Memo 19: Cycles
Recently, it’s been slightly less embarrassing to be a Southern Californian. LA’s cases are getting better, justice is coming for Britney and my noisy neighbors moved out recently. Not too shabby.
One dark and dismal smudge on this good news, however, comes from this recent activity in San Pedro.¹ As the tweet describes, a slew of squatters were recognized from the landlord of the empty building when the landlord blasted the Barney theme song on repeat, at volumes as high as 71 decibels,² in an inhumane tactic to scare the homeless away. Thankfully, this has a happy ending as the local uproar over this caused the landlord to cease his actions and apologize.
Unsurprisingly — or surprisingly, depending on how optimistic you are — this is not the first time that the Barney theme song has been used nefariously. Barney is torture-lite in Guantanamo Bay; torture lite is considered anything that isn’t full-on torture but is still intended to create those effects. Other music has been used to torture prisoners on repeat (like Metallica,³ Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” and the sound of crying babies mixed with a television commercial for Meow Mix cat food), but the Barney theme song is special. Due to its grating nature, it’s considered "futility music"— music that is meant to convince prisoners of the futility of maintaining their withheld position.
This cruel act can instantly get under anybody’s skin; it’s easy to imagine how torturous that is and why that would tick off buttons. But — and bear with me here — aren’t all noticeable cycles depressing, once they transcend a certain threshold and noticeability to us? Or are some cycles not so grating?
Let’s skip past the ideas of good things in cycles, as that is an obviously positive and unrealistic feature in modern-day life. And skip past tortuous cycles, as that is an obviously negative and realistic feature. I’m more interested in neutral cycles, cycles where it’s not great… but it’s also not psychological torture.
Low-hanging fruit is Groundhog Day, one of the first movies that pop into my head when I think about endless cycles. The message in it is pretty clear: cycles of day-to-day life are a reflection of what you put into it. This seems simple enough, but in the end, the cycle is broken; that is viewed as the reward or salvation for the hero’s attempts. The recent spawns of this conceit — Russian Doll, Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things⁴ — follow the same cycle-breaking treat. So even when you’re fine with the cycle of time, its ending is the best part. That makes it seem like cycles are something to get away from in any situation.
But what about non-fiction cycles? One of my podcasts, Radiolab, did an episode on loops filled with examples in day-to-day life. One of them is about comedians Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler, who do a repeating unfunny song-and-dance during a stand up of theirs. It’s a very interesting loop because, as Jesse Thorn put it, “..your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be, which is a joke, but there is no joke happening. So what these two people are doing is creating the expectation that the expectation is going to be broken, but then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken by just delivering the thing that they've been delivering over and over for the past 10 minutes.” This is a cycle that builds and tears down meaning in an organic, unexpected way. It’s still a little annoying but one I wouldn’t mind sitting through.
Another rad cycle highlighted in the podcast is musician William Basinski, who takes music recorded onto analog tape and cuts the beginning, the end, tapes them together into a circle and threads it through a tape machine to create this loop of music. It creates this haunting and somewhat peaceful music, all from what has already existed in a new format. This doesn’t seem like such a bad cycle, does it?
I’ll end this memo on my favorite cycle: fractals.
Fractals are the mathematic repeating cycles that never repeat in the same way. You’ve seen them used as a parallel to seashells, the Fibonacci sequence, you name it. But even though it’s a simple cycle to understand at a surface-level, it always amazes me because it is truly the backbone of nature. There’s something reassuring in fractals, how we are constantly caught in cycles but that doesn’t mean it has to be everything we’ve seen before. And with the big cycles of life, most of the time it never is
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
With Sundance in the recent past, I’ve been keeping my eyes on the reviews coming out of there. The movies that caught my eyes were this deaf family coming-of-age drama, a heavily-researched Swedish girl’s foray in LA porn, Jerrod Carmichael’s suicide pact dramedy, one about a couple in a memory-destroying pandemic, and this surreal feature on dream auditors.
Diego Garijo: MMA Fighter and Drag Queen, which is as genuinely fantastic and bad-ass as it seems.
These places were not ready for Flash to die. I thought that these would be silly small examples, not things like the South African Revenue Service or the SEC which are… massively huge.
How Choreography Can Help Robots Come Alive. When an article kicks off with an Ex Machina reference and then only gets more interesting, it’s a win.
Aesthetics Wiki: Cottagecore Was Just the Beginning, a look into internet aesthetics. I know what you’re thinking: I already know about aesthetics, no thank you. After reading this you will find that there is an aesthetic for every mood you can think of, and the article is a lot less shallow than you’d expect.
Oh and I’m installing something new called ~dish of the week~ because I have been getting into making different dishes lately, trying to take advantage of the continuous being-at-homeness. Recently I made this soon tofu jjigae soup and it was a hit. Very flavorful, a first time for me using silken tofu but worth it, I came away from that experience a fan.
Shoutout to Sydney for alerting me of this!
For context, 70 decibels is the equivalent of most vacuum cleaners.
Fun fact: in the article, James Hetfield of Metallica apparently doesn’t mind their music being torture music and has this to say: “We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music forever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”
I can’t say this for sure about The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, as it was only released 33 hours ago on Amazon, but I’ll make a safe bet that it follows this convention.