Weekend Reads: Shoegaze, "Field of Dreams," Amazon, COVID's End, Olympics and Anime
Recommended weekend reading material for August 14, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Noah Berlatsky interviews Lovesliescrushing. Even in a niche genre like shoegaze, the Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin Duimstra have carved out their own unique sound.
Other shoegaze bands — Ride, Slowdive, Sigur Rós — took MBV’s innovations and ran with them, even soared with them. But Lovesliescrushing have always seemed to operate in a parallel universe, making dense, beatless sheets of sound so disorienting you can’t see your shoes — the band’s music is turned inward so completely that the only thing you can gaze at is the inside of your own skull.
Cortez and his collaborator, vocalist Melissa Arpin Duimstra, have been recording and performing as Lovesliescrushing for three decades now. They haven’t exactly found fame or fortune, and they haven’t maintained a steady release schedule. But in that time they’ve put out around a dozen albums, earning a reputation as shoegazer’s shoegazers, widely respected among those who love the genre (Tim Hecker is a vocal fan).
New Lovesliescrushing releases are always a big deal here at Opus HQ. Here’s a list of all of my Lovesliescrushing reviews to date. (If I had to pick a favorite album, though, it’d be 2002’s Glissceule.)
When I first saw Terminator 2 as a high school student, it instantly became my favorite movie — and I think it still holds up as one of the best summer action blockbusters of all time. But as Catecinem points out, the movie hits hard surprisingly hard these days, and for reasons that have nothing to do with robotic assassins from the future.
Having grown up with this film, there’s a lot that I don’t think I could have seen in it when I was younger, even if I had been capable of watching for such things. In the early 90s, it’s tragic that Miles Dyson gets mortally wounded in his own lab, and it’s iconically heroic that he sacrifices himself to save his life’s work. Now? I see a bunch of L.A. cops gunning down a black man who is not given the opportunity to surrender or drop his weapon. In the early 90s, it’s super gross that the attendant licks Sarah Connor while she’s strapped to her bed in an apparently catatonic state. Now? I see a paunchy rapist-of-opportunity accustomed to abusing his institutional authority. In the early 90s, it sucks that John’s foster parents are neglectful dicks. Now? I see dysfunctional representatives of a dysfunctional social services system that crushes kids, turning creative, empathetic natural leaders like John Connor into juvenile delinquents.
Edgar Wright (The World’s End, Shaun of the Dead) has posted a heartfelt tribute to Brad Allan, a stunt coordinator and martial artist — and the first non-Asian member of Jackie Chan’s legendary stunt team — who died earlier this week.
An important thing to know about Brad is that he took being a representative of Team Jackie Chan very seriously and he wanted to bring that world-class reputation to everything he worked on. He set the bar very high for himself but always found ways to clear it through tremendous hard work, an incredible skill set, and, most crucially, a great action director’s eye. This is the Brad I met in the Chateau Marmont one afternoon. I found him to be kind, humble, a little shy even, and yet incredibly determined to bring something extra to the table. That weight of responsibility to make Jackie proud was very inspiring to me and I knew that he would be uncompromising in the pursuit of excellence. I wasn’t wrong.
Allan was responsible for many amazing fight scenes and action sequences, but the one he’s probably most famous for is his boxing duel with Jackie Chan in 1999’s Gorgeous — watch it here.
Sometimes, Hollywood becomes reality: the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox traveled to the cornfields of Iowa to have an honest-to-goodness Field of Dreams baseball game, and it was a massive success.
The setting was so perfect, the game so entertaining and the demand for tickets so great that the Field of Dreams game should become a tentpole game for the sport. Like Opening Day, the All-Star Game, Home Run Derby and the Hall of Fame inductions, the Field of Dreams game should give baseball another destination date on the calendar amid the sea of games over six long months.
The Field of Dreams game was the most-watched regular season baseball game since 2005.
The popularity of superhero movies means that Marvel and DC have raked in billions of dollars, only to turn around and pay a pittance to the artists responsible for the stories on which those very movies have been based.
The “big two” comic companies — Marvel and DC — may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?
Not well, according to [Ed Brubaker] who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter.
Last week, I shared some links about Apple’s controversial decision to begin scanning iPhones for images of child sexual abuse. Shortly after the announcement, John Gruber posted his own inimitable analysis of what Apple’s doing, and the pros and cons of their approach.
In short, if these features work as described and only as described, there’s almost no cause for concern. In an interview with The New York Times for its aforelinked report on this initiative, Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s chief privacy engineer, said, “If you’re storing a collection of CSAM material, yes, this is bad for you. But for the rest of you, this is no different.” By all accounts, that is fair and true.
But the “if” in “if these features work as described and only as described” is the rub. That “if” is the whole ballgame. If you discard alarmism from critics of this initiative who clearly do not understand how the features work, you’re still left with completely legitimate concerns from trustworthy experts about how the features could be abused or misused in the future.
Robert Rackley ponders the difficulties of being both an Amazon customer and an ethical consumer.
I’m constantly asking myself: What is a conscientious consumer to do? Those who have disentangled themselves from the great ecommerce beast, please let me know the process you went through. I’m open to even ways to partially extricate myself and feel good about contributing to a healthier retail, publishing and working environment.
Controversial representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account has been suspended for a week after she shared misinformation concerning the COVID vaccines.
The suspension comes one day after Greene tweeted that the FDA “should not approve” COVID vaccines. She falsely claimed that “vaccines are failing and do not reduce the spread of the virus and neither do masks.” The tweet is no longer able to be shared and has been attached with a label indicating that it is misleading.
Here’s a quick rundown of the reasons why Greene’s tweet was misinformation.
No doubt, Greene and the rest of her ilk — like Rand Paul, who was suspended from YouTube for seven days after claiming that masks don’t help prevent the spread of COVID — will present this as yet more evidence of “Big Tech” silencing conservatives (which is, itself, misinformation).
There are certainly legitimate questions concerning the power of tech giants like Twitter, and how to best hold them accountable for the considerable power they wield. However, that doesn’t entail criticizing those companies for penalizing users who a) violate their terms and policies and b) use those companies to promote harmful and deceptive information.
In more COVID-related weirdness and nonsense, writer/director Akiva Goldsman took to Twitter to shut down anti-vaxxers turning I Am Legend into a meme about the dangers of vaccines.
The meme incorrectly asserts that zombies were created in the movie from a vaccination program gone awry, as though that would have some relevance to the real-world covid-19 pandemic which has sickened at least 203 million people globally and killed 4.3 million.
To quote another recent meme, tell me you have no idea how to watch a movie without actually telling me that you have no idea how to watch a movie.
Just one more COVID-related link. Ed Yong explains how and why we must change our assumptions concerning how the pandemic will eventually end.
Here, then, is the current pandemic dilemma: Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense. And for now, unvaccinated pockets are still large enough to sustain Delta surges, which can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, and create more chances for even worse variants to emerge. To prevent those outcomes, “we need to take advantage of every single tool we have at our disposal,” Bansal said. These should include better ventilation to reduce the spread of the virus, rapid tests to catch early infections, and forms of social support such as paid sick leave, eviction moratoriums, and free isolation sites that allow infected people to stay away from others. In states where cases are lower, such as Maine or Massachusetts, masks — the simplest, cheapest, and least disruptive of all the anti-COVID measures — might be enough.
Yong’s piece is excellent, but it’s also rather grim and dispiriting at times. Then again, when you look at places like Florida and Texas, “grim” and “dispiriting” seem like the only legitimate responses.
There were lots of amazing stories to emerge from this year’s Olympics, but one story hit especially close to home for me: Olympic athletes really like anime.
After winning bronze in the Men’s 200m, Team USA’s Noah Lyles celebrated with a Kamehameha. On Instagram, Lyles confirmed that it is, in fact, a Kamehameha and not a Street Fighter Hadouken. (China’s 400m Men’s Relay Team likewise did what was either a Kamehameha or Hadouken pose before their competition.)
In related news, Mexico’s synchronized swimmers wore outfits inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender.
From the Blog
I recently took a break from my usual sci-fi/fantasy regimen and read Ty Seidule’s excellent Robert E. Lee and Me — and I’m very glad I did.
With its blend of personal memoir and history, Robert E. Lee and Me is Seidule’s attempt to better understand and come to terms with his long-term idolization of Lee, who Seidule now — spoiler alert! — rightly considers to be a traitor who violated his oath to defend slavery. And it’s a powerful and convicting attempt at that, as Seidule reflects on his Southern childhood, college studies, and even his Army career. But more importantly, it’s a clear-eyed, searing indictment of the “Lost Cause,” i.e., the lies that have been spun to defend the South’s rebellion.
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