welcome wordly interlopers
Prepare for lift off, and then an awkward hovering towards nowhere and everywhere with nobodies like you and me.
What are you on about? I’m doing it. Starting the Substack I’ve been promising to do for a while now. I’ve even stolen a picture off the internet. That’s how serious I am.
OK. I’m already bored, but what’s it about? Everything. Nothing. Nowhere. Everywhere. In between places. In between people. Thresholds. Going here. Coming back from there. Not going. Things. Non things.
That’s not a pitch. Right. Sorry.
Who are you? What are you doing in my bedroom? How did you even get in here? Wow, that’s a lot questions. Sounds like you have some trust issues. We can talk through those if you like?
No. OK, well I’m a journalist who cut their teeth in the newspaper world...
Great, how’s your readership of three going? Rude.
I’ve worked across continents and publication types, having done everything from bar and food reviews for magazines, to hard hitting social justice and environmental news stories, to cultural and geopolitical analysis. This one time, I talked a robot engineer into sharing all the gory details about his new venture, which was an opensource manual for making your own girlfriend. Obviously that went viral.
For a brief, happy time I focused exclusively on culture journalism in Hong Kong. Which is where I managed to convince wizened culture critic/globalism expert, Ackbar Abbas to explain lots of complicated stuff to me over breakfast in Sheung Wan.
He talked about two specific things that feel relevant here:
How he coined the term ‘hyphennation’ to refer to Hong Kong as a place with no power over its own choices, completely dependent on other nations to survive. That was in ‘97, as Hong Kong was being ‘handed back’ by the British to mainland China. “I used to think that was something peculiar to Hong Kong,” Abbas said. “Today, all nations are hyphennations”.
Hong Kong’s allure as a ‘dislocated space’ in the films of Wong Kar-wai, which, I wrote, “can be read as a prescient evocation of the future city in all its homogeneity”. Picture the scenes: Moody, half-emptying malls, people and vehicles shuttling here and there, random pineapple obsession, stuff being said like “I’m just a stopover on the journey of her life” and “it turns out all lonely people are the same,” and “the night’s full of weirdos”, and more cinematography words I will look up and insert later. Could be anywhere in the future, right? Same kinda cyberpunk angst, just the odd cultural reference points tweaks here and there and we have universal relateability. At this rate, we’ll all coalesce into each other as the same blob of everythingness and nothingness, and what does that mean about anything?
“Coalescing into each other”, hyphenations, prescient evocations… who even actually talks like that? And, seriously, how did you get in here? I liked the thing about the sex robot, but this…
Look I will try to avoid as much jargon as possible, I’m not here to pander to a closed-circuit academic crowd nor am I offering quick and easy takes on worldly things for you to unthinkingly regurgitate and rebrand as your own. What I want is to explore, with you, what it means to have so much cultural noise coming at us from all angles at such velocity and vertigo.
All the more so, what means when we ourselves are a dislocation, unsure of where we come from, or where we are going, and still trying to figure out, what, out of all of it, we actually want (or need) for ourselves (and each other). What it means to be from everywhere and nowhere at all, and to connect and identify on this very basis.
To quote artist/ activist Kacey Wong in an interview we did in Hong Kong in 2019 (he’s now in Taiwan):
“Before it was more like your culture is defined by the passport you hold, or your bloodline, or the language you speak. Now it’s much deeper than that. Such as, how do you identify? It’s based on certain facts and certain imagination. So it’s half fact, half fiction… It’s about pinpointing the self in that chaos of identity”
Right, and you have all the answers then?
Absolutely not. What I do have is a vested interested in getting under (and between!) the skins upon skins of this topic, alongside the requisite journo nous to hunt down the right people to ask the right questions. And also, let’s face it, the fois grois of verbal skills, and I’m funny.
And a healthy ego to boot… Hey, comes with the territory.
What territory? Oh, I see what you did there.
Right, one last thing. The picture you “stole from the internet” and the other one with the boat?
Yeah, the illustration accompanies the text of Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius)’s famous little religious yarn Labyrinth of the World.
One of my old tutor Jim’s favourite works (you can read about it in the tribute I wrote when Jim passed away.) Has the line that I always really liked:
As I gazed at the global shape of the world, I palpably felt it move and whirl in a circle until I feared to be overcome with dizziness
The boat is from a wood engraving my great uncle Sani, a toolmaker from the Hungarian Pusta who might never have seen the sea, made as a gift for my mother’s Norwegian family who hail from the bitter wilderness of the Arctic Circle. I’m very fond of it.
Right, well I can’t really say anything cutting about that, can I? Nope, but what you can do is ask me what’s in the cooker before we round things off?
…
… and you could ask if this going to be some doom and gloom entropy blog or if there are going to be any heartwarming wisdom nuggets to be gleaned #positivenews?
(yawn)
…and what I’ll say is that I’m really excited to be debuting with a conversation with New York-based, Inner Mongolia-born artist, Xinan Ran.
In her work, she “searches for the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge”. Her latest exhibit is fun and shrewd in the questions it asks about how Chinese influence is perceived in the States.
Timely, no?
Re: doom/gloom journalism versus #positivenews. The answer is, obviously, the in between. Think a freewheeling, broken-brained David Epstein but female, anxious, and with no actual books under my belt (yet).
Will there be t-shirts? No I only just finished the “Pumpstock” one I made for my training buddy and that took three weeks.
P.S. Judge me for my typos and I’ll judge you for the life you don’t have ;)
Brilliant!