Smith and his wife Jamie in 2024. 

COURTESY | MILES SMITH IV

Movie:

“Moana” (2016) 

I spent a lot of my life in tropical places so the island theme is beautiful, but I think what I love about “Moana” is that its a story about self-discovery — which we see a lot of in our day and age, usually with a cheesy modernist message attached to it  — that is on a deeper level actually a story of a young person rediscovering the traditions of her people and nation. I’ll never forget the scene where she goes into the cavern and finds the magnificent catamarans her people once used to travel across the seas. “We were voyagers!!” she shouts. I think there is something like that that happens for Americans in our day and age when they discover the history of the American republic. 

Book: 

Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” (1963)

It’s a story about the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat who watches as Italian unification — the Risorgimento — overtakes Sicily and sweeps aspects of the old order away. The prince’s ward is his nephew, Count Tancredi, who recites the now famous phrase that is associated with the film (and novel): “for everything to stay the same, everything must change.” The story is really about how the two men reconcile themselves to this new reality. Tancredi does it easily. The Prince never quite manages.

 

Song: 

“Ants Marching” by Dave Matthews Band (1994)

This is one of Dave Matthews’ early hit songs. It’s a song about monotony and it in so many ways evokes the ennui of the perhaps decadent but certainly prosperous days of the 1990s United States. Matthews says it was about drudgery and how there is a sort of emptiness to the vapid life of Generation Xers who became adults in the years that followed the Cold War. There’s something profound about that, but it also is a somewhat sunny song that alludes to a time where people felt — for better or worse — easy about life. History didn’t end, but there is something still meaningful to those of us who remember the prosperity of the 1990s.