All in Culture
This year The Festival of Political Photography focuses on food. Even for conscious consumers, the daily necessity of eating creates a tendency to interact with food mainly through habit and ritual. But viewed from unfamiliar angles, mundane foodstuffs can look provocative.
During a bout of textural appreciation, I first encountered reference to ASMR deep in the comments of a noise upload. ASMR is also noise, but not music. One ASMR video shows nothing more than two forks scratching a foam covered microphone. There’s also a low key, sleep inducing simulated kidnapping.
An album creates a whole; a collection of songs that together tell a story much wider and complex than they would alone. It feels like nowadays I just tend to listen to individual songs and kind of miss the big picture that an artist or a band is creating with the whole of an album. But every now and then I’m lucky enough to stop, take a moment, and listen to the whole story instead of just hearing the beginning.
For Barán, the biggest cultural difference has been how much people care about others. She feels that the people in Benin are so much more interested in each other, and so much kinder than what she is used to in Finland, where, she admits, it often feels like people simply don’t care about others’ daily concerns such as flus, stressful life situations of funny everyday occurrences.
This November right before father’s day one of Finland’s best-known dad-joke comedians published a humor book that seemed to have the corny humor category especially in mind. Author Stan Saanila created a guide for pronouncing Finnish using words, slang and sounds that are familiar (and pronounceable!) to speakers of English.
My hands are sweaty, My heart beats too fast (not fluttering like the wings of a bird but
thumping like stones being thrown into water).
The sneeze-like sensation warms up your long-time memory and drowns your consciousness in expired feelings. The voyage of déjà-vu can take you from overwhelming happiness to sinking sadness in a couple of seconds. It acquaints you with your memories afresh, releasing what I am addicted to: nostalgia.
There’s no expiration date on good music, but there is a certain flavor of regret reserved for discovering an awesome band through a midcareer album’s 11th anniversary show. Boris recently played the entirety of Pink at Tavastia, a noisy, smoke-drenched, perfect experience. The band’s particular mix of doom, psychedelic rock, and avant garde noise leaves little space for any sentiment other than pure enjoyment.