The Criterion Collection gained an almost divine status in the film world, at least to me, at the dawn of the DVD age. As DVDs were being dumped on to an insatiable DVD-buying public, the overall quality of some titles, particularly those that catered to a small audience hungry for classic, arthouse, or non-US fare, were sadly of dubious quality. Some were poor transfers. Others offered no “bonus features,” which was a bit of a waste of the multi-title DVD format. And some non-English titles displayed English-language subtitles that were burned into the image.
Criterion changed this. When you bought a Criterion disk, you knew you were getting a high-fidelity transfer, at least one bonus feature—such as filmmaker’s or a film critic’s commentary—and at least one set of removable subtitles and captions, often in multiple languages.
Criterion quickly adopted to the streaming-video age by making many of its titles available on a number of services. I seem to remember some Criterion titles available on Netflix for a while. Then for a long time, Hulu Plus became the exclusive home of Criterion Collection. And beginning in 2016, the Criterion Collection moved to the nascent FilmStruck video service. That ended last November when AT&T Warner Media abruptly shuttered the service to many cinephiles’ sorrow.
Shortly after FilmStruck’s closure, Criterion announced that it would be launching its own streaming service—The Criterion Channel—in 2019. They posted a signup page for Charter subscribers, offering them an extended free trial and a discounted membership. I entered my email and with the holidays and new year, promptly forgot about the service and hadn’t thought about it since.
Earlier this week, I received an email with a teaser. It featured a close-up shot of an envelope with a brief “Here’s your key. Bye” message written on it.
The email challenged us to identify the source of the close-up with a link to the new Criterion Channel website. The landing page allows Charter subscribers to stream this film. (The close-up image, by the way, is from Wong Kar Wai’s Chun-King Express.)
Currently, the service is in a kind-of soft-launch beta until its actual launch on April 8, 2019. Between now and then, Charter subscribers are allowed to stream one movie a week through a web browser or through some Internet-connected TVs.
I tried to stream the film from my iPad to my Apple TV and again from my iPad using a Lightning-to-HDMI adapter. It didn’t work.
However, despite this technical limitation, I was still able to watch the film on my iPad. The website promotes that the Criterion Channel will be “available anywhere” on “desktop, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS, and Android devices.”
In addition to getting early access to the Criterion Channel, Charter subscribers will also get $1 off a monthly subscription or $10 a yearly subscription for as long as their account stays active. A Charter subscriber will also get an extended 30-day trial. Presumably a trail starting after April 8 will be a shorter 7-day—or 14-day—trial.
After AT&T Warner Media shut down FilmStruck, a few thoughts came to mind. First, why didn’t Apple buy the Criterion Collection and offer that as part of its forthcoming streaming service? Second, why didn’t I get FilmStruck? Now that it’s gone, I predict that it will attain the reverence and cult-status similar to that of the Z Channel’s demise in the late 1980s. I won’t be able to share in the nostalgic melancholy of having it ripped away from me.
Although I didn’t get FilmStruck and can stream a lot of Criterion films through other venues, I love early-adopter deals like these and already signed up as a Charter subscriber. You should too.
Note: After posting this story, I was able to figure out how to stream to my Apple TV, but I think it’s a secret, and I won’t reveal it here. Yet.
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
A recent Google Alert found that my name was mentioned in a news or blog post. Almost every time, I get someone else that isn’t me, and this is what happened in this case.
SATURDAY, Feb. 9: Don’t let the name fool you:F*** Fest #3 is only an orgy of the non-literal, artistic kind. The day-long festival, organized by the longtime Capitol Hill studio-space-meets-incubator Studio Current, features live performance, music, video screenings, snacks and “cheap drinks”. Look out for film screenings with sound scores by DJ Onesies, performances by Nic Masangkay, GRIEF GIRLS and Angel Alviar-Langley, among others, as well as drag performances by Sugar Darling, Juan Monroy, and Angel Baby Kill Kill Kill. FYI: Right before the clock strikes midnight, the party moves to Vermillion’s dance floor. Studio Current, 2 PM – 11.30 PM
For the record, the last time a Google Alert was about me was in June 2017, after public radio station KPCC published an article about crime in downtown Los Angeles. They used a photo that I shot and posted on Flickr. When they credited me as the source of the photo, it trigged the Google Alert.
My friend Moira bought an decommissioned school bus and, over last summer, converted it to an art studio and clubhouse-on-wheels, that she named the Art Heart Bus. Currently the bus is parked in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, inside the shared outdoor cafe area of the Italian restaurant Ringolevio and the adjoining bar-lounge Four-Fix-Six. It’s winter and the outdoor patio space is closed, but it’s being used a holiday market, and Moira’s bus is there.
On Saturday, she invited a few musicians over to play inside the bus. After running an extension cord to power a space heater and a couple of amplifiers, the music got off to a start. I snapped a few photos of the event.
I have been impressed with how quickly and effectively Moira planned this whole bus project and how she hustles to organize and promote events. And this one was a nice, small gathering that brought us together on a bus.
The bus and the Humboldt Holiday Market will be there on Saturdays and Sundays, from about 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, through Sunday, December 23. I kinda hate the concept of brunch, but I can confidently admit that the restaurant has pretty solid and reasonably priced brunch.
After the holidays, the bus will be returning to the streets of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, usually around McCarren Park. You can also rent the bus for a party or other event.
American Apparel was one of the few major imprintable mills that manufactured all of their products in the United States—in California, no less. However, the company was forced into bankruptcy due to bad management and was acquired by the Canadian textile conglomerate Gildan.
Almost immediately, the company began offering American Apparel “worldwide” products that were manufactured at an offshore facility and are available for a lower price than the USA-made. The idea was that you could get an American Apparel–style product at a lower price than a USA-made product.
With the US and China raising tariffs on each other over the last year, I offer one data point about how this is working out. American Apparel announced two broad changes to their pricing, effective December 31, 2018:
all products made in the USA will be more expensive.
selected products manufactured outside of the US will be less expensive.
Let the logic of that sink in…
The full announcement was sent to wholesale customers in an email, but the message—all of it plain text—was sent in an image. (Sidebar: why are people doing that again?) You can see the image of the announcement included in this post.
Light Industry launched a campaign to raise funds to program their fall lineup. Donate at least $10 and receive passes for you and a guest to one of their upcoming events. So far, the Tuesday night events look promising. Already announced are the following events:
The weather in New York right now is very hot— the temperature has reached the mid-90°s on Tuesday and will continue through Thursday. And although it seems like I should be packing for the beach, the fall semester is upon us. This semester, I am teaching two classes: one at Queens College and one at Pratt Institute.
Contemporary Media
This class acts like a sequel for Media Technologies, where we survey various media forms. However, this class sets aside the mechanics and the history and instead focuses on the how contemporary media industries function. One theme that I hope to address throughout the term and across all the modules is digitalization and how that changes what we mean by “media.” It’s not like the record industry sells records, that people read newspapers on newsprint, and that television programs are necessarily watched on televisions.
This is the first time I’ve taught this class. When I was a cinema studies graduate student at NYU, I always wanted to teach a documentary film survey. Most of the classes that graduate students did were very narrowly focused—often closely related to his/her dissertation. I felt that this was a disservice to both undergraduates taking these class and the graduate students teaching them. It was unfair to undergraduates because they didn’t get a good foundation in cinema studies. And it was bad for us budding teachers because we didn’t get to develop classes that might be useful to teach after we graduated, especially if we didn’t get hired by a big film program.
Like a decade-and-a-half later, I finally get to do a survey of documentary film. However, as I’ve been working on this class, I can see why it’s tempting to avoid surveys. There is so much material to exclude. I literally have to prune my list of ninety-plus films to about twenty. I would feel a lot less guilty teaching a class like “Binging Truth: Documentary Films in the Netflix Age,” “Beyond the Interrotron: The Films of Errol Morris,” “WPA, FDR, and NYFPL: Interwar American Documentary and the New Deal.”
I remember an NYU professor teaching a whole semester’s seminar on the Hitchcock film Vertigo. Can you imagine how deep you could get with a topic like that? My class however is breadth over depth.
Earlier this summer, 7-Eleven introduced their own cold-brewed iced coffee beverage and priced it at the aggressive price point of 99¢, plus tax. (This is an introductory price, and it will cost $1.69 when the promotion ends.) If you take the long-view, it shows how far cold-brew has come since it was appropriated by third-wave coffee shops to create a sweeter, less acidic iced beverage. Cold brew is now literally as ubiquitous as a Slupree.
I ordered a 7-Eleven Cold Brew last week at the Greenwich Village location, on West 3rd Street, and sipped it as I walked to Washington Square Park. In my mind, there was a poetic irony of having a mass-marketed beverage at a neighborhood associated with bohemian coffeehouse culture. However, I then noted that the coffee at those places wasn’t particularly very good and that the bohemian days were over a half-century ago.
The beverage itself comes in two variations: one black and one mixed with some type of milky, fatty liquid. I pour the black cold brew into a cup of ice, paid my $1.08 using Apple Pay and headed out towards Washington Square Park in the blistering 90°F heat.
My initial reaction to the beverage was the smell. Unlike what craft, third-wave coffee roasters use, 7-Eleven appears to be using a dark-roast coffee. I could smell the roast, and it was as strong and off-putting as opening a can of Maxwell House. I didn’t grab a lid or a straw—because I’m not an Earth-Killing, Straw-Sipping Monster—and drank it straight from the cup. However, I wanted to know what the coffee tasted like without the smell, so I held my breathe as I took a sip of the coffee. The result wasn’t too bad. There was some light chocolate flavor, but it lacked any real tartness—no cherry flavors—that good coffees, in my opinion, balance between those flavors. It was reasonably pleasant, although a bit overly bold, as it they were really trying to extract coffee flavor out of their coffee ground. It’s not traditional iced coffee, but it’s not especially Good Coffee, either.
I’m not going to bemoan this as a sign of the death of cold brew or Good Coffee or as some wide-ranging cultural landmark. This is unlikely to get a critical mass of coffee drinkers who pay $4 for a cold brew coffee from a tattooed barista to switch to getting one at 7-Eleven. The beverage available at 7-Eleven is different product than what is available at the local coffee roaster, but it’s nice to offer not-too-fussy coffee drinkers another option.
Last month, Zachary Pincus-Roth, writing for The Washington Post, reported on how The West Wing had become a way for liberals to escape the Trump era. He profiles a couple who, in 2018, produce a podcast about the series that wrapped back in 2006:
The Attrydes, both in their 40s, are apolitical, but still — these days, rewatching a show about idealistic wonks working for a Nobel Prize-winning economist president is “a little slice of heaven,” said Paul, wearing a gray “West Wing Weekly” sweatshirt. “It’s the president we all want but don’t have.”
The funny thing is that I seem to remember when the series launched in the late 1990s that the series was marketed as being about a presidency “we all want,” implying that it wasn’t one we had. And this was during the waning days of the Clinton administration, which admittedly was hardly a paragon of liberalism.
When the Trump presidency began to crystallize last year, I was watching the fifth season of House of Cards. As I was watching the calculating and diabolical machinations of the Underwoods, I often thought about how the Trump presidency made House of Cards look like The West Wing.
What I would give for Frank and Claire Underwood today?!?
Living far from Southern California for almost twenty-years, I enjoyed reading Gold’s reviews and poring over his lists, especially his annual 101-restaurant lists, to keep updated on the unique nature of the LA-area. If you are not familiar with Gold, he was the subject of a recent documentary, released in 2015, that you can stream on Hulu, among other places I’m sure.
As has been noted elsewhere, Gold’s writing tried to bond the city and its various ethnic communities together through food. His wasn’t the adventurous explorations that were popularized by Anthony Bourdain. It was as if he was trying to make everyone comfortable and familiar with what Los Angeles and its environs had to offer.
In an era when a food connoisseur is one who posts a beautiful photo of a lovely plated dish bathed in warm light, optimized for an Instagram post, he will be missed.
If you’ve taken a large college class, you’ve likely experienced the situation where your class looks empty for most of the term, but then, all of a sudden, at the final exam, the lecture hall is full again.
Back in December, I kvetched back about how many of my students in Queens College classes fail, and I aimed to take measures to improve the success (failure?) rate. One such measure was to require students to actually attend class. Here is what I was thinking about at the time:
For the new year, I am implementing a few new policies at Queens College to help make clear that attending class and participating in the day-to-day assignments, not just the written ones that count towards their final grade, is essential in succeeding in college and beyond.
One step is to implement two new attendance policies:
Negative reinforcement: Students may not miss more than four weeks of class for any reason.
Positive reinforcement: Students attending more than 12 weeks of class will receive a half-grade bonus to their final grade.
And that is in fact what I did. This past spring semester, in each of my syllabi at Queens College, I wrote:
For in-person classes, regular attendance is required. Attend twelve or more classes and receive five bonus points added to your final grade. Students missing more than four classes will not be permitted to take the final exam.
For hybrid courses, regular attendance is required. Attend seven or more classes and receive five bonus points added to your final grade. Students missing more than three classes will not be permitted to take the final exam.
This policy does not apply to online courses.
It might have worked, at least a little bit. In my Media Technologies class this semester, there was only one absentee student who showed up to take the exam. That student also walked in thirty minutes late to the final, something that the student did for the midterm exam. I directed that student to the written policy from the syllabus, and I did not permit that student to take the exam. Failing that student seemed like the right thing to do as that student’s absenteeism really did warrant retaking the class.
However, the 20% rule that I bemoaned in December emerged in another way. In my Media Criticism class, I added a policy that each student must meet with me—either in person or through an online call—over a two-week period to discuss his/her draft for the two written essays due in that class. Many flaunted the policy, and when it came time for them to submit their final drafts, I alerted them that I would not accept them, as stated in the policy on the syllabus.
Alas, just after the midterm exam, about 20% of the students enrolled in the class dropped because of this policy, suggesting that we as teachers are powerless against the larger social forces that CUNY students face.
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