OMD's ABCs #272: Lost in Translation, Another Round, Toronto's Missing Middle, Amazing Developments...
Hello!
This week starts with a series of essays from a movie marathon I had weeks back. Lost in Translation and Another Round were two particular movies that sparked some thoughts. After some reflections, there’s a short bit on cool videos, followed up by an essay on Toronto’s Missing Middle and the background of the policies limiting the city from becoming a proper metropolis.
Also, there will be no newsletter next week. When there are five Sundays in a month, I take a break. The second monthly ABCs issue will follow the week after.
The ABC’s of the OMD learning function are below. Feel free to pick and choose the segments that interest you and I hope they make you think about something you didn’t before, raise an eyebrow, or leave you satisfied.
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
To quote Liam Neeson in Taken… "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
A very particular skill of mine, my friends, is the ability to sit and watch movies non-stop. There was one night when I sat on the ass a decade of squatting had built and watched three movies back to back to back. The following are thoughts on each of them:
Movie Thoughts: Lost in Translation—Finding Bearing in Writing
What’s the movie about? It’s about two Americans who befriend one another while staying at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt hotel. The movie appears to be in the early 2000s and our main characters find their day-to-day literally lost in translation (they don’t speak Japanese). But this metaphor also reflects how both characters appear lost in their own life with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s characters appearing to be in unhappy marriages.
Saying Lost in Translation was a great movie is a consensus opinion. Explaining the metaphor behind the title and how it played into the narrative is also something beaten to death by every movie blog. That’s why I’m not going to write a critique or review of the movie. Rather, I would like to share what I loved about the story and the emotions that poured out after I finished it.
Lost in Translation showed a part of life rarely depicted in narrative form. Most stories follow a beginning, middle, and end. That end is often the resolving of some problem that is introduced and crescendoed throughout the story.
The frustrating element of this is how fictitious most stories are. Now, of course, most stories are fiction. But there’s a difference between something that makes the struggles of life appear so trivial to as to border on the edge of naivety versus portraying the angst and difficulty of what is something that is so hard to communicate with words. The latter is what I felt the movie did so well in depicting.
In under two hours, the movie relayed the visceral struggle most humans will experience at one point in their lives. The specific struggle I speak of is a realization that there never is a map, instruction manual, or a perfect translator for the chaotic language of living. It’s hard to embrace this feeling of being lost, let alone realizing and admitting to such circumstances.
I think people who are lost find different ways to figure out where they are. It’s not about getting a precise answer or coordinates to “here.” But just getting comfortable with wherever they are standing and realizing this too is just another step in living. Murray's and Johansson’s characters found it through each other’s company, a platonic friendship between an old man and young woman strengthened through vulnerable conversation.
For me, that was my novel. It was how I engaged in the kind of vulnerable discussion with the consciousness that had existed and also wanted to exist on paper.
I decided I would be a writer around the time I turned 29. Whether that meant being an author or essayist, it didn’t matter. A switch had turned and this identity was something I wanted to consume myself with. Fame, money, or prestige wasn’t the motivation. In fact, I think the association of all the opposite of such three things writers had made it an identity I wanted to embrace.
It’s not that I didn’t want fame, money, and prestige. I’m a fallible human. Of course, I want them all. But what made it so important was how it had been a kind of lighthouse in my adult life. Writing was the only way I coped with feeling lost in translation when I couldn’t understand the world and it me.
I never considered it a legitimate profession for myself. I wrote because I liked journaling. Combine that with some narcissism and I was off writing essays and newsletters.
But it wasn’t until I was paid, briefly, by an organization for my writing that something clicked in my head. I was a professional writer in that moment and the mere fact that I received payment to write made everything real. The movie had colour like when Dorothy entered Oz. I could see a yellow brick road. A few months later, I decided to write a novel.
The novel entered its third draft around the time I watched Lost in Translation. I’m very aware now that I may never publish it. But I’ll continue writing it until I’ve completed it. I imagine this must be the journey most writers go through because I don’t think it’s possible to write a good book with publication or financial reward as the primary driver.
I’m fallible so I do dream of having the novel published on days when I stare up at the clouds amidst my concrete jungle. But, and maybe it’s because I’ve realized my writing is quite subpar, I’ve come to accept that the book may never be worthy of publication standards.
Still, I must finish the story. When will I know it’s done? I imagine just like how I knew the first and second drafts were done. The book just tells me "no more for now.” Then I stop and reread it all. This too is how I felt Lost in Translation transitioned and ended. It just needed to end a chapter there. The screen faded away and I felt neither lost or found.
Movie Thoughts: Another Round—Addiction and Discipline
Two reasons I watched this movie. One was Mads Mikkelsen. The second was because a friend recommended it was hygge.
As a Danish movie released in 2020, it might not be on many people’s radar. Hence, a quick overview might help set the context for the rest of the essay.
Another Round is a story following four friends who all teach high school together. They appear to have grown up together and all teach different topics from music, P.E to history. They also have different family dynamics with divorced, single, married, and estranged. What unites the foursome—aside from their friendship—is a sense that they let life slip away. Rather, I got the sense they were questioning whether they were actually living (some may call it a question of fulfillment but it could simply be the daily enjoyment of life).
One of the friends shares a study about how humans are born with a 0.5% blood alcohol level deficiency so consuming that much daily will put people in a state of equilibirum. The four friends decide to test it out. They measure their blood alcohol throughout the day and maintain a level of 0.5%. As the experiment progresses, they gather to write a report on their observations.
The movie progresses to show how the lives of each of the characters change. I won’t spoil what revelations, discoveries and resurgences occur in their lives. But the experiment turn out to have positive and negative effects—depending on individual interpretation—in unexpected ways. I recommend watching the movie so you can arrive at your own conclusion.
Now. I’ll be honest. My immediate thought was to grab three friends and do this in Tokyo for a week. I could taste having a nama biru with my daily ramen, curry and yakitori in various corners and alleyways. Aside from the food, it’s one of the few cities in the world optimized for safety, transportation, food, and Joie de Vive to do this kind of experiment. At least, for my predilections.
However, my mind transgressed to my addictive tendencies and the possible dangers of trying this out. Stephen King gave a glance into how an alcohol addict starts to think in his autobiography. I don’t think I’ve come close to that kind of tendency, maybe for a short period in high school. I would like to believe that the better state of affairs in my life today should suffice for a healthy mental state to weather the negatives of addiction.
But I often feel the addiction demon in me every day. For me, habits have a tendency of evolving into addictions where I go from doing something repeatedly to improve myself towards the other end where not doing it causes anxiety. Even a simple habit like writing in my journal daily can become something I berate myself for failing to do on a packed Saturday.
Powerlifting is one such addiction for me. I’ve long wrestled with such labels and wanted to tell myself it wasn’t or that I shouldn’t tell myself it was an addiction, given its negative connotation as something we are mentally enslaved to. But when the lack of the activity spells fear to my existence, I think it is an addiction. I don’t know what terror will come of neglecting my training. But I know I fear it and so I train. Just as one might drink water in fear of death, I train in fear of what might come if I stopped.
The years of closures during COVID were a true test of this fear and if it wasn’t for the momentarily charged hits I got from the reopening of gyms for random months and periods, I don’t know how far down the well my psyche would’ve gone. But with that, I know I need to be very cautious with any substance.
The regularity of any substance, however trivial it may appear, will need to be observed with caution. It’s no different from having a friend with a poor temperament. The more I hang around such a friend and increase the frequency in days seen and intensity in hours consumed in one sitting together, the greater that poor temperament will loom over me.
It’s just as true that my qualities will rub off on the other but that is their choice, not mine. My decisions stay with whom I choose to brush shoulders with in my life. Like an addictive substance, it’s best to avoid those with effects that I do not wish to adopt long term. No amount of short-term attention or curbing of boredom is worth such a risk.
Yet, I still get urges to dance with the devil. It’s funny, isn’t it? The things we yearn to do and fight daily to stop ourselves from doing. Some call this discipline. Following that definition, this act of withholding things from myself appears to be something else I’m addicted to.
Movie Thoughts: Gladiator
I was entertained.
What more could I say? I’ve heard many say The Gladiator is one of their all-time favourites and I can understand why. It had a fine story and the cinematography held up over two decades. Albeit, I watched most of the movie with a sadness I wished to be rid of, something I had hoped the end would cure. But I don’t think it did.
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Amazing Developments
Talk about human ingenuity! It’s easy to get swept up and discouraged seeing people obsess over selling gifs or some kind of Microsoft paint drawing and speculating on coins I’ll need to convert to money to buy something. But when I see things like this, I know human ingenuity is alive and well.
People talk about AI or robots taking away the jobs of writers. Before that happens, I bet you we’ll see robots playing sports.
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Toronto's Missing Middle
Why is it that Toronto is a city of two extremes? We have glass towers designed in the city center and a sprawl of detached houses a distance away.
It’s as if the city chose to be unattractive for people to have families in cities. Its plethora of 400sqf apartments forces those who want families to move to suburbia where one must drive a car to a train station to enter the city.
If you haven't noticed, I think suburbia-focused design is a travesty and the antithesis of human development. It’s what I would expect to find in a developing nation where the ability to build proper infrastructure doesn’t exist, not a G7 nation.
Still, Toronto is an improvement compared to most North American cities that have failed to evolve to urbanization that’ll solve many of the climate and societal problems all the suburbanite politicians bark about. I like human-centric cities and aside from NYC, Toronto (maybe Vancouver if I'm generous), I haven’t found another that comes close to mimicking the beauty of most metropolitan cities in Europe and Asia.
But back to the question around why Toronto has a long way to go. It’s a far younger city that’s only recently seen major development and influx in population. It has the potential and opportunity to be a proper city.
As It turns out, this unique divide in Toronto’s housing market between tiny condo or mega house in the suburbs is a globally recognized problem called the Missing Middle. Special thanks to the 99% invisible podcast for educating me on this issue:
I’m not going to go in-depth into the podcast episode itself. But a part of the episode I want to highlight is how the city’s lack of family-sized apartments in the downtown area (the middle between tiny condos and large detached houses) is the result of old zoning laws.
These zoning laws limit what can be build where. These zoning laws were created on the back of discrimination by the wealthy Brits at the time.
One of the primary reasons why we don’t have NYC-style brownstones or modern 3-6 story family-sized apartment buildings is because the Brits wanted to keep the immigrants out of the city. Apartments were seen as places where poor people lived at the time.
Apparently, the fear wasn’t just immigrants entering the city to make it poorer or less-white. They also thought other Brits would stop having families when they moved to apartments and believed wives who’d be waiting at home for their husbands would be so bored that they’d cheat given the density of people.
Ridiculous, right? Yet, we still uphold these laws and let it determine how one of the most multicultural cities should evolve.
One of the reason why we don’t have a variety of living options in Toronto and why everyone is settling for 400sqf apartments or a 3000 sqf detached house in nowhere-ville where you NEED a car to drive you to the closest train station so you can then train into the city is because a bunch of rich white dudes who immigrated earlier from decades ago wanted to keep it that way and keep other immigrants out. Shocker. What else is new?
Everyone is obsessed with tearing down statues of people who’ve been long dead. They will even change names of schools, teams, etc. in the name of “doing the right thing,” but that’s only if the dollars and cents line up and the PR teams think it’s the popular decision right? But no material change will happen to the system that matters (i.e the construct of the city).
We can’t see zoning laws so it’s often ignored. It’s easier to judge someone who is dead. It’s easier to tear down a statue or make an optical gesture that conforms to the current social paradigm. But it doesn’t change anything of substance.
It’s like the cliche’d detached husband buying off the wife with jewelry. But the truly ingrained things that should be changed are how we construct a city and its future.
People are like water. We adapt to our environment like water does to whatever container it’s poured into. So why should we live in a rickety old container set up with rules from the 1800s?
OMD's Journal in June
Investing
Powerlifting