notes on the ordinary, the evil, and the lemaire piped slipper
Thinking about Perfect Days, The Zone of Interest, and an ambient playlist about a high-fashion slipper.
Art is often an escape from the mundanity of life. Thanks to the vastness of the internet and a seemingly endless amount of streaming services, we’ve never had so many heroes and villains clogging our screens. We can literally watch epic journeys across space and time at any second of any hour of any day. I love these “larger than life” stories; I willingly watched six hours of Dune in cinemas two weeks ago during a double feature. Unfortunately for some, this week’s newsletter will not be a deep dive into how sandworms fuck or how they made Austin Butler so bald.
This week, I'm thinking about the mundane. The “ordinary.” I’m interested in how people — filmmakers, fashion designers, sound designers, and playlist makers, for example — tap into the beauty (or, in one instance, absolute horror) of the day-to-day, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other march through life.
Welcome to issue three of 5 pebbles.
01) perfect days review part one: the soft breeze of the beautifully banal
I have a reputation amongst my friends for my Sims-like habits. I eat the same breakfast most days, have a few outfits that I rotate through (shoutout to the orange turtleneck phase), and have been known to visit the same cafe on vacation four times in a three-day span if I like the food. Variety may be the spice of life, but sometimes routine tastes just as good. I mention all of this because I saw a film called Perfect Days recently that made this aspect of my existence not only feel seen, but validated. It’s the latest work from acclaimed slow cinema auteur Wim Wenders (of Paris, Texas fame), and centers around the habitual existence of the mononymous Hirayama, a cleaner of Tokyo’s architecturally stunning Tokyo Toilet system. As Wenders explained on the Little Gold Men podcast: “He’s very much about looking. He’s not a big talker.”
For two hours, we watch as Hiryama cleans already nearly spotless toilets; waters his collection of plants; sprawls on his tatami mat to read through a book until dozing off; listens to music on his vast cassette tape collection; gazes up at the sky before having his morning canned coffee from the vending machine outside his flat; takes out his film camera to capture the beauty of the branching foliage from his favorite trees; visits the same hole-in-the-walls for a plate of food after a long day of work. It’s a quiet meditation on the beauty of the seemingly banal.
There are moments that break the routine. He shows anger, surprise, and (in two heartbreaking moments) deep sorrow. These moments come like lightning; brief flashes of illumination that offer a glimpse deeper into who he is. Still, for all their wattage, they appear infrequently, gently shaking and never derailing the stability of his structured life. Seeing the film a week after watching both Dune films and The Zone of Interest in a 24-hour period, Perfect Days felt like a summer breeze. It is the cinematic equivalent of lying down in the sun, the rhythm of your favorite track drifting through the air, a soft breeze blowing across your face.
02) perfect days review part two: the overlapping shadows of big toilet, bad clothes, and the working woman
In comparing Perfect Days to a soft breeze, it’s only fair in this metaphor to admit the gust comes, at least partially, from a wind machine just offstage. Yes, there is a slightly darker side to a film about expertly buffed toilets designed by such Pritzker Prize-winning architects as Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, and Kengo Kuma. Life can’t always be as clean as it seems. The truth is that Perfect Days is a byproduct of Big Toilet propaganda. Long before Wenders came to Japan, the restrooms had been conceived by Koji Yanai, the heir to Uniqlo parent company Fast Retailing’s vast fortune. The goal was to showcase “Japanese pride” at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, which went about as well as anything did in 2020: not well, bitch. With that plan in the toilet, pun intended, Yanai teamed with Takuma Takasaki, the creative director at Japan’s largest advertising firm, Dentsu. A list of filmmakers was drafted, Wenders was invited, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.
Watching Perfect Days fully aware of its semi-corporate origins (I had already digested that bit of trivia before the film), I found myself thinking back to another recent project Wenders had taken part in — this one thousands of miles away from Tokyo Toilet. On February 28, Japanese designer Jun Takahashi’s label Undercover unveiled its Fall 2024 Ready-To-Wear collection at Paris Fashion Week. While the clothing itself was visually disastrous, the show was saved by a poem titled “Watching a Working Woman.” Narratively simple but deeply moving poem, it’s a romanticization of routine that Wenders wrote and recited specifically for the show. The poem was anchored by the first model, who walked barefoot into the room as the crowd still settled into their seats. Her outfit was visually simple: a pair of jeans and a white tank top, a cardigan loosely held at her side. An “ordinary” combination of clothes for an everyday woman.
Recited at the pace of the models’ own leisurely stroll across the cold cement floor, Wender’s tells the story of a single mom. She is 40 years old, works in a law firm, goes to the movies with her son, writes letters, does her grocery shopping. “As always, she wakes up just before the alarm goes off. As always, she looks at the clock and smiles, but then turns it off before it would start ringing. She doesn’t want her child to wake up. Not yet. As always, she gets up in the dark and walks into the bathroom. As always.” It’s a beautiful story, but I couldn’t help but get hung up on the context of how it came to be. The work was made to soundtrack a runway show full of clothes that no “working woman” could come close to affording. The pair of jeans and white tank top from the first look weren’t two separate garments at all; they were fused into a one-piece jumpsuit whose ribbed knit melted into the side seam of the jeans, matching the sweater at her side. A high fashion optional illusion twisting the “ordinary” that felt like a watered-down echo of the all-leather “jeans and a white tank top look” that opened Matthieu Blazy’s first show as creative director at Bottega Veneta two years ago.
There’s a tension to celebrating ordinariness at Paris Fashion Week, where the jet set class congregate to shop for their next outfit refresh. It’s a bit like catching sight of a flower blooming through cracks in cement. I’m left thinking about a small scene from Perfect Days. Hiryama pulls a young seedling from the ground, carefully packs it into a paper cup, and brings it back to his home to tend to. It’s important to consider the conditions from which things come, but at the same time, we can’t let it overshadow the joy of sitting back and watching beauty sprout.
03) the zone of interest review part one: we are witness to ambient genocide
A week before catching a screening of Perfect Days, I sat in silent horror among dozens of others trying to digest The Zone of Interest. The two films couldn’t be more different on paper. One is about a solitary man cleaning already clean toilets, the other is a family trying to maintain domestic bliss against the literal backdrop of Auschwitz. The film is about camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig working to create a dream life for their family in a house and garden just steps away from the cold concrete walls of the concentration camp.
I can’t remember ever seeing a Holocaust film that is as quiet as it is loud. A film that so deftly weaponizes the ordinary, using domesticity as a prism to refract the worst of humanity. It feels strange to call the film a masterpiece, but that’s the only way to sum up what director Jonathan Glazer achieved. Throughout the taut 106-minute runtime, the terror of what is happening is heard, not shown. It’s an effect that splits the movie in two.
There is The Zone of Interest as a visual experience, as a throng of cameras hidden around the home create an almost reality show-esque glimpse of the family as they go about their day as crematorium smokestacks billow in the distance. Then, there is The Zone of Interest as an auditory nightmare that rightfully won sound designer Johnnie Burn an Oscar this year. Faint screams and piercing gunshots puncture the domestic bubble, mixing with a series of compositions by Mica Levi that sound like otherworldly belches of pure evil. As Glazer explained in a recent behind-the-scenes discussion about his filmmaking process: “Genocide becomes ambient to their life.”
Ambient genocide doesn’t just encapsulate the pulse of the film, but also our current moment. For almost 23 weeks, a massacre has been waged against Palestinians. It’s the latest in a steady drumbeat of ethnic cleansings happening around the world (some more visible than others). The 24-hour news cycle puts evil on display in vivid, endless, high-definition detail; effectively turning war and terror and genocide into spectacle — but also background noise. It’s easy to get lost in the thick fog of compassion fatigue, which is why the film is so vital today. Faced with unfathomable evil, The Zone of Interest is a stark reminder that saying the loud part quietly can be just as important as saying the quiet part out loud.
04) the zone of interest review part two: ensnared in the vines of auschwitz’s tradwife queen
I had originally meant to contain my thoughts on The Zone of Interest to just one pebble, but there’s a particularly haunting scene I want to spend some time with. About midway through the film, Hedwig’s mother comes to visit the camp for the first time. So much time has been spent watching the Höss family mill around as they tend to their bucolic existence With the mother, Glazer introduces a powerful surrogate for the experience of the audience as she takes in the horrors of her daughter’s life in the literal shadow of Auschwitz. “That’s the camp wall,” the mother asks, as the two women take a leisurely stroll through the sprawling garden. “Yes, that’s the camp wall,” Hedwig replies. “We planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.” A minute later, she confides that her husband calls her “the Queen of Auschwitz.”
It’s a moniker that the real Hedwig Höss was known by around the camp, and it’s a key part of understanding both the people at the heart of the story and, more importantly, ourselves. No amount of planted vines can cover up the darkness of being Auschwitz’s top tradwife, yes, but the darkness isn’t in the past. Every day, people around the world adjust their blinders just enough to blot out atrocities; mentally compartmentalizing to ignore the screams and the smoke. As Glazer accepted the award for Best International Film at the Oscars this past Sunday, he issued a powerful warning: “All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present.” The Zone of Interest is as much a history lesson as it is a mirror, implicating us and urging us never to stop seeing the concentration camp wall through the vines.
05) you either die a lemaire lover, or live long enough to fuck someone who wears the brand’s piped slippers
On February 8, my friend Jacob texted a Spotify link to a playlist with a simple message: “Required listening.” The playlist, aptly titled “I fucked someone who wore Lemaire chinese slippers,” is a 12 hours and 43 minutes journey; a smooth, oft-sultry blend of ambient and moody deep cuts. Just to get this out of the way now, I am a dirty little slut for a good playlist — and this is a great playlist. No matter how many times I’ve tried to listen to other mixes, I keep crawling back to that stark image of the Lemaire piped slippers against a white background.
For those unaware of the very expensive slipper, here’s some background. It's officially called the "piped slipper," but with its distinctive middle seam, it stylistically has roots in Chinese slippers of the late 1800s. This modern iteration costs a few hundred euros, it’s been co-signed by the likes of GQ and Vogue in the last months, and was the subject of an SSENSE video wondering if “the mysterious world of men's footwear found its next ‘it’ shoe” — which prompted one commenter to accurately say “White guys in their 30s will see this and say ‘hell yeah.’”
Besides briefly buying and returning a pair of them last year (they were not functionally secure enough for my footwear anxieties), I hadn’t spent much time considering this particular shoe's soul until being introduced to the playlist. How things change. I’ve now spent an inordinate amount of time reflecting on how an outwardly innocuous clothing item can take on a life of its own based solely on some random cultural ephemera; in this case, a playlist created by Stockholm-based architecture student Miranda Lishajko.
“It was named a bit as a joke between me and my friends who know of my obsession [with the brand],” she explained over Instagram DM. “The title just came to me after seeing pics from every Lemaire show with ridiculous hot people wearing them.” For those wondering, while she has yet to meet or sleep with someone wearing the aforementioned shoes, “the dream still lives.” While she searched for a man to make the title a reality, I’ll be here vibing to the songs, forever associating the Lemaire piped slipper with an ambient music-loving softboy who has a thing for Sigur Rós, Four Tet, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
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