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In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These images, eventually published in Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.
In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.
In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.
Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
Fight Club, David Fincher’s arch 1999 study of disaffected men, presents male rage as a subculture. The layered neo-noir film, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, offers angry young men rituals, language, and an origin story for their fury. “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” pronounces Tyler Durden, a peacock of a character played by Brad Pitt. The line is true of all generations, but Tyler, a soap salesman who becomes the spiritual leader of these aggrieved dudes, delivers it as a revelation.
Though the film addresses the woes of Gen X, in the 25 years since it was released to polarized reviews and low ticket sales, Fight Club has burrowed deeply into American culture. Its dialects of secrecy (“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”) and insult (“You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake”) have seeped into casual conversation and politics. Pitt’s sculpted physique remains a fitness ideal, and his virile performance is worshiped by pickup artists and incels. And of course, actual fight clubs have sprung up, stateside and across the world.
Fight Club’s insights about the consequences of men rallying around resentment remain apt today, a period in which Donald Trump’s grievance politics and the growing swamp of the manosphere are shaping American masculinity. Amid its frenzied storytelling, the film offers a cogent theory of modern masculinity: Men suck at communicating. We see this idea most clearly in the constant evasions of the unnamed Narrator, an insomniac office worker played by a haggard and numbed Edward Norton; a cipher throughout the film, he eagerly adopts Tyler’s macho swagger to avoid facing his insecurities. The famous twist, that he and Tyler are one and the same—and that Pitt’s character is a mirage—is the culmination of his deception. The Narrator is so unused to expressing himself that he doesn’t even recognize his own desires and fantasies. He has to sell himself his own anger.
The film quickly establishes the Narrator’s emotional reticence. Prone to digression and omission, the Narrator is elusive despite his constant chattering. His wry descriptions of his IKEA furniture, business travel, and chronic sleep deprivation establish the detached mood of the film, which presents late-20th-century America as an immersive infomercial. His irony-tinged voiceover, which Fincher pairs with images inspired by commercials and music videos, is more performance than disclosure. The capitalist fog of the Narrator’s life is so thick that he struggles to tell his own story, channel surfing through his memories.
In the beginning, the Narrator briefly escapes his insomnia by attending gatherings of people with terminal and debilitating illnesses. Always bearing a name tag with an alias, an early indicator of his evasive nature, he keeps mum as he sits among people with testicular cancer, sickle-cell anemia, and brain parasites. His silence makes them assume he’s at death’s door and shower him with affection—which helps him get the best sleep of his life. This holds him over until he realizes Marla, a fellow attendee played by a quirky and gothic Helena Bonham Carter, is also a phony leeching off the unwell, a discovery that breaks his morbid simulation of intimacy. He confronts her and learns she, too, is lonely and depressed, but decides to push her away rather than bond over their mutual ennui. When they exchange numbers to divide up the meetings so they never see each other, the Narrator tellingly does not share his name. He fears vulnerability.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
A FTER HIS BROTHER DIED, Alex Van Halen fell apart. He can prove it. There’s photographic evidence right here on his phone, which also happens to be a repository of unheard, unfinished Van Halen songs. Spend the day with him, and he might play a few. But first, he’ll scroll to that image, an MRI of his spine with a gaping hole in it, a missing piece.
Eddie Van Halen died at age 65 in October 2020, leaving the world without its greatest post-Sixties guitar hero, and Alex without his brilliant, maddening, agonizingly sensitive baby brother, his best friend and bandmate of five decades, the “sweet guy” he jammed with nearly every day. Alex spent a lifetime protecting Eddie, but now, at last, there was nothing to be done, no bully to beat up, no lead singer to swap out. He was awash in what he calls “oceanic grief,” an onslaught of suffering so profound it left him with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. “I shut down,” he says. “I was yelling and screaming. I was beside myself.”
Read the rest of this article at: Rolling Stone
Patrick Clancy’s new apartment, in midtown Manhattan, looks much like any other tidy bachelor pad. There’s little on the living-room walls besides a mounted acoustic guitar and a sailing trophy. He has held on to a few keepsakes from his former life in the coastal suburb of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with his wife, Lindsay, and their three small children. A pink blanket printed with rainbows is draped over the couch, beside throw pillows stitched with scraps of kids’ clothing. A toy helicopter, his middle child’s last Christmas gift, sits on a sharp-cornered media console that would have needed babyproofing in the family home.
Cora was five, Dawson was three, and Callan was eight months old. Pat loves to talk about them and dreads having to explain what happened. On January 24, 2023, he stepped out of the house in Duxbury to pick up children’s medicine and a takeout dinner order. When he returned, less than an hour later, Lindsay lay semiconscious in the back yard, having cut her neck and wrists and thrown herself from their bedroom window. She’d left the children strangled in the basement. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night; Callan was airlifted to a hospital, where he died a few days later. “I have three kids,” Pat sometimes still says, out of habit, before adding, “They are deceased.”
The Clancys were the kind of family whom true-crime enthusiasts often find irresistible: young, white, well-off, photogenic. Lindsay, a thirty-two-year-old former cheerleader from suburban Connecticut, had no criminal record and was a respected labor-and-delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Tabloids reprinted Facebook pictures in which she cradled her baby bump or posed with the kids along a picket fence. Internet sleuths turned up a message from a private Web forum where she’d sought advice for postpartum anxiety and depression. As legal and medical experts have noted, women who kill their children tend to be portrayed as either “mad” or “bad”: victims who are very ill, or villains who are very evil. Whereas the “bad” mothers are demonized as callous and neglectful, the media scholar Barbara Barnett writes, the “mad” mothers are routinely exalted as “perfect” and “normal,” innate nurturers who were “driven to insanity because they cared so much.” Though little was known about Lindsay’s state of mind, the public was quick to slot her into the role of the exemplary mother who’d unexpectedly snapped.
State prosecutors announced that they were pursuing murder charges, but online a group of Lindsay’s fellow-nurses rallied to her defense. They shared a hotline for struggling mothers and changed their Facebook profile pictures to an illustration of hearts labelled with the letters “LAOL”: Lindsay’s Army of Love. Almost a hundred Massachusetts women wrote to the judge, vowing to stand by Lindsay “in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us.” Among Lindsay’s most vocal defenders was her husband. Four days after the tragedy, from the children’s hospital where Callan had just been removed from life support, Pat appealed to the public on a GoFundMe page that had been set up for medical bills and funeral expenses. He devoted most of his note to eulogizing his children, then asked others to join him in forgiving his wife. “The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring,” Pat wrote. “All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace.” Within days, the GoFundMe raised more than a million dollars.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
The first fire bell rang out at the St. James Hotel at a quarter to nine in the evening. A guest had noticed smoke curling under the door of the room next to his and rushed to the front desk to report it. Upon entering the room, hotel staff found flames spreading across the bedding, which reeked of turpentine. Matchsticks littered the floor alongside a black satchel holding a small glass bottle of liquid. The fire, which was still small, was quickly put out. The man who was staying in the room, who had given his name as John School, was nowhere to be found.
Ten minutes later, a similar discovery was made nearly two miles away at the St. Nicholas Hotel. A bystander claimed to have seen two mysterious men hurrying out of the lobby. Soon after, a fire was discovered on an upper floor of the nearby Lafarge House hotel.
It was November 25, 1864, a clear, cool Friday just after Thanksgiving, and New York City was thick with crowds of people headed out for the night or just enjoying a downtown stroll. The jovial mood shifted sharply as the sounds of alarms erupted in the streets of Manhattan. Frantic guests and staff found rooms aflame at hotel after hotel, including the Metropolitan, the Belmont, Lovejoy’s, Tammany Hall, and the Fifth Avenue. At most of these establishments the particulars were largely the same: sheets, blankets, and furniture piled atop mattresses in a tinder heap; apothecary vials left behind at the scene; guestbook listings indicating that a young man with a generic name had checked into the room.
Disinclined to lose paying customers to the mounting terror outside its walls, the management at Niblo’s Garden, a theater next to the Metropolitan Hotel, sent a young boy onstage with a sign hastily painted with “NO FIRE” in large letters. Nearby, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum wasn’t so lucky. Around 9 p.m., someone broke open a vial of flammable liquid in the museum’s fifth-floor stairwell, and a fire instantly ignited. Thousands of people had gathered for Barnum’s promise of extra performances on Evacuation Day, the anniversary of British troops’ departure from Manhattan after the American Revolution. Among other offerings, Barnum had lined up “three mammoth fat girls,” a collection of French automata, Native tribespeople, and live capybaras and kangaroos. Staff were able to extinguish the flames in the stairwell before any real damage was done. Still, a cry of “Fire!” sent Barnum’s audience running for the exits.
Over at the Winter Garden theater on Broadway, the house was full for a one-night-only performance of Julius Caesar, a benefit intended to raise money to purchase a statue of William Shakespeare to be placed in Central Park. The play’s cast featured the three thespian sons of the legendary Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth: Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes, on stage together for the first (and only) time. The Great Booth Benefit was the hot ticket of the season; orchestra seats, normally less than a dollar, went for five.
The crowd of 2,000 roared when the brothers made their entrance in the first act. The audience may not have noticed the distant sound of fire-engine bells at the start of act two, but soon enough the din was overwhelming. Someone saw firefighters outside the theater’s windows, near the Lafarge House next door. A man in the dress circle registered his assumption out loud. “The theater is on fire!” he shouted. He was wrong, but it was enough for alarm to spread through the house. Theatergoers abruptly stood, scanning their surroundings for flames and a path to the nearest exit. Edwin Booth stepped to the front of the stage to calm the audience, assuring them in his trademark low tone, “There is no danger.”
The performance resumed, and the New York Herald’s reviewer later dubbed it an example of the “high standard of our public entertainments”—no other theater scene, the reviewer said, could purport to offer “three tragedians, or even one, comparable to any one of the Booths.” Still, a lot more had transpired outside the theater than the audience at the Winter Garden suspected: While the Booth brothers played out Caesar’s untimely end on stage, Confederate arsonists were attempting to burn New York City to the ground.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atavist
