The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back

A friend of mine, a screenwriter in New York, believes Get Back has a catalytic effect on anyone who does creative work. Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together. This is strange, in a … Read more

Gigantic Wooden Megaphones Amplify the Quiet Sounds of a Natural Forest

I get a newsletter several times a week from Sound & Video Contractor, a holdover from my video editing days. Friday’s edition had this irresistible link. On display in an Estonian forest near Tallinn is ruup, an installation of three gigantic wooden megaphones that amplify the typically-quiet sounds of nature. The project was created by … Read more

Colie Kong

Colie with her Kong – stuffed with lettuce 🥬 ! She will spend a long time trying to get it out.  

Should We Be Punching Nazis? – Talking Points Memo

From Josh Marshall, and in keeping with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Pushing civil society from talk and voting to violence and paramilitaries is what the fascists are trying to accomplish – moving from the rule of law to the rule of force. By every historical standard and also by almost every philosophical one, this is … Read more

Charlottesville showed that liberalism can’t defeat white supremacy. Only direct action can. – The Washington Post

On matters of racism and discrimination, capitalism can never serve as the great social fix, because in many instances, the very sectors of the economy that have historically been the most profitable in American history — for instance, slavery, real estate — have also been the most discriminatory.Source: The Washington Post

By Immigrants, For Immigrants: Why “Casablanca” Still Matters – Los Angeles Review of Books

Like many films of its era, Casablanca was made primarily by European immigrants or their offspring. Director Michael Curtiz was Hungarian-born, and screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein were the children of Jewish immigrants, while their film was teeming with actors who had also fled Europe in the previous two decades. (Sakall played Carl, the head … Read more