kottke.org posts about video
A few days ago, on March 2, the first lunar lander operated by a private company landed successfully on the Moon. The video of the landing is really something — I wonder if I will ever get accustomed to or tired of watching footage of spacecraft landing on other bodies in our solar system? The answer is a resounding NO so far…this is cool as hell.
You can read more about Firefly’s Blue Ghost on Wikipedia. The mission delivered 10 science and technology investigations to the surface of the Moon for NASA. (via phil plait)
I recently rewatched Glass Onion and had a couple thoughts about it.
1. Before settling in to watch, I’d remembered that Edward Norton’s mega-billionaire character Miles Bron bore some resemblance to Elon Musk, but I’d forgotten that the whole plot of the movie revolves around what a blustering dope, what a dumb charlatan, what a dim-witted con man Bron/Musk is. As we endure this political moment dominated by halfwit flimflammers, witnessing Bron’s downfall orchestrated by a gay detective and a Black woman was surprisingly cathartic.
2. I love films like this! Like Knives Out, Glass Onion is stacked with acting talent, helmed by a great writer/director, funny & dramatic, and, crucially, doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s a sense that everyone is having a good time, with a wink at the audience. And they’re just flat-out fun to watch. Is there a name for movies like this? A micro-genre? The type of movie you could imagine Muppets being a part of without too many changes?
I’d include movies like the Ocean’s series, Lucky Logan, some of Wes Anderson’s films, perhaps Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot trilogy, and maybe even Mike White’s The White Lotus series. Like, what do we call these winking prestige ensemble dramedy thrillers? (Surely we can’t call them “winking prestige ensemble dramedy thrillers”.) And what other films would you include?
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a YouTube video of Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019 that was going viral on Insta and TikTok. Well yesterday, Doechii officially released Anxiety as a single, so you can find it on YouTube (though I prefer the original video), Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere else you stream or buy music.
P.S. Here’s Doechii doing a CATFISH / DENIAL IS A RIVER medley at the Grammys last month:
And of course, you can check out her Tiny Desk Concert too.
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
- Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
- Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
- How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
- The Million Man March in 1995.
- The environmental movement (1982-2011)
- “The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
- The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
- The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to watch an earnest show about an ultimately successful revolution against a fascist government. It will be interesting to see in this political climate whether Disney+ is the place to watch such a thing.
Apple TV+ is streaming an 8-hour remix of the Severance theme by ODESZA that is perfect music for your innie to refine macrodata to. The workday-long video is a 23-minute mix that’s looped and set to footage from the show. Legit adding this to the work music rotation. (via @margarita.bsky.social)
I can already tell this is going to be my favorite thing of the day: Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019. If you didn’t know she could sing, well you do now.
If my math is right, Doechii was 21 in this video, living in NYC, vlogging about going to thrift stores (on her old YouTube channel that only has a little over 9,000 subscribers), and working hard on her music. I think it paid off?
P.S. This video from 2015 of Doechii in high school singing Do You Want to Build a Snowman? with her friends is super sweet.
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In 2023, he gave a private speech at a meeting of his Center for Renewing America think tank in which he describes the goal of the purge of governmental employees that’s happening right now. A short clip of the speech obtained by ProPublica:
A transcript:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
From the accompanying article:
In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.
In another video, Vought stated that the “entire apparatus” of the US government was vulnerable and “exposed to our strategy”. And in this one, he talks about the president’s need to be able to ignore laws.
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote about Vought today too: The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab.
In 2022, Vought published an essay in the American Mind, a publication of the arch-Trumpist Claremont Institution, that provides an answer to some of these questions. Read properly, it serves as kind of a Rosetta stone for the early days of the Trump administration — explaining the logic behind the contemptuous lawbreaking that has become its trademark.
Beauchamp continues:
Vought believes that executive agencies have, with Congress and the courts’ blessing, usurped so much power that the Constitution is no longer in effect. He believes that presidents have a duty to try and enforce the true constitution, using whatever novel arguments they can dream up, even if the rest of the government might reject them. And he believes that threatening to ignore the Supreme Court isn’t a lawless abuse of power, but rather the very means by which the separation of powers is defended.
Russell Vought can call this whatever he wants, but it’s fairly clear what it amounts to: a recipe for a constitutional crisis. And it’s one the president currently appears to be following to a tee.
You should read both articles in their entirety.
Part of what this underscores for me is that this is not just Elon Musk’s coup. Musk seems to be following his own playbook but it’s clear that there are multiple, intersecting, mutually beneficial things going on there with Trump, Musk, Vought, and many Republican members of Congress. As Osita Nwanevu wrote recently in the Guardian:
Democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.
Not sure what else to say about this…their plan is all laid out in Vought’s remarks and in Project 2025. They’ve crossed some of this stuff off of the checklist already, so I guess we should be on the lookout for the rest of it, e.g. when/if protesting ramps up as the weather warms, we should expect Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and attempt to use the US military to quell dissent.
This afternoon on Twitter, the official White House account posted an ASMR video of an immigrant deportation flight. Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the video with “Haha wow 🧌🏅”. Here’s a screen recording I made of the video & tweet:
A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos are designed to trigger feelings of relaxation and low-grade euphoria through sounds and imagery. In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country. Some of those being deported are not criminals, are being imprisoned in countries other than their own, could be sent to a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, or might be sent back to countries with autocratic regimes to face persecution or death.
This is unfathomably cruel and monstrous. Vile. Evil. The stuff of sadistic dictators and terrorists. Nazis. People who killed cats for fun when they were kids. From the top down, the people serving in the Trump administration are sick, inhuman, heartless. This video absolutely gutted me. I am so very ashamed to be an American today. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through the days.
Nosferatu (2024). Not usually a fan of horror movies, but I liked this a lot. Great acting and cinematography. (A-)
Shōgun by James Clavell. This took a bit to get fully into, but I was riveted for the last 600-800 pages, even though I knew what was going to happen from having seen the TV show. So much more delicious detail in the book though. A great reading experience. (A)
September 5. Loved this. Solid journalism thriller in the vein of Spotlight, The Post, and All the President’s Men. (A)
Silo (season two). In agreement with many other viewers that the middle of the season was not all that compelling, but the final two episodes were great. (B+)
Not Like Us. For whatever reason, I ignored the Drake/Kendrick feud, so I got to this late but wow. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, run for your life…” (A)
Arca Tulum. Eating at this sort of restaurant should yield exclamations like “I’ve never tasted anything quite like this”. I thought this at least three times at Arca. But also: a pile of rocks is not the ideal plate for messy food. (A-)
Aldo’s. This is a Mexican gelato chain and they had a Biscoff-flavored gelato that was so good that I went back for it three more times. (A)
Antojitos La Chiapaneca. This is the only restaurant I ate at twice in Tulum — their al pastor tacos are so good. (A)
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A quick read but very relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. In keeping with the theme, I left the book at my hotel for someone else to read. (B+)
Janet Planet. A little too contemplative for me. (B)
Abruzzo. Mario Carbone created the menu for this Italian place at the Newark Airport. I had the penne vodka and I think it was the best thing I have ever eaten at an airport? Is it insane that I kinda want to plan a trip with an EWR connection so that I can have it again? P.S. the Tripadvisor reviewers haaaated this place. (A)
Reservation Dogs (season three). I reviewed Res Dogs in the last media diet post (“I enjoyed the first season more than the subsequent two”) but I’d like another crack at it. The last three episodes of the show were fantastic, especially the hospital breakout and Elora meeting her dad. (A+)
Flow. Reminded me strongly of Studio Ghibli’s films, but this wonderful animated movie is also uniquely its own thing. (A+)
The Bends. My usual Radiohead fare tends towards Kid A and In Rainbows, but I’ve been listening to The Bends a lot lately and appreciating the less polished rockiness of it. (A-)
Wool. Since the book (more or less) covers the events of the first two seasons of the TV series, I read half of it after season one and the other half after the latest season. And…I think the TV series is much better? (B-)
Thelma. A gem of a film, like Mission Impossible crossed with About Schmidt (or maybe The Bucket List). June Squibb is *fantastic* in the lead role. (A)
The Great British Bake Off (2024). Overall I enjoyed this season — they recruited a selection of talented bakers and the changes they’ve made (e.g. getting away from stunt bakes). But I found the semifinal and final difficult to watch because one of the contestants forgot he was supposed to be entertaining on television and totally lost his composure. (B+)
GNX. I also reviewed this in the last media diet post but I’ve continued to listen and I think GNX may have moved past DAMN. as my favorite Kendrick album? (A+)
Hundreds of Beavers. Super fun and inventive…this is like an animated movie with video game elements made with live-action actors. If you’re the sort of person who loves movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’ll probably love this movie. (B+)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. A reviewer complained that the final third of the book took on the style of a writing exercise and I agree. (B)
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I must have watched this 50 times on VHS as a teenager — I can still recite every line. (A)
Alligator Bites Never Heal. Love this album. (A)
The Penguin. Colin Farrell is unrecognizable (and great) as Oz, and Cristin Milioti is a chillingly fantastic Sofia Falcone. The first few episodes were really strong but I felt it slipped a bit as the season went on. (A-)
I’m also in progress on Severance season two and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time — but more on those next time.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.
It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.
Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.
Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans’ data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.
Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: “National program director of the CHUM Group”) and TikTok.
This fantastic two-minute video, from a guy named Rich, neatly explains why the anger and frustration of Trump’s supporters has been growing over time — why the pushback on things like diversity, equity, inclusion, trans rights, and LGBTQ+ issues seems to be increasing and the hate grows more overt. It has to do with an idea called an extinction burst.
Here’s a transcript of the video:
The Trump spike in racism, sexism, and hate — it’s the emotional foundation for the entire Make America Great Again movement, that nostalgia for when life in America was simpler and paler. But as soon as we began addressing it — boom! extinction burst.
This term is why I love science so much. You can take an idea from one field, like psychology for example, and apply it to another field, like political science, and the principles still apply.
Extinction burst is actually really simple. It’s when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change an undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time until ultimately the subject changes the behavior and then that behavior goes extinct.
This is like you’re at the store and you’re swiping your credit card, and it doesn’t work, and so then you swipe your credit card like 15 more times until you’re so angry you’re freaking out, and you’re about to scream an F-bomb in the middle of Toys R Us. And then you say, “I’ll just pay with cash”. Swiping is the behavior and the payment is the reward. So when the swiping doesn’t work and you don’t get the reward you need, you get madder and madder and you try it more and more until you change the behavior, which then results in the extinction of the original behavior.
Now, extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know very clearly what triggered it: it was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, the birther movement, and ultimately MAGA. It is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction.
This is why Republicans are still so angry. They know they know Trump winning can’t stop it, and they know Trump in office can’t stop it — they can feel the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.
At this point, the only thing that’ll stop it is if we let up. If you stop interfering with that undesirable behavior, it will go back to normal. So no, you’re not crazy; yes, you are doing the right thing; and yes, if you persevere, the extinction burst will end.
Note that this isn’t an explanation of where the Tea Party & MAGA movements came from; many people have written about how MAGA can be understood as a reaction to Obama’s election — subsequent events like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, the election of a Black woman as vice-president, the legalization of gay marriage, etc. have kept the indignities coming.
Rather, the extinction burst concept explains why the reaction seems to be getting more extreme, from QAnon to an increased number of book bans to anti-trans laws to anti-abortion laws to Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes in public to openly expressed racism by many Republican politicians to January 6th to the 2025 Coup. We are seeing behavior that 15-20 years ago would have been almost unthinkable — now it’s daily. They are swiping the card and getting madder and madder.
You can read more about extinction bursts, including some examples of extinction bursts in children:
Tantrums: A child who has learned that tantrums result in attention from their parents may initially escalate their tantrum behavior when their tantrums are no longer reinforced. This escalation is an extinction burst, as the child is attempting to regain the attention they once received.
Protesting: When a person has been reinforced by being excused from a task or activity, they may initially increase their protest behaviors, such as whining or arguing, when the reinforcement is no longer provided. This increase in protest behavior is an extinction burst.
Persistence: In some cases, individuals may persistently engage in a behavior that previously led to reinforcement, even if the reinforcement is no longer present. For example, a child who used to receive a treat for asking repeatedly may continue to ask repeatedly, hoping for the treat, even when the treat is no longer given. This persistence is an extinction burst.
And in adults:
Cell Phone Addiction: If an individual is accustomed to receiving instant gratification through social media notifications on their cell phone, they may experience an extinction burst when they attempt to reduce their screen time. They may initially intensify their checking behavior, hoping to regain the previous level of reinforcement.
Gambling: In the context of gambling, an individual who has previously experienced wins and rewards may exhibit an extinction burst if they suddenly stop winning. They may increase their gambling behavior, hoping to recreate the past reinforcement.
Smoking Cessation: When someone tries to quit smoking, they may experience an extinction burst in the form of increased cravings and even heightened smoking behavior. This burst occurs because the expected reinforcement (nicotine) is no longer being received, leading to an initial escalation in smoking behavior.
(via @karenattiah.bsky.social)
Hi, friends. It’s Friday and I don’t know about you, but I think we need to unwind a little bit with this Tiny Desk Concert from Doechii. Aaron posted this back in December but it’s popped up in my feed and inbox a few times in the past few days — must be that shiny new best rap album Grammy — so I thought I’d pop it in here again.
Backed by a full band, horns and two background singers, Doechii’s performance was a masterclass in creativity. Sporting vintage academia looks, complete with matching cornrows and beads, Doechii delivers a freshly rearranged medley of cuts from ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, tailored specifically for Tiny Desk. While hip-hop remained at the core, she truly gave us everything: a jazz arrangement of “BOOM BAP,” heavy rock vibes on “CATFISH” and a Southern praise break outro on “NISSAN ALTIMA.”
She closed her set with “Black Girl Memoir” from her debut album, Oh The Places You’ll Go. Before performing, she shared, “I wrote this song specifically for Black women. As a dark-skinned woman, there’s a very unique experience I’m trying to internalize … This is dedicated to all the beautiful Black women in the room.” While her star has been steadily on the rise since her debut, 2024 is shaping up to be the year Doechii cements herself as a household name.
In 2002, Fred Rogers wrote a parenting book as a resource for caregivers of children aged two to six. One of the topics he covered was how to talk to children about tragic events in the news. Rogers begins by noting that even young children can pick up on when adults are feeling distressed:
In times of community or world-wide crisis, it’s easy to assume that young children don’t know what’s going on. But one thing’s for sure — children are very sensitive to how their parents feel. They’re keenly aware of the expressions on their parents’ faces and the tone of their voices. Children can sense when their parents are really worried, whether they’re watching the news or talking about it with others. No matter what children know about a “crisis,” it’s especially scary for children to realize that their parents are scared.
In times of crisis, kids need to feel safe:
In times of crisis, children want to know, “Who will take care of me?” They’re dependent on adults for their survival and security. They’re naturally self-centered. They need to hear very clearly that their parents are doing all they can to take care of them and to keep them safe. They also need to hear that people in the government and other grownups they don’t even know are working hard to keep them safe, too.
Parents need to step away from the news in order to be present for their kids and for their own well-being. The 2025 equivalent of limiting TV viewing would be “put down the phone”:
It’s easy to allow ourselves to get drawn into watching televised news of a crisis for hours and hours; however, exposing ourselves to so many tragedies can make us feel hopeless, insecure, and even depressed. We help our children and ourselves if we’re able to limit our own television viewing. Our children need us to spend time with them – away from the frightening images on the screen.
We need to let kids know that whatever they’re feeling is natural:
If we don’t let children know it’s okay to feel sad and scared, they may think something is wrong with them when they do feel that way. They certainly don’t need to hear all the details of what’s making us sad or scared, but if we can help them accept their own feelings as natural and normal, their feelings will be much more manageable for them.
Angry feelings are part of being human, especially when we feel powerless. One of the most important messages we can give our children is, “It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hurt ourselves or others.” Besides giving children the right to their anger, we can help them find constructive things to do with their feelings. This way, we’ll be giving them useful tools that will serve them all their life, and help them to become the worlds’ future peacemakers — the world’s future “helpers.”
And of course, we can urge kids to look for the helpers:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.
Update: On the first anniversary of 9/11, Fred Rogers recorded this brief message about tragic events in the news. Here’s the video followed by a full transcript:
Hello, I’m Fred Rogers. Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. Well, we at Family Communications have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything and that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time. I’m always glad to be your neighbor.
This was one of Rogers’ last recordings before he died in early 2003.
I did not think I was going to watch this whole video when I started but I totally did. Some absolutely incredible shots & rallies in here. (thx, dunstan)
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let’s say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you’d get the same answers but rarely. You’d get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You’d get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Here’s the Letterboxd list from 1999, ranked by rating (more than 1K ratings):
Fight Club
The Iron Giant
The Green Mile
Magnolia
All About My Mother
The Matrix
The Straight Story
Beau Travail
The Insider
Being John Malkovich
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense are further down the list and The Cider House Rules is nowhere to be found. Anyway, interesting to compare!
Season two of Severance is underway and while the first episode didn’t have an opening title sequence, the second episode debuted a new sequence. The season one intro was inducted straight into the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame and season two’s intro is just as good. Once again, the titles were done by Oliver Latta, who was found by Severance producer Ben Stiller via his Instagram account.
I don’t know about you, but my brain is short-circuiting a bit from the news today, so I was glad to run across this video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading Ross Beeley’s letter published by McSweeney’s in 2011 called An Open Letter to the Gentleman Blow-Drying His Balls in the Gym Locker Room.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamed of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people who just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.
(via open culture)
Director Denis Villeneuve steps into the Criterion Closet to choose and talk about a few of his favorite films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, and Seven Samurai. At one point, he says, “We all look like Smurfs next to Fellini.”
In June 1971, the BBC aired a segment on a “mysterious” and “niche” sports imported from America called “jogging”. It’s in black & white, which makes it feel even older than it is, and they interview (while jogging!) Tory MP Ernest Marples, who says he often jogs to Parliament from his house in a lounge suit. This is something straight out of Monty Python…more interviews with people while they are running please.
BTW, Wikipedia has this to say about Marples:
In later life, Marples was elevated to the peerage before fleeing to Monaco at very short notice to avoid prosecution for tax fraud.
Once a runner, always a runner. (thx, dunstan)
Oh this is just delightful: for the opening of his documentary film on the history of music on SNL he co-directed with Oz Rodriguez, Questlove produced what the NY Times calls “a high-speed, six-minute DJ mix of SNL music highlights”. So. Good.
From the same piece in the Times, Questlove explains how it came about:
It’s impossible for me to phone anything in, even if I wanted to. I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate. It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.
In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals — what’s the three strongest moments between ‘75 and ‘80? — and do it that way. But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation. And once you put, like, 17 songs together, you have a conversation with yourself: “OK, are we really doing this?”
My producers said: “It’ll never happen! The clearance, the clearance!” This is the first time that I realized my diplomatic position in music. People say, “Ahmir, you might be the next Quincy Jones, because your whole thing is more social than creative, knowing the right people, knowing who’s who.” There were at least 19 situations in which I had to come hat in hand to said person, and mind you, this is for two seconds — Michael Bolton singing “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” just once.
He got every clearance except for Luciano Pavarotti:
The only outright no that I couldn’t fix was that Luciano Pavarotti was going to be part of the Bobby McFerrin-Busta Rhymes mash-up. But it was too much to explain to his estate, and I couldn’t go to Italy and whatever. It could have been brilliant, Bobby McFerrin and Pavarotti going toe to toe.
The film premieres tonight on NBC and will be available on Peacock starting tomorrow.
Update: According to Questlove’s Instagram post, the musical montage was edited by John MacDonald, Coordinating Producer of The Tonight Show. (via @solace.bsky.social)
Update: The YouTube video is now barely watchable — 2/3s of the screen is blurred. You’ll have to watch the film on Peacock to get the full experience.
I really enjoyed this interview with traveller and writer Rick Steves by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, which is also available as a YouTube video and podcast episode (Apple, Spotify). Here are some particularly appealing excerpts:
I love to be on a bus that’s so crowded that there’s people hanging outside the door when the bus takes off and then they settle in like cornflakes settle into a box, and there’s always room for one more body.
If you’ve never been on a bus or train like this, have you even travelled?
I just love to expose people to examples of things they would never encounter at home. Culture shock is a constructive thing. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective. To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.
I love escape travel (my recent trip was 90% escape) but the trips I really value are the ones that change me.
Media consumption modes could also probably be sorted into escape and reality. I’ve watched/read a lot of escape/comfort/easy media over the past year and am trying to ease myself back into stuff that’s a little more challenging.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, Travel makes a person wiser if less happy. I’ve always had this hunger to be more engaged. Not necessarily more happy, but more engaged.
As someone who is often puzzled by how to answer the “are you happy?” question, I appreciate this perspective. Happiness is generally not my goal, something closer to engagement is.
Lulu, I’m in this sort of thing in my teaching where I remind people there’s three kinds of travel: You can travel as a tourist, a traveler or a pilgrim.
Ok Steve, is it two kinds of travel or three? 😉 Here’s his explanation of the three types:
Most travelers I know, they’re proud to be known as a traveler as opposed to a tourist: “I’m more thoughtful — I’m not just here to shop and get a selfie. I’m here to immerse myself in the culture and learn.” That is a traveler, to become a temporary local. A traveler learns about the world, but I think a pilgrim learns about themselves, and you learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance. You learn about yourself, I think, by trying to get close to God in your travels
Yeah, the pilgrim thing definitely resonates with me — “transformational travel” he calls it a paragraph later.
The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there and met the enemy. My most powerful travel experiences have been going places where I’m not supposed to go: Cuba, Palestine, Iran. The friendliest people, the most curious people, the people that need to meet me and I need to meet them. When they meet me, it’s tougher for their propaganda to demonize me, and when I meet them, it’s harder for my country’s propaganda to dehumanize them. It’s a powerful thing.
In his ongoing series Cartoon Evolution, Dave Lee looks at how the character of Bugs Bunny has changed and evolved since his debut in 1938 as an unnamed rabbit in Porky’s Hare Hunt. It didn’t take long for the character to find its stride. From Wikipedia:
While Porky’s Hare Hunt was the first Warner Bros. cartoon to feature what would become Bugs Bunny, A Wild Hare, directed by Tex Avery and released on July 27, 1940, is widely considered to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is the first film where both Elmer Fudd and Bugs, both redesigned by Bob Givens, are shown in their fully developed forms as hunter and tormentor, respectively; the first in which Mel Blanc uses what became Bugs’ standard voice; and the first in which Bugs uses his catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?” A Wild Hare was a huge success in theaters and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cartoon Short Subject.
You can explore more of Lee’s Cartoon Evolutions, including The Simpsons, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh, Super Mario (not strictly a cartoon), and James Bond (not at all a cartoon).
In 2017, Audible released a pair of immersive audio dramas of The X-Files, with David Duchovny as Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Scully, that fit “somewhere between season 10 and 11” of the TV series. Then at some point, Audible removed them from their site/service, making them completely unavailable. So, a fan put them up on YouTube for X-Files fans to enjoy.
The Cold Cases audio drama is 6 episodes and about 4 hours long; here’s the first episode:
The Stolen Lives audio drama is 7 episodes and about 3h 45m long; here’s the first episode:
(via ironic sans)
Since 1997, using only Middle Ages tools & technology, a group has been building a medieval castle in a French forest.
In the heart of Guédelon forest, in an abandoned quarry, a team of master-builders is building a 13th-century castle from scratch. Quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenter-joiners, woodcutters, blacksmiths, tilers, carters and rope makers…are working together to revive heritage craft skills and to shed light on the world of medieval construction.
Here’s a quick, 2-minute video on the effort:
And here’s a longer look:
And from the Absolute History channel, a five-part series on how medieval castles are built, using Guédelon as an example; here’s the first video in the series:
If you find yourself in Burgundy, you can visit the castle — the construction is funded in part by visitors’ fees.
For the final video in their current series, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting tackle one of the fundamental questions in filmmaking: where do you put the camera? I was especially struck by Greta Gerwig’s comments about camera movement in two of her films:
Well, I kind of had an image of Lady Bird that I wanted it to be almost like stained glass windows in churches, because it is Catholic school and all of that. I was thinking of everything as a presentation within a frame. But then when I got to Little Women, I had the opposite feeling. I felt like I wanted the camera to be alive and curious and a dancer. Like I almost wanted the camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did.
I wanted to camera to start young and then get older, like the girls did — that’s pretty brilliant. The full interview with Gerwig is available here.
So that’s all for now from Every Frame a Painting…hopefully they will be back soon with a new project because I truly love their perspective on how films are made.
Nintendo has finally released some details and a sneak peek trailer for their upcoming console, a sequel to the mega-popular Switch. From The Verge:
The console looks a lot like the original, but it’s bigger. In the video, the Joy-Con controllers are black with colored accents, and they attach to the side of the console instead of sliding on and off. The Joy-Cons appear to snap on quite easily — leaks have suggested they could be attached via magnets.
It looks like there’s going to be a new Mario Kart game (huzzah!) and the Switch 2 will play Switch games, although “certain Nintendo Switch games may not be supported on or fully compatible with Nintendo Switch 2”. As for what Nintendo hasn’t revealed at this time, it’s a long list — and The Verge has some questions:
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Switch 2 reveal was the fact that Nintendo didn’t say anything about how powerful the new console is. We can see that the console is bigger, but what’s the screen size? Is it OLED or LCD? Is the screen resolution still 720p? Is 4K resolution supported?
Though visible for a few brief moments, the reveal video showed off the Switch 2’s new dock. What’s the docked resolution? Is it just a charging shell, or is it still required for TV play? Can you dock the Switch 2 in the original Switch dock, or will it support all the super-portable third-party docks?
Very excited for the Switch 2, but I’ll admit I will be slightly less enthused if it doesn’t support 4K resolution while docked.
Following on from last year’s successful trial, the Australian Open is once again broadcasting all their matches, nearly live and in their entirety, on YouTube — but with animated avatars in place of the players. Here’s how it looks in practice, kind of Wii Tennis; this is a match between Coco Gauff and Jodie Burrage from a few days ago (the animation starts just before the 35-minute mark:
The matches are only delayed by two minutes (the system needs some rendering time) and viewers get to hear the the audio & commentary from the actual match. From The Guardian:
The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men’s final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024.
The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. “Limb tracking is complex, you’ve got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton,” he said. “It’s not as seamless as it could be – we don’t have fingers – but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes.”
Re: not seamless, here’s a recent blooper reel:
Back in 2023, the NFL and Disney collaborated on a Toy Story version of an NFL game, the NHL broadcast an animated hockey game in 2024, and last month the NFL did another animated broadcast with characters from The Simpsons playing key roles.
Film critic David Ehrlich has dropped his annual visual love letter to cinema in the form of an expertly cut & crafted video countdown of his top 25 movies of 2024. You can also watch on Vimeo. Please note before you watch though:
This video includes a significant amount of footage from the endings of several films, most notably “Challengers,” “The Substance,” and “I Saw the TV Glow.”
The musical choice for Nosferatu had me cackling — an absolute perfect selection. Here’s the full list of his selections:
25. The Outrun
24. The Breaking Ice
23. Megalopolis
22. Hard Truths
21. The End
20. Babygirl
19. Juror #2
18. The First Omen
17. Between the Temples
16. The Brutalist
15. Flow
14. All We Imagine as Light
13. Evil Does Not Exist
12. The Substance
11. Close Your Eyes
10. I Saw the TV Glow
9. Nosferatu
8. The Beast
7. Challengers
6. A Different Man
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. Anora
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
2. No Other Land
1. Nickel Boys
On a personal note, I’ve seen only two of these films — three out of the six movie theaters I usually go to within an hour’s drive of my house permanently closed in 2024. There’s a lot less diversity in offerings now…everyone has to show the same blockbuster stuff because that’s what most people want to see and I don’t really care for the experience offered by the one remaining theater that shows more arthouse stuff. As usual, Ehrlich has got me fired up to fill in the gaps in my film watching, though it’s going to be impossible for me to see Nickel Boys until it comes out on streaming in like April or May.
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