Radiohead's new album A Moon Shaped Pool was worth the wait. Quite beautiful. Here’s a standout track, True Love Waits. Check it out.
small stories: it's so dark
Image: Sonja Braas, The Passage, Week 38, 2011
it’s so dark
I’ve put the lights on
to illuminate the sudden gloom
of thoughts and feelings
my eyes shuttering
it’s so dark
a sudden stripping of the light
by clouds weighing heavy
so I can’t see the sky
and it’s only morning
the day descending
and already I sense the night
so close
yet above
this smother of grey
there is still the sun
© Angela Jooste
Radiohead: Burn the Witch
Totally unexpected, yet it's been in the air that something was up with Radiohead going offline, and then sending out some funny images of wooden people in masks about to burn a girl tied to a tree (seriously!) on social media, but here it is, the new song/video Burn the Witch. Check it out.
The Bard
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)
PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolition Project
Looking forward to the soon to be released (April 15) PJ Harvey album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Here's one of the songs from the album, The Wheel.
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, 2016
small stories: laid bare
Artwork: Auguste Rodin, Danaid, 1889
laid bare
unstitched and
incomplete
in the cradle
of your
lap
© Angela Jooste
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
A snarly, twisty, frustrating kind of day—a set of fangs would have been great.
Bright Star
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
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.”
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Trying to focus, but I'm travelling in my mind...
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.
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
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.”
small stories: if my heart
If my heart
was enough
I'd reel
you in
© Angela Jooste
Nobody Really Cares...
Thanks Courtney Barnett!
Imagine Peace by Yoko Ono
Image: Yoko Ono's instagram message 15/11.15
Peace and love—we need them like air...
Isobelle Carmody: on finishing the Obernewtyn journey
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.”
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Kind of sleepy, kind of dreamy...
evolution
Evolution...huh! Stencil work near Melbourne University (no coincidence).