bevedog

A Recent Conversation

Me: [parks near the Einstein Bagels]
Them: [standing on the sidewalk near where I parked] HI!
Me: Hello, how are you?
Them: HOW ARE YOU?
Me: I’m good, thanks. [noticing their engineer boots] I like your boots.
Them: I LIKE YOUR BOOTS!
Me: [not wearing boots] Oh, uh, thanks.
Them: THANK YOU!
Me: [goes into the Einstein Bagels, emerges shortly after with bag of bagels and a coffee]
Them: WHERE’D YOU GET THE COFFEE? EINSTEIN’S?
Me: Yep!
Them: EINSTEIN, TECH-NINE! [“NI9E?”]
Me: Heh, yeah. Well, see you later!
Them: SEE YOU LATER, EINSTEIN!

Hot Takes

At work recently we were giving our hot takes, and Polly,one of my student colleagues who is also a reader of this newsletter, suggested I post some hot takes here.

The problem is that I don’t think I have a lot of hot takes. I’m middle-aged! My takes are tepid.

Here’s the closest thing to a hot take I can think of right now: Streaming media was a mistake, and has resulted in a media and cultural environment that is as stale and small as it was pre-streaming-media.

If you are older than my college student friends, you probably remember when Netflix was a DVDs-by-mail service. It functioned much more like a library, where customers would choose titles from an online catalog and order them from Netflix using a queue. They’d send you the top available DVD in your queue and, when you sent it back, they’d send you the next one.

Surely Netflix didn’t have every DVD but they had enough that it felt like using a really comprehensive film library. So when they went to streaming, I think most of us assumed that level of choice and variety would continue. But we have seen how that didn’t pan out and how Netflix and other streamers don’t want to pay the licensing fees necessary to keep such variety available. Sometimes they even produce a film or series themselves and then take it offline a few years later.

Lately I have been watching a lot of classic and foreign movies (see “Watching” below or my Letterboxd diary for more details). When I mention something I have watched to friends, they sometimes ask where I saw it, and are surprised when I say I checked the DVD out from the library or purchased it from Criterion. More than one person has mentioned not owning a DVD player anymore.

I think Netflix and the other streaming companies have us regressing to a pre-VHS era where there are only three networks, it’s just that the networks are Netflix, Apple TV and whatever niche third one you subscribe to. So in a world where theoretically we should have access immediately to the entirety of film-making and TV, we tend to just have a narrow slice of media chosen for us by a very small number of media companies. Rather than people following their individual interests, we tend to gather around a small number of agreed-upon hits anyway.

This also seems likely to lock out independent and low-budget creations as well, not to mention the truly transgressive or anti-commercial productions. I guess we can find those elsewhere on the internet. But I’m a little nostalgic for the local video shop these days, and the library DVD collection is the closest substitute.

Watching

Luke has been coming over on Sunday evenings to watch movies with us (and we are much enjoying his company). We started with Seven Samurai and have kept going with other Arika Kurosawa films: Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Ikiru, and Yojimbo. I’d seen most of them but this was my first time watching Ikiru which I think is now a new favorite of mine. It’s like a weird combination of Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, and, strangely enough, Twelve Angry Men.

In an unintended continuation of the overall Japanese theme, Shanon and I have recently watched the 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, her for the first time, me for maybe the fifth time. Evangelion for me is one of those touchstones like Madame Bovary, Brian Eno’s Another Green World, and so on–a work that I come back to again and again. I first watched it in 2019 when it came to Netflix. I was still very depressed in 2019 so the show’s themes of alienation, depression, and self-hatred really resonated with me. Years later, feeling much better, I still love the depth and richness of the characters and the themes.

Reading

I finished Wuthering Heights recently. I’d tried to read it at least two times before and bounced right off it. I decided to stay at it this time. I’m sure my reading was prompted by the film, though I haven’t seen the film–not the current one nor any of the older ones.

I really didn’t like the book very much until maybe 3/4 of the way through when I realized it wasn’t what I thought it might be (a love/romance story, a ghost story) and was able to appreciate it more for what it was, which I take to be more of a revenge tragedy. I almost want to go back and re-read the first part of the book, but not nearly as much as I want to start reading something else.

Other things I have read and liked recently include Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament by William Boyd, the first two in what promise to be a series of spy novels set in England (and places English spies go) in the 1960s; HHhH by Laurent Binet, a metafictional historical novel about the assassination of Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, recommended to me by a comparative literature professor (as Wikipedia tells us, “the title is an initialism for Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), a quip about Heydrich in SS circles.”); I also read another metafictional book a few months back, Trust Exercise, recommended by friend of the newsletter, Jane, and it had a hold on my imagination for at least a week after I read it.

Right now I’m reading We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy. So far the stories are a mix of weird/horror and day-after-tomorrow cyberpunk all with an anti-authority angle and I like them very much. I also like her Substack, Birds Before the Storm which is more about current affairs from a anarchist, transfeminine point of view.I think you need a subscription to read more than previews there; I think I still have some one-month gift subscriptions there, so let me know if you want one (thanks Dan for the gift sub that got me started.