Adjust Your Set
Neo-kayfabe, sauna-theatres and Season 1 lands
It’s time to adjust your television set.
This broadcast will taste like soil, feel like calloused hands and look like a windswept field.
I spent 18 months making five short films. They are all live on YouTube! It was hard, surprising and joyful.
The series is about food, community and the business models that help us all become a little healthier and happier. Each mini-doc explores one project as I hunt for answers to a big question: what can a world in crisis learn from the places bringing us back to the land?
And now, on with the show.
Cultural vignettes
What a gorgeous film and project. MakerWorld lives in a vacant shop on the high street. It’s a space for kids, art and unabashed creativity. I love it.
V&A East opened (a castle of sandy lattice in Stratford) We did the Storehouse too (better, IMO). I wrote a poem and will make it into a video. Are you dying of anticipation?
Oh, Wales. There is no place on earth like Wales on a sunny day. Three shoots in a week for Season 2 of The Landing Films. Matt of Henbant said something beautiful, on why Wales is special: “I think Wales might be the last place to fall in love with money.”
Hottest show in town LOL! Sauna Theatre will seat 80 people at the Edinburgh Fringe. It “fuses the extraordinary powers of heat and art.”
On meaning, purpose and surprise. Packy McCormack wrote this in two halves. The first half is free. I like this bit:
“You are not your job, your outfit, your emotions, your body. You are awareness. You are a little slice of the universe experiencing itself...here to experience and create in a way that only you can”
Playfully annoying (and something useful)
100 jumps. It would be wrong of me not to inflict this game upon you. (Thanks, Matt). I hope you get no more than 23.
GameUIDatabase is “the ultimate reference tool” for designing game-based user interfaces, mostly of the console variety. Not much in the way of indie-games, but bookmarkable none-the-less.
The tech isn’t the story
5 min Adidas film. The story is not that certain tech was involved in making this film. It’s just great storytelling! Snappy pace, starry cast and Zidane as a teenager.
Efforts to save the world
12 June deadline! $1,000,000 pot of funding for “creative teams using immersive media to engage people on climate”. Recipient must be US-based.
22 Mon June. 1% for the planet Hackathon (London) will be a room full of smart people.
Planet Wild is building its next mission budget (currently €84k) to invest in small-scale nature projects around the world.
Rivers. Ben Goldsmith is a bit posh but his Rewilding podcast is occasionally good, e.g: river management in the Netherlands. This matter-of-fact point struck me: insurance companies will pay for rewilding soon, because it’ll be in their own interest. The gist is that rivers should be allowed to meander.
Everything is fake and nobody cares. Where “kayfabe” comes from wrestling and the idea that everyone knows it’s a performance, “Neo-kayfabe” describes the post-truth world we live in. Every word is grift / sales / bullsh*t. The insight is that, if we believe in something fundamental (eg America is great), the details no longer matter.
On the work front: we started a VERY exciting creative process with a certain London gallery, who also commissioned one of Thought Den’s early (and possibly most famous) playful projects. Will this be the difficult second album, or another quirky triumph?
I’ll not go on about The Landing Films but if you’re interested in nature, community and alternative business models, your Subscribes, Likes and Comments are much appreciated.
Until next time,
B.
PS - My socials blew up! 36,000 views on a single Reel and 1,000 followers in 48 hours. Does this mean I’ve cracked the algorithm? Absolutely not.