Armond White praises the animated film Ruben Brandt, Collector: “Milorad Krstic, a Slovenian filmmaker working in Hungary, uses modern animation technique and inspiration to restore the form’s connection to the tradition of hand-created fine-art in Ruben Brandt, Collector. Krstic converts the Eastern European style of poster-art animation to museum culture. The title figure is a psychotherapist (voiced by Iván Kamarás) experiencing high-art vertigo; he suffers from nightmares about art-canon masterpieces from Velázquez, Manet, and Botticelli to Van Gogh, Warhol, and Hopper. This obsession intrigues his patients, including kleptomaniac Mimi (voiced by Gabriella Hámori), who ironically advises, ‘Possess your problem.’ This leads to a series of thefts in international museums, including the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Tate, and MoMA.”

Reconsidering the nuclear option: “As atomic power fades, a new band of supporters argues that it is still our best source of clean, reliable, and—yes—safe electricity.”

NASA ends Mars mission: “The space agency will stop trying to contact the Opportunity rover, which was sent to Mars to search for evidence of water.”

Why are the Southern and Northern Lights different? It has to do with how “the sun squeezes Earth’s magnetic tail.”

Reading J. B. Priestly today: “Acclaimed for most of his life as a writer of hugely popular books and plays, which became part of the national imagination, he is now best known for that dramatic pot-boiler, An Inspector Calls (1945) and as a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (launched after Priestley wrote an article in this magazine). To a modern readership his novels are – if they are considered at all – period pieces. Even The Good Companions, his breakout hit of 1929, adapted many times for stage and screen, has fallen by the wayside. There are writers of the recent past who are not particularly well-read, but who are nevertheless well-considered: Patrick Hamilton, for example. Priestley is neither well-read nor fashionable.”

The glorious miniatures (and chaotic life) of Nicholas Hilliard: “After completing his goldsmithing apprenticeship in 1569, Hilliard rose swiftly as a professional miniaturist, powered by exceptional talent and zealous self-promotion. In a self-portrait of 1577, produced when he was thirty, he is just as elegantly dressed and self-assured as his powerful patron Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is in a miniature painted in 1576, which appears on the facing page. Hilliard’s desire to live and present himself as a gentleman, combined with unlucky business ventures and downright financial mismanagement, repeatedly landed him in debt. Sources suggest that he did not handle this well, often letting down colleagues, friends and relations, exploiting his high-ranking contacts and lying. Goldring is compelled to admit that her assiduous archival research reveals a less than appealing character. But the art is glorious, and presents us with a pantheon of the Elizabethan court, most of whose prominent members sat for Hilliard. His most illustrious sitter was, of course, Queen Elizabeth herself, who evidently – and understandably – liked how he depicted her, using his services again and again, not only for miniatures but also for the full-scale Phoenix and Pelican portraits.”

Essay of the Day:

Kashmir Hill stops using the big five tech companies—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon—for six weeks. “It was hell,” she writes:

“A couple of months ago, I set out to answer the question of whether it’s possible to avoid the tech giants. Over the course of five weeks, I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple one at a time, to find out how to live in the modern age without each one.

“To end my experiment, I’m going to see if I can survive blocking all five at once.

“Not only am I boycotting their products, a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra designed a special network tool that prevents my devices from communicating with the tech giants’ servers, meaning that ads and analytics from Google won’t work, Facebook can’t track me across the internet, and websites hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, hypothetically won’t load.

“I am using a Linux laptop made by a company named Purism and a Nokia feature phone on which I am relearning the lost art of T9 texting.

“I don’t think I could have done this cold turkey. I needed to wean myself off various services in the lead-up, like an alcoholic going through the 12 steps. The tech giants, while troubling in their accumulation of data, power, and societal control, do offer services that make our lives a hell of a lot easier.

“Earlier in the experiment, for example, I realized I don’t know how to get in touch with people without the tech giants. Google, Apple, and Facebook provide my rolling Rolodex.

“So in preparation for the week, I export all my contacts from Google, which amounts to a shocking 8,000 people. I have also whittled down the over 1,500 contacts in my iPhone to 143 people for my Nokia, or the number of people I actually talk to on a regular basis, which is incredibly close to Dunbar’s number.

“I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokia’s numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; they’re not used to getting calls from me.

“On the first day of the block, I drive to work in silence because my rented Ford Fusion’s ‘SYNC’ entertainment system is powered by Microsoft. Background noise in general disappears this week because YouTube, Apple Music, and our Echo are all banned—as are Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, because they rely on AWS and the Google Cloud to get their content to users.”

Read the rest.

Poem: Matthew Buckley Smith, “Political Ode”   

Photo: Jahorina

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