• saving time

    Jenny Odell, Saving Time

    I see interfaces. Interfaces are everywhere. They are simple, everyday, vital, like the doorknobs that let us use our apelike hands to manipulate the innards of a mechanical doorknobs. They are complex, obscure, ridiculous if we weren’t so dependent on them, like the computers simulating human users interacting with virtual mainframe programs from the 1980’s that operate critical pieces of our civic infrastructure. Pieces like banking, telecommunications, the military. The imposition of the interface of the interstate highway system on the landscape of the West unlocked it’s development. The imposition of the interface of the shipping container is a necessary condition of globalized trade.

    In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell explored resisting the interfaces and attitudes that make up modern (Millennial?) productivity culture. Some of her exploration involved naming and questioning foundational assumptions of the culture, e.g. why is it considered better to create the new and disruptive rather than the restorative? Another line of exploration was the incursion of the capitalist profit motive into our private lives. In Saving Time, she expands another idea opened in How To Do Nothing: that clock time is an interface imposed on many different natural rhythms and cycles for the benefit of capitalist growth, and that there may be benefits to attuning ourselves to other ways of tracking time.

    It’s a great idea, and Odell curates a wonderful selection of texts to give various angles on the idea. She repeats a structure that worked well in How To Do Nothing: meandering, collage-like texts, sometimes extended paraphrases of anecdotes from other writers or long quotations, wrapped in a repetitive and bland account of a Bay Area walk. I didn’t mind this style in her first book, but this time I wanted either more artful prose or more disciplined synthesis of ideas. After making it about halfway through the book, the easiest way for me to open up more time was to put the book down and seek a richer experience.

    I’m still looking for a book with sharper thought about how to shrink the power of the clock time interface. What kind of cultural practices would it take for there to be a society-wide floor of rest and leisure like the Jewish Sabbath? Or to resist unnecessary 24-hour work schedules? Seasonality of food?

    other voices

    Megan Garber at the Atlantic focused on the disruption of personal routines during COVID and responded more than I did to the part of the book that explored how we are being destabilized as climate change is disrupting natural cycles.

    Tatiana Scholssberg at the New York Times also craved more substance, less vibes:

    Sometimes, in her race to gather all of this information together, Odell elides narrative inconveniences or leaves things unexplained.

    But singling out any specific moment in this book feels like a betrayal of the whole. The narrative logic is purposefully meandering and elliptical, a formal underline of the book’s arguments against a linear understanding of time. 

    Parul Sehgal for the New Yorker was more pointed, “Why does a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day, and possessed of such an urgent authorial voice, feel like such a time sink?”

  • no zero days

    An influential thing I read once was about doing a small amount of progress toward known goals. It was a comment on Reddit, summed up as “no zero days”: aiming for no days where zero progress is made toward goals.

    Having no goals sounds hard, having too many goals, seeing goals everywhere—also hard. Today I’m in a bit of a manic place regarding near term future, so I’m noting down some short term goals to work off of.

    Here are my parameters:

    • Only five goals, because that’s the number of fingers I have. Other numbers could work, but this seems about right to me.
    • Everything other than these goals can get filtered out or is leisure. The important thing about this is that I am giving myself permission to release any feelings of guilt associated with not making progress toward a goal if it isn’t one of the five chosen goals.
    • Goals can be abandoned, but if I abandon it I need to reflect on why. It would be good to capture what the real roadblocks I encountered were or what in my motivation shifted such that the goal didn’t feel worthwhile anymore.
    • No ongoing, habit formation goals. Only goals with real concrete targets, end dates. Nothing longer than 6 months out, for that matter.
    • Make real reflections about what motivations are and what values the goals are rooted in.

    And here are my first set of goals:

    1. Find employment (until completed): This goal will be completed when I accept an offer of employment. This is in service of working toward financial independence and in support of my partner.
    2. Write a song for an open mic (May 17th) : I have many musical and performance goals, but for right now I want to narrow my efforts to putting together an original song for an open mic night a few blocks away from my house.
    3. Complete SwiftUI tutorial track (June 20): I think it would be a shame to let my programming skills go. I am suited to it and would like to do it as a career. If I tackle two tutorial chunks a day, I can have this finished by my birthday.
    4. Daily knee rehab until resuming appointments on May 27: I lost the habit of completing PT exercises for my patella tendon. I want to do them daily until resuming appointments on or about May 27.
    5. Improve Spanish ahead of my honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta (August 29): This one is fairly straightforward.

    Wish me luck, and wish me no zero days!

  • utopia

    For the past few years, Utopia (2019) by the Danish instrumental duo Bremer/McCoy has been my go-to album when I’m spending some alone time and I don’t know what I’m feeling. It’s calm, positive music, with slow, sparkling keyboard melodies dancing around bouncy acoustic bass lines. It’s not going to be a downer, and equally at home when I’m staring into the dark night and trying to wake up during a morning shower.

    I’m pleased to see they’re now on Luaka Bop. That David Byrne!

  • campaign furniture

    Campaign furniture was collapsible furniture used to furnish British officer’s quarters during the colonial period. Here are plans for building a beautiful traveling bookcase.

  • kaddish

    Kaddish and Kiddush are not the same, but both come from the three-letter Hebrew root (Kuf, Dalet, Shin) for “holy”

  • the bear season 2

    After stalling out halfway through, I finished the second season of The Bear last week. Aside from some bright moments, I was disappointed. The first season caught a zeitgeist. I don’t think that the creative team found a way to develop the story elements that made the first season so fresh. 

    I loved that the first season was not about fine dining. It made room to explore more working class characters and settings. The Original Beef of Chicagoland was a restaurant out of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, not Chef’s Table. The visual language of Carmy’s fine dining flashbacks (the crisp white linens, flatware at perfect angles, chef’s brigade of intense young men) comes from fine dining documentaries. It’s supposed to be a contrast to the earthy, low-margin, traditional, welcoming environment of the Original Beef. Part of the democratic ethos of the show was the idea that there is a way to find excellence here, too. It’s disappointing to slip back to fine dining and it’s attendant connection to wealth and class.

    That promise and disappointment are found in secondary characters as well. Like Orange is the New Black and Lost, the first season was an ensemble show. It had generosity and attention for secondary characters. Anyone could anchor an episode. The focus is slowly shifting to a smaller number of main characters. You cannot ignore the racial aspect of this dynamic. Ebraheim, Tina, and Marcus are being left behind to give more time and story to Carmy and Richie. In the final episode of the season there’s a throwaway line that Ebraheim will be serving the old menu out of the back of the restaurant. As if you could fit the whole world of the first season through a Quikserv window.

    This is all connected. In the first season, Tina and Ebraheim knew the business of the Original Beef better than Carmy did. He knew the business of fine dining, but he didn’t know this business. That balanced the story and made an interesting power dynamic. While it’s great that the Original Beef crew gets new training, their expertise is no longer needed. Carmy was always able to tap out and go back to fine dining. In the first season, we’re always wondering why he doesn’t. He doesn’t seem to know why. In the second season, that source of tension is gone. Cliched beats about whether he can commit to a relationship don’t reheat well. 

    It wasn’t all bad. There’s so much talent on this show. Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bacharach and Oliver Platt are so much fun to watch. Richie and Marcus get solo episodes that are fantastic. “Forks” was my favorite episode the show has ever done, and what a magnificent cameo by Olivia Colman. I didn’t like “Fishes” very much, but Jon Bernthal and Bob Odenkirk butting heads at the dinner table was electric. 

  • 2024

    Happy New Year!

  • dia de los muertos

    At my high school, we were required to have regular meetings with the college counselor starting in junior year. They would get more intense as the clock ticked toward senior year college application season, but the first meeting was a get-to-know-you. Couselors would get a sense of your goals, and start to get the ground ready by making a connection between our current academic performance and the options that might be open to us next year.

    My meeting was with a woman I’ll call Ms. Troy. Ms. Troy was a lovely, warm person. She was mixed race and Chicana, and an anchoring presence for many students of color. She had a funny—sometimes infuriating—ability to slip out of any social friction, unpleasantness, or conflict by giving a little laugh like you had said something funny.

    I was meeting with her and sharing some of my goals for college. I have no idea where this came from, but at some point I mentioned something about exploring my Latino identity. Ms. Troy gave her little laugh and said, “Oh don’t worry about that right now. That’s what college is for!”

    I understand now what she meant. The campus we were conversing in had a lot of pressure to socially conform, and there was only so much room to express an identity counter to the dominant culture. Colleges have resources that our school didn’t: access to international communities, academic circles, student activity funds. In just over a year, she was saying, you’re going to have so much more room to explore.

    That’s not how I understood it at the time. What I took from her words was that there was going to be some mysical process of identity formation coming my way in college. I was asking some huge questions: Am I Latino enough? Enough for what? Why Latino, why not Chicano or Mexican-American? How important is it that I don’t speak Spanish very well? What stories am I at the center of? What stories am I on the periphery of? What is my relation to whiteness? How has whiteness advantaged me in my life?

    These are questions I deeply wanted to know the answer to, and I really took to heart this short conversation. Those questions were unsettling. Exploring them led to places I didn’t enjoy thinking about. It was a nice thought, that they would resolve themselves in college all by themselves.

    I am still living those questions. I no longer believe that there is someone out there that can give me the answers. I don’t believe my individual construction of identity has much of an impact one way or another.

    One person who explores this territory, and specifically as a gay Latino (with bad Spanish!) is JP Brammer. I loved this recent piece of his on the funny position that Dia de los Muertos occupies in US culture right now. It’s both a unifying example of Mexican identity, and also filled with iconography that are surprisingly new:

    It might surprise some to hear that the Día de Muertos parade [in Mexico City] stemmed from a single scene in a James Bond movie in 2015. Día de Muertos is, after all, a beloved tradition that many people hold close to their hearts. Indeed, the fact that it is a tradition, an heirloom of sorts, makes people protective, at times precious about it. 

    That it centers on the ancestors, a word that commands reverence, only adds to the idea that this holiday is an old, brittle thing that must be handled with great care. It’s understandable that some might view the parade through a cynical lens, as a tourist trap or as an inauthentic take on an ancient custom. “Fake,” others might say.

    But I’m not one of those people. In fact, in the James-Bond-inspired Día de Muertos parade, I see something else entirely: a cypher for how culture is generated and, frankly, for how absurd it can be. I mean that in a good, fun way.

    Please give it a read.

  • worldkiller

    amazon spheres beside a high rise building
    Photo by Hussein Haidar Salman on Pexels.com

    Last month I attended a one-day conference hosted at Amazon’s conference center in the South Lake Union area of Seattle. There’s a tech industry psychic hum in the streets there, just like the entertainment industry hum that runs through anonymous looking three-story office parks in northern LA or the legal hum that saturates certain blocks in downtown Portland. The office workers getting their morning coffee look focused and unencumbered by family or community commitments. They are men and women, and stylish. The pinup shirt wearing, punk rock programmer dude and the carebear gothic tenderqueer have both been disciplined by three tech recessions since the year 2000. The clothes are less formal and structured than the norm for, say, finance, but there is a look and bright colors are a risk. 

    Right across the street from the Amazon campus, a forest of huge rainbow glass-walled skyscrapers that hold the back office of the everything store, there is a humble red building. It’s a sex toy boutique with an old-school porn screening room. I find this delightful. 

    sky bird industry technology
    Photo by Jakub Pabis on Pexels.com

    When a platform goes away, especially when it has just left, it is hard to preserve memory of what it looked like when it was healthy. Especially things that you might not think of as platforms. Take phone calls. When the platform was built (not with lines of code but with redwood and creosote and copper) it was too expensive to use as a social network. Later, with home phone service and party lines, it got closer, but it wasn’t private enough. Once digital switching and billing and private home service came into being, there was a glorious period in which phone calls were welcome. Infrastructure to support the network sprang up, like answering services and phone booths and cordless phones. Friendships and relationships were built, distances shrunk. 

    That golden age was long gone by the time I was a kid. The phone system was becoming overwhelmed by telemarketing. Small breakdowns in the system were everywhere. For example, when everyone screens their calls using an answering machine, getting someone on the phone could take a full minute, much slower than in the era where each call was too expensive to waste on a cold call. Phone booths were always vandalized and often didn’t work. By the time that cell phones came around and changed the paradigm again, the stereotype of the Millennial that hates talking on the phone was well ingrained. 

    That same arc plays out over and over, for as long as humans have or will exist. Letters through the postal service, the bulletin board at the laundromat, philosophers at the agora. There are situations where these media survive long past when the rest of the world has moved on from them. Letters and phone calls still maintain relationships in prison. Astronauts swap movies on thumb drives on the International Space Station. 

    The porn store represents a node on a very particular kind of retail platform. That platform is rapidly disappearing, in no small part due to the work of Amazon. On that platform, you exchanged cash for a physical good. The store knew nothing about you, or where your money came from. You didn’t know anything about where the good came from. Somewhere out there, you could buy almost anything. 

    That platform didn’t exist everywhere. In cities where the power of the city government was finite and the size was big enough that there was some undesirable area where a sleazy, taboo business could exist without neighbors complaining, there could be remarkable freedom. In most places, the power of the local government could keep them out. If the government couldn’t do anything, customers could be harassed. 

    man on empty street passing by abandoned store
    Photo by Faruk Tokluoğlu on Pexels.com

    You can’t really go back. As much as I miss the good parts of healthy local retail, and as much as I worry about what will happen if the right wing succeeds in enforcing repressive suburban values onto the internet, internet retail does work better for most people in more places than local retail did in the late 1990’s. 

    But I love that these powerful symbols, one the last of its kind, the other the worldkiller, face each other on Westlake Avenue.

  • red letters

    “Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”

    Luke Skywalker, Star Wars

    Los Angeles is the movies, and the movies is LA. If you drive north of the city on the 101 for an hour, you get to suburbs filled with peripheral industry people. Somebody did a rewrite on Lethal Weapon II and put a downpayment on a house. Another person did the same with royalties from an insurance commercial. That’s every third house in Sherman Oaks or Woodland Hills.

    Drive up the 101 another half hour and you start hitting farms and beach communities. This is where industry people go when they don’t want to be found. Hang a right and drive another half hour inland and you’ll get to the citrus groves and chaparral hills. That’s where I grew up. My house is 45 miles as the crow flies from the Hollywood sign. 45 miles and a different cultural universe.

    It used to be almost impossible to watch cool movies. If you were lucky, your had access to an independent video rental store with some personality. We had a Blockbuster. Our selection of “Foreign” movies consisted of about one shelf of DVDs.

    Anime, black and white classics, silent film, these were hard to find. Forget gay and lesbian movies. You could put in the work to see them. You could make a trip to a bigger city with a better selection. Universities sometimes had media libraries. You would watch movies on a 15″ screen with headphones in an uncomfortable study carrel warmed by CRT tubes. Local libraries having big, good movie collections is a recent phenomenon. If you could afford it, you could order from a mail order catalog, or from Amazon. Amazon’s deep catalog of old books and movies used to be a killer feature.

    If you were lucky, really lucky, you knew someone with a killer home video collection. That used to be what it meant to be “into film”. It meant shelves and shelves of tapes in their basement or living room. Those people shaped so much of my taste. Indie dramas, foreign films and music documentaries from L——. Queer cinema classics and Merchant and Ivory films from M——. Studio action films from G——.

    This assumes that the movie got a home video release. There were plenty of movies that never got a VHS release.

    The arrival of Netflix DVD-by-mail changed everything overnight. It had a broad collection, accessible to anywhere the Postal Service reached. It improved some other parts of the video rental experience that sucked. No late fees, keep it as long as you want, drop it back in the mail when you’re ready to send it back. “I have to return some videotapes” is a punchline in American Psycho. We really did have to figure out when to return tapes all the time.

    Netflix swept away Blockbuster. It delivered the killing blow to the independent rental stores*. It devalued physical media. Netflix originals ducked legacy union contracts by streaming instead of releasing in theaters or on home video. Now it is killing its DVD by mail service, as it has wanted to since the early 2010s.

    I sometimes think about those people with big collections in the 90’s and early 2000’s. They paid a lot of money, and even the big collections only had a fraction of what is available on the big services now. In the last 10 years I have paid a lot for streaming. I have nothing in my house to show for that spending. We used to have more power to shape the culture that got left to the future through the objects we left behind. Movies can disappear, or be censored so easily now. The entire paradigm where I hand you money, you give me something I want, and we both go our separate ways seems to be ebbing away. In this new world, anything that provides you ongoing value, that brings you joy must be paid for, again and again, until you cannot afford to keep it.

    *Except my beloved Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon, which has not died but did retire—it’s now operated by a non-profit.

Matthew Eilar

Matthew Eilar headshot

This is my personal blog. I’ve been blogging since 2008, and self-hosting this blog on Linode since 2020.

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