Welcome to The Daily Mars
Issue 001: Culture is my religion
Hi, I’m Mars.
I love to read.
This does not make me unique. Lots of people enjoy reading. Many people don’t enjoy it but still read regularly, either for work or some other obligation.
My approach is a little different.
Reading is like oxygen for me. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up. It’s what I instinctively turn to when I have free time. Though my habits have shifted over time, reading is still the activity that takes up most of my waking hours. And reading is the primary way I consume culture.
I approach life and learning as something of a cultural explorer. I spent five years in graduate school, earning both a Master’s in Social Science and a law degree. I read academic and legal writing extensively in the hope that a comprehension of the subject matter would lead to a greater understanding of the world around me. Yet during these years, I spent even more time reading literature, listening to music and watching films and television.
When I use the word culture, I instinctively think of art. Culture is the animating thread of my life, and of this Substack. But art is the needle that guides the thread, through my mind and my heart, and connects me to the world around me.
I believe art should be a shot across the bow. Art can issue the opening salvo in a struggle to identify systemic flaws and ameliorate social wrongs.
Because of that belief, I spent five years writing a novel to try and make sense of this insanity. I was inspired by classic satirists such as Oscar Wilde and Kurt Vonnegut as well as films like Dr. Strangelove and The Social Network.
More recently I’ve written several short stories, screenplays and even a few (comically terrible) songs. Writing remains my strongest connective tissue to culture. If I love a show or a movie, that love almost always stems from great writing. And the inverse is also true.
I want to tell stories, and share culture, that transmit a searing commentary on society through indelible characters. Stories that make people laugh while making them think.
But culture also includes things such as politics, travel, the legal system, sports, religious and economic norms and customs that determine approaches to social behavior.
Culture serves as my North Star for orienting myself in the universe. I explore culture to make sense of the world around me. I search out things that I love. I reflect on why I love those things.
This exploration happens at concert venues, restaurants and, in particularly treasured times, traveling in foreign countries. But most often in the pages of a book or on the internet.
In today’s digitalized world, I sometimes think we are all citizens of the Internet as much as (and for many people, even more than) we are citizens of a particular country or consumers of a single culture. Navigating culture happens primarily on the internet.
Today, most people use social media as their gateway to the internet. For some users, social media actually becomes the Internet.
I do not have social media. This gives me the opportunity to navigate culture in my own way, rather than having the experience shaped by an algorithm that’s predicated on making me angry. I humbly submit that this unusual approach makes me suitable for the mission at hand.
The Internet can still be a source of news, entertainment and connection without using social media as a bridge. It just requires a little more time and effort to find the doors you want to walk through and the paths you want to explore.
I want to share some of my discoveries with people.
Culture also forms a lot of the connective tissue in my relationships. It’s the primary way in which I connect with and understand people. If you are a Radiohead fan, we have something in common, a link in the cultural chain. Ditto if you think Ted Chiang is an underappreciated genius, or if you are awed by Fela Kuti, comforted by Nina Simone and Elliott Smith, you’ve watched Dune: Part Two more than three times or you think that Hacks is the best show on television.
If I think back to those exciting moments early on in a new relationship, more often than not they centered on a shared appreciation or fascination with aspects of culture. A band, a film, a political idea or an excitement about traveling to a particular place.
Nicolas Cage, one of the greatest actors alive, touched on the concept of genius loci, or “spirit of a place.” I sincerely believe that being physically present in a place, interacting with the people who live there, seeing it with your own eyes, smelling it, hearing it, allows you to understand that place and those people in a different way. I grew up in the South, in Appalachia. Aspects of Appalachian culture like moonshine, bluegrass music and barbecue still connect me to the spirit of the place.
Traveling is something I treasure because it opens up the world of culture in such a visceral way. As the child of an airline pilot, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel extensively and live in every region of the United States. I’ve spent almost four years of my life traveling internationally. Traveling gives you the chance to experience another culture. It makes the idea of another place real in a way that it wasn’t before. It also serves as a connective bridge between people and a pathway to shared understanding.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his excellent new book The Message:
“[This is] about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge. There are dimensions in your words—rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color and curve…
But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness—in your interpretations, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.”
Culture is my religion, the altar where I worship.
This is a circular statement because traditionally religion is considered part of culture. But what I mean is that I have a devout fascination with, and often find a divine inspiration from, the neverending process of communicating about the human experience.
Experiencing culture is primarily a consumptive process: reading, watching, listening, traveling, examining and literally eating. Culture is something you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. It has an indelible power over the senses: to shock, to soothe, to bring laughter or anger, ecstasy and pain.
At its best, there is joy in this experience. That joy comes from a wide palette of emotions. Sometimes it is the byproduct of simply being entertained. There is the excitement of seeing, hearing, tasting or learning something new or surprising. Other times a piece of culture, perhaps a song or a book, resonates more deeply, producing catharsis.
I think several fiction writers have put it best, saying “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us” and help us to feel “less alone inside.”
The primary goal of this Substack is to curate information about culture, from the arts to politics, traveling to tech, sports to science fiction, and share it with those around me. In doing so, I want to persuade people to keep reading what I write, but also to explore some of the works of art I recommend or consider some of the ideas I advocate.
Love the concept and look forward to future posts.
Stuff to Distract You From the Abyss is particularly helpful
these days!
Keep it coming!