📺 on getting lost and corecore
Etgar Keret's Substack newsletter and The Girl On The Fridge, anti-trends, and existential TikTok
28 May 23 | Vol 2 Issue 19
I love the modern world. Things were never better in the past. Things are better now. MDMA, Viagra, easyJet. What a time to be young. There is one thing however I worry has been lost — being lost.
After a party I once marched the youngest two miles in the opposite direction from our home, post consuming a bottle of Polish potato vodka. I have been to Venice and tried to find my hotel. Where I live now you can see the sea in three different directions, while the spit of land is only three streets wide, it's is a bit of a head-fuck. I'm not referring to this kind of lost.
Chet Baker - Let's Get Lost
Spiritually lost. Lost from yourself. Lost from your known world.
Etgar Keret’s collection of short stories The Girl On The Fridge includes Journey. I read it back in 2008. I didn't know who he was. I primarily brought it as I adored the cover illustration. The other stories I can't remember but this one story has stuck with me all this time. I knew then it was a metaphor for something. Or a parable. Or fable. One of these things. I just didn't know what for. Now I do.
You can read Journey here www.read-any-book.net/online/651875
Previously, before MDMA and Viagra and easyJet made the world a giant recreational park, it was possible to visit a foreign country, and not know in advance how to get the coach or train somewhere, or what the dishes were on the menu. It was possible to go off grid. It was possible to get lost. Spiritually lost.
Lost from yourself. Like Herman Hesse's Siddhartha in India. Actually I'm not sure he did that. I tried reading it, it's one of those books I want to have read, only in practice I struggled getting past the first chapter. Lost on a transcendental odyssey. A real life bildungsroman.
There is one very valuable insight you need to know before embarking on a pilgrimage into the personal wilderness, one that my friend Em so succinctly put running away from the emotional baggage at home, to SouthEast Asia. That she had made the crucial mistake of taking herself with her.
To lose yourself you need to sever connection. Today it's possible to foreknow transport timetables in Madagascar m.moovitapp.com, vegan options in Siem Reap eatyourworld.com/blog/a-vegetarians-guide-to-cambodia, Trip Advisor's advice on almost anything, to walk across Hong Kong’s Lamma Island — where there aren't even any cars — on Google Maps www.google.com/maps/@22.2174245,114.1205002,3a,75y,339.57h,90t. That's without automatic translation tools that speak out loud, geolocation and the endless feedback loop of social media.
Online life means it's almost, if not, impossible to escape oneself. You could travel without your mobile phone. But who's going to do that? As long as you have the black mirror with you, you can not leave yourself behind. You are attached to your self image.
For some years I went on holiday without a camera (a practice I stopped when I had children). This was before mobile phones. I was asked after a trip to Guangzhou what it was like, and it dawned on me that I didn’t know what it was like, instead I had spent my time peering through the viewfinder, scanning for that perfect photo, never actually being there. You know where this is going next. I haven’t lost you. Yes, Etgar Keret’s story could be a metaphor of id never being lost from Instagram. (or TikTok or Snapchat or BeReal or Geneva or even Facebook and Twitter if they’re still going).
That the obsidian mirror of our mobiles also acts as a negative reflection, an inverted world. First it has made the connected world all knowable, you can't get lost, you can't be somewhere that's un-described. Lost in any real physical sense. While in parallel, we are constantly prompted with notifications to define an instant external self.
There is a subtle (maybe it isn't subtle at all) difference between the analogue and the digital recording of the self while travelling. With old school film cameras you took the photo, the number that could be stored was limited, the results unknown until you developed the film upon returning. Kodak Moments™. Now we review the photo while still standing in the front of whatever it is we want to capture, reviewing the replica, ignoring the original focal point. We retake, retake, until the two dimensional reality of the representation aligns with the desired self we are hoping to project. The Instagram moment™.
This inability to get physically lost, in a transcendental odyssey sort of way, coincides with social media channelling a requirement to create myriad perfect identities. The digital age has made it nigh impossible to lose sight of ourselves. To find a place where internal selves as yet unknown can blossom. To find out whether, as The Protagonist says in Tenet, We all believe we'd run into that burning building. But until we feel that heat, we can never know.
This may explain #corecore.
What the fuck is corecore you utter? It's a TikTok trend, emergent last summer, of seemingly disparate video clips fast cut to an emotive music soundtrack. I'm not making this up, by March this year, the tag #corecore has surpassed 2.1 billion views.
It's ostensibly a Gen Z phenomenon. Unlike the related but different hashtags #pinkcore (mashed-up clips of Fortnite with funny cat videos) and #nichetok (recycled degraded clips that require a knowledge of multiple fandoms and subcultures), #corecore has a political anti-capitalist undercurrent.
This inability to get lost, to find space to discover yourself, can also be seen in globalist capitalism narrowcasting on social media platforms to micro trends and niche groups.
Morgan Stanley has shares in Spotify, as do Universal and Sony [1 ]. This is a screenshot of their annual Wrapped report, categorising your listening choices into moods [2 ]. It's giving Gen Z fashion mood board.
Gen Z are not allowed to be themselves, they are awash in a sea of commerce, an endless horizon of being sold stuff. Corecore is deliberately obtuse, its purpose is to express a mood that can not easily be summed up in words. Fast cut enough to reach escape velocity from the gravity of being condensed to an easy-marketing™ slogan. Capitalism's end of history has been curtailed by the end of -core.
@flicksaga - corecore
The videos and aesthetic are anti-trend. Corecore is a stance resisting being made into an identifiable niche social catchment. It's an outlet to express an emotion, vague, I'm here, but I'm not sure where here is. To voice their concerns about life — divorced from creating a marketing opportunity which in the cycle offers a product promising solution should they purchase.
As corecoreer @masonoel says in an Instagram post “The whole point of this stuff is to create something that can’t be categorized, commodified, made into clickbait, or moderated—something immune to the functions of control that dictate the content we consume and the ideas we are allowed to hold.”
It has a lot in common with video art. It's as if Nam June Paik were alive today, stoned as fuck, and into Dadaist doom-scrolling Ryan Gosling mash-ups.
You wont like it. It's not for you. Also the fact I've heard of it probably means it's already over. It's so overcore.
Here’s a short story, Crazy Glue from Etgar Keret’s Substack newsletter Alphabet Soup,
Instead of recommending a book to purchase, if you enjoy it, subscribe. Hell, even pay.
📺
This week's heroes are Ryan Gosling (not screaming) and Nam June Paik, drawn by our artist in residence, Fatima Fletcher. Show your appreciation by following fatima.fletcher on Instagram. Her work is for sale at fatimafletcher.com, where she’s available for commissions. Her wonderful orchid place mats are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop.
Buy me a coffee at www.buymeacoffee.com/vfnIE9P0Ta
References
David Lynch invented Corecore during Twin Peaks S3