...

And it was definitely true in 1967 just as it is mostly true now. We adore speed: living fast, dying young, fast cars, fast internet, fast fashion, fast food, faster loading times, higher framerates, bullet trains, private jets, a stock market that doesn't sleep, skipping a grade, early graduation, being promoted sooner than your older peers, those who manage to make six figures by age 30, putting out a huge body of work in a short period of time, a quick turnover from one romance to the next, and so on.
     Terayama Shuji was an artist obsessed with the current moment, something which disappears faster than any of the things I just listed. Plays that took place in the middle of the street, films that decide to stop being films halfway through and start ostracizing the viewer for not living their life, always obsessed with cutting through the veil of the “everyday” and beating the shit out of the engine that drives it. The contradiction of living fast was a kind of rebellion and activism in and of itself, it stood in stark contrast with the status quo the generation before him was so intent on perpetuating, and it was a way of life that seeped into everything he did. It was protest.
     The romantic notion of speed that Terayama was so enamoured with has been completely co-opted and commodified. The world spins a little faster everyday and we are now always awake, always on in a way that Terayama Shuji was only beginning to experience in the 1960s. It wouldn't be so blasee to say that things have become too fast. I’m sure you hear it among your friends all the time: terms like “memory hole,” “doomscrolling,” and so on. Blink and it’s gone. If you didn’t see it on your timeline, it didn’t happen.
     But then last year I was in Europe trying to find a disposable camera in any goddamn country. Somewhere in Prague an old man who ran a camera store for the better part of the 20th century tells me that the factories in China cannot meet the demand; he hasn’t seen the damn things in over a month. Great--how am I supposed to take my cute analog photos of the Kafka museum?
     Disposable cameras, instax polaroids, vinyl records, albums released in the 21st century coming out on cassette. Analog has made a comeback in a very large way, clearly. The difference is it’s a purely aesthetic appreciation; people want to dress their memories in that ineffable quality unique to the twilight era of analog and digital, refusing to understand that it wasn’t the technical limitations that made the pictures look good but the people who took them.
     Food too: hundreds of Reddit posts about how to grind your morning coffee to a literal halt, services that eliminate all the creativity of cooking with rigid instructions and hand-picked ingredients sent straight to your door. Remember people making bread in the earlier days of the pandemic? Even my dad gave it a try.
     The 21st century seems to have a newfound fascination with the aesthetics of slowness. Everyone jokes about moving out to a farm, living off the land, or becoming some kind of hermit trying to achieve nirvana. These are the same people who repost TikTok compilations of Ghibli films that act as windows into their mundane holistic worlds: characters eating food, walking to school, studying in their rooms, all the while cutting around Miyazaki’s edges. It’s akin to the phenomenon that for every meme I see about whatever new television show is airing I see other memes antagonizing the speed at which these new trendy shows come out, and in the comments people are arguing but no one on either side of the discussion has actually seen the damn thing they’re talking about. We love to have opinions on movies we’ve never seen, books we’ve never read, artists we’ve never engaged with. We want to live fast but have the satisfaction of slowness. We want to be the tortoise and the hare. We want to dare to imagine a world where sometimes lying in a field of grass is enough, but that’s exactly it: we only imagine it.
     This kind of topic could go down a slippery slope of talking about the spectacle (in the Debord sense), hyperreality (in the Baudrillard sense), and postmodernism in general (in the Metal Gear Solid 2 sense). I don’t want to do that, because as Donna Harraway once wrote: postmodernism may be nothing more than the complaints of sons of bourgeoisie fathers punching up at the hand that fed them. Too much discussion about this kind of topic goes deep into regular postmodernism talking points that only boils down to: you see? Those French fucks were right!!!
     What I want to say is that living your life slowly like we all want to doesn’t have to be this macabre theater of spending absurd amounts of money on ethically-sourced coffee beans or paying Fujifilm the cost of a kidney annually to take faux Polaroid photos (half of which you fuck up setting the exposure to the right dial, because you don’t actually know how analog photography works (it’s okay, neither do I)).
     Recently I had this conversation with a friend:
     “But come on, there have to be some shows you watch on the side,” he says.
     “What? No, if I’m watching a show--especially if it’s the first time--I’m just watching it.”
     “What do you mean by that?”
     “I mean the lights are off, my telephone is put away, and I’m looking at the screen for the entire runtime, pee breaks not included.”
     “What about Naruto? You don’t think Naruto is something you can just watch on the side while you do other stuff?”
     “It could be Naruto, it could be Evangelion, it could be whatever you want it to be--if it’s something I care so little about that I could even think about ‘watching it on the side,’ then I wouldn’t watch it at all. Giving that little of a shit means it’s not for me.”
     Then I thought to myself, wow, I can be insufferable sometimes, but that’s okay--everyone deserves to be a little insufferable every now and again. I really did think about why I’m like this, and why it seems to be an outlier opinion that you should give any work of art your full attention and respect even if it is--especially if it is--Naruto.
     You know the scene in Breaking Bad where Jessie talks about his ideal life? All he wants is to fashion a simple box out of wood like he did once when he was younger. Recently I did something similar: I purchased an old beat up transparent Game Boy Color because I wanted to play a bunch of old Japanese games I missed out on. The thing comes and it’s a little too ugly for my liking, the plastic too yellow and cloudy to be called "transparent," and the screen--what the fuck? How did these things ever catch on without a backlight? So I take to Aliexpress and order a backlight screen replacement kit. It all comes in the mail a week later and I spend the whole afternoon tearing the Game Boy apart, making some plastic-cleaning goop that may have done permanent damage to my lungs, and then I performed surgery. I'm not too good at this stuff, but I always reassure myself with some bizarre fallacy that "every man in my family before me was an engineer," so there's no way I could fuck it up (but of course I do). The sun goes down as I adjust the ribbon cable on the screen for the umpteenth time, and I click the thing shut only to see it once again nudged over a fraction of a centimetre in the wrong direction and now the screen is just crooked enough that I will notice. Fine--fine, I will do it again, I'm not bothered, in its own way it's very fun. When it's time to screw it all back together of course I immediately drop all the tiny black screws on to my dark green Modern Gradient Design Good For House and Small Apartment Carpet (Not Good For Trying To See Small Objects) and I've been so focused on making the screen right that it's now nighttime so I can't see the screws but I sure as hell can feel myself stepping on them.
     Then it all finally fit together and I slammed in 携帯電獣テレファングKeitai Denjuu Telefang, a game I only know about because a distant cousin once gave me a GBC game called Pokemon Diamond (no, not that one, the year was like 2003) which turned out to be a machine-translated ROM of Telefang. The screen comes to life. The old speaker wheezes. I kept playing until the wee hours of the night, not just because the game was fun but because there was this total and complete satisfaction that I was playing it on a machine I gave my total attention to, and I did it for no one but myself.
     I felt, I don’t know: clean. Like, in my heart.

     Throw away your coffee-making kits. Rally in your local used book store. Find a 200 page novel and read it until there’s nothing left to read, or at least until you have to go to sleep. Turn on that three hour movie you’ve had on the backburner for months and don’t get up, don’t check your phone, don’t fall asleep. Play that video game, don’t use a guide, don’t put on a podcast, and stay until the credits. When the light comes up you gotta go back to the insufferably fast world we’ve invented for ourselves but at least you’ll know how to find the slower moments. Because really, it all comes down to giving enough of a shit about other people to want to do these things.
     Art has been around since we were in caves, and capitalism is a relatively recent invention by comparison. Unfortunately we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking art is just another expendable product when it’s really another human talking to you--not giving it that level of care poisons you in its own special way. Maybe this is you: every movie you watch, every game you play, you judge it all based on whether it entertains you. A work of art only has value as far as it engages you, and everything else is not worth your hard-earned cash. Don’t worry, I’m not going to say that this sentiment is outmoded, but I am asking you to just be a little more mindful about the reasons you’re approaching it this way. I don’t want to know people who rate their interactions with me based on whether or not I’m entertaining them--you certainly wouldn’t like it if someone was on their phone while you poured your heart and soul out to them either, would you?
     It all naturally coalesces: you will find yourself caring more about your friends’ Tuesday night stories, the old guy reliving his glory days next to you at the hardcore show will be more interesting to listen to, even your sister's monologues about Taylor Swift album deeplore will start to make sense, and most importantly you’ll find you’ll be able to hear yourself clearer, too.
     The answers to that ever-nagging anxiety in the back of your head of whether or not you’re doing enough can be answered by doing what you can instead of trying to trick that part of your brain that you’re doing a million things at once. Putting something on “in the background” is in its simplest terms: cope, but I don’t mean this in the meme-y sense that’s stained with condescension. Watching a movie with your phone in hand reduces both to pure noise and you start to wonder why you decided to watch a movie in the first place. Does anyone feel good after scrolling through 10 second videos for an hour on YouTube to begin with? Do you ever feel okay, do you ever feel proud of your choices? All you’re doing is occupying your brain just barely enough to numb yourself to the fact--coping with it, actually--that you will one day die while simultaneously inching closer to it. What happens when you actually do lay down in the proverbial death bed is you’ll feel the terror of death one hundred times more than the guy in the room over who actually played all of Metal Gear Solid instead of watching the cutscenes on YouTube (or even worse, watching a video essay). He’ll be thinking of every polygon that makes up Solid Snake’s ass while you can’t even recall Otacon’s real name.
     We are slow creatures, agonizingly slow, and we like it that way--it’s like if we live slow enough then we can’t possibly reach the finish line. That’s exactly why we’re so enamored with the danger and taboo of speed but like every other damn thing on this earth: everything in moderation. Everyone knows this is true, too, because that’s the same reason people get upset when you tell them reading a summary of a novel is the same as never having read the novel, because they’re embarrassed for themselves. If this is you then the answer is unfortunately the very same reason you won’t read the book: it takes effort, just like everything else that matters. On the brightside: I guarantee you’ll be surprised how little effort it takes, and how much better you’ll feel.
     When I was 16 I was playing seven RPGs at the same time. I was crushed by the fact that I would never be able to finish any of them and I had no idea what to do about it. It was too irresistible to play all the PS2 Shin Megami Tensei games simultaneously, but how’s a high school student ever expected to finish multiple 50+ hour RPGs all at once? Eventually I realized the stress of figuring out how to spend my free time was outweighing the fun I was having playing these games so I decided to stop playing them all together--I even deleted all my save files. I figured I would play a shorter game before any of them to accustom myself to actually beating a video game, so I sat down and played through Metal Gear Solid for the first time in my life. Then I played 2, 3, 4, and so on, and before I knew it I had found myself back in front of the Matador in Nocturne as naturally as if it was the next MGS. I spent less time and mental effort getting myself there than I did trying to finish seven games at once.
     The point is: if my 16 year old ass can figure this shit out, you should be able to, too.

January 15th, 2024