According to CNN, Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Familia will finally be completed in 2026. That’s amazing. Miraculous, in fact. For much of the 20th century it was in a state of semi completion. I went there as a young man in the early 90s and even then it was taken as a fact that it would NEVER be completed. But that was not a fact at all, thank heavens.
Barcelona is an amazing city to visit: it’s going to be even more so once the church is done. Go see it if you can.
I found this was a good piece on the state of the creator economy right now: the creator economy can’t rely on patreon. I have no doubt what the author is saying is true: it is very difficult to build up a sufficient number of followers to make it economically viable. If anything, I would say the conversion percentage for some people could be even lower than 5%. I remember in the 80s magazine would expect to get 1-2% conversion of offers sent out to subscriptions coming in. It’s difficult to convert people, regardless if your medium is magazines or social media.
One disagreement I do have with the piece is the critique of Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans theory. I would not say it’s true that “the 1,000 true fans theory that we’ve all been sold for the past 15 years – that all you need is a strong mailing list of people who give a shit, and a healthy living will follow….Unfortunately, a theory is all it is.” Kelly states clearly in his piece that “(a) true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce”. He goes on to state that they are “super fans”. You might have 20,000 followers on social media, but they are not true fans. The 1000 followers who pay up are your true fans. If you can get those 1000 to pay you $10/month, you should be good in most places in North America.
The problem no longer is publishing your work. Publishing is easy. The problem now is finding super fans, keeping them, and growing them. But that’s always been a problem. You won’t find a single way of doing that.
If there is any weakness with the 1000 true fans theory, it’s that it can’t provide a way to achieve that.
There was a lot of chatter around private jets last week as a result of Taylor Swift’s lawyers threatening to sue a person tracking her jet on social media. There’s a whole bunch of PR and legal maneuvers around that I won’t get into.
One thing that came out of that hullabaloo for me was finding this site: climatejets.org. While I don’t hold the creators of the site accountable for total accuracy, I do think it is accurate enough to highlight the fact that many wealthy people in the world use private jets a lot. And why wouldn’t they? Private jets do four things for rich people: they are efficient, they are private, they are status symbols, and they use up the excess amounts of money they have.
The focus on private jets has been centred around climate change. I think some of that focus should be on economic discrepancy. People use private jets because they have vast amounts of money and we have great inequality in our societies. If tomorrow someone invents private jets that run on clean energy, they will still highlight a problem in our society. It just won’t be a climate problem.
In our age of great inequality, it’s not enough to own large mansions or fancy cars or be surrounded by body guards. In our age, you need your own jet to bounce around in, whether you be Jay-Z or Bill Gates.
Every so often remnants from the 80s pop up in my feed. When something does stick out like a thread and I pull on it, more good 80s things appear.
For instance, things like this story on Angelina Jolie taking over Basquiat’s former NYC studio that lead me to a good post on Jean Michel Basquiat’s notebooks which is JAM PACKED with good stuff on him.
Or this thing in Martha Stewart on how 80s decor home trends are back that led me to this piece on one woman’s home full of Memphis design (so 80s!)
Same with tech. I went from this excellent interview on Robert Longo where he talks about many things such as the remaking of Johnny Mnemonic into black and white, That led to me reading how modern software is bringing back the timex datalink, a device I loved, to this great video of this guy living with 1980s tech for a week! Awesome.
Other great threads that came out of my 80s unravelling was this piece on how Sinead O’connor changed Ireland, these fantastic photos of Blitz Club in London by Andrew Holligan, and this interview of the singular Debbie Harry who says sex is what makes everything happen and more. This blog by Jamie Bradburn on Toronto in 1980s is a whole rabbit hole in and of itself.
The number of times the 80s appears in my feed is less and less. So whenever I find a bunch of them, I will of course be writing about them. 🙂
(Top image from the story on Memphis; bottom image from the substack on Basquiat’s notes)
There was much discussion about the Talking Heads being at TIFF this year for the reissue of their great concert film, Stop Making Sense. What people might not know was that it was also at TIFF in 1984, back when the Toronto International Film Festival was known as the Festival of Festivals.
TIFF has changed a lot since then. Back then the Festival was smaller, centred in a different location (Yorkville) and played films in midtown theatres like the Varsity, Uptown, Backstage and the Cumberland. (Also the Bloor for the awesome Midnight Madness series.) It was casual and fun.
I think I went to my first Festival film — my Beautiful Launderette with a bright new actor named Daniel Day Lewis — in 1985. In a few years I was hooked, going from one film to many films like these from 1987 listed here. It was easy in the 80s: you got tickets (or a pass), lined up for your next film, and hopefully you got in! (Holding seats for a person, never mind many people, was frowned upon.) For a surprising number of films this was easy to do, and people would even show up and buy a ticket at the last minute. Some days you would be heading to a certain film and you would run into a friend going to a different film and you would go with them instead. Or you’d get up in the morning to watch a film in a small theatre at the Cumberland and four films later you end up going to bed after seeing a late night screening at one of the gigantic spaces in the Uptown. A great time was had by all.
Perhaps too great. More and more people started going and it got harder to wander around and see great films. As it grew, the Festival of Festivals dropped that name, left Yorkville, and became the behemoth it is today.
I still think it’s a great thing, and I am glad it is big and bold. But back then it was small and intimate. I loved that, and I miss how it was.
P.S. More on Talking Heads with Spike Lee at TIFF in 2023 in Vulture and the New York Times. Spike Lee started at the Festival too. I remember him being in town to promote his first film, She’s Gotta Have It. Like Talking Heads, he was fresh and new and like them he changed our culture with his work and life.
Sometimes there are rumblings that lead to nothing, but these recently rumblings seem to be adding up to something.
So when Disney mumbles about cutting back on Marvel and Star Wars content, it’s worth noting. Especially so when the head of Disney, Bob Iger reiterates it. Now maybe the problems are just Disney’s. After all, Netflix’s earnings looked healthy. Maybe it’s just the quality of those films, as the Marvel actors seem to be saying. I’m not sure. But it seems like a transition period is beginning to happen in Hollywood, however boffo a hit Barbie and Oppenheimer are. Certainly the writers feel that way, as do the actors.
It will be interesting to follow up on this in a year from now.
“You’ve Got Mail” is many things. A romantic comedy, of course. A tragedy, as this piece argues… possibly. Of the many things I could list about it, what I loved most about it when I watched it was it’s historicalness.
For starters, the gentrification of New York is one of the historical things that pops out in the film. If New York now is a place of wealth and insane living costs, and New York of the 70s and 80s was a place of poverty and decrepitude, then the New York of the 90s was undergoing a time of economic transition between those two times. You see that in the arrival of bougie things like Starbucks and big bad book store chains like Fox / Barnes and Noble. The city just seems on the rise in the film. It is poor no more. New money is leading the development of real estate that is forcing a transition in the city.
The film also shows the start of the next big thing coming to force a transition: online communication. You’ve Got Mail illustrates how people back then are already dealing with how computers are starting to affect how we live and communicate. It will take some time past the 90s for books and magazines and newspapers to be impacted as we all take to the Internet in the 21st century, but the seeds are already sprouting up as we watch Kathleen and Joe get to know each other via their Apple Macbooks and IBM Thinkpads and the end of the 20th century. (And naturally she owns the former and he the latter). And the beloved typewriters in the film are dodo-birds of a mechanical sort.
It’s funny to think the film was once criticized by the Washington Post for product placement. After all, this month an entire film, Barbie, is launched and co-produced by Mattel. It may have been jarring then, but it barely registered to me watching the products placed in this movie from 25 years ago. If anything, it seems quaint compared to todays films.
Culturally the film drips with historicalness, from the clothes they wear (Ryan’s layered sweaters, Hanks’s dark shirts and ties), to the technology they use (AOL!, that MacBook), to the actors themselves (Hanks being a love interest, Chappelle trying to be mainstream). It all seems so long ago. It was 25 years ago, so I guess it was.
There’s lots to enjoy in You’ve Got Mail. One thing for sure: it’s a time capsule, and it’s quite good just to enjoy it for that.
P.S. You can read more on the film: You’ve Got Mail in Wikipedia. If you’re curious, here’s a piece on the You’ve Got Mail film locations. Many, like Zabars and Barney Greengrass, still exist.
Like Austin Kleon, I found the Wham! documentary a “delight”. He adds (and it’s true) that it is “tight, light, well-edited, and stylistically coherent”. It’s also 90 minutes, and on Netflix. If want to watch something good to watch this week, make it that.
There’s no spoilers here but I must say I found the documentary surprising in several ways. Surprised at how different the men were than I thought they were. Surprised they achieved fame well before fortune. Surprised how lots of things I thought about their career and their music were very different than I imagined.
The documentary also cleared up one of the biggest mysteries I had about the band, which was what was the point of Andrew Ridgeley in Wham. I just thought he was some weird side performer that managed to get stuck to George Michael. After watching this, I can see there would be no George Michael without Andrew Ridgeley. The evolution of Michael from shy guy to major star would not have been possible without Ridgeley and Wham.
There’s been a number of good reviews of the documentary. This take at the New York Times I found interesting, especially this comment: “born during Motown’s ascent in the early 1960s and, in adolescence, bonded to each other as disco was handing the party baton to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists, really, were Hall and Oates.” Once that thought is stuck in your brain, you can clearly hear all the influences Wham! bleeding into their music.
Besides that, this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle really understands the two men. This review at rogerebert.com was the one I most agreed with. Here’s something from the Guardian for those who like that sort of thing.
I’m glad Ridgeley is having a moment. He seems like he deserves it. More from him, here.
All that said, go watch it. You’ll be glad you did.
There was a fair amount of hubbub last week about the woman above who is known as Pinkydoll. Most of what it came down to is: what is going on??
Well if you are curious, I’ve found these three pieces useful in getting a better understanding of the phenomena: this is from the Washington Post, this is from Vice and this is from knowyourmeme.
As for me, I find it interesting because it combines a number of new media and ideas, from TikTok to gaming to monetization of audiences. The fact that they all roll in together makes it especially bewildering to people not familiar with those things. But like I said, if you don’t get it, maybe you aren’t supposed to. I’m familiar with that feeling, but I feel like many younger than me are not, and it was that cohort that was complaining about this last week.
Culture arises from new ingredients. These Internet things are as much our culture now as new books and new films. Get used to it. Hula hoops arise in all forms.
I have always been envious of New Yorkers and their Metropolitan Opera House. Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company is planning to perform 7 operas next season (and that’s good). Meanwhile the Met in 2022-23 performed 22. With that many performances going throughout the year you could sometimes feast on four different operas in a weekend! And it’s not just quantity: the greatest performers in the world are appearing in those shows. I cannot be alone in my envy and admiration of it all and imagining it to be never ending era.
So I was somewhat shocked to read that we may be at the end of that era, according to this piece in The New York Times:
Ticket sales have been robust for some new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer sure things — especially slightly off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”
And I was disturbed to read this:
In an attempt to make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to put on 10 percent fewer performances next season, which will feature just 18 staged operas (six of them written in the past 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory company, of 20-plus titles a year, could be slowly entering the rearview mirror.
Besides less new stuff, it sounds like some of the old stuff is being put out to pasture:
So it was fitting that, last month, the Met said farewell to one of the shows that typified the era that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The production was typical Met: hardly cheap but sturdy and flexible, into which you could toss singers with relatively little rehearsal. The company’s model has depended on a core of stagings of the standards like this — ones which could be mounted, and sell well, year after year. If there’s less of a year-after-year opera audience, though, the only solution may be to do less.
All signs point to the beginning of a decline of opera at the Met. Now perhaps this is a just a temporary decline brought on by the pandemic and our change of behaviors. But I fear it is not.
If you are in New York (or anywhere), make plans to go to an opera. Even if you know nothing about it, an evening at the Met is always magical.
(Photo Credit: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
Some one on Twitter posted some pages from Festival Magazine from the 80s, and looking at them, I was filled with so many memories. Among them I recall how I would go to the nearby Bloor Cinema and grab a copy from the newspaper box. I’d head over to Dooneys or some other coffee shop or maybe just head home to Brunswick Avenue and plan out my movie viewing for the next few weeks.
While I sometimes went to the other rep cinemas like the Revue or the Kingsway, I mainly went to the Bloor. This page below captures what the programming was like for it at the time.
There was often a special festival or a run of films like the new Chinese films shown above. Then there were films that had just finished running through the new theatres like Cineplex’s and were now getting a second chance to be seen. And then there were fan favorites, like Stop Making Sense. (If Stop Making Sense or a Blade Runner was in, I was there.) Most of all what I loved about the Bloor was this eclectic mix of programming.
The Revue’s programming was more straightforward. It pretty much showed films that had just finished their run in main theatres. Did I still like going there? For sure. (Except the time in winter when the theatre was showing a film without any heat!)
I loved looking at those pages. I loved seeing all the great films that came out in the 80s listed again. I really loved seeing the ad for The Other Cafe! (I went there often too.) It’s all so good.
Seeing movies was different back then. You might eventually see them on TV, but if you missed a good film when it was first out, you still had a chance of seeing it in the rep theatres. Not to mention classics and fan favorites. It was a good time at the cinema, for sure.
If you want to study that poem and think about poetry in general, I recommend you check this out. It really breaks down the poem, almost like you’re getting a lecture on it.
I recommend that whole site. There’s lot of study guides on things you may have studied in high school, or may not have. It’s never too late to read Yeats, or Shakespeare, or Eliot. If anything, it is better to study it later in life.
I loved the series, Ted Lasso, and I was sad to see it end. The last season, it’s third, was a bit of a head scratcher though.
The first season was the one people really loved. But I felt that Jason Sudeikis wanted to make the Ted character more than a 3D Ned Flanders in that season. That explained what happened with Ted in season 2 and to some degree in season 3. However I think people became frustrated with that: they wanted the Ted of season 1, even though the character became less of that as time went on.
Indeed in season 3 I just saw Ted fade away. He was barely in the last of the show. All the other character become the focal point and many of them had their own series within the series.
Of course this made sense in the end. Ted Lasso the series became like Ted Lasso the character. Just like the character, who believed that coach took a backseat to the players and the fans, the show became more about the other actors and less about Ted.
Will there be a season 4? I’m not sure. Like the character, Sudeikis doesn’t seem to have his heart in it. Maybe there could be a new season about the football club AFC Richmond. They certainly set it up that way. Let’s see.
For more on Ted Lasso, here’s a good write up in the Atlantic.
Here’s an absolutely cranky write up in The Guardian about how Ted Lasso, the nice comedy, became utterly dreadful television. As Ted might say, “Ouch”.
“Succession” also ended its series. So many people loved it and I can see why: it sounds really well done. As for me, I can’t watch shows featuring despicable characters. Succession was filled with that. Here two pieces, one in the Washington Post and one in the New York Times that align with my view of the show. But hey, to each their own.
Besides Ted, the other show the ended this month was “Somebody, Somewhere”. Unlike Ted, it has been renewed for a third season. Yay! Here is a piece on how it is the warmest comedy on TV. More praise for the show from the New Yorker. I can’t wait to see what the show does next.
Apparently, there are two French versions of the Simpsons: one for France, and one for Quebec. This is great for two reasons, I think, as this piece explains: The French version of the Simpsons is oddly fascinating | indy100 | indy100:
Brilliant/brillant!
I had been thinking about the Pennsylvania hotel recently. I first started thinking about it when I read this: Discovering another vintage two-letter phone exchange on a West Side sign. See the bottom? Things like MU 2-2655 were how phone numbers looked in the Big Apple (and other places too). Forget about area codes like 212.
One of the most famous of these old two letter phone exchanges was PEnnsylvania_6-5000 (PE 6-5000) for two reasons. One, it was the number assigned to one place and one place only: the Pennsylvania hotel. Two, Glenn Miller wrote a famous song about it, called…PEnnsylvania_6-5000. (My Dad loved this song, and whenever I hear the title, I can hear him shouting out with the band: PEnnsylvania 6-5000!).
Sadly, having a storied presence as well as being famous is not enough to survive. The Times has a piece on how its going to be demolished soon. That’s a shame. I hope the don’t regret it like they do the demolition of Penn Station.
As you can see from the photo being held, it was a massive hotel, and one deserving of its own exchange.
I highly recommend you read that piece on it in the Times. It had quite the run.
Now let’s join in with the the Muppets as they do their version of the famous song:
This is an odd piece in GQ: The New Cast Reshaping SNL’s Next Decade . It states: “After a slew of exits, Saturday Night Live is reloading—with a squad of young comics that could form the nucleus of the show for years to come.”
It’s odd because yes, there have been a slew of exits, and yes there are new comics, but if you have been watching it recently, the comics dominating it now seem to be people like Heidi Gardner and Bowen Yang, and of course, the great Keenan Thompson. To see what I mean, check out this recap of a recent episode with Travis Kelce starring. Or watch tonight. They aren’t the new people, and they aren’t the older comics leaving.
The new comics are no doubt good, and they likely appealed more to the GQ readership than the people I named. Plus everyone wants to talk about what’s new. But I can see the current veterans being around and in the forefront when it comes to SNL celebrating half a century in 2 years from now.
A little perspective, please, GQ. 🙂
P.S. As an aside, I’ve been a fan of both GQ and SNL since the 70s. Good to see them both still around and being current.
For the last 30 years or so I have not watched TV shows. I’ve watched movies at home and other things like news and sports, but nothing like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or Family Guy or…well, you name it. (I wrote about it here.)
Lately I have been watching television again. A lot of that has to do with having someone great to watch it with, as well as someone who knows what I might like. Having more time at home during the pandemic also helped.
I started off by watching Ted Lasso, which I thought was superb. Then The Crown (loved the first two seasons mainly). Followed up by Slow Horses (also great). I began to think: hey, I might love TV again.
But then I watched Loot, and while I think Maya Rudolph is a genius, I could not watch much of that. Same with Hacks, even though, again, Jean Smith is amazing. Which brings me to Shrinking.
Like Loot and Hacks, I first started to really like it. But then I just started to feel fatigue from the strained writing. (Hey writers, writing nonstop about sex makes me think you’re a bunch of frat boys.) I also remembered the problem with situation comedy (situational dramedy?) and the need to create situations just to keep the story going. I see that often in Shrinking. (Frat boys: I know, let’s get the main character to sleep with his coworker! Hijinx will ensue!)
Like Loot and Hacks, having someone great (in this case, Harrison Ford) is a good draw and he makes me want to watch it. But like those two, there’s not much more that makes me want to watch it. (I mainly don’t care what happens to the other characters, which is different than Ted Lasso or Slow Horses, where I am invested in many of the characters). It’s pleasant enough, and occasionally funny enough. And kudos to them for getting a season two: clearly people like it.
It’s been fun watching TV, mainly because I have someone great to watch it with. (Thanks, Lisa!) But if I didn’t have that, I’d go back to my old ways. TV is different in some ways (e.g. no Apple TV in the 90s) but in a lot of ways, it’s hardly changed at all.
A reminder of how great WiReD magazine was — and how often it was wrong — can be found in this fine piece by Dave Karpf: A WIRED compendium.
I bought the first copy of WiReD when it came out, and was a buyer and collector for some time. It was everything I loved in a magazine: smart and stylish and full of ideas.
WiReD was a perfect title for it too. The publication was about how the world was becoming interconnected through the rapid build out of the Internet, but it was also about how our brains were changing as a result of it. It covered both of those areas well.
Dave’s piece also covers some of my favorite things it got wrong, from the promise of PUSH technology (companies HATED Pointcast for flooding their networks and soon worked to shut that it down) to digitally encoded smell (right?? yeah, no) to a cover on how Second Life was the future (hey, I thought that too).
WiReD got plenty right, too. But more than right or wrong, it captured the zeitgeist of the 90s and early 2000s and generally provided insights into how information technology was affecting us.
If you have only read the magazine recently, you might not get what the fuss was all about regarding it. Check out that summary from Dave Karpf: you will get a history lesson and hopefully a glimpse of WiReD and why it was so great.
(For more on it, I also recommend Wikipedia)
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I like that Josh Barro stepped in (on?) the pseudo-controversy that arose when Joe and Jill Biden ordered the same meal by saying, yes, it’s fine to order the same dish as your spouse. I mean, of course it is, but that didn’t stop people from arguing otherwise.
Once he was on the topic, he had a number of other recommendations such as “Consider the restaurant’s specialty” and “Try to be ready to order by the time your server asks if you know what you want.” So much of it is common sense, but as we all know, so much common sense like this is ignored by people. Maybe even you. I recommend you go read that and adopt those recommendations.
Speaking of restaurants, this is a very interesting walk down memory lane or history, depending how old you are: The 40 Most (American) Important Restaurants of the Past 40 Years. Some of them are well known: Chez Panisse, Spago, The French Laundry. Others are more obscure. Regardless, it’s a great article. (I slipped in American, because it is only American restaurants.)
According to CreativeReview.co.uk…
the best movie posters of the year once again demonstrates a wonderful array of traditional techniques and styles – photography, painting, collage – and a refusal to homogenise into any singular form. One pleasing commonality: as yet, the world of film poster design has resisted any incursion from AI-generated art. Whether their creation was through physical or digital means, by one hand or many, each of them is a product of human creativity.
I thought the AI reference was noteworthy. More noteworthy are the posters themselves. You can find them, here: Movie posters of the year 2022.
My friend Jared Bramblett was recently in London, and as he does, he took some fantastic photographs of his visit, which you can see here: 5 Days in London – Jared Bramblett.
Once you check that out — and you should — take some time to look at the rest of his site. It’s wonderful.
(Image: link to image on his site.It looks so much better on his site.)
The 80s come back in vogue from time to time, such as when current works like Stranger Things delve into it. Mostly the decade is seen historically. That’s fine. It was a good decade, at least for me, and I love to think and write on it. One of the great things about having your own blog is you can write what you want about whatever you want. 🙂 So here’s more things on that era that I found worth reading lately…
Much of the music of the early 80s started at the end of the 70s. Take the music of bands like Talking Heads. Or the Ramones. Speaking of them, here’s some great bootleg footage of the Ramones in concert before the person filming it got caught!
As for other artists of that time, here’s a good piece on Blondie. Like punk and new wave, another trend of the time was Blitz. This piece covers the Blitz era and all the music that was associated with it. Moving from the English music scene to Canada, here’s something on Rebecca Jenkins, an artist and musician who was involved with so many other performers I loved at the time, from Jane Siberry, to Holly Cole, to the incomparable Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Another incomparable artist from the time is Richard Grant. I will never forget him for his great turn in the film “Withnail and I” back in the 80s. Nowadays he has suffered a great loss but still keeps going and is inspirational on twitter and elsewhere. This is a good piece to catch up on him: Richard E Grant on grief fame and life without a filter.
Finally, gone but not forgotten, here’s a fine piece on Ruth Polsky Who Shaped New York’s Music Scene in that era. Recommended.
(Image from the piece on Blitz)
Like many of you, I started playing Wordle during the pandemic. It was fun for a long time, then it wasn’t.
I’m not sure what got me playing again, but I think the Wordlebot had something to do with it. Every time I play now, I consult the little bot to see how it did and what it recommends in terms of words. As a result, I have become better at the game. Some of the go to words I use frequently now because of what I’ve learned from Wordlebot are:
the other day I played CRANE and first and then went with SLOTH and got it in two. If only I had made SLOTH my starting word! Oh well. It’s fun for me again, and that’s what counts.
Also I play it quickly these days. Before I could spent easily 30 minutes on it: now I try and be done in 5.
For more on it, see this good piece: Wordle and the starting word. Adieu!
Did you know you can still get DVDs from Netflix? Well according to this, you still can! And maybe you should.
I’ve been thinking about it recently for a number of reasons. One is the number of streaming services I pay for that I barely use. Sure I like the idea of being able to watch any movie at the drop of a hat. But do I….really? No, I do not. It’s a waste of money for the idea of instant gratification.
Second, streaming services may be making us less likely to hear and experience new things. I thought of that reading this piece in the Guardian. I find that happens to me with Spotify: it is trying so hard to match me with music that aligns with my taste that I get stuck in a rut. In some ways streaming is a gilded cage.
That’s why we should heed what Clive Thompson says and rewild our imagination. It’s more work, but more rewarding.
So get out your DVD player and order some movies or DVDs and watch something you’ve always wanted to but never seem to because it is not available online. You can even order a DVD player for cheap, here.
The famed TV show recently had a milestone: it first broadcast 50 years ago, September 1972. If you had watched M*A*S*H, and even if you haven’t, I recommend this piece by James Poniewozik, in which he presents a chronology of the show and how it evolved over the years. It brought back good memories.
Among other things, he recalls one of my favorite episodes, Point of View, particularly for this one scene. He writes:
“Point of View” is shot from the vantage of a wounded soldier whose throat injury renders him mute. In a repeated format, a reporter visits the 4077th for the new medium of television. The unit’s chaplain, Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), described seeing surgeons cut into patients in the winter cold. “Steam rises from the body,” he says. “And the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not feel changed?”
The episode was filmed in black and white, and there is a scene showing steam rising from the patient. It was stunning.
Recently I watched another one of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H on one of the streaming services. The writing was still good, but the format of the show displayed its age. This could just be me though: I think you really have to dive into old TV shows to adjust to the format to enjoy it. Certainly the quality is there.
One thing I would add: it is a show made in 1970s. There may be things about that era that makes you uncomfortable, like the sexism, or whole idea of Klinger dressing up as a woman to get out of the Army. These are products of that time. In its defense, the show became less sexist over time, and Klinger shelves the whole “I am a crossdresser therefore I am unfit” bit. But it was still a show reflecting that era.
The other thing to dwell on is that it existed in a golden age of TV. Just like movies and print, it was able to achieve numbers that no TV show can achieve now in the era of the Internet and streaming. We didn’t know that then: it was simply one of the best shows of its time and we all naturally watched it. (It’s funny to think of how back then we made the time to watch a show because if you didn’t, that was it, you missed it. You might, if you were lucky, see it in the summer when network TV would show the “repeats”.)
While M*A*S*H had so much going for it, what made the series one of the greats was its actors. It achieved a rare thing in that it lost three of the leads over time but never suffered as a result of this. The people that left were great, and the people that replaced them were also great. One person that was there from start to finish was Alan Alda. Here’s a 50th anniversary interview of him in the Times.
P.S. 1972 was a good year for film too. The 70s was filled with excess and schmaltz, but it was at its best on period pieces, like The Godfather, Cabaret, and M*A*S*H.
There have been lots of pieces explaining Dark Brandon. (Too many!) If you want to read what I thought was the best one, I think it was this: Dark Brandon, explained – by Matthew Yglesias.
As for my two cents….part of me likes the Dark Brandon meme. It a political jiu-jitsu move, taking the use of memes and shitposting that comes from trolls, the alt-right, and basic straight up Nazis, and using it effectively against them. That part I am good with.
But I think the warning that comes from this piece is worth considering:
… experts warn there are risks to embracing this type of political iconography. “You don’t want to take a trend that is precipitated by fascists and Nazis and then sort that into your arsenal. That’s just not great,” says extremist researcher Daniel Grober, who co-authored with Hampton Stall a definitive report on the Dark MAGA trend in far-right online networks. “What it does is it normalises the aesthetic, and it gives kind of a platform for it to be solidified into the general media.”
I agree with that. Essentially the use of memes like Dark Brandon risks getting into the mud with the worst of the Internet and wrestling with them. As G.B. Shaw(?) once warned:
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
As an example of this, one of the Democrats grabbed a Dark Brandon meme that contained some Dark Knight/Batman imagery and tweeted it, only to have to pull it when someone pointed out the Nazi Eagle in the background. See? The mud gets on you even as you fling it.
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It’s hard to believe that Marvel Studios were once far from a sure thing. (I wrote recently about that, here.) Now that they are a part of Disney, they are a Juggernaut, with rollout plans going on well into the future, as you can see, here: Marvel outlines Phase 6 with Fantastic Four and two new Avengers movies – The Verge.
In some ways the journey is not unlike Apple’s. Apple is such a dominating player now, but back in the 90s it was hanging on by a thread.
It’s possible that both companies could falter, but I suspect we will be getting our fill of Apple Devices and Marvel Entertainment for the rest of this decade. I’ll be curious to visit this post in 5 or 6 years and see if this prediction held.
I have been a fan of Obi-Wan Kenobi since the first Star Wars, and I’ve been a fan of Ewan McGregor’s acting since his first film. So I was generally pleased with the Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney+. If you’re the same way, I highly recommend you watch it.
Like The Mandalorian, I enjoyed having the chance to see more of the Star Wars universe with characters I’ve come to know and love over time. I thought the acting and directing and visuals all good. My main complaint is that both series played it safe. There is no compelling arch and the tension is low. I compare that to two TV series I’ve recently loved: Slow Horses and The Bear. They had me hanging on the edge of my seat. Not so with these Star Wars series. They are good, but they could be so much better.
The folks who made the video in this post sums up my thoughts better than I can! Also this is a good review.
Would I watch another season of Obi-Wan? For sure! And more from the characters that make up the original trilogy. Let’s hope Disney can put them in the hands of great — as opposed to good — writers.
I can’t say if it was a lie. Maybe it was a fairytale. Something too good to be true but something many of us including me wanted to believe in. Whatever your thoughts, I recommend you read this strong critique on it: Where Did the Long Tail Go? by Ted Gioia. If you are a true believer, Gioia will get you rethinking it.
As for me, I think part of the problem is that online services nudge or even push us to the short tail. There are advantages to them when it comes to selling us more of the short part of the curve in red. We need services and aggregators to get our attention to spiral outwards and look at things we never considered before. Spotify still does that to an extent when it builds me playlists.
Another part of the problem is the willingness of people to get out of their comfort zone and explore the long tail. Again, Spotify will recommend music lists to me, but I often find myself sticking with the tried and true. Services need to better encourage people to try new things or make it easier to try new things. Give people options, but in a smart way. I know it can be done. I hope it will be done.
Pop stars have unique careers. For some of them, it can be like being an athlete: you do it while you are young and then you are done. That what came across to me in this piece: ‘That’s it? It’s over? I was 30. What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on | Music | The Guardian.
Then there are some artists — not as many — who go on and on and whose careers shift and they become more akin to academics (e.g, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen).
What happens after the spotlight shifts depends on the artist. Read the article and see.
It’s an interesting career, to say the least. All the power in the world to those that can make a go of it.
Comments Off on The elusive spotlight (being a pop star as a career)
Posted in ideas
Tagged culture, ideas, music, theguardian
I’ve been wondering when this would happen, but finally some of the bigger names from SNL are departing next year, including Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant and Kyle Pete Davidson, according to Deadline. I’ve been surprised both by how stable SNL has been over the last decade and how big the cast has grown. It started off with less than 10, now it’s over 20.
Having a big cast makes sense in some ways. It means there is a deep bench of talent ready and eager to step up. It also helps SNL deal with the lack of diversity problem they had all too recently.
I’ve been watching more SNL recently, ironically because of Twitter. I say ironically because social media used to freak Lorne and company out. Now they feed the whole show via twitter on the weekend. I get to skip the ads, and I get to watch the best bits. It’s ideal for me. My rule of thumb is if Kenan Thompson is in a sketch, it’s probably funny. That’s likely why he is sticking around.
That piece above got me to this piece: ‘Saturday Night Live’: Actors Who’ve Hosted The Show The Most – Photos – Deadline. Several things to note there. In the early years, it was often people associated with the show, like Chevy Chase (although that is also true with Tina Fey in the later years). Later it was big actors who were just really good at being funny. For awhile Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were tied in appearances (there was even a bit where to win, Martin knocks out Baldwin, wraps him in a rug and throws him out the window!) Baldwin eventually ran away with it, not just for hosting, but by being a regular with his Trump appearances. (It probably helps too he lives in Manhattan.)
I have a sentimental weakness for SNL. It’s been on 47 seasons and I’ve been watching off and on since S1. I’m looking forward to it reaching S50 and beyond. Who knows will show up for that season. Tune in.
I stopped watching TV in the 90s. The last three TV series I watched were Northern Exposure (1990-1995), Seinfeld (1989-1998) and Friends (1994-2004).
I thought of that when I recently started rewatching Friends clips weirdly via Instagram. It is full of them. This Vanity Fair piece hits on something that Seinfeld and Friends and to some degree Northern Exposure had in common:
It was the ’90s; oh, was it ever the ’90s. The show’s anxieties are inextricably tied to the that decade—answering machines, VCRs, the discomfort its straight characters feel upon encountering queer people.
Yep, all that. The discomfort (or whatever you want to call it) in Friends is particularly painful to watch.
You notice other things too. No smart phones (obviously). No internet. Also suits and ties. Chandler and Ross in the early episodes are often in business attire of the time and it seems as dated as tuxedos and top hats now.
In the end, I gave up on each of those shows for different reasons. Northern Exposure lost its bearing and became some sort of Alaskan fantasy land. Friends seemed to become a landing place for cameos of famous actors. As for Seinfeld, I have to agree with the Vanity Fair piece, who said:
… for more than a few episodes at a time, these people and their concerns—so self-absorbed, so entitled, so stupid—are a little deadening to watch.
Seinfeld’s leads are a tiresome quartet; in the show, everyone who meets them ends up deeply regretting it.
I skipped the golden age of TV with the Wire and the Sopranos and all that. None of it appealed to me. I’m trying to get back into watching things via streaming, but even that is a struggle. I don’t think I am superior for not watching it. I just find it is something I can’t watch on my own.
For now I’ll watch clips via Instagram and maybe that is enough TV for me. 🙂
And the New York Times is on it: Can Shopify Stop Sneaker Bots? – The New York Times.
I find that story fascinating on many levels. It starts with the culture of sneakerheads. Then it shows what happens when you mix IT in. Suddenly there is a massive distortion effect that occurs. Combine that with voracious capitalism and a fun hobby morphs into something….well less than pretty.
So much of our current society is captured in that piece. Well worth taking a moment to read and digest.
P.S. I got caught up in that for a moment a few years ago when my son suddenly wanted this particular brand of Jordans. I remember him showing them to me by a guy who was selling them online, and I had to study sneakers to see if they were legitimate or knock offs before handing over hundreds of dollars to some guy who had some weird handle of a name.
Thankfully my son lost interest in becoming a sneakerhead. I couldn’t afford it anyway!
(Photo by Paul Volkmer on Unsplash )
While short movies are fun, sometimes one wants to settle in and watch a good long movie. The problem with that, though, is many of them draggggggggg. No one wants that. We want to settle, not fidget. We need help.
Help is here in the form of this: 20 of the Best Long Movies That Are Actually Worth Their Runtime. “Lawrence of Arabia” is an obvious choice, but there are many others on the list that are great too, such as “Hamlet” and “Malcolm X”. Check out the list, then block of some time this weekend or next and get some quality screen time in. Snacks are optional, but recommended. 🙂
First up, Seneca. Here’s a good piece that summarizes some of the consolation letters he wrote to people close to him. Though they were written centuries ago, they are timeless and worth reading.
Second, Suetonius. Here’s a good piece on why you want to read him: The Consolations of History. Essentially, good histories like those of Suetonius give you perspective that help you deal with your own time. Sometimes they do that by showing you things are fundamentally the same. Other times they do that by showing how much things have changed since that time. Either way you come away with a deeper understanding of your own time even as you learn about another time.
During the pandemic I have been noticing this frequently. People are looking back at the pandemic of 1918-19 and trying to draw lessons from it. That’s a good thing, I think. We can all gain perspective by looking to the past, which is never really past.
It looks like minimalism has had it’s time and now it’s time for maximalism to take over. At least that’s the sense I get, reading this:More Is More: The End of Minimalism | The Walrus
My thoughts are this:
For more on maximalism, here’s some other pieces I wrote. I also wrote more on minimalism too. 🙂
(Image via vinterior.co …I love it)
I agree with this assessment by Noah Smith: it is not powerful at all. It can seem powerful at times, like a very high wind. But like a very high wind, it either subsides or moves on. Sometimes there is damage, but mainly not.
If you disagree, I recommend you read his piece. It’s a pretty strong argument for why twitter as a social force is limited.
P.S. I have felt that for some time. I mainly post things that are either positive or amusing. If I want to take social action, there are concrete ways to do that.
P.S.S. Tweets are like straw, blowing this way and that way, yet not moving and not affecting things, besides making a nice noise.
(Photo by seth schwiet on Unsplash )
The joke is that SNL was at its best the years you watched it as a teen. I have literally been watching it since it started — Yes, I am old — and I kinda agree with that. SNL is really such an uneven thing that even back then there were good and bad parts of the show. (Usually anything after the second musical performance is throwaway). As well, SNL is best as much for individual performers as it is for the entire show. From Catherine McKinnon all the way back to Gilda Radner, there have been individual performers who made a good show great. (My favorite of all time is Bill Murray, but there are too many to mention here).
For another take on it, here is a someone more objective study on when SNL was at its peak. According to this piece in OpenCulture, this YouTuber took a systematic approach to deciding the best of SNL. He…
… decided to withhold judgment on the overall quality curve of Saturday Night Live, his favorite show, before putting in the time and effort to watch at least one episode from every year in its run
The article has a link to his YouTube results. As OpenCulture concludes,
He may not change anyone’s mind about the best, and worst, seasons, episodes, cast members, and hosts. But he does demonstrate an admirable willingness to dig into SNL’s history and give years of comedy positively antiquated by 21st century standards a fair shake.
One thing that happened during the pandemic is that big cities like New York vacated to some degree. When they did, there was talk about how in the future more people would continue to work from home, and if they did, they might go to smaller and more affordable cities, like Des Moines, Iowa. Indeed, places like Des Moines has been recruiting people.
The problem these cities have, though, is that they are missing part of the puzzle. People in big cities like NYC and San Francisco live there for a lot of reasons. One of those is the freedom and rights that come with living there. The respect those places have for progressive values are a big draw. Unfortunately, as this really good piece shows, Iowa (and likely other conservative cities and states) can’t and won’t provide that any time soon.
After reading that piece, I thought: yeah, even if the majority of people can still work from home, the mass exodus from Brooklyn to Des Moines is not going to be happening. Some will, for sure. But when the pandemic is over, people are going to head back to the major cities. They have more to offer than affordability.
(Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash)
Posted in cities
Tagged affordability, cities, culture, desmoines, economics, Iowa, newyork, SanFrancisco
Here at this blog I will always share my love of the 1980s.
First up, here is a great piece in the New Yorker on a recent Whitney art show which highlighted the Joy of Eighties Art. It’s begins great:
Starting in the late nineteen-seventies, young American artists plunged, pell-mell, into making figurative paintings. That seemed ridiculously backward by the lights of the time’s reigning vanguards of flinty post-minimalism, cagey conceptualism, and chaste abstraction. The affront was part of the appeal. As with contemporaneous punk music, sheer nerve rocketed impudent twentysomethings to stardom on New York’s downtown scene. The powerful excitement of that moment has been languishing in a blind spot of recent art history, but “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s,” at the Whitney, a show of works by thirty-seven artists from the museum’s collection, comes to the rescue. Some of the names are famous: Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring.
I loved reading every word of that. A great review.
Other 80s things I found recently is this here ode to a great album of the the early 1980s: Rattlesnakes from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
Saxophones don’t feature on that recording, but they did on many other great recordings of the 1980s. Gradually they died off. Here’s a good piece exploring that.
If you still have music from that era, chances are some of it is on a cassette tape, which was big then. If you suddenly have the urge to listen to that, you can, with this player (shown below at Uncrate.com). It’s not the original Walkman, but in some ways it’s better.
Rock on.
(Top image is David Salle’s “Sextant in Dogtown” (1987).Courtesy David Salle / VAGA, NY. Linked to in the article. Bottom image is from the uncrate.com article)
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