Dispatch #2: The Windmills of My Mind
The Dispatch #2: 17th July 2020
“When we're remembering something we're not actually recalling the original event. What we're doing is remembering the last time we remembered it. So we are constantly wiping our pasts and editing together a new one, one that makes sense to us now, in the present. All memories are therefore, by definition, alive.”
Quiz, ITV, 2020
Dear friend,
This past fortnight I’ve been thinking about memory: the mutability of memory and how our identities are mostly a series of curated recollections that are, by themselves, wholly piecemeal, imperfect. In other words, we are like knitted scarves: intricately formed and constructed, but full of gaps. The quote above comes from recent UK TV show, Quiz, and is a bit of dialogue spoken by a barrister defending a crime. Yet it’s a vivid and persuasive idea nonetheless. As the barrister argues, memories are not discrete entities—a short story to be archived—but are rather like bits of bacteria in a petri dish, liable to transmute in changed conditions.
Much of the works explored in this letter are themselves meditations on both individual and collective memories, as well as the gaps and silences in the stories that we tell ourselves: what we choose to include and what we decide to leave behind.
Perhaps this is too meditative a beginning for this letter. But there are some fun things in this, I promise! Below you’ll find an article on the most delicious piece of corporate schadenfreude this side of 2020, a fascinating podcast interview with the reigning queen of celebrity profiles, and a brilliantly re-configured piece of 90s nostalgia for the 2020 tween and the tween at heart.
As always, please email me if you have any thoughts! I would love to hear from you.
Much love,
Claude
Longform | Hamilton | Documentaries | TV! | Podcasts | Recipe
LONGFORM: BUT WHAT IS A QUIBI?
One of the most delightful pieces of entertainment journalism in recent memory has to be Benjamin Wallace’s longform feature on one of the great business failures of 2020, Quibi.
What is a Quibi, you ask? Quibi, a portmanteau of Quick Bites, is the ill-fated brainchild of entertainment titan (formerly of Disney and Dreamworks) Jeffrey Katzenberg. A streaming platform dedicated to video content of no more than 10 minutes, Quibi was envisioned by Katzenberg to be the dynamic new hybrid of Netflix and YouTube. As Wallace outlines, Quibi was notoriously overcapitalised, raising almost 2 billion dollars in funding by its launch. Yet by the time you read this letter, Quibi has widely been identified as a commercial failure, with a retention rate of less than 8% of its million or so trial users.
So what went so wrong? Katzenberg for his part has blamed COVID-19 for Quibi’s poor performance (a specious argument considering that COVID-19 seems an ideal moment to launch a streaming platform for anxious, short-attention-spanned audiences). What was more likely the culprit, as Wallace brilliantly chronicles, was a lightning storm of outsized egos and hubris on Katzenberg and his co-founders’ part. My favourite detail? Katzenberg’s original name for Quibi was Omakase, inspired by his favourite, terribly expensive predilection for sushi tasting menus. Highly recommended. (Vulture, NYMAG)
HAMILTON ON DISNEY+
Unlike Quibi, Hamilton on Disney+ will likely be considered one of the definitive pieces of entertainment for 2020. But what more needs to be said about Hamilton that hasn’t been spoken of already?
Technically it is a work of art, a piece of theatre so thrilling in its skill, scope and ambition, as well as so ingenious in the ways it uses the sound and discourse of hip-hop to mirror the revolutionary bravado of America’s founding fathers. More interesting then, is to meditate on whether Hamilton—so incontrovertible a product of the Obama period—works in the age of Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Critical appraisals of Hamilton’s identity as a political product have been mixed, but suffused with interesting and thoughtful commentary. Here are a few. Some more too.
Consider that this very moment might be a great opportunity for looking. As in gazing, meditating and contemplating a great, big, beautiful piece of artwork type of looking. And if so, why not look—and I mean really look—at one of the biggest and most beautiful of all works, The Night Watch by Rembrandt?
In May this year, the Rijksmuseum published the largest and most detailed photograph of this great work yet taken, allowing you to see details that you likely would never have registered before, even if you have visited it in real life. While you look at this crown jewel of the Dutch Golden Age of Painting, I highly recommend concurrently listening to a very short segment of Simon Schama on the BBC Front Row podcast (starts 20:23), as he guides listeners through the profound drama and detail of the work. It’s a lot of fun. Evan Puschak’s video essay of the painting is also very illuminating too.
THREE GREAT DOCUMENTARIES
Three Identical Strangers is best encountered with very little preamble. If you can, don’t even watch the trailer. Here’s the setup: In 1980, on his first day of community college, Bobby Shafran meets a man he has never met before, but looks exactly like him. Soon they are joined by a third stranger, who also appears to be an identical match. Revelations on how this came to be, and what happens next, are narratively thrilling as they are shocking. A short but powerful piece of documentary. (Netflix)
In 2016, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck created the painful, soul-stirring documentary I am Not Your Negro, a filmic meditation on the oppression of Black Americans through 200 years of American history, as written by one of the foremost writers, and indelible thinkers of the 20th century, James Baldwin. In the wake of Black Lives Matter 2020, this film feels even more necessary than when it first premiered. (SBS On Demand)
In Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley, the Canadian director of such devastating family dramas as Away from Her and Take the Waltz, tries her hand at non-fiction (mostly, anyway). Using her own family history as the basis for her first documentary feature, Polley unknits the stories her family has retold over and over again in the aftermath of the death of Polley’s beloved mother when Polley (the youngest of five children) was 11. In unveiling and dismantling these family narratives, Polley discovers some startling truths about her mother, and her own parentage. A generous and beautiful film. (Stan)
TELEVISION
Co-written and co-produced by Rachel Shukert (also of the brilliant Glow), The Babysitters Club is a superb adaptation, staying true to what made the Ann M. Martin books so readable but also making important updates in the places that matter. Here two of the main characters have been recast as girls of colour, and each of the 10 jewel-like episodes of this first season confidently explore important topics such as menstruation, feminism, transgender kids and the internment of Japanese-American citizens in WWII. It’s sweet but never sugary and is the 90s throwback we didn’t necessarily deserve, but all need. (Netflix)
Imagine if Anna Karenina (yes, the character from Leo Tolstoy’s very big book) was a tennis champion and lived in Melbourne. That is exactly the premise of The Beautiful Lie, an eight part mini-series that I’ve probably watched end to end at least five times over. What I love most about The Beautiful Lie is how ingeniously it translates this classic novel. The Beautiful Lie swaps 19th century Russian aristocracy for sport celebrity, but in such a way it makes Anna’s (quite poor choices) even more sympathetic. When you’ve lived a life of public adoration, how can anything, or anyone meet up to it? The mini-series is filled to the brim with great Australian performers (Celia Pacquola! Gina Riley!), led by the incandescently beautiful Sarah Snook, who is now riveting audiences in Succession. (7Plus)
Quiz, a three part miniseries from ITV, chronicles the infamous scandal that occurred in 2001 when contestant Charles Ingram unexpectedly won $1,000,000 on UK’s Who Wants to Be Millionaire, to the great skepticism and bafflement of its host and its producers. Quiz is a fascinating exploration about memory and class prerogatives, as well as a snapshot of the seemingly special relationship the British have to trivia (see pub quizzes and the University Challenge). It’s fast and funny, especially the TV production scenes, and easily consumed in a 3 hour sitting. (Binge)
PODCASTS
Planet Money: Economics Summer School
The effervescent, always interesting economics podcast from NPR, Planet Money, has recently launched a summer school series special, and their first episode is a most delightful beginning. Using Uber surge pricing and online dating as case studies to explain the concepts of marginal utility and opportunity costs, Planet Money: Economics Summer School is an introduction to the lexicon of economics that will appeal to even the most fiscally allergic among us. (NPR)
****
Working: How to Interview Celebrities, With Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Before she became the bestselling author of Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner was (and still remains) the reigning queen of the celebrity profile. Witty, sometimes acidic and always insightful, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profiles on Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Hiddleston and Tom Cruise are stuff of legend: the type of celebrity writing that is both gleefully consumed and taken seriously, that is celebrated for the skilfulness of its writing as much for its gimlet eye. Talking with Isaac Butler on Slate’s podcast Working, Brodesser-Akner shares her journey from screenwriting student to published author, as well as tips on how to write about celebrities and why structure is the key to any good piece of writing. Brodesser-Akner is as delightful in audio as she is in paper form, full of very good tidbits for aspiring writers and readers who want to know how writers write well. (Slate)
RECIPE: CUMULUS INC’S TUNA TARTARE AND CRUSHED PEA SALAD
A Melbourne classic, considered
Melbourne’s current lockdown has made me yearn for its most memorable restaurants. One of my very first dining experiences in Melbourne remains one of my very favourites: Andrew McConnell’s classic paean to downtown NYC restaurants, Cumulus Inc. The dish that made me fall in love with Cumulus Inc (and Melbourne dining in general) was the restaurant’s signature tuna tartare and crushed pea salad, which you can still order today, more than 10 years on. Since many of us can’t go to Cumulus Inc any time soon, it is perhaps a great consolation that you can (pretty closely) recreate the tartare at home with this excellent recipe from Smudge Eats.
Some tips: Don’t be tempted to buy more tuna than you need; opt for quality rather than quantity. For best results, serve less than 15 minutes from preparation. If you don’t have anchovies or a mortar and pestle handy, using a teaspoon of fish sauce imparts a similar (and in my mind, preferable) flavour. Room temperature goats cheese or Persian feta works in a pinch if you can’t find goats curd at your local supermarket. Finally, if you’re a veggo, this recipe obviously contains different elements of seafood but if you can find a veg umami substitute for fish sauce/anchovies, and replace the tuna with avocado, I reckon you could achieve similarly delicious, fish-free results. (Recipe)