I'm Jack, thanks for stopping by. This is about me, who I am, with some background to my art.
I was born in Scotland in 1996 although I eventually settled near London where I spent most of my childhood.
I chose to study psychology when I got to university because it allowed me to mix as many of the different things I enjoyed together- literature analysis, foreign languages, the sciences. Studying gave me the freedom to immerse myself in text, discourse, spoken language, and write about it through the night in the library.
I still study psychology and my day-to-day is academia, but recently I interact with it from a distance. Significance statistics and mathematical models of behaviour often feel lifeless and art has taught me more about humanity and the mind than 6 years of sitting in lecture halls and laboratories. I much prefer to think about psyche, the Ancient Greek word for soul and the etymological root of the word psych(e)ology.
For as far back as my memory takes me, I’ve had a love affair with language.
"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.”
-Virginia Woolf
I’ve only shared a very select few writings publicly before , and should you decide to read them, thank you for meeting with me within these lines. If they resonate with you, please feel free to share them.
I write first and foremost for myself, to seek something unbroken amidst the chaos; but the act of writing is larger than just myself. Poetry has allowed me to connect and resonate with otherwise strangers around the world. They inspire me, I hope that I can sometimes do the same for them.
We’re halfway through 2023 and critics are slouching towards their Best Records Of The Year So Far lists. They’re rarely happy about it. If dicing releases every 12 months is arbitrary, then six months is labor on a factory line, wood chips for the content mill. But this year, I feel like they hate these lists more than usual. They’re having a hard time picking much. And maybe you are, too. P...
At the close of 2022, Bitcoin wasn’t just down—it was so down that its precipitous fall was breaking records. One report from Bank of America suggested that the collapse in value was the fifth-worst for any asset in financial history. Despite steady gains this year, it hasn’t even come close to its November 2021 peak, and now things are about to get shaken up like a bead in a baby’s rattle w...
In Ari Aster’s 2016 short film C’est La Vie, Chester Crummings, a homeless man, speaks directly and combatively to camera about his life and society at large as he wanders the streets of LA, surviving, begging for change and casually murdering people. At one point, he says: “You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says it’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich.”
In Sig...
