a documentary, a book, a horse that wants cake
I was supposed to write weeknotes. I haven't been. I had a great 3-day jaunt to New York, I should write about that too. Maybe I will, but this is my site and it's not my job.
Embarrassingly, perhaps, to the indieweb set - I haven't been watching films or documentaries in years. I was always a documentary kid, the kind who checked out every 90's National Geographic documentary at Blockbuster until I ran out. At some point, my attention span shriveled. First I stopped reading books, then I couldn't watch a documentary without a second screen. I can watch a series or infinite YouTube videos, but if I sit down for something I know is an hour and a half long, I freeze up. It feels like a commitment, too long for something unknown. At least with a series, I will know what to expect, even with long episodes like the Sopranos (currently on season 4).
Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara
First - here's the link to it on YouTube. It's directed by Koji Sakabe and 93 minutes long, and I really enjoyed it.
Second - its link provenance. I am interested in how people find things online and navigate information.
My sleep schedule is jacked and the books I am reading are too dense and important to read to sleep, so I looked for a video to help me sleep that's interesting but not too loud or exciting. I started with Technology Connection's video about flip clocks which was too interesting, because then I wanted a flip clock and started looking at videos about flip clocks. I discovered this video by someone who just makes videos about flip clocks about the absurdly expensive Yoshitomo Nara flip clock:
I recognized Nara's work, but it wasn't the work itself (it's fine by my current taste but not my favorite) that made me look up more about him. It was a sudden memory of seeing his work on maybe a poster or a shirt in early high school, around 2001 or 2002, in the tiny record store in my small southern US city. It's been closed for almost two decades, but its website was corporaterocksucks.com (it's AI slop now) and it was so musty with old records my dad had an allergy attack in it just buying me a gift card.
It's where I found my first zines at 14 and started writing album reviews and submitting them from an anonymous email account. It was walking distance from my house and I would just loiter there when I couldn't afford to buy anything, knowing I could at least overhear what the adults who had also rejected white protestant southern culture were listening to. They had print copies of the Onion, which I had never seen. I wasn't exposed to much progressive thought except for the literal Bible, which at this point was getting me in trouble in Sunday School for asking questions about why we let poverty exist if we claim to follow Jesus. And how can we be sure reincarnation isn't real? Is anyone going to help me understand Revelations?
Anyways, part of the nostalgia of seeing his work is that it was also my first exposure to anything from Asia. I didn't meet an Asian person until a year or two later, but I swear some of the music from this documentary (incredible!) had to have been played in the record store at some point. I was also struck that someone was making a living making weird, spooky comic-style portraits out in the world - the only artists I had met painted oil landscapes of marshes.
It also strikes me now that, as a teenager in a conservative part of the USA, I had a physical place to go and physical media to touch and hear. I am exhausted by third place discourse because it doesn't seem like many of the people who want these spaces back want to get offline and go to them and keep them open, they just like the idea of them. But I do feel that I am better for having been exposed to alternative culture through a physical space as opposed to just Discord.
And this documentary - especially the music and mood - brought back a kind of fifteen-year-old magic.
Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld by Byung-Chul Han
I am a few pages into this short book by Korean-German philosopher and it made me pause and actually take notes for the first time since graduate school. He touches on what some call information addiction beautifully:
"We are not in the habit of perceiving reality in terms of attraction and surprise. As information hunters, we are becoming blind to still, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary - the things that do not attract us but ground us into being."
"Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information."
And a last thing: an Onion article
email: fern_enjoyer at tutamail.com mastodon: smallcypress@indieweb.social