I’m tired

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The end of 2018 is upon us. The government is on the verge of shutdown. The stock market is collapsing. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, one of the last “adults in the room,” has resigned, an ominous sign for the days ahead. It’s all just par for the course in a year that has felt, for many of us, totally exhausting.

2018 has taught me many things about myself, but one of them is that it is totally acceptable to set limits on your own intake of media and (bad) news. Sometimes, self-care means stepping away, disconnecting, and recognizing that keeping up with every minor political development, every outrage, every hot topic, every meme can actually be exhausting and damaging.

There is often no nobility to be found in subjecting yourself to things that will only serve to deaden you inside and tire you out for the battles you need to fight. It’s important to optimize your intake so that you strike a balance that works best for you. But above all: think about what you put into your mind, and what that in turn causes you to put out into the world.

On that note, this year has also taught me that there’s virtue in silence. I built much of my online persona on expressing my opinions loudly and strongly, but frequently this year we’ve seen that there are other voices that need to be heard who’ve often been drowned out by louder voices around them.

There’ve been many moments when I’ve seen folks celebrating the breakthrough of bold new talent, or a song/film/show that has resonated with them deeply. A much earlier version of me might’ve thought to share my disagreement, but there is no inherent virtue in simply sharing an opinion. Sometimes it’s best to just hear what others have to say. There’s nothing wrong in letting people have a moment over something. If you don’t agree, there’s a million other things to pay attention to.

As we enter the new year, I hope you’ll consider what is necessary for self care, and when to amplify the voices of those who might not have one as big as yours.

Some other interesting things from the week:

The bomb of the pirate era

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t last long. Evidently, significant parts of this video were faked. Original post follows.

When they write the internet history books, this will go down as one of the greatest videos of all time.

It’s wildly successful because it taps into that feeling of helplessness we all have when our packages get stolen. It’s a rude, inconsiderate, and frankly bizarre action (why would you take boxes that contain things you know other people want/need, when you don’t even know what they are??) but there is basically no way to fight back. Thousands of people just get away with it every day. This video asks the question: What if they didn’t? What if they were just a little bit inconvenienced for their theft and violation of our societal agreements? The results are immensely satisfying.

One other thing to note is that there appears to be no pattern in terms of the type of people who steal the packages. Most of them don’t appear to be homeless. Some of them appear to be normal suburban folk. Porch pirates aren’t confined to a specific demographic.

 

The stories we tell ourselves

I’m always a fan of a good Heather Havrilesky advice column:

Shame creates imaginary worlds inside your head. This haunted house you’re creating is forged from your shame. No one else can see it, so you keep trying to describe it to them. You find ways to say, “You don’t want any part of this mess. I’m mediocre, aging rapidly, and poor. Do yourself a favor and leave me behind.” You want to be left behind, though. That way, no one bears witness to what you’ve become.

It’s time to come out of hiding. It’s time to step into the light and be seen, shame and wrinkles and failures and fears and all.

I found this column to be very powerful because of its emphasis on the narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives. Anything can be viewed differently in hindsight. In fact, it often should be.

When Charles Barkley is your friend

Love this story by Shirley Wang about her dad’s unlikely friendship with Charles Barkley:

When Charles Barkley’s mother, Charcey Glenn, passed away in June 2015, Barkley’s hometown of Leeds, Alabama, came to the funeral to pay respects. But there was also an unexpected guest.

Barkley’s friends couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t a basketball player, he wasn’t a sports figure, and he wasn’t from Barkley’s hometown. Here’s what I can tell you about him: He wore striped, red polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts and got really excited about two-for-one deals. He was a commuter. He worked as a cat litter scientist in Muscatine, Iowa. In short, he was everyone’s suburban dad. More specifically, he was my dad.

I was deeply moved, as it reminded all the unlikely relationships we can form and how special they can be, especially as immigrants.

Be sure to listen to the audio version.

The glory of ‘Roma’

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“None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.”

Those words were spoken by Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the role of Caden Cotard in Synecdoche, New York. I found Synecdoche to be maddening and inaccessible but I also felt it contained insights that were worth trying to get to (I tried to do this awhile back in this video essay with Amy Nicholson).

Despite my confusion, these lines stood out as a fundamental message of the film. We experience our lives in a much different way than those around us experience them. Everyone is the main character in the story of their lives. And it can be difficult to let other people in — to acknowledge that their lives have fullness and arcs of their own. It’s difficult not because their lives are dull, but because we barely have the capacity to process our own stories. How can we be expected to understand what others are going through?

This thought came to mind while watching Alfonso Cuarón’s newest film Roma, out on Netflix today. Roma is a semiautobiographical story of Cuarón’s childhood and of his family’s live-in housekeeper, Cleo. Throughout the film, we witness Cleo’s experiences, from the mundanity of her daily tasks to her loving care of the household’s children. At the periphery, we see snippets of external events — the family she’s employed by begins to fall apart, and political unrest spills into the streets — but as with real life, these events are just tangential to the story. They aren’t the story itself.

Roma is a technical masterwork. The camera work is masterful and intricate. Its seeming passivity as it glides and pans its way through each scene seems to be the film’s way of saying “This is real. This happened. You’re just lucky to get a glimpse at it through this tiny window. ”

The movie invites us to take a look at this person who would be a side character in another film and to experience her life in all its fullness. The result is a wonderful celebration of how we shape the lives of those around us, and how they shape us too.

A few more thoughts for the week:

My favorite Instant Pot recipes: a constantly updated list

My wife gifted me an Instant Pot a year ago after I’d gotten excited via the hype, but I initially found using it to be a pretty off-putting experience. The device was well made and easily maintained (virtually every component is dishwasher safe) but the problem was that most of the food I made in it came out pretty mediocre. There were tons of Instant Pot recipes all over the web and in cookbooks, but I found that quite a few of them didn’t generate results any better than just using a nice stovetop skillet.

Eventually I read this NYTimes piece by Melissa Clark and it really helped me to put the device in perspective:

After using the machine consistently for nearly a year, I can say that if you stick to what it does best — stewing, braising, simmering, steaming — you’ll be amply rewarded. Just don’t attempt to cook anything crunchy or golden, because it probably won’t end well. No matter how many multicooker roast chicken recipes you may stumble across on the internet, don’t believe them. I’ve tried it several times: The skin ends up soft and flabby instead of crisp and salty, and the meat turns stringy.

If you play to the multicooker’s many strengths and remain aware of its weaknesses, you won’t be disappointed.

Essentially, if you use the Instant Pot for a rather narrow, specific set of tasks, you’ll find it excels.

The following are recipes that I think make particularly good use of the Instant Pot. My condition for listing these here are they use the Instant Pot to achieve a result that would be much more difficult or impossible to achieve with any other cooking implement. I will continue to update this list and may bring it to the top of this blog on occasion.

Japanese Chicken Curry – This recipe from Just One Cookbook does a great job of incorporating the instant pot into a standard curry recipe. The use of the instant pot results in chicken that’s fairly tender and onions that basically liquefy, leading to a rich flavor. 
Suggested modifications: I use store-bought curry for convenience, and I also use water instead of chicken broth, as the broth makes it a bit too rich for me.

Navy bean, bacon, and spinach soup – A vegetable-heavy soup that’s loaded with flavor. The bacon is essential and gives the soup some great texture. The navy beans become suitably soft, while still retaining a lovely chewiness. 
Suggested modifications: I’d use a little bit less broth to give soup a bit more thickness. Plus, more bacon. You can always use more bacon. 

Turkey cheeseburger soup – The concept of a “turkey cheeseburger soup” sounded pretty unappealing to me out of context, but something drew me to this recipe and I’m really grateful I tried it. This recipe is straight up delicious and fairly healthy to boot. The pureed cauliflower really gives the soup a richness that I couldn’t have predicted. One of my favorite recipes, and a regular go-to for me.
Suggested modifications: I don’t really alter this recipe in any major way, but I do play around with the ratio of carrots/potatoes, depending on how I’m feeling on the day.

Chicken chili verde – A flavorful and hearty green chili recipe that really shows what’s possible with the power of the Instant Pot (plus an immersion blender). The addition of fish sauce is a particularly brilliant touch. 
Suggested modifications: None, although fair warning that eating solely this for a main course might be a bit intense. (Potentially better as an appetizer or side dish)

Beef stew – I tried numerous beef stew recipes in the Instant Pot but few of them had the heartiness that I desired. Additionally, it was difficult to find a recipe that would cook the meat to the point where it would be tender, as I knew the Pot was capable of doing. This recipe hits all those requirements. The stew is suitably thick and the beef chunks become soft and easy to chew after being pressurized for 35 minutes.
Suggested modifications: Depending on your love of peas, you may want to take it down a notch from what this recipe recommends. 

Keto no-bean turkey chili – This is a solid red chili recipe that has a good balance of spices. Bonus: it’s low-carb and uses turkey meat, which I generally find to be more healthy and less heavy than red meat chilis.
Suggested modifications: None.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray Review

The Mission: Impossible – Fallout 4K Blu-Ray is a great home video package. Included in the box are three discs: A 4K UHD version of the film, which includes some of the special features like the commentaries, a Blu-Ray version of the film, and a separate Blu-ray disc that contains the rest of the special features. The biggest downside of this release is that it doesn’t match the box art for Paramount’s recently released 4K Mission: Impossible set. Really makes you wonder who Paramount is making those sets for, because in general, anyone who’s going to buy a 4K box set of all these films is probably going to watch those discs to match. Just going out on a limb there.

In terms how the feature presentation looks, it’s great. The movie’s shot and lit beautifully and loses very little in its journey to the small screen. Of course, Fallout was shot on a a mix of film and digital and this does make for an occasionally jarring viewing experience, but this is something that was present in the theatrical presentation as well. The sound mix is also great and it’s a particularly great way to experience composer Lorne Balfe’s score, which is one of my favorites of the franchise.

When it comes to special features, the highlight is the feature length commentary featuring Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie is an extremely generous filmmaker. Even before this disc was released, I’ve probably listened to about 8-10 hours of interview with him, but even so, I still Learned a few things about the production of this film listening to this commentary. And if you’re a fan of Tom Cruise, it’s great to hear his enthusiasm for the storytelling and the stunts of this film. He seems genuinely excited about the movie and grateful to his cast and crew to have the chance to make it.

On the special features disc there are a few cool things worth noting. First of all, instead of “deleted scenes” there’s a Deleted Scenes Montage. It’s a bunch of deleted scenes cut together with finished color grading and visual effects set to music. The objective of including this was just to give you a sense of all the hard work put into this film that you didn’t see. I personally would’ve preferred to see all the complete deleted scenes here, as it would’ve been fascinating to get more insight into how they decided to structure the final story. But my sense is that director Christopher McQuarrie wants us all to think of the final film as the definitive version (the “Director’s Cut” as it were) and putting in completed scenes might’ve muddied the waters a bit.

There’s also a ton of featurettes about the making of virtually ever major set piece in the film, where you learn really cool tidbits about production, like how they did hundreds of jumps prepping for the halo jump sequence, or how they needed five helicopters for that chase sequence at the end, or how they needed to airlift 150 crew onto the site for the final fight that they shot at Pulpit Rock. It’s all fascinating stuff and reminds me of the heyday of Blu-Rays when discs were just loaded with content.

But it’s not all perfect. One downside is that a lot of the special features are edited in a really distractingly frenetic way. It felt like the person making these didn’t trust they could hold the audience’s attention throughout literally an entire sentence, so you end up with sequences where they are cutting mid-sentence and you have like 4-5 people contributing to that same sentence? After awhile of watching this, it got pretty distracting. I wanted to say to the creators of this disc, “Hey, what you’re showing me is already pretty impressive. Please don’t edit this to ribbons, thanks!”

The second thing is that everything on this disc and these special features is meant to convince you that Tom Cruise risked his life to make this movie. I have no doubt that people put themselves in danger, but the special features do a lot to downplay all the safety precautions that were taken. It’s never about “Here are the 15 things we did to make sure Tom Cruise didn’t die,” it’s always about “Here are all the ways things could’ve gone wrong for Tom Cruise.”

I’m not sure if we should be celebrating the fact that Tom Cruise almost died making Mission: Impossible – Fallout? On the one hand, yes, we’re living in an age where advancements in CG have made audience skeptical of virtually anything they see on screen. And it genuinely is impressive that Tom Cruise did a lot of this stuff practically. But it’s also true that a lot of it was augmented with visual effects, and the special features barely talk about any of that at all. For me, I would’ve been much more interested in how they were able to combine both the practical and the digital, and how the director made those calls. But fundamentally, that’s not the story these features are interested in telling.

In a time where stunt people have actually died while making movies quite recently, the idea that this billionaire risked his life for us just feels like a weird message to hammer home in this piece of mass market entertainment.

Those minor issues aside, if you’re a big fan of Mission: Impossible – Fallout like I am, I think you’ll find this disc is worth your money. I just wish they had made the box art match.

Here is a list of all the special features included in this disc:

  • Behind the Fallout (Featurettes)
    • Light the Fuse
    • Top of the World
    • The Big Swing: Deleted Scene Breakdown
    • Rendezvous in Paris
    • The Fall
    • The Hunt is On
    • Cliffside Clash
  • Deleted Scenes Montage with Optional Commentary by director Christopher McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton
  • Foot Chase Musical Breakdown
  • The Ultimate Mission
  • Storyboards
  • Theatrical Trailer
  • Commentary by director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise
  • Commentary by director Christopher McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton
  • Commentary by composer Lorne Balfe
  • Isolated Score Track

The Content Cycle

Max Read, writing for New York, has a good overview on how cable news, social media, and blogs have a symbiotic relationship with each other:

The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew. Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought. Let’s walk through Problematic Rudolph as our emblematic example of the Content Cycle.