Curio #2 - Craig Mod, Hitchens on Self Improvement & Brian Eno
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the second edition of Curio, a newsletter for people who wish to escape the noise of the newscycle. Each week I’ll aim to spark your curiosity about a person, idea or thing you may not have previously encountered.
Thanks to all of you who responded with feedback on last week’s issue, it was greatly appreciated and is always welcome :)
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Enjoy the weekend!
Oli
Craig Mod
Last week in an intimate studio space near Union Square in Manhattan, I went to a fascinating talk by writer and photographer Craig Mod. Earlier this year he spent six weeks walking alone across Japan. He covered a distance of over 620 miles (998 km), taking photos and meeting some unforgettable characters along the way.
He wanted to use the opportunity to disconnect and so he limited his technology to Google Maps, Wikipedia and an app that charted the historically significant points on his journey. Other than that, he was completely cut off from the outside world. No social media, news or email for the entire walk.
Mod experimented with two innovative digital outputs. One was a custom-built SMS tool which he used to send out a daily text and photo to anyone who subscribed by texting “walk” to a number he wrote on his website. People’s responses to these texts weren’t sent to him. Instead, they were collected into a print-on-demand book that was waiting for him on his return.
His second unique digital output involved stopping each day at around 9:45am, taking out a recorder and placing microphones in his ears. He would record for about 15 minutes, and at the end of the day, right after pushing out the SMS, publish to a podcast called SW945. The idea behind it was that if you listen to the podcast with headphones on and close your eyes, you will be transported to the place where he was and will hear exactly what he heard.
Although his presentation left me with an intense desire to go walking in Japan, it also touched on a number of other much deeper issues. These included: asceticism, solitude, meditation, our relationship with technology and the philosophy of walking.
When he returned to the seaside town south of Tokyo he calls home, Mod wrote an essay for WIRED magazine called The Glorious, Almost Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan. A couple of excerpts:
“In the context of a walk like this, “boredom” is a goal, the antipode of mindless connectivity, constant stimulation, anger and dissatisfaction. I put “boredom” in quotes because the boredom I’m talking about fosters a heightened sense of presence. To be “bored” is to be free of distraction.”
“One chief purpose for this kind of monastic walking is to literally pound into your body, step after step, the positive habits that can be found only through repetition. To create a physiological template of stillness, or kindness, or focus that you can then attempt to bring back to the "real" world.”
Although his background is in computer science and he once worked at startup in Silicon Valley, Mod now spends his time writing, taking photos, podcasting and designing beautiful books. If you’re interested in learning more about him or his thoughts on the following topics, I’ve listed where I recommend you should begin:
Doing a ten day Vipassana meditation retreat
How to retain a positive relationship with technology in an age of unprecedented distraction
Why he walks
The process of physically creating and designing books
Mod has his own podcast on making books called On Margins
His thoughts on reading, writing and the future of books
Hitchens on Self Improvement
While working as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair in the mid 2000s, the late Christopher Hitchens was encouraged by his colleagues to go on year-long health kick. The objectives were, in his words:
“To drop down from the current 185 pounds, to improve the “tone” of the skin and muscles, to wheeze less, to enhance the hunched and round-shouldered posture, to give some thought to the hair and fur questions (more emphasis perhaps in the right places and less in the wrong ones), to sharpen up the tailoring, to lessen the booze intake, and to make the smile, which currently looks like a handful of mixed nuts, a little less scary to children.”
The result was a highly entertaining three part essay called On the Limits of Self-Improvement, part 1 of which is named Of Vice and Men. The pieces are vintage Hitchens and are littered with hilarious self-deprecation, particularly when describing his physical appearance in the third person. Some examples:
“The fanglike teeth are what is sometimes called “British”: sturdy, if unevenly spaced, and have turned an alarming shade of yellow and brown, attributable perhaps to strong coffee as well as to nicotine, Pinot Noir, and other potations”
“The nails on the hands are gnawed, and the nails on the feet are clawlike and beginning to curl in a Howard Hughes fashion (perhaps because the subject displays such a marked reluctance to involve himself in any activity that may involve bending)”
“Viewed from the front when clothed, the subject resembles a burst horsehair sofa cushion”
“At all times, the subject gives off a scent that resembles an illegal assembly, either of peoples or of materials, in the hog wallows of Tennessee or in the more remote and primitive islands of Scotland”
You can read the rest of Hitchens’ lively and amusing essay here.
Brian Eno - Deep Blue Day
This uplifting and nostalgic track from Brian Eno, the godfather of ambient music, was part of his 1983 album, Apollo (it would later feature in Danny Boyle’s cult classic, Trainspotting). Eno was asked to produce the album to accompany a film comprised entirely of real footage from the Apollo missions. In a 1998 interview, Eno describes why he decided to include the atmospheric twang of guitars:
“When I was asked to do the music for the film, I discovered that the astronauts were each allowed to take a cassette with them on those missions, and they nearly all took country and western songs. I thought it was a fabulous idea that people were out in space, playing this music which really belongs to another frontier - in a way, seeing themselves as cowboys. So the idea was to try and make a frontier space music of some kind.”
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