Weekend Reads (January 25): Donald Trump, “Star Trek,” Kate Bush, 2025 Oscars
Recommended weekend reading material for January 25, 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.
Photographers decode Donald Trump’s new presidential portrait.
Mr Draper’s first impression of Trump's image was that it was “heavily manipulated” with both studio lighting and retouching after the shoot.
The photo appeared to use “monster” lighting, he added, to dramatically illuminate the president-elect from below and make his eyes pop.
The lighting setup gives the image an “ominous” look often seen in horror films, said Eliska Sky, a portrait photographer with the London Institute of Photography. She compared the portrayal of Trump to a boxer before a fight.
It’s definitely a look, isn’t it? One that has “Dear Leader” or “Big Brother” written all over it. And I don’t know my history of presidential portraits, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first presidential portrait inspired by a mugshot. Take that for what you will.
Writing for The Dispatch, Jake Meador reflects on Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and its role in shaping our current political and cultural context.
Why bother with a book written more than 70 years ago by a man who died more than three decades ago? The most obvious answer is that tomorrow our nation’s next president will be sworn into office, a president whose ties to Peale and admiration of him are well documented. That is one reason: If we want to understand President-elect Trump’s relationship to Christian faith, we would do well to attend to the writings of the pastor who Trump has praised on many occasions — for the Christianity Trump praises is not historic orthodoxy, but rather the revisionist egocentric version articulated so clearly in Peale’s book.
Esau McCaulley explains how he’ll be praying for President Trump.
I do know that Christians are commanded to pray for rulers and those in authority, because the more power a politician has, the more influence he wields in people’s lives. I will pray for Donald Trump just as I prayed for Joe Biden before him. Those prayers ought to have a certain focus: that our leaders use their power wisely to protect the vulnerable and establish justice for all.
And when a member of the clergy is given the honor of praying in front of a leader, the prayer should not merely evoke a kind of divine mandate but remind the leader of his solemn responsibility. We serve those in power well when we help them remember there is someone to whom they must give an account. A good prayer for a person in power ought to leave them with knees trembling rather than head nodding.
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the world’s most beloved filmmakers thanks to films like My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, and Spirited Away. But before his directorial career took off, he worked on an obscure little film called Panda! Go, Panda! that nevertheless contained the seeds of his future work.
Their film was intended for young kids, and the inspiration behind it was personal. The two of them had children the “right age” for this story, Takahata said. Another main Panda staffer, Yoichi Kotabe, was also a father. Animator Yasuo Otsuka (on the team as well) saw the film as “a gift for [their] children.”2
“When I didn’t have kids, I wanted to create things for myself,” Miyazaki explained. “When I had little ones, I wanted to create things to entertain them.”
And yet Panda didn’t only affect the kids in the audience. It laid groundwork for its team, too. Here, Otsuka argued, was “one of the foundations for the line that continued into [Studio] Ghibli.”
Released in 1978, Kate Bush’s debut single “Wuthering Heights” was the first song written and performed by a female artist to reach #1 on the UK music charts.
The single would prove to be her breakthrough. Within three weeks of being released, it had reached number one, getting a boost from Bush’s arresting mime-style performance on the BBC’s music chart show, Top of the Pops. It knocked Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me” off the UK singles chart’s top spot, and stayed there for a month. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Australia. Her album, The Kick Inside, when it was released the following month, sold more than one million copies. She would go on to collect an Ivor Novello award in 1979 for “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” released as her second single from the album.
TIL there’s an annual event called “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” where fans gather to recreate the song’s music video, which you can watch below.
Luke T. Harrington ponders the really important questions, like “Who killed Christian rock music?”
The Christian labels, like all other labels, retreated to the most reliably profitable music — but for them, instead of generic butt-rock, that turned out to be generic “praise and worship” music — that is, the music that was ready-made for singing in megachurches. After all, there was no way to know what the next big Christian genre fad would be (Christian EDM? Christian doom metal? Christian zydeco?), but “cool” churches consistently needed songs to sing and were consistently willing to pay the performance royalties for the latest tunes — so the industry focused on that, and everything else atrophied.
Luke’s right: If you weren’t there, you’d never know just how exciting the Christian music scene was during the ’90s and even early ’00s. That was especially true in indie/alternative — aka, “Chrindie” — circles, thanks to labels like Alarma, Blonde Vinyl, Flying Tart, Frontline, Gray Dot, Intense, R.E.X., and even Tooth & Nail (which was way more fun and eclectic back then). They all released some amazing music during that era.
Related: My Chrindie-related articles, including all of my Cornerstone journals and photos.
Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall ranks all of the Star Trek movies.
The Star Trek television shows are by their very nature uneven, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the films, too, have a wide range in quality, even within the various individual film series featuring William Shatner’s original crew, the gang from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the Pine reboot. There’s one spectacular film, a number of very good ones, several mediocre ones, and a few godawful ones. They also cover a relatively wide range of types of Star Trek stories, like straightforward action-adventure and issue-oriented sci-fi, and operate across many levels of scale, from glorified TV episodes to big-budget epics.
In my experience, Star Trek fans aren’t quite as prone to toxic behavior as Star Wars fans, but I’m sure Sepinwall’s list will rankle a few Trekkies. Personally, I don’t find much fault with his list, though I’d probably rank Star Trek III and Star Trek IV a bit higher.
Related: My review of Star Trek: The Motion Picture: “The first Star Trek film contains some of the franchise’s most awe-inspiring scenes. At other times, it’s quite the snoozefest.”
The 2025 Oscar nominations have been announced, with Emilia Perez, Wicked, and The Brutalist leading the pack. For genre fans, Dune: Part Two picked up several nominations, including “Best Picture,” “Cinematography,” and “Visual Effects.”
The Oscars will occur on Sunday, March 2, with Conan O’Brien hosting.
Related: Here’s a list of the year’s biggest Oscar surprises and snubs.
The Brutalist is one of 2024’s most acclaimed films, with ten Oscar nominations, but it’s generated some controversy for using AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its characters, including leads Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Here’s director Brady Corbet’s response:
Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.
As the article points out, however, this isn’t all that dissimilar from practices and processes employed on other movies. For example, 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody employed “vocal stems from Queen master tapes” as well as recordings of singer Marc Martel to boost Rami Malek’s singing.
I’m all for criticism of AI being used in the arts, but as far as controversies go, this one seems pretty minor. Indeed, it could be argued that this is actually the sort of work that AI ought to be used for, bolstering human work instead of replacing it.
Apple has been touting their own AI tool — called, fittingly enough, Apple Intelligence — but John Gruber has found it to be surprisingly dumb.
When I started work this morning I thought I was simply going to link, with very little additional commentary, to Kafasis’s exhaustive “Who won Super Bowl __?” exegesis at One Foot Tsunami. (Which I’ll implore you once more to read, if only for the laughs.) I came up with “Who won the 2004 North Dakota high school boys’ state basketball championship?” off the top of my head as a spitball question that an AI-driven answer engine could plausibly answer correctly, but (so I thought) probably couldn’t. But Kagi gets it right, DuckDuckGo gets it sort-of right, and ChatGPT answers not just correctly but superlatively. What makes Siri’s ineptitude baffling is that ChatGPT is Siri’s much-heralded partner for providing “world knowledge” answers. Siri with Apple Intelligence is so bad that it gets the answer to this question wrong even with the ostensible help of ChatGPT, which when used directly gets it perfectly right. And Siri-with-ChatGPT seemingly gets it wrong in a completely different way, citing different winners and losers (all wrong) each time. It’s like Siri is a special-ed student permitted to take an exam with the help of a tutor who knows the correct answers, and still flunks.
Related: Gruber also shared this hilarious bit from Joanna Stern. “Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.”
Karen Swallow Prior finds wisdom in The Twilight Zone amidst the rise of Christian nationalism.
The viewer first recoils at this dystopian society’s upside-down standard of beauty. “Eye of the Beholder” asks us to think about where we get our standards of beauty in the first place. But more importantly, the show invites us to recoil even more at what they do with those who fail to achieve their standard.
The Christian knows that God offers sure and true answers. But what is the Christian to do in response to those who have different answers? Who don’t know the truth? That question was settled by the founders of this country when they wrote the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment, but that foundation is being undermined by Christian nationalists who seek to “merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.”
Finally, pour another one out for physical media: Sony Japan will no longer produce recordable Blu-rays.
This discontinuation doesn’t impact the Blu-rays you can buy with films or TV shows on them; it just affects the blank ones consumers use to record stuff on themselves with PCs or DVRs. Sony hinted at the discontinuation last year, telling the Japanese outlet AVWatch that it would “gradually end development and production of ‘recordable optical disc media.’’
True, it’s been years since I’ve used any recordable media — everything’s saved up in the cloud these days — but still, another end of an era.
From the Blog
I held off on leaving X for a long time because I didn’t like the idea of ceding any more online ground to racists, extremists, and crypto bros. But then I saw Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at a rally for Donald Trump’s inauguration, and I knew then and there that I no longer wanted to be on his platform, or have my time and energy benefit him in any way, shape, or form.
I’m under no illusions that my departure will matter to Musk or the vast majority of X. With just 814 followers, I’m the very definition of a small fry. But when the President’s right-hand man — sorry, JD Vance — makes a gesture that neo-Nazis and white supremacists celebrate, doubles down against any criticism, and then cracks juvenile jokes about the situation, I know it’s time to leave, if only for my own integrity’s sake.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.