Favorite
Things

In January of 1995, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall, where the militant thump of Phylyps Trak II drew me upstairs to the dark third floor. Club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit—all lock-stepping in a grid, heads bowed before the bassbin like an altar, which I soon l discovered it was.

A fine-grained collision between existential anxiety and end-game capitalism—and a masterclass in dialogue. The first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema: cosmic horror soundtracks the ultramundane.

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I fall asleep to an episode every night at 75% speed. The first hour or so is always delightful: This place is nice. Let's start a society. But wake up a few hours later for a sleepy pee, and everything's gone to hell. Usually because of the Assyrians.

Start with Carthage, but be warned: it’s a heartbreak.

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Number one inspiration station.

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Madeline Johnston’s voice sounds like it’s fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.

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Published in 1962, Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes offers a single image: a man trapped in a sandpit with a mysterious woman. Their survival depends upon shoveling the accumulating sand each night, a metaphor for the hard labor of existence. Does shoveling an endless pit of sand make him any less free than his former life of paperwork and obligations?

He contemplates the mind’s craving for routine: “It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.” But what else is there? This question becomes difficult to answer as he ponders the woman’s acceptance of their strange fate. Shoveling, she says, gives her life as much meaning as any other activity. Meanwhile, villagers peer into the pit to ensure his compliance. “More than iron doors, more than walls,” Abe writes, “it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.”

Abe's fable reads like an epitaph for the digital age: “Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion. And so one bit one’s nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one’s heart…one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one’s brain…one had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone.”

This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.

Hands down the best dim sum in the Middle West and maybe anywhere—and a beloved weekly ritual with my in-laws.

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Atom Heart & Tetsu Inoue’s drowsy low-end opus that comforted me thirty years ago and still soothes me today.

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A slow-motion masterpiece from 1995, and the namesake of my newsletter.

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Just the oil. No need for the flakes.

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Like mainlining every David Lynch film at half speed.

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Because I don't drink stale water. Fact: the Topo Chico that comes in clear glass bottles tastes better than the green-tinted bottles. And don't even talk to me about plastic or metal.

Joan Pope’s music is hypnotic, even compulsive, and sounds like an incantation that threatens to summon something ominous, which might help us prepare for the days ahead.

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My all-time favorite lyrics: A piece of brain in my hair. The wheels are melting. A ghost is screaming your name.

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Basic Channel is the godhead but this 45-minute track is the perfect form.

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