Looks like a Bradford pear, Pyrus calleryana. They’ve been blooming in Southern California over the past month or so. When a bunch of them are shedding petals on a windy day it looks like snow.
Joel: I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you. Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me. Joel: Okay. Clementine: [pauses] Okay.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party is nominated for Project of the Week on Indiewire! Please check it out and vote! You’ll have to vote and then confirm your vote in your email. It’s a pain, but we will really appreciate it :)
The Last Day of Pompeii, details 1830 – 1833 Oil on canvas, 456.5 x 651 cm State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg Ed. and Digital Restoration Origg. xx
Hungry people, our second to last livestream of the Poe Party campaign will be this Sunday the 28th from noon to 4 pm PST. Join us as we give out awards, talk to new cast members, and have a jolly ol’ time before we all head off to watch the Oscars.
Slate’s editor Laura Bennett explains why Room should win the Best Picture Oscar. I’m convinced; not that I expect that to make any difference.
The video is a little spoiler-y, and I still think seeing the movie knowing as little as possible is a risk that pays off. But since the biggest challenge the movie faces is people thinking it’s a different movie than it actually is, showing a little more of it is probably worth it.
It might also help someone who already knows the story from the book, and wants to see more of what the movie has to offer without committing to a full viewing.
The island of Madeira, where Crap Futures spends most of its time, is a fairly predictable place. The locals seem to like it that way: you don’t hear a lot of grumbling about the regular calendar of barbecues, beach trips, nature walks, saints’ days, and harvest festivals. When American visitors try to express their individualism through consumer choice it doesn’t usually go well. Try to order a venti light foam half caff flat white in Duolingo Brazilian Portuguese, for example, and you’ll get a powerful wag of the finger and a regular white coffee with over-boiled milk banged down on the counter in front of you.
Fortunately, Crap Futures is a pretty easygoing customer. Every morning we go to the same cafe and ask for two coffees and an order of toast to share. ‘Duas Chinesas, uma torrada’. (For some reason a coffee with milk on this island goes by the random and racist-sounding name of ‘Chinese lady’.) At first we had trouble pronouncing torrada because the ‘rr’ sound is difficult, but we’re getting better. After a couple of weeks the woman at the counter would anticipate our order and we no longer had to speak. We’d approach and she would say, ‘Duas Chinesas e uma torrada, não é?’ And we would nod our heads and pay the ridiculously low price.
After a couple of months – in fact this happened just last week – we unlocked a new level in this smooth daily transaction. We noticed that as we walked through the door of the cafe, the woman behind the counter would pop two pieces of toast in the little toaster oven and start the espresso. While it was being made, she would accept our money. For a day or two she would still go through the formality of saying our order out loud, and we would laugh and nod politely. Then last Friday we had a whole nonverbal transaction: walk in, see toast and coffee started, pay, move to the other counter, collect coffee and toast. Perfection!
Now that we’ve built this perfect machine, what comes next?
Four possible scenarios come to mind:
1. We keep the same order forever.
2. We change our order once and slowly re-establish trust.
3. We disrupt the harmonious state of things completely by changing our order frequently and at random to re-introduce danger and uncertainty into our lives.
4. We move to a different cafe and start again.
There are other possibilities: the staff could change (not likely, to be honest); one of us could be hit by a bus and the other carry on in his memory, but with only a half order of toast and one coffee.
The reason all of this is interesting for Crap Futures is that we seem to be on some sort of prediction precipice at the moment. The dominance of consumer prediction algorithms that has been the subject of speculation for many years is quickly coming to pass, following Moore’s Law and accelerating at an exponential rate. Amazon Echo and other kinds of ‘helpful’ surveillance technologies equipped with machine learning are absorbing our data in the form of instructions, decisions, and responses, preparing to anticipate our every desire. It is the dream of the perfect butler – who even, as in the case of Amazon’s ‘anticipatory shipping’, knows what we want before we are fully cognisant of it ourselves.
Our daily experience in the cafe tells us that consumer prediction has its pleasures. And what if it could be taken a step further, so that the person behind the counter always knew when we wanted two orders of toast (because we’d skipped breakfast)? Or beyond that, why not modify our order and present us with something that would be algorithmically certain to please our Crap Futures tastebuds, like extra buttery toast, or extra thick slices? Or something to slim our Crap Futures figures?
Why not indeed? Go ahead, sirs – says the soothing automated butler voice – treat yourself. You’re special. You deserve it. And you will deserve every minute of the agency-free consumer slave hell that it heralds.
This vision has left us in a quandary, to say the least, about the morning’s coffee and toast.
I wanted to share something I was thinking about Room, the Oscar-nominated movie based on Emma Donoghue’s novel (which I haven’t read, but am going to as soon as a finish a certain biography). But the thing I want to talk about is spoiler-y, and it’s a movie that deserves to be seen unspoiled. So I’m going to put the spoiler-y stuff after a cut.
But before that, I just want to say that if you’re like some of the people I’ve talked to (who are also like I was before I saw the movie), in that you think, um, sorry, there is no way I’m going to watch a movie about that, I have a couple of non-spoiler-y things I want to put out there.
It’s very much not that kind of movie about that. The way it’s framed and executed takes material that could be (and in too many other movies is) dark/brutal/horrific, and renders it in a way that is the opposite of that.
In a weird way, Room reminds me a lot of my other favorite movie of the year: Fury Road. On the surface they’re opposites. On a deeper level, though, I feel like each is about the same thing, and examines that thing in the same way: by subverting elements of their (very different) genres that are themselves a reflection of that thing.
Ugh. That sounds confusing even to me. But spoilers. Anyway, please consider seeing the movie, and not reading what follows until you have. Thanks.
The thing I want to talk about are the actions of the two police officers who first encounter Jack. It’s just a small part of the movie, played out in a few short scenes with minimal dialog. But it’s so powerful in terms of encoded meaning.
Officer Parker, the woman who sits with Jack in the back of the police car and questions him, figures out what’s going on very quickly. You can see it in how she responds. Meanwhile, her partner in the front seat, Officer Grabowski, is clueless. He wants to hand Jack off to Child Protective Services. He speculates that he might be drugged. Even as Parker is closing in on the truth, Grabowski still doesn’t get it. He thinks Jack might be in a cult – “the long hair, the tooth.” He thinks Parker is wasting her time. He interrupts her questioning to suggest that she might get more out of him after he’s eaten.
Parker immediately decodes what’s going on because she’s a woman. Grabowski misses it because he’s a man.
I was raised a Grabowski. I live my life inside a dense cloud of massless ignorance particles, and nowhere is the fog thicker than on the subject of toxic masculinity and rape culture and its effect on women.
I’m lucky to have been able to hang around on the edges of women’s conversations the last few years and pick up on some of this. I’m lucky that people like Aline Brosh McKenna are out there talking about Room, like she did in Scriptnotes 231. I’m lucky that this movie got made, that I saw it, and that it’s getting at least some of the recognition it deserves.
I’m up to 1793 in the Chernow bio, and it occurs to me that my experience is maybe a little like people who got really into lotr in movie form and only then read Tolkien. One medium is (lovely) ripples on the surface. But there are bigger things swimming below.
