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The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
One thing we read was a quote that I’ve known for years, and loved, from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said that we can only understand our life backwards, but we’re forced to live it forwards. And I think that’s the confusion we all feel, is that we always learn too late. We go through things that are completely inexplicable and mysterious. And then years later, we realize.
She suddenly starts realizing how she is building an experience of relationships, and how all the paradoxes that you see specifically in the film show how she is trapped in one role in one relationship then takes on a completely different role in the next one—maybe even the role of the other partner in the first one. You’re on different sides of the fence in certain discussions, going forward. And you become a richer person through those sometimes painful experiences, a more whole person and perhaps a more accepting person in terms of accepting others.
There’s a great book by a British writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, which came out a few years ago, called Missing Out, where he says that, in the therapy room, what he experiences with people a lot is that he realizes that people live their whole life with this big, imagined part of themselves. All the what ifs that never happened. That relationship they think they might or should have had or would have in the future, if they only broke away from the relationship they were in. Or that job they’re going to start doing one day. And it actually becomes your self-perception and your feeling of identity. And, suddenly, life has passed. And that whole imagined self was also a part of who you were, but it was unspoken or unlived. And this is life.
I thought that was an interesting notion, the negotiation between the imagined self and the real self that plays out in time. That’s a big theme that I can make several films about, but this one was specifically through the character of Julie.
I don’t really believe that we can see ourselves fully. So much is subconscious. There’s so much history and so much memory that we can’t access.
That’s the feedback we’re getting from people who’ve watched the film, is that it’s okay to be ambivalent and feel that things are not in full order. If we can add a consoling notion around that, I think we’re good.
The idea in psychology of “good enough” can be fine. Maybe there is a life where not everyone becomes that unique snowflake that we are all raised to believe that we have to be to be anything. Maybe there is a place of acceptance in a simpler life, a less turbulent life, without feeling that we’re losing the progressivity of thought or humanity in our own personal life. Maybe the exterior appearance of that success is less interesting than fulfilling it on a more intimate level, in one’s personal life. I don’t know. These are big questions, and I don’t want to come off as pretentious. But I think you’re touching on something that we indirectly have talked about a lot in making this film. Julie is this slightly idealized child from early on. She has good grades. She got into medical school. And she feels this pressure to do something really special. That is complicated for her.
what if COVID allowed people to take that step that they had been yearning for, sometimes, to say that the meritocratic society that we live in—particularly in America but also in Norway, to a large extent—where we are feeling that we are so responsible for fulfilling the utmost potential of ourselves, and we carry that alone, that that is a quite a stifling notion for a lot of people? That’s quite a heavy burden to carry: to feel that if you don’t do the greatest thing you could do, you’re a loser.
#themes#existential#introspection#films#interviews
·rogerebert.com·
The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on Working With Omar Apollo and Caetano Veloso for Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on Working With Omar Apollo and Caetano Veloso for Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
There wasn't that kind of clarity from a musical position on Queer. He threw out lots of different things that were kind of riddles to solve, but, eventually, what we decided on was leaning into Burroughs and the idea of the cut-up technique and using samplers. It felt like an organic way to tell the story musically.
Reznor: I just found some notes from a call with Luca. So I'll read [them to] you. Here was our directions: "Love could feel like dread—Stockhausen. Lee towards lover—engulfing, overwhelming, an uncompromising approach. He's a broken, lonely man—unknown reciprocation, unsure throughout, but still beautiful. I like the scale of an orchestra—bipolar. Make the score bipolar. Burroughs was like this, from Old America, but contemporary—the score should be like that. Maybe electronic element—Ayahuasca." Okay—go write a score.
the original cut was significantly longer, at least an hour longer than what's in theaters now. And a lot of what was taken out was a more surreal element that was exciting and alters the way the film feels quite a bit. When a lot of that got removed, it was hard for us to understand what the film became, because it shifted the tone of it quite a bit in certain ways.
It became disorienting at times to also quantify the impact the whole film has. You know what I mean? We're watching three-minute chunks, a week of this three-minute and then a week of that seven-minute segment, assuming it sits atop the scaffolding that got us there and leads to what's happening.
sometimes, when you start taking those pieces out, it becomes harder to understand. What you're working on is now affected because it doesn't have that stuff you know is there because you watched it, but it's not there. That's the part of filmmaking that I find tricky. We've experienced it with [David] Fincher as well on some things. To be able, as a director, to remain objective with that many moving parts, that's what feels... When people have said, “Do you ever think about directing?”—it's like, I've thought about how I know I couldn't do it. I thought about, “Well, I'd like to do it,” but it's like, the ability to be able to remain objective about so many things, that feels daunting to me. And as composers we feel like we're able to microscope in to get really close up on things.
#music#film#filmmaking#editing#directing#composing#film-scores#bts#interviews#people/Guadagnino#love#themes#writing/characterization
·gq.com·
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on Working With Omar Apollo and Caetano Veloso for Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
The Spectacular Now movie review (2013) | Roger Ebert
The Spectacular Now movie review (2013) | Roger Ebert
Now comes the place the movie was building toward all of his time. Not a “climax,” nothing really exciting, only an experience that helps explain Sutter’s life up until now, and points toward his future. He takes her along to meet his dad (Kyle Chandler). A lot of the meaning here is in long shots. Sutter says the hell with it. Insults Aimee. What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn’t use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley are so there. Being young is a solemn business when you really care about someone. Teller has a touch of John Cusack in his “Say Anything” period. Woodley is beautiful in a real person sort if way, studying him with concern, and then that warm smile. We have gone through senior year with these two. We have known them. We have been them.
When they make love the scene is handled perfectly by the director, James Ponsoldt. Neither is a virgin, neither is experienced. They perform the task seriously and with care, Aimee hands Sutter a condom and he puts in on and enters her carefully and they look solemnly into each other’s eyes. None of that wild thrashing about that embarrasses older actors, who doth protest too much.
The movie’s first hour continues on a, I dunno, realistic or naturalistic tone. It makes no point of it. It just looks at these two. They get to enjoy hanging out, and although Sutter says he has no intention of getting serious with Aimee, damned if he doesn’t ask her to the Prom. It’s not even that they fall in love; they just intensely enjoy one another’s company.
#people/ebert#films#reviews#coming-of-age#themes
·rogerebert.com·
The Spectacular Now movie review (2013) | Roger Ebert
Making 'Queer' required openness. Daniel Craig was ready
Making 'Queer' required openness. Daniel Craig was ready
“Maybe another portal is his open chest. He just goes, ‘Please come in, come in,’” says Craig. “It applies to art. It applies to everything. Letting one’s self go. If you don’t do it, how can you ever know? That tragedy of not doing that is greater than the embarrassment of doing it. We’re defined by those moments in our lives.”
“I’m really interested in the repression of others,” Guadagnino says. “I realize many, many times I go back to the theme. The idea of being so vulnerable and ready to be. He doesn’t have a sense of pride or a protection of social codes.”
Starkey, the 31-year-old “Outer Banks” actor, was met with the very different challenge of playing a character with few words on the page and a cryptic presence. He theorized that Allerton is in retreat because it’s “as if you’ve lived your whole life and never seen your own reflection, and someone puts a mirror in front of your face.” “A question I asked early on was: Is Allerton aware of the game that he’s playing? Is he aware that he may have some power over Lee, and does he like it?” says Starkey. “Luca’s answer to that was: ‘That’s a very good question.’”
#interviews#bts#themes#acting
·apnews.com·
Making 'Queer' required openness. Daniel Craig was ready
What are conference talks about? - the stream
What are conference talks about? - the stream
It's crazy how so much industry conf content is an ad these days. Ads obfuscate and conflate truth and opinion.
This is why events like Handmade Seattle or Strange Loop get so much love. They are about technology and people and values, not tools and companies.
When I write a talk, I almost always just want you to walk away thinking about the technology you create as an instrument for advancing your values, and a lens through which to view the world with those values.
if I do my job right, you won't go back and use the library I talked about, or whatever. You'll think about the values you're advancing when you build your technology, and think about the perspective it reveals to its users and audiences.
#blog#ideals#talks#themes#advice#philosophy
·stream.thesephist.com·
What are conference talks about? - the stream
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.
The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes.
The asymmetry of costs is largely due to our complex interdependency on so many systems and technologies, any one of which can cause major failures. Each piece of software depends on dozens of others, typically written by other engineering teams sometimes years earlier on the other side of the planet. Some software systems have not been properly designed to contain the damage caused by a bug or a hack of some key software dependency.
This market force has led to the current global interdependence of systems, far and wide beyond their industry and original scope. It’s why flying planes depends on software that has nothing to do with the avionics. It’s why, in our connected internet-of-things world, we can imagine a similar bad software update resulting in our cars not starting one morning or our refrigerators failing.
Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That’s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.
Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crashes cars to learn what happens to the people inside. But cars are relatively simple, and keeping people safe is straightforward. Software is different. It is diverse, is constantly changing, and has to continually adapt to novel circumstances. We can’t expect that a regulation that mandates a specific list of software crash tests would suffice. Again, security and resilience are achieved through the process by which we fail and fix, not through any specific checklist. Regulation has to codify that process.
#bureaucracy#ethics#metrics v humanities#business#trends#themes#legal/regulations#tech#security
·lawfaremedia.org·
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.
The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.
The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.
Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.
It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.
The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.
Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.
If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.
Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.
revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.
#writing#books#advice#entertainment#culture#profiles#reviews#themes#academic#liberal arts#americanism#social media#public-life
·nytimes.com·
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure. It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly. You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.
#relationships#lifestyle#themes#philosophy
·sherryning.com·
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page
Many filmmakers have interrogated the dream factory that employs them, but only David Lynch understands that to capture its insidious beauty requires rendering it a dream itself, in all of its prismatic glory. While “Mulholland Dr.” is — and is about — a dream, it feels like a disservice to the film to describe in such elemental terms.
it’s eminently possible to pull apart the surrealism in Lynch’s masterpiece to determine “how it works,” but doing so can’t ruin or even explain the film’s magic, which lies in how Lynch organizes every element at his disposal until real and unreal become indistinguishable.
their journey from A to B animates the desperate mystery at the film’s core, which revolves around personal identity and encompasses a web of taciturn mobsters, dopey hitmen, soothsaying cowboys, and ambitious filmmakers cut down at the knees.
Watts’ disarming portrayal of a wide-eyed naif evaporates the instant Betty enters a crucial audition; when it’s over, Watts and her character(s) suddenly feel unknowable and out of reach, just like movie stars.
the ugliness of the factory’s gears become readily apparent, and “Mulholland Dr.” becomes about the despair and heartbreak that comprise Hollywood’s background.
Time and again, Yang’s characters return to the feeling that something isn’t enough. A child’s presence isn’t seen as enough comfort to his comatose grandma if he can’t think of something eloquent to say. The effort spent on a massive video game project at work inevitably means not spending enough time with family (and vice versa). And the makeshift pile of memories and bonds that we acquire over the course of a lifetime — always doing our best — never feels like enough when we compare it against our Platonic fantasies of what could have been.
The finished film feels like a parting gift from an artist — already at the end of his tragically short life — who came to appreciate that a well-lived human life contains more poetry than all of the planet’s art put together.
David is unique because the love he carries for Monica quite literally allows his mommy to be real again, and in doing so it sees him become the only son humanity has left. The super robots designate him as an original because he actually knew a living person — he’s the realest boy in the whole wide world. And so the artifice of their experiment gives way to the most genuine of truths:  Love doesn’t exist in defiance of time — love is the defiance of time. And like David, the movie that Spielberg has made about him will never age a day.
#films#reviews#sci-fi#themes
·indiewire.com·
IndieWire Best movies of the 2000s - last page
Traces of Things, 2018 — Anna Ridler
Traces of Things, 2018 — Anna Ridler
Traces of Things (2018) is a video installation and series of thirty digital prints that explore what happens when history is remembered and re-remembered. Past moments in time are re-lived through the eyes of an artificial intelligence model, trained on images Ridler sourced from public and private Maltese archives, to create its own depiction of what it thinks should be included in an archive of Maltese photography. The process of how an AI recreates realities through a process of deliberating and deeming what is important echoes the selective and subjective human process of repeatedly recreating memories each time they are recalled.
Every time we remember something we are also actively recreating it. Traces of Things, a video installation and a series of thirty digital prints, explores this loop - remembering and revision - by passing through moments of history through an artificial intelligence model trained on material from a variety of public and private Maltese archives. At what point do the images change from one thing to another? At what point do they break down into nothingness?
I took photographs that showed historic Malta from a variety of sources, some primary, some second hand, some public, some private,  to create my own dataset of what the island has looked like. There are similar issues with using archives to the issues that exist with datasets: what we have deemed important enough to count and quantify means that what is recorded is never simply “what happened” and can only show sometimes a very narrow or very incomplete view
Traces of Things shows how quickly meaning can break down if only a narrow dataset exists. Human memory works by filling in the blanks, creating essentially confabulations, a type of memory error where a person creates fabricated, misinterpreted, or distorted information, often found with dementia patients. In this piece memories are mixed with inventions; inventions are modelled on memories. There is a term used often in computer science and machine learning called “overfitting” which is used when a model cannot create new imagery but constantly remembers just one thing, the link to dementia again coming through.
current technology still has the elements of transformation each time something is recalled, or played, or copied, that become encoded into it. These moments are compelling: the creation of a copy where things start to slowly transform.  In Traces of Things, boats turn into houses, houses into mountains, mountains into harbours. This power to metamorphose without real control is something that within an art context is more closely associated with work that deals with biology or nature, than the digital, which tends to be all smooth and clean. The style that comes out is ruined, decaying and decomposed - something antithetical to a certain  digital art. But at the same time, to my mind, beautiful. The link, then, to the biological processes - the neuroscience - that have inspired much of the research into artificial intelligence as memories and matter are constantly recalled and revised.
#art#ai#ml#themes
·annaridler.com·
Traces of Things, 2018 — Anna Ridler
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
When you grow up having to navigate the world with two minds, you can at least (hopefully) bask in the absurdity of it all. It also helps numb the pain.
Growing up differently and gay oftentimes made us feel alienated, lonely, and the black sheep of our families. To figure out who we really were and to learn to navigate the world in a healthy way we were forced to do a form of work that not many straight people are confronted with. The stuff that bothers straight men I know seriously makes me laugh. You can tell they've had to never do the work to search deep within themselves to find meaning and to move past unacceptance. I seriously look at being gay as a gift now. I wouldn't change it for all the money in the world because I'm proud and grateful to be who I am. I've honestly become the systemic change in my family because I've never had to follow the cookie cutter mold and I'm not afraid to speak up and voice important opinions.
The amount of self reflection one has to go through for being gay in this world is insane.
I still in my early 20s but I've changed so much backwards thinking in my family just by being myself and challenging some of their opinions. Also when straight men talk about being lonely I always just laugh and tell them I do feel lonely but I've been lonely since I was like 12 or so, atp I don't even feel lonely I've learnt how to keep myself company due to years of introspection.
Rules matter less than people think. We've already broken the grow up get married to a nice girl and have children rules that most of the world goes along with, so we tend to be more questioning when it comes to other rules
You can live your life however you want - not to societal expectations. Your partner is someone you likely truly get and gets you because they're also a guy - no mystery or gender related differences. No external expectations of marriage, or having babies / kids etc. Also no PMS, no biological clock ticking and putting deadlines in your life. And also added bonus, if you're similar size then you can share your clothes.
DavidtheMalcolm • 23h ago Oppression doesn't make us all better people. Like the narrative that feminism pushes hard is that oppression makes us kinder, nicer, more empathic than straight white men... and sometimes that's true. Sometimes there's great examples of that. But so many of us are just broken trash people who no sane person would want in their life.
#discussion#identities/lgbtq#coming-of-age#philosophy#themes
·reddit.com·
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
Tennis Explains Everything - The Atlantic
Tennis Explains Everything - The Atlantic
Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players move and where they hit the ball. It’s an ideal representation of conflict, a perfect stage for pitting one competitor against another, so it’s no wonder that the game comes to stand in for all sorts of different things off the court.
The “Battle of Sexes” match in 1973, between Billie Jean King and then-retired Bobby Riggs, has since been mythologized as a turning point for women’s sports. If the social allegory of the Ashe-Graeber match was subtextual, the one in this spectacle—which ended in a decisive victory for King over the cartoonishly chauvinistic Riggs—was glaringly explicit. At a time when women’s liberation was becoming a force that threw all sorts of conventions into question, and plenty of people were for or against the gains of the movement, seeing the debate represented by a game of tennis surely had a comforting appeal. For those with more regressive beliefs, rooting for Bobby was certainly easier than really articulating a justification for maintaining massive pay disparities between men and women, both within and outside of professional tennis.
Within their love triangle, tension arises with the dawning recognition that in a one-on-one sport, there’s always another person who doesn’t have a place on the court. Save for the night they meet, when Tashi induces Art and Patrick to kiss each other for her entertainment, the three of them rarely engage with one another at the same time: Someone is always watching from the stands, whether literally or metaphorically.
During Patrick and Tashi’s brief romance, a post-coital conversation seamlessly transitions into a discussion about Patrick’s poor performance as a pro, and eventually becomes a referendum on why their relationship doesn’t work. Confused, and trying to make sense of it all as their banter swiftly changes definitions, Patrick asks: “Are we still talking about tennis?” “We’re always talking about tennis,” Tashi replies. Frustrated, Patrick tersely retorts: “Can we not?”
As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their 1980 book,Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” In other words, we’re always talking about things in terms of other things—even if it’s not always as obvious as it is in Challengers. Metaphors are more than just a poetic device; they’re fundamental to the way language is structured.
No matter what issue is at stake, or how grand it may be, it can always be reduced to an individual’s performance on the court.
While Patrick is still dating Tashi, and Art is transparently trying to steal his best friend’s girl, Patrick playfully accuses Art of playing “percentage tennis”—a patient strategy of hitting low-risk shots and waiting for your opponent to mess up
Art asks for Tashi’s permission to retire once the season is over. Art knows that this would be the end of their professional relationship—he would no longer be able to play dutiful pupil to Tashi. But it might also be the end of whatever spark animated their love in the first place, as you can’t play “good fucking tennis” in retirement. Tashi says she will leave Art if he doesn’t beat Patrick in the final. Tired of playing, but unable to escape the game, Art curls up in his wife’s lap and cries.
#sports#interdisciplinary#films#reviews#themes#work/productivity#workflows
·archive.is·
Tennis Explains Everything - The Atlantic
@novelconcepts on I Saw the TV Glow - Tumblr
@novelconcepts on I Saw the TV Glow - Tumblr
I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying. And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic.
#reviews#films#identities/lgbtq#coming-of-age#themes#genres/horror
·tumblr.com·
@novelconcepts on I Saw the TV Glow - Tumblr
The Electrifying Ending of ‘Challengers,’ Explained
The Electrifying Ending of ‘Challengers,’ Explained
When Patrick and Tashi date as teenagers, he’s coy about whether they’ve slept together yet. Art playfully tells Patrick to mimic his serve if he and Tashi have.The bit isn’t so cute now, since it’s an admission of marital infidelity. But it’s also an expression of the men’s intimacy. Kuritzkes thought of Art and Patrick as orphans, shunted off to an elite tennis academy by their well-to-do parents, where they go through puberty together and have crushes on the same girls. The night they meet Tashi, a would-be threesome ends in the two boys making out while Tashi watches, pleased. “I think they understand each other as players better than they understand anybody else,” says Kuritzkes. “There’s a deep intimacy in that, which is the kind of intimacy you can only have with your best opponent. And they’re your best opponent because they know you the best.” As a teenage Tashi says of locking into a match with a competitor: “We went somewhere really beautiful together.”
#themes#films
·vanityfair.com·
The Electrifying Ending of ‘Challengers,’ Explained
Stop Erasing Tashi Duncan Because You Want New Internet Boyfriends
Stop Erasing Tashi Duncan Because You Want New Internet Boyfriends
Tashi Duncan is exactly what we have been missing from our screens; a selfish, messy, calculated woman who wields her intelligence and sensuality as weapons. She’s a cheater, a woman unable to see beyond her own needs, who refuses to lie even when she could save someone the heartbreak of the truth — “unlikeable” by all standards. When her golden retriever malewife of a partner Art tells her he loves her, she simply looks over and purrs “I know” in response. It is coolly dismissive and self-assured in a way that we do not usually get to see Black women behave onscreen.
Tashi Duncan is too formidable a character to be pushed around, least of all by white stans who don’t know what it means to strive beyond the approval of men. The story underneath all the tennis is about Tashi’s heartbreak, the mourning over the loss of her career and the identity it gave her and how she forges ahead anyway.
in every charged moment we see between Patrick and Art, Guadagnino makes it clear that the center of their connection is Tashi. Even the now infamous churros scene revolves almost entirely around Tashi. Patrick says that he likes seeing Art riled up, that he enjoys seeing him willing to connive and fight for something — even if that thing is his girlfriend. Even their lust for one another is moderated by her, unleashed by her. They would have stayed perfectly content meandering in suggestion if she had not forced them to confront their attraction for one another tongue-first in that bedroom scene.
Tashi Duncan is a woman so in control of herself that even in her greatest moment of heartbreak — sitting alone under a tree with an injury that has ruined her chance at doing the only thing she knows how to do — does not allow herself to break. Zendaya’s portrayal of her is glorious here. You watch the hurt, pain, grief, anger, and then finally resolute determination pass over her face as she makes her choice. She will not mope. That moment makes the woman we meet years later, who tells her husband that her love is absolutely conditional on his success as a player.
Tashi Duncan is utterly unique, a manifestation of a particular kind of female rage that makes her hard to forget or even fully hate. It’s what makes the boys so obsessed with her.
#reviews#identities/femininity#identities/race#identities/lgbtq#culture#discourse#review#themes
·teenvogue.com·
Stop Erasing Tashi Duncan Because You Want New Internet Boyfriends
Real life
Real life
Summary: "Real life happens now, in everyday tasks and interactions, rather than being something that starts in the future. The author urges the reader to be fully present in each moment and see what it has to teach, rather than always deferring true engagement with life to some later time."
Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.
Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.
We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.
But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?
You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?
You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.
#introspection#ambition#philosophy#meditation#themes
·bitsofwonder.substack.com·
Real life
The Signal and the Corrective
The Signal and the Corrective

A technical breakdown of 'narratives' and how they operate: narratives simplify issues by focusing on a main "signal" while ignoring other relevant "noise", and this affects discussions between those with opposing preferred signals. It goes into many examples across basically any kind of ideological or cultural divide.

AI summary:

  • The article explores how different people can derive opposing narratives from the same set of facts, with each viewing their interpretation as the "signal" and opposing views as "noise"
  • Key concepts:
    • Signal: The core belief or narrative someone holds as fundamentally true
    • Corrective: The moderating adjustments made to account for exceptions to the core belief
    • Figure-ground inversion: How the same reality can be interpreted in opposite ways
  • Examples of opposing narratives include:
    • Government as public service vs. government as pork distribution
    • Medical care as healing vs. medical care as harmful intervention
    • Capitalism as wealth creation vs. capitalism as exploitation
    • Nature vs. nurture in human behavior
    • Science as gradual progress vs. science as paradigm shifts
  • Communication dynamics:
    • People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
      • Discussions become abstract
      • Communication bandwidth is limited
      • Under stress or emotional pressure
      • Speaking to unfamiliar audiences
      • In hostile environments
  • Persuasion insights:
    • It's easier to add correctives to someone's existing signal than to completely change their core beliefs
    • People must feel their fundamental views are respected before accepting criticism
    • Acknowledging partial validity of opposing views is crucial for productive dialogue
  • Problems in modern discourse:
    • Online debates often lack real-world consequences
    • When there's no need for cooperation, people prefer conquest over consensus
    • Lack of real relationships reduces incentives for civility and understanding
  • The author notes that while most people hold moderate views with both signals and correctives, fundamental differences can be masked when discussing specific policies but become apparent in discussions of general principles
  • The piece maintains a thoughtful, analytical tone while acknowledging the complexity and challenges of human communication and belief systems
  • The author expresses personal examples and vulnerability in describing how they themselves react differently to criticism based on whether it comes from those who share their fundamental values
narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.
“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.” and “Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.” . . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general principles — because then it’s only about the signal.
I’ve said that when discussions get abstract and general people tend to go back to their main signals and ignore correctives, which makes participants seem further apart than they really are. The same thing happens when the communication bandwidth is low for some reason. When dealing with complex matters human communication tends not to be super efficient in the first place and if something makes subtlety extra hard — like a 140 character limit, only a few minutes to type during a bathroom break at work, little to no context or a noisy discourse environment — you’re going to fall back to simpler, more basic messages. Internal factors matter too. When you’re stressed, don’t have time to think, don’t know the person you’re talking to and don’t really care about them, when emotions are heated, when you feel attacked, when an audience is watching and you can’t look weak, or when you smell blood in the water, then you’re going to go simple, you’re going to go basic, you’re going to push in a direction rather than trying to hit a target. And whoever you’re talking to is going to do the same. You both fall back in different directions, exactly when you shouldn’t.
It makes sense to think of complex disagreements as not about single facts but about narratives made up of generalizations, abstractions and interpretations of many facts, most of which aren’t currently on the table. And the status of our favorite narratives matters to us, because they say what’s happening, who the heroes are and who the villains are, what’s matters and what doesn’t, who owes and who is owed. Most of us, when not in our very best moods, will make sure our most cherished narratives are safe before we let any others thrive.
Most people will accept that their main signals have correctives, but they will not accept that their main signals have no validity or legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to install a corrective in someone than it is to dislodge their main signal (and that might later lead to a more fundamental change of heart) — but to do that you must refrain from threatening the signal because that makes people defensive. And it’s not so hard. Listen and acknowledge that their view has greater than zero validity.
In an ideal world, any argumentation would start with laying out its own background assumptions, including stating if what it says should be taken as a corrective on top of its opposite or a complete rejection of it.
#narratives#mental models#communication#storytelling#misinfo#persuasion#difficult-convos#themes#bias#capitalism#psychology#politics#rhetoric
·everythingstudies.com·
The Signal and the Corrective
‘Talk To Me’ Filmmakers on Their Breakout Horror Hit and the Prequel They’ve Already Shot
‘Talk To Me’ Filmmakers on Their Breakout Horror Hit and the Prequel They’ve Already Shot
When kids are growing up, their moral compass isn’t formed yet. So there’s a dark side to it where you’re not really allowed to make mistakes. You’re supposed to make mistakes growing up and then learn from them. It changes who you are and helps you become a better person. But now, through everything being recorded, your mistakes can be immortalized for people to see, and kids aren’t allowed to make mistakes because that stuff can be brought up to tear them down later. So it’s a strange world that we’re living in now, and we won’t really know the effects of it till down the line.
I’d be in front of camera, and Danny would be behind. Danny would do a rough cut, I’d do a final cut, and then I’d do sound effects and music. And Danny would focus on VFX and color. So, during the process, we were more involved with those departments. I did a lot more with the sound and the music, and Danny did a lot more with the color. But on set, Danny would be the main voice communicating. If I had something like a direction that differed from what he was saying, I’d speak with him first and then we’d do a take like that. It was good having two of us, especially with scenes that had a lot more people. Danny could focus on the main, and I could look at the peripheral stuff. I feel like having a co-director is a bit of a cheat code. I can’t imagine doing it all by myself.
#interviews#filmmaking#internet#culture#themes#profiles#generations/genz
·hollywoodreporter.com·
‘Talk To Me’ Filmmakers on Their Breakout Horror Hit and the Prequel They’ve Already Shot
Kogonada’s Urban Neorealism
Kogonada’s Urban Neorealism
one might describe neorealism as a form of methodological and stylistic resistance against the standard filmmaking techniques that weigh each scene’s productivity and efficiency in carrying the linear narrative forward. Neorealism focuses on visual marginalia and gets intentionally lost in the details happening behind the protagonists or at the margins of the frame. Neorealism is slow and processual in method. It’s about what Kogonada identifies as visual lingering.
a different kind of cinema and sensibility in which shots linger and veer off to include others, in which in-between moments seem to be essential, in which time and place seem more critical than plot or story.”
These non-human persons and personalities, in fact, have the power as built structures to influence not only people’s moods but their everyday rituals and patterns of daily life. Columbus is an ongoing experiment about whether architecture and design can influence happiness, productivity, and heighted perceptions of the quality of life.
In the modernist purview, glass has symbolically been associated with purity, hygiene, transparency, fluidity, and openness.
In some vignettes, Columbus as an applied visual-architectural theory perhaps even exceeds the abilities of theory in written, academic form. Take glass as symbolic material for built modernism.
I'm wondering if there are connections to be explored between this and [[Seeing Like a State - Kindle Notes]]' view of high modernism and its role in organizing reality
Glass reveals and conceals. Glass displays and hides and symbolizes. Glass bespeaks transparency but is also disposed towards exclusion and control
#academic#architecture#neorealism#themes#critiques#films
·quod.lib.umich.edu·
Kogonada’s Urban Neorealism
‘It’s hard to be human – we’re isolated’: Kogonada on his new film, After Yang
‘It’s hard to be human – we’re isolated’: Kogonada on his new film, After Yang
A personal tragedy (he would prefer to leave the exact nature of the tragedy unspoken) “started to resensitise me. My cynicism felt embarrassing and trite in the face of actual loss and heartache. In doing so, it returned me to what I loved about cinema and the cinematic experience. It allowed me to be more honest and open.”
the low-budget drama Columbus. An instant hit at Sundance in 2017, this debut feature explored the world of architecture and matters of the heart with equal perceptiveness.
“As a film-maker, it’s about trying to find that balance between formal and emotional integrity. I happened to be moved by form: the shape of presence and absence. An empty room can break me. But it can also be cold and distant if that’s all there is. My desire is to be equally attentive to the world of emotions. When I enter a theatre, I want to be moved. I don’t want just an intellectual experience. I want to connect. I want to feel.”
for all the technologies that supposedly connect us to one another, there is a growing sense of disconnection. The struggle to truly connect with another human remains. And whatever that might mean, there is a longing for it.”
“The struggle is always that balance between what feels important to you and trying to survive in a capitalistic society, which is to say, making money. I don’t know if I can afford being indulgent. I have a family to support. I grew up working class. But I also struggle with the idea of money as an incentive.”
“In my first two films, I explored connection and disconnection in the context of family, which I imagine will always be of interest to me, but I’m eager to explore this in the context of romantic possibilities.
#culture#filmmaking#themes#profiles#films
·theguardian.com·
‘It’s hard to be human – we’re isolated’: Kogonada on his new film, After Yang
Dirt: Coping with things
Dirt: Coping with things
Coping with things is the prevailing mood in my corner of the universe. As I write this, America has just completed an election in which many people voted primarily for the idea of voting. The prevailing candidate? Less an individual than an avatar of civility and liberalism.
We are a country founded on an idea and not an identity.
Americans have a way of obscuring reality through grand symbolism and none of the accompanying semiotic rigor. As if the facade of democracy can be upheld by not looking too closely at increasingly undemocratic outcomes — our high tolerance for multiculturalism tenuously predicated on everyone struggling equally. The difference between idea and identity is both our saving grace and our downfall. Democracy: watch the gap.
The idea of the American individual, part of the national optimism that fueled the Space Race, is far less prominent than the citizen-consumer. Attaining a degree of celebrity, still a coveted means to financial stability, thrusts one into the category of “celebrity,” where image overtakes personhood.
Lifestyle, like work, is something we can only see in aggregate. Technological gains don’t relieve the pressure for ownership; they merely reinforce it.
#capitalism#politics#metrics v humanities#culture#themes#economy#govt/policy#americanism
·dirt.substack.com·
Dirt: Coping with things
Dirt: The indomitable human spirit
Dirt: The indomitable human spirit
what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.
A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism
Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.
The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.
#trends#tiktok#viral#capitalism#culture#internet#themes#plots#generations/genz
·dirt.substack.com·
Dirt: The indomitable human spirit