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mostlysignssomeportents · 14 days

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The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

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insanityclause · 2 months

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Deadline’s Contenders Television, the event where stars and showrunners talk up their shows ahead of Emmy voting, has unveiled its lineup.

The event kicks off on Saturday April 13 and runs through Sunday April 14 at the Directors Guild of America in LA. There will also be a virtual livestream of the event. Full details of the event and an RSVP link can be found here.

It will give you a sense of the hits of the last twelve months, as well as some shows that you’re about to be talking about, as the networks, studios and streamers vie for some awards love.

Stars attending include Tom Hiddleston, Nicole Kidman, Brie Larson, Kristen Wiig, Rebecca Ferguson, Lily Gladstone, David Oyelowo, Common, Jimmy Fallon, Giancarlo Esposito, Joey King, Andrea Riseborough, Sebastian Maniscalco, Bill Pullman, Kiefer Sutherland, Logan Lerman, Kelsey Grammer, Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey, Allison Williams, Maya Erskine, Nathan Fielder, Skeet Ulrich, Jeff Probst, Omar J. Dorsey, Harriet Dyer, Patrick Brammall, Sophia Di Martino, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo and Taylor Zakhar Perez.

Shows that will be featured across the two days include Parish, Masters of the Air, Lessons in Chemistry, The Morning Show, Silo, Palm Royale, The New Look, Survivor, Colin From Accounts, A Murder at the End of the World, True Detective: Night Country, We Were the Lucky Ones, Under the Bridge, Murdaugh Murders: The Movie, Loki, Alice & Jack, Genius: MLK/X, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, 3 Body Problem, Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Frasier, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Fallout, Expats, Red, White & Royal Blue, Fellow Travelers, The Curse, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Platonic and Bookie.

There will also be numerous top showrunners and exec producers including Chuck Lorre, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Alexander Woo, Benny Safdie, Graham Yost, Gary Goetzman, Lee Eisenberg, Abe Sylvia, Brit Marling, Zal Batmanglij, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Francesca Sloane, Lulu Wang, Sarah Schechter and Nicholas Stoller.

The studios, networks and streamers participating include AMC, Apple TV+, CBS, CBS Studios, FX, HBO and Max, Hulu, Lifetime, Marvel Studios and Disney+, Masterpiece on PBS, National Geographic, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, Prime Video, Showtime, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros. Television.

The event is sponsored by Apple TV+, Eyepetizer Eyewear and Final Draft + ScreenCraft in partnership with Four Seasons Resort Maui and 11 Ravens.

---

Both Tom and Sophia will be there.

#tom hiddleston #loki #sophia di martino #deadline: the contenders

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thelittletsarina · 6 months

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Holiday Gifting Day 5

Day 5 of 5 features a few Wicked audios with Nessarose understudies!

Idina Menzel (Elphaba), Helen Dallimore (Glinda), Adam Garcia (Fiyero), Nigel Planer (The Wizard), Miriam Margolyes (Madame Morrible), Caroline Keiff (u/s Nessarose), James Gillan (Boq), Martin Ball (Doctor Dillamond) October 28, 2006; London Matinee

Link

Ashleigh Gray (s/b Elphaba), Dianne Pilkington (Glinda), Pharic Scott (u/s Fiyero), Sam Kelly (The Wizard), Harriet Thorpe (Madame Morrible), Emily Tierney (u/s Nessarose), Alex Jessop (Boq), David Stoller (Doctor Dillamond) February 6, 2010; London

Link

Idina Menzel (Elphaba), Kristin Chenoweth (Glinda), Kristoffer Cusick (u/s Fiyero), Joel Grey (The Wizard), Carole Shelley (Madame Morrible), Eden Espinosa (u/s Nessarose), Christopher Fitzgerald (Boq), William Youmans (Doctor Dillamond) December 21, 2003; Broadway || Notes: This is the only known recording of Eden as Nessarose! Missing No Good Deed and March of the Witch Hunters.

Link

Shoshana Bean (Elphaba), Megan Hilty (Glinda), David Ayers (Fiyero), Ben Vereen (The Wizard), Adinah Alexander (u/s Madame Morrible), Stacie Morgain Lewis (u/s Nessarose), Jeffrey Kuhn (Boq), Sean McCourt (Doctor Dillamond) September 24, 2005; Broadway

Link

Dee Roscioli (Elphaba), Erin Mackey (Glinda), Derrick Williams (Fiyero), Gene Weygandt (The Wizard), Rondi Reed (Madame Morrible), Kate Fahrner (u/s Nessarose), Adam Fleming (Boq), K. Todd Freeman (Doctor Dillamond) March 21, 2007; Chicago

Link

Jenna Leigh Green (u/s Elphaba), Kendra Kassebaum (Glinda), Derrick Williams (Fiyero), David Garrison (The Wizard), Carol Kane (Madame Morrible), Lori Holmes (u/s Nessarose), Logan Lipton (Boq), Timothy Britten Parker (Doctor Dillamond) April 9, 2005; First National Tour

Link

Willemijn Verkaik (Elphaba), Valerie Link (u/s Glinda), Jens Simon Petersen (u/s Fiyero), Carlo Lauber (The Wizard), Angelika Wedekind (Madame Morrible), Maike Switzer (u/s Nessarose), Stefan Stara (Boq), Michael Günther (Doctor Dillamond) December 22, 2007; Stuttgart Matinee || Notes: Valerie's first show as Glinda.

Link

Eden Espinosa (Elphaba), Kendra Kassebaum (Glinda), Nicolas Dromard (Fiyero), Tom McGowan (The Wizard), Jody Gelb (Madame Morrible), Neka Zang (u/s Nessarose), Etai BenShlomo (Boq), Paul Slade Smith (Doctor Dillamond), Gregory Haney (Chistery), Samantha Zack (u/s Witch's Mother), Tim Talman (Witch's Father / Ozian Official) April 6, 2010; San Francisco || Notes: Neka's first show as Nessarose.

Link

#audio gift #wicked musical #holiday gifting

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justforbooks · 1 year

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Few songwriters have been able to enjoy hits across six decades, as well as the bonus of a dramatic revival of interest in their work during the later years of their careers. Burt Bacharach, who has died aged 94, could claim both.

With his writing partner Hal David, Bacharach launched himself into the front rank of pop songwriters with a brilliant streak of hits for Dionne Warwick during the 1960s, beginning in 1962 with Don’t Make Me Over and proceeding through (among others) Walk on By, Anyone Who Had a Heart, I Say a Little Prayer, Trains and Boats and Planes, and Do You Know the Way to San Jose. All became standards in Bacharach’s chosen pop-easy-listening genre, and meanwhile he was turning out equally durable classics for a string of different artists. Tom Jones never particularly liked What’s New, Pussycat?, the Oscar-nominated theme from the 1965 film of the same name, but acknowledged its enduring popularity.

Herb Alpert topped the US chart with the winsome ballad This Guy’s in Love With You, Jackie DeShannon did likewise with What the World Needs Now Is Love, and BJ Thomas was the lucky recipient of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which brought Bacharach and David Oscars for best theme song and best original score). Bacharach was an Oscar-winner for a third time in 1982, with Arthur’s Theme from the film Arthur.

The son of Bert Bacharach, a sports star turned nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, and Irma Freeman, an artist and songwriter, Burt was born in Kansas City, Missouri. The family moved to Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, when he was a child. At the insistence of his mother, Burt studied the cello, drums and piano. His ears were opened by the innovative harmonies and melodies of jazz musicians of the day such as Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, and he played with several jazz combos before enrolling in music courses at the Mannes School of Music, New York, and at McGill University in Montreal.

He served in the US army (1950-52), and while acting as a dance band arranger in Germany he met the singer Vic Damone. Back in the US after his discharge, Bacharach worked as piano accompanist to Damone and to numerous other artists on the club circuit. One of them was the actor and singer Paula Stewart, whom he married in 1953.

He was fortunate to fall into one of the all-time great songwriting partnerships with David, whom he first met at the New York songwriting beehive, the Brill Building (also to be the home of other renowned songwriting duos including Leiber & Stoller, Goffin & King and Pomus & Shuman). David had been writing hits for such luminaries as Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra since the late 40s. Bacharach and David scored their first big commercial coup when the country singer Marty Robbins took their song The Story of My Life into the US Top 20 in 1957. A cover version by Michael Holliday reached No 1 in the UK the following year, and Perry Como brought them another smash with his recording of Magic Moments, which spent eight weeks at No 1 in Britain.

After the breakdown of his marriage (he and Stewart divorced in 1958), Bacharach travelled to Europe to become pianist and bandleader for Marlene Dietrich, a role he would sustain until 1964. By 1961 he was back in New York, and wrote some material for the Drifters, as well as the Chuck Jackson hit Any Day Now before resuming his partnership with David. Their song (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance, inspired by the John Wayne/James Stewart western, became a US No 4 hit for Gene Pitney in 1962. Pitney did better still with the duo’s composition Only Love Can Break a Heart, which reached No 2 later that year.

Then came Bacharach and David’s historic hook-up with Warwick. She was a member of the Drifters’ backing group, the Gospelaires, and the songwriters invited her to make some demo recordings at their office at the publishers Famous Music, in the Brill Building. One of them was for Make It Easy on Yourself, which became a big hit for Jerry Butler. David recalled: “She said, ‘I thought that was my song!’ We said, ‘No, you just made a demo’. She was really very hurt and angry. Then we realised here’s this wonderful singer and we’re using her to make demos – she could be a star!”

So it proved, and the hits with Warwick became their calling card. They wrote and produced 20 American Top 40 hits for her over the ensuing decade, including seven that reached the Top 10. One of these songs, I Say a Little Prayer, also gave Aretha Franklin a US Top 10 hit and her biggest solo hit in Britain, where it reached No 4. Throughout the 60s anything Bacharach and David touched became commercial gold dust. They wrote film scores for What’s New, Pussycat?, Alfie and Casino Royale, and scored the successful Broadway musical Promises, Promises, whose title song provided another hit for Warwick and spun off a chartbuster for Bacharach himself with I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.

The writers always had a soft spot for the UK, probably because so many British-based artists had No 1 hits with their material, including Cilla Black – whose version of Anyone Who Had a Heart was her breakthrough hit – Sandie Shaw, the Walker Brothers and Frankie Vaughan.

The Carpenters ushered in the 70s with (They Long to Be) Close to You, a US No 1 which also reached No 6 in the UK, but although Bacharach’s 1971 album (called just Burt Bacharach) became a sought-after collector’s item, the decade would prove disappointing. In 1973 Bacharach and David collaborated on a new musical version of the 1937 film Lost Horizon, but it was a commercial disaster that prompted angry splits between Bacharach, David and Warwick, and involved them in a spate of lawsuits. The writers parted company after a disagreement over royalties. Bacharach’s second marriage, to the actor Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, began to come apart, although they did not divorce until 1980.

It was not until the early 80s that Bacharach’s magic touch returned, when he won the Oscar for best original song for the chart-topping theme from the film Arthur, which he had also scored. One of its co-writers was the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom Bacharach married the following year. The couple went on to write Making Love for Roberta Flack and Heartlight for Neil Diamond. In 1986, Bacharach enjoyed one of his best ever years, achieving two US No 1s with That’s What Friends Are for, recorded by Warwick with Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder as a charitable fundraiser for Aids, and the Patti LaBelle/Michael McDonald recording of the lachrymose On My Own.

In 1991 his marriage to Bayer Sager ended, and two years later he married Jane Hansen. In a 2015 interview, Bacharach – who was nicknamed “the playboy of the western world” during the 60s – admitted: “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you wind up being married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your wake.”

During the 90s, Bacharach and David reunited with Warwick for Sunny Weather Lover, from her album Friends Can Be Lovers, and Bacharach wrote songs for James Ingram and Earth, Wind & Fire. In 1995 he co-wrote God Give Me Strength with Elvis Costello for Allison Anders’ film about the Brill Building era, Grace of My Heart, and this resulted in the Costello-Bacharach album Painted from Memory (1998).

Bacharach’s contribution to pop history was acknowledged in a 1996 BBC documentary, Burt Bacharach – This Is Now, and he would find himself being hailed as an icon of cool by bands as varied as Oasis, REM, Massive Attack and the White Stripes. In 1997, an all-star cast including Costello, Warwick, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow and Luther Vandross banded together at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, for a serenade of Bacharach’s songs called One Amazing Night, and the Rhino label issued The Look of Love, a three-disc compilation of his music.

Bacharach’s profile received a huge boost from his appearances in all three of Mike Myers’s 60s-spoofing Austin Powers films. He earned an Oscar nomination for the song Walking Tall, his first collaboration with the lyricist Tim Rice, which was performed by Lyle Lovett on the soundtrack of Stuart Little (1999).

His 2005 album At This Time unusually found Bacharach writing lyrics as well as music and even provoking some controversy by touching on political themes. “All my life I’ve written love songs, and I’ve been non-political,” he said. “So it must be pretty significant that I suddenly have strong feelings of discomfort with the state of the world, and what our [US] administration is doing.” This did not prevent the album from winning the 2006 Grammy award for best pop instrumental album.

In 2008 he opened the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse, in London, with Adele and Jamie Cullum among his supporting musicians. His autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music, was published in 2013, and in 2015 he performed at the Glastonbury festival. He continued to tour past his 90th birthday, with concerts in the UK, US and Europe in 2018 and 2019.

In addition to his Oscars and six Grammy awards (plus a lifetime achievement award in 2008), he was awarded the Polar music prize in Stockholm in 2001. In 2011, the Library of Congress awarded Bacharach and David the Gershwin prize for popular song.

A daughter, Nikki, from his second marriage, died in 2007. He is survived by Jane, their son, Oliver, and daughter, Raleigh, and another son, Cristopher, from his third marriage.

🔔 Burt Freeman Bacharach, songwriter, singer and musician, born 12 May 1928; died 8 February 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Burt Bacharach #in memoriam

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mybeingthere · 1 year

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Kim Høltermand (b 1977) is a photographer from Denmark, based in Copenhagen.

Focusing mainly on architecture, Kim works with elements such as composition, space, light and mood. He says that much of his work bares references to masters of architectural photography; Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller and Balthazar Korab but also takes inspiration from cinema - more specifically directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky.

https://holtermand.xyz/

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zerogate · 2 years

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Highlighting the senses in our writings, coupled with a more radical participation on the part of anthropologists, and a willingness to express the previously unmentionable experiences that are often had during fieldwork, has led to a radical shift in the way anthropologists write about ethnography and their personal reflections on their research.

Not only are they bringing the field into the reader’s imaginal sphere with writing that has taste and flavor, they are expressing a part of themselves that makes the fieldwork situation more relevant, more real, while at the same time imparting as many facts about the culture as those whose writing is more laborious, even torturous, to read...

This more contemporary approach, with the colorful addition of sensorial anthropology, takes fieldwork in an exciting and valuable direction. David Howes calls it the “sensual revolution,” an ideological turn from reporting principally visual senses to the incorporation into our thinking of all of the senses, including the “sixth sense.” Many contemporary writers would agree with Edmund Searles’s comment, that the world cannot be explained by cognitive and material forces alone. About his fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, he writes:

I began to feel there was more to the world than natural forces and human agency. The weight and loneliness of a secular self began to loosen its grip on me. I began to feel re-enchanted and reanimated by a world of mystic presence and spiritual agency. I began to experience the world as saturated with unseen forces, a world suffused with God and other invisible beings.

[...]

One of the first to break the silence and reveal some startling revelations from the fieldwork situation is Paul Stoller. Prior to his apprenticeship as a sorcerer in Niger, Africa, Stoller told himself that the world of the spirits was an elaborate fiction. Nevertheless, he felt a sense of uncertainty about this, and after an extended stay with the Songhay people he experienced firsthand the powerful effects of sorcery.

“Nothing that I had learned or could learn within the parameters of anthropological theory,” he said, “could have prepared me for Dunguru.” When he first went there to study sorcery, he was admonished by the Songhay sorcerer Sorko Djibo: “You look but you do not see. You touch, but you do not feel. You listen, but you do not hear.” He was told that in order to become a sorcerer and to “know,” he needed to properly and deeply learn how to look, hear, and touch. During his apprenticeship with the sorcerer Dunguru, he learned how to use these senses as sorcery tools, and that there were other ways of knowing: knowledge, power, and energy can come just from sound, as well as sorcery attacks. Stoller writes:

Having crossed the threshold into the Songhay world of magic, and having felt the texture of fear and the exaltation of repelling the force of a sorcerer, my view of Songhay culture could no longer be one of a structuralist, a symbolist, or a Marxist. Given my intense experience— and all field experiences are intense whether they involve trance, sorcery or kinship—I will need in future works to seek a different mode.

These forays into other realms are not regarded as incredible in non-Western cultures, particularly those of a shamanic nature, many of which acknowledge these possibilities as very real, and have specialists who deal with them. For the Mekeo, in New Guinea, there is a “hidden aspect” to each person that is separable from consciousness and the physical body, acts almost like a totally independent entity, and can operate in another mode of existence. This hidden aspect of the self is said to partly exist in “the shadowy and perilous disembodied realm” that exists in the world of dreams.

Michele Stephen refers to this Mekeo idea as the “autonomous imagination,” which draws upon memories and information that is not readily available to conscious thought. It is more richly inventive than ordinary thought processes, can emerge as vivid imagery, and possesses a different kind of access to memory. In spite of this seemingly psychological interpretation, Stephen was convinced that a phenomenological world exists independently of the human mind, and the complexity of such a world is described, interpreted, and ordered in different ways by different cultures.

-- Lynne L. Hume & Nevill Drury, The Varieties of Magical Experience

#quotes

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meephobia · 2 months

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Ten Key Innovation Signals To Better Serve The Brain Health Needs Of An Aging Population

It's been a busy year, with hundreds of studies and media stories about brain health, neuroplasticity, lifestyle and emerging neurotechnologies. To summarize where we are, and to better prepare for the opportunities and challenges in the year ahead, let's step click here back for a minute. Let me highlight Ten Important Signals to help Reinvent Brain Health in the Digital Age we live in.

It's been a busy year, with hundreds of studies and media stories about brain health, neuroplasticity, lifestyle and emerging neurotechnologies.

To summarize where we are, and to better prepare for the opportunities and challenges in the year ahead, let's step back for a minute.

Let's take a look at the big picture presented in the article Both Important and Urgent: Getting ready to serve the Cognitive & Brain Health needs of an Aging Population, prepared by David Stoller at the new Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CC-ABHI):

"The urgency to develop innovative new technologies that will support brain health is closely linked to the fact that a growing proportion of the global population is living longer than at any other time in history. As this population ages, the need to maintain brain health and/or manage declining cognitive function will have far-reaching impact both socially and economically." -- David Stoller @ CC-ABHI.

Good news is, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs are working hard on this in the US and abroad.

The list of insights and initiatives worldwide is too long to detail; let me just highlight Ten Important Signals to help Reinvent Brain Health in the Digital Age we live in:

1. "Our health starts and ends with brain health," as Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, Founder and Chief Director of the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas, reminds us.

2. "There is too little wisdom in brain health (as practiced today)," cautions Dr. Peter Whitehouse, Professor of Neurology at Case Western Reserve University.

3. The American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology (AACN) just announced a new Disruptive Technology Initiative focused on "assessment and/or intervention-prevention-improvement of cognitive functions, accessible to the entire population."

4. Both the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CC-ABHI) have substantial funding programs to help start-ups access seed capital to develop and commercialize evidence-based digital brain health platforms.

5. Venture investors see a burgeoning landscape and future of the mind training space.

6. Many pioneers are working on ways to harness neuroplasticity for good, via cognitive assessments and therapies (BrainHQ, Akili, Click Therapeutics, Cogniciti, SBT Group) mindfulness apps (Claritas Mindsciences), EEG (Emotiv) and virtual reality (MindMaze).

7. A growing number of pharma companies, from Merck to Janssen, are investing in digital therapeutics by developing tools, licensing them, even investing in start-ups in the space.

8. "Clinically-guided" video capture of behavior can aid in diagnosis...behavior imaging, augmented by deep learning, will lead to real precision medicine, thanks to firms like Behavior Imaging Solutions, MyndYou, Pear Therapeutics, and more.

9. Old and new players in education--Pearson, ETS, UC Berkeley, the Arrowsmith School-- are developing digital and in-person programs to promote lifelong brain development.

10. The Coaches and Psychologists of the Future-exemplified by the Institute of Coaching, The Synapse System, the new Watson Centre for Brain Health-are already augmenting their practices with latest brain & cognition findings and digital neurotechnologies.

#youtube

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m-1950 · 3 months

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Art Tatum, "Tatum/Eldridge/Stoller/Simmons" Fine Art Print by David Stone Martin (1953)

#monkの独り言

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iahaber · 8 months

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Rüzgarın Oğlu filmi oyuncuları kim? Rüzgarın Oğlu filmi konusu, oyuncuları ve Rüzgarın Oğlu özeti!

İzleyenleri ekrana bağlayan Rüzgarın Oğlu filmi, beyaz perdeden sonra televizyon ekranlarında izleyici ile buluşuyor. Rüzgarın Oğlu filmini izleyecek olanların merak ettiği Rüzgarın Oğlu konusu nedir, Rüzgarın Oğlu oyuncuları kimler ve Rüzgarın Oğlu özeti gibi konuları inceliyoruz.RÜZGARIN OĞLU FİLMİ KONUSU NEDİR? Gösterime giriş tarihi: 27 Temmuz 2016 (Fransa) Yönetmeni: Stephen Hopkins Race , 1936 Berlin Olimpiyat Oyunlarında rekorkıran dört altın madalya kazanan Afrikalı-Amerikalı atlet Jesse Owens'ı konu alan 2016 biyografik spor drama filmidir.Stephen Hopkins'in yönettiğive senaryosunu Joe Shrapnel ile Anna Waterhouse'un yazdığı filmde, Owens rolünde Stephan James rol alıyor ve Jason Sudeikis , Jeremy Irons , William Hurt ve Carice van Houten'la birlikte rol alıyor. Kanada , Almanya ve Fransa'nın ortak yapımıdır. Ana çekimler 24 Temmuz 2014'te Kanada'nın Montreal kentinde başladı . Owens ailesi, Jesse Owens Vakfı, Jesse Owens Trust ve Luminary Group tarafından desteklenen filmin yapımcılığını Forecast Pictures, Solofilms ve Trinity Race üstlendi . Film ticari açıdan başarılı oldu ve karışık ve olumlu eleştiriler aldı ve James'in En İyi Erkek Oyuncu da dahil olmak üzere dört Kanada Sinema ÖdülüRÜZGARIN OĞLU FİLMİ OYUNCULARI VE KADROSU Stephan James Jesse Owens rolünde Jason Sudeikis Larry Snyder rolünde Jeremy Irons, Avery Brundage rolünde Carice van Houten Leni Riefenstahl rolünde William Hurt, Jeremiah Mahoney rolünde Shanice Banton , Ruth Solomon-Owens rolünde Amanda Crew Peggy rolünde Jeremy Ferdman Marty Glickman rolünde Barnaby Metschurat Joseph Goebbels rolünde Quincella rolünde Chantel Riley David Kross Carl "Luz" Long rolünde Glynn Turman Harry Davis rolünde Jonathan Aris Arthur Lill rolünde Shamier Anderson, Eulace Peacock rolünde Tony Curran Lawson Robertson rolünde Nicholas Woodson Fred Rubien rolünde Sam Stoller rolünde Giacomo Gianniotti Eli Goree Dave Albritton rolünde Anthony Sherwood Rahip Ernest Hall rolünde Jon McLaren Trent rolünde Tim McInnerny General Charles rolünde Vlasta Vrána St. John Adrian Zwicker Adolf Hitler rolünde Karl Graboshas Adolf Dassler rolünde Arthur Holden Rudolf Dassler rolünde Jonathan Higgins Dean Cromwell rolünde Anian Zollner Hans von Tschammer rolünde

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Antitrust is a labor issue

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

This is huge: yesterday, the FTC finalized a rule banning noncompete agreements for every American worker. That means that the person working the register at a Wendy's can switch to the fry-trap at McD's for an extra $0.25/hour, without their boss suing them:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

The median worker laboring under a noncompete is a fast-food worker making close to minimum wage. You know who doesn't have to worry about noncompetes? High tech workers in Silicon Valley, because California already banned noncompetes, as did Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington.

The fact that the country's largest economies, encompassing the most "knowledge-intensive" industries, could operate without shitty bosses being able to shackle their best workers to their stupid workplaces for years after those workers told them to shove it shows you what a goddamned lie noncompetes are based on. The idea that companies can't raise capital or thrive if their know-how can walk out the door, secreted away in the skulls of their ungrateful workers, is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Remember when OpenAI's board briefly fired founder Sam Altman and Microsoft offered to hire him and 700 of his techies? If "noncompetes block investments" was true, you'd think they'd have a hard time raising money, but no, they're still pulling in billions in investor capital (primarily from Microsoft itself!). This is likewise true of Anthropic, the company's major rival, which was founded by (wait for it), two former OpenAI employees.

Indeed, Silicon Valley couldn't have come into existence without California's ban on noncompetes – the first silicon company, Shockley Semiconductors, was founded by a malignant, delusional eugenicist who also couldn't manage a lemonade stand. His eight most senior employees (the "Traitorous Eight") quit his shitty company to found Fairchild Semiconductor, a rather successful chip shop – but not nearly so successful as the company that two of Fairchild's top employees founded after they quit: Intel:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

Likewise a lie: the tale that noncompetes raise wages. This theory – beloved of people whose skulls are so filled with Efficient Market Hypothesis Brain-Worms that they've got worms dangling out of their nostrils and eye-sockets – holds that the right to sign a noncompete is an asset that workers can trade to their employers in exchange for better pay. This is absolutely true, provided you ignore reality.

Remember: the median noncompete-bound worker is a fast food employee making near minimum wage. The major application of noncompetes is preventing that worker from getting a raise from a rival fast-food franchisee. Those workers are losing wages due to noncompetes. Meanwhile, the highest paid workers in the country are all clustered in a a couple of cities in northern California, pulling down sky-high salaries in a state where noncompetes have been illegal since the gold rush.

If a capitalist wants to retain their workers, they can compete. Offer your workers get better treatment and better wages. That's how capitalism's alchemy is supposed to work: competition transmogrifies the base metal of a capitalist's greed into the noble gold of public benefit by making success contingent on offering better products to your customers than your rivals – and better jobs to your workers than those rivals are willing to pay. However, capitalists hate capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Capitalists hate capitalism so much that they're suing the FTC, in MAGA's beloved Fifth Circuit, before a Trump-appointed judge. The case was brought by Trump's financial advisors, Ryan LLC, who are using it to drum up business from corporations that hate Biden's new taxes on the wealthy and stepped up IRS enforcement on rich tax-cheats.

Will they win? It's hard to say. Despite what you may have heard, the case against the FTC order is very weak, as Matt Stoller explains here:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/ftc-enrages-corporate-america-by

The FTC's statutory authority to block noncompetes comes from Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans "unfair methods of competition" (hard to imagine a less fair method than indenturing your workers). Section 6(g) of the Act lets the FTC make rules to enforce Section 5's ban on unfairness. Both are good law – 6(g) has been used many times (26 times in the five years from 1968-73 alone!).

The DC Circuit court upheld the FTC's right to "promulgate rules defining the meaning of the statutory standards of the illegality the Commission is empowered to prevent" in 1973, and in 1974, Congress changed the FTC Act, but left this rulemaking power intact.

The lawyer suing the FTC – Anton Scalia's larvum, a pismire named Eugene Scalia – has some wild theories as to why none of this matters. He says that because the law hasn't been enforced since the ancient days of the (checks notes) 1970s, it no longer applies. He says that the mountain of precedent supporting the FTC's authority "hasn't aged well." He says that other antitrust statutes don't work the same as the FTC Act. Finally, he says that this rule is a big economic move and that it should be up to Congress to make it.

Stoller makes short work of these arguments. The thing that tells you whether a law is good is its text and precedent, "not whether a lawyer thinks a precedent is old and bad." Likewise, the fact that other antitrust laws is irrelevant "because, well, they are other antitrust laws, not this antitrust law." And as to whether this is Congress's job because it's economically significant, "so what?" Congress gave the FTC this power.

Now, none of this matters if the Supreme Court strikes down the rule, and what's more, if they do, they might also neuter the FTC's rulemaking power in the bargain. But again: so what? How is it better for the FTC to do nothing, and preserve a power that it never uses, than it is for the Commission to free the 35-40 million American workers whose bosses get to use the US court system to force them to do a job they hate?

The FTC's rule doesn't just ban noncompetes – it also bans TRAPs ("training repayment agreement provisions"), which require employees to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit, get laid off, or are fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

The FTC's job is to protect Americans from businesses that cheat. This is them, doing their job. If the Supreme Court strikes this down, it further delegitimizes the court, and spells out exactly who the GOP works for.

This is part of the long history of antitrust and labor. From its earliest days, antitrust law was "aimed at dollars, not men" – in other words, antitrust law was always designed to smash corporate power in order to protect workers. But over and over again, the courts refused to believe that Congress truly wanted American workers to get legal protection from the wealthy predators who had fastened their mouth-parts on those workers' throats. So over and over – and over and over – Congress passed new antitrust laws that clarified the purpose of antitrust, using words so small that even federal judges could understand them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

After decades of comatose inaction, Biden's FTC has restored its role as a protector of labor, explicitly tackling competition through a worker protection lens. This week, the Commission blocked the merger of Capri Holdings and Tapestry Inc, a pair of giant conglomerates that have, between them, bought up nearly every "affordable luxury" brand (Versace, Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, Coach, Stuart Weitzman, etc).

You may not care about "affordable luxury" handbags, but you should care about the basis on which the FTC blocked this merger. As David Dayen explains for The American Prospect: 33,000 workers employed by these two companies would lose the wage-competition that drives them to pay skilled sales-clerks more to cross the mall floor and switch stores:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-24-challenge-fashion-merger-new-antitrust-philosophy/

In other words, the FTC is blocking a $8.5b merger that would turn an oligopoly into a monopoly explicitly to protect workers from the power of bosses to suppress their wages. What's more, the vote was unanimous, include the Commission's freshly appointed (and frankly, pretty terrible) Republican commissioners:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-moves-block-tapestrys-acquisition-capri

A lot of people are (understandably) worried that if Biden doesn't survive the coming election that the raft of excellent rules enacted by his agencies will die along with his presidency. Here we have evidence that the Biden administration's anti-corporate agenda has become institutionalized, acquiring a bipartisan durability.

And while there hasn't been a lot of press about that anti-corporate agenda, it's pretty goddamned huge. Back in 2021, Tim Wu (then working in the White wrote an executive order on competition that identified 72 actions the agencies could take to blunt the power of corporations to harm everyday Americans:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Biden's agency heads took that plan and ran with it, demonstrating the revolutionary power of technical administrative competence and proving that being good at your job is praxis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

In just the past week, there's been a storm of astoundingly good new rules finalized by the agencies:

A minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes;

The founding of the American Climate Corps;

A guarantee of overtime benefits;

A ban on financial advisors cheating retirement savers;

Medical privacy rules that protect out-of-state abortions;

A ban on junk fees in mortgage servicing;

Conservation for 13m Arctic acres in Alaska;

Classifying "forever chemicals" as hazardous substances;

A requirement for federal agencies to buy sustainable products;

Closing the gun-show loophole.

That's just a partial list, and it's only Thursday.

Why the rush? As Gerard Edic writes for The American Prospect, finalizing these rules now protects them from the Congressional Review Act, a gimmick created by Newt Gingrich in 1996 that lets the next Senate wipe out administrative rules created in the months before a federal election:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-23-biden-administration-regulations-congressional-review-act/

In other words, this is more dazzling administrative competence from the technically brilliant agencies that have labored quietly and effectively since 2020. Even laggards like Pete Buttigieg have gotten in on the act, despite a very poor showing in the early years of the Biden administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

Despite those unpromising beginnings, the DOT has gotten onboard the trains it regulates, and passed a great rule that forces airlines to refund your money if they charge you for services they don't deliver:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/24/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-rules-to-deliver-automatic-refunds-and-protect-consumers-from-surprise-junk-fees-in-air-travel/

The rule also bans junk fees and forces airlines to compensate you for late flights, finally giving American travelers the same rights their European cousins have enjoyed for two decades.

It's the latest in a string of muscular actions taken by the DOT, a period that coincides with the transfer of Jen Howard from her role as chief of staff to FTC chair Lina Khan to a new gig as the DOT's chief of competition enforcement:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-25-transportation-departments-new-path/

Under Howard's stewardship, the DOT blocked the merger of Spirit and Jetblue, and presided over the lowest flight cancellation rate in more than decade:

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/2023-numbers-more-flights-fewer-cancellations-more-consumer-protections

All that, along with a suite of protections for fliers, mark a huge turning point in the US aviation industry's long and worsening abusive relationship with the American public. There's more in the offing, too including a ban on charging families extra for adjacent seats, rules to make flying with wheelchairs easier, and a ban on airlines selling passenger's private information to data brokers.

There's plenty going on in the world – and in the Biden administration – that you have every right to be furious and/or depressed about. But these expert agencies, staffed by experts, have brought on a tsunami of rules that will make every working American better off in a myriad of ways. Those material improvements in our lives will, in turn, free us up to fight the bigger, existential fights for a livable planet, free from genocide.

It may not be a good time to be alive, but it's a much better time than it was just last week.

And it's only Thursday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

#pluralistic #labor #antitrust #trustbusting #noncompetes #indenture #ftc #matt stoller #david dayen #tapestry #luxury fashion #capri

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tomorrowedblog · 8 months

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Friday Releases for October 13

Friday is the busiest day of the week for new releases, so we've decided to collect them all in one place. Friday Releases for October 13 include And Then You Pray For Me, nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, the rest, and more.

Anatomy of a Fall

Anatomy of a Fall, the new movie from Justine Triet, is out today.

For the past year, Sandra, her husband Samuel, and their eleven-year-old son Daniel have lived a secluded life in a remote town in the French Alps. When Samuel is found dead in the snow below their chalet, the police question whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Samuel’s suspicious death is presumed murder, and Sandra becomes the main suspect. What follows is not just an investigation into the circumstances of Samuel’s death but an unsettling psychological journey into the depths of Sandra and Samuel’s conflicted relationship.

What Happens Later

What Happens Later, the new movie from Meg Ryan, is out today.

Two ex lovers, Bill (David Duchovny) and Willa (Meg Ryan) get snowed in at a regional airport overnight. Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to and annoyed by one another as they did decades earlier. But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted.

The Conference

The Conference, the new movie from Patrik Eklund, is out today.

What begins as team-building fun, descends into a nightmare as a mysterious masked killer begins stalking and picking off the participants one by one.

Goosebumps

Goosebumps, the new TV series from Rob Letterman and Nicholas Stoller, is out today.

Inspired by R.L. Stine’s worldwide bestselling book series, “Goosebumps” follows a group of five high schoolers as they embark on a shadowy and twisted journey to investigate the tragic passing three decades earlier of a teen named Harold Biddle – while also unearthing dark secrets from their parents’ past.

Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry, the new TV series from Lee Eisenberg, is out today.

Set in the early 1950s, Lessons in Chemistry follows Elizabeth Zott, whose dream of being a scientist is put on hold in a patriarchal society. When Elizabeth finds herself fired from her lab, she accepts a job as a host on a TV cooking show, and sets out to teach a nation of overlooked housewives — and the men who are suddenly listening — a lot more than recipes.

Suburban Screams

Suburban Screams, the new TV series from John Carpenter, Jordan Roberts, Michelle Latimer, and Jan Pavlacky, is out today.

John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams is a genre-busting unscripted horror anthology series from the mind of legendary director, writer, and producer, John Carpenter. The series explores the dark secrets and unspeakable evil that sometimes lurks beneath the surface of the sun-drenched streets, manicured lawns and friendly neighbors of suburbia.

Frasier

Frasier, the new TV series from Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli, is out today.

Same Frasier. New skyline. The new series follows Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) in the next chapter of his life as he returns to Boston with new challenges to face, new relationships to forge, and an old dream or two to finally fulfill.

Shining Vale S2

The second season of Shining Vale, the TV series from Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan, is out today.

Pat and Terry Phelps move from a cramped Brooklyn apartment to an old mansion in Connecticut, in order to save their marriage after Pat’s affair. The teenage kids are pissed, and Terry’s attempts to rally the family fall flat. The house seemed like a steal at $250K below asking, but when the former owner of the house—who died there—appears to Pat, Pat wonders if she’s depressed… or possessed.

Lords of the Fallen

Lords of the Fallen, the new game from HEXWORKS and CI Games, is out today.

A vast world awaits in all-new, dark fantasy action-RPG, Lords of the Fallen. As one of the fabled Dark Crusaders, embark on an epic quest to overthrow Adyr, the demon God.

Transformers: Earthspark - Expeditions

Transformers: Earthspark - Expeditions, the new game from Tessera Studios and Outright Games, is out today.

Battle and explore as courageous Autobot, Bumblebee, in an exciting action adventure to stop his nemesis, Mandroid, from becoming the ultimate evil cyborg.

And Then You Pray For Me

And Then You Pray For Me, the new album from Westside Gunn, is out today.

SET IT OFF

SET IT OFF, the new album from Offset, is out today.

Burning Desire

Burning Desire, the new album from MIKE, is out today.

nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana

nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, the new album from Bad Bunny, is out today.

the rest

the rest, the new EP from boygenius, is out today.

#Games #Movies #TV #Music #News

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thelittletsarina · 5 months

Note

How was your trip to Disney?

Also if you are still gifting can you please share wicked london 5 November 2009?

My trip was great! January in Florida is basically summer so my long pants weren’t needed a lot!

Here’s the audio:

Sabrina Carter (u/s), Sarah Earnshaw (s/b), Gregor Stewart (u/s), Sam Kelly, Harriet Thorpe, Natalie Anderson, George Ure (u/s), David Stoller November 5, 2009; London

https://mega.nz/folder/509BBSyb#BRi8fXSgpAqvLhyFeIQCcA

#audio gift #tsarina’s asks #wicked musical

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mywifeleftme · 9 months

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154: Young Jessie // Shufflin' & Jivin'

Shufflin' & Jivin' Young Jessie 1987, Ace

Deadspin/Defector writer David Roth coined a phrase for the idle pastime of recalling also-ran baseball players: Let’s Remember Some Guys. If you’ve ever sat around with friends who share a fandom and found the conversation pleasantly degenerating into taking turns naming Guys (e.g. “Oh man, Skeet Ulrich!”) and reacting (“Oh shit, I remember him!”), you’ve had the pleasure of Remembering a Guy. (I’ve uh homaged this bit a few times in this series already.)

youtube

Roth draws a distinction here between Guys and Dudes. A Dude is someone who had a respectable degree of success at the highest levels of their practice (made an all-star team; did an album the average stepdad has worn out multiple copies of), whereas a Guy is someone who was more of a workaday stiff who has become lodged in your mind for personal, arbitrary, or outright mysterious reasons.

To whit:

Soccer player Megan Rapinoe is unequivocally a Dude. Former Arsenal player Ray Parlour is a Guy.

The Pokemon Pidgeotto is a Guy. Bulbasaur is clearly a Dude.

Ex-porn star Carter Cruise is a Dude. Scarlit Scandal is currently a Guy with Dude potential.

Guy. The wrestler Duke “The Dumpster” Droese is a Guy. AEW’s Britt Baker is a Dude.

Basketball player Detlef Schrempf is a Dude. Christian Wood is a Guy and it’s no one’s fault but his.

Dude.

The talking doorknockers from Labyrinth are Guys. Ludo is an absolute Dude.

Border collies are a Dude breed of dog. Drevers are Guys.

I trust these carefully chosen exemplars have helped you calibrate your Remembering devices. So, based on what you know about the rules of Guy Remembering, would you say Young Jessie was a Guy or a Dude based on the stats below?

Active between 1953 and 2020, but best known for a short run of rock ‘n’ roll singles in the first decade of his career, some of them featuring guitarist Mickey Baker (among sidemen a definite Dude, otherwise technically a Guy?) and saxophonist Sam “The Man” Taylor (same)

Briefly a member of The Flairs (Guys) and The Coasters (Dudes)

Writer of the song “Mary Lou,” later covered by Bob Seger (Dude), Steve Miller (Dude), Frank Zappa (Dude), and The Oblivians (Dudes, within their specific niche)

Performed and recorded sporadically (mostly jazz) over the ensuing decades

youtube

Pencils down. What do you say?

Yeah, Young Jessie is obviously a Guy, but he’s a great example of the worthiness of humble Guydom, and the joys of Remembering Guys. There was a huge glut of talent working during rock ‘n’ roll’s first decade, and despite the public’s insatiable appetite for the new sound there wasn’t enough limelight, enough studio time, enough capital for most singers to get even a single whack at the pinata. To his credit, Young Jessie had enough onstage electricity, and enough craft in his pen, to cut thirteen singles between 1954 and 1963, including some work with the legendary songwriting duo Lieber & Stoller (Dudes).

The concept of an independent (or alternative) class of recording artists didn’t really exist in Jessie’s prime—studio time meant somebody somewhere was willing to risk money on you in the hopes you might have the decency to reward them with a hit. There simply wasn’t as much willingness to invest in a longshot at stardom back then, and you needed, luck, fortitude, and ideally something special vocally to stand out.

Relatively few of Jessie’s peers had the juice to fill out a retrospective compilation, let alone one with the spring of Shufflin’ & Jivin’, which collects most of his work for the Modern Records label (’54 to ’57), plus a few previously unreleased tracks and a token entry from his time with vocal quartet The Flairs (the latter with Ike Turner [Dude] sitting in on guitar). These are pretty hot recordings in general, not far off the jump blues-derived sounds of Big Joe Thornton and Chubby Checker (both Dudes), and Jessie makes a good host. He’s believable when he asks a woman if she’d like seven or eight kids, and he has the strut needed to sell a hustler’s anthem like “Hit, Git & Split.” But he never managed to land a real hit, and he was ultimately the type of unflashy pro that had a more limited ceiling in his stardom-driven era.

But, for anyone who is a true fan of early rock ‘n’ roll and can’t get enough of this sound, this compilation (like Young Jessie himself) is an excellent find, and if you say his name among the right crowd, you’re sure to get an appreciative, “Hey, I remember that guy!” We should all be so lucky to leave such a fond legacy.

154/365

#young jessie #'50s music #'50s rock #rock and roll #early rock #remember some guys #defector #deadspin #david roth #this is so stupid #music review #vinyl record

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justinmoviereviews · 1 year

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The Class of 2022

Bringing this feature back out. Some pretty good films this year.

Dog - Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum

If a movie about a damaged guy getting saved during his darkest night by a dog doesn’t make you weep, you don’t have a dog.

Barbarian - Zach Cregger

This movie slaps so fucking hard.

Don’t Worry Darling - Olivia Wilde

Basically I think this one was killed by its press tour. I think the critic class decided liking this wasn’t worth the risk so collectively expelled it, but going in without any idea anything had even happened I thought it was the best movie so far in the nascent Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity genre that’s become one of the few acceptable avenues for mainstream films. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the twist is so much more interesting than the Stepford Wives aura that hangs over this suggests it will be. And it’s a pretty good looking flick.

Bros - Nicholas Stoller

A very sexually explicit, funnier than average romcom. Allison’s take: I can’t tell if he’s making fun of romcom tropes or just using them.

The Banshees of Inisherin - Martin McDonagh

More than any movie he’s ever made, this one invites interpretation. I’m still working on it, and I don’t imagine there’s a definitive explanation, but right now the one I like is that this is a movie about death. I’m not sure whose death. I look forward to watching this several more times.

Confess, Fletch - Greg Mottola

Has there ever been a talented actor worse at understanding his gifts than Jon Hamm? The dude is an unknowable phantom with the face of Adonis, not an Apatow comedian. This is not a bad movie, but the guy at the center of it doesn’t fit and never feels natural. They would have been better off with just about anyone else. Even an unknown would have worked better than our man.

Amsterdam - David O. Russell

For awhile this movie has a Thomas Pynchon quality to it, where a ragtag group of goofuses stumble into an evil global shadow conspiracy they’ll never defeat or understand or even directly encounter. Its so good for a minute that I wondered if Thomas Pynchon was somehow involved (maybe he is, I didn’t look into it). The end wraps everything up too neatly to really spin into anything great, and it ends up as an enjoyably forgettable ride, which I guess befits David O. Russell’s late career stage as a guy living in the purgatory of Netflix after missing a bunch of Oscars he still can’t believe he didn’t win.

Prey - Dan Trachtenberg

I don’t know. It’s solid, I guess.

Emily the Criminal - John Patton Ford

This is a B action movie that caught extra attention because it stars Aubrey Plaza. A lot of people liked it. I’m happy for them.

Nope - Jordan Peele

Let’s see here. My first take was that it was his weakest movie because it didn’t have any neat core conceit at its center. Get Out was a revelation, and Us was I thought basically a perfect movie, a really cool idea from a filmmaker very good at realizing his cool ideas. Nope is more of a regular old flick. But the more I thought about it the more I saw that as a strength. I think most movies are not as good as Us, but it’s ultimately kind of a very expensive Twilight Zone episode. This movie is doing something he hasn’t done yet, which implies he’s going to continue to grow and get more ambitious. I still think there’s something a little undercooked about this one, and the mystery at the center is a little less cool than I think he wanted, but its beginning to seem very clear that greatness awaits.

Men - Alex Garland

If this guy wants to spin conceits out for awhile and then have his movies devolve into lunatic madness, I’ll come out for it every single time. The title and current political moment made me think this would be more of an indictment of the gender, another in the series of aforementioned Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity movies, and it’s sort of that, but its much more elemental, personal, and bizarre. I fucking love this director.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Rian Johnson

Like most sequels, some of the plot points go over the top as the movie attempts to outdo the original, and the billionaires are actually dumb plotline feels ripped directly out of leftist Twitter, but as long as Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig are involved I’ll watch every Knives Out movie they make. This is what happens when you let talented people do their jobs. Also as far as I know this is the first movie that includes Covid as a central life event. I love that for some reason. It is a central life event, its like making a movie about World War II.

Bodies Bodies Bodies - Halina Reijn

I’ll be honest, I was pretty drunk when I watched this on a plane. So this will be an impressionistic review. I thought it was pretty fun. There’s one scene that feels like it was written by people outrightly mocking woke culture. Pete Davidson is in it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once - Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

For the first hour I thought this was the Matrix, and wished that, as a movie about the literally unlimited nature of the universe, it was a little more creative. The second hour changed that thought. It is basically the Matrix, but while that movie was drab and minor key (by design) this movie is colorful and kaleidoscopic and wild and never ever ever not fun. The moviest movie I’ve seen in a long time, by which I mean a piece of art that could only be a movie, and one that pushes into new places what a movie can and should do. It’s big and beautiful and weird and exciting, and at 139 minutes it whooshes by. We’re in a weird place with representation at the moment, but this movie doesn’t feel like its correcting an error about who gets to star in Kung Fu movies, instead the Chinese heritage of the family is a natural part of the plot and makes the movie more than it otherwise would be. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t the best film of the year.

The Northman - Robert Eggers

The verisimilitude alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t think of a movie that’s setting feels so real since the Revenant. This is, and I guess I mean this as a compliment, the most normal movie Robert Eggers will ever make. If the Lighthouse was pure uncut Eggers, just a gonzo madhouse of his shit, this is basically Gladiator with a couple of spirit visions, which come to think of it Gladiator also had. I looked into it and learned that his compromise with the studio to make a big budget picture was to sacrifice final cut, which makes a ton of sense in retrospect and which I’m guessing is responsible for the movie’s worst parts, like when the main character monologues to himself about his motivation and plans for no reason. This is my take: the whole time I watched it I wanted it to be weirder. But as a bloody Viking flick, it’s a good movie.

The Menu - Mark Mylod

A movie about a great chef who got so tired of cooking for shitheads that he went insane. Pitched at a tone that, for me, made any level of insanity make sense. The characters in this movie aren’t unlikeable so much as they are urgently deserving of death. And you’re never, for a minute, worried they aren’t going to receive it. It’s been a good year for fun horror flicks.

X - Ti West

Except for the obvious reason--they’re both primal feelings--it’s never been fully apparent to me why these movies are always structured to be one half sexual titillation then one half slasher-horror. But while in the 80s they just pumped them out cuz they made money, now we’re getting all sorts of deconstructions and meta commentaries and sex as terror merges. Anyway, this is the most cerebral sex ‘n’ death horror movie I’ve ever seen; the most knotty, the most intellectualized, the most constructed in its creators’ heads. I felt a sourness at first--Barbarian and The Menu are two brilliant horror movies that do something genuinely new rather than comment on the old method in increasingly myopic ways--but that’s gone now. The things this movie does are just too fun and smart. I guess every one of these flicks is in one way or another punishing you for enjoying the T&A it gave you in its first hour, but this is the first to make you watch its monsters actually fuck. The final line is both a compliment to the movie I’m not sure it deserves, and an objectively fantastic last line.

White Noise - Noah Baumbach

Nothing says Fuck It Netflix money quite like the existence of this movie, an admiring adaptation of a book that’s essentially a novelization of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas. I remember liking the novel a lot, and finding it, for a book about mass hysteria over everyday life, oddly soothing. This movie is mostly faithful to the book, but it isn’t soothing. Baumbach uses chaos and claustrophobia to convey the story’s existential anxiety rather than the artificial feeling of meek contentment that is DeLillo’s chosen mode. The movie is noisy and full of static and incredibly ugly, like watching an 80s sitcom through a fishbowl. Interesting choices, but not pleasant ones, which matters when you’re watching a movie. But Noah Baumbach is an obvious fan, and he understands the ideas he’s working with. He even gets in some pretty good Noah Baumbach jokes. It’s an amazingly timely story too, as we head into the fourth year of a global pandemic that has foregrounded our collective anxiety and shrunken our worlds to a degree that can’t not be causing long term damage. There’s a scene here where a guy in a quarantine camp riles the crowd by demanding his fear not only be recognized but made the center of the public’s attention, which if anything is quaint when put up against what the MAGA mutants in this country actually want. But here’s what I kept thinking about while I watched a movie that I liked but that never truly distinguished itself from its very good source material: in 1985 Don DeLillo wrote a book about the fear of death as a uniquely modern condition of our sad and shrinking reality. These days, that condition gets called anxiety and we validate it on social media. Our culture sucks now.

Father of the Bride - Gary Alazraki

Shit! I watched this right before I got married. I didn’t realize it was a 2022 release. It’s pretty good! Nice and warm. Andy Garcia is a boss. Recommended for right before you get married.

Elvis - Baz Luhrmann

- Here’s a movie I thought of when I was watching this one that I think would be good: young Elvis spends all his free time watching the black people in his town make the music he loves. Most of the movie takes place in churches and after-hours clubs. It’s musical performance heavy. It ends right as he’s being discovered.

- Here’s what I assumed this movie would be: A shy kid with a lot of talent gets discovered by a sleazy manager. He rises to the top, meets a girl, then money, fame, ego, and the influence of shady characters bring him down. A lot of musical performances.

Baz Luhrmann likes his spectacle, but I can’t believe how shoddy and lazy this movie actually is. There’s no structure, no real story, no actions of consequence. It's a three hour montage of events I don’t even believe really happened. Did Elvis really feel strongly about Bobby Kennedy’s death? I sort of doubt it. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman were trite, but here’s a director looking his audience in the eye and saying “I know you hogs like this shit.”

Tar - Todd Field

This movie is such a slow burn I didn’t even realize she kept two houses until it was almost over. It doesn’t tell anything and it takes its sweet time showing. Some of its early scenes feel largely pointless. I wasn’t sure why at first, other than the fact that it’s a type of storytelling, but upon consideration I get it: the movie is told in the first person. It doesn’t tell you anything for the same reason I don’t wake up every morning and tell myself the address of my house. This is the story of a monster told from her point of view, and as the movie progresses you start to see the cracks in her self-image. Its slow and controlled and quiet, with an intensity hovering offscreen that peaks its head in just enough to let you know its there. Because of the narrative style there’s a ton of stuff I missed, and more than any other movie I’ve seen this year I look forward to watching this again.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Edward Berger

It felt for awhile like we were done with old fashioned war flicks, and modern war movies would all have some kind of stylistic or thematic bent. But this is about as simplistic and plain a story as you can come up with. So maybe the lesson is you can do whatever you want as long as you do it really well. This is an incredibly effective movie. A battle scene where the French close in on the Germans like an unfeeling horde of aliens will stay with me for a long time. A scene at the end which exposes the brutal evil of men who control the lives of other men will as well. Maybe I’m getting softer, but this is the most haunting and disturbing war movie I’ve ever seen. We can do terrible, unspeakable things to each other, and we can do them for no reason. One way of understanding this movie is that it’s about the humanity of a nothing special enlisted man, and follows him until he finally loses it. It’s also about the machinations of power that control his life from afar without any humanity at all. Also, it looks and sounds incredible.

The Fabelmans - Steven Spielberg

At this point, you should know what you’re getting from Spielberg. His movies are impeccably made, stories told seamlessly with warmth and craftsmanship. He’s the ultimate major key filmmaker, with an intuitive understanding of how to compel audiences that the movie says he’s had since he was a kid. The Fabelmans is, for better or worse, a Spielberg movie. My sense is that how you feel about it will be determined by how you feel about him. If you think he’s the best to ever do it, you’ll probably appreciate this career retrospective about how he discovered the power and joy of cinema. If you’re cooler on him, maybe you’ll wonder why he gets to do it but Martin Scorsese or Federico Fellini, two guys who also probably grew up with cameras attached to their hands, don’t. I guess the obvious answer is that those guys never would, which is probably one of the reasons I like them more.

Black Adam - Jaume Collet-Serra

Jaume Collet-Serra is responsible for two of the best schlock masterpieces of the century, the Shallows and the Commuter, so I am hopeful he’s just paying his dues now before they’ll let him go back to cooking those up, and not that he’s been swallowed by the Comic Book Movie Industrial Complex, which really does gobble up everything cool or interesting or unique about filmmaking. That said, like most of them are, this is a perfectly fine beer watch. The Rock, who is straight up one of the most likeable people on the planet, has been a real life superhero ever since he didn’t care what your name was.

Triangle of Sadness - Ruben Ostlund

I got big The Lobster vibes from this one. Both from the structure--part 1 takes place in a hospitality center, part 2 takes place in the wilderness--and from the overt strangeness that keeps you on your toes the entire time; both movies could go anywhere. Ostlund makes so many choices that are so fun; one highlight being a drunken mock debate over economic policy between the ship’s raging alcoholic captain and a Russian oligarch who accidentally became incredibly rich and now lives with an acutely Russian nihilistic joie de vivre. The movie begins as a pretty open satire of wealth and grows increasingly hysterical until it suddenly transforms into something else--something smarter and more deft. A bunch of seemingly useless rich people are all forced to pivot into a society where none of their material gifts will benefit them at all, and do better than expected. What is Ostlund saying? I’m not sure. But another way he reminds me of my man Yorgos is that he sets up a wild premise and then explores it as he thinks it would go in real life. Its a fun way to make movies.

Bullet Train - David Leitch

So you’re an excellent filmmaker, just dripping with talent, but you’d rather make snappy action flicks than three hour Capital-F Films about classical music conductors (I loved Tar, just making a point). I can’t believe how good this movie is. Fast, witty, bouncing through timelines and stories with a throughline that keeps expanding and gets fuller and more fun as it chugs along. This is like if Guy Ritchie took better drugs, or if Tarantino didn’t have final cut. Brad Pitt is one of the best actors on the planet if you can find interesting things for him to do. Here he plays a reformed underworld professional who speaks almost entirely through New Age self-improvement jargon as he tries to find a new life path for himself. And that’s maybe the fifth best thing this movie does.

Argentina, 1985 - Santiago Mitre

This is a pretty downbeat movie. The dialogue is spoken at a low tone, the color palette is dark and brown, it never gets too loud. Knowledge of the country’s history would help--I needed Google for things every Argentinian already knows. Otherwise this is a very straight trial movie, all the way down to the verdict resting on the prosecutor’s ability to give a sufficiently inspiring speech. Most of the movie takes place in the courtroom or a law office. One of the protagonists comes from a comfortably fascist background and at one point has to attend the world’s worst family gathering, but otherwise there’s very little on the periphery.

Nanny - Nikyatu Jusu

The structure is fucked. This movie takes ages to get started and then rushes its ending. It feels very messy and less clear than it wants to be. I'll need to chew on it some more, but I think the idea here is the titular immigrant nanny is carried through a consuming anxiety about the family she left behind by an African spirit that is committed to her survival but isn’t necessarily benevolent. It’s really not a horror movie, and the beats it hits in service of the genre are largely unnecessary and fairly lame--I think we can go ahead and put a period on scary dream jump scares. But despite its flaws, which are all just novice direction shit, I really liked this. It looks great, and it has a control over its tone that makes it consistently engaging even if it doesn’t ever really cohere. I’m starting to think the reason why there are so many good horror movies now is because they’re cheap to make and aren’t beholden to existing IP--essentially they’re a bush league for promising young filmmakers. I suspect Jusu is more interested in exploring the African experience in America than she is in the genre. It will be interesting to see what she does next.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - Jane Schoenbrun

I should say that the Internet didn’t invent loneliness, and things like these online sinkholes are just a new outlet for an old problem. If more people are isolating and detaching from reality, that has more to do with our culture and our politics (which the movie knows. A shot of a boarded Toys ‘R’ Us is as grim and unsettling as any of the webcam freakout scenes.) This is an incredibly effective film about a culture I don’t understand and have anxieties about. It seems pretty documented that more people are in fact isolating and detaching, and if they’re leaning into the type of solipsism that creates this stuff, that’s a fertile topic for new filmmakers. Maybe too fertile. Jesus Christ, this movie.

To Leslie - Michael Morris

The thing is, she’s really good in this! She’s not a sympathetic character for most it, she’s a full on addict, using the people who care about her and taking advantage of the Samaritans dumb enough to feel empathy for her. She’s resentful of the help she needs and then livid when people stop helping her. This is a movie I would not have heard about were it not for the insurgent Oscar campaign, but am glad I saw it. Sometimes its nice to watch small, universal stories play out. The third act redemption maybe comes a little too easily, and I’m not sure I buy what inspired it (a Willie Nelson song, apparently), but I’m just noting that for my own memory’s sake. This is a good one.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths - Alejandro Inarritu

There’s a scene here where the main character climbs up a giant pile of dead bodies until he reaches the top, where Spanish conquistador and founder of Mexico Hernan Cortes is waiting for him, and they get into a conversation about heritage. It’s a ripe scene, and its been set up perfectly, but the conversation isn’t as profound or layered as it could be, or that the height the director is reaching for suggests it should be. Then after a few minutes, some ash from Cortes’s cigarette falls on one of the dead bodies, who sits up to complain about it, and it’s revealed the whole thing is a scene from a film someone is making. Its not the first time and not the last time you want to throttle Inarritu. You’re one of the best filmmakers currently working, why do you keep fucking up your own good ideas with this jokey shit?!

I want to take my time with this movie because it deserves to be carefully considered. It is, without hesitation, the most ambitious movie of the last few years. My theory on Alejandro is that his life’s goal is to be Fellini; both this and Birdman shoot for the same surreal modernism that the Italian legend mastered back in the ‘60s. This one doesn’t get there the same way Birdman didn’t, and one of the reasons, at least in this case, is that he keeps telling us what he’s thinking instead of showing us. This film looks incredible, and the camera moves with the same fluidity it did in Birdman, but he runs out of tricks sooner than he should. His ideas could be conveyed visually, but instead he just has his characters say them out loud.

All that being said, I loved it. I loved it more than I loved Birdman when I first saw it, before I decided it was a failed version of 8 1/2. This is also a failed version of 8 1/2, but it’s playing with a different set of ideas. Instead of being a satire of the industry, it’s considering Mexican identity, and its ultimately more interested in mortality than in the morass of being alive. It’s incredibly rare to get a director who swings this hard, who’s given the space to work out his ideas like this, or who even has the balls or vision to try. A lot of this movie doesn’t work. But the parts that do are incredibly good, and his visual sensibility is unparalleled. This should be a -10,000 lock for best cinematography, but it won’t win because no one saw it. Which is to the detriment of the discourse. This movie deserves to be debated and raged over. It deserves to have partisans and detractors who crucify each other online. The culture would be infinitely better if we got three of these a year.

Vengeance - B.J. Novak

Parts of this movie are so good I had trouble believing the bad parts could be as bad as they were. A New York journo douchebag goes to deep west Texas for the funeral of a hookup he barely remembers because she’s told her family that they’re in a serious relationship, then stays because he thinks he’s found a podcast. The parts about Texas are fantastic; his dialogue is sharp and interesting--down here we don’t have police, we have Mike and Dan--and incredibly well observed. During a scene at a rodeo somebody is eating a giant barbecue chicken leg, someone else is eating potato chips covered in queso. But B.J. is playing a guy so cartoonishly dopey it feels beamed in from a different, much worse movie (sample dialogue: “Have you ever been in a fight?” “Like a real fight, or like a Twitter fight?”) Scenes where he’s on the phone describing the story to his incredulous producer give off Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. It’s so much worse than the stuff around it that I figured it had to be intentional. Maybe he’s the villain or something. But no, he just learns to love these simple people and their small town. One other thing, Ashton Kutcher, playing a sort of deep Texas ghost, is legitimately amazing here. Easily the best thing in it. If people had seen this he’d have been nominated. It’s that kind of performance.

Babylon - Damien Chazelle

Damien’s learned how to direct. Watching the guy who’s floundered (in my opinion) ever since his his tiny little arthouse flick about ambition put him on the map get these giant scenes to work makes me legitimately happy for him. There’s a moment during the party scene at the beginning where he turns the bacchanalia into an organized dance sequence, which feels like a guy making a choice; we’re going to stick classic film elements in the middle of this chaos, because we like them and we can. As far as I can tell the idea here is simple--turn the end of the silent film era into the fall of Babylon, or the Weimar Republic, or Vichy France, or any other era of decadence that was always going to be on borrowed time. Was it really like that? Is this a story that needed to be told? Who knows? And who cares? Unlike with First Man, he’s justified his decision by doing it well. There’s a scene here where a cruel and careless death cuts to a giant party, and its more effective--drunk and sobering--than when Scorsese did it in the Wolf of Wall Street.

RRR - S.S. Rajamouli

Maybe I’d feel differently if I was better versed in Bollywood; as it stands this film represents the entirety of the industry to me. Maybe this is like showing a person who’s never seen an American movie before the Avengers, and an Indian friend who liked it tells me it is not representative of Bollywood. But it ultimately doesn’t matter. First of all, I think it’s genuinely awesome that this has become such a crossover sensation, and that more people are getting exposed to world cinema. Second of all, this movie whips so much ass. It took me a minute to get used to the style, but once I did I was all the way in. The first film ever to get me pumping my fists in my living room. And a thing I’ve always believed is that being good at dancing is incredibly manly.

KIMI - Steven Soderbergh

There are two ideas in this that I like a lot: 1. what would the kind of trauma most thrillers like this are about do to a person after the movie ends?, and 2. what does a corporation that has to pretend it cares about ethics after #MeToo and Believe Women even though it obviously doesn’t look like in the year of our lord 2022? More than any other top shelf filmmaker I can name, Steven Soderbergh doesn’t seem to have any throughline other than that his movies are all made with a certain level of quality. There’s no thematic cohesion that I can find, other than a healthy dislike for companies and governments, and not really any stylistic one either, other than that his movies are all really neat and tidy. And while he used to get nominated for Oscars, for the past few years he’s seemed to be content pumping out genre flicks like a gun-for-hire Woody Allen, which I wonder if is just him being prescient about the state of the industry now. This is a quick little film, something that comes out by the truckload in the era of Netflix, but if you watched it without knowing who Steven Soderbergh was you’d be surprised by how good it is.

Watcher - Chloe Okuno

Didn’t really respond to this one. The acting’s not great, the pacing is off--she gets pretty scared pretty quickly--and beats that should hit hard land harmlessly. High point: Bucharest seems like a cool city.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio - Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

Guillermo is very good at putting the things he likes in movies that are ostensibly pretty one-for-them--some of these images belong on his highlight reel. There’s also a sweetness here that’s got his name all over it. This was apparently a years in the making passion project, and I have no doubt the animation is a triumph, but its a status as a Kids Movie papers over some storytelling messiness that bothered me as a person who doesn’t care about kids movies. At its best this movie makes me wish he’d gone full tilt into del Toro creature madness. Fuck the kids, man.

Women Talking - Sarah Polley

My take on this movie was that it’s the first piece of art to explicitly lay out the tenets of modern feminist philosophy, like a No Exit for the 21st Century American leftist political moment. I have never felt less equipped to give my opinion on a film, but suffice to say I liked this and thought it was intellectually interesting. Here’s the best I can do: this is an interesting one. Less interested in anger or revenge than in compassion and the value of forgiveness, and by value I mean worth, as in what do we gain by forgiving and what is the toll that forgiving will take on us? It’s that kind of a movie, managing emotional states with a philosophical detachment. Deal with the problem first, figure out how we feel about it later. Every atrocity visited upon these women is described in a matter of fact way. Nothing is shown.

The Good Nurse - Tobias Lindholm

This is firmly in Movie of the Week territory, all the way up to a soundtrack and establishing shots straight out of Law and Order, elevated slightly by its inclusion of two of our better actors.

Top Gun: Maverick - Joseph Kosinski

Loses points with me because it sags in the middle; I don’t care about Maverick’s guilt over his friend’s death or his romantic life. It’s great when he’s in the air. This whole movie should take place in a plane. Late period Tom Cruise is beloved by many, but not by me. I feel like he should have more to say at this point in his career than lying about his age.

The Whale - Darren Aronofsky

A very strange film. I’m not sure what to say about it. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, exactly. The main character’s morbid obesity seems almost like body horror at times. The plot seems simple enough; a guy makes the decision to remove himself from life after he loses a loved one, but it’s never quite that movie. I’m not sure if he’s a good person or not, or if he’s meant to be. He left his wife and daughter for someone else and was never in their life afterwards, though if you listen to him, he tried to be. I wondered if he’s someone that seeks out the good in others and extends that to himself even if he doesn’t deserve it. But if that’s the case, why is he killing himself? There’s also a religious element that fits in somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I thought about this movie the whole car ride home. I’m still working on it.

Empire of Light - Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes makes almost comically beautiful movies. This one, about a ragtag group of theater employees in England in 1981, takes place mostly in a movie theater, which is lit up and shot to look like a museum exhibit. This is a perfectly decent flick. It’s well paced, a simple story told well, emotional in the right places without being manipulative. It’s pleasant when its over. Not gutting, but pleasant.

Spiderhead - Joseph Kosinski

Quick, self-contained, well made, not too expensive, fun and kinda trippy, with a neat little twist at the end. I remember watching The Discovery a few years ago and thinking it was going to be the ur-text of a new genre called the Netflix Movie, and buddy was I right. These things now are being assembly-lined out by the dozen, and most of them are largely decent if a little bloodless. Sooner or later they’ll feel so packaged AI will start writing them, but until we get there I’m fine recommending a movie like Spiderhead. It’s a little bloodless in a way the similar genre grind-out KIMI isn’t, but it’s eerie while still being fun, holds its tone almost the whole way through, and includes the best Chris Hemsworth acting I’ve ever seen as a jocky nerd charming sociopath.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Ryan Coogler

The first one isn’t perfect, but like a lot of people I walked away from it thinking I’d just seen Marvel’s highwater mark. This one is even better. While the original stood above the rest by looking at real racial politics through the lens of a comic book movie, this one doubles down by bringing in a second superhero-ized colonized civilization with its own ideas about how to respond to the world at large and has the two of them meet and discuss. It even throws in for good measure a complex political dynamic at the top of the Wakanda power structure where every argument makes sense and is defensible. And while my biggest issue with the first one was that it could have used more world-building, some of the scenes here look genuinely great. All the standard Marvel movie objections apply--the dorky jokes, the dumb action scenes, the weirdly dark color palette these things are apparently mandated to have--but Ryan Coogler is possibly the only director franchised into the MCU who seems interested in making or allowed to make real movies.

Pleasure - Ninja Thyberg

A thing I learned the other day is that the movie Deepthroat was one of the highest grossing films of 1975. It is amazing to imagine the families of America lining up en masse to watch a movie, the premise of which is that a woman was born with her clitoris inside of her throat. I wouldn’t call Pleasure a return to a more sex positive past, exactly, but it’s explicitly sexually graphic in a way I’ve never really seen before outside of an actual porno. Parts of it are about the dark side of the porn industry, but other parts are about the light side, or the harmless side, and most of the characters are basically decent people. In fact one case this movie is making, maybe unintentionally, is that the ugly parts of the porn star life aren’t really any different than the ugly parts of the Hollywood life, or the sports life, or the investment banking life. The cost of success in this economy is your humanity, whether that means getting double-raw dogged in the ass or outsourcing a factory to Pakistan.

Ambulance - Michael Bay

Worth watching. Pretty fun. Basically incoherent. I will use this space for two observations: 1. Michael Bay has a fully singular visual style that if I had to give name to I would call Saturday afternoon barbecue full of hopefully not racist white men getting weepy after the fifth round of Coors Light, but its his, and as far as I can tell he created it, which means he fits my definition of an auteur. 2. Jake Gyllenhaal might actually be my favorite actor. He is incredible in this movie. I want to call it my second favorite performance of the year after Cate Blanchett in Tar. He’s not the most naturally gifted actor, it will never come as naturally to him as it does to, for instance, Cate Blanchett, but he makes up for that by going completely in on every role. He slips into raw nerve-ending panic within the first five minutes of being on screen in this movie. I think he also might be one the smartest actors in Hollywood. He has one particular line reading in this about a collection of plush flamingos that is so good, and so indicative that he knows exactly what he’s doing and what makes what he’s doing good, it singlehandedly bumps the movie up a letter grade.

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