the italian word is camera
in the weeks leading up to the tiktok ban, i started watching more and more of it because i felt that my for you feed was a part of me and i was going to lose it, this little room so purely about the pleasure of consumption, where i could feel the click of my self reflected back at me but without the strain and wear of the social or of making art, and i wanted to hold onto my light until it went out.
every night deborah and i would take turns casting our phones to the TV and scrolling through our feeds together. my usage of tiktok has always been purely the feed: i don't chat, i don't post, i don't comment, i don't follow, i don't search, i skip every live, just try to take in the stream pure and clear and follow my butterfly mind as it flickers against the refresh rate. i have this magical thinking belief that such shamanic practices connect me to the essence of my attention.
in tonight's run there was an excerpt from a documentary about studio ghibli which covered how a team of animators spent a year and three months on a four second sequence of a crowd moving. in the screening room we watch them view the rushes, a night vision camera capturing miyazaki's face, impassive, as he watches, and then we see him walking through a cubicle farm to commend the lead animator on his work and the animator says "it was so short, though" and miyazaki says "it was worth it" and then "good work" and then finally "thanks" and then he walks away and the animator goes back to another day of work.
i love those movies but it just doesn't seem worth it to me (even if that's not really what it takes, even if the amount of time is an exaggeration, it still doesn't seem worth it to me, whatever amount of time it actually was). i haven't finished writing anything lately but i guess as long as you start and stop that counts as finishing (that's what she said). i finish and then tap the icon and visit my little room (the italian word is camera) and live there in the frozen present.