Posted on Friday, 01/10/25.

On media diet

An easy pastime has been buying used books and DVDs and CDs. Physical media is popular here, and several chains are devoted to the collation of used goods. The expediency has its annoyances: prices can be high and consistent, many of these chains also have online stores, neutering the serendipitous joy which is, in truth, a pretty substantial part of the pleasure of buying used things. Now a text query immediately returns the price of the sought object, a rasterized image, a note on what prefecture it’d be shipped from, the price tethered to some invisible but hyperbaric market which places one in competition, not communion, with other lovers of the modern equivalent of quaint and curious volumes. It’s depressing.

Yesterday I watched the copy of ‘The Wicker Man’ (1973) I found in my local Disc-Union. The film is short, strongly acted, with a young Christopher Lee and a simple, remote setting in the outer islands of Scotland. A good, dated soundtrack. I chose this instead of ‘Drive My Car,’ which I feel I’d need to set aside a day for, would need to eat a healthy meal for. Otherwise yesterday I found an original copy of 回路 (2001), in English ‘Pulse’, priced higher because of the enduring popularity There is even a movie of his from last year, ‘Cloud’ (2024), which people seem to have liked, and about which I only know of a Twitter-based drama where some large film account was sharing a ripped, English-subtitled cut as an ‘exclusive’ and others were complaining that despite the piracy-friendly attitude of most of the online queer-Twitter-cinema community, smaller movies should at least be given the chance at a cinema run, lest the streaming services win, etc. of 黒沢清. That DVD was in a bookstore I hadn’t been to, behind the University of Tokyo hospital, said bookstore literary and well-stocked and rambly given its academic adjacency, and in which traditional music played the whole time I browsed, and from which I received a map of all nearby used bookstores from the owner as well as a Xerox of an impossibly profusely handwritten calendar of movies playing this month at a selection of art-oriented theaters nearby. Other attractive media in the store included an original VHS copy of ‘A Tale of Springtime’ (1990), translated as 春のソナタ, a box set of semi-obscure Herzog, and a special edition of ‘Killer Clowns from Outer Space’. Their written selection was also large and high-quality, but I chose not to browse too thoroughly this time.

Spending time in used-goods stores is a sort of pallid conjuring of my usual cycle from Cambridge; if anything the scarcity of familiar media here makes the process easier. I pick up a $2 vintage paperback of ‘Franny and Zooey’, which I have been reading on the train, and which makes me miss northeastern snobbery and letter writing. I find old beautiful translated hardbacks of John Barth and Jerzy Kosiński and Thomas Pynchon, and wish I could speak to their original purchasers here, such is the specificity. At 北沢書店, one of the only specialized English used bookstores, in 神保町, I find rare hardbacks at astronomical prices and appreciate the remaining basic barriers of distance in the world: a first edition of ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a copy of ‘Steps’, copies of Barthelme’s ‘Forty Stories’ and ‘Sixty Stories’ with dust jackets, endless early editions of the Beats’, who I care little for, Loeb classics series in red and green. Each of these had to be schlepped here at some point, and most exhibit carefully affixed ex-libris stamps or bookplates.

Book collecting is a disease for phonies, of course, at its core. It is easy to acquire faster than one reads, and much of the pleasure of the objects is in their discovery, in feeling their weight, examining a deckle edge, a multi-colored headband, the smell of foxed acidic paper. A few days ago I found a full-color book of Delvaux paintings for a few dollars. Before that, a copy of 精子宮 (Sperm Palace), a strange but beautiful collection from 2001 of the author’s photographs of a soon-to-be defunct Japanese sex museum, all painted mannequins and luridly colorful animatronic scenes. The book has a beautiful embossed cover in mainly a glowing cerulean. Most of this is to say, probably, that the acquisition of such heavy, singular, non-digital objects presupposes or prefigures the existence of some settled place to live, eventually, which in my line of work, and in the present world, feels especially illusory. Do I have any rich relatives whose deaths would be windfalls? Do I expect to discover some rare class of pharmaceutical to sell at inflated prices to the third world? A settled location seems good primarily, it would seem, to push against in youth as staid or suffocating: the fetters of one’s parents, stupidly bought into as one might call into an infomercial’s limited time offer, receiving only cheap plastic too late. But still, I buy books and DVDs and CDs. I spend too much on Lain’s ‘Cyberia Mix’. I own Nausicaä on VHS despite having no player. Somewhere at the vanishing point of all this is a modest early twentieth-century house somewhere a little cold with dark wooden furniture and muted woolen rugs. Somewhere to sulk, to alternately ice and warm an ailing knee, to wonder about whether it would have been better to buy somewhere with big windows and Japanese-Scandinavian bent-plywood furniture, as if that would nudge the fulcrum of my life.

On dressing habits in Brooklyn Roasting Co.

The rest of this is being written in RoJean, on Saturday morning, but the first half was mostly composed in Brooklyn Roasting Co. on Friday morning, in which there are usually far more foreigners, some obviously visiting and others long-term, usually in some slick design or tech role, it seems, based on the way they hunch over MacBooks, or the shape of their glasses (clear frames still abound). I’ll repeat some of what I’ve seen.

Observation 1 Woman with long brown hair, maybe early 30s, with Fjallraven bag and jacket, black DM Chelsea boots. Carabiners. Major colors of mustard, teal, and a burnt orange. Could easily be American but the obviousness of the outfit, the apparent sincerity, make me think German or Belgian or Dutch. She circles the cafe for a few minutes looking for an open seat (by this time it’s 10, which means slim pickings); I mourn, just a little, the Cambridge practice of asking to share someone’s two-top. I almost think I see her consider it with me. I miss old men in tweed or tech-bros in hoodies reading across from me, sipping their black coffees—or even the occasional grad student, laptop nearly touching my own, brows knit.

Observation 2 A man with jeans cuffed to oblivion (like midway up the calf) and various North Face semi-light gear. He and his girlfriend are rolling suitcases, but they’re small and tactical, hers looking like it’s covered in some sort of yellow Gore-Tex outer-layer. She wears even more North Face, though mostly it appears practical and quiet, if not really needed for this climate. The appearance of their taking travel seriously, almost monastically. But then again the jeans—my guess is some 3.5万 pair from a place they found in Osaka, on the first leg of their trip, and he’s decided that the breaking in starts now.

Observation 3 A group of women in a corner wearing nearly identical outfits: neutral colored modest sweaters and wide, dark jeans, some sort of cross-body bag. Hair cropped to just above their shoulders. When another one joins they all call out to her, and use an L-shaped couch in the corner. They are catching up, it seems, after a long time, if only because the logistics of such a large gathering seem difficult. They are there when I arrive and still there when I leave; I hope they are happy.

On media diet (II)

It’s now Wednesday, meaning this post is smeared across nearly a week, but that is fine. There isn’t much substance, or else the subject hasn’t changed significantly, and there is no reason to modify the date. Besides, I am back in the cafe I started in.

Last night, and the night before, I watched ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975), which I picked up a DVD copy for, along with ‘The Nightmare before Christmas’ (1993) for a total of about $5 again at the local Disc Union. I had been meaning to watch it—Kubrick DVDs show up relatively often, and I had told myself that none of them really appealed to me besides Lyndon, wanting something visually quieter than most of his movies, and besides Criterion is playing ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999) these days as part of a Kidman series

I split the watching at the intermission, which felt natural and satisfying. The entire thing is about three hours, but the central division is so clear and obvious that it feels like two standard ninety minute films stapled together. I almost never watch historical movies, and found the overlaid narration and towering Freytagian pyramid sort of pleasant and comforting, remembering why they exist. The movie is usually noted for its setting and how it was shot, especially the solely candlelit scenes, which are all uniformly dreamy and soft-focus due to the impossibly wide aperture required to properly expose the film. Discussion of these logistics (and the NASA-affiliated lens required) are effectively cliches in the discussion of the movie. Thinking back, I remember the pleasant classical repetitious soundtrack (in this case mostly Handel, though think of ‘Melancholia’ and its Wagner, that film having deep debts also to BL’s nearly static shots directly based on existing paintings), the fierce expressions of the child actors, the length of the shots, the basically painful pulchritude of Marisa Berenson. The film announces events before they happen, which is a soft litmus test for whether the movie has anything to offer but suspense. I felt comfortable watching it—excited at the right moments, relaxed at others, and basically believing the major motivations of characters, trying to square how I live my life with the truth of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, where news traveled slowly, one’s identity was unstable, and to be spared from labor was somehow more absurd than it is today.

I don’t think I have any statements about ‘Barry Lyndon’, other than that it felt a better way to spend the night than watching ten short form videos on random topics found on the internet. My days have been split between reading on the train (Franny and Zooey has ten pages remaining) and watching movies at night. The insidious aspect is that there is enough media out there to prevent me from ever having to think again, while the charitable view is that consuming the right kind of media might compel human interaction. I like that these books and movies are untouched by generative technology—that I legitimately feel like I can talk a little with Salinger, who the more I read about and of the more I realize was basically a piece of work. Next will probably be ‘Tenth of December’ Part of the comfort of him specifically being his stint as a depressed technical writer well into his thirties while scratching away at stories on the side, some of these earlier collections being my favorite of Saunders’; I have little interest in his later novels., and then maybe some novels from the 1920s, or the 1890s. Or Cynthia Ozick, who I was shocked to learn yesterday was still alive.

In shirking some of my work duties I have also been writing, though mainly the same short story I realized yesterday I created the original pages document for in late October. I provisionally felt that it was done last night, if mainly only that to make it better now would require massive additions and/or rearrangements, and besides the subject is a little tired and cliché among my stories in particular, and getting it down has been a sort of detoxification process, or self-soothing, or some roundabout way of thinking about my problems or the problems of people in my previous stories (which are my problems distended and mixed with the imagined problems of others), which are basically unseparate from one-another. Now I guess I intend to let it sit, or circulate it among some meager inner circle, until its embarrassments are brought into focus with distance. Through this I have looked through my various sites, re-reading bits of older things, alternately pleased or disgusted by how they’ve have held up—taken aback, as usual, by how effectively this re-reading can recall, for me, the circumstances of the stories’ writing: the people they are about, the unique species of helplessness I had been feeling then, the oblique and snotty allusions, the poor slights or admissions leveled. This continues to be something I continue to do despite objective defficiencies, a lack of formal training, some sort of massive distance from whatever Northeastern snotty unctuous thing the Salingers of the world got to marinate in—that I like it still, despite this, would seem pretty lame and hubristic anyway, if it weren’t for that no-one reads it, that it’s entirely unclear if anyone were to like it even if they did (let alone be moved or brought to their knees or similarly compulsed to write something themselves). I’m practicing flexing an increasingly arcane muscle, the appreciation of which requires other people to train their own little wormy obscure muscle—something to do with empathy—the loci of people who can do this being basically in blasted places like Iowa City or Marfa or certain parts of upstate NY, each of which comes along with pretty bad side-effects and secondary syndromes that make the whole thing pretty tough.