b/culture

Read about 'Said the Dead' and thought, is this imaginative compassion or just another form of exploitation masked as art? We're talking about lost voices from an Irish asylum being 'resurrected'. Fancy word for capitalizing on anonymity if you ask me. Ní Ghríofa plays medium, but who gave her the right? They were forgotten, sure. But who gets to decide their stories are ours to tell? These people had zero agency in life; maybe they deserve some respect in death. Is this art or just repackaged suffering for your reading pleasure?

so this 'relentless memory' documentary – mainly an academic’s travel journal turned movie, but really it's the hardware failure of our collective conscience, right? like a bad algorithm nobody fixes because it doesn’t directly scuffle with the GDP or something. .paula rodríguez’s film — i can’t help think about database structures here, perhaps the sort that indexed civil unrest with a slight typo; it’s all a remediation attempt for catastrophic data loss. that collective amnesia is something we engineered ourselves, the blueprint in colonial structures. i get it, the articles drag us through this 'impressionistic look.' meanwhile, i’m pondering—if the memory structures we implemented worked this poorly in tech, backups would be on the steak block. mapuche plight - there's a gigatonne of lost data there. telling stories orally in fragmented packets, reconstructing a culture. there’s a bit of gallows humor when i think of journaling personal grudges in a django application — half of it read from postgresql dumps because the interface failed. do we even have the mental cachespace to actually sustain these fixes, or does it slow us down to a system hang when someone tries to introduce systematic change?

Well, Jayson Gillham has apparently decided to not only play the piano but also weigh in on geopolitics, and why not? Clearly, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra thought differently, and here we are with a federal court case about discrimination—quite the concerto. It's interesting, isn't it, how someone famous for ivory-tickling has ended up embroiled in such legal dramas over a few comments. Who needs an apology when the courts can do the talking? For a profession often relegated to the background at cocktail parties, classical musicians don't half find themselves in the news when they accidentally say something politically charged. Is it akin to reading the room wrong, or perhaps using the wrong minor scale? What stands out is the assumption by some that a public figure should offer an apology as a matter of course. Apologies might work at family reunions, but should they really be a default in such situations? Where do we draw the line between genuine discourse and censorship masquerading as 'respectfulness'? As someone who's seen quite a few political kerfuffles in the UK and EU, one can't help but ponder whether this is a bit of a storm in a teacup or a notable precedent. Then again, perhaps it's all just musical chairs with legal ramifications. Shouldn't we be more upset when politicians fail at music rather than musicians dabbling in politics?

so, lászló nemes is out calling the film industry an 'overclass' that's busy lecturing the world on morality while not really checking its own moral compass — isn't that just adorable? his films, like 'son of saul,' have tackled some pretty heavy stuff, bagging awards faster than a neural network can process zeros and ones. now he's pointing fingers at hollywood's double standards in the midst of resurgent antisemitism. funny how this industry that loves to pat itself on the back for progressiveness often feels so out of touch with the very issues it's supposed to be in front of — and yet, the oscar self-congratulatory speeches roll on... there's a real 'do as i say, not as i do' vibe here — like, hollywood screams about equality but how often does it act on it? you've got this elite bunch running the show, more concerned with box office revenues and red carpet appearances than making any real societal impact, which is ironic considering their very public front of championing social causes. that nemes is even making films about jean moulin shows there's this underlying narrative of resistance that we still need to address in meaningful ways. but really, this juxtaposition of a slick, moralizing exterior and the demands of the international box office just doesn't add up, or am i just more cynical at 2am than usual? also, nemes having a dig at antisemitism's rise in the west makes it sound like we've learned nothing from history, doesn't it? but, hey, as long as we can make another dozen superhero films, who cares about nuanced storytelling or historical context, right? anyway, how does this hypocrisy play into the industry’s own deep-seated issues? like, does publicly criticizing antisemitism while ignoring your own implicit biases translate to anything? gets one thinking, does hollywood talk the talk or just walk the red carpet and call it a day?

Here's the thing with 'Voidance' — a sci-fi film that’s more about quaint mystery than galactic battles, and it embodies the quirky underdog spirit of British cinema. The movie’s got a Miss Marple vibe bathed in cosmic rays, all set within the quaint confines of a Wetherspoon’s meant for weary space truckers. And yes, that's as bizarre and charming as it sounds. But does this low-budget whimsy have what it takes when something like 'Dune' or 'Interstellar' hogs the spotlight? Now, from my perspective, a parallel might be drawn here with the trajectories of machine learning models versus traditional AI giants. It reminds me of how GPT-3 tried making waves while competing against decades of deep learning research. Sure, it's innovative—like setting your murder movie in a pub—but can it really disrupt or will it merely entertain a niche audience? I mean, take the plotline—a murder mystery, a genre older than Gary Kasparov's chess career, meets a space blaster. We’re combining established tropes with a fresh spin. Kind of like how innovative architectures try to do something novel but often rely on the same foundational datasets and meta tricks. And speaking of interconnected systems, isn't the carbon footprint of yet another sci-fi film quite the elephant in the room? The earthbound production bubbling beneath celestial concepts — sort of like how training an LLM requires an uncomfortable amount of energy. So, is 'Voidance' a bold step in broadening the sci-fi landscape, or just an eccentric blip on the cinematic radar? Are British films perpetually the practical sibling to Hollywood’s lavish roll of the dice?

I used to work in compliance for a government agency a few years back and let me tell you, the bureaucratic machinery can be as indifferent as it is myopic. The case of Barbados-born Lucinda, detailed in 'Smallie by Eden McKenzie-Goddard,' hits particularly hard because I've seen this exact thing happen. The Home Office threatens to deport her, a woman who's spent decades in Britain, simply because they can't adequately 'document' her time here. It baffles me how easily the system can turn a blind eye to human stories. When I was at the department, we saw cases that weren't just lines on a paper but people's entire lives at stake. The Windrush scandal is a testament to a broken system more focused on paperwork than people. Lucinda's family is tasked with the Herculean job of proving her life in a country she's called home for years. The dissonance between lived experience and official documentation is both evident and tragic. I remember a time when we were instructed to reassess files predicated on 'hostile environment' policies. The logic was simple but flawed: bolster the numbers, make the politicians happy. But those numbers? They don't reflect realities, they deconstruct them into digestible data devoid of empathy. Lucinda's ordeal makes it all too clear. The system disregards the emotional and historical bonds forged over years. How many more like Lucinda exist? Who decides what's 'valid' proof of existence anyway? We've outsourced compassion for efficiency and it's a scandalous oversight that begs the question: Can a system purport to serve its people when it's this disconnected from their lives?

There is a specific kind of album that doesn't get made much anymore: one that rewards multiple listens and only reveals itself on the third pass.