🐰MY FAVOURITE THINGS🐰 || There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

“PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.”

— NATHANIEL RICH

I finally closed out Adam Curtis’ new six-part documentary series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head over a half-dozen sessions on my Pop’s exercise bike. While the series left me feeling emotionally tender — it offers a rather sobering diagnosis of the last two centuries — it did get me to chewing over our current moment with a fine-tooth comb. I particularly enjoyed a fascinating side-bar on Abraham Maslow in episode four (27 minutes in) and his forecast that mankind’s future will primarily focus around self-actualization. Never before has man been afforded the luxury of uncovering our innate potential. And while this is a moment to celebrate, the ongoing pandemic reminds us that individualism rings hollow without genuine community and cooperation.

Happy Easter! 🐰

Dark Waters 🎥

One of the most frightening aspects of Todd Haynes’ latest film, an adaptation of Nathaniel Rich’s long-form piece in the New York Times, is the discovery that American chemical giants were allowed to self-regulate for close to half a century. The film, which follows the never-ending quest to bring DuPont and its manufacture of PFOAs (aka forever chemicals) to justice, is a difficult watch. It’s not just the fact that the chemical compound, used in the manufacture of so many household consumer products, is now found within almost all living species (including you and me!). It’s that these trillion-dollar behemoths are still prospering from the manufacture and sale of this toxic waste. Erin Brockevich’s recent op-ed in The Guardian shares a terrifying Children Of Men future where PFOAs could lead to global infertility without governmental intervention. Another sobering example that the ‘free market’, left to its own devices, will always serve the bottom line above all else.

Mike Nichols: A Life 📚

To say I’ve been enjoying listening to Mark Harris’ new biography is an understatement. There is a quality to his writing, as narrated by George Newburn, that vividly animates the inimitable escapades of Mike Nichols. While I had heard of the comedic duo Nichols & May, I was oblivious to the fact that this side-project was responsible for catapulting Nichols and his partner Elaine May to the top of the crop in the nineteen-fifties. To think that these creative wunderkinds would both go on to trade in their stage cred for the director’s chair is fascinating in and of itself. That his first two films, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, effectively up-ended the studio system while receiving universal acclaim, would cement Nichols’ place in the stratosphere (and my own heart).

Whale Rider 🎥

Niki Caro is one of those rare filmmakers whose visual palette and acute understanding of storytelling grows on you with every re-watch. While I foolishly slept on Whale Rider, watching the film almost two decades on was spiritual and deeply moving. I loved the journey of this headstrong little girl (Keisha Castle-Hughes is a phenomenon) and her incorrigible quest for self-discovery. The film compelled me to re-subscribe to Disney+ to stream her ambitious live adaptation of Mulan, another precocious young spirit whose talents and passion are trampled by the ambitions of men. Caro has a knack for capturing the verisimilitude of everyday life and made me long for an Australian voice who can capture familial tension with that same deft touch.

Small Axe 📺

Steve McQueen has always occupied a unique place in my mental cabinet, his restrained style of visual storytelling evoking a sense of humanity that sets him apart from his peers. After dipping my toes into this anthology series, his first foray into the long-form space, I’ve come away with a new formal understanding for the next generation of TV. Each episode immerses itself within the private spaces of West Indian men and women trying to carve out a unique place for themselves within the racial strictures of London. Red, White and Blue stars John Boyega and tells the real life story of Leroy Logan, a policeman of Jamaican descent who joined the force after his father was beaten black and blue by London bobbies. The feature-length episode beautifully translates the tensions underwriting the five-part series and includes a sequence between father and son that will stay with me always.

Playing Piano For Dad 🎙

I’m always looking for new ways to distract myself while I get into the writing zone. Putting on a random ambient playlist last month, my Spotify algorithm shuffled onto a fascinating lo-fi track by H. Hunt that soon had me listening to the album on repeat. There is something so earnest to the whole production, its lack of pomp and pretense setting the mind at ease. After trawling the world wide web in search of answers I soon discovered that Harry Hunt is the co-founder of Tasty Morsels, an eclectic European label whose website left me both curious and vexed. I love this chat with Rory McCarthy (aka Infinite Bisous, a musician I came to know while mooching off the kind graces of Alex Cameron in Paris back in 2016) who explains how the album came to be.

The Last Wave 🎥

Ed Feldman’s passing was an unlikely revelation, his obituary compelling me to hunt down a second-hand copy of his tell-all memoir Tell Me How You Love The Picture on World of Books. I came away chuckling at the Hollywood producer’s PG stories on working in the sausage factory of motion pictures. What really hit home however was his ongoing relationship with Peter Weir starting with Witness. While I fell in love with the Australian director through his Hollywood years, his varied home-grown pictures offer a fascinating window into his process. The Last Wave, his follow-up to the celebrated Picnic At Hanging Rock, is a strangely moving examination of Australian history and our tragic disconnection from Aboriginal lore. Weir achieves something sublime with this surrealistic crime drama starring Richard Chamberlain and a baby-faced David Gulpilil.

The Secret River 📚

One of my favourite weekly walks skirts the perimeter of Waverley Cemetery, a beautiful hillside plot overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Every so often I find myself perusing the engraved names and epitaphs, imagining what Sydney might have looked like during their innings. Since losing myself in The Secret River, a novel set in the early 1800s of Colonial New South Wales, I’ve come to walk in their shoes. Kate Grenville has crafted one of the most searing tales of colonial life and given voices to characters whose unique hardships have slipped from the public consciousness. I sought out a copy at the urging of Nick Bryant, the BBC journalist who confessed that the book (and its stage adaptation) perfectly captures the turmoil between white Australia and its original occupants. I can’t help but agree.

“No one had ever spoken of how a man might fall in love with a piece of ground. No one had ever spoken of how there could be this teasing sparkle and dance of light among the trees, this calm clean space that invited feet to enter it.” — Kate Grenville

Sound of Metal 🎥

As a cinephile filmmaker, I make it my business to search out a wide array of films in the pursuit of growth and understanding. While I savour this ritual, it’s rare that a film disarms my critical eye to the point of terror. Darius Marder’s chilling tale of a heavy-metal drummer’s fall from grace shook me out of my comfort zone and into Riz Ahmed’s desperate shoes. What would I do if my hearing went the way of the dodo bird? Marder achieves something special through Ahmed’s journey of grief and ultimately acceptance, bringing us into the interior world of a deaf community through intricate layers of sound design. You can find out more by tuning into Louis Theroux’s spell-binding chat with the London native.

Tiger 📹

This new two-part series on the rise and fall of a golfing icon left me emotionally bereft. Much like Netflix’s The Last Dance last year, the commodification of Tiger Woods would become emblematic of a generation. Where these series diverge is their parting message. Woods’ precipitous rise and fall strikes of Greek tragedy, whose consummate ambition would prove his very undoing. Watching the formative years of this golfing icon is especially devastating with the gift of hindsight. For while there are many moments of sublime joy, Woods’ downfall — including his very recent car crash — is a cautionary tale that we can never outrun the past no matter how high we climb. Incredible storytelling.

GMO’s, Glyphosate & Healing The Gut 📻

I’ve never heard anyone give voice to the glaring issues plaguing the Western world quite like Dr. Zach Bush. Much like Rob Bilott’s all consuming passion to bring DuPont’s barbaric negligence to light, Bush has spent the last decade raising awareness to some startling allegations. As he makes plain, monoculture and the rise of GMO food giants like Monsanto have been directly responsible for a precipitous rise in birth defects, cancer rates, and a vast array of new auto-immune conditions. While his diagnosis is far from simple, a clear culprit lies in the emergence of glyphosate, a chemical used in most pesticides. This man-made compound single-handedly hampers a plant’s ability to protect itself and generate the necessary nutrients that nature destined for it. As Bush attests, the side-effects of such farming practices have been excessively deleterious to mankind and the planet at large.

“The fundamental human impact driving climate change today is the destruction of our soils. Soils function as the lungs of the planet. When Earth stops breathing, we lose the carbon cycle, we lose energy production at every level, microbial, soil, food, human.” - Dr. Zach Bush

Larry McMurtry 👤

In reading about the recent passing of Larry McMurtry, it dawned on me how little I knew and understood about his extensive body of work. I first came to know McMurtry through listening to Karina Longworth’s wonderful ten-part series on the life and times of Hollywood producer and production designer Polly Platt. You Must Remember This gave me a window into the Texan native’s life and process and his deep-seated humility. He had a gift for evoking the rugged beauty of the West and the indomitable might of the frontiersman. Yet he was also never afraid to debunk the mythology of cowboy lore, nor to shed light on the inherent fragility of masculinity. His novels, celebrated through film adaptation that included Hud, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, captivated one generation after another.

“Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.” — Larry McMurtry

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders - Promises 🎙

I’m often visited by the feeling that age, and the experience it brings, is slowly numbing my ability to lose myself in new music. While this evolution certainly holds water with most new pop records, my salvation comes from the fringes. Artists whose passions are unconcerned with feeding the current whims of the moment. Promises is a beautiful tangent for Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) whose output has kept my heart rate up for over a decade. Listening to the LP, made in collaboration with American saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, brings about a deep sense of calm and catharsis that has found me returning to it at moments of frustration and elation.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS | There Is A Light That Never Goes Out