Watched: Room 999. This revisiting of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary Room 666 is often interesting and sometimes fascinating. (It must be said that not all filmmakers are especially articulate about what they do — this is evident in the original film as well.) Perhaps the comment that strikes me most forcibly is when Audrey Diwan wonders what will happen to her children’s sense of narrative when all the stories they experience are less than a minute long. And this is something to be concerned about. Many of the most important things in our lives develop over years; will people be capable of reckoning wisely with their experience if the only stories they know reach a resolution in 60 seconds? 🍿
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I wrote a lengthy, passionate evisceration of everything about that disgraceful exhibition — by which I mean both the anti-football and the anti-entertainment surrounding it — and then deleted it. There are things one has to write that one does not have to post. ⚽️
In fact, I’m reconsidering my footy fandom. Eight-five minutes in and anyone showing up now will have missed absolutely nothing. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
Update: Extra time and I am extra done. I don’t care any more. Time to watch a guitar repair video or some such.
A good many of the people who have become soccer fans in the last few weeks are probably reconsidering right about now. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
When I follow a link to X or another social network, I inevitably see people slinging abuse at one another in the comments, and think: You’re still doing this? After all these years? I left Twitter a decade ago just to avoid such sniping. I guess the people still doing it must like it. I can’t even.
Hard to think of a cooler nickname in all of history than the Finnish farmer-turned-sniper known as the White Death.
Why Am I Left-Handed? | Natalie Wolchover:
Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operati...
My hope for the World Cup final: that it also ends 6-4, with four goals for Messi and goals by six different Spaniards. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
Dear Me, England - by Ian Leslie:
To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”
The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.
About five years ago I stopped using Overcast as my podcast player because it would not play more than one show at a time. I could set up a queue, but it would not play the queue. (Many users were complaining about this at the time.) I just downloaded it again to give it a try and… It will only play one show at a time. (Many users are still complaining about this.) I really don’t want to use Apple Podcasts because it defaults to promoting crappy shows it likes rather than just letting me see my own library… but I may be stuck with it.
Revised this post to point out that the most crucial difference between Thomas Pynchon and Terrence Malick is that the former has been on The Simpsons while the latter hasn’t — but hey, Terry, it’s not too late!
WSJ:
Vibe slop happens when coders replace the hard work of designing and testing a system with the shortcut of prompting AI to whip it up … and the resulting software won’t stand the test of time. It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code — GitHub — has instituted new policies and features to combat it. […]
These systems are supposed to make senior engineers so productive that companies can lay off junior engineers, but in reality, many companies are trading near-term productivity for long-term woes. Not only does the pipeline of junior talent dry up, but residual effects include buggy software, service outages, security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt.
Finished reading (for the first time in 30 years): Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. If you’re new to McPhee, this might be the ideal place to start. It’s the book in which he perfects the narrative method he would follow for the rest of his career, and the first one in which he explores the geological themes that would later become his obsession. Nobody is better than McPhee at illuminating difficult questions by showing how real peropla engage those questions, and engage each other. 📚
“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper dep...
The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory:
This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate ...
Watched: Lumière, Le Cinéma! What an absolute delight: a series of more than 100 early (1890s) films by the Lumière brothers — each 50 seconds long — beautifully restored and commented on. Louis Lumière was an absolute genius of composition, and I could watch his tiny movies all day. 🍿
The problem with the theory of the “uni-context” is that it’s an explanation of the behavior of Extremely Online People masquerading as an account of “everyone” or “the world.”
Absolute tactical idiocy by Tuchel. 🏴-🇦🇷
Don’t park the bus, England. DO NOT DO IT. You will pay. 🏴-🇦🇷
Watched: Eno. What a wonderful documentary: a film about a person who does generative art that it itself generative. 🍿
Back cover of the forthcoming.
In my previous post I used the line “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” It’s a line I've been using for fifty years, since I heard Billy Crystal deploy it in a routine on Saturday Night Live in which he portrayed an old jazzman called Face.
Crystal’s routine was based on people he knew from his childhood, jazz musicians who came into the Commodore Music Shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan:
That’s Billy Crystal’s father Jack in the plaid shirt on the right. Larger image here.
Currently listening: Count 'Em 88, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. Can you dig it? I knew that you could. ♫
Finished reading: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. Thomson is the best living writer on the movies, but this is his worst book, by miles. He seems to be judging movies for what was done to us by TV and the internet. Dyspeptic without being insightful. 📚
Dan Cohen:
Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data...
When Oklahoma! was near the beginning of its staggeringly long Broadway run, the great Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn saw it and spoke to Richard Rodgers afterwards. Goldwyn thought it was the best show he had ever seen, brilliant and riveting from the first notes of the opening number to the very end. He had never seen anything to approach its greatness. “And,” he added, “I know what you should do next.”
Rodgers: “What?”
Goldwyn: “You should shoot yourself!”
Yesterday I stopped at the McDonald’s in Burnet, Texas, and the young man who brought me my food said “Here is your luncheon, kind sir!“