April 16, 2020
"First Look"
If by chance that special place... leads you to a lonely place...
1985 was a ridiculously strong year for music releases, and we're far behind with celebrating releases. On Feb 14, 1985, only three weeks after No Jacket Required, The world was introduced to 21-year-old Whitney Houston on her debut album Whitney Houston. The massive global success of the album and her meteoritic rise to international stardom is truly because, at its core, this album [YT playlist] is about Whitney singing. And man, could she ever sing. Side A: You Give Good Love [video], Thinking About You, Someone For Me [video], Saving All My Love For You [video], Nobody Loves me Like You Do (w/ Jermaine Jackson) [more inside]
Look for the helpers
33 Moments Where Friends, Family, And Total Strangers Had Each Other's Backs In This Pandemic (Buzzfeed listicle by Stephen LaConte)
Tim's Twitter Listening Party
Tim Burgess from UK band The Charlatans invites you to listen along on Twitter to some classic albums. [more inside]
Black in Rembrandt's Time
Dutch Golden Age Art Wasn’t All About White People. Here’s the Proof (NYTimes)
On March 6, the Rembrandt House museum in Amsterdam opened an exhibition titled ‘Black in Rembrandt’s time’
The museum, like other museums around the world soon closed. But Mark Ponte walks us through a history of the black community in Amsterdam.(Twitter) And the museum has now put together a 12-minute documentary walking you through the exhibition (Dutch with English subtitles)
COVID-19 vaccine lead Kizzmekia Corbett - Not your average scientist
After years studying coronaviruses and dengue fever, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is leading the research team that launched the earliest clinical trials toward a COVID-19 vaccine. Janell Ross reports on Dr. Corbett for NBC News. [more inside]
"Did someone say my name?" "Who are you?"
Brian Dennehy, known for roles in First Blood, Cocoon, and Silverado, has died of natural causes at age 81.
"But we've lacked the political will to do so."
A research paper published this week in Nature has estimated the total cost of failing to meet the Paris Agreement of keeping global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius: $150 trillion to as much as $792 trillion by the end of the century. [more inside]
Disaster Capitalism: Pandemic Edition
Corporations Are Not Letting This Crisis Go to Waste — As the pandemic wreaks chaos, corporations and the GOP are following the shock doctrine playbook. [more inside]
Burning Man, 25 years ago, and into the multiverse for 2020
In 1995 some friends invited me to Burning Man. I thought it was an overnight rave, so I grabbed a backpack with a change of clothing and my Super8 camera. It wasn't until we entered Nevada that I realized I was going to a week-long festival in the desert. With no food or shelter, and minimal supplies, I lived off the kindness of friends and strangers. [...] The film [...] is unedited—straight from the camera. I only brought two 3.5 minute rolls of film with me (one color and the other black and white), so I preserved film by capturing scenes with short recording—like moving photos. I cut out some under-exposed night footage, but the rest is how I shot it. The music is from a favorite 1995 chillout album by Subsurfing called Frozen Ants. [more inside]
Pass the Pepper
I know we've all seen enough Rube Goldberg machines to last a lifetime, but...
Pandemic in Azeroth
World Of Warcraft Fan Server Unleashes Days-Long Virtual Plague To Teach Covid-19 Prevention [Kotaku] “Over the weekend, Elysium—an unofficial, fan-run project that lets players relive early versions of WoW sans Blizzard’s oversight or subscription requirement—ran an event called “Pandemic In Azeroth.” The idea was ambitious, but risky: Without warning, Elysium’s admins dropped a virus into the game world that, within 15 hours, infected 2,276 players. Within 24 hours, that number jumped all the way up to 7,000. At its peak, the virtual illness impacted 88 percent of active players. After the virus had time to spread organically, the admins let everybody know what was going on: A virus had been placed on an in-game object. A player, dubbed “patient zero,” had touched that object and then interacted with other players and NPCs, any of whom had a chance of contracting the virus. It could spread to objects as well. If players who came into contact with germ-coated objects or characters failed to rush off to a city and wash their hands using a special “hand soap” item, their character would contract an illness that led to a 5 percent stat reduction and 10 percent movement speed debuff. Oh, and of course, they’d become a danger to other players, too.”
WWE Essential, Employees Contractors Not So Much
Reports surfaced this week of WWE being labelled an "essential business" by the state of Florida, allowing them to continue airing live wrestling shows in an empty studio. When asked about the decision, Governor DeSantis delivered a word salad for the ages, citing Disney gardening staff, content, Nascar, Woods and Mickelson doing "the golf," and Tom Brady being in Tampa Bay before ending his press conference. Then, a couple days later after getting the go ahead to continue, billion dollar company WWE began releasing wrestlers, as well as furloughing and laying off producers, and other employees. Many people have been wondering what the hell is going on. [more inside]
portrait of the Artist as a young Korean-American
"What if the finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel was also one of the first? To a modern reader, the most dated thing about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, published by Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. Practically everything else about this brash modernist comic novel still feels electric... Its value is in the heady mix of high and low, the antic yet clear-eyed take on race relations, the parade of tragic and comic bit players, and above all, the unleashed chattering of Chungpa’s distinctive voice. Underlying the richness and humor, there’s a deep pessimism about making it in America, for anyone not white and male." Ed Park writes for the New York Review of Books about the 1937 comic novel.
The Writer of "Demolition Man" on the Predictive Power of His 1993 Movie
Demolition Man may have been intended as a goof about restrictions on behavior and language, but it plays differently from a sheltering-in-place 2020 perspective.... It’s a portrayal of how normalcy can change, and of people who are uptight because upheaval is still a close enough memory that they have trouble bringing themselves to relax, no matter what the oblivious ’90s action hero in their midst might urge. And so, in the light of Demolition Man’s accidental coronavirus relevance, Vulture spoke to the movie’s writer, Daniel Waters — also of Heathers, Hudson Hawk, and Batman Returns fame — about being back in the news.
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