Weekend Reads: Dune, The Green Knight, The Far Side, Libertarians
Weekend Reads: Dune, The Green Knight, The Far Side, Libertarians
Recommended weekend reading material for September 25, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Denis Villeneuve’s big screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (aka, my most anticipated movie of 2021) finally arrives in theaters (and HBO Max) in October. In many ways, it feels like the culmination of a rather difficult book-to-screen history.
Like most fans of the novel Dune, I await with great anticipation the forthcoming film version directed by Denis Villeneuve. Some have asked “Does Dune need yet another film adaptation?” and there is reason for answering in the negative, though not the reasons that might readily be offered. Each incarnation of Dune, be it big screen or small, has proven to be highly polarizing.
Related: Villeneuve’s Dune had its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival; read my collection of critics’ reviews.
Steven D. Greydanus is one of my favorite film critics, so naturally I’m going to recommend his in-depth and insightful review of David Lowery’s The Green Knight.
This textual tension between the events we see and the way they’re talked about is consistent with Lowery’s history. Running through his work is a curiosity about how and why stories are remembered, retold, and reshaped. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, The Old Man & the Gun, and even Pete’s Dragon aren’t just stories, but stories about stories. In that spirit, The Green Knight seeks not simply to retell or reimagine the poem’s story, but to interrogate or cross-examine the poem itself: to cast a shadow of postmodern skepticism over the original telling, and indeed all of Arthuriana, with an eye to the ideological forces that shape stories into legends and myths.
For what it’s worth, I found The Green Knight fascinating and certainly beautiful to look at, but ultimately unsatisfying. Or at least, not as satisfying as I’d sincerely hoped it would be.
Back in the early ‘80s, somebody tried to make an honest-to-goodness live-action film based on Gary Larson’s The Far Side starring John Larroquette (Night Court) and Dirk Blocker (Brooklyn Nine-Nine).
[W]hen the time finally came to assemble a stand-in cast and shoot the test photos, [writer/director Alan Rudolph] instead decided to go ahead and film some footage as a more realized proof of concept. He quickly drafted some dialogue for his actors and shot what he could for about the same cost as the stills. If he got the green light, Rudolph hoped to create a “sketch-based narrative with a loose story. Basically, an examination of everyday life in which humans, non-humans, and objects equally occupy [space] with competing bizarreness.”
I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to watch a live-action version of The Far Side. I’m pretty sure it would’ve been a trainwreck, but also a really fascinating one.
Marvel has filed a lawsuit against the creators of some of its most iconic characters (e.g., Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor) in order to hold on to their copyrights.
The complaints, which The Hollywood Reporter has obtained, come against the heirs of some late comic book geniuses including Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Gene Colan. The suits seek declaratory relief that these blockbuster characters are ineligible for copyright termination as works made for hire. If Marvel loses, Disney would have to share ownership of characters worth billions.
I hope Marvel loses this lawsuit, though I doubt they will. Despite making nearly $23 billion on these characters at the box office, Marvel has become notorious for paying peanuts to the creators of those same characters.
For decades, Hong Kong has had one of the most vibrant film industries of any nation. However, that stands to change as Chinese authorities tighten their grip in the name of national security.
China is rapidly remoulding Hong Kong in its own image after the democracy protests, and films are just the latest in a long list of targets.
On top of the new scrutiny rules, a law making its way through the legislature will expand censorship to films previously given clearance as well as tightening the punishment for breaches.
This censorship apparently also applies to previously released films, meaning that films released even decades ago could be re-edited to appease China. In other words, now might be the time to start buying physical copies of your favorite Hong Kong films if you want to continue seeing them in their original, uncensored form.
Best-selling violinist Nigel Kennedy canceled an upcoming performance, claiming that the hosting radio station had prevented him from doing a Jimi Hendrix tribute.
“This is musical segregation,” [Kennedy] said. “If it was applied to people, it would be illegal. If that type of mentality is rampant in the arts, then we still haven’t fixed the problem of prejudice. This is much more serious than my feathers being a bit ruffled. Prejudice in music is completely dreadful. They’re effectively saying that Hendrix is all right in the Marquee Club, but not in the Albert Hall.”
For the last 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been our pre-eminent window into the cosmos. But that’s about to change. Meet the James Webb Space Telescope, launching this December, which will see even deeper into space — and further back into time (i.e., 250 million years after the Big Bang).
Due to its sensitive instruments, the Webb Telescope will be placed a million miles away from the Earth (or four times the distance to the Moon), which means that if it breaks, there’s no repairing it. That’s quite the gamble, given its $10 billion price tag. Hopefully, the scientific breakthroughs — and amazing images — that it brings will prove worth the risk.
A group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship with the intent of creating a libertarian utopia on the high seas. What could possibly go wrong?
Their vision was utopian, if your idea of utopia is a floating crypto-community in the Caribbean Sea. No longer was seasteading a futuristic ideal; it was, said Romundt, “an actual ship”. The Satoshi also offered a chance to marry two movements, of crypto-devotees and seasteaders, united by their desire for freedom – from convention, regulation, tax. Freedom from the state in all its forms. But converting a cruise ship into a new society proved more challenging than envisaged. The high seas, while appearing borderless and free, are, in fact, some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth. The cruise ship industry in particular is bound by intricate rules. As Romundt put it: “We were like, ‘This is just so hard.’”
Related: Some libertarians tried to create their own utopia in rural New Hampshire. And then the bears showed up.
Maybe it’s just my “Nebraska nice” personality, but ascribing much of what happens in our political and cultural discourse to sheer stupidity seems a bit… rude. However, Garret Keizer makes a compelling case for it.
More than the parade of people walking into lampposts while gawking at their phones; more than the insatiable appetite for any kind of technologically enhanced spectacle, to the extent that political conventions, big-ticket sporting events, and megachurch services are virtually indistinguishable from one another or from a Nuremberg rally in their obsessive reaching for the unreal; more than the open disdain for science; more than the oxymoronic statement “I believe in science” — I know of no more definitive expression of stupidity than proudly professing a total inability to understand an opponent’s position on a controversial issue. That a fetus is an integral part of a woman’s body and thus under her sovereign moral control, that a fetus is a form of human life entitled to certain protections, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get rid of guns, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get a gun — “I simply can’t understand how anyone can think like that.” Really? Can’t agree with it, sure. Can’t accept its basic premises, fine. But can’t understand it? And yet I catch myself saying this all the time, and what is more, I think I might be telling the truth. Because after a while the refusal to understand becomes the inability to understand. Chronic stupidity is not the result of injury or genetics; it’s a learned behavior. We acquire it like a microwave or a suntan.
From the Blog
Around this time last year, I was celebrating the 30th anniversary of Cocteau Twins’ magical, enchanting Heaven or Las Vegas.
Heaven or Las Vegas is one of those rare albums that I can describe as “otherworldly” and not feel hyperbolic doing so — not in the slightest. There are aspects of Fraser’s coo and Guthrie’s guitar cascades that simply do not sound like they were made by humans, or at least humans on this particular plane of existence. But the wondrous thing is that sense does nothing to diminish the album’s beauty or emotional effect. Rather, I believe the otherworldliness that the trio tapped into — however you want to try and explain it — is what ultimately allows Heaven or Las Vegas to be the affecting and sublime album that it is.
Related: I also created a subscriber-exclusive playlist of artists influenced by Cocteau Twins’ heavenly sounds.
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