The old woman asks if she can have her sunglasses just a tranquil darker,
and the optometrist, without blinking an eye, does not trifle with her,
says he can do that, says he’ll take care of that for her.
And I think for a moment he is William Wordsworth listening to Dorothy,
her spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, her perfect tranquillity.
Or maybe he is God himself, the great optometrist, or at least that dim image
we strain to see of the omniscient god who mostly does not trifle with us.
The occasional hat flown off our heads, perhaps, the tossed banana peel
with the businessman’s wingtip approaching, the hurtling safe heading
down for our heads, all of us so intensely looking elsewhere, as if our lives
were God’s New Yorker cartoons, all his back issues stacked up, the ones
with the Elizabeth Bishop poems, teetering, in his waiting room.
Mostly He gives us our due, God, or Wordsworth for that matter, for the things
we choose to believe in, the things we say we’ll see if we can do, like loving
each other, like being true, like the woman who accompanies her husband,
the lawn mowing man, and sits on the steps of the houses he goes to.
(See her, by the daffodils?) She watches him moving from row to row,
loves the ease with which he moves, sees the lawn changing right before
her eyes, like some eye chart of I’s and E’s slowly coming into view,
her love for him the one thing that is perfectly clear.
It is as if they live in some peripheral light that is always glowing,
that we can see sometimes, like a lark that flares up suddenly
out of the corner of our eyes, somehow always lifting
from this cock-eyed part of the world, away from the glare,
to some other place where everything is just the way we want it,
just a tranquil darker.
I have a Swedish friend who can say Roy Andersson’s name the way it was meant to be pronounced. It sounds really cool. The Swedish language, in general, sounds very cool, don’t you think? If you agree, that would be one reason why you might enjoy Roy Andersson’s films.
Other reasons would include: the way his work is like visual poetry, laden with metaphors and rhyme and rhythm; his beautifully stark sets, which, through their ceramic-and-cement coldness speak of the human yearning for warmth; his dark humour; how the pallor of death that stains the faces of all his characters contrast against how painfully alive they are, how his vignettes say so little and so much at the same time.
You just have to watch his films to understand it.
Here is a trailer for his film Songs from the Second Floor.
And here are a bunch of commercials that he directed. He was a commercial director first before becoming a filmmaker. Ingmar Bergman once called him the best commercial director in the world. (My favourite’s the last one, the one for the Social Democrat party.)
I have no patience for full-length biographies but I do like reading profiles of people in newspapers or magazines. This is a good one from the New Yorker: a profile of Grant Achatz, a chef who’s battling tongue cancer.
(If you, like me, immediately thought “Hey, that’s like Beethoven composing music while deaf!”, the analogy crops up in the article itself.)
The food starts off at the savory end of the spectrum, and slowly turns sweeter, concluding with coffee, in the form of crystallized candy. Most items could be eaten in a bite or two, but the procession took four and a half hours. I had liquefied caramel popcorn in a shot glass, and a bean dish that came on a tray with a pillow full of nutmeg-scented air. The plate of beans was placed atop the pillow, forcing the aroma out. I sampled a “honey bush tea foam cascading over vanilla-scented brioche pudding,” in the words of the young man who brought it. There was also a dish centering on a cranberry that had been puréed and then re-formed into its original shape.
It’s an article about life as a chef, about cancer, about food and about how your tongue works. Like a good dish at a gourmet restaurant, you’ll never realise how well they all go together until you see it for yourself.
“It’s the summer of 1994, and the streets of New York are pulsing with hip-hop and wafting with the sweet aroma of marijuana—but change is in the air. The newly-inaugurated mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is beginning to implement his anti-fun initiatives against “crimes” like noisy portable radios, graffiti and public drunkenness. Set against this backdrop, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) spends his last summer before college selling dope throughout New York City, trading it with his shrink (Ben Kingsley) for therapy, while crushing on his step daughter (Olivia Thirlby). Famke Janssen, Mary Kate Olsen,and Method Man round out the cast in this edgy, bittersweet, and funny coming of age story.”
You read that right - Mary Kate Olsen is in this film. But you only see her about twice in the trailer, so it’s not terribly dangerous to your health.
I first stumbled on this site thanks sort of indirectly to zatandad, who, on one day sometime around ad’s birthday and the new year, I went over and they were all like “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LISTEN TO THIS GUY WHO WALKS AROUND AND PLAYS HIS TRUMPET ON THE STREET”.
That guy was Beirut’s Zach Condon, and I quickly got obsessed with the trumpets, the drums, the violins that make up his eclectic Eastern sound. The walking in the street thing, as it turned out, wasn’t completely his thing (although it really does fit the nomadic gypsy vibe he has) - it belongs (if such a thing can belong to someone) to the people at Blogotheque (yes they’re really French) who film bands who swing through Paris. They take these bands, who are forced to strip their music down to the essentials and walk around Parisian streets entertaining/weirding out Parisian folk.
The site is a bit hard to navigate cos it’s mostly in French, but if there’s an indie band you like and they’re relatively known, you can bet they’ve strummed a guitar through Paris and it’s on film And it’s a really awesome way to check out new music - it’s such a nice, fresh way of watching a group perform live without the shakiness, darkness, general mayhem that are live shows on YouTube.
The Beirut-Blogotheque relationship is pretty special cos the French guys travelled all the way to New York to film every song off the Flying Club Cup album in New York. You can see all those videos here.
Apparently there have been some copycats, and I know one of them is called the Handheld Shows but I couldn’t find anything on Google. If you do, let us know.
Bonus bonus: The reason I was thinking about Zach Condon this morning was because of this guy - Merz. You probably don’t care that Coldplay likes him, but check him out anyway!
Ok. You can sort of see why I want to kill myself right?
This site has some photos of the most beautiful workspaces I have ever seen. It makes one philosophical to look at them: are beautiful offices only a symbol of the pointless efforts that humanity makes to mask the meaningless drudgery of their materialistic, money-chasing lives? A hopeful manifestation of the human spirit’s struggle to surround itself in beauty even in the dullest and most dire circumstances? Or is it just capitalism’s way of ensnaring you with its gilded cages and cheap promises of free gourmet cafeterias?
You think about it, while I look through the recruit ads.
I heard a track from Bon Iver for the first time last year but I wasn’t completely blown away. Then today I listened to a recording of him performing live at South by Southwest and I suddenly liked it. So I went and listened again to a few tracks from his album, For Emma, Forever Ago, and I realised why the discrepancy — he sounds much better live than on the CD.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
Bon Iver is really just one guy named Justin Vernon. He wrote For Emma, Forever Ago, his debut CD, while holed up in a cabin in Wisconsin trying to exorcise some inner demons. I think the concert recording captures the darkness, misery and anguish really well, while the album sounds too… clean.
The Guardian calls him “quintessentially English”, but that shouldn’t turn you off from John Hegley just yet. He writes very endearing, funny poems about dogs, potatoes and other things that generally make you happy. I first found out about him through The Guardian Unlimited Books podcast, where he read this:
In the embrace of my glasses
I openly accept my vulnerability
And affirm my acceptance of outside help.
As well as providing open acknowledgement
Of the imperfection in my eyesight,
My glasses are a symbolic celebration
Of the wider imperfection
That is the human condition.
In contrast, contact lenses are a hiding of the faults.
They pretend the self-sufficiency of the individual
And minister onto the cult of stultifying normality.
They are that which should be cast out of your vision.
They are a denial of the self.
They are a denial of the other.
They are a betrayal of humanity.
Link time: You can read 22 more poems here, and listen to him perform some more poems here. (As far as I can see none of the poems are duplicated on the two sites.) You can also listen here to the Guardian interview that I mentioned above, in which he also turns a daily news story about the UK education system into a song and sings a poem about two gay bus drivers. That should brighten up your Monday somewhat, I hope!
Listen to Mark Kermode’s rant against The Hottie and the Nottie. It is infinitely more entertaining and insightful than the film.
Ok I can’t believe I just corrupted the sanctity of this website with a still from this film.
Anyway go listen to Kermode here. You have to have Real Audio installed.
Choice quote:
“The way it demonstrates that beauty is on the inside is that the Nottie goes to a plastic surgeon and is eugenically changed into a Hottie. And then the horrible, creepy guy who loved Paris Hilton in the first place, discovers that he might actually fancy the Nottie — but only, only after she’s had intense plastic surgery. So clearly, this is a Nazi tract.”
Yasmine and Joon, and we did this because we wanted to have a place where we could collectively store all the things that make us go ‘Wooooooooooot’ on MSN.
Have anything to recommend back to us? We promise we won’t let lazy interns delete your emails to theportableguide [at] gmail.com.
And it’s a really awesome way to check out new music - it’s such a nice, fresh way of watching a group perform live without the shakiness, darkness, general mayhem that are live shows on YouTube.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
The Guardian calls him “quintessentially English”, but that shouldn’t turn you off from 
Ok I can’t believe I just corrupted the sanctity of this website with a still from this film.