I came across a new Twitter account that immediately caught my attention.
This image is mind-blowing.
Can’t believe my husband & I took / processed this photo. Like it’s not nasa, it’s little old us in our back yard with a telescope. 😯 pic.twitter.com/skYnMuvxiG
— Cathrin Machin Space Art (@Cathrinmachin) May 15, 2024
Below the photo, Machin links to a Youtube video by her husband, Ian, about which telescopes to buy. It was a really helpful breakdown that felt essential after seeing this image they captured. Would love to capture photos a fraction as cool as that one.
In his most recent piece for The New Yorker, he confessed as much in its opening lines.
In a cogent sense, I have spent, at this writing, about eighty-eight years preparing for Wordle. I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle.
In multiple places in the piece, you can just tell how much he respects words and their power and how he regrets not a second of his life's dedication to them. Some of my favorite takeaways from the piece were of that playful joy he found in words.
John McPhee's Order of Wordle Answers
Lottery
Luckshot
Insight
Autodidact
Buffoon
D.U.I.
The old master's rating for how quickly one gets the Wordle answer reminded me so much of those triangular wooden peg games, where the goal is to leave one. My papaw had half a dozen of them in a bin at his house, and we'd always marvel at his ability to get it down to the prized single peg.
After a long list of examples of things he'd prefer not to be changed in future editions of his books published after he's died, McPhee ends the section with this passage:
My books have been proofread with exceptional care by proofreaders at FSG, by proofreaders at The New Yorker magazine, by myself, and by others. In more than a million words, there are probably fewer than ten typographical errors. Please do not fix one unless textual evidence allows you to be absolutely positive that you have found one of those ten. I warmly thank you for your attention to these words.
I love the confidence this must take to say and even more so the swaggering ability that makes it most likely unassailable.
On Great Writing Being Made, Not Born
He gave his students zany sentences that seem unlikely (if not impossible) for a right-thinking person to write down, and those are good for a laugh. But it's this collection of clunkers from a former New Yorker editor that gives me hope when I lament that my sentences just aren't quite good enough. Because even sentences that end up published in The New Yorker can't begin as indecipherable nonsense.
The late Charles Patrick Crow was an editor of nonfiction pieces at The New Yorker. He did not acquire manuscripts. They were assigned to him after they were bought. With the exceptions of fly-fishing and family, Crow had a distanced, not to say cynical, view of most aspects of this world. He kept in his wallet a little blue card that bore selected sentences from manuscripts bought by the magazine:
Very likely, if we knew the answer to this question we wouldn’t have to ask it.
Until the orchestra didn’t exist, composers didn’t write music for it, and instrumentalists didn’t form such groups because there was no music for them to perform.
Grey-haired, yet crewcut, he was clean, precise and appeared somewhat cold, just as one would expect a surgeon.
These two atolls being studied prior to returning the people that had been removed from those atolls prior to the nuclear testing.
On Final Exams and The Hardest Spelling Test
More gamification of words. I loved spelling tests (on paper) and spelling bees (the competition) when I was in school, and while I consider myself pretty good at it, I think I would wilt under the pressure of McPhee's test to his students. How many could you spell correctly? (The really brutal part is that assuredly you'd come close on many of them.)
This piece from Semafor's Max Tani on who might succeed David Remnick in that role confirmed it.
Who wouldn't love working in a job describe like this?
The hiring challenge comes in part because of the long list of qualifications leadership, staff, and readers expect from the magazine’s top editor — and in part because of the magazine’s singular role in American liberal intellectual culture, one that is currently being challenged most strenuously by The Atlantic.
In addition to serving as its head of state, the next editor will need to be an intellectual force who can synthesize both the week’s events and literature, arts, and culture. They’ll have to possess an astute editorial mind that can provide a last line of defense on some of the most famously dense and detailed (and occasionally dangerous) journalism now published in a weekly magazine.
I'm invested in the decision not just as a journalism nerd but quite literally. The New Yorker is one of the most expensive yearly subscriptions I have. Full stop. No qualifiers needed. I have only ever subscribed during the David Remnick Era, so I have high hopes for his successor.
This interview with Nieman Lab explores how reporters used AI to assist in reporting that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. These are the first Pulitzers won with the assistance of AI.
Local reporting prize winner “Missing in Chicago,” from City Bureau and Invisible Institute, trained a custom machine learning tool to comb through thousands of police misconduct files. The New York Times visual investigations desk trained a model to identify 2,000-pound bomb craters in areas marked as safe for civilians in Gaza. That story was one of several that won as part of the paper’s international reporting prize package.
The whole thing is worth a listen, but it's the second half that lodged itself in my brain. It starts with clips from a pretty forgettable movie, The Day After Tomorrow (which, somehow, is 20 years old, apparently).
In the film, Dennis Quaid's character suggests that changes to the North Atlantic current could be to blame for massive aberrant weather events. Though I remembered the ice-age conditions that defined the majority of the film, I'd forgotten that it was supposedly caused by changes to ocean currents.
Even if the film weren't largely forgettable, I'm not sure I would have thought it was a scientifically sound theory as a story engine. But as it turns out, that part of the film, if little else, wasn't so far out there.
It was cool to learn about how AMOC takes warm water to the north and cold water to the south, and in a sense, helps regulate things as we know it. AMOC, though, is slowing down, and one of these days (nobody is sure when, though the episode says the consensus seems to be it's a long way off) it might collapse entirely.
If it continues to slow (or collapses entirely), twin weather-related terribles happen: Colder water stays in the north, driving down temperatures there, making it a much colder place to live (possibly colder than it was before the Industrial Revolution when humans started emitting greenhouse gases, possibly like roughly 12,800 years ago when AMOC last collapsed and brought on an ice age), and warmer water stays in the south, fueling stronger storms and more rainfall near the equator. These could have dramatic effects on humans living in these areas.
Even though it's likely way in the future, I couldn't stop thinking about this possibility, these trickle-down effects that make so much sense when the science is explained and would have such massive consequences. Maybe it was the movie comparison that made it so visual in my head, but it's one of stickier podcast episodes I've listened to in a while, especially on climate issues.
This is probably every person's nightmare: You put your trust in some online service and suddenly it betrays you. Betrayal could come in the form of lax security that ends up with all your information floating around the dark web. We've all been there. But betrayal can also feel more basic: One day, the service just stops working. Some seemingly bright and shiny new app or service simply doesn't have the business strength to keep going and poof. No more access.
Now, that's not likely to happen to Google, one of the most ubiquitous names in all of tech (perhaps that distinction doesn't even matter and it's simply one of the most ubiquitous businesses period). But that doesn't mean there's no way for it to suddenly stop working.
This WIRED story is just that: Google Docs failed a user. But not just any user. A writer.
I sometimes lose sight of just how important the Google suite of services (Docs, Slides, Spreadsheets, etc.) is to people because I've been a student again in the recent past and I've worked in journalism. Both of these endeavors require lots of word documents, and Google's free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite of tools was a game-changer.
But how much do everyday folks, not writers or students, open up a Google Doc? Writing this sentence is truly a moment of "Huh, haven't really thought about that before." It's truly just the water in which I swim every single day.
And that's the same story for so many creative types. The WIRED story revolves around one main author (though there are others mentioned who are experiencing the same problem) who cannot access her own writing. More than 220,000 words spread across numerous drafts and projects, suddenly locked up from her.
The interesting thing for writers is the worry that it might have been the content of her writing that was causing Google to restrict access. And while it's a known fact that as we turn over permission to our writing as soon as we opt for that free alternative; as always, we (and our data) are the product when the services are free.
Despite knowing that, I rarely spend much time thinking about the possibility that anyone from Google would actually see what I kept in there. Now, that likelihood is increased because of AI. Perhaps human eyes are just as unlikely to ever read the contents of my Google Drive, but the writing itself could be scraped and stored away, and like the subject of the story, I could be subject to automated moderation and safeguards that deem certain content OK and others not.
The story has no definitive answers for what happened to various users who'd been locked out of their own Google Docs. The mere existence of the issue is scary for writers who 1) might not feel free to write whatever they want and 2) might lose access to the things they've written because of unseen forces.
But I remember that many of us are no safer. We all have thousands of photos of friends, family, events, pets, trips, and more saved digitally that we've trusted to some service, trusting they'll always be there. Same with the way we listen to music, with few of us bothering to buy music anymore but instead simply rent the right to play it from streamers for a monthly fee. The convenience of technology is hard to resist. Most of us don't. Most of us won't. And most of us will be fine with that; we don't actually want to resist.
But it's in reading stories like this one that I value the collection of films I have in physical form, the old vinyl records I can spin whenever I want, and longhand notes in notebooks that can't deny me access (though I could always lose them).
As promised, The Work of Art by Adam Moss was my latest book purchase.
Oh. My. God. What a beautiful book this is! Just look at it.
I can't wait to just luxuriate in its pages, with so many gorgeously rendered photos, and learn about the creative processes of 43 different artists, from writers and journalists to filmmakers, painters, and more.
I've read through the introduction so far, and I wanted to take a minute to express my love for introductions more generally.
Introductions, along with summaries on back covers and inside dust jackets to a lesser degree, are those parts of the book that hook the readers. Introductions, though, are in the author's own voice. It shows off their priorities and gives insight into what they think is worth leading with. It's a distinct talent to be able to write at a high enough level to properly introduce the entirety of the book and also be entertaining enough to make the reader want to keep going. It showcases a different skill from what's required to write the majority of the book, which prioritizes depth and getting lost in the weeds; introductions can show how well versed an author is in the subject and how he presents his case to the reader: "If you like this, you're going to love the rest of it." They're always one of my favorite parts of nonfiction books.
Moss does a great job setting the stage for the rest of the book, and it's nice how his introduction serves as a microcosm of the book's overall purpose: It outlines his creative inspiration and process. It showcased how the book would be organized, with its helpful red guiding lines to figures/drawings/photos. It benefited from Moss's magazine background, with an innovative layout that will no doubt be sustained throughout the book, and I loved its use of footnotes to articulate and memorialize some of his thoughts as he organized the book.
When I heard that author Paul Auster had died, I was taken back not to one of his books but to an episode of the Radiolab podcast.
But, for the life of me, I couldn't think of which one.
What I remembered were fragments. I was in law school, because I'd just started really listening to podcasts. So I knew the episode had to be from before 2013. Something he'd said, a story he told, something that was read, had caught my attention and put Auster's name in my mind. Something mentioned The New York Trilogy, because I knew to look for that book at McKay's, the used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my happiest of happy places while I was in school. And at some point, I remember feeling like I'd lucked out majorly when, on one of McKay's shelves, I found it in paperback.
After a lot of searching, I've come to the reluctant conclusion that this was the episode. (To be honest, this one was the first I found from the simple search strategy of entering Auster's name in the Radiolab search bar.) I just had the memory slightly different in my head.
The story that Auster tells at the end of this episode was related to the first story in The New York Trilogy, called City of Glass, but I was convinced what I remembered was about the second story called Ghosts. So I searched and I searched through old episodes of one of the first podcasts I'd ever listened with any regularity. It was great to revisit some of the stories that made me fall in love not just with the show but with the form of podcasting (although the experience wasn't great for mad-dash searching because the only place to hear those old episodes is on the show's website and you can't listen at higher playback speeds and the search function leaves something to be desired for this sort of task).
All that reluctance flowed from my unwillingness to admit that maybe I misremembered the details. That stung my pride a little bit because it was such a vivid memory, in general, and even more so the memory of finding that book among the stacks at McKay's, which was far from a certainty any time you went into the store (and was part of the appeal: book-buying by way of treasure hunt).
I listened to the final story he shares in the episode, and I try to peer back in time at that long-ago me and wonder, "Is this what so captivated you at the time?" Because I don't hear it now. The story fits well into the show's theme, and it's undeniably interesting, but I don't hear it in such a way now that makes me think I'd immediately go out and look for his book.
This sort of examination of a prior self felt in keeping with many of Auster's themes. As The New York Times obituary says:
“City of Glass” is the story of a mystery writer who is reeling from personal loss — an ever-present theme in Mr. Auster’s work — and who, through a wrong number, is mistaken for a private detective named, yes, Paul Auster. The writer begins to take on the detective’s identity, losing himself in a real-life sleuthing job of his own while descending into madness.
While my mystery was made of tamer stuff, I felt myself coming unraveled as I searched the archives of old episodes, searching for a memory that was probably incorrect in the first place, and wondering what had been going on in my life at the time to become so captivated with the story in the first place. Auster probably could have written something interesting out of that.
Shortly after I got back from Wyoming back at the end of February, I rummaged through the backpack I'd used on the trip. I was looking for a small Field Notes notebook that I'd taken on the trip with me into which I'd scribbled just a few lines while in Laramie. I found it in the front pocket of my backpack.
Then I lost it. I have no idea where it went. I'll sometimes get a wild hair to go looking for it again in the nooks and crannies of my house. I'll rifle through drawers and bins, check folded pairs of pants' back pockets, anywhere else I can think to look. As of yet, no luck.
At first, I was reluctant to start a new notebook. I was convinced I'd find the misplaced one, and I hated the idea of starting a new one when that one had so few lines scratched in it.
But eventually, I relented. I started anew with a different Field Notes.
Yesterday, a close call may have shed some light on my ongoing mystery.
I was coming up the parking garage stairs after tutoring students in the university library. Just before I reached my level, I had reason to think of my current Field Notes, tucked in my back pocket. Or so I thought.
I reached down and felt for it, but it wasn't there. I felt a mild panic; I knew I'd come to campus with it. Had I lost it in the library? Had it squeegeed out of my pocket while I was tutoring? Had I removed it and placed it in my backpack without remembering?
As these possibilities ran through my mind, I reached my level of the parking garage. This whole episode took place in the span of a few steps on the staircase. And as soon as I stepped onto the level, I saw a pop of color on the ground, near the wall.
The luckiest little pocket notebook ever.
There it was. It had fallen out of my back pocket and, luckily, nobody had picked it up (or if they had, they'd read my words and clearly realized it wasn't worth the effort they'd used to bend over in the first place).
While it sucks to think that's very likely what happened to my long-lost previous notebook, it's kind of nice to know it's not likely been misplaced around my house.
Naturally, upon retrieving this notebook, I promptly opened it and jotted down the whole episode, right there from behind the wheel of my car.
I love film. James Baldwin loved film. And I love James Baldwin.
In a recent preview for a film series at the Barbican in London, The Guardian recapped some of Baldwin's criticism but also some of his close calls with the creative side of things as well. It was inspired by his personal essay-memoir The Devil Finds Work.
He pitched slave-ship dramas to Ingmar Bergman, cast Marlon Brando as a bisexual man and wrote a Malcolm X screenplay that horrified the FBI. Why was this cinephile spurned by Hollywood?
I mean, how great does that sound? Think of all the cinema we missed out on! Ingmar Bergman's slave-ship drama?! Marlon Brando as Guillaume in Giovanni's Room?! Baldwin's take on Malcolm X?! Ahh, so much potential.
After reading the story, I pulled out my copy of The Price of the Ticket, the collection of Baldwin's nonfiction from 1948 to 1985, which contains The Devil Finds Work.
I just love how much he loved film, loved this line from the piece:
Baldwin scholar Caryl Phillips said that while literature was his biggest love, “Baldwin discovered the cinema before he discovered books, and he never forgot the impact that these early movies had upon him.”
The mountaineer's letters have been collected at Cambridge, and in honor of the 100th anniversary of his death, Magdalene College has digitized and transcribed his letters.
This past weekend, Courtney and I were in one of those moods where nothing in particular seemed compelling to watch. Couple that with an embarrassment of riches when it came to services and actual options to choose from, we landed somewhat casually on 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, the documentary following Nims Purja's attempt to summit all 14 8,000-meter peaks in just seven months.
It reminded me of a story I'd saved away for later: Letters belonging to George Mallory, the famed explorer and mountaineer who died on the mountain in 1924 trying to summit, were now digitized by his college at Cambridge.
It's an impressive collection, but the saddest has to be his last letter, dated May 27, 1924, to his wife, Ruth. He died with the letter on his person, and it was found intact when his body was discovered in the ice by climbers in 1999.
In it, he writes of both the struggle and the allure of accomplishing his goal:
Dear Girl, this has been a bad time altogether. I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes - & yet, & yet, & yet there have been a good many things to set on the other side.
He talked of his health troubles:
My one personal trouble has been a cough. It started a day or two before leaving the B.C. [Base Camp] but I thought nothing of it. In the high camp it has been the devil. Even after the day’s exercise I have described I couldn’t sleep but was distressed with bursts of coughing fit to tear one’s guts - & so headache & misery altogether; besides which of course it has a very bad effect on one’s going on the mountain.
The end of the note was just heartbreaking knowing the outcome:
The candle is burning out & I must stop.
Darling I wish you the best I can - that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this - with the best news. Which will also be the quickest. It is 50 to 1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet & do ourselves proud.
But the sweet postscript made me smile, a brief sneak peek into the loving relationship of the couple:
P.S. The parts where I boast of my part are put in to please you and not meant for other eyes. G.M.
The Ezra Klein Show recently had on Adam Moss, former editor of New York magazine, to promote his new book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. And it's quite simply the best podcast episode I've listened to in a long while.
Moss's book is all about how creative types do their work. The chat was wide-ranging, but it was one of the best articulations of what it means to be an editor and how they do the work of editing that I've ever heard. Moss said:
Any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. I think you're just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting. Or your heart is reacting. It's not just an intellectual thing; it's also very much an emotional thing.
It sounds so simple, but it's actually quite deceptive in its simplicity. It's no small thing to have reactions. Those reactions are, essentially, what define your taste, and an editor has to learn to trust those instincts. But that's easier said than done.
The entire rest of the conversation is great and a must-listen if you pursue any kind of creative endeavor. Topics include how to hire a good team of editors, the three stages of making art, the distance between what you think is good and what you can do as a creative, creative inspiration through motion, fast creatives versus slow creatives, the value of working on paper, artists' faith in themselves, and the differences between young artists and old artists.
That's essentially the premise of a recent episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, where Pablo and Dave Fleming try to uncover the science behind the tears of Caleb Williams, projected No. 1 draft pick in the upcoming NFL Draft.
This podcast, however, goes to some surprising places when it comes to men's overt show of emotions. At times, it might feel a bit icky, as many of the selected audio clips are harsh and outright hateful. The words of NFL scouts about their assessment of Williams based on his crying are far from enlightened. Even the hosts themselves, who seem generally progressive on the issue of "Can men cry?," talk at times as if they're a bit put off by the whole thing.
And they are, but not necessarily for macho reasons of disagreement with the fact that it happened in the first place. Their discomfort is our discomfort, and our discomfort is relatively engrained in our culture, where we, in general, don't want to see men cry because 1) they're not supposed to and 2) because they're not supposed to, we, the viewers, don't know how to respond. (To be fair, I think most of us prefer not to be in the presence of someone extremely upset and crying; nothing feels right in that moment.)
The episode contains an interview with an expert in the science of crying, and by her own admission, it's somewhat surprising how little research is done on something as common as crying.
The science of crying is fascinating: Crying isn't the peak of our emotional distress. That comes in the lead-up to the tears, when our breath speeds up and we feel the fight-or-flight response well up in us. But once we actually give way to tears, our body is shifting from that sympathetic response to a parasympathetic one, known as "rest and digest," as our body returns to homeostasis.
Pablo and Dave find that as the direct opposite of the criticisms of Williams: He cares too much, he's too invested, and arguably, this crying episode is evidence that he's living and dying with the result of every game. In other words, exactly what NFL scouts say they want in a draft pick.
It's not likely to be viewed that way by the wider public, but I'm glad the episode went there.
The second half of the interview turns to former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, the "Darth Vader of pro football" famously known not to emote.
They try to get to the bottom of whether he cried when the team blew its perfect season in a Super Bowl loss, and the answer seemed to be not really but maybe he had "moisture around the eyes."
More interest was how they watch a clip of him from the documentary The Two Bills, and he comes so close to crying but doesn't quite get to it. His voice quivers. His breathing gets faster. Without being able to see it, a listener would be forgiven for thinking tears were streaming down his face.
They come to the conclusion that watching him try so hard not to cry was actually worse than the not-knowing-what-to-do-with-ourselves discomfort of watching Williams curl up in his mom's arms and sob uncontrollably.
I would have found this interesting no matter what, but it's been on my mind a lot lately. With the one-year anniversary of my dad's passing earlier this month, I found myself seemingly not very far along the path to closure when it came to talking about him and his passing. I couldn't do it. Tears would come up immediately, and I would struggle so hard to keep them at bay that I would practically choke on any words I was trying to get out and air I was trying to gulp down.
I hated being seen that way. It wasn't so much the crying because I've been conditioned to believe that it's OK to cry, even for men, maybe especially for men. And I know that, intellectually.
But something else takes over in that moment, when I'm caught between wanting the catharsis that inevitably comes from a good cry and straining so hard not to be seen as crying, as needing that catharsis, and I so often revert to someone whose actions make clear his opinions on masculinity and crying aren't actually that evolved but rather sound a lot like those critics of Williams at the early part of the podcast.
I think my addled brain considers it some kind of affront to my dad's memory because it feels so distant from the man he was. Quiet, stoic, tough-as-nails military man—that was him. He never sat me down and said, "Men don't cry. Don't let me see you do it." It was absorbed though, a sort of instruction by osmosis: This is not what we do.
Maybe part of my aversion to being seen that way stems from not wanting him to see me that way. I foolishly thought he'd want to see himself reflected in me, to be as strong as he was, when again, intellectually, I feel confident that he'd want to see me, his eldest boy who wasn't really all that much like him outwardly. That insight came too late to be useful, and my struggles with not letting him see me cry made for some difficult final days where I said barely a fraction of the things I know I wanted to.
Now though, what I wouldn't give to have let go and been as vulnerable as Williams was in the arms of his family, had I known then just how close we were to the end.
Charles Darwin couldn't think of an evolutionary reason for crying, calling the act of weeping "purposeless." The crying expert has a more satisfying answer than that, but even if there weren't a evolutionary explanation for crying, the kind of wrestling I've been doing lately (that this podcast episode did, as well)—of masculinity and emotions and how to be in this big ol' world—certainly serves a purpose for me.
As media companies try to find their way in the new streaming world, customers are quick to cancel when they don't like what's being offered. But they often come back.
There was another piece on depressing (though understandable) actions of the customers of these streaming services: frequently canceling (and returning to) subscriptions.
Maybe this action sounds familiar to you out there. Beloved show that streams only on Peacock is over? Unsubscribe. Invested in a new, splashy, looks-like-a-million-bucks-because-it-is offering from AppleTV+, but found it to be a bit of a dud? Delete.
I don't really blame consumers. I don't really practice this form of cost-cutting (or protest, if you think about it), but I can see a certain value in it. Make good stuff or we will leave! Make yourself indispensable or feel our wrath!
It was notable in the piece that Netflix seems the best-insulated from this type of blowback. Is it because its fare is just that much better? Probably not, though it is incredibly diverse and seemingly endless, and if a person were only going to pick one in an attempt toward mass appeal, he could do much worse.
But it's more likely because Netflix has become our TV. I can't remember who I heard say that, but someone out there (apologies for the lack of credit) said that Netflix serves essentially the same purpose that basic cable TV, which is funny when you realize that Netflix led the charge to dismantle the cable bundle in pretty short order, especially as others raced to "catch up" to heights that honestly weren't ever achievable for them considering Netflix's massive head start, solid offerings, and generally high approval ratings from users and (sometimes) critics.
We spent so much effort to break apart the cable bundle, and now we're all juggling multiple subscriptions, some of which we don't want. Some refuse to suffer fools and simply delete it when it stops to be of value to them; others, like me, continue propping up a faltering system for fear of missing out, laziness of shutting things down, and probably, if I'm being honest, more than a little nostalgia for the cable bundle which I don't elect to pay for these days.
I worry about the future depicted in that Harper's article. I'm not a Hollywood writer, but a boy can dream, can't he? And it just feels like this practice of off again, on again from the customers can't be a good thing for the companies in the long run, and if they go away, what's left?
The Coppola family has been in the news a lot lately, and it was a sad addition to hear that the matriarch, Eleanor Coppola, died last week at 87.
In her honor, I bought a digital copy of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, her documentary of the making of her husband's famed film, Apocalypse Now.
It felt like a fitting time to watch the film (not that one is needed, as many argue her documentary might be an even better film than its subject) because of Francis Ford Coppola's recent screening of his long-awaiting film Megalopolis: The consensus opinion seemed to be the film was a bit of a stinker.
The Hollywood Reporter had everyone talking with its dispatch from the screening. The subhead to the article said the film was "too 'experimental' and 'not good' enough for the $100 million marketing spend envisioned by the legendary director."
Coppola started the film more than 40 years ago and spent a sizable fortune funding it himself. But the piece quotes studio heads and distributors saying the business side of things just make it unlike that the film gets picked up. Even with news that it's in competition at Cannes isn't enough to sway the doubters.
Watching Eleanor's first documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now reinforced the idea that I had when I'd initially read the news: It seems like a bad idea to bet against this guy.
Everything was working against him. No studio funding. Typhoons. Recasting midway through. The star having a heart attack on set. And more. But he pulled it off.
So it's wild to me that Hollywood isn't leaping at the opportunity. Maybe financially speaking it makes sense. Maybe those Hollywood execs are right: Maybe there's only money to be lost in Megalopolis. And at the end of the day, maybe that's enough.
Hollywood, though, doesn't have to be just that. Sure, sure; I get it. It's a business.
But it's also art, and there seems to be less and less of it that can honestly be given that distinction. That's what Apocalypse Now is, and so much of Eleanor's film documents the ongoing newspaper and TV news reports that have all but written off for dead both Francis and his Vietnam War epic.
Bilge Ebiri made the case for Hollywood to let the dreamers dream and give us all a chance to love or hate Megalopolis.
Eleanor captures that dreaming in Hearts of Darkness, though it doesn't always seem pleasant. She captures the neuroses of an artist; his self-doubt came through as the list of challenges grew even comically longer. He did not hide it; he spoke it directly to camera.
She captures the raw, unedited nonsense that was Marlon Brando on set, overweight and underprepared for his role as Kurtz. And she captures Francis in the moment he decides the only way to survive this is the just forge through, as he doubles down on filming seemingly incoherent ramblings from Brando, all prompted by Francis. He was hoping, praying, that he'd find the film in the edit.
And he does. That's the craziest thing. We all know he does. For his ambivalence about the ending as written in the script, the ending he'd tried to write, the ending he conjured out of thin air banking on little more than Brando's brilliance, he nails the ending.
Eleanor was right there to capture it all. She knew what an undertaking it was; she knew how it almost broke him. The New York Times obituary said it nearly broke their marriage.
She turned chaos and near-calamity into beauty. I love that.
I love how she said she wasn't sure whether Francis asked her to make the film just to keep her busy, but it worked. And I love how she ended the film, with a little quote from Francis, speaking directly into the camera:
To me, the great hope is that now these little 8-millimeter video recorders and stuff are coming out, some people who normally wouldn't make films are gonna be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father's camcorder, and for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever, and it will really become an art form.
While no doubt speaking from his own experiences working outside the studio system to finance Apocalypse Now, Francis could just as easily have been talking about novice filmmaker's like his wife. And what a beautiful film she did make.
This past weekend, I went to see Alex Garland's new film Civil War.
I really enjoyed it. It was visually stunning, it sounded like an actual war, and had some incredible performances.
What I've really enjoyed in the aftermath of seeing it are the conversations and disagreements. They have been robust and fun, and I find art that can incite this kind of conversation to be the best kind.
One of the biggest criticisms is the lack of context or world-building in the film. It was marketed somewhat vaguely, and I think many in early audiences showed up expecting a different type of movie. A movie that would take a side. A movie that had some explicit politics. A movie that you either loved or hated for very obvious reasons, namely political ones that disagreed with yours.
It wasn't really that kind of movie, though.
But what it was is up for debate. Conversations that inevitably start with that lack of context/world-building criticism without fail move on to more interesting conversations. For example, it's much remarked upon that the film's Western Forces is made up of Texas and California, two states known for their cultural alignment and agreement on most issues. When that's not explained—how they teamed up, what they were responding to, what united them—people have complained that the film isn't saying anything.
Take, for instance, the three-way discussion on The Big Picture podcast.
The pivot beyond the context/world-building criticisms touched on myriad topics. Made just for me was the discussion of the film's view of journalists, and while Garland has said his goal was to make journalists the heroes of his film, there's a lot ambiguity of what he thinks about the usefulness of journalism, the ethics of its practice, and the type of person who pursues it so relentlessly.
One of the most interesting strands of their conversation is whether Civil War is an anti-war film, and whether the concept of an anti-war film, when not a documentary to showcase the horror of war with actual participants, is even possible, since the cinematic tricks that draw audiences in manipulate us into reacting positively (in the movie-going sense) to what we see on screen.
Another good conversation was had on The Filmcast podcast.
The guys talk about the value of journalism, whether objective reporting does anything for the audience, whether it matters to history.
They also dig into expectations around the film (and how they tie in to those context/world-building criticisms): Do audiences have a point when they expect commentary on (and affirmation of) certain politics when the film is set in a 2024-like setting? They make the point of how the film could have been made in its current format but set 100 years in the future, and nobody would have a single complaint; the context/world-building matters because of the world and political climate the film was released into.
Both are great, ranging conversations that cover so many interesting topics of art and commerce, and in the moments of each podcast, the hosts all realize what a great thing it is to have a film that could stimulate such conversations.
A relatively short video from YouTube stars at Dude Perfect show what it takes to hit a World Series-winning closing pitcher.
There's no shortage of "average guy tries to hit a 90 MPH fastball" videos on YouTube. Just google "how hard is it to hit a major league pitch" and you'll find tons of articles and videos.
They'll quote a lot of the same science: It takes a 90 MPH pitch about 0.4 seconds to reach the plate; it takes a batter about 0.25 seconds to decide to swing. A lot goes into that decision: assessing the pitch's initial trajectory, analyzing its spin to identify the pitch and decide whether it will stay on that trajectory or move, and if it's going to move (they almost all move), is it going to move out of the zone or is it going to move somewhere else in the strike zone? This is just a fraction of the inputs and considerations to be made, and it's also just trying to put the bat on the ball; it doesn't take into consideration situational hitting when a player might need to hit it to one side of the field or another to help a particular runner or drive in a run.
All of that's to say: Baseball is hard.
The guys at Dude Perfect expanded the typical "average guy vs. MLB pitcher" by focusing on another part of why baseball is so hard: the stratification of difficulty and competitiveness.
Granted, the guys take it to extremes: They first put Tyler through his paces of facing off against a 12-year-old pitcher, a high school pitcher, and a college pitcher before he faces Jose Leclerc, the Texas Rangers' closer.
There are even more levels of baseball stratification, from Single A to Triple A. The talent can be different at each one.
Tyler is a natural athlete, as any viewer can discern from watching him in Dude Perfect's often silly videos. He's got a natural talent. But when he tells another Ranger that it's been 17 years since he last faced live pitching in high school, well, the odds don't seem in his favor.
The video does a great job of building up the suspense, the will he/won't he have it all. And the thing that makes it fun for the viewers is the recognition of his natural talent that makes you think maybe, just maybe, he could pull it off.
I'd love to have the opportunities he got while at the Rangers' spring training, because if anything is obvious in the video, it's that baseball is a lot of fun.
Jon Blistein
