Carl Mehrbach "2016 No. 1" [Painting-01·08·2016 (state 5)], oil on canvas, 56X60 inches
“I miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at… I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff… I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say… I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.”
—Orin Incandenza in Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
This sort of sums up where my mind has been lately. I feel a grief for a past where time was structured differently, anticipation felt so much different, and where attention and focus didn’t require such an effort. Being a so-called Xennial (those born between around 1977-1983), turning 47 in October, there is this challenge of reconciling the way things used to be with what they will inevitably become, with the present being feeling like a nebulous transitional state where it always seems like I am waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Social media has left me feeling exhausted lately. There is so much slop to sort through, whether A.I. (endless fake images of celebrities crying each other’s arms or flora and fauna that do not exist in reality) or human-made (think grifter garbage, click-bait or rage-bait fodder, etc.). Scanning through feeds I am met with a barrage of advertising, promotional posts, ‘content’ vying for my attention, trying to convince me that my belly fat is due to poor gut health or that my fellow fragrance content creators have just the right suggestions for “summer bangers.” I am feeling the fatigue.
This afternoon, I opted to put my phone away from reach and watch full episodes of the old show In Search Of…, hosted by Leonard Nimoy and of the CBC-produced Canadian children’s program Mr. Dressup. I made a conscious decision not to splinter my attention between what I was watching and, say, my email, or looking at five other tabs in my browser. There was something infinitely comforting about it, even as I at moments drifted in and out of sleep while these shows played. There was this dreamy familiarity of a fundamentally different world for those two hours or so, as if time really did sort of slow down. It felt like the most relaxed state I had felt in such a long time.
“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
― American computer scientist and computer philosophy writer Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Sometimes I feel like some neural pathways in my brain have weakened since algorithms transformed timeline-based “social media” into “recommendation media.” It promotes restlessness, anxiety, wanting more, while dispensing dopamine rewards like narcotics. I also feel like my neck strain from craning it forward viewing screens has increased tenfold in a matter of months. Its seduction is that powerful. I am angry that I find it harder to sit and read a book: to dedicate a mere chapter feels like such an accomplishment. This is breathtaking. I used to get through whole 200 page books within a week.
Here I am on SubStack, compelled to write for my small but loyal readership, and I am so enervated that I can barely muster through paragraphs. It’s writer’s block. The inner critic is loud lately, especially since I showed up on the scene here. I’ve learned that the only solution is to write freely, and that’s why I push through. I guess what I am really trying to convey here is that there has been a lot on my mind about the state of the world, of American society, and our future as a human race that it’s taken precedence over writing about fragrance, for now at least. I think the above is a disjointed expression of my trying to console myself for the state that I am in (cue the Belle and Sebastian song).
That’s all I have to offer this week. ***I am still finding my footing here.
'Slow content' like listening to records, reading books, watching movies have a bit of a "magic" quality to them since they are paced in a way that is more suitable to humans. We aren't built to be barraged and process the intense stream of content being thrown at us with short-form media like TikTok, instagram, X/bluesky, etc. As a result, people have less attention, are more anxious and paranoid, and get addicted to the occasional quick hit of 'feel good' content that is mixed among the trash.
It's part of why I enjoy things like fragrance. The acts of intentionally sitting down, smelling, pulling apart the notes, revisiting memories or things the scents remind me of, writing my notes down, etc all help to slow me down. Quite literally, stopping to smell the roses. Photography can also do this for me, forcing me to take an active role in *noticing* and capturing the beauty in the everyday.
While it's not really productive to be anti-contemporary media, having a balance with the wild media landscape and slower, more intentional (disconnected or not) activities to help re-center is important (I think). Otherwise, we end up stressed, anxious, depressed, and mentally exhausted -- none of which are particularly great places to try to muster inspiration to create from. One could argue this is by design, depending on how down the conspiracy rabbit hole you'd care to go, but that's beside the point.
If you're looking for an idea: you post a lot of photos of flowers elsewhere, maybe could do a series of posts highlighting some of these -- whether a fragrance currently exists or not -- and things about them that you like? *or* a series highlighting smells you have yet to find a scent for that you'd love to find? There's nothing wrong with a little self-indulgence and at least for me, sometimes that helps throw more fuel on the fire.
I feel this so much. Thanks for putting it out there into the world. As a 46 year old, I’m on the same basic cable channel. Social media has sapped any sort of creativity that I had which is not much. I feel the pull to post ad nauseum about what I’m doing, wearing, summer bangers as you say, sotd, etc, but I’m fighting it. I adopted a strategy recently. I’m only going to post longer pieces (on here) that I’d actually want to print out and bind into a physical book. Speaking of books, I think you should write a physical book/ebook/self published book of reviews or articles. There’s such a void of published work on perfumes, even reviews. It’s all just throwaway content for the most part, but how many of us still look at Turin and Sanchez’s guides? I do.
Ha. Yes. Belle and Sabastian. I wish others would nostalgically discover that soft is the new loud!