Knocking At The Gate

My review of Take This Waltz (2011) is up at Letterboxd . Again, I am reminded that all movies should feature Michelle Williams.  

Goin. (2022). "PɇaceMaker" at Maison de la Paix (House of Peace), Geneva, Switzerland. Artist site: https://goin.art/

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist (2024) is one hell of a ride: Sweeping but clunky, overflowing with injustice but inspiring, stupendously long but always attention-seizing. The cinematography, acting, music, production design, and direction are all triumphs but there's more going on here there it might seem. First, let’s be clear about the word “brutalist.” That adjective is almost exclusively used to describe an architect or a building that is associated with a mid-20 th century art movement known as Brutalism. That word does not refer to “brute” or “brutal” or as commonly used in English, but instead refers to a French term for “raw concrete.”   Concrete is cheap, plentiful, quick to use, and long-lasting and that’s why it is one of the most important building materials of all time. It is commonplace to try to hide that buildings are made of concrete by cladding them in something that’s pretty such as glass or stucco or stone or by detailing them with flourishes made of wood...

For state regulators (a) to commission a study which showed that Florida insurers were shoveling billions of dollars in excess payments to their parent companies then claiming to be unable to cover claims without hiking rates or closing up shop, (b) to then keep that study from state lawmakers seeking to calm Florida's hurricane-drenched insurance market, and (c) to then take two years to release the study in a public records request might be one of the most Florida things ever. In this article, Tampa Bay Times staff writer Lawrence Mower explains how this happened and provides a link to the "draft" report.

 Sarah Hagale on Instagram.

Writing in the News-Press , Dr. Robert Hilliard —the noted educator, author, playwright, and veteran who won a Purple Heart fighting Adolf Damn Hitler — explains how to recognize and respond to fascism .

In keeping with the current craze of abusing workers and vilifying the work of public employees, Utah has decided that they shouldn't be able to bargain collectively with their employers . That's a low blow, and a hateful one, and a grotesquely anti-American one. Every single worker everywhere should be able to organize their workplace, period. Anything else hurts us all.

The U.S. Department of Education has long used a series of “Dear Colleague” letters sent to state and local education officials to outline the Department’s broad policy goals and to explain the Department’s interpretation of federal law and court decisions. Along with the law itself, with non-regulatory guidance issued by the Secretary, with the Code of Federal Regulations, and with findings of the Inspector General, these Dear Colleague letters are a fundamental component of federal, state, and local education governance in the United States. Unfortunately, this most recent letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of CivilRights is horrifyingly anti-American. Along with the purges of public employees, this letter is a function of ongoing hostile takeover of federal agencies with the intent of destroying them from within and preventing them from implementing the laws enacted by the Congress. Here are my notes based on my first reading. LETTER (p. 1): “Discriminatio...

  I would like to review RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" now that I'm done sobbing, but I hesitate because explaining a major part of why the film is so powerful might spoil it a bit. Let me just say that: 1. This is a film about Black struggle, about Jim Crow, about institutional abuse, about corruption, and about child slavery in 1960s Florida. 2. This is a film about selfless love, about sacrificial love, about friendship, about family, about trust, about truth, about identity, about agency. 3. This is a immensely confident film that asks a lot of its audiences, in that it is told in first person, that faces are often not shown, that it treats Florida's infamous Dozier School for Boys in a fictionalized and sometimes dreamlike manner, that many critical narrative sequences — including one at the heart of the story — are not performed at all but instead are described by still shots of exhumed artifacts and clips of documentary films, and that its one of those movies...

 J.F. McCullers. (2025). "Now The Serpent Was More Subtil." [Digital collage.]

  This article by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards in Pro Publica reveals that t he raids on federal agencies have come to the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, unlawfully "canceling" millions of dollars of in research contracts. The AI-slinging team of course has no idea what they're doing — not only do they not understand the policies they are undermining, but they don't even seem to understand the data they are feigning to analyze. Snatching a gigantic database with elements coded for machine tabulation and then running it willy-nilly through language-based LLMs will inevitably produce nonsensical results, but the team doing it are hooting and hollering because they think they've accomplished something. It would have been efficient to simply ask the data scientists in charge of those databases what they wanted to see, but the new administration has committed itself to ignoring experts. What the team of invaders almo...

Last night we watched Ildikó Enyedi’s “On Body and Soul” (2017) and I woke up thinking about it. That means I am required by intergalactic treaty to write a review, and so here it is. This one might be hard for some to watch. It’s a love story, more or less, involving a lonely younger woman who feels attracted to a lonely older man at her workplace. The complications come in layers: First, he’s a longtime senior manager and she’s a nervous new hire. Second, he’s had enough failed relationships that he’s decided to give up on them entirely and she’s neurodivergent in ways that complicate how she speaks to others, how she hears what others say, and how she responds to touch. Third, they work in a slaughterhouse in Budapest that is fulled of flawed and gossipy coworkers. Fourth, through a complicated turn of events at work, they discover that they both dream the same dream each night. With all that, this movie might well have been some sort of issue-based drama of several kind...

McCullers, J.F. (2023). "Come Now Witness Your Judgment."   Imagine a science fiction novel where all of the people there live in a symbiotic relationship with computers. Their children dig for precious metals that other children in gigantic factories then make into the dazzling computers. These mighty computers are everywhere and in all things, and contain all of the knowledge of the entire history of the planet. Despite the omnipresence of this knowledge, the people don't like knowing true things and instead walk around saying ignorant things to each other. Some of the people even try to make it illegal to learn things, and most of the rest of them go along with it because they're busy looking at the computers. Many of the people are uncomfortable making decisions and so they instead look to the computers to tell them what they should buy next. The computers also write simulated poems and make simulated art for the people that focus on the things the people are supp...

Writing in Specchio Scuro , Carlee Gomes shares why it might be that sex scenes have nearly vanished from popular cinema and television, and what that might mean: "These critics (and audiences today generally speaking) are only interested in a sanitized, moralized, and ideally, completely non-controversial experience with their media and art, an experience they readily commodify into an easily digestible opinion (or tweet, meme, headline) to exist as an artifact online, one that’s representative and reflective of their personal political and moral ideologies. They want a film (just like any other commodity they consume) to stand as a totem, a badge, for their specific belief system rather than challenge it (or not serve as representative at all). While these critics claim to be clamoring for the resurgence of the sex scene, they’re in fact affirming the perspective that is reflective of its demise and of audiences’ aversion to sex in film and media more broadly." https://spec...

Writing in The Bitter Southerner , Wyatt Williams reads Lucinda Williams' memoir but doesn't get to talk to her about it and instead contemplates the limitations of memory, the relationships between parents and children, the complexities of the American South in general and of Louisiana in particular, on the nature of songs that are lists of resonant images or place names, and on whatever it is that Lucinda Williams does for and about and because of all of these things.

  Wilhelm von Kaulbach. (1857). " Headpiece with dancing animals." 2000 – Ice Spice and Lil Pump 1999 – Polo G and Lil Nas X  1998 – Maya Hawke and Shawn Mendes 1997 – Simone Biles and Lil Yachty  1996 – Tom Holland and Zendaya 1995 – Timothée Chalamet and Denzel Curry 1994 – Bad Bunny and Justin Bieber 1993 – Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande 1992 – Cardi B and Selena Gomez 1991 – Tyler The Creator and Travis Scott 1990 – Margot Robbie and Emma Watson 1989 – Taylor Swift and SZA 1988 – Adele and Lizzo 1987 – Zac Efron and Kendrick Lamar 1986 – Drake and Josh Peck 1985 – Gal Gadot and Keira Knightley 1984 – T-Pain and Mark Zuckerberg 1983 – Future and Mila Kunis 1982 – Seth Rogen and Lil Wayne 1981 – Beyoncé and Roger Federer 1980 – Macaulay Culkin and Lin-Manuel Miranda 1979 – Josh Hawley and Zhang Ziyi 1978 – Ashton Kutcher and Ron DeSantis 1977 – Orlando Bloom and Shakira 1976 – Rick Ross and Kyrsten Sinema 1975 – Bradley Cooper and Taika Waititi 1974 – Christian Bale a...

  Hell and damnation: I stewed over this article in Nature since before sunup so now I bring to you my list of boderations. I am enormously pleased to see that visual logic problems are hard for machines to solve. I am not at all pleased at how well the damn things do on the GRE. I'm neither a fan of nor an apologist for the GRE despite all the many enduring benefits I obtained by acing it, but nonetheless this is vexing. My rubric for admitting that there are "glimmers of reasoning" or what we think of as actual understanding in machine results is so hard that I'm sure I'm not being objective about it. As with preschoolers and matches, we're not smart enough nor responsible enough to be doing this work and we ought not to be doing it. That I believe something like this is quite astonishing to me, because it seems to go against just about everything else I believe about science and technology and ambition and possibility and progress. I am amused and slightly...

Trying to use the 2010s Internet with a 1980s mentality is an ongoing struggle. What I mean is that I still somehow think the Internet should be experienced so that (1) I get to the content I want in less than three clicks, (2) I do so in a way that sheds the least personal information, and (3) I get the content I want, instead of the content a robot wants me to see. This last item includes advertising, of course, all of which we all know in our hearts to be a mortal sin.  Obviously, I use a pihole as a DNS sink, and I send all of the devices I use through it: my PCs, my tablet, my phone, my teevee box, and every stupid light bulb that thinks it needs to tell corporate when it gets dark here. On my pcs, my phone, and my tablet, I used locked-down versions of Firefox with additional layers of adblock. I also block most scripting, and block specific layout elements. When I want to build up my teevee watchlist, I use an aggregator like JustWatch or Letterboxd. I expect these services ...

Killer Mike by Brinson + Banks Writing in The Bitter Southerner , Christina Lee looks at why Atlanta legend Killer Mike is so successful and why he continues to surprise and confound: But as Mike has discovered, being what he calls a “connector” is tougher than ever to actually put into practice, especially when America’s political and cultural divides have deepened. “I wish to be someone from the westside of Atlanta who keeps his community connected to hope and opportunity, and I don’t mean that in an abstract, vague way,” he says. “There’s a real hope in growing up as a Black person in America and seeing Black success. And there’s a real hope in seeing Black people and white people cooperate.” Mike is invoking the storied “Atlanta Way,” an unwritten and informal code of conduct between Black activists and white business leaders that dates back to the Civil Rights Movement. Proponents of the Atlanta Way credit it with achieving gradual but steady reforms by putting business interests ...

It is my honor to have three paintings in "The Road To Florida," a new juried show at The Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center on First Street in Fort Myers. The shows asks of the artist and the audience to consider what brought us to Florida, and what keeps us here.    The show opens Friday, June 3rd at 6:00 p.m. and runs through Friday, June 24th at 10:00 p.m. Dona and I will there in the Grand Atrium on opening night and it would be great to see you!   Regular gallery hours are Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with extended hours on Wednesdays and Fridays 10 a.m to 10 p.m. Admission is one dollar.