23. Watching Grey Gardens with Rory 📺 Gilmore Girls 🏡
and silver medal to "Waiting room 💉 Grey's Anatomy 🏥 | Writing, ambulance, dialogues."
Lately many of my Google searches start with “Do I have ADHD if…” followed by a habit I’ve done my entire life and recently thought might not be how a typical brain operates. Now, I do not recommend taking your medical cues from things you see on Instagram/TikTok/a Grey’s Anatomy scene that hits too close to home. I also can’t say I’m actively trying to do anything with these google searches because then I have to make an appointment and call my insurance and find out if I can get off work and…wait, is putting this off an ADHD symptom? Hold on while I Google something real quick.
After a while of being spoiled with the luxury of having my own private office for the past year, I am back in an open bullpen and it's made me realize how my work routine has really come to rely on a constant background stream of podcasts/hyperpop/Patti Lupone cabaret show recordings. With other peoples’ conversations and phone calls or worst of all, silence, I feel like I’m only able to focus on tasks in at best two-minute increments before my attention wanders or the other three conversations happening around me steal it. But earbuds in a bullpen are frowned upon, even though I have to do this for 12 hours a day and am constantly tired because I’m also (cringe) marathon training. Just a little Lorde warbling in my ear though, and I’m sailing through my spreadsheets. I have no idea how people are able to work on something boring without having a little bit of separate stimulation, like using a metronome to keep your brain on beat.
If only there was someone out there who had dedicated their lives to creating background sounds to help people concentrate, specifically people who watch too much TV. Oh wait, there is- the YouTube channel TV Ambience. Why listen to my own stupid office when I could listen to the sounds of Luke’s Diner from Gilmore Girls or the meadow with Edward and Bella? Though ambient noise playlists have been around forever, its funny to give literal background noise a fandom tie-in. There are definitely cozy, vibey shows that are basically ambient noise on their own. Heck, TV as a medium was designed to be listened to while doing other housework. But what are the “vibes” of hanging out in the Seinfeld apartment divorced from the context and tone and, you know, what makes it a TV show. Furthermore, Miranda Priestly’s office or Ryan Gosling’s car in Drive are actually two of the most stressful places I could ever think of being (although maybe that's part of it? Every assignment I’ve ever completed was mostly motivated by fear). I could also poke fun at the Grey’s Anatomy one advertising “hospital atmosphere”, but that literally is my background show. Also, most of these don’t even use sound design from the shows themselves, just a few seconds of a scene and then stock sounds looped. It would be harder to isolate those moments and remove dialogue and music, but you could get some lovely textured sounds if you picked the right sources, and you’d be using a bit more of the craftsmanship that actually made this show something people enjoyed.
I do want to give TV Ambience their laurels though as I’m impressed by the sheer output here. 189 videos in the last two years! With 56 alone for Gilmore Girls! There’s no real money being made, and the creator interacts with their commenters earnestly enough that it seems they take real satisfaction from this craft. Turns out porn commenters aren’t the only artists with integrity left. I wonder, what's their process? Surely you don’t get to 189 by just looping sounds and hitting upload. They have developed their own style by opening on dialogue and innovate new formats like their pomodoro method videos.
I’m very interested in artists who pump out many similar works in large volumes. In Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, he says that in a chef, you value consistency over creativity. If art is your business, especially if your medium is something as tangible as a ceramic or a dish, repetition makes sense, but what about when there’s no incentive or supply to fill? Any artist may become obsessed with a theme or a style so much they must crank out similar piece after piece, often repeating themselves yet inevitably coming out with something different eacb time because they were a different person upon that work’s making. Think of the love of labor in grooving your hands through wet clay or braising a piece of meat in the same motions over and over. Or the Character Actor who plays the same archetype a hundred times. The usual metric of an artist is their range, but many’s careers are spent in narrow straits, where success is finding new variations in the same typecast. As a studebt of minutia, I’d like to ask the artist to point out which of their five hundred clay cat figurines or Mean Old Lady performances is the one they’re proudest of and why. I bet they have an answer, and quick.
good reads
New York Magazine | The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates by Ryu Spaeth
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
Holding Patterns | Loaded by Gray Chapman
In Georgia, when you go to the courthouse to get your marriage license, you follow signs for “Pistol and Marriage Licenses,” because those two types of paperwork are handled by the same probate court. Some couples are tickled by the irony, the juxtaposition of love and violence. Georgia is ranked 10th in the nation for its rate of men killing women.
“Most games feel like a mini Pride party,” Kate, a Sun season ticket holder who requested we only use her first name, posted a TikTok video about her experience at the game, told Andscape. “Last night felt like a MAGA rally in Connecticut. It felt rabid.”
SEEN/READ
09/20 Not Another Love Song
09/21 CIVIL WAR
09/22 The Black Jacobins, WOLFS*
09/23 The Picture of Dorian Grey
09/24 The Black Jacobins
09/25 The Black Jacobins
09/26 The Picture of Dorian Grey
*this was my first time seeing my name in the credits on a big screen :D also i met spike lee in the lobby??? huge day all around
and now the local news…
The Yankees are the AL East champs, jaywalking is now legal, and Eric Adams has been indicted. If I actually think too hard about the human suffering that could’ve been alleviated in this city with the $10 million of public funds stolen by his administration, I want to cry. The three-month-old girl who died in a migrant shelter, the migrants who were forced to sleep in tents in the dead of winter while there were thousands of empty beds in shelters, turning a college campus into a war zone to defend genocide- the list goes on, sadly. I love this city so much, and so I have a burning hatred for anyone who has the privilege of being chosen as its steward but instead makes it an even harder place to live than it already is. I never thought my DeBlasio hatred could be surpassed, but Eric Adams is an incredibly exceptional asshole. He’s also one of the funniest people to ever live though so here’s some jokes.
and finally tag yourself i’m yeti mischief
shocked you didn’t tag yourself as werewolf howls!