existing within the context
New writing, and looking at the context of all in which we live and what came before us via three internet rabbit holes.
It has been 24 days since I last wrote a newsletter, which I assure you was by choice. The truth is this: I didn’t want to upstage Joe Biden. That's right. Over the past few weeks, I waited patiently as he put on his long, slow political striptease. He shed his clothes, slowly and then suddenly dropped out, and, finally, donned a slime green crop emblazoned with the word “Kamala” on it as he took the ferry to Fire Island to join his gaggle of gays for a truly Brat summer.
As diehard 5 pebbles stans will note, I have been quietly fingering the prostate of American politics for months as I waited for Operation Coconut Tree to commence. Issue 01 — an intro, a coconut tree, a chatgpt erotica, and more — devoted key space to the philosophical ponderings of Kamala Harris. “We really do exist in the context of all in which we live and came before us,” I explained. “But it’s hard to see the forest from the coconut trees when the focus of our cultural output is so vehemently stuck on creating viral moments that are as hollow as a discarded coconut.”
This edition continues the essential work that Harris began as I forgo cultural trends and look at the context of all in which we live and what came before us via three internet rabbit holes sandwiched between two excerpts of recent writing I did for ARTnews and the One Thing newsletter. Read on for Wim Wenders' prescient thoughts on pachinko parlors in 1985, learn more about an incredible 1988 Comme des Garçons ad, and join me on a hunt for a stray painting seen briefly in a steamy, fucked up French film about incest.
Welcome to issue eight of 5 pebbles.
01) an excerpt from ‘netflix’s charmingly polite new dating show’
Sometimes, a piece of media is released that is so specifically tailored to your interests that it feels fabricated. It’s as if it has been created in some anonymous room by media executives, their business suits covered by sterile lab coats as they pour liquified records of your viewing history into test tubes to build an Überprogramm. That piece of media, for me, is The Boyfriend, a new reality show on Netflix. I discovered the show through genuine word-of-mouth via a Chinese friend's IG story. He had posted a photo of a cast member, the beautiful model and barista Ryota (my personal favorite), slurping noodles in what could’ve passed for a scene from the legendary, defunct Japanese reality show Terrace House. A few DMs later, I was introduced to The Boyfriend and immediately devoured the first batch of three episodes.
The series boldly answers the question: "What if Terrace House and Love Island were smashed together in a seaside home in Japan, and everyone was (naturally) beautiful, (extremely) well-mannered, and, most importantly, gay (or bi)?” While I don’t personally watch Love Island, MILF Island, or any related archipelago-based shows in the “love, sex, and alcohol poisoning” genre of summer TV, I was a major fan of Terrace House before its abrupt, tragic ending in 2020. I bring up this series because, well, Terrace House lazily strolled so The Boyfriend could… walk slightly faster (and be gay). Both shows feel like the reality TV equivalent of taking an Ambien and cocooning yourself under a weighted blanket.
To read the full review, please click here.
02) wim wenders went to a pachinko parlor, and all he found was a prescient metaphor for social media
I recently began watching Wim Wenders’ 1985 documentary, Tokyo-Ga (I have not finished it because of my attention deficit issues and its obscurity on the back web streaming sites). The film centers around his trip to Japan to learn more about his favorite director, Yasujirō Ozu, whose 54 film oeuvre includes the masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953). He was curious whether, in the 20 years since Ozu’s death, anything was left of the world Ozu captured in his films. It’s described as a “film diary” more than an actual movie, and is unintentionally hilarious because Wenders drolls on about the state of our civilization from the moment he sits on the plane from Germany to Japan. “On the flight over, they showed a film, and like always, I tried not to watch it and, like always, I ended up watching it,” he grouses within the first six minutes. I love this man!
There's a rant he goes on about 16 minutes into the film that I want to highlight, partly because it feels like the words of a time traveler, describing the hollowness of social media decades before it ensnared all of us in its web. The quote is obviously about gambling addiction, but it also proves that we’ve always been grimy little rats trying to seek out brain-dead escapism to distract from the crushing weight of reality.
Late into that night. And then, late into all the following nights, I lost myself and one of the many pachinko parlors and the deafening noise where you sit in front of your machine. One player among many, yet for that reason, all the more alone and watching the countless metal balls dance between the nails on their way to out or, once in a while, into a winning game.
This game induces a kind of hypnosis, a strange feeling of happiness. Winning is hardly important. But, time passes. You lose touch with yourself for a while and merge with the machine and perhaps you forget what you always wanted to forget.
03) hunting down a painting hung above a bed in the steamy french film, ‘l'été dernier’
With movies about successful (usually terrible) people with beautiful homes, part of the fun isn’t just figuring out their toxic character traits. It’s dissecting the art and objects placed in their homes as background fodder for the characters. I recently watched the 2023 French film L'Été dernier (aka Last Summer, aka the subpar remake of the fantastic but terribly-named 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts), which is basically — spoiler alert — about a mom fucking her hot stepson. It would be an understatement to say this is not a romance.
To give slightly more detail, Anne is a highly respected attorney living a picturesque life with her businessman husband, Pierre, a distracted, sagging older man, and their two adopted daughters. Pierre’s hot, troubled, 17-year-old son (played by the spectacular new talent Samuel Kircher) comes to live with them, and… just watch the film or the Danish version. As my Letterboxd review sums up: “This remake of the superior original film [...] shows that the French also know how to engage in a bit of, how you say, l’incest. Samuel Kircher is impressive, but the acting all around was too melodramatic, the editing was a mess, and the directing was overwrought.”
Around midway through the film, one painting caught my eye and burned itself into my mind. A blonde woman with pink lipstick slumps against what appears to be a bed, gazing off into the distance with a forlorn air and a black bow affixed to her hair. After a quick screengrab, some brightening and color adjustment, and a reverse image search, I found the source: Nu De Face (1943) by Swiss artist Gérard de Palézieux.
In the film, this Realist painting is hung above Anne and Pierre’s bed, providing a perfect visual metaphor for the film’s core theme of “woman languishing as she considers the weight of her actions.” I couldn’t dig up any info on the particular painting, and the artist’s oeuvre is generally unmemorable and full of far too many works depicting still lifes of vases, but I love that a seemingly random painting added so much texture to the narrative. The movie may have been a flop for me because of my love for the original, but the film and this painting show that artistic renditions of complicated women will never go out of style.
04) three fashionable nuns walk into a comme des garçons ad
How many tabs did I open within minutes of seeing this black-and-white image of three high-fashion nuns power-walking through a factory floor? After catching sight of the photo from the IG account @sheetnoise shared on a random follower’s IG story, I had to know more and quickly settled into my sleuthing mode (more hunched over my desk than usual, in a rabbit hole of browser tabs, totally forgetting where I am).
The image is part of a 1988 ad campaign for Comme des Garçons, shot by German photographer Peter Lindbergh and featuring the supermodels Linda Evangelista, Michaela Bercu, and Kirsten Owen. The images are captivating and timeless, thanks in part to Lindbergh’s use of black-and-white. He is quoted as saying: “The real world is in color, so if you use black and white, you take it out of the real world, out of the banal.” There’s a reason his images still get plastered across Pinterest boards and social media vibe accounts.
During my research, one close-up shot of the three women kept coming up repeatedly; unsurprisingly, this photo was chosen as the cover art for Peter Lindbergh. Untold Stories, a massive 322-page tome published by Taschen to coincide with a major exhibition at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The museum invited Lindbergh to self-curate Untold Stories, allowing him complete artistic freedom. He would work on the show until his untimely death in September 2019, making the 2020 exhibition a bittersweet capstone for his historic career. As one blurb for the accompanying book notes:
“This volume documents the first exhibition curated by Peter Lindbergh himself shortly before his untimely death. With more than 150 photographs from the early 1980s to the present, it offers new and unexpected insights into the work of the legendary photographer. The selection is complemented by detailed texts on the exhibition’s origins and a tribute by Wim Wenders, a close friend of Lindbergh’s.”
Lindbergh was a true artist in the realm of fashion photography. His ability to produce images as artistically stunning as the clothing draped over his models made him a rare talent. RIP to a real one, but probably for the best that he passed away in 2019. He would’ve hated the AI puffer jacket Pope Francis era.
05) excerpt from ‘queer artists brought pain, history, and hope to the 60th venice biennale’
Deep within the cavernous Arsenale di Venezia, amidst hundreds of works on view at the 60th edition of the Biennale, two paintings by Peruvian artist Violeta Quispe offer an invitation into a queer, gender-breaking multiverse. The works — El Matrimonio de la Chola (2022) and Apu Suyos (2024) — are a patchwork of nearly 100 characters pulled from Andean traditions of Quechua culture, recontextualized and filtered through a prism of sexual and gender equity. The inspiration for these colorful pieces comes from an adolescence spent navigating Lima’s deep conservatism.
“This led me to ask myself, where do I place myself in the nature of a society where ‘those minorities’ are found and marked by the society of a country that, unfortunately, still has patriarchal, racist, classist, homophobic and sexist thinking?” Quispe told ARTnews in a recent interview. “My origin is part of my blood, my touch, my art, my customs and my identity.”
This question of placement (or, more often, displacement) forms the core of Quispe’s work, but could also serve as a subheading for the exhibition’s central theme: “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere.” It’s a concept that the Biennale’s curator, Adriano Pedrosa, knows well. As the first Latin American and first openly queer person to lead the famed exhibition, foreignness and identity have been at the top of his mind. But so, too, has beauty.
Specifically, as his curatorial statement explains: “A foreign, strange, uncanny, and queer sort of beauty.” Constructing an exhibition full of this exact kind of beauty was the only directive he’d received when former president Roberto Cicutto appointed him artistic director in late 2022. After exploring the exhibition over two balmy days in early June, it seems Pedrosa’s mission was accomplished, mostly. There is beauty, strangeness, uncanniness, and, yes, queerness to this year’s Biennale.
To read the full feature, please click here.
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