watch Babygirl for the music!
Plus: C-suite newsletters, creamy dye prints, and socialized surveillance...
Thank you Courtney Kocak for the kind words about my “literary glow-up” hehe in her newsletter, The Bleeders, about Why Every Writer Needs a Newsletter.
I watched Babygirl over winter break, and what I was most struck by was that soundtrack! The needle drop into George Michael’s “Father Figure” was the sexiest cinematic experience in recent memory, for one thing (It’s worth seeing the movie for that and the rave scene alone, because otherwise I found Nicole Kidman rather wooden…we needed those parts in motion, plus Harris Dickinson’s lynx-like slouchiness, to bring her to life!)
But also, after leaving the theater, I realized why all those breathy and operatic tracks sounded so familiar: the musical score was done by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who you may know best as The White Lotus composer (remember this?). (Apparently he also scored pasta for a Barilla stunt last year). In any case, let us patiently await a third break-through film score (unless Smile 2 has it??) so we can get the inevitable charming New Yorker profile on our Breathy Sounds King.
Did you guys see this NYT piece back in December about media companies, including Semafor, pivoting to C-suite newsletters? It makes sense that the “newsletters as privileged information” model would evolve toward a kind of $$$$ Bloomberg terminal-y direction, and especially because no one likes to feel more like a spwecial inswider than those corporate expense account types. But Semafor’s foray is kind of interesting because theirs will be free—but it’s invitation only, and you have to be a chief executive. Think Opulent Tips, but for the PJ set? I guess I just assumed those types get their news delivered at breakfast, under one of those silver domed plate covers that the butler lifts up with a haughty little flourish.
Amidst the recent Share My Location discourse, I really loved this essay, “On the Grid,” by Zoë Hitzig from The Drift about social surveillance:
Technology companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy that our attitudes toward privacy more broadly have also been warped … Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly, monitoring and being monitored by loved ones through social media platforms like BeReal and location-sharing apps. It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors. Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.
If you’re in LA, you have until Feb. 1 to see the William Eggleston show at David Zwirner, which I loved for the deep hues and an almost painterly creaminess that the dye-transfer prints offered:
Finally, ICYMI, I gave some recent advice over on Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column re: boundary-less mothers, inviting work friends to a wedding, and an objectively bad husband situation. Write in with your most burning questions / let me be your father figure!!!!
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Pssst reminder that all classifieds are half off for January!
