Ventriloquism and its discontents
The weekly digest: June 13, 2019
To me, nothing speaks more to the homogenizing-by-algorithm than coffee shop playlists. Kamasi Washington in the lobby of the Ace Hotel. Mac Demarco in the combination cycling-coffee shop in Shoreditch. Sylvan Esso in a Starbucks at the Tube station.
Here I go about thinking that I’ve got unique taste, then what I believed to be an obscure Zambian rock band starts playing in the wood-paneled coffee shop that juts into a narrow sliver of an alleyway in Saint-Louis, Senegal. I glance up and next to the Nespresso coffee maker, the Senegalese barista’s laptop is open to Spotify.
When hitting a brick wall as a creative person, sometimes it feels like the only thing you’ve got is taste. You may not be able to make your own stuff, but at least you know what good stuff is. Like most people I know in “creative” industries, the cocktail party questions I get asked most are for book and podcast recommendations. I wax pretentiously about what simply cannot be missed if one hopes to be a Cultured Person Today. But lately, it feels like we creative folks don’t even get the consolation prize of taste anymore. We live in a hyper-curated world. Algorithms and starred reviews and influencers shape so much of what we wear, but sometimes just subtly enough that you can be led to believe that you came to these decisions as to what to read and watch and eat and wear and visit completely of your own volition. Even though I am fairly certain my phone knew I was going to eat at Dishoom well before I did.
When frustrated, my impulse is to forgo all of these trappings by deleting it all. Who doesn’t want to nuke their personal data across all platforms and throw their phone from a bridge sometimes? Not practical, of course, but it feels like an opportunity to begin to “think for myself,” as it were. But that feels like a not entirely useful impulse. It is a mistake to suggest that our desires ever can be individuated, that our taste can ever be our own, that we actually could “think for ourselves”; these sorts of things have always been a shared endeavor. (Let’s be real: mix CD’s and zines were 80% of my personality in high school.)
But I wish there was a way to soak in the communal-ness of all this social media online life without feeling our sociality, our collective taste-making wasn’t so readily appropriated for profit, both in the scary ways (selling our data to Big Bad Corporations and Governments) and in the less scary, but entirely dull ways, like in the fan fiction that passes for mainstream culture today (e.g. Marvel Cinematic Universe, Riverdale, Star Wars, Ocean’s 8, etc).
Anyways, can you tell that I am listening to Kamasi Washington in the lobby of an Ace Hotel right now feeling like a bit of a poser? Hope you’re all well.
reading
In Don’t Touch the Dummy, Jennifer Parcy attends a ventriloquist convention and observes two ventriloquists carry on an intimate flirtation exclusively through their dummies, one of which is a very un-PC caricature of a homeless woman, and this isn’t even the weirdest scene in her essay !!! On the topic of puppets… given that Sudan is in the news, it is worth revisiting this remarkable Roopa Gogenini short documentary about rebel satirists in Sudan who oppose their repressive leadership by making farces of them through puppet representations. But my favorite story involving a puppet has to be this Jessica Lee Williamson personal story about the time she decided to master ventriloquism ahead of her school talent show. And, it should be noted, that on display at the Metropolitan museum, are puppet heads made by the Toba Batek people. The puppets are made to stand in for the dead, so communities party with the puppet, a facsimile of the deceased, as part of their funeral rites. The puppets are really cool if you get the chance to go.
Sadly, Binyavanga Wainaina died last month at the entirely too young age of 48. His death is a huge loss for the world of literature. He wrote the blistering essay “How to write about Africa” which you’ve likely seen floating around the internet. But he did so much more than write a searing hot take: he also started the literary magazine Kwani?, and he was an expert on African cuisine, collecting over 13,000 recipes, and, of course, he was an excellent writer. I highly recommend his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place.
Other fantastic stuff to read: Jess Stark interviews Ocean Vuong about mothers and monsters and the specters that haunt us all. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor visits a distillery in Mathore Valley in Kenya that illicitly churns out chang’aa, and the sober man Amunga whose work there keeps his family afloat. Mariana Calvo reports on one of the social leaders in Colombia who has been killed during the peace process, her friend Hugo George.
Al Burian, in Burn Collector, a collection of his zines:
Did I have literary aspirations? Of course I did, just as everyone who plays the guitar might harbor some arena rock dreams. But, like 99% of guitar players, my follow-through on the career plan was lackluster. My ambitions were low. I do not say this in a spirit of modest or self-effacement: as usual with me, it’s a matter of upholding serious moral principles. Ambition, after all, is a terrible thing. It is the root source of almost all conflict. Compared to deep-rooted ambition, a little mild megalo is nothing, a walk in the park. Ambition destroys friendships, makes your colleagues into your competitors, whittles away your ability to feel enjoyment in your small successes. It plays you like a puppet on an eternal Sisyphusian treadmill. A healthier, saner strategy for success is to play it cool, and hope that things will fall into your lap.
[…]
Some of the writing in here was an intense labor of love, other pages are pure filler and my main pleasure was in doing the layout. I was, and still am, happiest when I was doing a little bit of everything, and not taking any of it too seriously.
I photographed the Baye Fall of Senegal who cook feasts for fasting Muslims every day of Ramadan. I also produced a podcast for the Knight Foundation all about museums: the first episode dropped last week!
As always, I am on Twitter and Instagram. You can also see what I’ve been eating on @charcuteriebored on Instagram.