Chart / July

Time for a chart. Here in Athens, the city has been gripped by a heatwave for the better part of two weeks, which means that even thinking about writing causes me to break out in a Rocky-II-final-fight sweat. As a result, I haven’t done much. Ideas aplenty, but the ability to rise above this heat-induced malaise and tap away at the keyboard has thus far eluded me. I didn’t read anything about this in The War of Art. Perhaps it’s time for Steven Pressfield to add a new chapter: Conquering Your Resistance in the Climate Crisis (answer: put the air conditioning on full blast and accelerate change even further).

Publication news: The trad-publisher Quillkeepers Press has seen fit to include one of my essays, titled ‘Shrouds’, in its forthcoming anthology on grief. It’s a highly personal essay penned during a period of heightened emotion, and I’m over the moon that someone wants to put it in print. I’m unsure when the publication date will be, but suffice to say I’ll make a big song and dance about it.

Book of the month: I will pick Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, simply because the first few chapters are a whirlwind of climate adaptation and mitigation measures observed through the lens of parody. While the story is little more than a series of side quests and the payoff falls flat for me, the idea of companies being able to buy excinction credits so they can safely eliminate animal species in pursuit of capitalist expansion is both a bold and terrifying idea (and one I wish I’d come up with).

Film of the month: Under Therapy, a Spanish comedy-drama from the heady days of 2024. It moseys along for a while, doing that European film thing where a handful of character actors are confined to a single location and act their hearts out in the form of quickfire dialogue and meaty swipes against the conventions of modern society when WAPAW it shifts into high gear and the comedy drains away and you’re left feeling both hollow (because of the climax) and satisfied (that you didn’t just spend 90 minutes watching a guy take great pleasure in blowing a bugle in other people’s faces).

Album of the month: I guess it’s Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions by Deathbrain (yep) simply because everything else I’ve listened to this month has been hot trash. The album is outsider house, so it reminds me a little of AL90 or Kedr Livansky, albeit nowhere near as good because it all just kind of melts together. Good for when you’re melting, though.

40-degree playlist:

1 Deep Purple - Burn

2 Van Halen- On Fire

3 Disclosure - When A Fire Starts To Burn

4 C&C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat

5 King Krule - A Lizard State

6 Talking Heads - Burning Down the House

on a steel horse i ride

Petersen's Ghosts now available to read on Litro Magazine USA

As Grant Price awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a man with an essay published in Litro Magazine. I have wanted to contribute to this magazine for a couple of years now, so to something of mine in print and online is fantastic. This piece is called “Petersen’s Ghosts”, and it is about how German municipal policy has failed to help the poor and deprived in Hamburg in the 50 years since the seminal photobook, Café Lehmitz, was released by Anders Petersen in the mid-1970s. As a bonus, this essay was an ‘Editor’s Pick’, which I shall grasp at and hold on to like it’s pure gold.

YOU CAN READ IT HERE (FORMATTED FOR MOBILE)

A quote from the piece:

I stare at the derelicts and the forgotten who have burrowed deep into the seams of this road. Here are Petersen’s ghosts, hiding in plain sight. The difference is they have nowhere to go. In his photos, the hopeless came together, swathed in shirts and ties, dresses and heels, in search of camaraderie. If you squint, they could be movie stars. Today is pure chaos. The hopeless are strewn across the city, homelessness rising, tent cities under bridges and overpasses. There is no togetherness. No community.

The essay features photographs by the talented Daniel Montenegro, who is a fellow alumnus of the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin.

I am grateful that Daniel’s works are there to elevate my own.

Also thanks to Anders Petersen for signing off on the content (one of his photos from Café Lehmitz is below).

the lads.

Chart / April

Squeaking in at the end of the month with a brief update on what’s hot and what’s not in the world of Climate Writer Grant Price (hello SEO, keep me in first place, Google).

First up: publication! I had an essay accepted for the world’s favourite magazine, Litro. What is Litro? Apparently, they “publish stories that transport.” Just like a train. I was very keen to appear in their hallowed pages, so this is fantastic news. The essay is about the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and it features photographs from the Swedish lens maestro Anders Petersen and the black-and-white tyro Daniel Montenegro. It’s not out yet, but once it is published it’ll appear right here (under ‘Shorts’).

Second up: publication! I wrote an essay for a photobook by the photographer Martin Kemper titled ‘Waters take Me’. Again, the book hasn’t been published, but once it’s out…you know the drill.

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a new section on the website: NON-FICTION. This page contains all my projects that I have done for other people, either as a ghostwriter, editor or translator. It also lists my own forthcoming photobook, The Burned-Over Country, which is being finalised as I write. More on that in the future. Have a click around and see all the things I do for other people for $$$.

Also, I’ll be merging my photography website with this one soon, so everything is in one place.

Book of the month: Cool Hand Luke. One of those novels I gravitate towards, it’s about hopeless men living dirty and smoking a whole lot. The film is far more famous, but the book by Donn Pearce is well worth a read for the simple, effective prose and an honest look at the US penal system in the 1950s and 1960s. Reminiscent of Ivan Denisovich, Cormac McCarthy and Deliverance.

Film of the month: Heaven Can Wait. Beautiful, tragic, touching and stylish in equal measure, this is an uplifting treat all the way from the troubling days of 1943. It stars Don Ameche, who looks so much like Brad Pitt in some scenes that I had to look him up and check that Ameche wasn’t Brad’s dad. There’s also Gene Tierney, whose life story is just as complex and melancholy as her character in the film.

Album of the month: The compact EP Connla’s Well by Maruja. This is a perfect continuation to last year’s Knocknarea and maybe the pinnacle of what people are calling the ‘windmill’ scene (that’s post-punk British bands that sound like Slint with sad-sounding people whisper-talking over angular bass/guitar attacks). The scene has been going on since 2021, but I’m not bored of it yet…as long as it continues in this vein.

Sounds of the summer:

1 Headache - The Party That Never Ends

2 Michael Vincent Waller - Jennifer

3 Mount Kimbie, King Krule - Empty And Silent

4 Tirzah - F22

5 Daniel Avery - Running

6 Jlin, Philip Glass - The Precision of Infinity

steps are for racing.

Chart / March

This month, I was away at a writer’s residency at Joya:AiR in southern Spain, a climate-positive, not-for-profit, off-grid farm-like Moon base, where I found out that I can channel my inner Stephen King and somehow write 4,000 words per day. I also learned that being isolated on a mountain, a four-hour walk from the nearest town, with a handful of strangers to keep me company is quite the challenge. Plus, I eat more food than the average person, apparently (in service of dem gains). All in all, it was a great experience, the surroundings were magnificent, and I’ve made significant headway with the old magnum opus (no, really, this time).

In Pacific State news….there is no news. Poor baby is tanking hard and it pains my sensitive heart that my favourite of all my novels has by far the lowest audience, but such is life. Locus asked to review it, at least, and it has been submitted to a couple of awards, so there’s a chance it’ll find a new lease of life at some point. But maybe it just isn’t meant to be appreciated in its own time.

Other writing news: I translated a couple of photobooks that will be coming out this year, my own photobook is at the dummy stage, and I’ve started a new climate-related book project that - I hope - will see the light of day this year. Even so, it’s April tomorrow and things are piling up. It’ll be 2025 before I know it.

Book of the month: I’ll go with Night of the Hunter by the fantastically named Davis Grubb. The film with Robert Mitchum may be more famous (and I believe it may have provided some inspiration for Cape Fear), but the novel is tightly plotted and darkly endearing. I love the Southern turns of phrase and the quasi-oedipal battle between John and Preacher for the mother/wife’s heart. Seems like every single page has a new description of the Moon on it, but it all helps create an expressionist mood suffused in sweat and fractious energies.

Film of the month: I finally watched Fear and Desire, Kubrick’s earliest film. It’s rough and ready and the seams are extremely visible, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. There’s a spark there throughout, though the only really worthwhile scene is when the youngest of the soldiers goes insane while taunting a woman prisoner tied to a tree. I felt echoes of Gomer Pyle (Full Metal Jacket appeared a full 34 years after F&D) while watching it. It was only an hour long, too - good job, as the actor who plays the captain is unbearable.

Album of the month: Invincible Shield by Judas Priest. Pure, beautiful metal by a bunch of men over the age of 70. I don’t even really like Priest (except Painkiller), but this may end up being my album of the year because why even pretend I’m in touch with the kids anymore eh.

Lights, camera, music:

1 Duke Boara - Sapphire

2 Mall Grab - Dive

3 Will Silver - Maybe It’s Not Our Time Yet

4 Tom VR - Heart Can Still Somersault

5 Supreems - Nachtschone

6 Vegyn - Makeshift Tourniquet