lend me ur eyes 091
Some things I believe, irrespective of whether they are true or not:
Everything has a box that it should go in.
Shoes should always come off when you enter the house.
Shorts should be as short as possible.
Start with white socks and a plain white t-shirt and then build shape and colour on top of that combination.
Trainers look better when scuffed a bit, and you might as well get a stain on a white t-shirt on first wear because one is going to appear sooner or later anyway.
Everybody has the capacity, if not the means, to live beautifully.
The best course is dessert; the best meal is breakfast.
It’s no problem to eat a pastry each and every day.
There's no such thing as bad coffee, but there is great coffee.
A good hairdresser is valuable, but a great one is transformational.
It’s a good idea to frequent local businesses and get to know the proprietors; running errands gets you out of the house and then once you are out there the possibilities for what might happen next are endless.
Who you are isn’t fixed and the world too is always shifting.
Having a conversation requires asking questions and genuinely wanting to hear the answers.
It takes nine months from first meeting someone to cultivate a friendship.
Some things truly never get old (…like taking a shower.)
If you don't drink enough water you'll get kidney stones.
It's possible to communicate telepathically with animals; always take a second in the street to pet cats and wave at dogs; stare a while at birds when you see them.
Aliens are real and the government has long been hiding them.
Success mostly comes down to luck (and privilege) but a dogged type of persistence increases the probability of positive outcomes.
Autodidacticism is easy: most, if not all, of what higher education purports to offer can be found for free on the internet.
What you get out of anything is dependent on what you put into it.
You don’t need to be something to do something (e.g. you can take photographs without being a photographer, cook without being a chef, paint without being a painter etc etc).
It is better to do something than not do anything.
The journey is generally better than the destination.
Nothing is a waste of time if you like it.
WATCHING
We have been slowly working through some of the films of Franco Piavoli. These are extraordinarily beautiful films. Each one almost seems like the filmmaker was having a contest with himself to find or create an image that is more breathtaking than the one that came before it, and, as such, each film becomes a cascade of some of the most sublime images ever seen on film. We watched Voices Through Time (1996) first, which evidences this best perhaps. The filmmaker traces the seasons in a small town in Northwest Italy, observing inhabitants of different ages going about routine tasks through the changing weathers and patterns of light. We see dances and kisses in the height of summer, children at play in leave-littered autumn, and older folks talking winter walks against frozen lakes. Everything looks absolutely perfect. We see a vision of the world, but beautified and crystallised, snow-globed by a filmmaker with a singular knack for making the most screenshottable of images. Then we watched his first feature The Blue Planet (1982), which also takes a seasonal structure but is focused more on animal life and nature than Voices Through Time which centres people. It’s quite slow, but again extraordinary beautiful. The opening sequence is just an extended series of closeups of different bubble formulations, water movements, and tricks of the light in a stream. It reminded me of that Nathaniel Dorsey film (Alaya) where he studies how light travels over grains of sand, and as dull as that may sound, I mean it as the highest compliment. There is not much more to it than simple observation and orchestration, but this is enough. In an interview about the film, Piavoli says that, making it, he breathed “in all the charm, all the beauty, all the moments of the day, because it’s clear these are living paintings.” Very Italian! Last was Nostos: The Return (1989), a drama that draws upon Homer’s The Odyssey, charting Odysseus’ journey home over the Mediterranean Sea. Piavoli has called this film “symphonic” cinema, and like the other two films we watched, it very much centres the visual, telling a loose story through images of the landscape, alongside occasional gestural incidents of action or motion with sporadic unsubtitled dialogues presented in an intentionally unintelligible version of Ancient Greek. It too is beautiful in a primal way that is hard to put words to. I can’t recommend these films enough, so I’ve uploaded the files of them here incase anyone wants to watch them and live for a while inside a world of exaggerated beauty.
PERSONAL
I made a mixtape recently that attempts to combine British music and news events (in the loosest sense of the meaning of the latter) from the year of my birth (1991) through to today (2025). It’s obviously quite a regressively nostalgic thing to do but at the same time it is an interesting exercise that I would recommend anyone undertake. You get a highly personalised sense of your life and times, what registered and why, and what you remember and what you forget, but also a kind of imprint of a national consciousness, for better, and, in the case of Britain (“sad island,” to quote JF), very much for worse. In case you want to listen to it, I’ve uploaded it here. For some reason, tracklistings are a paywalled feature on Mixcloud, so I’ve pasted that below. “Hello Ian… long time no see.”
my bloody valentine - loomer (1991)
faithless - insomnia (1995)
bbc news - princess diana's death (1997)
channel 4 - ali g meets tony benn (2000)
n'n'g ft. kallaghan & mc neat - right before my eyes (2000)
robbie williams - feel (2002)
sky sports - the moment arsenal became the invincibles (2004)
ruff sqwad - u make me wanna (2006)
digital mystiks - anti war dub (2006)
itn news - stranded thames whale becomes london celebrity (2006)
bbc - ian wright meets his old school teacher (2006)
bloc party - like eating glass (2006)
kate nash - foundations (2007)
chase and status ft. plan b - end credits (2009)
foals - spanish sahara (2010)
al jazeera english - uk students protest over university fees (2010)
bbc news - darcus howe on the london riots (2012)
stormzy - shut up (2015)
bbyfather - stealth intro (2016)
jeremy corbyn - at glastonbury (2017)
caroline - coldplay cover (2025)
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.