TPO#7: Cool Thoughts, Cool Music, Cool Visualizations
This round in The Purposeful Object: some thoughts about winter and facing life; music I'm probably too old for but is fun; imagining a bespoke internet; and a taxonomy of every (Western) musical genre ever?
Lean Into It
The depths of February can be hard when you live in a northern country. While the days begin to lengthen slightly — a sunset peeking out from behind a row of buildings at 6pm can do wonders for the soul in winter — you are faced with the reality that the cold has already lasted for four months and will likely be around for another two. This is the Faustian bargain we make for a loose sense of post-nationalism, okay health care, and the spoils of an ongoing, brutal colonialism: it's better than most places in the world but it's winter for fully half the fucking year.
Some of what can make winter hard is whether the spaces in which we live and move through are suited to it. I have written before about how cities can either design themselves for winter or, instead, bury their collective heads in the ground and pretend like winter is a minor inconvenience (guess which way Toronto leans). I think it's more than just about appropriate design or planning, or even just pragmatism, but more plainly, facing life as it is.
Still. Many people I know find winter hard. They have SAD, or they just find the months of scarce light and air that hurts your face a needless psychological drag. To say to them "hey, just make some soup!" seems callous, or at least unfair.
But I also think that finding ways to mitigate the inevitably hard parts of life is important work. For me, that approach to winter is (you will not be at all shocked to learn) rooted in food and drink: about using the cold as opportunity to indulge in hot and spicy stir-fries, the Punjabi food I associate with home and, most of all, ramen and pho (though obviously I love those things so much, I eat them when it is blisteringly hot outside, too).
Anyway, my point is just this, if you'll excuse me being a bit obvious: weather is sort of a good metaphor for life. It just sort of happens and then you have to choose how to react to it. Some of that you can control and some of it you can't. A bowl of soup may not fix everything, or it may not help anything, but even if it just sits there uneaten on the counter, the act of trying still produces warmth. And I think the circularity of that dynamic is one of the hardest things about life: it is at just the moment that things are darkest and coldest that it is vital you get up and do the thing you don't want to but will ultimately make you feel better in the end.
Listening
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Spotify tells me that I am among the top 2% of Stormzy listeners on the app which somehow both tracks and is also very surprising. What are you Brits listening to instead? Anyway, Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr. (that's his name) has a new album and it has some pretty great tracks. Sometimes I find the conventions of grime and rap a little boring (wow, another track about how you're better than other rappers?) but Stormzy is one of those artists who, in addition to being smart and talented, just has such a compelling voice. Also, there's the opening of "Handsome": "First things first I'm a real G / How's a tweet on Twitter gonna kill me?" Heh.
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Doja Cat's new track "Say So" is that sort of pop song that's so catchy that one's affection for it will burn bright, hot and hard, and then extinguish just as quickly. That's ok; that's what confections are for. Doja Cat is also the same artist of "Moo" fame, and I think there's something to be written about her rise to popularity — not just the way that social media virality factored into it, but how Doja Cat herself leaned into it on IG Live, Twitter and, most prominently, TikTok, where Doja Cat reigns as Queen. Also, in that neverending debate over whether women who publicly embrace their sexuality empower or objectify themselves, Doja Cat seems like a strong argument for the former. Also also, if you're wondering "wait, did Nav just say 'hot and hard'?" you watch that video and try not to think anything lascivious!
A Bespoke Internet
People say you gotta' rage against the dying of the light, but I think as you get older, you need to rage against nostalgia — against that seemingly inevitable desire to fetishize and idolize a now-lost past. Alas... I am still struck by how much I miss "the internet I was raised on": blogs, comment sections you actually loved, Google Reader, and things feeling small, as if they were somehow yours.
Perhaps, though, that's why I love Robin Sloan's recent experiment in which he made an app for the 4 people in his family and only the 4 people in his family. In short: it's the benefits of an app (communication, connection, ambient intimacy) without the downsides of tracking, external control etc. It's such a lovely idea, not just because it brings to app making a sense of bespoke crafting, but also manages to implicity speak to what we lost in the mad rush onto Facebook or Twitter: perhaps we should've focused on just creating dead simple ways for people to make things of their own instead of defaulting to an internet of mass culture and scale. I love it. By the way, if you don't know of Robin... well, you may be reading the wrong newsletter, but he is one of a few people in my life who are oases against the misery and cynicism that is so easy to immerse yourself in the 2020s. Stuff like this is just part of why.
Ephemera
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A musical instrument composed of microbes fermenting things.
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This one is bananas: somebody tried to produce a visualization of all the different genres of music with examples in each. It's just incredible and love the note at the bottom: "The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier." Spikier and bouncier!!!
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I can't remember who linked to this but 19th century Armenian-Russian painter Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was famous for creating seascapes that captured the luminescent, irridescent nature of light on the ocean and OH. MY. GOD.
That's it for this time, folks. I've been buried with work so I'm sorry about the slow pace of TPO issues, but... you have enough email to read anyway, right? Until next time.