- Ned Resnikoff
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- Miscellany - 12.3.22
Miscellany - 12.3.22
Links, etc.
Links
Michael Eric Dyson on Kanye West and Kyrie Irving.
Jon Mooallem on Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation.
Peter Canby on Guatemala’s Death Squad Dossier case.
Tavi Gevinson on what TÁR knows about the artist as abuser:
It didn’t occur to me until I left a showing of “Tár” that the movie does all sorts of things that I’d normally find intolerable in a narrative about a powerful person accused of sexual misconduct. The camera stays glued to Lydia, using long takes and few establishing shots, and rarely straying from her point of view. The victims are barely fleshed out or else absent altogether, their accusations only referred to in passing, their testimonies unheard. We catch only the first lines of Krista’s desperately confused e-mails. One of the few characters to challenge Lydia directly—a “BIPOC pangender”-identifying Juilliard student who struggles to connect with Bach because of his “misogynistic life”—is not given the time to make a full or coherent argument for a more inclusive canon. But making the forces that threaten Lydia’s stature as muted to the viewer as they are to her turns out to be a highly effective way of conveying the insidiousness of power. Lydia does not have to contend with other people’s humanity—nor offer hers to them. The film immerses viewers in Lydia’s world of extreme control, which is to say, extreme isolation.
John Holbo’s cartoon philosophers.
John Ganz on fascism as aestheticized barbarity.
L.M. Sacasas on reading.
D.W. Rowlands on the geography of Los Angeles:
What's unique about Los Angeles's urban form is its moderate-density homogeneity: it has neither super-low-density sprawl nor super-high-density clustering, for the most part. Instead, it's a network of moderate-density activity centers with lots of parking.
(4/6)
— DW Rowlands (@82_Streetcar)
5:49 PM • Nov 29, 2022
Lexis-Olivier Ray on the barbaric futility of encampment sweeps:
Brad Troemel, calling Hitler out for his problematic behavior:
Currently Reading
I’m about halfway through Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s Tolstoyan epic of Soviet life around the time of Stalingrad. It’s a grueling read—800-plus pages about ordinary people grappling with Stalinism, Nazism, and all their attendant horrors—but a gripping and deeply moving one.
Grossman was a Soviet Jew and a war correspondent, so he brings a level of journalistic detail to the book that really makes you feel the texture of those times. But there’s also a humanity to his vision that prevents the bleakness from ever overwhelming you. There’s something powerful about reading the account of someone who has seen some of the worst humanity has to offer but refuses to give into cynicism.
Here’s a little snippet that I think serves as a sort of mission statement for the book. It comes from a manifesto written by the character Ikonnikov, a prisoner of war who is clearly a little cracked. But this part in particular feels like something Grossman really believes:
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
I might write a bit more about the book once I’ve finished.
Music
According to Apple Music, this is my most-listened song of 2022. It’s arguably Sharon Van Etten’s at her most Radiohead-inflected, so that tracks.