Mix Tape

Each song was another needle dragged into the groove of my obsession; each chord reinforced pathways I’d forged in his honour. I saw his name, his initials, his profile everywhere. I was besotted, and adrenaline-soaked in my need for approval.
‘What are you thinking?’
I’m not thinking anything, apart from how cracked your ceiling is, and how you’re living the hard-luck student dream. And how I can’t believe someone so wrapped up in themselves might be wrapped up in me too.
‘I’m not thinking anything, apart from how the cracks in your ceiling remind me of stories we used to make up when we saw the cracks at our grandmother’s house,’ I confessed, referring to my childhood again.
He pointed this out, and I felt embarrassed, and wished I’d talked about something relevant – something contemporary.
“You’re so traditionalist in your approach to things,” he said in pseudo-intellectual tones that impressed me so much at the time.
“You’re more of a blazer and straw hat type, aren’t you Mark?”
I reveled in his attention and snuggled further into his crumb-strewn bedclothes. The blue screen of the television flared out into the room, having been switched on in order to play a cd through the DVD player. I loved his taste in music, his fierce pride in mixing high and low culture. He would often talk about Mariah Carey as though she were a close friend of his, and this sort of planned off-the-cuff humour was a major part of what endeared him to me.

Friends & lovers

A lonely and reclusive millionaire writes his telephone number on 10 pound notes in the hope someone will contact him.

Communication breakdown

The day finally arrives when everyone realises that all human verbal and written communication - our seemingly logical systems of language - have actually been a freakishly long string of coincidental understanding. Suddenly humans cannot comprehend each other, and everyone is reduced to the same level of intuitive and animalistic interaction.
Perhaps this realisation spreads like a virus: a linguist or some other expert in this field makes a discovery that effectively renders human verbal/written communication an indecipherable mess - and all those who read his findings eventually find their understanding deteriorate to the point of total incomprehension.

Compilation CDs

Filmed on a vintage 1990s video camera, we are thrown into a circle of friends from that era who are deliberating over what songs to include on their respective compilation CDs. We don't learn the reason why they are compiling these tracks, we simply follow their bickering and conferring via telephone and in person about what songs might be the most appropriate. Later, we see them meet up and travel to a hospital. There, it transpires that they are visiting a close friend who has been in a coma for some time. The idea behind the CDs is a vague hope that hearing a particularly familiar song might rouse the friend from their unconscious state. One by one the CDs are played, tracks are skipped, memories are shared, and arguments occasionally break out over the merits of each song - but the friend remains unmoved. Ultimately, a song included as an afterthought is played, and this is of course the track that brings the friend back into the realms of consciousness. There is immediately a commotion, and after a flurry of nurses and doctors attend to the re-animated patient, the friends settle around the bed and await their companion's first words since re-emerging. He looks around at the expectant faces, clears his throat and says, 'I hate that song.'