ageing Archives - The ClearOut

What the Hell Is That! The Audacious Grotesquerie of ‘The Substance’ – Episode 177

In this episode, Dara is still reeling after watching Coralie Fargeat’s astonishing film ‘The Substance’, a scarifyingly vicious body-horror satire on the pressure that results from the extreme demands of celebrity and the beauty expectations inflicted on women. The film is centred around a TV fitness personality whose middle-age renders her undesirable in the eyes of the network. In a ferocious performance by Demi Moore we bear witness to the lengths a woman will go to to preserve her looks and corresponding status.

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Too Old for This S**t, or Try Harder, You Silver Foxes! – Episode 175

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In this episode, Dara shares his gripes about the utterly mediocre buddy movie Wolfs, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as two fixers reluctantly obliged to work together through a night of yuk-filled capers (SPOILER: THERE ARE NO YUKS!). The film is an ode to laziness, self-satisfaction, complacency and vanity, and has the gall to pay tribute in its final shot to a truly great buddy movie of yesteryear, the inference clearly being that Clooney and Pitt are a contemporary equivalent of two past greats. No such luck.

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What’s So Great About It? – The Dubious Value of Nostalgia – Episode 169

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For the second time in the show’s history, Dara is considering the questionable value of nostalgia. While allowing that there are wellness benefits to understanding the connection between nostalgia and loss, and the stark reality of nostalgia’s relationship to ageing, there is something offensive about a particular brand of generalised nostalgia that regularly raises its unoriginal head on social media.

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Is It Okay to be Vulnerable? Yes, it is! – Episode 148

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In this episode, Dara wants to know what vulnerability looks like. He talks about his own sense of feeling vulnerable at this time in his life and tries to contextualise that feeling in terms of age, time spent, and time left. He also reflects on fear, threat identification, and the conviction that one can be ‘got’.

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The 2023 Christmas Special! – Episode 135

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In this hard-fought-for episode, Dara soldiers on alone to deliver this year’s Christmas special.

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Breasting the Tape

6 Comments / Poems / Dara Clear

A poem I wrote about my father, who recently turned 79 and has been showing the signs of a mind and body slowing down and no longer being cognisant of the happenings of everyday life in real time. Not all the time, but enough to be of justifiable concern. It is old age. It is

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Witchman

2 Comments / Poems / Dara Clear

a poem from quite a few years ago, inspired by the sight of an aged driver advancing carefully along a motorway, a long, irate tailback in his wake Witchman Witchman, wrapped around leather, staring through glass, blasted eyes, bloodshot translucent skin. Fingers like knots of gristle and rock, stuck in time, modernity raging at his

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Hilary

3 Comments / Short Story / Dara Clear

Hilary He felt the spade bite under his boot and promptly applied extra weight to get greater depth out of his effort. He withdrew and entered again at right angles. Thrust, push, bite, deepen, withdraw. And again at the other end. Flip the sod. Move along the line. Repeat the process. The metronome clicked in

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ageing

What the Hell Is That! The Audacious Grotesquerie of ‘The Substance’ – Episode 177

Too Old for This S**t, or Try Harder, You Silver Foxes! – Episode 175

What’s So Great About It? – The Dubious Value of Nostalgia – Episode 169

Is It Okay to be Vulnerable? Yes, it is! – Episode 148

The 2023 Christmas Special! – Episode 135

Breasting the Tape

Witchman

Hilary

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