Some Tuesday treats
The tightest drummer, a stick of time, an earthbound moonscape, 100 million seeds
“Enshittification” has been labelled word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary in Australia. Cory Doctorow coined the term in 2022 to denote how online products and services progressively decline in quality. “It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it,” he writes. “ We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.” He mused, earlier this year, that we might have now entered the “enshittocene”.
The 17 hours Zoe Williams recently spent trying to get back to London from Köln by train has her reaching for Doctorow’s term. At first glance, this sounds like English speakers who’ve just not been paying attention to French idiom: "emmerdement” was in use in the 1830s, at least, and features in the Dictionnaire de l’académie française (which, interestingly, it has taken the academy 44 years (!) to publish in full* — this brings historical perspective to bear, quite forcefully, on the concept of newness in lanaguage, doesn’t it?). But it turns out enshittification has in fact had to be translated into French. French pundits talk about “la merdification, ou emmerdification”.
As helpful it is to have a word to describe that phenomenon all of us know only too well, I also marvel at the way we do this. How we find new words. How we make old ones fit into new meanings. I love language like our kids love slime. It slips into every crevasse, malleable and shiny. And so long as its speakers are not oppressed and its usefulness allowed to flourish too, it is alive.
One of my favourite pieces I commissioned at the Conversation was this listicle, by linguist Sara Pons-Sanz, of the five life-affirming words we should bring back into use. Here are some other life affirmations I’ve kept in my pocket for you recently.
London’s ring-necked parakeets (above, in Millfields Park on the way to ice-skating last Saturday), the flit and whirl of chirping green that makes every walk in a park near me that much better. I’ve little time for people talking about invasive species—surely, at this point, any such vibrant wildlife is absolutely something to celebrate. As this piece by Nick Hunt explains, the fact that these beautiful birds flourish in the capital is basically because of my kid’s favourite new fact: London is the world’s largest urban forest and its first national park city.
I’m still rewatching Soo Hugh’s Pachinko (Apple TV+) for this piece I’m working on and oh the sequences where Sunja and her sister-in-law are cooking with her mother, or when they’re packing her eldest son Noa’s clothes for him to go to Waseda University — the quiet, the gentle folding or stirring, those deliberate, careful gestures of a life lived together in silent doing. From the outset, I’ve admired how much space the directors have been given with this series to let a moment breathe.
Also been rewatching Shogun (Disney+). Among the many details that I’ve either seen for the first time, or relished the second time round, is the way people ask Toranaga for a meeting by requesting a stick of his time: the time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down. (I’m writing this with a stick of Morning Star cedarwood in a tiny ceramic ball holder on the shelf next to me. The smoke drifts over my keyboard in disappearing volutes and swirls.)
It turns out that the moment is, actually, an actual unit of measure, or at least it was, in medieval times: “The movement of a shadow on a sundial covered 40 moments in a solar hour; on average, 90 seconds.” As is the jiffy, ”the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt; typically, 0.01 seconds”. Early on, when working together at the Conversation, Avery and I bonded over unusual units of measure. I’m particularly fond of the vee (v), “a unit of vertical distance often—but not always—corresponding to the height of an ordinary line of text”.
That of course leads to this, one of the greatest SNL sketch of all time, wherein Nate Bergatze as General Washington explains his dream of newfangled weights and measures for the newly independent nation (a bit of superlative writing on a par with Kate McKinnon “full porky-pigging it in a drafty dome”).
The drummer that kept me utterly spellbound last week. Glasper has just finished a five-day residency at Koko, in Camden, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. They called it the House of Glasper.
I booked a ticket to see Glasper last Monday, when they were released back in May. And then because I interviewed him (what a year’s highlight that was - read here) I got a plus-one on the guestlist for Thursday too, so I took my friend Grace Allen for her birthday. As Rayanne Graff would have put it, we had a time.
Glasper was a G, throughout. Funny and brilliant with all the best tunes. Then Common bounded on to the stage in the middle of the set like a kid on to a bouncy castle and took the entire audience with him. Vula (erstwhile Floetry member) followed next. Then came Cynthia Erivo, who whistled the theatre into bated-breath silence with a version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen that she recorded last year with Glasper, singing “comfort and joy, comfort and joy, comfort and joy” ever more quietly, pure magic)
Clearly everyone on stage was amazing. But Justin Tyson on drums, man, he gripped my heart throughout. Here’s them playing in Seattle last December. (We were on the guest list for the after-party too, which, you know, was awesome and cool, but then, maybe bc it’d all been so perfect already and we felt filled with good music but properly hungry for actual food, we decided to skip out and get kebab-shop burgers instead. Then we walked back to Hackney in the early morning and it was fabulous.)Spent a long time in the Barbican’s current show, The Imaginary Institution of India, which details the art made between Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1975 and the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998. Himmat Shah’s terracotta heads (1 of the images below, numbered clockwise — all images are details) are a special thing: sculptures made from clay, an ancient material, inspired by the pottery he saw excavated during the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1950s and his homeland of Lothal, in Gujarat, home to the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation.
I loved Gieve Patel’s Off Lamington Road (1982-86) (2), an epic streetscape depicting a crowd in Bombay: see the children in the foreground holding on to their adults and the contrast between the detailed, gestural relationships between characters and the unfinished background — that Patel found inspiration in Pietro Lorenzetti’s 14th-century Crucifixion (3) is evident, and beautiful. And Nilima Sheikh’s When Champa Grew Up series of 12 narrative paintings that detail the “fragile story”, as Sheikh puts it, of a young girl’s tragically short life. She deploys attention to detail and domestic framing and scale, much as Soo Hugh does in Pachinko, as a lens through which to survey huge societal forces which sweep up and crush small lives.
Also of note, Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of young people living their lives during the Emergency: Hanging Out With the Maharani Bagh Gang, New Delhi (3) and Nommie Dancing at a Party at Koko’s, New Delhi (4). Everything in this encyclopaedic survey demands attention.
Chetna Makan’s potato paneer balls and Nik Sharma’s rum-soaked raisin caramel cake that I’m gearing up to make several batches of, as Christmas gifts.**
Minoru Nomata’s eerily beautiful drawings of land-escapes, windscapes, weather balloons, endless external staircases and seedbanks.
The sand of 70 deserts that Katie Paterson has collated for her Mirage project for Apple Park in Cupertino, CA.
The 100 million seeds from 27 plants native to the Amazon forest that Brazilian skydiver Luigi Cani released in 2022.
Some Worlds Have Two Suns, a new photobook by Andrew McConnell, that documents life on the Kazakhstani steppe where astronauts and cosmonauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station land — or fall, really. This Big Picture piece by Tim Adams on what life is like for the people who actually live on that steppe is amazing.
Herbert Ponting’s 1911 A Cavern in an Iceberg.
Claude Cahun’s Je te tends les mains (I Extend My Arms), 1931. I wouldn’t have translated that phrase like that — because it omits the “te”, the you to whom the gesture is directed: I extend my arms towards you, it means, I reach for you.
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری)’s 3D-print of one of the Assyrian winged lamassus destroyed by ISIS, as part of her Material Speculation series.
Notes
*In this interview about the new dictionary, an academician asks: “Is there a more beautiful gift than to give someone a new word?”
**An update on the honey butter toast project, c/o Elliot, who found this dude commenting, uniquely, on one bakery’s process. Obviously, I’m here for the commentary alone, but also, this is very helpful technical information. There’s no honey in honey butter toast. It’s only sugar.
World of echo
It’s going to have to be mostly Glasper, with these Live at Capitol Studios videos from a while back that remain unbeatable:
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Levels
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box
Golden Lady
Barangrill
Stella by Starlight
I Don’t Even Care
The Worst
So Beautiful
I Don't Even Care
Reckoner
And then, just cos, Yebba, Louie Bag, again.