(24 mins) | This week Iām doing a reading of #17: Xanax for the human condition, with the help of a brand new mic that makes me feel deeply professional. I also offer a little context behind why I wrote about nostalgia this week, and why I recommended some of the things I did (like the article about having kids during perilous times). Hope you enjoy!
So listening to this back I remembered an emotion I saw described related to Heian period Japanese literature, "mono no aware" or "the impermanence of things", which brought me to this wikipedia article:
which it turns out is full of great movie recommendations, like of course Isa Takahata's Only Yesterday (which is studio Ghibli), but also I can't recommend Ozu enough. I remember you said you don't remember what happens in movies, and maybe you're not that into movies - well, maybe you're just not that into narrative, which, to be honest, it's pretty annoying when you're you're watching a movie, which is a visual medium among other things, you're just expecting some bullshit to happen any moment now for the plot twist or the peripetia or whatever. Which isn't that important with Ozu, it's more about showing a family going through various life events, thinking through the dilemmas, etc. There isn't even continuity between the three movies in the Noriko trilogy, it's not even exactly the same Noriko even though it's the same actress and the same name.
And all these movies focus a lot on the in-between-ness, the details and mundane stuff in life. I think what can get really wearing sometimes, in our idea of narratives for instance in movies or novels, and transposed into life, is that everything has a narrative function, like you said, soundtracking your life etc. like we don't have lives, we have stories and if we don't, we haven't even lived. I find everything tends to take on "narrative" significance in real life in moments of stress, when you start to see everything as an irreversible choice, a fork in the path you can never return to, or even an omen.
(after that, Wikipedia's exercise in "explaining Japan", which is kind of an international sport, is a bit meh, but for an intense dose of melancholy at things passing, check out those movie recommendations)
So listening to this back I remembered an emotion I saw described related to Heian period Japanese literature, "mono no aware" or "the impermanence of things", which brought me to this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware
which it turns out is full of great movie recommendations, like of course Isa Takahata's Only Yesterday (which is studio Ghibli), but also I can't recommend Ozu enough. I remember you said you don't remember what happens in movies, and maybe you're not that into movies - well, maybe you're just not that into narrative, which, to be honest, it's pretty annoying when you're you're watching a movie, which is a visual medium among other things, you're just expecting some bullshit to happen any moment now for the plot twist or the peripetia or whatever. Which isn't that important with Ozu, it's more about showing a family going through various life events, thinking through the dilemmas, etc. There isn't even continuity between the three movies in the Noriko trilogy, it's not even exactly the same Noriko even though it's the same actress and the same name.
And all these movies focus a lot on the in-between-ness, the details and mundane stuff in life. I think what can get really wearing sometimes, in our idea of narratives for instance in movies or novels, and transposed into life, is that everything has a narrative function, like you said, soundtracking your life etc. like we don't have lives, we have stories and if we don't, we haven't even lived. I find everything tends to take on "narrative" significance in real life in moments of stress, when you start to see everything as an irreversible choice, a fork in the path you can never return to, or even an omen.
(after that, Wikipedia's exercise in "explaining Japan", which is kind of an international sport, is a bit meh, but for an intense dose of melancholy at things passing, check out those movie recommendations)
Thank you for another dose of calm & digital xanax :)