Like a Bird Podcast J E Chadwick

All creative projects at jechadwick.com

— Did you also find yourself unexpectedly Binge-watching Netflix’s One Day, and what did YOU take out of it?
— What did it say to you about relationships, and how we often misunderstand love?
— What are the foundations of a healthy kind of love?

Just when you think you know your own taste in TV shows, a fourteen-episode Netflix Rom-Com pops up and gets deep under your skin.
I lost a week binging One Day, the new bittersweet adaptation of David Nicholls’s 2009 bestseller. The film tracks the complicated love between Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) and Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) for two decades.
They hook up on the final day at Edinburgh University, July 15th, 1988, and then each episode intriguingly revisits them on that same day a year later. 
The format is genius. It allows us to see the broad arc of a relationship over decades, especially how power shifts between friendship and love as their fortunes rise and fall. It slowly sucks us in, requiring us to imagine what happens between each July rendezvous.
Like a Jane Austen chapter, each episode sets fresh obstacles for their relationship—new partners, weddings, children, addiction, the death of a parent—inviting us to switch our sympathies. Who’s to blame for this fight? Who is holding the relationship back? Are we still rooting for them? 
Although they botched the final episode (Emma Morley would have hated it; way too sickly sweet), I was hooked until then. Of course, all the British 90’s nostalgia helped: a killer soundtrack, college balls, lad culture, London pubs, and getaways to Greece, Italy, and Paris.
But for me, the real hook was its brutal dissection of love and how easily it can be misunderstood.
Sexy Dex and Serious Em are unlikely soul mates. They come from entirely different places—social background, race, gender, vocation. He lacks purpose and direction, while she takes life too seriously, and there are few signs of sexual chemistry between them.
Em resents the privilege that Dex was born with, and his lack of self-awareness, yet she still sticks with him as he loses a decade to narcissism and addiction. Their path from young love to adult love in the city is messy, even brutal.
Yet together, they find an equal footing over the years, and we are reminded that love is a journey, often painful and unpredictable but almost always worth it.
One Day’s dialogue is knowing and sharp.
“You’ve never seen me before in your life,” Em accuses Dex when they first meet, in a moment that foreshadows all of his narcissistic thoughtlessness.
In Episode 3, Dex lies on his back while Em’s head rests on his chest. In this moment he does see her:
“You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are. You know, smart and funny and talented and all that. I mean, endlessly. I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff? Do you think it’s all a conspiracy? People secretly ganging up to be nice about you?”
Soon, they grow apart. Dex finds the fame and success he lazily pursues as a TV presenter, and his ego takes over. In an excruciating restaurant scene, Dex can’t stop looking over her shoulder for more interesting options, bored by her conversation, and she explodes on him outside in the alley:
"You used to make me feel good about myself. But now you make me feel like s**t. Like I’m not cool enough, or interesting enough or ambitious enough."
A few years later, life begins to catch up with Dex, triggering a journey of self-awareness:
“You know, if you’re 22 and f*****g up, you can say, “It’s okay. I’m only 22. I’m only 25. I’m only 28.” But 32…”
As he struggles through his thirties, they grow closer again as his marriage falls apart. When they finally get together, Em jokes “I just thought I’d finally got rid of you,” and Dex tells her what she already knows, “I don

Why do so many of us still read? After all, there are now dozens of alternative ways to entertain or improve ourselves. Can a good book still compete with a blockbuster movie or an addictive computer game? Finding the time to sit down to read alone feels harder than ever, and too often we gradually lose our cherished habit.
That would be a mistake. In this essay, I’ll argue for more books and share twelve different ways to read them. Some of these may seem obvious, but a few of them might make you feel hungry to devour your next pile of books. I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review.
Read with total freedom.
There are too few areas of our lives that we genuinely get to control. Most of us wake up earlier than we’d like to, then race to hit deadlines and appointments and make hundreds of daily compromises to keep others happy. Sometimes, we don’t even get to choose the movies or music we need to match our shifting mood.
But nobody gets to control what we read.
The books we choose and how we decide to read them are an oasis of pure, indulgent freedom. Books uniquely put us in charge, allowing us to slow down and dwell on new truths or to speed past or skip tired ideas. This rare freedom is what we need more of in our lives.
Nobody can judge us for keeping five or ten different books on the go at the same time. Like tapas on a Mediterranean break, we can endlessly snack on a diet of fiction and non-fiction—Yeats on the park bench, Amis before dinner, Austen in bed. Libraries are free, and all are now online, so everyone has access to an unlimited stream of fresh books. And if you don’t like your local selection, you can even ask a friend in a fancier zip code to lend you their login details.
Life is too short to continue with a dull book. If you find a book opaque or challenging to get through, it’s the author’s fault, not yours, so please move on. If they could think clearly, they would write more clearly, but alarmingly few do. Reading a different chapter of ten books is often more rewarding than reading ten chapters of one book. 
Modern life rarely offers us pure freedom, so we must indulge in the serendipity of reading books.
Richard Powers captured this freedom wistfully in this passage from Bewilderment:
“My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”
Read to be alone.
We can only know ourselves once we deliberately carve out space to spend time alone. Books are perhaps the best way to be alone. They provide just enough company to keep the wolf of loneliness from the door yet still demand our active introspection. A good book gently pulls our attention between the characters, the author, and inevitably ourselves at a pace that creates space for self-compassion. Do we sometimes act like this? Are we also, perhaps, too jealous or too forgiving? Possibly. Read on.
With a day of solitude and a pile of books, we can enjoy aloneness, the happy cousin of loneliness. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust captured it well:
 “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by s

“All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting”
—Thomas Merton

A man walks into a monastery. He takes a vow of silence and commits to speaking only two words every seven years. After seven years, the monks summon him and ask him to speak.
"Hard bed," he says. They nod and dismiss him.
Seven years later they summon him again.
"Bad food," he whispers. The monks all nod and wave him out.
Seven more years pass, and they bring him back.
"I quit," he declares.
This time the abbot can’t control himself.
"Oh, big surprise!” he says, "You've done nothing but complain since you got here."
The longest stretches of silence I ever experienced were ten-day Vipassana retreats. For the first few days, you feel disoriented by the lack of human communication. Nobody is talking to you, nor are you talking to others, which means you are no longer spending energy trying to interpret or perform all those endless stories.
At first, you miss the human reinforcement that you do, in fact, exist, but after a week or so you will likely start to enjoy this new, quiet freedom.
Then, you start noticing a new, quieter soundtrack. There’s no TV, music, arguments, podcasts, gossip, ringtones, or keyboard tapping. In their place, there’s a new background hum of birds, insects, wind, streams, leaves, and the gentle shuffle of fellow meditators as they struggle with their positions. 
It’s delicious. It was always there, but you never heard it before, and now it feels like someone turned off the other soundtrack and turned the volume on this one up.
Finally, on top of this soundtrack, there’s a new noise to get used to: your inner voice. It was also always there, of course, chattering away with itself in the background, but you have become an expert at drowning it out with playlists, screen time, and Netflix episodes. 
Now, you have no defense. You are forced to listen to it for around sixteen hours a day, but hopefully, with the gentle guidance you are given each day, you are also learning how to observe it rather than identify with it.
We start asking ourselves a new set of questions about this inner voice. What will we learn from it about ourselves? Will we be able to cope with listening to it, all on our own? And how come we took so many decades to sit down and listen to it finally? What were we afraid of?
And then, for me at least, we start asking this weird new question: Does my inner voice have a volume dial? And if so, what default is it set to?
Before you read on, please try to answer yes or no.
So, it turns out it does—or at least mine does. I didn’t know this until I noticed that my inner voice was practically shouting at me, and I could barely hear the delicious background noise of the meadow outside the room.
For the first time in my life, I wondered idly whether I had a volume dial. I tried to change my inner voice to a whisper instead of full volume, a “3” instead of a “9.” Unbelievably, it worked immediately, and for the rest of the retreat, I was able to observe my thoughts in a softer whisper that was far more enjoyable to listen to.
It was quite a revelation. I always knew that I had the power to move to a quieter place and meditate, but I didn’t know I also had volume control for my inner voice. It made me feel even more in control of my mind than before. I would have never known this if I hadn’t stepped out of daily life to change my soundtrack.
It was another reminder that we can change the volume in our lives to make ourselves feel lighter.
Why don’t we do this more often? Tenzin Palmo, the remarkable British Buddhist nun who lived for eleven years on her own in a cave in India, believes we are afraid: 
“We are afraid of silence—ou

I once got the opportunity to meet and interview one of my all-time heroes, Mikhail Gorbachev.
It was around 1993, a few years after he’d received the Nobel Peace Prize, and I was still an undergraduate at Oxford, trying to prove myself as a journalist on the student paper. One evening, the press release came through on the fax machine - Gorbachev was coming to speak in Oxford next week - and I knew this was my big chance for a serious interview.
I’d just recently worked out that getting interviews in Oxford was easier than I’d imagined, and I was already pestering every poor A to C-list celebrity who was unfortunate enough to visit the city. I just called their PR team and asked to meet them, and they inexplicably said yes and proposed a time to meet in the Randolph lobby.
In fact, I was on a bit of a roll. A chubby George Best dressed in an improbably pink shell suit. A very witty and kind Eddie Izzard. The dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, over tea and biscuits served by his mum at his home in East Ham. And even Bob Hawke, the former Australian prime minister and Rhodes scholar, famously held the world record in the 1950’s for drinking a yard of ale (11 seconds).
Gorbachev, I felt, would cement my reputation as a serious interviewer.
I just needed to call up the number on the fax sheet in my hand before anyone else got the same idea, and ask politely. Gorby would be all mine.
As I called the number, I didn’t recognize the name or organization on the fax - Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society. This was still five years before Google was founded, so I was not aware that Boteach, named subsequently by the Washington Post as the most famous rabbi in America, had been sent from America and funded as an emissary to Oxford to raise the profile of the Chabad Jewish community, and had founded the L’Chaim Society in 1989. I didn’t know any of this, and in those days if you didn’t know something, you just dialed and blagged it:
“Hi, is this Rabbi Shmuley Boteach? This is James Chadwick, from the Oxford Student. I understand the L’Chaim Society is bringing Gorbachev to speak next week. I’d love to interview him.”
Long silence.
“Hello?”
Another long silence.
“Tell me, Mr Chadwick, why should we let you interview one of the greatest political figures of the twentieth century? What are your motivations for this interview? What relevant experience or geopolitical insight do you bring that qualifies you for this honor?”
I explained about Eddie Izzard and George Best, wisely omitting the part about the pink shell suit.
“Mr Chadwick, I do not know these people. Do you even know what the L’Chaim Society is, and what we stand for? Do you know what is happening in Israel? Have you done any research into us, Mr Chadwick?”
Another long silence, this time mine.
“Look, why don’t you come over, and we will discuss this further? Come to my house this evening, we are having a little party. It’s very informal. You can meet some of our student community and we can see where it goes. See you at 7.”
The call ended, and my bowels churned a little. F**k. This was a big problem. I desperately wanted to meet Gorby, and my future career might depend on it, but there was now a monstrous obstacle I would need to tackle first.
My deepest, darkest nemesis. A party.
I’ve always hated parties. I think I’m generally a sociable and chatty person in regular life, but for whatever reason parties freak me out. All my physical and mental faculties turn to undependable blancmange between the moment I step into a party and stumble out.
Usually, I RSVP yes and then never get off my own sofa and am a no-show. Still, on the disastrous occasions that I turn up, I typically seek out the dullest and most isolated person in the room and then monopolize them until even they find an excuse to leave early.
I’m like a colon cleanse for party hosts. 
But this was for Gorby. Tonight, I needed to step up and br

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I spent Saturday afternoon exploring a 60,000-square-foot L.A. warehouse trying to make sense of Luna Luna, perhaps the greatest art story ever told.
It spans six decades and features Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Miles Davis, Philip Glass, and a $100m investment led by the Canadian rapper, Drake.
The story begins in cold-war Vienna and Hamburg against a backdrop of post-war Holocaust trauma. If it were a painting, it would feature dark, European surrealist roots, neon-colored graffiti of New York’s pop-art explosion, and a long sandy exile in the Texas desert in 44 metal container boxes.
It reminds us that art does not need to be confined to individual frames on well-lit gallery walls in capital cities, or the dark vaults of billionaires. Art also lives. Outside the constraints of the boxes created by their industry, artists can collaborate playfully and create physical spaces for crowds to enjoy together for reasons other than money. It leaves us wanting more.
Luna Luna is a forgotten fantasy, and perhaps the greatest story that art has ever told, which I will explore here in three action-filled acts.
Act I, Hamburg 1987: “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth”
Over a seven-week run in Hamburg in the summer of 1987, almost 300,000 visitors came to enjoy a colorful, surreal amusement park built by the eccentric Austrian maverick André Heller and 32 of the world’s most talented artists.
The mostly German families rode in a large, white Ferris wheel designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, rotating to Miles Davis’s haunting track ‘Tutu.’ They explored the mirrored Dalídom of Salvador Dalí and wandered through a glass maze designed by Roy Lichtenstein, to a soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. They could step inside David Hockney’s ‘Enchanted Tree’ structure, or whizz around on Keith Haring’s painted carousel or Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride.
It was a big hit. At the time, Life magazine called it “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth”, and arguably that still stands, if only because it somehow fused pop art and surrealism with abstraction, art brut, Dada, nouveau realism, and Viennese Actionism. Heller managed to unite established post-war artists like Dali, Hockney, and Lichtenstein, with emerging stars like Haring, Basquiat, and Scharf.
Even Andy Warhol, who didn’t participate and died a few months before the show, was memorialized with a booth where visitors could get their 15-minutes-of-fame snaps with cut-outs of Einstein and Marilyn Monroe.
It was joyful. From the 30-minute documentary video shown on Saturday, we get a feel for the true magic of the 1987 live carnival. Kids squeal with delight and roam wild, as couples cuddle affectionately and enjoy a mock wedding at Heller’s surreal wedding chapel, surrounded by jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers, and costumed performers. 
To remind us that this is 1980’s Europe (and definitely not 2024 California) we can watch the stunned and sniggering audience of Manfred Deix’s ‘Palace of the Winds’, a live performance of amplified bare-cheeked farting, accompanied by a concert violinist. (Apparently, there was a tradition of public ‘flatulists’ in Europe earlier in the century.)
And then it ended. After one summer of fun, Luna Luna was packed up into containers, ready to be shipped to the next destination.  As they meticulously packed and labeled everything for the next event, nobody dreamed it would be forgotten for almost forty years.
But who was Heller, how did he come up with such a colossal idea, and how did he pull it off? 
Franz André Heller was born in 1947 in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family of sweets manufacturers, Gustav & Wilhelm Heller. In 1964 he began a prolific and eclectic creative career as a German-language artist, author, poet, singer, songwriter, and actor. Sixty years on, he

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Wim Wenders's latest movie is unlikely to win an Oscar on Sunday, yet I suspect Perfect Days will be watched and contemplated for many years to come.
It’s a simple story told quietly, creating a space for everyone to find their own meaning. For me, it revealed an unexpected and comforting truth about growing old.
The action, or perhaps more accurately, the non-action, takes place over a week or two in the life of Hirayama, a sixty-something toilet cleaner in an outer district of Tokyo. He wakes early alone each day on the floor of his narrow, spartan room and rolls up his futon
The camera rarely leaves him as we follow his daily routine - brush teeth, canned coffee, drive van, clean toilets fastidiously, lunch in the park, communal bath, street cafe for dinner, read under a lamp, and sleep.
There is little dialogue and less storyline, and each day he repeats his Groundhog Day routine, scrubbing toilet bowls meticulously until they gleam. 
In less expert hands, this could have been a soul-destroying film to endure, yet Wenders infuses every crack of Hirayama’s routine with humor, beauty, and joy, to create a truly life-affirming experience. 
I watched Perfect Days last night in the theater. Before the film started, Wenders and his lead actor Koji Yakusho, who won best actor at Cannes for his performance, gave a short introduction to thank the audience. The men stood quietly side by side, smiling warmly with their eyes. Wenders explained how the movie was inspired by ‘komorebi’ ( the original title for the film) which literally means “sunlight leaking through trees” but also suggests a much larger philosophy.
Komorebi reflects the very unique, almost romantic love of the Japanese for nature, but also the importance of pausing often to notice and appreciate the tiny moments of beauty all around us. It’s another example of a Japanese word we need in our own language - like ikigai (life value) and irusu (pretending not to be home when somebody rings your doorbell). 
Hirayama not only understands Komorebi, but he effortlessly expresses it through his every gesture and impish smile. At lunchtime, he sits in the park and takes photographs with an old camera of the dappled sunlight leaking through the leaves above from the same tree. Every week he develops the 35mm film and keeps only the best photographs of his tree in a memory box. He saves tiny saplings from the parks and brings them home to nurture lovingly. Even at night, his black-and-white dreams feature shimmering branches and leaves.
There’s a delightful Wenders visual moment in the middle of the movie that is easy to miss. The cleaner is busy inside a cubicle polishing a toilet when he hears voices outside. He pauses and looks up to watch the blurry-colored figures of the passers-by, reflected on the toilet's ceiling. If you look for it, sunlight is always leaking through trees. 
Komorebi is not only about nature though. Hirayama unconsciously carves out a distinctly analog path within an overwhelmingly digital city. In addition to his 35mm film prints, he devours paperback books at home and in restaurants, and above all he cherishes his collection of 1970s cassette tapes, which he inserts every time he drives his van. The cassettes provide a loving and classically Wenders soundtrack: Van Morrison, Otis Redding, Jagger, Simone and of course Lou Reed’s eponymous ‘Perfect Day’.
Hirayama lives a simple and modest life, but he is not alone, and he finds many small ways to enjoy human connection. He is firm but kind to his young and unhinged co-worker, whose girlfriend becomes infatuated with the beauty of the older man’s cassettes. He harbors a secret love for the proprietor of his favorite restaurant and plays tic-tac-toe with a stranger he never meets, hiding a sheet of paper daily in one of the toilets he cleans.
When his teenage niece turns up unannounced for a few day