#10: I'm ready for pandemic art
Plus cellular emergence and millennials exploring Gen Z
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Thinking
About why I’ve watched Bo Burnham’s Inside special on Netflix four times already this week:
It’s desperate, tender, intimate, funny, sad and sexy, which is how I like my comedy/ performance art
Male vulnerability is intoxicating
Being a physical being with digital personas is deeply strange and we should keep remembering that
The pandemic is a big trauma and we should keep remembering that
I currently find structure intolerable. Inside is a balm, a visual zine that is all themes and mood and vibes and feeling (not narrative)
I’m just about ready to leave escapism behind and welcome in some sense-making from pandemic art
It’s comforting to see millennial anxiety on screen: sandwiched between the generations that ruined everything and the generation that might save us all.
Reading
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. Everybody by Olivia Laing, which is not as satisfying as Lonely City, but I enjoyed learning about Wilhelm Reich and how his progressive ideas about politics and sex travelled from the 1920s Weimar Republic to the 1960s US civil rights movement.
This mind-blowing New Yorker article contains many of my interests: regeneration, self-organising systems, patterns. Our bodies are formed through cellular emergence, not through a pre-programmed manual, as I had assumed: “cells turn into three-dimensional organs by interacting with one another, like water molecules forming an eddy”. The article doesn’t really touch on the ethical implications of bio-regeneration, for example, the likely unequal access to these future technologies, and what they will mean for bodies that are different. Warning: article contains descriptions of animal experimentation.
How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life. A pleasingly chaotic article with a series of interesting and odd reframings about work. It’s modernism’s fault. It was all over for us the moment Romanticism met Capitalism. We’re living in a strange century, after human servants but before robot servants. Might you need to be celibate to do some jobs really well? It’s worth reading to the end (you might have to ignore the facile bit about feminism).
Millennials exploring Gen Z. Educating the TikTok generation, a fun but condescending piece. Caught in the Study Web, a characteristically curious and empathetic piece from Fadeke Adegbuyi, one of my favourite writers voyaging the internet.
What is sanity in an insane world?
Ten Lessons from Covid for Stepping into the Decade of Transformation.
I’m cresting the wave of my current obsession with trees, but this article about
people <> tree communication was too good not to share.
