Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit.

Well now there’s another we hope to please by groping pathetically in the dark - the machine gods (as if I wasn’t busy enough already). I’ve got a couple fancies I’m trying to tickle, namely Spotify, Instagram, and maybe TikTok once I fully divorce myself from shame, so I thought I’d share a little bit about how things are going with my album release about a month away (pre-order here, coward).

Let’s start off with my old standby, Meta Ads.

I first used these during the pandemic and it felt like I had truly unlocked some hidden power. Previously, nobody streamed my music. Like, no one. All of a sudden I’m blasting out ads on Instagram Stories with my song accompanying a stock hiking photo for $.04 a click and watching the returns roll in like it’s Super Tuesday. This was on $5 a day budget mostly, but sometimes I upped it to $10 when I was feeling frisky (drinking). I was getting DMs, follows, people adding the songs to personal playlists and even naming their children after my track (this is my interpretation of what they told me and I’m sticking with it). It was awesome, and it was only costing me about a hundred bucks a month. Fame was imminent.

Fast forward to today and boy does this shit suck. Meta has decided ultra-specific targeting is passé so I’m no longer able to target fans of “James Taylor” directly but the obvious broader category everyone thinks of when they hear Sweet Baby James: “Rock music”. And never mind I had asked Meta to limit my ads to those under a certain age, the only people I seem to attract from these mega-broad categories (“trust me bro, the algo knows better than you”) are ancient abuelas from South America who either 1) do not truly exist or 2) think my artwork is cute. If they are the latter, I do appreciate the gesture but you’re absolutely torching my budget and your translated comments aren’t making any sense. Meta’s algo is hammered and really fucking adamant they can drive themselves home and do so without directions because home happens to be “north of here”. My advice here is to hire a professional because you’ll burn the cash you would have used to pay them learning how everything has changed since the last time you did this. And you should only invest in this if the playlist gods decide you’re worthy. Speaking of….

I underutilized playlisting in the past because I didn’t understand the game (reminds me of an old lyric: I see it’s a lie, I see it’s no good, the game I don’t play, but know I should). Only after Spotify picked up one of my songs did I realize how this all works. Playlisters who make this a career dump a bunch of money into the aforementioned Meta ecosystem to plug their playlist and charge plebes for the opportunity to be included. Getting on these entry-level playlists is the first real barrier to entry to algo-heaven. Because without an influx of a few thousand streams, Spotify has no clue what to do with your song (and again I’m reminded of another certain lyric: Everybody wants a little bit of heaven but no one is really willing to pay). Spotify ain’t pushin’ your stepped on merchandise until it knows how the clientele will respond (i.e. remain alive). So young padawan, you must pay the piper. I’m not saying pay for placements, because that is truly a scam and pointless, but you do have to pay the tastemaker toll. And there’s a lot out there: Genre-based playlists, mood-based playlists, playlists that are oddly prescriptive (“songs 2 take a hammer to ur temple”), and so on. The idea is to hit critical mass. Get on as many as you can that fit your song. Feed the beast so that it may feed you in return. But keep in mind - if you get on the wrong ones you’re gonna send the wrong signals. And if that happens, she’s definitely not climaxing the way she did with that other guy!

You can actually profit with this strategy if you have a song with popular appeal as $500 in submissions can easily net $500 if the algo decides you’re worthy. But I have to say, a lot of these songs that make the cut (i.e. get on these entry level playlists) alongside me really aren’t good at all. And I don’t want to be mean but I also know immediately when it’s an “emerging” track 95% of the time. Lackluster mix, tired progression, predictable lyrics, etc. It’s easy to say this because absolutely no one thinks this about my own tracks and I’m simply not like all the others. I’m special, I am. And yes, I know: algorithmic listening is completely soulless. But let’s get real - this is how it is for the casual listener. You dig, they consume. That’s why you’re here reading this. You’re special, you are.

This next one is really the most embarrassing one. And it’s not because I’m paying someone to review my music. Again, I’m not above paying the toll. But I asked for a technical review. I asked for you to listen, be critical, and tell me (and the world) what you think. Instead, you (of course, of course, of course) ran those lyrics though Claude and made a few tweaks to quiet your conscience and then you shipped that shit. This guy was the most expensive (likely the tell) and the fastest, which means he’s breaking the cardinal rule of contracting. Contracted work can only be 2 of the 3: fast, cheap, and good. Fast and expensive and not good? That doesn’t add up, brother. What’s even more rotten in Denmark is either a paranoid machination of my own feeble consciousness (not likely) or a true glimpse into the future where a writer uploads his lyrics to the AI whereupon the AI registers the words as an original work, forms an opinion on that work and then disseminates that opinion to anyone else who references said work until it finds reason to change its mind. In other words, are you fucking recording right now, bro? Because I’ve heard this analysis before.

Another potential partner I’ve been watching with puzzled amusement is Spotify itself, who seems desperate to increase revenue streams by offering a direct route onto their streaming autobahn. First there’s Discovery Mode, which is the equivalent of throwing in the towel. Done everything you can to get some traction? Might as well tell Spotify to take the governor off the ol’ jalopy and let her run full-speed into the sunset. They’ll give you just enough gas money to get there too.

The other hustle they have going is the Showcase campaign. Big Mama Spotify only lets you pay them hundreds of dollars for this special campaign (you need a minimum listener count) after you invest equal sums earning the option to do so. Honestly, that’s some pretty slick shit. No one forced me to give them more money. I did it under my own volition. What’s that you ask? What exactly does this campaign do? No clue, but we'll be doing a post mortem - thanks for asking.

This leads me to my final frontier, Substack (in particular, “musicstack”). Throughout the initial stages of marketing the record, I kept asking myself where the hell the music enthusiasts were. I know TikTok has a bunch, but there is no practical way to access information there without getting sucked and fucked at the cortex pleasure palace, so I largely abstain. I’ve always preferred to read than watch (which means I get my rocks off at X), but I’ve been slowly pulled towards Substack as the STI rate has started ripping over there.

Jokes aside, I truly do wish to cultivate the nobler aspects of my nature, so I intend to stay a while. I also fully intend to bring my wares to the market and humbly lay them at the feet of those who listen to a lot more music than I do. But I’ll do it in a cool, unassuming way. And I’ll try to give back as best I can, even if I never end up “finding” that elusive, fleeting, infuriating little spot.

I wrote most of this album while living in the East Village. And every day I walked by the Joe Strummer mural at Ave A and 7th and read what Joe wanted me to know: “the future is unwritten”. I’m hoping this future of AI will saturate these social monopolies so fully we’ll be forced to return to what I’ve stumbled upon here on musicstack - small, engaged communities of enthusiasts whose passion diminishes the existential threat of the future into the simplicity of a melody. That is the power of music, and that’s why I make it.

P.S. I sincerely do hope you will listen to my album.

• Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

• A Day In The Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)

• The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

• Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

• The Rules Of The Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

• His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1939)

• Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

• The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)

• The Shop Around The Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

• Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

• Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

• To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

• The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

It’s been too long for me to say much of value. But there was a stark difference between the films of Renoir and Hawkes as we approached the Second World War. While Renoir broods over the last war and the future of Europe, Hawks relishes in slaking America’s thirst for entertainment. Renoir is blowing smoke rings into the void while Hawks can’t seem to light his cigarette lest he stop moving.

Mizoguchi’s complete lack of closeups kept the entire film at a distance. It was, for the first hour or so, a slog. But then it evolved into a rewarding prodigal son epic.

Lubitsch hasn’t missed. Shop Around The Corner was incredibly charming and, dare I say, a completely ignored Christmas classic. To Be Or Not To Be was razor sharp and almost certainly influenced Inglorious Basterds. He is the perfect mix of old and new world.

Sullivan’s Travels seemed strangely modern in a Hollywood sort of way. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I was completely taken by Veronica Lake’s autistic charm.

There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said about Welles’s films. Melodramatic, high-stakes, capital-A American storytelling. But here’s my take: Orson Welles is a Randian figure. They are two sides of the same megalomanic horseshoe. I don’t care if they were “politically opposed”, they have much more in common than either would ever dare to admit. They see with the same eyes.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (in Technicolor!) was visually stunning. I don’t think we can even make films that look like that anymore. This is fitting, because the film is a slow wave goodbye to an era that will never return. A poignant meditation on the passage of time that has been poorly served by its name.

Like Vampyr, there is something vaguely unsettling about the entire thing. Many characters die, but they die in ways that are simple, like being thrown off a log that’s high above a murky body of water. This is not some modern action flick where characters are seemingly invincible, so you’re inevitably drawn much deeper into the action. And they’re not afraid to kill randos, either.

Like Propeller guy or Toilet guy, innocent bystander deaths always evoke a visceral reaction. It reminds us we are eternally vulnerable in a world that can be randomly cruel in all sorts of horrible ways. In Kong, the cruelty is best represented by a woman sleeping in her apartment. Because she’s not the hot blonde Kong is naturally selecting for but rather a less remarkable woman, she is dropped to her death by the brutal, callous Kong. Any sympathy we may have had for the formerly imprisoned beast instantly disappears. The ape must die!

This scene, along with a few other death scenes, were removed from the film during the Hays code era, effectively neutering the horror element. I can’t imagine the film without them. It certainly wouldn’t be as scary and might even fail to transcend the dated effects, leaving us with a slightly goofy looking ape who miraculously avoids killing innocents. In such a world, we might even start to feel sorry for the ape. Hey, are we the baddies?

This seems to be the folly of piecemeal censorship – that we’ll still “get the idea” without the more explicit parts. If you’re looking to censor something, just censor the whole thing by banning it. Not only is it way cooler for the thing being censored, we won’t unintentionally reinforce actually dangerous ideas like nature is a purely benevolent force and violence can’t actually hurt you.

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In a stunning display of actual human behavior (as opposed to the overly serious caricatures we often get in Soviet cinema), one of the men fakes an illness so he can skip out on communal work and further his individual romantic pursuits. When his betrayal is uncovered, I was fully expecting his corpse to be swinging from the gallows. Yet his punishment is much more severe: a look of pure disenchantment on the face of his beloved as she slo-mo rips the necklace he gave her from her neck.

Soviet or American, we can all agree making your best friend work harder by pretending to be sick so you can chase the girl you’re both competing for is some bush-league shit. And despite framing it as a betrayal to the collective, Barnet seems to suggest the betrayal of the friend as the more serious transgression. Even hinting at something like this elevates the film from the tedious propaganda that preceded it.

While the public shaming is indeed a very dramatic scene, the film really feels more like a bromantic comedy. Beyond the occasional musical numbers, there’s an extended comedic gag involving the fitting of a suit which ends up being quite funny, and for a minute it’s easy to forget you’re watching Stalin-sanctioned (albeit, barely) cinema.

When the men ultimately discover the heart of the pursued woman already promised to a soldier away on duty (uhh, thanks for mentioning?), they sail into the sun singing for his safe return. If we take them at face value, they’re virtuous for not stealing a comrade’s woman. But again, Barnet is definitely hinting at a deeper truth of this classic genre. The exact phrase is escaping me – something along the lines of “brotherhood before females”? It’ll come to me.

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I did, however, find the time to see two of Jean Vigo’s films, Zero for Conduct (1933) and L’Atalante (1934). The former is a “kid’s movie”, meaning it took the perspective of children and presents the adult world as repressive, inane and dull. Naturally then, the adults are deserving of tricks, pranks, and general irreverence. I’m assuming it’s likely the first film to do this, or at least the first to do it exceptionally well, so it has quite the legacy. Think The Sandlot, Little Rascals, Home Alone, or any movie that features children harboring a comic disregard for parental authority. It comes as no surprise then the father of this genre’s father was a notorious anarchist. Ni dieu ni maitre!

The most compelling part of the film comes when the teachers try to persuade the sensitive boy (no doubt based on the director himself) to ally with them and rat on his fellow schoolmates. There’s some dramatic tension, because the other students have already been a bit standoffish towards the boy on account of his soft-ass demeanor and we as the audience are not entirely sure which way he’ll turn. He ultimately makes his allegiances known in a very public way by telling his slobbish science teacher to eat shit in front of the entire class. With their potential defector now safely on their side, the boys (there are no female students) are then free to openly scheme their revolution against the school, which they pull off successfully on the school’s most important day. The most iconic image (the majestic pillow fight being a close second) is the ending, with the children triumphantly “escaping” their school via the roof, giving us the impression they may begin flying any second. At only 49 minutes, it feels like a feature.

I was reminded of several times in my schooling years when teachers pulled me aside to ask for some kind of assistance. Usually it was something easy to oblige like making the new kid feel accepted, but the tension of being “in” with the teacher while being “in” with your peers still created alienation from both parties. In such circumstances, turning inward presents itself as the only safe harbor. If Vigo is indeed recreating scenes from his own childhood, it seems he was able to use this conflict to both cultivate his artistry and tell his teachers to fuck off.

L’Atalante is considered his better film, though it failed to capture my attention as much. Michel Simon’s character certainly did though, and his performance as a grisly sailor absolutely dominated the screen.

A tattooed and french speaking Hugh Grant giving big Zorba the Greek energy.

Essentially, a girl from a small town (Dita Parlo) marries a sailor (Jean Dasté) in a romantic fever with dreams of worldwide adventure only to find marriage harder than expected, the outside world crueler than imagined, and the grass always a bit greener than where she’s standing at any given moment. Her hothead husband seems to make everything worse with his youthful jealously and spurts of inadequacy, especially in response to the well-traveled Père (Michel Simon), who swaggers his dad bod all over the screen in a way that suggests he’s perfectly OK with you seeing him in the buff. In fact, come take a seat, he’s going to cook you onion soup with his balls out.

It’s familiar territory for men of a certain age. You’re trying to impress a girl, she’s into you on a certain level, but then she’s absolutely charmed by some guy who has something you’re absolutely incapable of offering: experience. Even worse, he’s making her laugh. These are the kind of things that drive young men to high-powered careers only to find themselves wealthy and still woefully under-experienced in anything other than making the money that was supposed to solve the problem in the first place. Vigo, who has in his twenties when he directed L’Atalante, surely knew it well: rizz is a hard currency to come by.

Apparently Dita Parlo’s performance and look inspired Madonna’s beloved children’s book Sex, which is a fun piece of trivia if you’re trying to impress a Madonna fan.

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“What would you do if you were my secretary?”

“The same thing.”

“You’re hired.”

Ernst Lubitsch, 1932. What happens when you take Oscar Wilde’s wit out of the Victorian era and put it in pre-code Hollywood where characters slyly joke about having sex for no other reason than the act itself? Box office gold! Only this gold had to be quickly buried and wasn’t dug up again until 1968, when the Hays code responsible for its absence was replaced with the MPAA rating system we use today.

It’s incredible how easily this film seems to exist with the earliest days of the talkie era. If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume it was just another smart comedy from a well-practiced genre. But this razor sharp, sexually charged dialogue really was something new to the silver screen, and 92 years later, it still feels cool.

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I’d have no idea who they were, but the caricatures were so distinct it filled me with a sense of great mystery. Who were these larger than life characters that crossed the boundary from real into cartoon life?

It spoke to a world I wasn’t yet a part of, a distinguished and sophisticated place inhabited by forbidden things awaiting my discovery.

Took me 36 years, but now I understand the image.

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To be young Allan Gray is to be stuck in a dream you can barely discern from reality, moving more slowly than you’d prefer, and with no option to run from or fight that which you encounter. Instead, you must bear witness. I will try to explain:

When you become cognizant within your own dream, and in doing so, want to end the dream, often it seems obvious to simply allow yourself to die. But to conjure your own destruction requires a supreme amount of confidence in the fact you are, indeed, dreaming. This is likely why people inebriated by large amounts of psychedelics occasionally will jump from a bridge. The line between what is real and what is not becomes so blurred they start considering options perfectly reasonable within a dream, but ill-suited to the physical realm. Like, for example, jumping off a bridge.

So how would you feel if you were certain you were dreaming and embraced your death for the sake of ending the dream, only to find death impossible and your own awareness condemned to the realm where death was preferable? I would imagine its similar to the the feeling you get watching Vampyr: The Dream of Allan Gray.

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Tragedy befell more than just the film’s characters however, as its director would die a week before its release in a car accident, robbing the world of any additional Murnau films.

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I will keep watching, I will keep watching, I will keep watching.

Mário Piexoto, 1931. Before I knew anything about this film, I was pronouncing the title “lie-might”, as if it was some kind of a construction material you would apply to your patio. I imagined this chemical taking a very long time to dry. In reality, it’s pronounced differently (lee–meech, Portugese for “limit”), but this quality of a make-believe compound is remarkably similar to that of the film itself in that there are better things to do than watch it while you wait for it to do whatever it’s supposed to do.

Critics love it because it’s experimental, avante garde, etc. They drool over the extended montage of breaking waves to celebrate a “visual poem” that eschews any kind of narrative. I’ll take their word for it that Piexoto broke some barriers, but to me, Limite is a twenty-two year old using the camera as a masturbatory aide; a promising but immature director in desperate need of an editor to forcefully remove his hand from the camera and put an end to all the gooning.

It has its place in the curriculum of silent world cinema but that is, without question, its limite.

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Francis Ford Coppola, 2024. Thrilling performances that exist within their own vacuum. Pygmalion (and other classics haphazardly injected into the screenplay) as Meisner exercise. Imaginative compositions made to look sci-fi-on-the-CW-Network cheap. Stilted dialogue in service of nothing more than the sound of it being spoken.

I share these impressions stochastically and without further development to mirror the experience of viewing the latest, and likely last, film of Francis Ford Coppola.

The film’s celebrants (and there are seemingly few) want me to believe it’s like this on purpose. That everything is supposed to be sloppy, absurd, and nonsensical. That Coppola’s vision is simply too vast to be grasped in the year 2024. I certainly understand the impulse. When I left the theater, I tried desperately to find some lens of criticism that didn’t view this film as an unmitigated disaster, and the only one that worked was it being some grand statement on the futility of dying with one’s treasure; a mad genius burning all his money to launch a million seaward harpoons on the off chance of fatally striking that awful White Whale.

Coppola clearly missed but remained fortunate enough to have caught plenty of exotic, strange looking fish in the form of memorable lines spoken by his actors. These will live on in midnight showings for years to come, received by an audience who will ritualistically shout them back at the screen a la The Room and leave the theater absolutely giddy they live in a world where the director who made The Godfather also made Megalopolis: a film they will brag to whomever will believe them was one they saw opening weekend, the one and only time it was intended to be taken seriously.

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Charles Chaplin, 1931. When I made my first music video, I wanted it to be funny. I remember sitting down at my desk and writing it out frame by frame, looking to maximize the amount of gags within each of the two hundred and thirty one seconds. It was, like finding the right combination of words to fit a phrase of music, an energizing and rewarding challenge; a realization that working within limitation could open more doors than it would close.

And then I consider Chaplin, at the top of his game, facing a tidal wave of change that threatens to wash away the world in which he became king, imposing an unfashionable limitation upon himself and maximizing all four thousand eight hundred and sixty seconds until he produced something that could exist, perfectly preserved under the depths of this sea change, as the most timeless film ever created. The stakes, my friends, were only slightly higher.

Homage is meant to be noticed, and thus often corny. Influence, however, hides in plain sight. When I made my music video, I had never seen a Chaplin film. Yet when I watch it back, there he is (albeit in a much less talented form). Post City Lights, Chaplin’s influence no longer hides from me.

So as I was thinking of what to say about a film that essentially serves as an epitaph to silent cinema (because pretty much everything has been said already), I considered anchoring it to the idea that “art loves limitation more than any else”. Feeling suspicious I was regurgitating something I had read long ago, I googled. To absolutely no one’s surprise, I was right. “The absence of limitation is the enemy of art” is a quote made famous by Orson Welles, director of what many believe to be the greatest film ever made. And what was his favorite film? I’ll give you one guess.

City Lights.

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Joaquin Phoenix as Joker in "The Joker"

Fritz Lang, 1931. Hard to communicate what a leap this film is. I had no idea we had entered the talkie era, so that was already a huge shift. But the inventive camera work, the superb acting of Peter Lorre, the bone-chilling story, and the little disconcerting details all made it feel like the first modern film. And it was modern in more ways than one.

I was floored watching the bloodthirsty crowd of career criminals roll their eyes at the idea of rehabilitation while angrily predicting he would be released back into society only to kill again. The delicious irony of the underworld denouncing liberal crime policies was part of it, but there was also the unsetting recognition this argument is still being had a hundred years later. I was like Leo pointing to to the TV in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. “Hey, that’s New York City!” Let’s hope it turns out a bit better than it did in Berlin.

And then there’s the ending, which essentially punts on the moral quagmire of how to treat the most evil guy in town (you know the type, he’s actively kidnapping the young children so he can rape and murder them). The ending scene (which shrank to a small window in the top right corner of my screen before it concluded because streaming classic movies on platforms like Max is often a nauseating experience) amounted to essentially “keep a close eye on the children” which is a message everyone can get behind, but doesn’t really answer the question. And I’m not someone who’s looking for art to give me answers, but it felt a little convenient to leave us without a resolution to his story. Did society deem him redeemable? Did they eliminate him? We don’t know. Protect the kids!

And I guess that’s all you can do to guard against the perpetual advent of demented perverts. Why they do what they do and how you prevent it from ever occurring in the first place is the real question, but I’m not holding my breath for an answer. And with Lang’s ending, I don’t think he was either.

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Oleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930. I didn’t feel particularly moved by this film at first, but some of the imagery (the opening death, the dancing, the funeral) has stuck with me. That’s really been my experience with Soviet films thus far. They are very impressionistic and hyper-focused on imagery. Emotions are more often than not symbolic of a group of people than they are displays of individual experience. But then again, these films are propaganda. Or at least created with a political intention, for all the predictable losers who are going to say “well, all art is political”. Yes, I know. But the director made the film to first and foremost communicate a deliberate political message, so save it.

The final scene was unfortunate (not the funeral scene, which was beautiful). The very last frame is the wife of the murdered hero locked in an embrace with her new man, but its portrayed as if she’s reuniting with her first husband in the clouds. I suppose its meant to communicate we’re living in a God-less world where the dead die and the wheat continues to grow, but I don’t understand why it had to be portrayed so…luminously. I really thought it was her reuniting with the spirit of her dead husband, but it turned out to be some new guy we’ve never seen before. And then it ends.

Now that I think of it, her entire treatment was bizarre. After her husband is murdered, she strips naked and enters an erotic frenzy, squeezing her breasts together and wincing at the ceiling by the window, suggesting the elimination of her human pleasure device has left her in the throes of sexual withdrawal. If you look at it symbolically (as I assume it’s intended), I suppose Dovzhenko is simply reminding us the soil is never not desperately searching for the seed. Maybe that’s true, but it’s just a bit collective for my tastes.

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G. W. Pabst, 1929. Here we have Louise Brooks smiling at the fiancé of the man she was just caught kissing in a storage closet. Look at that face! It’s just too good.

In this (excellent) film Brooks plays LuLu, a prostitute, in Weimar Germany. Pabst wanted us to know she’s a Jewish prostitute, as evidenced by the sizable menorah she keeps in her well-furnished apartment, but this soon-t0-be historically relevant detail is completely overshadowed by the larger theme of this film: attractive, charismatic, and uninhibited women leave destruction in their wake.

And it seemed Pabst knew exactly what he was doing by casting Brooks (who had already established quite a reputation for herself). She’s the most compelling and attractive female I’ve seen from this era. Undeniable sex appeal. Some imdb reviews have complained she’s too “fresh” looking for such a practiced hooker. Who cares! What matters is you believe beyond a doubt these men are obsessed with her, because you yourself are also obsessed. And I confess I am now also obsessed.

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Dziga Vertov, 1929. A precursor to modernity. Now everyone has a lusty, manic “kino-eye” in their pocket. And they also have an editor, too. You know the apps that create splice of life montages from your camera reel that change every two seconds? This is exactly that, expect a hundred years ago. Makes you wonder what other works of great effort will be effortlessly reproduced 100 years from now via technological advances. It also makes you wonder how many of the people featured in this film died the following decade, considering the future was portrayed as looking quite bright throughout the film (spoiler: it wasn’t).

I watched a truly silent version of this and regret it – Cinematic Orchestra did an entire soundtrack for it and it’s definitely the version to watch unless you can get the other one with the Nyman score.

Was surprised to see this listed as the number eight best film of all time according to a panel of “critics” (in this decade’s version the word is used incredibly loosely) at Sight and Sound. As I’m reading about some of these silents (especially the Soviet ones), I’m pounded over the head with how important these films are. I get it – but maybe it’s better served on a most consequential or influential list than a greatest one. Great movies change your life. And I fully recognize great movies often owe tremendous debt to what came before. A Man With A Video Camera came before, but it is not great. Sorry!

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I read this right before Biden dropped out of the race. A good portion of the book covers his first run for president in the year I was born, 1988. He was really living hard those years. Not surprised he ended up with a brain aneurysm. And not surprised he’s completely dust now. Burned both ends for a long, long time. I will admit, I do respect the grind. After reading, I’m not sure there is a more exhausting exercise than running for president. Or more shameless. Also, both Dole and Bush’s WW2 experiences are insane.

Really fun, Hunter S. Thompson type writing, but a bit too long to really recommend. And it doesn’t even cover the general election. The woven-in bios are easily the best part of the book.

Ladurie just died and someone on Twitter said this was his best book, so I picked it up. Apparently there’s a real lack of information on what the day-to-day was like for medieval peasants. But because Bishop Fournier was such a detailed notetaker when he was burning Albigensians alive during the French Inquisition, we got a real account of what these folks were up to through his records. It’s like the confessionals on reality TV. He calls them in, they spill, and then he uses it to thicken up the plot. And by thicken up the plot I mean cutting out a woman’s tongue for heresy and making people wear a yellow cross (history rhymes, as they say).

One thing that stuck with me was that body odor was considered very good, and the worse it was, the more virile you were considered. For a minute, please imagine the baseline they were nose-blind to. And then imagine what was cutting through and getting the womenfolk sprung. Also, these people were truly idle. I guess when you’re a peasant, you don’t have much to do beyond work, eat, fuck, and argue about religion. Hey, wait a minute…

This was so good, I read it in a week, which is very fast for me. Gives you a nice history of salafi jihadism and its roots in Egypt’s revolution. Doesn’t preach at all, just gives you the story and perspective. It reads like a thriller, despite the spoilers of it being a real thing that happened (crazy, right?). Still feels extremely current, and now I feel myself going down a Middle East/Antiquity rabbit hole.

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“She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life-those moments when a man shows once for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was preparation for these moments.”

LEO TOLSTOY, ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina is full of these “decisive moments of life”: Vronsky’s horse race; Levin working with the peasants; Anna reuniting with her son; The death of Lenin’s brother; Kitty’s labor; Anna’s final hours; Lenin’s revelation. These are visceral and unforgettable moments.

However it’s also full of superfluous scenes, characters, and dialogue. Is this the secret that makes Tolstoy’s world full and rich? Do these moments shine the way they do because of the slog it took to reach them?

In this way perhaps it mirrors life. And maybe that’s why, when Faulkner was asked his three favorite novels, responded, “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina”.

Also, I can’t help but notice the same thread of mania running through both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s characters. Karenina’s frenzied paranoia is the same of Raskolnokov’s. Is it a Russian thing? I think it may be.

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Started this book a few days after I returned from Beirut. A few days after that, Hamas attacked Israel. Now Israel is launching drone attacks in Beirut and trading rockets with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Despite the title, what happened in Hama, Syria in 1982 will stick with me more than anything else I read. Once you understand “Hama rules”, nothing about Israel’s response will surprise you.

The first (Lebanese) half is much better than the second (Israeli) half, only because the latter half covers the same ground that’s been covered many times before (and after). Somehow, Friedman is able to maintain a folksy optimism about the whole thing. Saw an interview with him recently – wasn’t getting a lot of optimism.

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