Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

[ed. Acting and film-making techniques from Every Frame a Painting (YouTube).]

The Shogun Code

Speaking very broadly, linguists divide languages into “high context” and “low context” varieties. High context languages tend to rely heavily on shared cultural knowledge; low context ones less so. Japanese is considered high context, which means that fluency in the language from a linguistic standpoint isn’t necessarily enough to make one “fluent” in social communication. There are many unstated assumptions about manners and etiquitte in Japan. You may agree or disagree with them, but if you don’t understand them, you will have a hard time conveying your intentions to others.

There are some great examples of this in the 2024 reboot of the “Shogun” miniseries. And don’t worry – no spoilers!

As a Japanese person, I’ve been fascinated by how well the series nails period language, style, and mannerisms. As Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Lord Toranaga in the series, put it in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last week, “it’s still considered rare to hire Japanese actors for Japanese roles in Hollywood.”

But thanks in large part to Sanada’s efforts (not to mention a whole team of Japanese producers, translators, and fixers behind the scenes), “Shogun” bucks the trend. It is filled with cultural symbolism and subtleties that are essential to Japanese communication, even today. There were three moments in particular that struck me as the sorts of things that capture this culture of nonverbal communication. Some only lasted a few seconds, and I suspect a lot of foreign viewers may have missed them. They might seem trivial at first glance, but if you look closely they do a great job of expressing some of the nonverbal cues of a high context culture.

The first example involves a cushion. In this scene from episode 7, the brothel-owner Gin has been granted an audience with Lord Toranaga. His retinue sits directly on the floor, as they serve beneath him. But Gin has been given a cushion – a non-verbal cue instantly understandable to Japanese: she is not part of Toranaga’s “posse,” so to speak, and is a guest in this space.

 

Yet if you look closely, Gin isn’t sitting on the cushion, or not exactly. This is another non-verbal cue, from Gin to Toranaga: I may not be one of your retainers, but I look up to you, and humble myself in the way your retainers do. In fact, not sitting directly on a cushion offered by someone you see as “above” you, socially speaking, is still considered a social grace in Japan today.

But there’s more. Note how she sits, with one knee touching the cushion. This is another non-verbal cue that Toranaga would instantly interpret as a show of politeness. By putting part of her body on the cushion, she silently expresses that there isn’t some problem preventing her from using it. It accentuates her effort to humble herself before Toranaga. So as you can see, this simple cushion is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a tool of communication!

Here’s another fun example from the same episode. Toranaga welcomes his brother with a fancy meal. But not just any fancy meal. A tai red snapper and an ise-ebi rock lobster are prominently, even theatrically, displayed. Japanese food is known for the attention to detail regarding presentation, and this looks great, but there’s actual information being conveyed here, too.

 

Why snapper and lobster, and not, say, scallops and natto? With the fish, the answer can be found in its name: tai sounds like medetai, or luck and joy. Japanese culture is full of wordplay, where things whose names evoke positive words become associated with celebration, prosperity, and happiness. That makes red snapper an auspicious fish. The association remains today; we serve tai on special occasions, which is why Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods, carries them on every can of Yebisu Beer.

As for that lobster, the answer comes more from biology. Rock lobsters “wear” suits of strong armor. And their shedding to grow larger is seen as a symbol of advancement in life. In other words, this menu expresses Toranaga’s aspirations for his brother at this moment.

Finally, a moment from episode one. Hiromatsu, Toranaga's steely-eyed general, is in a discussion with another warlord. Their initial meeting is tense. At one point, Hiromatsu states cooly that “it was my understanding that you were loyal to our lord.” Then he subtly shifts the grip of his sword downward. The message is simple: be careful about what you say next, or I might draw this and strike you down. But Hiromatsu never breaks eye contact or even raises his voice. It’s another great example of a non-verbal cue.

I’ve seen Japanese katana used in so many Hollywood movies. Actors are often seen carrying them on their backs, or swishing them around casually, as if dancing or waving a magic wand. I’m no swordswoman, but these scenes always struck me as “off.” Swords are never treated lightly in Japan – they’re seen as divine tools made for a singular purpose: taking of life. There’s even a saying that “a good sword is one that has never been drawn.” It’s good to see an American production get it right. Hiromatsu radiates a “killer aura” without ever pulling his sword from its scabbard.

by Hiroko Yoda, Japanese Happiness |  Read more:

Images: Shogun (Apple+); Yebisu

[ed. See also: American Shogun; and, The kids are all right (Pure Invention).]

Human Nature

And God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Image: markk
Genisis 126-31 via 

A contract for the sale of a field and a house, written in a cuneiform script, c. 2600 BCE. Cuneiform scripts were used to write several languages, over a wide area of land and time. They began as mostly recognisable images of things like ploughs, trees, grain, human body parts, etc., and morphed into distinctive wedge shapes that were easy to press into clay. These clay tablets were often inadvertently fired when archives and library buildings burned down, leaving the information baked solid. (Image credit here.)

via:

Randy Newman

The Mystery Of The Two Sonny Boy Williamsons
[ed. Wow... I didn't know about any of this. SBII was an amazing harp player and deserved all the accolades he got. But you'd only have to look at him to wonder "would I trust this guy?" Nope. Scary dude. See also: Little Village and Nine Below Zero.]

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story

(In case you’re just joining us - SB 1047 is a California bill, recently passed by the legislature but vetoed by the governor - which forced AI companies to take some steps to reduce the risk of AI-caused existential catastrophes. See here for more on the content of the bill and the arguments for and against; this post will limit itself to the political fight.) (...)

On some level, I don’t mind having a bad governor. I actually have a perverse sort of fondness for Newsom. He reminds me of the Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby, a sort of old-school politician’s politician from the good old days when people were too busy pandering to special interests to talk about Jewish space lasers. California is a state full of very sincere but frequently insane people. We’re constantly coming up with clever ideas like “let’s make free organic BIPOC-owned cannabis cafes for undocumented immigrants a human right” or whatever. California’s representatives are very earnest and will happily go to bat for these kinds of ideas. Then whoever would be on the losing end hands Governor Newsom a manila envelope full of unmarked bills, and he vetoes it. In a world of dangerous ideological zealots, there’s something reassuring about having a governor too dull and venal to be corrupted by the siren song of “being a good person and trying to improve the world”.

But sometimes you’re the group trying to do the right thing and improve the world, and then it sucks.

I think these people beat us because they’ve been optimizing for political clout for decades, and our side hasn’t even existed that long, plus we care about too many other things to focus on gubernatorial recall elections.

Newsom is good at politics, so he’s covering his tracks. To counterbalance his SB 1047 veto and appear strong on AI, he signed several less important anti-AI bills, including a ban on deepfakes which was immediately struck down as unconstitutional. And with all the ferocity of OJ vowing to find the real killer, he’s set up a committee to come up with better AI safety regulation. (...)

We’ll see whether Newsom gets his better regulation before or after OJ completes his manhunt. (...)

A frequent theme was that some form of AI regulation was inevitable. SB 1047 - a light-touch bill designed by Silicon-Valley-friendly moderates - was the best deal that Big Tech was ever going to get, and they went full scorched-earth to oppose it. Next time, the deal will be designed by anti-tech socialists, it’ll be much worse, and nobody will feel sorry for them.

Dean Ball wrote:

In response to the veto, some SB 1047 proponents seem to be threatening a kind of revenge arc. They failed to get a “light-touch” bill passed, the reasoning seems to be, so instead of trying again, perhaps they should team up with unions, tech “ethics” activists, disinformation “experts,” and other, more ambiently anti-technology actors for a much broader legislative effort. Get ready, they seem to be warning, for “use-based” regulation of epic proportions. As Rob Wiblin, one of the hosts of the Effective Altruist-aligned 80,000 Hours podcast put it on X:

» “Having failed to get up a narrow bill focused on frontier models, should AI x-risk folks join a popular front for an Omnibus AI Bill that includes SB1047 but adds regulations to tackle union concerns, actor concerns, disinformation, AI ethics, current safety, etc?”

This is one plausible strategic response the safety community—to the extent it is a monolith—could pursue. We even saw inklings of this in the final innings of the SB 1047 debate, after bill co-sponsor Encode Justice recruited more than one hundred members of the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA to the cause. These actors (literal actors) did not know much about catastrophic risk from AI—some of them even dismiss the possibility and supported SB 1047 anyway! Instead, they have a more generalized dislike of technology in general and AI in particular. This group likes anything that “hurts AI,” not because they care about catastrophic risk, but because they do not like AI.

The AI safety movement could easily transition from being a quirky, heterodox, “extremely online” movement to being just another generic left-wing cause. It could even work.

But I hope they do not. As I have written consistently, I believe that the AI safety movement, on the whole, is a long-term friend of anyone who wants to see positive technological transformation in the coming decades. Though they have their concerns about AI, in general this is a group that is pro-science, techno-optimist, anti-stagnation, and skeptical of massive state interventions in the economy (if I may be forgiven for speaking broadly about a diverse intellectual community).

I hope that we can work together, as a broadly techno-optimist community, toward some sort of consensus. One solution might be to break SB 1047 into smaller, more manageable pieces. Should we have audits for “frontier” AI models? Should we have whistleblower protections for employees at frontier labs? Should there be transparency requirements of some kind on the labs? I bet if the community put legitimate effort into any one of these issues, something sensible would emerge.

The cynical, and perhaps easier, path would be to form an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest. AI safety can become the “anti-AI” movement it is often accused of being by its opponents, if it wishes. Given public sentiment about AI, and the eagerness of politicians to flex their regulatory biceps, this may well be the path of least resistance.

The harder, but ultimately more rewarding, path would be to embrace classical motifs of American civics: compromise, virtue, and restraint.

I believe we can all pursue the second, narrow path. I believe we can be friends. Time will tell whether I, myself, am hopelessly naïve.

Last year, I would have told Dean not to worry about us allying with the Left - the Left would never accept an alliance with the likes of us anyway. But I was surprised by how fairly socialist media covered the SB 1047 fight. For example, from Jacobin:

The debate playing out in the public square may lead you to believe that we have to choose between addressing AI’s immediate harms and its inherently speculative existential risks. And there are certainly trade-offs that require careful consideration.

But when you look at the material forces at play, a different picture emerges: in one corner are trillion-dollar companies trying to make AI models more powerful and profitable; in another, you find civil society groups trying to make AI reflect values that routinely clash with profit maximization.

In short, it’s capitalism versus humanity.

Current Affairs, another socialist magazine, also had a good article, Surely AI Safety Legislation Is A No-Brainer. The magazine’s editor, Nathan Robinson, openly talked about how his opinion had shifted:

One thing I’ve changed some of my opinions about in the last few years is AI. I used to think that most of the claims made about its radically socially disruptive potential (both positive and negative) were hype. That was in part because they often came from the same people who made massively overstated claims about cryptocurrency. Some also resembled science fiction stories, and I think we should prioritize things we know to be problems in the here and now (climate catastrophe, nuclear weapons, pandemics) than purely speculative potential disasters. Given that Silicon Valley companies are constantly promising new revolutions, I try to always remember that there is a tendency for those with strong financial incentives to spin modest improvements, or even total frauds, as epochal breakthroughs.

But as I’ve actually used some of the various technologies lumped together as “artificial intelligence,” over and over my reaction has been: “Jesus, this stuff is actually very powerful… and this is only the beginning.” I think many of my fellow leftists tend to have a dismissive attitude toward AI’s capabilities, delighting in its failures (ChatGPT’s basic math errors and “hallucinations,” the ugliness of much AI-generated “art,” badly made hands from image generators, etc.). There is even a certain desire for AI to be bad at what it does, because nobody likes to think that so much of what we do on a day-to-day basis is capable of being automated. But if we are being honest, the kinds of technological breakthroughs we are seeing are shocking. If I’m training to debate someone, I can ask ChatGPT to play the role of my opponent, and it will deliver a virtually flawless performance. I remember not too many years ago when chatbots were so laughably inept that it was easy to believe one would never be able to pass a Turing Test. Now, ChatGPT not only aces the test but is better at being “human” than most humans. And, again, this is only the start.

The ability to replicate more and more of the functions of human intelligence on a machine is both very exciting and incredibly risky. Personally I am deeply alarmed by military applications of AI in an age of great power competition. The autonomous weapons arms race strikes me as one of the most dangerous things happening in the world today, and it’s virtually undiscussed in the press. The conceivable harms from AI are endless. If a computer can replicate the capacities of a human scientist, it will be easy for rogue actors to engineer viruses that could cause pandemics far worse than COVID. They could build bombs. They could execute massive cyberattacks. From deepfake porn to the empowerment of authoritarian governments to the possibility that badly-programmed AI will inflict some catastrophic new harm we haven’t even considered, the rapid advancement of these technologies is clearly hugely risky. That means that we are being put at risk by institutions over which we have no control.

I don’t want to gloss this as “socialists finally admit we were right all along”. I think the change has been bi-directional. Back in 2010, when we had no idea what AI would look like, the rationalists and EAs focused on the only risk big enough to see from such a distance: runaway unaligned superintelligence. Now that we know more specifics, “smaller” existential risks have also come into focus, like AI-fueled bioterrorism, AI-fueled great power conflict, and - yes - AI-fueled inequality. At some point, without either side entirely abandoning their position, the very-near-term-risk people and the very-long-term-risk people have started to meet in the middle.

But I think an equally big change is that SB 1047 has proven that AI doomers are willing to stand up to Big Tech. Socialists previously accused us of being tech company stooges, harping on the dangers of AI as a sneaky way of hyping it up. I admit I dismissed those accusations as part of a strategy of slinging every possible insult at us to see which ones stuck. But maybe they actually believed it. Maybe it was their real barrier to working with us, and maybe - now that we’ve proven we can (grudgingly, tentatively, when absolutely forced) oppose (some) Silicon Valley billionaires, they’ll be willing to at least treat us as potential allies of convenience. [ed. they (I) actually believed it; your problem that you didn't.]

Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest”, and equates it to selling our souls. I admit we have many cultural and ethical differences with socialists, that I don’t want to become them, that I can’t fully endorse them, and that I’m sure they feel the same way about me. But coalition politics doesn’t require perfect agreement. The US and its European allies were willing to form an “unholy alliance” with some unsavory socialists in order to defeat the Nazis, they did defeat the Nazis, and they kept their own commitments to capitalism and democracy intact.

As a wise man once said, politics is the art of the deal. We should see how good a deal we’re getting from Dean, and how good a deal we’re getting from the socialists, then take whichever one is better.

Dean says maybe he and his allies in Big Tech would support a weaker compromise proposal that broke SB 1047 into small parts. But I feel like we watered down SB 1047 pretty hard already, and Big Tech just ignored the concessions, lied about the contents, and told everyone it would destroy California forever. Is there some hidden group of opponents who were against it this time, but would get on board if only we watered it down slightly more? I think the burden of proof is on him to demonstrate that there are.

I respect Dean’s spirit of cooperation and offer of compromise. But the socialists have a saying - “That already was the compromise” - and I’m starting to respect them too. (...)

VII.

Some people tell me they wish they’d gotten involved in AI early. But it’s still early! AI is less than 1% of the economy! In a few years, we’re going to look back on these days the way we look back now on punch-card computers.

Even very early, it’s possible to do good object-level work. But the earlier you go, the less important object-level work is compared to shaping possibilities, coalitions, and expectations for the future. So here are some reasons for optimism.

First, we proved we can stand up to (the bad parts of) Big Tech. Without sacrificing our principles or adopting any rhetoric we considered dishonest, we earned some respect from leftists and got some leads on potential new friends.

Second, we registered our beliefs (AI will soon be powerful and potentially dangerous) loudly enough to get the attention of the political class and the general public. And we forced our opponents to register theirs (AI isn’t scary and doesn’t require regulation) with equal volume. In a few years, when the real impact of advanced AI starts to come into focus, nobody will be able to lie about which side of the battle lines they were on.

Third, we learned - partly to our own surprise - that we have the support of ~65% of Californians and an even higher proportion of the state legislature. It’s still unbelievably, fantastically early, comparable to people trying to build an airplane safety coalition when da Vinci was doodling pictures of guys with wings - and we already have the support of 65% of Californians and the legislature. So one specific governor vetoed one specific bill. So what? This year we got ourselves the high ground / eternal glory / social capital of being early to the fight. Next year we’ll get the actual policy victory. Or if not next year, the year after, or the year after that. “Instead of planning a path to victory, plan so that all paths lead to victory”. We have strategies available that people from lesser states can’t even imagine!

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Pixabay via

[ed. Well worth a full read. Very grateful for the people actively (and passionately) fighting for AI security.]

Jane Graverol, Still Life. Born November 25, 1907 in Ixelles and died April 24, 1984 in Fontainebleau, Belgian surrealist painter.

via:

Colossal x Firebelly: Defining the Visual Voice

via:

The Joy of Clutter

In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These images, eventually published in Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese. (...)

All of this paved the way for Marie Kondo, whose Jinsei wo Tokimeku Katazuke no Maho (‘Tidying Magic to Make Your Life Shine’) arrived in 2011. She singled out Tatsumi by name in the first chapter, and unabashedly wove Shintō spiritual traditions into her method. The English translation, retitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), came out in the US three years later. The subtitle is telling: now decluttering was no longer a form of housework but an Art, with a capital A, echoing austere pastimes such as inkbrush-painting or the tea ceremony. (...)

There was just one issue. In the hyperconsumer societies of Japan and the West, minimalism is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, let alone maintain over the long term. If it were easy, we wouldn’t regard gurus like Kondo with such awe, nor would we be moved by the austerity of Zen temples or Shintō shrines. They exist as a counterpoint to our mundane lives. And think back to Tsuzuki’s pictures of Tokyo homes. They hinted, even insisted, that a life surrounded by stuff wasn’t unusual or pathological. It could be invigorating, even nourishing. If the people in Tsuzuki’s anti-tidying manifesto could make it work, was clutter really the problem? (...)

Yet as Japan provides a roadmap to simplicity, it also gives us a vision of clutter. The nation may or may not possess the magic of tidying up, but its untidy spaces can be magical in their own rights. There is a dreary sameness to so much of modern culture, rough edges smoothed into comfortable averages by the power of market research and algorithms. It’s why the movies we watch are sequels of sequels, or the music we listen to feels like samples of samples, or the fashions we wear turn out to be copies of copies.

Cosily curated Japanese clutter-spaces are different. There is a meticulousness to the best of them that is on a par with the mental effort poured into simplifying something: a deliberate aesthetic decision to add, rather than subtract – sometimes mindfully, sometimes unconsciously, but always, always individually. Clutter offers an antidote to the stupefying standardisation of so much of modern life.

by Matt Alt, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Lee Chapman

Lunch Order

xkcd via:

Adapt or Die, Or...?

Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of self-interested inertia even if they wanted to.

In eras of stability when little changes, the capacity to adapt takes a back seat. As noted in Why Political "Solutions" Don't Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse, absent any pressure from tumultuous change, nature is hard-wired to keep the genetic instructions unchanged, as there is little selective benefit in modifying what's working well and potential risks in messing with it.

In other words, nature is conservative in eras of stability and low volatility. Since its genetic instructions are working pretty well, the shark genome is relatively stable over millions of years, with a few tweaks here and there to adapt to changes in its environment.

But adaptative churn takes the driver's seat when the ecosystem changes rapidly and the existing instructions are failing. This is the adapt or die moment, when species must experiment by churning out modifications (semi-random mutations in the instructions) and test them in trial-and-error: the ones that add selective advantages live, the ones that don't die.

If this period of intense adaptive experimentation is ultimately successful, the species' rate of change spikes and then drifts down to the baseline of low activity. This is known as punctuated equilibrium: the instructions drift along when nothing much is changing, suddenly spike when selective pressures shoot up, threatening extinction, and then diminish as the new adaptations relieve the selective pressure.

All this is automatic and beyond the individual's and the species' conscious control. We can't order our genome to speed up mutations and get cracking on the adaptive modifications.

Human civilization operates on the same principles of adapt or die: when circumstance change, selective pressures mount and the society must adapt or perish.

What's different is humans can stifle or encourage adaptive churn. As social beings hard-wired to organize ourselves in hierarchies, those at the top of the power pyramid will naturally deploy all their power to conserve the status quo, as any modifications might threaten their outsized share of all the good things such as wealth and status.

The view from the top of the pyramid is rather grand. Those at the top see the vastness of the imperial reach, the army's strength, the peasantry toiling away and the obsequious Mandarin bureaucrats bowing and scraping, and the idea that all this immense structure could decay and blow away is incomprehensible.

There is little sense in the top circle that the extinction of the entire social order is a threat. The threat is more personal: is my private fiefdom at risk of being diminished? Are rivals gaining influence? Are the reforms being proposed positive for my fortunes or could they pose a threat?

This narrow view of the overlapping crises (a.k.a. polycrisis) favors short-term expediency over more radical long-term modifications, as the Powers That Be have a grip on expedient "stave off the immediate crisis" measures such as imposing curfews, lowering interest rates and increasing the pay of soldiers, but these measures are slapdash rather than part of a recognition that radical changes in the structure of the society must be organized now, not later, for later will be too late.

In other words, there is no urgency for the kind of reforms needed to avoid extinction, there is only urgency for expedient "kick the can down the road" measures because these measures 1) are within easy reach and 2) they don't threaten the pyramid of power the "deciders" dominate.

Put another way, faced with skyrocketing risks of a heart attack, the leadership concludes that cutting out the HoHos but keeping the DingDongs and Twinkies will be enough to maintain the status quo. That the crises demand a complete overhaul of diet and fitness, now, not later, is both 1) too painful to contemplate, and 2) beyond the reach or the leadership's atrophied adaptive skillset: the leadership only has experience with managing stability, not tumultuous crises.

There is an irony in this atrophy of competence: the longer the good times roll, the less experience anyone has of polycrisis. In the competitive churn at the top of the pyramid, the skills that are most valuable in periods of stability are those of bureaucratic in-fighting and maintaining the status quo. Since there is no selective pressure demanding radical changes to survive, the skills needed to manage such a radical transition are nor longer present.

Those with the necessary character and skills to manage radical transformations have all been sent to Siberia for threatening the status quo with all their crazy proposals. Those in power have been selected to believe the organization they rule is perfectly capable of adjusting as needed, without actually changing anything. (...)

So quality decays first, then quantity decays, too. Each crisis reveals another layer of under-competence and dry-rotted foundations, and each one is dutifully papered over.

Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of self-interested inertia even if they wanted to--and they don't really want to because why should we risk upsetting such a splendid arrangement that's capable of handling anything that arises with ease?

Decay is a perfectly adequate strategy if there's sufficient resources to keep everything glued together as it slowly unravels. Magical thinking (AI!) helps smooth the decline, and soon everyone habituates to decay.

Polycrisis has a way of disrupting decay. If conditions remain stable, decay can be managed. But if volatility soars and multiple crises arise and reinforce each other, decay accelerates into collapse.

by Charles Hughes Smith, Of Two Minds |  Read more:

Image: Charles Hughes Smith

[ed. Pretty straightforward. But, what 'radical' actions should be pursued (and how)?]

The Sci-fi Career Guide

Tech jobs are vanishing. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, now face for the first time what it’s like to hustle to find work.”

Rui Ma asks the obvious follow-up question: “how are parents of high schoolers approaching career guidance for their kids in light of this?”

The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers his own unhelpful, but very honest, response:

Miller’s sentiments echo those of Yuval Noah Harari, who claimed in a widely shared clip that “today nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.” [Full disclosure: I work at Sapienship, the company co-founded by Harari.]

Most of the responses to Harari involved people trying to isolate those things that they thought would still be relevant in 20 years: “Try Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for a start”; “Home economics… athletics… math… ancient philosophy”; “The treasures of revealed religion, philosophy, and laws and institutions.” These are all good things! Things that most people should spend more time learning about! But, in the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, they’re “nothing I’d call a career.”

Happily, there is an untapped resource that stumped professors, anxious parents, and ambitious students can all make use of… Science fiction!

Science fiction authors have been thinking about the future of work for ages, and we can all benefit from their foresight. What follows is a career guide for the near future inspired by sci-fi: a compilation of job titles that don’t exist today but may be in-demand professions in the years to come. Descriptions of these speculative jobs are followed by suggestions for courses of study that will prepare today’s students for these occupations of tomorrow.

Planetary Ecologist

Source: Dune by Frank Herbert

In Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, Doctor Kynes is a planetary ecologist (or “planetologist” as he prefers to be called). On the desert world of Arrakis, Kynes is busy supervising a secret terraforming project. His trade is the study of the innumerable interactions between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.

Kynes’s aim is to develop a set of self-reinforcing feedback loops, wherein genetically-engineered grasses capture atmospheric moisture, paving the way for forests and open bodies of water. This manufactured ecology would be totally artificial, but nevertheless conducive to the flourishing of organic life.

Back on earth, we are beginning to identify the “atmospheric bridges” and “oceanic tunnels” that transport matter and energy across the hemispheres, linking distant regions. A study published in 2015 based on lidar data revealed that phosphorous-rich dust swept from the dry bottom of an ancient lakebed in Chad travels on winds across the ocean to eventually settle in the Amazon basin. Once deposited, the dust-borne phosphorous helps replace nutrients lost to runoff and erosion. Given this interrelationship, it seems appropriate to speak of a meta-ecosystem containing both the rainforest and the desert. (I propose we call it “the Sahamazon.”) This ocean-spanning desert-forest is simultaneously arid and tropical, at once barren and biodiverse. One job of the planetary ecologist would be to spot these meta-ecosystems hiding in plain sight.

It is entirely possible that AI systems could one day manage ecosystems autonomously. Bradley Cantrell has drafted a blueprint for an AI “wildness creator” that “creates and maintains wild places independently of humans.”

But as I wrote in an essay some years ago:

As opposed to a game such as Go, which, despite its complexity, has a clear method for assessing victory, it remains an open question what exactly a “winning” ecosystem ought to look like.

What goals should an AI ecosystem-optimizer be given? Carbon sequestration? In that case, expect endless hectares of acacia trees.

As with most discussions about the natural world, our aesthetic commitments tend to masquerade as ethical ones. So even if superintelligent AI systems come along to manage the planet for us, we will still need people with good taste to decide what kind of earth we want to craft.

Recommended college courses for the aspiring planetary ecologist:

complex adaptive systems, climatology, evolutionary ecology, environmental history, synthetic biology, landscape architecture, aesthetics of nature

by Jason Rhys Parry, Blueprint Canopy |  Read more:

Image: X; and, uncredited via

Want to Live to 100? Really?

Why everything you think about living to 100 might be wrong.

Image: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Creative/Getty Images
[ed. Quality over quantity. See also: The world’s healthiest lovers? Meet the couple aiming to live to 150. (The Guardian).]

Anchorage, AK

More than fat bears: Alaska trail cams show peeks of animals from lynx to moose (The Guardian)

Images: Donna Gail Shaw/AP
["In addition to the 290,000 or so human residents of Anchorage, nearly 350 black bears, 65 brown bears and 1,600 moose call it home." [ed. One more reason to love it.]

Jack Nicholson’s Hall of Fame Basketball Life:

Jack Nicholson was synonymous with the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers. He sat courtside at their games at the Great Western Forum. He participated in promotional photos. Occasionally, he invited them to parties at his house in Beverly Hills.

One summer night, Nicholson tended bar.

The Lakers had just defeated the Detroit Pistons in an exhausting Game 7 to win the 1988 NBA championship. The postgame party had spilled from the locker room to On The Rox, a private club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

Lakers forward Mychal Thompson walked to the bar, surprised to see Nicholson, a few months removed from his ninth Academy Awards nomination. In a recent interview with The Athletic, Thompson paused while relaying this memory. “Let me see if I can imitate him,” he said.

“What do you have, Mychal?” Thompson said in Nicholson’s famous drawl, one that’s delivered some of the most iconic lines in cinema.

Thompson laughed.

“That was so cool I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

Today, celebrity super fans are the norm, but perhaps no one has been more associated with a team, or a sport, than Nicholson has with the Lakers and the NBA. On Sunday, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will add Nicholson, as well as actor Billy Crystal, director Spike Lee and businessman and Philadelphia 76ers fan Alan Horwitz, to its James F. Goldstein SuperFan Gallery, the latest honor for a man who long ago integrated Hollywood and hardwood.

For most of his adult life, Nicholson, 87, has been an NBA fixture, part of the fabric at The Forum and Staples Center, which is now Crypto.com Arena. A columnist for The Los Angeles Times once called Nicholson “the best sixth man the NBA has ever seen, the oddest weapon in a very odd league.” During the Lakers’ championship clashes with the Boston Celtics, Nicholson was a main character, as significant as Magic and Kareem, especially the night he stood in Boston Garden and showed Celtics fans his backside. Allegedly.

“He was not a normal person — he was Jack Nicholson,” former Lakers forward Jamaal Wilkes said. “We were all aware of that. We didn’t treat him like any other fan. We treated him with due respect and we appreciated the fact that he was so into us.”

For celebs, attending Lakers games became a form of Hollywood street cred, a place to be seen, but for Nicholson, it was never about publicity. He had grown up in New Jersey playing basketball, and his love for the game remained strong, even as life took him to the West Coast. Rolling Stone magazine once identified Nicholson’s passions as art, movies, skiing, books and basketball. Writer Tim Cahill asked Nicholson for a common denominator.

“There’s poetry in all those things,” the actor said in the 1981 story. “When I look at a painting, I get involved. There is a moment of truth somewhere. And basketball … when you miss a play, it’s a matter of microseconds. Little moments of truth. Skiing is like that. It’s all little moments of truth and extending the limits of control.” (...)

At On The Rox, an establishment owned by Nicholson’s close friend Lou Adler, Nicholson handed Thompson a beer. He poured forward Michael Cooper a tequila. Actress Daryl Hannah, Adler’s sister-in-law, joined Nicholson behind the bar. Magic and others danced. Parties that night erupted all over Los Angeles, but this was intimate. Just the Lakers, the coaching staff, trainer Gary Vitti and the players’ wives.

“And Jack,” former Lakers guard Byron Scott said. “That was our team. We were very tight. Very close-knit. Pat Riley wouldn’t let us have a lot of people in our inner circle. But Jack was in our inner circle.” (...)

For most of his years as a Lakers fan, Nicholson has had four season tickets in the front row near the visitors’ bench. A famed record producer, Adler, the On The Rox owner, has almost always sat by his side. In the 1980s, actor Harry Dean Stanton and film and television producer Bert Schneider were frequent Nicholson guests. Dennis Hopper and Michael Douglas were there as well.

Over the years, these seats have become known as the “Nicholson seats,” among the best the house can offer. Former NBA star Ralph Sampson suggested recently that Nicholson should receive royalties because nearly every team in the league profits handsomely from the courtside seats he made so famous. In town for the 2014 Wooden Awards, a couple college players actually posed for photos in the Nicholson seats, like tourists in front of a historical landmark.

But not everyone appreciated the location. Former Lakers public relations director Josh Rosenfeld said former Portland coach Jack Ramsay once asked organizations not to sell the seats close to the visitors’ bench. The reason: Ramsay was convinced Nicholson was relaying Ramsay’s instructions to the Lakers. Others made similar accusations, albeit jokingly. In the 2006 playoffs, Suns star Steve Nash told reporters that Nicholson was practically in the Phoenix huddle, “trying to steal our plays.”

Nicholson enjoyed the banter, especially with officials. Former referee Ed Rush actually addressed this with young officials before games at The Forum. “Look,” he recalled telling them. “He’s going to know you. He’s going to call you a rookie. You can handle this any way you want, but, remember, he’s going to want to talk for the whole game, so you have to figure a way to corral this. If you want to say hello or whatever, that’s fine. But at some point, it’s over.”

Former official Joe Crawford said he was in his third or fourth season when Nicholson first greeted him by name. It rattled him. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, Jack Nicholson knows my name!'” Crawford said. “I’m all excited. Game starts and I don’t even know what freaking town I’m in. I’m missing plays all over the place.”

Former NBA head coach P.J. Carlesimo said it was like a coach had not yet arrived until Nicholson at least had an idea what your name was. It was almost like a rite of passage. Same for players. The first time he met Nicholson, Hall of Fame forward Adrian Dantley told the actor how much he enjoyed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a popular Nicholson film, and for the rest of his career, Nicholson always made sure to say hello whenever Dantley played in Los Angeles.

“He wasn’t one of those nasty guys,” said former big man Tree Rollins, who once politely asked Nicholson to put out his cigarette, back when the NBA allowed smoking in arenas. “You had Spike Lee in New York. You had the lawyer (Robin Ficker) in Washington, you had Leon (the Barber) in Detroit. Jack did not harass you. I think he really enjoyed watching you perform, just as you enjoyed watching him perform.”

by Doug Haller, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Noah Graham / NBAE via Getty Images

Private Equity: Slash and Burn

Whenever I ponder the enormity of the multitrillion-dollar industry known as private equity, I picture the lavish parties thrown by Stephen Schwarzman – and then I think of the root canals. Schwarzman is the billionaire impresario of Blackstone, the world’s most colossal private equity firm. In August, he hosted a 200-person housewarming party at his $27m (£21m) French neoclassical mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a modest affair compared to the grand soiree he threw himself at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate for his 70th birthday, in 2017. That black-tie bash was itself a sequel to his multimillion-dollar 60th, in 2007, which became a symbol of the sort of Wall Street excess that led to the global financial crisis. The Palm Beach party, which some reports say cost more than $10m, featured Venetian gondolas, Arabian camels, Mongolian acrobats and a giant cake in the shape of a Chinese temple. “Brilliantly stimulating” was the billionaire industrialist David Koch’s review. Gwen Stefani serenaded Schwarzman as Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and several members of her father’s cabinet looked on. It was a world in miniature, ruled over by a modern Croesus – the perfect symbol for a form of money-making that has infiltrated almost every facet of modern life.

Preschools and funeral homes, car washes and copper mines, dermatologists and datacentres – private equity is anywhere and everywhere that money changes hands. If it can in any way be marketed or monetised, private equity firms have bought it – from municipal water supplies to European football clubs to the music catalogue of the rock group Queen. By some estimates, these firms now control more than $13tn invested in more than 50,000 companies worldwide. “We cannot overestimate the reach of private equity across the global economy,” Sachin Khajuria, a former partner at Apollo Global Management, which manages half a trillion dollars in assets, wrote in 2022.

It’s not just that hundreds of millions of us interact with at least one private equity-owned business every day. More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors. Private equity firms and related asset managers “increasingly own the physical as well as financial world around us,” the scholar Brett Christophers writes. “All of our lives are now part of their investment portfolios.” This is true not only in the US, where private equity has been on a spree since the late 1970s, but increasingly in the rest of the world, too. In recent years, private equity firms have spent hundreds of billions of dollars snaffling up businesses from Canada to Cambodia, Australia to the UK.

As private equity has spread, so have dire warnings about its effects. The vultures and vampires of the industry have been decried almost everywhere in the media that isn’t already owned by private equity. In the span of a single week last year, two major and almost identically titled books were published in the US – Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America. Private equity is “greed wrapped in the American flag of efficiency, looting justified by solid investment returns”, the authors of Plunderers write. “The marauders answer to almost no one.”

This is where the baby root canals come in, as a grotesque epitome of the industry’s modus operandi. According to multiple media investigations and a US Senate inquiry, in order to drive up profits, private equity-controlled dental chains have induced children to undergo multiple unnecessary root canals. “I have watched them drilling perfectly healthy teeth multiple times a day every day,” a dental assistant in a private equity-owned practice told reporters. One child even died as a result. To its many critics, private equity is a shining example of “asshole capitalism”, but baby root canals make one feel even that label is a touch too kind.

Unsurprisingly, practitioners of private equity see their industry differently. Yes, they admit, there have been a few bad actors, and yes, a handful of bad deals, but by and large private equity firms are not full of profiteering sociopaths merrily making the world a crappier place. Rather, they’re the necessary fertilisers of growth and innovation, using their superior talents to rid companies of bad management, rejuvenate sluggish businesses and grow the economic pie so we can all continue to enjoy the relative prosperity of our developed societies. It’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does best. They call it “value creation”.

What’s more, they say they’re providing amazing returns to their investors, who might well include you, dear reader, if you happen to have a pension. “Hopefully we can get the news out there that, actually, private equity’s been a great thing for America,” Stephen Pagliuca, the billionaire co-chairman of Bain Capital, said at Davos in 2020. David Rubenstein, the billionaire founder of the Carlyle Group, another of the world’s largest private equity firms, goes further. “Private equity,” he likes to say, “is the highest calling of mankind.”

Whatever good or ill there is in private equity is not just about greedy sinners or enterprising saints. Whether acquiring a bakery that makes chocolate chip cookies or the nursing home where your grandmother is living out her days, private equity relies on the same basic business model: the leveraged buyout. These transactions – which account for roughly three out of every four dollars of all private equity deals – are frequently compared to house flipping: you buy a business using a ton of debt, or leverage, the way you buy a house with a mortgage; then you try to sell it for a tidy profit after you replace the carpets (or, better still, the market goes up). Unlike buying a house, however, the debt isn’t the responsibility of the buyer; it sits on the balance sheet of the acquired company. As strange as it sounds, it’s sort of like the company is forced to take out a loan to buy itself.

“Private equity creates value by growing great companies,” Pagliuca has said, offering a picture of the industry as a green-thumbed gardener turning mere seedlings into fruit-bearing trees. But over the past several months, as I combed through the recent trove of books on private equity, trawled through the memoirs of industry titans such as Schwarzman and Guy Hands, spoke with people who have worked inside Wall Street and City firms and interviewed scholars who study this species of finance, I came to see private equity in more virological terms, like a pandemic.

A coronavirus replicates by injecting its RNA into the cells of a target organism. Once inside, the RNA hijacks its host’s resources to build more copies of the virus, weakening and sometimes destroying the host in the process. Private equity’s business model is similar. A private equity firm pools cash from investors, then uses those funds, along with an extraordinary amount of money borrowed from other sources (the “leverage”), to take over a target company. Having acquired its target, a private equity firm may fire the management team, install new executives and decimate the workforce, or move it offshore. It can also liquidate the company’s own assets to pay back investors and line the pockets of the firm’s partners before selling the company to a new set of investors, a tactic sometimes known as a “buy, strip and flip”. (...)

“The predatory practices of private equity exacerbate inequality and eviscerate our economy by taking money from productive businesses” – retailers, hospital chains, manufacturing companies – “and giving it to largely unproductive ones,” Brendan Ballou, a US Department of Justice antitrust lawyer, writes in Plunder. Chief among these largely unproductive businesses are private equity firms themselves. Worse still, the private equity owners can make ludicrous amounts of money whether or not the companies themselves succeed – a decoupling of financial and commercial success that makes a mockery of the basic premise of capitalism.

by Alex Blasdel, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group. Richard Drew/AP

Survivors fleeing firestorm after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

via:

Ry Cooder

Banksy
via:

Watch List

Past Lives

The first few seconds of Celine Song’s decades-spanning, poignantly lived-in debut feature, Past Lives, are about assumptions. As cinematographer Shabier Kirschner’s camera slowly pushes in on our three protagonists—Nora (Greta Lee), Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro)—sitting at a bar together, an off-screen couple remarks on what could possibly be the relation between them. One of them conjectures that Nora and Hae-sung are a couple, while Arthur is their tour guide. The other thinks that Nora and Arthur are the couple in question, while Hae-sung is their Korean friend. All the while, Kirschner’s camera continues to unwaveringly move forward, until Nora is the only person in the centre of the frame, her face laced with both a sense of mild excitement and deep uncertainty. The answer to the couple’s inquiry, as it turns out, is far more complex than either of them could have anticipated.

As the film jumps back 24 years, we’re thrown into Seoul, South Korea, where we promptly learn that Nora (then called Na-young) and Hae-sung were childhood friends with an unusually close bond, to the degree where both their parents would eventually set up a date for both of them to further strengthen it. With a relative economy of narrative, Song patiently traces the innocence of a burgeoning young relationship set against the backdrop of the apartment-laden cityscapes of Seoul, one steadily formed in the backseats of sedans, stone installations in parks, and the open dirt fields behind an elementary school building. Such stylistic modesty, tangible attention to detail, and atmospheric patience remain consistent throughout the film’s layered yet ostensibly simple narrative. It’s here we get the first taste of how this film chooses to elegantly move through months’ worth of development, change, and time. (...)

With an understated commitment to her already established sense of atmosphere, Song proceeds to distinctly separate her two protagonists through the details surrounding their individual locations halfway across the globe. Seoul and New York both serve as bustling urban centres for their respective countries, and it’s once again in things like the minutiae of the apartments Nora and Hae-sung live in, the people they meet, and the career paths they take, that we get to immerse ourselves in the divergent paths on which they’ve grown. (...)

For such a tightly driven character drama, Song’s primary cast of three faithfully plays their way through the emotional intricacies of her deceptively straightforward character dynamics. Lee, for one, plays Nora ineffably and with great immediacy, down to all of her intensely human contradictions in both identity and romance. With a deeply lived-in portrayal, Lee understands that Nora’s American identity as tied to Arthur, alongside her Korean identity as tied to Hae-sung, seems to have created an earth-shaking reckoning with her own upbringing and adulthood. It’s astonishingly difficult to emotionally balance Nora’s commitments and progress in her career with her lingering vestiges of youthful excitement and longing, but Lee executes that tightrope walk with significant grace.

Yoo, meanwhile, portrays Hae-sung as a man whose devotion and vulnerability, even in the face of growing cultural distance between him and Nora, makes for a compelling hopeless-romantic protagonist, especially one with a subtly refreshing dose of self-awareness. Magaro walks a sharply fine line as Arthur, playing a man who compassionately allows Nora to parse through her longing for Hae-sung out of a refusal to submit to a clichéd, forbidding sense of envy. However, he understandably finds himself confronted with his own place in their marriage. He’s now facing a new side of Nora through a fresh understanding of her cultural roots, all of which are filtered through one seemingly sporadic and ephemeral man from her past.

~ Past Lives (FR)

Dont' Look Now

The early 1970s was a beautiful and traumatic time for cinema. The density of really interesting films seems higher than at any other time since. Being a child of the 1960s, there were two films I remember watching on television that really shook me up, stirred my senses, played with my little mind, and left a lifelong impression. They were unlike anything I’d seen before and both had unexpected endings that shocked me to the core.

The first was Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and the second was Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, both made in 1973 and originally released together as a double feature! Don’t Look Now is distinguished by being an intriguing supernatural mystery bracketed between the most harrowing, intensely affecting opening sequence, and one of the most nightmarish finales. Anyone who’s watched the film won’t need me to remind them because these scenes can never be unseen! (...)

The film is based on the 1971 short story from the collection Not After Midnight by Daphne Du Maurier, the author who’d already provided source material for several classic movies—the best-known being Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963). Although faithful to the central plot and core theme, things changed dramatically in the transition from page to screen.

The well-to-do but sad couple in Du Maurier’s original story are dealing with grief over the loss of their child. In that version, their daughter has died of meningitis prior to the start of the story. (...)

The death of the daughter, this time by accidental drowning, is a montage masterclass and a truly traumatising piece of cinema. It’s difficult viewing for anyone and overwhelming for any parent. The way in which John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) ‘sees’ the impending tragedy building, almost as if he’s outside the reality of the film and watching it with us, suggests he has some psychic power straight off the bat. This is held back as a late reveal in the original story but here it’s as if Baxter has an insight into the director’s foreshadowing. When we start to understand this, our approach to the film is altered and it becomes less of a personal drama and more of a mystery thriller with supernatural clues. The viewer is sucked into dialogue with the work and invited to interrogate it scene by scene on both an intellectual and emotional level.
~ Don't Look Now (FR)

Tokyo Story

However, there is one filmmaker who was perhaps even better than Bergman at communicating life’s greatest questions through stillness: Yasujirō Ozu. There is something completely transcendental about Ozu’s filmmaking style, and undoubtedly his static camera has much to do with that. It creates a serene tranquillity that few other visual artists have ever been able to match. And due to the utterly unique aspect of this stasis, many have questioned what the stillness in Ozu’s cinema symbolises.

So what is the absence of movement in Ozu’s work conveying? While it could be nothing at all, many have reflected on how the static nature of Ozu’s camerawork reflects his thematic intentions. In his book, Transcendental Cinema, Paul Schrader dedicates a lot of thought to understanding the stillness in Ozu’s cinema. Primarily, he describes it as mirroring tenets of Zen art, such as mu, meaning negation: “The basic principle of Zen art is the first koan of Zen, mu, the concept of negation, emptiness, and void. Emptiness, silence, and stillness are positive elements in Zen art, and represent presence rather than the absence of something.”

If we look at Ozu’s most renowned work Tokyo Story (1953), which professional directors voted as the best film of all time in Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll, we can see how the composition of shots reflects this line of thinking. Ozu lingers for long periods in empty spaces, with a still camera and a silent background: an empty living room, a lone chair, and an abandoned street.

These objects take on a subtly portentous significance. They defy the traditional rules of filmmaking, rules which Ozu essentially rewrote. There’s no apparent reason for Ozu to cut to a vase, a tree, or the skyline—so why does he do it? Therefore, if we want to comprehend the importance of stillness in Ozu’s cinema, we must first understand his use of the pillow shot.
He calls these innovative changes to form “pillow-shots” because he judges them to be similar to the pillow-words. Also known as makurakotoba, it’s a stylistic trait of classical Japanese poetry from the Heian Period, stock epithets and adjectives that tend to serve a decorative function rather than modifying the meaning of the nouns to which they are appended. This perfectly describes the pillow shot: they serve no functional purpose. They don’t bridge to a new scene, nor do they reveal the location of subsequent action. Instead, they are merely moments of total stillness, opportunities to reflect on life as it passes us by.

~ Stillness in the Moving Image (FR)

Perfect Days

The city and the trees. These are the first two things we see in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023): a wide shot of Tokyo at dawn, and an angle looking up at a leafy canopy against a dark blue sky. The former feels like an establishing shot, the latter like a mental image—fitting, since we next see the protagonist, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), opening his eyes in his modest home, awakened by the sounds of a solitary street sweeper outside. Perfect Days lives, in essence, between these two tableaux. It’s a city symphony about a man who appreciates the patches of nature and light he can find in his concrete world, and it’s a film about how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

Perfect Days also happens to be a movie about bathrooms. Its impetus was an invitation that Wenders received in 2022 to visit Tokyo Toilet, a collaborative project to build seventeen unique, high-tech public bathrooms—each conceived by an acclaimed architect, artist, or designer—in the ward of Shibuya. The endeavor’s original aim was to highlight Japanese hospitality in time for the 2020 Olympic Games, which, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended up being delayed until the following year, when they were held without spectators. After being tasked by Tokyo Toilet founder Koji Yanai with developing a new way to showcase the bathrooms, Takuma Takasaki—a writer, producer, and award-winning advertising creative director who shares credit with Wenders for the Perfect Days script—reached out to see if the director might be interested in making a series of short documentaries about them. (...)

Yet there’s nothing rushed or undernourished about Perfect Days. In fact, it might be the most patient film Wenders has ever made. The camera takes its time lingering on Hirayama’s face and his methodical, graceful movements, watching him as he quietly goes about his daily routine and his job as a bathroom cleaner. He wakes up every morning, spritzes his flowers, puts on his Tokyo Toilet jumpsuit, drinks his breakfast, and drives his cramped van through the streets, listening to old cassette tapes of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and Otis Redding. At each stop, he shows dedication to his work: he wipes down every corner of the bathrooms, diligently cleans the retractable bidets, and even uses a little mirror to ensure he has covered all the tough-to-get spots.

It would be difficult to imagine a less “cinematic” subject. Perfect Days has very little story or traditional character development. Instead, it has Yakusho—a revered Japanese actor who has played everything from cops to samurais, from frustrated office workers to murderous madmen—portraying that most elusive of figures: a contented and peaceable human being. Hirayama doesn’t say much, and his face betrays no particular inner unrest. Instead, he works, he observes, he smiles, he glows. The actor conveys happiness, but he doesn’t forsake the mystery required to keep us captivated.

During his lunch breaks, Hirayama looks up at the trees, fascinated by the delicate dance of sunlight on the leaves, snapping photos of it with an old film camera. A title at the end of the movie defines the Japanese word komorebi, which refers to the way light and shadow filter through foliage—something that “only exists once, at that moment.” Hirayama’s black-and-white pictures, which he edits ruthlessly and keeps tucked away in meticulously organized boxes, all seem to be attempts to capture this impermanent phenomenon. He’s an artist, but we don’t sense that he will ever do anything with these photographs. They themselves are, in a way, impermanent. In the film’s periodic “dream installation” passages, orchestrated by Donata Wenders (the director’s wife and an artist in her own right), Hirayama’s photos are interspersed with images from his daily life—creating the only moments when the film seems to leave the material present. But unlike most dream sequences in cinema, these do not offer any clues about our hero’s psyche. If anything, they reflect a mind at ease with itself.
 ~ Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through (Criterion)

Daddio

Christy Hall’s two-hander directorial debut, Daddio, reaches for the poetic grace that once animated the theatre pictures of Louis Malle and Robert Altman 30 and 40 years ago. Though in the end it’s not quite up there with My Dinner with Andre (1981), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), or Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), we revel in its suggestive aroma anyway.

The conceit isn’t anything novel: after landing at JFK, on her way up the 678 and then off to the 495 for Midtown, Girlie (Dakota Johnson) starts chatting with her cabbie (Sean Penn), and slowly but surely, like in a psychoanalysis session, she pours her deepest secrets out from her gut like she’d never have with friends and family. It might not sound like much, but the two leads’ charms stay with you, and their dynamic keeps turning corners you didn’t know were there, and before long you may find yourself forgetting your initial scepticism towards the minimalist premise.

Playing Christy’s self-insertion, Dakota Johnson (Cha Cha Real Smooth) is at her most sensually sensitive and emotionally layered. At 34, she may not be bringing to her character the same richness and vulnerability that Julianne Moore or Sissy Spacek did at a similar age—she doesn’t entirely give herself over to the camera—but she has the sureness in her screen presence to suggest that she’s capable of much more. As Girlie the blondie, her radiance is warm and musky. When she speaks and gestures, she’s in the air—afloat, airborne. Even in press interviews, you feel soothed by her velvety timbre. Yet her goody-two-shoes breeziness isn’t soft and sultry like Marlene Dietrich. Returning from a visit to her sister in their Oklahoma hometown, Girlie’s self-control doesn’t translate into the sneering aloofness of the classic femme fatales. The cabbie tries to elicit a conversation and doesn’t draw a blank. “You can handle yourself,” he says, deducing from her confidence with a vulgar old-shoe like him.

As Clark, Sean Penn, with his friendly-neighbourhood tenor we’ve come to expect of old-school city cabbies rotting in their front seats, emanates in his breaths the smell of garlic and tobacco. Emerging onto the scene some four decades ago with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Penn is one of those New Hollywood method actors who prided themselves on their masculinity. In Daddio, he taps his fingers on the wheel and plays the tunes in his head, then seconds later he’s off rambling about getting screwed over by the apps and running on empty with his veteran life as a taxi driver. Girlie wasn’t that put off by him. For her, his vulgar mannerisms and gravelly voice are what’s enticing her, but she draws a line, too. (Apparently, she has a pet peeve about men around her using the word “panties”.)

Daddio isn’t feminist in the traditional sense. It’s not only contemplating passive misogyny and a woman’s unease towards masculine crudeness, but also her confusion over her temptations by these men who sexualize or try to get close to her. Christy Hall has reached down into her feelings, unresolved and self-contradictory as they may be, and projected them onto Girlie (she even has her born a blonde Oklahoman like herself). With Dakota’s character as the angle through which she examines her sexual and physical opposites, Christy tries treating them with the respect she has for herself and looking at them in the way they actually are—whatever’s behind their gregarious swagger. She cherishes knowing them, relating to them as fellow persons, rather than a contact in your social media.

As it generally goes in wars of the sexes, the process of forming mutual respect with your rival is one of gradually letting down your guard, piece by piece, quid pro quo. As is clear from the outset, both characters are troubled by their dissatisfactions in their relationships, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re perfect for each other: the young Girlie’s trapped in a problematic relationship with a married man by her own Oedipus complex, and the older Clark needs Platonic satisfaction over having been of use for Girlie. So dating philosophies were thrown around, and personal secrets were exchanged, and in between the lines you detect their insecurities before they’re revealed for you: Clark has a sarcastic routine about being a “Clark” or a “Vinny”, and Girlie finds the Boolean certainty of computer science reassuring, and so on. And they let you in on it, too. The film gradually builds up the momentum for the emotional discharge at the end, so when it comes it not only isn’t mawkish enough to cloy you, but it surprises you and chokes you up in a way that you couldn’t have predicted, especially with how primal Girlie’s exploration of her traumas went.

~ Daddio (FR)

After Life

Some memories are best left alone, but one doesn’t know that until one tries to relive them, sometimes to great disappointment. A book or movie that occupies a hallowed place in the mind from when it was first encountered in childhood or young adulthood may not be as wonderful when reencountered decades later. The times have changed, as has oneself. I have deliberately not rewatched Il postino for this reason, preferring to remember it as I saw it with the young woman who would become my wife, when it was a romantic and political touchstone that helped bring us together. Perhaps the movie would be as wonderful now as then, but why risk it?

It was a gamble, then, to rewatch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), which I first saw when it came out in theaters. I remembered the plot well enough, about a way station through which the newly dead transit on their way to eternity. A small staff oversees the operation, which appears to be a bit underfunded, judging by the spartan rooms, the aging infrastructure, and the lack of heat, evidenced by how everyone is bundled up inside as the weather turns to winter. The dead are told that they have a few days to choose one brief memory from their lives, which the staff will recreate on film, to serve as the infinite loop that they will see in perpetuity.

I loved the movie back then for its melancholy and its measured descent into an emotional revelation, the profundity of which lingered, and the welcome news is that I still do. If anything, the movie feels more insightful to me now, two decades later and after the passing of my mother, than it did at a time when I did not yet know death. Part of the magic of the movie comes from its balancing of philosophical questions about death, memory, and film with a story and style that are understated in tone and design. The Hollywood version would probably involve a soaring orchestral score, exaggerated emotions, and an explanation of the mechanics of the premise. After Life—Kore-eda’s second fiction feature, which brought him international acclaim and helped pave the way for later masterpieces such as Shoplifters (2018)—is resolutely not that film. It has little music beyond that provided by an off-tune house band composed of the way station’s workers; just one emotional outburst, which involves only some kicking of snow, alone, by Shiori (Erika Oda), an upset eighteen-year-old member of the staff; and no attempt to justify the world presented. (...)

One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who’s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that After Life quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.

~ After Life: In Memoriam (Criterion)

***

[ed. For whenever these get to my streaming service. Also like to see more Wong Kar-Wai movies (and Christopher Doyle cinematography): 2046; The Grandmaster; Chungking Express; Fallen Angels. See also: The Movies of Wong Kar Wai, Ranked from Worst to Best (IndieWire).]