Something is missing when you have to pretend to be someone who you are not. Isn’t it true? I wonder if you, like me, feel that something is going on when we talk about ‘The Society of the Spectacle,’ (Guy Debord, et al), or the missing sense of substance that seems to be receding like galaxies pulling away from each other as we move more and more progressively towards that glam land of pretending to be so interesting.
(I blame the Millennials, of course, but that’s just me. And I know, I know. Stop blaming. Amirite? Er.) I skip those movies now because they spend tooooo much time on those ‘oh my gosh look at me having such an amazing life!,’ scenes that remind me of those tooooo long dance scenes in 80s Bollywood. Yes, I watched those. On VHS. Yes.
Anyway, what am I getting at. I want us to focus on things of substance rather than trying to get ‘likes’. I really mean this because it’s me that’s losing out, me seeing people who could be making something cool, just making something that algorithmically gets ‘liked’ or at least, becomes controversial. What is going on here? Do people not really care about something that moves us, as people, anymore? What? Or do they care as I do, but it’s harder and harder to find each other and interconnect us in moments of connexion that actually goes deeper than just, hey, look at me and my sexy tattoo. What. Who cares about your tattoo.
Something is missing when you want to gain approval through your ‘glamour labour,‘ I feel. But that’s just me. What can I say. How can I put it. Do I write ten paragraphs of impassioned speech asking people to please consider substance over form?
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I’m looking for Quality, ladies and gentlemen (ref: Lila, ZAMM, et al). To be continued, when we get closer to publishing an issue of S P A C E centered all around this. One of the images in the new issue is by HCMC-based photographer Anthony Tran, whom I discovered on Unsplash. Most of these pictures below are Tran’s…
I’ll talk more soon, closer to the date of publication, about the authors of the stories to come. Including ‘Circus Girl,’ by Ho Chi Minh City based self-taught designer, Uyen Vu.
Cool.
S P A C E | Glamour Labor
S P A C E is a 100% crowdfunded effort to link, and interlink, some of us who are asking questions like, ‘Waitaminut. What are we doing here, though?’ Et cetera.