We’re hittin’ the road with a tank full of new picks we cooked up for ya.
LISTEN
Folk songs to fuel your next road trip
After the initial “Life is a Highway” high of embarking on a new adventure has worn off, settle in and look inward with these mellow and melancholy numbers. Why are you really leaving, and where are you really hoping to go?
Bruce Cockburn, “Going Down the Road”
I know it must get better
If far enough I go
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, “Rollin’ On”
We’re rollin’ on, rollin’ on
Feeling better than we did last night
Rollin’ on, rollin’ on
It’s hard sometimes, pretty much it’s alright
Adrianne Lenker, “Gone”
To know something’s near
Not the change in the seasons that scares me, dear
It’s the sound in the distance I start to hear
Cat Stevens, “The Wind”
I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul
Where I’ll end up? Well, I think only God really knows
Matthew Joel, “The Grey Line”
It seems time has tried her best
To take that old grey line and put her to rest,
But she’ll always be home in the ramblin’ one’s breast.
Zachary Lucky, “Town to Town”
Oh, how this soul aches for the open road
Townes van Zandt sings another one
Light another cigarette, and son, you’ll burn those regrets
Soon you’re coming back home, back home
-JB
Share your sonic travel advice.
WATCH
Great films that cook surprisingly fast
Most of the films considered classics can lose the average viewer’s attention because they take so damn long. You might not expect it, but these five masterpieces are among the exceptions.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
The Holy Grail is perfect because of its imperfections. It takes an odd number of scenes to set up its premise and then does very little to pursue that premise. It follows an unrealistic number of characters toward that unclear end. It interrupts action with weird, animated asides and a narrating professor. And somehow, all that culminates into one of the greatest comedies of all time in 91 minutes. A blessing! A blessing from the Lord! God be praised!
Stand By Me (1986)
Clocking in at an hour and 29 minutes, this coming-of-age flick directed by the late, great Rob Reiner is a classic ‘80s example of saying it (“it” being adolescence) like it is. It’s a movie you will remember watching, especially if you first watched while you were the age the characters are becoming.
Elephant (2003)
This movie envelopes you in a series of moments we’d all rather didn’t exist—a school shooting and the events that lead up to it. It was one of the first examples of “quiet cinema” that I watched as a teen, so it came as a surprise to learn that it ends in 81 minutes.
Old Joy (2006)
Speaking of quiet cinema, the queen of the subgenre, Kelly Reichardt, served this incredible ode to aging and male friendship, paired with a brilliantly understated soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, in under 75 minutes. One of my all-time favourites.
Once (2007)
You remember enjoying this one. You remember the songs. But do you remember how short it is? Only one hour and 26 minutes. That’s a lot of punch packed in each frame.
-AK
READ
The fuels for life in Martyr!
Given all the “Hormuz nuz you can uz” dominating our attention lately, I decided to read something Iran-related over the last few weeks and picked up Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 novel, Martyr! But the connection to this week’s theme was not what I expected.
Akbar’s book weaves a number of themes together: displacement, immigration, empire, and addiction just to name a few. But one question works as the hem holding it all together: when our reasons for living start to fall away one by one, what keeps us going?
The closest the story gets to an answer arrives near the end, through the voice of a Vietnamese art gallerist named Sang Linh. In her conversation with Cyrus (the protagonist) she, in an off-hand way, references the need for emotional fuel to move forward in life. The first fuel she mentions is fear:
“Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger? Anger helped me to leave him. To get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger.”1
Later in the conversation, when Cyrus lists the fuels that haven’t worked for him—God, alcohol, drugs, writing—she suggests an alternative: love. “It’s a cleaner fuel than getting high, she says. “Cleaner than art too, mostly.”2
The way she frames her advice removes the moralism usually assigned to these “fuels” while reaching the same conclusions drawn by traditional sources of wisdom. But besides that, the metaphor offers a different angle from which to look at the search for meaning in life. I’m left thinking, what am I putting in my gas tank?
What are you?
-AK
Time for a pit stop. Hitch a ride with us in two weeks as we head out on
vacation.
Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr!, p. 302.
p. 305.