TOAST co-founder Jamie Seaton tells Elle Decoration what he is reading, watching and downloading this month.My favourite piece of music is (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For? by Nick Cave, for its capture of those pure, amazing, transcendental moments of new love. I'd like to add Schubert's last three piano sonatas, which seem to weave their threads around our existence and render it gorgeous.The music I am currently listening to a lot is rebetika the wild, keening Balkan blues of the 1920s, often played on a bouzouki. A great modern take on this can be heard on idem Aslan's album Mortissa.
One of the wonderful things about books is less that they influence one but rather that they seem to coax into the light ideas that one is already groping for. It's almost a magical process by which one finds oneself led to just the right book, making manifest inchoate feelings or ideas, at just the right moment. Here are two: The Midnight Folk by John Masefield, which my father read to me when I was four or five years old and opening doors on the magic possibilities of the imagination; and Living by Zen by DT Suzuki, which I read when I was in my mid-twenties.
At the moment I'm reading The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray, £25). It's the last book in the trilogy that tells of his walk from London to Istanbul between wars and was put together posthumously by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. It's romantic, elegiac, erudite and very entertaining.
If I had a free day in London, I would spend it going around the galleries. There's a favourite Velzquez and a favourite Rembrandt in the Wallace Collection that I visit again and again. I love Sam Fogg's gallery, on the corner of Cork Street, which shows Gothic and medieval art. Or, for a really indulgent free day, I would have a long lunch with my wife and friends at Locanda Locatelli.
My favourite destination in the world is Kyoto. I love to go to one of the Zen temple gardens in the morning before any crowds arrive.
The app I love and use most is, boringly, Chambers Dictionary. I love words, their derivations, their resonances, their various uses and what they reveal of the cultures and times that use them.
This interview appears in the April 2014 edition of Elle Decoration.
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