THE CASS REPORT

EMAIL WAS THE ULTIMATE DEVELOPMENT IN HUMAN COMMUNICATION

And it's all been downhill since. The only improvement would have been a platform like twitter, which instead of a tiny maximum character count, had a sizeable minimum word count. Give me two thousand words or LOG OFF.

Social media is DEAD

Okay, no it's not. But everyone knows it sucks and I keep lying to myself that I've stopped using it. In reality, I'm using it all the time, but just scrolling on mindless garbage rather than actually interacting with anyone, which is a clever trick to use it covertly with literally no benefits. So instead, I'm going to write big long rambling things like this. I'd thought about using my own little custom made website to host things before (and if you look around you can see my first efforts towards that), but then my friend Mac sent me one by email. Genius. Visionary. Of course, you're not reading this on an email, because I couldn't make it look quite so hideous there, but it'll do. For now I've decided I'm going to do it just four times a year, on the change of the seasons, which seems like it'll give me a reasonable amount to write about, although I might end up having busy months and put a cute little extra one together. We'll see. For now, this is sort of a recap since mid-2024.

So welcome to THE CASS REPORT

Cool name, right? I chose it myself. Any other outfits, publications or papers proclaiming themselves to be "THE CASS REPORT" are for sure 100% fake ass bullshit. Why? Because fuck em.

I'm writing this bad boy in HTML so that I can do all sorts of fun mixed media things like links and images omg wow it's like a digital scrapbook aren't I clever? I also want to include these things which are my "yapper's overflow". You can hover over them to read extra stuff I've decided not to include in the main text because otherwise I'll go on and on forever.
I've also invented these other things, which are my little gallery divs, that display images sideways, like an art gallery (NOT like instagram). This one's got some cute pics from when I visited Bronwen in January.

How are things?

It's 2025, which is the most sci-fi sounding year I've lived through yet, so it's automatically exciting. Pacific Rim is set this year, and I've never seen it, so I'm excited I get to live it instead. Speaking of movies, I'm working at a cinema, which if you didn't know already, means you NEED to message me about coming to watch movies for free. It's one of the few perks I get from sweeping popcorn off of carpet (hell) all day and I need to make the most of it.

I'm also still doing writing, very slowly. I've added in journalling, too, as sort of a warm-up exercise for writing fiction, and also just to actually remember the things I've done. I've only carelessly forgot to write about TWO THREE days so far, which does mean they're unfortunately lost to the misty depths of history forever.

Working at Everyman

That's right, I'm not working at your bog-standard Vue/Odeon/Cineworld. I'm climbing up the social hierarchy, I work at the BOUGIE cinema that you can't afford, and looking up at the even richer bastards in their Curzon penthouse.
Okay, alright, I'm not quite a class traitor yet. They still only pay me minimum wage whilst I serve people wine and cocktails and little bowls of appetisers. As a job, it actually feels more like working at a restaurant than it does a cinema - it just so happens that all the tables are right next to a great big wall showing Red One and Bridget Jones 4.
The idea of a cinema where you get to eat and drink in the screens sounds really great if you're four years old. Yeah, let's put a load of people in a room where you're meant to be quiet and focused, and then ask them if they want loads of alcohol and sweets and what is essentially just fast food, and then have them eat and drink all that in the dark whilst the movie plays. Then when it's all over, some poor sod (me) has to go round and clean it all up.
I complain a lot, but at this point I'm in a decent groove with it and it's not that bad. I get free tickets, and a big discount on aforementioned food and drink (although I don't leave a fucking MESS!) and I sort-of kind-of work on the edge of the movie industry, albeit whilst it collapses into the cesspool of straight-to-streaming.
What I also get are fantastic anecdotes about customers (important to note that corporate would have me call them "guests". fuck off). Speaking of the total and complete economic failure of cinemas in the face of streaming, there was a standout story recently where a customer was annoyed he didn't get his order taken quick enough in the screen, so stormed out to the bar and was rude to all my colleagues there, before exclaiming, in order to make us really shake in our boots, that he was a SHAREHOLDER!!!

Most people are lovely, and normal, but like any customer service/hospitality job, you do get the world's most entitled people in. I've had people tell me their chips are too short. I had an anxious mother interrupt me serving another set of "guests" to ask where her popcorn was, because if her diabetic son didn't get it IMMEDIATELY, he would GO INTO A COMA!!! and for some reason I walked off and got it for her??? Instead of telling her it's at the bar downstairs and I'm busy and can you be serious?? Sorry, your son could drop unconscious if he doesn't have sugar, and you decided, sure, we'll order at the same time as the 169 (actual number of seats in screen one, NOT a funny joke) other people in this screen and not bring along, I don't know, a fucking freddo just in case? I don't know man. Some of these people really do live on another planet. We serve these decently stacked burgers with like, lettuce and tomato and onion and pickles and all that, and probably about 40% of people get them removed, or leave them on their platters for me to clean up at the end. It's like... you've got enough money to come and pay £22.50 for a cinema ticket, but you don't eat your veggies? I get that not everyone likes them, but it's near enough to being a majority that I find it weird. Bear in mind, these are the same people who order a £3.90 bottle of water instead of a FREE tap water, plenty of whom don't even open the bottle. And it's fucking metal, and reusable, and they leave it behind when they go! The waste is insane.

You have people turn up to the cinema (which at any other chain can cost you like, less than a tenner, and you can just sneak in a subway or whatever) and order "tortilla [pronounced: taw tiller] chips", and one time, a "pinot grigio [pronounced: pee knot grigg eeo]" among other things. This always gets to me. Where are people amassing enough money to be able to drop twenty grand on a cinema trip whilst also not knowing how to pronounce "tortilla"?!? Smh. It's like Fight Club and "the joker". People are watching criticisms of themselves and finding it aspirational.

Amsterdam

BREAKING RED ALERT INSANEO NEWS: STONER WENT TO AMSTERDAM. Yeah, that's what you're thinking. Yeah, of course this fucking USELESS JUNKIE WEED ADDICT went to Amsterdam. Well guess what??? I went with my sister who's never even HAD a weed. Boom. Didn't see that one coming, did you?
ANYWAY so i smoked some weed over there. pretty good. before i went, i thought "hey, im not gonna smoke here at home cause i'm gonna do it a shit ton in amsterdam. and then i got there and got fucking ONESHOTTED by the strong as fuck dutch weed. oops.

Me and Amy (aformentioned sister) have been trying to be MORE SPONTANEOUS, and towards that end, when my work schedule came through and I saw I had four days off in a row, we just booked the plane tickets and then hostel then and there, a week in advance. Hell fuckin yeah.

What a nice place! felt super safe. more public transport than people (but genuinely actually, there are more bikes than people in amsterdam). the hostel was fourteen euros a night so was super cheap. spent the second day wandering around stoned as fuck taking videos of all the amazing "composition in the street layouts" and then watched it back later sober and could barely see what i was on about. great.

We also went to the Van Gogh museum and the Eye Film Museum, where we attended a lecture on "Global Film Colour", where we saw five short films. Most notably was Territories (1984), an experimental documentary about the policing of Notting Hill Carnival in the 80s. It was a surreal experience to go to another country and see a film highlighting the problems with your own. Plus it's really good. Anyway yeah so you totally need to see this documentary, just fly to Europe so you can watch it yeah???

Looking Up

Here's my little wildcard section at the end which will probably be called "Looking Down" in Autumn when mushroom seasons return. But for now it's going to be about my other love affair, the night sky.
We've just finished this much advertised "parade of the planets" season, where all of the planets are visible in the sky at once, which whilst you can't actually see uranus or neptune with the naked eye, has been really cool actually. It's been a great view to have, looking over the Northern Line behind the bins at Everyman, to see the visible elements of the solar system strung out like lights in the sky every night. I've realised, in particular, how much the planets play with constellations, and have gained a real appreciation for how important they must have seemed to people in the past watching Mars move through Gemini and change the shapes up in the Heavens.

I also saw the Lunar Eclipse in a partial phase before it was eaten by clouds, and hope to catch the partial solar eclipse at the end of this month. There's ALSO maybe going to be a brief new addition to the naked-eye sky at some point soon, whenT Coronae Borealis does or does not go supernova. I've read articles about it previously that made me feel relatively confident about it, but I just looked through the wikipedia page I linked there and they're being all fun-policey about it, calling it a "theory". Eurgh.

Skeleton of the Season

Here's a section I surely won't regret come the summer solstice when I haven't found a new skeleton to include. This is Van Gogh's Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, which was unfortunately in Norway when we went to the Van Gogh Museum. I love the little sign of life in the cigarette's lit end. I bought a little A5 print of it which is blu-tac'd above my desk to remind me that I'll die one day, or whatever.

and finally...

Album of the Season

That's right, it's Caroline Polachek's Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, which features, on its "Everasking Edition", her cover of Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth which you must go and listen to immediately please, because Spring is now here and maybe even has a Strawberry In The Mouth???.
I suppose if you want one more, you could try Jean-Michel Jarre's Équinoxe, a 1979 electronic album with plenty of yummy synth on it. I used the cute/creepy little binoculars guy from the cover as the background to the first (and last) div element on this newsletter because, like, it's the equinoxe, innit.

Wrapping Up

That about does it for the winter edition of The Cass Report. There's just time for the last thing I forgot. I've started brewing kombucha, because I wanted to do more things that make me sound annoying.
Me and Amy went on a SCOBY quest, which ended in Earth Natural Foods in Kentish Town, where the guy behind the deli counter knew a guy round the corner who could get me one. So I gave him my number and he rang me when it was ready, and we went back in to town to pick it up. In lieu of cash, all the guy wanted was a pot of houmous, because the SCOBY was stored in one, and he needed another pot for the next one. I'm out here bartering and shit.
Anyway so yeah it worked. It's just a little pet that I keep in a jug and feed tea, and it turns it into fizzy drinks, and it's real??? What the hell.

Anyway I need to stop writing this now. I left most of it till the night before it's due (I never learn) and I'm up early tomorrow to go to Brighton with Amy because the travel grind NEVER STOPS. PLEASE write one of these back, maybe, if you'd like, I'm not your boss, etc.
Godspeed,
Cass