Film Review

For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I understood that what I was looking at was the byproduct of a ringing artifact, a ghost at the meeting point of cow and sky.

Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that is a weird and improbable synthesis between the visions of these two era-defining midcentury mind scientists.

Zoom in, zoom out; repeat mantras or drink soju: our pains and hopes will continue to occlude our sight.

Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now (1937), the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad.” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy.

This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.

Two moments are irresistible to rock biopics: the birth of a good song, and its activation in front of an audience. The scene where the initial idea strikes the songwriter, usually while tapping idly at the piano, is a virtual requirement in the genre. Malek-as-Mercury hits on the “Bohemian Rhapsody” theme while pecking at the keys lying upside down. In the truly lovely Love and Mercy, in which a mumblecore romcom slowly swallows a rock-and-roll trauma plot, Paul-Dano-as-young-Brian-Wilson pulls “God Only Knows” out of the æther in much the same way. He then plays it for his overbearing father and onetime manager, who more or less tells him it sucks.

The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich (and, almost by definition, most hostile to the poor).