The May Round-Up
A monthly rundown of what I found interesting and/or worth sharing.
Morning!
With the end of May signaling the end of my first full concert season here in Washington DC, and my first full season in the USA, there’s a lot to reflect over just now. There really was no better way to cap it off than with a remarkably heartfelt Beethoven 9 performance last weekend - my first full Beeth 9 in its entirety (wow, lots of firsts). Is there any music more joyful than this?
Now that I’ve rather come back down to earth and the long summer months are stretching out before me, I’m looking for new projects to keep me occupied and I’m pretty excited to have some time for them. What’s keeping you all busy this summer?
Today’s list includes things to watch! After not seeing anything on screen remotely worth recommending for what feels like forever, I’m pretty excited to finally talk about a couple of films (albeit they are nothing new…). What has happened to cinema these days? Also, another Bush blunder (because weren’t we missing those?!), and a great snack option.
Take care of yourselves and each other. See you in the next installment.
Love,
Freya
I have not been able to stop thinking about ‘Tokyo Project’, a short film starring Elisabeth Moss and Ebon Moss-Bachrach that I watched a week ago. Although only half an hour long, it is so jam-packed with tension, emotion, intrigue, adrenaline… please, please don’t wait around on this one.
Like many books I have read recently, ‘Migrations’ by Charlotte McConaghy is not something I would have picked up myself, but after a couple of friends recommended it I just couldn’t ignore it. It started off a little un-promising for me, but slowly picked up and kept pulling my attention back in, and in the end, I feel compelled to share it here. I don’t know if there is a description that I could give that would really do this novel justice; it’s ultimately a dark, melancholic, thoughtful story, set at some point in the future, about a woman who finds herself on a fishing boat together with a crew of eclectic characters. Just trust me on this one.
It’s been a while since I thought about German film-maker, Werner Herzog, although I went through a real Herzogian phase in my early twenties (Grizzly Man, Encounters At The End Of The World…). So it was nice to get a fresh reminder of his work with this Atlantic article, which promotes his new book. I love Herzog’s advice to young film-makers;
”Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema.”These Ryvita with pumpkin seeds and oats are serving me 100% in the snack department.
If you are a little curious (read: nosy) about how other people live, dive into the world of Alicia Graf - director and dean of Juilliard’s dance division - in this article in The Cut.
This clip of George Bush misspeaking “Iraq” for “Ukraine” has to be a contender for the best Freudian slip of all time.
I guess we are still talking about The Great Resignation, but, contrary to what some republicans (and Kim Kardashian, apparently) WANT to believe, it wasn’t about people not wanting to work! People switched jobs in search of better pay, conditions, and treatment, and evidently, this has been a success. Read these personal stories in The Cut for more of an inside glimpse.
David Lynch’s evocative, sexy, nightmarish film, “Mulholland Drive”. So good. And what a performance by Naomi Watts. I feel like I need to go back and watch this one a few times more before I can feel like I quite grasp what Lynch wanted us to see.
This kind of brings me to my next point; I’ve been feeling more and more convinced lately that one has to experience a piece of art many times to really be able to create a meaningful impression and understanding of it. I think this goes for paintings or films or pieces of music; the more you look at it or listen to it, the more you can get out of it. Proust talked about this in “In Search of Lost Time”; how one’s feeling about music, for example, on first listening, changes dramatically on next hearing it - different ideas and sounds emerge that you didn’t hear before, and that make you feel entirely different about it. When I was younger, I think I lived by that typically youthful principle, of wanting to experience it all, see all the art, read all the books. Now, I feel more and more that it’s better to only see a couple of things, but really see them and feel them. Just some musings from me this morning.
I do love these blue rooftops of Paris, painted by a nineteen-year-old Picasso…
