I've listened to this live show countless times over the years. Great background music when you want to focus and get something done.
So, Errol Morris made a new documentary called Separated, about the Trump administration's border policy when he was president. Here's the trailer:
The film is in the can, ready to show. But NBC, who bought it a few months ago, has decided not to show it prior to the election. I hate to link to Bloomberg, but here's Jason Bailey's excellent Opinion piece on how holding it is a disservice to voters:
Having seen Separated, I can confirm that, yes, it would absolutely ruffle Trump’s feathers. Through archival footage, first-hand accounts from government officials and damning interagency emails, the film provides a detailed, meticulous history of where his family separation policy came from and how his extremist Republican administration implemented it. Trump certainly comes off poorly.
News Minimalist uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10. Significance is estimated based on eight factors:
- scale: how many people the event affected;
- magnitude: how big was the effect;
- novelty: how unexpected or unique was the event;
- immediacy: how close in time is the event;
- actionability: how likely it is that a reader can act on the news for personal benefit;
- positivity: how positive is the event — used to fix media negativity bias;
- probability: how likely it is that events speculated in the news will actually occur;
- credibility: how credible is the source.
The results are posted on the News Minimalist front page.
Road to the Sea is a travel / nomad / sailing blog by a literal couple who've been on the road or water since 2011.
We have been full time land-based nomads since 2011. We became nomads separately at different times and in different places. In 2015, thanks to close friends, we met on the road, fell in love, and have been traveling together since. We have been all over the United States, parts of Canada, up to Alaska, over to Hawaii, and as far south as the tip of Baja. After eight years we decided to expand our travels and took to the sea. With no experience or knowledge about sailing, or boats in general, we were starting from scratch. We knew only two things when this all began; the style of sailboat we wanted, and that we wanted to sail.
They're currently in French Polynesia. Follow along!
I've always loved to watch people do their thing when they are expert at their jobs, especially if it's handwork. Though I am not at all skilled with anything artistic with my hands (painting, drawing, sculpting, etc.), I have always been dextrous in my manual labor jobs. For instance, I can check the quality of a vinyl record — something I sell for a living — with unreasonable speed. Within a few seconds, and mostly by touch, I can identify the provenance of the majority of records I handle — their era, the country of origin of the pressing, the flatness and condition of the vinyl, etc. It's one aspect of my work that I still enjoy after almost two decades.
When I lived in Vanuatu in 2019 and 2020, I witnessed two Ni-Vans (natives of the country) do astonishing things with machetes: prior to my arrival, a parcel of land neighbouring the one I was to manage, changed hands, and the purchaser needed to clear it of vines, thick overgrowth, and hundreds of trees. The new owner, a New Zealander, hired a team of men with a backhoe. After a month, barely anything was cleared. The machinery was too cumbersome for the dense forest, and the men, who were more experienced with cement, sand, and steel, were humiliated by the organic material that had thrived there for decades.
When asked how my employer had handled the job on their land, they answered that they had hired Jackson, a local man with a machete. When the new tenant did likewise, the majority of it was completed in a fortnight. I arrived midway through and it was astonishing to see. What is it the Marines say? "One man, one army"? I also witnessed Jackson spearfish from a kayak using only the light of a crescent moon.
The second expert with a machete was a worker on "my" property: Marie. We needed a tall, Y-shaped crutch to prop something up. She grabbed her blade, hopped a chest-high fence in one motion, and disappeared into the forest. In just a few minutes, she reappeared with a nine foot tree about 4 inches around. Carrying both the tree and the machete, she again hopped the fence. While covering the ground between the fence and myself, she chopped the extraneous branches from the trunk, leaving only the two forked limbs we required. A few more swings and the bottom was carved into a perfect spear to stab into the ground. In her real life, Marie is a 44-year old housekeeper:
I think of these things because I've spent some of today watching this video: 15 Jobs That Take a Lifetime to Master, which features some wonderful handwork. It's 3 hours long but each job's segment is only 10 to 15 minutes and they're unrelated, so you can watch in chunks and skip around if one doesn't interest you.
Donna Kalil has plunged into canals in the dead of night, straddled two-hundred-pound serpents, and been bitten more times than she can count—all in the name of killing a thing she loves and playing a game she can’t win.
Fantastic piece in Garden & Gun on Donna Kalil, a professional, full-time Python hunter. Don't like to read? Here's a short video. But you should read the article. How could you not with a pull-quote like the one above.
Via Metafilter
Being a big walker, I listen to a lot of audio — mostly Podcasts and Audiobooks and occasionally music. One of my favorite podcasts is one that I never hear anyone else ever mention: Everything Is Stories.
They describe themselves as "an ongoing survey of personal histories. Each episode is a first person narrative from someone who has lived through consequential changes to their notion of self and the world... Sometimes these stories explore the philosophy of outsiders. But most importantly, these stories examine what it is to be human...We don’t record to defend or demonstrate an idea. Rather, we create a document of what was seen and felt during their transformative experiences."
Episodes are released sporadically and, with the exception of being top shelf quality and first person narration, the stories have little in common with one another. The current story, The Disorientation of Survival, is a multi-part piece about a gay fraudster growing up in the era of AIDS.
A good starter episode might be Reviled and Maligned: "Peter Stefan, owner of Graham Putnam & Mahoney funeral parlor in Worcester, Mass., found himself thrust into the national spotlight in the spring of 2013 amid a damning controversy. With implications that still linger to this day, Stefan and his team faced the question of where to draw the line on who deserves a burial. EVERYTHING IS STORIES explores the morality behind such decision-making and how one man—during a time of universal anger, fear and sadness—stood up for what he thought was right."
The part they're keeping hidden in that description is that Stefan and his team were burdened with the task of burying one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Here's the trailer:
Or what about this episode from last season:
"Charles Farrell could be labeled a number of things: pianist, writer, boxing manager, and hustler. As a teenager, Farrell lived in the streets of Boston, playing piano in mafia-owned clubs. With a love for boxing, he started gambling on high-profile matches while also managing fighters. He fixed an array of professional fights by using code-talk with trainers, foolproof matchmaking, and buying referees and judges. In this story, the highs and lows of gangster culture are explored as Charles Farrell describes the ease of taking advantage of society’s vulnerable parts."
That's Season 3, episode 6: Sesquipedalian. Here's the "trailer":
Everything Is Stories is, of course, available for free wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen online.
As a sidenote, EIS is now funded by Oscilloscope, which was founded by Adam Yauch (Beastie Boys' MCA) and David Fenkel. Yauch died of cancer in 2012. That same year, Fenkel left Oscilloscope to co-found the wonderful distro, A24.
I prefer to experience Canadian winters from afar. Though I did that successfully for many years, it hasn't happened since Covid. Now, with an aging dog I don't want to be apart from, I'm looking at spending another winter here.
As I did last year, I will run weekly screenings for friends in my loft. The sudden drop in temperature has me thinking about what to project this year and I thought readers of A Tiny Bell may be interested in these works as well.
Here's some what I'm considering:
Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot
d. William Kentridge
Streaming on Mubi
This is a 9-part series about art and its creating. Kentridge is a South African artists and made these ~30 minute episodes during Covid. Here's the official description, the trailer, and an overview:
Inspired in part by Charlie Chaplin, Dziga Vertov and the innovative wit of early cinema, pioneering South African artist William Kentridge offers a cinematic experience of the creative process during the plague years of COVID. Interconnected yet distinct episodes introduce us to William and his collaborators in action, inviting us to step inside the intimacy of the studio as shared discoveries about culture, history and politics, and profound truths about the ways we live and think today are uncovered through the making of works of art.
Le Trou
d. Jacques Becker, based on the novel by José Giovanni
Streaming on The Criterion Channel
Le Trou is my favorite prison film. I think it's astonishingly good and can't believe Hollywood has never remade it. So, so tense.
A Separation
d. w. Asghar Farhadi
Streaming on Hoopla, but I own the blu-ray.
Farhadi has had some controversy the past few years and I don't side with him on it, but this is an all-time favorite of mine and an exceptional way to introduce people to Iranian cinema.
Network
d. Sidney Lumet, w. Paddy Chayefski
Streaming on Apple TV+
I used to assume most everyone has seen these 70s classic films but last year I screened Dog Day Afternoon and no one who attended had even heard of it before. So, this year it'll be Network. All the acting is incredible — Beatrice Straight's ~5-minute performance earned her an Oscar — and the script is impeccable. There are few films as prophetic as Network. See if it you haven't. It has never been more relevant.
The Graduate
d. Mike Nichols, w. Buck Henry from a novel by Charles Webb
Streaming on The Criterion Channel
Another film that I assume most people have seen. However, the people I asked last year seem to only vaguely recall watching it as kids. I think many people dismiss it as a bawdy comedy, but it's a meticulously constructed film. The performances are great, and the direction, camera work, and editing are top-notch. Howard Suber, a film prof at USC, did an audio commentary for the laserdisc years ago. I learned more about storytelling from listening to that then I did in four years of film school.
About Dry Grasses
d. Nuri Bilge Ceylan w. Akin Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
On the fence on this one for two reasons: I have not yet seen it, which means I'd have to watch it twice as I only screen films I've seen, and it's 3 hours and 17 minutes. Certainly looks interesting, however, and the reviews were excellent.
Capernaum
d. Nadine Labaki w. Nadine Labaki, Jihad Hojeily, Michelle Keserwany
Stream it for free on Hoopla
A critic in the trailer says, "Prepare to be blown away." That is certainly my experience with this film. I've seen it twice and it's remarkable. The child playing the lead, who was not an actor, but an illiterate Syrian refugee, is mind-bogglingly great. He's now a teenager and thanks to the film was able to relocate to Norway where he attended school for the first time in his life.
Join or Die
d. Pete Davis and Rebecca Davis
Stream on Netflix
Recent documentary on Robert Putnam, definer of Social Capital, and author of Bowling Alone, which I, along with everyone else, read in the 2000s.
The Boy and the Heron
d. Hayao Miyazaki
Stream it on Netflix
I once had a promising relationship go sour after the woman noticed my utter boredom while watching her favorite film, My Neighbor Totoro. I've pretty much hated Miyazaki films ever since. However, I really like herons and art that explores grief, so gonna give this one a shot.
I'll make new posts in the future listing the screenings so that people can follow along if they wish.
Some beautiful new work from Keita Morimoto.
Morimoto has a new book out as well — might be Japan only. Their site is here. Morimoto studied at OCAD.
Of all things, The Pudding does a wonderful breakdown of the Canadian board game, Crokinole. Many of my Canadian readers will already know the game, but it's not very popular outside of southern Ontario. That link describes the rules and references this semi-final World Championship match.
More on the One-Cheek Rule.
