2020-12-15
I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at the time; it didn’t seem like a big deal.media
2020-12-04
I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world, organising the information so I can take it in, or turning it into stories so I can connect with it on some emotional level with my burned out stump of a brain.2020-11-12
Remember, the device has no buttons and is not a touch screen; it only shows the front page of the paper. But that’s enough to get the gist of what’s going on in the world, and if I want to continue reading an article that caught my attention, I use the Times app (most of the time it’s somewhere near the top of the app as well).
Every morning, I wake up to a fresh edition of the Times on my wall. I find it wonderful to hover for a bit with a cup of coffee, scanning the headlines or reading an article. Mission accomplished and I am one satisfied news junkie.
— An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall, Alexander Klöpping
Men in evening wear slapping one another on the back
2020-11-02
The latest issue of the All My Stars newsletter got me reading about Crash (1996). It was obviously a very contraversial film, that much I remember. There was some monocle-popping from Francis Ford Coppola on the Cannes jury; he refused to present the award that the film went on to win. What’s funny though is that the film won the Special Jury Prize, not just the Jury Prize. What’s the difference?2020-09-15
I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling. A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different consistencies and levels of water saturation is amazing.2020-09-15
We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties*, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor. I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured with the charismatic and thoughtful liberals Steven and René.Week Notes - 7th September 2020
2020-09-11
Ideally all the books in the API should stay in the store even if they haven’t been included on any of the named shelves in the last Goodreads scrape. When a new scrape is run it would add any books that don’t appear, shift any books that are in the store but don’t appear in the latest scrape to a no-shelf status (representing books I know about but have no relation with, I guess).Rich writers showing themselves up about COVID-19
2020-08-12
The journals fall into several categories. One is family and kids. In “Stuck at Home With My 20-Year-Old Daughter,” for instance, Todd Purdum described in The Atlantic the pandemic’s “achingly uncertain implications” for the future of his daughter Kate. A sophomore at Barnard College, she has led a charmed life. “Because of my career as a journalist and her mother’s as a former White House press secretary, political consultant, and Hollywood studio executive, we have the luxury of working from home, and the financial resources to help weather this storm.” That, however, does not mask “the reality that Kate’s world has shrunk to the size of her bedroom. In a flash, the daily life of the confident, privileged young woman who’d thrived at school, haunted Broadway stage doors, mastered the New York subway, and, yes, discreetly flashed a fake ID in the bars of Morningside Heights was upended indefinitely.”
— The Afflictions of the Comfortable, Michael Massing in The American Prospect
The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
2020-08-04
Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man In Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers?
— The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free, Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs
2020-07-15
The platform is a fire hose of asinine recommendations for songs you haven’t heard that were only recommended to you because they’re as similar as possible to songs you have. (In the words of one Guardian writer: “You like bread? Try toast!”) In pursuit of its goal of perfect, frictionless streaming, Spotify encourages you to outsource the work of deciding what you like and dislike, and of figuring out why. In other words, it discourages listening to music as such. Not all listening requires immersive attentiveness—that’s what the radio is for—but in its attempts to swallow up radio and home listening alike, Spotify turns all music into something that fills up the background while you work or exercise or scroll through Twitter. And at least radio stations have DJs. Listening to Spotify is like listening to a radio station run by the stupidest version of myself.
— I Am Here To Demonize Spotify, Richard Beck in n+1