Friday, April 23, 2021

I hope this newsletter finds you well.

Item 1: a link

Taylor Swift’s Fearless rerelease review: The album is both business stunt and conceptual art.

I am probably excessively interested in this whole saga, but there is something really compelling about Taylor Swift's effort to reappropriate her back catalog (Fearless, the first re-recorded album, came out a couple of weeks back on April 9), and this Slate piece does a good job summarizing the context and reviewing the results.

My take: the effort to recreate the original recordings so faithfully makes it more postmodern but less revealing - it would be more interesting to see what an artist would do with the historical source material but their current sensibility. As it is, the re-recorded album is, almost by definition, inessential. But maybe after she's done with the carbon copy rerecordings Taylor will start all over again and record the ska covers the world deserves.

Item 2: a list

Christopher Nolan movies, ranked

1. The Prestige
2. Inception
3. Memento
4. The Dark Knight
5. Dunkirk
6. Interstellar
7. Batman Begins
8. Tenet
9. The Dark Knight Rises
10. Following
11. Insomnia

Item 3: a media recommendation

HoloVista

This simple (and easy!) iPhone game was one the highlights of my pandemic. I don't want to give anything away but a really powerful, thoughtful story unfolds as you basically tap around on stuff in a bunch of rooms and pretend to send and receive text messages with friends. The art, music, and writing are all great and although it's a pretty serious narrative the whole thing is laced with humor that's actually funny. You should definitely play this game.

Item 4: a photograph

Thanks, as always, for reading.