The Sydney Morning Herald has a column, The Two of Us, that explores the bond between two people—friendships, romantic relationships, shared experiences—written with such lightness and optimism that it reads like fiction. Last week, in a cramped BGC bus bound for Ayala, I read about Hamish and Rawson, best friends with different personalities who supported each other throughout the years: one developed PTSD after an incident of domestic violence, and the other was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Adulthood came, their lives diverged, but eventually, they moved in together, bonded over weightlifting, and established a gym.
Another piece about relationships is Bryan Washington’s Hatagaya Lore in The New Yorker. It spans years in paragraphs. It’s a breeze to read, but like the wind, the story sifts through your fingers and leaves no traces—except maybe one: “Sitting water rots.” The story is an assortment, like a box of photos with a very loose theme that you must piece together.
Piecing together samples is something The Avalanches, an Australian electronic band, is famous for. A YouTube video by someone blessed with a “clear ear” deconstructed perhaps one of my favorite tracks ever: If I Was a Folkstar, which features the breezy vocals of Toro y Moi. The video feels like operating on a song with surgical tweezers.
And over at The Baffler, there’s an interesting article about Tokyo from the perspective of a white expat writer – Eastern Promises by Dylan Levi King – who has lived in the city for nearly a decade. He laments the current influx of tourists, its declining population and its reliance on foreign labor as a harbinger of doom, a symptom of Japan’s failure. If Hatagaya Lore sees Tokyo through dreamy, rose-tinted glasses, King’s Tokyo is the obverse (and true to The Baffler‘s ethos): exclusive, xenophobic, and anti-poor… a refreshing (albeit a controversial) take.