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Whether embedded in a hospital, a high school, a zoo, a welfare center, an army training camp, a public library, a city hall, or an entire neighborhood, his films are “stylistically ur-vérité,” as Errol Morris put it in the Paris Review in 2011. “No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the-wall. But Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He may be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”

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For Gaza

—with a battle cry from Kamehameha Nui

We drink this and share the same taste with you.
We mixed the kava in the parking lot, face-to-face with you.

What becomes of children who drink war instead of water?
The rubble, a chronic obituary. I will never waste a name with you.

Today an elder dreams in the long arms of his olive trees.
Home, he sings. To put hands to the light and fill crates with you.

The drone wind whips, grief wraps a country’s throat.
We find your hands and keep our place with you.

E inu i ka wai ʻawaʻawa. Histories of bitter waters and love,
love, love. E Palesetina ē, Hawaiʻi stays and fights with you.

by Noʻu Revilla
from Split This Rock

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This ghazal incorporates famous words of Kamehameha Nui, who united the Hawaiian islands. Before a battle on Maui, he implored his warriors: “I mua e nā pōkiʻi a inu i ka wai ʻawaʻawa (Forward, my siblings, and drink the bitter waters).” Throughout Oceania, Indigenous Pasifika people believe that if we drink the same thing before taking collective action, we go forward with the same stomach. As an ʻŌiwi aloha ʻāina, I am proud of the historic and ongoing connections between Hawaiʻi and Palestine. We stand with Palestine.

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Todd Cronan at nonsite:

When Édouard Manet exhibited Olympia in the Salon of 1865, it unleashed a firestorm. Viewers were shocked by the subject matter—the sheer nakedness of the sitter—and by his formal treatment of the subject: critics lamented the lack of finish, the sharp contrast between light and dark, and, above all, the starkness of the model’s outward look at the viewer. For critics at the time, Manet’s shocking way with form went hand in hand with a sense of moral outrage, around gender and class. Olympia subtly but powerfully broke all the unspoken rules about the nude in painting and set the standard for a new form of revolutionary modern art.

Olympia has been subject to countless interpretations for over a century, but one subject has seemingly eluded critical commentary: race. If the white model Victorine Meurent has been at the center of many interpretations, what about the other, equally central character, the model’s black maid, Laure (we don’t know her last name).

more here.

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Joshua Cohen in Undark Magazine:

For decades, scientists have been trying to develop therapeutics for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is characterized by cognitive decline. Given the global rise in cases, the stakes are high. A study published in The Lancet Public Health reports that the number of adults living with dementia worldwide is expected to nearly triple, to 153 million in 2050. Alzheimer’s disease is a dominant form of dementia, representing 60 to 70 percent of cases.

Recent approvals by the Food and Drug Administration have focused on medications that shrink the sticky brain deposits of a protein called amyloid beta. The errant growth of this protein is responsible for triggering an increase in tangled threads of another protein called tau and the development of Alzheimer’s disease — at least according to the dominant amyloid cascade hypothesis, which was first proposed in 1991.

Over the past few years, however, data and drugs associated with the hypothesis have been mired in various controversies relating to data integrity, regulatory approval, and drug safety.

More here.

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Xan Brooks in The Guardian:

Her name is Anora but everyone calls her Ani. She’s fluent in Russian but prefers to speak English. She dances at a strip club, which means she’s emphatically not a sex worker, even if she occasionally moonlights as one on the side. Ani, it’s clear, is smarter and tougher than she lets on to her clients. But the woman’s a mess; she’s compromised and conflicted. Probably the world around her is too.

Anora, the brilliant new picture from American writer-director Sean Baker, is a screwball Cinderella tale – frenetic and funny, fiery and profane. While Baker has already won plaudits for his previous work (Tangerine, The Florida Project, 2021’s Red Rocket), this boisterous New York caper vaults him towards greatness. Anora combines instinctual deft handling of its volatile subject matter with a jubilant, swing-for-the-fences ambition. But the film’s a joint triumph and shares the spoils with its star. Cast in the title role, 25-year-old Mikey Madison gives a performance for the ages. She rustles up a flawed, fearsome heroine who’s as gorgeous and grubby as life.

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William Deresiewicz at Persuasion:

Now I’ll never have a chance to impress Arlene Croce.

Croce, who died last month at 90, was the dean of American dance critics during the heyday of American dance. I started my writing career as a dance critic, too, and for many years that’s all I ever dreamed of being as a writer. My first sixty-plus published articles were dance reviews, and their intended audience consisted, in its entirety, of Arlene Croce. She was the lodestar, the queen, the presence around which the field arranged itself. I’ve wanted few things more in life—wanted it with the ardor of youth and the thirst for praise of the apprentice writer—than to win her approval.

I never did. In fact, I’ve no idea if she ever saw a word I wrote. But her death brought me back to that time. In retrospect, it was the waning days of the golden age of an American art form whose achievements bear comparison to those of Florentine painting or Viennese music. Not many remember this now, for dance leaves little to posterity.

More here.

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Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:

“Oulipans are rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.” –Raymond Queneau

It brings me no joy to report the rebirth (or the renewed undeadness) of the zombie literary movement known as OuLiPo.

Oulipo’s first birth came in 1960, from the vibrant and idle minds of Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. They dubbed it ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”). A self-conscious experiment in applying strict mathematical constraints to art, its results (such as George Perec’s La Disparition, a novel that avoids the letter e) were spectacles of virtuosity, triumphs of ingenuity, and, at their very best, passable works of art. No coincidence, I say, that the name “potential literature” stands opposed to actual literature.

I believed this volcano had gone dormant. I was wrong. The last year witnessed four eruptions. I offer brief comments on each species of ash.

More here.

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Sumit Paul-Choudhury in The Guardian:

People reacted in different ways to my wife Kathryn’s diagnosis: an aggressive, fast-spreading ovarian cancer discovered after the miscarriage that ended our first and only pregnancy. A few understood that her future was likely to be grim and short; those people mostly kept quiet or stayed away. But many professed to believe that things would somehow work out – sometimes out of superstition, sometimes out of a desire to reassure, but most often simply because they could think of no other way to react.

Kathryn, for her part, insisted that those around her – her family, her friends, her colleagues and her doctors – only express hope. Naturally, that applied to me most of all, but I struggled to know how to accommodate her wishes. On the one hand, I’d always been inclined to look on the bright side, and some part of me believed it would all work out fine. On the other, I was an empirically minded rationalist. I read the medical reports and the scientific literature, and realised that her odds of surviving more than a couple of years were vanishingly small. But since I wasn’t the one with the terminal illness, I concluded that I should keep my mouth shut and be supportive in the way my wife had chosen, while hoping against hope for a statistical miracle.

No miracle came. Kathryn’s cancer overran her body’s defences in less than a year; she endured an unrehearsed and graceless death.

When it came to rebuilding my own life, the piece of advice I was given, over and over, was to “take it one day at a time”. No long-term plans, no significant life changes. I found that unsatisfactory.

More here.

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Many Authors at Salmagundi:

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: In the course of writing my new book (on the ephemeral life of the classic in art), I was heartened to find that a standard of taste could be established when a work of art is felt to exemplify primary aspirations and excellences. Joshua Reynolds set out this understanding in his Discourses on Art (1790) when he located the standard of taste in “the authority and practice of those whose work may be said to have been consecrated by having stood the test of ages.” From the sixteenth century until the nineteenth, ancient sculpture such as the Venus de’ Medici and the Apollo Belvedere, which had been unearthed during the great building projects in Rome during the Renaissance, and also those artists who had most perfectly imitated them—Raphael and Michelangelo—met this test. These “true examples of grandeur,” as Reynolds called them, were regarded as models for artists to imitate and as the indisputable standard of taste. Exemplar and standard were synonymous. And as long as the practice was in good working order and artists and viewers felt part of its intellectual and aesthetic continuum, they could confidently judge works of art, both present and past.

more here.

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Talking To My Grandmother Who Died Poor

… (while hearing Richard Nixon declare
…………….“I am not a crook.”)

no doubt i will end my life as poor as you
without the wide veranda of your dream
on which to sit and fan myself slowly
without the tall drinks to cool my bored
unthirsty throat.
you will think: Oh, my granddaughter failed
to make something of herself
in the White Man’s World!

but i really am not a crook
I am not descended from crooks
my father was not president of anything
and only secretary to the masons
where his dues were a quarter a week
which he did not shirk to pay.

that buys me a new dream
though i may stray
and lust after jewelry
and a small house by the sea:
yet I could give up even lust
in proper times
and open my doors to strangers
or live in one room.
that is the new dream.

in the meantime I hang on
fighting addiction
to the old dream
knowing I must train myself to want
not one bit more
than I need to keep me alive
working
and recognizing beauty
in your
………….. so nearly
undefeated face.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

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David Mason at the Hudson Review:

In an 1846 letter to the Athenaeum, English writer William Thoms coined a term, “folklore.” He wondered whether some new scholar might do for British culture what Jacob Grimm had done for German. Jacob was the more prominent of the Grimms, but his life and work were inconceivable without the companionship and contributions of his younger brother, Wilhelm. The work for which they are most celebrated today, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), was a collaboration in which Wilhelm eventually played the dominant editorial role. The two brothers shared a bed when young, and lived side by side for most of their lives, pursuing some of the most prodigious scholarship imaginable. Since their deaths (Wilhelm in 1859, Jacob in 1863), so many legends have accrued about their lives and works that they almost seem fairy-tale figures themselves, quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why Ann Schmiesing’s brief, eloquent and moving biography, The Brothers Grimm, is bound to prove enlightening to English-language readers.

more here.

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James Smart in The Guardian:

When the explosion shakes New York’s East Harlem one morning in 2008, Royal Davis is dozing in a coffin, his face itching behind a prosthetic as students film a zombie movie in his funeral parlour. Veteran detective Mary Roe is arresting a homeless man who has just presented a bank with a ransom note. And would-be film-maker Felix Pearl is struggling to sleep in the multi-tenanted brownstone he calls home before his room starts to “flutter” and he is flung into the wall, his nose popping with blood.

The blast comes from a five-storey tenement that has collapsed nearby, cloaking everything in acrid dust. As sirens wail and helicopters hover “like small black spiders beneath the roiling sky”, Price’s ensemble mobilises. Royal, spotting that death may be on onlookers’ minds, enlists his young son to pass out business cards. Mary begins to search for the missing. Felix grabs his camera to shoot: a man yelling at oncoming traffic, another praying by an ambulance, a mute, ash-caked woman standing with her howling dog.

More here.

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Sonia Rao in The Washington Post:

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Enzo Escober in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Desire is among the United States’ most enduring global exports, an industry as profitable as war. As a 10-year-old child in the Philippines, Geena Rocero, the woman in the centerfold, snuck into her father’s bedroom to flip through his collection of Playboy magazines. Poring over the glossy pages, she grew enamored with the bodies on display. Smooth, bosomy emissaries of the American libido, they gave a young trans girl an education in comportment funneled through an imperial pipeline. In 1898, the US purchased the Philippines from its former colonizer, Spain, for $20 million and, after killing about 20,000 revolutionaries, held dominion over the islands for close to 50 years. To this day, it is the United States’ most secure sphere of influence in the Far East, a society where stateside cultural products emit a mystic gleam.

For many Filipinos, the US itself is a place of imports—a country one loses parents to. When Rocero was a teenager, her mother left Manila to take a job as a factory worker in San Francisco, sustaining her family on the power of the American dollar. The care packages she sent back were as redolent of excess as Playboy spreads.

More here.

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Steve Newman at Am I Stronger Yet?:

No one seems to know whether world-bending AGI is just three years away. Or rather, everyone seems to know, but they all have conflicting opinions. How can there be such profound uncertainty on such a short time horizon?

Or so I thought to myself, last month, while organizing my thoughts for a post about AI timelines. The ensuing month has brought a flood of new information, and some people now appear to believe that transformational AGI is just two years away. With additional data, the range of expectations is actually diverging.

Here’s my attempt to shed some light.

Have we entered into what will in hindsight be not even the early stages, but actually the middle stage, of the mad tumbling rush into singularity? Or are we just witnessing the exciting early period of a new technology, full of discovery and opportunity, akin to the boom years of the personal computer and the web?

There was already a vibe that things were starting to speed up (after what some viewed as a slow period between GPT-4 and o1), and then OpenAI’s recent announcement of their “o3” model blew the doors off everyone’s expectations.

More here.  And see also this article called “The Important Thing About AGI is the Impact, Not the Name“.

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C.J. Chivers in the New York Times:

In late 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced an ambition never before heard in the history of war. Ukraine, he said, would provide its forces with one million FPV drones in the next calendar year. The announcement, which followed battlefield disappointments and long delays of arms shipments from the United States, pushed this unusual new class of weapon to the front of Ukraine’s bid for survival and rapidly reordered contemporary combat along the way.

Drones became entwined with modern armed conflict years before President Vladimir V. Putin sent Russian mechanized divisions over Ukraine’s borders in 2022. But no previous conflict had involved drones used so extensively by two sides, in so many forms or in so many roles.

More here.

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