Reading, watching, and listening in March 2024
Highlights of the books, movies, and music1 I’ve enjoyed over the past month. The first entry in a hopefully recurring series.
Reading ¶
No fiction this month, sadly, but I have a handful of novels toward the front of my reading queue.
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Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan. I actually started this back in January and regret not finishing it sooner – it’s fantastic2. Kernighan presents an overview of the design and evolution of Unix3, weaving in workplace anecdotes and corporate history along the way. My favorite chapter, on Seventh Edition Unix, emphasized the power of domain-specific languages. Yacc and Lex stood out in particular, as they rapidly begot even more little languages and tools. There’s also plenty of wisdom in this book about what a successful research operation looks like, on both organizational and interpersonal levels. Reflecting on the legacy4 of Bell Labs, Kernighan had this to say:
The big secret to doing good research is to hire good people, make sure there are interesting things for them to work on, take a long view, and then get out of the way. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but Bell Labs research generally did this well.
Kernighan is a lovely technical writer whose prose I’ve enjoyed in the venerable K&R and the more recent GOPL. I’ve already picked up a copy of his AWK book’s new second edition and it’s waiting on my shelf for when I find the time.
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100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings. Though I’ve been a loyal watcher of Jeopardy! for years (and a great fan of Ken’s hosting so far), this is the first of his books I’ve read. And it’s a fun one, taking us on a tongue-in-cheek tour of various historical cultures’, religions’, and fictional franchises’ takes on what happens after we die. It’s far from a reference volume, but it did make me want to read The Divine Comedy and watch Curb.
Watching ¶
Now that the Oscars are in the rear-view mirror, I can stop pretending to care about what came out last year and instead watch what I want to watch.
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Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985). Horror is not really my genre, but comedy horror might be. I’m a sucker for goofy practical effects and this movie has those turned up to eleven. Best watched with a hooting-and-hollering-at-the-screen kind of friend group.
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Dune: Part Two (Villeneuve, 2024). Brilliant adaptation with a Jaws-tier sandworm to boot. If studios keep giving Denis Villeneuve massive budgets to make sci-fi movies, I will keep purchasing tickets.
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The History of the Minnesota Vikings (Bois, 2023). You might think you have to be a Vikings fan to enjoy a nine-hour documentary about them, but you really don’t (I just happen to be one). Best sports doc since The Last Dance.
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I worked through the first three discs in the Criterion Collection’s “World of Wong Kar-wai” box set. As Tears Go By (1988), Wong’s debut, sticks out from the rest as less stylistic and more narratively straightforward. It’s still good though. Days of Being Wild (1990) feels more on track5, and it sets up a cinematic universe of sorts for some of his other movies. Then there’s Chungking Express (1994), which is essentially a perfect movie. I’ve seen it many times but never before as beautiful as this time. The new restoration is incredible, especially compared to the DVD with burned-in subtitles I first saw it on. Though they updated the translation of Cop 223’s voicemail password from “love you for ten thousand years” to “undying love.” I prefer the old one, but then again I don’t speak Cantonese.
Listening ¶
- Johann Sebastian Bach
- St. Matthew Passion (Herreweghe). Lyrical Lenten listening. “Erbarme dich” in particular is overwhelming.
- Brandenburg Concertos (Pinnock). An authoritative recording and for good reason. A lot of the newer stuff feels too fast.
- Ryuichi Sakamoto6
- YMO’s Solid State Survivor
- BTTB. One minute Sakamoto is evoking Satie’s Gnossiennes and the next it sounds like we’re in the movie Stalker. Incredible stuff.
- Playing the Piano
- Joe Hisaishi – The Boy and the Heron soundtrack.
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Maybe in the future I could include especially good short form writing, YouTube videos, or podcasts. I just don’t want this to get too crowded yet.
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My only gripe is its print quality, for which I blame Kindle Direct Publishing, the rainforest company’s print-on-demand service.
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Kernighan notes that as the labs slowly declined through acquisitions and restructuring, the most common destination to which researchers jumped ship was Google. It’s notable that both AT&T and Google have wielded monopoly power (in telephony and web search, respectively) and used the consequent riches to fund some truly groundbreaking research. Lately it feels like antitrust regulators are less asleep-at-the-wheel than usual. Are Google’s research divisions destined for a similar fate? Even without regulation, Google seems to have far less of a “long view” than peak Bell Labs.
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And it was the start of his collaboration with Christopher Doyle.
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Figured it was a good time to dive back into his music, as last week marked a year since his death.