From designer Frank Chimero, a list of stuff he learned in his 30s. “Knowing when to stop is a form of talent.” Happy birthday, Frank! 🎉
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Jack Kerouac’s 30-item list of Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, including “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” and “Submissive to everything, open, listening”.
The Flashlight Gun Is Peak WTF America
An officer “accidentally” fired his weapon during an NYPD raid on a student-occupied building at Columbia University on Tuesday. Apparently, he mistook his gun for a flashlight. You may be wondering: how could this happen? Well, like this. From a 2014 article in the Denver Post:
Ronny Flanagan took pride in his record as a police officer in Plano, Texas. He had an incident-free career. He took safety training regularly. He was known at the range as a very good shot.
Yet he killed a man when he was simply trying to press a flashlight switch mounted beneath the trigger on his pistol.
In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.
“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”
Jeeeeesus Christ this is the most American shit ever. First of all: guns, guns, guns!! We love ‘em! Don’t forget the complete militarization of the police (they’ve got tanks!), which happens in tinpot countries where leaders fear the citizenry. Those gun flashlights were initially developed for the Navy SEALs and now city cops wield them around students.
And then. And then! There’s the completely genius idea of PUTTING A SECOND TRIGGER ON A GUN — I wish I had letters more uppercase than uppercase for this next part — RIGHT BELOW THE FIRST TRIGGER!!!!!!! 1
You know, the one that propels a projectile out of the weapon at deadly speeds!?
You’re familiar with those doors where the handle makes it seem like a pull but you actually have to push it? They’re called Norman doors, the canonical example of bad design. These flashlight guns are like Norman doors that kill people. W T Actual Fuck. (via @ygalanter.bsky.social)
- I know I’m gonna get email about this so I’ll stop you right there Johnny Gmail: I am sure “not all guns” 🥴 with flashlights are designed like this. I am positive that putting yet another switch on a firearm that’s designed to be used when the gun is pointed at something or someone is a Bad Idea. And anyway, this whole thing about being an “accident” is BS anyway…there is nothing accidental about where that officer was with the gear that he had, doing what he was doing. It is all perfectly predictable that guns are fired by militarized police in Gun Land USA.↩
From 1912 to 1952, the Olympics gave out medals for the arts in events like graphic works, compositions for orchestra, epic works (literature), statues, and drawings & watercolors.
The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production
I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s podcast conversation with Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge. They talked about media and AI mostly.
(First of all, anyone who says they’re trying to “revolutionize the media through blog posts” is a-ok in my book.)
Anyway, here’s Patel on the limitations of AI and where humans shine:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.
And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone’s making the same thing all the time. It’s because we’ve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.
Later he talks more specifically about why curation will grow more important in a world inundated with aggressively mid AI content:
And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.
And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, you’re Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist means something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value. I think that stuff is still really powerful, and I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.
Yeah, exactly. Individuals and groups of like-minded people making things for other people — that stuff is only going to grow more valuable as time goes on. The breadth and volume offered by contemporary AI cannot provide this necessary function right now (and IMO, for the foreseeable future).
And finally, I wanted to share this exchange:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
I never focused on traffic all that much, mainly because for a small site like kottke.org, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, vis-à-vis Google or Facebook, to move the needle that much. But as I’ve written many times, switching to a reader-supported model in 2016 with the membership program has just worked so well for the site because it allows me to focus on making something for those readers — that’s you! — and not for platforms or algorithms or advertisers. I don’t have to “pivot to video”; instead I can do stuff like comments and [new thing coming “soon”] that directly benefit and engage readers, which has been really rewarding.
See also Kyle Chayka’s recent piece for the New Yorker: The Revenge of the Home Page.
Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials-or videos or audio-from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques.
I’m going to get slightly petty here for a sec and say that these “back to the blog / back to the web” pieces almost always ignore the sites that never gave up the faith in favor of “media” folks inspired by the former. It’s nice to see the piece end with a mention of Arts & Letters Daily, still bloggily chugging along since 1998. /salty
Designing a 3D-Printed Rollercoaster Clock. “I used to play tons of Rollercoaster Tycoon as a kid, and I spent a good portion of my life planning to be a rollercoaster designer.”
Ancient-ish Woolen Dutch Hats
Nothing more exciting than knitted items! This isn’t news, but a relative sent it to me recently, and I see it also made the rounds on Reddit a few days ago. Here’s the gist, per the Rijksmuseum:
In 1980 archaeologists investigated the graves of 185 Dutchmen — whale hunters, and workers at whale oil refineries — who had died on or near Spitsbergen [an island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago] in the 17th century. Many skeletons were still wearing their knitted woollen head coverings. These caps were highly personal. The men were bundled up against the severe cold and could only be recognized by the colours and patterns of their caps. Presumably this is the reason why the caps went with them into their graves.
The hats look remarkably modern, especially if you zoom in. And in fact here are some modern caps, called Deadman Hats, inspired by the old ones. (More info and context for the Dutch hats can be found in this 2016 post from the blog A Bluestocking Knits.)
And this is maybe tangential, but it reminds me of an 18th-century kerfuffle I read about once, in which the young poet Thomas Chatterton claimed to have discovered a 15th-century poem, until a reference within the poem — to knitting — gave it away as contemporary, and presumably as written by Chatterton himself. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway … Although it looks like subsequent research places the advent of knitting earlier than believed at the time.
Even more tangential, to the above tangent: The smoking-gun reference to knitting doesn’t seem to actually appear in the poem, at least not as I’m currently finding it. (??) (The reference: “She sayde as her whyte hondes whyte hosen was knyttinge, Whatte pleasure ytt ys to be married!”) … Actually, I think I’m in over my head. … The “history of knitting” Wikipedia page also generally confirms this impression (of being in over my head).
Sorry to link to a paywall, but if you like my comics, you might really like Gabrielle Bell’s on Patreon, if you don’t already. Her latest post was especially excellent. (Or, for free from her Instagram: “New Patreon Tiers.”)
Copy the Shrug Emoji. A website for copying the shrug emoji. Too cute? Ruins it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reading About Listening to J.S. Bach
For the past couple months I’ve been enjoying CFO and real estate developer Evan Goldfine’s newsletter about listening to J.S. Bach. Called Year of Bach, it often includes more Bach than I can handle, but in a good way, and I like letting it wash over me.
Yesterday’s installment was more of a primer — I mean it was literally labeled “Where to start with Bach” and “a primer for new listeners” — which was especially up my alley.
Through this project, I’m attempting to write for the masses about a niche topic, which embeds the danger of writing for no one. So today I want to recognize my readers who are in earlier stages of their Bach journeys, and in this post I’ll be recommending some of the grassier pathways into this music.
Of the tracks and musicians he linked to, my favorite is the Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, and Edgar Meyer rendition of Bach’s Trio Sonata No. 6 in G Major (above), from their Bach Trios album of 2017. I also loved Brad Mehldau’s Prelude No. 3 in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, which Goldfine describes as “damned perfect, a one track playlist on repeat forever.”
Can’t resist an I Called Off My Wedding essay! (“On another plane ride, I watch Pride and Prejudice. Despite my tendency to be gay, Mr. Darcy makes my heart leap.”)
Diary Comics, Dec. 19 & 20
It’s another Thursday Afternoon With Edith! Here are some more comics from my journal, from last fall. (Previously.)
The Native Youth Olympics
Since the early 70s, the Native Youth Olympics have showcased the traditional games of the Alaska Native people:
Our Alaska Native ancestors developed traditional games in order to test and prove crucial abilities that governed everyday life. Competition was created with each other to hone their ability to hunt and fish for daily survival in the traditional way of life. The creators of the NYO Games wanted an opportunity to demonstrate their favorite traditional Native contests of their forefathers.
I found out about this via a highlight reel on Instagram — here’s last year’s competition highlights:
You can check out a list of the competitive events; they include:
- One-foot High Kick: “In many cultures, the One-Foot High Kick was used for signaling a successful hunt.”
- Indian Stick Pull: “The Indian Stick Pull represents grabbing a slippery salmon, and was used traditionally to develop hand and arm strength.”
- Kneel Jump: “Historically, the Kneel Jump was a game used to strengthen the leg muscles for jumping from ice floe to ice floe, and for lifting prey after a successful hunt.”
- Seal Hop: “The Seal Hop is a variation of the Inuit Knuckle Hop, and used traditionally as a game of endurance and stamina, and for sneaking up on a seal, mimicking the mammal’s movement on the ice.”
- Two-foot High Kick: “The Two-Foot High Kick was historically used to communicate the success of a spring hunt.”
I love these events. I think my favorite is a reintroduced event for the 2024 games (just concluded): the Toe Kick, which returned after a 10-year hiatus. Here’s how you do it:
Here’s a short documentary about the NYO and athlete Autumn Ridley from 2013 — her event is the Alaskan High Kick, perhaps the most impressively athletic event:
An FAQ About Your New Birth Control: The Music of Rush. “Imagine taking the most annoying parts of science fiction and Libertarianism, isolating them, and then somehow blending them up into a cursed musical slurry.”
Video of a tornado in Nebraska going right over a train, filmed by the conductor. “The tornado blew over and derailed 31 cars. The engineer and I were unharmed.”
Rock stars that sound like… (Kurt Cobain as a coffee grinder, Ozzy Osborne as windshield wipers). Genuine LOL at Henry Rollins.
This Sliding Door Sounds Like a Screaming R2-D2
My therapist and I have yet to figure out why, but I have a soft spot for objects that do unexpected impressions of other things and people. Like this sliding door that sounds like R2-D2 screaming. Or the falling shovel that plays Smells Like Teen Spirit. Or the door that can do a wicked Miles Davis impression. Or the nightstand door that sounds like Chewbacca. I even found one of my own a few months ago: the elevator door at the old Buzzfeed office sounded like Chewbacca as well. (via @williamlubelski)
Update: Here’s a video full of things that sound like Chewbacca.
The World Central Kitchen Cookbook by José Andrés was just announced as a finalist for a James Beard Award. WCK resumed their work in Gaza yesterday, serving 200,000 meals to displaced Palestinians.
Bubblegum Aliens
These bubblegum sculptures created and photographed by artist Suzanne Saroff are delightfully disgusting.
I found this via Grace Ebert at Colossal, who writes:
Conjuring memories of childhood competitions and absent-minded chomping, the photos zoom in on chewed wads of pink, blue, and green that appear almost corporeal, their pudgy folds and pockets evoking the beauty and repulsion of the human body.
I love these but grrrrossssss. (And I don’t know why, but these remind me of Roe Ethridge’s photo of Andrew W.K.)
Great piece on the existential threat faced by TV & film writers. It’s a familiar story: low interest rates, private equity, execs squeezing workers. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget… It is fucking broken.”
“What they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure. They know how bad it would be for them to be seen clearly; they are fucking terrified of being treated as they treat others.”
PLEASE STOP EMAILING US HARRIET. The internet is still good, people are still good.
Love this: a grid-based CSS solution for displaying sheet music (staffs, notes, clefs, time signatures, etc.)
Electronic Plastic
Oh wow, this takes me right back to my childhood: Electronic Plastic, a museum of portable, old-school electronic toys. We didn’t have a gaming system in my house growing up — I had to settle going over to my friend Steve’s house for Atari 2600 and my big city cousins’ Intellivision — but we did have a couple of these handheld games. Specifically: Baseball (upper right), Football 2 (lower left), and Q*bert (lower right). The football game was my favorite. I played it for hours and hours — so many touchdowns. (And look at these Soviet handhelds!)
Friends at school had other games: I particularly remember the watches, some of the mini arcade cabinets from Coleco, and these pre-Game Boy Nintendo handhelds. The teachers hated them…I think they probably got banned at some point.
I know that my dad still has these games stashed somewhere in the house I grew up in…I’d love to play Football 2 again. 🤖🏈 (via present and correct)
Gen X and millennials who have been posting selfies on social media for more than a decade are “watching [their] identities shift in real time in a way no previous generation has experienced en masse”.
“What if owls had flags?” wonders artist Alex Tomlinson.
Amazon has renewed Fallout for a second season. I’ve been watching this with my son and we’ve been enjoying it so far.
Mike Masnick shares how he uses AI to help write Techdirt. “No, it’s not to write articles. It’s basically to help me brainstorm, critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.”
Art Celebrity Doppelgängers
Whenever Beauford Delaney’s Portrait of Howard Swanson (1967) pops up in MoMA’s New Tab extension in Chrome, I’m like, “Jerry Seinfeld?!”
There are a number of celebrities who have art doppelgängers — the Robert De Niro and John Krasinski ones are particularly good. Have you noticed any of these?
A lovely profile of Daniel Radcliffe. “If there’s a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then that’s the stuff I really love doing.”
The JWST recently captured the Horsehead Nebula in “unprecedented detail”.
The AP is reporting that the DEA will reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug in a “historic shift”.
AI Image Feedback Loop
Data artist Robert Hodgin recently created a feedback loop between Midjourney and ChatGPT-4 — he prompted MJ to create an image of an old man in a messy room wearing a VR headset, asked ChatGPT to describe the image, then fed that description back into MJ to generate another image, and did that 10 times. Here was the first image:
And here’s one of the last images:
Recursive art like this has a long history — see Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room from 1969 — but Hodgin’s project also hints at the challenges facing AI companies seeking to keep their training data free of material created by AI. Ted Chiang has encouraged us to “think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web”:
It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
And we already know what you get if you recursively save JPEGs…
See also La Demoiselle d’Instagram, I Am Sitting in a Room (with a video camera), Google Image Search Recursion, and Dueling Carls.
Super cool photos from this story about a nuclear-powered submarine. Interesting detail: “Day 31 is sometimes the lowest morale day while underway. App downloads expire: Spotify, Netflix, etc.”
I love watching these genetic algorithm thingies. “The program uses a simple genetic algorithm to evolve random two-wheeled shapes into cars over generations.”
Check In On Those Around You
This is a powerful public service announcement about mental health from Norwich City FC and Samaritans (note the content warning at the start of the video). That’s all I’m going to say about it — just watch it.
“It’s clear to me that sharing our shortcomings and weaknesses with each other is our greatest strength. Our salvation.” I was very moved by this By the Book interview with former NFL player Steve Gleason. His book is out today.
A live-action, 1950s version of The Simpsons, imagined by AI. From the same person who did 50s Futurama and Harry Potter by Balenciaga.
“Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America”
That’s the title of a poem by Matthew Olzmann. It begins:
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom.
You can read the rest at Tin House.
From Lacy M. Johnson in Orion Magazine, The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine:
The oldest longleaf pine tree in the world, I remember, is a nameless tree in Weymouth Woods in North Carolina. It is roughly 474 years old, taking root around the time Michelangelo took over construction of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, fifty-nine years before European colonizers arrived at Jamestown. In 2016, when the tree turned 468, visitors to the North Carolina State Parks system held a “Party for the Pine.” They celebrated by hiking to the tree, cutting cake, singing it “Happy Birthday.”
Illustration above of a longleaf pine by Edith Zimmerman.
From 1994, a collection of segments from a screening of The Grinch hosted by Phil Hartman. Seuss’s widow drives a Cadillac with customized “GRINCH” license plates called the Grinchmobile!
With MovieCart, you can create Atari 2600 cartridges that will play full-length movies. “Joystick controls brightness, volume, and shuttle position. Console switches control b/w, ten second rewind and full rewind.”
Drawing Media, an Interview With Zaria Forman
Edith here. For the latest installment of my newish illustrated column, I interviewed my friend and neighbor, the artist and climate activist Zaria Forman. Zaria makes pastel drawings of ice, among other things, and her solo show “Fellsfjara, Iceland” is currently on exhibition at Winston Wächter gallery in New York until May 4. (I’ve rendered a miniature version of some of it right below these words, but definitely click here for the actual images.) Zaria is also on Instagram.
Zaria, have you read, watched, listened to, or otherwise experienced anything good recently?
Poor Things. It was so visually stimulating and imaginative — more than anything I’ve seen in a while.
Possibly more interesting: the ice storm a few weekends ago! I’d never seen an ice storm before moving to upstate New York, and although the storms are destructive, they’re so beautiful. It was the most spectacular one I’ve ever experienced.
Seen anything bad?
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new version. I thought it was poorly cast and just plain dumb. OR: All the mud, now that the ice has melted ;)
What’s something you’ve read or seen that changed your life?
Seeing glaciers and icebergs for the first time absolutely changed my life. But if we’re sticking to books, etc., one that changed my way of thinking was Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, by Polly Young-Eisendrath.
She’s a psychologist and couples therapist, and the book just kind of reframed the idea of relationships in my mind — of how you relate to someone you’re in a long-term relationship with, and how you can grow with them. And how, like, love is.
She talks about radical acceptance, fully accepting someone for who they are, learning how to do the same for yourself, and then figuring out how all of that can work together.
Another one that changed my way of thinking was Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jetha.
Does anything make you laugh online?
Memes on Instagram!
What’s a recent one?
I just forwarded you the last one I sent to [my husband] this morning.
Are there any cultural moments you currently think about unusually often? Like are you haunted by a moment from a TV show, or anything like that?
More “inspired” than “haunted,” but the artists Ray and Charles Eames made a 10-minute documentary in 1977 called “Powers of 10” that made a big impact on me. The Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited the film in a show during my years at Skidmore College, and it’s probably the one film I think about more than any other.
What’s it about?
It starts with a couple on a blanket having a picnic by a lake in Chicago. And then from one of their hands, the camera zooms back 10 meters. And then it continues zooming back by powers of ten. And so you see these squares get smaller and smaller, and it keeps going into the atmosphere, and the solar system, and it’s just mind-boggling how it keeps going.
And then it then zooms back down to the picnic and goes into their skin and all the way down to, like, a molecule inside the body. And it’s crazy to see the similarities between the two.
It’s on YouTube, if you want to watch — I highly recommend!
What were you really into when you were 12?
My So-Called Life, singing along to Alanis Morissette, and a boy named Ben.
Is there a book/movie/whatever you’d like to experience again for the first time?
Burning Man. There’s just no way to really know what it’s like until you’re there, in the middle of it. And when you know what to expect, it’s not as thrilling. But as a climate activist, it doesn’t feel right to continue attending over and over.
What’s a funny or weird way people have described your art?
As “finger painting.” It was a term used first (I think) in the Daily Mail, and then almost every writer used it to describe my work for several years. I wince at a line I say in my TedTalk: “I cringe when people call me a finger painter,” or something like that — my tone just sounds so snobby, I hate it — but I was attempting to detach my work from the term, and it did finally work. It pops up every now and then, but rarely.
Please tell me something silly that you love.
Naked Attraction, the dating show where people are naked.
Thanks, Zaria!
Zaria’s work can be found here. And past installments of Drawing Media can be found here.
Murdle: Volume 1, a book of “100 original murder mystery logic puzzles” from the creator of the daily mystery puzzle site of the same name. One reviewer: “a high-speed game of Clue that tortures your brain in the most enjoyable way”.
“I blame Facebook for January 6.” Aaron Sorkin is writing a sequel to The Social Network. “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”
We’re in the Golden Age of Mid TV
TV critic James Poniewozik writing for the NY Times:
Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.
Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep!)
Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue.) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.
Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
Bullseye. Although I also agree with this caveat from Alan Sepinwall:
I’d only take issue with this excellent Poniewozik essay in the sense that not all Mid TV is created equal. Poker Face and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are great examples of the kinds of shows they want to be. I’d rather have those than all these wild swings by people who don’t understand how to make TV.
For me, the problem with Mid TV is differentiating it from actual good TV…finding shows that you actually don’t want to fold laundry to. I’ve gotten burned a few times on shows that I thought were going to be challenging & interesting — Constellation, 1899, and Mrs. Davis come to mind — but were just sort of aggressively fine (so much so that it turned me off).
Two more thoughts, from the comments section of Poniewozik’s piece. I love this re: specificity:
Shogun is by far the best show released this year, and it has an enormous amount to do with its *specificity* of artistic vision. All of the “mid” shows otherwise referenced here are trying to achieve too many things at once or appeal to too many demographics to have much of an impact. They are content, not art.
It’s a contradictory truth that if you want to create something that really connects with people (even a lot of people), you gotta make it specific or personal (or both). Shōgun is right at the top of my to-watch list (after I finish the five shows I’m stinge watching).
Writer of TV here. I won awards for an iconic HBO show. I can tell you that 95 percent of the blame here lies with the executives who are now so scared to lose their jobs that they just go right down the middle — to the mid, if you will. It’s easier to say yes to a show they have seen before than take a risk on something outside the box.
And yes, they are using AI to give us “notes”. I feel very lucky to have worked in this medium when it still rewarded real creativity.
Sounds about right.
How crappy federal legislation has encouraged US automakers to build & sell bigger cars, trucks, and SUVs, which are more dangerous and worse for the climate.
The Louvre wants to put the Mona Lisa in its own room to improve visitor experience. Here’s my suggestion: two rooms, 1 w/ the Mona Lisa (timed entry, no photos) and 1 w/ a fake (free-for-all, selfies, usies, etc.)
Lydia Polgreen: The Student-Led Protests Aren’t Perfect. That Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Right. “These young people seek a worthy cause: to end what may be the most brutal military operation for civilians in the 21st century.”
Yo-Yo Ma Performs Bach in Alaska for Earth Day
This is a nice thing to end the week on: Yo-Yo Ma playing “Bach’s Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.” He was brought to this birch forest by Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a member of the Neets’aii Gwich’in people, who wrote:
Our relationship to our birch relatives, our salmon relatives, and all the beings of Alaska are sacred. Our traditional stories tell us that at one point we all spoke the same language … we still do. If we find the time to truly listen, we might recognize ourselves in the melting permafrost or the fallen birch, but we might also recognize ourselves in the songs of the birds or the freshness of the Arctic breeze. There is still hope when we experience life. We should all fall in love with the places we live and let this love drive our determination to protect the waters, the salmon, the caribou, and all our plant relatives so that future generations may also experience such joy and sustenance.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
Yesss, Run Lola Run is returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary. A 4K digital restoration will start showing on June 7. I loved this movie — saw it in the theater when it came out but haven’t seen it in many years.
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