Weekend Reads (Nov 26): “Andor,” Shoegaze, Björk, AI Woes, Fake Scorsese
Recommended weekend reading for November 26, 2022. I hope you’re having a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday with your friends and loved ones.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
In his review, Walter Marsh explains how Andor became one of the year’s best TV series, Star Wars or otherwise — especially when compared to previous Star Wars series.
For better or worse, Disney’s previous experiments with live-action Star Wars TV, from The Mandalorian to Obi-Wan Kenobi, have often felt like watching lifelong fans play with their action figures in a sandpit. From a de-aged Mark Hamill to a long-awaited rematch between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, some of their biggest moments have come from weaving in beloved characters and Easter eggs while tiptoeing around the established canon of a galaxy far, far away.
We finished Andor this week, and I concur with Marsh: it starts off on a bit of a slow burn, but once it hits its stride, it never lets up.
Related: Turns out, the only thing Andor was missing was a retro ‘70s-style intro.
Along with My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Lush, Oxford’s Ride was one of the most popular and acclaimed bands of shoegaze’s first wave. Speaking recently to Bandcamp, the band reflect on their catalog and ongoing career.
In a digitized era when bands rise and fall at the mercy of algorithms and the fickle tastes of TikTok teens, the story of Ride’s early days seems almost the stuff of fairy tales. Within 12 months of forming in 1988, a band whose initial ambition, Queralt says, “was to be the biggest band” in their hometown of Oxford and hopefully get booked at “a big venue in town called the Co-Op Hall,” Ride were signed to Creation Records thereby becoming a crucial group in the legendary label’s pre-Oasis peak years; selling out shows all over the UK (a peek at their early gigography will inspire third-hand exhaustion); and putting out a series of well-received EPs, all of which made the UK Singles Chart—proving that, like one of their foundational favorite groups Sonic Youth, you could be an indie band while still achieving commercial success.
1990’s Nowhere is an absolutely fantastic album, especially on songs like “In a Different Place,” “Dreams Burn Down,” and the title track. And Ride’s more recent material, like 2018’s Tomorrow’s Shore EP, is pretty great, too.
Related: Ride’s Andy Bell answers fan questions about playing in Oasis, meeting Robert Smith, and beating Radiohead in soccer.
Over the last three decades, Björk has become one of the world’s most distinctive vocalists, whether she’s singing about motherhood, volcanoes, or in the case of her latest album, mushrooms.
Fossora delights in the idea that mushrooms and people might collaborate to solve the problem of connecting with others. Björk populates the album with a vast array of voices, both her own and those of her friends and children. The muddy, teeming undergrowth of her production, which blends woodwind arrangements and gabber beats, evokes those electrochemical whispers carried along invisible chains in the ground. With nature as a guide, she sketches a model of voice as network: not the imprint of a rarified celebrity, but a web of far-flung filaments that group individuals together. The early interlude “Mycelia” makes the proposition explicit, as Björk chops up wordless segments of her own singing into a simulation of mushrooms chattering away.
Kranky Records co-founder Bruce Adams highlights some of his favorite Bandcamp recordings, beginning with Labradford.
The significance of this to me is that it was the second record that Bobby Donne was on with the band, and I felt at the time that it was a big jump for them. It just revealed some things that the band would expand on in the rest of their records, and it was a push forward for them: they brought in synthesizers, some drum textures, and then they mixed that with the sort of wide-scope sound they had. I think of the Virginia background, ‘the High and Lonesome Sound,’ it had potential, I thought, and was the first indication that the band was going to expand and become more than just a drone band.
That self-titled Labradford album is my favorite of theirs, and still one of my favorite Kranky albums (read my review). Sadly, the band called it quits after 2001’s Fixed::Context, with the members going on to other projects like Pan•American, Anjou, Aix Em Klemm, and Spokane.
Despite being released 80(!) years ago, Casablanca is surprisingly relevant to our current day and age. Which, by the way, only further cements its status as one of the greatest films of all time.
As a movie about World War II and the righteous struggle of the Allied Forces against the Axis Powers made and released during the war, Casablanca is the product of a very specific cultural moment. Yet Michael Curtiz’s masterpiece is also timeless in its elegant retro aesthetic. It’s a cinephile black and white art deco wet dream of beauty and sophistication, glamour, and romance. From the vantage point of 2022, it’s also almost suspiciously timely. At its core, Casablanca is about patriotism and masculinity. Those are two subjects that have been twisted and corrupted by the worst of us to such an extreme that they have given both a bad name.
Since its release in 1987, Planes, Trains & Automobiles has become a Thanksgiving staple as it follows an unlikely pair (Steve Martin and John Candy) and their various mishaps as they try to make it home for the holiday. The movie may still be a hilarious classic, but watching it now is also a good reminder of just how much the world has changed in the last 35 years.
In an age of smartphones with access to the internet, digital wallets, and apps like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, there are so many solutions that make traveling easier than it was in 1987. We even have virtual meeting software that makes travel less necessary, so Steve Martin’s character might not even have had to be in New York to present a physical ad campaign to that indecisive client at all. Without that business trip two days before Thanksgiving there is no movie, but where else would it have stalled out along the way? Let’s take it beat by beat.
Earlier this month, Meta revealed Galactica, an AI platform intended to help with scientific research. But within days, it was shut down because users were able to get it to publish racist and inaccurate results.
While some people found the demo promising and useful, others soon discovered that anyone could type in racist or potentially offensive prompts, generating authoritative-sounding content on those topics just as easily. For example, someone used it to author a wiki entry about a fictional research paper titled “The benefits of eating crushed glass.”
Even when Galactica’s output wasn't offensive to social norms, the model could assault well-understood scientific facts, spitting out inaccuracies such as incorrect dates or animal names, requiring deep knowledge of the subject to catch.
Via 1440. For all of its lofty promises, artificial intelligence is no match for human nature. Or rather, our current approaches to AI just can’t seem to account for our our inherent proclivity to mess things up.
You may say you want to leave Facebook or Twitter behind because you don’t like Zuckerberg or Musk, you don’t like “Big Tech,” etc. But as Cory Doctorow points out, you’re not just leaving “Big Tech,” you’re leaving behind all of the relationships that have been formed and sustained by social media platforms.
Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform.
We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage situation, and we’re all holding each other hostage.
Collective action problems are hard problems.
Via Frosted Echoes (who recently announced that he’s leaving Twitter after 14 years).
Doctorow hits on an important point. It’s easy to criticize Musk for his senseless and reckless behavior since becoming Twitter’s CEO because Lord knows, there’s so. Much. To. Criticize. It’s harder to do something about it, like switch to Mastodon or some other alternative, because the cost of leaving Twitter and all of the relationships it represents might just be too high; it takes time and effort to recreate that stuff on another platform, even one you own.
Twitter may be burning down as we speak, but the internet keeps marching on and making beautifully bizarre things… like a fake Martin Scorsese movie (and on Tumblr, of all places).
As constructed by Tumblr users, Goncharov presents itself as a 1973 satirical crime-thriller directed by Scorsese. Starting off as what was either a misprint or prank, one Tumblr user bought a pair of boots online and found, on the tongue of the shoe, a tag with the supposed movie details. The user inquired about it online, and another user took the opportunity to create a Scorsese film out of thin air, joking that the original poster hasn't seen the allegedly acclaimed Scorsese film. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users, claimed on November 20 that the fake film was one of the biggest-gaining fandoms of the day.
Via Morning Brew.
From the Blog
If you’re a paying subscriber, then don’t forget to check out the latest playlist and podcast episode, both of which delve into the shadowy-yet-beautiful world of “blackgaze” music.
On paper, the “shoegaze” and “black metal” genres would appear to have nothing in common. But they’re both focused on overwhelming the listener with sound to the point that the external world fades away and all that’s left is the music and its emotional effect.
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