One of the principal reasons for our recent trip to Brighton was to collect a painting. Some time ago I was fortunate enough to work alongside talented graphic designer / artist Siân Klein at an art centre here in Oxford. She fled the city and headed to the coast during pandemic times, but we’ve just about stayed in touch, and I recently learned that she’d turned her hand to landscapes. Specifically she’s produced a series of bright acrylic paintings that celebrate the geometry of cityscapes. 

As soon as I showed these to my special lady friend, she wondered aloud whether Siân would be interested in making a painting for us, of our former neighbourhood in Reykjavík. A few months later, the resulting piece now adorns one wall of our living space, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. 

I first saw Daniel Kitson live about a decade ago when he was touring a show titled Tree. It was the first time in the comedian’s career that he worked with a substantial piece of set dressing, and—more than a decade later—he mentions as part of his current show, Thrum, that the giant tree is still in storage. It’s a not-insignificant monthly expenditure, he explains, to keep it there. But environmentally-responsible disposal of the tree would cost ~10 months of storage costs in one go, which has never felt like the easier choice. Somehow, Kitson manages to make the dry maths of his financial imprudence into something hilarious. It speaks to his enormous likability and his skills as a comic, but it also nods to a key component of his onstage persona: projecting a complex mix of self-assurance and self-ridicule—a “generational talent” who cannot get out of his own way. 

What makes it work is the extent to which Kitson is demonstrably a man of principles. One thread—of so very many at play throughout the evening—concerns his unwillingness to raise his ticket price. It’s a topic to which he returns a few times, wrestling with questions around what it means to make one’s art as accessible as possible if it’s always the same people who turn up anyway. Ultimately, you get the sense that he’s just not entirely comfortable enjoying “two hours of being applauded for one fifth the annual salary of a nurse”. 

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I recently caught a screening of Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and I’m happy to report that they remain an interesting filmmaker making interesting films. The first of those, 2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair, didn’t really work for me but was at least formally and visually inventive. I thought a better balance was struck with I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which was funny and tender as well as looking great (and calling on both 90s nostalgia and Buffy fandom). 

TSaDaCM feels like another case of Schoenbrun applying their own sensibilities onto a familiar genre template: this time, specifically, the meta slasher movie. The specifics of plot are less important than the fact that (as both writer and director) Schoenbrun is exploring very personal subjects in a smart way, and with a lightness of touch that invites the audience to participate in, and draw from, the film. The movie is very light on the horror aspects, and is more interested in the chemistry between its two excellent leads: Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. 

I also recently watched Scream 7 (2026), which provides a crystal clear example of what happens when the meta slasher sub-sub-genre has entirely run out of fresh ideas. By contrast, Schoenbrun’s movie is smart, funny and full of heart. It’s also quite silly, and in places wears its artifice in a way that not all audiences will enjoy¹, but I found everything to be so consistently well executed that it was hard not to smile throughout. 

As newsletter subscribers may remember, I was already looking forward to Schoenbrun’s adaptation of Charles Burns’ Black Hole (1995–2005), currently in pre-production for Netflix. TSaDaCM has only further convinced me that they’re the right person to bring that material to the screen. Beyond that, I hope they get to keep making these strange films. Scream 7 took $208M on a $45M budget, so—for better or more likely worse—Scream 8 is more or less guaranteed. At the time of writing, TSaDaCM looks set to just about recoup its modest budget of $10M. Buy a ticket; pay to rent it; please help interesting artists make interesting art. 

1. eg a Wes Anderson-esque use of painted backdrops  ↵

This week we spent a few days down in Brighton, and I have brought back coffee and food recommendations for you. 

• Loam (Gloucester Rd) — a cute little spot in the heart of the city; probably the best coffee I had this trip

• 17 Grams (Meeting House Ln) — impeccable packaging design and a really good veggie breakfast; let down only by whoever was on aux playing some questionable stuff

• Fika (Madeira Dr) — really good coffee + stupendous baked treats

• 44 Poets (Rutland Rd, Hove) — worth the journey out to neighbouring Hove for the quiet vibe, cute dog¹ and good coffee

• Bonsai Plant Kitchen (Baker St) — hands down the best meal we had, and one of the best vegan restaurants I’ve ever eaten at; we ordered eight different dishes but I would have been perfectly content with a plateful of the tempura cauliflower or a huge bowl of the ‘dirty rice’

• The Pickle (Bristol Rd) — a little further out in Kemptown, but worth the walk: the menu probably rotates, but the vegan sandwich I had—mushroom, rocket, aioli on focaccia—was superb²

• Nowhere Man (Upper North St) — we went here for the pancakes and they did not disappoint!

1. cute dog not guaranteed, I guess ↵

2. check out the nearby Kemptown Bookshop whilst you’re there ↵

Last Saturday we headed into London to see a trio of Canadian bands under the billing of the All The Feelings tour. We were staying in Camberwell, which is not an area of London that I know, so we took the opportunity to walk around — found a cute little park where we saw a guy repair a lamppost whilst a surprisingly inept spaniel failed to find and retrieve a tennis ball. We browsed at Lala Books, got pretty darn good pizza at Theo’s (where the chilli sauce is not to be underestimated), and then headed to Brixton Academy, a venue I used to attend frequently, but haven’t visited in years. 

We caught the tail end of Stars’ set celebrating 20+ years of Set Yourself on Fire (2004). I was then approached by a guy, five minutes later, asking whether they’d played yet… hated to give him the bad news. I made a game of spotting Toronto Blue Jays caps amongst the crowd until Broken Social Scene came on for a fun set that epitomised the night: a group of friends who have been making and playing music together for ~25 years, just having a lot of fun. It featured a rotating cast drawn from the extensive list of current and former members of the collective, including—of course—Emily Haines coming out for ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ (from seminal 2002 LP You Forgot It in People). The whole thing had an air of celebration. With up to 20 performers at any one time, it felt a little like the audience were simply witness to a party happening onstage. 

Headliners Metric were far tighter and more controlled. This is a band who have been doing it for a while and know how to lead an audience where they want them to go. As my special lady friend commented, Haines in particular has a presence that none of the ~30 other people on stage throughout the evening can claim to share. If it were up to me, there are tweaks that I would’ve made to a setlist weighted towards this year’s Romanticize the Dive, one of them being to fix the omission of that album’s high point: second single ‘Time is a Bomb’. Overall though, ten albums into their career, Metric have enough grade-A material that something is going to be left out.¹ What is here is pretty much note-perfect and the crowd are into it. I had encore closer ‘Black Sheep’ stuck in my head for ~48 hours after leaving the venue, which is as it should be. 

1. See also perhaps my favourite Metric song, ‘False Dichotomy’, which was a stand-out moment the last time we saw them in 2023.  ↵

Today I am 16,676 days old, and I’ve been lucky enough to be in a relationship with my beloved special lady friend for 8,338 of those days: exactly half. From here on out, it’ll be true to say that I’ve spent more of my life with her than without, and I cannot express just how blessed that makes me feel. 

Do you know… I don’t think I’ve had beans from Square Mile before. Longstanding roasters based in north-east London—of which coffee YouTube’s own James Hoffman is co-founder—it’s a (semi-)local famous name that I’m yet to sample anything from. 

That’ll change soon though, as I just picked up this bag from the Eastcastle St branch of Kaffeine during our weekend stay in the big city. They do things right at Kaffeine, and it’s always worth a visit. I ordered a double espresso, which was potent and delicious, and was served with both a sip-able green tea palate cleanser and a glass of filtered water with a light citrus boost.

At lunchtime today, I cycled out to Little Clarendon Street to grab a coffee at the newly re-opened Common Ground. The vibe here is different from any other coffee spot in Oxford, partly because it’s also a co-working space / community arts hub. This afternoon, almost every customer was celebrating with the staff that they managed to take ownership and get the place up and running again. Add in good coffee, super comfy mismatched seating and someone in the corner playing out 70s soul vinyl — it felt good to have the doors open again. 

The current lease runs into next summer, so if you’re local to Oxford please go support the place. I did my part by grabbing a delicious cinnamon bun along with my long black. 

Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. 

I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.¹ Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their strengths, but in recent years I’ve become increasingly bullish on the prospect of an open social web based in AT Protocol (or atproto). 

Perhaps most important, its basis in individual ‘Personal Data Servers’ (PDSs), as a user-empowerment mechanism that also solves for centralisation, is very exciting. Secondarily, the use of domains as public identifiers is super neat. At the technical level, my account on atproto has the identifier did:plc:wpjckptarurm2hg4456ecee4, but I’m free to associate that with a URL, and I’ve done so: adamwood.online — far more human-readable. That URL now becomes my username across any application built on atproto. That’s particularly exciting when you look at the variety of experiences already being stood up, collectively forming what has come to be known as ‘the Atmosphere’. 

A quick poke around an index of services already built on atproto reveals solutions for microblogging, photo sharing, live-streaming, personal pages, long-form writing, media logging and also interesting projects in spaces like professional identity, web annotation and curation. It’s an exciting and rapidly-evolving ecosystem, all using a shared user identity and true user-ownership of data.

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I spent the recent Bank Holiday reading the new book from Rachel Cusk. A continuation of her project to—seemingly—remove not just plot but character from the modern novel, it arrives freighted with some headline-grabbing buzz about the fact that the ‘fictional’ actress of which it purports to be a portrait is a (very) thinly-veiled Natalie Portman. 

I found it a somewhat frustrating read. Cusk’s language remains mesmerising, but here it’s pointed in a distinctly ungenerous, perhaps even unkind, direction. If the person depicted in the novel were entirely the product of Cusk’s imagination, you would say that she had made it her exercise to centre the novel around someone for whom the reader is invited to feel unsympathetic. So clear are the allusions to Portman’s career, however, that it begins to feel like spite. The bulk of the slender novel is bracketed by conversations between the actress and her would-be biographer, with the closing pages seeming to contain a report of the moment in which Portman expressed her displeasure with Cusk at having written the book. To then include that conversation itself within the text is both a deft meta trick and a deeply uncool twist of the character assassin’s knife.

Where the novel does reach higher—to discuss, for example, the extent to which each of us is called upon to act out roles in our lives—the effort is fatally undermined by the framing. 

I like trying out new roasters and I like funky packaging, so this pick-up from Edinburgh’s own Cult Coffee Roasters is a win-win for me. Actually, a triple win: check out the neat tarot card-style pack-in that was foil-wrapped inside—come for the coffee, get a free bookmark. 

I’ve made a couple of cups of this already, as filter: one in the Chemex and another using a single-serving no-bypass dripper. Both have been pleasantly complex, if a little darker / heavier than I’d usually go. 

Shhh… don’t tell my reading group, but I’ve also been seeing other books. In fact, I just got done with a pair of books by British writer Jem Calder. 

Reward System (2023) is a set of interlinked stories, and this year’s I Want You to Be Happy is Calder’s first novel. The two share a similar focus, centring a relationship between a man in his mid-to-late thirties and a woman in her early-to-mid twenties. Throughout both, Calder shows compassion for his characters where it would have been easier to draw one or other of them as a villain. Both have flaws (some more serious than others), but I was impressed by the nuance with which Calder could write from both perspectives. This is the case in the novel, in particular,  where the chapters alternate perspectives, focussing first on Joey and then on Chuck as they navigate their new romance. Calder uses this oscillation to good effect. In one chapter the reader might be privy to Chuck’s self-recriminations over his own recent actions; perhaps his certainty that he has ruined things irreparably; how he agonises for so long over the best way to make an apology that he’s paralysed into not making one. Then we switch to Joey’s perspective, and witness her confusion over why she’s not heard from Chuck — the silence itself amplifying the forgivable into something worse-seeming. 

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New in the hopper this morning is this offering from Edinburgh-based roasters Carter. I didn’t get the ‘forest fruit cake’ in my first cup (as filter), but it was clean and pleasant. 

Last week we headed north to spend some time in a part of the country I’ve never been to before. On the way up we stayed overnight in York, where we spent some time walking around, dropping in for a look at Thin Ice Press, good coffee from Another Brother and out-of-this-world pizza at Dough Eyed.  

On the way out of the city we stopped in at Beningborough Hall for a walk around the gardens and the house, plus ice cream in the sunshine. The estate has a storied history, but my favourite part was a brief glimpse of a tiny hummingbird near one of the lily ponds. 

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It’s that time of year again: the season for enjoying a long(-ish) novel in the company of an unknown number of like-minded fellow readers. Friends, if you prefer—only friends you’ve maybe not met. 

Many of you know the story, but just in case you don’t, it goes like this: back in 2014 it took a small posse of folks to get me over the finish line of David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel Infinite Jest (1996). Since then, I’ve led a total of ten (10) read-alongs (reads along?) of long novels by the likes of Haruki Murakami, Donna Tartt, Roberto Bolaño and several others. We tackle the book at a very relaxed pace of ~100 pages per week, and each Sunday you get an email from me discussing our progress. 

We took a summer off to recharge last year, but now feels like a good time to get the gang back together and do this thing again. 

This year’s novel of choice is The Unconsoled (1995) by Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) amongst others. Ishiguro’s fourth novel, upon release it was described in The Telegraph as ‘almost indecipherable’. Our task: decipher it real good. We’ll begin on 19 Jul and finish on 30 Aug. As always, it’s free to join—you’ll just need a copy of the novel. 

Oh, you’ll also need to let me know that you want to take part. The easiest way to do that is to head over here and click the dancing ink bottle. It’d be great to have you along. 

Update: the read-along is now in progress and sign-ups are closed. You can still access the archive of newsletters whenever you like. 

This afternoon we attended a musical event with a difference. Sigur Rós: Ára is billed as ‘a fully immersive listening experience, expanding the sonic universe of Sigur Rós to new sensory dimensions’. In a small black box theatre, an audience of around 35 people sit or lie on beanbags, surrounded by the kind of darkness absolute enough that sometimes I wasn’t sure whether my eyes were open or closed. The music seems to come from all around you. Occasionally a sweet scent floats into the room. Now and again an abstract projection glows dimly into view on the ceiling, brightening a little as the music crescendos. For most of the 75 minute duration however, it’s possible to begin forgetting that you have a body at all. For me, it was somewhat reminiscent of the experience I had using a sensory-deprivation tank for the first time. 

I focussed on the music, or the music and my breathing. I tried not to try to make sense of the projected images, but the rational mind is difficult to turn off, even if experiences like this one can turn it down a little for a while.¹ For the briefest of moments, I felt able to embody the fact that if I was anything at all, I was whatever was sensing the music, the projected pattern and the sweet scent. Somewhat separated from the physicality of that act, and its ‘meaning’—if any—it was fleetingly possibly to simply receive something. 

It’s a difficult sensation to adequately capture, but I’ve no reservations about recommending it. Ára is at Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities until 19 July. Should it subsequently pop up near you, it’s well worth your time and attention. 

• • •

I have seen Sigur Rós live once: you’ll have to take my word for it, but this photo is from their Brixton Academy show in 2013. 

1. I noted something similar at another music / art performance piece, by Ryoicihi Kurokawa, some years ago, of which I wrote: 

   ‘It goes similarly with the visuals: they flare up, flash, morph one to another to another, spawn unanticipated lines of connection. Whilst the event notes entreat the viewer/listener not to ‘digest gradually with the head’ but rather to ‘feel simultaneously with the eyes and ears’, I found myself able to experience the work at this pre-cognitive level only for very short periods. The mind’s tendency toward processing and categorisation is too strong and too deeply ingrained to consistently suppress, and even making the effort to do so with respect to higher cognition, I found myself incapable of not perceiving the visual elements of the piece as belonging to particular sets: organic, geometric, topographical….’ ↵

A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at the Sheldonian to see Ali Smith awarded the Bodley Medal. On that occasion she read a passage from what would later become the opening section of her next novel: Gliff (2024). I published some notes on that novel about a year later, when I finished listening to Eliot Sumner’s audiobook version. 

Recently, I re-read Gliff—this time in hardback—in preparation for my first reading of Smith’s new novel: Glyph (2026). In my notes on the first of the pair, having learned that there would be a follow-up with a homophonic title, I wrote: 

The author of a novel published in two back-to-front versions, and also of a seasonal quartet that numbers five volumes, it’s little surprise that Smith intends to extend her current project further. To mirror the first book, interrogate it, subvert it?

Turns out—unsurprisingly—that it’s option D: all of the above. 

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This week I received a card from an acquaintance in Brooklyn, artist Shawn Liu. I don’t get post all that often, and seldom is it so exciting. You see, this is no ordinary postcard, but a postcard-sized painting—one of 100 such studies that Shawn’s making as part of his current project. The intention is to send each of the paintings to people around the world; all that the recipient is asked to do is to email Shawn a photo of the painting in its new home. Eventually he’s going to turn all of those photos into a book. 

If you would like to request a postcard painting be sent to you, hop over to the project page at Shawn’s site. At the time of writing, there are still some slots available. 

Something I’ve been pondering recently is whether statements of gratitude need always contain subjects as well as objects. Which is to say, when we express ‘I am grateful for x’, does there necessarily need to be an invisible parenthetical: ‘I am grateful (to y) for x’? 

I imagine that for people of faith this question is easily answered. If such a person says ‘I am grateful for this sunny day’, it’s implicit that it is to their chosen deity that the gratitude is owed and directed. For those of us who recognise no higher power possessed of its own will, things are trickier. Perhaps the implied parenthetical can still be filled with something like ‘to nature’ in the above example, but there are other cases in which there isn’t a neat fit. When I am mindful enough to think, in a given moment, ‘I am grateful to be experiencing this’, is the gratitude owed to something as impersonal as circumstance? Is my gratitude for my good fortune being directed to the network of causes and effects that has given rise to it? 

Asked another way: can one be grateful to something that is not knowingly responsible for the object of one’s gratitude? I believe in karma as an impersonal and incomprehensibly-complex cascade of causation, but that doesn’t seem like something to which gratitude can be appropriately expressed. 

Perhaps the distinction here is better drawn between ‘thankfulness’ and ‘appreciation’. Where the object of my gratitude is the result of the actions of another will, it feels appropriate to express thanks. In those other circumstances, where I simply wish to reflect upon my good fortune, perhaps it’s more appropriate to take a moment simply to appreciate it.