Knocking At The Gate

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 ...