FYI #15
One of the songs featured in Jeff Tweedy’s latest book, World Within a Song, is The Weight by the Band. I love this video of Wilco, Nick Lowe, & Mavis Staples rehearsing the song backstage at the Civic Opera House in Chicago in December 2011. Tweedy writes beautifully about the impression the performance of the song, with the Staples Singers, in the movie, The Last Waltz, had on him. He said of Mavis Staples ‘She inhabits herself - her own skin - so completely, so free of judgement, so visibly generous in her spirit, that to see it is to be changed.’
A new film series, Homing In, by the Modern House. The first subject is British architect Simon Allford.
Sheila Heti speaks about her new book, Alphabetical Diaries, with writer Lillian Fishman, at a Books Are Magic (owned by writer Emma Straub and Michael Fusco-Straub) event in Brooklyn. The publisher describes the book this way: ‘Sheila Heti collected half a million words from a decade's worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow.’ I enjoyed it.
In the latest episode of Merve Emre’s ‘The Critic and Her Publics’ series, she speaks with food critic Hannah Goldfield. I like this question.. ‘I’m wondering how you match sensation to a vocabulary for describing it.’
I’m looking forward to Wim Wenders’ new film, Perfect Days, starring Koji Yakusho.
Profile of Hollywood journalist, Matt Belloni, via Vulture. This week his podcast, The Town, featured a conversation about OpenAI’s Sora with tech analyst, Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery.
American photographer Annie Leibovitz, as IKEA’s first Artist in Residence, shoots 25 homes & stories around the world.
Interview with pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout who is directing the ACO’s Beethoven's Emperor program in March.
‘Dune’ and the delicate art of making fictional languages, by Manvir Singh, via the New Yorker
In Carrie Sun’s new memoir, Private Equity, about her experience as an assistant to a billionaire hedge fund founder she describes coming across an artwork, Sublimation, by Louise Bourgeois at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The Bourgeois exhibition currently on at the Art Gallery of NSW closes April 28.