Footnotes

1. You may be noting how painfully slow my reading of Woodcutters is going. I was on vacation! Plus, it’s tough to pay attention to an irritable narrator’s circular rantings about the Viennese petit bourgeois of the 1980s when there are more clear and present dangers now, at home.

   Was finally able to bite off a huge piece on the plane ride back to Chicago, though. The book captures such a specific time, place, and energy. Been looking up a lot of Viennese streets and neighborhoods and nearby Austrian towns/states.

   The story behind the story is interesting, too, with characters based largely on various members of the Viennese artistic scene that author Thomas Bernhard hung out with and clearly hated. The characters are drawn so closely from real individuals that at least one of them took Bernhard to court and nearly got copies of the book pulped before backing down. Messy! ↩

2. A good, detailed primer for those interested in understanding why this story was such a big deal at the beginning of the week—and such an embarrassment for all the AI bulls in Silicon Valley whose primary strategy seems to be to throw more money and more compute power at it, rather than look for refinements. ↩

3. News about this is ongoing (see some of the entries listed for Friday), but ... uh ... I’m alarmed! I will just go ahead and say I’m alarmed. And I think you should be alarmed, too. If Musk continues his unilateral reach into our federal payment and information systems unchallenged by Congress, courts, etc. (for actions that are flagrantly illegal, as several have noted), I think the odds are pretty high that he starts breaking things in a way that won’t just be unfortunate but will in fact get people killed. ↩

4. This is a rich text for thinking more generally about the rise of romantasy and the dominance of tropes in the genre. The difference in how that incredibly large arm of the publishing world works, compared to all others in the industry, seems quite stark. ↩

5. I’m basically committed to a full Lynch revisit at this point, I think. Not really moving in any particular order; just watching what I can find as I find it. Did you know Wild at Heart isn’t streaming anywhere right now? Had to order the Blu-ray.

   Anyway, Lost Highway was a trip. I hadn’t watched it since high school, when I very much did not get it. That Robert Blake / Bill Pullman cellphone scene ripped then and still rips now, though. The way Pullman says “That’s fuckin’ crazy, man” still makes me laugh.

   

   In general, I appreciated what Pullman and Patricia Arquette were doing a lot more this time around, but I think it’s the acting of some of the others that makes this a more mid-tier Lynch work for me (plus the fact that the second half with Balthazar Getty drags quite a bit). Robert Loggia specifically feels out of his depth. His rant about tailgating’s funny, but I imagine some other actor could’ve really sold it. Imagine James Caan dining out on that scene, y’know? ↩