Hi folks! Welcome to the latest edition of the Friday fry-up.
First on today’s docket:
Holy fresh hell – am I ever digging Sigur Ros these days. I cannot believe it has taken me this long to start listening to them.
Most of the reactions I’ve been getting to this news have been pretty hilarious. The lovely M put it best when he said: “Jeeze lady. You’re only ten years too late to the party.”
No doubt!
Even worse, it’s not as though I didn’t know the band existed.
In my last year of undergrad I read one of the most breathtakingly beautiful books of all time – an Icelandic work entitled Angels of the Universe. I sobbed through the last three chapters and watched as my heart broke into thousands of tiny pieces as I turned the novel’s last page.
I actually don’t know if I’ve ever been the same since.
If you ever have a chance to read it, please do. It’s a must.
Anyways, in the lead up to exams we watched the movie that was made from the book in order to facilitate a discussion on the similarities and differences employed by the two artistic mediums.
(Or you know…kill time during the last week of school.)
I liked the film and thought they did a fair job adapting the material. But in the end it just couldn’t live up to the overwhelming majesty, power and heart-wrenching grief of the book.
I did however find the soundtrack haunting in its melancholy. And even though I knew many of the songs were by Sigur Ros, I just didn’t take any steps to explore the band or their discography once the course was over.
For some reason I just always lumped them together with Radiohead, a band which I cannot like no matter how hard I try (and believe me I’VE TRIED – they’re my husband’s all-time-favorite) and just assumed that Sigur Ros was the Iceland equivalent to the music that makes me want to take a bath in a tub full of razorblades. (This pretty much sums up all my musical ventures with Mr. T. Yorke in any and all incarnations.)
And FYI – I’m all for music making me feel things, I’m just not on board with it taking me to a place where I believe that there will never be anything good about the world ever again.
Seriously dudes, to me, Radiohead are the bloody Dementors of the music world.
Good grief.
Either way, it’s all water under the bridge now.
One last note on Scandinavian tunes though – the best song ever to be featured in a movie (or perhaps indeed EVER) is Paha Vaanii by Marko Haavisto from the brilliant and hilarious The Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismäki.
I routinely listen to this on loop as I frenetically clean my house on weekends. I pretend to know the words and everything. For serious, the day I arrive in Helsinki I’m going to have this song DOWN PAT.
Check it:
…
Number two on the dial for the fry-up is not nearly as sexy as Icelandic post-rock but, any way you slice it, just as important:
DINNER.
More specifically, those dinners where you’re not really eating a traditional “dinner” but you’ve still taken the time to prepare something totally tasty and exactly what you’ve been craving all day and you’re about to sit down to a really good book, or maybe a collection of New York Times Crosswords, or a new Parks and Recreation or even better yet, a combination of all three to be shared with the person you love more than anything in the wide world, and everything is just GOOD.
No. GREAT.
Who are we kidding here? EXCELLENT.
And if you are alone maybe you’re eating this:
Or, perhaps you are with someone else, and you’ve both decided that breakfast for dinner is pretty much the most incredible invention of all time so you cook up some apples in butter, cinnamon and brown sugar and make chai French toast with raspberries, whipping cream and maple syrup:
Or any incarnations of these meals:
I guess for me, I used to spend so much of my life agonizing over every meal – what I was going to eat, how much I was going to eat, who I was going to eat with, what I was going to do after I ate – that I cannot help but feel totally excited and liberated just looking at these (totally crap quality, sorry peeps) photos.
I sometimes like to take pictures of the food I prepare because it is proof for how far I’ve come: that I cannot just take pride in the excellent meals I’ve prepared, but also a new strength that allows me to enjoy the excellent food I’ve prepared ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME.
Now, if only I could quit diet pop drinks I would be a bloody superwoman and my office desk wouldn’t look like this every day at 3pm.
Baby steps!
AAAAANNNNNNNNDDDDD –
DANCE!
Rant and Roll 
I’m glad you’ve joined the Sigur Ros train, I agree the film version of Angels of the Universe (though very good) doesn’t quite capture the beauty of the novel (but do films ever capture novels?), and your meals looks delicious (and I know they are, having tasted you two’s cooking).
However! I do also hope that one day you will open your heart to Thom & co. – because, no other band can break my heart into tiny little pieces and put it together again like Radiohead can. I know they have a reputation for being depressing, but I also find Thom’s voice and songwriting really beautiful and honest (though often melancholy). Once I read a quote from him saying it upset him that people dismissed their music as depressing, because that stigmatized depression and mental illness, and that music exists as an outlet for emotion, and many beautiful things emerge from states of depression (or something like that).
And, I mean, they just leave me breathless sometimes: (try it, you might not hate it! :)
Of the maybe 10 pictures on my phone, one is of a delicious meal I put together (simply a steak with grilled veggies and caesar salad piled high) and standing beside it, a tallboy of a lovely pilsner beer from Kelowna. When someone asked to see a picture of my husband, I was hard pressed to show a decent photo of him haha but man if they asked what I ate one evening last summer I could do that.