A random snapshot taken in Central Park in 2008 — with the original iPhone. Funny how lo-res digital imagery now has a nostalgic aura.
Watching Stray Dog, the chief experience I have is a feeling of immense gratitude for air-conditioning. The film takes place during a brutal Tokyo heatwave (indeed it was filmed in those conditions) and everyone sweats rivers throughout. 🍿
At the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris we see Kris returning to his father’s house — the place where we had first seen him in the opening seconds of the movie. Shortly after that opening we had heard Kris’s father tell a friend that he had built that house in imitation of another house he liked; and now, at the end, the camera pulls back from Kris and his father to show that the concluding events of the story are not taking place in a Russian dacha but rather on a tiny island in the great ocean of the planet Solaris. We might also reflect that the house being filmed is a set in a movie. So what we’re seeing as the film concludes is a simulacrum of a simulacrum of an imitation of a fictional house. 🍿
By dominating the digital world, Silicon Valley has already exerted indirect control over the physical one. Today’s data-center build-out is a whole new beast. From the most concrete aspects — cooling, power, land — to the most abstract financial instruments, AI has morphed into a heavy industry.
And needs to be regulated as such.
The second entry in my series of essays on the ongoing interest in the Second World War is now up.
Kaiju IPO:
Initiating Psychic
Obliteration.
When you need a good album to cook to, I highly recommend Dusty in Memphis.
Five minutes from snooze.
Comment’s Seedbeds of Christian Humanism gallery is a wonderful resource.
Watched: Room 999. This revisiting of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary Room 666 is often interesting and sometimes fascinating. (It must be said that not all filmmakers are especially articulate about what they do — this is evident in the original film as well.) Perhaps the comment that strikes me most forcibly is when Audrey Diwan wonders what will happen to her children’s sense of narrative when all the stories they experience are less than a minute long. And this is something to be concerned about. Many of the most important things in our lives develop over years; will people be capable of reckoning wisely with their experience if the only stories they know reach a resolution in 60 seconds? 🍿