Newsletter I: Ethan (Hawke), Amy (Winehouse), Karl Ove (Knausgaard) and a great New Yorker read
The general perception of writers’ lives is that they are exciting and desirable. But you generally spend most of your time cooking and cleaning
. -Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1
The Deal
:
I'll go see a movie twice if I really like it. Part of it's the deconstructing a story thing. Like the engineer as a boy taking apart radios to see how they work. Also, because I tend to go to the theatre alone for a first viewing, I like to take my wife or maybe a friend the second time round. Because I get off on sharing what I love.
That's what The Mendelsohnianis meant to be.
A monthly newsletter to share links and recommendations to the cool and the creative, mainly: books, movies, music. The aim's not to be the most current, but to find what resonates most from the (pop) cultural world.
The Rules:
1. Don't bother the people (The 'unsubscribe' button is below)
2. Include a link from something on Netflix
3. Include something you cannot find on Netflix
4.One book recommendation, fiction or non
5. An interview, TED talk, podcast type thing
Without further ado:
2.
In theatres now: "Amy"
By the director of "Senna" which has to rank up there with "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" as one of my all-time favourite documentaries, this doc about Amy Winehouse is truly devastating. But like "Senna" it's how human director Asif Kapadia makes his subject. This is a story about music, fame, addiction, and maybe I'll stop there cause enough said. Just go...
5. Interview:
Earnest, honest, passionate. Hawke is the consummate artist. The entire thirty minutes is highly compelling, but when he talks about working with Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, whoa.
1.
Netflix Documentary: "Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis"
A doc about a folk concert in support of a movie about a folk artist. The movie itself wasn't anywhere near the Coen bros usual standards, but then that's what happens when you make your hero so damned unlikeable. But the music! Bluegrass folk. Marcus Mumford, Jack White and Joan Baez make appearances but the film belongs to lesser known super stars in waiting. If you like me had never heard (of) Chris Thile you are in for a treat.
3.
What to read online: "No One Asks to Be Buried with his [sic] iPad" from the New Yorker
"We want lives that are fresh and stimulating, yet we also demand easy living--instant cooking, painless travel, and frictionless human relationships--without realizing the inherent contradiction."
4. Book: "My Struggle" Volume One by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
This book captures what life is really like. I can't think of a less cliche way to say it. Here's a passage James Wood, literary critic for The New Yorker, chose to capture so much of what Knasugaard does in his book.
"Inside, it is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into, before I, with the collapsible double stroller in one hand and nudging the two small girls forward with the other, step into the elevator, which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting on its descent, and into the hall where I ease them into the stroller, put on their hats and mittens and emerge onto the street already crowded with people heading for work and deliver them to the nursery ten minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume."
Please share this if you like it and know someone else who might.
See you in about a month!
*Very special thanks to Wendy Litner (you may have skills in the lawyering arena, but you write like Nora freakin Ephron. Your book/TV show will kill it, as y
!)
Thanks for reading.