Welcome to Midnight Culture

I have friends who savour the final pages of a book or the last episode of a series under a carefully calculated schedule. They create the perfect conditions to consume them; dinner on a tray in front of their laptop or at the end of a day they know is going to be stressful. I am not one of those people. I don’t want delayed gratification.

If I am into something, I want all of it as quickly as possible and in it’s totality. I want to watch it/ read it/ listen to it and then I want to Google the fuck out of it. I love a bit of media trivia; a juicy ‘Production’ tab is my favourite part of any film’s Wikipedia page.

I like to stay up late. I like cities with 24 hour off- licences, I like flicking through the Sky TV guide all the way to four in the morning, just to see what I could watch if I was awake. I like starting a new episode at one in the morning.

Last year I read twenty-two books after having read nothing for pleasure for the previous five years. As a young person I was a ferocious reader, regularly tearing through 300 page novels in two or three sittings. I stopped reading because it had become a chore, chewing through reading lists of books I mostly didn’t enjoy. In place of reading for pleasure, I started watching more. With streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video it was the beginning of the ‘full season drop.’ You could watch a whole season in a day if you wanted to. If binge reading until the early hours of the morning was a cathartic sugar rush, binge watching was like eating electricity.

Anyone who knows me, knows I consume a lot. I watch a lot, I read a lot, I scroll a lot and I love hearing about what other people have been watching, reading and listening to. Often these are solitary experiences but the art we consume individually invites us to connect with others, through our shared experience of the content. Also, practically, when you get through a series as quickly as I do, you are always in need of something new to watch or read!

As you may have gathered, I don’t do moderate very well. If I am enjoying something I want to know everything about it. I will watch interviews with actors, musicians and writers, I will do a deep dive social media stalk, I will watch that indie movie that actor made in 2001, because I want to know everything. I get caught up in the obsession. Last year during Lockdown One, I became so obsessed with Mark Ronson that I listened to his album ‘Late Night Feelings’ on repeat solidly for about two months (and that really is not an exaggeration, it was the only music I listened to) but I’ll talk about that another time.

So I want to start making a record of things I have enjoyed and hopefully there will be things that I can recommend that other people might enjoy and then we can obsess together. If you’re reading a post about my favourite 90’s rom-coms maybe you can let me know the ones I’ve missed and then I can find something new and the collective experience continues.

Expect to see:

And just to be clear I consume everything: plays, podcasts, reality tv, anime, documentaries, novels, poetry, YouTube clips, drama, comedy, cult films, queer films, pop, musical theatre… etc.

See you at Midnight!