End-of-week treats #11: the power of levity
Dancing noses, pink clouds, giant bubbles, bouncing balls, perpetual motion, a ghost train, a bold diver, a piano backpack, a runaway bicycle, effervescent and hyper
Standing up for a sneeze! In a clip from not too long ago Amy Poehler was on Late Night with Seth Myers (click on the below post). Myers, the host, is mid-sentence when he suddenly excuses himself because he has to sneeze. “Oh my god a sneeze!” goes Poehler, like it’s a rare sighting in the wild. “Everyone stand up!”
And they do. She stands. The audience stands. Everybody giggles. Myers throws his hands up in the air in baffled wonder.
The way Poehler’s voice goes high on “sneeze”. The way she can still laugh like a three year old. The way she lifts her arms and eyyyys like the DJ’s put on a solid tune and not only do you have to stand when people sneeze, you have to dance. The woman’s utterly indomitable levity. It’s like a feather on the breeze. This tiny clip has got me through some tough moments in the past weeks. I just can’t get over it.*
It strikes me that this is a profoundly creative stance, not just a character trait. I loved Poehler’s memoir, which I listened to on Audible, bc she reads it herself. Even though she’s obviously famous yada yada yada, there’s something very real and unblinking about her. Her ability to laugh and make you laugh is an active thing – it’s not just a talent. If I had to explain this to a tiny person, I’d say she chooses to smile, basically, even when things are frowning.
I’ve been told I can be scary. I feel like I frown too often and I know I can shut things down with a look, which I’m not sure is always a good thing. Mostly though, I’ve come to treasure reminders like this about the power of levity — any prompt to hold things a bit more lightly, to step through life with a bit more grace. Which is not the same at all as ignoring them or it. It’s just, perhaps, a more helpful path in making decisions or finding/trying to find solutions – in sum, in simply making it through the day. Here are some more prompts I’ve held on to of late/always. Like this indelible photograph by David Spero, which, honestly, if I had to choose one abstracted way of depicting how I hope my life feels when I share it, I would pick this one.
My daughter sings in her school’s chapel choir. For the voluntary (the bit at the end of the service) at their choral evensong last week, the organist chose The Revd Mustard his Installation Prelude by Nico Muhly (the legend to whom we owe so much beauty, including the soundtrack for Pachinko).
Muhly composed this piece for the installation service (AKA inauguration) of his “dear friend Reverend James Mustard”, as rector of The Church of St Mary the Virgin in East Barnet”. The main technical conceit, he writes, is “a perpetual motion machine happening between the two hands of the organist, and a long, slowly developing melodic pattern that begins in two voices in the pedals and then migrates up to the left hand.”
To me, it sounds like Steve Reich woke up mid-air one morning, no longer tethered to the ground (like when the Moomins take to the skies on those pink clouds the bad hat lets out – fast forward to 11:37 in this clip). This chimes with Muhly’s own adjectives for the piece, “effervescent and hyper” (he could be speaking about Poehler no?), “a fitting welcome” he writes, “for Reverend Mustard to his new surroundings”. Just imagine being the friend your friend composes this for, when you take on a new job. I think I’d very much like to befriend both Mustard and Muhly.
I recently interviewed Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga for my first piece in the New York Times, on the occasion of her winning the 2025 Nasher Sculpture Prize. I finished the interview, and then the piece, and instantly wished we could do it all over again.
Nkanga makes beautiful, layered, surprising work that, as the jury put it, wildly expands the idea of what sculpture can be. She uses soap and ceramics and glass and stones and plants and weavings and minerals and words, but also dancing and singing and writing and commercial structures and community connections. In person she is warm and generous, unstoppably curiosity — and, frankly, unstoppable. She’s also very funny.
What has stayed with me most is this enchanted stance of hers. She is acutely tuned into the real world and its very real pain. But she also has this deep-set compulsion to move. Rather than letting doubt or frustration or overwhelm take root, she expulses it to give it sculptural shape. She speaks of making an exhibition as “a way of creating something that goes out of your body, goes out of your mind, and sharing it with the world”:
“Sometimes I get really frustrated, especially when I have to do a lot of administrative things and the frustration, it feels like it's loaded, like my body's full, my brain is full everything, like you have a full bladder and you cannot release yet. And so sometimes the decision even to make an exhibition is a release: a release of thoughts, of different things that have fermented in a way, and then that fermentation takes form.
It's right there in the way she uses language. Nkanga is a multilingual person. Hearing her take a word and play with it out loud, as if it were one of those strong bubbles that street performers blow up huge then play with in the sunlight, is really something. I’m so glad I have that on tape …
William Kentridge and his tap-dancing noses (I’ve been watching and reading a lot, for an upcoming piece; I’ll let you know when it’s out):
“Everyone claps when anyone tries a new dive. Even if it’s a flop. Because they tried it, and they are better than they were before, when they weren’t trying it.”
Antonia Murphy, the 68-year-old swimmer who only took up high diving two years ago and has already mastered somersaulting off the 7.5m jump.
The magic of photographer David Spero’s Ball Photographs**: like the piano one (up top), I find the ones in artist studios to be metaphorically perfect for what can happen in places like that.
Andre3000, who wore a piano to a big-ass fancy dinner last week and released a surprise new album, 7 Piano Sketches …
… which continues the magic of his previous release of flute music. Watch this “intimate album film” he made for his 2023 album New Blue Sun, titled Listening To The Sun.
When he released that album, he did an interview with Jeff Weiss that made me feel like I too was levitating. AhhjhhhhhhhhHHHHHHH, the space, the fresh air. “These days,” writes Weiss, “most of André’s mornings begin with a five‑mile walk”:
“Afterwards, he heads to his creative studio in nearby El Segundo, where he paints, sculpts, takes video calls and sketches designs for his new company, A Myriad of Pyramids, which aims to connect all of his artistic endeavours. He plays the flute throughout the day and has begun an apprenticeship to learn how to make the instrument. At night, he has vivid recurring dreams, most notably a vision that he has been having since the beginning of his career, in which he floats through the air.
“‘I’m always amazed that I’m flying. And I’m so amazed that I want to tell my friends,’ André says. ‘I’m not flying with wings, but I’m hovering and I can float to certain places. But when I try to show my friends, it doesn’t work. I don’t know why that is.’”
A while back I had to get a series of tests done at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Eye doctors wanted to check I didn’t have glaucoma (I didn’t ) after I was referred for an anomaly my optician thought might be connected to my migraines (it wasn’t). I have always been petrified of the medical establishment as a whole, but I actually loved the few months I got to spend going to this darkened floor, looking into white boxes and following coloured lights and patterns with my eyes.
All those optical tools, the old-fashioned wooden boxes with the glass lenses, the prisms, the digital environments, all of it so beautiful and weird and a lot like early video games and Joseph Cornell both.
Look at these 1860s optics illustrations from Amédée Guillemin’s Les phénomènes de la physique (1868) and Le monde physique (1882). As I type, my room is flooded with reflections not dissimilar, from the faceted crystal Jodie gave me a long time ago, that hangs in my window. It makes every early morning better.
A fetching Québecois version of my favourite French children’s song, A la claire fontaine: “Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai”
Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête
Tomorrow, Katie and I are headed to Somerset, to see Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: Myths and Machines, at Hauser and Wirth. This year would have been Tinguely’s 100th birthday. For a piece in this month’s Art Newspaper, I interviewed de Saint Phalle’s granddaughter, Bloum Cardenas, Director of Museum Tinguely in Basel Roland Wetzel, and conservator Jean-Marc Gaillard, who joined Tinguely’s studio as an assistant in his 20s and is now the one person in the world who really knows how fix his ageing works.
In 1977, to mark the opening of the Centre Pompidou, Tinguely worked with de Saint-Phalle, Bernese sculptor Bernhard Luginbühl and several other artists, under the art collective Zig et Puce, on the Crocrodrome: a 30m-long mechanical dragon/ghost train which comprised one of Romanian-Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri’s Musée Sentimental and a Boutique Abérrante.
I love these drawings Luginbühl made of the structure. Tinguely was a real cad, playing as fast and loose with hearts, as he did with machines and spelling. At the same time, as Gaillard put it, of his time working with him, “It was pure joy. He brought everyone together.”
Notes
*Of course, in the longer clip you can watch here, you’ll see the sneeze comes midway through an anecdote Poehler is telling about reading A Room of One’s Own. Now that’s book beloved by many who might well take issue with Poehler’s blunt assessment. To my shame, I’ve never read Virginia Woolf 😬, so I can’t say either way. But that controversial take aside, I’m holding on to the magic of that reaction to a sneeze.
**Contrast Spero’s subtlety with the bombast of these two things that, as momentarily mesmerising as they were, they simply would never happen now (one hopes): that time when José Gonzales and Sony threw environmental concerns to the wind and dumped 250,000 bouncing balls down a hill in San Francisco and filmed them with 23 cameras. Totally beautiful; sheer lunacy. See also, the time Cleveland city released 1,429,643 balloons from Public Square, downtown, and a storm system not only brought them down over Lake Erie and the entirety of northeast Ohio but also brought to a halt the Guinness Book of Records counting balloon releases as something to be measured because of the frankly tremendous ecological impact. What were they thinking?
Pull up a memory
I am, as usual, reading too many books, but also, I’ve started listening to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (lu par Andé Dussollier) when I’m running or walking. It’s another thing that has somehow eluded me until now and actually, it is pretty mesmerising.
What are you reading? Let me know and I’ll do a summer reading list with all your and my recs next week <3
World of Echo
Happy weekend to you all. I’m going to attempt to run a half marathon on Sunday. See you on the other side x
I adore these end-of-week treats! Thank you!