litter ovenbird The world is dark and mostly awful, but sometimes humans are so beautifully_weird that my lungs feel like they’re full of helium and my heart floats joyfully in my chest. While empires crumble and humanity gives in to its darkest impulses Shoji Yamasaki is out there imitating plastic bags and bits of trash blowing in the breeze in a series of choreographed performances called Littered Mvmnts. My Instagram algorithm decides I might like to see this, and it’s right. I am entranced. Here is a man dressed in clothes that mimic a crumpled wrapper, carefully recreating the interaction of wind and waxed paper. Here he is in silver, looking for all the world like a foil skin skittering across the sidewalk. Here he becomes a liberated label, his arm the flapping edge of forgotten polymer. And so litter becomes a dance, becomes intentional movement, becomes beautiful and strange and riveting. “We’re living in a choreographed world on a micro- and macroscopic level,” he says in an interview for an arts publication called Hyperallergic. “Cells divide, DNA zips and unzips, our galaxy swirls and expands, our planet rotates on an axis while orbiting the sun, giving us seasons—that’s all choreography.” I go back to watching Shoji pretending to be an aluminum pie plate, its edge lifted by the slightest breeze. I don’t know why this makes me want to cry, but it does. 260130 what's it to you? who go blather from