Friday again? Ok. This week I was 100% determined to persevere through my ennui, my main-character syndrome, have something to talk about that wasn’t “oof, politics lol”. Did it work? Well some weeks drag, and others feel like they drag you behind them. This week tied me to the back of its bumper by the ankle and drove through gravel for seven days straight (not to be dramatic, I was also somehow behind the wheel). Here were the good bits:
1. Good tweet
2. Listened to Depeche Mode a lot
Music for the Masses (1987)
The space in my heart for synth sounds is bottomless. And screechy door sounds, tasteful shakers, ghostly howls, an accordion, and the whole intro to I Want You Now (what is that, latex?), and all the other good sounds that made Trent Reznor at all relevant.
3. Made strong moves to decentralize my brain’s knowledge and experience stores
After hearing that Goodreads retired API access and reading indignant commentary about it online (not that I ever used it myself, but out of respect for the indignation of the strongly-opinionated) I also decided to switch to a reading log with a more pleasant user experience. Goodreads has been so flat and joyless, like a stock-template markdown forum with no love poured into it, and a heavy-handed layer of ads on top from something untrustworthy and vaguely malevolent. It makes reading look even more unappealing than it normally does. Prediction: in 2021 someone targets the market gap and we get Instagram-style Goodreads Stories and everyone will collectively roll their eyes at the horrible pun.
I settled on The StoryGraph because I will fall for anything with an ambiguous piechart, even if the color palette is as bad as this one:
I also made a Letterboxd. Both of these things felt like displacing knowledge from brain memory to external servers that are probably just as unreliable over the long-term, but I needed to make room for more important things like cornbread recipes.
4. Paper I liked: the controversy of Japan’s utility poles and its landscape
“Noise in the landscape: Disputing the visibility of mundane technological objects” by Masato Fukushima
There is an ongoing dispute in Japan on whether utility poles and electrical wires are aesthetically unappealing and should be buried, or whether they are an integral part of the contemporary landscape. Fukushima uses the idea of a landscape as palimpsest (a piece of old writing that is later reused and written on again) to describe how the pro- and anti-pole factions differ in how they see electrical poles within the surrounding landscape: whether they are noise or iconography.
Because of their quasi-ubiquitous nature, it is tempting to think of them as just another part of the paraphernalia of modernity, like junkspace (Koolhaas, 2004) or non-places (Augé, 1995); as the controversy above shows, however, these poles indeed have a complex stance in the palimpsest of landscape where they are revealed to be Janus-like: they may be regarded as visually negative noise to be erased, or as amicably individual with a capacity for being appreciated for their potential beauty.
He also describes the role Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion) played in the cultural beautifying of powerlines, but for some reason Serial Experiments Lain was not mentioned at all (??????).
Link to epub.
5. I finished Sopranos 22 years after the first episode aired
And spent an hour arguing about why the ending was good actually. Happy to entertain opinions to the contrary but if you’re a baby that needs to be spoonfed plotlines and satisfying resolutions, you’re beyond help.
6. Found an onion or some kind of bulb, perched on a handrail
Thanks for keeping up this week. Feel free to let me know what you thought of the mystery onion and if you have any leads on who it might belong to:
Yours with a decentralized brain,
N