Stephen Troussé

@retrousse.bsky.social

182 Followers 250 Following

Movies & music at Uncut magazine + charity comms. https://trousse.ghost.io/

“On the other hand, sometimes intellectuals live in a state of actual decay in damp cottages surrounded by snails, grates overflowing with ashes, something more permanent than them growing between their teeth, swaying heaps of books to the ceiling, spines-inward, for some reason, even on the shelves. Their system of order exclusively whimsical; implements mixed on every surface – bellows, used cooking spatula, ink well – because they had to stir a stew before dribbling it down their shirt, and tend the fire, and then had an idea. They sit in the middle like a great, dusty mushroom, thinking deep thoughts. Holy fools, homeowners, with the right to choose exactly how revoltingly they live in pursuit of higher things.” Excerpt From BLACK BAG Luke Kennard
The cover of the new Uncut magazine featuring David Bowie
Stevie Wonder singing ma Cherie amour at Hyde park in london
It may be that the genre they really fit into is the terrace anthem. They made their name with songs to sing when you were winning, when you were young and it didn’t take much more than cigarettes and alcohol to make you feel like you were a rock and roll star. Like New Labour, they’ve benefited from the good fortune of ten years of relative plenty. But really, the great football songs are the ones you sing when you’re losing – when you’re relegated to the third division, or you’ve been twatted at home by United or your club’s been taken over by criminal plutocrats. They’re songs that give you heart, in spite of it all – “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, “Blue Moon”, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. As their audience slump into middle age, and recession looms, when folk might lose their homes, their jobs and more, it may be that Oasis’s biggest challenge is to give their audience something to sing along to when there’s not much else else to shout about. Are they up to it? Are they still mad for it?
A man with a spatula asks a woman, a kangaroo and a hybrid plant-person if they are awake or asleep, in a drawing by Steven Appleby.
A cat watching a lemur and capybara in the 2024 film FLOW
I know that the sale of the Central YMCA represents just the latest chapter in a seemingly neverending story about places being stripped of their social function in favour of the pursuit of personal profit. And I’m not a great campaigner, or an activist – I’m a common reader – but as we lose more spaces like the YMCA, it does make you wonder what kind of a world we’re imagining for ourselves. Mourning the closure of the Central YMCA isn’t just about lamenting the closing of a building, and it’s not about looking back: it’s despair about closing a door to the future. And if you still think that’s just nostalgia, I’d argue that it’s a very particular kind of nostalgia, what C. S. Lewis would call our “lifelong nostalgia”, “our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside”, which “is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation”.
A rusty freight train with the word GOLD on the side
Robin Denselow review of ABBA from the Guardian 1978
A truck from the events company HOT GOBLIN
Review of Strange Darling in Uncut magazine
Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote chase scene in the desert
Desertscape by Moebius
A cat reading Uncut magazine