The Number One Email In Heaven
There are going to be a bunch of videos in this email. So if you’re not into that kind of thing, please scroll down a bit.
The other day, I needed a little lift-me-up after I had looked at the news. I decided to watch a video again that had been released last year, a music video for a parody song. The type of music this was a parody of was Euro dance from the 1990s. I actually don’t know anything about that, but the song made me laugh when it came out.
Looking for it on YouTube, I came across a metal cover someone had made. Of course, I had to check that out. I’m imagining that it’s really difficult to create a cover version of something that is a parody, but the guy really pulled it off:
I then went to look for some of his other stuff, and of course I had to watch his metal cover of what I imagined to be the intro song of some Japanese manga:
This then led me to look up the original intro:
Whatever you want to make of the music in all of this, it seems clear that LittleVMills somehow manages to pay homage to the originals while making them completely his own. The Nokotan video has a huge number of Japanese people commenting underneath. My favourite comment might be “People often say Japanese people are crazy, but it's reassuring to know that overseas guys are just as crazy.” (translated from the original).
It’s crazy how our visual culture is evolving even as we — or maybe I should say: I — don’t even notice. When I opened YouTube, its algorithm threw a bunch of stuff at me. I tend to ignore the suggestions. But there was the 1979 (original) music video of Sparks’ The Number One Song In Heaven:
Obviously, the visuals look really dated. Or maybe dated is not the right word. You can tell it’s old. But it’s also still profoundly weird and great. (Btw, if you don’t know, these two are brothers.)
Maybe this is easier to see outside the world of photography. In that world, we maintain the idea that someone’s photography always has to be original. You have either that, or you have all of those clones, such as when someone (inevitably a man, many of them Scandinavian) does what Daido Moriyama started (seemingly sloppily photographed high contrast black and white).
But I do think that it’s much more interesting to acknowledge the tradition. As a photographer, you don’t actually have to be completely original. But you also do not want to merely replicate someone else’s style and/or approach.
The beauty is to be found somewhere in between these poles, where you make something your own, where, in other words, people can see where it might be coming from — but it’s also something uniquely different.
“[T]his town was his language,” Yoko Tawada writes, “Hamburg’s roads a grammar only he understood.” I yet have to read her work. I’m saving it for some later stage (I will know when I’m ready).
As you can tell from the name, Tawada is Japanese, but she lives in Berlin. And she writes in Japanese and German: “Tawada took a bilingual approach to her 2004 novel Das nackte Auge, writing first in German, then in Japanese, and finally producing separate German and Japanese manuscripts.”
I find that idea really interesting because it undermines our idea of the work of art: it’s supposed to be unique, right? In some ways, Das nackte Auge is: there is only that one novel by Tawada. But there are two versions, produced by the same author. I can read German, so I don’t have to worry about getting access to the author’s original (and hopefully, years from now I will be able to read it in Japanese as well).
But imagine being a publisher interested in producing, say, an English version: which one do you translate? The German one or the Japanese one? Or maybe you would offer two translations, one from each language?
And what might this look like in the world of photography? Could you make two books that are identical in the way the Das nackte Auge versions are — and separate in a similar fashion? What might that look like?
I partly read this article about Rie Qudan and her book Sympathy Tower Tokyo out of spite: on social media (BlueSky), people were heaping scorn on the whole idea because of how it was sold: “Sympathy Tower Tokyo attracted controversy for being partly written using AI. Does its author think the technology could write a better novel than a human?”
As an aside, it’s good to know that in newspapers, authors of articles often/usually do not write the headline or those brief snippets that you see first.
Anyway, I have no interest in “AI”, but I had the feeling that there was a lot more to it than those few brief words that everybody jumped on.
To begin with, Qudan used “AI” for the parts that, well, involved “AI” in the novel: “Qudan said that part of it – 5% was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation – was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT.” I personally don’t see how you would have to invent ChatGPT dialogue when you could have it created, possibly more accurately, by the thing itself.
That aside, though, the book sounds really interesting. Furthermore, the article addresses a number of contemporary topics in Japan, including that new far-right party you might have heard of (Sanseito). The party adopted the slogan “Japan First”. But curiously they’re using a Japanified version of “first” from English, even though (of course) Japanese has its own word for “first”. This is something you can’t do in English, which only has one alphabet. In Japanese, you can do that, though. What is communicated by these kinds of choices? Qudan tells you in the article.
For ProPublica, photojournalist photographed the families of the Venezuelan men that the Trump regime had disappeared in the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador. And then they were freed and came back home. You really want to see the photographs and read the story.
“[C]riticism at least helps me know myself and the world better,” Jillian Steinhauer writes, “It’s a way of sorting through problems and picturing possibilities. It’s a form of engaging in a very old and ever-evolving conversation about meaning.”
“Several academics I met had taken to communicating on Signal to ensure their conversations were secure and gathered at their apartments rather than at their universities, where public events on Palestine are all but banned.” This is Adam Shatz writing about Germany in 2025.
In order to get the visual culture we want, I believe that first, we have to acknowledge the one we have. Acknowledging the one we have does not mean to accept it. But denying it is not a good idea: denial precludes the critical aspect of analysis.
I mostly had to think about this in light of California governor Gavin Newsom’s attacks on Donald Trump, using the exact same techniques and approaches (poor grammar, misspellings, absurd claims, over-the-top images). Here is an example (source):
I will admit that at first, I thought this was childish at best. But now I’m not so sure any longer. Or rather, in some ways, it is childish. But it’s not any more (or less) childish than the messages and imagery produced by the MAGA crowd.
What it does, though, is to counter trolling with trolling. And honestly, that’s what a lot of people here are waiting for: someone is fighting back.
But Newsom’s approach also exposes the crass double standards US media use. And this seems to be working. Here is a longer article about this.
A lot of people are worried that Newsom will somehow gain a larger role because of this. I actually don’t think so. In part, this stuff works because while it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of an exaggeration. If, say, Tim Waltz (Kamala Harris’ runnning mate) did this, it would not be believable. That’s just not who Tim Waltz is. So I think Newsom is actually damaging his own political standing as well — which is a good thing, given his absolutely odious views on, say, homelessness or trans people.
Honestly, I don’t know about you. I personally would rather not see more of this visual crap around. But I have come to realize that in order to get to the culture I want, I can’t leapfrog past the one I am embedded in.
Lastly, and completely unrelated: a while ago, I realized that there is a little Korean deli near where I live. It’s basically a large kitchen with a row of refrigerators and freezers. The owner is Korean American and makes everything right there. I’ve always loved Korean food (I absolutely love spicy food), in particular kimchi.
But now I know that there isn’t just kimchi. That’s just the overall category (much like “pickles”). The kimchi I knew of was made with nappa cabbage. But you can make it with a lot of other source materials, and you don’t even have to use only vegetables. So now I’ve had mango kimchi, asparagus kimchi, and peach kimchi.
Honestly, the peach kimchi is the absolute best. And yes, that’s peach kimchi made with scallions, red pepper flakes, garlic, ginger, and fish sauce. Those juicy peach pieces with all the added flavours and the red-pepper kick — absolutely incredible.
If you ever have the chance, try it!
And with that I will conclude for today because I need to dive into the peach kimchi I bought yesterday.
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As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg