alexi gunner
@idlegaze
cultural strategist
writes idle gaze; a newsletter exploring the undercurrents of the modern zeitgeist.
founder @ idle gaze consulting
cultural futurist @ RADAR
alexi gunner
idlegaze.substack.com
we need a word for a type of person who spends all their time working to live in a city so they can be near cool things, but they don’t actually like going out
threads.com“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
— David Foster Wallace
Reading on the bus is performative. Reading at the cafe is performative. Writing in public is performative. Wearing clothes is performative. Waking up in the morning is performative. Engaging in witty conversation is performative. It’s performative all the way down. All the world’s a stage. Take stimulants
Tonysubstack.comSemi-cool has usually stood in for cool in the popular imagination, because the latter – well, because the latter wouldn’t be what it is if it troubled the popular imagination. Cool is, to repurpose the late Donald Rumsfeld as a cultural theorist, an unknown unknown.
Everything is Clapham now
In our bottomless craving to reveal what’s unknown, we deprive ourselves of the sensual encounter, the anticipation, and the potential to rejig reality.
Toko-pa Turner • Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home
We want surprise and suspense, but we also crave order and closure. The artistry of the mystery box is in the balance: give away too much and we’re bored, give away too little and we’re lost.
Jonah Lehrer • Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution
We need the presence of mystery in the same way that the coherence and beauty of a landscape require the presence of a horizon, whether as a line defining the field of vision or as a dark boundary that gives sharper definition to the world that is illuminated. Or as language needs the refreshment of silence. We need a sense of communion with that... See more
the hedgehog review • Mystery
A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us.