Most days after my bookstore job, I watch the sunset over the east side of Riverdale Park in Toronto for as long as that sunset takes. It's a sublime experience of public decompression, as young people from the low-income towers nearby picnic alongside the gentrifying families the bookstore serves and dogs and solo teenagers cut through quiet picnickers against rolling greens, beyond which lies the Don, beyond which lies our red, smoky sun in its last hours. I abandon my phone and book for this time. Watching takes on new meaning when it's this spacious and slow—and it's saving my sanity. The park is small enough that peoples’ expressions are visible, and laughter is audible, and the sun has competition for meaning. The park is big enough that music from birthday parties doesn’t disturb other soloists waiting, meditating or simply watching down the graded view.
This post-retail peace occupies a similar place as screens for relaxation. Framed by trees rather than the curtains of a theatre, you get a very slow movie. As I return to myself, I sit as still as if I’m in that theatre, and I bring a snack, allowing the small public dramas to work on me. It isn’t the watching of the child- or dog-tender, the obligated golden cord. People are mostly having a gently exuberant time. It’s a big relief after years curled around my laptop’s glow watching made-up people, or around my claw-borne phone scrutinising real people remotely. People-watching without engagement in this semi-natural agora rests my brain and restores my faith in a different way from watching them in the movies or, you know, talking and listening to them. It’s beyond a relief from narrative, or stolen hours from beyond the narrative demands of productivity and forward motion: the park provides the theatre for the true story of life on Earth Boring.
What else is there to see? At some other hour on that claw-borne phone, I saw the poet Ariana Reines critique viewers suggesting a consumption boycott alongside Hollywood’s striking writers and actors. She suggested that those abandoning the weakest streaming offerings in the middle of high summer weren’t making much of a sacrifice, and recommended that they make some creative initiative beyond refusal. The eternal screeds on screen bans predictably take up saving the childrens’ brains, divesting from online advertising and blue light, turning down the volume on ADHD symptoms or renewing creativity.
“Going outside to play” is older than television, and flaneurie is older than Baudelaire. I position this people-watching not as an exercise in recharging in order to charge forth and offer up your own mastery, or even feeling good (although you will), but in attuning your senses to what you expect from the people—and media—you watch. Fewer people in the park will lecture you than on social media. Our corporate and political leaders are not in the park with us right now. There are few catastrophes and many acts of kindness, the kind you usually only experience firsthand. In viewing—though not, I think, in life—I’m a coward, and have found myself desperate for gentler options in the sensationally evil Succession/White Lotus/Idol landscape. For TV, my tastes run towards 100 Foot Wave (in which surfers mostly talk, for 10 episodes, about how big waves are, like really really huge). In movies, I like a protagonist who’s self-aware from the start, more Drive My Car than Barbie or Oppenheimer. For earnest viewers like myself, it doesn’t get better than watching people have a gentle time to steel the nerves, relieve them, if you will, for the inevitable pains of entertainment, news, art, and intimacy.
"For earnest viewers like myself, it doesn’t get better than watching people have a gentle time to steel the nerves, relieve them, if you will, for the inevitable pains of entertainment, news, art, and intimacy."
Recently I attended Toronto reading series phenomenon, Pack Animal, where I wallflowered from my position against the studio wall to witness close to two hundred ticket-holding people folded together for an hour of lyrical readings in a warmly pink hall. I scanned the crowd as I listened, watching them watch in all their stillness, analysis, self-consciousness, restlessness and bravery. Readings are one of the few occasions where the audience is usually lit, and that may coincide with their recent expansion and resurgence. Watching people quietly watch, alongside watching people quietly live, is an opportunity for a structured and gentle engagement, a narrative with several open doors.
Most days after my bookstore job, I watch the sunset over the east side of Riverdale Park in Toronto for as long as that sunset takes. It's a sublime experience of public decompression, as young people from the low-income towers nearby picnic alongside the gentrifying families the bookstore serves and dogs and solo teenagers cut through quiet picnickers against rolling greens, beyond which lies the Don, beyond which lies our red, smoky sun in its last hours. I abandon my phone and book for this time. Watching takes on new meaning when it's this spacious and slow—and it's saving my sanity. The park is small enough that peoples’ expressions are visible, and laughter is audible, and the sun has competition for meaning. The park is big enough that music from birthday parties doesn’t disturb other soloists waiting, meditating or simply watching down the graded view.
This post-retail peace occupies a similar place as screens for relaxation. Framed by trees rather than the curtains of a theatre, you get a very slow movie. As I return to myself, I sit as still as if I’m in that theatre, and I bring a snack, allowing the small public dramas to work on me. It isn’t the watching of the child- or dog-tender, the obligated golden cord. People are mostly having a gently exuberant time. It’s a big relief after years curled around my laptop’s glow watching made-up people, or around my claw-borne phone scrutinising real people remotely. People-watching without engagement in this semi-natural agora rests my brain and restores my faith in a different way from watching them in the movies or, you know, talking and listening to them. It’s beyond a relief from narrative, or stolen hours from beyond the narrative demands of productivity and forward motion: the park provides the theatre for the true story of life on Earth Boring.
What else is there to see? At some other hour on that claw-borne phone, I saw the poet Ariana Reines critique viewers suggesting a consumption boycott alongside Hollywood’s striking writers and actors. She suggested that those abandoning the weakest streaming offerings in the middle of high summer weren’t making much of a sacrifice, and recommended that they make some creative initiative beyond refusal. The eternal screeds on screen bans predictably take up saving the childrens’ brains, divesting from online advertising and blue light, turning down the volume on ADHD symptoms or renewing creativity.
“Going outside to play” is older than television, and flaneurie is older than Baudelaire. I position this people-watching not as an exercise in recharging in order to charge forth and offer up your own mastery, or even feeling good (although you will), but in attuning your senses to what you expect from the people—and media—you watch. Fewer people in the park will lecture you than on social media. Our corporate and political leaders are not in the park with us right now. There are few catastrophes and many acts of kindness, the kind you usually only experience firsthand. In viewing—though not, I think, in life—I’m a coward, and have found myself desperate for gentler options in the sensationally evil Succession/White Lotus/Idol landscape. For TV, my tastes run towards 100 Foot Wave (in which surfers mostly talk, for 10 episodes, about how big waves are, like really really huge). In movies, I like a protagonist who’s self-aware from the start, more Drive My Car than Barbie or Oppenheimer. For earnest viewers like myself, it doesn’t get better than watching people have a gentle time to steel the nerves, relieve them, if you will, for the inevitable pains of entertainment, news, art, and intimacy.
"For earnest viewers like myself, it doesn’t get better than watching people have a gentle time to steel the nerves, relieve them, if you will, for the inevitable pains of entertainment, news, art, and intimacy."
Recently I attended Toronto reading series phenomenon, Pack Animal, where I wallflowered from my position against the studio wall to witness close to two hundred ticket-holding people folded together for an hour of lyrical readings in a warmly pink hall. I scanned the crowd as I listened, watching them watch in all their stillness, analysis, self-consciousness, restlessness and bravery. Readings are one of the few occasions where the audience is usually lit, and that may coincide with their recent expansion and resurgence. Watching people quietly watch, alongside watching people quietly live, is an opportunity for a structured and gentle engagement, a narrative with several open doors.