• The music, animal masks, and leather jumpsuits in this ‘70s Bollywood movie intro (search “animal mask Bollywood”; via Amos).
  • Listening to Deerhoof’s cover of the Shining soundtrack while staying overnight in a near-deserted, massive former monastery.
  • The ice floating by on the Fox River.
  • How if a big driving force of our behavior is our discomfort with ambiguity, then it makes sense that we would latch onto brands so strongly, since they’re these stable, knowable identities. I‘m sure that MBAs have written about that but I was just thinking about it in pop psych/philosophy terms.
    • It’s the same case with mass-produced goods, since each individual instance of one is virtually identical to the next. It gives us the feeling that they have this knowable, ideal form, and that they’re not contingent objects made out of contingent materials by contingent people with contingent hands. (Jony Ive practically says as much in Apple design videos.) That, combined with their ubiquity, makes them comforting; it’s nice to know that you can go almost anywhere in the world and find a twelve-ounce can, or eat a Big Mac that tastes the same as home’s. (I knew a tour manager who would do exactly that even in food meccas like Italy and France.) But it’s worth giving up that familiarity sometimes. Or more than sometimes.
    • And this, from the New York Times op-ed “The Rise of Woke Capital”: “‘As much as we fear corporations gone wild,’ Poulos concludes, ‘we love corporations that love us.’ And in a rich society people may prefer that their #brands prove this love by identifying with favored social causes rather than through the old-fashioned expedient of paying their workers a little bit more money.”