Totally unexpected—yet it's been in the air that something was up with Radiohead going offline—but last night just checking out my IG feed and there's this funny image of wooden people—actually scary looking wooden people in masks about to burn a girl tied to a tree—and I double check and it's Radiohead's sneak preview of their new song!
So—ominous and exciting—here's the video for Burn the Witch.
Artwork: Shakespeare psychedelia by @akajimmyc
It's Shakespeare's birthday and 400 years since his death.
It also happens to be my mum's birthday, so I've never forgotten this significant date! My way to celebrate is to turn to Shakespeare's words, which truly immortalise him. Here is my favourite sonnet, which strangely (speaking about immortals) I revisited the other night when watching Jim Jarmusch's wonderful vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive. Although Jarmusch sneakily attributes this sonnet to Christopher Marlowe—a vampire played by John Hurt—because well, Shakespeare was simply a dunderheaded foil for Marlowe to get his work out there! Would have been great if Jarmusch had actually made Shakespeare into a vampire...(I'm a sucker—pun intended—for a great vampire story!)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when alterations finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(source: William Shakespeare: Complete Works, RSC, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2007)
So excited about the soon to be released (April 15) PJ Harvey album, The Hope Six Demolition Project! Here's an amazing song from the album, The Wheel.
I love this street art project by eL Seed. Titled Perception in Cairo, in eL Seed’s words:
“In my new project ‘Perception’ I am questioning the level of judgment and misconception society can unconsciously have upon a community based on their differences. In the neighborhood of Manshiyat Nasr in Cairo, the Coptic community of Zaraeeb collects the trash of the city for decades and developed the most efficient and highly profitable recycling system on a global level. Still, the place is perceived as dirty, marginalized and segregated. To bring light on this community, with my team and the help of the local community, I created an anamorphic piece that covers almost 50 buildings only visible from a certain point of the Moqattam Mountain. The piece of art uses the words of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic Bishop from the 3rd century, that said: ‘Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.’‘إن أراد أحد أن يبصر نور الشمس، فإن عليه أن يمسح عينيه’The Zaraeeb community welcomed my team and I as we were family. It was one of the most amazing human experience I have ever had. They are generous, honest and strong people. They have been given the name of Zabaleen (the garbage people), but this is not how they call themselves. They don’t live in the garbage but from the garbage; and not their garbage, but the garbage of the whole city. They are the one who clean the city of Cairo.”
Check out his site: http://elseed-art.com
Artwork: eL Seed, Perception, Cairo
Artwork: Auguste Rodin, Danaid, 1889
laid bare
unstitched and
incomplete
in the cradle
of your
lap
© Angela Jooste
a snarly, twisty, frustrating kind of day—a set of fangs would have been great...(grrrrr!)
Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star is exquisite.
The love story of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne is told with grace, honesty, humour and an emotional intensity that had me enthralled from the first time I saw it. And every time I’ve watched it since, the ending still has a gut wrenching power that reduces me to tears.
As Fanny comments in the film, the beginning of Keats’ poem, Endymion is “quite perfect”, and I find these lines express something of my feelings about this film:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Artwork: eLSeed (@elseed), love you mum, 2012
Thinking about the word—love. One word in English to express so much.
So, following that train of thought—this is from one of my favourite novels, Ahdaf Soueif’s, Map of Love, the many ways “love” finds its expression in Arabic:
“Hubb’ is love, ‘ishq’ is love that twines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the heart, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carries sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and with ‘falling’, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price.”
Trying to focus, but I'm travelling in my mind...
I've been a fan of Four Tet since I heard the album, There is Love in You. Gorgeous. So, happy start to the day when on my IG feed, a post from Four Tet (Kieran!), of a remix of Seesaw with Jamie xx and Romy (the xx). Check it out.
Sometimes, you just fall.
Tom Dosland's recent free fall on the big, big wave, Jaws (Peahi, Hawaii), is hard to watch. But he made it without being injured, although his board got shredded.
Big wave surfers amaze me with the risks they're prepared to take.
Just read a wonderful interview with Toni Morrison in The Paris Review on 'The Art of Fiction' (no.134). Here's just one of her observations on writing:
“The difficulty for me in writing—among the difficulties—is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn't hear anything. Now for that, one has to work carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.”
If my heart
was enough
I'd reel
you in
© Angela Jooste
Love this—thanks Courtney Barnett!
Jimi Hendrix: “ When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know Peace.”
Image: Yoko Ono's instagram message 15/11.15
Peace and love—we need them like air...
For Paris—thoughts, prayers and love
I've been wondering how Isobelle Carmody must have felt finishing the last Obernewtyn Chronicles book, The Red Queen—a 30 year epic writing journey! In an interview with The Guardian to mark the release of the book, Carmody reveals she wrote The Red Queen while staying at a friend's place, and when she finished, she packed her things and took a bus and train journey home:
“I arrived home in the night and it felt very symbolic, that journey. It was a lovely feeling of blissful separation, of floating away into the future.”
FInally!!! The last of the Obernewtyn Chronicles has been released—The Red Queen. And it's a doorstop! I'm very excited to see how the journey ends, and also slightly daunted at the 1,100+ page length. I came late to reading this series (read Obernewtyn a few years ago), so I can't imagine how it must feel for readers who have been there from when the first book was released in 1987!!!! Truly epic and mind boggling.
Kind of sleepy, kind of dreamy...