We need to de-white-cube our culture
Welcome to the 91st edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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I start every day by making a cup of green tea. In large parts thanks to your -- the reader's -- generous support, I am able to order teas directly in Japan (it's actually not more expensive than buying Japanese teas in the US; the main difference is the quality). Today's tea is a Kamairicha ("a Japanese green tea produced by pan-frying tea leaves during the early stages of production"). Each infusion (you can brew green teas more than once) delivers 100ml of a pale green liquid with a vast number of flavour notes, including a faint hint of smokiness.
There's nothing particularly noteworthy about any of this. For a number of reasons, some random (where I was born), some accidental, some medical (I became lactose intolerant after some food poisoning years ago), I now drink green tea. Had things gone differently, I might be drinking black tea or coffee or whatever else.
I'm telling you this because something occurred to me this morning. As long as I have been making green tea, I have had the persistent thought in my head that I minded the fussiness and ritual of it all. I use a little digital scale and a water heater that allows me to get the proper temperature for each tea. I also time the infusions as needed. Part of me is bothered by all of that. I have been wondering for a long time where that resentment was coming from. I think I now know why.
When (at this stage, it's probably more of an "if") I go back to Japan, the absolutely last thing I'd want to do is to participate in a tea ceremony. There's the fact that I don't think that I need to drink tea pretending I were some court noble from Japan's medieval past. But my main problem with the tea ceremony is that the aspect of culture overwhelms what I am really interested in when I drink tea: the tea itself.
If you think about how many people in the West go about coffee... I should note that I'm not intending to dunk on coffee drinkers. It's just that there are a million coffee shops and very, very few cafes that serve tea. So anyway, coffee has become a part of our culture, and it has also become an essential part of our capitalist fabric. A local coffee shop might provide the perfect example for this: it looks and feels like a gallery, a white cube, if you can imagine very fancy benches and tables in such a setting.
In other words, the spiel around coffee has totally overwhelmed what it should be really about: the coffee itself. And that's the very aspect that I have had so many problems with in the case of the green tea I make.
Or rather, I need to disentangle some things here. After all, I'm not advocating to ignore the way coffee or tea has to be brewed for it to taste well. It's not the fussiness that I mind. After all, any food needs to be prepared properly. Instead, I mind that in our culture, we have begun to place too much of an emphasis on the fussiness and thus on the resulting supposed merit of it all -- to the point where some coffee shops now look and feel like galleries.
I see part of this reflected in how many Western writers approach aspects of Japan. It's very common to find books or documentaries that focus on someone who has become a master of something (whether it's sushi or whatever else). Almost inevitably, there is the idea that in the West, we somehow are incapable of what these people are doing because, you see, we don't have the Japanese mindset. Ignoring the fact that this is a form of orientalism, it's also complete bullshit. I know plenty of people who have mastered what they're doing to a degree that I can only be in awe of (for example, I have a friend who is a master bookbinder). There's nothing particularly Japanese about becoming a master of something even if, of course, in the West we approach things differently (to become a master in photography, you pay some private university many thousands of dollars).
Jiro might dream of sushi, but there literally are thousands of other restaurants in Japan where you can get incredible sushi. Jiro's sushi might be better than many other chef's. I doubt, though, that any of us are able to actually taste the difference. But obviously, the main difference is that in order to get your sushi from Jiro you need to somehow be able to get a spot in that limited-seating restaurant. Even as you can get incredible food in the most humble settings in Japan (I once had some aji -- horse mackerel -- in a small izakaya that was so good that I almost fainted), it's the production around Jiro's sushi that for us denizens of neoliberal culture makes all the difference. Frankly, for some people being able to eat at Jiro's isn't about the sushi, it's simply a power trip (I know someone who wouldn't stop bragging about it).
What this all comes down to is the following. I think we need to re-train ourselves to enjoy things more, regardless of what they look like or how they're presented (obviously, your mileage might vary, maybe it's just me who needs the re-training). If you remember my last email -- the one where I used a cheap office printer to make photographic prints, that's not that different than the above.
We need to de-white-cube our culture.
I don't know whether you've heard, but Barbenheimer (the meme) isn't going over very well in Japan at all. "The linking of nuclear holocaust to summer entertainment," Matt Alt writes, "is backfiring spectacularly here".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=x7tdqUlBuZo
There's a deeply affecting video of a conversation with someone who survived the bombing in Hiroshima. Watch the whole thing! (There are English subtitles.)
This might sound a little bit crazy, but one of the first reasons why I wanted to learn Japanese was to be able to understand Pizzicato 5 lyrics. Obviously, you might never have heard of them. The other day, I found a really good article about them:
"The musical movement of Shibuya-kei, based in Tokyo in the early 1990s, had the rare quality of being an underground musical style based on frivolous consumption, not making any attempts to speak for vulnerable members of society. This frivolity is especially striking when you consider that the 1990s were a dire decade for Japan’s economy, after a real-estate bubble burst and left many unemployed, especially the young lower-class. But this crisis did not really affect the musicians of Shibuya-kei, who came from wealthy Tokyo families and spent their days curating record collections rather than worrying about their wages."
Poking around on YouTube, I then found footage of Pizzicato 5 from the mid-1990s. Check it out here:
I was very familiar with a lot of their music, but this was a lot wilder than anything I had seen. Maybe you're familiar with their song Sweet Soul Revue. You can see it roughly half an hour in.
Speaking of music, a New York City based TikTok comedian just produced a parody of 1990s European dance music, and it's brilliant.
Something completely different: Warsaw 1945: A Guide to a City of Ruins, which features a lot of photography and many voices from people living there at and after the end of World War 2. Even if you scroll through just to look at the photographs, it'll be worth your time.
The other day, I saw an announcement of an event with Mely Kiyak. Unless you live in Germany, you're probably going to be unfamiliar with her. For a while, she wrote a column for a German weekly that was a must-read for me. Unfortunately, she stopped doing that a while ago. Seeing the announcement had me do a Google search to see whether there was anything new.
I found an interview that strictly speaking is not new (by now it's two years old). But given that it's in English, it gives you an idea of who Mely Kiyak is. I don't think that I am the target audience of the interview; but it left a big impression on me.
By the way, Kiyak was one of the driving forces behind Hate Poetry: "The show explores the growing rancor against Muslims in Germany by revealing hate mail filled with clichés and abuse — and seeks to combat it with humor."
Lastly, there's a new report about AI (pdf) out of Norway that sums up pretty much all aspects that you need to think about. If you're eager to learn more about those aspects or if you're teaching, you want to read it. It's 75 pages, but you probably only need to read Chapters 1 and 2 (unless you live in the EU, in which case the rest also applies).
Wait, what?! No photo? No, no photo content today. Sorry! This is not on purpose: I find what I find. I don't exclude anything on purpose.
But honestly, I'm currently thinking that so many discussions outside of the world of photography are much more interesting than what we photolandians tend to produce...
In any case, as always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg