May 19
The Indian film at Cannes made by half a million farmers
Parallel cinema maestro Shyam Benegal's acclaimed film Manthan was crowdfunded by half a million small dairy farmers putting in ₹2 each. Nearly a half century later, a newly mastered copy is premiering at Cannes. It tells a fictionalized account of the real-life story of dairy collectivization among poor and exploited small dairy farmers, the story of the famous Amul cooperative. [more inside]
Come for the songs, stay for the songs
Jesse Welles is a singer/songwriter in the protest tradition: War Isn’t Murder; Cancer; Fentanyl; The Olympics; Whistle Boeing; Payola; Happy Mother’s Day; Fat; God, Abraham, and Xanax.
Step into the Closet
The Criterion Collection, a revered distributor of classic and arthouse cinema, built a vast library of 3,500+ films over the last 40 years. It can be overwhelming, even for cinephiles. Want a savvy friend to guide you? Enter Criterion's Closet Picks, a lo-fi YouTube series which invites top filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other artists into the vault to freely sample while musing about core influences, all-time favorites, and hidden gems. Highlights:
Willem Dafoe -
Maya + Ethan Hawke -
The Daniels (EEAAO) -
Richard Ayoade -
Comic Patton Oswalt -
Yo La Tengo -
Cinematographers Roger + James Deakins -
Charlie Day -
Nathan Lane -
John Waters -
VG designer Hideo Kojima -
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) -
Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek) -
Cauleen Smith (Drylongso) -
Animator Floyd Norman -
Jane Schoenbrun -
Paul Giamatti -
Marc Maron -
Wim Wenders -
Cate Blanchett + Todd Field -
Hari Nef -
Photographer Tyler Mitchell -
Molly Ringwald -
Peter Sarsgaard -
Udo Kier -
Gael García Bernal -
Pixar's Lee Unkrich -
Singer St. Vincent -
Critic Elvis Mitchell -
Anna Karina -
Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) -
Flying Lotus -
Agnès Varda -
Alfonso Cuarón + Paweł Pawlikowski -
Mary Harron -
Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman -
Carl Franklin -
Roger Corman -
Michael K. Williams -
SNL's Bill Hader
// Watch the full playlist, or see this cool database of picks (info), including the most popular.
The real life Lady Whistledown scandalised 18th-century society
The Guardian: Like the fictional pamphlet from Bridgerton, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746 (here in archive.org) , has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.
A prolific anti-racist, proto-feminist writer, Haywood used her transgressive newsletter to expose 18th-century hypocrisies about race and gender. It was published weekly over nine issues. [more inside]
This is not a post about lying in fiction or games
Some say that lying non-player characters can motivate player characters, at the cost of paranoia. Some say that characters in crime fiction may be justified in their dishonesty. Marvel comic books are full of liars. Psychology experts have advice for you about how to spot liars. Some recent research has addressed factors associated with designing video games with falsehoods.
A relevant previous Ask. [more inside]
That's Hommy, not Tommy
"Orchestra Harlow's answer to the Who's Tommy -- Hommy, A Latin Opera [YT playlist], and one of the few concept albums we know from the New York Latin scene of the time! [Dusty Groove] The tracks are fairly short, and they're separated by short "interludes" throughout the album that feature some cool spoken bits that trace the story of the record...although Orchestra Harlow borrow the name of the Who's album, the work here is all original -- not covers -- two long "acts", spread out over the sides of the record with a sophisticated approach that shows the Harlow group moving into much deeper territory at the time." [more inside]
The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel
Jenny Nicholson's latest video is live, it's a 4 hour review retrospective of Disney's Star Wars Hotel.
Long after we are gone, our data will be what remains of us
In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It’s an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World
Research into dingoes in the ACT
Little is known about the dingoes living in the Australian Capital Territory, but one researcher is trying to change that. Concerns have been raised over the current assumptions about the ACT's dingoes, and its hoped more understanding can help the animals coexist with humans and other species.
May 18
How To Live Forever
The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse. [New Yorker / Archive]
Right To The City
YouTube channel Radical Planning recently posted Third Place vs. Right to the City [50m] which digs into the theory of cities mostly from a Marxist point of view. Ray Oldenberg, the founder of Third Place Theory, is discussed, and dissed, and then Right To The City as a concept is introduced and discussed. I found it to be informative and interesting and well-sourced.
“National Geographic’s Picture Atlas of Our Universe”
Nerd John Siracusa reminisced about a certain National Geographic book from his childhood and the reactions flooded in. Siracusa says the cover image is “burned in his brain,” more than 40 years later. Nearly everyone who responded also had fond memories of the book. One respondent said he had written a blog post about in 2009. [more inside]
The fish did not respond to a request for comment ...
Faith No More was one of the most influential bands in the 1990s. The song and video for Epic was a hit in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Like many songs, it was about sexual frustration. They weren't the first to mix rap and metal, but they are the ones who have to apologize for it.
But about that fish ... [more inside]
He was stupid. But I was already in love with him.
On average, marriages around the world don’t last terribly long. The average is eight years in the United States. Ten years in Singapore. Five years in France. And the key reasons couples cite for divorcing are always the same: extramarital affairs. Lack of intimacy. Lack of commitment. Add to that the stresses of work. Especially if your work is having sex with other people. From RIP Jose and Daniele Duval: Enduring, Forever Love [The Rialto Report] (NSFW photos and text)
English as she was Spoke
In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says “I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced”. [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] “a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering” [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Jacques Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"
Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
Podcast (2:42:24) with transcript. Christopher Brown is a professor at Columbia specializing in the slave trade and abolition. He argues that abolition, though obvious in retrospect, was not inevitable and relied on a particular set of circumstances that could have been disrupted at many points. He has also written about Arming Slaves and has an interesting review of Capitalism and Slavery at LRB.
The “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” is dead.
NPR reporting that actor Dabney Coleman is dead at 92. Dabney Coleman was practically ubiquitous in the early to mid 80’s by appearing in films like 9 to 5, Tootsie, Cloak and Dagger, On Golden Pond, and War Games. [more inside]
Time Is Shaped Like a Labyrinth
Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults is a short film in 4 parts by Yara Asmar, a musician, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Beirut. The creator describes it so: "In a wonky universe set within the fake walls of an old abandoned children’s TV show, Mr Samuel and his friends -peculiar, ugly puppets navigating the strange thing that is time- attempt to make sense of it all through stories, songs and arduous loops of nonsensical chores." [more inside]
Procedural Artificial Narrative using Gen AI for Turn-Based Video Games
"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)." [more inside]
How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder
How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder. Class, nativism and gender stereotypes all played a role in Borden’s acquittal for the 1892 killings of her father and stepmother. (Smithsonian magazine.)
"It’s not for everyone, but it’s a good life."
He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]
May 17
Children in a rural New Zealand school sing about their community
The song Our Toanga by the Sea has been produced by the children and wider community of Hampden [map link], and it's simply a nice look at a rural New Zealand South Island coastal settlement (on Highway 1 just North of Dunedin).
I think this has come out at the right time as (most of) the people of NZ are very worried about the new government. We need to remind ourselves of what we have so we can move forward again - this song I think will help.
Toanga in the song name is Māori for treasure
Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand.
The online Māori Dictionary is an extraordinary resource with a nice format, all about the words of our place.
Make Anim(ation) Real
Over 15 years ago, Microsoft released Photosynth [previously], a nifty tool that could correlate dozens of photos of the same place from different angles in order to make a sort of virtual tour using photogrammetry, a technique that went on to influence Google Earth's 3D landscapes and virtual reality environments. But what if you tried the same thing with cartoons? Enter Toon3D, a novel approach to applying photogrammetry principles to hand-drawn animation. The results are imperfect due to the inherent inconsistency of drawn environments, but it's still rather impressive to see a virtual camera moving around glitched-out versions of the Krusty Krab, Bojack Horseman's living room, or the train car from Spirited Away. Interestingly, the same approach works about as well on paintings or even AI-generated video; see also the similar technique of neural radiance fields (NERFs) for creating realistic high-fidelity virtual recreations of real (and unreal) environments.
Teruna Jaya (gamelan animated graphical score)
Stephen Malinowski is a YouTuber who makes animated scores, usually of Bach's music, but today I discovered something completely different: his spectacular score for Teruna Jaya, a classic of Balinese gamelan music (12 min.). [more inside]
Mass production of ornamentation and its recent decline
The beauty of concrete. "Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor." A long article by Samuel Hughes describing the history of how ornamentation is produced.
‘He likes scaring people’
These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings. The CBI charged Shah with kidnapping, extortion and murder. It alleged that the officers who killed Sheikh and his wife were working on Shah’s orders... Today, Amit Shah isn’t home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city’s police force, and oversees the Indian state’s intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. How Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, runs India.
The Low Spark of High Heeled Chairs
"Designing a chair is a very constrained exercise: the general dimensions and angles are very much fixed," Yovanovitch said. "Designing a shoe is even more constrained and technical." from Christian Louboutin and Pierre Yovanovitch perch chairs on legs informed by "iconic women"
In my imagination, never feeling out of place
Young schoolchildren from County Cork, working with a non-profit children's music & creative space, have created a piece called 'The Spark" for Cruinniú na nÓg, which is the national free day of creativity for young people, run by the Creative Ireland Programme’s Youth Plan. [cw: strobe transition effect on first link]
Take a moment to imagine what you think it might sound like, before you click the link and enjoy 'The Spark'.
Take a moment to imagine what you think it might sound like, before you click the link and enjoy 'The Spark'.
Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world
"I’m bored of that conversation and I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m known for." Kathleen Hanna interviewed about her newly released memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
(archive link here)
"this rat borg collective ended up [performing] better than single rats"
Graffiti-covered door from French revolutionary wars found in Kent
A scratched wooden door found by chance at the top of a medieval turret has been revealed to be an “astonishing” graffiti-covered relic from the French revolutionary wars, including a carving that could be a fantasy of Napoleon Bonaparte being hanged. [more inside]
Another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission
Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as ‘commercial tokens’. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]
May 16
tree of life of trees (flowers, really)
Old and improved, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew recently released a lovely tree of life of... well, plants [pdf]. [more inside]
The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts
Joshua Charow is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NYC. He spent the past couple years ringing doorbells to find and interview over 30 artists who are living under the protection of the Loft Law to create his first photography book, 'Loft Law. The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts'. [more inside]
The Car You Never Expected (to disappear)
Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was “so uncool, it was cool,” declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn’t enough to keep the car off GM’s chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they’re less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]
Chicago photography
Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport. I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.
“Bert, one step into animorphing into Ernie.”
It becomes apparent there were at least three versions of the dough
Let’s go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]
New Yorker on Lucy Letby: Did She Do It?
The New Yorker takes on the dubious evidence that led to Letby's conviction and the bizarre UK media restrictions that governed coverage of the case. [CW: infanticide] Rachel Aviv's article paints a picture of a neonatal intensive care unit undergoing the same catastrophic deterioration as the rest of the National Health Service—a topic the magazine has covered recently—and how an especially competent and determined nurse might just end up at the scene of several patients' deaths because she was called in to help on virtually all difficult cases. [more inside]
"Every time you kiss me, feels like a..." WHAT?
Sock It To Me, Baby! was one of blue-eyed soul singer Mitch Ryder's top-ten hits, from early 1967. The expression is possibly best-remembered today from when a presidential candidate uttered it: In 1968, when Nixon said 'Sock It To Me' on "Laugh-In," TV Was Never Quite the Same Again. (Smithsonian magazine, 2018) [more inside]
I've Worked With Better, But Not Many
How did Ghostbusters II create the talking Vigo the Carpathian painting? Glen Eytchison was deep in the planning stages of his next theatrical production when he got a phone call from Industrial Light & Magic. It was early 1989, and employees at George Lucas’s famed visual effects house needed to create a painting of a 16th-century Carpathian warlord that could come to life for director Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters sequel. They had to do it fast: The movie was due to come out in June. Could Eytchison help them? [more inside]
“It’s really a strange town.”
There was allure beyond negation. Branson’s geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O’Neill has termed Primordial America, the “buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.” “Wherever they hail from,” 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer went on, “they feel they are the Heartland.” No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]
"This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work."
As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.
May 15
"I didn’t realize how important it is not to tell the truth"
The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members. [more inside]
30,000 rare oysters being reintroduced to Firth of Forth
30,000 rare oysters are being reintroduced to Firth of Forth. (The Firth of Forth is in Scotland, it is a body of water just North of Edinburgh.)
Social History Of The Cardboard Box
I'ma show y'all how to move this yay'
From Donald Glover: Childish Gambino - Little Foot Big Foot (Official Video) ft. Young Nudy [6m] Genius lyrics page.
Bobby Fingers Plays Fowl...Fabio-usly
Greatest human alive today, Bobby Fingers, has released another video, researching and creating a diorama of the 1999 incident where heartthrob Fabio came back bloodied after participating in the inaugural ride of the "Apollo's Chariot" roller coaster at Busch Gardens. [more inside]
History Doesn't Repeat But It Sometimes Rhymes
Slovakia’s populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP] [more inside]
You're not supposed to actually read it
A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.