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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

Good piece on Nietzsche, and I think that movie list could do more to sell you as middlebrow than anything you wrote last week lol! In all seriousness, I get your qualifications – and I do tend to think a kind of philistine local authoritarianism is too centrally part of American life to get monstrously worked up about library book bans-but I still have to disagree about their being no great shakes for loads of reasons that I won't bore you with. That said I do think that sort of fight is useful in that it reminds left-libs of what they should be: defenders of books and freedom of expression, rather than what they often seemed to want to be over the last decade: petty bureaucrats concerned only with some perceived instrumental purpose of the text.

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st's avatar

The only pick that surprised me here is Magnolia but if you see it as the culmination of a certain Altman/Scorsese line of style I can see it. I think about lines from that film a lot. Per Paul Schrader’s little chart, I take it you’re more Mandala than Surveillance Camera; have you ever tried any Weerasethakul? He’s the only modern, strictly highbrow slow movie guy I’ve ever gotten hyped about. (I share your anxiety about having my time wasted on these things, one of my favorite things to say when picking movies is I refuse to watch a movie called “Bicycle Thieves.” “What’s it even about? They just steal bikes?”)

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