Recently, I was at a party celebrating Robbie Burns Day and someone mentioned a show called Love On the Spectrum, which I’d never heard of. After listening to the description, I recalled a documentary from the 90s called How’s Your News?, about a team of developmentally challenged reporters. No one at the party had heard of it. Of course, the whole thing is on YouTube. I do remember it fondly.
Documentaries
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Emergence Magazine presents Shifting Landscapes, a documentary series, directed by Emmy- and Peabody-nominated filmmakers Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, exploring the power of art and story to orient us amid the darkness of our time.
Following a musician, a poet, a writer, and a filmmaker who are each embracing the alchemical power of story to connect and transform us, this series opens ways of being that hold both catastrophe and love as our landscapes change and disappear.
I've only watched the first of the 4-film series, but it was well done and I'll hopefully get to the rest this week.
The full series is here: Shifting Landscapes.
Trailer for The World According to Allee Willis, "the most interesting woman you've never heard of," according to the Washington Post. Looks great!
In addition to being a prolific and grammy-winning songwriter, Willis ran the Museum of Kitsch, which is how I first heard of her in 2010 (though I'd been of a fan of her music without knowing she'd written it). Willis died in 2019, but her Youtube channel lives on.
Digression Alert
Watching this trailer, I was reminded of Montez, a milliner I met once in LA in summer, 2016. She owned and operated The Milliner's Guild at Crossroads of the World.
After walking into her shop, which was closed at the time, I immediately felt a connection to her and we began a talk that lasted a few hours where she told me about growing up in Venice and hanging out with Hendrix or Jim Morrison or both. The specifics are vague as it was my first trip after a stroke a few months prior. She'd made hats for Madonna and plenty of other celebrities from the 80s going forward. We stayed in touch digitally for a few years and the last I heard, she'd moved to New Mexico with her husband. I just sent her a message through a probably now-dead channel, but hopefully I'll hear back.
I wonder if she knew Willis. Montez, are you out there?
Great 10 minute doc about a young keeper who worked at an Australian Safari:
You may believe that rhino poaching is a one-sided, cut-and-dried affair, but there's nuance, and you can get it in this excellent podcast: The Invisible Hand.
Georgina Savage returns to South Africa to document her family’s fight in a poaching war, but as she gets more immersed in the lives of those involved, she must confront the colonial past of her country and its implications on a conflict close to home.
NYTimes review of Eno, a documentary that is never the same twice:
“Every time it plays, it’s a different movie,” Hustwit told an audience in May at the film’s New York premiere. “I’m surprised every time I see it.”
His collaborator, the digital artist and programmer Brendan Dawes, explained that because of the variables, including 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive, there are 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie.
Hustwit is the director of the much-loved doc, Helvetica.
Below are two 60-minute documentaries, made twenty years apart, about Clive Wearing, a Brit with the worst-ever recorded case of amnesia. Clive's memories only last between seven and thirty seconds.
I first read about Wearing in the 90s in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks later spoke about him on an episode of Radio Lab, and wrote about him again in The New Yorker in 2007.
Prisoner of Consciousness, 1985:
The Man With the Seven Second Memory, 2005
Oliver Sacks: Music and Amnesia
From 2007: Oliver Sacks on Clive Wearing, an English musician struck by a devastating brain infection that left him with retrograde amnesia and a memory span of only seconds.
Wearing is still alive as I write this. He's 86 and has been living with "the illness" for almost 40 years.
Clive Wearing - Wikipedia
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
The Japanese have a word for severe social withdrawal: hikikomori.
It refers to people, usually men aged 18 to 35, who refuse to leave their homes, and often won't even leave their bedrooms. They do not socialize and they do not work or attend school. For an "official" diagnosis, the Hikikomori must do this consecutively for at least six months. However, many spend decades alone in their bedrooms, some even dying there, having isolated themselves until they're without friend or family.
One researcher compared its growing prevalence in Japan to homelessness in the US — Americans have millions of homeless, whereas Japan only has about ten thousand homeless. Yet, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Japanese Hikikomori exist — and those are 2010 numbers.
France 24 English did a segment on it:
Rent-A-Sister
The phenomena has given birth to an industry of women for hire, known as Rent-a-Sisters. They are not social workers, nor are they professionally trained. They're paid (usually by the victim's parents) to visit the Hikikomori and talk with them. At the start, it's usually through the bedroom door, and over months or years becomes a face-to-face relationship. Eventually, it can lead to outdoor accompaniment, and, hopefully, cause the afflicted to move out on their own and start a normal life.
I found the topic rather interesting and it checked my Unorthodox Work box.
Amelia Hemphill has a BBC short on the Hikikomori and the Rent-A-Sisters program:
More Info
There is more info on the Hikikomori Wikipedia page: and an entry on Psychology Today. Some former Hikikomori even have a magazine, HikiPos.
For an even deeper dive, there's Saito Tamaki's book, Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End, which was the publication to first bring the phenomena to a wider audience within Japan.
My Blonde GF is a 19 minute film about the victim of a deepfake porn. One interesting revelation is that, in the UK at least, deepfakes aren't considered revenge porn because they don't feature the actual victim, but just their image overlayed onto another party. Just another way that our laws aren't keeping up with technology.
From Guardian Documentaries. I mostly like The Guardian but am conflicted supporting it because their Trans coverage is garbage. That in mind, they excel at documentaries and podcasts.
1988 documentary from the Los Angeles History Project: Raymond Chandler's LA.
