19 - A life of making things in public

Currents is back after a month of travel and rest. Thank you for reading!

Hello! It’s finally getting warm here in New York and it seems like the seasonal depression may be leaving me alone for now. Expect significantly less unhinged writing this month! As always, thanks for reading.

(I don’t know how this came to be called 19 when I know I have written more than 19 newsletters. At what point did I lose track?) 

🌊 Hi, I’m Sachi, and this is Currents, a newsletter about books, movies, and stories. If you want to unsubscribe, the link is at the bottom. If you like this, share it with someone or say hello. I live to yap.

Eno & Finding Vivian Maier -  Creating publicly and for yourself

I watched Eno (2024) a generative documentary on Brian Eno by Gary Hustwit last week and Finding Vivian Maier (2013) by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel on Mubi this week. Both artists are extremely prolific in the sheer quantity of work they created, both are very serious about their work but in some ways couldn’t be more different from each other. Brian Eno’s body of work and his creative evolution is very public. Vivian Maier’s photography and films were discovered by complete accident. Her body of work and story was tracked down and collated thanks to  John Maloof’s tireless work. People around her had no idea that her work was as good as it was. She worked alone. 

Eno is a musician, songwriter, record producer and visual artist. I don’t think there’s anything he can’t do. He seems like the kind of man who’ll try anything new and interesting. He agreed to making this documentary with Hustwit only because it would be different every time you saw it. Hustwit and his team built a custom program to shuffle their archive of recordings and music around fixed anchors to create a new outcome every time a movie is generated. Eno didn’t like that documentaries told a person’s story in one way alone. A life can hardly be boiled down to one story. What’s most interesting about Brian Eno is his approach to anything he’s making. He wants to push the boundaries to see what shows up, not for the spectacle or attention. He is a genuinely playful person who loves experimenting. I left the room excited to make something.

Some interviewees in Finding Vivian Maier believed that Maier would hate the attention she was getting if she were alive when the documentary was being made. She carried a camera everywhere she went. She was always clicking photos wherever she went. She had an ability to capture compelling moments in time. The photographers interviewed in the documentary remarked at how skilled she was and how sad it was that her work didn’t get the attention it deserved when she was alive. That’s the thing, she never shared her work on purpose. She clicked over 150,000 photos but nobody saw them until she died and Maloof happened to buy them at an auction. Maier chose to work as a nanny and work her photography simultaneously. An interviewee in the documentary said she worked as a seamstress in New York and hated it. She wanted to be outside and free. Being a nanny gave her a place to stay, her needs were met, and she could work on her art to her heart’s content. It was never about fame. It was about living a life with no compromises.

In 2025,  your thought processes aren’t considered real until they are externalized and shared. Making anything today is an extremely public act. You’re expected to share your work online. Being famous is a prerequisite for growing your art and sometimes even getting an entry to a mid level job. Maier makes us question that assumption. There’s Eno’s approach to things where he pursued whatever he wanted to in a very public way. His search for the new and experimental remained unchanged. Then there’s Maier’s approach where she built a life where she could focus on her art with no clients and external pressures. She had full freedom of what she made and when she made it. Honestly, both are very valid approaches. 

You may ask, what is the point of making art if it isn’t shared? For Maier, making the work itself was the point. This is conjecture on the part of the documentary makers and yours truly. Maier never kept a diary and was extremely secretive. We can only guess her motivations. I, for one, love having a small audience. If I write something, I want to show it to a few people and talk about it. Can I handle Eno level of fame? I don’t know. I know I would never survive Maier’s level of secrecy. Ultimately, making things can achieve multiple goals such as getting in a creative flow, relaxation, or even finding like minded people. Simon Sarris and Henrik Karlsson make a case for why sharing your ideas publicly is valuable for more than just fame, it’s a way of building community.

 My biggest takeaway from watching both of these documentaries in succession was that any approach to making things is a good approach if it fits your values. There’s nothing harder than approaching creative work in ways you think you ‘should’ when you know you’d rather do it differently. Just pick and commit. Your creative life will be one well lived and well explored no matter how you choose to share it.

Movies - Satoshi Kon Week

I have enthusiastically jumped into watching movies and reading books again. It’s gone from being an activity constantly happening in the background to one in the foreground again. I’m back to investigating what makes a story compelling and hopefully get closer to writing my own. This week, I’m reading Dostoyevsky and watching one of Satoshi Kon’s movies every day this week. The plan is to watch Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika. I couldn’t find his movie Memories in Japanese (it’s in English on Prime) There’s also Paranoia Agent, a TV show, which I’ll watch if I can squeeze it in. So far I’ve watched Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress and I must say that reality blending into fiction can be so good when done well. When done poorly, messing with reality as a narrative tool can feel like a cop out. I feel like this has been a lesson in expert storytelling. For every ten mid movies I watch, there is one brilliant movie that wakes me up, that brings a spark back into my eyes, and lights me up. More notes on the end of this experiment to come.

This essay on how Darren Aronofsky heavily borrowed from Satoshi Kon was interesting to find out. Apparently, so is Inception but I haven’t gotten there yet. 

(Video) Forget chasing someone you love all the way to the airport, chase them across movies, across your career in a wild dream sequence the way Chiyoko does in Millenium Actress.

Videos

A mesmerizing dance performance by the CDK Dance Company and Sergio Reis to Gotye’s famous song Somebody That I Used To Know. From the movements, cinematography, styling and colors, this video is absolutely a delight to watch.

Music video of Humankind’s new song Run It Up.

Anime

Devilman Crybaby (Netflix)

Okay, hear me out. This anime is a solid 3/5 for me because of the missing payoff after that buildup. BUT BUT it made a point better than many other monster related movies. Demons/ monsters live among humans in this world. They merge with humans to blend in and slowly take over human systems. When humans find out about this they turn on each in the most horrifying ways and destroy themselves. It made its point well enough, even in face of invasion by actual monsters, it is humans that will resort to the most cruel monstrosity. For that point alone will this be mentioned in Currents.

May you find things that light you up and may you have a joyful month.

Warmly,
S