CGP Grey has an insightful new video essay on YouTube, listing 7 ways to maximize misery:
Beyond its dry wit, this video illustrates that it can often be useful to think of our unhealthy behaviors in terms of what outcome they are driving us towards versus away from.
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, in a memo to the staff:
The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader’s representative – has outgrown that one office. Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves.
To that end, we have decided to eliminate the position of the public editor, while introducing several new reader-focused efforts. We are grateful to Liz Spayd, who has served in the role since last summer, for her tough, passionate work and for raising issues of critical importance to our newsroom. Liz will leave The Times on Friday as our last public editor.
This is distressing news on a variety of fronts. The position of public editor, founded in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, theoretically helped keep Times’ folks honest. The idea that Times’ commenters and tweets/Facebook posts directed at the Times are a sufficient substitute for a respected person inside the organization seeking comment and effecting change is laughable. And those who think outlets like the Times don’t need to work on self-improvement need look no further than its coverage of the 2016 election.
That being said, the most recent public editor, Liz Spayd, was an unfortunate note to go out on. Spayd wrote many columns of dubious quality and essentially embodied the worst version of what this position could be.
Will Oremus wrote a takedown of Spayd on Slate not too long ago:
Most of [Spayd’s] column ideas appear to spring directly from the public editor’s email inbox, which she and her assistant monitor vigilantly. She quotes from readers’ missives prolifically, and she presents their sundry beefs and prescriptions with a level of respect that verges on reverence. But if we’ve learned one big lesson from Spayd’s work so far, it’s this: Readers are quite often wrong. Of course the public editor should listen to them and take them seriously. The real challenge, though, is to distinguish between their wishes and their true interests, to understand not only where those overlap but where they diverge, and to recognize which should influence the paper’s editorial decisions and which should not.
At that difficult task, Spayd has repeatedly failed.
Yesterday, the press embargo lifted on Canon’s newest addition to its cinema camera line, the C200. Here are the tech specs:
Here’s a pretty good summary by Pro AV of the key features:
My opinion: This is a weird set of features for a camera that cost $7500.
The default recording mode in HD provides only 35Mbps of quality, which is pretty much the same as the C100 Mark I (yes, Mark I) from five years ago. I’m sure the image will look great, but that data rate is painful in this day and age.
But the camera comes with RAW Light, which is great, and comes with dramatically higher data rates and file sizes (bafflingly, the much more expensive C300 Mark II does not currently support RAW Light). RAW Light records at 12bit 4K DCI at 30p and 10bit 4K DCI at 60p. There’s also talk of support for the XF-AVC codec in 2018, so that’s a huge positive.
That being said, I think it’s also Canon’s first camera for under $8000 that allows for high frame rate capture (up to 120p) in full HD, something that competitors such as Panasonic and Sony have already featured for years.
There are also a bunch of other cool things, like the fact that it supports 2 SD Cards AND a CFast card, as well as a better top-handle system than the C100 Mark II.
There’s a lot that’s appealing about the camera. There’s also a few head-scratching decisions. I wish it cost about $1000-2000 less than it does. In other words: It’s a Canon camera.
For more reading, I’d recommend Erik Naso’s commentary on the C200.
A big happy birthday to Stephen Tobolowsky today.
At this point, I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life trying to bring Stephen’s stories into the wider world. The reason is obvious: When you see impact of Stephen’s stories in front of a live audience, you feel like you have to do everything you can to share what you just saw. Sometimes, we are called to just carry the fire, to just keep an idea alive, even if our resources aren’t that vast.
In return, Stephen has been game to work on most of my crazy ideas, like starting a podcast that would span 80+ episodes full of stories about his adventures, or making a movie based off the podcast. Or, more recently, doing a live show in Los Angeles this past weekend on three weeks notice, which we filmed and are planning to put out into the world.
I took this photo of him backstage at the Whitefire Theatre, preparing to go on. He killed it, btw.
Happy birthday, Stephen. Here’s to many more awesome years and stories.
One of my favorite podcasts is Reply All, a podcast about the internet. They recently produced an episode explaining how easy it is to get phished and how devious modern phishing techniques can be. It’s a fun episode, and teaches us the following things:
This month, Gen Pop — my pop culture podcast with Joanna Robinson — will come to an end.
Sometimes I’ll create a podcast that lasts 10 years (and counting). Other times, a show will last 6 months. Unfortunately, Gen Pop was one of the latter.
Out of all my podcasts, Gen Pop was probably the show that I worked the hardest on and stretched myself the most on. And while it didn’t have the largest audience, it had a really impassioned fan base. I’m so grateful to people who donated to the show and who supported us every step of the way.
The folks at Nerdophiles wrote up this lovely retrospective on the podcast, and it’s awesome:
I’m sad to see Gen Pop go, but happy for the other opportunities to catch Joanna and David still podcasting. Gen Pop truly was one of my favorite podcasts that really had its finger on the pulse of pop culture. It delivered a weekly interesting conversation that was topical and well-informed, often times giving me new insight and perspective.
I’m glad that people got something out of the show. It makes me feel like all the work we put into it was not ill-spent.
With the forthcoming release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (see my video reaction to the film here), I’ve been thinking about all the great music that this series has given us over the years. These scores not only help create the world of the films, but they help imbue it with a whimsy and a poignancy that would otherwise be totally missing — especially the more incoherent films like At World’s End and Dead Man’s Chest. Below are some of my favorite tracks, and a few thoughts on each one.
Note: Geoff Zanelli does the music for the new film, replacing Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt. His work is fine, but he mostly re-uses memorable themes from the previous movies (think Don Davis in Jurassic Park III and you have a good idea of what the score is like).
He’s a Pirate – Written by Klaus Badelt for the original Pirates of the Caribbean, this track is oft-imitated, never equaled. It combines modern, bombastic action film sensibilities with a heavy emphasis on strings that make it one of the most memorable themes of all time.
Angelica – For On Stranger Tides, Zimmer collaborated with my favorite band in the world right now, guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. One of the results was this tango that features some beautiful riffs.
Jack Sparrow – The composers of the Jack Sparrow theme found a way to express his personality using a cello solo. It’s beautiful, silly, and grand.
Up Is Down – One thing the Pirates films are great at is crafting inventive visuals. In a memorable scene in At World’s End, Jack Sparrow uses the weight of his crew to flip his entire ship underwater. This fun track captures some of the whimsy and challenge of that task.
I Don’t Think Now Is The Best Time – This track is an extremely intricate one that plays at the end of At World’s End. As the climactic battle is coming to a head and all hell is breaking loose, Elizabeth and Will declare their love for each other. Almost every single theme in the Pirates movies shows up for a moment in this thing, but my favorite aspect of this track is how it manages to combine them, often layering one on top of the other, all while still managing to match the action on screen. It’s probably the track I’ve listened to more than any other.
For more reading, see my review of Hans Zimmer’s live tour.
I was delighted to participate in this panel at the Seattle International Film Festival with fellow Seattle film critics Charles Mudede, Sara Michelle Fetters, and Zosha Millman. Brendan Harris moderated a discussion about the economics of film criticism, the role a film critic plays as an advocate of films and consumers, and past opinions we’ve regretted.
You can watch the entire panel here on Periscope.