Weekend Reads: Hayao Miyazaki, “Ghostbusters,” U2, NFTs, Pumpkin Pie
Recommended weekend reading material for November 27, 2021.
For those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving this week, I hope you had an enjoyable time with friends and family — and got to eat some delicious food at the same time. Make yourself a turkey sandwich, dish up another slice of pumpkin pie, and enjoy this week’s newsletter.
In this in-depth overview of Hayao Miyazaki’s life and career, Ligaya Mishan explores the many contradictions that help explain why the legendary animator’s films resonate so strongly with people.
[A] filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries “not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,” as he has written; a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.
Miyazaki is currently working on his twelfth film, How Do You Live?, which is based on a novel by Yoshino Genzaburo.
Mark Allison makes the case that Wes Anderson is “cinema’s most misunderstood filmmaker.”
Despite this thematic absorption, death is unlikely to be the first thing that comes to mind when considering Anderson’s oeuvre. His distinctively affected visual style has been subject to both criticism and parody. A 2013 Saturday Night Live sketch imagined an Andersonian horror film called The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders; brimming with twee pretensions, dad-rock needle-drops and oddly detached performances. But this preoccupation with the offbeat surface of Anderson’s work underestimates his deep understanding of the human condition and the gentle empathy which pervades his filmmaking.
The new Ghostbusters movie isn’t just a bad movie, writes Drew McWeeny. It also represents “the inevitable dead end for modern fan culture.”
Now that we’ve seen two different radically different attempts and neither one of them really works, maybe it’s time to admit that chasing all of these sequels to films that are 30 or 40 years old and attempting to reproduce whatever chemical magic it was that made them special in the first place is a losing bet. Maybe there’s no good Ghostbusters sequel out there. At this point, I wish we could retire all of the Terminators and the Ghostbusters and the Men In Black. They’re all turning into Police Academy at this point, endlessly churning IP that only exists to satisfy stockholders. None of this is fun anymore, and when all of these reboots and requels culminate in a scene where the original Ghostbusters stand around a dead guy reproduced through CGI, crying, something has gone horribly, permanently wrong.
As part of Treble’s ongoing series covering U2’s career, Jeff Terich sings the praises of the bizarre, imaginative, and experimental Zooropa.
Zooropa is weird. Not just by U2 standards, but by the standards of pop music in general. Adorned with a kind of bizzaro-world image of the European flag (an animation of which also prominently played a role in the ZOO TV tour) and a crude cartoon image of a boy astronaut, Zooropa is to Europe what The Joshua Tree was to America. U2 had, for the most part, completely set aside the influence of American roots music in favor of the beats pulsing from Berlin clubs and the glitzy camp of ’90s Britain. Its most earnest moments come wrapped in tongue-in-cheek drama, its seemingly least serious harboring subtle political critiques. Like the best of U2’s albums, it seems to strive for a better world, but it guides the listener through an artificial neon playground on the search for utopia.
Here’s a fun bit of personal trivia: My very first album review was of Zooropa, written for Honor Students on Acid, a little ‘zine that I started in high school with some friends. It was a pretty positive review, as I recall; I ranked Zooropa even higher than Achtung Baby. (I still like Zooropa, but I now consider Achtung Baby the superior album.)
One of the beautiful things about pop culture is that it can help us feel less alone by telling stories that resonate with us and connecting us to a larger community. Such is the case with these Star Trek fans. (Note: This link is a sponsored post written to promote the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery. Even so, it highlights the ways that even nerdy shows like Star Trek can have a positive impact in people’s lives.)
Netflix and other streaming services are making a concerted push to acquire non-English titles that appeal to the global market. Translation is obviously a critical piece of this, but more and more translators are quitting due to the stress and low pay.
“There is no lower limit [in pay]. It goes all the way to almost zero,” said Max Deryagin, chair of the British Subtitlers’ Association and a representative of Audiovisual Translators Europe. In theory, he added: “It should be a golden moment. We have insane volumes of work.” Instead, what he sees is widespread stress and burnout as subtitle translators try to make ends meet.
This, he says, is leading the most experienced translators to leave the field for better-paid translation jobs or to switch professions entirely: “When the most experienced veteran subtitlers quit, they are quickly replaced with who? Amateurs, part-timers, students, people like that. Then, of course, that affects the quality – it becomes worse.”
The final season of The Expanse airs this December, but it looks like Amazon is already lining up another epic sci-fi series: an adaptation of the Mass Effect video game series.
Mass Effect is a massively popular RPG series created by BioWare. The sprawling sci-fi epic consists of many different alien races and civilizations reckoning with technology left behind by the ancient precursor civilization. The series consists of the core Mass Effect trilogy and a sequel series Mass Effect: Andromeda.
The original Mass Effect trilogy takes place in the 22nd century, as humanity is about to become a major player in galactic politics even as an ancient evil re-emerges to threaten the entire galaxy. The Mass Effect games are praised for their in-depth characters and epic sci-fi storytelling, which often forces players to make surprisingly complex ethical decisions. (The trilogy was also roundly criticized for its underwhelming conclusion.)
Related: The Expanse is the best sci-fi show on TV right now and I’m going to be really bummed when it’s all over.
Also (sort of) related: I just finished the first season of Apple TV’s Foundation, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s celebrated sci-fi series. It’s a very epic and ambitious series, which is both a good thing and a bad thing: read my full review.
Speaking of Foundation, it’s plausible that Apple’s series might inspire people to learn more about Isaac Asimov’s original novels, and the man who wrote them. However, they might not like all that they learn.
To read Asimov is to escape into a world where infinite progress seems tantalizingly possible. If you’re inclined to spend a lot of time with Asimov’s work, you’ll come to an appreciation of his many gifts: his wide-ranging intellect, his amiable writing style, his optimistic spirit, and the breadth of his imagination.
You’ll also, however, notice a frequently lascivious attention to his female characters. If you begin to suspect that Asimov looked at actual women that way, you’ll be troubled by interactions that the author himself reveals in his two-volume autobiography: In Memory Yet Green, published in 1979, with In Joy Still Felt following in 1980.
In his latest bit of web nostalgia, Jay Hoffmann looks at the various kid-friendly websites that emerged in the early-to-mid ‘90s, like Yahooligans! and Club Penguin.
When the tech scene turned their attention to websites for kids, they didn’t exactly know what they were doing. The boon of the dot-com bubble was mostly led by upstarts just out of college; there wasn’t much parenting experience split between them. As a result, early kids websites were offbeat, whimsical, occasionally missed the mark, and almost always entertaining.
The folks at Love Thy Nerd have put together a list of — surprise! — nerdy things they’re grateful for in 2021.
The holiday season is almost upon us, and along with that comes reflection on the year that is drawing to a close. We asked our writers to tell us about nerdy things they’re grateful for this year, and their answers remind me just what a wonderfully diverse group of nerds we have in our community! I enjoyed pulling together this list of nerdy thankfulness, and I hope reading it reminds you of the things you’re grateful for in your own life.
Several of the things listed (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons) would appear on my own “nerd gratitude” list.
It’s all too tempting to roll one’s eyes at any mention of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and NFTs, especially in light of recent debacles like a failed attempt to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. However, Casey Newton points out one potentially valid use of NFTs: disrupting the music industry.
The idea is to take the traditional record industry model, in which the label might keep 80 percent of all future royalties, and flip it to one where the artist keeps 80 percent. (Royal takes a cut of primary sales that is under 10 percent, the company said, as well as a cut of secondary sales.)
This summer, Blau tested the platform by giving away 333 NFTs representing half the streaming ownership in his new single. Those songs have now generated more than $600,000 in sales and are worth more than $6 million.
I’m all for challenging the music industry, which all too often takes advantage of smaller artists in order to fatten the bank accounts of executives and shareholders. And I like the idea of using crypto to do so. But there’s still so much uncertainty and skepticism when it comes to crypto — not to mention the environmental impact — that I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, if you really want to support your favorite musicians, keep it simple and just buy some of their music and merchandise.
Finally, pumpkin pie is an iconic part of Thanksgiving but during the Civil War, it was a controversial dish.
Each time I serve pumpkin pie, I get to share a little known slice of American history. Although meant to unify people, the 19th-century campaign to make Thanksgiving a permanent holiday was seen by prominent Southerners as a culture war. They considered it a Northern holiday intended to force New England values on the rest of the country. To them, pumpkin pie, a Yankee food, was a deviously sweet symbol of anti-slavery sentiment.
One more reason to enjoy another slice (topped with the appropriate amount of whipped cream, of course).
From the Blog
Earlier this week, the Poland-based Zoharum label announced a 25th anniversary release of vidnaObmana’s The River of Appearance. Originally released by Projekt Records, The River of Appearance is one of my favorite ambient albums of all time, so I had to write something to mark its anniversary, and explain the impact that it’s had on me over the years.
Put simply, The River of Appearance is a masterpiece of serene, contemplative ambient music for which terms like “heavenly” and “ethereal” are perfectly apt even as they fail to adequately capture its essence. I return to this album when I need refuge, be it from the torment of a migraine or illness, or from a world that feels increasingly insane. With its shimmering electronics and elegant arrangements, The River of Appearance handily provides just such a tranquil space.
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