Austin Kleon’s great newsletter edition on the objects we love and live with reminds me that we still use our metronome, some sixty-plus years after Teri’s mom bought it.
The most Arsenal thing ever would be for Spurs to beat Man City today and then Arsenal lose to Everton on Sunday. ⚽️
This by Rob Chapman is one of a zillion videos encouraging me to ask whether I’m a beginner, intermediate, or advanced guitar player. “Beginner” is a bad word here, because no one who has been playing for a long time (in my case, 20 years) can properly bre called a beginner. The better word is basic. Also, I think “advanced” should be distinguished from “professional.” So I think we need five categories:
- beginner
- basic
- intermediate
- advanced
- professional
I think I’m a basic/intermediate player, and will probably not get much better. It’s hard to progress when you start an instrument in your forties, and I have the added handicap of some permanently damaged fingers on my left hand (thanks to a habit, common among basketball players, of breaking them and then not having them properly set). But it would be silly to call myself a “beginner.”
By the way, if I could belong to one of the London livery companies, I would certainly choose the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.
If you happen to be a Freeman or Freewoman of the City of London, then you may exercise your ancient right to take sheep across London or Southwark Bridge without paying a toll. That right is protected by the Worshipful Company of Woolmen, so now you know whom to thank.
Perfect Days
The Richard Brody review of Perfect Days is a tone-deaf review by the most reliably tone-deaf reviewer out there. Every reviewer has limits to his or her catholicity of taste, because every human being is thus limited, but Brody’s cinematic sweet spot seems to be tiny, and when he doesn’t like a movie he simply doesn’t pay attention to it. I just don’t think Brody likes movies enough to review them for a living.
Brody wants everything in Perfect Days to be revealed, including (especially?) our protagonist’s politics. I mean, sure, how can we know what we’re supposed to think about another human being unless we know what their politics are? The idea that Hirayama might be utterly apolitical is one that seems not to have crossed Brody’s mind. Nor has he considered the artistic and moral possibilities of narrative reticence.
What’s wonderful about the movie is that it reveals just enough about Hirayama for us to understand that his simplified and repetitive life is both a comfort — a stabilizing power for a person who (for reasons only imperfectly glimpsed by us) desperately needs it — and also a kind of impoverishment. He is a lonely man who has many loose ties, which are unquestionably good things in his life, but no really strong ones, and we get a sense of what that lack of strong ties protects him from and what it deprives him of.
“Mama,” the woman who runs the little izakaya where Hirayama is a regular, wonders why everything can’t remain the same. Well, it can’t; but stability happens too. What we see at the end of Perfect Days is a kind of re-establishment of the rhythm of Hirayama’s life, but not without change, and not without the possibility of betterment. His new work partner seems to be a significant upgrade from the old one; his kindness to his niece Niko just might reconnect him to her and to his sister; and who knows, maybe he and “Mama” will forge the kind of relationship that he tells her ex-husband he doesn’t currently have with her. Change isn’t always bad. But a structured rhythm of life, a settled disinclination to chase novelty, an appreciation for what we can count on, including our friends the trees — that’s a very good thing indeed.
“The secret of good cursing lies in cadence, emphasis, and and antiphony. The basic themes are always the same. Conscious striving after variety is not to be encouraged, because it takes your mind off your cursing.“ – A. J. Liebling