Today, I want to tell you about my whiteboard. It’s up on a wall in my room, and I use it to write down my never-ending list of to-dos, fantastical project ideas and daily reminders for meetings and events. I was inspired by a friend who uses a whiteboard to plan his day, hoping that his ability to stick to his routine would rub off on me if I purchased the same object and gave it a coveted spot on my walls.
#38 Starry, starry night
Vincent and I go back a long way.
Vincent was one of my favourite songs as a child. It took me a while (longer than I’m comfortable admitting) to make the connection between the Vincent in Don Maclean’s poignant lyrics, the artist haunted by demons in Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s biography and my much-treasured postcard of the saddest looking bunch of sunflowers I’d ever seen. They didn’t have Google in my bacchpan, okay. All our aha moments came to us the hard, painful way.
#36 A compendium of the obscure
Ever visited a historical attraction? Maybe the ruins of a fort somewhere? Perhaps an excavation of a buried civilisation? And while there, did you wonder about the stories the ruins could tell? The legends and history that time forgot?
#35 It ain’t me, Babe
Comic books are probably the first things that help us to dream. A fantasy world that shields us from the harsher realities of the world outside. Every generation discovers its superheroes anew – a fresh lease of life even as they go digital.
#34 What impossible worlds do you see?
“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.”
I first came across this quote in a post from Humans of New York, the world-famous project run by Brandon Stanton, who stops New Yorkers on the street and asks them about their lives – gathering fascinating stories from people we might just walk by without looking twice. For this post, he photographed a woman with this quote by Don DeLillo tattooed on her back.
#32 Malls. Really.
If a shopping mall exists in the metaverse, is it a shopping mall or a Meta Mall? I never thought I’d begin this post with a Meta reference, but here we are. I’ve always thought of malls as soulless, glamorous, better-lit avatars of expo centres. No? Just me then.
#31 Let’s go to the movies?
Cinema, for me, is the most potent weapon of mass communication. My fascination with film studies started early enough. And while I didn’t care much about the technologies used in making movies, I just had to understand why a specific technique was used. Like when the audience is made voyeur or how paranoia or impending danger are created on screen. 50 years on, Laura Mulvey’s male gaze is still helping viewers decode visual narratives, and the evolving cultural discourse around effective representation in cinema is adding racial and gender nuance.
#30 Hear, hear
What does the Earth sound like? WhatsApp University graduates might tell you it makes the ‘Om’ sound as it rotates on its axis (or is that the sound the Sun is supposed to make? I forget), but scientists say it does have a distinct sound, and they’ve recorded it!
But why should scientists have all the fun?