end-of-week treats #4
end-of-week treats #4
Aimer et faire aimer, I want to be a Brita filter, and clear eyes, full hearts
I have two Grace Allens whom I love dearly. The one who lives on the south coast asked* me the other day to list my favourite TV/filmic depictions of parenting, which I’ll do for a Thursday Letter** coming your way soon. One couple that will defo make the cut is Friday Night Lights’s Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) and her Coach Taylor husband (Kyle Chandler).
I’ve been rewatching the early seasons of the show, like I do sometimes, partly because I wish I lived inside an Explosions in the Sky guitar and because I’ve always loved the looseness, the limber quality, of how it was initally written and shot. Also Tami and Coach Eric are still some kind of relationship goal, a beautifully drawn depiction of a couple figuring out how to parent, together. I’m not saying they’re always right. But they’re just so real together. They’ve had me in tears, multiple tears, this week.
Ofc the easy cheesy*** takeaway from FNL is the locker-room slogan, “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”, which is patently disproven most days, in terms of actually winning things (games, matches, jobs, competitions, arguments, conflicts).
Further, the writers’ room’s lack of clarity on very obvious problems is clear. In the way characters of colour are portrayed, the show falls flat when trying to tackle the very racism it acknowledges. Starting running back Smash also having to be the rapper to hype up every gathering; the one Black coach on the team’s staff being given neither a name or any lines to speak; Voodoo Tatum the 2D villain; Carlotta the 2D live-in nurse, exoticised, seductive and the only Hispanic female character, when this is set in a Texas town so close to the Mexican border you can just drive there; the dismissive, clichéd way Mexico is portrayed. Just nope. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it early on, “I wish the TV and film folks had grappled harder with race. I think it actually adds more to the story.”
FNL did cement some superlative careers: Chandler’s, Britton’s, Jesse Plemons’s (what an extraordinary character is Landry, and how beautifully is he portrayed, with that face as subtly changing as moving water) and Michael B Jordan’s, after he’d played Reggie in All My Children and, indelibly, Wallace in the Wire. And in terms of living life, every day, OH to have constant clarity of mind and vision and a full heart every day in this unrelenting storm of a world. I don’t think about the second part of the slogan — what are we trying to win? against whom? — but I do think about the first.
Here then, somehow, a list of Friday morning lights.
“Aimer et faire aimer”: I love this job description for the head architects in charge of France’s historical monuments. The blurb says they do not play a technical role. Rather, in the first instance, their job is to understand and make intelligible historical architecture, in order to transmit it to others and get them to love it like they do. “To love it and get other people to love it.”
These humming legends:
(That’s Common, Black Thought, Queen Latifa, Busta, De La Soul’s Dj Maseo and more, backstage, about to go on stage, in Cleveland Ohio****, for A Tribe Called Quest’s induction to the Hall of Fame on October 19. Just low-key going through Bonita Applebum, a joint you can just feel they’ve lived in and loved since 1985. And who wouldn’t? I certainly have since I first heard it. What a perfection.)
Even more exciting: Mary J Blige, the realest, finally being inducted too.
After I emailed an art historian to thank her for doing an interview about the iconography in Notre Dame de Paris with me on Wedneday, she wrote back saying that no, it was a pleasure, she should be thanking me: “Mon regard est de nouveau aiguisé,” she wrote, “My gaze is newly sharpened.” Honestly, all I did was listen …
… which chimes with
being a don on a bridge:
“I’m a sponge.”
“Don’t be a sponge.”“I want to be a water purifier, a Brita filter.”
Listening — to sound artist Bill Fontana amplifying the latent vibrations of Notre Dame de Paris’s bells at rest.
Studying — Pierre Soulages’s monochromatic stained-glass windows, made in 1987 for the cathedral in Conques.
Quiet made visible: I love this quote, “Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow” from this excellent piece on monochromes as a medieval form of contemplation, far, far predating abstraction.
Hettie Judah’s Secret Lives of Stones.
Wendimagegn Belete ወንዴ ’s murals.
Phin Harper (of
)’s mobiles …… and his repairs on an Akari N1 lantern light by Noguchi.
My washi-tape Akari N1 repair:
All the MT washi tape!
Mulatu Astatke, Tezeta, always …
Saagara’s new track, God of Bangalore, the video of which reminds me of Shahanara doing kathak, and how completely wonderful it was to watch her dance.
অপুর সংসার | Apur Sansar | The World of Apu, by Satyajit Ray (1959), a beauty of a film that Shahanara will confirm I’m never not thinking about. And it’s right here on YouTube darlings.
My kid just walked in with a blanket wrapped around her hips like a fat hoollahoop, going “I’m a donut. I’m a donut.” A vendredi prochain <3 <3 <3
Notes
*You can request things too:
**This week I published my first review on here, in one of four new sections: Reviews, Interviews, the Thursday Letters I started out with and the Friday morning Treats — I won’t be sending something from each section each week, because that would be a fulltime job and I feel like I already have several. You are welcome to unsubscribe from any of these sections if they don’t appeal / please stay.
***Please can we take a minute to love Snoop, the legend of legends, waxing lyrical about “Michael Bublé Woobly”.
**** “Cleveland Ohio o-meo o-myo” bc I’m a compulsive West Wing nerd, i cannot lie,
which ofc leads us to “skibidi toilet Ohio rizzler” bc as I’m told, literally every day, I’m also a gen alpha mama.
World of echo
All the tracks listed here and a few more: