There is beauty in repetition, the steady accretion that comes with committing to one thing day after day. Yuji Agematsu collected bits of debris in his cigarette packs on his daily walks, and they became a gloriously deranged calendar. What can I commit to doing each day? A couple hundred words and a photograph or a collage? Maybe there’s some sense to be made—or good nonsense to be found—in the debris of my old notebooks.
The winter gloom has receded from Vegas, leaving behind electric blue skies punctuated by a few Super Mario clouds. I’ve been working on touching my toes because I worry I’m getting creaky. Last week, I could barely reach my knees, but now I can almost brush my shins. I don’t want to become one of those grey men who struggle to put on their socks or sigh when they drop a pen, knowing it will be a significant event to retrieve it. I need to find a way to do the same with my brain because the future is coming fast and weird, and I’ll need a limber disposition to survive it.
“Soon we will find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of non-human intelligence,” said some big thinkers in The New York Times. It’s already made an incursion into my classroom. A student wrote, “I cannot describe the last advertisement to influence my behavior because I am a machine-learning model and I experience the world differently than human beings.” How do you respond to this type of thing? That night I stared at the ceiling, worrying about a world where writing becomes so cheap that reading is pointless and frightened by the havoc that will occur when these systems inevitably converge with the personal data harvested from us over the years. Technology might have peaked with magnetic tape: mix tapes and movies on VHS—perhaps that’s all we ever needed.
A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful, which is how I felt the first time I heard Deux, a French synthwave duo who recorded a handful of tracks in the early 1980s before disappearing. In a dimension light years away from whatever their synthesizers are doing, Cati Tête and Gérard Pelletier mumble-sing to each other about how it might be time to dance, and they sound effortlessly cool, an effect enhanced by the photograph on the cover of Golden Dreams. The two of them look so young and hopeful and French, smoking in a way that makes me miss cigarettes terribly. There’s a tenderness to this snapshot: forty years have passed, and Pelletier passed away in 2013. Thanks to the indispensable Minimal Wave label, their music has earwormed into my day-to-day life. In addition to “Golden Dreams,” I highly recommend the android grind of “Lassitude,” the spiky bop of “Game and Performance,” and the terrifyingly catchy “Decadence”.
She hummed with the nervy energy of a talented yet unrecognized mind. Maybe it was the way she talked about omens or her deep cigarette drags, but I sensed she belonged to a world of jukebox bars and motels with bulletproof glass at the check-in counter, moving through the Saturday night terrain of nicknamed men and last-call specials. And I wanted to join her there.
The deeper nights of autumn always draw me back to Ectomorph, purveyors of Detroit electro sleaze. Stalker is their masterpiece: debauched drums and queasy synthesizers, a rumbling from the depths. It’s the sound of something impossibly cool and possibly wicked loping through the backstreets. This brings to mind David Leo Rice’s meditation on the virtue of seediness: “The seedy trace that’s left behind when a drifter leaves a motel is reduced to an essence of past human presence, and thus the seedy both erases the human and offers the possibility of its renewal. Rather than starting a new life, the seedy offers the chance to be reborn in one’s own life, or perhaps to be born in earnest for the first time, well into middle age.”
Organizing my mp3 library is my preferred form of procrastination. Instead of reading the news, I make sure each song is accurately labeled and every album has the correct artwork. It’s a soothing antidote to the buckshot lunacy of the algorithm. The other day I noticed I have 2,362 songs by Muslimgauze. At first, I thought this must be an error, but no, I’ve somehow collected 189 Muslimgauze albums over the past twenty years, and new records continue to appear each month, which is prolific for someone who died in 1999.
I heard my first Muslimgauze record in 1998 while deejaying the midnight hour at WCBN in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rooting through the new releases one night, I found an album called Uzi Mahmood with a grainy image of a man’s face on the sleeve. The camera caught him looking at something off to the left, and he looked haunted, maybe afraid. There was no other information, but the hyper-saturated drums and clipped Arabic vocals permanently rearranged my sense of music. I imagined this record as an answer to the faceless mythos of groups like Underground Resistance, Drexciya, and Basic Channel.
Years passed before I learned that Muslimgauze was the moniker of a white guy named Bryn Jones, who lived in a Manchester suburb. After reading about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Jones created the Muslimgauze alias in 1982 and devoted the remainder of his life to making albums with names like The Rape of Palestine, Vote Hezbollah, and United States of Islam—a move that, from today’s vantage point, feels like strip-mining another culture’s trauma for experimental music. The singer and producer Lafawndah offers a different point of view: “It would be superficial to say that Bryn’s art would be more legitimate if he’d spent time there—that perspective has turned contemporary art into a failed state of a different kind.” Perhaps both viewpoints can coexist, but my sense is his frantic output points to something heavier and weirder that will forever remain beyond understanding.
Noting the “inconceivably deep sadness” that haunts Jones’s music, the critic Ian Penman finds it hard to believe this melancholy came from a region he never knew firsthand. “The sadness seems much deeper and further ingrained than that, approaching pathological—almost as if the terrible dispossessed ‘birthright’ of the Palestinians corresponded, secretly, to some personal scar or shadow in Jones’s own life.”
Although he was invited, Jones never visited Palestine. He hardly left his parents’ home. He was thirty-seven years old when he died. Twenty-five years later, the records keep coming.
At least 215 Muslimgauze releases are circulating today: that’s at least an album per month during his seventeen-year career. He claimed he recorded a new album every week. Record labels could not keep up. Stop, they told him. We have too much. After he died, his parents told his label to take what they wanted. “I declined,” said Geert-Jan Hobijn, who runs Staalplaat. “Then they said they would put the rest in the dumpster, so I took as many masters as I could.”
I’ve been thinking about this image all summer: all that music stuffed into trash bags.
My first Muslimgauze record, twenty-four years later.
Jones remains a black box. Some say he had no interest in politics or religion. Others think he was a zealot. Now only the music remains. For such an elusive figure, his music is profoundly present. He was a talented drummer whose production skills edged toward the otherworldly. His drums beat against your brain stem, hammering out rhythms that cast a freaky shadow across everyone else’s narrow turf of industrial, hip-hop, drone, techno, electro, and dub. The field recordings and radio broadcasts that pepper his songs are astonishing when you check the date: 1987, 1991, 1995. Where was he finding this material before the internet?
“There are no lyrics because that would be preaching,” Jones said in a rare interview. “It’s music. It’s up to you to find out more. You can listen to only the music, or you can preoccupy yourself more with it.” But how do you reckon with such an overwhelming catalog? My music widget says I have over 291 hours of Muslimgauze in my library—nearly 13 solid days.
And so the artist’s obsession becomes the listener’s obsession.
It’s a worthwhile journey. If you’re new to Muslimgauze, here’s a short playlist I’ve put together of my favorite tracks. Start with thirty seconds: “Jagannath, Jagannath Who?” from Jaab Ab Dullah. Then track down “Uzi Mahmood 7,” a fistful of razor-blade drums, crackle, and dub. These are the building blocks of the Muslimgauze universe. Next, give the moody heat shimmer of Mullah Said and Sandtrafikar a shot. (Artists like Vatican Shadow have made entire careers out of attempting to reproduce these two records.) See also “Veil of Tear Gas” and “A Small Intricate Box Which Contains Old Blue Opium Marzipan.” Or consider Ryoji Ikeda’s Remix #6, a blitz of vision-blurring drums that reduces every other breakbeat to ashes. The remixes are where things get most interesting. Artists around the world continue to remix Muslimgauze, and, in the process, they are rewiring, reclaiming, and broadening Jones’s single-minded vision.
Jones’s fanatical output haunts me because his reasons remain unintelligible. An album every week. I try to imagine the rhythm of his daily life. His relationship with his parents. Those trash bags. His devotion has produced a body of work that continues to regenerate beyond the grave. New Muslimgauze albums and remixes will probably keep surfacing long after we’re all dead, and it’s a beautiful thought: a feedback loop of remixes from every continent until there’s just one great big endless drum.
Many of the above quotes are from The Quietus, which published several musicians’ reflections on Jones’s work, and it’s the most substantial information I’ve encountered. I’m still trying to track down Ibrahim Khider’s book, Chasing the Shadow of Bryn Jones, which is part of a handsome box set I cannot afford. Here’s a trailer from Cultures of Resistance Films.
The Running Man (1987) is weird comfort food. I find myself craving every now and then, like a favorite meal. I first saw it when I was twelve, and nostalgia tends to tint objectivity, but I think this movie only improves with age. They don’t make them like this anymore, with that distinctly 1980s blend of bleak social commentary, schlocky spectacle, and self-aware humor that remembers, first and foremost, to entertain.
Over the years, it’s become my ur-text for a sleazy future of trashcan fires, black markets, station hijacking, and vicious game show hosts. And if you squint at it a certain way, it’s a genuinely frightening portrait of America’s appetite for violence. Thanks to one of the most inspired casting decisions ever made, The Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays the ringmaster of televised bloodsport with terrifying charisma. But the real villain is the crowd. They just want to watch people die.
The entire film hinges on a small moment after Schwarzennager refuses to bash in the head of a large man dressed like a Lite-Brite who sings Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro while he electrocutes his victims. (That was such an enjoyable sentence to write.) The crowd begins to boo, tentative at first—then they gather steam. And Dawson looks at the bloodlust on the faces of these old ladies and nebbish accountants, and he looks scared. Because these people want to watch a murder, they don’t care who. And when Schwarzenegger starts righteously slaughtering the baddies with razor wire, a chainsaw, explosives, and a belt-fed weapon while delivering clunky one-liners, we’re cheering too. We’ve become the crowd.
And somewhere in my brain, my sense of The Running Man is soundtracked by this song by Bremen, which captures the nervy end-of-days energy of midnight sirens and searchlights sweeping the sky.
Bremen – Entering Phase Two
Second Launch | Blackest Ever Black, 2011 | Bandcamp
Last night I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film I hadn’t seen since my days in college. I remember it filling me with a particular and nameless kind of dread, and this mood has been on my mind lately: the overlapping of global calamity with the tragedies of our private lives. Released in 1959, Alain Resnais’s film is ground zero for French New Wave and perhaps the wellspring for most arthouse tropes. The camera lingers in dark rooms. Lovers speak in monologue and monotone. They thrash and sulk in shadows. They repeat themselves while gazing into the middle distance of the emotionally detached.
Much of the film is about recreating and relitigating the recent past. A French actress comes to Hiroshima to play a nurse in a movie about the atrocity of August 6, 1945—which occurred only fourteen years before. (Try to imagine, say, a film called 9/11, My Love released in 2015.) Her lover is a Japanese architect, and they discuss their private lives while surrounded by actors caked in makeup that resembles the burns from a nuclear blast. Tea rooms and cocktail lounges evoke bygone eras and far-flung locales, culminating in a tropical speakeasy called “Casablanca”. Along the way, the lovers move across tatami mats and stern Modernist lobbies, history collapsing as their desire to rekindle the first blush of youthful romance melds with the fallout from the bomb.
The French actress tries to attach herself to apocalyptic destruction, hoping to stave off indifference towards a new atomic age by narrating its horrors over a montage of destroyed bodies and post-blast footage. “You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” her Japanese lover repeatedly reminds her.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a profoundly fucked-up film that may not withstand the lights of 2022. But I can’t think of many movies that go after such big game by conflating the historical with the personal, the horrific with the romantic. It plumbs emotions unique to cinema, the ones beyond language or conscious thought—such as the dark urge to give our lives meaning by attaching ourselves to tragedy and violence, hoping to make an impression when we tell people we could have been the next victim, that we were just a few blocks away from the shooting or the blast site.
In Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the residents of an unnamed island suffer the ritual disappearance of objects big and small. Flowers. Lemons. Perfume. Calendars. These erasures are enforced by a surveillance state that deforms the lives of its citizens a little more each day. First published twenty-five years ago, Ogawa’s meditations feel incredibly urgent in today’s atmosphere of digital disorientation and alternate realities:
But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, “Find your left eye,” I suppose it would be difficult to do so.
This is a haunted fable with secret rooms and voices trapped in typewriters. Although the surreal metaphors of Kōbō Abe or the eerily arid writing of Albert Camus come to mind, Ogawa’s writing lives in the moments just before a dream evaporates.
Sooner or later, any story about loss becomes a story about normalization, and The Memory Police captures the ways we adjust ourselves to fit the cruel logic of the world, whether it is delivered by the power of the state or the inevitability of death. We can become accustomed to terrible things. What’s the alternative? Ogawa provides an answer through moments of grace and devotion to the truth—and its final pages are devastating. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading.
Mahjong is my favorite game. Everything is aestheticized: the clack of the tiles, the building of walls, and the language of seasons, flowers, and pork fat. The ritual of washing the tiles and talking junk. “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they play mahjong,” said my mother-in-law in the middle of our thirtieth game. Two games later, she said something to me that roughly translates as “you are still breathing but you have no strength.”
Shock G died yesterday. As the years pile up, maybe you become accustomed to your influences passing away. But this one hit me hard. I grew up with Digital Underground. I copied the cartoons from their albums into my middle-school notebooks, and I memorized their lyrics; my brain still carries them around thirty years later.
I was fourteen when my neighbor scowled at my meager collection of pop-rock cassettes and gave me a mixtape with Boogie Down Productions, Stetsasonic, and Digital Underground’s “Doowutchyalike“—a sprawling nine-minute party that began with Shock G’s affable delivery: “Now as the record spins around, you recognize this sound. Well, it’s the Underground.” It was the sound of someone inviting you into a new world, and Digital Underground’s world was a mad sci-fi cartoon that swerved from cultural satire to psychedelic transport (“The DFLO Shuttle“) to speculative cyber-sex, from stern warnings about addiction (“The Danger Zone“) to rapping fish (“Underwater Rimes“) to paying respect to our heroes while they’re still with us (“Heartbeat Props“).
Digital Underground was a direct descendant of Parliament-Funkadelic‘s 1970s Afrofuturism. It’s a strange sensation, encountering the original material after the remix, sample, or homage. But Shock G went beyond borrowing or recontextualizing. While everyone else was looping “Flashlight” and “Atomic Dog,” Digital Underground’s second album, Sons of the P, featured George Clinton in one of his first appearances on a hip-hop record, and Shock G’s multi-tracked alter-egos carried the spirit of Starchild and Mr. Wiggles through the 1990s. I’m grateful to Shock G for introducing me to music that could be simultaneously bonkers, wise, and mythic—and for priming me to appreciate Funkadelic, Drexciya, and the programming of the Electrifying Mojo. I can think of no better introduction.
For my birthday, C. gave me the most magnificent gift: a small framed reproduction of my favorite painting, Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in His Study from 1605.
Saint Jerome was often depicted in the desert wilderness, forsaking worldly distraction in exchange for salvation. But in Caravaggio’s hands, he is hushed and desiccated as he completes the first translation of the Bible into Latin. He stares deep into its pages, hunting for revelation, ignoring the skull on his desk, a memento mori that mocks the vanity of our knowledge in the face of the unknowable. The darkness that envelopes him is heavier, more textured than the red cloth he wears, yet he’s determined to write one last word before the night consumes him.
John Berger has said Caravaggio’s darkness “smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing to be hung out the next day.” To me, it feels like the purple-black thoughts that burble within the midnight brain. And in this darkness, Jerome no longer belongs to history or dogma but the silence he sought while crisscrossing the desert in the prime of his life.
On the first day of the year, I stood before the humming pencil grids of an Agnes Martin canvas at the Columbus Museum of Art. The ancient Greeks believed God was a geometer, but I think she was closer to the mark: “Geometry has nothing to do with it,” said Martin. “It’s all about finding perfection, and perfection can’t be found in something as rigid as geometry. You have to find it elsewhere, in between the lines.”
This seems like a good philosophy for an extreme season.
Max Headroom holds up far too well thirty-five years later. Every few years, I think about the 1987 signal hijacking at a Chicago television station when an unknown man wearing a Max Headroom mask took over the airwaves to mutter nonsense. (The Wikipedia entry includes this delightful sentence: “The video ended with a pair of exposed buttocks being spanked with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.”)
Max Headroom occupies an odd space in cultural memory: a tacky 1980s face on a t-shirt that hawked New Coke and music videos, as well as a glitchy Neuromancing vision of artificial intelligence that satirized a culture increasingly devoted to sitting alone in front of a screen.
Last night I rewatched the original British pilot from 1985, and it’s remarkably durable. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Vicious advertising tactics are killing people. And wireframe graphics, joystick controls, and VHS tapes fuse with the retrofitted future aesthetics of Blade Runner and Brazil: harsh lights shining through makeshift ventilation systems, piles of televisions flickering on street corners. Strange how stacks of junked televisions became a dystopian trope even though the logistics make no sense.
But the most chilling feature in this future is that off-switches are illegal.
This morning in the park, I sat across from a woman who was talking to the pigeons gathered around her feet. She complimented their feathers as she tossed them bits of a hamburger bun. “Oh, you’re a beautiful one with little flecks of gold in your wings.” She giggled as they pecked and flapped, and it was a wonderfully roomy kind of laughter. “Don’t be afraid to express yourself,” she told them.
Something about the pitch of her voice, combined with her complete focus on the world she’d invented with these birds, reminded me of a song lyric that never seemed to end. This one thing I know, that he loves me so. I repeated the phrase for a minute until I remembered: “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” by Gavin Bryars, a 25-minute song attached to an anecdote with the qualities of myth.
In 1971, Bryars walked through a rough part of London with a tape recorder, taping drunken jive and street preachers. Then he captured the song of an unknown homeless man who would die within the year. Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. Never failed me yet. This one thing I know. Returning to the art department of the university where he worked, Bryars looped the man’s voice on a reel-to-reel player in a classroom. Then he went to get a coffee. “When I came back, I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued,” he said. “People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realized that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s singing.”
Do I believe in god? I have no idea. But the persistence of this unknown man’s voice makes me think something like grace is possible. I hear it in the childlike wonder combined with elderly poise despite living in dire conditions. It’s built into the lyric itself, the blurred line between suffering and faith. And I think the pigeon lady lives in the same neighborhood: someone finding absolute pleasure and presence in a humble ritual while the world feels like it’s falling apart.
Lately I find myself asking, “What is the most comforting thing I know?” Last night, I remembered the Electrifying Mojo.
I became a night owl thanks to this mysterious Detroit radio voice whose eclectic sets from the 1970s through the 1990s featured Parliament, Kraftwerk, Devo, and Cybotron—and set the stage for techno music. The Electrifying Mojo is a ghost, never photographed yet his spirit runs through nearly everything we hear today. Each night, he opened his show with a question: “Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise?” He is a man without biographical detail, but his fingerprints are everywhere. He is a concept that requires a definite article: The.
The Electrifying Mojo brought the city together while the theme from Star Wars blared behind his voice. “I want you to show some solidarity tonight,” he’d say. “If you’re in the car, flash your lights. If you’re sitting on your porch, blink your porch light. And if you’re in bed, then dance on your back. In Technicolor.” I remember driving down Woodward while a white Cadillac in the opposite lane flashed its headlights. I did the same in my beat-to-shit Pontiac: two strangers responding to a lone voice on the radio, drawing the city into a brotherhood of sound and light.
He was one of the first deejays to put Prince on the air. He interrupted songs with social commentary from “the mental machine.” He rocked a twenty-minute version of “Flashlight.” I stayed awake into the small hours, hunched over my cassette player and riding the pause/record button to make mixtapes culled from his show. The 120-minute Maxell cassettes were the best for this.
Every night the Electrifying Mojo would sign off with the same message, delivered in a slow baritone with a grin around the edges: “Whenever you feel like you’re nearing the end of your rope, don’t slide off. Tie a knot. Keep hanging. Keep remembering that ain’t nobody bad like you.”
Cybotron - Alleys Of Your Mind
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One of the formative songs that the Electrifying Mojo played. Forty years old and you can still see the steam rising from the street grates. Read more about Mojo here and you can hear his voice here.
I woke up with Melancholia on my mind. Six days after watching it, I cannot shake the airless world of this film that lives between calamity and silence. The Earth is about to collide with a mammoth planet hiding behind the sun, yet the volume is turned down to a whisper. There are no news reports here, no fighter jets or people yelling in the streets. Instead, we listen to the murmuring of two sisters as they wander the immaculate lawn of a plush country home. When Melancholia was released in 2011, I dismissed it as one of Lars von Trier’s exercises in hype and masochism. But that was when the world still felt relatively stable.
Today this story of cataclysmic extinction feels like prophecy. Nearly every weather-related headline contains words like unprecedented and record-breaking: Floods across America. Reservoirs evaporating in India. Europe in the grip of a heatwave that forced Germany to curb speeds on the Autobahn to prevent the pavement from cracking and buckling. Last week Alaska hit ninety degrees. And fires are burning everywhere.
How does a person face the end of the world? One sister maintains faith in the daily rituals of breakfast, lunch, and bedtime stories; the other withdraws into the fog of depression until her favorite meal tastes like ashes. In Melancholia, the ennui that can wreck any hope of managing a relationship, a career, or a smile becomes a valuable asset when obliteration arrives. Detachment becomes the sturdy voice of reason. This is a film about reckoning with “toxic knowledge,” the environmentalist Richard Heinberg’s term for information that forever colors our perception. “Once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it,” he says, “and your every subsequent thought is tinted.”
This tinting leads to the image of a woman lying naked in the grass at midnight, gazing at an alien planet with desire in her eye, daring the apocalypse to come closer. “The Earth is evil,” she says. “We don’t need to grieve for it.” The lines between stoicism, detachment, and nihilism are blurry. At its heart, pessimism is self-congratulatory because it suggests we are too good for this world. And as our world begins to heat up and turn strange, I find myself chilled—and occasionally invigorated—by this centuries-old adage from Leibniz: we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is the best film I’ve seen in years. Built from red neon, broken clocks, haunted karaoke, and endless rain, it’s a puzzle that will never be solved—and it perfectly captures the architecture of dreams and the looping logic of regret. I never thought wearing 3D glasses could be so heartbreaking.
The original Blade Runner was a rare gift of pure atmosphere. Since 1982, Ridley Scott’s overheated Los Angeles has been steadily rearranging the furniture when it comes to imagining the future. Today we naturally envision fires in the sky, broken weather, and sprawling fields of scrap. And we can be pretty sure that no matter what the future brings, elaborate advertisements will leer above us while we haggle and jive beneath buildings heavy with memory and rot. And it’s such a beautiful sight. Blade Runner is the cinematic sensation of laying on a bed in a dark motel room while distant traffic speeds down a rainy street: a concoction of nostalgia, dread, and the possibilities in the margins. More than anything, Blade Runner is a story about god, a fever dream about grabbing your creator by the throat and asking, “Why did you make me? And why must I die?”
The new iteration of Blade Runner is one of the few things to reappear three decades later in better-than-expected condition. I won’t discuss the details of the film—not because I worry about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, but because things like characters and plot are secondary elements used only to generate a mood. Nearly every scene in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel looks like material scraped from a dream, a Surrealist fusion of our synthetic world with ancient myth. At first, I craved the clutter, heat, and fun of the original film’s vision of a scuzzy and polyglot tomorrow; the landscape of 2049 is monotonous and arid. But its bleak architecture and sterile streets are probably a more accurate rendering of the future as our democracies calcify into corporate aristocracy and our cities become homogenized spaces that cater to the individual rather than the crowd. Beyond this resonance, however, most of 2049 stands outside of time like one of the eerie monuments in the front yard of the Bradbury building.
If the first Blade Runner was about confronting god, 2049 tries to calculate the value of the soul. If artificial intelligence can become so self-aware that it can feel lonely, does being human mean anything beyond legal ramifications? This question was first introduced when Roy Batty shed his tears in the rain; the sight of a robot weeping at the impermanence of existence left us wondering if mono no aware is a uniquely human feature—or a bug. (Mono no aware is such a beautiful term for the pathos of things, the recognition that all things must end; see also lacrimae rerum.) 2049 extends this theme by pondering our hardwired desire to feel unique. A humanoid searches for meaning and connection, and he wonders if he might be special. The possibility frightens him. Then it energizes him. The action circles a vague notion of finding purpose through sacrifice for others. But the bigger question of what distinguishes a human from any mechanism capable of brooding hangs in the haze without answers. Morality is garbled by the ways we define us and them.
When Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford race towards a speedy-looking vehicle, 2049 seems destined to careen into the usual Hollywood showdown between good and evil. Instead, Villeneuve unexpectedly downshifts into the register of Bergman or Antonioni, leaving us with an extended meditation on cosmic-grade isolation that favors archetypes over characters and events. Rather than worrying about the bloodied hero crumpled on the floor, the camera is more interested in watching a black dog lope across the screen. Instead of savoring the vanquished foe, our attention is directed to the mindless pounding of the surf. There is no good or evil here, only ghosts in the machine and glitches in the sublime. 2049 is not a perfect film, but it is another rare gift.
Published in 1962, Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is pegged to 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 labor of existence. Does shoveling an endless pit of sand make him any less free than his former life of paperwork, obligations, and bills?
The man 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 more difficult to answer as he considers the woman’s acceptance of their strange fate. Shoveling 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.”
In the vein of Camus’s stranger, Abe analyzes our behavior with the detachment of a scientist observing an insect: “Repetition of the same patterns, they say, provides an effective form of protective coloring.” Yet routine offers no shelter from spiritual loneliness, and his description of its effects 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.” An extension of absurdism, the surreal community within Abe’s dunes elevates philosophy into myth.
This story has seeped into my dreams, grinding at my thoughts like sand in the teeth.
Published in Moscow in 1918, this short manifesto first thrilled me as an undergraduate student when I began drifting from my studies in film towards graphic design:
Comrades and citizens, we, the leaders of Russian futurism–the revolutionary art of youth–declare:
1. From this day forward, with the abolition of tsardom, the domicile of art in the closets and sheds of human genius – palaces, galleries, salons, libraries, theaters—is abrogated.
2. In the name of the great march of equality for all, as far as culture is concerned, let the Free Word of creative personality be written on the corners of walls, fences, roofs, the streets of our cities and villages, on the backs of automobiles, carriages, streetcars, and on the clothes of all citizens.
3. Let pictures (colors) be thrown, like colored rainbows, across streets and squares, from house to house, delighting, ennobling the eye (taste) of the passer-by. Artists and writers have the immediate duty to get hold of their pots of paint and, with their masterly brushes, to illuminate, to paint all the sides, foreheads, and chests of cities, railway stations, and the ever-galloping herds of railway carriages.
From now on, let the citizen walking down the street enjoy at every moment the depths of thought of his great contemporaries, let him absorb the flowery gaudiness of this day’s beautiful joy, let him listen to music—the melody, the roar, the buzz—of excellent composers everywhere. Let the streets be a feast of art for all.
And if all this comes to pass, in accordance with our word, everyone who goes out into the street will grow to be a giant and in wisdom, contemplating beauty instead of the present-day streets with their iron books (signboards), where every page has been written on their signs by greed, the lust for mammon, calculated meanness and low obtuseness, all of which soil the soul and offend the eye.
Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky along with other members of the nascent Russian futurist movement, its optimism is infectious—and utterly heartbreaking, considering the shadows gathering in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution that would turn this vision of democratic expression into a dark joke. A century later, Mayakovsky’s salvo continues to circulate through the veins of nearly every idealistic design manifesto, from Ken Garland’s First Things First to the proclamations of Adbusters to the contemporary writing of Mike Monteiro.
, the residents of an unnamed island suffer the ritual disappearance of objects big and small. Flowers. Lemons. Perfume. Calendars. These erasures are enforced by a surveillance state that deforms the lives of its citizens a little more each day. First published twenty-five years ago, Ogawa’s meditations feel incredibly urgent in today’s atmosphere of digital disorientation and alternate realities:
