43. Make a point of seeking out moments of quiet more often in 2024
I.
Welcome to the new year! I canât be the only one who finds it satisfying that 2023 ended on a Sunday and the new year began on a Monday. New week, new year.
One of my best plans for 2024 is a trip to Japan. Iâve wanted to go there for years, but in May itâs finally going to happen. Thanks to Duolingo, I can already order rice and water, and thanks to countless anime series, I can, er, shout made-up battle cries. That takes you a long way.
Tips for Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka are more than welcome!
II.
People with a Letterboxd account (the best social platform) will know how important the first film of the year is. It will always feature prominently in your accountâs annual review. My first film of 2024 was the surreal Japanese ramen western Tampopo. That seemed quite fitting. And Letterboxd has also renamed this month âJapanuaryâ. So I simply had to.
Tampopo is about a woman (her name is Tampopo) who runs a ramen restaurant in this film. But business is going badly. Her dishes are substandard and the little restaurant is outdated. Until a trucker walks in and decides to help her. What follows is a humorous quest for the best ramen recipe and a successful restaurant. And itâs a twist on the samurai genre: a ronin on a culinary mission. The film alternates the main story with short vignettes, all of which are about food.
Be warned: Tampopo will make you hungry. The food is portrayed in a mouth-watering way. And more often than not, âfood pornâ becomes a literal concept. Incidentally, director Juzo Itami also made a highly entertaining making-ofTampopo, offering a glimpse behind the scenes.
---III.
Sad news: Herman Koch is terminally ill. He has been for a few years now. He didnât necessarily want to make a big deal of it, but decided to do so anyway, via de Volkskrant. The result is a moving interview that offers some perspective. When Koch heard that he wasnât going to get better, he made some dark jokes at home for a while. He would say to his son: âCould you fetch some coffee? Iâve got cancer.â
Somewhere in a subordinate clause, whilst explaining that he didnât want to put up a fight, Koch describes his motto. âDoing nothing is the shortest route to happiness.â I think we could all do with taking that to heart in 2024. Donât constantly fill your time and thoughts with podcasts, TV or social media. Try doing absolutely nothing more often.
PS.
Comic artist Barbara Stok says it too: âWe just take so many things for granted, but if you stop and think about them for a bit longer, you realise theyâre actually quite strange.â Last year, Stok won the Storyworld Audience Award for her book The Philosopher, the Dog and the Wedding. She has also been writing beautiful biographical comics for years.*
A month ago, Het Uur van de Wolf broadcast a documentary about Stok: How to Live Well. The portrait offers a glimpse into the artistâs mind. She is a sceptic who found a way to shape her life through philosophy.
Artist Tomohiro Okazaki worked from early 2021 to late 2023 on stop-motion animations in which matches play the leading role. All the short works have been compiled into a YouTube video lasting over 75 minutes without sound. I canât get enough of it.
---Just a quick word on Micha Wertheimâs brilliant New Yearâs Eve show, who took a slightly different approach to his predecessors. Layer upon layer, a delightful meta-show. It wonât have you rolling on the floor laughing, but it is certainly witty and carries a message. Why do we intervene when a father hits his child, but not when a father parks his child in front of an iPad all day? Letâs think more carefully about our relationship with addictive screens, before AI becomes the norm and we stop thinking for ourselves altogether.
Why are you sitting watching the telly on New Yearâs Eve, Wertheim wonders aloud. Turn that telly off for once. The worse the viewing figures, the more successful the show, the comedian concluded. You could call it a clever way of covering his back, but also: mission accomplished.In de Volkskrant, Gidi Heesakkers noted how Wertheim put this show together âin the tradition of the meta-mindfuckâ.
A thirteen-year-old American has become the first person ever to reach the unofficial end of Tetris on the NES. There is no official end, but after 155 levels there is a possibility that the working memory will become overloaded and the game will crash. This is considered the finish. No one had managed this before, as it requires nimble fingers and flawless play. But Willis Gibson pulled it off. He dedicated his victory to his father, who passed away in December. Beautiful footage of a boy with a passion, making his dream come true.
Here is the full video of Gibson, with the victory coming after 38 minutes. The video below is an excellent explanation of just how extraordinary this victory is.
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