It's not as hard as sell as his earlier albums: this fits into more conventional and comfortable genres (not for nothing, people have been comparing this album to Elliot Smith, where people usually don't have many points of comparison to work with.)

Kendrick Lamar's, as well (or at least Thundercat et al.) He samples it on "Hood Politics."

Love it! There's something so charming and terrifying about Robertson's art that the song captures perfectly.

This would be my admittedly weird top 5:

The letter they sent to the German government comparing themselves to Jews under the Third Reich was pretty amazing, in a "how awesomely tasteless can your p.r. strategy be?" kinda way.

Agreed, but it's odd to give that to Tarr, since he's just filming the scene from Krasznahorkai's Sátántangó, the cat abuse in which is plenty awful already.

Heh, you'd be surprised. History is full of the very intelligent being very dumb for a very long time.

I just finished reading Gilbert Seldes' The Stammering Century, about the various cults, messiahs, and movements that came out of 19th century America, and one point he keeps hammering home is that public intellectuals were just as likely to get swept up in nonsense as anyone else. He even leads off the second part of…

This is a good time to be reading Russian fiction; publishers like NYRB are digging up stuff that's either never been available or very hard to get (like Krzhizhanovsky, Grossman, and of course Serge). If there are genres/styles you're interested in, I'd be happy to offer suggestions.

I've not only read it, I've taught it for a couple of years. So there are dozens of people, at least in my circle, who've read it. The Strugatskys are tremendous: you should really check them out.

Of in-competition films, I've also seen "Stars of Russian Ballet", which is a good historical document if you're a fan of ballet, but not much else. It's effectively a clip show of Swan Lake, Bakhchisarai Fountain, and Flames of Paris. If anyone's interested, you can watch the whole thing here. It's a fine movie, and…

Perfect.

An exclusive from "snatched off the floor and not yet smelly enough to go in the hamper."

Here's my awesome story: I accidentally walked through the red carpet premiere of this movie on my way out of seeing It Follows. I kept walking. The end.

Oh, I was definitely not criticizing her. She's the best.

D'oh, you're right. Edited.

Things I loved about this episode:

The actress who plays Xan gets her best showcase here, too: that amazing pivot during the bird-watching reveal, where she's both horrified at her friends' likely reactions and elated to share it with her mom? Golden.

I think this was my least favorite episode. It's great that they're trying to giving Kimmy more depth, but she's so off-putting in here (to the point of unmotivated meanness) that I found it harder to get invested in the story, though it did wrap up relatively sweetly.

Some aspects of this show can be so uneven, but line-by-line, it's generating some of the best and most memorable exchanges of any show I can remember in such a short time. The 2090 burn made me laugh so hard I had to pause the show.