Weekend Reads (January 18): David Lynch (RIP), Hong Kong Cinema, Neil Young’s Pono, Y2K, TikTok
Recommended weekend reading material for January 18, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
David Lynch — one of cinema’s most unique and singular filmmakers — died earlier this week. A lifelong smoker, Lynch was diagnosed with emphysema last year, a condition that left him housebound. He was 78 years old.
Nobody who saw Lynch’s works could mistake them for anyone else’s. Unlike other leading auteurs, he didn’t belong to a movement or fit easily into a genre; while his pictures echoed the mindset of a Luis Buñuel or a Salvador Dalí — critic Pauline Kael called him “the first populist surrealist” — and were influenced by such film noir landmarks as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd., they were sui generis; his creations, in fact, appeared timeless, strangely disconnected from any particular era or place, which made them all the more startling and disturbing.
These were horror stories that mixed the monstrous with the mundane, that emerged from a landscape of dreams or nightmares, their happy endings doing nothing to erase the discomfort they left behind. They were as perplexing as any drawing of M.C. Escher, as haunting as any Grimms fairy tale, only far harder to decipher — which sometimes led skeptics to wonder whether even Lynch had the key to unlocking them. Few doubted the power of his vision and imagination, though naysayers questioned his logical thread.
While the filmmaker could occasionally descend into self-parody, critics’ groups included his major pictures on lists of the most important movies of the past century. In a 2012 poll of nearly 900 experts, Sight & Sound magazine ranked Mulholland Drive (2001) at No. 28 and Blue Velvet (1986) at No. 69.
Scott Tobias said it well: “All the great artists are one-of-a-kind, but David Lynch is just uniquely irreplaceable. We’ll never see anyone like him again. Not even close. What a colossal loss.”
Related: Tributes to Lynch have started rolling in, including very emotional statements from Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Dune, and Naomi Watts, who starred in Mulholland Drive. Meanwhile, Bong Joon-ho calls Lynch “the pinnacle that every director aspires to reach.”
Also related: Critic Brian Tallerico on Lynch’s legacy: “The entire art form was shifted by him and is now lessened by his absence. We owe it to him to burst through the doors he opened.” Via Daring Fireball.
Also also related: If you’re in the mood to watch something strange and unique this weekend, Peter Martin breaks down which David Lynch titles are available on which streaming service.
Big news for Hong Kong movie fans like myself: Shout! Studios has acquired the Golden Princess film library.
In a major move set to electrify action film aficionados, Shout! Studios has nabbed worldwide rights (excluding select Asian territories) to the coveted Golden Princess movie library, a treasure trove of 156 Hong Kong cinema classics that’s been MIA from Western markets for decades.
The deal, which brings together Hollywood’s indie powerhouse with one of Hong Kong cinema’s most prestigious catalogs, includes genre-defining works from directing legends John Woo and Tsui Hark, alongside star-studded vehicles featuring Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung.
The library includes such classics as John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled (two of the greatest action movies ever made), Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (which influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs), and Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues. Here’s hoping we’ll get some gorgeous 4K restorations in the not-too-distant future, as well as some theatrical releases. I’d love to see Woo’s films on the big screen.
Back in 2014, Neil Young unveiled the Pono, a music player and online store that promoted high-quality digital recordings. The product was poorly received at the time, but maybe after ten years, it’s due some reassessment.
Reflecting on it now, Baker doesn’t see the Pono project to be a failure. He said the 25,000 units sold in their first year was more than the collective total of competitors at their level, and that there’s still an active base of people who happily use their PonoPlayer. The way it’s spun by Young and Baker in their book is that Pono helped move the conversation of digital audio quality forward, leading to hi-res streaming platforms like Tidal and Qobuz carving out markets for themselves. “It was responsible for the fact that today you can easily get high-res music at the cost of low-res,” Baker told me. “It’s no longer a luxury.”
If you’re of a certain age, then you can still remember the trepidation surrounding Y2K and the possibility that all of the world’s computers could fail at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000.
The Y2K threat made people suddenly aware of how deeply dependent modern society was on technology. Simultaneously, they realised computers were not the sleek, perfect devices they might have assumed — in fact they were fragile patchworks of design compromises and lazy code, liable to fail at any moment. It was as if you thought you’d been standing on a sturdy suspension bridge, then looked down to realise it was a rickety platform of rotting planks held together by glue, duct tape and hope. As one computer science adage had it, “If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation.”
“It’s frightening when you tell people they are reliant on opaque technical systems, that these are vulnerable, and all they can do is hope the nerds are going to fix it in time,” Loeb says. “Amid the hype and excitement around computers in the 90s, suddenly this is the dark side.”
The article makes an interesting point: the hysteria, and later, skepticism surrounding Y2K, could be viewed as a precursor to modern conspiracy theories like QAnon and COVID denialism.
And yes, I’m old enough to remember the Y2K hysteria and preparations. I didn’t stock up on canned goods and bottled water, but on December 31, 1999, I did withdraw some extra cash from my bank account, just in case the ATMs stopped working the next day. Which, of course, proved unnecessary. There were no doomsday hiccups.
Barring any executive or legislative intervention, TikTok will be banned in the U.S. beginning next week. In preparation, users are flocking to RedNote as an alternative, but as another Chinese-owned app, it might get banned for the same reasons as TikTok.
The rapid rise in U.S. downloads may be cause for concern for the same U.S. lawmakers who ushered in the ban on TikTok. One cybersecurity expert told CBS News that RedNote may actually represent an even greater threat.
“RedNote was never meant for outside of the China market. All of the data sharing and all the servers to which the data is being shared is in China,” Adrianus Warmenhoven, a cybersecurity expert at Nord VPN, told CBS News on Wednesday. “It means they are exempt from all of these data protections and outside of the view of the American government.”
Related: TikTok’s “Big Tech” competitors — Snapchat, Substack, YouTube, X — are angling to snap up its users. Via Techmeme.
Also related: TikTok has denied reports that Chinese officials might sell the app to Elon Musk, calling them “pure fiction.”
Surprise, surprise… the California wildfires are inspiring fake images of the disaster, some of which are generated by AI.
It’s “completely predictable” that people would create bogus images of traumatic events, Farid says. Their motivations can range from simple trolling or attempts at humor to scams seeking donations — and state-sponsored disinformation actors who want to undermine or interfere with a democratic society.
“This is on fire. That’s on fire,” Farid says of the false alarms. “Is this distracting the fire department? Is it sowing confusion? The answer is yes, and it’s frankly inexcusable.”
Related: Last October, I wrote about the damage AI-generated disaster images can do to our individual and collective abilities to understand, determine, and agree upon what is real.
The CEO of the AI music generator Suno recently claimed that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” That’s so mind-bogglingly silly and out of touch that I’m at a loss for words. So instead, I’ll just quote Emanuel Maiberg:
It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task.
This might come as a shocker, but Suno is currently being sued by the music industry for training its AI tool on copyrighted material without permission.
Still Wakes the Deep is an indie horror game that takes place on a Scottish oil rig in 1975. In keeping with its setting, the game’s available in a Scottish Gaelic translation.
For [creative director John McCormack], Still Wakes the Deep is an expression of Scottish identity. The game, with its acute sense of place and eye for regional detail, resonates with efforts across pockets of the U.K. and Ireland. Northern Irish band Kneecap rap in Irish Gaelic; the fiction writer Harry Josephine Giles won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award for Deep Wheel Orcadia, a sci-fi novel written in the Orkney dialect of Scots. Blindboy Boatclub is an anonymous podcaster and author reimagining Irish history in response to centuries of English colonialism. “People are reclaiming their identity,” says McCormack. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Related: Disney released Moana 2 in Māori for New Zealand audiences, which makes perfect sense given the film’s setting and subject matter. However, this seemingly innocuous decision lands in the middle of a political battle that’s left the indigenous language increasingly embattled.
Christian speculative fiction exists on the periphery of both the Christian and secular markets, so now it’s carving out its own space and community.
In a welcome letter, Realm Makers CEO Becky Minor told 2024 conference goers: “I pray the time you spend at Realm Makers allows you the space to revel in all the quirky appreciations you have of the magical, impossible, or even the creepy corners of your imagination.”
Those “quirky appreciations” have always been part of Christian speculative (“spec”) fiction, the broad literature category encompassing faith-based science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. But the genre’s quirks have also isolated it in the marketplace: Christian spec fiction is not shelved with general-market fantasy and sci-fi, nor is it grouped with mainstream Christian fiction like Amish love stories, historical romances, and more contemporary titles.
That lack of a home has long been viewed as a problem for Christian spec fiction. Now, however, the category is coming into its own like an ancient spore drifting in from space. Or a sentient robot intent on becoming human. Or a dragon freed from its treasure cave. Or an elf, a dwarf, or a wizard on a quest.
I can’t help but see some parallels here to the indie/alternative Christian music of the ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s. Looking at some of the books that are being published, though, these authors do seem a bit more overt in their proselytization than, say, Daniel Amos, The Choir, the 77s, and Michael Knott ever were.
Finally, in Australia, “ugg” is a generic term for a type of sheepskin shoe popular with surfers. Nevertheless, an Australian company had to change its brand after losing a trademark battle with the American-based UGG brand.
Dozens of companies in Australia and New Zealand have trademarks containing the word “ugg,” which is why many in the region take issue with Deckers’ ownership of the trademark in more than 130 countries.
Australian Leather brought a lawsuit to remove a trademark for “ugg” boots and keep it as a generic term.
“This is not just about me; it is about Australia taking back ‘ugg,’” Eddie Oygur, the owner of Australian Leather, told The New York Times in 2021. “The trademark should never have been given in the first place to the US.”
Via TLDR Design. As if I needed another reason to hate UGG boots and footwear.
From the Blog
Like so many others, I was appalled and rattled by recent revelations of Neil Gaiman’s history of sexual assault. Gaiman had been one of my favorite authors for years, but what I read left me feeling sick to my stomach. (So much so, that I couldn’t even finish the article.)
Instead, I spent some time processing my own thoughts concerning Gaiman and the quandary of great art made by terrible people.
There’s certainly something redemptive about that, that even the worst of us is not so far gone as to be completely incapable or bereft of beauty. Nevertheless, it’s only right and fair that we should want our favorite artists to be decent men and women given the comfort, entertainment, inspiration, and joy their work adds to our lives. Thus, when an artist is revealed to be an abuser, a racist, or a degenerate creep, it’s a heart-breaking experience and a kind of betrayal. (Of course, this existential dilemma, while not nothing, is a far cry from the physical, psychological, and spiritual damage that abuse victims suffer and pales in comparison to their need for healing, restoration, and justice.)
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