Uncanny Dimensions
Some news, reading recs, and other curiosities that arose from the week we spent on the internet.
Some news, reading recs, and other curiosities that arose from the week we spent on the internet. For you to watch, read, and listen to:
We stumbled upon this 2015 short film by Rosalind Nashashibi’s, called Electrical Gaza. “It posits landscape as a place of connection as well as a reflection on memory, distance, and exile.”
We revisited The Isis Beat by Rozina Ali in the Drift— an article from 2021 on the media’s shocking incompetence when it comes to covering extremism: “Even while Obama and Trump criticized the forever wars, they both expanded America’s military footprint and backed oppressive regimes for the sake of fighting extremism. And even as the new Biden Administration announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, to ‘end; the twenty-year war, it will continue airstrikes and raids to tackle the ever-looming threat of terrorism. We owe the countries we’ve invaded and bombed more than such a narrow lens of the world, a lens we’ve created. The question we’ve been asking, after all, has yet to be answered: Who are we really fighting?”
It pairs well with our interview with Yale Law and History professor Samuel Moyn on the intended consequences of the project to make war more human: “We constantly hear people are dying, things are going south, and the process is endlessly creating terrorists, not ending terror. My book attempts to figure out, given that the declared goal is safety, why we continue to be the world's policeman, thinking control could benefit ourselves, not just the world, when that doesn't seem to be happening. My answer is that people are willing to say, ‘at least the violence is not that messy.’ And if we have an empire, it’s not like the old ones that were intentionally brutal.”
And, also from
, a Q+A with Jordan Thomas on firefighting, forestry, and ecological disaster: “The first thing I want readers to understand is that megafires are not “natural disasters.” Fires take the shape of the conditions under which they ignite. We’ve profoundly altered those conditions, from the carbon in the atmosphere to the vegetation patterns in our forests. We know how to prevent megafires: stop burning fossil fuels, and reintroduce the kinds of fires that California’s landscapes evolved to thrive with. The fact that we’ve done neither, despite knowing how, means that megafires are not inevitable. They are political choices.” had a nice short piece on Substack about Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and a photobook called Evidence: “About halfway through that photobook—a portal to an uncanny dimension, conjured with images from government archives—there is a strikingly similar scene: the nose of an aircraft perched on wooden risers in a darkened room, facing a video projection of a runway. Published in 1977 by San Francisco photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Evidence perplexed the art world, then changed it forever. The book consists of 59 forensic photos from police, military, scientific, agricultural, and municipal institutions, mostly in California—all presented without context…Indeed, many of the images depict some kind of rehearsal. That’s much of what forensics involves, whether you’re building a spaceship or investigating a crime: reenacting highly specific scenarios under controlled conditions, either to prevent something from going wrong or to understand what did.”
David Lynch on happiness in GQ: “Are you more creative when you're happy or unhappy? You're just as creative when you're miserable, but you don't feel like creating when you're miserable. I always use the example of the starving artist in the garret, which I think started in France. And it's a very romantic idea. Maybe, I say, a way to get girls—you know, they come and help you out, bring you soup, or maybe spend the night. But for the starving artist, freezing in the garret, it's not romantic, Chris. It's romantic for everybody else maybe, but not for the guy who's freezing and hungry in the garret. And when you're depressed, hungry and cold, you don't feel like making stuff. Your ideas don't flow so much. You're worried, you're cold, you're depressed. So negativity, to my mind, is the enemy of creativity. When you're really happy, filled with energy, and you've got those ideas flowing, it's so beautiful. You want to work. You want to realize those ideas, translate those ideas to one medium or another. And that's the ticket.”
Check out our radio archives from the week! Featuring friends
, and others on everything from “music for bugs” to sociological explorations via a tiny Venice livestream on Youtube to a deep dive into the Blue Crush soundtrack.
Enjoy the long weekend we will be back with more interviews, radio shows, and roundups next week!
Thank you for the shout out!