5 minutes
Caught in a Jam, Portraits of Tracy
This song is one of two advance singles from Tracy Amare’s forthcoming EP, the much-anticipated follow-up to her 2023 experimental pop album, Drive Home. The track combines 1970s psychedelia and disco rhythms with John Barry-style guitar lines, sent wailing through a battered Fender Twin, and (eventually, after a glorious, 52-second introduction) the sugary melody of 90s bubblegum pop. It feels like futuristic music assembled from vintage cuts.
An afternoon
Continue Arcades
On social media, much of the cultural conversation last week concerned the disappearance of supposed third spaces for young people: the bowling alleys, shopping centres and youth clubs where teenagers once congregated beyond the supervision of home and school. Continue Arcades offers a modest revival. The small chain, with locations in Chichester, Plymouth, Taunton, Swansea, Tenby and Derby (and a new branch opening in Hemel Hempstead on 24 July) charges a little over £10 for unlimited play on its dozens of arcade machines, which have been rescued – presumably – from the digital knacker’s yard. Vintage favourites such as Pong and Donkey Kong represent the 1970s and 80s era respectively, albeit via reproductions rather than the original “woodie” cabinets, which are far too valuable now for public use. There are dozens of more recent titles, too, from Guitar Hero to Dance Dance Revolution, and enough machines that you’ll rarely need wait for a turn. Popcorn is available when your energy begins to flag.
An evening (173 mins)
The Odyssey
A Christopher Nolan film arrives with a cultural force unmatched in contemporary movie-making. The director now requires subjects grand enough to meet, or support, the accompanying weight of expectation. So having depicted J Robert Oppenheimer’s summoning of the atomic age, it is perhaps natural that Nolan should turn to an ancient poem whose influence has cast an even longer shadow over human culture: Homer’s Odyssey. This is a translation not merely from poem to screen, but from an ancient sensibility to a modern one. Odysseus, played with grim reserve by Matt Damon, is presented as a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, while the Olympian gods, whose interventions shape almost every turn of Homer’s story, have been largely written out. Some supernatural charge has also been lost in the exchange. Yet features made on this scale and at this expense, by collaborators working at the height of their powers, cast a powerful spell of their own. Also, it’s best to form an opinion before Monday, when everyone else will turn up for work with their own.
Night-time
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France v England
It is not the consolation fixture any England supporter wanted or – at least until the 85th minute of last Wednesday’s semi-final against Argentina – imagined they would be watching. (Though, somewhere underneath it all, obviously we all did.) Still, defeating France to claim bronze in one final agonising stagger towards quasi-victory would feel like an appropriate way to round out this tournament of scrapes.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance for The Observer