Monday, September 30, 2024

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Hopeless Romantic - Music Mix #34

Dead Horses; Future Islands; X; Boomtown Rats; Harry Katz and the Pistachios; GZA; Revyn Lenae; King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizards; Thee Marloes; SadBlackLab; The Beths; Father John Misty; Fantastic Negrito; Caleb Landry Jones; The XX; R.E.M.; GROUPLOVE; Alice in Chains; Muse; Damian Marley; The Smashing Pumpkins; Oasis; Vampire Weekend; Hole; Angelika Garcia; Carlos Ares; Bleachers; The The; Cannons; Sylmar; Nilufer Yanya; Iron Maiden; Gelexaida; Shearwater; Ben Sollee; Delafaye; Hurray for the Rif Raff; BLACKSTARKIDS; Simon and Garfunkel; 87 Nights; Johnny Cash; Elvis Costello and the Attractions; The Tragically Hip 


Hopeless Romantic - Music Mix #34

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Licorice Pizza (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

 





 Licorice Pizza (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021: 133 mins)

Anderson, Paul, et al. "On Licorice Pizza." Film at Lincoln Center (March 24, 2022)


Dargis, Manohla. "Licorice Pizza: California Dreaming and Scheming." The New York Times (November 25, 2021)

Dueren, Sean Van, Tucker Johnson and Scout Tafoya. "3 on Licorice Pizza." Apocalypse Now (January 3, 2022)


Flight, Thomas. "The Evolution of Paul Thomas Anderson." (Posted on Youtube: December 21, 2021)


Hudson, David. "Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza." The Current (December 1, 2021)

Jenkins, David. "Licorice Pizza." Little White Lies (January 4, 2022)



Lemire, Christy. "Licorice Pizza." Roger Ebert (December 24, 2021) 


Nayman, Adam. "Show Biz Kids: Paul Thomas Anderson on Licorice Pizza." Cinema Scope #89 (2021)


Warren, Ethan. "The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia University Press, 2023) New Books in Film (March 29, 2023) ["Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential."]
































Tuesday, September 17, 2024

The Graduate (USA: Mike Nichols, 1967)

One of the most beloved American films of all time, The Graduate earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon & Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents’, the indomitable Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), before turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katharine Ross). Visually imaginative and impeccably acted, with a clever, endlessly quotable script by Buck Henry (based on the novel by Charles Webb), The Graduate had the kind of cultural impact that comes along only once in a generation. -- Criterion
It's the great American danger we're all in. That we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it. - Mike Nichols (quoted in More Than Meets the Lens' video essay "Why The Graduate is So Timeless.")
Occasionally in the arts, a work manages to speak to its contemporaries in a powerful and timely way that seems to capture the essence of its era. The usual fate of such works is that they become historical artifacts, of interest only to historians and sociologists. A few works, however, manage to continue to speak across time, renewing their hold on each generation because of their richness, complexity, and treatment of universal concerns and experiences. This ability to transcend different eras is what makes a work a classic. In American film history, one such work is The Graduate, originally released in 1967. - Howard Suber (1987)



The Graduate (USA: Mike Nichols, 1967: 106 mins)

Criterion Collection introduction and commentaries for The Graduate

Henry, Buck. "On His Career and The Graduate." Pinewood Dialogues (June 22, 1996)

Insdorf, Annette. Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes. Columbia University Press, 2017. ["Your professor has a copy of this book."]

Koski, Genevieve, et al. "The Graduate (1967) / The Meyerowitz Stories (Part 1)." The Next Picture Show #100 (October 31, 2017)

Kuersten Erich. "CinemArchetype #6: The Intimidating Nymph." Acidemic (March 2, 2012)

"Mike Nichols." Auteur Musuem #2 (September 1, 2015)

Nichols, Mike. "On His Filmmaking Style and Directing Actors." Pinewood Dialogues (March 1, 1990)

Rich, Frank. "The Graduate: Intimations of a Revolution." Current (February 23, 2016)

Shone, Tom. "Should Film Critics Care About Cinematic Technique." The Guardian (April 11, 2014)

Suber, Howard. "The Graduate." The Current (December 6, 1987)

West, Stephen. "The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Love." Philosophize This! #150 (February 6, 2021) ["Key Takeaways: The Problem of Human Existence and Separateness: Erich Fromm posits that a fundamental issue in human existence is the feeling of separateness or existential loneliness. This awareness of being separate from others and the universe drives people to seek connections beyond themselves, often through love, to alleviate this sense of isolation.
Transactional vs. Genuine Love: The podcast explores the difference between transactional love (where love is treated as a commodity in a personality market) and genuine love. Fromm criticizes the former as being about mutual benefit and not true love, suggesting it leads to relationships that are shallow and likely to fail.
Love as an Active Faculty: Fromm argues that love should be viewed not as a passive emotion that happens to someone, but as an active faculty, a skill that can and should be developed. True love involves a constant, active effort to connect and care for others.
Mastering the Art of Love: The episode discusses Fromm's view of love as an art form that requires dedication and practice, similar to mastering any skill. He emphasizes the importance of humility, courage, faith, and discipline in developing the ability to love genuinely and deeply.
Recommended Reading:
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (1994): This book explores the psychological challenges associated with the transition from traditional societies to modern freedom, and how this shift can lead to authoritarianism.
"The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm: A profound analysis of love as an art that must be actively practiced and developed, rather than a passive feeling. Fromm explores how love, in its various forms including romantic love, familial love, and self-love, is an expression of one's life and a key to human fulfillment.
The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being by Erich Fromm (2014): This work encapsulates Fromm's views on achieving a fulfilling life, focusing on the dichotomy between 'having' and 'being', and the art of living well."]














Wednesday, September 4, 2024

ENG 102 2024: Resources #21

Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.
— John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960)

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Alter, Adam. "Feeling Stuck? Here’s How To Achieve a Breakthrough." Big Brains (June 27, 2024) ["We've all been stuck at some point in our lives — whether we've been stuck at a job and wanting to make a career change, stuck in a location and wanting to move somewhere new, or stuck in relationships or friendships. But the method to getting “unstuck” and achieving a breakthrough might be easier than you think. Using research-backed tools, New York University's Adam Alter shares his tips for how to get unstuck in his new book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Alter shares success stories from some of the world's most successful people, and explains how altering your thoughts and habits could lead you on a better path to success. Alter is a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "The Beauty and the Horror." Weird Studies #171 (June 12, 2024) ["This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming."]

Gardner, Caden Mark and Willow Catelyn Maclay.  "On the Trans Film Image." The Film Comment Podcast (June 25, 2024) ["In April 2021, Film Comment published a Trans Cinema Roundtable Podcast, in which two trans film critics and two trans filmmakers answered questions submitted by listeners on what constitutes a cinema of transness. Now, two of those panelists—Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay—are about to publish a new book on that very subject. Corpses, Fools and Monsters is a thorough inquiry into the history, present, and future of what Caden and Willow call the “trans film image”—not a fully developed cinema, yet, but gestures, glimpses, and traces that have been visible in film from its earliest days and have now gained a renewed creative force. On today’s episode, Caden and Willow join Film Comment Editor Devika Girish to talk about the extensive research they undertook for the book, why representation can be a complex term for trans cinephiles, and films from reappraised classics like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) to new works by trans filmmakers, including Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow."]

Hollis, James. "How to Find Your True Purpose & Create Your Best Life." Huberman Lab (May 13, 2024) ["In this episode, my guest is Dr. James Hollis, Ph.D., a Jungian psychoanalyst, renowned educator and author on finding and pursuing one’s unique purpose. Dr. Hollis is also an expert in the psychology of relationships and healing from trauma. We discuss how early family dynamics and social context create patterns of both adaptive and maladaptive behavior and internal narratives that, when examined, lead to better choices and a deeply fulfilling existence. We discuss discovering your unique self-identity and purpose through specific practices of reflection, meditation and conversations with others. We also discuss self-perception and the evolution of roles within marriages, parent-child relationships, and work. Throughout the episode, Dr. Hollis provides both basic knowledge and practical tools to help us assess ourselves and better understand who we are and what we really want in careers, relationships of all kinds, and society."]

Kenworthy, Nora. "What Fixes Medical Debt." Today, Explained (May 14, 2024) ["It's gotten so bad in America, people are crowdfunding their doctor bills. Vox's Dylan Scott and associate professor Nora Kenworthy explain an imperfect solution and offer a better one."]

Keyes, Corey. "Why You Feel Empty." Hidden Brain (June 10, 2024) ["Have you ever had an unexplainable feeling of emptiness? Life seems perfect – and yet – something is missing. This week, sociologist Corey Keyes helps us understand where feelings of emptiness come from, how to navigate them and why they’re more common than we might assume." Features a discussion of his 2024 book Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down.]

Means, Casey. "Transform Your Health by Improving Metabolism, Hormone & Blood Sugar Regulation." Huberman Lab (May 6, 2024) ["In this episode, my guest is Dr. Casey Means, MD, a physician trained at Stanford University School of Medicine, an expert on metabolic health and the author of the book, Good Energy. We discuss how to leverage nutrition, exercise and environmental factors to enhance your metabolic health by improving mitochondrial function, hormone and blood sugar regulation. We also explore how fasting, deliberate cold exposure and spending time in nature can impact metabolic health, how to control food cravings and how to assess your metabolic health using blood testing, continuous glucose monitors and other tools. Metabolic dysfunction is a leading cause of chronic disease, obesity and reduced lifespan around the world. Conversely, improving your mitochondrial and metabolic health can positively affect your health span and longevity. Listeners of this episode will learn low- and zero-cost tools to improve their metabolic health, physical and mental well-being, body composition and target the root cause of various common diseases."]

Napier, Daniel. "Was Jesus a Philosopher?" Parker's Pensees #260 (June 13, 2024) ["I'm joined by Dr. Daniel Napier to discuss his work on the philosophy of Jesus, especially in his new (and fantastic) book, The Soul Whisperer: Jesus' Way Among The Philosophers."]

Slingerland, Ted. "Why Trying Too Hard Can Backfire On You." Hidden Brain (June 3, 2024) ["Thinking is a human superpower. On a daily basis, thinking and planning and effort bring us innumerable benefits. But like all aspects of human behavior, you can sometimes get too much of a good thing. This week, we talk with philosopher Ted Slingerland about techniques to prevent overthinking, and how we can cultivate the under-appreciated skill of letting go."]

West, Stephen. "The importance of philosophy, justice and the common good. (Michael Sandel)." Philosophize This! (June 23, 2024) ["Today we talk about some of the benefits of being a practitioner of philosophy. Michael Sandel's view of the three main approaches to justice throughout the history of philosophy. The strengths and weaknesses of all three. The consequences of replacing social norms with market norms. And the importance of the common good as a piece of a just society that is able to endure."]


Tuesday, September 3, 2024

ENG 102 2024: Resources #20

This is the mystery we thrust ourselves into: A single neuron is not conscious of its existence. A network of billions of unconscious single neurons is. These monads living in a world without perception become a being that perceives, thinks, and acts. Consciousness lies not in neurons, but in a sophisticated pattern of connectivity (125). - Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottr-Chan in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.

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Angwin, Julia and Will Knight. "The AI Hype Machine." Today, Explained (May 22, 2024) ["Big Tech companies have rolled out a new batch of AI-powered products, improving upon what came before. But as Wired's Will Knight and investigative journalist Julia Angwin explain, they’re not even close to living up to the world-changing technology the Big Tech CEOs promised."]

Arablouei, Ramtin, et al. "The Labor of Love." Throughline (May 9, 2024) ["There's a powerful fantasy in American society: the fantasy of the ideal mother. This mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the kids, volunteers at the school, cleans the house, plans the birthday parties, cares for her own parents. She's a natural nurturer. And she's happy to do it all for free. Problem is? She's imaginary. And yet the idea of her permeates our culture, our economy, and our social policy – and it distorts them. The U.S. doesn't have universal health insurance or universal childcare. We don't have federally mandated paid family leave or a meaningful social safety net for when times get rough. Instead, we have this imaginary mother. We've structured our society as though she exists — but she doesn't. And we all pay the real-life price. Today on the show, we look at three myths that sustain the fantasy: the maternal instinct, the doting housewife, and the welfare queen. And we tell the stories of real-life people – some mothers, some not – who have fought for a much more generous vision of family, labor, and care."]

Azeb, Sophia and Zachary Samalin. "Campus Uproar." Open Source (May 9. 2024) ["We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for its pattern. Columbia and USC have cancelled graduation ceremonies. Many more schools are threatening suspensions or worse if students don’t remove their encampments. In our neighborhood, Harvard Yard is encamped, closed to people without Harvard ID. Harvard students are catch-as-catch-can. We are dropping in conversationally on faculty players we know on either side of the country: Sophia Azeb at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Zachary Samalin at New York University in Manhattan. Santa Cruz is encamped in tents and abuzz with notably civil and inclusive debates about rights, wrongs, and history—all the arguments about Palestine that Congress doesn’t have. You could wonder: what if the 19-year-olds who have preempted the conversation from the campuses are, in fact, the leaders we have been looking for?"]

Butcher, John. "Mythology (Storytelling)." Ologies (February 26, 2018) ["Superhero movies. Bastardized fairy tales. The psychology of celebrity. Star Wars. And yes, some ancient Greek and Roman myths. Professional mythologist and screenwriting consultant John Bucher spins some yarns and unravels some mysteries behind what makes a good story, and why we so desperately need them. Also: rethinking your own life's narrative and gaining a greater appreciation for Elvira. Trust me."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's F is for Fake." Weird Studies (May 29, 2024) ["Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics."]

Greenberg, Udi. "The Abuses of Prehistory: Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors." The New Republic (May 10, 2024) ["With such diametrically opposed claims, it may seem that these books share little beyond pretentious titles. But as historian Stefanos Geroulanos reveals in his original and exciting new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins, both are part of the same intellectual tradition: the ambitious desire of European and North American thinkers to transform humanity by reconstructing its deep past. Geroulanos charts the history of this effort, which began in the late eighteenth century, with a dazzling survey of countless anthropologists, scientists, and artists. By studying bones, art in caves, or nomad tribes, these thinkers believed they could answer humanity’s fundamental questions: Are we cruel or compassionate? Monogamous or polygamous? Are there “natural” ways to organize our families, religious rites, or social institutions? The answers they offered varied enormously and often led to bitter disputes. What they all shared, and what they left for us, was the belief that prehistory is the key to understanding ourselves."]

Haidt, Jonathan. "How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions." The Huberman Lab (June 10, 2024) ["In this episode, my guest is Dr. Jonathan Haidt, PhD, professor of social psychology at New York University and bestselling author on how technology and culture impact the psychology and health of kids, teens, and adults. We discuss the dramatic rise of suicide, depression, and anxiety as a result of replacing a play-based childhood with smartphones, social media, and video games. He explains how a screen-filled childhood leads to challenges in psychological development that negatively impact learning, resilience, identity, cooperation, and conflict resolution — all of which are crucial skills for future adult relationships and career success. We also discuss how phones and social media impact boys and girls differently and the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of how smartphones alter basic brain plasticity and function. Dr. Haidt explains his four recommendations for healthier smartphone use in kids, and we discuss how to restore childhood independence and play in the current generation. This is an important topic for everyone, young or old, parents and teachers, students and families, to be aware of in order to understand the potential mental health toll of smartphone use and to apply tools to foster skill-building and reestablish healthy norms for our kids."]

Moses, Dirk. "Genocidology (Crimes of Atrocity)." Ologies (May 8, 2024) ["The world is confusing, but there are experts in everything. In our least funny episode ever, we thankfully convinced a global expert, professor, researcher, author, and Genocidologist (it’s a real word) Dr. Dirk Moses to answer the questions that we may secretly have: What exactly is genocide? How long has it been happening? Is it a war crime? Is it a crime of atrocity? Who makes up humanitarian law? What's self-defense — and what's offense? How is it litigated? Whose business is it? Why do we do this to each other? What can be done? It’s a dense, long episode with lots of asides for history and context, but it might be just what you need to give you perspective on the conditions — and cycles of trauma — that can lead to crimes of atrocities."]

Procter, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds.  Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2008. ["What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible."]

West, Stephen. "The Improbable Slavoj Zizek - Pt. 1." Philosophize This! #196 (February 26, 2024) ["Complexity of Zizek's Ideas: The episode discusses Slavoj Zizek's philosophy, highlighting the challenge of making his complex ideas accessible to a broad audience. Zizek's provocative style is not mere trolling but aims to disorient and awaken people from ideological complacency. Zizek's Philosophical Influences: Zizek's philosophical framework is deeply influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Lacan. This combination allows Zizek to offer unique interpretations of culture and society, particularly in critiquing global capitalism and exploring human subjectivity. Ideology and Subjectivity: The episode emphasizes Zizek's view on ideology. Zizek argues that everyone is influenced by ideology, and it's crucial to be aware of this in our pursuit of truth. This perspective challenges the simplistic view of ideology as something only others possess, highlighting its universal impact on human subjectivity. Analyzing Zizek's Communication Style: Zizek's method of delivering his philosophy is analyzed. He often starts with a progressive position, makes it appealing, then flips it to show its contradictions. This disorienting style is intentional, designed to reveal the limitations of ideology and encourage deeper critical thinking."]