I Want You Still: Celebrating 40 Years of Marvin Gaye’s Sensual Classic | Pitchfork

~ Mark

Fun interview about creating one of my favorite albums. Nice bit:

Out of the 13 months we took to make the album, there was six months of partying. Seriously. We would come into the studio, and Marvin would say, “Let’s go play basketball.” And we would play basketball half the day, on studio time. There was no pressure.

I Want You Still: Celebrating 40 Years of Marvin Gaye’s Sensual Classic | Pitchfork

Citizenfour

~ Mark

Citizenfour. There’s this interesting tension where a guy has done something earth-shaking, and he knows it… but he’s watching the effects while hidden in a hotel room far from home. Very cool to see all the planning and diligence they took to keep things mum until they were ready to reveal. So glad they took the time to document this while it was happening.

I’m probably on a watchlist now.

Meru

~ Mark

Meru. I liked it most when they were showing the footage that makes you squirm and makes your palms get sweaty. Wish they’d geeked out on the nitty-gritty climbing details more, and/or cut back on the talking heads. Sometimes the people who were there aren’t the best ones to tell the story?

The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal

~ Mark

The explosion of local bands around the world tends to track rising living standards and Internet use. Making loud music is expensive: You need electric guitars, amplifiers, speakers, music venues and more leisure time. “When economic development happens, metal scenes appear. They’re like mushrooms after the rain,” says Roy Doron, an African history professor at Winston-Salem State University.

The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal

Tangerine

~ Mark

Tangerine. It kicks your feet out from under you with all this zany energy. I wish it could have sustained it all the way through. The scene at the end where all the threads come together is a bit of a too-long jumble. And some parts are, ah, problematic because the tone feels a bit off. But man, such a fresh and fiery start. I love how they work in the soundtrack, and let the visuals and the music guide you every now and then.

The Assassin

~ Mark

The Assassin. Not going to pretend that I understood the plot in its finest details, but it’s pretty great. We have a heroine who’s had her life planned for her, and now she is wrestling with a choice. Love how the soundtrack often sticks to almost silence, except for a slow drum strike every few seconds. There’s one long scene that’s we watch – just barely, sometimes – through these gauzy curtains that drift back and forth as the camera pans from A to B and back. It’s one of those moments that gets me fired up about what you can do with movies with a little patience. Rare to see something so reflective yet so lively.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

~ Mark

I read Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, and I got some good ideas out of it.I suppose at it’s heart it’s about making decisions. “Less but better”. It’s a tough one to pull quotes from. Some of the best parts were a few graphics here and there. This was important:

Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles.

I also like this idea of an “essential intent”. That is, some idea that’s both somewhat inspirational but also concrete. It gets you motivated… and you also know when you’re done. “Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions”.

Maybe the most immediately practical part was a section on sayning “no”, where appeared this lovely bit of conversational judo:

Use the words “You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y.” For example, “You are welcome to borow my car. I am willing to make sure the keys are here for you.” By this you are also saying, “I won’t be able to drive you.” You are saying what you will not do, but you are couching it in terms of what you are willing to do. This is a particularly good way to navigate a request you would like to support somewhat but cannot throw your full weight behind. I particularly like this construct because it also expresses a respect for the other person’s ability to choose, as well as your own. It reminds both parties of the choices they have.

And this section on sleeping:

The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that I mean our minds, our bodies, an dour spirits, we damage the very tool we nee to make our highest contribution. One of the most common ways people – especially ambitious, successful people – damage this asset is through a lack of sleep. […] While there are clearly people who can survive on fewer hours of sleep, I’ve found that most of them are just so used to being tired they have forgotten what it really feels like to be fully rested.

Guilty as charged. Reminded me, I realized this over Christmas vacation recently, when my previously typical 6-6.5 hours of sleep each day ballooned to 10-11 when I didn’t have any constraints. I felt like a different human being and now I’m all about that 8hrs every day. Worth a read.

Basin and Range

~ Mark

I read John McPhee’s Basin and Range, and really liked it. He’s just a ridiculously great writer. Big chunks of the book tie in with a road trip he takes with a geologist named Deffeyes. They stop a lot and look at rocks.

Deffeyes said, “Let’s Richter the situation,” and he got out and crossed the road. With his hammer, he chipped at the rock, puzzled the cut. He scraped the rock and dropped acid on the scrapings. Tilted by the western breeze, the snow was dipping sixty degrees east. The bedding planes were dipping twenty degrees east; and the stripes of Deffeyes’ knitted cap were dipping fifty degrees north. The cap had a big tassel, and with his gray-wisped hair coming out from under in a curly mélange he looked like an exaggerated efl. He said he thought he knew what had cause “that big goober” in the rock, and it was almost certainly not a manifestation of some major tectonic event – merely local violence, a cashier shot in a grab raid, an item for an inside page.

There’s a lot of neat historical parallels, like how geology’s growing understanding of deep time put humanity in our place, just like over in biology, natural selection was having a similar effect. It’s 300 pages about rocks, y’all. This is one book of a four-part series collected in Annals of the Former World and I’m very, very tempted.

Filed under: John McPhee.

The Revenant

~ Mark

The Revenant. I still hold to my first reaction:

I wish THE REVENANT were wilder, of all things. Camera makes you feel not like you’re there, but like you’re on an Arctic ride on rails. Or a videogame cut scene? I liked it though. Looked like the most miserable filming experience one could ask for. Also, Tom Hardy has never lost a staring contest.

A bit of a slog. Doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of meat on those bones. Birdman also felt a bit stifling for me. Amazing that this thing got made, though. I wonder if all the PR talk about the filming conditions was sort of an admission/cover that they didn’t quite get what they wanted out of this one.

See also: The Grey and Grizzly Man.

Out Stealing Horses

~ Mark

I read the first 1/3 or so of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, but then I came to a chapter where I predicted what was going to happen within the first couple pages. When my prediction turned out to be right, I tried to press on but interest dwindled too quicky. Lovely writing about nature, though. I like this, too:

Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.

Carol

~ Mark

Carol. I feel like there’s enough there for me to like it more than I do, but it wasn’t for me. I don’t regret watching Blanchett and Mara for a couple hours, though.

Spotlight

~ Mark

Spotlight. I loved it. Great writing and acting. Teamwork, thinking, putting pieces together. There is some conflict here and there, and most of it doesn’t seem too drummed up for drama, but just real people navigating messy institutions and practical realities. Love the costume design, too. Doesn’t just capture the era but the personalities, too. One of my faves of last year.