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| JonBenet Ramsey - artwork by Tarek Chemaly |
I, like everyone else on the planet, am suffering from information overload. There is something I wrote in 2025 (here): "The 2006 war in Lebanon was eclipsed by another news - a man confessing (wrongly) to being the killer of JonBenet Ramsey (you know the child beauty queen) as he was on his way to Thailand for a sex-change operation. Suddenly, everything happening in Lebanon was no longer worthy of news."
Everything is news and therefore nothing much is. As all eyeballs were directed to the US midterm elections and their analysis across all media, I opened my usual media scrolling today to find that the only article that interested me was Callum Turner being the frontrunner for the new James Bond role (here). Nothing else seemed interesting enough. As a matter of fact, the other day I spoke of social media fatigue (here), and I think this extends to just information/news at large.
I began to read, again, after years of focusing on online articles whose analysis - true or false - just fades in the background about 2 days later. Sometimes just a good detective story is enough to pacify you, to let your mind wander. Sure, not all books are created equal, but the tranquility of just sitting with a book is nothing the internet in its frantic pace can give you.
Not that I am dropping the internet of course, these days I am focusing on the new Christmas ads by major brands - the ubiquitous John Lewis yearly Christmas ad this year with Kristin Scott Thomas (here), the Gucci one with Mariah Carey (here), , Dior Beauty (here), the extra extra long Dior night in color (here) which tells the story of both "no Dior no Dietrich" and the Junon dress (here) and the list goes on indefinitely, with Chanel it is raining gifts (here), the Prada one with hand-animated visuals (here).
The John Lewis is very so-so to be honest, Gucci is pseudo-tacky but let's face it quite fitting for their image, Sure, the Prada one takes the cake easily, and by miles. Dior beauty is an over-produced thing, appealing to the eye but a bit boring, the "night in color" as I said is 7 minutes 20 second long which well is much less than the sum of its parts (real story let down, "no Dior no Dietrich" was when the star said so for her film Stage Fright, she however never wore the Junon dress, and the person who directed Stage Fright is actually Alfred Hitchcock not some colored person as it appears in the film). Chanel, well, shoots a correct ad which I guess appeals to its target audience. Of course, the film that takes the cake is Prada, a beautiful masterpiece that blends hand-drawn animation with AI.
All this to get away from the dispiriting news of what is going on in the world. Once this post goes live, I think I am going back to the tranquility of reading my book.