Everything At Once

I’ve had Ibeyi’s Ghosts running through my head for weeks now. Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, those French-Cuban sisters, doing these creeping atmospheric tracks that just sit in your skull without trying. The kind of music that doesn’t announce itself.

The A Bathing Ape and Hello Kitty collaboration keeps catching me. Baby Milo and Hello Kitty shouldn’t share a space, shouldn’t make sense together, but the execution is clean. No fuss, no apologies. Sometimes that’s the best design.

I went back to Shibuya in my head recently, which is dangerous. I was there once and stood at that scramble crossing in front of the Starbucks, watching all that movement at once, thousands of people crossing simultaneously, and something about it broke my brain in the best way possible. I remember thinking I’d move there forever. I also remember knowing that was a lie even as I was thinking it.

Ping Pong is the thing I can’t get out of my head though. Taiyo Matsumoto’s anime about two kids obsessed with table tennis. Should be forgettable but it’s not. The writing is sharp and the visual style is completely its own thing. There’s this emotional coldness running through it that shouldn’t work but does, and I find myself thinking about it constantly.

I also somehow spent sixty hours in Fantasy Life on the 3DS, which was not supposed to happen. Opened it one afternoon because I was bored and next thing I knew I’d lost most of a month to this small nothing game about an unemployed adventurer being pushed around by an obsessed butterfly. It was stupid and I loved it completely.

There’s Bristlr, which is just a dating app for people obsessed with beards. Sign up, find someone with the right facial situation, and then you’re running your hands and lips through it. The whole specificity of desire is funny—narrow enough to need its own platform.

I’d read Kenza Zouiten’s blog forever if I had to pick just one. I have no idea what she’s writing about most of the time, whatever parties and travel and Tokio Hotel stuff. But something about it keeps pulling me back. I’ve never been to Stockholm, but I’m certain everyone there just looks like her. Everyone. The whole city.

Some months you just find yourself pulled in ten different directions by things that have nothing to do with each other. No cohesion, no throughline. But there’s something honest about admitting that’s where your head is, what’s actually catching you, not what you think you should be paying attention to.