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    Joker Is One Unpleasant Note Played Louder and Louder

    David Edelstein, writing for Vulture, tells me everything I need to know about the movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in one simple sentence.

    The downside to the performance is the downside to the movie: It’s one note played louder and louder. 

    I don’t need that in my life. In fact, I have zero desire to watch this film. As Edelstein points out, it’s obvious what director Todd Phillips is going for here: a pastiche of a better director’s (Martin Scorsese) movies (obviously King of Comedy and Taxi Driver). Of course, he stunt casts Robert De Niro.

    Although Phillips and the screenwriters sought to make Joker more realistic than its DC Comics predecessors, it exalts its protagonist and gives him the origin story of his dreams, in which killing is a just — and artful — response to a malevolently indifferent society. Arthur/Joker might be repulsive, but in a topsy-turvy universe, repulsive is attractive. I’m not arguing that Joker will inspire killings (it might, but so might a lot of other things), only that it panders to selfish, small-minded feelings of resentment. Also it’s profoundly boring — a one-joke movie.

    How boring. But then, I’m not a selfish incel with “small minded feelings of resentment.” If I want to watch a “killing is just” movie, I’ll watch Keanu Reeves gun-fu through the John Wick movies. I’m sure I’ll be way more entertained.

    Just who is this movie for anyway? I mean fans of the DC Comics version of the Joker aren’t going to care about this approach. If you loved Heath Ledger’s Oscar winning performance, this isn’t going to make you love the character more. If you hated Jared Leto’s take on the character, I’m sure Phoenix’s version will be even more wrong.

    My fear is the controversy surrounding this movie will push audiences to go see the film and make those in charge of DC movies to incorrectly believe that creating individual, non-universe connecting movies is the way to go. It isn’t.

    Don’t go see this movie.

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    In the Dark

    I just updated my phone to iOS 13.1 and experimented with dark mode. Overall, it’s kind of meh for me.

    M.G. Siegler, in his 5ish newsletter, pointed me to a story back in May about dark mode that I hadn’t seen. Adam Engst talks about Apple’s introduction to Dark Mode and then proceeds to rip it apart.

    Unfortunately, Apple’s marketing claims about Dark Mode’s benefits fly in the face of the science of human visual perception. Except in extraordinary situations, Dark Mode is not easy on the eyes, in any way. The human eyes and brain prefer dark-on-light, and reversing that forces them to work harder to read text, parse controls, and comprehend what you’re seeing.

    It may be hip and trendy, but put bluntly, Dark Mode likely makes those who turn it on slower and less productive. Here’s why, if you adopted Dark Mode purely because Apple promoted it as the new hotness, you should think hard about switching back to the Light Mode that your eyes and brain prefer in System Preferences > General.

    Interestingly enough, I like it in places and not so much in others. For example, I use the Dark Mode in Feedly and Tweetdeck, but not in Notion. I would hate it in Instapaper and would never turn it on for Google Docs. Of course, Spotify is always in dark mode.

    I appreciate white space, but sometimes having a dark mode is nice. Still, I don’t anticipate turning it on my phone for any significant amount of time.

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    Zero

    Nicholas Bate with some zero basics.

    1. Zero In-box

    2. Zero, Coke Zero

    3. Zero Netflix Monday to Thursday.  Read.

    4. Zero taking the lift/elevator down.

    5. Zero time to waste.

    6. Zero poor coffee.

    7. Zero excuses.

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    Remember

    Kevin Drum wants us all to remember what this whole Ukraine business is all about.

    Ukrainegate is about Donald Trump holding military assistance hostage unless a foreign leader helped him win an election. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this has never happened before. It is an obvious and flagrant abuse of power.

    Nothing that was said—or yelled or tweeted—over the weekend has changed this.

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    Cardinals Manager Predicts Popping Champagne

    Hey, that’s fun.

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    Maddon’s Out

    Jordan Bastian, writing for MLB, says Joe Maddon is meeting with Theo Epstein.

    Entering Saturday’s game, Maddon had guided the Cubs to 470 wins, the fifth-most for a manager in team history. His run of four consecutive postseason berths (2015-18) is unprecedented for a Cubs manager, the 2016 World Series win snapped a 108-year championship drought and his winning percentage (.582) is the second-highest mark among all Cubs managers with more than two years at the helm.

    Even with all of those accomplishments on Maddon’s resume with the Cubs, the franchise is weighing whether a new voice is needed for the next era for the team. Maddon’s contract expires at the end of the season, so he also has the ability to elect to become a “free agent” ahead of the 2020 campaign.

    “We all have a huge amount of respect for Joe and what he’s done here,” Cubs outfielder Kyle Schwarber said. “Whatever happens, happens. If he comes back, that’s great. If he decides to move on, we wish him the best. But he’s done a lot of dang good here, and you can’t take that away.

    “For me, for him being my first big league manager, I think that’s a pretty good Major League manager to have as your first one. I have a huge amount of respect for him.”

    That’s some interesting spin.

    I’m sure the Angels will be looking really hard at hiring Joe Maddon in this off season.

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    Go Force Yourself

    Seriously, this was a dumb move by Ivanka.

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    Apple Picking

    Easily the best sketch from Saturday Night Live last night. Really funny.

    “For just $45 you call bring home $10 worth of apples…”

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    There’s a Horse Loose in a Hospital

    This might be my favorite bit ever by a stand-up comedian.

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    The Whistle-Blower’s Guide to Writing

    The director of the Writing Center at Harvard University, Jane Rosenzweig, writing for The New York Times, says the whistle-blower’s writing is amazingly clear.

    Her piece showcases several points from the letter that illustrate clear, concise writing. All writers should read the story.

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    Richly Deserved

    Jonathan Chait, writing for New York Magazine, predicts this whole Ukraine scandal just might be Trump’s downfall.

    Trump responded to the threat of impeachment by reaffirming why he deserves it. He told reporters impeachment (a mechanism in the Constitution) “shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it. Maybe legally through the courts.” And he told a private audience the media reporting the story were “animals” and “scum” and said the CIA officer who filed the complaint (through approved legal channels) committed “treason” and implied that he should be executed. L’état, c’est Trump, as always.

    Part of Trump’s rage stemmed from what appeared to be genuine surprise that the record of him pressuring Zelensky failed to win the approbation he expected. Hadn’t Zelensky flattered him and noted his great electoral victory? Didn’t his counterpart meekly submit to Trump’s demands? How could this be received as anything other than the “perfect” conversation Trump had promised it would be?

    Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s more slavish followers, observed in the president’s defense, “He didn’t see anything wrong with the conversation he had with a foreign leader.” That is probably accurate. Trump has a finely honed antenna for assessing winner versus loser, or loyal versus disloyal. But the formulation of moral concepts is not a function he can perform. His brain is no more capable of distinguishing right from wrong than your microwave oven can tell you what’s on Netflix. No American president has more richly deserved impeachment.

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    Eurythmics + White Stripes Mashup | Pomplamoose ft. Sarah Dugas

    Pomplamoose is know for doing really cool and interesting mashups. This one is great.

    Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams are Made of This and The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army have never sounded better.

    Way better than you might expect.

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    Whistleblower Complaint

    Mark Frauenfelder, writing in Boing Boing, points to a cool bit audio.

    Saskia Maarleveld is an audiobook narrator and voiceover actress. If you listen to audiobooks, her voice will sound familiar. Here, she reads the whistleblower complaint released by the House Intelligence Committee. Listening to it, as opposed to just reading it, makes it even more damning to Trump and his sycophants.

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    The Most Dangerous Divide

    Patrick Rhone speaking the truth.

    Increasingly, I feel the most dangerous divide in our nation is between those who read and those who don’t.

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    Kingdom Come Superman

    This looks pretty good.

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    He Has No Idea What He’s Talking About

    David Roth, writing for The Concourse in Deadspin, believes it’s a problem that the president can’t talk or think.

    It is a problem for President Donald Trump that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell he’s talking about. This is not one of those signature Trump defects that can readily be spun into a secret strength or as a subtle bit of advanced dealcraft that only experts and initiates can appreciate. His mind is a television that changes channels every three seconds and where every channel has an infomercial on it; it cycles day and night without ever quite cohering into a signal. There is plenty of noise, though, and because Trump so utterly lacks discernment he is constantly interrupting himself with some new bit or blurt. As a result, his average sentence is a parade of wild upstage moves in which whatever thought he’s had most recently is forever blundering into past the one he had just begun to express-imagine one of those halftime shows at a NBA game in which people throw down wild dunks after leaping off trampolines except there’s a new guy jumping on the trampoline every second and there are frequent midair collisions. Trump also only knows about a hundred words, about a third of which refer to volume or size.
    Trump cannot ever keep his story straight because he never fully knew what it was in the first place. He knows it is about him, and the things that keep happening to him, but beyond that he never knows, and will never know; he is conspiring and scheming constantly, but so ineffectually and in such a state of flummoxed confusion and utterly abject ignorance that the endgame is never anything but unclear. Trump is always trying to get over, to win and keep winning, but also he doesn’t know what the rules are, or what the game even is, and also someone-it’s not important who, it would be unfair to point fingers-has eaten the racecar, the thimble, all of the little plastic hotels, and a third of the cards in Community Chest. It can be difficult to prove that any of Trump’s many howlingly overt acts of malfeasance are intentional because everything he does-from the first grasping moments to his last seething ones, all through his endless expanses of executive time-feels like and fundamentally is an accident.

    Yes. Trump is an accident. I like to think of it as a car crash everyone slows down to gawk at. He’s a spectacle of incompetence. He’s a horse in a hospital.

    Roth then goes on to explain how Trump forms his worldview. Spoiler: it’s by watching television. He then explains perfectly what Fox News does.

    The more worrying part of all this is that there is fundamentally nothing to know about most of what he talks about. Every rank thought-chunk that clears his blowhole is either some legacy beef or bigotry or something Trump learns from his television shows, which feed him attenuated suspicions, a list of ominous what-abouts that hint at some sort of outcome but stop well short of it, and a bunch of leading questions that, by design, cannot be answered. All of this is supposed to shore up a worldview and generate specific political outcomes, but mostly it aims to create a mood-a coiled and claustrophobic sense of being under siege, by someone-more than it does to answer any of the questions it hints at. It doesn’t really add up to anything, but also it can’t; the game is to accumulate.When Trump is stressed, the deficits inherent in all this are especially plain. What would Trump do, if handed this purloined DNC server? What would he even hope to find in it? Even the element of the story that involves Joe Biden and his son, which involves real and knowable facts, has been so degraded by its immersion in the garbage-whirlpool of conservative media and so muddled by Trump’s limp n’ lazy brain that the man who first reported it can barely recognize it. Nothing adds up to anything and all the fragments, which look like they should connect, don’t. Trump transparently doesn’t know where it ends. He’s the story’s hero, but mostly he’s just a customer.

    Exactly. Trump consumes the conservative media, blurts it out constantly, and then can’t fathom why his voice vomit doesn’t completely exonerate him from wrongdoing when he obviously did the wrongdoing.

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    Impeachment is Bad for the Image?

    So, the White House released a memo of a conversation Trump had with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I’m not sure what the purpose of doing this was because it clearly makes Trump look like he’s doing the mob shakedown thing.

    Kevin Drum has a perfect abridged version of the memo, and I’ll reprint it here:

    TRUMP: Congratulations.

    ZELENSKY: Thank you. You were a great example to us. We’re going to drain the swamp.

    TRUMP: That’s very nice. You know, we do a lot for Ukraine.Way more than those yakky Europeans.

    ZELENSKY: Yes indeed. I especially want to thank you for your support in the area of defense. We are ready to buy more weapons from you.

    TRUMP: I would like you to do us a favor though. Please look into the DNC server hack. Our attorney general will be calling you about that.

    ZELENSKY: Sure, sure, anything for you. I’m appointing a new ambassador so we can continue our strategic partnership.

    TRUMP: That’s great. I’d also like you to investigate Joe Biden’s son. Rudy Giuliani and our attorney general will be calling you about that.

    ZELENSKY: Sure, sure. The next prosecutor general will be 100 percent my candidate. He or she will look into this. And don’t worry about the old ambassador. She was an Obama fan and she’s being recalled.<

    TRUMP: Great. I’ll have Giuliani and Barr call you. Your economy is going to get better and better, I predict.

    ZELENSKY: The last time I was in New York I stayed at the Trump Tower. We’ll be very serious about that investigation of Biden’s son.

    TRUMP: Good. Giuliani and Barr will call you.

    So basically, instead of exonerating the president, it basically has blown up in his dumb orange face. Now, apparently, he’s shocked this didn’t work. According to Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, writing for CNN, Trump doesn’t understand why the memo did not deescalate the problem and really doesn’t want to be impeached.

    But people close to him said he is not welcoming this impeachment fight. The President who keeps a careful watch on his approval numbers was unhappy.A source close to the White House who routinely speaks with Trump confirmed he does not want to be impeached.

    This is only about optics. He’s going to go down in the history books as the third President ever to be impeached. Unless he resigns. Which he should.

    I’ll make a short case for it. Trump never wanted to be president. Trump only looks out for himself and his immediate family. Trump is going to be impeached, and while he likely will not be removed from office by the Senate, the corruption, self-dealing, and incompetence will be presented for the world to see. That is bad optics. Trump should resign before formal articles of impeachment are presented and to guarantee a full Ford-like pardon of Nixon by Pence. The only downside to this plan is that he will immediately be arrested as a co-conspirator in regards to the Stormy Daniels payout. Michael Cohen says hi. Maybe he can flee to North Korea or Russia.

    It’s all about the optics. And money.

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    Here Comes the Sun

    Today is the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album and to celebrate, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and their collaborators have released a new video for “Here Comes The Sun.” From a statement:

    The “Here Comes The Sun” music video welcomes the viewer into Abbey Road Studios’ Studio Two, where The Beatles famously recorded most of Abbey Road, to experience a unique and moving sunrise above the band’s instruments and gear. Working closely with Apple Corps Ltd., the video is directed by Trunk Animation’s director team Alasdair + Jock (Alasdair Brotherston and Jock Mooney) and produced by Trunk’s Maria Manton. The video’s sun centerpiece was filmed as it was meticulously crafted on-set in Abbey Road’s Studio Two. The video features photos from the Apple Corps archive, and photos and footage shot by Linda McCartney supplied by Paul McCartney.

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    The Three Basics for Individuals

    Michael Wade with the three basics:

    • Mindfulness. Watch your drift. Pay attention to the small things. Get the “incrementals” going in the right direction.

    • Self-Discipline. Restrain or eliminate any behavior that you know is negative. Stop making excuses.

    • Nobility. Act in such a manner that if nobleness were a crime, you’d be easily convicted.

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    Albums I Wish Existed

    Albums I Wish Existed features albums that could have been made, perhaps should have been made, and now they are made, by a man who just seems to be doing what he can to make the world a better place for those of us who love music.

    The guy seems to know everything about every artist on the planet, and seems also to know about obscure cuts and rarities and special pressings, and he goes about locating these cuts, cleans them up if they need it, and puts together albums out of what he’s put together.

    Here’s a few to get your appetite wet:

    AC/DC — Rock in Peace
    Cheap Trick — In Color (Steve Albini mix)
    KISS - Ozone
    The Eagles — Dirty Laundry
    The Eagles — Sunset Grill

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