#15: Silence, space, and Silksong - September in review
I’m entering my “framed wall art” era. I’ve lost track of how many hours I’ve spent hunting down the appropriate photo frames for photos I wanted to hang up.
I never expected to undergo this transformation… I’ve always been a painter’s tape kind of girl, affixing posters and prints to my walls with nary a care for protecting them from scuffs and sun damage. But it’s like a switch flipped in me earlier this summer, after I got those beautiful linoprints in an art trade, and now I’m obsessed with finding the right frame for anything I want to put on my walls.
It turns out gallery walls do look a little cooler once frames and matting enter the picture. Add that to the list of things they don’t really tell you about being an adult.
What I’ve Been Watching:
The 2019 Chernobyl miniseries might be my favorite piece of media that I’ve consumed this month. Comprising just 5 episodes, it’s easy to binge, and every single moment of it packs the maximum possible punch.
One thing that really stood out to me was how silence was used throughout the series. There are multiple long, panning shots used to establish or transition between settings, with no score or non-diegetic accompaniment. These shots tend to linger a second or two longer than you might instinctively expect them to—do we really need to watch a truck drive down a road for this long? But these scenes help slow the pacing of what is otherwise a breakneck drama. Silence here helps to create pockets where the show and the audience can breathe before they’re thrown back into the fray.
And on the other hand, silence is also used to ratchet up the tension to a fever pitch. Any time soldiers clad in protective gear are clearing radioactive debris, the sound design shrinks to the following three things: the crackling of a Geiger counter, the scraping of the soldiers’ tools, and the ambient background noise of a damaged nuclear reactor. This auditory trifecta is unbelievably haunting, as the Geiger counter shrieks its unending warning with nothing to drown it out.
Another thing I found cool about the series’ sound design is that the entire score was built using sounds captured on site at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant. The resulting effect of this is that the score often fades into the background, registering only as ambient noise—which makes it even creepier when the ambient noise starts sounding…wrong.
Watch Chernobyl (2019) on HBO Max
Listen to the companion podcast on YouTube
What I’ve Been Reading:
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
A philosophical and contemplative reflection on the human experience, both that which we all share and that which is wholly unique to each of us, this slim novel follows 6 astronauts aboard the ISS through 24 hours spent orbiting Earth. We get glimpses of their onboard duties and interactions with one another, but most of the novel is spent looking back at Earth through lenses macroscopic and microscopic.
This is the first book in at least a decade to make me think, “I need to take a highlighter to this.” Harvey is a master of recontextualization, of shifting the frame of reference slightly askew so you get an unexpectedly new perspective on something completely mundane. She writes in a voice that both comforts and probes, regaling you with simple but beautiful prose while putting words to feelings and experiences you didn’t even know you wanted words for.
There’s a passage early on that felt to me like a microcosm of the novel itself:
He dreamed – of all things, of all damned American things – of the infamous image taken by Michael Collins during the first successful moon mission, back in 1969: the photograph of the lunar module leaving the moon’s surface, and of the earth beyond….
In the photograph Collins took, there’s the lunar module carrying Armstrong and Aldrin, just behind them the moon, and some two hundred and fifty thousand miles beyond that the earth, a blue half-sphere hanging in all blackness and bearing mankind. Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.
Anton has never really understood that claim, or at least the enchantment of it…. In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen. Everybody is invisible – Armstrong and Aldrin inside the lunar module, humankind unseen on a planet that could easily, from this view, be uninhabited. The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself – his eye at the view-finder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.
In a sense, Orbital feels analogous to that photograph, with its primary cast playing the role of the photographer: their eye at the viewfinder, their finger pressing the shutter release on this snapshot of humanity. This novel gazes at Earth, but it’s not really about what we see; it’s about the people doing the looking.
What I’ve Been Playing:
After 7 years of silence, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped a few weeks ago! Silksong has occupied most of my waking hours (and some of my sleeping ones) for the past month. I’ve been having an absolute blast; I’ve already sunk 100 hours into the game, and somehow I keep finding new things to explore.
The reception for Silksong has been generally positive, but there’s been some discourse, too. I have feelings about this. I do think it’s fair to say Silksong is more punishing than Hollow Knight—enemies move faster and do more damage, there are way more environmental hazards, and there are fewer safe spots to heal between gauntlets.
However, I also think that a lot of the frustration with Silksong arises from trying to play it like Hollow Knight, instead of engaging with the game on its own terms. Silksong introduces some cool new mechanics: expanded movement abilities, a tool system that lets you do ranged or delayed damage, and a crest system that lets you swap out your entire moveset. The massive map also encourages exploring and doubling back in order to find upgrades. A gameplay strategy that prioritizes rapid linear progression while entirely ignoring the tool or crest mechanics will necessarily feel bad and frustrating—it’s just not how the game was designed to be played.
Which is not to say that Silksong has no issues. I’ll be the first to admit annoyance with the completely broken resource economy and the overreliance on minions during boss fights. And I do think the steep difficulty curve will turn some players off the game. But I have to wonder… If the game didn’t look and sound like Hollow Knight, would we be hearing the same criticism?
Where I’ve Been:
Arguably the most difficult objective on my NYC bucket list was scoring Shakespeare in the Park tickets. I didn’t realize this when I was putting the list together. In fact, I had no idea what SITP even was. I expected it to be something like Broadway in Bryant Park, where casts from different musicals perform a few songs, and you can hear them for free just by walking by the park.
So imagine my surprise when the star-studded cast for this year’s performance, Twelfth Night, was revealed. “They do this for free? Lupita Nyong’o will be on that stage every night for a month for free??” I said to my native New Yorker friends.
“Yeah, provided you can get tickets,” they told me.
“Is it difficult to get tickets?” I asked, and my friends just laughed and laughed.
It turns out getting SITP tickets is a grueling exercise in endurance. There are two main ways to score tickets: standing in line at a distribution center, or entering a ticket lottery. The distribution centers give away more tickets, but you have to show up crazy early to be guaranteed a ticket. The lottery, on the other hand, has no line, but significantly fewer tickets are distributed, and there’s no guarantee at all that you’ll win.
I entered the lotteries multiple times without luck, so eventually I decided to give the Central Park distribution line a go. The first time I attempted it, I showed up at 5am with a folding chair and book in hand, only to find out there were already 200 people in line ahead of me. So I retreated to lick my wounds and become more insane in planning my strategy.
I was more prepared for my second attempt. I showed up at 3:45am, straight from a wedding with my makeup still on, stocked up on supplies: picnic blanket, cushion, coffee and bagel, multiple books, umbrella, mini fan. It then proceeded to rain for 8 continuous hours, until the grass had melted into muddy swampy mush, and I was left huddling on a small rock to escape the clutches of the bog while snatching catnaps here and there.
At noon, the rain briefly abated, just as the line finally began to move. In fits and spurts, we drew closer to the ticket booth, until, finally, at 12:28pm, I stepped up to the booth and then stepped away, 2 tickets firmly in hand.
The show itself was great—beautiful costumes, whimsical set design, and a string quartet that took my breath away. But it’s certainly not the most memorable part of the experience, nor is it the story I’m going to be telling in years to come.
Was it worth it? I’m on the fence. The rain was a little much, and I’m still gobsmacked by how many people were already in line at 4am.
Will I be doing this again next year?
…Yeah. And next year, I’m going to be prepared.