https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/10/wallace-gromit-producers-hand-stake-in-business-to-staff
The owners of Aardman, the animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Morph, are handing over a 75% stake in the business to their 140 employees in a bid to protect the Bristol-based company’s independence.
Now maybe Shaun the Sheep is not quite Wallace and Gromit level wonderful, but it's still pretty charming. :)
...
American history has largely forgotten what Washington knew. Narratives of national expansion and Indian conquest often neglect the complexity of Indian relations and ignore the reality of Indian power in the very formative years of the nation. Historians of the early Republic who focus on creating a new nation, the rivalry between Hamilton and Jefferson, and the challenges posed by relations with Britain and Revolutionary France often treat Indian affairs as tangential or even irrelevant. In fact, federal officials devoted much time, attention, and ink to conducting diplomatic relations with Indian politicians who, as the Moravian Rev. John Heckewelder observed, “display[ed] as much skill and dexterity, perhaps, as any people upon earth” in “the management of their national affairs.” Indian nations figured alongside European nations in the founding fathers’ thinking about the current and future state of the union. Indian leaders were adept at playing on American fears of British and Spanish backing for Indian resistance. Debates over the sovereignty of the United States and struggles over the extent and limits of federal authority and states’ rights centered on Indian treaties, and Indian issues, wars, and land policies were critical in developing a strong central government.
It would appear that some eagles really, really do not like drones!
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/birds-vs-drones/576724/
Things Banksy related that I meant to link to earlier ... Banksy and the art-world related.
I recently sat disconsolately through a screener of director Nathaniel Kahn‘s new artworld documentary, “The Price of Everything.” Its dyspeptic take on the artworld turned my stomach. The film miscarries by not delivering what’s promised in its own synopsis:
While holding a funhouse mirror up to our consumerist culture, the film ultimately reaffirms the transcendent power of art itself [emphasis added] and the deep need we have for it in our lives.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-price-is-wrong
https://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2018/10/puncturing-bunkum-the-subtext-of-banksys-subversive-directors-cut-with-video-part-iv.html
Banksy’s stealth video of the bidding on the above work at Sotheby’s and the sales job that preceded it adds yet another layer of satire to a subversive intervention that has a more serious subtext—a critique of self-sabotaging auction houses that have damaged their credibility as a transparent public marketplace where buyers can feel reasonably confident that they are paying fair market value, equitably arrived at, on a level playing field.
Here are some excerpts from the auction house’s unintended self-parody in “Shred the Love–The Director’s Cut”:
Sotheby’s, London, employee: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of interest on it [the Banksy], as you can imagine. It’s, I think, by far the most asked-about lot in the sale.
Another Sotheby’s employee: Yes, and the artist put the frame on it as well….He quite likes the romanticism of having the National Gallery-esque [!?!] frame.
Cut to the Sotheby’s partygoers enjoying a good laugh (as Banksy and his merry pranksters, observing this swanky scene, must be also having, for different reasons).
Sotheby’s employee: I think this [the $260,600-390,900 presale estimate] is a fair price….Everyone’s got a chance!
Auctioneer Oliver Barker, exulting in the frenzied bidding on the doomed painting: We’ve never finished an auction with such energy. [BOOM!]
Little did Barker know what would happen next—the public shredding of a $1.4-million market trophy. At the end of his “Director’s Cut” video (with some 2.87 million views, at this writing), Banksy also shows us what was supposed to have happened—a complete shredding, not the half-shredding that auctiongoers (and Barker, who managed to keep his cool under alarming circumstances) had witnessed on Oct. 5:
in such a context it maybe isn't surprising that the proposal that an MFA degree in this day and age is basically a scam continues to have "feet".
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-expensive-superficiality/245260
Perhaps it's inevitable that Taylor Swift would endorse Democratic candidates and thereby semi-redeem herself in the eyes of other entertainers and culture journalists but ... her use of facial recognition technology to help track and apprehend stalkers has gotten some understandable protest.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-technology-surveillance
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/13/taylor-swift-facial-recognition-stalkers-rose-bowl-concert
Not that anybody needs a dozen or more stalkers, obviously! But a "pre-crime" approach to keeping tabs on stalkers does seem creepy.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 ... decades ago it began and it's got a new variant out. Slate has a piece commemorating what seems like a quintessentially Generation X sort of creation.
...
But Minnesota offered Hodgson a chance to try something daring he might not have gotten away with somewhere else. “I kind of knew I had a certain amount clout coming back to Minneapolis, and I wondered if I could use that to make a TV show made in Minneapolis rather than going to New York or L.A.,” Hodgson says. It would no doubt have been easier to get a typical TV show made on the coasts, but something strange and experimental, put together by hand and involving puppets and bad movies, might be better launched from the Midwest. With some help from performers from the late-’80s Twin Cities comedy scene, some of whom would stay with the show for years, it worked.
...
The kind of lazy bromides and axioms that can be rolled out about Wes Anderson films at The New Republic inspired me to reposition the work of someone like Anderson in light of a Generation X conundrum with respect to artistic activity.
Wes Anderson films as iterations of "boys not growing up" over at The New Republic--a few thoughts on Generation X growing up with the puzzle of how to play with the trademarked toys our parents bought for us
Since we're just a week or so away from, you know, some movie called Bumblebee, and a recent release was Into the Spider Verse, another Spiderman film, the idea that kids these days can't come up with their own ideas is a canard that seems eagerly taken up when something meets with a journalists disapproval. Conversely, if a journalist raves about product X then now matter how derivative The Last Jedi might be in terms of plot formulas, or how rote the Ghostbusters franchise reboot was doomed to be from jump, if journalists decide "we need this right now" that's that. Whether from a red state pundit like Mark Driscoll or even blue state punditry at The New Republic, it's easier to cast a sweeping judgment on a generation than to consider that a generational response might be indicative of being stuck with the hand they've been dealt and trying to make the best of it.
If this can be done for Millenials by saying that millenials didn't kill the US economy, the US economy gutted the possibility of millenials participating in the American Dream, then I could propose as a member of what's loosely called some kind of Generation X that what we have done in the arts is see how much can be done with a world of IP that was copyright and trademarked or had those extended ad infinitum, encompassing the popular culture we grew up and learned to love before any of us could be of the legal age to contribute to it in an institutional way.
Whether it's Brad Bird or Christopher Nolan or any number of other directors or writers in mainstream cinema, I suggest we keep in mind that complaining that members of Generation X onward somehow aren't creative enough to please journalists might be putting the cart before the horse. Journalists tend to write about what other people do more than they ever attempt to come up with stories of their own. If we want to entertain the idea that Millenials were toast before they realized they were toast in economic terms, Generation X was stuck having to deal with a legal and economic regime in which all their pop culture was trademarked and locked into copyright that was extended so far into the future we of Generation X will die before any of our pop culture touchstones might even risk becoming public domain.
So for those who are committed to working with the contemporary (i.e. the last forty years since copyright got expanded and extended), there's sampling in the more conventionally understood sense. Others may do work-for-hire or gain the clout to pull a Nolan or a Raimi and work with characters they love. Still others, and this is what I suggest might be easiest to do in IP terms, is go trawling back so far into the sea of public domain music and literature to radically transform and revise the possibilities of older styles and gestures. Some call that pastiche but that's a topic for some other time.
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