vibrations. This is very much the sound of surf music. But where is the surf guitar player as we hear them twanging on recordings? In the hall created by the curl of a giant wave? In Monument Valley? In deep space?
Early echo/delay effects were created through similarly analogue means, using loops of tape to record a sound and play it back almost immediately, layered over the original. By adjusting settings engineers can create the impression of sounds bouncing into infinity, or slapping back as if from a nearby cliff face.
The EMT 140 plate reverb, first manufactured in 1957, was a significant breakthrough. That’s it travelling in space in the main image above. It was used extensively on recordings by The Beatles and Pink Floyd, among others, and is one of the defining sounds of psychedelia.
It conjures vastness from a bland looking wooden box of the type you might find collecting dust at the back of a school assembly hall.
Inside that box is a large plate of sheet metal suspended from springs. Your raw sound – John Lennon singing, for example – is played into the plate through (in non technical terms) a small speaker. That causes the plate to reverberate and that sound, in turn, is picked up and sent back out of the box to be mixed with the original sound.
Since the 1970s, it’s been possible to create reverb and echo using, first, analogue electronic circuits, and then digital signal processing. This has allowed those mindbendingly enormous spaces to be housed in ever-smaller packages – the voice of God in a matchbox.
In recent years, convolution reverb has emerged. It uses ‘impulse responses’ (IRs) to capture the qualities of real spaces. Or to steal their souls at gunpoint, you might say. Because that’s often how IRs are created – by firing a starter pistol into, say, a cave, or concert hall, and recording the violent boom.
Another modern trend is shimmer reverb which, rather than recreating real spaces in perfect fidelity, creates impossible ones, where sound behaves in illogical but magical ways. It uses digital processing to repeat each sound at a different pitch, as part of a wash of sound, creating twinkling harmonies. It’s a key feature of modern ambient music.
Ambient music. Musical ambience. Ambience as music. Listeners want to be taken away, enveloped, lifted ten feet off the ground.
Having narrowly avoided setting up a newsletter on Substack (well, a second newsletter) I’m going to use this blog for a similar purpose.
Not least because the other day I read this…
Hot take: I don’t really want to read writing advice from authors I like and to who’s newsletters I subscribe to. I just want to know what they are reading and thinking and doing.
I’ve also been inspired by Paul Watson in a couple of ways. First, by his monthly round-up of interesting reading, much of which really is interesting for once. And, secondly, by his habit of maintaining a proper RSS feed reader, which is how he manages to stay on top of other people’s blogs.
As a result, I’ve fired up Feedly and given it a spring clean.
That is, I’ve deleted all the blogs and websites I followed about a decade ago – because most of them are now either defunct or degraded beyond belief – and added a bunch of new and active blogs.
Many of those I cribbed from Paul’s blogroll but I also had success asking people on BlueSky to let me know about their own blogs, or suggest others they liked.
I’m especially interested in:
hauntology
folk horror
architecture
cities
books, films, music
graphic design
content design
Do let me know if you have a blog in that territory, or know of a good one by someone else.
In lieu of a newsletter, I’m also nudging people to subscribe to this blog, so they’ll be notified when I update it. So, uh…
A new favourite blog is Stephen Prince’s A Year in the Country which examines various hauntological and folk-horror-related texts in serious detail, drawing unexpected connections between them.
In fact, I’ve been enjoying it so much, I bought the latest print-on-demand anthology of recent writing which I’ve also been reading before bed.
That, in turn, led me to A.D.A.M., a one-off play broadcast on ITV in 1973 as part of its Sunday Night Theatre strand.
It’s about a disabled woman (Georgina Hale) whose scientist husband builds her an electronically controlled house with a voice-activated AI helper. Predictably, perhaps, stuck at home together all day while hubby does Serious Government Work, A.D.A.M. and Jean form an intense and unhealthy relationship.
I found it fascinating and rather enjoyed its paciness, at 53 minutes. Of course it has gained new relevance in the age of Alexa and ChatGPT. In particular, with recent stories of people becoming infatuated with avatars in AI dating apps, there was particular resonance in a scene where Jean writhes naked on a chaise longue while A.D.A.M. robotically recites compliments she’s taught him.
“[In] a TV play that comes in under an hour, a two and half-minute sequence that is essentially two people walking through a doorway comes across as some fairly extreme padding. As this is only the second scene, it doesn’t bode well.”
Oddly, and pleasingly, A.D.A.M. is available for anyone in the UK to watch for free via the excellent BFI Player, so you can make up your own mind at little cost. If nothing else, the opening five minutes are a wonderfully moody piece of grey 1970s British grot.
I was also moved to design a new poster for the film, very quickly, because the default one on Letterboxd was so crappy. Fan made posters are discouraged at The Movie Database but I’ve contributed a few where there really wasn’t otherwise a good alternative.
I love it when reading one thing leads me to read another which leads me to watch something else which prompts me to make something – however trivial. That’s what it’s all about.
Integrating music making into my life
I’ve also been trying to work out how to make more music, just for fun, in a way that fits around my day job, my relationships, and my other hobbies.
The latest effort is to actually spend time playing my guitar and learning to play particular songs, in part or in whole.
I’m being helped with this by a new gadget, the Sonicake Pocket Master, which cost about £50, has a headphone jack, and among other features can convincingly (to my ears) recreate the sound of playing through various amplifiers.
Last night, I spent about an hour and twenty minutes learning to play ‘September Gurls’ by Big Star for no particular reason other than that for about an hour and twenty minutes I didn’t think about anything but ‘September Gurls’ by Big Star.
It helps, I think, that thanks to the headphones other people can’t hear my playing badly, so I’m able to stick at it until it actually sounds good.
Writing weird stories
I’m continuing to work on my next collection of short stories in the background and seeking input, through blogs, books and films, as set out above, is helping enormously.
I’ve actually got drafts of a full set of stories but I really want to have more than enough so I can (a) pick the very best and (b) try to pull out a theme.
One of my theories for why Municipal Gothic continues to outsell Intervals of Darkness is that the former has a stronger proposition which is further underlined by the brutalist tower block on the cover.
I’ve also been considering turning those free stories, and some other bits I’ve written for zines, or never published at all, into a sort of bargain B-sides and offcuts compilation.
I always loved those as a teenage music collector because they were both cheaper than ‘proper’ albums and tended to have weirder stuff on them.
What do you reckon?
Lois the Witch
Finally, I’m going to recommend the novella Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell, from 1859. It’s been rereleased as a cute little minimalist Penguin paperback which I picked up on a whim at Bookhaus in Bristol.
It tells the story of a girl who is sent to New England to live with relatives when her parents die and finds herself at the heart of the Salem witch trials.
In the middle of a heatwave this description of the spookiness of 17th century Salem in winter hit all my buttons:
Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen – Satan, in some shape, seeking whom he might devour. And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long, dark evenings, the dimly-lighted rooms, the creaking passages, where heterogeneous articles were piled away out of reach of the keen-piercing frost, and where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in its right place – so accustomed are we to measure noises by comparison with themselves, and not with the absolute stillness of the night-season – the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms, – all these, and many other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling them round, the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white men’s settlement than either he or they would have liked could they have chosen, the hungry yells of the wild beasts approaching the cattle-pens, – these were the things which made that winter life in Salem, in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange, and haunted, and terrific…
Photography
Finally, I’m still taking photos, and currently enjoying trying to imitate Daidō Moriyama. See the main image above for an example.
Moriyama’s style is high contrast black and white, shot from the hip, often askew or otherwise technically ‘bad’, and yet full of vigour and interest.
The murkiness of his photos is half the fun, forcing you to stare a little harder to understand what you’re looking at. Which may well just be a bin bag blowing down an empty street.
If horror film makers have nothing else they can always rely on a cheap mask to bring a sense of the uncanny, playing upon our deepest instinctive fear of The Other.
Watching the 1974 Spanish horror thriller Night of the Skull, directed by Jess Franco, I was struck by how it instantly seemed to step up a notch when a character in a mask appeared on screen.
The mask in question isn’t a lovingly crafted custom design. It’s not carved or sculpted. No, it’s a typically floppy, tacky rubber Halloween mask, as you can see in the picture above. But that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that, suddenly, there’s a human on screen whose true features we cannot see or read – who is utterly blank.
A few years later the same trick was used to even greater effect in Halloween, from 1978. John Carpenter’s film, which really kickstarted the ‘slasher’ craze, gave its enigmatic killer Michael Myers a mask which, as everyone knows, was adapted from a novelty product supposed to depict William Shatner as Captain Kirk.
In that case, the mask is more detailed and comes with the added oddness of feeling vaguely familiar. Should we recognise this face?
Demonstrating just how broadly we might define a mask in this context, the monster at the heart of the Friday the 13th series, Jason Voorhees, at first wore a simple sack over his head. Then, from the third film in the series, he gained his trademark hockey mask – a white ellipse with a few dark holes punched in it.
Alice, Sweet Alice.
In proto-slasher Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole, 1976) the mask is the cheapest, simplest plastic mask you can imagine – the kind I might have bought with my pocket money at the seaside, held on with a string of thin elastic. And it still works. The killer’s face becomes fixed, glossy and rigid, frozen in a smile that our animal brains read as uncanny.
There are examples of real life murderers wearing masks. The perpetrator of the 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders, for example, wore a white cloth mask.
And the Zodiac Killer who terrorised San Francisco and the surrounding area in the late 1960s wore a hood that concealed his face, turning him into a folkloric bogeyman.
For people like this, the mask is a way to become more than their pathetic selves, and to assert their dominance.
If you can’t see my face, but I can see you, then I’m in control.
Ed Gein, the inspiration for Norman Bates, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and many other fictional serial killers, made a mask from the peeled skin of his victims. His motive seems to have been to possess them from within – to steal their identities in a sense that predates online fraud.
Kansas City Confidential.
Accessories to crime
The mask gives anonymity to criminals of all kinds, from lads riding eBikes too fast round the local park to hardened blaggers.
Criminals pull a pair of tights over their heads, or a balaclava, and in an instant their features are concealed or distorted.
In the heist movie, as much as the horror movie, masks create an instant visual hook. Think of the gang in Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952) with their unsettling felt masks, or the crew in Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) who wear comical rubber masks representing various presidents of the USA.
In A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) the juvenile delinquent Alex wears a particularly grotesque, phallic mask during an instance of home invasion and rape.
Alex, left, and Noseybonk, right.
And when hauntologically minded British people over fifty talk about being ‘terrified’ of the 1970s children’s television character Noseybonk, consider the similarities between Alex’s mask and Noseybonk’s.
Much as they are empowering masks can also be dangerous.
The best section of a book I did not otherwise care for, Grady Hendrix’s 2023 novel How to Sell a Haunted House, is a side narrative which depicts the danger of masks. It tells the story of a troupe of avant garde puppeteers who fashion and don masks in the likeness of Pupkin, a sinister haunted puppet, and lose control of themselves:
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to wear a mask. You’re aware of what’s going on around you but it all feels far away. The longer you wear the mask, the more distant the world becomes through your eyeholes. Bits and pieces of time go black because the mask is active and you slip into a semi-somnolent state, but it feels good because you’re not in control. Nothing is your fault. You’re a puppet. Like Clark said, ‘A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.’ And a mask turns a person into a puppet.
In Kaneto Shindō’s 1964 film Onibaba, set in medieval Japan, the particularly sinister mask below equates to a curse. Yes, it confers power, but it also extracts a fee, binding itself to the wearer’s face, with removal only coming at too high a cost.
Onibaba.
Creating horror from nothing
Masks are scary, among other reasons, because they deny us the cues we rely on to assess threats.
They turn our fellow humans into creatures that are humanlike but different enough to trigger deeply programmed fight-or-flight subroutines.
Art doesn’t necessarily need to include people, and art that omits them isn’t necessarily inhumane – but we need to resist the allure of the soothing blank.
When I read the line “For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art” it felt like a contribution to a conversation I’ve been having in my head for years.
It depicts two schoolboys walking along a street in an idealised small town in 1950s America. It’s kitsch, essentially – the stuff of ‘Who remembers…?’ accounts on Facebook.
Part of the supposed appeal of the image is the promise of space, peace and homogenous white culture. It presents the small town as the antidote to the Lovecraftian nightmare of the big city, with its crowded streets, small skies and complex mix of peoples.
My Darling Clementine, dir. John Ford, 1946.
In America, ‘manifest destiny’ was about heading west to open space, and to freedom. On film in particular, westerns continued to mythologise this expansion throughout the 20th century. That’s especially true of the films of John Ford who fetishises vast desert landscapes, and the brave men who exist in them, in contented isolation.
From manifest destiny it’s only a couple of steps to the idea of ‘Lebensraum’ (living space) which was a key concept justifying the Nazis’ annexation of European nations, and the push into the east.
In a 2023 article, nature writer Richard Smyth argued that the appeal of rewilding programmes sometimes reflects an urge to purge natural spaces of humans, and evidence of human activity:
A strong anti-people streak is evident not only in old-school get-orf-my-land types, but also among the carefully curated hills and vales of the rewilders – a queasy tension, in the latter case, between ‘look at these splendid landscapes!’ and ‘stay the hell away from these splendid landscapes!’
When right wingers complain that “Britain is full!” or overcrowded it only compounds the sense that the left-liberal position must be to embrace and revel in the presence of people, and to resist the allure of spaces without them.
Cropping people from the frame
As someone who is a habitual Camera Haver and Photograph Taker, I’ve been grappling for more than a decade with the question of whether photos should or should not include people.
Photos of the world around us, I mean. Street photography, in other words.
There’s an argument that photographs without people don’t qualify as street photography. Those are just photos of streets. No, street photography at its best captures human beings in motion, living their lives, in all their infinite variety, behaving in fascinating ways.
To capture real life, however, street photographers must be, to some extent, intrusive, voyeuristic, and sly. They snatch images of strangers who either don’t know they’re being photographed, or don’t get chance to object.
Some street photographers push this to the limit. Bruce Gilden is famous for his aggressive technique, thrusting his camera into the faces of strangers and snapping them with full flash. It gives his pictures enormous energy but can also feel like a form of abuse.
All of this is why there’s now a view that the only truly ethical way to take photographs of strangers in the street is to ask permission, ideally before you point your camera at them; and to share publicly only images that come with explicit permission from the subject in the form of signed consent documents.
In that context, photos of spaces without people begin to feel like the less problematic (less fascistic) choice.
East Bristol, June 2025.Central Bristol, June 2025.
A convenient excuse for misanthropy
My own photographs tend to be of humanless spaces and blanks in the urban landscape. I often spend ages waiting for people to clear the frame, or grab my shot in split second gaps as people pass back and forth through the scene.
One of my more successful photo projects, Bristol Without Cars, relied on this approach for its effect.
I might tell myself this is an ethical choice but it’s also a personal preference.
With or without a camera, I spend hours every week walking through industrial estates near my house rather enjoying their dusty, desert-like emptiness.
Recently, I found myself alone in a Norman church in an apparently deserted village, listening to birdsong and the wind. And I was surprised to hear myself emit a long, contented sigh.
When I think about nerdy billionaires and their post-apocalyptic bunkers, I sometimes wonder if being the last men on earth is their true desire – peace at last! And, uncomfortably, I recognise that urge in myself.
During my Bristol Without Cars project, I thought I was creating rather peaceful, almost utopian images. But others found them unsettling and even post-apocalyptic.
In this world, people are viewed as clutter, or as a mess to be cleared away. Is it also, perhaps, part of what Tracy Durnell has called “the business borg aesthetic”, in which “Humans are perceived as sources of inefficiency”?
Remember me
I worry about the long-term value of the thousands of largely people-free photographs I take every year. When I choose to photograph bins (as my partner mockingly puts it) rather than humans, I’m not only magically erasing them from the landscape but also from (small H) history.
As time passes, the work of great street photographers gains additional value as documentation of history, and specifically aspects of social history that would otherwise be overlooked.
Men on phones, 2018.
Tish Murtha’s work captures the bodies, the faces and the living spaces of working class English people in ways that now feel profound and vital. This is also true of, say, Chris Killip, or the many citizen photographers whose work is unearthed and published by Cafe Royal books.
This is why I have a guilty secret: I do, in fact, take photographs of strangers in their place in the urban landscape. It’s just that I don’t often share those images in public, or on social media.
No, those are for (small P) posterity. There for me to look at in 30 or 40 years time and remember that I was, in fact, surrounded by humanity in all its wonderful variety.
I’ve never been to Los Angeles and probably never will. But it’s a city that exists as a high fidelity virtual model in our collective imagination as a result of more than a century of dominance over mass media.
What percentage of American films and TV shows are set in LA? A disproportionate number, I’m certain. And that’s before you take into account those that are filmed there even though they’re set in New York City, Las Vegas, Dallas, or wherever.
As a result, we all know aspects of Los Angeles’s landscape that would otherwise be insignificant to outsiders.
For example, there’s the concrete trough in which its river runs. Built to guard against flash flooding between the 1930s and 1950s it has since become a favourite location for filmmakers looking to shoot car chases and action sequences.
Griffith Observatory is another landmark that turns up in movie after movie, from Rebel Without a Cause to Bowfinger.
Watching Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat for the first time this week I was struck by the deliberate choice of less frequently filmed locations, often quite anonymous. But even these spaces, beneath flyovers and in the car parks of malls, seemed familiar. If we haven’t seen these exact spots, we’ve seen similar ones in, say, episodes of T.J. Hooker, or Bosch.
Perhaps it’s because filmmakers so often live in Los Angeles that they so often make films about the city, or in which, as the cliché goes, “the city is a character in its own right”.
Films like To Live And Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) present particular versions of the city. The former shows us a dusty Wild West city of backrooms, guard dogs, and industrial zones. The latter takes us back in time and attempts to magic back into existence the Los Angeles of the director’s childhood.
Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969), Cisco Pike (Bill Norton, 1972) and L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) are all set in ostensibly the same city but each present it from a different perspective, in different light. There are a thousand others.
Together, they allow the outsider to begin to triangulate – to understand how the city fits together, and how it has changed over time.
L.A. Confidential is based on a novel by James Ellroy whose literary version of Los Angeles is both vivid and idiosyncratic. It’s similar to the city presented by Raymond Chandler in his Philip Marlowe novels, or by Chandler’s disciples in their LA private eye stories, only meaner and more brutal. Chandler’s LA is at least romantic, in a cheap, rather superficial way.
Chandler was an outsider, born in America but raised and educated in England, and looked at Los Angeles as if it were an alien planet. This is from The Little Sister published in 1949:
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
Another British writer who observed Los Angeles from a similar distance was critic Reyner Banham whose 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies feels like a manual for understanding the city. Read a chapter or two and you’ll start to feel like an insider – as if you’ve seen LA’s top secret schematics.
Beyond literature and highbrow criticism, there are a million other ways that Los Angeles infiltrates the brains of people who live in, say, Luton, or Lübeck. If you listen to podcasts the chances are that you’ve heard the hosts fill the first ten minutes comparing notes on their drives to the studio, the weather, where’s good to eat, and how they’ve been effected by whichever natural disasters or episode of social unrest has most most recently occurred.
It’s an interesting aspect of the parasocial relationships we form with these strangers who murmur unscripted nothings in our ears every week for years on end.
Every month the excellent movie podcast Pure Cinema has an episode running down what’s showing at The New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. It’s interesting not only as a list of recommended viewing but also because of the ambient notes on life in the city, including casual asides about which actors have been spotted where, doing what.
Before podcasts there was radio and vast chunks of old radio shows from Los Angeles are now readily available on YouTube. As with podcasts, the pleasure here is in the snippets of chat between songs, and the evocative advertisements.
The songs, though, shouldn’t be ignored. Listening to The Beach Boys, The Byrds and The Monkees, as well as all those Nuggets fodder one-hit wonders, also transports you to Los Angeles.
British music fans talk casually about the Capitol Building and the crack session musicians later christened the Wrecking Crew. The most obsessed listen to hour after hour of bootleg recordings, absorbing the good vibrations of Gold Star Studios in the near silence between takes.
Surely with all of this data – all those episodes of Columbo and Adam-12 – at some point we’ll be able to conjure up a four-dimensional immersive model of a sunny Los Angeles we can wander about in, or even escape into for good.
There have been a few attempts already. The 2011 game L.A. Noire was an attempt to make the world of James Ellroy explorable and playable. To achieve that its creators, Team Bondi, recreated a vast swathe of Los Angeles approximately as it looked and felt in 1947.
It wasn’t perfect but in a rather moving article games journalist Chris Donlan wrote about playing the game with his father who grew up in LA in the 1940s. He found it pretty convincing:
The accuracy with which the city structures and roadways are recreated is really astounding, and the details were almost perfect… To be able to experience it again with my son who was born 20 years after I first left the city was, I think, wonderful for us both…
Then there are the several not-quite Los Angeles cities of the Grand Theft Auto games. The 2004 game GTA: San Andreas gives us Los Santos, an almost parodic version of LA circa 1992. The GTA V from 2013 develops Los Santos further, in higher fidelity, to the point where players were able to shoot their own films in its ultra-realistic environments.
If, like me, you’re not very good at games, there’s also Google Street View – a wonder of the age that so many of us take for granted. It’s easy to lose hours wandering jerkily from one street or roadscape to another, feeling both close to the city and impossibly far away.
“As with shadows and reflections, so with portraits; they are often believed to contain the soul of the person portrayed. People who hold this belief are naturally loth to have their likenesses taken; for if the portrait is the soul, or at least a vital part of the person portrayed, whoever possesses the portrait will be able to exercise a fatal influence over the original of it.”
James Frazer, The Golden Bough
“One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream.”
Edvard Munch, diary entry
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.”
Matthew 6:22
“The eyes are the first thing you have to destroy because they have seen too many bad things.”
Lucio Fulci
These photos were taken between 2019 and 2025, mostly in Bristol, but also in London, Istanbul, and elsewhere.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 