Ahh, it’s nice. The outside. The outside is nice. Finally, very nice. The best season in Japan. The leaves, they change. Out yonder, Mt. Fuji performs foojalicousness on the horizon as I type these very words. Being a bit coy, hiding, peeking, hiding once again. The usual Fooj, all snow capped and sweet.
’Tis the season to Buy Things, apparently. So says every website in the world. Black Friday, now also a Japan Thing. Our faces are being smashed by sales. If you’re going to buy anything, I say buy books:
I know most of you have read Things Become Other Things (thank you!!), but if you’d like to gift it to someone, that would be lovely. And it’s pretty cheap right now: $17 on Amazon. It was just named a Kirkus Reviews “Best Book of 2025” (not the, but a; we’ll take it), so that’s nice.
Also, thank you to everyone who bought the fine art edition of TBOT — we sold out last month. If you’re looking for Japan-printed-and-clothbound books for gifts, my books OTHER THING (which is signed and numbered) and Kissa by Kissa make for great ones. They ship next-business-day and usually arrive anywhere in the world within 3-4 days. SPECIAL PROJECTS Yearly members get big discounts on books and prints. Thanks, as always.
#Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century
Speaking of books you should nab. Longtime friend and member of the Craig Mod Cinematic Universe, W. David Marx, has a new book fresh off the presses: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. I loved this book. I also hated it, in the sense that it affirmed my growing sense of dread around “cultural production” in 2025. I got to read it back in September, and I marked the hell out of it. And then David and I recorded a new episode of On Margins, the first in about five years.
The book is a look at the last twenty-five years of (largely) American pop-culture: art, film, music, and politics, as politics has veered firmly (entirely?) into mostly bad-faith entertainment. Spread out over Marx’s 380 (quick) pages, something’s off:
The first step in reversing cultural stagnation is to accept that artistic invention is a social good. And like so many other social goods, it isn’t necessarily going to have its production prioritized by the market. We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than overly market-tested products.
Reading Blank Space didn’t necessarily “radicalize” me, but it made me overtly grateful for the work I’m doing: work grounded in the world, physicality, relying on social media as little as possible, operating at “human scale” and creating as many “durable” and “deep” connections as possible, attempting to elevate everyone who’s involved. I’ve been lucky. I’m able to walk, to write, to photograph, and then collate all that into printed books. It’s easier than ever to sell printed books online thanks to companies like Shopify. And it’s easier than ever to form a relationship with a fulfillment warehouse, set up a DHL account, and ship the things around the earth. Global shipping is the 10th wonder of the world. I love that I work with talented printers and binders, paying their employees well. I love that I have readers who are OK with paying what my books cost. I like that the arc of the work is slow and loping, that daily updates might happen in spurts, but they are 2,000-5,000 words spurts, amidst an outsized walk, more like an ascetic ritual, calming, fullness-giving, the opposite of whatever it is you have to access to upload daily TikToks.
Work like mine has almost no representation in David’s book. There’s a ruthlessness that’s taken hold across all strata of cultural making (and life itself). Everything turned into a casino, “traps” galore. Billions as the only goal. Achieved celebrity? Start a coffee brand (or gin brand, or tequila brand; I’m shocked nobody is selling their own cigarettes). Leave “nothing on the table.” Epicurean maximizing. That sort of thing. The whole world in a swivet about every dumb breath by some dumdum. AI now turning the future protean. Models upending models within days. Solid ground made liquid for the next decade.
David’s book is funny. I mean, it’s heartbreaking, mainly. But you’ll laugh as your soul is pummeled. David quotes all the fools of the last twenty-five years. They are happy to shoot themselves in their own feet, again and again. The book is most tragic when it dips into politics. In our On Margins chat, we mention Obama, how his ascension symbolized some “completion” — “it was love triumphing over hate, and peace over war, and all sorts of things of the way we were told how things were going to play out because of the natural order of the world, that there would be some sort of correction and this was the correction.” It’s surreal now to think of that world in 2010. The iPhone basically still new. Obama in the White House. The full conversion of everything online to brain traps, to teleportation heroin, still years away. Back when you actually had to “follow” folks to see their content. 2010, just fifteen years ago, but about seven generations of mental life. Back when a trillion-dollar company was a pipe dream (Apple being the first to hit that number, in 2018; now it feels like a monthly announcement, Nvidia hitting $5T a month ago), back when you didn’t nab a $100B valuation as a startup before you even launched a product. Back when Apple’s own apps weren’t loaded with ads. Back when not everything was “recurring revenue” driven. Back when even non-institutional investors had a chance to get in on a company like Facebook or Google while they were still in ascendancy.
Still, around that (now seemingly Brigadoonish) time, I already had a growing sense of doom / skepticism around how much tech money was being bandied about:
Craig: Early 2008, 2009, 2010, I was very negative on Facebook. Very early because I remember explicitly that Facebook was eating up all the designers, uh, from Brooklyn who were doing genuinely interesting work. I remember being really depressed about that. But if Facebook offers you a million dollar salary — especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, it’s hard to turn down. But it felt like there was this incredible compromise that had started to happen.
And David, expanding on this point:
David: This is a really important point of the 21st century, which is I graduated in 2001, and I don’t think anyone around me, even the money hungry people were like, I’m going to be a billionaire. No, it was just on zero people’s minds. And the best was like, dude, did you know you could go work for an investment bank and within five years you could be making $1 million?
Anyway, you should absolutely read David’s book. It deals with all of this and more. His ability to synthesize vast swaths of history and criticism into sane, compressed chapters is inspiring. It’s a fun read, and may radicalize you, too, in better directions. Or just reaffirm the path you’re already on. Or just get you to step offline for a few moments.
As my “protest” against the speed of onlineness, the way culture seems to be compressed and homogenized, pushed through the beef-grinder of social media, becoming less and less surprising or compelling, I’ve switched from not only starting the day without touching my phone / the internet until at least lunch, but also reading for 1-2 hours each morning. It turns out, when you read deliberately each day, you can plow through quite a few books.
I almost always nab the Kindle sample of the Booker winner each year, and sometimes stick with it, more often drop it. This year, I stuck with it. It was easy. David Szalay’s Flesh is an amazing read, strangely compelling, strangely riveting, unlike anything I’ve recently read. Reminded me a bit of the game, A Dark Room (itself riffing off McCarthy), mixed with Hemingway, sprinkled with Murakami passivity. The book has been criticized for being “too masculine” but a heterosexual male protagonist does not a masculine book make. This thing is utterly denuded of masculinity. The Hungarian protagonist is passive in the extreme, the world “happens” to him. He, himself, is inarticulate (his most common line of dialogue is: “Okay.” (This, also, is not a sign of masculinity.)), but Szalay’s brain often sneaks in, to articulate what the protagonist cannot. On cultural schisms:
He realizes that the things that are so important to him—the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—they just aren’t important here. Those things have no reality here. That’s what it feels like. So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality here.
It’s nice to imagine that contained with an “Okay.” Very much enjoyed this book!
Occupying an entirely different universe: Peter Miller’s Shopkeeping:
A shop is a stage—there is a degree to which it must be ready. If it is not ready, if there is a stray box on the floor, a customer will flinch and fear they are not to come in. If a light bulb is out, they will fear something is wrong. A clear-countered kitchen, a couch with fresh pillows, a well-made bed—that is a shop, ready to open.
And so Peter unloads a lifetime of running a shop. I don’t think I’ve nodded so hard at a text in a while.
On Amazon:
Amazon was a setback to hands-on retail. It brought a kind of dishonor to the environment of a shop. Suddenly, time after time, people were asking for some help, then copying down the titles or products you had suggested, and then leaving without purchasing a single thing. They had not come to purchase; they had come to survey what they would later buy online. The quiet sorrow was the tacky, stained edge that it put between the shopkeeper and the customer. It was impossible to not feel something. And it became clear that you needed to have caution as you dealt with your customers. “How may I help?” turned into a sadly complicated exercise.
I think we’ve flipped back a bit. People might still do this — go to a retail shop to inspect and then open Amazon to buy — but those people are probably not the same ones entering a local indie bookstore.
And apropos all the above, Miller says: A true shop has a life, a breath, a status, set not by algorithms but by minds and hearts. And you know it. It’s true. It’s why we love local bookshops. Why we love kissaten. In fact, let me pause for a second on that point: Perhaps the biggest single factor in why kissa are “so cool” or “feel good” or feel “otherworldly” stems from the owner(s) deciding, forty or fifty years ago: This is the place I’m going to invest in (hence the nice, well-made furniture) and be present at and part of until I die. This is simply not a contemporary impulse, to run a coffee shop for forty years. (To a degree, economic factors in the 60s and 70s and 80s made it so you’d do it forever or not at all; also there is a survivorship bias in the kissa left today — these are the owners who truly stuck it out.) Flowing from that commitment: all the small details of life and love, of attention and care.
One of the great interior designers of kissa in the 70s was Matsukei Shinpei (松樹新平), whose work still lives on in a scant few Tokyo kissa: Enseigne d’angle (which I’ve been going to for 20 years) and Voleur de Fleurs and Les Jeux Grenier. There’s also Bunna in Roppongi with an endearingly surly owner. All these places embody Miller’s ethos.
Shopkeeping is a punch of a read, full of wisdom for anyone who cares about what they do. Even if they don’t run a shop.
I also plowed through John Fowles’ The Magus (1965). It’s nearly 700 pages long, making it possibly the longest book I’ve ever read? Also, why? Well, a friend and I have an informal “book club” and he had just blown through it and wanted to discuss, so I read it, too. I have to say, it’s an impressive feat of synthesis — the sheer volume of references and historical notes. It’s well written, but it’s written in a way that doesn’t light me on fire. It’s very “workable, pretty prose.” But nothing like what Lynne Tillman or Annie Dillard or Solvej Balle or Robin Sloan or Joe Westermoreland or Percival Everett or Denis Johnson or Ursula K. Le Guin or Sam Anderson or Peter Matthiessen or Michael Ondaatje or Jenny Ofill or … you get the idea … nothing like what those writers do. There is a whole subset of authors, writing in a way that makes it almost impossible for me to get through ten of their pages without having to start writing down lines myself. There’s a kind of writing that activates this noggin’, and there’s a kind of writing that impresses but feels like something else entirely, distant, a bit cold. Maybe it’s the difference between, say, Monet’s Water Lilies vs a photorealistic charcoal rendering of a landscape. Fowels tends towards the later — technically impressive but, now that I’ve been done with the book for a few weeks, I’m left wondering where the emotional heft went. It’s worth reading to see how many times you can “subvert” expectations, almost to farcical levels. The last 200 pages were some of the fastest pages I’ve ever read. Be warned though: The landing, however, doesn’t stick. (It didn’t for me, anyway.)
For a hoot, after reading, watch Guy Green’s 1968 film version of the book, staring Michael Caine and Anna Karina. Anthony Quinn is perfectly cast as Conchis. The rest of the film is a fine example of how books stumble when translated to film. There’s a lot of compression happening here, and I’m not sure anything in this movie would make sense to someone who hasn’t read the book.
It’s been great to see Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams get more and more recognition in the last few years. I read it in 2011 (a first version was actually published in The Paris Review, Summer 2002 (and heck yes, I own a copy!)) at MacDowell, at the behest of Lynne Tillman. It instantly became one of my favorite books, and remains so today. I read it yearly. (It’s short; 1/6 a Magus) It’s difficult to articulate precisely why it’s so good. The magic is in the words, Johnson’s deft use of vernacular. It is a masterclass in brevity, in making every sentence count. I’ve discussed the book at length with friends. Eli Horowitz and I spent a whole afternoon at Banff in awe of its effortless non-linearity (try mapping it out on a timeline, the book bounces wildly back and forth). So it was with great great great trepidation / fear / apprehension that I hit play on Clint Bentley’s new film adaptation. Thankfully: It mostly delivers. Joel Edgerton (aside: I really loved him in Dark Matter (2024) (what a fun show?)) and Felicity Jones are extremely well cast. William H. Macy brings the goods as Arn Peeples, the best named character in history. I was happy to see a dying hobo drink from a boot. It was instructive to see how they compressed and expanded the text.
Sadly, one key point felt botched: Robert’s participation in the “murder of the Chinaman” was far too demure, and almost recast the man against Johnson’s vision. In the film he holds his foot for nary two seconds. In the book he’s a full participant in the attempted execution. Because: the “Chinaman” doesn’t die in the book. He lives — allowing him to curse Robert. Which sort of frames his whole universe. It’s worth quoting this ‘graph from the book because it’s so good:
The party of executioners got to the midst of the last completed span, sixty feet above the rapids, and made every effort to toss the Chinaman over. But he bested them by clinging to their arms and legs, weeping his gibberish, until suddenly he let go and grabbed the beam beneath him with one hand. He kicked free of his captors easily, as they were trying to shed themselves of him anyway, and went over the side, dangling over the gorge and making hand-over-hand out over the river on the skeleton form of the next span. Mr. Toomis’s companion rushed over now, balancing on a beam, kicking at the fellow’s fingers. The Chinaman dropped from beam to beam like a circus artist downward along the crosshatch structure. A couple of the work gang cheered his escape, while others, though not quite certain why he was being chased, shouted that the villain ought to be stopped. Mr. Sears removed from the holster on his belt a large old four-shot black-powder revolver and took his four, to no effect. By then the Chinaman had vanished.
I mean, I get why they didn’t film this (money) but so much of the movie hinges on the guilt of Grainer having taken part in this guy’s “murder” (as opposed to just being “cursed” by him), I wish they had honored that more fully, or otherwise had shown us the circus performance, guns and all.
Conversely, the film added a few scenes: the guy shooting the guy who shot his brother (also, nice to have a big wide, static shot), Grainer chatting about life with the park lookout, nailing a dead guy’s boots into a tree. They worked well.
The film is beautifully shot (by Adolpho Veloso) — I applaud the use of natural light. There were several moments of transcendent cinematic beauty. But my main criticism with this adaptation is photographic: it is too “digital T/1.4” — way too sharp for this material, way too much dynamic range, and way too shallow a depth of field for many of the shots (there’s a lot of single-head-filling-the-frame-bokeh-bonanza going on). It makes a movie focused on 1915 feel so 2015. Having just rewatched There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, I can’t believe I’m about to write this sentence, but: I wish this had been shot on film. I wish they had “properly lit” a few of the scenes, were able to balance the natural light in the background with real foreground lighting as well. I know why they didn’t: again, money. But the more I shoot film the more I realize what a kind of infinite crutch digital sensors can be — they almost allow too much, too easily. (Dynamic range being the biggest tell.) I think an edge is lost. It felt lost here. (Of course, who am I to judge, just some bozo watching too many movies.)
Still, nice to see Robert Grainer finally up on the big silver screen. (So to speak.)
Meanwhile, I made my “film debut” in Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune (2025) staring Aziz and Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer and, impressively. Keanu Reeves. Keanu and Keke slay. Although, Felipe Garcia Martinez steals all the scenes he’s in. It’s a timely hoot, done well. I read about twenty versions of the script and gave a ton of notes over the last few years. A blast / delight to see the final form. I appear twice, in a photograph from an onsen trip. You can rent / buy Good Fortune on Apple TV / iTunes.
On the TV side of things, PLUR1BUS’ (2025; Vince Gilligan) pilot was one of the best pilots in recent memory. So much fun, such a great pace, original, intriguing — fabulous through and through. Sad to say, the next four episodes have left me wanting. I love Rhea Seehorn, but wish she had been given more than one note to hit. Also, as I’ve written many times before, these kinds of series would often benefit from being half the length. Or even better, as a movie. There is something to be said about the compression of a 90-minute film. It’s a real art, somewhat lost. If you have ten hours to tell a story, you need to be disciplined, lest the rope afforded by that length end up hanging you along the way. Episode five is a great example of an hour that should have been twenty minutes.
Somewhat connected to PLUR1BUS is Solvej Balle’s (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell) insanely named On the Calculation of Volume. Like PLUR1BUS it’s also a story about a global “event” leaving just a few people “unaffected.” But Volume really works to embed us in the most bizarre and delightful ways possible. I don’t agree with much of what Tara (the protagonist) does, or how she goes about doing it, or how little “testing” of the world (which is stuck on November 18th, and no longer advances forward) she engages in, but damn if it’s not fun to spend some time peeking over her shoulder. I feel like she is operating in the most “Scandinavian” way possible (whatever that might mean), making it all the more intriguing.
I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here (and online discourse around PLUR1BUS is … manic to put it lightly). Simply, that you don’t need a lovable, or even sane protagonist, but you do need someone curious, or capable of curiosity? And with more complex inner workings beyond single emotions? It just struct me as odd how two pieces of media engaging with similar circumstances (humans responding to global-altering events), could present so differently from a yes-this-is-working, or no-this-isn’t-quite-landing perspective.
Holy smokes. Here we are, like four thousand words later, or something. Sorry about that. I haven’t written much online in over a month. A lot has been going on, and I’ve realized I need to attend to Life Things more than I have. I’ll be discussing a bit of this at my SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only Board Meeting at the end of December.
