Category: The Arts

What is wrong with movies these days?

Here is one bit from a longer and very interesting essay by Vicky Osterweil:

This kind of audience-condescending premise-forward literalism is not just in the narrative and scripting, it’s in the acting. The actors of Dune 2 almost all speak in that tedious whisper-growl that stands in for profundity, a vocal-style also popularized by Nolan, in Christian Bale’s portrayal of the caped crusader in 2005’s Batman Begins. I believe that if a movie features a bunch of good actors and all the performances are flat and dull, as is the case in Dune Part Two, where even Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux and Josh Brolin lack all charisma, it is ultimately a reflection on the director (and the script), not the actors.

Worth reading the whole thing, though I think it is quite wrong about Russian constructivism in the visual arts, which is a far more diverse tradition than the author lets on.

My excellent Conversation with Marc Rowan

Here is the video, audio, and transcript, taped in his Apollo office in NYC.  Here is the episode summary:

Marc Rowan, co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, joined Tyler to discuss why rising interest rates won’t hurt Apollo’s profitability, why liabilities have traditionally been the weak spot in insurance, why the concept of liquidity needs a rethink, the meaninglessness of the term “private credit”, what role crypto will play in American finance, why Marc bought a brutalist apartment, which country has beautiful new neighborhoods, what motivated Apollo’s office redesign, what he looks for in young hires, the different kind of decision-making required in debt versus private equity, the biggest obstacle to doing business in India, how university governance can be improved, what he’s learned from running restaurants, the next thing he’ll learn, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: Now, how stable is all this as a political equilibrium? If you think about the four major banks, as you well know, there are very serious stress tests applied to them, capital requirements. The Fed is a major regulator. At least for insurance, it tends to be at the state level. One can reinsure through Bermuda. Capital requirements are very different. Competence of the state regulators arguably is lower than that of the Fed. Whether or not one wants more regulation — and generally, I don’t — but is this a stable situation? How’s it going to evolve?

ROWAN: First, I would have to correct almost everything you’ve said along the way to set the table for what I’m going to talk about. First, the difference between not so much the banking system and insurance, but the banking system and the investment marketplace. Let’s start with this — there are plenty of ways for investors to lose money. Investors can buy speculative stocks. They could buy the S&P. They can speculate in almost anything.

The making or losing of money is not, in and of itself, a systemically risky activity because, for good reason, we allow speculative investing every single day. Things go up, things go down. You can lose money in credit as well as in equity.

Now we come to mutual funds. If a mutual fund, which is daily liquid, owns credit, and investors want to get their money back, you’re right, price just adjusts. Mutual funds are not price guarantors. Are they regulated? Mutual funds are regulated. Are they disclosed and transparent? Yes, they’re disclosed and transparent. The holdings of a mutual fund are completely visible and they’re de-levered. Is that a risky activity because it moved out of the banking system and into a mutual fund? I don’t think so; I actually think it has de-risked. It’s made our economy and our financial system more resilient.

Now I’ll come to your question on political equilibrium. Insurance — if you just focus on insurance — has no federal guarantee, does not borrow short and lend long, has no access to the Fed, and does not do liquidity transformation or maturity mismatch, and they are forced to hold amounts of capital.

If you look — and I’ll give you a comparison just for us, not for the whole industry — who holds more capital, Athene our insurer as a percentage of assets or the typical bank? You would think the typical bank, but you would be wrong. We hold more capital per dollar of assets than anyone else. Who holds more investment-grade assets? Ninety percent of our book is investment-grade, the typical bank is two-thirds investment-grade.

COWEN: Sure, but that’s all time-sliced—

ROWAN: Let’s keep going.

COWEN: Money market funds have been a source of systemic risk, AIG has been —

ROWAN: I can’t tell you there’s not risks in the economy. We have a choice. We can have risk dispersed among lots of institutions, or we can have it concentrated in the government-backed, borrow-short, lend-long, government-guaranteed banking system.

Every time we disperse that risk, we make the system more resilient. If you want to focus on insurance, which is your question on political equilibrium, there’s more capital, there’s no ALM mismatch, there’s more investment-grade, and there is appropriate state-based regulation for institutions that do not have government guarantees or borrow from the Fed or do anything else.

Insurance is very slow-moving. We’re talking about, on average, 10-year assets. This is a very slow-moving process. Again, most of the issues that have happened in the insurance industry have not been asset issues. They’ve been liability issues, exactly the kind of thing that insurance-specialist regulation is designed to detect.

Recommended, and of course we talk about Marc’s higher ed campaign as well.

Grimes on Gemini images

I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.

offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece. A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)

The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.

It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.

It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.

Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma

Here is the link.

My Conversation with the very excellent Masaaki Suzuki

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, we recorded in NYC.  Here is the episode summary:

A conductor, harpsichordist, and organist, Masaaki Suzuki stands as a towering figure in Baroque music, renowned for his comprehensive and top-tier recordings of Bach’s works, including all of Bach’s sacred and secular cantatas. Suzuki’s unparalleled dedication extends beyond Bach, with significant contributions to the works of Mozart, Handel, and other 18th-century composers. He is the founder of the Bach Collegium Japan, an artist in residence at Yale, and conducts orchestras and choruses around the world.

Tyler sat down with Suzuki to discuss the innovation and novelty in Bach’s St. John’s Passion, whether Suzuki’s Calvinist background influences his musical interpretation, his initial encounter with Bach through Karl Richter, whether older recordings of Bach have held up, why he trained in the Netherlands, what he looks for in young musicians, how Japanese players appreciate Bach differently, whether Christianity could have ever succeeded in Japan, why Bach’s larger vocal works were neglected for so long, how often Bach heard his masterworks performed, why Suzuki’s  favorite organ is in Groningen, what he thinks of Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach, what contemporary music he enjoys, what he’ll do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: You’re from Kobe, right? That was originally a Christian center along with Nagasaki.

SUZUKI: Exactly.

COWEN: Because they were port cities. Is that why?

SUZUKI: Yes, Kobe is one of the most important after the reopening of Japan in 1868. There are probably two, Kobe and Yokohama, and even Sendai — the port places. This was very important to accept any kind of culture from the outside, but Christianity came in. For example, the oldest Protestant church is in Yokohama. That is the end of 19th century. That’s a really interesting history.

COWEN: How do Japanese audiences for classical music, say in Tokyo, differ from New York audiences?

SUZUKI: Hmmm, probably a little different. American audience are more friendly, I think.

[laughter]

More friendly and more easily excited by the performance, and they look more inspired directly from the music, and also musicians. In Japan, Japanese audiences — sometimes they know very well about the repertoire and they are very cooperative, but at the same time, they are a little bit, well, not so excited immediately. Probably on the inside, very excited, but we Japanese people don’t express directly from inside to outside. We were all told in school, for example, that is a rule. That is not the intellectual demeanor — something like that.

Of course most of the conversation is about Bach.  Self-recommending, and then some.

Henrik Karlsson asks

What is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?

Twitter link here.  Well people?  Popular romances don’t count, try to get as close to “the canon” as you can.

I found this question difficult.  GPT-4 listed a bunch of inappropriate, not actually so wholesome answers from Victorian literature, and then for a film cited Her (bravo to that actually, but still not a good answer).  A Beautiful Mind made that movie list as well.

I rewatched Casablanca lately on a large screen, and concluded that Rick was wanting Ilsa to suffer as much as possible.

Can you do better?

What should I ask Coleman Hughes?

I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.  On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Also from Wikipedia:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer.  So what should I ask Coleman?

My Conversation with the excellent Ami Vitale

Here is the audio, visual, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.

She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she’ll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer,  her next project, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: As you probably know, there’s a long-standing and recurring set of debates between animal welfare advocates and environmentalists. The animal welfare advocates typically have less sympathy for the predators because they, in turn, kill other animals. The environmentalists are more likely to think we should, in some way, leave nature alone as much as possible. Where do you stand on that debate?

VITALE: It depends. It’s hard to make a general sweeping statement on this because in some cases, I think that we do have to get involved. Also, the fact is, it’s humans in most cases who have really impacted the environment, and we do need to get engaged and work to restore that balance. I really fall on both sides of this. I will say, I do think that is, in some cases, what differentiates us because, as human beings, we have to kill to survive. Maybe that is where this — I feel like every story I work on has a different answer. Really, I don’t know. It depends what the situation is. Should we bring animals back to landscapes where they have not existed for millions of years? I fall in the line of no. Maybe I’m taking this in a totally different direction, but it’s really complicated, and there’s not one easy answer.

And:

COWEN: As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?

VITALE: Well, it doesn’t at all. My job is to tell stories with images, and not just with images. My job as a storyteller — that has not changed. Nothing has changed in the sense of, we need more great storytellers, visual storytellers. With all of those social media, I think people are bored with just beautiful images. Or sometimes it feels like advertising, and it doesn’t captivate me.

I look for a story and image, and I am just going to continue doing what I do because I think people are hungry for it. They want to know who is really going deep on stories and who they can trust. I think that that has never gone away, and it will never go away.

I am very happy to have guests who do things that not everyone else’s guests do.

What should I ask Benjamin Moser?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is one outdated bit from his home page:

Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Workwon the Pulitzer Prize.

I am a big fan of his new book on the Dutch painters, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.  He lives in Utrecht and is also an expert on Brazil.  Here is his Wikipedia page.  Here are other assorted writings by him.

So what should I ask him?

My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.

She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?

KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?

COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?

Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.

KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.

Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.

COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?

KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.

Interesting throughout.

2023 CWT retrospective episode

Here is the link, here is the episode summary:

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.

And one excerpt:

COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.

I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.

HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.

COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.

Fun and interesting throughout.  If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.

The new *Pedro Páramo* translation

By Juan Rulfo, first published in 1955.  The previous English-language translation was abysmal, so this is perhaps the least read piece of truly great world literature?  In the English-speaking world at least.  It took me a long time and a lot of effort to read this short novel in Spanish.  The vocabulary is not difficult, it is simply difficult in any language to know exactly what is going on.  What exactly are the borders between the living and the dead, for instance?  Which character is doing what?  What is Rulfo telling us about Dante?  As first-tier literature should, it strains our capabilities to the utmost.  A knowledge of rural Mexico helps, for sure.

García Márquez compared the work to that of Sophocles in import.  Carlos Fuentes called it “the essential Mexican novel.”  For me it is in the top 25 novels of all time.  Susan Sontag thought it was one of the essential works of 20th century literature.

The new Douglas J. Weatherford translation is probably as good as it is going to get.  The work is intrinsically difficult to translate, so try the Spanish if you can, or read the two jointly together, switching back and forth.  And as they like to say in Haiti, “if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.”

Recommended, essential, and kudos to Weatherford for making this available.  I’ve addended it to my favorite fiction of 2023 list.

Do I want the Wizards and Capitols to move to Virginia?

No, in short.  To be clear, I don’t have any personal NIMBY stake in this, as the new site in Alexandria is about as far away from my home as the old site downtown.  The bad news is that there are fewer complementary visits attached to the new site.  Under the current regime, the Museum of American Art — which is pretty good — is a mere block away.  The National Gallery is walking distance.  How about all those meeting opportunities in DC?  So you can combine a game visit with many other good activities.  I’ll even accept a higher risk of crime for this benefit.  What comparable opportunities might we expect from Potomac Landing in Alexandria, VA?  A bunch of overpriced corporate-branded taverns nearby?  Whom do you think you can meet for that early dinner, before going to the game?

It is also easy to leave the current site and make a clean getaway.  You could walk for five or six blocks and catch an Uber without hindrance.  Or you could park your car in a garage ten blocks away and drive home without hassles, or needing to deal with post-game traffic.  (And is the Metro still running?)  A concert or sports venue can be evaluated by a simple rule: if your only options for leaving are the ones they have planned for you, it will be a bad experience.

Ugh.  And I haven’t even gone into the well-known bipartisan reality that sports stadium subsidies are inefficient, inegalitarian, and full of rent-seeking opportunities.  These have been described as possibly the largest stadium subsidies ever.

At a deeper level, I think it is also better for NoVa if the DC downtown does not collapse altogether.  But again you don’t have to get into those points.  Even if you could move the stadium at zero cost, the new venue would not create a nominally better experience.

Milei in action

It only took a day into his term as Argentina’s new president for Javier Milei to get rid of the Ministry of Culture. Milei was inaugurated on 10 December, and the following day, the boisterously libertarian economist and former television commentator fulfilled his campaign promise with typical bravado. Also on the chopping block—or, rather, in the path of his chainsaw, which Milei carried throughout his campaign to symbolise his intent to slash government spending—was the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity.

Several other ministries were downsized and recombined into new entities. The Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security will be pared down into a newly formed Ministry of Human Capital, headed by the former TV producer Sandra Pettovello. Meanwhile, the Ministries of Public Works, Transportation, Energy, Mining and Communications will merge into a new Ministry of Infrastructure. (It appears that the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity will be completely dissolved.)

Here is the full story. Whether or not you favor a Ministry of the Arts in the abstract, I don’t think you should during a fiscal crisis and hyperinflation…