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inky-duchess · 4 years ago

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21 History Ancedotes for my 21st Birthday

So today I celebrate my 21st birthday and I have decided to gift you all with 21 of my favourite historical Ancedotes. Some are funny, some are sad and some are plain bizarre but I hope the make your day 💜

Mary Maloney, an Irish-born suffragette in England followed Winston Churchill around while he was campaigning for a seat in Parliament, drowning out everything he said with a very large bell and calls for him to apologise for his comments on women's rights and suffrage movements.

Clodius Pulcher was a well born Roman noble during the last day's of the Republic. He gave up his Patrician status to become Tribune of the Plebs (an office in which one had to be a Pleb) by being adopted by a much younger Plebian man who became his "father". Clodius was a bit of a riot, sneaking into religious festivals dressed like a woman to sleep with Caesar's wife, building a shrine to Liberty in the ruins of the Conservative Cicero, vetoed the last speech of one of the Consuls (who basically did nothing all year and was apparently going to roast Caesar) and burned down the Senate House with his funeral pyre (the Plebs who loved him literally tearing up the furniture to build his pyre). He was honestly the best fun.

When laying on her deathbed, Queen Caroline of Ansbach turned to her husband George II of England and told him he should marry again. George refused to ever wed again... But added he would have mistresses. Caroline said , likely with a roll of her eyes, "oh my god that doesn't matter."

Florence was a pretty cool city in the Renaissance until Savanorola came to town. He disliked the loose living artists that crowded the city, with their naked pagan gods and rampant homosexuality. He expelled them all with help of the French hoping to make Florence Holy Again. When the Borgia Pope excommunicated him and sentenced him to death, one man in the crowd was reported to have said. "thank God, niw we can return to sodomy." One Floretine man in the 1490s said Gay Rights.

So this list couldn't be complete without an entry of the only American politician I love, Alexander Hamilton who was just a walking entity of sass. I could go on about his sharp sarcasm or his disaster bi vibes with John Lauren's but my all time favourite Alexander Hamilton ancedote has to be this exchange with Thomas Jefferson "There are approximately 1010300 words in the English language, but I could never string enough words together to properly explain how much I want to hit you with a chair."

Caterina Sforza was an Italian noble woman during the Renaissance. She was apart of the powerful Sforza family, which drew many enemies to her. One fateful day at Forli, Caterina's children were snatched as hostages. The besiegers threatened to kill her children if she did not cede the castle. Caterina refused, lifting her skirts and shouted to the besiegers that she had the means to make more children.

Hannibal Lecter's creator Thomas Harris was happy to end his great character's story with the original trilogy. However his publishers forced him to write an unneeded prequel explaining why Hannibal became Hannibal. Thomas Harris agreed lest he lose the rights to his character so he wrote Hannibal Rising, where Hannibal as a young man hunts down the Nazis who ate his sister with a katana.

Nell Gwyn is my favourite mistress of Charles II, mainly because of her sass. Once while trapped in the middle of a riot where Londoners swamped her carriage thinking she was Charles's Catholic mistress. She popped her head out the carriage and told the people "Pray good people be civil. I am the Protestant whore." She also dosed her rival Moll Davis with laxatives in order to free up some of Charles's time and she once flashed her underwear at the French ambassador after asking him why the Franch King did not pay her to spy on Charles because she was with him every night. A true Queen.

Emperor Ai of the Han Dynasty of China once rose from his bed to go do some ruling when he realised his lover, Dong Xian was sleeping on his sleeve. Rather than disturb his lover, the Emperor cut his sleeve off at the wrist to leave Dong Xian nap. Nothing has ever been more romantic than that. Y'all could never.

Princess Margaret the sister of current Queen Elizabeth II was a socialable Princess and often tasked to visit the up and coming music stars of the day on behalf of the Crown. When meeting the Beatles one evening, she noticed George Harrison was acting a little odd. When she asked what was the matter, he replied "We arent allowed eat until you go." Princess Margaret laughed and promptly left so the Beatles could get some dinner.

During the Siege of Jadotsville, Irish soldiers under the flag of the UN were attacked and besieged by local insurgents allied with the Katanga Regime. The insurgents numbered thousands while the Irish only had 158 soldiers, all who were lightly armed. They radioed to their allies assuring them that "we will hold out until our last bullet is spent. Could use some whiskey though".

Napoleon was famous for writing raunchy letters to his wife, the Empress Josephine while he was away. She used to reply with really mundane letters or not at all. She really just could not be bothered with him.

Josip Broz Tito was so fed up with Joseph Stalin sending assassins to kill him, he wrote to Stalin personally to say "If you don't stop sending assassins to kill me. I will send one to Moscow and I won't have to send another." It didn't work but Big Dick Energy.

Successful Roman soldiers returning from war often got to march along in parades known as Triumphs. During this, it was customary for them to sing bawdy songs about their commander. One surviving one about Caesar goes like this "Romans, lock up your wives. Here comes the bald adulterous whore. We pissed away your gold in Gaul and come to borrow more."

Matilda, Lady of the English was a woman so badass that history cannot handle her. She was the daughter of Henry I who left his throne to her after the death of her brother. She was away in France when her father died and her throne was snatched by her cousin Stephen. They battled back and forth for years with neither side ceding any ground. Matilda was once besieged in a castle during a snow storm, with Stephen's men all around her. Instead of fighting her way out. She simply donned a white cloak and walked out of the castle. Just walked out without any of Stephen's men seeing her.

Pedro of Portugal once fell in love with a beautiful lady in waiting called Inez de Castro. For years, they lived as man and mistress, popping out a few kinds. Pedro's dad really did not like Inez and wanted Pedro to find a legitimate wife so he had her killed. Pedro returned home to find the mother of his children dead. Pedro went a little crazy. He had all his father's assassins killed, ripping out their hearts as they had done to him. When Pedro ascended the throne, he demanded the Pope legitimize his children by Inez. The Pope not wanting to upset the King, said he couldn't because Inez was never crowned Queen. Pedro dug Inez up and crowned her as Queen, having all the nobility swear loyalty to her corpse. The Pope had no choice but to agree to his request.

A famously clever general once saved an entire city with an ingenious stragety to sit outside the city waiting for the attacking army to come. The attack had come to fast for the city to ready themselves for a Siege so, the general had to move quickly. He evacuated the city and took his place waiting for the army to come. The enemy forces stopped and took one look at him and bolted, thinking he meant to lure them in one of his famous traps.

Michaelangelo was really badly treated by the Vatican when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. He constantly fought with the Popes over the design and his work, which he was paid peanuts for. Michaelangelo got his revenge in his work, painting the gates of Hell behind the Papal Throne and an angel flipping the ol' fig (the Renaissance version of the bird) toward the Pope's chair.

Peter the Great was not a perfect guy. He kept serfdom as a practise in his kingdom, he had his son tortured to death and he could be an unpleasant guy. But Peter was a dreamer. He wanted nothing more to build a fleet for Russia and bring Russia beyond its borders. Peter took a gap year from ruling Russia to wander around Europe. When he stopped in England, he was granted Leicester House to chill in while he did his shipwright studies. It was here that Peter found a new passion. The wheelbarrow. Cue Peter and his new found English buddies drinking in Leicester House, punching the artwork and rolling each other around in barrels across the house's Great gardens.

Diogenes is hands down a walking shit post. He was a great thinker in Greece during the reign of Alexander but a rather dry, sarcastic wit. He lived in a pithos/a jar because he shunned all vanities and values of society. He trolled other philosophers, attending their debates to heckle them and eat loud foods through them. When Alexander the Great came to fan boy over him, saying that if he were not Alexander he would like to be Diogenes to which Diogenes just said "yeah me too, now get out of my sunlight."

Cosimo de Medici was the son of a Floretine banker with a great knowledge and love of art. Cosimo wished for Florence to release its potentially and join the Renaissance. He hired Filippo Brunelleschi to finsh the Great Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore which had láin unfinished for over a century, a symbol of a failure of ambition. The builders had lost the knowledge of creating a dome so large so it remained unfinished. Despite much opposition from the other nobility and denouncers of the Renaissance, Cosimo's dream of the completion of the dome was completed, making it the largest brick dome in creation at that time. There is nothing like achieving your dreams and certainly nothing like leaving a lasting reminder that screams 'I was right and you were wrong' to stand for centuries.

#Instead of doing shots I decided to give you all a gift #History is our greatest gift #And it's filled with dick jokes and idiots #Anyway happy birthday to me #Go forth and enjoy this great gift #history dump #History Ancedotes #History bites: kinda?

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sataniccapitalist · 5 years ago

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APRIL 09, 2020

It's All Over but the Shouting

Wafers-

A few months ago, David Masciotra, a free-lance writer and author of Against Traffic, among other works, approached The American Conservative with a proposal for an article, which would be a review of my American Empire trilogy. He subsequently submitted the article, and never heard back. Since I'm neither a conservative nor a progressive, but only a writer interested in Reality, it's possible that TAC got spooked by David's essay. (To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, "Americans can't bear too much reality.") However, it's also possible that by that time the coronavirus was starting to make itself visible, and that TAC was thrown by that rather than anything ideological. I guess we can give them the benefit of the doubt. In any case, David and I agreed that I should just post his essay on my blog, and accept the fact that no American publication was likely to run it (for whatever reason). Hence, here it is.

It’s All Over but the Shouting: Morris Berman’s Work on American Decline

“Stick a fork in their ass, and turn them over. They’re done,” Lou Reed dryly announces on his 1989 song about the American Empire, “The Last Great American Whale.” The rock and roll poet’s grim diagnosis of a culture gone awry makes for a fine lyric. If Reed were to have expanded his morbid one-liner into a 1,000-page trilogy of books, full of assiduous research, brilliant anecdotes, and despite the sad subject matter, immensely enjoyable, and often amusing, prose, he would have something resembling the series of books on American decline from cultural critic, historian, novelist, and poet, Morris Berman.

Berman, while a visiting professor in the belly of the beast at the Catholic University in Washington, DC, began writing the first installment in the late 1990s,The Twilight of American Culture, after observing the coalescence of several pathologies that are now beyond dispute as inflicting pain on American life: staggering rates of inequality, governmental dysfunction, an ever-expanding militarism, the fracturing of communal and civic life, and the dominance of anti-intellectualism, visible in everything from an increasingly shallow pop culture to misspelled words on public signs. There was also an aura of threat in the air, of the kind predicted by Don DeLillo in his 1985 novel, White Noise. Like the thick presence of humidity on a summer afternoon, Americans couldn’t see that their neighbors were becoming selfish, and often cruel, but they could feel it.

Having studied the downfall of other empires, Berman saw the window for American reform closing. He warned that if America did not drastically transform its public policies, ideology, and working conception of citizenship, its troubles would only intensify and calcify, bringing a once-promising civilization past the point of no return. In the two books that followed—

Dark Ages America

and

Why America Failed

—Berman meticulously demonstrated that America’s myopic focus on profit, at the expense of everything else, its zest for war – at home and abroad – and its lack of self-awareness and insight had escalated, making recovery virtually impossible.

Simultaneous with the development of Berman’s argument, the United States suffered the worst attack on its soil on September 11, 2001, and responded by launching not one, but two disastrous wars. Its housing market and financial system crashed, liquidating much of middle class wealth, and it reacted with giving away boondoggles to the very parties of greed that caused the crisis. Then, in 2016, as the citizenry began to stratify in ways more violent and intractable, Donald Trump became President-Elect. Berman, whom the New York Times and other mainstream outlets dismissed as cynical, cranky, and “anti-American,” looks more and more sterling.The left and right argue about nearly everything, making extreme accusations about each other. Maybe one camp is right on other issues, and the other is correct on some, but the larger possibility to consider is, what if they are all wrong on the main issue?

As Berman put it during a recent email exchange that I had with him:

Conservatives and progressives alike are patriots; like Trump, they seek to save America, or make it great again. What they are ignoring is the rhythm and record of history. All civilizations rise and fall; there are no exceptions to this rule, and America is not going to escape its fate. The great Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, first suggested the inevitable decline of the nation in 1953. Andrew Hacker stated it clearly in The End of the American Era, 1970. Between that year and today, there have been a host of books—my trilogy on the American empire included—that have pointed out that civilizations come and go, and that now is our time. Yet on both the right and left, there is no recognition of this bedrock reality. If you do recognize the larger picture, you can't possibly care about impeachment, for example, or who wins these silly Democratic debates. All of that is theater, not reality.

The reality is ascertainable from the daily deluge of grim headlines—lead poisoning in the water causing irreversible brain damage in children, the rise of the “working poor,” near-daily mass shootings, America spending hundreds of billions on weapons of war while ignoring its crumbling infrastructure. Pundits and politicians have a tendency to treat all of these signs of pathology and dysfunction as isolated, but an unobstructed historical vantage point, which Berman’s work provides, suggests that all of America’s problems—from high rates of functional illiteracy to political corruption—are trees growing out of the same rotten roots.

Berman’s project becomes more excavation than analysis, demonstrating an affinity for radicalism, in the original sense of the term, which is identifying and criticizing an issue’s origin, rather than obtusely obsessing over its consequences. America, from its inception, was dedicated to commercial conquest, and equated “the pursuit of happiness” with the acquisition of wealth and property. The third book in Berman’s trilogy, Why America Failed, relies on assiduous research and sharp analysis to prove the case over its 400 pages. Meanwhile, the consistent papering over the more accurate story he tells, with red, white and blue advertisements, robs even many of the country’s leading dissidents of a holistic perspective. In his deployment of cultural criticism, Berman shows how, although his politics tend slightly toward the left, he is most in mourning over America’s destruction of tradition and refusal to balance its desires for commercial dominance with small scale, communal concerns:

Dating back 400 years—the continent was filled with individuals whose idea of the good life was goods, i.e. money and property. There were dissenting voices, such as Capt. John Smith and the Puritan divines, but these were increasingly pushed aside. The title of Richard Bushman's book, and the book itself, are good summaries of the process: From Puritan to Yankee. America was effectively born bourgeois; it had no feudal period. And while feudalism had its obvious drawbacks, it also had some serious advantages: community, craftsmanship, ties of friendship, meaningful work, noblesse oblige, and spiritual purpose, among other things. The American experiment was based, from the first, on hustling, opportunism; this is what the "pursuit of happiness" really meant in the eighteenth century—go out and get yours (which the Founding Fathers certainly did). "Virtue" originally meant putting the needs of society above one's own personal interests. By the late seventeenth century, the meaning had been inverted: it now meant personal success in an opportunistic environment. Blaming the corporate elite has its limits, because what virtually all Americans want is to join the upper 1 percent. Thus American spirituality, such as it is, can be summarized in a single word: More. More, more, I want more. Our leaders reflect our values, which is how America's consummate hustler, Donald Trump, wound up in the White House. In that sense, we have a genuine democracy.

In his seminal essay, “Democratic Vistas,” Walt Whitman worried that ��genuine belief” had left American life. In the mad race for money and status, Americans were forgetting or neglecting the sociopolitical principles that could construct a spiritually strong society. For “genuine belief” to thrive, the believers must, in spite of their partisan or ideological disputes, maintain some adherence to tradition – a set of ideas, rites, and practices that form the foundation of their politics, behavior, and vision for the development of their culture.

Berman attempts to achieve a balance in his cultural and historical analysis by spotlighting societies where edifying traditions are steadfast, helping to anchor their respective cultures, and help inhabitants connect to each other with a shared sense of purpose. In Neurotic Beauty, Berman writes about Japan’s traditions of craft, family, and advantageous use of empty space in art and identity, and how those traditions are under siege by Japan’s own move to large scale, corporate capitalism. In Genio: The Story of Italian Genius, Berman examines the Italian gift of injecting space, movement, into static situations – the result of which is, arguably, the most significant creative legacy in the Western world.

It is not only through travel and study that Berman is able to contrast cultures that maintain some loyalty to their best traditions with the American fixation on commercial, technological, and militaristic “progress,” but also through his own experience. He asserts that the “best decision” of his life was moving to Mexico, and one of his worst decisions was waiting so long to do it. When I asked him about the “traditional society” of his Mexican home, as juxtaposed with his previous home in Washington, DC, he began with the caveat that “Mexico has been heavily Americanized, and traditional values—community, friendship, craftsmanship, spirituality—have accordingly been eroded in favor of hustling, individualism, alienation, and meaninglessness.”

Nevertheless, his move to Mexico was a “bet” on the lasting elements of tradition and communal life in Mexico, and it is one that has proven itself wise. Berman offers an anecdote to illustrate the camaraderie and generosity that often characterize his relationships and interactions in Mexico:

Something like this happens to me at least once a week, and it always wakes me up to the fact that I am not living in the US anymore. I live in an apartment building in Mexico City, one floor up. One day I was coming home from the supermarket, going up the stairs, carrying plastic bags full of groceries, and one of the bags broke. Contents spilled out all over the stairs and onto the ground: oranges, Diet Coke, whatever. At that point, at the top of the stairs, the door to the apartment there opened, and a 5-year-old girl peered out. Without saying a word, she came down the stairs and helped me put the spilled groceries back in the bags. When it was done, she went back upstairs and closed the door.

Berman would not argue that acts of kindness never take place in the United States, or that every single Mexican behaves according to an ethic of solidarity, but the rarity of friendly relations in America, and the breakdown of community, as documented at length by Robert Putnam, Sherry Turkle, and many other scholars, is not accidental.

“For one thing, girls are taught to fear men, in America (possibly with good reason),” Berman said, and added, “The sexes pretty much hate each other, or are at least wary of each other. But equally significant, Americans of all ages are taught to not help other people (we even arrest people who attempt to feed the homeless). Their problems are their problems, not yours. You are not your brother's keeper, and in general other people are rivals or enemies.”

America has failed to enact the social welfare policies of its democratic peers in Western Europe, but what Berman indicts goes to deeper to core of America’s character. America has also neglected to preserve its “bonds of voluntary association” that Alexis de Tocqueville believed were crucial to the health of the society. In that sense, Americans interested in conservatism might consider that their country is the least conservative in the world. It invests almost no effort in conserving anything, from the beauty of its natural environment to the social ties that are essential for a durable civilization.

The improvements of American life for blacks, women, gays, and workers were possible through the courageous social movements of the 20th century, and these are improvements that Berman admires. He cautions, however, that none of them address the central problem of American culture:

Those were certainly great successes, and they made a great difference for the people involved in those movements. Personally, I applaud them. The problem, however, is that all of them were bids to have a greater share in the American pie—bids to enter the dominant culture. None of them envisioned, a la Lewis Mumford, Henry David Thoreau, or Ernest Callenbach, a different type of society. They merely wanted a greater role in the society as is. The only group that stood for a completely different way of life was the Native Americans, and look what we did to them. The savagery of that genocide, of a people who dared to disagree with the American definition of "progress," is unbelievable.

When Martin Luther King turned more radical, expressing opposition to the “spiritual sickness” of America, rather than only its racist laws, the country turned on him. Similarly, Berman describes in his trilogy how most of the public mocked and ridiculed President Jimmy Carter for his televised "Spiritual Malaise" address, given in Annapolis in 1979—a speech that now appears prescient in its condemnation of uncontrolled consumerism, unabashed selfishness, and the stunning inability of the nation to observe its own behavior.

The candidates in the 2020 race for the presidency, including the president himself, routinely repeat the bromide that the election will determine the “direction” of the country. The "soul" of the nation is somehow always at stake, and yet regardless of who gets elected, things continue to spiral out of control. Morris Berman’s sobering assessment doubles as a “Dead End” sign, warning that the winner might influence the speed and comfort of travel, but that ultimately, we're headed for collapse.

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mistavybe · 5 years ago

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Favorite childhood TV shows/movies 🖥 🍿

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that this list could very well be never ending because I am, and have always been a TV and movie superfan lol.

In the interest of keeping it brief (especially after that long ass “Albums That Remind You Of Your Early 20’s” post), I’ve decided to list the first ten that come to mind, in no particular order.

Note: I doubt this could count as a TOP 10 list... More like a “List Of The First Ten Of My Favourite Childhood TV shows and Movies That Came To Mind” list. ��🏾‍♂️

To be fair to myself, I’ll do 5 Movies and 5 TV Shows. 📺

First, the films: 👇🏾

The NeverEnding Story (Furry, flying dog-faced dragon, pretty fairy princess, awesome soundtrack, and all exactly like the the book that I got for Christmas earlier and read four times in a row back to back because it was that good. If you didn’t love The Neverending Story, then did you even have a childhood pre-1984? 💁🏾‍♂️ OMG and the theme song by Norwegian Pop star Limahl featuring American songstress Beth Anderson! 🕺🏾💃🏽)

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Star Wars (I’m counting the original Trilogy as one film because otherwise Star Wars films will take up three of the five spaces lol. Fight me if you need to 🤷🏾‍♂️ Also, Lando Calrisian > Han Solo AND Luke Skywalker any day IMHO. As a young black kid, Billy Dee Williams’ portrayal of Lando was legit the coolest black man I had ever seen onscreen at that point and for a long time thereafter. This is not up for debate. He ruled a Sky City! And he wore a cape while doing it. 🕺🏾 Han was a pilot / con man and Luke was a bumbling magic farmboy. The End!)

Spider-Man (Yes, the cheesy-ass 1977 made for TV movie! This was the best thing ever for a 5-year old, comic book loving kid like me 🕷🕸🙌🏾)

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Labyrinth (If David Bowie singing “Dance The Magic Dance” to that little baby while they’re surrounded by muppet monsters didn’t warm your heart till you melted then we can’t be friends 👋🏾. Best villain casting everrrr!!!)

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Eddie Murphy: Delirious (Okay, but hear me out... Yes, I was only 12 when Delirious came out but I already knew and loved Eddie Murphy after cracking up laughing at him in Trading Places, 48 Hours and various rented VHS tapes of his skits of Saturday Night Live... then I discovered the Delirious VHS tape at the video club and it was the raunchiest, most foul mouthed, crazy ass, most hilarious thing I’d ever seen or heard! Within a couple days I memorised his entire stand up routine and had my friends rolling at school till they asked to borrow the tape too. I converted a lot of my friends to Eddie Murphy fans back then. Classic stand up. So politically incorrect and sooo funny omg! 😂🤣)

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Anddd... the five TV shows!

Anybody old enough to remember Blue Falcon & Dynomutt - Dog Wonder? 👀

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The A-Team (Mr. T was everything in the 80’s lol)

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I can’t choose between The Six Million Dollar Man and it’s equally successful spin-off series, The Bionic Woman, so they’re both my third choice lol.

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Knight Rider! (Because everyone wanted to drive K.I.T.T. back in the 80’s 🤟🏾)

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And last, but by no means least, I give you one of the most iconic cartoons of all time - Scooby Doo! 🐕🙌🏾

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If you enjoyed this post you might want to click over to my Honorable Mentions post that follows this one, because I thought of some more classic shows and movies that should not be overlooked lol. 😉

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aaronmaurer · 4 years ago

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Movies I Liked in 2020

Every year I reflect on the pop culture I enjoyed and put it in some sort of order.

Discussing film in 2020 is almost nonsensical. Theatres were shut down in most places for most of the year, shuffling release schedules and availability of titles in various markets, further fracturing an already-fragmented landscape. I personally love the movie-going experience – the darkened atmosphere, the massive screen, the ability to escape the outside world for a couple hours in the company of a room of strangers. Man, do I miss all of that. Yet I am exceedingly grateful to the creators and media conglomerates that decided to release some of their projects to streaming services and “virtual cinemas” during this unprecedented year. (Despite Wonder Woman 1984’s flaws, wow, was it nice to have a new action blockbuster to watch over the holidays.)

I toyed with breaking out stage/theatre projects separately, but at the end of the day, had those played on the big screen they would have still been considered, so I decided to keep everything together. This year more than ever I make no claims to comprehensiveness, and it seems even more futile than usual to rank these films, so here are 15 of my favorite films of 2020 listed in alphabetical order. How I wish I could have experienced these all on the big screen.

American Utopia (available on HBO)

Spike Lee’s film of the Broadway engagement of David Byrne’s American Utopia is right up there with Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, the gold standard of concert films (and I’m not even much of a Talking Heads/Byrne fan!). The brilliance of this tour-turned-Broadway show is the elimination of any stationary equipment – Byrne and his band, utilizing mobile instruments, perform choreographed movement to the songs (a mix of Byrne solo material and Talking Heads classics) on an otherwise bare stage. The arrangements of the songs themselves are warm and life-affirming, something we all needed more of in 2020.

An American Pickle (available on HBOMax)

This quirky comedy from writer Simon Rich stars Seth Rogan in dual roles as an immigrant in the early 1900s transplanted to modern day New York and his last remaining descendant. I wasn’t expecting much from the premise but found it to be a surprisingly resonant story about family and legacy with salient observations about modern conveniences and appreciating small pleasures. Rogan himself is really great in this, creating two very distinct and believable characters that in an alternate reality might be up for awards consideration.

Black Is King (available on Disney+)

Beyonce’s latest visual album has its origins in her Lion King role, but the material transcends that misbegotten remake (despite the occasional out-of-place audio clips sprinkled throughout). The visuals here are stunning, from the costumes and makeup to the set design and choreography, all in celebration of Black excellence and beauty.

Emma. (available on HBO, VOD and Blu-ray)

One of the last films I saw in theatres this spring was the latest treatment of Jane Austen’s Emma from director Autumn de Wilde. Similar to Little Women last year, I had no prior experience with the source material, never having read the novel or seen any prior adaptations (outside of Clueless, if you count that), but I found it absolutely delightful. The cast is terrific, including Anya Taylor-Joy in a role completely different than her other big turn this year in The Queen’s Gambit, and the production design & direction are impeccably sumptuous, creating the type of escapism that came to mean all-the-more as the year wore on.

First Cow (available on Showtime, VOD and Blu-ray)

Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is a moving meditation on unexpected friendship, ideas of masculinity and economic inequality set against the backdrop of 1800s Oregon Country. Poetic but not ponderous, First Cow is one of the most humane and empathetic portraits of man and nature I experienced in 2020.

Hamilton (available on Disney+)

Already a big of Lin Manual-Miranda’s race-bent musical about founding father Alexander Hamilton, I was still awed by this document of the original Broadway production. Director Tommy Kail adeptly films his own stage direction while capturing intimate moments through closeups and vantages that are unavailable to the live audience. And while I personally may have preferred Lin to sing more than sob through some of his Act II songs, the whole cast is phenomenal, especially Leslie Odom Jr, Renée Elise Goldsberry and MVP Daveed Diggs whose energy and charisma are palpable in his dual role as Lafayette/Jefferson.

Just Mercy (available on HBO, VOD and Blu-ray)

Although technically a 2019 film, Just Mercy didn’t receive wide release until 2020 so I’m including it here. The adaptation of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s memoir about his fight for death row inmates is a powerful story of the ongoing fight for justice and rarely falls into “based on a true story”/biopic clichés. Michael Jordan brings dignity and righteousness to the role of Stephenson and Jamie Foxx is excellent as the wrongfully incarcerated Walter McMillian.

Kajillionaire (available on VOD)

The story of an insular family of grifters, Kajillionaire explores what it’s like to exist in a bubble and reconcile that with a growing understanding of the wider world. Evan Rachel Wood engenders immense empathy with her portrayal of the family’s daughter who has been raised without any real physical affection or affirmation and Gina Rodriguez exudes light and charisma as a woman who comes into their orbit and changes everything.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (available on Netflix)

Adapted from August Wilson’s play of the same name, this film contains a powerhouse performance from Viola Davis as the titular blues singer but belongs to the magnetic Chadwick Boseman in his final role. As Levee, a brash young songwriter and musician, Boseman fully realizes a portrait of a talented and demeaned Black man in America, trapped by circumstance and his own feelings of helplessness. It’s beautiful and gut-wrenching to behold, and makes his passing all the more tragic as we can only imagine the great performances that we’ll never get to see.

Mank (available on Netflix)

Mank, a biopic about Golden Age Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, may be director David Fincher’s most conventional film yet, however that takes nothing away from the charm of its engaging storytelling and performances. As “Mank” works – or rather drunkenly procrastinates – on the screenplay for Citizen Kane, we get flashbacks of his relationships with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, which will provide the basis for his script’s thinly veiled characters.

Small Axe (available on Amazon Prime)

A series of five separate films from director Steve McQueen, the Small Axe series is linked by its exploration of the West Indian community in London. Exploring topics including the justice system, educational disparity and the unifying & life-affirming power of music, these films are each powerful and moving on their own but add up to a rich and beautiful tapestry of the complexities of immigrant life.

Soul (available on Disney+)

Soul is in many ways a spiritual successor (pun intended) to Inside Out, my all-time favorite Pixar film, envisioning life after death (or is that life before life?) as a strange and delightfully stylized realm where new souls prepare to be born. The audience surrogate to this world is a frustrated jazz musician who finds himself incapacitated the day of his big break. The stunningly rendered film is another example of the studio – and co-director Pete Docter – at its heart-rending best with lovely observations about passion, mentorship and being present to life’s small pleasures.

The Vast of Night (available on Amazon Prime)

An indie sci-fi flick set in 1950s New Mexico from first-time director Andrew Patterson, The Vast of Night pays homage to the likes of The Twilight Zone better than the current reboot of that show does. This surprisingly compelling movie creates a tangible sense of time and place and utilizes innovative shots and blocking to deliver something unique and artful, while still delivering on its genre promises.

What the Constitution Means to Me (available on Amazon Prime)

The final live communal event I attended before everything locked down last spring was the touring production of this Heidi Schreck play, and boy, was it a moving way to say a temporary goodbye to live theatre (even if I didn’t quite know it at the time). Later in the year, Amazon gifted us with a record of Schreck’s Broadway run, which loses nothing of its impact or immediacy. Using her personal history of debate contests at American Legion Halls as an entry point, Schreck explores how the Constitution has been used (and not used) to impact the rights of women (and other marginalized groups) throughout America’s history. Brilliant, heart-breaking and inspiring art.

Wolfwalkers (available on AppleTV+)

The latest wonder from director Tomm Moore (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea) completes his trilogy of films inspired by Irish mythology. The topics this time are the Wolfwalkers, an Irish variation of the Werewolf legend, and the clash of urbanization with the natural world. Vividly rendered in gorgeous traditional animation, this is one of the most visually splendid things I saw all year.

Bonus! Honorable Mentions:

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Netflix)

Feels Good Man (VOD)

Palm Springs (hulu)

Sound of Metal (Amazon Prime)

Tenet (VOD, Blu-ray)

#film

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ramajmedia · 5 years ago

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5 Reasons The Godfather Is The Best Mob Movie Ever Made (And 5 Why It's Goodfellas)

It’s not often that a discussion of the greatest movie in a certain genre boils down to just two movies, but the debate over the finest gangster film ever made usually comes down to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

They’re both very different movies – one is adapted from a fictional novel and the other is a true-to-life biopic, one has a conventional timeline and the other has a nonlinear structure with choppy editing etc. – but they’re arguably equally well-crafted. Here are 5 Reasons The Godfather Is The Best Mob Movie Ever Made (And 5 Why It’s Goodfellas).

RELATED: 10 Most Memorable Quotes From The Godfather Trilogy

10 The Godfather: A more romantic portrayal of mob life

The Corleones are not a real family, and they’re essentially royalty in the criminal underworld, so The Godfather was free to make their lifestyle look glamorous. The occasional scene like Sonny getting shot dead at a toll booth might not seem very glitzy, but they’re few and far between.

With romantic ideas about going to lavish parties and the Don giving out favors on the day of his daughter’s wedding, the movie does make being a mobster look awfully fun. No one thought gangsters were cool until Francis Ford Coppola came along and gave audiences an idealized Hollywood depiction of their lives.

9 Goodfellas: A more realistic portrayal of mob life

The biggest difference between The Godfather and Goodfellas is that, while the former glamorizes the gangster lifestyle, the latter provides a more realistic portrait of it. The characters of Goodfellas are often shown doing the dirty work that the Corleones rarely have to get involved in, and while the Corleone family has more money than they know what to do with, the characters of Goodfellas don’t get very rich.

The movie ends with one of the mobsters selling out all of his friends to secure his family’s safety in the Witness Protection Program. The look on their faces as they get convicted sells the point of the film to us. This is the inevitable ending, and it’s not worth it.

8 The Godfather: More nuanced acting

Ray Liotta’s performance as Henry Hill in Goodfellas, a guy who adores the gangster lifestyle, constantly cheats on his wife, and slowly lets the hooks of drug addiction get into him, is phenomenal – it’s intense, and we believe every emotion – but Al Pacino’s turn as Michael Corleone in The Godfather is simply more nuanced.

Where Henry will loudly yell what he’s feeling, Michael will tell us everything in a single facial expression. Add to that the subtle performances of supporting players like Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Talia Shire, John Cazale, and Diane Keaton. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci provide riveting support in Goodfellas, but it can’t compare to the ensemble of The Godfather.

7 Goodfellas: Faster pace

One of the main criticisms of The Godfather from people who are willing to admit it’s not perfect is that it’s too slow. The pacing in Goodfellas, on the other hand, is much quicker. The plot moves by at breakneck speed, jumping back and forth along the timeline of the narrative to make sure you’re only getting the information you need at any given moment.

RELATED: 10 Most Memorable Quotes From Goodfellas

The choppy editing of Goodfellas, the fact that no scene is more than a couple of minutes long, and the way it throws you into the story at the deep end with a corpse in the trunk all contribute to a pace that’s much faster than The Godfather’s.

6 The Godfather: More striking imagery

Obviously, there is plenty of striking imagery in Goodfellas, because Martin Scorsese is one of cinema’s giants and his keen attention to detail has helped him to get there, but The Godfather is in another league. Cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose work has been called a “milestone in visual storytelling” that “defined the cinematic look of the 1970s,” composed some gorgeous shots that could stand on their own as works of art.

The shot of a murder with the Statue of Liberty way off in the background, poking out from behind the long grass, says everything this movie has to say about the American dream in one frame.

5 Goodfellas: Humor

While The Godfather is a terrific film, it’s also a humorless affair. Goodfellas, however, is a hilarious movie, mostly thanks to the actors’ improvisation. From Joe Pesci’s “How am I funny?” monologue to the introduction of Jimmy Two Times, there are plenty of funny moments in Scorsese’s masterwork.

And not only that, the humor is often used to dramatic effect with striking juxtaposition, such as the central trio’s discussion of Tommy’s mothers painting (“One dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy’s sayin’, ‘Whadda ya want from me?’”) while they have a guy bleeding out in the trunk.

4 The Godfather: Better-crafted plot

This one isn’t really fair to Goodfellas, because that movie was based on a true story, while The Godfather was a fictional story, so while Mario Puzo could shape and reform his novel until it had the perfect structure, there was only so much wiggle room Martin Scorsese had with the true-to-life story of Henry Hill.

Still, The Godfather’s script is a masterclass in screenwriting. We meet our protagonist, the tragic hero Michael Corleone, and watch for three hours as he is slowly corrupted by his family’s lifestyle. His transformation is marked by murdering the crooked cop at the midpoint, exactly when a character’s viewpoint is supposed to turn in a screenplay.

3 Goodfellas: Better soundtrack

The musical backing for The Godfather, written by the great Italian composer Nino Rota, is a breathtaking film score. However, there are few movies whose soundtracks hold a candle to that of Goodfellas, which is basically a mixtape of Martin Scorsese’s favorite songs.

(He even wrote some songs into the script, conceiving the scenes with the music he would score them to in mind.) From Tony Bennett to Aretha Franklin to Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton’s bands Cream and Derek and the Dominos, the Goodfellas soundtrack contains tracks by some of the greatest artists of all time, and they all suit the scenes they’re assigned to perfectly.

2 The Godfather: Stronger historical context

While Goodfellas has a real place in history, being based on a true story, The Godfather has a better hold on its historical context. It’s about fictional characters, but it’s rooted in very real history. It takes place between 1945 and 1955, and this post-war setting forms a lot of the plot.

RELATED: 10 Sprawling Crime Sagas To Watch If You Like Scarface

Michael has just returned from war when he attends his sister’s wedding in the opening scene. This sets him up nicely as the wayward one who isn’t going to get into the family business – until he does. The Corleone family came over from Sicily at the turn of the century, and The Godfather has a lot to say about immigration.

1 Goodfellas: It’s endlessly rewatchable

You have to be in a certain mood to watch The Godfather. It’s long, it’s heavy, there’s a lot to take in – you have to really strap in if you’re going to sit through it. Goodfellas, however, is endlessly rewatchable. It doesn’t matter what mood you’re in or what kind of movie you want to watch – it’s never a challenge to get into Goodfellas.

When you’re channel-hopping and you see that a movie’s on, it’s easier to stop and watch the rest of Goodfellas than it is to stop and watch the rest of The Godfather. It sounds silly, but that’s important.

NEXT: Martin Scorsese's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

source https://screenrant.com/godfather-goodfellas-best-mob-movie/

#screenrant

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newyorktheater · 6 years ago

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Four shows are opening on Broadway in March. Two of them are transfers from Off-Broadway that thrilled audiences in very different ways: “Be More Chill” and “What The Constitution Means To Me.” The other two bring to Broadway some beloved tunes — a revival of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate” and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations”

But as savvy New York theatergoers know, Broadway ain’t the half of it: For every “Ain’t Too Proud” on Broadway, there’s an “Ain’t No Mo'” Off-Broadway. Among the shows opening Off-Broadway in March:

Daveed Diggs in White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks (Public Theater)

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks – White Noise

Florian Zeller

Alan Cumming in Daddy by Jeremy O. Harris (Vineyard and the New Group)

Daveed Diggs in “White Noise,” a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks (Top Dog/Underdog); Isabelle Huppert in The Mother, a new play by Florian Zeller (The Father); Alan Cumming in “Daddy,” a new play by Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play.)

Below is a selective list of Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway and festival offerings in February, organized chronologically by opening date, with each title linked to a relevant website. Color key of theaters: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black, Blue, or Purple. Off Off Broadway: Green. Theater festival: Orange. Puppetry: Brown. Immersive: Magenta.

To look at the Spring season as a whole, check out my Off Broadway Spring 2019 preview guide and my Broadway 2018-2019 season guide

March 1

Ajijaak on Turtle Island (New Victory)

A “family-friendly First Nations spectacle.” Separated from her family in a Tar Sands fire, the crane Ajijaak makes her first migration from Canada to the Gulf Coast alone, discovering the strength of her song along the way.

Chained: A Victorian Nightmare: (FOST at Starrett-Leigh Building )

An immersive theater VR adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tickets sold only as an add-on to the FOST (Future of Storytelling) Story Arcade, which is described as a “pop-up, showcasing a… sampling of immersive, experiential, and multi-sensory exhibits.”

March 5

Daddy (Vineyard at Signature)

In the second Off-Broadway play by Jeremy O. Harris (who gained some notoriety with his Slave Play in the fall), Alan Cumming plays Andre, an older white art collector who befriends Franklin, young black artist on the verge of his first show. Their bond creates a battle of wills with Franklin’s mother.

The Cake (MTC at City Center)

In what sounds like a recent Supreme Court case, Debra Jo Rupp portrays a baker in North Carolina who refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The difference — one of the brides is the daughter of a dear friend, now deceased. The play is by Bekah Brunstetter (who writes for the TV series This Is Us.)

March 7

Fleabag (Soho Playhouse)

The play by Phoebe Waller-Bridge that inspired the BBC television series currently being shown on Amazon Prime.

Actually We’re F**ked (Cherry Lane)

In this play by Matt Williams, “four millennials gather every Thursday to order take-out, drink too much wine, and argue over how to unf**k the planet.”

Chick Flick The Musical (Westside Theater)

In this musical by Suzy Conn, four friends gather to unwind, watch a chick flick and play their favorite chick flick drinking game.

Chimpanzee (HERE)

A “non-verbal puppet play based on true events.” An aging, isolated chimpanzee pieces together the fragments of her childhood in a human family

March 10

Be More Chill (Lyceum)

Broadway transfer of the teenage cult musical about high school student Jeremy Heere who sees himself as a loser but then swallows a pill containing a supercomputer and becomes cool — but at what cost?

My review of Be More Chill Off-Broadway

If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka(Playwrights Horizons)

In the village of Affreakah-Amirrorkah, no one questions that Akim is the one true, perfect beauty — not even her jealous classmates. But they’ll be damned before they let her be the leading lady in this story. A decidedly contemporary riff on a West African fable by Tori Sampson

March 11

The Mother (Atlantic)

Isabelle Huppert stars in a play by Florian Zeller (The Father) as a woman suffering from clinical depression and grasping for stability after her grown children move on to build lives of their own.

Southern Promises (Flea)

A revival of Thomas Bradshaw’s incendiary 2008 play: On his deathbed, a plantation owner vows to set his slaves free, but when his wife rejects the request chaos erupts on the plantation.

March 12

Ashes (HERE)

In a small village in the south of Norway, a young man sets houses on fire, and a writer seizes them as literary material several decades later. From Plexus/Polaire, the Norwegian/French avant-garde theater company that in January presented Chambre Noir

March 13

Surely Goodness and Mercy (Keen Company at Theater Row)

In this play by Chisa Hutchinson (“She Like Girls,” “Dead & Breathing”), a Bible-toting boy with a photographic memory befriends the cantankerous old lunch lady in an underfunded public school in Newark.

Hatef**k (WP)

In this play by Rehana Lew Mirza, passions ignite when Layla, an intense literature professor, accuses Imran, a brashly iconoclastic novelist, of trading in anti-Muslim stereotypes. But as their attraction grows into something more, they discover that good sex doesn’t always make good bedfellows.

March 14

Kiss Me Kate (Roundabout at Studio 54)

Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase star as warring ex-lovers forced to portray the warring couple of Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in this third Broadway revival of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical. The winner of the first-ever Tony Award for Best Musical, the show features such familiar tunes as “Too Darn Hot,” “So In Love” and “Always True To You In My Fashion.”

Georgia Mertching is Dead (EST)

In this play by Catya McMullen, three 30-year-old women who have been friends since high school set off on a road trip south–with homemade female urination devices, too much pie, ill-advised sexual escapades–to celebrate and mourn a figure from their past.

Rogues Gallery (Broken Ghost)

Unleash your inner villain in this fully immersive evening of world conquest and inevitable betrayal!

March 18

Culturemart Festival (HERE)

Cannabis! by Baba Israel, 9000 Paper Balloons by Spencer Lott & Maiko Kikuchi,Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna by Imani Uzuri,A Voluptuary Life by James Scruggs,Paper Room by Laura Peterson

Nantucket Sleigh Ride (Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse)

Written by John Guare and directed by Jerry Zaks (the pair behind House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation) this new play stars John Larroquette as a New York playwright turned stockbroker revisiting a wild event that happened 35 years ago on that island.

March 19

Juno and the Paycock (Irish Rep)

Part of the theater’s season of Sean O’Casey, the play is a devastating portrait of wasted potential in a Dublin torn apart by the chaos of the Irish Civil War. When a handsome visitor arrives with news of an inheritance, the Boyle family begins to plan their new life, but their apparent salvation soon reveals itself to be the cause of their ruin

March 20

White Noise (Public)

Daveed Diggs (Hamilton) returns Off-Broadway in a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis. Long-time friends and lovers Leo, Misha, Ralph, and Dawn are educated, progressive, cosmopolitan, and woke. But when a racially motivated incident with the cops leaves Leo shaken, he decides extreme measures must be taken for self-preservation

St. Peter’s Foot (UP Theater)

Mike and Roma think they made the right decision in not having children. Then a baby is left on their doorstep

March 21

Aint Too Proud (Imperial)

“Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations” stars Jeremy Pope (Choir Boy) as Eddie Kendricks, Ephraim Sykes as David Ruffin, etc. This new musical with a book by Dominique Morisseau helmed by the director of “Jersey Boys” follows The Temptations’ journey from the streets of Detroit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

March 25

Accidentally Brave (DR2 Theater)

Actor and playwright Maddie Corman shares her true story of what happened after her husband was arrested on a shocking charge.

March 27

The Lehman Trilogy (Park Ave Armory)

Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes (The Ferryman!) stars acclaimed actors Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles and the Lehman brothers and their sons and grandsons over nearly two centuries, climaxing with the end of the firm that bore their name in the crash of 2008.

Ain’t No Mo’ (Public)

In this satire by Jordan E. Cooper that began at the Fire This Time Festival, African-Americans leave en masse a country plagued with injustice.

March 31

What The Constitution Means To Me (Helen Hayes)

Fifteen-year-old Heidi Schreck earned enough money for her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. Now, the Obie Award winner resurrects her teenage self in order to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women in her own family and the founding document that dictated their rights and citizenship. My review of the play Off-Broadway

Do You Feel Anger? (Vineyard)

In this play by Mara Nelson-Greenberg , Sophia is hired as an empathy coach at a debt collection agency

March 2019 New York Theater Openings Four shows are opening on Broadway in March. Two of them are transfers from Off-Broadway that thrilled audiences in very different ways: "Be More Chill" and "What The Constitution Means To Me." The other two bring to Broadway some beloved tunes -- a revival of Cole Porter's "Kiss Me Kate" and "Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations"

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thesnhuup · 5 years ago

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Pop Picks — August 30, 2019

August 30, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.

What I’m watching:

Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.

Archive

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to:

The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.

What I’m reading:

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.

What I’m watching:

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life. While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading:

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library. It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more. It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching:

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to:

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.

What I’m watching:

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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drippeddaily · 7 years ago

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Album of the Year 2017 #03: BROCKHAMPTON - SATURATION

Artist: BROCKHAMPTON

Album: SATURATION

Listen:

Youtube

Apple Music/iTunes

Google Play Music

Tidal

Napster

Spotify

Album Background:

BROCKHAMPTON formed in 2015, largely as a rebirth of a group known as ASF (AliveSinceForever). Over the course of the next two years, they dropped a few singles, eventually releasing a mixtape by the name of “ALL AMERICAN TRASH” in the summer of 2016. That winter, frontman of the group Kevin Abstract released his sophomore album “American Boyfriend”, touring for the album and earning a following and notoriety for the larger group. Then, in the spring of 2017, the group returned with the first single from SATURATION, “FACE”. In the space of around a month, they reportedly created around 40 songs for their sophomore mixtape, which evolved into their debut album. Of those 40 songs, 14 made the cut, in addition to 3 skits, creating a 17 track album. With each single leading up to the album, they steadily built more and more hype, with one of the final songs to release before the project, “BOYS” premiering on Beats1 Radio on Apple Music. The group’s chemistry and their unique music videos quickly found a larger and larger audience, highlighting the talents of a diverse group of members, including rappers, singers, directors, visual artists, and producers. All members of the group (excluding singer Bearface who was in the UK until the day of the album's release) lived together in a house in Van Nuys, California for the creation of the album.

Review

When reading an album of the year writeup for BROCKHAMPTON’s debut album, SATURATION, given the state of this corner of the internet, most people would expect the reviewer to try as hard as possible to refute criticism of the music, and to argue that the group is something unique and special. The music isn’t perfect, but they are doing something special. There are valid criticisms: while rapper Dom McLennon impresses with his technical ability the content of his verses can at times be entirely abstract and unrelated to the song, and Merlyn Wood, while fun and energetic, is justly divisive in the vocal performances and style he can bring to a track. The oft repeated lines of “Kevin always raps about being gay” or “Ameer always raps about dealing” (and just where will Dom’s heart be put next?) while true, aren’t necessarily bad things, and the members of the group have responded within their own music in an adequate manner. This album isn’t necessarily even the best album of the year. An argument could be made that the sequel, SATURATION II is better, as well as projects such as who told you to think??!!?!?!?! by Milo or 4:44 by Jay-Z. An album such as 4:44 will invariably go down in hip hop’s canon as a classic, a step in the right direction for the craft. So, given all of this, declaring SATURATION to be album of the year seems confusing.

A project has to be the most enjoyable music released within a year for it to be the defining album of that year. Let it not be taken, however, that this is saying that BROCKHAMPTON has made a genre-defining album: they’re simply too obscure at this point for that. But at a critical level, SATURATION does serve as an album that embodies the state of Hip-Hop in 2017. In fact, the album at times reads as a revue of hip-hop, opening up with a stretch of songs that switches from gritty and aggressive to smooth and danceable.

BROCKHAMPTON are something special. Not because they formed over the internet: of course groups like Odd Future have already done that more famously. While Odd Future tapped into this punk destructive energy that allowed them to set a fire with the youth of America, BROCKHAMPTON are tapping into a part of the genre often critically panned: pop rap. What BROCKHAMPTON is focused on is straddling a particular line: that between the poppy rap tunes of artists in the ilk of Recovery-era Eminem, and the aggressive offputting experimental hip hop of such groups as Death Grips. These aforementioned acts are direct influences on members of the group, as are such performers as M.I.A., Prince, Master P, Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi, Kanye, and the list goes on. These artists styles would seem to clash with each other and BROCKHAMPTON exists on that very point of conflict. Their music serves as an answer to the question of being both accessible and off putting, and they manage those two lanes beautifully.

BROCKHAMPTON crafts tunes that are both poppy and experimental. Even if your tastes are weirder than the music that the group produces, it’s disingenuous to suggest that their music isn’t weird to your average listener. Switching from distorted bass and manic rapping to a soft acoustic guitar and crooning simply (a la “BUMP”) isn��t something in a lot of rap that many people find accessible. People can’t be blamed for finding highly experimental music off putting, but it is a shame that people don’t listen to it because of that unease that it creates. SATURATION exists as an inbetween point: “FAKE” has quickly become a favourite for many from the project. And when you think about it, that is strange. The verses are pitch shifted, the beat is wonky (thriving from the same Pharrell influence that most of their production does), and the subject matter is deliberately off putting. But the hook is undeniably catchy. Tracks like “FAKE” are easy to listen to and yet have weirder depths to them.

“HEAT” is perhaps the best example of this. “HEAT” isn’t a purely political song. For many of the members it’s more personal than that, with rapper Matt Champion talking about his experience being cheated on, or Dom McLennon talking about his feeling unable to be around other people. But there certainly is a political bite to it: not too heavy handed at all, but there. The messages and themes in the song become available to anybody who wants to find them: a classic anti-cop rap sentiment, the politics of drug dealing, a sense of discontentment with the state of the world. They’re setting up a world for the viewer that while ultimately escapist, does remind the listener of the realities back home.

When BROCKHAMPTON keeps on rapping about how different they are, how special their music is, it can seem like the yuppie protagonists of a blockbuster film at times: i.e that these are people who exist in this idealised world that just isn’t real. Perfectly relatable, both broke and receiving riches, self-loathing and cocky, a nonexistent contradiction. But there is always that bite of home: the message that brings the group back to where they really are. While Ameer Vann can rap about dealing and make it sound cool, this showmanship also functions as an exploration of his real past. While so much of the album is concerned with dreaming of them in the spotlight, future kings of music, we are reminded every now and then of what they’re running away from, whether it be disappointed parents or the general weight of the world. There’s a sad beauty in their flights of fancy, and it comes across elegantly in their music.

You don’t have to like BROCKHAMPTON’s music to appreciate them, and they should be appreciated for what they’re doing. Artists shouldn’t have to live in a world in which they have a choice between making a living or making art. The viewer shouldn’t have to choose between self-obsessed works of auteurs and worldly but ultimately milquetoast mainstream pieces. Many shy away from this altogether: they just pick a side and they’re done with it: they’ll make their money and not care what the critics say, or they’ll make their original ideas flourish and not care about the money. Sometimes, creative people strike on something so good that people listen to it and support them anyways. The fact that BROCKHAMPTON are trying to create a roadmap to striking that gold, and are attempting to remove the fog of mystery that lies over the line between experimental and popular is commendable. They’re not there yet, but they’re certainly on to something. SATURATION is the starting point for it all.

Favorite Lyrics

“I’ve got pipe dreams of crack rocks and stripper poles”

“HEAT”

“I got a dream I'm willing to die for

I got a team I'll commit a crime for

Got some dead homies I ain't get to cry for

'Cause I'm working for my freedom, while the world cry war

Cry wolf when the shepherd finds a way to strike gold

'Cause the stocks gon' crash and the dollar gon' fold

You don't know that the poor eat the rich when there's no profit

They gave you the floor but you brought up the wrong topic”

“CASH”

“Was I more than it's worth

Or will you see my name and I'll fade?

Pitch my camp in your mind

Sat by the fire, behind your eyes

And I'll look through them just once or twice

But I might see something I don't like

Like your hands in his shirt

Entwined in cotton, his loving smirk”

“WASTE”

Discussion Questions

BROCKHAMPTON’s career is on an upwards trajectory in terms of popularity, and yet there’s still a raging debate over how relevant they truly are. At what point is an artist no longer a “nobody”? At what point is an artist “relevant”? Is BROCKHAMPTON relevant?

BROCKHAMPTON insist that they are not a rap group but in fact a “boy band”. What do you think of this? Do you agree with this statement? Why do you think they claim this?

Once the SATURATION trilogy ends, what direction should BROCKHAMPTON go next (who knows what's happening with that SATURATION III announcement)?

Thanks for reading!

Be sure to check out the other BROCKHAMPTON writeup for today, done by the great /u/snidelaughter, as well as tomorrow’s writeup for billy woods terrific album, “Known Unknowns”, done by the amazing /u/ReptiIe!

Artist: BROCKHAMPTONAlbum: SATURATIONListen:YoutubeApple Music/iTunesGoogle Play MusicTidalNapsterSpotifyAlbum Background:BROCKHAMPTON formed in 2015, largely as a rebirth of a group known as ASF (AliveSinceForever). Over the course of the next two years, they dropped a few singles, eventually releasing a mixtape by the name of “ALL AMERICAN TRASH” in the summer of 2016. That winter, frontman of the group Kevin Abstract released his sophomore album “American Boyfriend”, touring for the album and earning a following and notoriety for the larger group. Then, in the spring of 2017, the group returned with the first single from SATURATION, “FACE”. In the space of around a month, they reportedly created around 40 songs for their sophomore mixtape, which evolved into their debut album. Of those 40 songs, 14 made the cut, in addition to 3 skits, creating a 17 track album. With each single leading up to the album, they steadily built more and more hype, with one of the final songs to release before the project, “BOYS” premiering on Beats1 Radio on Apple Music. The group’s chemistry and their unique music videos quickly found a larger and larger audience, highlighting the talents of a diverse group of members, including rappers, singers, directors, visual artists, and producers. All members of the group (excluding singer Bearface who was in the UK until the day of the album's release) lived together in a house in Van Nuys, California for the creation of the album.ReviewWhen reading an album of the year writeup for BROCKHAMPTON’s debut album, SATURATION, given the state of this corner of the internet, most people would expect the reviewer to try as hard as possible to refute criticism of the music, and to argue that the group is something unique and special. The music isn’t perfect, but they are doing something special. There are valid criticisms: while rapper Dom McLennon impresses with his technical ability the content of his verses can at times be entirely abstract and unrelated to the song, and Merlyn Wood, while fun and energetic, is justly divisive in the vocal performances and style he can bring to a track. The oft repeated lines of “Kevin always raps about being gay” or “Ameer always raps about dealing” (and just where will Dom’s heart be put next?) while true, aren’t necessarily bad things, and the members of the group have responded within their own music in an adequate manner. This album isn’t necessarily even the best album of the year. An argument could be made that the sequel, SATURATION II is better, as well as projects such as who told you to think??!!?!?!?! by Milo or 4:44 by Jay-Z. An album such as 4:44 will invariably go down in hip hop’s canon as a classic, a step in the right direction for the craft. So, given all of this, declaring SATURATION to be album of the year seems confusing.A project has to be the most enjoyable music released within a year for it to be the defining album of that year. Let it not be taken, however, that this is saying that BROCKHAMPTON has made a genre-defining album: they’re simply too obscure at this point for that. But at a critical level, SATURATION does serve as an album that embodies the state of Hip-Hop in 2017. In fact, the album at times reads as a revue of hip-hop, opening up with a stretch of songs that switches from gritty and aggressive to smooth and danceable.BROCKHAMPTON are something special. Not because they formed over the internet: of course groups like Odd Future have already done that more famously. While Odd Future tapped into this punk destructive energy that allowed them to set a fire with the youth of America, BROCKHAMPTON are tapping into a part of the genre often critically panned: pop rap. What BROCKHAMPTON is focused on is straddling a particular line: that between the poppy rap tunes of artists in the ilk of Recovery-era Eminem, and the aggressive offputting experimental hip hop of such groups as Death Grips. These aforementioned acts are direct influences on members of the group, as are such performers as M.I.A., Prince, Master P, Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi, Kanye, and the list goes on. These artists styles would seem to clash with each other and BROCKHAMPTON exists on that very point of conflict. Their music serves as an answer to the question of being both accessible and off putting, and they manage those two lanes beautifully.BROCKHAMPTON crafts tunes that are both poppy and experimental. Even if your tastes are weirder than the music that the group produces, it’s disingenuous to suggest that their music isn’t weird to your average listener. Switching from distorted bass and manic rapping to a soft acoustic guitar and crooning simply (a la “BUMP”) isn’t something in a lot of rap that many people find accessible. People can’t be blamed for finding highly experimental music off putting, but it is a shame that people don’t listen to it because of that unease that it creates. SATURATION exists as an inbetween point: “FAKE” has quickly become a favourite for many from the project. And when you think about it, that is strange. The verses are pitch shifted, the beat is wonky (thriving from the same Pharrell influence that most of their production does), and the subject matter is deliberately off putting. But the hook is undeniably catchy. Tracks like “FAKE” are easy to listen to and yet have weirder depths to them.“HEAT” is perhaps the best example of this. “HEAT” isn’t a purely political song. For many of the members it’s more personal than that, with rapper Matt Champion talking about his experience being cheated on, or Dom McLennon talking about his feeling unable to be around other people. But there certainly is a political bite to it: not too heavy handed at all, but there. The messages and themes in the song become available to anybody who wants to find them: a classic anti-cop rap sentiment, the politics of drug dealing, a sense of discontentment with the state of the world. They’re setting up a world for the viewer that while ultimately escapist, does remind the listener of the realities back home.When BROCKHAMPTON keeps on rapping about how different they are, how special their music is, it can seem like the yuppie protagonists of a blockbuster film at times: i.e that these are people who exist in this idealised world that just isn’t real. Perfectly relatable, both broke and receiving riches, self-loathing and cocky, a nonexistent contradiction. But there is always that bite of home: the message that brings the group back to where they really are. While Ameer Vann can rap about dealing and make it sound cool, this showmanship also functions as an exploration of his real past. While so much of the album is concerned with dreaming of them in the spotlight, future kings of music, we are reminded every now and then of what they’re running away from, whether it be disappointed parents or the general weight of the world. There’s a sad beauty in their flights of fancy, and it comes across elegantly in their music.You don’t have to like BROCKHAMPTON’s music to appreciate them, and they should be appreciated for what they’re doing. Artists shouldn’t have to live in a world in which they have a choice between making a living or making art. The viewer shouldn’t have to choose between self-obsessed works of auteurs and worldly but ultimately milquetoast mainstream pieces. Many shy away from this altogether: they just pick a side and they’re done with it: they’ll make their money and not care what the critics say, or they’ll make their original ideas flourish and not care about the money. Sometimes, creative people strike on something so good that people listen to it and support them anyways. The fact that BROCKHAMPTON are trying to create a roadmap to striking that gold, and are attempting to remove the fog of mystery that lies over the line between experimental and popular is commendable. They’re not there yet, but they’re certainly on to something. SATURATION is the starting point for it all.Favorite Lyrics“I’ve got pipe dreams of crack rocks and stripper poles”“HEAT”“I got a dream I'm willing to die forI got a team I'll commit a crime forGot some dead homies I ain't get to cry for'Cause I'm working for my freedom, while the world cry warCry wolf when the shepherd finds a way to strike gold'Cause the stocks gon' crash and the dollar gon' foldYou don't know that the poor eat the rich when there's no profitThey gave you the floor but you brought up the wrong topic”“CASH”“Was I more than it's worthOr will you see my name and I'll fade?Pitch my camp in your mindSat by the fire, behind your eyesAnd I'll look through them just once or twiceBut I might see something I don't likeLike your hands in his shirtEntwined in cotton, his loving smirk”��WASTE”Discussion QuestionsBROCKHAMPTON’s career is on an upwards trajectory in terms of popularity, and yet there’s still a raging debate over how relevant they truly are. At what point is an artist no longer a “nobody”? At what point is an artist “relevant”? Is BROCKHAMPTON relevant?BROCKHAMPTON insist that they are not a rap group but in fact a “boy band”. What do you think of this? Do you agree with this statement? Why do you think they claim this?Once the SATURATION trilogy ends, what direction should BROCKHAMPTON go next (who knows what's happening with that SATURATION III announcement)?Thanks for reading!Be sure to check out the other BROCKHAMPTON writeup for today, done by the great /u/snidelaughter, as well as tomorrow’s writeup for billy woods terrific album, “Known Unknowns”, done by the amazing /u/ReptiIe!

#IFTTT #reddit

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typologycentral · 8 years ago

Text

What's my type? LSI vs ILI? Beta vs Gamma?

Hi, I'm recently started learning about socionics and I've been having trouble figuring out my type :unsure:. I taken a ton of tests online and I've gotten either LSI and ILI for the most part. In terms of quadras, I find myself relating to Beta and Gamma depending on my mood. In MBTI I prefer INTJ and my enneagram type is 3w4 so/sp, 358 tritype. People have told me that INTJ translates to ILI, while others have told me that types don't translate well from system to system, because of the functions have different definitions. I would really appreciate it if you guys can give me your thoughts on what my type is, along with the examples of how I used certain functions in this questionnaire. Thanks :) ! Personal concepts 1. What is beauty? What is love? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Love is a deep attachment to any person or object. 2. What are your most important values? Honesty, being inclusive, accepting, forethought, respectful, not being a bigot,making decisions while taking other people into account, consensus, and loyalty to those that you care about. 3. Do you have any sort of spiritual/religious beliefs, and why do you hold (or don't) those beliefs in the first place? I don’t personally subscribe to any spiritual belief, but in my everyday life I behave more as a stoic. There is no rational basis for believing in spiritual/religious beliefs, so I choose not to subscribe to it. 4. Opinion on war and militaries? What is power to you? War occurs when there two nation states cannot resolve disputes through diplomacy. It should comply with international law and there should be a consensus between states in UN. War is incredibly disastrous for both parties involved and it comes at the cost of countless of lives unnecessarily. While war can be extremely disastrous, it sometimes necessary and justified. It can be justified in cases of self-defense from an aggressive state or humanitarian aid, such as a genocide. Likewise, militaries are a necessary evil as a means of self-defense and diplomacy. Militaries should be used primarily as a deterrent and play a secondary role to diplomacy/consensus. Power is anything that gives you the means of influencing people or institutions in your favor. Interests 5. What have you had long conversations about? What are your interests? Why? Politics is a personal hobby of mine. I can have extended conversations about it for hours at a time. I love politics mainly because of the different power dynamics that involved in it. Also, a part of me has always been interested in politics--that's the part of me that wants to save the world. I believe that some of the most daunting challenges in the world today--poverty, disease, war--can be solved if people can put aside their petty differences and preconceived notions and do what they know to be right for the world/country. I’m also interested in history, philosophy, science, dancing, music, and coding. 6. Interested in health/medicine as a conversation topic? Are you focused on your body? While I don't for the most part care about body, I am extremely self conscious about my appearance and I always try to look my best. I am also interested in and use recreational drugs. 7. What do you think of daily chores? I cannot stand daily chores, but they are a necessity. 8. Books or films you liked? Recently read/watched or otherwise. Examples welcome. Books - The Prince, 1984, The Art of War, The Republic, The Alchemist, A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, Brave New World, 48 Laws of Power, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lord of the Rings, The Far Seer, Kissinger The Idealist, Catcher in the Rye, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Rules for Radicals, Catch-22, The Anthem, Walden, Civil Disobedience, Crime and Punishment, Brothers of Karimazov,and Under the Dome. Films – The Godfather, The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, The Matrix, Ghost in the shell, Goodfellas, Citizens Kane, Malcolm X, Schindler’s List, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Inception, Forest Gump, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Gangs of New York, Taxi Driver, I am Legend, Glory, Goodwill Hunting, John Wick, Lincoln, Saw, American Gangster, 12 years a Slave, Titanic, Big, and Star Trek. 9. What has made you cry? What has made you smile? Why? I almost never cry, but I do get teary eyed when I watch a heartbreaking documentary of poverty or war crimes. A clever sarcastic joke will always make me laugh. 10. Where do you feel: at one with the environment/a sense of belonging? Anywhere where I can discuss topics that I am interested in and feel included. Evaluation & Behavior 11. What have people seen as your weaknesses? What do you dislike about yourself? Being arrogant, argumentative, condescending towards people, not being able to relax, being vulnerable, power hungry, lack of emotional awareness at times, antisocial at times as well. 12. What have people seen as your strengths? What do you like about yourself? Intelligence, cleverness, thinking before acting, ambitious, charming when I want to be, confident, tough-minded, protective, analytical, inclusive, loyal person. 13. In what areas of your life would you like help? Opening up to people emotionally and vulnerable with them. I've been told that at times I can be extremely cold and unapproachable. Also, to understand myself better as a person and who I am. 14. Ever feel stuck in a rut? If yes, describe the causes and your reaction to it. Whenever I can’t reach my goals, it causes me to be critical of myself. I also start doubting myself, which causes me feel ashamed and vulnerable. It causes me to become depressive and cynical. People & Interactions 15. What qualities do you most like and dislike in other people? What types do you get along with? Overly emotional people, stupidity, willful ignorance, hate, bigotry, tribalism, people who don’t think about how their actions will affect others or the future, zealousness, lack of loyalty, and weakness. 16. How do you feel about romance/sex? What qualities do you want in a partner? I think its overrated to some extent, but it’s a wonderful feeling and experience that you share with someone. I usually look for someone who is thoughtful, funny, sarcastic, clever, good looking, ready to challenge me, and someone you I can feel completely vulnerable with. 17. If you were to raise a child, what would be your main concerns, what measures would you take, and why? I would want my child to have a proper education and also develop into healthy self esteem. I would also worry about demanding too much perfection from my child. Also, get the balance between being overly strict and giving them enough freedom to fully express themselves. 18. A friend makes a claim that clashes with your current beliefs. What is your inward and outward reaction? Inward I think that they are either an idiot or just misguided. Outward, I try to figure out why they believe what they believe by debating them. 19. Describe your relationship to society. How do you see people as a whole? What do you consider a prevalent social problem? Name one. Until recently, I held a very cynical outlook on humanity and even considered myself a nihilist of some sort. However, I have faith in humanity to make the necessary progress to ensure our survival. I truly believe that most people are good and well intentioned in most cases, even when it doesn’t seem that way. While I still hold that view, I also think most people are too naïve, emotional, and irrational in most cases. Also, people don’t take the time to understand what’s going on and latch onto some demigod who makes all kind of promises. A prevalent social problem is still the hate that we have in the world for each other. People think way too much in terms of tribalism. 20. How do you choose your friends and how do you behave around them? My friends are chosen based on similar interest and ability to have conversations beyond superficial things. Also, someone that I can be brutally honest with and vice-versa. Even with my friends though, I feel as if I can never fully open up emotionally to them, so I feel as though a part of me is always missing. But I'm usually much more blunt, sarcastic, and to the point with my friends. 21. How do you behave around strangers? I try to be extremely polite and accommodating on the outwardly. I also try to be more extroverted than I usually am. Inwardly however, I judge people on their comments, politeness, intelligence, beliefs, actions for the most part. http://www.typologycentral.com/forums/socionics/89234-whats-type-lsi-vs-ili-beta-vs-gamma-new-post.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

#Socionics

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thesnhuup · 6 years ago

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Pop Picks — July 1, 2019

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to:

What I’m reading:

What I’m watching:

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirror and Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.