✶ look at your fish
In 2012, Robin Sloan published a tap essay-app called Fish. Through it, I learnt the story of Samuel Scudder, Louis Agassiz, and looking at fish. Fish extolled the value of, in the age of a fast-moving internet, returning to the things you love over and over again.
Here are the fish in my genealogy of influence, my personal canon. In the words of Mary Oliver: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
My life has opened up in the moments where it met art: Egon Schiele’s work in Leopold Museum one cold dark winter’s night; the Setouchi Islands in the off-season, like fresh air coming through the window cracked open; learning about Goya in college on a gloomy day. I went to the home of Monet’s waterlilies paintings and spent the entire afternoon on a different planet. Hammershoi. To look, to look again.
Singaporean theatre: Teater Ekamatra, who staged an amazing transcreation of A Clockwork Orange. Grandmother Tongue by Thomas Lim; GRC by Alfian Saat.
In London, Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities and I haven’t shut up about it since. Elsewhere, New York gave me Hedwig & the Angry Inch’s audacity and Lena Hall’s voice.
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Alice Wu’s Saving Face, Mia Love-Hanson’s L’Avenir. Wang Xiao Shuai’s So Long My Son, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, Alejandro Landes’s Monos, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap. Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All the Time.
Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive; Carey Mulligan in An Education; Kim Min-hee in On the Beach Alone at Night.
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Maria Turmakin’s Axiomatic, Sherry Turkle’s The Empathy Diaries.
Fiction by George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Carmen Maria Machado, Alice Sola Kim, Min Jin Lee, Elena Ferrante, Colette, Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gogol, Nabokov. This very short story by Rumaam Alam. Ann Ang’s Bang My Car. You Jin, Lu Xun, Yuan Fei. The Great Gatsby.
The poetry of Mary Oliver, Ada Limon, Linda Pastan, Heather Christle, Mary Ruefle, E. E. Cummings, Jorie Graham, Danez Smith, Frank Bidart, Richard Siken, Lydia T. Liu.
Sady Doyle on class, Calvin Trillin on his beloved, Alice, Ingrid Sischy on Galliano, John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. Dave Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.
My favourite illustrators in the world: Eleanor Davis — anything and everything, but especially You & a Bike & a Road, and her work for The Bronx Freedom Fund; Sara Hagale, whose pencil strokes are sublime. Kate Beaton’s hilarious, poignant comics. How to Draw a Horse.
Makers, writers, researchers. Those whose careers and philosophies have been inspiring me lately: Kenya Hara, Alan Kay, Sara Hendren. Nendo. Kelli Anderson’s motion and paper craft. Craig Mod, Robin Sloan. Cecile Richard’s games. Jon Bois’s Future of Football. Rasmus Andersson. Eva Decker’s website and guestbook. Susan Kare, Katie Dill, Erin Kissane, Celine Nguyen.
Virginia Satir’s five freedoms. Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert in conversation on grief. Sister Corita Kent’s work and rules.
The words of the marvellous Adrienne Rich:
“An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
Lastly, and most importantly: I am always thinking about Sakamoto listening to the rain.
