The Jeff Stream Summer Subway Series 2023

This has next to nothing to do with baseball

One of the great pre-pandemic joys in our household was periodically inviting a small group of friends to come enjoy a curated playlist of video ecstasies and oddities sourced from YouTube - short animations, music videos, miniature documentaries, uncategorizable artifacts. During the first months of COVID we hosted a few such evenings to share with a larger group online, but as the era’s novelty curdled into soft despair we retreated deeper into our cocoon - we spent enough time interfacing with colleagues on Zoom that doing it after hours felt more alienating than connective. 

Now things have gone back to “normal” (a word that turns out to have been meaningless all along). We’ve returned to entertaining small groups of friends at home, but these days no one seems interested in sitting down to watch a bunch of videos. Instead, we try to cram three years of lost conversation into every gathering - the idea of focusing on anything other than our living, breathing presences feels faintly sacrilegious. 

Still, when we’re alone, left to our own (literal) devices, we all tend to watch videos on screens. This has become a beloved Friday-night ritual for me and Hope. After earmarking novel content throughout the previous days - sourced from articles, email newsletters, Instagram recommendations, Facebook groups, and our own intellectual rabbit holes - we sit down amid the wreckage of the finished week to watch it scroll out together. Instead of owning a TV, we have a projector and a pull-down screen, set up as our own private cinema. There are few things better than washing away our mental and emotional detritus with a stream of sounds and images cultivated to satisfy our varied curiosity. True, much of it is mediocre, and some of it turns out to be utter crap, but every week there are a couple of gems that we store away for future use. 

So today, Hope has joined me to co-curate a little YouTube playlist so you too can experience some of the miscellaneous wonders that we’ve grown to cherish over the years. It’s only about an hour long, so you can enjoy it at any time of the week, as a whole or in parts. We decided to build it around a loose summertime theme, supported by other motifs both intentional and accidental. But you don’t need to read too much into that - wherever you are, and however you watch, just turn down the lights, prepare a beverage or edible treat, and let the multifarious weirdness of the world sweep you away…