Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.-
Over on Criterion's Current—a blog that quickly morphed into a full-blown magazine on film—Mike McQuade dives into his design process for the Criterion Collection edition of Citizen Kane. Iconic, yet divisive.
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A profile of Kendrick Lamar and the moves he's made since leaving T.D.E., the label he was with since 2007.
"It's hard to overstate the shock it caused in the rap world when Kendrick announced that he was leaving T.D.E. It was like when the Jackson 5 left Motown. When Prince left Warner Bros. When Jay-Z left Def Jam."
The last album he released on T.D.E., "Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers", is monumental, but this Big Step does feel like a clean slate, and I am so looking forward to seeing all the things he – Pulitzer Kenny – will do next.
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My colleague Amy recommended this podcast with Molly Mielke in which she speaks about her thesis on computers and creativity, which I'm linking to here. It's a delightful read, one that makes me excited about the future of computers & computing. To quote Molly:
“Computers have, since their inception, been a rigid tool that the human user has had to adapt to use... However, through standardization, moldability, and abstraction, we can dramatically expand the utility of computers while broadening their capacity to help more people solve their problems creatively.”
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A lovely deep dive into Madlib's "Sound Ancestors", a highly underrated album, in which the creator identifies a parallel between the combination of Madlib/Four Tet and Miles Davis/Teo Macero.
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I've written about it before: the cinematography of The Batman is fantastic. It's a dark, immersive world, portrayed with shots wet with rain and dirty with grime. Patrick Tomasso published a video essay last year that details the work that director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser did to achieve it.
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I've been a fan of Perfume Genius ever since he released No Shape in 2017. His latest album, Ugly Season, is out now and accompanied by the film above. I highly recommend you listen to the album in full—start to finish, no interruptions, preferably with headphones on—because it is an experience. To me, this is his finest album yet; an album that combines and builds upon all the beautiful things he's created over the years and, at the same time, takes it to another level. The visual by Jacolby Satterwhite is mind-boggling, a mesmerising tasting platter of Ugly Season.
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I recently watched this documentary about Martha Cooper, who photographed much of—if not all of—New York's graffiti in the 1970s and 1980s. The documentary is an inspiring piece of work, and Martha comes across as a delightful individual, with a fantastic legacy of documenting people rising above their environments.
Seek it out, if you can!
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Brought to my attention by Fabian, in response to my essay on the intimacy of experiencing a film in a movie theatre, Soderbergh's address—dating back to 2013—is an impassioned speech, arguing that film culture is "under assault by the studios".
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The New York Review of Software. I'd subscribe. (Though reading the sentence that mentions revisiting software a few years later served as a sad reminder that a lot of software wouldn't survive until the revisit.)
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I've spent a lot of time thinking about and making improvements on our house in the past year. Our house is old (built around 1907) and, while we have some forward-looking plans, it is sometimes difficult to know where or how to start. In swoops Simon Sarris' Substack. He built a beautiful home in New Hampshire and has documented the process, providing some useful guidance and recommendations along the way.