Fantastic Negrito: An Honest Man

YiYi: A One and a Two

I recently watched a Taiwanese film made in 2000 called YiYi: A One and a Two – Edward Yang's last film before he died of cancer at 59. (I am now in the process of hunting down his other films.)

This is one of those movies that's about life and also, everything. It's small and therefore big. A real gem.

Here's the trailer below.

The Threepenny Opera: Tango Ballad

Kurt Weill (Music)
Bertolt Brecht (Lyrics)

Minor White: Hands

I came across the work of Minor White (what a name),  a photographer who worked mostly in the 1940s - 1960s. His work capturing the natural world are striking and worth a look, but I find these shots he took of hands beautiful and interesting.

But Beautiful: Geoff Dyer

I fell in love with Geoff Dyer's writing recently, reading his book about jazz But Beautiful, a series of fictionalized vignettes about some of jazz's tragic heroes. I've underlined a good majority of this book - it is so sensitively written and so very beautiful.

One of my favorite passages about Chet Baker:

Chet put nothing of himself into his music and that's what lent his playing its pathos. The music he played felt abandoned by him. He played the old ballads and standards with a long series of caresses that led nowhere and subsided into nothing. 

That was how he had always played and always would.  Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn't even wave. These old songs, they were used to being loved and wanted by the people who played them; musicians hugged them and made them feel brand-new, fresh.  Chet left a song feeling bereft.  When he played it the song needed comforting: it wasn't his playing that was packed with feeing, it was the song itself, feeling hurt. You felt each note trying to stay with him a little longer, pleading with him. 

Francis Alys: Fabiola

"Created by the internationally acclaimed artist Francis Alÿs, Fabiola is an installation of over 300 portraits of a fourth-century Christian saint collected by the artist from flea markets and antique shops throughout Europe and the Americas. These seemingly identical portraits, including paintings, embroideries and miniatures are all copies of a lost original of Fabiola by the French nineteenth-century painter, Jean-Jacques Henner." (from: The National Portrait Gallery)

Don't Fence Me In

I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in


Cole Porter, 1934

The Black Between the Frames

Loved this e-mail that Natalie Portman sent to Jonathan Safran Foer.


From this Times Magazine piece.

James Nasmyth, the Man Obsessed with the Moon

"In his book, 'The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite', he was hoping to demonstrate that the surface of the moon had formed as its molten body shrank and gradually cooled and shrivelled, just the way human skin wrinkles with age."

"...the shrunken hand on the other side is that of Mr. Nasmyth, photographed by himself. It exhibits a thoroughly mechanical hand, as well as the hand of a delicate manipulator illustrating that remarkable expression in the book of Job that 'in the hand of all the sons of men God places marks, that all the sons of men may know their own works'.

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

I went to see the Mary Heilmann exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery today. I loved the vibrant, playful colors, a sense of a certain measured carefree quality in her work.
I liked this quote from the Guardian's review of the exhibit:

"Paint drips accidentally, like when you get a bit of sauce on your nice clean shirt when you’re enjoying a meal too much. Entire paintings go over the edge and round the sides of the canvas stretcher, like those cartoon characters who run over a cliff and don’t fall until they recognise the drop below. It is good to sidle up to Heilmann’s paintings, to see what’s going on around the side, as much as it is to confront them head on....
Heilmann’s paintings aren’t the best in the world, but they don’t need to be. To me, they seem to contain a lot of happiness and pleasure in the act of looking. The human details and imperfections count. A hand and an all-too-human brain made them."

On Starting Over

A lot can happen in two years.

At the age of 30, I'm starting from scratch.
A few weeks ago, I quit my job, moved out of my apartment in New York City, and packed up a suitcase and moved to London, a city that had always loomed large and beautiful in my mind. A place I'd often thought, dreamed, talked about. And now I'm here.

It is at once surreal and challenging. Surreal because it's still sinking in, and at first, I found myself gliding on the surface of the moment vs. actually being in the moment. (Sometimes, your brain needs to catch up to your actions, though of late, I quite prefer this than the other way around - I tend to overthink things.) And challenging because it's quite lonely to be on one's own and not have any choice in the matter. 

A few nights ago, I fell asleep listening to British / Irish philosopher-poet David Whyte wax poetic about the need for solitude but also the need to belong. I woke up remembering lines wondering if I'd dreamed them. It was a nice to wake up that way. 

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

From "Sweet Darkness" - David White

I found these lines comforting because they're true, which means my decision must have been the right one...that my other life was too small for me and I needed to ask more of the world.

But these are also lines that hover, because I want to continue to live up to them.
Why is this harder than it should be?

Because "alive" doesn't mean comfort, routine, familiarity. Because "alive" could also mean discomfort, vulnerability, and fear.

It takes a brave soul to dive headfirst into it anyway.