Let your soul glow
Pixar's here to raise our spirits once more as its jazz-infused existential tale comes to the big screen. But is it worth seeing again?
In this issue:
Headliner The second coming of Pixar’s Soul and why it’s worth a trip to the cinema
Revival A voice note about home and belonging
Aftershow Remembering secret agent and war hero Noor Inayat Khan, L’Rain drops heavy in London, the personal essay goes under review, Nam June Paik is beyond documentary, True Detective: Night Country freezes over
I don’t watch many animated films but when I do, the level of artistry and depth of storytelling astound me. How universal they can be and how they speak to kids and adults of all ages, in different ways, as time passes. Up comes to mind🎈
Soul is cut from the same cloth. It manages to be playful yet profound in pondering that eternal – though some might say futile – question: what is the meaning of life?
The fact that it landed on Disney+ in the limbo of 2020 gave the story even greater resonance. In other words, few of us have had the chance to immerse ourselves in The Great Beyond and Before as its creators intended. That changes next week when Soul arrives in selected cinemas across the UK.
Jaded teacher and struggling jazz musician Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) could be any of us. Trying to find true purpose and pursuing a big goal so singlemindedly that we miss many of those little everyday moments that come and go. The things Joe dismisses as “just regular old living” while mentoring 22 (a drifting soul voiced by Tina Fey, who needs to find her spark before she can get her Earth Pass).
Taking in the air of a new day, biting into a slice of pizza, really talking to your barber... These all add up to something. They bring contentment and counter mundanity with everyday meaning. And the more open we are to them, these interactions, the more likely we are to feel inspired, energised and at peace with our present.
After a fun body swap involving a cat, Joe experiences his life anew through the eyes of 22 and he begins to realise that when your passion becomes an obsession, you cut yourself off from so many other possibilities. As director Pete Docter acknowledged, these aren’t always happy, comforting or obvious things. They can be are hurdles, limitations and challenges.
Joe’s occupation is not by chance. The jazz spirit infuses much of this film and Docter has referenced Keith Jarrett’s legendary performance on a rackety piano in Köln in 1975. How Jarrett made the best of the situation and created something new in the process. Like he did, the trick is to “improvise”. Docter has also referenced a similar story that Herbie Hancock told about Miles Davis.
The barbershop scene was one of my favourites. For Joe to get in touch with himself, he has to pass through a space like that. The barbershop has been a cherished meeting place, black forum and community hub for many decades, and not just in New York as Inua Ellams’ superb Barbershop Chronicles portrayed so lovingly on stage. Heated debates, banter, wisdom, camaraderie ... it’s all there.
The perceptiveness and attention to detail in that scene pay great respect to this fact, as co-director Kemp Powers explains in the following ray of sunshine.
“Yeah, that scene was my idea. It wasn’t even in the film. And it came from a selfish place ... a place of, ‘I just want to see Black hair.’ I want to see all different kinds of black hair. What I love is I rewrote that scene 40 times.
“But the opening stayed the same the whole time. The opening was hair falls gently down to the floor. That’s how the scene opens. You hear the clippers buzzing and the hair falls onto Dez’s Timberland boots.
“Starting with the hair falling off the head managed to stay through every single iteration. Because again, only Pixar can render certain things the way that Pixar does. And I just knew that it would be incredible to see the process of a Black haircut up close, in a Pixar film.
“Once we sold the idea, it was the same kind of due diligence. The animators took trips to the barbershops, and they sat there, and barbers worked through all of their tools so that everything was done in order.”
Soul was re-released in the US this January and the box office numbers weren’t great. Turning Red suffered a similar fate. Whether this is a reflection of poor marketing or viewers’ refusal to pay cinema prices to watch a film they have already seen online is open to debate. A combination of both, probably. What you don’t do is keep Soul available for streaming during theatrical release. Strategy 101.
If you asked Docter what the enduring value of this film is and why you should leave the house for it, what would he say? Aside from immersion, the following might resonate in these fractious times, when it’s harder than ever to get along with your enemy. “It’s that fundamental human thing, connecting with each other and connecting more foundationally with the space we’re in, the world we’re in.”
Soul is released nationwide across the UK on 8 March, followed by Luca on 5 April.
Listen: where is home?
I came across The Rolling Desk by
the other weekend, specifically a post called The Intimacy of Sound. Many Substackers offer to read their pieces to subscribers but the way Holly integrated voice into that one made a big impression. It felt like a cross between a podcast and a Substack. Switching between reading and listening was more fluid and evocative than I expected.Another great example from Holly’s list of recommendations is
with Raising Myles. A tender and lyrical series of letters to his newborn son. I wrote about them here.“Marc does more than share his parenthood journey or amass an archive for his child to sift through in later years. These are imperfect offerings, expressions of love they can build on as Myles finds his voice and the
world turns.”
Take this one, for instance, where his partner corrects him on how they wound up on a Thanksgiving road trip to Birmingham, Alabama, in month three of their relationship. Talk about bringing it to life…
Anyhow, it got me thinking about my past adventures in sound. Some of you may know I occasionally host radio shows and script podcasts like this special about Charles Stepney. A master composer, arranger and producer who made seminal records with Ramsey Lewis, Minnie Riperton, Rotary Connection and Earth, Wind & Fire.
In 2020, during that first lockdown, I was commissioned by Broccoli Content to write and voice a piece on the theme of “home” for their wonderful Anthems series. I chose to riff on this idea of belonging, something many of us find hard to do – particularly children of immigrants. But also the floaters, non-conformists, lone wolves and wanderers out there.
I cover much ground in 7m 30s, from growing pains in Brighton and trying to flee the nest, to pondering the deeper meaning of The Littlest Hobo and turning to the wise ones John O’Donohue, Maya Angelou and artist Zarina for answers.
Girl blog: on the personal essay
A fascinating discussion here about the history of the personal essay in Terry Nguyen’s Vague Blue. What is its value today beyond adding to the deluge of content? You know, the stuff that’s more easily interpretable and offers a lesson in the form of a quicker takeaway. Something that “leaves no room for ambiguity”.
The decisive question for me is do you have something interesting to say? A view worth grappling with. Can you connect the personal to something more universal in a way that tells a larger story about these times? There may be a degree of intimacy that holds out a hand to the reader or a sense of humour that brings levity in a troubling situation.
is all of that.If your writing is a process of figuring that out then fair enough. I am interested, just as long as the story constitutes more than a log of emotional responses to events and the depth of personal inquiry doesn’t careen into solipsism (no matter how eloquent and articulate it may be).
It’s also worth remembering that not everything needs to be shared right away. The first draft is rarely the best. The edit is a great opportunity to distill, reflect, recalibrate … and save yourself! Writing of this nature should not be therapy in the moment. As Caroline Donofrio says, “If I’m in the process of working through something, or looking for validation or feedback, it’s not yet time.”
This evolution to the era of the girlblogger that Terry notes towards the end of the piece raises further questions. Who is the I? Someone who is “intrinsically sceptical of herself” and “keenly aware of the performance, the aesthetics of writing”. A multiplicity. Her identity “a collage of resonant images and quotations”.
“They drink the tap water of the zeitgeist to get a sense of how to respond. Perhaps this, too, is a liability — the inability to commit to an argument, opting instead to read between the lines of other people’s arguments. Can I read through an essay without a laundry list of citations?”
[Ok that last, bit. Gulp! Not just young girls, I must add.]
Unruly Figures: Noor Inayat Khan
Heard the one about the Sufi children’s author who became a British secret agent and joined the Resistance against Nazi Germany? Well, spare a few minutes for Noor Inayat Khan, who featured in historian and writer Valorie Clark’s
in January.Born in 1914 in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother, Khan was a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century Muslim ruler of Mysore. Her father was a musician and Sufi teacher. He moved his family first to London and then to Paris, where Khan studied and later wrote children's stories.
She escaped to England after the fall of France and in November 1940 entered the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). In late 1942, she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) as a radio operator. Despite concerns about her suitability, in June 1943 she joined the Prosper resistance network in Paris, with the codename 'Madeleine'.
Many members were arrested shortly afterwards but she chose to remain in France and spent the summer moving from place to place, trying to send messages back to London while avoiding capture.
In October, Khan was betrayed by a French woman and arrested by the Gestapo. She had unwisely kept copies of all her secret signals and the Germans were able to use her radio to trick London into sending new agents – straight into the hands of the waiting Gestapo.
Khan escaped from prison but was recaptured a few hours later. In November 1943, she was sent to Pforzheim prison in Germany where she was chained and put in solitary confinement. Despite repeated torture, she refused to reveal any information. In September 1944, Khan and three other female SOE agents were transferred to Dachau concentration camp where on 13 September they were shot. Her final word? “Liberté!”
Clark turns facts like this into an epic, engrossing account with all the rich characterisation of a wartime novel while leaving space for conjecture. I can’t get enough of Noor’s remarkable story and wonder why, 80 years later, this national hero is not better known.
There are flickers of recognition. You can see a sculpture of her in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. In 2018 there was a campaign to put the George Cross recipient on the new £50 note. Still waiting… Last night I watched a short film on Sky History called Liberté starring Sky News anchor Sam Naz. A snapshot that parachutes us into her cruel captivity.
Ok, we should appreciate the extent of her bravery and sacrifice in those darkest hours. But she also deserves the big-screen biopic treatment, a chance to exist as a rounded human being in our minds. Noor felt pleasure and joy too in her short life.
Who should play her?
L’Rain live in London
In constant motion, open-ended and on the edge is how I would describe last week’s gig with Taja Cheek and the L’Rain band. Not many groups can take us from an enchanting lullaby to a jagged torrent – sometimes in the space of one track – but that's the scope of music and adventure we are dealing with here. And let's not forget the chorus of howling dogs to start the show. You don't get that every day. This was our wake-up call 🐺
It was a performance where I gave little thought to genre, picking out influences, waiting for my favourite 'song' or whatever. It was a night to just go where the sound takes you. Release. Forage for meaning, if you like. Otherwise, find joy in the looped repetition, amplification, expansion, deviation. Hearing laughter on mic gets the endorphins flowing, don’t you know (out to Laraaji).
Ah, remember laughter?
In their hands, songs on the latest album, I Killed Your Dog, are like launch pads, jump-off points, sculptures to dismantle and reconstruct. There are moments in the set where a waft of a familiar melody seeps through a gust of noise like on 'Uncertainty Principle' and it revives you. Or when someone attacks the bridge of their guitar and it's like a firecracker dancing in your mind. We are LIVE.
I loved watching the different ways they worked with each other. Without fuss or fanfare but you could feel the respect and a symbiosis. There is a vision, a direction of travel, but each member has the freedom to express themselves in the moment.
Here is a telepathic cluster of friends, who have spent days and nights in the studio, encouraging and challenging one another, then deepening that understanding on tour. Forging an alliance through all the late nights, early rises and challenges of life on the road. Last November to January were spent across North America. Now they were with us in London Town. We give thanks.
Being up close also made me more attuned to movement. The tapping of toes on pedals, fingers on frets, wandering eyes. Seeing musicians lose themselves for a moment … and you go too. The switching between instruments only added to the freedom of it all. Being in the second row is a different type of experience 😵💫
Taja and Zachary Levine-Caleb taking turns on the bass, Justin Felton and Zach veering to the flanks of the stage with their guitars, as if stretching the vibrations a little bit further. Ben Chapoteau-Katz alternating between synths and sax adding layers of texture and intrigue to each composition. The way Tim Angulo worked his drum kit any which way, as they switched gears.
This is the sound of L'Rain figuring things out in front of us, instigating change and finding new possibilities in those in-between spaces. To delve deeper into her process and perspective, check out Matt Mitchell’s interview for Paste magazine.
“I feel like I’m never wasting my time. Instead of writing something and being like, ‘This is garbage,’ I try to have a philosophy where nothing is garbage. There’s no bad ideas, it’s just – maybe – the incorrect application at the wrong time."
Final thought: shoes off on stage will always be big punk energy to me 🤟🏾
Nam June Paik: Moon Is The Oldest TV
It doesn't matter how long you wait to see this documentary, its subject will always feel prescient. Nam June Paik was miles ahead. A real mad professor, or a “beautiful freak” as artist Doug Aitken has described him.
A maverick who delighted in manipulating video and digital imagery with touch and voice to show the world it needn’t fear technology. Quite the opposite. TV and the “electronic superhighway” could help us feel more human and interconnected. And rather than being passive consumers or receivers, we could talk back.
Later, he would update that A-to-B automotive analogy for today’s hyperculture, saying that it’s more like we are in a boat in the ocean and we don’t know where the shore is. Sound familiar?
There was a big retrospective in 2021 at Tate Modern, spanning more than five decades of work. As mischievous an afternoon as I’ve ever had in a gallery. Here’s a taste.
The shock factor in his early antics could make him easy to dismiss as some trickster. Dragging a violin around the streets of New York. Cutting the tie of mentor John Cage and dumping shaving cream on his head. Strapping mini TVs to the breasts of frequent collaborator Charlotte Moorman as she played cello. Or placing a camera in front of a statue of a Buddha so it appears to watch itself in a feedback loop of infinite bliss, which he then mass-produced.
But there was a deeper phenomenon at play that Paik wanted to explore. The idea of stimulus and response. How to find new ways to communicate and empathise with one another. He lived to break taboos and provoke new thoughts. And he was funny. Very funny. Ask Bill Clinton.
Amanda Kim’s documentary offers valuable insight into his formative years in South Korea and Japan. How he rebelled against his affluent background, abandoned his classical music studies, became a leftist, fled to West Germany and joined the Fluxus movement, then tried to make it in New York’s avant-garde scene while living on very little. Ever the outsider.
You get a clear sense of his mission. To simultaneously pioneer new forms of art and to make them widely accessible, which led him to working in public television and conceiving a utopian satellite broadcast like 1984’s Good Morning Mr Orwell featuring Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Gabriel.
The live extravaganza was watched by 25 million people, 6.8 million of them Koreans, which must have been so satisfying as acceptance and recognition in his homeland had eluded him until then.
After watching Moon Is The Oldest TV, there can be doubt about Paik's influence on popular culture but I wish some of his work was given more space to breathe. How did his conceptual thoughts evolve and what set his art practice apart from other contemporaries who used video like Jud Yalkut?
There are a few moments that try to emulate that visceral feeling of a Paik installation. Nevertheless, some may question how effective and appropriate a portrait documentary is for an artist who relished breaking convention. Terry Nguyen wrote about this paradox for Dirt, while also reminding us that Paik was a provocateur artist without borders, who should be left open to interpretation.
“Paik’s aversion to the documentary might have to do with his ultimate distrust of the form. He wrote in 1970: ‘A director of [a] documentary film is so persuasive that he is imposing his view with skillful editing and powerful zoom-up.’ He took issue with its straightforward linearity, what he described as the “one-way time [and] one-vector direction” of tape. This frame-by-frame chronology, he argued, is a ‘tendentious interpretation of reality’. If film is to be a representation of human sight and life as experienced, it must adhere to the randomness and freedom of seeing.”
An attempt to reckon with True Detective: Night Country’s bonkers season finale
What did you think of the latest series of True Detective? It was a promising start. A gruesome cluster of corpsicles is discovered in the bitter cold and endless night of Alaska and two very different characters (Jodie Foster and superb first-time actor Kali Reis) are thrown together to find the killer. They have their history and each is carrying heavy baggage.
I remember seeing the billboard just after Christmas and feeling very hopeful.
Being drip-fed almost week by week wasn’t just welcome, it was essential. (Binging is bad for you, ok.) This is a franchise that trades in obfuscation, contradiction and misdirection. Designed to be pondered, debated and theorised over in feeds and comment sections for weeks after. True Detective fans don’t expect simple answers or quick resolutions. Some things can even remain unexplained.
By the halfway point, I would describe myself as being unwillingly lost in the abundant mystery of it all and the script wasn’t strong enough to sustain my interest in the miseries of these characters. No matter how many spirals you throw in there.
Yes, season one was captivating but I can let it go and enter new territory. Subsequent series should be able to exist on their own terms. Do we need random and slightly desperate callbacks?
There has been lots of discourse online about the series and charges of misogyny against its critics. Are they angry because the women are in charge – the leads and showrunner Issa Lopéz? Or is it the ‘woke’ 🥱 themes of climate change and exploitation of indigenous communities like the Iñupiat that irritate them?
My issue isn’t the thematic focus, the setting or the lack of Rust Cohles. It’s the writing, which is ponderous and leaden, even by the standards of earlier circuitous seasons. Early on, we sense that nature could have played a larger role in this horror in the form of some vengeful spirit. But it’s too inert to pierce the veil beyond superstition.
Supernatural forces occlude and confuse the plot instead of igniting or enriching it. Suspense is the motor of the good murder mystery and the best exponents know how to keep raising the stakes to build anticipation so it peaks at the finale. Not so here.
The pay-off felt like a swindle – well-meaning but a triumph of politics over storytelling. Aja Romano wrote a very precise and reasoned critique for Vox.
“López picks up on the well-known line, ‘You’re asking the wrong question.’ She has characters repeat variants of this statement over and over again throughout season four until it becomes preposterous, an annoying substitute for meaningful writing. Each reference, from ‘flat circle’ to Funyuns, is purely fan service, a distracting blip on the map that contributes nothing to our understanding of the True Detective universe.
“The same goes for Night Country’s over-the-top horror elements, which range from pointless jump scares to spectral phenomena that appear for no reason. Where season two was completely devoid of the supernatural, Night Country is so full of ghosts that they lose all significance.”
Thoughts, please.
So much goodness in this post, Amar! I really loved the Anthem piece on home. I feel I could listen again and again and get more out of it.
And thank you much for the mention. I love sound and so enjoyed curating the list for the sound piece. :)
Thanks for the mention. Loved Soul. So many life gems for us all.