Week 20

Please read up on Baltimore's experiment in non-profit video rental. It's genuinely encouraging to see a functional model being tested out against corporatized streaming. Brandon Soderberg's a sharp writer, and his article has all kinds of intriguing details about a future Netflix would rather we not imagine.

Vultures eating vultures. The "BFFs for life" thing is close to obscene, but an outright food desert is even worse. This problem concerns me very much.

More lightheartedly: I crack up every time I think about the popularity of this anime about Karl Marx. But, I also quite seriously want to watch it.

The more I read of this Bordwell blogpost, the more I became convinced that he was revealing more about himself than Rosenbaum. To be sure, Rosenbaum doesn't come off so great here either, but at least his method of approaching people is in harmony with how he approaches films. If the defining trait of Rosenbaum's writing is candor, then Bordwell's seems to be an academic remove that borders on pettiness. He always seems to be removing himself from the heated debates (hence no social media presence) until it's convenient to weigh in with resounding authority. Rosenbaum spoke hastily and retreated in the same manner; Bordwell drew up a taxonomy of reasons why Rosenbaum's manner of being displeases him. I can't pretend I'm neutral in this dispute, but I do want to highlight a useful part of Bordwell's preferred framing that, in fact, shows how these two outlooks really are incommensurate. It can certainly be tiresome lobbing opinions back and forth across social networks about this or that film, but what's at stake in such a process is very precisely the ideological path of film culture, something that is not disconnected from Bordwell's enlightened formalist concerns. I believe Rosenbaum's commercial engagements in film criticism actually dovetail with his polemical approach, just as Bordwell seems to imply. Where I differ from his diagnosis is that this need not be a bad thing, and can in fact be a useful thing. Rosenbaum's made no secret of his radical politics and how it shapes him; Bordwell may cite Marx comfortably in Planet Hong Kong, but he just as often will describe market forces in mystical tones that confuse the issue at hand. It's not that it's vulgar or reactionary of him to consider economics in relation to film production. It's that this tendency reads as obscurantist when anger, ardor, and antagonism have necessary uses too. Ultimately, this may be a matter of affect more than anything. Even so, affect is derived from exactly these embedded ideologies that are expressed through critical and academic writing. I myself read both Rosenbaum and Bordwell regularly, yet I don't feel the need to cloak myself behind Bordwell's preference for proliferating modes of thought. If I had to choose one, to stop pondering all the many avenues of understanding and commit myself to just one of these two, it would be -- yes, you can probably guess -- Rosenbaum's.

Week 19

Unequal Childhoods are now the norm.

Week 18

I've been following the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge with some interest. It would seem to have a practical purpose, but then you could say the same of all these perplexing mega-projects. How many will come to fruition, and how many will be worth the cost? I can only watch from afar with a measured skepticism.

Week 17

A nice little video on Singapore's success at public housing. I'd like to see other countries learning from this.

Maybe unneeded, but a useful rebuttal to the right-wing claim that Democrats are exploiting black voters (they are, just not in the way described by conservatives).

Antonio Gramsci hates New Year's Day for good reasons. (I don't hate it myself, although I understand his objections.)

Sometimes I feel like this when I switch from reading digital articles to books. I need to slow myself down and think a little harder. It doesn't bother me much, perhaps because I read a lot of books as a kid. I can imagine digital natives having a harder time with the switch.

I was tipped off to this problem by the tankies, who counterpose fascist Ukraine to the Communist USSR. I see nothing in the linked article to disprove what I've heard.

Week 16

An engaging FACT mix from Rian Treanor.

Douglas Sirk at Universal, and how it affected his career.

Week 15