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Michael Holden

@michaelholden.bsky.social
126 followers 55 following 60 posts

Words for pictures, words for papers. michaelholden.net Also reluctantcarer.com But now more at preciseinstructions4everydaylife.su…

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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Many thanks to those of you who donated - we raised around 12K which will let four people stay with us. 🙏
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Prediction for BBC remake ten/fifteen years hence - "Last of the Summer Ketamine."
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Ian Martin @ianmartin.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I love this. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Perused by illusions
Farewell photography, we hardly knew you.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Dear all - I am doing a 13 mile sponsored walk In September on behalf of Maytree, the charity where I work www.maytree.org.uk. We remain the UK's only residential support for people in suicidal crisis and are reliant on donations. Please share or donate if you can tinyurl.com/32h86dnp 🙏
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
With a lot of Robert Bolt on iPlayer (Man for All Seaons + Lawrence) I bought Adrian Turner's biography 'Scenes From Two Lives' and was pleased to see this attribution of the legendary match/desert cut youtu.be/uE0DBpw09SU which normally skews towards Lean/Young/Coates, as rooted in the writing.
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David Whitehouse @dwhitehouse.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
I wrote one of the episodes for the newly relaunched Play For Today, which starts tonight (my episode is on in a couple of weeks). This is an article about that . www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...
independent.co.uk
Play for Today: The revival hoping to save British TV from a class crisis
Play for Today’s one-off films were a seminal moment in television in the Seventies and Eighties, writes Hannah J Davies. Decades later, Channel 5 is bringing them back, and aiming to diversify small-...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
Karma, Kim n' Elon. "Influence is a coproduction. Perhaps the brightest future is one in which we learn to look away." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
Drama series about a man who wakes up in the middle of the night profoundly depressed about the possibility that 'Faith' will also be the main character's name.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
If only I had thought of this "Greetings, Pope pickers," joke whilst watching Conclave months ago, instead of today, at the shops.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Pulp Friction “The object that behaves perfectly becomes no better than a hallucination.” open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
"The Attention Casino" a piece I wrote for @vice now liberated from their paywall. "The ‘zone’ in the casino where we find ourselves is not one of comfort. In fact, it runs on stress, anxiety, and a replica of togetherness experienced mostly while alone." www.vice.com/en/article/a...
vice.com
Is Our Relationship With Tech Turning Life Into One Giant Casino?
Modern life has become an inescapable attention casino where we're perpetually distracted, stressed, and seeking a state of total absorption.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
Sheared, slaughtered and scorned. Ruminations on the ruminant. Of sheep, and eating menus. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Sheared, slaughtered and scorned.
Ruminations on the ruminant. Of sheep, and eating menus.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
The Fridge Magnet at the End of the Universe… "The pressure to know (internal and cultural) and our appetite and skills to do so are getting further apart, and in the widening distance between the two, we have the bullshit." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
The Fridge Magnet at the End of the Universe…
(Don’t) Do the Hustle (part two)
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
Not with a bang, but… open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Not with a bang, but…
What are the appropriate emotions for the end of everything?
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Publish, and be Scammed The rickety rise of the fake author biography open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Publish, and be Scammed
Eyes down for the new meaninglessness
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
Our Mother the Mountain - Greed, growing older and getting down with the uphill struggle. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Our Mother the Mountain
Greed, growing older and getting down with the uphill struggle.
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David Whitehouse @dwhitehouse.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
My book is out in two weeks. The self-promotional push! It begins!
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
Unmarked Raves Where George Eliot meets Giorgio Moroder open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Unmarked Raves
Chasing status through intoxication
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
"It would be a shame to be wise all your life – and to a large degree, pointless. What else are we here for – if not to change?" Sunday Mourning open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Sunday Mourning
On Weakening the Weekend.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
Off to dissolve parliament...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Back Off to What? "The “Grandpa Gang,” a clutch of French hoodlums in their 60s and 70s who, in 2016, disguised themselves as police and robbed Kim Kardashian in Paris without - they claim - having any idea who she was, is a tale of our age, as well as our aged." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Back Off to What?
On older people and organised crime
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
"I doubt any child of that era can forget the glaring disparity between the implied Bond villain universe of the packaging and the simplistic plastic reality it contained, but in that landscape of distractions this thing of pegs and guesswork was a global hit." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
"Having spent a good part of the last five years moving between higher education and second hand bookshops, I did what a character in a video game based on me would resort to as a special move – I took a book off the shelf and looked it up." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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David Whitehouse @dwhitehouse.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
I've written a true story about how I spent 9/11 helping hundreds of terrified men to reach orgasm, in the new issue of The Fence.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
"The young, forlorn-faced baker looked at me with an expression of defeat that would grace any Don McCullin picture and said, “we are not allowed to heat things up." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
"Soon, nothing on any screen will be credible as fact, incredulity will be the only constant and those feelings… will be the only proof we have." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Forget about keeping it real
Reality is unkempt, but also needs reclaiming.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
"The car of the imagination eats up the open road towards a better tomorrow – the car of reality loiters at the lights and may yet be towed away and crushed like (or even by) those dreams with which it was mis-sold." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
Life is Traffic
But we are sold on the open road.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
Real Life is Not a Headline open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
Congrats to Anora! Unpaywalled: probably the ONLY piece to link it the work of best adapted screenplay winner Peter Straughan’s Wolf Hall and definitely the only one to bring in psychoanalytic pioneer Wilfrid Bion, proabably…The Marriage Plot open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
The Marriage Plot
Why it’s more crisis than lysis in the best of modern cinema
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Die, Beautiful Launderettes. This week finds me in a spin open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
"It has been said (wrongly, I feel) that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, but I think there is a case that is becoming, in effect, a kind of rave for people who don’t leave the house much. preciseinstructions4everydaylife.substack.com/p/fair-is-fo...
open.substack.com
Fair is foul and foul is fair.
Can there be any upside in the age of upside down?
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
It's raining, the light is fading and "You're So Vain" is playing in over the tannoy in Morrisons. Not sure this is what Carly Simon had in mind.
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The Fence @thefence.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
'If irony – of a kind – is the layering of comedy and tragedy, there are some places in the capital where it becomes fully three-dimensional...' @michaelholden.bsky.social takes a trip to Monopoly Lifesized. www.the-fence.com/gaming-the-s...
the-fence.com
Gaming the System
Playing at owning property
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
"One truth refreshed in tumult is that uniforms come with expectations which are not uniform themselves." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
"We long to be where others are not, and yet, somewhere inside those spaces - having done all we can to be included – we then do our best to lose ourselves." Where Sigmund meets Iggy - the nightclub's decline and fall. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
"It’s like there is something, in this race to shallow knowledge, that its sponsors wish to hide" Because you haven't read enough about A.I this week, or linked Blade Runner to Burt Kwouk. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
open.substack.com
"A beast that wants discourse"
There is no such ‘thing’ as A.I
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
My Friday wellness discovery is that if you sing, "I'm a one time passcode" to the tune of "Rhinestone Cowboy," modernity becomes momentarily less depressing.
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Prince Charles Cinema @princecharlescinema.com · 28/01/2025
#SaveThePCC Some of you may have read about the situation regarding our new landlord wishing to add a new redevelopment break clause, with only 6 months notice to our lease. For now, we're simply asking you all to share & sign the petition below; you.38degrees.org.uk/p/princechar...
you.38degrees.org.uk
Save The Prince Charles Cinema
The iconic Prince Charles Cinema in London’s West End future is under serious threat! We are beyond disappointed that our landlords Zedwell LSQ Ltd and their ultimate parent company Criterion Capital...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
This week's frail, travelling coincidence. Not messing about on trains - but definitely Larkin. On the decline of The Way. preciseinstructions4everydaylife.substack.com/p/this-frail...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
"The abundance of belief, that’s what I miss about childhood, sometimes. The sheer faith and credulity of it all" Part two of the pencil paen, with full support from Supertramp & Mishima. open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
I'm in love with a German pencil... open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
"What we took for a meal was really just a canape, and they will not require, desire or permit us at the banquet. From that point on, it’s go hard or go home." Anora dances, Tudor romances and more... open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
As 'Where Eagles Dare' makes a seasonal return to iPlayer it seems a good moment to reflect on the no-nonsense literalism of its Hungarian poster.
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
Meditations on the marriage plot. Anora, Wolf Hall, Billy Wilder and (psych-nerd bonus)... Wilfrid Bion! preciseinstructions4everydaylife.substack.com/p/the-marria...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
"I’m reaching out specifically to those of you that have drunk and suffered levels of pain and psychedelic internal torment that have caused you to question your sanity, humanity and the wisdom of continued living." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
"Decades pass, the promise becomes the actual, and here might be where disappointment and revelation become the same thing." Public transport, poetry, Lee Marvin, Theodore Roethke, Curtis Mayfield - together, only under my scratchy auspices: open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
I will say this about disappointment, it's not all it's cracked up to be. preciseinstructions4everydaylife.substack.com/p/to-be-tran...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
"The tithe of being male sometimes is the pretence of being unaffected. This is a hill well worth being over. If you are lucky enough to make it to your mid-fifties then certain aspects of the game have been non-negotiably lost or won." open.substack.com/pub/precisei...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
"Punk is not dead. It just attempts to shop offline." Thoughts on retail spaces, Gladiator II, The Shawshank Redemption, The Clash, and life in public places. preciseinstructions4everydaylife.substack.com/p/all-lost-i...
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Michael Holden @michaelholden.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Latest from other self: "As a close family member, you are both the best and the worst person for the job. You know just enough and far too much. And when you give up the job, there is a lot to reflect on." reluctantcarer.com/2024/11/24/significant-others/
reluctantcarer.com
Significant Others
Things have changed since I put my name to all this back in the summer. One of the sadder outcomes is that I find it much harder now to write about my mother. When she was the mother of someone nam…
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