Book review: "Fathoms: The World in the Whale" by Rebecca Giggs

 To put it most simply, this book is about whales - but it's so much more than that. The writing is so lyrical and almost poetic that it feels like reading poetry sometime. Poetry with great whale information!

-There was a chapter at the end all about how in the last few years that scientists have opened up the stomachs of dead whales and the amount of plastic that they have found in them is STAGGERING. I immediately wanted wanted to get up and recycle everything that was nearby.  There was one whale that had 88 plastic rice sacks (empty) in it's stomach. And so much fishing nets and fishing line. There are some seagulls in Australia that 8% of their bodyweight is made up of plastic. If that was a 137 pound human that would be 11 pounds of plastic in their stomach. It was heartbreaking.

- One of my favorite parts of the book was when they talked about the sounds that whales made. This was one of my favorite facts from the book: " Songs sung by humpbacks off Puerto Rico, for instance, would be heard by whales in waters near Newfoundland some 1615 miles away; the equivalent to a shout on the streets of Moscow  being made-out, whisper quiet, by people in London". How is that even real life? I love it. 

-Livestock (cows and pigs) make up 60% of the earth's mammals. (Not much room left for other things, like whales)

-You know how the Germans have a word for everything? (And sometimes it's 16 letters long?) I learned another one in this book "heiliger Schauer": the shiver of prey sensing a predator's gaze.

- You know that sometimes if you are threatening to beat the crap out of someone you can refer to it as "whaling on someone?" The reason that it's called that is because police batons used to be made of whalebone. Which is the part of the whales mouth that they use to strain krill.

Also, I love this font

Starting the year with a DNF...and some German vocabulary

 So, starting the year with a DNF isn't maybe the strongest start to 2021. Or...maybe it says "I value my reading energy in 2021, be gone things that don't make me super excited!"

The thing is, I was very pumped for this book : "A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany." Right up my alley, right? The bummer of the book is that it's really more about 2 faith healing hucksters operating in a super vulnerable time in post-WWII Germany. There's a lot of interesting information out there about how people deal mentally in countries after wars and uprisings but this book doesn't really touch on that and that was one of the ways that I was kinda let down.

But you know where this book didn't let me down?  Ridiculous German words. They are long and ridiculous and all of them look like untreatable venereal diseases. I found some fun ones in this book. 

-Schicksalsgemeinschaft - term to describe a community supposedly bound together by a shared experience of fate.

-Paragraphenschwierigkeiten - red tape! (Or, literally, paragraph problems)

- Teufelsaustreibungen - devil expulsions. (This book says that devil expulsions are what Protestants say and Catholics say exorcisms which...I don't know if that's true)

(This one wasn't in the book but Garrett and I have talked about this one. Also if that is spelled wrong please direct your corrections to him).

- Vergangenheitsbeweiltigung - This is when you have guilt about the Holocaust even if you were born after it happened and had nothing to do with it.

I hope that some of you had "learn some obscure German words" as a new year's resolution.

Book Review: "Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World" by Matt Alt

 Holy cow Japan...you guys have a lot to unpack. You are a complicated country.

 My friend Garrett gave me this book for Christmas this year because we often discuss Japan and their place in history (generally WWII) and the unusual (to us) societal quirks that may have come from the shock of the nuclear bombs and the upsetting of their empire. If this is something that interests you I can't possibly recommend Dan Carlin's podcast and his series on the Supernova in the East enough. 

Also a beautiful independent theater in the Milwaukee area has started doing Anime April and Miyazaki March so I (reluctantly at first) went to a couple of movies the last few years during those times with Garrett and our friend Gage and while a couple of them weren't my favorite I have enjoyed far more than I have disliked. Totoro, you cute sonofabitch.

This is a lot of words to basically say that, before reading this book I would say "I mean, I dabble in a few Japanese things but that's really about it". Now that I have read this book I realize that I have: sang karaoke, know who Hello Kitty is, almost ran over people staring at their phones playing PokemonGo and played with a Tamagotchi I guess I know more about Japanese pop culture than I thought I did. And I bet you do too! 

As usual, as follows are things that I found interesting or questions that I have after reading this book.

-For a time, and maybe still now, women were expected to graduate from college, work for a couple years, and then get married and quit their job. That's what happened to the woman who designed Hello Kitty did. And then the company was kind of like "uhhhhh so should we just let hello kitty die out even though it's really popular because we don't know what girls/women want?". The assistant to the original designer bucked tradition, stayed unamarried and at her job and became Hello Kitty's human "manager" and helped keep the company out of bankruptcy and maintaining and worldwide phenom. Hello Kitty makes a half billion dollars in revenue at year. The company that makes her is the 8th biggest licensor in the world - ahead of Pokemon, the NFL and Playboy.

-The guy who created Pokemon loved playing outdoors as a child. However, one day his favorite fishing spot suddenly had a new building built there, an arcade. He went in, became obsessed with Space Invaders and it changed the direction of his life. The irony on this kills me because a lot of little kids probably were yelled at by their parents to put down their Pokemon stuff and GO PLAY OUTSIDE. Though I bet the PokemonGo everyone goes outside and wanders looking for invisible critters kind of balances the scales back. I've also decided that Lickitungs is the grossest sounding Pokemon name. 

- Prewar Japan was like, a huge producer and connoisseur of children's toys. This obviously screeched to a halt during the war. 6 months after the war a man who was a toy maker before the war started collecting the tins that occupying Americans trashed (we are preeeettty great at generating trash) and made little toy American Jeeps. They were a sensation. It was one of the first little luxuries that Japan had after the war. 

- There are a lot of pages devoted to Dragonball Z, early origins of anime (RocketBoy) and how it came to America, some super shady stuff on the internet, the invention of the Walkman and karaoke machines. 

Most of the information on this book was completely new to me, so it made reading a little slow going and a lot to digest but I learned so much! If you have an interest in pop culture this would be a great book for you!

Book review: "What Are You Looking At? The Surprising, Shocking and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art" by Will Gompertz

I don't know how I got SO lucky that I read two books that almost back to back that I really really enjoyed. I'd give it an incredibly enthusiastic 4.5 stars. 

So the author of this book was the curator of the Tate in London, if there is someone who can try to make sense of modern art it's him. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting, with it's seemingly random drips and swirls and think "This is so dumb, my 5 year old could do this". (First of all, it's not dumb, second of all no they couldn't and no they haven't so stop saying things like that) Then this might be the book for you. One of the most amazing things about this book is that the inside of the covers contains a map, and it looks like a London Tube map but instead of finding Piccadilly Circus and Islington, you find Pollack and Monet and Damien Hirst and how they all fit together and who leads to who. I love it. I want it blown up and on my wall.

There's so much information in this book that I don't even know how I'm going to condense it, but whatever that's the job so here's my effort :)

• Many impressionists, specifically Manet and Monet, were influenced by Japanese wood block prints. Japan was just coming out of it's self isolation and this was some of the first art anyone in the world people saw coming out of Japan. You miiiiiiight know this one. Mostly the influence was in perspective.

• I really thought the couple of pages on Degas were super interesting. He was the most non-Impressionist Impressionist of the bunch. He didn't like painting en plein air, he was meticulous about his prep work and sketching, he cared more about his subject's movements then the lighting. You may know Degas from things like ...
• 

• Seurat was El Capitan of color theory and pointillism. Though Da Vinci did it first because #GOAT.  Pointilisim means that you use dots not strokes and the dots don't touch. You may know Seurat from such things like...

Here's a quote that I liked: "The truth is that abstract art is a bit of a mystery; one that plays havoc with out rational brains if we believe paintings and sculptures need to tell a story. It is a complex idea that is typically expressed in a simple way....subsequent generations of artists eliminated yet more visual information in an attempt to capture atmospheric light (Impressionism), accentuate the emotive qualities of color (Fauvism), or look at a subject from multiple viewpoints (Cubism). "

Here's another quote I like, it's in reference to museum curators describing art in a kinda pompous and incomprehensible way sometime because  they are trying to cater to a broad constituency. "It's a fact of life: rock stars trash hotels, sportsmen and women get injured, art folks talk bollocks". 

Rene Margritte is one of my favorite painters, and when I explain him to people I'm like "I like his stuff because if you glance at it everything looks fine but then you look closer and things are not fine". The author says "(he) inhabits a world of the everyday and the mundane where the ordinary is extraordinary-in a very bad way... he was the prince of paranoia, the doyen of dread". There are so many great examples of this, but this is the picture that they highlight in the book. Take a long, long look at it the worse it gets.

 

There's a discussion of a painting by an artist I'd never heard of before. The artist's name is Marcus Harvey and the painting is called Myra. It's a portrait of a British woman who killed some children and instead of brushstrokes the painting is made of palm prints....of children. The actual face I made when I read that. 🤯

Anyway, I loved this book, I was massively entertained, I learned so much.

Book Review: "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman

 I really liked this book but I felt like it was a little bit all over the place. The general theme is that humans are innately good. What's kind of weird about this book is that he says that and then he talks a lot about really garbage things that people have done (like the Stanford prison experiment or that experiment where people shock someone that they can't see even if they are screaming, and the like). The book is more like a series of essays then a cohesive nonfiction book.

So, as usual - here's a list of things that I found interesting.

- Going all the way back in history, even with a lot of training, war combatants are incredibly reluctant to shoot another human. During WWII only 15-25 percent of soldiers fired their weapons. There's also a stat somewhere that I couldn't re-find that said in WWI that the amount of soldiers killed in hand to hand combat was in the single digits. It was almost always long distance killing (mortar shells shot from across no man's land, grenades, bombs dropped by plans, etc.) We truly don't want to hurt people even when our lives depend on it. And the reason that we do fight? Not for ideas or presidents or territory, it's to protect the person standing next to us. 

- When people talk about the terror of unchecked human nature they talk about Lord of the Flies. Which, I get. The thing is the guy that wrote that book was a teacher who HATED children. And was in general a pessimistic and heavily depressed person. Also a teacher. A teacher that hates kids? Greattttt....

-Did you know that humans are the only animals that blush?

-There was a lot of talk about neanderthals and such in this book but honestly I always think that stuff is super boring so I don't have much to expound on from that part

- 99% of Denmark's Jews survived WWII. A nazi who didn't agree with what was happening (Greg Ferdinand Duckwitz) warned the Dutch government that a raid was coming in two days to collect their jews. The country hid them, helped them flee, refused to give up their neighbors, escaped routes organized, Danish police refused to cooperate. It honestly feels like a miracle in a mass of terrible things. This was a unique event in WWII. (There were some countries that gave up their "undesirables" the second the nazis walked through their borders - looking at you a couple far eastern european countries)

-There's a section on Kitty Genovese. If you've ever heard about bystander effect and Kitty's murder I suggest listening to this FANTASTIC podcast episode. I always cry at the end. 

Wow, that got long.

Book review: "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Timothy Snyder

 This book is noteworthy for many reasons but on a personal level it's because this is my first 5 star read of 2020! People use different scales for rating books, but for me, a 5 is pretttty rare. That means I'm very excited to share this book with you!

If the name Timothy Snyder sounds familiar maybe it's because you have seen him on the blog before. Bloodlands (review here) is about the countries that are located between Russia and Germany and how, almost without fail, that's a sucky place to be. Black Earth (review here) is one of the most elegantly written and well researched books about the Holocaust I have ever read. It seems like Tim has taken all of the knowledge gleaned from these two books, and other books that he has written (so many on my TBR) and put them into this slim, pocket sized book.

The book has, as you may have guessed from the title - 20 lessons from the 20th century. Each very short chapter has a short introduction paragraph and then the chapter.  Some chapters include "Be Wary of Paramilitaries" - "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and carrying torches...the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come". "Believe in Truth" -"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom...If nothing is true than all is spectacle". 

There's also a chapter entitled "Remember professional ethics" which I'm like I don't really know what that means. Turns out, what it means is that no tyrannical regime operates on their own, they need obedient civil servants. Take for example - trains were essential to the Nazi regime to move their people AND victims of their terrible practices throughout their occupied territories. Did you know that no train company was ever persecuted for their collaboration? If a couple of train companies said "absolutely not, you are not using our train tracks or train cars to take these people to these camps throughout Europe" things could have looked VERY DIFFERENT. There's a reason that so many resistance groups blew up train tracks.

This book provoked a really emotional response in me, that was a little surprising to me. When you get familiar with a few different low points in history it's easy to look at the people who were terribly effected by those incidents and go "why didn't they get out while they could? How could they not see how bad it would get?" . This book is kind of a roadmap of things to look for before things get bad, and, instructions on how to prevent it from getting there in the first place. It's also very easy to put a lot of trust in our long standing institutions that "that can't happen here, we have all of these things in place" or "this can't happen, someone will stop it". That person and that institution needs to be you if the time calls for it. "Be as courageous as you can" the last lesson tells us.

Milwaukee Film Festival 2020 - Movie Round Up

It's the most wonderful tiiiiiiime of the yeeeeeeeeeear! It's Milwaukee Film Festival. I was worried that the Film Festival was going to be another thing that the damn pandemic took from us. The good news is that MFF did an amazing job turning the whole thing virtual. It was my first year as a member of Milwaukee Film and it felt really good to support such a wonderful cause in such a weird time. What made it even better was that I won a contest and the prize was two free vouchers for a movie AND a pound of coffee from a local coffee shop. (I'm not a coffee drinker so I handed that over to my two Film Fest Viewing Buddies aka Garrett and Maggie). Part of the film fest that I love the most is the "well it's 8pm on a Tuesday night and I'm getting in the car and driving to a small, cool, theater in downtown Milwaukee to watch a documentary on competitive chicken showing in New Zealand. I won't get home until midnight 30 and I'll be trash for the first part of the next day but I have 0 REGRETS". The good thing is that film fest is just as magical from my couch in the suburbs with pizza and root beer floats because the company and the movies are still amazing.

Let's talk about movies, shall we?

 Stage: The Culinary Internship - A documentary about people going through a very intense cooking internship at a famous restaurant in Spain. It's some very serious gastronomy. Like, where you aren't particularly sure that the food is actually food because it's so fancy. The idea was interesting but there wasn't much context about the restaurant and I'd have liked if they would have gotten more in-depth with the interns. 3/5 stars.

Shiva Baby - As a Milwaukee Film member one of the perks during film fest is that you get access to a "Super Secret Members Only Screening" (actual name). What's super fun about the screening is that it's only available for one day AND you don't know what it is until you literally start the movie. This movie is about a young Jewish woman who is about to graduate college and feeling aimless and uninspired. She goes to sit shiva for a distant family friend and runs into her sugar daddy...who is married...and has a baby.... This movie was tense and awkward and there were many times where we were yelling "JUST RUN OUT THE DOOR. JUST GO". A fun thing about the movie was that the soundtrack sounded like a horror movie soundtrack. If you closed your eyes and just listened to the music you would think that there was about to be a body to be found in a basement, not a girl stress eating bagels and avoiding weird looks across the living room of a near stranger. 3.5/5 stars. 

Shorts: The Best Damn Fu*#king Midnight Shorts Ever. Sh*t.  (Again, this is the actual name.) The midnight shorts selection is a legendary part of Milwaukee Film. It's a collection of the weirdest, scariest, freakiest, "did I actually take mushrooms and forget" short films that the fest has to offer. My favorites were: "The Motorist" - we see a man get welded into a car after refusing to leave it in a weird ancient ritual. "Diabla"" - a woman gets revenge on her rapist with the help other other women who have been in similar circumstances.  "Little Miss Fate" - a weird, animated short that talks about the literal hand of fate. Also talking genitals. It was weird but not in a completely unheartwarming way. "Regrets" has had me checking the corners of dark rooms before I go to bed since I've seen it. 3.8/5 stars.

Lapsis - A man takes up a job laying cable (this is really a stand in for things like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc) in an effort to make enough money to treat his brother's sickness (it's like a constant fatigue due to the crush of everyday life). But as we all know, when things seem to go to be true, they usually are and that is the case here. Our lovable, slightly oafish main character bumbles his way through a world he doesn't really understand and unwittingly helps start a revolution. Side bar - if the robots from Boston Dynamics makes you cringe this will also make you cringe. Maggie and I were disappointed by the lack of true scifi or horror from the Fest this year, but between the shorts and his movie it helped scratch that itch for us. 4/5 stars.

Black Bear - Maggie and Garrett both had this on their lists of films they were interested in watching, so we went for it. I agreed because Garrett said Kit Harrington was in it. Garrett was wrong, it's just a guy that looked kind of like Kit Harrington. Audrey Plaza is the star of this movie as a screenwriter/actress who goes on a retreat out in rural New York. There's a big twist after the most AWKWARD dinner of all time. I liked the format of this one, and I liked Audrey Plaza's performance more than I anticipated, but I don't think this is going to be one that I really mull over for a long time after I've seen it. 3/5 stars.

Coded Bias - This movie is basically about artificial intelligence and it's flaws and how because of who it is developed by and the fact that it's still a developing field, it's got some racist tendencies. A great thing about this movie was how incredibly well women were represented with who they interview. A lot of the things in this documentary were pretty infuriating (do we have a constitutional right to avoid government sanctioned facial recognition? how safe is it to buy things with your face?) and led to some really thoughtful conversations. Almost not yelling. 3.4/5 stars.