end-of-week treats #8
It’s still only January 24th, but, to paraphrase Toby Ziegler, in the three weeks this year has had me on its radar, I have aged 48 years
Do you feel it too? I know Steve Madden is just a shoe brand, but it was really on the money when its Insta person posted this on Sunday:
All week, I’ve had pasted at the top of my Daily Notes/to-dos* this Chris Hayes quote: “Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still.”
That’s because, I’m not gonna lie, I’m properly battling my brain into focus, my workspace into tidiness and my limbs into training. So this isn’t going to be a very long missive. Just long enough to list some things that have been propping up those efforts, like gardeners prop up creaking trees:
Sheku Kanneh-Mason playing Ernest Bloch’s Abodah (also Yehudi Menuhin’s version). (All music mentioned, and a bit more, in a playlist ⬇️ down under)
Brad’s excellent recent deep-dive into Bach’s Suites for Cello, prompted by Ute’s suggestion to listen to Jacqueline du Pré’s rendering (du Pré only recorded the first two, unfortunately, but they’re superb). My favourite is Anner Bylsma’s 1992 recording, which I’ve been listening to with religious fervour since I was a teenager.
My papa, playing this on the latest guitar, la Lusette, he’s made—and gifted me! because I loved its patchworked woodwork and veneer so much. (Also, his song, I’ll Be There, with some pretty sweet cello and lyrics to make you weep, every time, which he wrote for my mama.) The guitar’s named for the Col de la Lusette, a pass at 1,351m in elevation, not too far from the village, deep in the mountains I’ve presumptuously taken to calling mine.
The fact that four friends—Mina, Lanre, Jessica (whose wonderful Substack is
’s Read.Look.Think) and Alayo—all have books coming out in the coming months; that Katie has a show on right now (I’m going to interview her for you about it soon); that Jason AKA ’s album is just out (Pitchfork just gave it an excellent review); that Patten was on BBC6 recently, on stellar form (look at this cosmic headshot!!). And that Samantha Harvey, with whom I was doing a lifechanging Arvon writer’s retreat that Easter weekend Notre-Dame burned, has just won the Booker Prize (!!!!!!!) for her magnificent book, Orbital. How awesome is that? I’m just so excited for each book and album and show, you’re all legends and that helps on hard days, little hard-won glimpses of people going full Voltaire and still cultivating their gardens.How the gardeners in Kenrokuen, the beautiful park in the centre of Hiraki’s hometown, Kanazawa, tend to their trees.
These magnificent colour charts.
Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, color analyses from Japanese fabrics, 1902 These beautiful hand-coloured flowers.
Ogawa Kazumasa, Some Japanese Flowers, 1896 Curry Hackett imagining the beautiful spaces the quilters of Gee’s Bend could make if quilts were structures you could take shelter in—the first time I’ve thought AI might actually have the potential to make something moving.
The real quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend. Oh the beauty of these works, particularly those by Nellie Mae Abrams, Pearlie Kennedy Pettway and Polly Bennett.
My Tsu Tsu, just now, telling me, as she goes to sleep, about how she and her one friend at school have bonded over their shared love of cucumbers (they both get Japanese bento boxes made by parents every day; they always have cucumber to eat at lunch time) and how she was in the playground wrapping a ribbon around a mini cucumber to give to her friend the other day when two teachers walked past and saw what she was doing. “And that was the first time I’ve seen Sir laugh,” she said. And I can just see how it’s not just me, is it, I reckon a few people at school probably also think she’s special.
Ichiko Aoba and Pomme’s collabs last year — they each recorded one of the other’s songs in their own language, Japanese and French respectively.
I’ve just interviewed Aoba—you can read it soon. That was pretty special too.
Nujabes and the eternally beautiful Reflection Eternal—the most perfect riff on the keys and these nicest of things to say to a friend: “You're a flower / You're a river / You're a rainbow”
… and Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas, for some reason, these days I keep thinking about early Wim Wenders (I still haven’t watched Perfect Days, I need to.) and that feeling of hearing Madredeus for the first time when I first watched Lisbon Story, and then watched it again, and again and again and couldn’t come out of it. Whenever I’m out just listening to the city, or recording its sounds, that’s kind kind of always what I’m thinking about, on some level.
This, from Hayes, who wrote this really good op-ed in the NYT the other day about attention and focus, daydreaming, going for walks just to hear the world and find your thoughts:
Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive and also a casualty of the attention age. Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about attention, I’ve begun to force myself to just walk and let myself be with my thoughts. I’ve also developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone.
Hope you can give yourself some such gentle time to wander this weekend. <3
Notes
*in Roam Research, the desktop app/tool I work and write and think with and basically live in now, and without which—it’s absurd, given what I just typed out, like, four lines above this line—I’m not sure I’d make it.
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i'm so here for patchwork guitars and ribbons around cucumbers ......x