TPO#3: The Algo, Beeps and Boops, and Dry Feet
Listening (to what you thought was yours)
A few weeks ago, the excellent New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel tweeted the following:
It's stuck with me ever since, mostly because (to get a bit meta) what Charlie describes here with music, I experienced with this tweet: I thought only I had noticed this... but it's part of this bigger thing!
But in that feeling there is, I think, a sort of clash of logics.
If you'll excuse the phrase, before the Web, when you found music on your own, it was almost necessarily "unpopular" — that is, if you'd never heard of the artist or band on TV or in magazines or from friends, they were almost by definition, "not mainstream."
But in the world of algorithms, the long tail etc. etc., you can come across some random track from a band you've never heard of and will never hear of again — but which, crucially, becomes part of the cultural lexicon — because we are all getting approximately the same "random" suggestions. What bubbles up isn't organic — and it never was — but now how we get fed something has changed from one type of gatekeeper to another.
In one sense, I find this interesting simply because it speaks to the new, and I just like thinking about how things change. Take the way a music collection shifted from being a thing that takes up space (in shelves, in homes etc.) to a thing that takes up time (in digital lists that take longer to scroll through as they grow). I've never really known what to do with that thought except that it points to some sort of shift — a change not just of type, but of structure, of mode, of again, logics.
But in another sense, the algorithmic mode forces us to ask whether having those private, small things that are your own is still important. And it also raises the idea of what is a private thing when everything is also accessible to everyone else: it is always necessarily the deeply personal — the printed photograph, the shared language of a couple or a family, the memory — or is it simply the thing you choose never to share? And further: is it important to have parts of the self that no-one else can relate to because they are only yours?
Anyway: here's an album by a band called Team LG that I've never found on streaming sites and was given to me by a friend. I like it and I share it because I hope you like it too -- this song in particular.
A Well-Stocked Life
Friends and long-time readers of, uh, "my work" (gosh that sounds pretentious) will likely remember my essay "My Wine Accumulation." It's perhaps my favourite piece of writing, and in part it's because it's the closest I've gotten to talking about some of what constitutes the good life to me: a store or reservoir of indulgent things to draw upon.
I was thinking of it again after I came across this idle piece of fluff in Toronto Life that lists off what restaurant owner John Sinopoli keeps in his small, Annex kitchen. It's sort of what you'd expect for a Toronto gourmand who owns one of the best pasta restaurants in the city: a lot of pickled things from lupini beans to kimchi, tinned fish, a well-stocked bar, olive oil, chocolate, wine etc. and so on. You get it.
TPO is ostensibly about "the good life," and you'll likely have already noticed that the good life to me is very much about food and drink. To me, a kitchen like this and the things in it seems very much like the ideal, in no small part because for reasons I can't quite explain, having things in reserve seems incredibly luxurious to me.
But I'm also reminded that last year when I was in California, I stayed at a friend's home, which was lovely, almost idyllic. Yet in a moment of solitude in the house, I realized that what felt so nice about their home wasn't the things or the design or even the fig, lemon, and avocado trees in the front yard: it was — and I'm sorry for being ever so earnest here — the people.
So... wait, where was I going with this? Oh, right. I don't want to set up a binary in which one has to choose what the good life is about: do you want people and experiences, or do you want things? Instead, I suppose the more interesting question is: how is one enmeshed in the other, and how do each (re)produce each? That is — I don't think it's wrong to want the tactile, aesthetic pleasure of nice things, but for what and whom do we accumulate them?
Ephemera
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Speaking of way too earnest, here's Iz Harris asking what matters. Harris is a vlogger who had a very cool series on Eater called Travel, Eat, Repeat, in which she (and her partner and two young kids!) travel around Portugal in Season 1 and Taiwan in Season 2. This particular video is, I admit, extremely cheesy and it may well make you roll your eyes... but at the right moment, it might be what you need.
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Beepbox, which lets you quickly stitch together loops of beeps and boops, might be of no interest to you or it might waste a week of your life. Be warned.
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What do you do if you need lead that hasn't been contaminated by the ubiquitous radition that has accrued in the last hundred years? You take it from deep sea wrecks... which seems bananas to me, and fascinating.
Netflix and Wine
Toronto/Canadian people will likely not need this recommendation at all, but for you ahem foreigners, Baronness Von Sketch Show may well be the best sketch comedy show in years. The show stars an all-women four-person troupe who frequently poke fun at their status as privileged white ladies, and while some of it is pretty Canadian — we're at the cottage! — the humour is smart enough to transcend its occasional specificity. It airs on IFC in the States and I believe it may be on Amazon Prime there.
To pair, why of course you absolutely must have a white wine! I'd suggest an unoaked or lightly oaked Chardonnay, like one from ever-reliabile French giant Louis Jadot.
Late in 2016, I went to Iceland as a kind of slightly belated "yay, I finished my PhD!" jaunt. I was miserable. The highlight of my trip was sitting in my AirBnB drinking a bottle of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc while binging S1 of Fleabag. Sometimes travelling alone is great, and sometimes it blows.
Anyway, for whatever reason I still have a soft spot for Iceland. It really is otherworldly and beautiful, though before you go, you probably want to read Kyle Chayka on tourism in the modern era and the "coincidence" that we all went to Iceland. But: a couple of Icelandic recommendations. First, Trapped, a murder mystery that is harsh and bitter and great, particularly because of lead Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. It had me hooked. Second, Out of Thin Air is a smart, gloomy documentary about an unsolved murder that shocked the tiny island of just a couple hundred thousand people.
To pair, you might even skip wine and go straight to the ultimate winter combination, a shot of bourbon and a malty amber beer. But if you must have wine, go big for something this cold and snowy: Borsao Tres Pico Garnacha is all-time favourite of mine, especially around Christmas.
TPO Recommends
TPO Recommends is a regular feature in which I recommend a product of some sort that I think is, um, good.
Here in Toronto, the weather has finally turned after an unnervingly mild autumn. That means it's going to be cold and dark and sodden for the next six months, and there's nothing more annoying than wet feet. So, I've been genuinely impressed by Vessi Footwear's waterproof knit shoes. Are they a brand that is annoyingly ubiquitous on social media? Yes. Are knit runners the quintissential tech bro, Instagram-ad shoe? Yes. Are they overpriced? At C$135 a pair, also yes — but with Black Friday coming up, you will likely be able to get a pair for C$99. Anyway, the truth is that they are cozy, comfortable, and do just as advertised: keep your feet bone dry in the wet. They aren't quite cut out for deep snow or ice due to modest grip, but otherwise: TPO recommends.
That's it for this round folks. This newsletter is now up to over 300 subscribers but if you've been enjoying it, tell your friends maybe? And remember, you can always chip in US$4 a month if you want to support its creation or the drinking habits of its creator.