From 78 -026 | How we talk to (or don't talk to) others in places then & now

Summary:
In this episode of the From 78 podcast, recorded on Thursday, December 4th, I discuss the subjective experience of time and how it intertwines with social spaces and technology. After a hectic Thanksgiving with my family, I delve into the significance of physical places in making meaningful human connections, contrasting them with today's digital interactions. I highlight a particular episode of Craig Mod's newsletter 'Ridgelines' that emphasizes the atmosphere of jazz kisaten in Japan and their unique social dynamics. I also share observations from my own life, pondering how modern technology and remote work have transformed communal spaces like cafes, affecting how people interact today. Suggestions and reflections on this transformation invite listeners to consider their own experiences and interactions in such spaces.

Table of Contents: 
00:32 Introduction and Thanksgiving Reflections

01:52 Podcast Content and Recent Activities

04:14 Craig Mod and His Works

06:50 The Importance of Place in Human Experience

12:22 Jazz Kissa: A Unique Cultural Phenomenon

17:48 Reflections on Modern Social Interactions

24:50 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

Referenced:
Marjory Prime (film)
Mubi (service)
Craig Mod (web)
Things Become Other Things (book)
Ridgelines 218 (web)
Ridgelines archive (web)
Kissa by Kissa (book)

Contact: 
[e-mail]

Creators and Guests

Host

Neil Gorman

Neil Gorman is a Lacanian psychoanalyst, social worker, and podcaster. He has ridden the Earth around the sun 47 + times witout falling off.

What is From78?

From78 is a podcast about people in time.
The host is a dude who was born in 1978, who is literally From78. On the show, From78 talks to people who are older, young, or about the same age as he is about what the past and the future as they experience is. Topics discussed include: Hauntology, technology, politics, theory, art, culture, theology, and a wide range of other sundry things and stuff.

Along with these discussions, there are occasional audio-essays about what it is like to be From78 in the here and now.

F78-026_RAW
===

Neil: This is from 78. It is a podcast about the subjective experience of time, and this is episode number 0 2 6 26. I'm recording this on, Thursday, December the fourth. This is exactly one week after. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a little hectic for me. I don't know how it was for you, but I have four little kids and that means that people come to me for Thanksgiving.

People in my life have been really, good to me and my family rather than asking us to go through the rather time consuming process of packing up all of the things that you need. To pack in order to bring four kids, the oldest of which is six someplace else. So that's a big undertaking and people in my life tend to know that.

And so they're like, why don't we come to you for Thanksgiving? So we had 20 people at our house for Thanksgiving. My kids had a great time. I had a good time. There was no cantankerous, there was no animosity that people were acting out in different ways. It was a good Thanksgiving, but it took a lot of time.

And because of that, I wasn't able to do this thing, this podcast where I sit down in front of the microphone like I am now and talk to you about either my specific subjective experience of time or the subjective experience of time in a more general sense. And in that time, I've continued to do the things that I do on a regular basis.

I read things on the internet and in books I. Listen to podcasts and music, and I have conversations with people. Sometimes I eavesdrop on conversations that people are having as well. Sometimes I call that ear hustling instead of eavesdropping. It's the same thing and I've watched certain things, you know, TV shows occasionally.

I was able to watch a movie recently called Marjorie Prime. On movie. It was a really cool movie. I'll probably have something more to say about it on a future episode, but I'm gonna save that because I have so much stuff that I want to tell you about today. So many things I want to talk about. I ma had been making this list of things that I had come across that I thought illuminated some aspect of the subjective experience of time, and it got to be big.

It got to be a pretty big list because the. Time in between episode number 25, and this episode number 26 was so large. The list got bigger and bigger and for a little bit, my plan was that I was gonna try to take this rather large list and weave the different things together into a single tapestry that would constitute one episode.

And I actually was trying to do that on, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. So the two days before today when I'm recording. And I realized in trying to weave all these different strands together that it just wasn't gonna happen. It, I could do it maybe, but to do it would require even more time in the gap between episodes, it'd be even bigger, and it would have to be a doozy of an episode.

I'd have to talk for a really long time. And these from 78 podcasts tend to be on the shorter side, and I think that's good. So I'm gonna keep it like that. So what I've decided to do today on this episode. It is rather than talk to you about a whole bunch of different things and try to weave those different things together.

I'm gonna tell you about just one of the things that I came across recently, and this is something that I found in an email newsletter, which is titled Ridgelines. It was the 218th edition of that specific newsletter. I will have links to this specific Ridgelines 218. In my show notes, and I'll also give you a link to the archives of the newsletter because the archives are full of lots of great stuff.

This is a email newsletter, which is written by a guy named Craig Mod, who I have mentioned on this podcast in the past. I'm a big kind of Craig Mod fan. I like what he does. I like the things that he produces. I'm gonna give him a little bit of a plug here. Recently he published a book, a memoir of sorts.

About walking in Japan and thinking about things, remembering stuff as he walked it. It's a book called Things Become Other Things. And one of the things I really like about the book, there are many, but one of the things I really like about it is that it is a really good capturing and text of a person's subjective experience of time.

I read it and I thought, man, this is something that really does it for me. This is a really good book for somebody of my ilk, somebody who thinks about the things that I think about, somebody who's really, thinks about time and what it's like to exist in time as much as I do. It was really, really good.

And so I would highly recommend this book. It's available right now. It got published by Random House and he also published a fine art edition of the book, but I don't know if there's any more copies of the fine art edition available. Either way, if you just go to my show notes, you'll find all this, and you could as well just kind of go to your search engine of choice and type in Craig, C-R-A-I-G, space Mod, MOD.

And I am positive that you would be able to find the things that I'm mentioning and many more things that Craig Mod has created. Okay. That's gonna be the end of my plug for Craig Mod. He's not sponsoring this podcast. I just really like his stuff. Having said all that, I'm gonna read a little bit of text to you that comes from this email newsletter.

And the reason I've selected this is that I think that. The previous episodes of this podcast, the most recent kinds of episodes, have really been focusing a lot on place and on the importance of place as that, as place pertains to the way that we. Subjectively experience time as these kind of social creatures, human beings like to be around other human beings.

We form relationships. We form communities and societies and so on and so forth, and I've been riffing a lot on how in my life, in my past, as I've moved through time, I have very frequently. Found different places that I could go to on a regular basis. Sometimes these were places that I worked at, and other times there were places that I just went to.

And the reason I would go to these places mainly was that in becoming a regular there, I would notice that there were other people who were also regulars at this place. Or if I was an employee, there were other people who were employees at this place. And because we would show up at these places. You know, over and over and over again, these places became these nodes, these things that we could use in order to become familiar with one another and eventually create significant slash meaningful relationships with one another.

And I'm, I find myself today, right now, in the year 2025. With all of the technology that's available and like people are working from home a lot, there's zoom meetings where you can just, be in your pajama pants and sitting at your house and go to a meeting. So there's that kind of stuff.

There's texting. Everybody has these pieces of glass in their pocket that let them do all sorts of instantaneous communication and looking things up. And I'm wondering a lot about what is. The effect of all of that and more that I'm not mentioning the kind of the way that we live now, what is the effect of that on places that people can use, that they can become regulars at, so they can, and then becoming a regular, they can use those places to create significant and meaningful relationships with other people who are also regulars?

My opinion at this moment is that. We're kind of losing those, that these places are becoming less available to me and to therefore to other people. Now, I could be wrong about this. Absolutely. I'm 47. As I say this, as I mentioned a little bit ago, I've got four little kids, so the way that my life is structured now, I don't have a whole lot of available free time to go to places and just kind of hang out there.

So maybe that's happening and I'm just not privy to it because of the way that my life is structured at the moment and what the priorities in my life are. I understand that, but I do think that acknowledging all that, it seems to me that there is less emphasis on place. I think that people do more often than not, probably create connections with other people.

, Through digitally mediated sorts of things like discord, slack channels, group text messages, individual text chains, so on and so forth. I mean, people are still creating relationships with other people, but the place part of it seems to be absent, and I don't know exactly if I'm right about that, if that hypothesis is indeed correct.

I'm just not sure how that's gonna play out. In society more broadly. It's a question that I don't know the answer to. I'm interested in finding out the answer. I will find out the answer if I continue to pay attention to it, 'cause I move through all this different stuff. , Anyway, so that's a lot of rambling.

Before I get to this thing that I want to read to you, one last bit of ble and then I promise I'll get to it. There's a term in this text, Kisa, it's spelled K-I-S-S-A. And this is a term that Craig uses a lot. He actually wrote a book, another book called Kissa by Kissa , which is all about these kinds of places in Japan.

And that what they seem like to me whenever he talks about them is non-chain unique, mom and pop style coffee houses or cafes, maybe you might say. That existed in Japan. It seems like they came into existence in Japan mainly after World War ii. Maybe there was a little bit of them before that, but they seemed to, people really set them up, established them, and they became more of a successful kind of business venture for people, a more of a thing that was part of the quotidian day-to-day existence in Japan after World War II.

And there's different kinds of these cases. , Craig will talk about jazz cases, which are. These sorts of coffee houses where people would go specifically to experience jazz music. And he talks about, , kinda like old man kissas, which are run down.

Maybe a, they're kinda like a greasy spoon maybe is a equivalent in the American vernacular. I'm not, I've never been to any of these places, so I don't know this. Telling you what I think based off of what I read, not off of what I experience. So when you hear the word quia, I guess the important thing for you to know if you didn't already know this, is that a Kissa is a kind of coffee house in Japan.

And Craig goes to these places. He really likes them a lot for all sorts of different reasons. And in the 218th edition of his email in Newsletter Ridgelines, he wrote the following.

"I’ve visited dozens of jazz kissa all around Japan. When they opened in the 50s and 60s, records were prohibitively expensive, and American musicians touring Japan were rare. The only way to really listen to overseas jazz, was at their shops. There was an information arbitrage happening, a kind of translation between abroad and local, and the jazz kissa was the intermediary broker. So they had rules, too. No talking (you’re there to listen). They had little pads of paper on which you could request an album. (The music was so loud you couldn’t issue a request using your voice, anyway.) If you made a music request and went to the bathroom while it was playing, you were never allowed to make another request. Obviously, back then there was no Spotify, no Apple Music. The rules were modeled in alignment with their purpose, elevated their purpose, created a kind of superlative in-shop presence, tasting that burnt coffee, _hearing Charlie Parker for the first time_, having your mind blown. The matchbooks would sometimes have lines printed on them for you to take notes about what you heard that day (this was some deadly serious business, listening to jazz).

Today, I often think about what could be arbitraged, what could be brokered, and how we could regain our attention from the black mirrors in our hands. I’ve come to feel that a café or restaurant banning phones themselves (never mind laptops; phones always strike me as the real vibe-killer (but of course, dingdongs rocking video calls in cafés will forever be the ultimate boss of sanity)) would provide some kind of utility to the world, would self-select for a certain kind of customer craving shared silence from the algorithms, from the news, from the din of endless horror and outrage."

So that was a bit of a longer bit of text that I read to you and as I was reading it, I don't know how it sounded. There's a couple of parenthetical comments in there and I didn't say parentheses as I was reading. , So sorry about that. But I think you probably get the gist of what this is talking about, right?

Craig is describing a certain kind of place, the jazz Kissa, where people would go. And when they went there, there was a set of norms, expectations, rules, that you wouldn't be talking, that you wouldn't be distracted, that you'd be focused on what you went there to do, which was listen to jazz, and you other people were also there for that purpose, and so you wouldn't do things that would disrupt their enjoyment of the jazz that they had come there to listen to.

That's part of what he's getting at. He also talks about the. More kind of like material economic conditions that had existed, that created these things get, you couldn't just stream jazz music anytime you wanted. Streaming services weren't around, and it was also pretty difficult to acquire physical copies that you could play at your house of jazz music, right?

So if you wanted to listen to jazz music, you would have to go to a place that. Would assume the burden, I guess you might say, of acquiring a library of a kind of music that was not a specifically mainstream. Everybody likes this kind of music and they would build up a library and you could go there and ask them to play things from that library as long as you were following the rules and being polite to the other people who are in the space.

Right. This is kind of an interesting thing. It's a very specific. Description of a very specific place, and what I think is probably interesting about this, to me, the questions that come to my mind is in places like that, did people still end up becoming regulars and forming relationships with the other regulars?

I don't know the answer to that question because I've never been to Japan. I don't know a lot about this subculture. I don't know a lot about jazz. I imagine that they probably would've, I mean, if you go to a place. And even it's a place like this where you gotta be quiet. It's kind of like, um, like a library or something like that, right?

You're supposed to let people concentrate and not do things that would disrupt their concentration while you're in this space. That doesn't mean that you don't see the same people there and maybe people passed notes, maybe they met up outside , and talked. Maybe people. Showed up there and would swap records because they were prohibitively expensive and you could, if I had a record that you didn't have and you had a record that I didn't have, maybe we could trade for a little bit and stuff.

I imagine that stuff like that must have happened. So that's something that I thought was really interesting as I was reading this. The other thing that really stood out to me is the way that Craig was talking about the use of technology in these places that. It really caught my attention and it made me remember, and I've been kind of dwelling in these memories a lot over the past couple days since I've read this.

It made me remember certain cafes that I would go to in my adolescence in probably my early twenties, time before there was an iPhone and before there was a lot of even broadband internet most places, right? I remember going to cafes and there were rules at the cafes that I went to as well. He talked about the set of sort of rules or expectations of how people were supposed to behave in a jazz kissa here.

And some of the cafes that I went to, there were other kinds of rules, that people would follow. So one rule. That was never written down anywhere. It wasn't like this was , a thing that you had there terms of service that you needed to agree to as you entered the cafe or nothing like that. But people would go to cafes and they'd go to cafes to read books, to study, to engage with some kind of content.

And there was an unspoken rule that if you saw somebody reading something, you could approach them and you could ask them about what they were reading, right? That was, and that happened regularly, I think, in these places. I would sit there and I would read something. I'd read a comic book or a graphic novel.

I would read novels. I remember one time specifically I was reading a Herman Hess book. , And somebody came up to me and they're like, is that a Herman Hess book? And I'm like, it is a Herman Hess book. And they're like, have you, which one is that?

And I'm like, is this one? And they're like, I haven't read that one. Tell me about it. And I told them what I thought about it, and they're like, oh, since you like Herman Hess, have you read this other stuff? And they mentioned, I can't remember who it was right now. And a whole conversation happened in that little moment with somebody.

I never saw that person again. But I had a nice little exchange because there was this. Vibe, this style of how you related to people in these places where you could do these sorts of things. Now if you were really busy, which happened sometimes, I can recall one time sitting and reading a book that I needed to read because I had a class later that day and I needed to read this book prior to that, or read part of this book prior to that class.

And somebody came up to me and tried to start a conversation. And I remember telling them, I would really love to talk with you about this. Unfortunately, I have to read this so that I can prepared for a class in a couple hours. And so I kind of need to focus on it. And they're like, oh, absolutely, sorry to bother you.

And I was like, oh, no problem. And you know, I went back to my reading and they went back to whatever they were doing and that wasn't an issue. But I, I think about that style of approaching a person in a place. And maybe you know the person 'cause they're a regular and you are too. Or maybe you don't know them because you're not a regular and maybe they're not either.

You don't know 'cause you're not a regular. But you can approach them and you can say like, Hey, I've noticed something that you're doing. I have a question about it. , You were able to approach people and effectively say to them, would you like to enter into a conversation with me? And you didn't need to do it like that.

You didn't need to walk up and basically sit down and be like, hello person. Would you like to enter into a conversation with me? You could go up and you could just say, Hey, I noticed that you're, you seem me to be very engaged in something there. Do you mind if I ask you what it is? And it was very normal to then be polite back to people and have a short conversation, which you could opt out of also in a polite way by saying, I, I really don't have time to do this.

I'm, I need to get this done. Nowadays, I find that what happens is most people when they go into a place, they throw on headphones or earbuds and they just sit and they look at a screen of some sort. And I find that, I can't think of actually any instance ever that I've witnessed or had happened to me.

Where a person approached me and said some version of, Hey, what's going on your screen? It seems that the norm, the rule is that to ask that kind of question of a person would be extremely rude, would be all sorts of bad juju. Don't do that. Don't go up and interrupt a person while they're looking at their screen and ask them what's going on in their screen.

That would be rude and it would be invasive, and it's none of your business anyways. Right. And the, the difference is so striking to me as I think about this. In one sense, in my past, it was not seen as rude or off-putting or invasive to walk up to a person and to ask them about the book that they were reading or the music they were listening to, or something.

And even other things too that would happen. I remember I would sit in these places and I'd be having conversations about a film or something and there'd be a person who was sitting not that far away and they might turn around and be like, Hey, I couldn't help but overhear what you were talking about because I'm not that far away from where you're saying it.

And I've seen that film and I have some thoughts. And they would, they could then jump in on what you were talking about. That kind of stuff happened too, and it wasn't. Inappropriate. It wasn't weird because if you wanted to have a private conversation, you probably wouldn't go to a place like that. Or if you were in a place like that and you wanted to have a private conversation, you stepped outside.

We, there was ways of managing that kind of a thing. And today that, um, ability to just sort of like jump in on things to, to become a part of a conversation to. Open up a conversation with another person. They just seem so much more lacking. So even if places exist today, which obviously places exist, where people go, people can go to a Starbucks and they can hang out there.

But I think if you do that today, you're gonna see a lot of people using the Starbucks as a place to get some work done on their computers or to watch some movies on their iPads, their phones, those sorts of things. And I don't think it's, it would be nearly anywhere near as okay to walk up to a person and be like, Hey, what's going on on your iPad?

What do you, you seem really absorbed in whatever's on that screen. Do you mind if I ask you what it, that would be so strange, would it not? It's an, it's a significant difference. So even if the places exist, do they function the same way that they once did? That's the question. My hunch, my hypothesis is that they don't.

What does that mean? What's up with that? Right? What do we do with this? How do we respond to these conditions that we find ourselves in today? I sure don't know. I'm thinking about it a bunch.

I recently had a patient cancel on me, which gave me a free hour, and I walked down to a Starbucks, which is not that far from where my office is. Rather than grabbing a coffee and a sandwich and hoofing it back to my office, I decided that I was going to grab a coffee and a sandwich and I was gonna sit at the counter at this place, at the Starbucks 'cause they have a counter.

And I was just gonna watch what was going on. And what I saw there is actually informing a lot of what I'm saying in this specific episode of from 78. I noticed what I told just told you about, and I am, I'm befuddled. I really am. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know. I guess I'm gonna make a podcast about it, which I just did.

What Now? I don't know. What do you think about that? Eh. It'd be nice to know I set up an email address for this podcast. If anybody wants to use it. It's from 78 [e-mail]. If you send an email there, I'll read it and I'm busy so I might not reply to you the same day that you send it, but I will reply to you at some point.

Again, that's [e-mail], and I think that's all I have for you today. This has been from 78, a weird little podcast about the subjective experience of time. I really appreciate that you. You gave me your time that out of all the things that you could be listening to right now, you picked this weird little podcast that I make.

Appreciate that a whole bunch, whoever you are, whatever you're doing. I hope you're having a good time and I hope that you'll come back and you will let me be in your ears again sometime in the future till then. You take care. Make some glorious mistakes. Don't let the man keep you down. And remember that it is a serious thing just to be alive in this broken world on this fresh morning, or this afternoon, or this evening for this small hours of the morning, late at night, depending on when you're listening to it.

All right, I'm done. You take care.

-N