Entries for January 2021
Werner Herzog doesn’t know anything about skateboarding. But suspecting the director was a kindred spirit, Ian Michna interviewed Herzog for skate mag Jenkem. My favorite bit is when Michna asks Herzog if he shot a skateboarding video, what music would he choose as a soundtrack:
What comes to mind first and foremost would be Russian Orthodox church choirs, something that creates this kind of strange feeling of space and sacrality — so what you are doing is special, bordering the sacred.
(via @mathowie)
Fried eggs are something almost everyone, regardless of culinary prowess, can cook. Even so, in the hands of a master chef like Jacques Pépin, even this simple dish can be improved upon. For starters, he uses waaaay more butter in the pan than most people probably do. And there’s water involved? The finished product looks amazing.
After you’re done watching that, you should check out Pépin making scrambled eggs:
And then finally, here’s Pépin making omelettes two ways (country/”American-style” and classic French):
Love that backhand plating technique!
Using images from the Kaguya orbiter, Seán Doran has constructed a 4-hour realtime orbit of the Moon. Feel free to pair with your favorite piece of relaxing music for a meditative viewing experience.
See also another video by Doran: An Incredible Video of What It’s Like to Orbit the Earth for 90 Minutes.
From photographer and filmmaker Roman De Giuli, Satellike is a fluid abstract video that simulates satellite imagery of river deltas, etc. As De Giuli explains, the effects he uses here are entirely practical, not digital.
What you see in SATELLIKE are very long shots of watery ink in motion on several coats of half dried paint. Drying the paint leads to organic structures which can be brought to life again with water, ink and sour flow release mediums. The results look different from my usual approach, way more realistic and less otherworldly.
The organic nature of fluids in motion is very tough to duplicate digitally with the accuracy to feel, I don’t know, relaxing. I don’t know how you quantify or categorize this feeling/intuition, but watching this video feels very much like watching a river or the ocean flow. You can see more of De Giuli’s fluid work on his website.
On the challenges of navigating the pandemic while single. “One day I realized it had been three months since I had touched a human being.”
I love these coastline contour maps made by the Inuit people of Greenland. So simple and functional.
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.
See also the Marshall Islands Navigation Charts. (thx, kate)
Inspired by rock climbers, Danny MacAskill visits the Isle of Skye with his mountain bike to find an impossibly steep route down the Dubh Slabs. He is so far back in the saddle on some of the steepest stuff. I know high-end mountain bike brakes are on hair-triggers, but good God I wonder what MacAskill’s grip strength is… (thx, jeffrey)
Several years ago, I saw an NYC performance of Tree of Codes, a collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Olafur Eliasson, music producer Jamie xx, and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name. The whole performance was dazzling but I was especially taken with Jamie xx’s score.
In the weeks after the performance, I looked online for the score, hoping against hope that a recording was out there. No dice. As time went on, whenever one of Jamie xx’s songs popped up in a mix I was listening to, I’d do a bit of searching for the score, always without success. Until the other day, when I discovered this bootleg version on Soundcloud:
So happy to hear this again — for as long as this link lasts. I’m still crossing my fingers for an official release at some point…
In this short film by Simon Perkins, Jon Wilson shares his story of how cancer left him with one leg and the perspective he’s gained by skinning up and then skiing down mountains.
Sometimes I forget I’m broken. I cover up my scars and plug my ears. Things go okay for a while, but then I start thinking I’m entitled to some artificial slice of happiness, and before I know it I’m climbing a ladder to nowhere. To get down again, and find my equilibrium, it helps to remember when I was so low. It also helps to remind myself that life is relatively good if I have the luxury to ski up a goddamn mountain.
Many of us are scared to be broken. I’m a high school teacher, and I see it in the kids around me every day. They’re conditioned by black mirrors and social media algorithms designed for “perfect offerings.” We tell them about the ills of brokenness, but not the power and wisdom in it. We talk about post-traumatic stress — not post-traumatic growth. Being broken is a pre-existing condition that is never expunged from our record. And while I would never wish it on anyone, I would never trade in my scars, even if it meant having my leg back.
Here’s what we should do as the new Covid-19 variants bear down on us. I cannot describe how SO VERY FRUSTRATING it is to read articles like this that recommend doing all the things we should have been doing all along.
This interview on This American Life with a Black Capitol Police officer who defended Congress against the domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol Buidling on Jan 6th is essential listening. BuzzFeed’s Emmanuel Felton interviewed an anonymous officer he calls “Officer Jones”:
Emmanuel Felton: Have you ever been in a fight like that?
Officer Jones: No, not like that. No way. These people were deranged, and they were determined. I’ve played video games before. Well, you know, zombie games — Resident Evil, Call of Duty. And the zombies are just coming after you, and you’re just out there. I guess that’s what I could relate it to — Call of Duty zombies. And the further you go, the more and more zombies just coming. You’re just running, running, running. And they wouldn’t stop. You’re seeing they’re getting their heads cracked with these batons, and we’re spraying them, and they don’t care! It was insane.
Jones appealed to some of the mob who were carrying “Blue Lives Matter” flags and that stopped them for a bit. A couple of the insurrectionists pulled out their own police badges. But then the invaders turned hostile again:
They looked at me. They yelled at me. They were yelling at me. And I would not let them go past. They all want to go past me? I’m going to beat all your asses. One by one, I’m going to deck all of y’all. Come on. And that’s when one of the guys that was a cop said, “Hey, man, we’re going to stand here with you.” I was like, “No, get the fuck out of my building.” He was like, “This is our building.” And I was like, “This is my goddamn building. I’m in charge here. Get the fuck out.” And that’s when I started losing my temper even more. I mean, I got tears streaming down my face.
Felton wrote a related piece for BuzzFeed News: Black Police Officers Describe The Racist Attacks They Faced As They Protected The Capitol.
A pretty good explainer about what’s happening with the GameStop stock situation. “How a horde of Redditors are destroying various hedge funds and becoming rich.”
The spring, the USPS will be releasing a set of 10 stamps featuring droids from Star Wars movies and series. (These are the droids you’re looking for lolololol.)
Representing more than four decades of innovation and storytelling, the droids featured in this pane of 20 stamps are IG-11, R2-D2, K-2SO, D-O, L3-37, BB-8, C-3PO, a GNK (or Gonk) power droid, 2-1B surgical droid and C1-10P, commonly known as “Chopper.”
The characters are shown against backgrounds representing settings of memorable adventures. The selvage features a passageway from the floating Cloud City above the planet Bespin, introduced in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”
(thx, caroline)
U.S. Suffers Sharpest Rise in Poverty Rate in More Than 50 Years. The rate increased by 2.4% in the last half of 2020 – for Black Americans, the poverty rate increased by 5.4%.
PBS TV series American Masters has been on the air since 1986, profiling prominent American cultural creators. Only a small fraction of the footage for the interviews they do makes it into the episodes, so they’ve created a digital archive of over 1000 hours of footage “from more than 1,000 original, never-before-seen, full, raw interviews”.
For four decades, we’ve asked: who has changed America? We’ve aired hundreds of carefully crafted programs that illuminate the stories of our cultural giants. But just a fraction of the interviews filmed for American Masters appear in the final films; nearly 96% of the footage never gets released. Now, the American Masters digital archive makes this rich catalog of interviews available to the public.
You can access the archive here. Many of them clock in between 20 and 40 minutes in length — like these interviews from Maya Angelou, David Bowie, Nan Goldin, and Betty White — but some are much longer, like Carol Burnett’s 3-hour 39-minute interview, Quincy Jones’ nearly 2-hour interview, and Steven Spielberg’s 1-hour 20-minute interview. What a treasure trove! (via @tedgioia)
Using the POLITY data series, The Center for Systemic Peace has downgraded the system of government of the United States of America from a democracy to an anocracy, a “regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features”. From a notice on the front page of the CSP website:
The USA has dropped below the “democracy threshold” (+6) on the POLITY scale in 2020 and and is now considered an anocracy (+5). It has also lost its designation as the world’s oldest, continuous democracy; that designation now belongs to Switzerland (171 years), followed by New Zealand (142) and the United Kingdom (139). Further degradation of democratic authority in the USA will trigger an Adverse Regime Change event.
The downgrade can be tied directly to the Trump administration’s actions over the past four years:
In 2019, CSP changed the USA code for Executive Constraints from 7 to 6 due to the executive’s systematic rejection of congressional oversight; dropping its POLITY score to +7 and resetting its DURABLE score to “0”. In 2020, the coding for Executive Constraints will fall another point or two due to the executive’s systematic purge of “disloyalists” from the administration, forceful response to protest, vilification of the main opposition parties; and undermining public trust in the electoral process, reducing the USA POLITY score in 2020 to +5 (anocracy).
Their analysis also places the US at “high risk of impending political instability (i.e., adverse regime change and/or onset of political violence)” and designates “the ongoing efforts of the USA executive to circumvent electoral outcomes and subvert democratic processes as an ‘attempted (presidential) coup’”.
I Am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement. “What if you could get infinitely close to being indoors, while remaining, by some convoluted set of standards, outdoors?”
Last night, Tony Hawk posted a video of himself doing a 720 at the age of 52 (a full 2 years beyond the Brimley/Cocoon Line).
Hawk says it’ll probably be his last one — he’s getting too old, his spin is slower, etc. In 2016, at the age of 48, Hawk hit his final 900:
There’s a way in which watching Hawk perform these tricks and watching, say, 11-year-old Gui Khury perform the world’s first 1080 is the same: they’re both attempting something they aren’t sure they can do at that moment. But Hawk has both the benefit and hindrance of wisdom to draw upon here. He knows he can do a 720 because he’s done probably hundreds of them before, but he’s also battling his body, self-doubt, and probably the tiny voice in the back of his head saying “why exactly do you need to do this, dumbass?” Hawk probably knows better than anyone that as you get older, the true battle in sports (and life) is not against others or the record book, it’s against yourself.
Update: On Twitter, @limitedmitch says: “If you want to feel desperately sad today, Tony Hawk has been sporadically doing tricks ‘for the last time ever’ on his Instagram”.
Because the pandemic (mostly) shuttered US movie theaters for the duration of 2020 and studios reduced or redirected their output accordingly, you might be excused for thinking that it was a bad year for film. As David Ehrlich’s masterful video countdown of the 25 best films of 2020 demonstrates, there was plenty of good stuff out there if you knew where to look.
I didn’t end up seeing many of the films on Ehrlich’s list — I’ve been stuck rewatching old favorites and meaningless garbage during the pandemic — but I’m going to make some time for several of these soon. Two documentaries that I was surprised to see omitted: My Octopus Teacher and The Painter and the Thief. The latter is one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages — I can’t imagine that Ms. Americana (for instance) was better. And I’m Thinking of Ending Things? Did not do it for me at all. *shrug* (thx, brandt)
Against all odds, Paris has become a city of bikes. “Rue de Rivoli, the wide street that runs past the Louvre, has been entirely closed to private cars.”
As someone who lives in an A-frame house, I love this architectural alphabet designed by Johann Steingruber in 1773. A typically great find by Present & Correct (see also).
You probably read something yesterday, maybe just a headline, about Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine being “six times less effective” against the B.1.351 coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa. This is, to put it plainly, a bullshit take on what is actually excellent news. This is the important bit, via Stat:
Both the Moderna vaccine and the immunization from Pfizer-BioNTech produce such powerful levels of immune protection — generating higher levels of antibodies on average than people who recover from a Covid-19 infection have — that they should be able to withstand some drop in their potency without really losing their ability to guard people from getting sick.
“There is a very slight, modest diminution in the efficacy of a vaccine against it, but there’s enough cushion with the vaccines that we have that we still consider them to be effective,” Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious diseases official, said Monday on the “Today” show.
Let’s hear that again: “Both the Moderna vaccine and the immunization from Pfizer-BioNTech produce such powerful levels of immune protection…” These vaccines are so good, so potent, that even this sixfold drop in one measure of the vaccines’ ability to neutralize this one SARS-CoV-2 variant isn’t even enough to significantly reduce their overall protective power.1 That’s the important news here, that’s the very good news, that’s what you should be taking away from this. We have miraculously developed a near-perfect medicine for a plague that has significantly disrupted all human life on Earth and we’re flipping out over some technical details that the experts assure us don’t mean much in terms of overall effectiveness?! No thank you. Not today.
In a Twitter thread, Zeynep Tufekci is tearing her hair out because of the media’s misunderstanding and sensationalization of the “sixfold drop”.
I know people are tired but needless anxiety isn’t helping us. Let’s focus on getting through these months — better masks if indoors with others, more strict attention to our precautions — and the real problem: making more of these amazing vaccines quickly & getting them out there!
I get it, we want to understand but not how it works. Stop worrying about Nab titers. That does NOT mean the vaccine is six times less effective. People whose job it is to worry about it are on it & we just got confirmation: it works against the variants.
Plea to media: this isn’t a good headline. It makes people think the vaccine is six times less effective against the new variants (FALSE!) when the news today is *excellent*: The vaccine continues to work well against the new variants. That’s the headline.
For a much more technical take on the efficacy of the vaccines against variants, see virologist Florian Krammer’s long thread. His conclusion:
mRNA vaccines induce very high neutralizing antibodies after the second shot (consistently in the upper 25-30% of what we see with convalescent sera). If that activity is reduced by 10-fold, it is still decent neutralizing activity that will very likely protect. Furthermore, we know that the mRNA vaccines are already protective after the first shot when neutralizing antibody titers are low or undetectable in most individuals.
There is a concern here and it’s that B.1.351 or B.1.1.7 might mutate into variants that are significantly resistant against the vaccines’ good effects. Krammer again:
First, we need to do what every good scientist is praying for a year now: We need to cut down on virus circulation. The more the virus replicates, the more infections there are the higher are the chances for new variants to arise. Also, we need to try and contain B.1.351 and B.1.1.248/P.1 as much as possible.
That’s why, aside from preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the next several months, getting these vaccines into people’s arms is so important: the less the virus spreads, the less opportunity it will have to mutate into something even more dangerous. The US vaccination effort is slowly ramping up — we’re at an average of 1.3 million doses per day right now and the trend is heading in the right direction. We can get this done!
So what can you do about this right now? 1. Stop worrying about the variants until the experts let us know we have something to worry about. 2. If you are eligible for the vaccine, get it! 3. Spread the word about vaccine availability in your area. Yesterday Vermont opened signups for vaccination appointments for all Vermonters 75 and older, and I texted/emailed everyone I could think of who was over 75 or who had parents/relatives/friends who are over 75 to urge them to sign up or spread the word. 4. Continue to wear a mask (a better one if possible), wash your hands, social distance, stay home when possible, don’t spend time indoors w/ strangers, etc. Thanks to these remarkable vaccines, real relief is in sight — let’s keep on track and see this thing through.
I cannot improve upon the succinct description of this video from Natalie Smillie: “A new Ghibli film?! No — this is an advert for the state of Oregon.” It’s a great ad and certainly takes both content and stylistic cues from Studio Ghibli’s films. The video, along with a previous one, was created for Travel Oregon by creative agency Psyop and animation studio Sun Creature.
“Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption.” So many people I know have said something like “my next car will be electric”.
I sent Vivian Wu’s snowflake generator to a friend this morning and they replied, “Well there goes my workday”. So, uh, sorry in advance to you working snowflake fans. You can check out how these generated versions compare to the real thing. (via @colossal)
With tongue in cheek, Jon Methven writes about what it’s like to take a walk during the pandemic.
My knapsack is full. I’ve stowed backup masks should I encounter any maskless pandemic denialists. I have Band-Aids, cotton balls and large-wound bandages, in case my run-in with the anti-maskers goes awry. I packed five gallons of backup sanitizer and a refill funnel. I have nine factory-sealed packages of antiseptic wipes. I packed face shields and oral swabs and disposable thermometers in case I need to self-test. I have a rolling oxygen tank. This jaunt is just what I need to unwind.
At least now people without kids know what it’s like leaving the house with a toddler.
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