Supercuts have been around for years at this point. They are a sort of megamix of clips on a specific topic where all the clips are stuck together back to back. I guess they arose out of actual megamixes which were more music based, where a whole load of tunes from a specific artist were mixed together. For example here’s an 80s megamix - 1980s Greatest hits mixed nonstop. Oh the 80s were such fun.

I remember listening to megamixes in my youth, so the concept has been around for decades. When consumer audio and video editing tools became more widespread, along with online video sharing websites like YouTube became popular, supercuts of classic bits from various actors back catalogues of films started popping up everywhere. A famous example is Nicholas Cage loosing his temper. They are pretty fun, often a sort of homage to the person that’s being supercuted.

I never really used to pay much attention to elections, but the past few months have been filled with pretty exciting election cycles in the UK, France, the US and the EU, with some small interesting appearances from places like South Africa and Iran. World politics is actually kind of interesting these days.

What I’ve noticed recently is how supercuts are now being used during election campaigns to illustrate how much the main stream media is manipulated. The best example of this is in the recent US elections, where vice president Harris is now standing against Trump in the upcoming elections. Some politics observers have started putting together supercuts with pieces taken from main stream news channels where they are all using not just similar language, but absolutely identical language week in, week out.

It’s really odd to hear this because it totally breaks the facade they portray as trusted professional journalists. It turns out they all just parrot the political party weekly talking points. It’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it, but the supercuts expose the lie. It’s so blatant to be truely comedic. Take for example this supercut of news anchors talking about the Republicans as being 'weird'.

The irony is that the supercut exposes were the real weirdness lies, in the fact that a huge part of the main stream media are just puppet mouthpieces for the Democrats. I think it’s probably the most original use of digital media I’ve seen in years. I fully expect these supercuts to get more popular in the near future.

Another thing that I think supercuts show you goes far beyond politics. It’s really just an example of how the social layer of society can be hacked. And it can be done pretty easily. I mention this because it’s the sort of thing that can happen outside of television and radio, it can happen in just regular real life. Anywhere there are networks of connected humans, which these days is made all the more easy with social media and encrypted group messaging apps but could easily be implemented by just word of mouth.

I write a lot about my experiences living here in Vietnam, and there is no doubt in my mind that a version of this occurs here. Events happen, often manufactured, and the word on the street spreads really quickly through the various groups of people like the food vendors, the security guards, the park gardeners, the motorbike taxi drivers, and eventually to the regular population of adults, children, office workers and even older folks. You can often see things spreading over several days. It tends to escallate, and to be honest it can be quite scary. Sometimes it’s totally organic, other times it feels very orchestrated.

I write about it now, for example in this blog post about a recent bullying cycle, and another very strange and quite dark one that happened just in the past few days. I’m making the link to these supercuts so you can get a sense for the type of thing that can occur. When targeted individuals try to explain what’s happening they can often seem a bit unhinged. That’s because this type of thing really is quite disturbing to your senses. I think the supercuts can give you a glimpse of the type of harrassment and bullying that happens in societies, which often goes unnoticed, but is very real. It’s a good thing to be aware of in case it happens to you but also so you can empathise when you see it happen to others.

Modern life is weird, and it’s likely going to get weirder, but ultimately we are all in this together.

I had totally forgotten about how much I like street art until I read this article about UK street artists earlier today. It’s funny how seing pictures of some of these murals brings back all sorts of memories of places I’ve lived in, or visited or just past by often. All those pieces of art are ever present but they sort of disapear into the scenery, into the background. They become part of the city, part of your everyday life, like an old friend you bump into every now and then.

What I love about street art is how it channels culture jaming in really positive ways. In that for a moment as you go about your daily routines, it pierces through the invisible bariers that innevitably rise in between us and wakes you up out of the automatisms of life. For a small moment you pause and appreciate life in it’s purest form, and then life goes on. It’s some sort of combination of magic and love encoded directly into the environment.

And people take photos, and send them to their friends, the love and ambience spreads. Yes I guess it’s strickly speaking illegal but it can have such a net benefit, when done right and used sparingly, for the ambience of a place. It breathes life right into the often cold and mundane realities of urban life. There are lots of examples all over the world, but my favorite, and I am of course very biased, is the street art in the UK.

There is something so personal and unique about UK street art, the artists must spend so much time thinking about their projects because I find that more often than in other places they seem to seemlessly blend in to the location almost as if they had somehow grown out of the walls, bridges and nooks and crannies where they appear. Getting this type of art right I imagine is very difficult, a sort of synthesis of a melange of cultures and vibes and historical events, boiling it all down to an essence, but it’s also a sort of curration, one that breaks right out of the frame and into the place where it resides.

Also I think one of the unique aspects of this art form is that it references the culture, becomes the culture and shapes the direction of the culture. And as an observer of it, you somehow feel part of it, like you are participating, because it’s about your city, and you are living inside that city, and when you look at the art there’s a part of you - the part that in some way contributed to that city by being there everyday just doing normal everyday things - that is inside the art itself. I’m not sure if others feel that way, but that’s how I feel about it.