Category: Film
*Terminator: Dark Fate*
Much of the movie is set in Mexico, to excellent effect, and arguably the main lines of the plot mirror some themes from Nahua culture and history:
“…the Aztec saw themselves as “the People of the Sun,” whose divine duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun with his tlaxcaltiliztli (“nourishment”). Without it, the sun would disappear from the heavens.” Link here.
Quetzalcoatl descending into the land of the dead, and the breaking of the bones.
“…a sibling rivalry grew between Quetzalcoatl and his brother the mighty sun, who Quetzalcoatl knocked from the sky with a stone club.”
“…When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone. The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade.” Link here.
Overall the movie reminded me of Rogue One. Rogue One did not have the freshness or originality of the core Star Wars movies, but it was a member of the actual franchise in a way that some of the later sequels were not, and thus a refreshing reminder of what the whole thing was all about in the first place.
My Conversation with Henry Farrell
An excellent episode, here is the audio and transcript. We ranged far and wide, starting with Huawei and weaponized interdependence, moving later to the Facebook supreme court, Karl Polanyi, Ireland, and Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Arguably, dominant firms are easier to regulate. And since you seem to favor some kinds of additional regulation on the major tech companies, does this mean we’re too worried about monopoly, that we actually want to keep around a few dominant firms, and that if we split them up into many small parts, there would be more chaos or more fake news or more privacy violations?
If some parts of what they do are bad, and you get more competition in the bad, don’t we just want to put in GDPR barriers to entry, not quite public utilities, but keep them big and fat and happy and somewhat not so dynamic, yes or no?
FARRELL: It depends on what you value.
COWEN: But what you value.
FARRELL: Yeah. Let me put the tradeoff to you this way. If you value security, if the highlight is on security, then the answer is, you probably want to keep big companies around because you’re going to want to impose broad standards. You’re going to want to create collective security goods, and the only actors that can really do that in a substantial way are big businesses of one sort or another.
If, alternatively, you value things like privacy and other kinds of rights, then you probably want to move towards an equilibrium in which there are far, far fewer big firms. So that’s where I see the fight being played out. I see the fight being played out between people who value security and people who value privacy. I think they point in somewhat different directions.
COWEN: And where are you on that spectrum?
FARRELL: Well, it depends on the time of the day, and I find myself —
COWEN: It is 2:22 p.m.
And:
FARRELL: Well, I guess the question for me is — and again, this is a wide open question because we simply don’t have enough good empirical research — but what is the relationship and the broader ecology between companies like 8chan and companies like Facebook? I suspect that companies like 8chan will be far, far less successful if there weren’t much bigger platforms like Facebook that they could effectively grow upon.
So here are the arguments, something as follows. If you think about 8chan, and if you think about 4chan before it, they were basically meme factories. They were basically these places where these bored individuals hung out. You also created these memes in a kind of process of frenzied Darwinian evolution, where you desperately want to make sure that whatever you had said was on the front page because otherwise it would disappear forever. So you’ve got this survival-of-the-fittest thing, where incredibly valuable or incredibly effective memes go out and begin to populate the entire space.
But you need two things for that to work. First of all, you need a process of generation, and secondly, you need some kind of process of dissemination. You need other platforms which have far greater reach, which can then allow for these memes to propagate through the atmosphere.
I suspect that if we were in a world in which everything was at the scale of 8chan, rather than having a mixture of companies at the scale of 8chan and companies at the scale of Facebook, that the likelihood of this stuff spreading and becoming epidemic across the entire community of internet users would be far, far less. Obviously, we would have other problems then. But I think that the problems that we would face would be a very, very different set of problems from the problems that we face in the current environment.
Finally:
FARRELL: Yes. [Gene] Wolfe misleads us systematically, and clearly Severian is not a reliable narrator, but then neither is Proust’s narrator either. I think that if you really want to understand where Wolfe comes from, it really is Proust. His writing style is Proustian. His concern with time, with how it is that time works, is quintessentially Proustian.
And you don’t look to Wolfe any more than you look to other science fiction for characterization. I don’t think that’s the particular strength. What you do look for is a kind of a sense of the world. And in Wolfe, in particular, he provides this real understanding of how it is that the workings of society, and interestingly, conservative understanding of the workings of society.
I think of him almost as being Proust in reverse. Proust is describing a world in which the modern world is overtaking aristocracy. And that clearly is one of the great problems of Proust, what is happening on the social level. You have all of these aristocratic understandings: the Merovingian, all of these histories, all of these castles, all of this wonderful art, and they are being replaced by the modern world with its telephones, with its electric lighting, and so on.
And how do you think about this? How would you try to preserve what was happening in the past? What Wolfe does, which I think is an extraordinarily interesting thing, which would be impossible for anybody who is not a science fiction writer, is to take that and to reverse this and to imagine a world in which modernity has disappeared.
Recommended!
My Conversation with Ben Westhoff
Truly an excellent episode, Ben is an author and journalist. Here is the audio and transcript, covering most of all the opioid epidemic and rap music, but not only.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: But if so much fentanyl comes from China, and you can just send it through the mail, why doesn’t it spread automatically wherever it’s going to go? Is it some kind of recommender network? It wouldn’t seem that it’s a supply constraint. It’s more like someone told you about a restaurant they ate at last night.
WESTHOFF: It’s because the Mexican cartels are still really strongly in the trade. Even though it’s all made in China, much of it is trafficked through the cartels, who buy the precursors, the fentanyl ingredients, from China, make it the rest of the way. Then they send it through the border into the US.
You can get fentanyl in the mail from China, and many people do. It comes right to your door through the US Postal Service. But it takes a certain level of sophistication with the drug dealers to pull that off.
COWEN: It’s such a big life decision, and it’s shaped by this very small cost of getting a package from New Hampshire to Florida. What should we infer about human nature as a result of that? What’s your model of the human beings doing this stuff if those geographic differences really make the difference for whether or not you do this and destroy your life?
WESTHOFF: Well, everything is local, right? Not just politics. You’re influenced by the people around you and the relative costs. In St. Louis, it’s so incredibly cheap, like $5 to get some heroin, some fentanyl. I don’t know how it works in, say, New Hampshire, but I know in places like West Virginia, it’s still a primarily pill market. People don’t use powdered heroin, for example. For whatever reason, they prefer Oxycontin. So that has affected the market, too.
And:
COWEN: Did New Zealand do the right thing, legalizing so many synthetic drugs in 2013?
WESTHOFF: I absolutely think they did. It was an unprecedented thing. Now drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, all the drugs you’ve heard of, are internationally banned. But what New Zealand did was it legalized these forms of synthetic marijuana. So synthetic marijuana has a really bad reputation. It goes by names like K2 and Spice, and it’s big in homeless populations. It’s causing huge problems in places like DC.
But if you make synthetic marijuana right, as this character in my book named Matt Bowden was doing in New Zealand, you can actually make it so it’s less toxic, so it’s somewhat safe. That’s what he did. They legalized these safer forms of it, and the overdose rate plummeted. Very shortly thereafter, however, they banned them again, and now deaths from synthetic marijuana in New Zealand have gone way up.
COWEN: And what about Portugal and Slovenia — their experiments in decriminalization? How have those gone?
WESTHOFF: By all accounts, they’ve been massive successes. Portugal had this huge problem with heroin, talking like one out of every 100 members of the population was touched by it, or something like that. And now those rates have gone way down.
In Slovenia, they have no fentanyl problem. They barely have an opioid problem. Their rates of AIDS and other diseases passed through needles have gone way down.
And on rap music:
COWEN: This question is maybe a little difficult to explain, but wherein lies the musical talent of hip-hop? If we look at Mozart, there’s melody, there’s harmony. If you listen to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it’s something very specifically rhythmic, and the textures, and the organization of the blocks of sound. The poetry aside, what is it musically that accounts for the talent in rap music?
WESTHOFF: First of all, riding a beat, rapping, if you will, is extremely hard, and anyone who’s ever tried to do it will tell you. You have to have the right cadence. You have to have the right breath control, and it’s a talent. There’s also — this might sound trivial, but picking the right music to rap over.
So hip-hop, of course, is a genre that’s made up of other genres. In the beginning, it was disco records that people used. And then jazz, and then on and on. Rock records have been rapped over, even. But what song are you going to pick to use? And if someone has a good ear for a sound that goes with their style, that’s something you can’t teach.
And yes on overrated vs. underrated, you get Taylor Swift, Clint Eastwood, and Seinfeld, among others. I highly recommend all of Ben’s books, but most of all his latest one Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic.
*Joker*
I read so many scathing — forgive me long and thorough and scathing — reviews of this one that I figured something had to be up. And indeed there is. However unpleasant and disturbing this movie may be, it is excellent along all major dimensions of cinematic quality, including drama, script, characterization, performances, cinematography, color, music, and more, not to mention embedded cinematic references.
But here is the catch: it is the most anti-Leftist movie I have seen, ever. It quite explicitly portrays the egalitarian instinct as a kind of barbaric violent atavism, and it is pointedly critical of Antifa and related movements, showing them as representing a literal end of civilization. Only the wealthy are genteel and urbane and proper. On crime and law and order, it is right-wing in a 1970s “Death Wish” sort of way, though anti-gun too.
I believe the critics simply could not see straight. I hesitate to recommend such a non-entertaining and indeed reactionary movie, but I am very glad I saw it. If you have been put off by the reviews, with this blog post I am adding my dissenting voice of reason.
My Conversation with Alain Bertaud
Excellent throughout, Alain put on an amazing performance for the live audience at the top floor of the Observatory at the old World Trade Center site. Here is the audio and transcript, most of all we talked about cities. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Will America create any new cities in the next century? Or are we just done?
BERTAUD: Cities need a good location. This is a debate I had with Paul Romer when he was interested in charter cities. He had decided that he could create 50 charter cities around the world. And my reaction — maybe I’m wrong — but my reaction is that there are not 50 very good locations for cities around the world. There are not many left. Maybe with Belt and Road, maybe the opening of Central Asia. Maybe the opening of the ocean route on the northern, following the pole, will create the potential for new cities.
But cities like Singapore, Malacca, Mumbai are there for a good reason. And I don’t think there’s that many very good locations.
COWEN: Or Greenland, right?
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Yes. Yes, yes.
COWEN: What is your favorite movie about a city? You mentioned a work of fiction. Movie — I’ll nominate Escape from New York.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: Casablanca.
Here is more:
COWEN: Your own background, coming from Marseille rather than from Paris —
BERTAUD: I would not brag about it normally.
[laughter]
COWEN: But no, maybe you should brag about it. How has that changed how you understand cities?
BERTAUD: I’m very tolerant of messy cities.
COWEN: Messy cities.
BERTAUD: Yes.
COWEN: Why might that be, coming from Marseille?
BERTAUD: When we were schoolchildren in Marseille, we were used to a city which has a . . . There’s only one big avenue. The rest are streets which were created locally. You know, the vernacular architecture.
In our geography book, we had this map of Manhattan. Our first reaction was, the people in Manhattan must have a hard time finding their way because all the streets are exactly the same.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: In Marseille we oriented ourselves by the angle that a street made with another. Some were very narrow, some very, very wide. One not so wide. But some were curved, some were . . . And that’s the way we oriented ourselves. We thought Manhattan must be a terrible place. We must be lost all the time.
Finally:
COWEN: And what’s your best Le Corbusier story?
BERTAUD: I met Le Corbusier at a conference in Paris twice. Two conferences. At the time, he was at the top of his fame, and he started the conference by saying, “People ask me all the time, what do you think? How do you feel being the most well-known architect in the world?” He was not a very modest man.
[laughter]
BERTAUD: And he said, “You know what it feels? It feels that my ass has been kicked all my life.” That’s the way he started this. He was a very bitter man in spite of his success, and I think that his bitterness is shown in his planning and some of his architecture.
COWEN: Port-au-Prince, Haiti — overrated or underrated?
Strongly recommended, and note that Bertaud is eighty years old and just coming off a major course of chemotherapy, a remarkable performance.
Again, I am very happy to recommend Alain’s superb book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.
My favorite things Pakistan
1. Female singer: Abida Parveen, here is one early song, the later material is often more commercial. Sufi songs!
2. Qawwali performers: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, and try this French collection of Qawwali music.
3. Author/novel: Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I am not sure why this book isn’t better known. It is better than even the average of the better half of the Booker Prize winners. Why doesn’t he write more?
4. Dish: Haleem: “Haleem is made of wheat, barley, meat (usually minced beef or mutton (goat meat or Lamb and mutton) or chicken), lentils and spices, sometimes rice is also used. This dish is slow cooked for seven to eight hours, which results in a paste-like consistency, blending the flavors of spices, meat, barley and wheat.”
5. Movie: I don’t think I have seen a Pakistani film, and my favorite movie set in Pakistan is not so clear. Charlie Wilson’s War bored me, and Zero Dark Thirty is OK. What am I forgetting?
6. Economic reformer: Manmohan Singh.
7. Economist: Atif Mian, born in Nigeria to a Pakistani family.
8. Textiles: Wedding carpets from Sindh?
9. Visual artist: Shahzia Shikhander, images here.
I don’t follow cricket, sorry!
The new generational divide
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
In a nutshell, younger people today are very comfortable with a small screen and older people are not. Both younger and older people can be found staring at their phones for texts or email or directions, but the big difference comes in cultural consumption. According to one study, the median age of an American television viewer is about 56, whereas for mobile and computer video viewers the median age is 40. Forty percent of those viewers are between 13 and 34…
Just as many older people don’t grasp the import of YouTube, most younger people have a weak sense of the power of cinema on a large screen. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s relatively easy to see older movies on a big screen in London or Paris, and maybe in New York City and Los Angeles (and Silver Spring, Maryland, home to the American Film Institute). In most other places in America, it’s much more difficult.
Sadly, the world is rapidly becoming a place where cinematic history, as it was created for larger screens, no longer exists. Netflix, for all its wonders and diverse contemporary selection, is notoriously bad about making older movies available for streaming, and at any rate the service does not provide a properly large screen for those films.
There is much more at the link, and the economically-minded reader will note this is an application of the Alchian-Allen Theorem.
My Conversation with Hollis Robbins
Here is the audio and video, here is part of the CWT summary:
Now a dean at Sonoma State University, Robbins joined Tyler to discuss 19th-century life and literature and more, including why the 1840s were a turning point in US history, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Calvinism, whether 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained are appropriate portraits of slavery, the best argument for reparations, how prepaid postage changed America, the second best Herman Melville book, why Ayn Rand and Margaret Mitchell are ignored by English departments, growing up the daughter of a tech entrepreneur, and why teachers should be like quarterbacks.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You’ve written a good deal on the history of the postal service. How did the growth of the postal service change romance in America?
ROBBINS: Well, everybody could write a letter. [laughs] In 1844 — this was the other exciting thing that happened in the 1840s. Rowland Hill in England changed the postal service by inventing the idea of prepaid postage. Anybody could buy a stamp, and then you’d put the stamp on the letter and send the letter.
Prior to that, you had to go to the post office. You had to engage with the clerk. After the 1840s and after prepaid postage, you could just get your stamps, and anybody could send a letter. In fact, Frederick Douglass loved the idea of prepaid post for the ability for the enslaved to write and send letters. After that, people wrote letters to each other, letters home, letters to their lovers, letters to —
COWEN: When should you send a sealed letter? Because it’s also drawing attention to itself, right?
ROBBINS: Well, envelopes — it’s interesting that envelopes, sealed envelopes, came about 50 years after the post office became popular, so you didn’t really have self-sealing envelopes until the end of the 19th century.
COWEN: That was technology? Or people didn’t see the need for it?
ROBBINS: Technology, the idea of folding the envelope and then having it be gummed and self-sealing. There were a number of patents, but they kept breaking down. But technology finally resolved it at the end of the 19th century.
Prior to that, you would write in code. Also, paper was expensive, so you often wrote across the page horizontally and then turned it to the side and crossed the page, writing in the other direction. If somebody was really going to snoop on your letters, they had to work for it.
COWEN: On net, what were the social effects of the postal service?
ROBBINS: Well, communication. The post office and the need for the post office is in our Constitution.
COWEN: It was egalitarian? It was winner take all? It liberated women? It helped slaves? Or what?
ROBBINS: All those things.
COWEN: All those things.
ROBBINS: But yeah, de Tocqueville mentioned this in his great book in the 1830s that anybody — some farmer in Michigan — could be as informed as somebody in New York City.
And:
COWEN: Margaret Mitchell or Ayn Rand?
ROBBINS: Well, it’s interesting that two of the best-selling novelists of the 20th-century women are both equally ignored by English departments in universities. Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind is paid attention to a little bit just because, as I said, it’s something that literature and film worked against, but not Ayn Rand at all.
And:
COWEN: What’s a paradigmatic example of a movie made better by a good soundtrack?
ROBBINS: The Pink Panther — Henry Mancini’s score. The movie is ridiculous, but Henry Mancini’s score — you’re going to be humming it now the rest of the day.
And:
COWEN: What is the Straussian reading of Babar the Elephant?
ROBBINS: When’s the last time you read it?
COWEN: Not long ago.
Recommended throughout.
Disgrace insurance markets in everything
According to a Vulture article, Comenos then put together a squad of researchers in India to do the same thing: comb the trashiest ends of the web for iffy tweets, racial slurs and ill-advised sexts sent by about 27,000 prominent figures. These are then fed to a team of data specialists in Boston who crunch the numbers, based on 224 factors, and generate a “risk score” out of 100 for each person to gauge how close they are to getting permanently cancelled (shamed, rejected or boycotted for offensive behaviour or language).
Comenos’s company is called SpottedRisk: a “disgrace insurer” backed by Lloyds of London and touting for business from studios and brands badly burned by a celebrity shooting themselves in the foot – and damaging whatever project they were involved in. These losses have been substantial. Tiger Woods’ 2009 car crash, plus revelations about his infidelities, cost him $22m in brand contracts – and the shareholders of those brands up to $12bn. Meanwhile,#MeToo has escalated Hollywood blacklisting. After sexual abuse allegations against Kevin Spacey in 2017, Ridley Scott reshot the thriller All the Money in the World with Christopher Plummer in Spacey’s role – at a cost of $10m. Another Spacey movie, The Billionaire’s Boys Club, ploughed on with its planned release regardless of increasing public disgust at its star. It made £98 on its opening night.
SpottedRisk says its payout for Spacey would be about $8m – a number generated by combining his risk score with its “outcry index” to gauge public reaction. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein would merit $10m payouts, while Roseanne Barr is relatively small change at $6m.
Here is the full Catherine Shoard article, via Michael, note that Donald Trump and R. Kelly are considered “uninsurable.”
My Conversation with Masha Gessen
Here is the transcript and audio, here is the summary:
Masha joined Tyler in New York City to answer his many questions about Russia: why was Soviet mathematics so good? What was it like meeting with Putin? Why are Russian friendships so intense? Are Russian women as strong as the stereotype suggests — and why do they all have the same few names? Is Russia more hostile to LGBT rights than other autocracies? Why did Garry Kasparov fail to make a dent in Russian politics? What did The Americans get right that Chernobyl missed? And what’s a good place to eat Russian food in Manhattan?
Here is excerpt:
COWEN: Why has Russia basically never been a free country?
GESSEN: Most countries have a history of never having been free countries until they become free countries.
[laughter]
COWEN: But Russia has been next to some semifree countries. It’s a European nation, right? It’s been a part of European intellectual life for many centuries, and yet, with the possible exception of parts of the ’90s, it seems it’s never come very close to being an ongoing democracy with some version of free speech. Why isn’t it like, say, Sweden?
GESSEN: [laughs] Why isn’t Russia like . . . I tend to read Russian history a little bit differently in the sense that I don’t think it’s a continuous history of unfreedom. I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history. That’s a 20th-century phenomenon that has a very specific set of conditions.
I don’t read Russian history as this history of Russians always want a strong hand, which is a very traditional way of looking at it. I think that Russia, at breaking points when it could have developed a democracy or a semidemocracy, actually started this totalitarian experiment. And what we’re looking at now is the aftermath of the totalitarian experiment.
And:
GESSEN: …I thought Americans were absurd. They will say hello to you in the street for no reason. Yeah, I found them very unreasonably friendly.
I think that there’s a kind of grumpy and dark culture in Russia. Russians certainly have a lot of discernment in the fine shades of misery. If you ask a Russian how they are, they will not cheerfully respond by saying they’re great. If they’re miserable, they might actually share that with you in some detail.
There’s no shame in being miserable in Russia. There’s, in fact, a lot of validation. Read a Russian novel. You’ll find it all in there. We really are connoisseurs of depression.
Finally there was the segment starting with this:
COWEN: I have so many questions about Russia proper. Let me start with one. Why is it that Russians seem to purge their own friends so often? The standing joke being the Russian word for “friend” is “future enemy.” There’s a sense of loyalty cycles, where you have to reach a certain bar of being loyal or otherwise you’re purged.
Highly recommended.
My favorite things Venice
1. Favorite playwright: Carlo Goldoni, eighteenth century, best if you can see one rather than try to read it.
2. Play, set in: William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice. Read it carefully and repeatedly, it is far subtler on issues of racism and prejudice than you might have been expecting.
3. Opera, set in: Verdi’s Otello (James Levine recording). Even as a dramatic work I (perhaps oddly) prefer this to Shakespeare’s play.
4. Memoir, set in: Casanova, though I suggest you read an abridged edition. I strongly recommend reading Marco Polo as well, though I am not sure that counts as a “memoir.”
5. Short story, set in: Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice.” But a close runner-up is Henry James, “The Aspern Papers.”
Are you getting the picture? Venice has inspired numerous major writers and artists. However I don’t love John Ruskin on Venice.
6. Painting: Ah! Where to start? I’ll opt for Giorgione’s The Tempest, or any number of late Titian works. And there are so many runners-up, starting with Veronese, Tintoretto, the Bellinis, and later Tiepolo. Even a painter as good as Sebastiano del Piombo is pretty far down the list here. Canaletto bores me, though the technique is impressive.
7. Sculptor: Antonio Canova was born in the Venetian Republic, and I believe he is now one of the most underrated of Western artists. His greatest work is in Vienna.
8. Composer: I can’t quite bring myself to count Monteverdi as Venetian, so that leaves me with Luigi Nono and also Gabrieli and Albioni and Vivaldi, none of whom I enjoy listening to.
9. Conductor: Giuseppe Sinopoli. I enjoy his Mahler and Strauss and Elgar, and his take on Verdi’s Aida was special as well.
10. Photographer of: Derek Parfit, here are some images.
11. Movie, set in: I can recall the fun Casino Royale James Bond scene, but surely there is a better selection attached to a better movie. What might that be?
11. Maxim about: Pope Gregory XIII: “I am pope everywhere except in Venice.”
All in all, not bad for a city that nowadays has no more than 60,000 residents and was never especially large.
I’ll be there in a few days time.
The new Quentin Tarantino movie
Richard Brody’s New Yorker review is titled: “Quentin Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties in “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood”“.
I didn’t love the film, and with each work of his I see, the more I like the others (and him?) less. My main takeaway was to be reminded of an enormous and unprecedented historical shift. In the 1960s, in part because of the birth control pill, the sexual opportunities of high status heterosexual men, or even medium status men, increased enormously, in terms of both quantity and quality. And indeed the men in this movie take advantage of that, to various extremes (wife murder, the Manson cult) and it is not entirely clear how much Tarantino disapproves.
Whatever your normative view of this change, keep it in mind the next time you encounter the “Puritan excesses” of today’s PC movement. Very rapid historical shifts in norms do in fact bring various forms of reaction and sometimes overreaction, and pushing back against the overreaction is not always the wisest thing to do.
If you want to see southern California on the big screen, you might enjoy Echo in the Canyon more, while its bookend cinematic partner David Crosby: Remember My Name will fill in the Joni Mitchell blank and also show you how deeply unpopular and unlikeable people talk and think about themselves.
My favorite things New Hampshire
1. Musician. I don’t love Steve Tyler/Aerosmith, so what am I left with?
2. Author: I find John Irving unreadable, so does it come down to Russell Banks? Who else is there? Salinger lived in New Hampshire for a long time, so I’ll pick him, though it is also pretty far from my favorite. Here is my Catcher in the Rye review.
3. Sculptor: August Saint-Gaudens.
“Law Supported by Power and Love”
4. Adam Sandler movie: The Waterboy, Happy Gilmore.
5. Poet: Robert Frost, who seems to be clear winner for the whole state. There is a scholastic version of Frost which is quite dull, don’t be put off if that is all you know of him.
6. Movie director: Brian DePalma, Dressed to Kill and Mission to Mars being my favorites.
7. Painter: Maxfield Parrish. I feel I’m being forced into many of these choices — I simply can’t think of anyone else.
8. Secretary of the Treasury: Salmon P. Chase. Chase is one of the few people to have had a major position in the executive branch, served in Congress, and sat on the Supreme Court.
9. Free trade economist: Douglas Irwin.
The bottom line: For all of my grumbling, for such a small state it does pretty well.
What should I ask Hollis Robbins?
I will be doing a Conversations with Tyler with her, no associated public event. Here is part of her Wikipedia page:
Robbins is a noted expert in the field of nineteenth-century African American literature and recently co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. an anthology of African American women’s writing. Robbins’ work focuses primarily on nineteenth and early twentieth century black print culture; she is affiliated with the Black Press Research Collective and serves as an advisor to the Black Periodical Literature Project at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.
…Previously, Robbins edited several other books with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., including The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006) and In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2003). She also co-edited The Works of William Wells Brown (2006) with Paula Garrett and an edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy.
In addition to now being Dean at Sonoma State University, she also has written on film music, the history of post offices, the gold rush, higher education, African-American sonnets, and numerous other topics. So what should I ask her?
*Godzilla: King of the Monsters* (spoilers in this post)
Carp all you want, I thought it was pretty damn good. The innovations: monsters have economic value, there are property rights in monsters (for a while), communication really matters, the environmentalists are the bad guys, and nuclear power saves the world. The stagnation: Asian people, and only Asian people, have TFP about monsters.
You can’t judge these movies by normal standards, like those silly critics do, instead you have to ask:
1. How good are the monsters and the monster fight scenes?
2. Does it give the monsters a decent backstory and mythological lore?
3. Does it pay suitable homage to the original movies?
4. Does it have the right number of obscure monsters, arbitrarily added to the canon, as if we know all along who and what they are supposed to be?
5. Do you learn something about how the film-producing country views its own science and bureaucracy?
6. Perhaps YIMBY will come to Boston after all.
Mothra steals the show, A- I say, don’t @ me on this one. The Japanese movie Shin Godzilla, which appeared about two years ago, is pretty good too, especially on #5.