Things That I Love

Screengrab from Studio Ghibli’s ‘Whipser of the Heart’ - one of my all-time favourite movies.

I read this article by Sasha Chapin, about writing faster as a way to tap into your rawest and purest creativity (and to just force yourself to actually make stuff) and I was intrigued.

I’d had the idea, for a while, to just write down a bunch of stuff that I love, and that felt like an easy and fun thing to blab about, so here we are:

The first thing that comes to mind is coffee because I don’t have any in my apartment right now. It’s 6:21am and I won’t have my first coffee until about 8am, which sucks.

I love coffee.

I want my coffee flavour profile to read something like: chocolate, peanut butter, hazelnut, molasses. In Toronto I buy Fahrenheit Coffee’s Diablo beans - to make with my Breville Barista Express - and they slap. In Halifax I’ve been buying Have Fun Coffee’s Cant’ Complain beans, which also slap. We have another Barista Express at my office in Halifax, thank god.

**I do not love - actually, I despise - fruity, acidic coffee. I think it’s likely that people who say they like these profiles are lying (like people who pretend they’re scared of birds)**

I’ll also take a dirty diner coffee any day.

I love early mornings. When I’m in a solid routine, where waking up at 5:30am feels easy, life feels easy. Those several quiet hours to yourself, that first slow coffee, taking in sunrise. Can’t beat it.

I love sci-fi and fantasy. I am a sucker for the Hero’s Journey. Books and films from these genres are just jam-packed with the kind of meaning, purpose, adventure, and wonder that we all crave, and can’t always tap into in our day-to-day lives.

In Evan Puschak’s (NerdWriter1 on YouTube) book of essays “Escape into Meaning”, I love the way he speaks about his love for Sci-Fi & Fantasy, contrasting them and saying:

“If cyberpunk is an escape from meaning, a surrender from reality at its most nihilistic, then the Lord of the Rings is an escape into meaning, a longing for reality as I want it to be.”

I just re-read Ender’s Game and it’s an all-time favourite (I’d never re-read a novel before). It’s the book that sparked my love for sci-fi, when I grabbed it off a shelf in grade 11 and told my friend I was going to read it “as a joke” because I still thought I was “cool”.

I was not, I am not, but sci-fi is.

Speaking of re-reading, re-watching, re-doing etc… I’ve watched The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance like four times now (again, I don’t re-read/re-watch often at all), and it’s everything I could ask for in a fantasy series.

I also just looked up the cast for the first time (it’s made with puppets so they are just voices) and I’m blown away by how stacked this show is.

My favourite fantasy novel is The Name of The Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. It’s the first in a trilogy and the second book The Wise Man’s Fear is fantastic as well, but the third book has been in the works for 12 years so reader beware.

I love this sci-fi short film about human proclivity for adventure and space exploration called “Wanderers” by Erik Wernquist. The visuals are stunning, the music is absolutely epic, and the narration by Carl Sagan will pull at your heart strings. Watch it. I love it.

I love Richard Linklater films. I first saw “Before Midnight” with my brother while we were home for Christmas in 2013. I googled it immediately after watching and realized that it’s the third instalment in a trilogy (Before Sunrise → Before Sunset → Before Midnight) where each film was made nine years (real life years) after the previous one. We loved the third so much that we stayed up until 5am watching the first two and I was hooked.

Note: The Before Sunrise trailer could easily scare you off watching these films. Don’t let it.

I love Linklater’s unconventional approach to filmmaking. I love the long, drawn out scenes. I love how much the writing and acting feels like real life. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy feel like friends after having seen these films.

This is so cheesy, but I actually took a train to Vienna by myself after a work trip in Germany and visited as many places as I could from Before Sunrise, like the Riesenrad and the Zollamtssteg Bridge.

I so respect the courage and patience required to space the films out the way he did. He also wrote and directed Dazed and Confused, Boyhood (the 2014 coming-of-age film that was famously filmed over 12 years), as well as School of Rock (which explains why a silly kids movie is so inexplicably good and still holds up 20 years later).

My admiration for Linklater and his work crystallized when I came across “Dream is Destiny”, a 90-minute documentary about his life and career. I found out that he was just a dude from Texas who grew up playing baseball in college, and who also had a creative side that he decided to lean into, more and more, when entering his 20’s. I gathered that he tries to writes honest, slice-of-life stories that often directly reflect his own life experiences. This was incredibly relatable for me and got me excited, for the first time, at the prospect of writing my own stories and creating my own film someday.

For the longest time, I’d felt guilty about the fact that all the stories I want to tell are at least somewhat autobiographical, but the way Linklater injects his own story and experiences into brand new stories made me realize how silly that guilt was.

In this interview clip he references Andrei Tarkovsky to emphasize the importance of telling stories that are meaningful to you, as the creator, and then allowing the “power of cinema” to translate it to the viewer.

I love dinner scenes in films.

There’s an awesome one in Before Midnight, with three generations gathered around a big outdoor dinner table in Greece.

There’s another beautiful one in Drive My Car. It’s my favourite scene in the whole film, although I can’t fully explain why. It’s slow, long, and peaceful, and it has a lovely real-life quality to it.

Long dinners with friends are absolutely one of my favourite things in the entire world. I have a particular group of friends (four of us, in total) that I especially look forward to dining with because I know we all approach the experience with the same level of enthusiasm and appreciation. It always ends up being one of those dinners where you order anything the server recommends (which usually ends up being nearly the entire menu), where your wine is constantly being topped up and, if someone asked, you couldn’t honestly say whether you had three glasses or thirteen.

Everything is shared, everything is appreciated and discussed. There are multiple desserts, with a few different amaros, if available, to taste and compare.

I love this TV series on Apple TV called “HOME”, which profiles interesting homes of interesting people around the world.

A few episodes I loved:

Soot House - Maine
Hourré House - South of France
Naturhus - Sweden.

My single favourite episode is about Theaster Gates, a multidisciplinary artist known for his sculpture work, who has been revitalizing South Side Chicago by leveraging his background in urban planning, his clout as a world-renowned artist, and his political influence to repurpose old, abandoned spaces and convert them into beautiful new projects that celebrate black art/history and uplift his community.

I’ve watched this episode about 10 times and it inspires me like nothing else. If you need a spark to motivate you for anything at all, or if you’ve been losing hope in humanity (like so many are), you need to watch this.

When thinking about Theaster Gates, I’m reminded of an exhibit of his that I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario, featuring a choir, and this in turn makes me think of this insecurity I have around music, where I feel ashamed that I can’t play any instruments, and that my music knowledge is relatively limited because I almost exclusively listened to rap from ages 12-28 (I had a massive chip on my shoulder and the me against the world attitude in rap really did it for me).

I think there’s more to this insecurity, but this post is about things I love, not performing open-heart surgery on myself in public. Maybe another time.

Do notice (PLEASE!) that I did not say that my music taste is bad, it’s the general volume of knowledge that’s lacking. Like, I know a good song when I hear it, and people tend to like my playlists/choices when I’m handed the proverbial aux, I just don’t have a large catalogue to choose from.

With that said, I love:

• Khruangbin and funky, jazzy, soulful music that sounds kinda like Khruangbin

• Polo & Pan

• The OG Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack

• Afrobeats - especially this song: Girlfriend by Ruger

I still love rap, especially songs that blend the hardness of rap with some degree of positivity or a message about the struggle or the come up, like:

• All my Life - Lil Durk & J. Cole

• Coming Home - Pusha T, Ms. Lauryn Hill

• Or in a slightly different direction, I love: Coming of Age (da sequel) - Jay-Z, Memphis Bleek.

I always loved Jay-Z, but my appreciation for his music grew immensely after reading Decoded. I am so blown away by and interested in the level of intelligence, pragmatism, creativity, and fearlessness required to come from the absolute bottom and to cultivate knowledge, wealth, influence, and power like he did.

I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “The 50th Law” (Robert Green and 50 Cent) for similar reasons.

I love Animé. A few my all time favourites are:

Whisper of the Heart - It’s slow, gentle, and stunning. The artwork is mind-blowingly beautiful, I love the story and pacing, and John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’ (one of my all time favourite songs) is woven into the film in a really fun way.

Cowboy Bebop - An Animé, Sci-fi, Western, Noir with the coolest jazz intro and it’s still somehow cooler than it sounds? - and

Akira - Teen biker gang rips through Neo-Tokyo and wreaks havoc in a cyberpunk Animé. Impossibly cool.

I love cycling along the countryside, but I also love biking in cities - especially a new city.

I love laying down and staring at the stars (haven’t had enough of this in my life the last three years).

I love salmon sashimi and mashed potatoes.

I love my friends and I love a Rich Aucoin show. I was flying home the other day and when I remembered I was going to see one with my pals, and my eyes welled up because I was so damn excited to see them and drink and dance and take a bunch of shrooms with them.

I love a cry.

This was a fun and rewarding exercise. I’d encourage you to take some time to write down a bunch of things that you love and to see where that takes you.

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Feel free to send me an email at dave@threesixfive.ca if you have any questions or ideas!