Jordan Lee (dot) Life

It is safe to say my life has been changed by years of reading the slim philosophy books of Byung-Chul Han. But his way of thinking is very hard to pin down. I thought Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? by Matt Elmore did a great job tying together his various projects as well as providing some elusive life context. I highly recommend reading it.

My entrypoint to his work was through his book Burnout Society which offers a blistering critique of digital life during late stage capitalism, where “self” becomes a project that must be constantly mastered and freedom turns into a need to always be achieving. There is no rest, just exhaustion and anxiety fueled by an inner boss who can’t be hidden from.

But it was work on rest and time through books like Vita Contemplativa and The Scent of Time that changed my whole paradigm. When there is no contemplation, action loses its meaning. Without inner space it is not possible to have deep encounters and our feeling of time becomes disjointed without any “scaffolding” for memories to be built. This was starting to sound suspiciously like some of the ideas of Zen and lo and behold, he had written The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism which theorized it from a very interesting angle.

I think this article does a good job of showing some of the unresolved (dialectical?) ideas that make his work so compelling to me. He clearly loves German romanticism and the pursuit of eros or beauty but also shows the deep need for inner space created by contemplative traditions. He lands somewhere very interesting where space and beauty work together. That a self shouldn’t be an insular 24/7 project of improvement (which shuts out the world) but a thing that can be loosened so that the immensity of the world can come through in a more profound way. I’ll end this with a quote from the article.

A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend. One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.

Since 2018, when her excellent record Hand in the Dark came out, Eva and I have collaborated on her music and mine, done several extensive tours as bandmates and kept up a musical kinship when she moved to the other coast. I know how deep and intuitive of a musician she is, yet this album was still able to blow me away. These astral-folk leaning pop songs feel like a culmination of a decade of experimentation and searching.

Looking Glass eschews the inward-looking tape hiss invocations for a wide range of collaborations highlighting the scenes in LA and NYC she’s been a longtime member of. While the recording fidelity may be clearer and the disposition a bit sunnier, mysticism is still the soul of the project with lyrics reflecting on the nature of time, love, and the depths that can’t quite be reached with words.

Eva and I have had many long conversations about the depressing state of the music biz and how to navigate it in a way that feels true to our art and ourselves so it was interesting and heartening to see that this album is currently only available on bandcamp. I give this meticulously crafted, fun, yet soulful album my highest recommendation.

Blade Runner (1982) Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (seen on the airplane to Paris)

I had never seen Blade Runner and absolutely loved the atmospheric storytelling and the philosophical questions posed. The sequel, made 35 years later was fine but in comparison felt bloated and lifeless. It got me thinking about how the conditions of filmmaking have changed so much in the past decades crowding out weird visions and trying to turn all “IP” into a franchise.

Juste une Illusion (2026) (seen through Lost in Frenchlation subtitles in Paris)

L and I saw this through a nonprofit group who adds English subtitles to French film. It was a funny and sweet coming of age movie that was kind of like if Superbad had a really good heart and was aware of societal stratification.

Perros Amores (2000) (seen at Angelika in NYC)

If the promotional text is to be believed, this movie kicked off a golden age of Mexican cinema. It tells the story of three lives forever intertwined by a car crash- a poor dogfighter, a celebrity model, and a mysterious vagrant type. At first I had a hard time with the cruelty and hopelessness but it has stuck with me and I think the filmmaker did a good job of showing the way casual harm is perpetrated on every level of society.

Toy Story 5 (2026) (seen at Universal Studios in LA)

My friends Noah and Natalie love spectacle so when I visited them in LA they wanted to see the new Toy Story at the IMAX screen at some sort of Universal Studios fake town square. I had a fun time in the unreality and really enjoyed the movie which rails against screen time and advocates for (Disney branded) imaginative play instead. I especially loved the self-serious slapstick comedy of the Buzz Lightyear army.

Jackass Forever (2022) Father of the Bride (1991) Hoppers (2026) (seen at Noah and Natalie’s house in LA)

At Noah and Natalie’s house we watched these movies as we prepared for their wedding (congratulations!) I had never seen Jackass before but it definitely was entertaining. I think my favorite stunt was Steve-O making a beehive on his dick, least favorite was when they got really hurt. Recently a friend said she liked Jackass because she liked watching men destroy themselves.

Speaking of men, Father of the Bride was awful! It’s like it wanted to be sentimental but it was about this rich factory-owning dad who sees his family as just another one of his vast possessions. The main slapstick part is him sneaking upstairs to check the in-law’s bank statements and the main comic relief is the vaguely gay, vaguely European wedding planners. He has no personal growth whatsoever! It’s like he finally decides to spend lots of money on the wedding, admits he lied, everyone just gets used to him, they hug, the end. There’s a version of this movie that could have been great where you see how idiotic he is, but in this one the gaze is firmly his and it is all the other characters who seem ridiculous. It’s such a time capsule of the type of comedy in the 80’s and 90’s where the whole plot is that a man all of a sudden has to have emotional intelligence instead of business savvy for a second. Are you guys ok???

Hoppers was another pseudo-political Disney movie about environmentalism which was cute and fun but ended on a real centrist compromise where, as Joe Biden once said, “nothing will fundamentally change”. In the end her little glade is protected but the system that threatened it is still 100% intact. I know what you’re thinking, why am I thinking so hard about a movie meant for 8 year olds? And you’d be absolutely right. But the movie plays with such potent imagery, the protagonist blocking a bulldozer with her skateboard, her freeing all the pets from her school- they are signaling towards real animal liberation and eco-justice movements where some of the members have been sent to jail for doing this type of thing. All I’m saying is that I wish the movie could have had more political imagination and collectivity than the lone hero protecting her own backyard.

Testament of Ann Lee (2025) (seen on airplane home from LA)

I loved this movie about the origin story of the Shakers. The musical sequences with eerie dancing and beautiful renditions of hymns were really well crafted. The story felt revolutionary, not just because it partially took place during the American Revolutionary War, but because the Shakers were willing to go to such lengths to live what they believed to be a virtuous life and the sublime transcendence that comes with it.

Reading this book was one of the most profound experiences of art I’ve had all year. Written in 2021 by Romanian Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai, the reader is given a penetrating look into a thinly fictionalized East German village. The narrative centers around Florian Herscht, a muscular yet boyishly naive and good hearted young man who doesn’t quite understand that he works for a neo-nazi.

Halfway through I noticed for the first time that the book is entirely one sentence. In interviews the author talks of his writing as having “velocity” and I have to agree. The narration moves unceasingly from one townsperson to the next picking up the inflections and worldview of whoever is currently being described. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. In a very short time the town of Kana felt completely inhabited.

I was surprised that most reviews say the book is bleak or difficult. I found that the first half described the inhabitants of this small town in ways that were darkly humorous and sometimes even endearing. As the action picks up the story changes to be about the ways they react to fear and chaos in their own ways. Some appealing to the higher powers of God and government, others becoming nihilistic, some numbing themselves, and others transforming in completely unexpected ways.

After reading this, I did a little research and found out that this specific area of Germany is having a serious resurgence of dangerous far right activity in real life. You could say that this book shows the way that fear and nationalistic nostalgia mixed with an economic downturn create the conditions for movements like virulent fascism but I think it goes deeper than that. It also shows the little ways the townspeople give their lives meaning against the backdrop of chaos and randomness. From the post office workers to the town drunk to the amateur meteorologist- everyone’s seemingly erratic behavior makes sense within their own richly depicted yet contradictory inner world.

As usual it got me thinking about my Zen practice which says that suffering cannot be escaped from but only looked at deeply, understood, and transformed. Viewed through this lens the book is not a nihilistic celebration of suffering but an exercise at looking deeply and, if we’re lucky, eventual transformation.

I really liked Brian Merchant’s recent post on the neo-luddite movement. He not only gets into the historical context of why skilled textile workers wanted to destroy the machines that automated their craft with poor substitutes that put them out of work but also gets into the current day movements against reckless generative AI companies recreating the same dynamics.

Based off of the BBC show of the same name, this book contains four written essays and two photoessays. I was expecting a sort of Art 101 type of text, which I would have welcomed, but instead I got something deeply thought-provoking and politically radical. I kept being surprised at how contemporary this work from fifty years ago still feels.

The first essay draws heavily upon the work of Walter Benjamin and his ideas of how our relationship to the image changes in the age of mechanical reproduction. Then he moves on to the nude and the objectification of women in European art which feels indebted to Simone De Beauvoir. The second half of the book critiques European oil painting as obsessed with possession, status, and objects and draws a line straight to our current moment of being inundated with ads as our main way of interfacing with the visual.

A line about advertisements stuck out to me, that as a form it is incapable of showing pleasure-in-itself since it would defeat the point of creating desire. He spells out how deeply destructive it is to be surrounded by these images that stir up envy and convert political activism to individualistic daydreaming. It is kind of unbelievable that the BBC funded this, it almost reminds me of Adam Curtis.

I’m glad to have recently learned about the mid twentieth century psychoanalyst and theorist Marion Milner who specialized in creativity and blockages and I loved this article by Akshi Singh exploring the idea of how creativity “de-idealizes” the self and forces a deep look at ugliness and destruction along with the beauty.

For Milner, both love and work are steeped in risk and danger, presenting terrains where the boundaries of the self are breached, convictions and certainties surrendered, and where destructiveness, aggression, and shame are close at hand. It isn’t Eros versus Thanatos here, love versus evil and destruction. No, for Milner destruction and evil are part of love.

I am back from a week abroad and was looking for something grounding while adjusting back to my old timezone. It seemed like a good opportunity to get into the new album of improvised bowed instrumentals by this accomplished trio of musicians whose multifaceted work has travelled through many varied musical ecosystems.

The album has been a rewarding one with improvisations slowly unfolding as the result of expert listening and playing. I’ve been a fan of Macie Stewart’s for a while now but I’ll definitely be checking out the work of the other two members of this trio.

I’ve been seeing this book pop up a lot lately and finally decided to read it after a strong recommendation from Liz. Postman argues that the television is a culmination of the instantaneous speed of the telegraph with the visual nature of the photograph and has shifted our culture out of the age of typography into the age of show business- changing how we think of news, education, and social interaction.

The book first takes a historic look at how the technologies associated with writing totally changed society and brought with it new ideas like a sense of linear history and the ability to make fully cited, complex propositions that could be refuted point by point. Apparently In 1800’s America, three hour public debates were popular forms of entertainment even among the working class. Can you imagine our collective attention span handling that now?

He believed the television brought with it a new ideology where the viewer needed to be constantly entertained through tactics like attractive people, short decontextualized bursts of information aka “news of the day”, no time for introspection or ability to have serious debate, and of course the barrage of fifteen second commercials psychologically tuned to tap into our deepest longings.

The problem is that even if we don’t watch TV ourselves he demonstrates how the dominant media technology of the day still has major downstream effects on every part of our lives. I think that is why this book from forty years ago has become popular again, because his description of the ills of television have only accelerated in the age of social media.

I agree with his conclusion which is a call to be more aware of the ways a media technology shapes our actions and find ways to push back. He calls for a demystification of how media is made. I think these are great points and makes me feel validated in a pull towards small scale DIY types of distribution and a desire to regain my attention to handle more rewarding works.

Percussionist extraordinaire Matt Evans has a new album of synth and rhythm which pulls sounds from the alien and the mundane to make compelling and inventive instrumentals. Matt is also one half of Neti-Neti who I wrote about back in April after their moving show at the Poetry Project exploring the need for modern Western societies to have public grief rituals.

Shoutout to Jeremy Shatan’s great music blog anearful for bringing this album to my attention through his weekly newsletter.

I have been following the journey of the proposed A Corp LLC structure for a while now and it looks like it just passed in the Colorado legislature. I know it sounds boring, but an A Corp would have some interesting advantages since it is specifically for creative fields like making sure the artists keep 51% of the shares, being mission driven, making it easier to share equity with large groups of collaborators, and having less onerous paperwork than a traditional LLC.

Like any new framework I’m sure it will have its problems once it meets reality but for now I think it could occupy an interesting niche.

I was really inspired by Liz and Max’s podcast interview with two members of the Maine Music Alliance who sucessfully stopped a Live Nation venue from coming in and disrupting the local scene in Portland, Maine. I found the conversation to be especially helpful in demystifying the process of dealing with local government and how to change conceptual arguments into ones that are legible for policymakers.