Ben Heels

Reading:

I recently read a great essay by Rachel Kushner called “Learning to Wait” in which she recalls a film screening she attended in Los Angeles in the mid 00’s. The film in question, Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, is a dizzying experimental work that runs just over three hours.

Perhaps the most conceptually interesting is Christian Marclay’s The Clock, made from snippets of hundreds of movies throughout history. In each clip, time and clocks are the focus; characters are announcing the time, asking what time of day it is, glancing at their watch, and so on. Kushner writes:

“Screenings were scheduled so that the video montage was synchronized with “real” time, taking viewers out of the film with each strike of a clock, but then putting them back in the film, whose propulsion is the promise of the next clockface, which will then eject them back into their own reality once more. This goes on for twenty-four hours. I stayed for eight, like a workday, and then went home to cook dinner, and knew that in The Clock, people inside the succession of montaged scenes were also having dinner, or otherwise occupying the early-evening hours.”

Rachel Kushner, “Learning to Wait” – Harper’s Magazine, October 2023

This idea of paying attention to something for a long time—in this case, very long movies—is all part of a longer dialogue that has been going on for hundreds of years. Now, in our modern age of endless distractions, the conversation continues. Though our problems with smartphones, shiny new apps, and increasingly powerful algorithms are very new, the problem of attention versus distraction is much older.

A lot of the nonfiction books that I’ve been reading over the past few years are about attention and distraction (Stolen Focus, Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, The Chaos Machine) so Thoreau’s Axe felt like an appropriate next step; I borrowed a copy from a university and started reading this morning over coffee.

One of my favorite things about reading is when one book leads to another and another. In this case, a great essay led me to two books. This game of curiosity and exploration and discovery is one of the reasons why I can’t and don’t keep a strict reading schedule. Instead of planning out what to read next or committing to reading a specific book at any given time, I let my natural curiosity and intuition guide me; every book has its time.

Watching:

Every fall, my friends and I watch a classic horror franchise. One year, we watched all nine of the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Another year, we watched all of Friday the Thirteenth (eleven! Not counting Freddy vs. Jason which we watched with the Elm Street movies). We also watched most of the Halloween franchise, including the critically underrated Halloween III that doesn’t have Michael Myers. We lost steam when we got to Rob Zombie’s 2007 reboot. There are exactly two movies that I stopped watching without finishing: One was Rob Zombie’s Halloween, the other was Cats.

Listening:

I’ve been listening to a lot of Crosby, Stills & Nash lately, though surprisingly no Neil Young. Just about all of my favorite CSN songs have no Y. Here’s what’s on loop:

My ambient playlist has been getting a lot of use lately too. I usually throw it on if I’m writing or journaling since it helps me focus. A few ambient/drone favorites as of late:

• Forest Management – “Interior Music 010”
• Yui Onodera – “Too Ne I” from Too Ne
• Celia Hollander – “6:58pm”
• Texture Harvesting – “Zzzzzzzzzzz”
• Tetsu Inoue – “Zen”

“Zen” reminds me a lot of the music I used to hear in science museums and aquariums, maybe the sort of stuff I hear in abstract puzzle games like The Talos Principle or Antichamber.

Playing:

This week I finally started Octopath Traveler 2, a game that I had been eagerly anticipating ever since I spent 100+ hours playing the original. The music is amazing, the visuals are stunning, and the gameplay has everything I love about the first game but with some new quality-of-life improvements. It’s incredibly rare that I fall in love with a game for everything—the story, characters, art, music, combat system—but Octopath really struck a chord with me. There was a point where I was filling up pages in my notebook with build ideas, damage calculations, and party configurations. I cannot wait to learn more about Octopath 2’s battle system and to fall in love with the game all over again.

I started Octopath 1 with Alfyn, the apothecary, but decided to start Octopath 2 with Hikari, the warrior. So far, I beat Hikari’s first chapter and have made my way East to the town of Canalbrine, home to Castti, the apothecary. For the apothecary, you used to have to learn what each combination of ingredients did by their name alone. In 2, the concoctions you make in battle are now clearly labeled—no guesswork or learning required. I will say that actually learning the intricacies of the first game’s mechanics was deeply satisfying, but I understand why they made it easier.

Until next time…