It’s been a strange week full of opportunities for respite I haven’t taken. Except one. It all started with my friend’s funeral, which I watched on a live feed. It being a Jewish funeral, it was graveside and ended with her loved ones helping to bury the casket. I’ve always found this kind of funeral hard to watch. What I found especially dismantling about this one—beyond the obvious—was just the sound of the dirt thumping on that plain wood box. I don’t know if the funeral was miked strangely, but it was so loud. Especially in contrast to the silence of everyone doing the hard mitzvah of burying her. I’ve had a tough time getting that sound out of my head.
Fast forward to a YouTube wormhole I fell into not long after—a series of videos brought to me by Food Around the World. I’ve watched a few so far (read: several) and they, are, amazing. For starters, they aren’t about food at all. Not really. They are about voyeurism and sensationalism. They have hilarious titles like: THE WOMAN LIVES ALONE IN THE MOUNTAINS. COOKING POTATO SAUSAGES. I can’t tell you how much this makes me laugh. The caps aren’t even mine! THE WOMAN LIVES ALONE AND DOES STUFF! Really what they are trying to communicate is the shocking revelation that a) a woman lives alone and b) she lives alone in MANLY conditions and survives. That is the surround sound for everything that happens next.
Which is…silence. THE WOMAN never says a word. For twenty minutes, we watch her cook something—who knows what it is; it actually feels like mystery—and all you hear is the sound of pots and pans, the scuff of a knife, a key in a lock, logs on a fire. So as we watch what she’s doing—and seriously, what is she doing?—every sound is poignant. Moving. And purposeful.
Is that lard? Cheese? Do you really need to pack the cheese, grate the cheese, and then pack it again to get the right consistency? Does this woman realize 9 million people have watched her make this dinner? More people have seen THE WOMAN ALONE than I will ever meet in my life. The filmmakers better have paid her.
Periodically, these videos resort to slo-mo, which is also deeply hilarious and pornographic—yep, there goes the cream oozing, the sausage flipping—but mostly it’s just simple cross-cuts. And access to what appears to be a very hard way of life, but of course a more simple way of life, too, insofar as THE WOMAN lives off the land. Which is why all these sounds are meaningful in this context and why they’ve helped me recalibrate how I feel about the thumping sound of earth on my friend’s casket. Also, I’ve probably watched like three hours of these videos by now so basically, hey, I’m a zombie who sits around at night massaging her dog and zoning out on sound porn, so, yep, I’m healed! All better now.
In other news: Hello to my new subscribers! I’m so happy you’re here.
And now for another episode of Name Your Shame (in which I list out everything that was new to me this week that a much hipper, younger person would have known about for sure):
Every single person on this list. Seriously. Not one has crossed my radar.
Okay, so I actually knew all but one face on this quiz but, uh, I couldn’t recall all their names so, wow, the Times does not understand its aging demographic and should have allowed descriptive answers to count, like: that little boy who just defrauded thousands of people because he is a turd.
Until next week friends, I remain, as ever, gray about the pate—
fm