The Bard

Artwork: Shakespeare psychedelia by @akajimmyc

Artwork: Shakespeare psychedelia by @akajimmyc

It's Shakespeare's birthday and 400 years since his death.

My way to celebrate is to turn to Shakespeare's words, which truly immortalise him. Here is my favourite sonnet, which I was strangely reminded about the other night when watching Jim Jarmusch's wonderful vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive. Jarmusch sneakily attributes this sonnet to Christopher Marlowe—a vampire played by John Hurt (alluding to the debate about whether Shakespeare was actually Marlowe).

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when alterations finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be

     taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

     If this be error and upon me proved,

     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

(source: William Shakespeare: Complete Works, RSC, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2007)

eL Seed: Perception

eL Seed’s street project in Cairo, Perception, is brilliant. This is what he said about its creation:

“In my new project ‘Perception’ I am questioning the level of judgment and misconception society can unconsciously have upon a community based on their differences. In the neighborhood of Manshiyat Nasr in Cairo, the Coptic community of Zaraeeb collects the trash of the city for decades and developed the most efficient and highly profitable recycling system on a global level. Still, the place is perceived as dirty, marginalized and segregated. To bring light on this community, with my team and the help of the local community, I created an anamorphic piece that covers almost 50 buildings only visible from a certain point of the Moqattam Mountain. The piece of art uses the words of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic Bishop from the 3rd century, that said: ‘Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.’‘إن أراد أحد أن يبصر نور الشمس، فإن عليه أن يمسح عينيه’The Zaraeeb community welcomed my team and I as we were family. It was one of the most amazing human experience I have ever had. They are generous, honest and strong people. They have been given the name of Zabaleen (the garbage people), but this is not how they call themselves. They don’t live in the garbage but from the garbage; and not their garbage, but the garbage of the whole city. They are the one who clean the city of Cairo.”

(Check out his site: http://elseed-art.com)

Artwork: eL Seed, Perception, Cairo

Artwork: eL Seed, Perception, Cairo, 2016

Bright Star

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Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star is exquisite. The love story of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne is told with grace, honesty, humour and an emotional intensity that had me enthralled from the first time I saw it. And every time I’ve watched it since, the ending still has a gut wrenching power that reduces me to tears.

As Fanny comments in the film, the beginning of Keats’ poem, Endymion is “quite perfect”, and I find these lines express something of my feelings about this film:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Love: the word

Artwork: eLSeed (@elseed), love you mum, 2012

Artwork: eLSeed (@elseed), love you mum, 2012

Thinking about the word, love. One word in English to express so much.  

So, following that train of thought—this is from one of my favourite novels, Ahdaf Soueif’s, Map of Love, the many ways “love” finds its expression in Arabic:

“Hubb’ is love, ‘ishq’ is love that twines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the heart, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carries sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and with ‘falling’, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price.” 

Four Tet + Jamie xx + Romy = Seesaw

I've been into Four Tet’s music since I heard the album, There is Love in You, and followed his work since. Here’s his recent remix of Seesaw with Jamie xx and Romy (the xx). Check it out.    

SeeSaw (feat. Romy) [Club Version]
Jamie xx & Four Tet

free fall

Sometimes, you just fall. Tom Dosland's recent free fall on the big, big wave, Jaws (Peahi, Hawaii), is hard to watch. But he made it without being injured, although his board got shredded. It’s amazing the risks big wave surfers are prepared to take. Check it out.

Toni Morrison: in between the words

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Just read a wonderful interview with Toni Morrison in The Paris Review on 'The Art of Fiction' (no.134). Here's just one of her observations on writing:

“The difficulty for me in writing—among the difficulties—is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn't hear anything. Now for that, one has to work carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.”

 

 

Isobelle Carmody: on finishing the Obernewtyn journey

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I've been wondering how Isobelle Carmody must have felt finishing the last Obernewtyn Chronicles book, The Red Queen—a 30 year epic writing journey! In an interview with The Guardian to mark the release of the book, Carmody reveals she wrote The Red Queen while staying at a friend's place, and when she finished, she packed her things and took a bus and train journey home:

“I arrived home in the night and it felt very symbolic, that journey. It was a lovely feeling of blissful separation, of floating away into the future.”

evolution

Evolution...huh! Stencil work near Melbourne University (no coincidence).

The Assassin

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Just saw the movie The Assassin—haunting, beautiful, visually stunning—a quiet heartbreak permeates the film, never heavy, but powerful. A film about love, honour, dignity and the choice to follow one's own sense of what's right. To find one's own path. 

 

Grimes/Aristophanes: Scream

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For anyone with the urge to rip free a horror-flick worthy howl—Grimes and Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes' song Scream, from Grimes' soon to be released album Art Angels is kind of perfect. Says a lot for my headspace that I’m actually listening to this. Check it out.

Scream (feat. Aristophanes)
Grimes

PJ Harvey: songwriter & poet

Image: PJ Harvey poem, The Hand from The Hollow and the Hand, 2015

Poetry and song are entwined. Historically the Greeks had two types of poetry: epic poetry such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, and lyric poetry which was a song accompanied by a lyre.

Ballads have been sung since the Middle Ages and are simply ‘story songs’, passed on from singer to singer. The ‘ballad stanza’ is a common verse structure (the quatrain or four-lines of alternating rhyme) present in both poetry and song lyrics. Interestingly, many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are in ballad form, although her influence is said to be that of the hymn with its similar meter.

Lyrics and music are bound by rhythm—beats. Rhythm and movement go hand in hand, hence the notion of “measure” or “meter” in poetry.

Some argue for a distinction between songs and poetry, with an emphasis on poetry being printed and self-contained as an internal dialogue, while songs require voice and performance to be fully realised. Bob Dylan is often called a poet, but he’s remarked: “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem.” Yet it can be said that the roots, structure and purpose of both forms seem inextricably connected.

Leonard Cohen wrote poems before writing songs, navigating the genres of fiction, songwriting and poetry throughout his career, much like Patti Smith who doesn’t see much difference between songs and poetry. Many songwriters quote poets as inspiration, and many have written poetry distinct from their songwriting.

So, it’s not much of a surprise that songwriter PJ Harvey also writes poetry.

Harvey is about to release her first book of poetry, The Hollow and the Hand. She wanted to explore the people and places of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, so between 2011 and 2014, she went on a series of journeys collaborating with friend, Seamus Murphy, who took photographs to accompany her poems. Previously the two collaborated on Harvey’s album Let England Shake, with Murphy taking photographs and producing 12 short films.