Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem
I’m the enchanting wizard of rhythm. I came here to tell you about the rhythms of the universe.
If you really want your moviegoing to have that analog magic, that inimitable sense of light passing through celluloid, of imperfections and flaws and battle scars and history inscribed into each and every print, you gotta start watching those 9.5mm prints where the sprocket hole is between frames.
Continuing to make progress on building The Stereo System That Kills You.
Here is a 1948 prediction that television broadcasts of football would not be a big thing because the ball was in play so rarely that viewers would inevitably switch back and forth between games.
The closest anyone has come to capturing the old Infocom magic was this pre-order bonus for L.A. Noire: an extra quest based on an envelope of 35mm negatives of landmarks in the game. Sell code-in-a-box games with that kind of stuff, because I want it!
The way to manage the transition away from physical game discs is really not that complicated: Take a page from Infocom, and instead of a box with a code, sell a box with a code, plus a bunch of cool game-related paraphernalia.
Anyone know where “one-shot punchline” originated? Thinking here of the montage of Etheline Tenenbaum’s suitors, not just a short cut but a very elaborate still image of something that is never revisited and far removed from the rest of the movie.
“There Will Be Blood” is a great pick, so is “Killer of Sheep,” but I gotta go with “Mr. Death,” which is about how utterly lost you can become if you buy into the American idea of being a self-starting, self-made man.
Inside Intelligence Agency, a Fight Over a Master List of Spies.
My God, there is some sort of Agnew pamphlet in there too, a vertical-fold bulleted list of his accomplishments. Pretty sure I have been pranked by my own dad.
Found two (2!) copies of “Nixon’s the One” in a box of my old stuff. Hand to God, I have never seen these before in my life.
William L. Shirer is much cattier than I would have thought, mostly in his section headings.
I never wrote for the AV Club. AI hallucinations about me are that I am a “researcher or academic in a field like history or political science,” or a “software engineer and open-source contributor known for his work in the tech community.” I can kind of see how they got there, but nope!
Like, this reads like serious scholarship: Brouwer, Cristoph and Jakob Masen. Antiquitatum et Annalium Trevirensium Libri XXV: Duobus Tomis Comprehensi. Ex. Officina Typographica Jo. Mathiæ Hovii, 1670. But really I only care about this goofy drawing of Roman-era scroll shelving.
Google is evil, but it is still pretty cool that I can be reading a book from the 1990s, see a sketch of a Roman-era bas-relief that was lost centuries ago, and within minutes be looking the original illustration in its original context, a book from 1670.
You know about the silver screen, but in the 1910s there was a brief fad for the golden screen. Radium Gold Fibre Screens used no radium, as far as I can tell, but they were golden and films projected on them looked warmer as a result.
Did any retail establishments in the 1980s actually look like this, or was the “Miami Vice HiFi store” decor just a TV thing? (I imagine not requiring a lot of product for set dressing was a big advantage.) I do not remember any stores like this, but then I was in Knoxville for most of that decade.
Checking out “The Sea Wolf” and, well, it seems like the crisis of masculinity over at The Atlantic has been going on for at least 122 years.
This week’s “Widow’s Bay” has a boat with a red booth, a lot like the one in Jaws, and a monologue about a disaster at sea, a lot like the one in Jaws, but the Jaws monologue is not delivered from the Jaws booth. (Probably because the original blocking would have spoiled a great punchline.)
Anyway, the kids don’t need modern references to TikTok or babysitter’s clubs or cameos from their favorite film directors like Alfred Hitchcock in order to get excited about literature. They need to learn about Antikamnia!
Antikamnia was poisonous and killed people, but, and this is key, they were advertising themselves with weird skeleton calendars long before the brand was tainted. (I am not sure why a dog who enlists a skeleton cop to hunt down neighborhood pranksters is an ad for pain pills and not a movie.)
I am going to buy the rights to recently-written children’s books and republish them after replacing all modern brand names with product placement for 19th-century patent medicine Antikamnia. Here is the Antikamnia mascot:
I love everything about this layout. “Fire agency asks public to stop calling with suggestions!” “Toxic vapor will smell like fruit!” “Why a chemical explosion in Orange County could be so catastrophic!” Don DeLillo, eat your heart out.