• 26 Dec, 2025 *

A system designed to function with the constant possibility of slapstick failure.

If you’re unlucky I might have spoken at freewheeling speed and with little clarity to you about a YouTube video published this year called ‘Buckets’. It’s by musician and filmmaker Adum Brate and is hosted on Madjestic Kasual’s YouTube channel. It’s an onslaught.

Buckets makes reference to some of my favourite ever pieces of visual media: Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s ‘The Way Things Go’, a piece of video art burned into 6-year-old-Christian’s brain when seeing it for the first time at the Serpentine Gallery in London, decades ago. Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Ocean’s 11’, my all-time favourite film and a rippling neutron star of last-bus Hollywood moviestars, laserpointer editing and impeccable pacing. Everyone’s so fucking hot in this film. It’s also heavily built on Looney Tunes and slapstick humour. It’s also entirely comprised of about a trillion other video clips, quotes, samples, and oddball references.

Buckets is more an argument for a carrier-bucket-theory-of-everything than it is a straight line narrative or argument, but reading the transcript at bucketsmusic.org some themes emerge. This new Americana is defined as ever by a thin-air hallucination, a persistent teetering on the edge of either a grand realisation or a fatally wacky collapse into an endlessly deep matte painting of the grand canyon, followed shortly by a 1ton box of ACME TNT.

Buckets, in its frenetic editing, gets closer to the reality of the neoamerican present by understanding that we’re constantly in orbit. That is, we fall, constantly, but in just the right way as to miss the centre of mass and get swung / shot back around to begin the fall again. My therapist will remind me that progress is more of a spiral than a straight line, in that behaviours, mistakes, and progressions all happen in recoginsably recurrent forms. Change is gradual but often experienced as a simplified form of repetition. I don’t want to overexplain this piece of art, and I don’t think I can. But the spinning recycling image and perpetual rise / fall is vital to the hat / bucket dichotomy.

The fall we’re staring at right now, in meatspace, is a mixture of gambling and dataprocessing and sartorial quizzicality. I’ve been repeatedly trying to talk to people about hats this year, typically drawing disdain for posioning the conversational well before it even got anywhere, but the recipients of my unspun thoughts tend to come around when I start laying it all out: Where have all the hats gone? My theory is one of dead-man’s-switch practicality, as the ways we dress are increasingly optimised for presence, survival, image-management in the face of deteriorating living conditions. We cling tightly to control and on the whole, there is no space for ornamentation in a world at war, and the loss of different hat forms in favour of the peaked cap is demonstrative, to me, of a retreat from the capacity for visible personality as commonplace among male-presenting people. As a brief aside, watching a bunch of musicals over Xmas also has me questioning the loss of singing as part of the social fabric of workers.

Back to the fall. Buckets is prescient in distilling the Kalshi-powered speculation (gambling) economy that your pension is now sellotaped to. That is, a system designed to produce random inequalities and upredictabilty is treated with absolute certainty and with absolutely certain negative consequences. You can bet your life savings on the current frontline position of Russian drone FPV drone pilots. Many people are. We join hands and pray that Jensen Huang can automate us out of existence. The climate crisis is already happening and we’re acting like there are chances to avoid it... We’re already into the jaws of the giant scary dog and our heads are still on the outside trying desperately to grab a last bite of a piece of cheese arrange by Tom on a little plate by the window. We’ve been swallowed by the void but are still pedalling in the sky.

The vulnerability of ornamentation isn’t a given. Living in East London, I’m obsessed with the waterways and aquatic engineering which helped to create the contemporary city. Just up the canal you can see a Victorian steam engine run a few times a year, handled by old blokes who volunteer to keep the local museum there running. By museum I mean 2 small rooms with a collection of photographs and maps. They water the engine and get the speed regulators spinning and the large wooden vats (buckets) start spitting steam and a flywheel lurches and the main drive wheel, about 6 metres in diameter, starts to move slowly. It’s beautifully legible and legibly beautiful in green and red and white paint. This was infrastructure (private nonetheless) with a sense of gaudy pride attached to its body. Look at Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station (above).

Maybe it’s just that the Victorian engineers would have worn their own fun hats. And the hats were definitely part of a costume, or rather, an increasingly corporatised uniform dominated by the contemporary suit. Nonetheless, the lack of practicality to wearing a bowler while operating an excavator tickles me. It’s cartoonish in the same way that a man wearing a tophat and shredding a guitar morphing into a pile of nickels is, or a plastic bag unravelling and catching fire and activating the next part in an ultimately meaningless chain of interactions. The fall continues, just cash out before the house folds.

I mostly wrote this to remind myself I’m capable of sentences having not put anythign on the blog for like 2 months - sorry! 2026 is gonna be different, and I’m gonna do it all in headwear.

PLUR to all <3

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