This weekend’s tips feature a documentary about visitors from darker worlds, a podcast on perfect duos, photography to make you stop, feel, think, and act, and a book that helps you silencing your inner critic.
World Press Photo Barcelona: “Stories to make people stop, feel, think and act”
For the sixteenth time, The Photographic Social Vision Foundation presents all the winners of the World Press Photo photography award in a group exhibition in different cities worldwide. The Barcelona edition, which opened on November 13, hosts a range of additional activities open to the public, designed to generate debate and examine the winning projects’ themes in greater depth. Due to COVID-19, these activities partly occur online in the form of a guided tour through Filmin and additional content on the website World Press Photo Barcelona. The live exhibition takes place at the CCCB in Barcelona, and the organizers recommend to buy tickets online as the number of visitors will be restricted.
Fireballs: Visitors from Darker Worlds
The documentary “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds” examines how meteorites influenced and inspired cultures from all over the globe. Acclaimed film director Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer take us on a journey from Austria to Norway, Hawaii, Australia, Mexico, Antarctica, and Papua New Guinea, exploring the science and mystery of asteroids, meteorites, and cosmic dust. Experts and scientists share their knowledge of the information each fireball holds. Some of them date back an unbelievable 2 billion years. One highlight of the documentary includes a visit to Norwegian jazz musician and citizen scientist Jon Larsen. He is hunting for micrometeorites on rooftops and explains that every day 100 metric tons of cosmic dust fall to Earth. Another great moment of the documentary is an expedition in Antarctica accompanying scientists searching for meteorites in the eternal ice and witnessing their delirium of joy. “Fireballs: Visitors from Darker Worlds” is available on Apple+.
Podcast “Partners”: On Perfect Duos
As it reads in the introduction, “Partners is a podcast about two people and the story between them, told in their own words.” Creative duos share their stories on how they met, collaborated, fought, reconciled, complemented, and celebrated their greatest successes together. Among them, musicians such as Tegan & Sara, Jeff and Spencer; the father-and-son bandmates in Tweedy, and Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal who met at a poetry event in high-school and later on “made music until the sun came up.” They released the movie Blindspotting in 2018, one of Barack Obama’s favorites, and the album Seven Nights in Chicago in 2019. “We have this expression that we always say, we did this before every show, and we kind of do it anytime we’re at a crossroads. We’re like Energy up, expectations down.” “Partners” is produced and hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway, known for the podcast “Song Exploder” that will soon air as a Netflix documentary series, in which musicians are taking apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
Sabotage: How to Silence Your Inner Critic and Get Out of Your Own Way
The book Sabotage by the British writer Emma Gannon, who also hosts the popular podcast Ctrl Alt Delete, is a must-read for everyone who struggles with self-sabotaging tendencies. The book is not only informative, offering advice from clinical psychologists and tips and tricks on how to silence your inner saboteur, but also a diverting and digestible read. The only unsatisfying thing is the book’s length, which only comes with 114 pages and a font size a little too big. Funny are the anecdotes of the author’s own experiences with imposter syndrome, procrastination or jealousy, feelings, and sabotaging behavior that we all (forgive my generalization ) go through in our lives. For example, Gannon tells how she wanted to write a book so very badly in her twenties that she went to a book event where she drank too much overpriced gin and tonic and pissed off the speakers while live-tweeting horrible things about the evening. Then she let her inner saboteur say: “I didn’t want it that much anyway.” Through these candid confessions from her personal life, Gannon establishes a connection with the reader and offers immediate relief from one’s own shortcomings.
