This Week You Will Find Conflict With:

• streaming services
• the natural world
• jazz notes
• fight!
• fight! fight! fight!

We raise the gloved hands of scb0212, Casper, and Miller for contributing this week. 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 Screen Slate, Ayanna Dozier surveys the ongoing problem of film preservation and archiving, and how streaming is not the savior it was described as:

The actor Kristen Schaal recently bemoaned the removal of The Mysterious Benedict Society (2021–2022) from Disney+, tweeting a request for help ripping the show from the platform so that she might one day share the series with her daughter. Schaal’s appeal reminds us that personal, often informal, archives fill in the blanks of film history. For example, the legendary former Third World Newsreel archivist and programmer Pearl Bowser’s personal prints are the reason we have a restored director’s print of Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) and much of the work of early Black filmmakers in Hollywood like Oscar Micheaux. These clandestine channels of insiders sharing prints, ripped files, and physical media is often how we come to know of the myriad counter-histories of cinema.

For Vulture, Nicholas Quah does a deep dive on the process and popularity behind the History Channel’s Alone:

But as much as the show celebrates ingenuity, it is equally about the galaxy of ways a human can fail. As winter sets in, the contest settles into a grinding rhythm. Small accomplishments, like starting a fire or catching a single fish, become increasingly cathartic. Medical checks, a driving force for the show’s drama, happen more frequently. This is when Alone takes on a sheen of body horror. Competitors can voluntarily tap out of the game, but they can also be pulled from competition by producers for being frostbitten, dentally compromised, constipated, food-poisoned, or simply starving to the point of potentially irreversible bodily damage. In the punishing cold, the beauty of the natural world gives way to a menace that feels closer to The Blair Witch Project with prize money.

Mark Richardson looks back at Keith Jarrett’s legendary solo improvisations in the 1970s for Pitchfork:

The early passages of “Pt. 2” are a fascinating exploration of thick, earthy gospel chords, every one of which seems to involve all 10 of Jarrett’s fingers extending the root notes up to heaven. Where he typically uses such material as the basis for a rhythmic vamp, in the first few minutes here he sounds as if he’s trying to wrestle them into shape, discovering their harmonic contours and then figuring out how to craft it into a new song. Eventually, the chords congeal into a syncopated beat, which he wallows in while exploring how he can subvert the bounce with a pretty melodic digression. Here and there, this passage, like many of Jarrett’s blues/gospel vamps, makes me think of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy,” the primordial banger that so many children internalized before they had ever heard the word “jazz.” And there’s a childlike delight in bopping your head and moving your body, twisting it into the kinds of shapes that we imagine him adopting as well as those colorful two-dimensional figures we absorbed from the television.

Lauren Collee interviews critic/new screenwriter Nick Pinkerton about writing the young lead of his new movie:

While [Pinkerton] acknowledges she’s a ‘rather shifty’ protagonist, he maintains that her indifference to tragedy is true of the experience of being young. ‘I mean, I can remember being 13 or 14 when the Oklahoma City bombing happened, or a senior in high school when the Columbine shootings happened. And, you know, maybe I’m just a completely broken lost soul, but it did not affect me the way that an event like that would have affected me five or 10 years later – in part because I just don’t think you’re really equipped to even understand the weight of that sort of thing, and that there is a kind of amoral giddiness that a lot of young people have, where it’s kind of exciting.’

Despite dodging a legitimate fight with a fellow rich idiot, Elon Musk still takes some licks courtesy Hamilton Nolan at The Guardian:

Fights can reveal a person’s character. That would be Musk’s worst fear. As frivolous as all of this jawing has been, it is very much in keeping with a lifetime of acting like a selfish brat and getting away with it. This is a man who is a certified illegal union buster despite having more money than almost anyone on earth. This is also a man who bought Twitter for $30bn more than it was worth and then proceeded to use the company only to display how easily he can be duped into falling for conspiracy theories and unfunny memes. Neither statesman nor business genius, Musk is graceless enough to covet public approval of his manhood but too craven to deserve it. Scientists could not design a man more likely to get whipped in a fair fight.

And finally, in other lame-ass fighting news, Jacobin‘s Jacob Debets discusses the bullshit trying to make slapfighting the next MMA:

Whereas medical professionals have decried slap fighting as “glorified traumatic brain injury masquerading as an athletic competition,” and cultural critics have asked whether televised knife fighting might be next, White has determinedly shucked off criticisms. Arguing that slap fighting is inherently popular and pointing to investments he claims the promotion has made to ensure fighter safety, he’s repeatedly compared the moral panic around his latest venture to the John McCain–led push in the mid-1990s to get mixed martial arts (MMA) banned in the United States and kicked off cable. A sober analysis of these claims, however, leads to some very different conclusions: namely that slap fighting, by conventional measures, is not particularly popular; it sure as hell isn’t safe; and comparisons to MMA are disingenuous. So, what’s behind Power Slap? As it turns out, monopoly, regulatory capture, and good old-fashioned hucksterism.