Cartoons Curated

All this year I’ve been treating social media like an 18&up club. I still remember turning 18 and lining up in the cold in front of the Sound Factory in SF, paying $20 to be herded like cattle into a dark warehouse by a port, bouncers interrogating my driver’s license with a tiny flashlight, and getting a big black X sharpied onto the back of my hand to let the bartenders know that I’m only allowed to drink soda.

After I’d paid my premium, bought my $12 Roy Rogers, and found a nice dark corner to awkwardly bob my head to Jagged Edge songs all night, I’d contemplate two main things: (1) What are 21&up clubs like? (2) Wtf are these people who are 21&up doing at an 18&up club?

All of this is to say that I spent so much of 2017, after a neck-aching Facebook session, asking myself, “Wtf am I doing here?” Didn’t I hop on the social media wagon during my college years, when I also wore XXL Ecko tees and thought that drinking a SlimFast milkshake with my Del Taco dinner meant I was being healthy? How many things have I outgrown since my college years, and why is feeding the Facebook machine pretty much the only habit I’ve maintained consistently since then?

At a certain point in my life, walking down the street and seeing people shivering in line, waiting to get felt up by a bouncer so they can shout at each other to compete with the bassline, I thought to myself, not for me anymore. I’m starting to feel the same way about social media.

But just because I don’t go to clubs anymore doesn’t mean I don’t still love music, and just because I’m backing off of the feedz doesn’t mean I don’t still love the internet. Actually, I miss the old internet – the dodgy but still relatively more-wholesome internet, where you could stumble upon something amazing, simply because someone else thought this thing would be cool to share. When the internet was a playground, and not a boutique gym.

This week I’m sharing “Flyin’ Bamboo,” a new music video for a song by Nitai Hershkovits and MNDSGN, animated by Felix Colgrave. I’ve been following Colgrave ever since I stumbled upon his work during a good old-fashioned Youtube wormhole dive. My time away from social has offered me the space to do these again, they feel like hikes through the internet as opposed to the daily traffic jam commute. The song and accompanying cartoon is a beautiful way to start the weekend, and a reminder that, despite all its flaws, the Internet giveth.

Everyone begins their new years differently. Some make resolutions, increasingly more partake in the tradition of pointing out why resolutions don’t work. Some party it up on New Year’s Eve, others keep it low-key and reflect on the year they had. But everyone enters a new year with some sort of expectation, even if that expectation is manifested in ambivalence.

That puts so much pressure on the first week of the year. It feels like a pilot episode, a mold or a barometer for what the other 51 are going to be like. We conjure extra effort to be the archetypes of ourselves in our head, and find comfort in the idea that our missteps from last year were absolved when December ended.

And whether or not you believe that 2018 presents a blank slate, it can’t be denied that the new year is, at the very least, an occasion offered by time itself for us to collectively reposition ourselves. It is a universal placebo, and as placebos go, just because it’s all in your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

This week’s cartoon: The Creation by FilmBilder, 2010

Since 2016 I’ve been presenting Cartoons Curated, a newsletter that shares a cartoon on Saturday morning. I’m going to also start sharing my posts here too, but feel free to subscribe!