Weekend Reads (April 5): Sufjan Stevens, Val Kilmer (RIP), Shinichirō Watanabe, Trump’s Tariffs
Recommended weekend reading material for April 5, 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.
Back in 2023, Tyler Huckabee asked his fellow writers and music snobs to write about their five favorite songs by Sufjan Stevens.
In a Sufjan Stevens song, everything is connected. There are no coincidences. It mattered that a childhood friend passed away on a state holiday devoted to a Polish Civil War general. It mattered that a stepmother he grew up resenting used to take him to the same town where Abraham Lincoln once lived. Oregon’s Tillamook forest spent much of the 1900s getting ravaged by a series of wildfires, and this changed the whole course of history, up to and including Sufjan’s final day with his mother.
This is a very grounding thing to consider in the chaos of your late teens: There are no loose ends in all creation. The thread of your life is part of a grander design that includes all the other threads. I suppose it’s not hard to see how this way of thinking could collapse into a black hole of self-absorption. But for Sufjan, it’s an exercise in humility. He’s not the protagonist of the universe. He’s just one member of the band, and we’re all playing on the deck of the Titanic here. “God gave me a pen and a pad of parchment paper,” he wrote in a series of essays for the upcoming Javelin. “‘Transcribe your feelings and your findings,’ she said. ‘Do your thing. First thought, best thought.’ I did as I was commanded, a dutiful sea urchin inching its way to the possibility of words and wisdom.”
If I had to pick my top five Sufjan songs off the top of my head, I’d go with “Vito’s Ordination Song,” “The Transfiguration,” “Casimir Pulaski Day,” “Sister Winter,” and “Christmas Unicorn.”
Related: To mark its 10th anniversary, Asthmatic Kitty is reissuing Sufjan’s Carrie & Lowell, a heartbreaking album about his mother’s death. From my review: “Sufjan, well-known for the pomp and artifice in his music, explores grief, death, love, and forgiveness with such honesty, courage, and faith that I can’t help but admire it, and be humbled by it.”
Val Kilmer, best known for his performances in Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever, died this week from pneumonia. He was 65 years old and had been battling throat cancer for several years.
The baby-faced blonde actor had a solid run as a leading man with a volatile reputation in the ’80s and ’90s, starring in Top Gun, Real Genius, Willow, Heat, and The Saint. He returned briefly to screens in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick although he could no longer speak due to his cancer.
In 2021, a documentary on his life, Val, was released. His son provided the actor’s voice and the film utilized hundreds of hours of video he had recorded over the years, giving a revealing look at the sets he worked on and showing the actor to be an introspective thinker with an artist’s soul.
Tributes to Kilmer have come pouring in from Michael Mann, Francis Ford Coppola, Josh Brolin, and others.
One of my favorite Kilmer performances that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Shane Black’s darkly comedic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, where he plays private investigator “Gay” Perry van Shrike opposite Robert Downey Jr.
Martial arts cinema legend Richard Norton died last week at the age of 75. Throughout his long career, he starred in such movies as The Octagon, City Hunter, Mr. Nice Guy, and Mad Max: Fury Road. He was also a stunt performer and fight choreographer on The Suicide Squad, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Walker, Texas Ranger, to name just a few titles.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching Norton chew up the scenery as the big bad in Mr. Nice Guy contra Jackie Chan and he nearly steals the show in The Octagon as the masked enforcer Kyo.
Lazarus is the latest anime series from Shinichirō Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop (widely considered one of the greatest anime titles of all time). Last October, Charles Pulliam-Moore interviewed Watanabe about Lazarus and the state of the anime industry in general.
In order for an animator to really develop their skills, I think they need to be working on a project, and being able to focus solely on it. But more often than not, because of the sheer number of shows and films, many animators have to jump from one project to another, and really scramble to finish their work, and it’s not an environment that’s conducive to genuine artistic growth.
Related: My review of Kids on the Slope, Watanabe’s delightful jazz-influnced coming-of-age story. “Kids on the Slope may be unlike any anime you’ve ever seen precisely because it never tries to be unlike any anime you’ve ever seen. Rather, it just does it best to swing, baby, and that’s more than enough.”
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any period of time, then you know that one of my pet topics is AI, and more specifically, how AI is being used to generate low-quality “slop” that serves no real purpose. Hence, I’m glad to see YouTube start demonetizing channels to produce and promote the stuff.
YouTube’s monetization policies state that if creators are borrowing material from others, “you need to change it significantly to make it your own.” It adds that vidoes must not be “duplicative or repetitive” and should not be made for the “sole purpose of getting views.”
Furthermore, YouTube misinformation policies prohibit content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads viewers.
What’s particularly disturbing is that several Hollywood studios (e.g., Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony) were actually seeking to profit from these fake trailers, which undermine the studios’ own IP and talent, rather than challenge them and take them down.
Related: Dais Johnston asks, “[A]re these trailers meant to pose a clever ‘What if?’ like the AI generated videos of movies in the style of Wes Anderson, or are they meant to deceive viewers into thinking the projects featured are actually happening?”
Streaming services like Roku and Amazon are collecting an awful lot of data about you in order to increase their profits.
Ads are obviously not new on TV. As long as we’ve been watching shows on glowing boxes, we’ve been watching commercials that provide the economic engine for the entire entertainment factory to operate. While streaming platforms offered a reprieve for a few years by charging monthly fees for commercial-free content, it’s now practically impossible to watch TV without seeing some sort of marketing. What’s happening more under the radar is that your TV is collecting data about you and your watching habits — sometimes by directly monitoring what’s on your screen — and serving you personalized ads on your TV or elsewhere.
American YouTuber Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov was arrested by Indian authorities and now faces jail time after he attempted to illegally contact an isolated tribe.
The Sentinelese live on the Manhattan-sized forested island of North Sentinel in the Indian Ocean, and violently resist contact with all foreigners. After repeated attempts to contact the Sentinelese in the 70s, 80s, and 90s ended in violence — and in some cases, death — the Indian government stopped trying to befriend them, according to Survival International. It is currently — and unequivocally — illegal to visit North Sentinel Island.
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“In a reckless attempt to get attention on social media, his illegal actions could have wiped out the entire Sentinelese tribe through introducing new diseases such as flu to which they have no immunity,” reads the Survival International statement.
In 2018, an American missionary named John Allen Chau was killed by the Sentinelese after he attempted to contact and evangelize them.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced a series of sweeping tariffs that he claims will help bring about American prosperity. However, the tariffs have put America’s tabletop game industry into a panic.
Tabletop gaming, which includes board games, card games, and role-playing games, has enjoyed a roughly two-decade renaissance brought on in part by crowdfunding. Nevertheless, much of the industry consists of individual creators, sole proprietors, small family businesses, and remote teams of creatives. The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) said Thursday that the impact of these tariffs will be nothing short of a disaster.
“The latest imposition of a 54% tariff on products from China by the administration is dire news for the tabletop industry and the broader US economy,” GAMA said in a news release. “As an industry highly dependent on producing goods overseas and importing them into the US, this policy will have devastating consequences.
Related: Steve Jackson Games, which has produced numerous tabletop and role-playing games over the years, explains how Trump’s China tariffs will drive up game prices. “A product we might have manufactured in China for $3.00 last year could now cost $4.62 before we even ship it across the ocean. Add freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution margins, and that once-$25 game quickly becomes a $40 product. That’s not a luxury upcharge; it’s survival math.”
Also related: Back in November, I wrote about the threat that Trump’s tariffs pose to artists and creators.
Also also related: Nintendo has delayed pre-orders of the highly anticipated Switch 2 so they can “assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.” The Switch 2 is still set to be released on June 2, with a price of $449.99 — which will almost certainly increase if the tariffs are still in place.
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