A painting of me
  • War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus. 

    Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.

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Aftersun & Civil War

   15 April 2024, early afternoon

A weird double header of sorts for Sunday: Civil War in the afternoon with my friends and family, and then Aftersun alone at night. Two films that are difficult to watch in completely different ways. Civil Wars is Alex Garland’s latest film. The film follows war journalists covering a modern day civil war taking place in America. It’s an Alex Garland film, so we get to experience the full monstrosity of humanity. An intense movie that builds and builds to what felt like an inevitable conclusion. I felt the ending was a little bit rushed, the arc of the two leads felt too fast. Still, I enjoyed the film all the same. Aftersun was something else. A coming of age film. A film about memory and trying to understand the moments in our life that shape us. This film begins with a sense you’re going to watch one thing, and ends with you understanding you watched something completely different. This was a really beautiful movie. The ending sequence one of those incredible pieces of cinema that people will probably talk about forever and ever. It was a solid day of cinema.

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Perfect Days

   10 April 2024, mid-morning

I was off to the Lightbox last Friday watch Wim Wenders latest film, Perfect Days, a film following the quiet life of a Tokyo sanitation worker, played wonderfully by Koji Yakusho. The audience experiences the perfects days of the films protagonist Hirayama, the structure and repetition of his life. Each day Hirayama wakes up to the sound of a women sweeping the street. He brushes his teeth, trims his moustache and shaves, and gets dressed. He picks up the keys and camera and change he put away the previous night at his door before heading out to start his day. He buys himself a coffee from a vending machine and heads off to work. And so on and so forth. His days are simple, but quietly joyous. The film shows us the patterns of his life, and the audience intuits whats going on through the little snapshots of his life that follow as we experience subsequent days of his life. The movie is meditative. There is very little dialogue. Koji Yakusho’s performance is incredible. This was a wonderful film.

The trailer for Perfect Days.

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  • Martin Greenfield dies at 95. 

    He dressed six presidents, coached designers and made thousands of suits for TV shows and movies. But his beginnings were dismal: He learned to sew at Auschwitz.

    A very incredible life.

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  • The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary—and the secret $100 million a16z-led investment to save its fading brand. 

    This article really explains some of the bizarre moves Kickstarter has made in recent years. My friend Mark feels the article misses the mark when it comes to articulating Kickstarter’s current woes. They haven’t made things easier for creators on their platform. Meanwhile, Gamefound and Backerkit entered the market and hoovered up creators. The perfect example, that’s even mentioned in the article: Sanderson’s latest crowdfunding effort is taking place on Backerkit. I can’t imagine he’s there because of Kickstarter’s lack of web3 nonsense. 17 million and counting, on someone else’s platform.

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