January Newsletter: Bird, The Tennis Court & Ruthie’s Table 4

 
 

Photos: Classiq Journal

 
 

“You have to see it to be it.”

Billie Jean King

 


 

Viewing

Cast Out with Love, a wonderful, poetic short visual story written by Lauren Williams, and directed by Greg Dennis, revealing the beauty, history and craft hidden in a traditional hand-knitted Cornish Gansey jumper. It is part of what and who local fishermen are, it is part of a community and its identity. It’s not just a simple garment, it’s every generation woven in its tweaks.

 

Bird, 2024
Andrea Arnold

Navigating the newest film releases, hoping to find something that stands out, has become increasingly challenging in the past few years. And so, very late to the scene, I can finally name a favourite film of last year. Andrea Arnold has a way to tell stories, full of realism and humanism. It’s been years since I saw Fish Tank and I still think of it as special and raw, this unsparing yet humorous and never judgmental look at working-class Britain. American Honey, both road journey and coming-of-age story, captured the midland-American youth culture with electrifying energy. And now Bird, where 12 year old Bailey (newcomer Nykyia Adams in a brilliant performance) lives on the fringes of society in a town in Kent, England, with her father, Barry Keoghan, and her brother. She has a broken home, an unreliable father, an absent mother, her world is bleak, and confused and chaotic, fueled by poverty, violence and drugs, and she’s defiant and desperate to seek adventure in her brother’s gang. And yet, there is no contempt in portraying Bailey or any other character, and there is no denying in the love of her father for her, but you root for her to find the kindness and understanding she needs the most. And it’s kindness, and a streak of fantasy, she finds and embraces when she encounters a mysterious man, Bird. This film, so bitingly realistic, feels so alive especially when tenderness is sneaking in, and hope seems to arise from nowhere and there is the promise of tomorrow.

 

The Circus, 1928, City Lights, 1931
Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin’s silent films will never age. There is such fluidity in the narrative, so much is said with so little, they make you laugh hard, and show you a hint of darkness in the human heart… and today they ring truer than ever. They are simply fascinating to watch.

 

Five on a Treasure Island, 1957

My son is a great fan of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five books and only recently have we discovered the tv series they made after the books. Five on a Treasure Island, adapted after the first book, is fun and timeless, a tale of three brothers and their tomboy cousin and her dog on a wonderful old-fashioned (in the best possible sense) adventure.

 

 

Reading

I would find it difficult to read David Lynch’s Room to Dream now, so I am glad I read it when it came out. I can’t forget that the moment I saw the title and cover I fell in love with it. Room to Dream. It’s all in that title. The possibilities that title holds. The mysteries it eventually further deepens. I didn’t expect anything less from David Lynch. Room to Dream does not demystify. What movie lover would want that? A deconstruction of David Lynch’s films? Art does not need explanation, but to be felt and experienced and interpreted by each individual differently. The Lynchian universe remains an enigma. We will always have his films.

The artist who did not compromise, did not sell out, a filmmaker who did not make movies for critics but answered “to the higher authority of his imagination”. There are many random things I took away from the book, the little details and contours and the personal stuff teasing that take you a little closer to the artist and the man, without intruding. You’ve been invited in and you take this chance, a brief splash of insight, because the door will not remain open for long.

His childhood shaped him. He had a sense of humour. He was a happy child and had a happy personality, but was always drawn to dark things. In high school he already had a well defined style and he continued to dress in the same way. Apparently, every woman he met found him attractive. He discovered meditation in 1973 and it changed his life. His films didn’t really make money, but he did what he believed in. He valued his privacy and his favourite thing to do was to be home working. He loved Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment. He thought Grace Kelly and James Stewart’s kiss in Rear Window is one of the best in the history of cinema (the other one is Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift’s in A Place in the Sun). For Laura Dern’s character in Twin Peaks: The Return, he created his own lipstick palette and mixed colours until he found the pink shade that he wanted. He loved Los Angeles light. He worked with actors, not stars. Work always came first. He gave himself room to dream.

 

If we ever needed a reassurance about why we love cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, then North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much spells that out. North by Northwest “sparkles with a technical confidence and a joy in making movies,” it introduces us to “characters who are neither completely good nor completely evil” and “the male predecessor of Melanie Daniels” – Roger Thornhill. And it “may be thoroughly unrealistic and illogical” – it’s cinema after all and we love being fascinated by it – “but the world view has realistic resonance to it; North by Northwest is a wild jazz symphony, extravagant in both its tone and range.”

 

Listening

The podcast: Ruthie’s Table 4, centered around food and memories and friendships, with Ruth Rogers, the owner of The River Café in London, which she opened with Rose Gray in 1987, and her amazing guests, from directors and actors to writers and sportsmen. It only takes Ruthie’s masterful art of conversation to fall into the rabbit hole, listening to every single episode every chance you get. But do listen first to the ones with Guillermo Del Toro, Danny Huston and John McEnroe. And then continue with all the others.

 

The soundtrack: Bird, directed by Andrea Arnold

 

The album: Morrison Hotel, The Doors

 

Making

Guida Alpina: a beautiful collaboration between the makers behind Sentier Italia (I love how their story began with an old pair of men’s mountain boots) and Meredith Erickson. A mountain guide in the form of travel, recipes and life stories.

 

Exploring

I’ve been dreaming about this book and I didn’t even know. Nick Pachelli’s The Tennis Court profiles 200 of the most beautiful, significant, diverse tennis courts from across the globe. A few favourites: Tennis Michelangelo (Florence), Knickerbocker Field Club (Brooklyn, NYC), Libby Park (Ojai, California), Jamor Tennis Training Center (Portugal), Waiheke Tennis Club (New Zealand), TC 1899 Blau-Weiss (Berlin). All of them are beautifully photographed, many of them come with a view, so, yes, that makes this tome a great photography book and the kind of book that takes me on a journey more than a travel book. But it is the stories and people attached to each tennis court that truly champion the game and make us travel the world, deepen the language of tennis, strengthen our obsession with it, vividly articulate the exhilaration this sport provides, and simply make me relive every moment related to the sport, on or off court, and dream on, irremediably in love with tennis. One of the most beautiful photographs in the book is taken in western Uganda: a playing surface dug out in the wet soil near a corn field, with make-do poles and lines drawn with burnt, that resulted in a tennis camp for kids from the local village and surrounding refugee camps. It’s about embracing whatever you have at hand and providing access to tennis for children everywhere.

 
 

”In nowadays to me the most successful artists, at least financially,
are not even the best artists anymore, they are just smart, extremely
smart people and they manipulate the system in a brilliant way I must
say. That’s part of what I like about sports ultimately. Because you
really can’t do that in sports. You can talk all you want, but you get
on the court and you gotta step up.”

John McEnroe, Ruthie’s Table 4

 
 

 

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

 

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