Photos: Classiq Journal
”I watched a teenager at the bookstore counter ask if they still sold a novel that had been banned at her school.
The clerk nodded. “We keep a few in the back.”
She disappeared for a moment, then returned with a copy wrapped in brown paper. “No barcode. Just take it.”
Some people fear what stories can do.
Bookstores remember why we need them.”
Matt Lillywhite
Viewing
Jane, 2017
Brett Morgen
“People need to realise that every single day, they make some difference in the world.”
But to do it with kindness and curiosity, as Jane Goodall did, that is extraordinary.
Jane Goodall’s discoveries were revolutionary, her passion for her work was monumental, and her study of the chimps is the longest continuous study of a wild animal in history. But, for me, the beauty of the documentary Jane, directed by Brett Morgen, is more than scientific facts, it’s about Jane’s love of the wild life, of nature, of discovery. This is the first thing I wanted to take away from this wondrous and inspirational portrait of Jane Goodall.
One Battle After Another, 2025
Paul Thomas Anderson
I was surprised of how outspokenly political Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is. It somehow landed differently than his other films. On the other hand, it somehow made me think of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, which, as Mladen Dolar beautifully wrote in the book Lubitsch Can’t Wait, blatantly disregarded all political correctness, and described it as “a comedy about fascism made at the time of its steep and sinister rise, confronting its disastrous historical and political reality at the time, as it happened, rather than from the distanced privilege of hindsight.” One Battle After Another does have something of that “stance and courage” and “immediate engagement”. Having said that, if only for one scene, and I would watch One Battle After Another over and over and over again. It occurs towards the end of the film and it’s the absolute best, most thrilling car chase I have seen in movies. Paul Thomas Anderson breaks the form of every classic car chase and saves the most edgy, energetic and beautiful scene for last. Four cars (and four characters, Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti and John Hoogenaker), at first unbeknownst of one another, seemingly riding randomly on a road chiseled into one after another undulating phantasmagoric hill. When you arrive at that scene, and the music starts, you feel you have arrived somewhere, and the film suddenly feels complete, without any moment of predictability in between, because it’s where the story has naturally taken you. And it all happens on the sound of Jonny Greenwood’s River of Hills. The entire soundtrack, both the music composed by Greenwood for the film and the needle drops, is not only threaded into the story, it tells the story. There is something of Bernard Hermann’s Hitchcock music in it, and that scene suddenly reminded me of Hitchcock and Spielberg’s Duel, but it is where Paul Thomas Andersen shows us what cinema is really about: a film should belong to cinema and cinema alone.
Holiday,1938
George Cukor
When it comes to the films that Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made together, Holiday (I’m leaving Sylvia Scarlett out, their first film together, made a little earlier, in 1935) is the least talked about and I always wonder why. Sure, it doesn’t have the sparking fuse and the breakneck pace until the very end as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, nor can it be attributed the title of the uncontested classic of all sophisticated slapstick comedies as The Philadelphia Story (in no other film is Katharine more luminous and apt in balancing comic timing and vulnerability), but we have Katharine Hepburn as a high-class nonconformist, the black sheep of the family fall for her sister’s fiancé, another unconventional idealist, Cary Grant’s Johnny Case, whom we see “perform slapstick while retaining a stylish romantic presence, no easy feat, and something no actor had achieved before and no actor has rivaled since,” as Richard Torregrossa wrote in his book Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style. “He lifts Katharine onto his shoulders and they launch blithely into a forward circus roll”, performs a back flip-flop, too, and he does it in a Savile Row three-piece suit. There is an electric chemistry between them. And we meet another wonderful couple, the Potters (played by Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton), Johnny’s best friends, so authentic, and awkward, and funny, and sincere, and loyal. I want them to be my friends too.
And we have one of the best speeches, delivered by Cary. Today, it rings truer than it did almost nine decades ago: “I don’t call what I’ve been doing living… I’ve been working since I was ten. I want to find out why I’ve been working. The answer can’t be just to pay bills and to pile up more money and even if you do the government is going to take most of it… I don’t know what the answer is but I intend to find out; the world’s changing out there. There are a lot of new exciting ideas running around. Some of them might be right and some might be cockeyed but they’re affecting all our lives. I want to know how I stand, where I fit into the picture, what it’s all going to mean to me. I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office, so as soon as I get enough money together I’m going to knock off for a while… quit… I want to save some of my life for myself.”
Dead of Winter, 2025
Brian Kirk
I often feel there is so much noise in today’s films, and by that I mean a constant urge to quickly tick certain cultural boxes, without much sense of a storyline, let alone atmosphere. We’ve got plenty of atmosphere, and dry humour, too, in the thriller Dead of Winter, set in snowy Minnesota, and featuring Emma Thompson in a unique role, a widow still grieving her husband, but also a surviver in deep connection to the natural surroundings where she has spent her entire life. Heroism is right there in the everyday life, under layers of normalcy.
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, 1947
Irving Reis
It’s wonderful to see Cary Grant with another grand of comedy, Myrna Loy. Grant is an artist and lady’s man, Shirley Temple is the teenage girl who has a crush on him and Myrna Loy is Shirley’s sister and a judge who, through a comical occurrence of events, sentences Richard to date the girl until her schoolgirl crush wanes. Only Cary Grant could have pulled it off with that very personal combination of insouciance and charm.
Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944
Frank Capra
Another comedy. Because this one truly is one of the quintessential screwball comedies that only gets funnier as it gets more diabolical. “All I did was cross the bridge and I was in Brooklyn. Amazing.” It is Frank Capra’s only black comedy and his most frenetic, just as Cary Grant’s character with the funniest name, Mortimer Brewster, and it also features a sleuth of character actors, from Peter Lorre to James Gleason to one of my favourites, Edward Everett Horton.
Reading
Bread of Angels is Patti Smith’s new memoir, announced to be released in less than a month, on November 4th. Her storied life has already been captured in text in two previous wonderful memoir books, Just Kids, from 2010, and M Train, released five years later, and her writing we’ve been lucky enough to celebrate in other powerful books, such as Woolgathering, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, The Coral Sea, but this new memoir will be the most complete. Much inspired by her parents, as Patti Smith reveals, it is a “bright and dark dance of life”.
Just Kids is a heartbreakingly beautiful book. I liked the strong, true, unaffected writing style and I liked the way it was able to capture the innocence of youth and of life before stardom. Writing a memoir can’t be easy. Writing it with that sense of childlike search for beauty and magic must be even more difficult.
There were times when I felt Just Kids had elements of a fairy tale, as if it was written right then when it all happened, and before everything happened. It is a story of two friends, Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, their dreams and their helping each other to achieve them. They were young, free, completely unknown, free to dream. In the early autumn of 1967, a touristy couple spied them in Washington Square Park and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively: “They’re just kids.”
For the better part of the book, Patti Smith was not yet famous, not yet a great punk rock singer and composer (although already writing poems and drawing), but frequented various artistic circles and lived at Chelsea hotel for a while, which gave her the chance to connect with some of the most important artists and musicians of the time. I guess it is always interesting to learn about other artists from an insider’s point of view, but what I was completely taken by was rather Patti’s innate, infectious passion for books, films, music and art, and the faith in her own artistic mission. This all seemed to have always been part of herself and her life – a world she had already made her own before meeting everyone and without anyone’s help. It is her whole life, fame or no fame, that is inspiring.
Today, Patti Smith remains one of the very few artists who honors the legacy of others every single day, and she does it on a platform, Instagram, that is preposterously dedicated to self-promotion and nothing else much. The ones who have inspired her in life and along her artistic path, from writers, to musicians to artists and beyond, “beloved heroes, mavericks and saints”, are given credit. By rendering others visible and valued, we respect them and dignify ourselves. Patti Smith even made a book, A Book of Days, with the snapshots from her daily life, as posted on Instagram: a photo of Sam Shepard reading Beckett, a photo of Three Novellas book by Samuel Beckett, a photo of poet Arseny Tarkovsky and his son, her CD player and a few favourite CDs, Ornette Coleman, Philip Grass, Marvin Gaye and REM, and so on, throughout a whole calendar year. “An inspirational map of a life devoted to art.”
I loved Just Kids, but I loved M Train even more. Patti Smith is such a wonderful writer. With that beautiful, natural flow of the narration, floating between present and past, she takes us places, many times to Greenwich Village, for many cups of coffee at Café ‘Ino, but also to Berlin, Reykjavík, Tangier, Mexico City or Tokyo – the leitmotif of the café is recurring everywhere. She talks about a favourite book (like Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and then another (like Peter Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky), and another, and another, and about writers and artists, so we are treated to a beautiful literary incursion. We even discover how she met Katharine Hepburn when working as a clerk at Scribner’s Bookstore, where she used to gather books for Katharine. “She wore the late Spencer Tracy’s leather cap, held in place by a green silk headscarf. I stood back and watched as she turned the pages, pondering aloud whether Spencer would have liked it.” We watch one too many detective series. She praises Akira Kurosawa and, about Ran (his adaptation after King Lear), she says that it is an epic that might have caused Shakespeare to shudder (I agree). And we feel her grief, still, so many years after losing her husband. She’s nostalgic, but has a “natural optimism” in her as well, as she herself writes.
She somehow reminds me of the characters in Yasujirō Ozu’s films. There is something so nobly quiet about her. It seems that hardly anything is allowed to interfere with her interior life and art … and coffee, and this lack of artifice, her pared-down way of being is what draws you into her story, into understanding the soothing nature of life, despite whatever may come its way.
I can not wait to see where Bread of Angels will take us.
In Writing Wednesdays, Matt Lillywhite writes about reading, writing and why stories still matter. The fastest way to lift your spirits is reading Matt’s little stories. I promise you, they can change attitudes and people, just as books and bookstores and libraries do.
At an historical moment when the clichés of art history have turned into spectacular immersive experiences featuring digital versions of artists’ greatest hits, and when, at the same time, age-old establishment assumptions are being seriously questioned by scholars, it seems timely to revisit The Hollywood History of Art. A new book by Christopher Frayling, who has authored, among others, Sergio Leone by Himself, French New Wave: A Revolution in Design and Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, the definitive work of shooting the masterpiece that Once Upon a Time is – this is how all books about the making of a film should look like.
Robert Redford rides the Outlaw Trail. In 1976, National Geographic asked Robert Redford to follow in the footsteps of the Wild West’s greatest outlaws. And he wrote an incredible article in the magazine about what he saw.
An excellent interview by Wendy Laird with Roscoe Tanner, at one time everyone’s favourite bad boy, for Racquet. 80s tennis, what the game has lost now that so few players serve and volley, those short shorts, and camaraderie on tour as it once was. All the good stuff. If you love tennis, you know.
Listening
The album: Soul Asylum Unplugged
The soundtrack: One Battle After Another
Making
All made in a small factory on the edge of the English Lake District, Oubas was founded by Kate Stalker, who spent her entire childhood growing up in the area and developed a deep appreciation and respect for the area and its heritage. Their purpose is simple: They want to empower people in their everyday lives, to enable the wearer to connect to their truest self, through pieces that have been considered in every aspect, that are of benefit to the wearer, the maker, and the environment. It’s more than timeless knitwear made with sound and care. It’s an entire community they are beautifully and slowly building around the brand and around the local voices.
Exploring
HOME, at Robin Rice Gallery, Hudson, NY. A deeply personal, immersive exhibition that explores the meaning of home through the diverse but interconnected practices of John Dolan, fine art photography, Michele O’Hana, interior designer, textiles, ceramics, and weaving, and Jack Dolan, blacksmith, hand-forged knives. The show brings together three artists—two parents and a son—in a celebration of craft, memory, and place. The exhibitions runs through November 7.
The David Bowie Center, a new permanent home for David Bowie’s archive, open daily at the V&A.
On an end note
Starting December 10, Australia is introducing a ban on social media platforms for under-16s. Norway will enforce a strict minimum age limit of 15 on social media and Denmark plans a social media ban for under-15s. “We have unleashed a monster,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said. “Mobile phones and social media are stealing our children’s childhood,” she added.
What better timing to get back to books and bookstores? It’s the connection Matt Lillywhite is talking about. It’s also the connection Jorge Domingo, who works as a bookseller, while studying film and theater, at Desperate Literature (so timely and appropriately called, given the context above) international bookstore, in Madrid, is talking about here, too. The children’s books section is the where he always stops when he first enters a bookshop. Mine too.
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. My New Roots monthly newsletter. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different.”
Patti Smith, M Train
Bread of Angels / Holiday, directed by George Cukor / The Hollywood History of Art
