Category: Music
What to Watch
A House of Dynamite (Netflix) is an expertly crafted political thriller about living 18 minutes from nuclear annihilation. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it shares thematic DNA with two of her previous films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. (Bigelow also directed the cult classic Point Break and the underrated Strange Days). The film tightens the tension in the first 18 minutes, releases it just enough to breathe, then resets and winds you up again—and then again. There is no climax. That frustrates some viewers, but the ending makes the point: the film is fiction but we are the ones living in a house of dynamite. Nuclear war is underrated as a problem–see previous MR posts. The film is technically and politically well researched, which is one reason the Pentagon is trying to pushback on some figures. If HOD is to be charged with a lack of realism, it’s in the competency of the within 18-minute response (although there are some excellent phone scenes.)
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t a conventional rock biopic. It focuses on the making of Nebraska, Springsteen’s bleakest and most intimate album—a solo acoustic recorded at his home in New Jersey on a cassette. Nebraska’s songs portray not the merely unlucky, but the damned: people who drag others down with them.
I saw her standing on her front lawn
Just a-twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir
And ten innocent people died…I can’t say that I’m sorry
For the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir
Me and her, we had us some fun
Springsteen was depressed at the time. The film has three love stories, the first and least important is between Springsteen and his then girlfriend. The second is Springsteen’s relationship with his troubled father. The third is with his manager, Jon Landau. We should all be so lucky to have someone who loves us as much as Landau loved Springsteen.
Jeremy Allen White, as Springsteen, gives a strong performance; in some shots he looks uncannily like him. He sings most of the songs himself and excels on the Nebraska material, though he can’t match Springsteen’s power and electricity on the brief E Street Band sequences. Jeremy Strong is excellent as Landau.
I liked Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it doesn’t demand a big screen, you can watch at home.
It’s not a movie, but for my money Wings for Wheels: The Making of “Born to Run”, included with the 30th-anniversary edition of BTR, remains the definitive portrait of Springsteen at work. It shows Springsteen driving the E Street Band through take after take, unrelenting and exhausting, in pursuit of the sound in his head—a great study in creative obsession. Pairs well with the very different process documented in Peter Jackson’s Get Back.
What should I ask Dan Wang?
Yes, I will be doing a podcast with him. Dan first became famous on the internet with his excellent Christmas letters. More recently, Dan is the author of the NYT bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Here is Dan Wang on Wikipedia, here is Dan on Twitter. I have known him for some while. So what should I ask him?
My choral music podcast with Rick Rubin
Here are ninety-seven minutes of me DJing choral music for Rick Rubin, and the two of us discuss each piece. From many different eras, from Perotin to the current day.
Excerpt from the discussion, this is me speaking:
“If you study 20th-century choral music, you will understand the century artistically and historically in very different terms. We often think of it as a secular or a secular-rising century, but so many of the top composers were deeply religious. They were drawn to religious music and ideas. You hear that most clearly in their choral work. It changes how you view all music and our own history; you will think of music, culture, and religion all tied together much more closely when you study choral music.”
Self-recommending!
Tanmay Khale on the decline in iconic songs over time (from my email)
https://x.com/wdavidmarx/status/1977162349107900770?s=46
A model that would explain this (which seems plausible to me for how judges generate these lists):
1. Come up with some metric for assessing works which is normalized such that the overall distribution is constant over time, usually by normalizing a metric that isn’t constant over time.
E.g. (a sports example) touchdowns scored by quarterback -> percentile of touchdowns scored by quarterback among currently active quarterbacks.
The metrics are less concrete for art, but I think people try to make similar adjustments in art as they do in sports (to make the distributions constant over time). The motivation that the judges would give for this is that one should assess each contribution based on how exceptional it was for its time.
2. Classing an achievement as “great” when it’s at least a certain percentile compared to whatever preceded it, by one of the metrics above. (“Oh wow, Johnson’s X was far more Y than anything preceding it, what an innovative work!”)
1. and 2. together will basically guarantee that you’ll have (by that definition) fewer great works over time; in the simple case where you’re looking for something that’s better than everything before it by some metric where the distribution is constant over time, the chance of observation n being better than everything preceding it is 1/n…
I don’t claim that judges are doing exactly this, but they only have to be doing some of this (e.g., their assessment criterion is 20% something like this) for it to lead to the behavior highlighted in the Twitter post!
D’Angelo, RIP
Only 51 years old, very sad, he was one of the modern greats…
Chinese rap music, by SKAI ISYOURGOD
Is fourteen million views a lot or a little?
Here is further information on the creator, including this article from The Economist.
My excellent Conversation with Steven Pinker
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Steven probe these dimensions of common knowledge—Schelling points, differential knowledge, benign hypocrisies like a whisky bottle in a paper bag—before testing whether rational people can actually agree (spoiler: they can’t converge on Hitchcock rankings despite Aumann’s theorem), whether liberal enlightenment will reignite and why, what stirring liberal thinkers exist under the age 55, why only a quarter of Harvard students deserve A’s, how large language models implicitly use linguistic insights while ignoring linguistic theory, his favorite track on Rubber Soul, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Surely there’s a difference between coordination and common knowledge. I think of common knowledge as an extremely recursive model that typically has an infinite number of loops. Most of the coordination that goes on in the real world is not like that. If I approach a traffic circle in Northern Virginia, I look at the other person, we trade glances. There’s a slight amount of recursion, but I doubt if it’s ever three loops. Maybe it’s one or two.
We also have to slow down our speeds precisely because there are not an infinite number of loops. We coordinate. What percentage of the coordination in the real world is like the traffic circle example or other examples, and what percentage of it is due to actual common knowledge?
PINKER: Common knowledge, in the technical sense, does involve this infinite number of arbitrarily embedded beliefs about beliefs about beliefs. Thank you for introducing the title with the three dots, dot, dot, dot, because that’s what signals that common knowledge is not just when everyone knows that everyone knows, but when everyone knows that everyone knows that and so on. The answer to your puzzle — and I devote a chapter in the book to what common knowledge — could actually consist of, and I’m a psychologist, I’m not an economist, a mathematician, a game theorist, so foremost in my mind is what’s going on in someone’s head when they have common knowledge.
You’re right. We couldn’t think through an infinite number of “I know that he knows” thoughts, and our mind starts to spin when we do three or four. Instead, common knowledge can be generated by something that is self-evident, that is conspicuous, that’s salient, that you can witness at the same time that you witness other people witnessing it and witnessing you witnessing it. That can grant common knowledge in a stroke. Now, it’s implicit common knowledge.
One way of putting it is you have reason to believe that he knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows, et cetera, even if you don’t literally believe it in the sense that that thought is consciously running through your mind. I think there’s a lot of interplay in human life between this recursive mentalizing, that is, thinking about other people thinking about other people, and the intuitive sense that something is out there, and therefore people do know that other people know it, even if you don’t have to consciously work that through.
You gave the example of norms and laws, like who yields at an intersection. The eye contact, though, is crucial because I suggest that eye contact is an instant common knowledge generator. You’re looking at the part of the person looking at the part of you, looking at the part of them. You’ve got instant granting of common knowledge by the mere fact of making eye contact, which is why it’s so potent in human interaction and often in other species as well, where eye contact can be a potent signal.
There are even species that can coordinate without literally having common knowledge. I give the example of the lowly coral, which presumably not only has no beliefs, but doesn’t even have a brain with which to have beliefs. Coral have a coordination problem. They’re stuck to the ocean floor. Their sperm have to meet another coral’s eggs and vice versa. They can’t spew eggs and sperm into the water 24/7. It would just be too metabolically expensive. What they do is they coordinate on the full moon.
On the full moon or, depending on the species, a fixed number of days after the full moon, that’s the day where they all release their gametes into the water, which can then find each other. Of course, they don’t have common knowledge in knowing that the other will know. It’s implicit in the logic of their solution to a coordination problem, namely, the public signal of the full moon, which, over evolutionary time, it’s guaranteed that each of them can sense it at the same time.
Indeed, in the case of humans, we might do things that are like coral. That is, there’s some signal that just leads us to coordinate without thinking it through. The thing about humans is that because we do have or can have recursive mentalizing, it’s not just one signal, one response, full moon, shoot your wad. There’s no limit to the number of things that we can coordinate creatively in evolutionarily novel ways by setting up new conventions that allow us to coordinate.
COWEN: I’m not doubting that we coordinate. My worry is that common knowledge models have too many knife-edge properties. Whether or not there are timing frictions, whether or not there are differential interpretations of what’s going on, whether or not there’s an infinite number of messages or just an arbitrarily large number of messages, all those can matter a lot in the model. Yet actual coordination isn’t that fragile. Isn’t the common knowledge model a bad way to figure out how coordination comes about?
And this part might please Scott Sumner:
COWEN: I don’t like most ballet, but I admit I ought to. I just don’t have the time to learn enough to appreciate it. Take Alfred Hitchcock. I would say North by Northwest, while a fine film, is really considerably below Rear Window and Vertigo. Will you agree with me on that?
PINKER: I don’t agree with you on that.
COWEN: Or you think I’m not your epistemic peer on Hitchcock films?
PINKER: Your preferences are presumably different from beliefs.
COWEN: No. Quality relative to constructed standards of the canon…
COWEN: You’re going to budge now, and you’re going to agree that I’m right. We’re not doing too well on this Aumann thing, are we?
PINKER: We aren’t.
COWEN: Because I’m going to insist North by Northwest, again, while a very good movie is clearly below the other two.
PINKER: You’re going to insist, yes.
COWEN: I’m going to insist, and I thought that you might not agree with this, but I’m still convinced that if we had enough time, I could convince you. Hearing that from me, you should accede to the judgment.
I was very pleased to have read Steven’s new book
What of American culture from the 1940s and 1950s deserves to survive?
In the comments, Elijah asks:
Would love to read a post about which movies and novels from this era do and do not deserve to survive and why.
I do not love 20th century American fiction, so maybe I am the wrong person to ask. I started with GPT-5, which gave this list of novels from those two decades. I’ve read a significant percentage of those, and would prefer:
Raymond Chandler, J.D. Salinger, Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and lots of science fiction. The I, Robot stories are from the 1940s, and the book published in 1950. A lot of the “more serious” entries on that list I feel have diminished somewhat with age.
Great Hollywood movies from that era are too numerous to name. In music there is plenty of jazz, plus Elvis, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Buddy Holly, doo wop, “the roots of rock” (includes some one hit wonders), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, the Everlies, the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, lots of country and bluegrass and blues, and many other very well known names from the 1950s. It is one of the most seminal decades for music ever. The 1940s are worse, perhaps because of the war, but still there is Rodgers and Hammerstein, lots of big band, and Woody Guthrie.
Contra Ted Gioia, much of that remains well-known to this day, though I would admit Howard Hanson and Walter Piston have fallen by the wayside. Overall, I think we are processing the American past pretty well.
The Return of the MR Podcast: In Praise of Commercial Culture
The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back with new episodes! We begin with what I think is our best episode to date. We revisit Tyler’s 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture. This is the book that put Tyler on the map as a public intellectual. Tyler and I also wrote a paper, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, exploring themes from the book. But does In Praise of Commercial Culture stand the test of time? You be the judge!
Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: Here’s a quote from the book, “Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.”
COWEN: So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding. Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible.
What ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now, it’s much more boring. It seems obvious in retrospect. The NEA did a much better job in the 1960s, right after it was founded, when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, “Let’s send some money to this person,” and then they’d just do it, basically.
TABARROK: Right, so the greatness cannot survive the mediocrity of democratic consensus.
COWEN: There are plenty of good cases where government does good things in the arts, often in the early stages of some process before it’s too politicized. I think some critics overlook that or don’t want to admit it.
TABARROK: One of the interesting things in your book was that the whole history of the NEA, this recreates itself, has recreated itself many times in the past. The salon during the French painting Renaissance, the impressionists hated the salon, right?
COWEN: Right. And had typically turned them away because the works weren’t good enough.
TABARROK: There could be rent-seeking going on, right? The artists get control. Sometimes it’s democratic politics, but sometimes it’s some clique of artists who get control and then funnel the money to their friends.
COWEN: French cinematic subsidies would more fit that latter model. It’s not so much that the French voters want to pay for those movies, but a lot of French government is controlled by elites. The elites like a certain kind of cinema. They view it as a counterweight to Hollywood, preserving French culture. The French still pay for or, indirectly by quota, subsidize a lot of films that just don’t really even get released. They end up somewhere and they just don’t have much impact flat out.
Here’s the episode. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
*The Sound of Music*
For the 60th anniversary of its release, the movie is now playing in some cinemas on a large screen. See it if you can. For a while it was the highest-grossing movie ever, and it is not hard to see why. It has spectacular visuals, music, and casting, but most of all there is a remarkable sense of life to it all. Julie Andrews dominates every scene she is in (p.s. I say the Baroness was a Nazi, or at least anti-anti-Nazi). It is also a fascinating glimpse of both life and aesthetics circa 1965. Seeing it is one of the very best things I have done in recent times.
What should I ask Cass Sunstein?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him soon. Most of all (but not exclusively) about his three recent books Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom, Manipulation: What It Is, Why It Is Bad, What To Do About It, and Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do.
So what should I ask him? Here is my previous CWT with Cass.
My very interesting Conversation with Seamus Murphy
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world’s most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria’s Boko Haram territories. Having left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women’s poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit.
Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when visiting any conflict zone, how photography has shaped perceptions of Afghanistan, why Russia reminded him of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, how the Catholic Church’s influence collapsed so suddenly in Ireland, why he left Ireland in the 1980s, what shapes Americans impression of Ireland, living part-time in Kolkata and what the future holds for that “slightly dying” but culturally vibrant city, his near-death encounters with Boko Haram in Nigeria, the visual similarities between Michigan and Russia, working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and their travels to Kosovo and Afghanistan together, his upcoming film about an Afghan family he’s documented for thirty years, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now you’re living in Kolkata mainly?
MURPHY: No. I’m living in London, some of the year in Kolkata.
COWEN: Why Kolkata?
MURPHY: My wife is Indian. She grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata, but Kolkata was her favorite. They were the years that were her most fond of years. She’s got lots of friends from Kolkata. I love the city. She was saying that if I didn’t like the city, then we wouldn’t be spending as much time in Kolkata as we do, but I do love the city.
It’s got, in many ways, everything I would look for in a city. Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better. This is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. Kolkata is extraordinary. It’s got that history. It’s got the buildings. Bengalis are fascinating. It’s got culture, fantastic food.
COWEN: The best streets in India, right?
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s my daughter’s favorite city in India.
MURPHY: Really?
COWEN: Yes.
MURPHY: What does she like about it?
COWEN: There’s a kind of noir feel to it all.
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s so compelling and so strong and just grabs you, and you feel it on every street, every block. It’s probably still the most intellectual Indian city with the best bookshops, a certain public intellectual life.
MURPHY: It’s widespread. It’s not just elite. It’s everyone. We went to a huge book fair. It’s like going to . . . I don’t know what it’s like going to, Kumbh Mela or something. It’s extraordinary.
There’s a huge tent right in the middle, and it’s for what they call little magazines. Little magazines are these very small publications run by one or two people. They’ll publish poetry. They’ll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don’t speak Bengali because I’d love to be reading this stuff. There are hundreds of these things. They survive, and people buy them. It’s not just the elite. It’s extraordinary in that way.
COWEN: Is there any significant hardship associated with living there, say a few months of the year?
MURPHY: For us, no. There’s a lot of hardship —
COWEN: No pollution?
MURPHY: Yes. The biggest pollution for me is the noise, the noise pollution.
Interesting throughout.
Why is choral music harder to appreciate?
It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music and themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music. It helps a great deal to be right there. So it occurred to me there are a few reasons why choral music is harder to appreciate than say either symphonies or chamber music:
1. Mixtures of voices do not translate onto recordings as well as do most symphony orchestra instrumental blends. For one thing, the different voices are harder to sort out. They are best understood when you are singing in the midst of the action.
2. A good deal of choral music is sung in a different language, and so most listeners do not understand the words.
3. A good deal of quality choral music has a background religious context. Most listeners have only a modest knowledge of this background context. For instance, how many people know that Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius is about purgatory, and that this was highly controversial in Elgar’s time, as it was viewed as a very Catholic concept?
3b. 6. Choral works may depend on church acoustics, or the surrounding church aura, but we go to church less often these days.
4. A lot of choral music sounds pious, and indeed may be pious. At the very least they tend to be serious. (How many comic choral pieces can you think of from the classical repertoire? Or even comic moments?) That seriousness of mood may appeal less to contemporary listeners.
5. Star vocalists drive a reasonable percentage of classical music sales. But most choral works have a strong collective element, and they may not be set up to showcase soloists. So the celebrity-driven appeal of choral forms can be relatively weak.
6. Many of the best-known choral works are quite long. That may place them at a relative disadvantage.
7. Opera arguably has grown in relative popularity, and that may be serious competition for choral works because it can serve as a substitute.
What else?
My Bach podcast with Evan Goldfine
Here is the transcript and also the link to the audio. Forty five minutes or so. Here is the YouTube. We discuss much more than Bach, full of fresh material, plus Evan knows a lot and prepares, definitely recommended. There are a few glitches in the transcript, but you should be able to figure them out.
What to Watch (or Not): Ballard, Perfect Days, Billy Joel
Ballard (Amazon Prime) — I liked Bosch, so I had high hopes for this spinoff. The core premise—a team of misfits solving cold cases—is solid enough but the writing is unimaginative and lazy. In one scene, Ballard is told she needs to get a confession. We expect clever interrogation tactics. Instead, she walks in and bluntly asks, “Did you shoot Yulia Kravetz?”
Maggie Q is charismatic but the writers don’t write for her. She’s exceptionally slim, for example, yet the show repeatedly asks us to believe she can physically overpower men twice her size. I have no problem with that in a superhero movie but it’s off putting in a show that pretends to be grounded and gritty. If you’re casting someone with that physique, write her as sharper, more cunning, more insightful—not as a female stand-in for macho Bosch.
Worst of all is the ending: a killer reveal that comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing or internal logic. The writers don’t understand the difference between a twist and a cheat. Disappointing.
Perfect Days (Hulu, Amazon) — a 2023 Wim Wenders film that won the award at Cannes for “works of artistic quality which witnesses to the power of film to reveal the mysterious depths of human beings through what concerns them, their hurts and failings as well as their hopes.” The film follows the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho, who won at Cannes for best actor) as he cleans public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. You will not be surprised to learn that the movie proceeds slowly. The toilets and the cleaning are the most interesting part of the first hour! I say this not as critique–I liked Perfect Days and the toilets really are interesting–only to illustrate the kind of movie that it is.
It helps to know the following from a useful Sean Burns review:
Komorebi is a Japanese word for the dancing shadow patterns created by sunlight shining through the rustling leaves of trees. There’s no equivalent term in English, and it’s tough to imagine any American caring enough to come up with one. But every afternoon on his lunch break, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) takes a picture of the komorebi from his favorite park bench using an old Olympus film camera. Back at his apartment, he’s got boxes and boxes of black-and-white photos of the same spot, every one of them unique. Subtle shifts of the light and swaying branches in the breeze make similar snapshots strikingly different every time. Indeed, the whole concept behind komorebi is that it can exist only in a moment, never to be repeated. “Next time is next time,” Hirayama’s fond of saying, “Now is now.”
Although I would disagree with Burns slightly because there is an English term for something related to komorebi and that is crown shyness, the phenomena where trees grow in such a way that their branches keep from touching one another creating a canopy of closeness yet also distance. Indeed, I would argue that crown shyness expresses more of what the movie is about than komorebi.
A key question that divides reviewers is whether Hirayama is happy or content. The standard interpretation is that he has found, as Davis puts it, “beauty in the routine,” stopping to smell the roses. Yes, that is one aspect, but the routine is also a narcotic for the lost. Hirayama is estranged from his family. Barkeeps like him but all his relationships are superficial. He plays a game with a “friend” he never meets—distance and disconnection are everywhere.. In two scenes he finds meaning and joy in looking after a child but in both these scenes the child’s mother quickly rips the child away. Hirayama’s work partner disappears in the second half of the film. He almost makes connections with three women but in each case, crown shyness intervenes. He takes pride in his work but is operating well below his ability. He is isolated, alone, and without someone else to share a life, he is incomplete.
There are great scenes and music in Perfect Days, including a beautiful scene in which a Japanese hostess (Sayuri Ishikawa) sings House of the Rising Sun.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO) — 52nd Street was one of my favorite albums as a youth and it was fun to revisit his career. Billy Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, was the muse for many of his early songs including Big Shot and Stiletto:
She cuts you hard, she cuts you deepShe’s got so much skillShe’s so fascinatingThat you’re still there waitingWhen she comes back for the killYou’ve been slashed in the faceYou’ve been left there to bleedYou want to run awayBut you know you’re gonna stay‘Cause she gives you what you need
She is indeed, fascinating! Wow. Even today, she comes across as formidable.
I thought a lot about genetics while watching And So It Goes. Joel’s father was a classical musician, though his only notable comment on Billy’s playing was to knock him unconscious for taking too much liberty with a piece. The father left when Billy was eight. Not much nurture. Years later, they reunite in Vienna—where Joel discovers he has a half-brother, Alexander Joel, a successful pianist and conductor.
Joel grew up poor, but his paternal grandfather had been a wealthy Jewish businessman in Germany until the Nazis forced him out. His mother, Rosalind, was also musical, but her primary inheritance may have been bipolar disorder. Joel’s mental health struggles are never explicitly named in the documentary, but the signs are everywhere: an early suicide attempt, alcoholism, repeated motorcycle and car crashes of a self-destructive nature. The emotional cycles also help explain the pattern of intense, short-lived marriages to beautiful and accomplished women—Weber, Christie Brinkley, Katie Lee, and Alexis Roderick. In his highs, he was irresistible. In his lows, unbearable. He goes to extremes.
Critics didn’t always love Joel’s music, but his catalog has become part of the American songbook. Proof of something Tyler and I often discuss, the power of simply keeping going.