Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
Welcome back. It’s been a while. If you’re a long-time subscriber to this letter, you’ll know that I am a fan of the Brooklyn band Office Culture. I did a very brief write-up of their 2022 LP “Big Time Things” here.
In the interim, I’ve become online-friendly with the band’s mastermind Winston Cook-Wilson, and we’ve exchanged a few music and film recommendations here and there. More importantly, the band has returned with a layered and expansive new LP entitled “Enough”, which you can listen to below, and read about (and buy) here.
Over the weekend, Winston DM’d me with the following: “This is maybe a crazy idea but I can’t shake it—would you have any interest in curating a movie watchlist to go with this Office Culture record? Like 5 movies that feel related / in its world to you, with a couple sentences about why. I’m so curious how someone with a deep knowledge of film and an independent interest in this music, would triangulate that. And as I said, the record feels related to film for me.”
I thought it was a fun idea—and squarely in the collaborative, generative mindset that powers “Enough”—so I set myself the challenge of taking a crack at it without doing my usual thing of overthinking something to the point of physical pain. First thing this morning I hammered out the following, in one go, off the top of my head. Enjoy!
Films that come to mind when I think of “Enough” by Office Culture include, but are not necessarily limited to:
Chantal Akerman’s musical Golden Eighties (1986). The film is a polyphonic symphony—somehow simultaneously gaudy and austere—that makes room for multi-vocal exhortations of love and longing, yet is still marked by the unmistakable stamp of its auteur. I think “Enough” shares plenty of this DNA.
I can’t listen to “Enough” and not immediately travel to Scotland in my mind. Why? Perhaps its because I like to imagine that the “Hat Guy” is wearing the hat from the cover of The Blue Nile’s “Hats”, and traipsing past crowded streets and empty bars on the way to his moment of sartorial-existential crisis in the doorway of a party. Alan, the protagonist of Scottish maestro Bill Forsyth’s sui generis Christmas comedy Comfort and Joy (1984) is, for me, a “hat guy”: freshly dumped, self-critical and facing an uncertain future, yet doing it with wry charm. I can also see Alan, resigned and rueful, strolling through the chilly air to the instrumental break (03:20—04:52) that closes “Where I Can’t Follow”. This is my favorite passage on the whole album: when those chiming “Saturday Night”/Blue Nile guitars start pealing, we know it’s over, but we also know that we can always start again.
“Enough” is a headphone album that rewards intensive listening, even if this act of deep immersion takes you closer to textured ambivalence rather than any sort of concrete meaning. If you listen too hard with your heart and head in the wrong place, you might end up like the protagonist of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974): secluded, damaged, forlornly wondering if he was cruel… and honking on a saxophone in a wrecked apartment.
If “Enough”’s maximalist form harks back to the CD’s 1990s heyday, it’s also in conversation with the era’s boom of daring, hard-to-classify independent cinema. Tom Noonan’s funny and disturbing chamber piece What Happened Was… (1994)—about an extraordinarily wayward date night—comes to mind when I listen to the claustrophobic, churning reckoning of “Open Up Your Fist”, and the woozy, off-kilter fairground shuffle of “Around It”.
Michael Winterbottom’s gorgeous, unfairly forgotten Wonderland (1999) is a film about Londoners looking for love, connecting, and breaking apart, threaded together by an insistent musicality in the form of Michael Nyman’s wondrous (and often repurposed in commercials) orchestral score. In spirit and form, Wonderland makes me think of “Enough”’s closer “Everything”: an initially discordant and slightly awkward portrait of human relationships that coheres into an open-hearted, hopeful, and quietly forceful grace note.
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!