The Penny Post - 09/02/20
Hello all! Welcome to this week's edition of The Penny Post. Apologies for it coming late. It’s early stages and this isn’t intended as a professional newsletter so don’t tie your schedule to it, but I will in the future be striving to release at 7 pm EST on Saturdays. To briefly talk about the reasoning for this; I’ve had it a part of my schedule for a bit now to read various newsletters or sites that I find valuable Sunday mornings. I find this the most enjoyable way to consume a decent chunk of media/writing that is intellectually stimulating. Using this timing I’d like to enable people to do the same, and to read it Saturday nights if they’d like. An evening deadline rather than a morning deadline also keeps me from writing unreasonable hours. All of this to say though, if you would prefer another time I’m happy to work with readers to change it to whatever is most convenient.
Second piece of housekeeping; I’d love to hear your feedback or thoughts on anything I put in here. Everything I talk about is of the utmost fascination to me so if you have even passing musings I’d love to hear them. To have a public discussion you can tweet me @matthewdavis130 or if you want to say something more lengthy you can email me at thepennypost22@gmail.com
Happy reading :)
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https://www.patreon.com/PsychologyInSeattle/posts
https://psychologyinseattle.squarespace.com/
The best podcast. Every person, from the age of three onwards, should be Ludovico technique’d weekly on its latest episode. It's a podcast about psychology and mental health hosted by a therapist of thirty years. I don't endorse every stylistic decision or idea, but it is an invaluable resource for understanding, perhaps, the most important thing you can learn in the modern world. To introduce yourself to it, I recommend listening to the first q&a episode that catches your attention. These episodes all have the same title format as a series of words separated by commas. Here’s a recent example; “Tell Me Who I Am, Borderline, Hong Kong, Theoretical Orientation Test.”
The podcast’s best episodes (the audiobook length deep dives on a single topic) are behind a paywall, so if you're on the fence for paying I can link you a deep dive of your choice. For this, email me at thepennypost22@gmail.com.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/her-story-of-and-30917407
I wanted to spotlight one thing that I found from the podcast this week. This is an incredible interview with someone who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder) who has experienced severe trauma their entire life. It’s a window into what Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) really looks like and where it stems from. Wider culture doesn’t understand DID at all so it’s all the more important to destigmatize it and increase understanding. The episode is also a valuable demonstration of some of the effects of childhood trauma in adulthood. The guest returned to the podcast recently but I haven’t listened to the full episode yet so can’t comment on quality but it’s sounding just as good so far. Here’s the link - https://www.patreon.com/posts/opioids-identity-33553451
(I’ve since listened to it and wanted to point out one thing. There’s a moment where the interviewee starts crying after talking about the traits of one of her alters. It’s a great demonstration of the internalized shame people with this disorder have. Up till that point in the interview, Liza was fine talking about DID and her past traumas. It was only when actually discussing one of the, as the ignorant public would see it, “weird” specifics of her condition in a public forum that she started crying.)
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Code Switch - Ask Code Switch: What About Your Friends? - 22 January
Code Switch - Bonus Episode: ‘Between Friends’ From WNYC - 23 January
So I’m not fully sure how to read this. The statistic: 75% of white Americans have entirely white social networks. Black Americans are 8 times more likely to have a white person in their friend group but their groups are still largely homogenous. Asian Americans and Latinx are the most likely to have diverse friend groups but Latinx are also the most likely to have no friends. This statistic really shocked me upon reading. I feel slightly embarrassed that I never noticed it before but now that I think about it it does resemble my observed experience. There are two possible reasons behind it. One is housing segregation in America, which apparently and insanely is still a massive problem. Housing segregation means that people of the same race have friends of the same race because they live in the same place. The other reason may be that because of housing segregation as a child, race preferences for friends have some persistence into adulthood. They don’t talk about this in the podcast and I’ve searched high and low for studies on it but there doesn’t seem to be anything too solid. Because of this I won’t give it too much weight, but to some extent there has to be an inherent truth to it, even if it’s only the initial barrier of someone making friends with a person of a race they’ve never been friends with before. I’d be very interested to see whether this homogeneity persists when people move from suburbs to city centres. From what I’ve seen it does kind of seem like there’s lower crossover between friend groups of different races for Americans living in city centres, but my data could be faulty for multiple reasons. Either way this statistic is shocking and I’m surprised I’ve never seen housing segregation discussed. It seems like one of the base policy things you can change to enact large scale shifts in attitude.
The book they talk about “Racial Melancholia and Racial Dissociation” sounds fascinating and I’m definitely going to pick it up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/opinion/nicholas-kristof-our-biased-brains.html
Some additional stats of interest.
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Bojack Horseman
I wish I had more to say about this show. After binging the first few seasons then lukewarmly following the rest with an occasional blast of emotion, I don’t feel connected enough to respond to it as a whole. There are times where it meant a lot to me but they were so spaced out, and I forgot about them quickly, because it was another show to tick off the watchlist or because I just wasn’t investing the emotion and focus it was asking of me over time. I’m regretting that now because in its final season I’ve finally invested that emotion.
Bojack Horseman has always had an uber focus on Hollywood culture. I sometimes wonder if they did this knowing that they were making a show for show makers. The newly born stereotypes they lampoon feel like they’ve barely had time to spread beyond LA by their air date. One of the central plot points of last season was a strike still ongoing as the season premiered. The show feels like the show makers are telling stories directly from their life, with all the joy and sadness that comes from facing hard reality.
A lot of American media can feel distinct from reality. Like it’s in an elevated space beyond the culture and life that most who watch it experience. I think this was part of what drove the confused reaction to Euphoria. It proclaimed to know the life of the modern teenager and implicitly based part of that proclamation in the idea that all other media had dropped the ball in showing the truth. That it would shock audiences with what it was showing them was only because they were out of touch with reality. Whether or not Euphoria did show the truth of most American teens, it was able to make its argument because so much American media is disconnected from people’s lived experiences, made as escapism or distraction. The lauded aesthetics of such media become primarily internal; about plot twists, full circles, and fan favourites rather than being tied to the audience’s emotional investment, let alone the audience’s daily emotional struggles.
Near the end of Bojack Horseman, two old friends stand on a beach together watching fireworks as the tide washes away their footprints. One character is explaining their realization about the deep emotional meaning of the lyrics to the Hokey Pokey. “You do the hokey pokey and you turn it all around… that’s what it’s all about.” The other character remains skeptical to which the first replies “but isn’t the point of art less what people put into it and more what people get out of it?” As the show comes to an end and characters with full lives strewn across six seasons say the closest thing to goodbye they’ll ever get one says “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” to which another replies “sometimes… sometimes life’s a bitch and then you keep living,” to which I replied; and sometimes you never lived it. It’s their own deep personal truth that the makers of Bojack Horseman imbued it with that lets it be as personal to you as it is to them.
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Some interesting studies from the last week.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200204091403.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200204094722.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200203151158.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200129104705.htm
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The Oscars are awful, here's what you should do instead
The Oscars don’t even come close to showcasing a year’s best work in movies yet they’re still the mountaintop most Americans look to because they don’t know the other options or because they’ve rarely heard critical discussion of the Oscars (this being said I do love how much Parasite won this year). The Oscars are still valuable though because they get more people seeing important movies they otherwise wouldn’t, enabling more of these movies to be made. That said, they’re still an awful recommendation platform and here’s what you should do instead.
The best thing you can do for your movie watching habits is find either one critic, a number of critics, or a website you respect and/or very often agree with and go by the reviews they put out. I’d recommend at least having a critic that you almost always agree with to know when you’d enjoy a movie, and having a critic you respect to occasionally watch things that will challenge you. If you find the task of selection daunting I recommend just going to Indiewire.com and going by their reviews. As for best movies of the year, most critics put out a personal list so I recommend looking for those. Here’s a list of the best critics that I know of: Tasha Robinson, Genevieve Koski, Scott Tobias, Keith Phipps, David Ehrlich, Katey Rich, Joanna Robinson, David Chen, and Aisha Harris.
And to substitute for an Oscar watch list, here are the best films of 2019 in alphabetical order: A Hidden Life, American Factory, Honeyland, Hustlers, I Lost My Body, Knives Out, Little Women, Marriage Story, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pain and Glory, Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Synonyms, The Farewell, The Irishman, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Lighthouse, The Souvenir, Uncut Gems, and Under the Silver Lake.
https://twitter.com/mousterpiece/status/1226725620945575936
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https://old.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/f0bi81/do_you_want_to_do_a_superhero_movie_answers_from/
In case you couldn’t tell, this is a collection of answers from various directors asked whether they’d do a superhero movie. I’d like to point out Ethan Hawke’s, Denis Villeneuve’s, Boots Riley’s, Bryan Cranston’s, Robert Eggers’, James Gray’s, Charlie Kaufman’s, Barry Jenkin’s, Christopher McQuarrie’s, Lynne Ramsay’s, Steven Soderbergh’s, and Lulu Wang’s responses.
Ethan Hawke’s comment about disappointing people is very interesting. I’d never thought of that perspective or responsibility before.
I’m going to use Denis Villeneuve’s comment to monologue for a moment. It’s only in the last couple years that I’ve started seeing modern European culture as a distinct and defined set of cultural practices. The best markers I can give off the top of my head are the differences in standing and in interacting with strangers between Americans and Europeans. Americans tend to stand with their weight resting on one leg and one hip slightly cocked upwards, whereas Europeans tend to stand straight with equal weight on both feet. Americans also tend to smile and be open to casual conversation or brief remarks with strangers whereas Europeans tend to have no display of emotion targeted at strangers. It’s interesting that these traits and certain aesthetics are dominant among many European nations.
I think of myself as international rather than American but I definitely derive a very large number of conscious and unconscious cultural axioms from American culture. Despite this, I do feel out of place when with solely Americans. I like to think that in the internet age (at least when living in a city) your geographical location doesn’t have to significantly alter your cultural makeup beyond childhood but I think there are unconscious axioms, the things that in conversation and basic exchanges are assumed as default, that are forced into you when living in a place. Your geographical location also forces its culture into you through the ideas that it deprives you of as much as the ideas it exposes you to. All this to say that one of my goals is to be an ‘international’ or ‘global’ citizen and my blindspot towards an entire modern culture shows me not only that I can be doing better but how many of the bases of my thinking and beliefs are derived from American culture; how many of my defaults have alternative options I’ve never been exposed to.
To tie this back to the Code Switch episodes, I’ve been thinking about how the internalized behaviours and preferences of your childhood impact your culture and the extent to which that culture can shift. Lot of questions stem from that simple idea. As with the Orientalism stuff from last time I have more questions than answers. I assure myself as much as you that I’ll get to an essay sometime soon where I try to give the various possibilities their due.
Lastly, I cannot express how much I want a Lakeith Stanfield joker.
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Did you know?
That blaxploitation movies exist because of the rise of television? When television became available to upper-middle-class families in suburbs, those families stopped going to cinemas in their nearest city. With the majority of their audience gone, cinemas had to figure out a way to keep in business so they looked to the demographics nearest them and blaxploitation movies best fit the bill.
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https://youtu.be/6iIZ9rnS6HU?t=2950
https://youtu.be/7JrCejRYGAM?t=3307
I’ve been watching Adam Savage’s one day builds quite a bit recently. They make very good background videos because you can never really miss something important but they’re simultaneously interesting enough to watch as your sole focus. Mostly though I think I like them because Adam Savage is a genuinely wonderful person. I watched Mythbusters a ton as a kid and I’m very glad to see my early love for one of my role models vindicated. As he’s thankful for Monty Python in the clip above, I’m thankful for him.
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For any Magritte appreciators.
https://twitter.com/JasonAdamK/status/1220814789519249409
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Music this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jSJKPJ3Cg
Thanks for reading this week’s edition of The Penny Post. I hope you got something out of it. If you think you know anyone that would find it valuable feel free to share it with them using this link: https://buttondown.email/thepennypost
I’d love to start writing for some people I’ve never personally known. Don’t forget you can discuss any of this week’s content with me through email or twitter. Until next week.
Matthew