Sol's MEDiA DiET

Can intense melancholia flood your system with dopamine? If you said those two things are mutually exclusive, you'd be wrong! If 31 songs are too much for you, here's my condensed version. This album isn't “fast food”: it took me 3 days to “get it”, and I'm glad it got me, because it's sublime. One of my favourite lyrics:

For a moment I knew cosmic love
Now I'm down bad crying at the gym

After reading this interview with Sigrid Nunez on the Paris Review I decided to pick up one of her books at random, because well, if you read the interview, you will be curious, too. This book has two threads: the end of the world through climate change and how we are doomed because too stupid to take action, and the end of the narrator's friend's life with terminal cancer. But don't be put off! It is funny and neurotic and full of deep questions and absurd observations, all without any hint of affectation.

Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.

Life isn't just tragic, or just absurd, or just ridiculous, so when a movie defies genre by being more than one thing, and does it successfully, it's more real and more interesting. The comedic parts of this movie are sharp and clever. The tragic parts are subtle, understated, and more real for it. The cast is wonderful. Five stars from me. The book must be brilliant, which I will put on my TBR and link on here.

Shortly before getting my hands on this fascinating, enraging, important book, I heard the unsurprising statistic that the happiest people are single women and married men.  

Part of the deadening effect of domesticity is that a man must earn money, the ‘logic’ goes, to keep a wife. But outside of marriage the services she provides – sex, mothering, cleaning, cooking, editing, psychology, management – would be unaffordable, not to mention hard to arrange. […] a wife to create the conditions necessary for his productivity. Without that, he can’t work.

Highly recommend. If only to understand how history treats men and women differently.

Caught this wonderful exhibition on its last day. I was low-key amused, until I got to the end of the corridor where the short film was showing, of Gormley talking about his work – its meaning and its production process – and then I was low-key mind-blown. The video can be watched at the link below.

It is only through accepting our condition of embodied time that we can be truly free. 

This steampunk masterpiece had my brain firing in all directions. Yorgos Lanthimos has yet to disappoint, and this is maybe one of the best things I've ever seen. I will need to watch it again, but at home where I can pause it and reflect in peace at every turn. Besides being beautifully produced, designed and performed, it's deep and deeply funny. I got my hands on the book and it's next on my list.

This show has everything: a cute dog, scatological jokes, well written female characters (narcissistic mothers, bad-ass friends, self-caricatures of hurt and lonely middle-aged women, etc), cringey moments without any of the tired contrivances of more mainstream shows, and so much heart.

This film tells the story of a woman mainly from the perspective of her romantic / sexual relationships. It attempts to illustrate character development exclusively through one aspect of a person's life – and it makes me wonder, since the director is a dude, if that's how men think about women, not their intellectual, professional, political, etc. worlds, but just in terms of who they fancy, who they fuck?  I still enjoyed it, but left me with a funny feeling and I finally pinned it down.

It had been a while since I loved a TV show like this. Maybe because the neurodiverse, hyper-neurotic main character is the most normal person in the lineup? My friend Stephen recommended it and told me I'm just like her, and after seeing two seasons, I think it's the highest praise I've ever received. If this show doesn't make you laugh, we can't be friends.

There is a different you for everyone who knows you, and each of them is real. You grow comfortable with those versions and inhabit them, for better or for worse, for a minute or for years. This extraordinary film is about the inevitable mourning of the ‘yous’ you leave behind. Five stars.

So brilliant. No words. Just sad it was over too soon. (2+ hours not enough)

Maria Kalman turns everything she touches into sheer magic. If you need proof, watch the delightful short film she created to promote her illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

This book is, as a physical object designed and printed with such care and love by Erik Spiekermann simply precious. As a text it is razor-sharp, brutal in its honesty and acceptance of what means to start fresh in spite of all the ghosts, or maybe because of them. 

The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering) that has made some women go mad. 

I love Greta Gerwig since I saw her in Frances Ha, and more since Ladybird. I think if this movie had been made by anybody else I wouldn't have been remotely interested. 

They hyped it so much that I started getting antsy. What if it's a dud? Well, it's no dud! It's cringey, deep, funny, surprising and if it has one fault, is that it is an American Movie™ – you know what I mean? where everything is spelled out and subtlety is a foreign concept. 

The first time I saw The Visitors was about 7 years ago and I was absolutely mesmerised and sorry that I would probably never be able to see it again. I had already spent about 4 hours at Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition at the Barbican (watching half of A whole lot of sorrow) and I had a train to catch. Otherwise I'd have stayed there all day, easy peasy. 
I can't explain my delight when I saw it was showing at SFMOMA during my work trip to San Francisco, except that it reinforced my faith in second chances. It's such a beautiful piece.

There isn't enough time in a day to listen to all the things I want. 
Listening to a TS song is like reading a very good novel in 3 minutes and 13 seconds. This album is the embodiment of that: nothing else stands a chance for a good while. Oh and: I have tickets for the Eras Tour so next year there will be that on here.

I got an axolotl sticker for my laptop in Japan, and couldn't not see the obvious similarities between me and this creature:

Indisputably cute: check
Mexican: check
Weird: check

But a bit more research made me aspire to be even more like it:

the axolotl does not heal by scarring and is capable of the regeneration of entire lost appendages in a period of months, and, in certain cases, more vital structures, such as tail, limb, central nervous system, and tissues of the eye and heart.They can even restore less vital parts of their brains.

Love this: don't let yourself be scarred. Just grow your hurt parts anew and start over.

By the time the evening rolls around my ADHD meds have run their course so it's nigh impossible for me to sit down to watch anything at all. (thankfully I can still read books, as long as I've gotten myself hooked before said meds evaporation). 
Despite the beautiful typography in the opening credits, this show was doubly hard to watch: an assemblage of truly horrible people and their very bad decisions, so masterfully performed that I had to remind myself like Bert and Ernie: “it's only a movie it's only a movie”. 

I will be raving about this short documentary/film for a long time: adventure, resourcefulness, wonder, hope, friendship but in a perfectly understated, Scandinavian way.

This year's edition of the International Insistute for Information Design's conference centres around Info Design for healthcare, and although that is very far from my own chosen flavour of Info Design, it's been valuable to expand my horizons and meet old colleagues and friends. And Vienna is always a good idea.

The best feeling is when my friends see something and they think of me. My friend Tom sent me this article that I had somehow missed. As mentioned previously, I'm kind of obsessed with The National, but I'm also not a Sad Dad. Leave it to Phoebe Bridgers (another legend) to explain why:

Something middle-aged men and teen-age girls have in common is the act of finding yourself, and being kind of self-conscious. Maybe some beliefs that you’ve held on to for a long time are finally being shed. The teen-age girl in me is obsessed with the National, and feels very spoken to and seen by them, maybe for the exact same reasons that they speak to middle-aged men.

I am a teenage girl at heart.

During lockdown I became an avid romance reader. I discovered that knowing how the story will end is a major stress reliever for me. The patriarchy makes us dismiss the genre as stupid/shallow/dumb or worse: "not proper literature" (???) but I loved what the hero tells the heroine in this book, where the plot is a bit meta around romance books:

Seems it’s pretty hard to write a compelling book when the reader already knows how it ends.

This isn't one of my favourites but it's good, and the author duo is an insta-buy for me.

Some meetings should've been emails, some books should've been twitter [RIP] threads, some movies –like this one – should've been shorts. Viola Davis is fantastic. Ben Affleck is a terrible actor. Matt Damon is the king of hamming it up. 

In this one-hour workshop Matthew Rechs expounds on the qualities that make a good manager, one that ultimately brings out the best in people and fosters a good company culture. As a new entry to the corporate world, this was insanely eye-opening.

My favourite take-away:

Be intentional and sophisticated in the ways that you deal with other people. Do not accept without challenge those social cues against being vulnerable and transparent.

Two pages into this book and I'm hooked. I love a male character written by a woman. And Hustvedt's writing is so intimate and precise that I feel that she's talking to me and that I have to listen.

My father died in 1947, when he was only forty-three years old, but my mother lived on. I was their only child, and after my father was gone, my mother and I shared his ghost. […] For twenty-six years she lived in the same apartment on Eighty-fourth Street between Broadway and Riverside with my father's missing future.

I came across this Ethiopian composer by accident and well, there are no accidents. She was a nun, and died last month aged 99. Her music is happy and melancholy at the same time, joyful and dreamy but there's something raw about it. 
I'm no music writer.

Two of the things that bring me most joy in life were gifts from my friend Rachel. My dog, who she convinced me to – and helped me – get; and The National, who she introduced me to back in 2010. I woke up early today just to play this and it's wrecking me, in a good way.

I once said that if I could write a letter to my younger self I wouldn't. That bitch has to figure out stuff on her own, just like I did. But this one brought me to tears. Read it in full, like:

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Mark Boulton curated a collection of typeface micro-sites for about ten years. I hope he continues because these are great.

The first time I thought my kid was ADHD like me was when I noticed that he would listen to the same song on repeat for weeks, or watch the same films over and over and over (I later realised that he's more on the spectrum and this hyper-fixation is one of those shared traits with ADHD). Anyway, I've been extracting all the possible dopamine out of this song for weeks and it doesn't seem to run out.

I receive about 50 newsletters per week, I open them randomly and choose to take whatever I read as a sign. It's like Tarot. There is one, however, that I always open because it's consistently great: Dense Discovery by Kai Brach is a condensed magazine with no fillers, the topics range from climate change, politics, anthropology, late stage capitalism and more, and every word in it is intentional and important. I always get the feeling that none of my time reading it has been wasted.

My friend / client Christopher gave me this book. It's in French, which I speak poorly but read quite ok. It's the biography of a composer who happened to be a woman and had an incredible life. Think: the illegitimate child you're forced to give away as an infant falls in love with their half-sibling 20 years later.

Bought this pattern on Ravelry and will cast on soon: need to decide first if I should frog the red jumper I've not managed to finish (more than three years since first cast-on), or use new yarn.

I wish my “media diet” included the Eras Tour. Maybe when she comes to Europe? In the meantime, hours scrolling hashtag taylorswift on instagram will have to suffice.

This is the first post of my Media Diet website. I will keep it because after all, making this website meant that I had to consume a lot of media: tutorials, mostly. I made this with Expression Engine, which is really logical and has been relatively easy to learn. I love that I can take any template, for example any from HTML5UP and make it dynamic.