Kia ora and welcome to the late round up with your host, Michelle. Due to the unfortunate circumstance of being employed, I’m thinking about cutting down to once a week newsletters. We’ll see how that goes when I start next week. Love to all my fans for dealing with my s.p.a.m xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
The long read
1. What happens when I read something I don’t like
The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music: I think that this has got to be one of the most interesting things I have read in a while, not because of the content, but because of what was happening in my head when I was reading it. I bookmarked it to try to expand the things I read about, I want to learn more about fine arts or movie scores or composition so I want to read about it, and I want to learn to talk about it. This was the combination of things I don’t know about and things I know too much about all in one, and it took me on a ride.
Here’s the reason: The essay is about Nicholas Britell, who scored “Succession,” “Moonlight” and “The Underground Railroad,” and who seems to think of scoring in a new and particular way:
There’s a slight Willy Wonka vibe to Britell in his studio, and as I processed Fred and the drill, he and Jenkins grinned like the inventors of the Everlasting Gobstopper. Over time, the two have grown more comfortable with thinking about a score in terms of manipulated recordings, not just a composition for instruments. “If everything’s in context,” Britell said, “the drill is music.” In “Moonlight,” they used ocean sounds; in “Beale Street,” subways. They were looking forward to getting new fire sounds. “We actually do have people on set burning things,” Jenkins said.
It’s wonderfully imaginative. It’s one of those things that makes art great, like when you go to a museum or gallery and say “anyone could’ve done that” about something but it’s only because you have seen the thing that you even think to think about it.
But in the middle, there’s this, about when he worked with finance company Bear Stearns:
By that point, Britell had been in finance for about a year, traveling to interview central bankers and people in finance ministries in Europe and East Asia. He thought he was happy. If you’re a curious person, Sullivan observes, a hypercompetent person, “it’s sometimes hard to actually parse out your true feelings.” For years she watched him come home and play the piano, or improvise beats on his old keyboard. “He’d be up, in a suit, gone around 7:30 a.m. every day and home around dinnertime,” she says. “But he would need to touch the piano.”…
In 2008, on a vacation, Sullivan watched the heavy way Britell would pull out his BlackBerry to check the markets. For months, he had been so depressed that it felt like vertigo, but until Sullivan told him he was unhappy, he hadn’t fully known it. The markets, meanwhile, had guttered, Bear Stearns had folded in front of his eyes and, terrifyingly, the smartest people he knew had no idea what was going on.
Nothing has pulled me out of an essay faster than realising that the person I was reading about in this imaginative and philosphical way was involved in the 2008 financial crisis. I am still interrogating this feeling. I know the people who plunged the world into crisis were people, but it still feels very weird for me to have someone who was directly responsible-I do mean directly, we take too much agency away from people in finance-have this part of their life recounted as the anti-climax for themselves and not crisis for the entire world. Again, I get that this feeling is because this is something I Know Too Much About. I know the point of this essay is to talk about this one human. I don’t really have a conclusion here. These are just my feelings about this article.
A quick watch
2. Oh to be a celebrity who gets ignored by T-Pain
A quick petition
3. Well this is a first:
Even if you don’t sign the petition, I still wanna bring attention to this:
Our essential workers in the public service have been keeping us safe during a global pandemic, but earlier this week the Labour Government announced that they will suppress public wages for the next three years.
The announcement means all public service workers earning $60,000 or more - which includes essential workers such as nurses and people on the front line at the border - won’t have their pay keep up with the cost of living.
After the last year we know how much we all - including Labour - value our essential workers. With enough public pressure, we can convince Labour that suppressing the wages of our wonderful essential workers doesn’t get the balance right.
Sign the petition and show your support for Minister of Finance Grant Robertson and Minister for the Public Service Chris Hipkins to reverse the decision to suppress wages of the public service.
A quick read
4. I love
A long read
5. Violence in Jerusalem is the rule, not an exception
Title comes from this article. I have a history where I know I’ve been taught weird things about this situation and I’ve always been hesitant to talk about it because I can’t parse out what I’ve been taught vs what happened. I don’t know enough. But I do know that this violence shouldn’t be happening.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Martinique-born psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote:
The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say his property, to the colonial system.
The settler’s relation to land is through colonisation, which brings to the fore relations of power and domination with the Indigenous (or native) community. Take for example Jerusalem, the site of this recent violence. Since 1967, the State of Israel has annexed the city, meaning its Palestinian residents (which comprise roughly 40 per cent of the total population) live within enclaves under Israeli military control. Palestinian residents of occupied east Jerusalem need to apply for Israeli citizenship, which the State can accept or reject, leaving them in a bureaucratic limbo.
For decades, Israel has razed Palestinian homes and taken over Palestinian land. The settler-colonial logic described by Fanon was evident last week in the words of a young woman wearing a ‘Kahane was right’ sticker, who – interviewed while participating in the violent events, said of Palestinians:
I don’t say that we burn their villages, I just say they get out from it and we take over their land.
Simply put, Palestinians are disposable and displaceable – this is also the logic that the liberal Zionist project hinges on.