Look at the Next Steps Toward:

• stardom
• canonization
• preservation
• innovation
• good porno music!

Get some shades for Conor Crockford, scb0212 and Miller to protect from their blinding contributions. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

At Vulture, Madeline Leung Coleman hosts a debate between Matt Zoller Seitz and Angelica Jade Bastién about the star power of Zendaya:

[AJB:] With her performances, I think of Katharine Hepburn’s quote about Meryl Streep: “click, click, click” — you can hear the wheels turning. It always feels like I’m watching someone play-act in their older sister’s clothes. Tashi is a tricky role because she’s really just the complication in these two men’s relationship, which seems more important to the film, emotionally, than she is. I don’t think she’s a strong gravitational force. Watching Dune, I kept thinking that she and Timothée Chalamet come across as besties, not people who actually want to fuck each other. She doesn’t bring sexual heat. Sensuality is really hard to play, and we are living in a very un-sensual era in general. I think people are feral, horny, and sad, and they’re not getting fucked. And I can tell by their movie taste.

As a retrospective opens on his work, Imogen Sara Smith talks about getting introduced to the work of Hiroshi Shimizu:

Descriptors such as “overlooked,” “forgotten,” and “unsung” have been attached to Shimizu so often by western writers that he can almost be said to be famous for being less famous than he should be. His low profile is sometimes attributed to his being overshadowed by his exact contemporary Yasujiro Ozu (both were born in 1903), though Ozu was an avowed admirer of his colleague at Shochiku, the studio where Shimizu worked throughout the 1930s and the war years before striking out on his own. Kenji Mizoguchi declared, “People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius.”

Chris Person describes his journey into media preservation and makes the case for you to join him in Aftermath:

I don’t think everyone needs to be capturing and encoding media. I don’t even think that all media has to be preserved. This is a complicated skill to learn and requires a lot of time, resources and energy to do correctly. But preservation is not just a mechanical act, it’s a moral position. It’s about being actively aware of media that isn’t publicly available, and to contribute in some small way, either by supporting small, boutique releases or directly contributing to the transfer of lost media. This only gets better if we help each other, if we exchange notes, and if we make the resources needed to do this kind of archiving as available to every community as possible.

At his blog, artist David Palumbo describes why generative AI does not replace artistic intent:

It has become standard to describe A.I. as a tool.  I argue that this framing is incorrect.  It does not aid in the completion of a task.  It completes the task for you.  A.I. is a service.  You cede control and decisions to an A.I. in the way you might to an independent contractor hired to do a job that you do not want to or are unable to do.  This is important to how using A.I. in a creative workflow will influence your end result.  You are, at best, taking on a collaborator.  And this collaborator happens to be a mindless average aggregate of data.

And finally, a catchy song whose origins took the investigative powers of thousands of Redditors has finally been located in a 1986 adult movie. Ben Beaumont-Thomas at The Guardian explains:

The full version of the song, credited to [composer Christopher] Booth and his brother Philip, can only be heard alongside the movie in question, accompanied by carnal sound effects, leading to hundreds of requests for an original version to be released. A re-edited, non-pornographic version without the sound effects – but still in low fidelity – has been created by admirers in the meantime. […] The song was part of a wider community known as “lostwave”, with members dedicated to identifying forgotten pieces of popular culture. “We live in a time when knowledge is freely available to us and we can consume music without much restriction,” one of the moderators of the Everyone Knows That subreddit, Bas, told the Guardian of the appeal of lostwave. “Music that is lost in pre-internet times is likely very interesting to younger people, because it’s such a foreign thing to them, to not be able to simply look up the song.”