Welcome to the first issue of ben tapeworm’s almanac. Farmer’s almanacs, of course, were compendia of information for farmers, though they often had little to do with actual farming. This 1802 Almanac, for instance, set Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural address amid lunar charts; another printed things as varied as “Recipes for Pickling Beef,” “Medical Uses of Salt,” “The Cocoa-tree of the South-sea Islands,“ and the “Anatomy of Man’s Body as Said to be Governed by the Twelve Constellations.”
My hope is that this newsletter will be similarly wide-ranging and at least somewhat useful (though—I hate to say it—without any animal husbandry tips). Expect a weekly collection of music, archival-oriented websites and articles, memes, films, photos, and whatever else seems worth sharing. Every now and then there may be some longer thoughts from me.
Please let me know what you’d like to see more or less of, and feel free to send me things from your own internet spelunking. There’s also a link at the bottom for sharing this newsletter if you know of anyone else who might be interested.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
coastal overcast - A relaxing but winter-tinged playlist of psych-rock, indie folk, jazz, and other rainy-beach vibes. Made to be listened to in order, but listen however you’d like.
Bleachers - “chinatown (feat. Bruce Springsteen)” - By getting 71-year-old Bruce Springsteen to sing on what sounds like an 80s Springsteen track, superproducer Jack Antonoff has created a weird, self-devouring loop of 80s influence and nostalgia. It’s a vapid song (if you’ve ever seen Chinatown, telling someone “You’re my Chinatown, baby” seems like not the move), but I can’t stop listening to it.
on the screen
How To With John Wilson is one of my favorite things I’ve seen on TV this year, in part because it’s a documentary show that feels like an actual document of something, rather than part of the dim world of boilerplate, billion-hour docudramas. Each episode is essentially a video essay, where observational footage is stitched together into 25 minutes of visual puns, kooky characters, and delightfully delirious footage of (mostly) pre-Covid New York. Episodes 3 and 4 are my favorites if you’re short on time. Stream it on HBO.
I watched 35 Shots of Rum (2008) with my friend Sam on his suggestion, and was struck by how much I liked it—and by how refreshingly unlike anything else I’d watched recently it was. Claire Denis’s father/daughter film is capacious and deliberately edited, an antidote for over-plotted dramas. There’s also a rainy-night bar scene that will have you mourning for moments of pre-pandemic intimacy. Stream it on Criterion.
The latest banality to get a cringey pandemic rebrand: the panda-cam! “During a time when the COVID-19 epidemic is touching all of our lives,” announces the Atlanta Zoo’s website, “we’re proud and glad that people around the world find joy in PandaCam.” If pandas don’t spark joy, you can also livestream coral reefs, Norwegian railways, elk sanctuaries, Earth from space, Times Square, the Abbey Road crosswalk, an empty parking lot outside the National Corvette Museum, this Finnish village where Santa Claus supposedly lives, and the (very probably NSFW) inside of people’s apartments.
from the archives
radiooooo.com is an interactive global radio that lets you listen through the decades in (almost) any country in the world. The interface is fantastic, the music is wide-ranging, and it’s free-to-use—albeit without some paid features like skipping tracks and sharing links. It seems like it’s mostly been populated by French audiophiles (the team is based in Paris), so expect plenty of hard-to-find disco jams. Might I suggest South Africa in the 80s? Or South Korea in the 70s? Thanks to my friend Gabby for sharing.
from the future
this person does not exist is the result of an engineer at NVIDIA training two neural networks against each other to generate uncannily real-looking photos of nonexistent people (keep refreshing the page to get different faces). This has been around for a while (and the New York Times recently ran this nice interactive piece on the subject), but I only recently discovered the somewhat less upsetting companion sites, this cat does not exist and this artwork does not exist—as well as the way more upsetting this horse does not exist:
from my incoming texts
“We’re going to forget more insane things about the trump era than we could ever remember - by a long shot - and I think that’s wonderful”
“we simply cannot go to the wine shoppe every night”
“STRAP ON 🍆 and STRAP IN 💺☢️ for a wild 🚀 RIDE 🛴 on this 💦🦃💦🙏🏼THANKSGIVING 2020 🙏🏼💦”
“Is Ben tapeworm a friend of yours?”