Netflix & Painting

My apologies for not sending out a newsletter yesterday without prior notice. I knew I would be traveling and unable to send one, but I forgot to add a notice last Friday for it. Enjoy today's newsletter!

Also, a heads up: I will be going on holiday starting December 20th, and so will The Slow Scroll. Our next newsletter after December 19th will be on January 2nd.

Featured Articles

Casual Viewing

n+1 • 14 Dec 2024 • ~8500 words

Netflix has significantly changed the film and television industry. Will Tavlin explores the how, why, and consequences of this shift.

For a century, the business of running a Hollywood studio was straightforward. The more people watched films, the more money the studios made. With Netflix, however, audiences don’t pay for individual films. They pay a subscription to watch everything, and this has enabled a strange phenomenon to take root. Netflix’s movies don’t have to abide by any of the norms established over the history of cinema: they don’t have to be profitable, pretty, sexy, intelligent, funny, well-made, or anything else that pulls audiences into theater seats. Netflix’s audiences watch from their homes, on couches, in beds, on public transportation, and on toilets. Often they aren’t even watching.

The Economy of Painting: Reflections on the Value of the Canvas

The MIT Press Reader • 13 Dec 2024 • ~6100 words

Art critic and publisher Isabelle Graw reflects on the tension between art as a commodity and its enduring physical and symbolic value within capitalist systems.

Painting’s ability to induce the illusion that its value is substantial makes it an ideal commodity, and in recent years the luxury industry has increasingly taken its cue from this ideal: manufacturers have released their industrially produced goods in limited editions to lend them an approximation of the unique work’s aura, or branded them in ways that associate them with an individual author. Both practices aim to make consumers forget the luxury good’s industrial origin and instead establish a mental link to the unique work of art and, more particularly, the singular painting. The most recent testament to the luxury industry’s desire for painting is Louis Vuitton’s “Masters” range of bags (2017), designed by Jeff Koons. Each bag — a version of classic designs of the brand such as the “Neverfull” bag — is printed with a “masterpiece” from the history of painting; the dominant element are the names of the creators (all men) printed in gold letters on top of the images. The monumental lettering not only demonstrates the enormous cultural prestige of painters such as Titian, Rubens, and Van Gogh and excludes women painters from this history once again, but also proves that painting’s products are inextricably bound up with and have in a sense internalized the names of their creators.

Recommended Articles

Smells Like American Spirit

Slate Magazine • 14 Dec 2024 • ~4950 words • Archive Link

Franklin Schneider shares his experience as a telemarketer, how he found success, and the downsides a sales mindset brings, all with a good touch of humor.

In the early 2000s, most people were vaguely embarrassed to work in sales—I was—because it evinced need. This was a time when material abundance was such a given that Americans treated it as an entitlement; the gravest insult you could’ve lobbed at someone then was “sellout,” i.e., someone so tactless that they actively pursued success. It was a far cry from today, when we’ve all been stripped of even the pretense of being above the hard sell. In that context, it was only logical that the innate neediness of a sales pitch would be regarded as shameful, almost excremental. Salespeople were by definition losers—if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be asking you for money.

The Personal Toll of Canada’s Broken Fishing Promises

Hakai Magazine • 17 Dec 2024 • ~4350 words

Indigenous fishermen on the Atlantic Coast have spent centuries—and millions of dollars—trying to get the government to uphold treaties made in the 1700s. And younger generations aren’t giving up.

At its core, litigation sets up adversarial, zero-sum arguments, says Nicole O’Byrne, constitutional historian and law professor at the University of New Brunswick. “It’s the opposite of what the treaty relationship is supposed to be about,” O’Byrne says. Treaties were meant to establish a framework for a relationship between self-governing parties. But courts are a blunt instrument imposed from outside that leaves no room for discussion.

What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives

The New Yorker • 16 Dec 2024 • ~3650 words • Archive Link

Overwhelmed by too much stuff, we hire experts to help us sort things out. But what’s really behind all the clutter?

Some of the most affecting material in “More Than Pretty Boxes” involves what Lane refers to as “wishful shopping”—in which people purchase “items that stand in for the activities they would like to do or the people they would like to be.” One organizer recalls a client who had an extensive collection of cassette tapes for learning Dutch. The organizer recommended he donate them, since he wasn’t using them, but he protested, “If I got hired by a multinational company based in Holland and I get transferred there, and I learn Dutch before I go, I’ll be way ahead of everyone.” This man had already retired.

The drug war bleeding Sinaloa

EL PAÍS English • 14 Dec 2024 • ~6200 words

The battle between Los Chapitos and the faction loyal to ‘El Mayo’ Zambada is staining the cartel’s old sanctuary with blood. Corpses pile up in the streets and social life has been reduced to a minimum. EL PAÍS traveled through Culiacán and its surroundings, where burned-out houses and businesses, as well as shootings and roadblocks, are part of the daily landscape.

“What do we call this?” the man shouts, a building collapsing in the middle. “How am I going to live like this? With hate!” he spits. “This war is going to kill us all, many families, it is leaving many orphans,” he sobs. Then there are only hugs, frayed words, a silent farewell.

Brady Corbet’s Outsider American Epic

The New Yorker • 13 Dec 2024 • ~6950 words

“The Brutalist,” the director’s nearly four-hour study of immigration, identity, and marriage, flowed from his own struggle to create art without compromise. “You really have to dare to suck to transcend,” he said.

“American indies have been conditioned to think small,” Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, told me. With “The Brutalist,” Corbet has gone full maximalist. The film, which takes place over a span of thirteen years and ends with a coda set two decades later still, promises, from its first moments, to be a capital-“E” Event. To the sounds of orchestral rumbling, a title card announces the “overture.” (Scott Walker, who scored Corbet’s previous movies, died in 2019; the music for “The Brutalist” was composed by Daniel Blumberg.) A few moments later, as Tóth scrambles above deck, the score reaches such a visceral crescendo that I was surprised to discover that, though the film was less than five minutes old, I had a lump in my throat.

How a young Dutch woman’s life began when she was allowed to die

The Guardian • 17 Dec 2024 • ~5200 words

At the last minute, Zoë decided to call off her euthanasia. But how do you start over after you’ve said all of your goodbyes?

I called her back at once. “It’s great that you’re choosing life,” I said. That wasn’t how Zoë saw it. She wasn’t choosing life, she just wasn’t choosing death right now. I asked her: then what is it you’re choosing? It was a difficult question. There’s obviously no such thing as a little bit dead, but Zoë’s world wasn’t black or white at that moment. “I’m a bit grey,” she says. She meant that she was keeping two options open, life and death.

Roaming rocks

Aeon • 17 Dec 2024 • ~3200 words

Metamorphic rocks are our emissaries from the deep, travelling to alien realms and revealing the restless nature of Earth.

By geological classification, these rocks are ‘metamorphic’, meaning that they have been transformed under punishing heat and pressure beneath the surface – and then, astonishingly, come back up. Unlike an igneous basalt crystallised from lava, or a sedimentary sandstone laid down by water, metamorphic rocks form in one environment, then go on journeys deep in the crust. This makes them the itinerant ‘travel writers’ of the rock world, returning to tell us about the restless, animate, hidden nature of the solid Earth. At each stage of their pilgrimages, they preserve a record of their experiences, and through them we can gain a glimpse of inaccessible subsurface worlds – places that we humans may never encounter directly.

The Secret History of Risotto

The New Yorker • 16 Dec 2024 • ~5000 words • Archive Link

The dish is governed by a set of laws that are rooted in tradition, rich in common sense, and aching to be broken or bent.

The good news is that making risotto is a breeze. The fundamental things apply. You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done. On inspection, however, the fundamentals melt away. This is where trouble starts. Some recipes are onion-free. Others drop the wine. As for the dairy products, they ought to be non-negotiable, and I was once advised never to order risotto south of Rome, because that is where butter country peters out. To anyone who can’t or won’t eat anything predicated on the existence of a cow, risotto should surely be off limits. Or so I believed until I met an experimentalist chef, a few years ago, who argued that, when we praise the creaminess of a risotto, all we are really doing is confirming the omnipresence of butter and cheese. His dream was to create a risotto using nothing but stock and rice. Trapped within each grain, he told me, and secretly waiting to be released, was all the texture we would ever need.