84. A lesson in resilience from Christopher Owens

---

---

I.

Last summer I wrote that singer Christopher Owens had disappeared from the radar for a while. God, that turns out to be an understatement. In an interview with The Guardian, I read that he’s been through hell over the past seven years. Owens was involved in a road accident, lost his job and his girlfriend, and then his home. He lived in a camper van for a while, until it was stolen and he lost absolutely everything (he never even saw his cat again).

In 2009, I played Owens’ band Girls’ debut album to death. I was mad about the Californian shoegaze sound. Songs like Lust For Life, Laura and Hellhole Ratrace still have a place in my heart fifteen years on. In early 2010, I saw Girls perform at Paradiso. It turned out to be the last time I would see them.

In 2012, Owens disbanded his band and that was that. At least until a few years ago. Owens rang his bandmate Chet ‘JR’ White and they hatched plans to make a new Girls album. But during the recording sessions, Owens noticed that White wasn’t well. “He could barely keep his eyes open,” he says. In October 2020, he passed away at the age of 40.

So that Girls album never materialised. But from that moment on, Owens worked on a new solo album (his first in about ten years) which was released this week. I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair there are a couple of tracks that were intended for that Girls album. If I had to guess: No Good, This Is My Guitar and Two Words.

It’s lovely that Owens managed to pick himself up from rock bottom and make this record. It sounds absolutely brilliant. As I listen, a wave of nostalgia washes over me. Owens’ voice takes me back to when, in my early twenties, I used to listen to bands that nobody seemed to know. In my bubble, at least. We still listened to music on iPods rather than via Spotify. You discovered new music through blogs. Around 2010, it was teeming with indie darlings breaking through in a niche, so you could keep them close to your heart, all to yourself. Anyway, let’s see if Owens can break out of that and achieve a bit of success with this album.

This is my favourite track so far:

---

II.

Nothing puts me off a film, series or book more than a mistake in the translation. Professional subtitlers know that. The idea is that you do read the subtitles but that they don’t stand out, subtitler Peter Bosma told me. I wrote an article about the use of machine translation by video streaming services.

It’s bothering me more and more on services like Netflix and HBO Max, and it irritates me immensely. English sentences are translated literally, there are grammatical errors, and long sentences flash in and out of view. Meanwhile, the Authors’ Union is watching with dismay as streaming services have recently been handling rates for subtitlers. These are getting lower and lower. After all, video services can already do a lot of the groundwork using AI tools to automatically translate subtitles. And then the maths is simple: why would you still pay a professional subtitler the same as before, when they only need to go over the work with a few tweaks here and there?

Well, for one thing, because subtitling is a creative profession that isn’t at all about translating what is said as literally as possible. Subtitling is about paraphrasing, condensing and omitting, says Bosma. Not to mention translating jokes and cultural references between the lines.

---

III.

It’s still horror month! I watched some more great Halloween films.

I enjoyed Barbarian, about a woman who arrives at her Airbnb in the evening only to find the place has been double-booked. With nowhere else to go, she takes a chance that the lad offering to share the flat won’t harm her. Gradually, the film starts to escalate, like a snowball rolling down a mountain and causing a massive avalanche by the end. It goes completely off the rails, and that’s a real treat.

*Creature from the Black Lagoon* is one of my favourite Universal Monster films. A group of researchers sail a boat into the jungle and arrive at a lagoon where a strange creature is hiding. This monster, also known as the Gill-man, has got stuck somewhere in the evolutionary process between fish and human. Gill-man is such a wonderfully dramatic Universal Monster, designed to hold up a mirror to the viewer. The underwater footage in the film is incredible. It’s unimaginable how they managed to pull that off in 1954. Another classic: *The Body Snatcher* (1945), starring horror greats Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, who previously played Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula respectively. In this film, Karloff plays the grave robber Gray. In Edinburgh in 1831, he digs up bodies which he sells to the eminent doctor MacFarlane. The doctor uses the corpses to teach his students and advance science. When Gray starts murdering people to replenish his supplies, things go awry. A delightfully dark film in which Karloff steals the show. I hadn’t planned to, but I think I’m watching all the films in the *Final Destination* series. In the third instalment, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the lead role. There’s one other highlight in this mad film that focuses even less on the plot and even more on the ridiculous murders, namely [the transition from a shot of two sunbeds in which girls are being fried alive to their two coffins](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ea5aa55be28d34ca3082e4c4cad979d6/6606d05064ac80f7-44/s540x810/b2df3ad4fc2c6597f9732643596ef182800f0ab6.gifv). Chef’s kiss. ---

---

PS.

Photographer Erwin Olaf was frustrated that his work had never been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. De Volkskrant therefore describes it as sweet revenge that he donated hundreds of photographs to the Rijksmuseum. Next week, the biography of Olaf by writer Mischa Cohen (title: Erwin Olaf Springveld – Hard werken, hard feesten will be published. It will be presented at the Stedelijk. At the end of next year, the museum will finally host a major retrospective exhibition of Olaf’s work. De Volkskrant: “Posthumous recognition for the photographer whom the museum kept out for thirty years.”

---

A new EP by Bon Iver: Sable,. The beautiful track S P E Y S I D E was released a while ago, but I think AWARDS SEASON might be even better.

---

In this art project by Macro Room, you can see the sacrifices humanity makes to move forward. Or are we actually ruining it?

---

Lize Spit’s new book is due out on 15 November. Her previous two novels (Het smelt and Ik ben er niet) read almost like gripping films; once they had you hooked, you couldn’t put them down. Clever, but sometimes almost too contrived. That’s why I’m very curious about Autobiografie van mijn lichaam in which Spit reveals more of herself. After learning that her mother is terminally ill, she tries to salvage their troubled relationship one last time. In doing so, she explores their past and her own troubled relationship with her body.

---

What a treat that a new Wallace & Gromit film is coming out after nineteen years. Vengeance Most Fowl will be available on Netflix early next year. A teaser is already out.

---

In 1974, Amsterdam’s Luud Schimmelpennink was way ahead of his time with his ‘white bikes’ scheme and the Witkar, an electric two-seater vehicle that could be hired at five stations in the city centre for one guilder per five kilometres. Once your journey was over, you would return the vehicle to a station so that someone else could use it. Fifty years ago! Long before initiatives such as Tier bikes and Check scooters. This week, the BBC published an archive report on the Witkar.

---

I’d really appreciate it if you’d subscribe to this newsletter. I send it out every Sunday. Tips and feedback are always welcome!