Some Tuesday treats
Little Simz, musical trees, a heron under a bridge, closing your eyes to listen in public
Avery has organised an excellent event on Saturday — see below — so I’m doing a Tuesday treats this week, instead of waiting for Friday, to tell you about it.
Since handing in what felt like a year’s worth of pieces last week, I’ve been mostly breathing and walking. Every window in my flat is wide open right now so I can fully feel that most glorious cold air we now live with. That does mean I’m sat typing with frigid fingers in my puffa coat. But the sky is peach-hued frozen yoghurt. And all I can hear is the clickclack of my keys and the overhead rush of an airplane far above like expanding foam in the silence. A truck reversing now, at the end of the road. A shutter lifting. The thud of a neighbour upstairs closing the door to head out. The squeak of the ancient Vent-a-matic in the top pane of the window closest to me. The trundle of a trolley being pushed out on the pavement.
Do you find yourself trying to type more quietly? Have you closed your eyes in public recently? What do you use to measure time internally? How do you wait?
I can’t always remember the exact duration of Robert Glasper’s Y’Outta Praise Him Intro but I do pretty much know every note he plays in it so whenevert I’ve nothing to do but have to wait, I wander through it in my mind, chord by beautiful chord. He recently told me which hymns he composited into that brief instrumental and it was a total thrill (that interview will be out soon in the FT).
Here then, some hymns, sounds and other beautiful distractions/foci to get you through the lulls or irks of your week.
Erykah Badu’s Appletree
Badu, in a live she did during lockdown (from inside actual giant blow-up bubbles) which is sadly no longer online, when she told her viewers: “You are all truly geniuses and heroes, and your audience hears you. Your audience is the trees and the wind and the birds and the sky and the moon and the grass that grows and the breath that blows between. So breathe deep. Exhale. But not too deep right now. Not too deep.”
I loved
’s recent letter about storm petrels:Maybe it is helpful to remember this when times are difficult. Maybe it will help us be kind to our minds, to our bodies; to other minds and other bodies. We are just small things, carrying the weight of timeless storms upon our backs.
Maybe it will help us to remember that when we do find light and beauty and joy, we must hold onto it with both hands. Grip it tight. Soak it in. Think of its shape over and over again until it maps its way into our minds.
The harmonics in my favourite hymn, Jesus Christ the Apple Tree…
…and the Cambridge choir which is singing that particular 1993 version — a choir soon to have ample airwave-time in my house bc Christmas is nearly upon us and that, I love.
This folksong, Yerabu Yuri no Hana from the Amami archipelago in Japan, which I always sing to that first hymn. What happens when you overlap these two melodies is something special.
Wildly, I’ve just realised that my favourite Little Simz track, 101FM, shares something with both those melodies. Listen to the loop she’s singing over.
I found the graffiti at the top of the page, on yesterday’s walk to the Senate House library, by way of Angel, a beautiful tribute to Simz herself, the rapper I love best of all, an all-round legend, the Queen of N1 and the capital at large.
Which reminds me of what happened when Hilary Mantel met the other Queen, Elizabeth II: "For all her imaginative dealings with royal subjects, perhaps the most characteristic of Mantel’s sensibility was her first encounter with the Queen. At a party in Buckingham Palace they locked eyes, and Mantel felt her sympathies shift towards the monarch in a manner so 'violently interesting' that she had to hide behind a sofa and sit on the floor.”
Can’t tell you how often I think about that. I also can’t wait to watch The Mirror and the Light adaptation. I can still feel the astonishment I felt when I read that trilogy in what felt like one held breath.
Another walk I did was a loop from St Augustine’s Tower in Hackney Central > Victoria Park > the Olympic Park > Hackney Marshes > Clapton Pond.
Captions top to bottom, left to right:
Jah, the door to St Augustine’s Tower (its bell is ringing as I type);
Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae), by Veronica Ryan, 2021 (my favourite public art in all of London, and quite possibly, the world);
A mural honouring Dr Colin Franklin, one of Hackney’s first Black doctors;
A sinking boat;
A smiling cat on the Hertford Union canal;
The Severn and Canal Carrying Co. Ltd barge (supplies people living on narrow boats on the river Lee with fuel);
The 2012 Olympic signage in Stratford, seen from behind;
The bridge under which lives a heron. A heron! (See that tiny spec of white amid the greenery on the far side of the water, out of the shadows of the bridges?);
The many years of tape affixed to one of the hundreds of goal posts on the Hackney Marshes playing fields.
How Hackney Marshes got its 135 pitches is one of my favourite pieces I commissioned while at the Conversation. I think about it all the time. (I’m also missing my colleagues. Aren’t you grateful when you realise how much you’ve loved working with people? Like, I need to move and do the things I want to do, but I feel so deeply grateful for the friends I’ve made along the way.)
Can’t wait to see Steve McQueen’s Blitz — “But it’s the young boy at the heart of the film,” writes historian Lucy Noakes, “that tells us the most important and most overlooked truth about London in 1940. This was a cosmopolitan, diverse city that went to war in 1939 and Londoners were soon joined by many thousands of volunteers from across the Commonwealth and occupied Europe.” McQueen was inspired by a picture he came across while researching Small Axe, his incredible TV series. (btw, you should all subscribe to Anna and Naomi’s Something Good newsletter for more in-depth scholarly takes, like Noakes’s, on the kind of things I often highlight; it’s so good).
The photographer Elliot Ross’s new artist book (Schilt Publishing & Gallery), titled Crows Ascending, featuring shots he’s taken over an extended period of time of crows near his apartment near Russian Hill in San Francisco.
Elliot Ross, from Crows Ascending, 2024. Copyright: the artist. Courtesy of Schilt Publishing & Gallery. Lanre Bakare, another excellent former colleague and friend, has a book coming out in April next year, titled We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain, which I’m so very excited about.
This window, with paintings by artist, rapper and producer @rxcvdro_
I’ve been to see Haegue Yang at the Hayward Gallery twice now, but for reasons beyond my control, have yet to see it all. I’m not that sure about the big blue-wall installation, mostly because of that blue (an almost Yves Klein hue that absolutely dominates) but I love the bell curtain at the entrance with the trad roof structure, the smaller installations and the works on paper that all, too, speak of domesticity and urban habits and pattern recognition in really intriguing, beautiful ways.
Haegue Yang, Leap Year (installation shots), the Hayward Gallery, 2024. Copyright: the artist. Photographs: Dale Berning Sawa Last days to see Danh Vo at White Cube, Masons Yard, closes 16 November
I’ll tell you about this week. Can’t wait to see it.Tashi Wada with Julia Holter is my first London Jazz Festival event — at Kings Place, Friday 15 November, 20:30
I’m having a cinema day on Saturday with: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (which is on until 28 November) at the Institut Français; What can Paddington teach our leaders?, at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green, 18:20 (organised by Avery Anapol, my former colleague on the politics + society desk at The Conversation UK — a screening of Paddington in Peru followed by a Q&A with migration scholars, about how this film might get our leaders to think about migration and immigration in critical and compassionate ways); and the Jarman Award shortlisted films at the Whitechapel…
…I love that Derek Jarman, for whom that award is named, used to talk about filmmaking as “finding family”.
World of echo
Spotify playlist here.
I enjoyed that Badu quote, nature as the audience as well. It feels so good to hear as an artist. Thanks for sharing.