crooked road
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius. -william blakecrooked road
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i’m trish reid.
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My cab driver coming back from LaGuardia this afternoon handed me a clipboard and a pen and said, “Will you draw me a painting?” I am quite obviously not a skilled artist, but I obliged.
His name is Fabio Peralta, and he asks everyone in his taxi to “paint” when they get in. (I am not the first person to write about him.) He has been driving a cab for 41 years, but the picture requests have only been going on for 3 1/2 years. He said he was inspired by then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who made him feel like “I could be and do whatever I wanted.” He has collected 35,000 “paintings” — he refers to them exclusively as “paintings” — and he sells a book of his favorites to riders for “whatever you think it’s worth.” I gave him 10 bucks, though it was clearly worth a lot more. I hope you are lucky enough to hail him down someday.
The Mighty Explorers : (You Froze the) O-Rings of My Heart
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists. Ingmar Bergman went so far as to say, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” And Akira Kurosawa acknowledged his influence too, adding, “I love all of Tarkovsky’s films. I love his personality and all his works. Every cut from his films is a marvelous image in itself.” Tarkovsky’s seven feature films often grapple with metaphysical and spiritual themes, using a distinctive cinematic style. Long takes, slow pacing and metaphorical imagery – they all figure into the archetypical Tarkovsky film.
Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch Tarkovsky’s films online – for free.
—- of the films available now, I’d recommend The Sacrifice.
![“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” -Henry David Thoreau
[Walden Pond, April 2010]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l192s3jUM01qz7wpmo1_400.jpg)
“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” -Henry David Thoreau
[Walden Pond, April 2010]
![tylercoates:[via]
Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973 (dir. Norman Jewison)](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0at5pGabA1qzbykto1_400.jpg)
Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973 (dir. Norman Jewison)
One of my favorite photos, taken by my favorite woman.
There is much humour in Ozu’s films, but they are most profoundly marked by an atmosphere of bitter-sweet melancholy … life, inevitably, is full of loss and disappointments, but there is beauty even in sadness. Japanese have an aesthetic expression for this: mono no aware, the tears we shed over the transience of things. It is hard to translate precisely into English, and is frequently cited as a kind of definition of Japanese culture, but it is something all of us can feel.
