💎MY FAVOURITE THINGS💎 || Fill Your Heart 

MY FAVOURITE THINGS | Fill Your Heart

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” —

— J.R.R TOLKIEN

The tail end of a class pass trial left me curious to get uncomfortable. Which is how I found myself in a blacked out spin class, cycling in time to some god-awful high-intensity music. But when I stopped judging and gave myself over to the moment, the pulsing lights and outrageous routines had me crooning along to Craig David’s 7 Days (the only redeeming track) in the dark. While I don’t see myself rushing back anytime soon, the unsettling nature of doing something completely different reminded me why I want to stick close to Jerzy Gregorek’s sound life advice. ‘Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.’

To celebrate the release of my first five episodes of Putting Yourself First on my YouTube channel, I made my April playlist extra picante 🌶️

Perfect Days 🎥

I sat down with Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days at the tail end of an imperfect one. Within minutes, the clouds dispersed, welcoming blue skies once more. Which got me to chewing over Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and an opening passage on how the invention of the clock turned us into ‘time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers’. Time is a central focus of this quiet masterpiece, stripping the essence of life back to basics with Kôji Yakusho. While I was initially reticent to watch a middle-aged man clean toilets, Yakusho’s daily habits had me leaning forward. His hermetic existence and mindful practices reminding of Wilde’s quote that to love oneself and enjoy our own company is the beginning of ‘a lifelong romance’. This film truly resonates post-pandemic. I’m looking forward to Shall We Dance, the 1996 film that brought it all together.

“Most everyday routines of people in movies is not nice, and I wanted his everyday routines to be gorgeous.” — Wim Wenders

Occupied City 📹

The persistence of memory is under the microscope in this four-hour documentary on Amsterdam under Nazi occupation. Unsettling and violent stories of prejudice and antisemitism on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation as set against tender slices of modern-day life. That the footage captures the onset of the pandemic, complete with empty streets and the odd protest, infuses an alluring tension. Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a highlight from my 2021 newsletter, set me alight with his tales of prejudice and hardship for the West Indian communities in Margaret Thatcher’s England. McQueen follows in this tradition, upending the limits and bounds of what makes for compelling storytelling.

The Twilight World 📚

Only Werner Herzog, my favourite living human being, could turn down an audience with the Emperor of Japan (“What would I have to talk to him about but utter banalities”) for a fortuitous meeting with Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier to surrender in WW2. The gift of The Twilight World is its study of time through the mind’s eye of Onoda, a devoutly principled soldier who toiled in the Filipino jungles for 29 years after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. S/O to The Adam Buxton Podcast for turning me onto this slim gem through this revealing conversation which explores how and why Herzog considers himself a writer before all.

“Time outside their lives seems to have the quality of a spasm, even though it can’t shake the imperturbable universe.” — Werner Herzog

How to Seduce Anyone 🖥

I fell into the first half of this DOAC interview with Robert Greene over a quick spot of scrumptious Nepalese after an evening Yoga class. I was so consumed by his compelling arguments around how and why we all wear masks that I didn’t even think to sweat the traffic jam in the kitchen. Greene offers such a refreshing take on the idea of the public persona, each and every one of us actors upon a stage. As Rene Girard makes plain, mimicry is an essential part of the development process, an intuitive process that carries on the traditions and practices of our ancestors. Which stands to reason that our public persona is built off generational mimesis. I look forward to diving into my incoming second-hand copy of The 48 Laws of Power.

Sons of Cain 📹

A friend’s birthday dinner had me lost in conversation with Keti Stamo, an Albanian filmmaker, across the table. It was our mutual fascination with redemption that led her to share the synopsis behind her debut feature documentary. Blood feuds, or Gjakmarrja, are a part of Albanian folklore, an honour-bound tradition of seeking retribution for harm done to one’s kin. An eye for an eye. Yet it’s the ensemble of children, the offspring of adults trapped in this vicious cycle, that truly startles. Innocent boys and girls debating the merits of this violent tradition, by way of Cain and Abel, with such prescient wisdom. Stamo’s all-consuming doco releases on MUBI this month. A must watch.

The Promised Land 🎥

It was Mads Mikkelsen’s stoic face, plastered across telephone poles and tiled wall fronts, that got me curious. As I’ve confessed more than once in this newsletter, a period drama with a juicy hook is my idea of a good night in. In 18th Century Denmark, Mikkelsen, a retired captain, invests his pension in a Sisyphean dream. There’s something so primal and compelling about a man forging something out of nothing, cultivating barren lands while deflecting the duplicitious double-talk of civil society. Nikolaj Arcel’s compelling drama reminds why mankind, especially when cloaked in silk and lace, is truly a vicious beast. I’m hungry to feast my eyes on Mikkelsen in Arcel’s 2012 A Royal Affair.

Michel de Montaigne 👤

As I shared in a recent book review, Steven Soderbergh is a man after my own heart. His captivating conversation on his 2023 reading list also explained why a good book helps me find equilibrium, a cast anchor in stormy seas. His newfound zeal for Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live and more specifically Michel de Montaigne, its subject, sent me down a rabbit hole. As this School of Life video proves, Montaigne is cut from the same cloth, a brilliant academic whose self-awareness inspired him to skewer the pretensions of power. What makes the 16th Century thinker so modern is his implicit believe that our fallibility is what makes us so beautiful in the first place.

“Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom. Whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.” — Michel de Montaigne

家.V3 🎶

There’s only a handful of public personalities that can lower my emotional drawbridge on social media and Knxwledge is one of them. His hilarious animations, homegrown on Twitch, serving as dancing monkeys to his bespoke beats. I’m a sucker for cultivated irreverence and the Los Angeles based musician makes it look easy. For my money, the Stones Throw artist is one of the most innovative beat makers making the scene today. There’s something so infectious to his throwback samples on 家.V3., his pulsing rhythms inducing a childlike impulse to climb inside the matrix and groove alongside his animated creations. HX.25 is pure unadulterated gold.

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