Discern the Best and Worst In:

• touchy filmmakers
• gouging streamers
• best pictures
• search engines
• poetry
• being gay and stoned!

We judge scb0212 and Miller very worthy in their submissions. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The Guardian‘s Dalya Alberge reports on a critic’s book that Stanley Kubrick blocked from publishing that will now see the light of day, almost 55 years after its completion:

Filippo Ulivieri, a leading Kubrick scholar, said: “It’s quite shocking to read the correspondence between Kubrick’s lawyers and Neil’s publisher … Kubrick wanted a book that praised his films and Neil’s book was not like that. His films up to that point were reviewed positively – although some critics, especially in New York, had been critical. So he needed a book that was completely positive. “With its down to earth, craft-­oriented analysis of the films, would [Hornick’s] book have chipped away at the myth of the all-powerful, never-failing director?”

Phillip Vance Smith II writes for Film Comment on how private companies gouge incarcerated people like himself through their moviewatching programs:

The high cost of entertainment falls on families of the incarcerated more than us because we can’t earn much money behind bars. Most jobs in North Carolina prisons pay 40¢, 70¢, or $1 per day—so a streaming bundle could cost a prisoner two weeks’ worth of income, or more. We simply can’t afford the price of entertainment. The astronomical fees that prison-tech companies charge are aimed at our families, who want to help us while we are incarcerated…I rarely watch films on the tablet. I can’t afford to. I earn 40¢ a day as a dorm janitor. I can’t sacrifice a stick of deodorant to watch a bad miniseries called Knights of Bloodsteel (2009).

In honor of last 4/20 weekend, Naveen Kumar offers a list of 7 movies that are gayer when you’re high at Them:

What is it about the wild goose chase that makes it an ideal narrative to blaze to? Tangerine is perfect at any time and under any circumstances, but the adventures of Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are especially delightful when paired with a puff. Maybe because the chill of it balances out Sin-Dee’s complete lack of chill as she turns Los Angeles upside down in search of her cheating boyfriend and pimp Chester (James Ronsone). Director Sean Baker’s famously iPhone-shot film is both a riotous rollercoaster and a rare instance of unflinching, unglossed storytelling about trans women and sex work. We’ll take any excuse to revisit these friends and their fierce commitment to each other — and to the truth.

Bright Wall/Dark Room celebrates the movies of 1999 – here’s Candace Jane Opper’s attempt to remember American Beauty in the context of that year:

American Beauty makes some grandiose statements, but this seems to be its fundamental cautionary tale: don’t let the shiny trappings of the bourgeoisie distract you from, well, fill in the blank as you see fit (beauty, truth, happiness, etc.). For the purposes of this essay, I’m going with the 90s holiest value—authenticity, the natural antidote to selling out, which we all understood to be the greatest sin. “We all,” in this case, refers loosely to the Gen Xers and elder millennials toward whom all pop culture was pointed in the nineties. We weren’t necessarily the audience for American Beauty; we were just the audience in general.

At Dirt magazine, David Hill takes a long, grim look at the freelancer’s life:

Writers come in all shapes and sizes, in many and multiple disciplines, and at various points along the ladder of economic and social class. Writing is work, like anything else, and as such it can provide riches for some, and peanuts for most. Freelance writing, which I suppose is the purest form of the writing life, where one can simply write whatever interests them and sell it to whomever will publish it, is a life of precarity. Just as I fell for the romance of a life as a swashbuckling labor agitator in my twenties, I had fallen for a similar bullshit idea about the romance of the life of letters. The freelance writer is no different than any other gig worker in our fractured, dystopian modern economy. We only eat what we kill.

Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At documents the man who killed Google search:

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.  These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

And for The Paris Review, Kate Dwyer interviews poet Anne Carson about translation, creation and getting past cliche:

KD: You and [Carson’s husband] Currie are fans of John Cage, who talks about eliminating the ego from art. I’m still thinking about the John Cage epigraph that appears in your 2016 collection Float—“Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.”

AC: That pertains to writers because they tend to have an accumulated store of memories and choices, which they call their autobiography, and then they just recycle that endlessly as they’re writing. You’ve just got to get out of that.

KD: In the writing world, particularly in and around M.F.A. programs, there’s a lot of discussion around things like “character” and “perspective,” the mechanics of narrative. Do you think about “craft” in these terms?

AC: Never. I don’t think about it. I think people should just quit that stuff. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.