A Yoshitomo Nara Day

Been a while between posts! Since I just posted about di Caprio's doc, Before the Flood, what's on my mind—planet earth. This Nara image reminds me of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Little Prince, one of my all-time faves. Finding home, self and love.

Frank Ocean: Endless/Blonde

Forget the hype.

That’s what I keep reminding myself when listening to Frank Ocean’s new album. Both the video-album, Endless and the album, Blonde (or Blond??? Yeah it’s confusing).

In the end, it’s the music that matters. With the drop of Blonde there’s been fudged release dates; a video-album that could have been the actual album; the exclusive Apple music deal; huge number of stellar collaborators, pop-up shop promos and a glossy mag accompanying the album. 

Too much hype. So, I decided to just focus on the music. Watching Endless was intriguing, seeing Frank going DIY and building his spiral staircase (more sculpture than functional), but I found myself closing my eyes and just listening. Whether the video was a metaphor for crafting, creating, taking time, the ongoing process of making stuff—whatever. In the end, the music felt like submerging myself in a sonic sea. I just drifted along with the current. It’s an immersive experience, like listening to Blonde, and it’s beautiful. Blonde has a different tone, edgier, darker, but equally poetic, with that quality of slipstreaming from one song to the next. Both are mesmerising and it’s been wonderful engaging with Frank’s words and voice once again.

I’ll be listening to both for a long time, because the wait has been worth it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: writing the fantastic

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"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

So begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez's marvellous tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez's book wasn't my introduction to South American magical realism, that book was Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. Thoroughly entranced, I went searching for more and discovered Marquez.

In a Paris Review interview (The Art of Fiction no69) I was delighted to read how Marquez found the tone for One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is what he had to say:

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

[] It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day.

INTERVIEWER

How did she express the “fantastic” so naturally?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

Frank Ocean: Boys Don't Cry

I love Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, so I'm very excited that he's about to release his next album this Friday, Boys Don't Cry. 

Can't wait!

Update—apparently it might not be out until November! So much for the excitement...

 

The Man & the Sea

A great meditation on one surfer's connection to the sea—check out this short film directed by Andrew Kaineder, The Man & the Sea, featuring Australian surfer, Derek Hynd, getting philosophical at Jeffrey's Bay. 

 

   

For Nice

Illustration by @Louison_A

Illustration by @Louison_A

Thoughts and prayers for France, and especially the people of Nice.

Mar

Here's a gorgeous short film from CWS company Finisterre and directed by Andrew Kaineder, Mar: 

“Daylight wanes as sky becomes heavy. Isobars compress and warp; cross-sectioned onions on the nightly news. The coast awakens, transformed from the doldrums of summer. Warmth; a flickering memory, like those drawn upon for favourable conditions at half-forgotten spots. The ocean roars, resuming it’s age-old attack on the coastline in a relentless barrage of storm fronts. And so the hunt begins, chasing the nooks hidden from wind and seas. Schedule revolves around brief opportunities, better described as optimistic hunches. A goading carrot dangled, and ever so occasionally within reach.

Winter chasing shapes on the fringes of the North Atlantic. A collections of moments captured along the way. Mar.”

Check it out.

but beautiful

Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful is a book about jazz.

About legendary musicians Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Art Pepper and Ben Webster. It’s not criticism, although Dyer set out to create something along those lines. Instead, Dyer found himself embellishing fact with fiction, weaving known events, the music, the musicians and experience of that music with his own imagination. As one critic said, he’s writing about music, “from the inside out”.

Dyer captures the sounds of the music and musicians through language; the form and style of how he tells a story acts as a mirror. Each story is unique, but together they produce a complex, sinuous and fascinating improvisation that becomes a whole. The continuous story thread of Duke Ellington’s car journey is like the anchoring melody that musicians riff off to create something new, but return to again and again.

This book resonates for me as Dyer’s way of writing about music is akin to how I write about art. My approach to writing about art in the Arts Stories project is writing “from the inside out”.  It’s a process of delving into the maze of the artist’s thoughts, feelings and intentions, their words, the work itself, and what other writers, art historians and critics have also said about it. Coming out of that maze, I’m pulling on a thread, or more than one, to create a poem, short or long form piece of fiction expressing an imaginative engagement with the work of art.

The art story hopefully creates a bridge for the viewer/reader to then engage or interpret the artwork. Maybe. Who knows! That’s the beauty of it—it will resonate for some, not everyone. Like art or music.

For anyone into jazz, Dyer’s book is a must, and quite simply, beautiful.

Féileacán - (And the Lost Weekend)

Another great short film by the cold water surfing company, Finisterre. Féileacán - (And the Lost Weekend) has that dreamy, relaxed, easy-going and openness to wonder and adventure that makes an excellent road trip. Check it out!

Martin Scorsese: Tisch Salute

I went looking for inspiration today and came across this wonderful and highly entertaining speech by Martin Scorsese that he gave to the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, graduates in 2014. 

A master storyteller speaking about his own time at Tisch; the journey to become a film maker; the ups and downs of following his passion, and keeping that spark of creativity alive.

Enjoy!

The Colour in Anything

Okay—I'm not a James Blake fan, but his new album release this week, The Colour in Anything took me by surprise—it's quite gorgeous. I was especially interested to discover Frank Ocean was one of Blake's collaborators—I'm definitely a fan of his music!

Here's the video for the song, I Need a Forest Fire with Bon Iver.

A Moon Shaped Pool

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Love it!!!!! Radiohead's new album—A Moon Shaped Pool. So worth the wait! Truly incredible. Beautiful. Magic.

Just keep wanting to listen to it, which says it all.

small stories: it's so dark

Image: Sonja Braas, The Passage, Week 38, 2011

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—but last night just checking out my IG feed and there's this funny image of wooden people—actually scary looking wooden people in masks about to burn a girl tied to a tree—and I double check and it's Radiohead's sneak preview of their new song! 

So—ominous and exciting—here's the video for Burn the Witch. 

The Bard

Artwork: Shakespeare psychedelia by @akajimmyc

Artwork: Shakespeare psychedelia by @akajimmyc

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

It also happens to be my mum's birthday, so I've never forgotten this significant date! My way to celebrate is to turn to Shakespeare's words, which truly immortalise him. Here is my favourite sonnet, which strangely (speaking about immortals) I revisited the other night when watching Jim Jarmusch's wonderful vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive.  Although Jarmusch sneakily attributes this sonnet to Christopher Marlowe—a vampire played by John Hurt—because well, Shakespeare was simply a dunderheaded foil for Marlowe to get his work out there! Would have been great if Jarmusch had actually made Shakespeare into a vampire...(I'm a sucker—pun intended—for a great vampire story!)

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

I love this street art project by eL Seed. Titled Perception in Cairo, in eL Seed’s words:

“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