Dear Reader,

I recently happened to count up all the posts I’ve made on my blog jasper.land over the last three years, and the number was 460 posts. That seems like a lot! Yet I have the distinct suspicion that no one beyond my friend Norma (thank you Norma!) actually reads my blog. Which is a pity. Writing little blog posts is fun, but having them be read by people you respect is the real dream.

I was telling my friend Alex about this last week, and he pointed out that this newsletter Lightplay doesn’t have to always be centered around a full-on essay. I’ve long included bloggy little “motes” as part of the Lightplay product. Why not send out some issues of Lightplay with just motes, if that’s what I have on a given week?

So that was the plan for this week—to share some short posts that would otherwise go on the blog. Then I started writing an intro letter here, and it spiraled into a whole little essay about tripping balls while stone sober. So, hey, here’s a full issue of Lightplay. And maybe next week I’ll send out a “Just Motes” edition.

I hope you know that it’s you: you’re the reader I was talking about who I respect and who I hope will read some of my stuff. Thanks for being here, for reading this.

– Jasper

Involuntary Perspectival Shift

Last night we wanted to watch a movie, but these days the three-year-old has a lot of trouble going to sleep. “Tell me a last-last story, please,” he asked in his cutest voice, after over an hour of bedtime books and stories and breathing exercises and lullabies. I told him a last-last story—about Pooh Bear and his friends accidentally eating some “Sleep Honey” and feeling very, very, very tired—and I sang one more lullaby, and I slipped out the door, saying, “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, see you in the morning.” And then, three minutes later, he set to banging on his bedroom door and wailing, “Daddy! Come let me out! Please! PLEASE DADDY!”

What a jerk I am—telling the kid that he doesn’t get to have any more stimulation—when I (and basically every other adult I know) am liable to push the “entertain me” button on my little pocket computer again and again, all day long, getting my heartrate up, filling my veins with cortisol, chasing one more distracting morsel of story, and in fact quite often delaying my own sleep. But being a parent sometimes means having healthier boundaries for your kid than you do for yourself. (And one of the benefits of parenting is getting to reflect on this, and maybe changing your own habits.) So last night I went back in, told the kid one last story, and then gently but firmly told him that he needed to sleep, and I wouldn’t be settling him again. Miraculously, it worked. The nursery fell silent.

So we watched The People’s Joker. It got a lot of press when it first premiered, and I wanted to watch it then, but the film ended up mired in copyright / fair use claims from DC Comics and Warner Brothers for so long that neither Lisa nor I realized when it finally got free of the lawyers and became available to stream. Last night, there it was.

The movie was great: a parody of The Joker, retelling it as a trans coming-of-age story with an acid sense of humor, vicious swipes at Saturday Night Live and Upright Citizens Brigade, and a light-touch metatextuality that feels postmodern in a pleasing, retro way. Of course just as the credits began to roll some other random movie “auto-played,” and we had to scramble to turn the TV off.

We sat on the couch for a while talking about what we’d just seen. I had many ideas about influences on The People’s Joker: Batman movies (obv), comic books (visually), John Waters (camp), but also the Youtube channel Contrapoints (video essay energy). Lisa strained to remember some point she wanted to make, then she had it: a line of dialogue had stuck out to her: the moment where Joker says that as a kid, “Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I existed.” Lisa said this lined up with how she’s heard some trans folks describe their memories of being a kid. They look at their hand, for instance, and wonder, Whose hand is this? Is this my hand? 

As Lisa kept speaking, I had an abrupt, involuntary perspectival shift: it felt like I was being sucked backwards and up, a pulling-back from being embedded in the moment to instead having my consciousness located somewhere a few feet away from my eyes, such that now I peered down and then through them. The arbitrary strangeness of this moment of my life—sitting in my underwear on a gray couch in a warm room—my bare thighs right there under me against the fabric—our living room just this little box inside a sprawling metropolis—the books on the bookshelves each with their stories inside—the life path that had brought me to this moment. The words I was trying to say back to Lisa were caught inside my head, and I had to get them to travel down to my mouth and tongue, and I couldn’t really manage it.

Despite being ten years sober from marijuana, I felt hella high all of a sudden. It was jarring, though not completely unpleasant.

Gradually the world cohered a bit better, and I tried to express what was happening with me. I wasn’t carrying on our conversation so much as narrating my sensory dislocation. I was aware that it was annoying.

Lisa eventually got up to go get ready for bed. I gave the cat some intense pets, then wandered into the kitchen. I marveled at the freshness of my perceptions. As the trip settled down, it came to feel like the world was re-enchanted. The diaphanous nature of all things became available to me once again. I was acutely aware of the patterns I was following, the weave of everything. It felt like being a kid, when the strangeness of the world is still fresh and you spend so much energy trying to adapt to it.

I had, entirely by accident, fallen back into the place where art comes from.

Today, sitting here at my kitchen table typing out this letter as the kid pulls kids’ books off the bookshelf (“It’s still quiet time,” I tell him, “keep playing quietly”), I remain in a slightly different state than I was just a day ago.

***

It’s not lost on me that the precipitating event for my consciousness trip was hearing secondhand something experienced by trans folks. As a cis-identifying person, I have to wonder, is there something else there, some repressed memory or hidden side of my identity? Maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about it.

What I do know: all of us, no matter our identity, are susceptible to dislocations of the self and the strangeness of having a body across time. I suspect a lot of anti-trans fear and bigotry comes from how uncomfortable people are with the experience of noticing as their own bodies and consciousness gradually changed.

***

I’m grateful that, for me, this perspectival shift left me feeling more alive to the mysteries of the world. This change feels especially useful today. Navigating how to be a person and an artist in this era is a difficult piece of work. I know I’m not alone in finding it difficult. So how useful to remember that the world isn’t any less enchanted now than it was two years ago, or a decade ago, or way back when I was five. That it’s all a question of perspective and consciousness.

I want to keep finding my way into this more wondrous, innocent perception of our strange, goofy, beautiful world. I don’t know precisely how to do that. Last night’s trip felt so random, like a gift. Can such things be forced?

Maybe on certain nights, after the kid goes to bed, I’ll make a pot of tea, light a couple of candles, and pull some tarot cards. Maybe I’ll get back into meditating every day. Certainly I need to make more of an effort not to be so busy with work and responsibilities and adulthood that there’s no time for art or introspection or getting lots of sleep or watching great movies.

Promising news from Gen. Z: across the country, college radio stations are overwhelmed with students wanting to get involved. Here’s one station:

I’m so happy for these kids, and happy for our culture. Live radio rules, and helping make it can be so fun and rewarding. And what a great antidote to the ways capitalism keeps trying to consolidate music and power.

(I was a jazz DJ in college, and unlike my Slavic major, it actually prepared me for my day job, where among other duties I host a podcast that’s about to turn five.)

New Craig Mod “pop-up walk” is nearing its conclusion. He’s walking “100 kilometers south-north along the Kiso-ji in Nagano, and then turning around and walking 100 kilometers back, north-south along the same route.” And he’s sending out a fresh newsletter about every single day of the walk. I’ve followed along on so many of his Japan walks, slurping down his pictures and stories from the day over my morning coffee. (Time zone magic!) This walk has so far been equally great and escapist and fun. Here are the rules he sets for himself, like some sort of newsletter-slinging Marina Abramovic:

You can sign up to catch the last handful of installments here.

Roxane Gay has a great essay about how “civility—this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences—is a fantasy.” I especially love this part:

There are a lot of us who wish we could just give something to the supremacists and it would be enough to satisfy them, and then we could go back to whatever it is we liked doing back in more peaceful times. A prominent example of this worldview is the podcaster and writer Ezra Klein. He’s an incredibly influential voice—several close family and friends are on a first-name basis with “Ezra.” Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, this New York Times columnist is willing to trade away, you know, the rights of trans people to exist or women’s bodily autonomy, in the hopes that it might mean electoral gains for democrats and a return to a fantasized state of harmony. This is “enlightened centrism.”

If you’re having some doubts after the last heel turn from the wonk himself—a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”—the best piece of writing I’ve seen on it is A. R. Moxon’s “Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something.” Moxon’s essay focuses on this telling exchange from Klein’s follow-up conversation with Ta-Nahesi Coates:

Political peacetime sounds great, man. But appeasement ain’t getting us there.

Speaking of ravenous forces in the neighborhood that would, if left unchecked, swallow each and every one of us up and keep on being hungry, how about the sublime stink spirit from Spirited Away (2001). As I recall, that avatar of a polluted river was not defeated by giving it one more thing to eat, and then one more, and then another. Some dangers one must address at their root.

Speaking of big vats of yellow liquid, I adore this Youtube series called “Big Batches,” and this one might be my favorite: “How 150,000 People Are Fed For Onam In Kerala, India” If you asked five-year-old me how a kitchen could feed thousands and thousands of people, I would definitely have imagined the immense brass pots and mountains of cut-up vegetables from this Keralese kitchen. Maybe I wouldn’t have imagined that they would be tended by buff, shirtless guys. But how great to see these men cooking in socialist Kerala—like a vision of a different future. Plus, who doesn’t love seeing papadam instantly puff up.

Beautiful cover story for the latest issue of The Believer (which we recently subscribed to): Mona Kareem’s “The Labyrinth.” Here’s the subtitle: “One Bidoon father’s all-consuming and occasionally illegal efforts to assemble the perfect personal library.” It’s a moving portrait of the author’s father, a stateless person and profound bibliophile, making a life full of books in Kuwait from the ’70s to the present. I especially loved this passage:

As inveterate cult-doc heads, we watched the latest cult-doc, Thirst Trap: The Fame. The Fantasy. The Fallout, which turns out not to be about a proper cult but is instead about how this young man named William White started making TikToks where he would make sexy faces at the camera, and he quickly developed a rabid following of middle-aged women who bullied him with money into being a full-time livestreamer / sex worker, and things just went downhill from there. It’s a pretty sad story. It’s also, I’d say, a cautionary tale about just how terribly Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” idea can go.

A zine came in the mail this week from the writer Sarah McColl: the annual print zine for paid subscribers to her newsletter Lost Art.

It’s about quilts!

How nice it is to hold writing like this—a spiraling, quilted essay, full of synchronicity and personality—in your hand. It makes me want to make—and distribute!—a zine of my own. (Watch this space!)

Protest update: we made it out to a No Kings Day protest on Saturday, and it was downright fun. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the iconic Portland frog who backed down a dozen heavily armed ICE officers, boldly, lewdly, a few weeks back.

This frog has inspired dozens or hundreds of copycats. At our protest there was no frog, but there was a blow-up dragon and a blow-up dinosaur (“DINOSAURS AGAINST THE ICE AGE”). Still, this is exactly what a protest movement needs: participatory fun that takes the piss out of the would-be secret police. The kid loved the costumes and was talking about them for hours afterward.

Back in the spring I suggested that we should be “Invoking Mythical Americana to Fight Fascism.” In some ways, these goofy inflatable outfits are even better than what I imagined.

If you’re worried about this regime but haven’t been going to any of the No Kings Day protests, I strongly encourage you try to make the next one. It’s motivating and makes you feel less alone. Plus, as protests go they’re extremely fun and nonviolent. For a recap, I especially loved this report from Sarah Jeong on Saturday’s protests in Portland. Here’s the luminous closing passage:

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?