> social haunting
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: cyberpunk anime, the summer of rage, and social haunting.
Hello friend,
> I’ve begun to think I live off walks and calls with friends almost more than food. Communication as sustenance.
> Watched Ghost in the Shell, a cyberpunk anime film from the 90s, with mom and sister. Watch it if only for the chanting soundtrack and the iconic first five minutes.
> Also watched Farewell My Concubine, which follows two Beijing opera singers for over half a decade of Chinese history, on my cousin’s recommendation. Intense from the first moment to the last. I kept thinking about time, about my hazy understanding of Chinese history, how it meant so much more to see history through the eyes of individuals.
> On July 4th, a group of White men attacked a Black man on Lake Monroe and threatened to lynch him. Two days later, a car ran through people protesting the attack, injuring two. My friend told me we’re in the midst of “the summer of rage,” to which I can only say that yes, we are.
> A counterpoint to rage is that we adopted a kitten, like the many other people who have adopted pets while stuck at home. She is cute and fluffy and her name is Taro.
> An optimistic view of rage is that it incites change. But I’ve been thinking about social change that doesn’t start from rage, like Social Haunting. The group brings academics and artists to a place haunted by some social wound (think empty factories, closed coal mines) and holds workshops that allow community members to discuss that haunting. Those workshops often involve play—walks, comic book workshops, tarot card readings—which sounds silly at first, but the playfulness allows people to explore alternative realities in a way that seriousness doesn’t quite afford. At the end of the workshops, the community has a plan for how to address that haunting. It’s not perfect, but it’s captured my imagination.
> From Anaïs Duplan’s “When the Play Ends, We Have Learned Nothing about the Protagonist”:
When you say all hands on deck do you mean
that I am the deck or that I am all these hands, trying
to approximate hands. Guess how long it takes
to get from genuine to wicked. I spend / eons hanging off the mouth
of a bottle, enthralled by the fight: I swipe
two to the left cheek one
to the right, for good grace. It is only infanticide
if you finish it. Blight, there was blight
for miles & miles & an entire generation of people called
the police when they heard the noise next door.
I was lonely when you were on vacation so I touched myself thinking about
the sentence fragment. Choose your own
disappointments.
> More than a pretty picture brought to you by Shoji Ueda.
Cheers,
Tiffany