Janna

@janna

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The bedroom pop guitar, the harshness of the beat, the repetition of the riffs, Antwon's voice rough and echoey over it — all sounds like leaning out of a car driving through a town you knew when you were a different person and thought life would be different; it's summer and you're wondering when everything fell apart There's an inevitability to the grief in Antwon's forceful delivery and the constancy of the guitar and the beat: "you seemed so sad, I felt the same / I knew you felt a way that I couldn't change", all delivered as facts. No illusory hopes, no wishing it away, no positive spin. Only an acknowledgement of the sadness and its gravity — a recognition poignant in itself because sometimes all we want is just to be heard, to be seen Feels dumb to say (because surely it's the point of music) but I love a track in which the instrumentation and production add a vital layer to the story being told that couldn't be expressed any other way https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6P1do1__c

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❤️‍🔥 Thinking hard about this one today Twin Peaks, s2

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For non-fiction where each word matters, look for: 1. Texts that take storytelling seriously — • The Power Broker by Robert Caro • Annals of the Former World by John McPhee • 1453 by Roger Crowley 2. Texts that take arguments seriously — • Philosophical texts • The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander 3. Texts that take language seriously — • Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton • See #5 below 4. Texts that understand there is no hard distinction between the factual and the mythical — • Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung • Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje 5. Different styles: memoir, letters, essays — • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke • A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes • And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger • Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

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maybe each day is a new year

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thinking about Wim Wenders' film, Perfect Days (2023), and how it walks the delicate line between (1) extolling the virtues of presence and attending to one's life with care and love, which can turn the most mundane of routines into joy and become our salvation, and (2) portraying how the architecture of a perfect routine and an existence seemingly shorn of the past can also be an illusion used to suppress or escape from things too painful to address

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I love radios, and there's something so tactile, elegant, and retro-futuristic about this cube Sony TR-1825 transistor radio from the '70s Images from: https://blog.iso50.com/26131/26131/

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obsessed w/ this microtonal cover of You're Everything by Chick Corea on a "Clavemusicum Omnitonum", possibly the most beautiful instrument ever and which I believe is 31edo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upbwQPeGm0Q

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Sharon Olds on the “comforting distance” of simile, allowing one to live in a radically interconnected world while remaining exactly oneself. There is no transformation, or collapse, as in metaphor. I love this because I’ve always seen simile as less powerful and direct than metaphor, but this gives me a new understanding of simile as honouring the space between — as a gap across which we can reach and still remain whole in and of ourselves. The excerpt below is from Sam Anderson’s profile of Sharon Olds in The New York Times (h/t Ben Purkert)

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Nicolas Jaar's 17-episode radio play delivers a beautiful, haunting world through its rich soundscape – something I've always loved about his work: https://nicolasjaar.bandcamp.com/album/archivos-de-radio-piedras As most of what I listen to now is digital, I miss so much texture in how sounds were once routinely conveyed. So much physicality is lost when we do all we can to reduce friction and noise – it's easy to forget how hard each individual would work to receive communications and stay connected, so much so that we take it for granted and steer our efforts now towards disconnection, an orientation I find negative. I wish the default would switch back because I believe it is closer to reality: that we are each of us islands who reach out, waiting, straining for a sign of other life...

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Grateful to be alive — 1. Mary Oliver: “It is a serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world” 2. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there is a whole life in that, in knowing the sun is there.”

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One of the most beautiful passages I've read recently, on uncertainty, mystery, and transformation from Chloe Hope, writing Death & Birds (https://www.deathandbirds.com/p/love) Even before the threshold of death, the reality is there is far more that is unknown than known. To survive, we must evolve in order to meet it, stepping with courage beyond the spheres of comfort and safety we create for ourselves. There's no answer or formula for it, but those who aren't afraid of the mystery, who cultivate a relationship with reality "that our perception of it is far from the whole story", will wear this life a little better

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Thinking about initiation rituals and how the loss of rituals has meant the loss of stability and wisdom. Rituals structure time. Structuring time anchors how you perceive yourself and where your attention goes In ageing, it’s crucial to step into and step up for each stage of life, or you exist in a limbo where you want to move forward but don’t know how bc you don’t think of yourself as that kind of person “I’m legally allowed to do X”≠ “I’ve reached a threshold, past which I’m an adult, where I put away childish things” (to paraphrase an old book). Attention needs to be directed to your way of being, not what you have / possess. Adulthood rituals trigger this shift: they signal that it’s time to do so The loss of rituals is the loss of this mode of thinking and existing as a default. Rituals aren’t silly or archaic — they are important mentally bc they help us understand and cope with the flow of time

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I don’t think introversion is a permanent, irreversible trait. It’s the result of feeling you need to wear a mask in public in a way that is incongruent with who you feel yourself to be. The strain of maintaining that mask is what tires you out and prompts the need to “recharge”. If you can take the mask off in a way that integrates who you are, you feel far less exhausted by interaction — in fact, it can be energising bc it allows you to connect with people in ways you may have always wanted.

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Westworld isn’t meant to be a true view of consciousness — rather, it deepens the metaphor trend where we liken ourselves to the tech of the day It lets us understand humans as also being programmed & stuck in loops. Insight & awakening help us break out of these cycles and reprogramme our thoughts, habits, lives

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Being “private” and “closed off” are distinct things. Being private means not allowing certain spheres of life to mix (public / private). Being closed off means not allowing certain parts of you to be known / acknowledged, by others or yourself One can be private yet open, or public yet closed off to oneself

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thinking abt the line from Rilke: "No feeling is final. Don't let yourself me." in the poem, it's God speaking to humans, but it comes to mind when I feel someone slipping away: how we allow ourselves to lose one other & let defences rise instead of doing the difficult thing: turning towards each other, again & again

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I missed that Justin Vernon officially released 'hazeltons' last year, an album of his from 2006 that I stumbled upon online in the lowest quality audio files — a beautiful thing now to hear these clearly more than a decade later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZf0tRXvns&ab_channel=JustinVernon-Topic

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“Worry … is a type of thinking that dominates a mind searching for closure.” Forces us into endless states of “I just need X problem to go away” But that’s not how life works. These are features, not bugs — one major way to address this is to move our sense of safety away from closure and towards flow

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"reality is made of bonds ... you are not made of little motes floating alone in a void" 😭 can't speak to the scientific accuracy but this falls in my favourite genre of musing about reality: that we are not separate, individual, atomised, but instead inescapably intertwined and relational

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Four ideas that get at the same thing: - the universal is found in the specific - how you do anything is how you do everything - every moment is a rep of the person and character you want to be - most life is lived in the small, mundane, day-to-day moments (and these are what you will miss the most)

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