Aaah Bjork—she's in love! Here's her song Blissing Me from her newly released album, Utopia.
amok
Chilling out now, thanks to Thom Yorke and his band Atoms for Peace's single, Amok. Check it out.
need some air
Image: Robert Levon Been from BRMC at the Paradiso 2017, current tour. Photo: @tmeimardes
I feel like I've just surfaced from cave spelunking (love that word). I've been editing, editing, editing...The light is too bright, it's muggy, hot, and I need a serious infusion of caffeine and some high energy music. BRMC will do. Here's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's I Need Some Air from their album, Baby '81. Check it out!
silk
Some books are simply this—unforgettable. Stories that graft onto imagination, memory, even our bodies as they seep through our senses, winding their way beneath skin. We don’t simply read, we feel, travel, escape and for a moment, live these tales.
Once read, we carry them with us. Such stories can even change us.
Silk by Alessandro Baricco is such a story.
Told as a fable, in 1861 a French silk merchant, Hervé Joncour, travels to the end of the world: Japan. His mission is to find and buy silk worms. Here he meets with the most “invincible” man in Japan, Hara Kei, and at that first meeting there is another, a concubine with eyes that do not have an Oriental shape.
So it begins.
A love story lit by an unfathomable desire and a subtle eroticism, spanning time and a vast distance, and is compelling for having a will all its own.
A truly unforgettable story.
the sky is broken
Last Saturday afternoon the clouds rolled in, lightning cracked the sky and the power went out. I stood outside and I could feel it—the absence of the switch-flow of energy, an undercurrent we're barely aware of, but now that it was gone, there was a null space. An eerie silence. So, I put my headphones on and the silence filled with sound.
And this song came on and it was kind of—perfect. Moby's The Sky is Broken from his album, Play. Pared back, poetic, hypnotic and achingly intimate. Check it out.
100 Love Sonnets
Recently I was gifted a book of Pablo Neruda's poems to add to my collection of his selected poems and Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. This book is special for having come all the way from Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris (I love that place), and for featuring 100 of his love sonnets (Cien sonetos de amor). I've been savouring them, a truly luscious and sensuous collection.
So far, a standout for me is Sonnet XVII:
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
the ocean doesn't care
Film by Finisterre and Huck. Directed by Mikey DeTemple.
“The ocean doesn't give a fuck about you.”
A blunt statement from this short film about four New Yorkers escaping their everyday lives and why they surf.
The ocean doesn't care—it's all about why you care about the ocean and your relationship with it. Check it out.
blue elephants
Artwork: Wall mural by WRDSMTH, Blue Elephants
Great paste-up by WRDSMTH, Blue Elephants. I so want to read blue elephants!
Kendrick Lamar - love
Here's musician Kendrick Lamar getting down to basics about what's important in life: love.
Cai Guo-Quiang - Fireflies
Artist Cai Guo-Quiang recently brought some magic to the streets of Philadelphia, with this Public Art event titled, Fireflies, to celebrate 100 years of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Using a fleet of rickshaw pedicabs, he created 1000 handmade paper lanterns that were lit and moving as the pedicabs made there way around the Parkway. Known for his pyrotechnic artwork, Guo-Quiang makes the connection of the lanterns with his childhood home in Quanzhou:
“In a way, these lanterns are the fireworks of my childhood that can never be put out. When I was a kid in my hometown, there were a lot of lanterns I could play with and these became extensions of my dreams.”
imagine
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson found this paste-up on a walk home from his studio one day and shared it on IG. “Imagine a world ruled by love”. Makes you wonder.
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Trying to write—bug-eyed, unfocused, thoughts meandering. Chocolate would be good.
two thousand and seventeen
Four Tet has just released a gorgeous new work, Two Thousand and Seventeen. Been listening to it on repeat. Check it out.
murmure
Artwork: Paste-up and writing by Murmure, France
Paste-up by French street artist Murmure Love Forever. Some things last.
Through hardships to the stars
Artwork: wall mural by Seth, Per aspera ad astra
Love this. From SETH (@seth_globepainter) as part of a Unicef schools project in the Ukraine. Titled: "Per aspera ad astra", "Through hardships to the stars".
strong and stable my arse
Image: Poster by Jeremy Deller, 2017
British artist Jeremy Deller has fessed up that he's the creator behind a poster that's been cropping up around London, pointedly having a go at Prime Minister Theresa May and her electoral platform: Strong and stable my arse. Bloody brilliant.
Resurrection of Angels
Artwork: wall mural by Findac, Resurrection of Angels
Quite gorgeous—Resurrection of Angels by fin dac (@findac). Love the wings.
Banksy, Brexit & Hope
Artwork: wall mural by Banksy, Dover, 2017
Banksy's nod to Brexit in Dover: a worker chipping away at a star on the EU flag. It's sombre, sobering and the task appears daunting.
Nick Cave on narrative songwriting
In an interview to coincide with today's release of the Bad Seeds retrospective compilation, Lovely Creatures—The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), Nick Cave had this to say about the restriction of narrative song writing:
“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience [...] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux. So, to apply that to songwriting, a song like I Need You off the new album [Skeleton Tree], time and space all seem to be rushing and colliding into a kind of big bang of despair. There is a pure heart, but all around it is chaos.”
the hate u give
Just finished reading Angie Thomas' YA novel, The Hate U Give.
Powerful message; one of those books that defies simple categorisation. I read it in one sitting. The title comes from American rapper Tupac's idea of “Thug Life” (T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.) which stands for, “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”. And in the character, Khalil's words, “Meaning what society give us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it?”
Sucked in from the first page, the story of 16 year-old Starr who witnesses the shooting of her friend, Khalil, was partly inspired by Thomas's life, but pivotally by the continual and tragic killings of unarmed black people by police in America. Endemic racism, blind assumptions, police brutality and fear, prejudice, ghettoisation, class rivalry, gangs, how young people fall into crime, the limitations of choice, and the constant struggle to live and find hope, love, humanity and light in the bleakest and most violent circumstances. Thomas' book encompasses all this and so much more with an engaging voice, nuanced complexity, vivid characters, and humour. Great writing that resists simple conclusions or clear cut divisions.