private links

---Sounds of Aronofsky

---What If . . . 

---"Data journalism is the new punk"

---Bill Murray's tour of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom

---"Randers' ideas most closely resemble a World3 scenario in which energy efficiency and renewable energy stave off the worst effects of climate change until after 2050. For the coming few decades, Randers predicts, life on Earth will carry on more or less as before. Wealthy economies will continue to grow, albeit more slowly as investment will need to be diverted to deal with resource constraints and environmental problems, which thereby will leave less capital for creating goods for consumption. Food production will improve: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause plants to grow faster, and warming will open up new areas such as Siberia to cultivation. Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain. Despite humanity's efforts to ameliorate climate change, Randers predicts that its effects will become devastating sometime after mid-century, when global warming will reinforce itself by, for instance, igniting fires that turn forests into net emitters rather than absorbers of carbon. `Very likely, we will have war long before we get there,' Randers adds grimly. He expects that mass migration from lands rendered unlivable will lead to localized armed conflicts." --Madhusree Mukerjee

---@annehelen's recommended reading on the scandals of classic Hollywood

---Introducing the Leap

---a 1979 interview with Woody Allen

---words to avoid

---movie references in The Simpsons

---The Power of Networks

---"To my mind, the thing that’s exploding into relevance in our era is not mass culture but the critique of mass culture — the Barthesian dissection of everything, no matter how trivial. This happens everywhere now, often in real time. And this critical analysis is often as vital and interesting and consumable as the culture it discusses. Consider, for instance, the way the TV recap has evolved into a nearly independent creative form. So the critical analysis of pop culture has itself become a kind of pop culture. We seem to be approaching some kind of singularity — a collapse of creativity and criticism into one."  --Sam Anderson

---Francois Truffaut: The Man Who Loved Cinema

---the Situationist International, remixed

---"I have absolutely no idea who my government is continuously bombing to death by drone, but I assume they deserve it"

---Michael Z. Newman's "Television Pictures"

---"newer" media and their various platforms are always largely anchored by the nostalgic remediation of older properties instead of anything truly "new"

---an open letter to Jay Leno

---Haneke's work does contain slight yet dazzling threads of hopefulness here and there, but for each of those threads there's at least two instances of unequivocal and irreparable carnage serving as a counterbalance. There's no bringing back the girl in Benny's Video, for example, or the boy in Funny Games, or the father in Time of the Wolf, and so on.  And so in Haneke's work, hopefulness isn't progress or potential so much as it's the byproduct of endurance--it isn't a slate-clearing sunrise so much as a (momentary?) passing of the tornado. Misery and despair so thoroughly blanket Haneke's filmography that one could argue quite plausibly that many of his stories' apparent victims wind up being victors, because the dead are spared from continuing the experience the unavoidable disasters of life." --Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

---trailers for Skyfall, The Master, Deranged, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, The Great Gatsby, and Holy Motors

---Ridley Scott on storyboarding

---protests in Chicago and Montreal

---"users should assume they have absolutely no privacy"

---lastly, John Michael Hayes on Rear Window