Weekend Reads (May 17): Andrei Tarkovsky, John Woo, “The Rehearsal,” Generation X, 4chan
Recommended weekend reading material for May 17, 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.
Siddhant Adlakha reviews Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which had its Cannes Festival premier 45 years ago.
Preserved within the sci-fi drama Stalker — between its elliptical cuts that bend space, and in its looming, lengthy takes that extend time — is the very essence of its director, Andrei Tarkovsky. The late Soviet filmmaker has long been hailed as one of the all-time greats, a cinematic poet and philosopher whose thoughts on the medium helped expand our understanding of its capabilities. There is perhaps no greater compendium of his artistic worldview than the eerie and deeply spiritual sci-fi masterpiece that might have slain him.
Related: My review of Stalker, which I re-watched last November. “If you’re willing to surrender to Stalker’s glacial pace and elliptical narrative… then you’ll be treated to a truly unique cinematic atmosphere.”
Cutting a few seconds from a film in order to excise a racist slur doesn’t seem like a big deal. But Keith Phipps argues that in the case of The French Connection, that seemingly minuscule edit actually changes the film at a fundamental level.
It’s not hard to see Disney’s logic behind the cut, assuming Disney is indeed responsible. This moment might disturb some viewers. It’s only six seconds. Are those six seconds really worth the complaints and hassle they invite? And the issue of how to deal with potentially upsetting material from the past isn’t one with clear rules that can be applied to every instance. Context is everything: a racist character using a slur in The French Connection isn’t Song of the South, which isn’t Gone With the Wind, which isn’t Fred Astaire wearing blackface, which isn’t Blazing Saddles, etc., etc. But this provides a pretty great example of how not to deal with it.
In related news, I learned that the guy who wrote The French Connection — Ernest Tidyman — also wrote Shaft and High Plains Drifter.
John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992) is one of the greatest action films of all time. Sadly, given its iconic status, it’s been all but unavailable due to rights issues. Thankfully, that’s about to change, and the film is undergoing a painstaking restoration to preserve it for a new era.
Henry Weintraub, restoration supervisor at Shout! Studios, describes the emotional investment in the project. “Restoring the film was both a challenge and a labor of love,” he says. “Hard Boiled means a lot to so many people, myself included, and I wanted to be sure we did it justice. It was important to preserve the original look and sound design of the era, while also enhancing both to bring out their full potential.”
Director John Woo has already given his stamp of approval. “He said he was very happy with the restoration — which was incredibly rewarding to hear, especially given how personal the film is to him,” Weintraub confirms.
The restored Hard Boiled will be released digitally on June 24 along with Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (another classic Hong Kong action flick), with a physical release to come at a later date. And you’d better believe I’m buying a copy as soon as it goes on sale.
Related: Shout! Studios recently announced its first batch of classic Hong Kong cinema releases, including Hard Boiled, Peking Opera Blues, and A Chinese Ghost Story. Needless to say, I’m very excited for each and every one of them.
The question of whether or not you can enjoy the art made by artists who’ve done reprehensible things will keep being asked for as long as humans keep making art. But what does it say about the rest of us when previously “canceled” artists get to enjoy the privilege of playing sold out shows?
Yes, I understand artists are inherently flawed people, like anyone else. That’s what makes their music so relatable. But does consuming art without interruption give credence to such disgusting actions? In these cases, it does for me — there’s plenty else I can listen to that doesn’t give me that sinking feeling.
Yet my perspective may now be antiquated, as pop culture has been tainted by our current political and social climate, where being unapologetic about past transgressions seems to be en vogue. Gone are any remnants of the well-intentioned “Me Too” reckoning less than a decade ago.
I’m only vaguely familiar with Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and his ultra-elaborate productions. But apparently, such productions involve a non-trivial amount of deception and manipulation.
The comedy series helps ordinary people “rehearse” for life’s biggest moments with hyper-realistic simulations, and in Season 2, Fielder sets out to prevent aviation disasters. Fielder’s hypothesis is that the No. 1 cause for plane crashes is poor communication between pilots, so in between flight simulations and other role-playing exercises, Fielder hires real pilots to serve as judges on a fake singing show. If a co-pilot can learn how to give direct and honest feedback to an aspiring singer, maybe they can better assert themselves to a dismissive airline captain. The pilots were not aware that Wings of Voice was a sham, and neither were the singers, many of whom flew across state lines for their shots at stardom.
“I signed up to be a singer, not a lab rat,” Love says. Many of the contestants are just now finding out that they were essentially extras in an elaborate bit. Love says she spent $5,500 on travel, lodging and hair and makeup across her three trips to L.A. And as a vocal teacher in New York, she lost out on nearly $4,000 in canceled lessons.
There’s something really gross about all of this, especially given the extent to which artists are already treated as disposable.
Daisy Jones asks the really important questions, like what if Gen Xers are actually the cool ones?
Obviously, separating and defining people by generation is a largely meaningless endeavor — I probably have more in common with someone three years younger than me, who would be Gen Z, than a 44-year-old millennial. And one 50-something is going to be wildly different from the next (I’m pretty sure Gen X invented the Karen haircut, although don’t quote me on that). But as Gen Zers and millennials continue to argue over who’s more cringe, or who was born cooler, I’d like to offer an alternative viewpoint, which is this: maybe it’s neither of us. And maybe we weren’t ever the only ones in the race.
To which I answer, “Well, obviously.”
Launched in 2003, 4chan quickly established itself as one of the most popular and problematic internet message boards, thanks to the often juvenile and offensive behavior of its anonymous members. The message board recently survived an attack by rival hackers, but even if 4chan disappears entirely, its toxic legacy lives on everywhere else.
What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous way station for the internet’s anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world — a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again — which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything — from X to Facebook to YouTube — now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.
Via Kottke.
Earlier this year, Meta announced plans to flood Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated content by AI-generated character profiles. But as Stephen Moore notes, such a move does nothing but destabilize and dehumanize social media.
What this latest Meta saga does show is that the future of social media — once heralded as a social "network," a place for humans to connect with other humans — is soon to be a place where humans consume content created by inhuman bots. Feeds filled with endless AI sludge, generated at frightening levels of speed and quantity, constantly refined and optimized to drive engagement. Taken to the nth degree, it may even become a platform where this content engages with itself in some kind of death loop.
We must resist the urge to share and promote AI-generated content, which means taking a wee bit of time to verify that the images, articles, etc., we share are, indeed, created by actual human beings. Just typing that sentence feels incredibly dystopian, but such is our current state of affairs.
Related: Last year, I wrote about the threat that AI poses to our communal ability to agree on what is true. “We’re on the cusp of a fundamental change to our assumptions of what is trustworthy or not, a change that threatens to wash away those assumptions altogether.”
Also related: My AI policy for Opus, in case you’re interested.
In light of the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, some international musicians are deciding against traveling to the United States.
New York immigration attorney Matthew Covey says that while he hasn’t seen the U.S. government target international artists specifically, reports of “unprecedented I.C.E. enforcement” are prompting dozens of artists to bow out of U.S. tours and reconsider prioritizing the U.S. market. His firm, CoveyLaw, assists thousands of international artists each year.
“[They’re] deciding, ‘You know what? I think I’m not going to do this tour this year. I think I’m going to stay in my home country, or I’m going to tour in Latin America, or I am going to go to Asia,’” says Covey, who also is the executive director of Tamizdat, a nonprofit that advocates for international cultural exchange.
Since beginning his second term, Donald Trump has employed carefully designed aesthetics to promote his agenda, his version of American history, and his image.
The 100 days that have followed have proven blindsiding to anyone who thought Trump’s second term would constitute little more than a few tax cuts to the rich. In this brief window, Trump has rewritten the propaganda playbook for the modern political age by marrying well-proven tactics from decades past with a savvy approach to our current media landscape.
His approach to governing is as much a practice of world-building as it is policy building. He has woven together imagery, rhetoric, and technology to create an unnervingly convincing (if in large part illegal!) vision of the world he wants to sell (or force upon) his constituents. Trump has leveraged craftily designed aesthetics to position his destructive policies as necessary and his self-concerned personality as heroic, all while he dismantles the institutions in place to question him.
Via TLDR Design.
Related: Back in February, I wrote about the White House’s “ASMR” video in which police officers shackle and escort individuals onto airplanes to be flown to foreign countries for detainment and imprisonment. “[Trump and his administration] don’t want us to simply celebrate the deportation and inhumane treatment of Christians and other asylum seekers fleeing death and persecution. They want us to find comfort and pleasure in it. They want to show off their cruelty and they want us to enjoy it.”
Finally, a group of scientists are laboring 1.5 kilometers underground in South Dakota to try and answer a simple question: why does the universe exist?
When the Universe was created two kinds of particles were created: matter — from which stars, planets and everything around us are made — and, in equal amounts, antimatter, matter's exact opposite.
Theoretically the two should have cancelled each other out, leaving nothing but a big burst of energy. And yet, here we — as matter — are.
Scientists believe that the answer to understanding why matter won — and we exist — lies in studying a particle called the neutrino and its antimatter opposite, the anti-neutrino.
Via NextDraft.
From the Blog
I’m at that point in my life where many of the bands I listen to have been going at it for multiple decades. Case in point, Fine China. Their releases in the early ’00s were heavily indebted to The Smiths and New Order, but this year’s I Felt Called opts for a more expansive and contemplative sound that hits me right in the middle age.
This more expansive and meandering sound does mean that I Felt Called lacks the punch and concision of Fine China’s previous releases, which were more focused on delivering catchy hooks and singalong choruses. However, that same expansiveness feels quite apropos for the album’s lyrical musings.
Though not a “lyrics guy” — in a recent Indie Vision Music interview, he confesses to waiting until the night before recording to finish his lyrics — Rob Withem still taps into the same mix of nostalgia, existential lament, and mid-life mopery as label mate Jason Martin (Starflyer 59). But whereas Martin’s lyrics are characterized by simplicity and bluntness, Withem’s lyrics are more abstract and even stream-of-consciousness. I might be tempted to call them “indulgent” — if I didn’t find them so relatable at times, that is.
Read my full review. RIYL The Smiths, Tears For Fears, and Talk Talk.
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