Month: June 2020

Froµ Matt Taibbi’s 6.28 essay on Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility“:

“It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, ‘American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.’ When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, ‘I know…everyone wants to talk to you right now!’

“White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.

“White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

“If your category is ‘white,’ bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (‘Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities…whiteness has always been predicated on blackness’), which naturally means ‘a positive white identity is an impossible goal.’

“DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except ‘strive to be less white.’ To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as ‘leaving the stress-inducing situation’ — is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the ‘ordeal by water’ (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

“DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.”

A little less than five years ago I badly wanted to catch Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton on Broadway. It had opened at the Richard Rodgers theatre in August 2015, and for a good year or so I kept reminding myself to somehow catch it during one of my NYC visits. But I was also repelled by the absurdly high ticket prices, and I gradually convinced myself that it wasn’t worth the candle.

I then told myself that I’d catch a roadshow version or at the very least a video-captured version on cable or streaming. But neither scenario happened. The cable/streaming thing stalled because the producers felt this would cut into roadshow revenues.

And so gradually the Hamilton moment — the late-Obama-era, fresh-out-of-the-box excitement — began to wear off.

Now the Hamilton “movie” is finally about to stream on the Disney channel (starting on 7.3). Obviously a good thing for millions who never saw it. But honestly? As brilliant and universally applauded as the stage show was (and to go by reviews of the streaming version), it’s no longer a thing with special vitality.

Hamilton doesn’t seem to have opened five years ago (it actually began at the Public Theatre on 2.17.15) but more like a decade ago, given everything that’s happened since that first electric moment. And it’s always been my feeling that movies don’t just connect because they’re exceptional but because of the timing — because they’ve opened at just the right time and have struck when the iron is hot.

A Hamilton press screener has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of days, and I’m thinking of catching it tonight. Why didn’t I watch it immediately? Because it’s an old show now.

Read more

After yesterday’s coinage of “No Chairs Nolan“, his p.r. rep Kelly Bush issued the following statement: “For the record, the only things banned from [Christopher Nolan’s] sets are cell phones (not always successfully) and smoking (very successfully). The chairs Anne [Hathaway] was referring to are the directors chairs clustered around the video monitor, allocated on the basis of hierarchy not physical need. Chris chooses not to use his but has never banned chairs from the set. Cast and crew can sit wherever and whenever they need [to] and frequently do.”

From Jeffrey Toobin‘s “Why The Mueller Invetigation Failed,” posted a day or sp ago by The New Yorker: “The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a ‘scam’ and a ‘hoax.’ Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, ‘a grave injustice’ that was ‘unprecedented in American history.’

“According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true.

“Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report.

“In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller — he should be thanking him.”

The acrobatics are applaudable, but who climbs up the side of a building in shiny leather street shoes? Especially while wearing glasses and a straw hat? Almost dying from falling five or six stories and slamming into the pavement at 100 mph is deeply unsettling and therefore not the least bit entertaining. This is basically a stretched-to-the-limits-of-crediblity suspense sequence, and over-rated at that. Sidenote: Harold Lloyd died in ’71, but I was invited to a party at his Green Acres estate (or at least what remained of it) sometime in ’83. I’ve never forgotten the magnificent 1920s interior design (Mediterranean / Italian Renaissance) and furnishings, particularly the Tiffany lamps.

Read more

Jeffrey Wells / Hollywood Elsewhere to PicMonkey:

As we all know, official support for Flash will finally end on 12.31.20, with interactive HTML5 content replacing it. HTML5 is lightweight, fast and takes less time to render web pages whereas Flash is CPU intensive and not as lightweight as compared to HTML5.

I writing to ask you or a PicMonkey colleague to please explain IN DUMB PERSON LANGUAGE what will be be specifically different in terms of capturing and refining images on PicMonkey after Flash is discontinued and HTML5 kicks in.

I know how everything works now as I’ve been using PicMonkey for several years. I capture an image, save it to my desktop and then use PicMonkey to crop and enhance or what-have-you. But I want to know how things will be different (if at all) after 12.31.20.

Kindly don’t answer with confusing techno-jargon. Just talk to me like I’M A CHILD….like I’M AN IDIOT…like I’m a GOLDEN RETRIEVER…what exactly will be different in terms of commands, basic capturings, refinings and whatnot.

And please promise me you won’t dump classic or, as you describe it, “old” PicMonkey in favor of your reprehensible new version[s], which are apparently aimed at the tens of millions of vapid, ADD-afflicted, selfie-taking, Tik Tok-frequenters out there.

Thank you very much & have a nice day.

I understand the idea that it’s not a desirable thing if too many people are laughing and chatting and kicking back during principal photography (Brian De Palma used to frown at same). But if you’ve even hung out on a set you know it’s all about waiting for the director and the dp to create the right lighting and figure out the camera movement, and that this always takes hours and hours. So denying people the option of sitting down (even in jest) is, like, “what?”

It has been revealed that famed Director, Christopher Nolan, does not allow chairs on sets pic.twitter.com/OFu0QdNKut

— Film Secrets (@FilmSecrets) June 29, 2020