This year The Festival of Political Photography focuses on food. Even for conscious consumers, the daily necessity of eating creates a tendency to interact with food mainly through habit and ritual. But viewed from unfamiliar angles, mundane foodstuffs can look provocative.
During a bout of textural appreciation, I first encountered reference to ASMR deep in the comments of a noise upload. ASMR is also noise, but not music. One ASMR video shows nothing more than two forks scratching a foam covered microphone. There’s also a low key, sleep inducing simulated kidnapping.
This massive reform is an exhausting project to get going, but once rolling along it has a chance of offering new options for collaboration and pooling together disciplines and people in a way that promises something fresh. It brings with it some bad, some good, and a whole lot of confusing, but the final tally should be on the side of the positive.
An album creates a whole; a collection of songs that together tell a story much wider and complex than they would alone. It feels like nowadays I just tend to listen to individual songs and kind of miss the big picture that an artist or a band is creating with the whole of an album. But every now and then I’m lucky enough to stop, take a moment, and listen to the whole story instead of just hearing the beginning.
For Barán, the biggest cultural difference has been how much people care about others. She feels that the people in Benin are so much more interested in each other, and so much kinder than what she is used to in Finland, where, she admits, it often feels like people simply don’t care about others’ daily concerns such as flus, stressful life situations of funny everyday occurrences.
Fay felt something tighten around her chest.“I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard music”, Nicole whispered from somewhere far away.
This November right before father’s day one of Finland’s best-known dad-joke comedians published a humor book that seemed to have the corny humor category especially in mind. Author Stan Saanila created a guide for pronouncing Finnish using words, slang and sounds that are familiar (and pronounceable!) to speakers of English.
My hands are sweaty, My heart beats too fast (not fluttering like the wings of a bird but
thumping like stones being thrown into water).
I’ve said the words “no, Finland doesn’t have polar bears” about a dozen hundred times and friends’ birthday parties were actually massive barbeques. We took a car to a school located 300 metres away and our burglar alarm went off almost weekly. I’m a third culture kid, nice to meet you.