WRLS #2
Watching | Reading | Listening | Seeing #2
It’s the (post) season of the Little Golden Bald guy, a wonderful time of the year for the sole fact that film becomes the talk of the town—a big hoorah for ‘cinema’ / ‘pictures’ as Scorsese is so fond of saying. It’s a time where weird and wild and wonderful stories ascend to the top of watchlists that might not have gotten the chance had their creators not have had a two-second shoutout during the nomination announcements (or lack thereof). Of those nominated, one gets to ascend those perilous steps and offer thanks and a few inspiring words about fashioning futures out of childhood dreams and why telling stories about elementary school instrument repairpeople need to be told. It’s an evening where the superheroes hang their capes while we celebrate the cape makers.
Regardless of the actual awards, I find this time to be extremely aesthetically stimulating; the movies begat books which begat music which begat etc. etc., resulting in a million new things to Watch Read Listen or See. My reading pile swells and my headphones battery ebbs and flows like high and low tide, and if I don’t talk about what I’m consuming I get nauseous and develop weird rashes. So on that wonderful note:
Watching:
- Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Sanshiro Sugata
- Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days
- Villeneuve’s Dune 2
- Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
- Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall
- Lanthimos’ Poor Things
Reading:
- Byung-Chul Han
- The Scent of Time
- Saving Beauty
- George Eliot’s Middlemarch
- Jeremy Cooper’s Brian
- Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (on pause)
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Save Your Life
Listening:
- Aphex Twin’s Drukqs
- Elbow’s 3 new singles
- IDLES’ Tangk
- Sean Mason’s The Southern Suite
- Dune 2 Soundtrack (Duh)
Seeing:
- Honestly not much
Watching:
Everything I’ve watched recently I recommend. Though I could easily spend ten thousand words per entry (paid subscribers only)1, I’ll spare everyone else and stick with just a couple:
Dune 2 was phenomenal. As it is written. I’ve been telling people that even if you don’t like the story, just seeing this one in theaters is well worth your time and money. It may seem like an overstatement (a feat which, believe it or not, I’m more than capable of committing), but I truly think that a film like this comes along only semi-generationally. I can say that I’ve not seen a film land a perfect ten on the scale of grandiosity in over twenty years; the sheer size and scope of everything, from sound to performances (this might be history’s first Oscar for casting next year) to visuals, amalgamates to something which seems decades ahead of its time. To put it succinctly: if some alien life form were to appear suddenly on Earth and require an immediate example of what Homosapienkind might achieve with the blockbuster cinematic format, Dune 2 would be a fine example to show them.
I’m in love with the quotidian. Rather, I’m in love with those in love with the quotidian. After having watched Wings of Desire a few years ago, its measured pace and transcendentalist leanings paying so much homage to the quotidian, I became a huge Wenders fan. I saw Perfect Days a couple of weeks ago and now I can say with even more conviction that Wenders has become a favorite of mine. I’ve never left the theater happier, butI won’t speak much about it here so that I can write something longer and more appropriate in the near future. Something which pairs extremely well with the Byung-Chul Han that I’ve been reading. Oh, speak of the devil:
Reading:
Byung-Chul Han is a philosopher that crept into by TBR pile with astonishing speed. A recommendation from a YouTuber I enjoy, Byung’s work apparently is all the rage on the other side of the pond. Byung is cultural theorist teaching at the University of Berlin whose books are small but pack a force of the same magnitude as one of Bruce Lee’s finger punches; in just one hundred fifteen pages he diagnosed our “cultural malaise” better than almost anyone in recent memory. How so? The Scent of Time claims that we’re moving at such a speed that we’ve lost the capacity to linger, and therefore, to actually live. We are stuck on a timeline of point systems, aimlessly flitting between each, trying to shorten the gaps—a pursuit that has us constantly bored, unhappy, anxious, and panicked about everything under the sun. But like I said—more on that, and Wenders, later.
George Eliot. George Eliot. George Eliot.
I’m hoping that by a triple invocation of her name I’ll have a shred of her writing capability or capacity for observing human feeling and empathy. Hot DAMN does this brilliant woman know how to write. I’ve got a quarter left in Middlemarch and I can say with full confidence that it's among the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. Eliot’s got a god-like omniscience over her work, an ability she continually utilizes to bless her readers with Shakespearean-level intimacy with every character we come into contact with. The book as a whole so far, to put it loosely, is like a viewing a 30-hour compilation of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice hand flex scene without ever growing tired of it. Scout’s honor.
Hannah Arendt is brilliant but I’m having to pause here for sake of other reads. Jeremy Cooper’s Brian is also fantastic. It’s a story about a man (you’ll never guess his name) whose life centers around film at the BFI. A book about loving the arts. It’s lovely, as you might guess.
Alongside the greatest British novelist, I’ve fallen in love with the Greatest American Poet. Emily Dickinson has always been on my list, but I think I needed Eliot to take my hand and show me what I was missing with Victorian literature again, as its been a few years. After having read Walter Willing’s glowing review of her poetry in The Atlantic in 1913, I had to give her a try. The result? Read these three snippets to see for yourself:
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound
There is no frigate like a book,
To take us lands away,
nor any coursers like a page,
Of prancing poetry.
Who never wanted, - maddest joy
Remains to him unknown:
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine.
My favorite thing about her might be her devotion; like Van Gogh or Kafka, she was near completely unknown during her life, only having about ten of her own pieces published. We owe the discovery of her gift to her sister, who, upon receiving strict directions to burn Emily’s notebooks, discovered a box of eighteen-hundred tied poems beneath her bed. Art’s only necessary audience is the self, and I’m eternally grateful for those who lived that philosophy out, but thank God her audience grew.
Listening:
Manchester’s Finest are among my all-time favorite bands. I started listening to Elbow right around Christmas of 19’, and they became one of my seminal bands during the pandemic. Guy Garvey can write lyrics better than 95% of lyricists alive,2 and the musicality of the band is just as good, mainly orbiting around the sophisticated dad-rock sound, with their newer stuff being a bit grittier and edgier. The latest record is called Audio Vertigo and I’ll be playing it on a loop much to my wife’s dismay. (She’s not a fan of Garvey’s voice. It’s one of her few faults.)
IDLES are incredible. They make me want to cold-cock a stranger then treat them to a four-course dinner. TANGK is their third record, and their best in my opinion. Their sound has matured, but thankfully not softened; there’s an emotional security they’ve managed to maintain in their music that’s cathartic, surprising, and maybe most of all, uplifting, which is a difficult thing to do while screaming lyrics like “never fight a man with a perm.” I actually think these Bristol boys would get along quite well with Elbow. (I see a new supergroup formation on the horizon—everyone, I give you, Idle Elbows.)
The Southern Suite is just an incredible jazz record. Mason is a wizard, like a lot of jazz musicians are, and this one is steel-strong from front to back.
Seeing:
Nothing really here. Although, Byung-Chul Han speaks a bit about Jeff Koon’s artwork (not good things) so I think I’ll be looking at a bit more of his stuff soon. Though from the looks of it I might not endorse it as a recommendation. But I could be wrong.
My current plans are to finish what I’ve been reading. Next on my pile, after Byung-Chul Han spoke about him at length, is to knockout some Proust after finishing De Botton’s book. The Complete Letters of Emily Dickinson comes out April 2nd, so I might carve out space in my calendar for that beast, clocking in at just a mere one thousand pages. I’ve also been back in Leaves of Grass as an exploration into the other half of the two greatest American poets, though my preference definitely lies with Dickinson in that centuries’ old War of Wordsmiths.
It’s a lot to take in of course, but hey, Beauty sometimes requires a bit of elbow grease. With all that’s been said, if anyone has recommendations I’ll gladly take them, any time, anywhere—TBR pile be damned.
So many incredible truths gleaned from all these great works recently. It’s all worship, really. But WRLS is just an overview so I’ll save the specifics for your regularly scheduled programming. Until then, here’s a great little bit from Jeremy Cooper’s new book, Brian, which sums up my feelings about all of this nicely (though isn’t reserved to just film):
“The thing about the cinema, in Brian’s experience, seated in a large dark space staring without interruption at a high wide screen, entranced, lost in another’s vision, was that he found feelings inside himself he did not know existed, replaced the next night by a different film and new sensations. And the next. Another film, a new set of feelings.”
Us too, Brian. Us too.
A joke. The day my paid subscribers request a 10,000 word essay is a day I become simultaneously very proud and very alarmed.
Examples of Garvey’s lyricism:
•“You have the time-worn shimmer of tarantella on a Tuscan plain” – ‘The Take Off and Landing of Everything’ (The Take Off and Landing of Everything)
• “If I loose a sequin here and there/More salt than pepper in my hair/Can I rely on you when all the songs are through/To be for me the everthere?” – ‘The Everthere’ (Leaders Of The Free World)
• “I have an audience with the pope/And I’m saving the world at eight/But if she says she needs me/Everybody’s gonna have to wait.” — ‘Audience With The Pope’ (The Seldom Seen Kid)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the whole post, but this is a top-tier recommendation: "The book [Middlemarch] as a whole so far, to put it loosely, is like a viewing a 30-hour compilation of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice hand flex scene without ever growing tired of it."