2024-12-07 01:49:18
Michael Koresky begins his 2004 essay on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village with a question: Is allegory in American cinema dead? Koresky, perceptive in his diagnosis of the post-millennium American audience as a stunned and stunted one, entertained the possibility that a literate Hollywood cinema was waning because few adults in the country read. Twenty years later, I wonder if there’s also the added element that allegory is difficult to swallow, at once too obvious and too subtle, nothing we haven’t heard before and nothing we want to hear again.
It’s a dangerous time for a critic, in the wake of an event as seismic as a presidential election, to engage with art when people are trying to inject meaning into cultural objects that don’t have any. This impulse is understandable; most reactions, as I’ve seen people reassure one another online, are understandable in the wake of a traumatic return to a worse status quo. But even that characterization, trauma, feels false, hyperbolic not because there is no threat to what is coming, but because the therapy-speak that saturates so much discourse does everything but engage with, even combat the thing that occasions trauma. To endeavor to create a substantive allegory out of the social and political elements that cause so much distress at a given time, whether the so-called Trump era or post-9/11, seems foolish, naive, but these are the same descriptors that have stalked Shyamalan’s career from the very beginning.
2024-12-07 01:28:59
While I could count on zero hands the number of Chinese people I met in China who cared about baseball, I would need more than two to count the number of brick-and-mortar MLB stores I saw, simply by wandering around various cities like a normal human being. The first store I entered in Beijing explained some parts of this phenomenon: In China, as elsewhere outside the U.S., MLB is a streetwear brand, not a sports league. Subsequent research filled in the rest: MLB is licensed in East Asia by a South Korean retailer, which has successfully turned it into a billion-dollar enterprise in China.
This means that you can more easily find MLB-branded gear in more styles in China—handbags, puffer coats, eared beanies, puffier(?) baseball caps—than wandering around a city in the United States. The trade-off is extreme limitations in team selection. The streetwear brand's detachment from the actual sport of baseball and its attendant loyalties has odd side effects: In two separate stores, in two separate cities, I encountered window displays of mannequins wearing both Yankees and Red Sox gear. In response to this phenomenon, Barry Petchesky, Yankees fan, offered the following comments: "Oh [no]" and "They love that stupid heart shirt!!" I think it's a sweatshirt, Barry, but I agree with the sentiment. From Samer Kalaf, Red Sox fan: "The duality / Of fan."
2024-12-06 23:57:24
This season's version of the Denver Nuggets appear to be a team constructed for the sole purpose of answering the question: Is it possible for a team with the best player in the world, having the best season of his career, to be kind of depressing to watch? Twenty games into the season, the answer is, "Wow. I guess so."
The Nuggets lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers Thursday night, 126-114, in a game that neatly displayed the structural and spiritual issues that currently plague Denver. The Nuggets are 11-9 after winning a franchise-record 57 games last season, and there's no shortage of explanations for the slow start. Nikola Jokic and Aaron Gordon missing games hasn't helped, and neither has Jamal Murray playing like a whisper of his former self. Depth is an issue. The defense is an issue. There are a lot of issues. But in the wake of last night's loss, all of those potential answers feel like red herrings.
2024-12-06 22:01:44
Ed Hardy's historic tattoo parlor is closing. A lot more than that stands to be lost.
2024-12-06 06:54:00
If you're a Pal-level subscriber at Defector, you get access to a premium weekday newsletter called The Cipher, which has a recap of the blog day, links to other sites, and extra takes and bits from staffers. You can change your newsletter preferences or upgrade your subscription at the My Account page. Here's a piece from the newsletter archives.
I thought everyone knew The Popcorn Trick. But it has recently come to my attention that some people were unaware of The Popcorn Trick. Thus, I will explain The Popcorn Trick.
2024-12-06 05:32:37
It shouldn't be a strange thing to talk football—like, really get after it, talk about it like you really care about it—on a sports podcast, and I suppose on the merits it isn't. Drew, for his part and to his credit, is never self-conscious about it; he really cares about the Vikings like that, and he really follows the fine points of the sport like that, so this is a very natural way for him to talk and be. I am less that way, both because I care about my team of choice so much less and because football is a sport I've always kept at something like arm's length. So it was strange, both during the recording of this week's NFL-heavy episode and in listening back to the finished product, to hear someone who sounds so much like me so obviously enjoying Talking Football like this. Can you be highly interested in something that you're pretty sure you don't entirely like? Given how much I have written about American politics, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the answer is yes. But I think, here, the proof is very much in the podding.
