Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: Things that arrived without a blueprint, and worked anyway. A ghost ship, a show on the wrong channel, a philosophy that preceded its own proof, a masterpiece found in a trunk, and a cure that shouldn't have worked (but did).
1. This is Not Back to the Future: Rose of Nevada
Given how often I complain about people falsely claiming that nO gOoD fiLmS gEt MaDe ToDaY, I’m slightly ashamed to realise that, of the ten movies I’ve recommended so far for this series, only one is from the 2020s. Whoops!
I’m going to make a conscious effort to sprinkle a few contemporary recommendations into upcoming instalments, starting with Rose of Nevada, a shimmering ghost story from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Nick (played by George MacKay, whom you may know from 1917) is a taciturn but sweet-hearted family man with a wife to please and a daughter to feed. He’s a lifelong resident of an out-of-time, once lively Cornish village, whose economy and soul have been sucked away by climate change, economic crises and Brexit.
The village is steeped in tragedy. Decades ago, a fishing vessel sank, killing its crew and devastating the tightly knit community. So, when the vessel mysteriously reappears, local businessman Mike decides to launch a new fishing venture, one that is as much a reclamation of the village’s broken past as it is a financial enterprise. Signing up as crew are Nick, mysterious out-of-towner Liam, and salty sea-dog Murgey, who serves as the boat’s captain.
Revealing a film’s premise is a risky endeavour, particularly when common genre tropes are invoked. So take it with a pinch of salt when I tell you that this is a film about characters getting trapped in the past and trying to find a way back to the future. While technically true, there are zero tonal or stylistic similarities to Zemeckis’ perfectly designed piece of pop entertainment. Instead, Jenkin has crafted a weird, uneasy and utterly unique film, one deeply rooted in place and willing to suggest much while answering little.
Jenkin, who writes, shoots, directs, edits and scores his films himself, has an unusual approach. He shoots in 16mm using a hand-held, hand-cranked camera that can’t run longer than 28 seconds per take and doesn’t record sound (all audio, including dialogue, is recorded in post). These formal constraints, far from being gimmicks or poverty tourism, are deeply embedded in Rose of Nevada’s theme and story, with heavy use of close-ups of hands and gutted fish, sparse dialogue, and crackling imperfections in the frame all contributing to a nightmarish nostalgia.
I’ve desperately tried to avoid using the L-word up to now. “Lynchian” is a dangerous adjective, often flattening rather than clarifying a film’s identity. But it really is appropriate here, in how the film’s dreamlike elements, both narrative and formal, blend into the fabric of the story to transcend metaphor.
A wonderful, inimitable film. Go see it. [Ed]
🎬 Rose of Nevada (2025)
2. TrueSouth : The Best Show Hiding on a Sports Channel
There is an Emmy-winning television show, now in its eighth season, that explores the American South through food, music, literature, and the voices of people who actually live there… and almost nobody outside of college football circles knows it exists. TrueSouth is buried on the SEC Network, which means it premieres in and around college football season, sandwiched between game highlights, and I have the feeling many of you have never found it. That’s a shame, because it’s one of the best travel shows on television.
Each episode drops host John T. Edge — a four-time James Beard Award–winning food writer — into a new destination, and tells stories about food that open into something larger: the history of a town, the economics of who stayed and who left, the culture that took root in between. The show is executive produced by Wright Thompson, one of the most brilliant writers at ESPN (oh, and he’s also a bestselling author worth checking out), and is clearly made by people who care about getting the details right.
In one episode, Edge follows fiction writer George Singleton, one of the best short story writers in the South, through the Upstate of South Carolina, eating chili-slaw dogs at joints that haven’t changed since the 1950s and wandering the aisles of the Pickens County Flea Market. It’s where Singleton says he gets a million ideas for his stories because flea markets are full of things that are “funny and sad.” In another classic episode, Edge finds himself at Lucky Palace, a Chinese restaurant tucked between a casino and a dingy roadside motel in Bossier City, Louisiana. What unfolds is a portrait of its owner, Kuan Lim, whose generosity made the restaurant a community gathering spot, complete with a wine list that earned multiple James Beard semifinalist nods.
Music is baked into every episode — local bands perform on screen, and the full soundtrack lives on a TrueSouth Spotify playlist that’s become its own discovery engine. If you’re a traveler, a reader, or someone who believes the best places in America are the ones nobody’s marketing to you, this show is a goldmine hiding in plain sight. [Taylor]
🌐 TrueSouth Official Website (SEC Network / ESPN+ · Seasons 1–8 streaming)
3. Simulacra and Simulation : The Map Ate the Territory
Early in The Matrix, Neo opens a green, hollowed-out book. If you pause at the right moment, you’ll see the title: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This is no mere prop. It’s the philosophical underpinning of the Wachowskis’ entire franchise. Funnily enough, Baudrillard was no fan of the adaptation.
I’d argue that Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, is one of the most prescient philosophical books ever written. He begins by inverting Borges. In “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges imagines an empire whose cartographers draw a map so detailed it covers the territory one-to-one, and then over generations the map decays into tatters.
Baudrillard argues that in the digital age, it’s the territory that’s decaying into tatters. The map is all. Experientially, at least, the Simulation has already arrived. And this was decades before social media, algorithms, deepfakes, and the like! Regarding the technology-induced upheavals going on in the psyche of modern life, Baudrillard was earlier than early.
He himself arrives at some wild conclusions, but Simulacra and Simulation still makes for an incredibly fun and eye-opening read—and all within 164 pages. If there’s one quote that really encapsulates the book, it’s this: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” [Dylan]
📗 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
4. The Book of Disquiet : A Candy Bowl That Never Empties
Most books are commitments. But a few are more like a friend you don’t have to talk to every day, and cherish when you do. I was recently gifted a book like this. A curious work called The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
It reads like an intermittent diary of a character from a Gabriel García Márquez novel. And then I learned that Pessoa spent his life writing in near-total obscurity. After his death, a trunk with over 25,000 manuscript fragments of unpublished writing was found.
Here’s the thing about that trunk: Pessoa never organized it. The Book of Disquiet was assembled by editors after Pessoa’s death, from fragments he left in no particular order. Different editions sequence the pieces differently. There is no correct way to read it because there was no finished book to begin with.
The value of the book isn’t in the plot, as there is little of that. It’s the quality of the writing, the depth and imaginative flexibility, the precision with which he observes daily life, interactions, personhood, and the strangeness of being conscious at all.
Like a great friend you harmlessly forget to hang out with, I see Pessoa’s book and I’m delighted and weirded out that I forgot I was reading it. Like the days and weeks after Halloween when you remember there’s a big bowl of candy in the cupboard that’s all for you. I pick up the book again and each little entry is like a piece of candy. I haven’t finished it. I’m not sure you’re supposed to. Like that sweet tooth, you find you’re always wanting more. The mind grows sweet on his words. [Jean-Marc]
📘 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (this is the Penguin Classics edition, generally considered very good. But there are at least four English translations that are very different from each other.)
📙 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (this is The Complete Edition, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro. He organized the fragments chronologically for the first time.)
5. The Strangest Thing That Worked: How a Book Fixed My Chronic Pain
About 20 years ago, I started to have pain in my wrist. I figured it was from spending too much time at the computer. Then it moved up my forearm, to my elbow, and eventually all the way to my neck. I Googled a bit, and found scary articles about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain injury (RSI).
I became serious about best practices: I got an ergonomic chair, various ergonomic mice and keyboards (trackballs, a sideways mouse to reduce wrist strain, a trackpad). I even ended up using the mouse with my left hand for a while. Each of those changes helped for a time… and then it got worse.
I eventually had pain in both wrists and arms. My neck also hurt. There were times when just resting my arms on the armrests of a chair would create shooting pain. Sleeping was an ordeal, since almost any position would cause my arms to go numb and new pains to show up.
I tried everything: doctors, physiotherapy, wrist braces. I lifted weights, did stretching exercises, took breaks from the computer every 15 minutes. I improved my nutrition and kept a pain journal to see if the pain correlated with anything.
Nothing worked.
Or rather, everything worked briefly, and then things got even worse.
This went on for years. My whole life revolved around my pain. It was debilitating. I got depressed. I thought I would have to find a different career and different hobbies. Clearly, my body was damaged and couldn’t handle sitting at a desk and doing things on a computer.
Until one day, out of desperation, I simply Googled “how I cured my RSI”. This is the blog post I landed on at the time. It was published in 2010 by Aaron Iba, a programmer and entrepreneur who studied at MIT and worked at Google. He described a chronic pain journey that sounded very familiar, but the main difference was that he had found a solution. I probably would have dismissed it out of hand — too esoteric, too good to be true — but I was desperate and figured the worst case was wasting a few hours, so I read the book.
That was over a decade ago, and I’ve been cured ever since. I’ve recommended this book to dozens of people when I hear about similar symptoms (never-ending back pain, neck pain, wrists/arms, etc), and it also helped most of them. I won’t try to summarize the book here because it would be too compressed and easy to dismiss. I think if you want to judge this one, you have to go to the source. If you or someone you know has chronic pain, consider adding this to whatever else you're already doing. It especially applies to perfectionists and people who put a lot of pressure on themselves. What have you got to lose?
The last entry in my pain journal is from over a decade ago. Within days of reading Sarno, there was nothing left to write. [Liberty]
📘 The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno