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I really can't come up with a clear answer to this. Pretty much anything by Tate McCrae or Sabrina Carpenter or virtually anybody else in this new generation of pop artists is about as aggressively painful as it gets, to be honest. After a while everything melts away into the same homogenised corpus of liquidised shit that is modern pop music. It's virtually all irredeemable, there's no sense talking about "worse" or "better" in such a context.
At least stuff that's unintentionally but parodically bad such as Liz Phair's lyrical and musical masterpieces (Bollywood, U Hate It) are fun to listen to, these songs can't even aspire to that.
Google Earth is a thing. Having a monitor/phone and other modern tech actually decreases the relative utility of a flat map projection, as opposed to the days of yesteryear where it would have been much more convenient to carry an easily storable map around instead of an unwieldy globe, and most people's practical use of maps would (usually) have been in local small-scale contexts where the distortion would have been negligible. Now, though? I wonder why there are any map apps that don't project their satellite imagery onto a sphere.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but I got to halfway through Tarkovsky's Stalker and turned it off. I managed to read Roadside Picnic and play Shadow of Chernobyl all the way through, but the movie was different. The book and game resembled books and games pretty well, but the movie was extremely slow, shot weirdly, with characters that didn't really have names, with dialogue that wasn't particularly interesting to me.
I definitely get it, it's a weird niche movie that's extremely slow-paced and abstruse; I have a hard time justifying recommending it to anyone because of that. Your general perceptions of the movie probably correlates with how much patience you have for arthouse, and how much you enjoy the vibe (which is the aspect that carries the entire movie). For the most part, I wasn't expecting to like it either. I don't usually like exceptionally pretentious types of media and consider myself sort of ambivalent on arthouse (some are good, some aren't) and I'd heard Stalker was a particularly difficult one to get through. So imagine my surprise when I'd finished the whole thing and felt as if only an hour had passed, it was very dreamlike.
I suppose part of the reason why I had a different takeaway was because I conceptualised the movie in a bit of a different way than I do other films? It kind of felt a bit like a fable or myth to me, and I engaged with it as such. Your familiarity with the source material probably also has an impact since I never read Roadside Picnic and never built up any expectations.
Transnational Media Thread
I am very tired after a long week of work. Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? Anime still doesn't count.
I haven't really mentioned Soviet media around here much, except for the time I wrote about my experience with Tarkovsky's Stalker a while back, but I've had a longstanding love affair with it. There's an inexplicable poetic, sometimes haunted desolation to a lot of Soviet art that really grabs me, and I find no other nation manages to capture this as well as the Russians do. The latest music I've been very into is a Soviet rock band named Kino; they found quite a bit of popularity in the Soviet Union but not quite so much outside of it, and their relevance in the global music scene has steeply declined ever since the founder and helmsman Viktor Tsoi died and the group disbanded. But the music is so very timeless, with some incredibly evocative lyrics and musicianship. Gruppa Krovi is a great introduction; it's a very strong and immediately likeable number that's probably Kino's best known song (and was my introduction to the group), but Spokoynaya Noch is their masterpiece and towers head and shoulders above the rest of their discography. It's a six-and-a-half minute long rock ballad that manages to craft the most potent atmosphere I've encountered in the genre, with some very poetic and abstract lyrics; I never tire of listening to it.
On another note, here is your regular daily dose of Sinoposting; I continue to be surprised at how much interesting stuff there is in China that is just completely internationally unknown. This time, I've been looking at their 20th century works of ink-wash animation, which are so very singular and unique I'm surprised that I barely ever hear about them. The project started in the 50s, when the state-funded Shanghai Animation Film Studio was tasked with creating cartoons for children, and the animators working there quickly started trying to create something that looked uniquely Chinese in the style of traditional painting. The technique they used to create their animations was unorthodox, and it's mostly secret even today, but apparently it was so laborious that according to one of the creators it was possible to create four "traditionally animated" films in the time that it took to make one in the ink-wash style. Such a style was really only viable in the days of socialist state funding and ownership, and after the market reforms of the Deng era this style declined due to the introduction of financial and commercial incentives. As such, there are only four "original" ink-wash animation films, and of these four probably the best and most refined is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), which is completely wordless and stunning. A close second for me is Buffalo Boy and his Flute (1963). Apparently ink-wash techniques have slowly made some resurgence in Chinese animation ever since then with the introduction of more modern animation techniques that made it more cost-effective to produce, but these early works have a very good vibe to them.
I agree that modern China barely qualifies as communist, and mainlanders care way more about the Chinese nation-building project than they do communism as an end-goal. However, I do want to touch on a tangential comment here as an excuse to talk about something that annoys me:
I always hear this stated, but in spite of its popularity as an idea I've never actually heard anyone base this off any proper quantification of the mentioned losses in Chinese culture, and this sentiment is often expressed by people with a clear China Bad agenda to illustrate the illegitimacy of the modern Chinese state and to distance it from the history its people seem to derive a huge amount of national identity from. It's not incorrect that Mao's actions were often destructive, it's also not incorrect that criticism of Chinese tradition was a huge trend in early 20th-century Chinese thought (and not just communist ones), but in general I actually think Chinese culture has proven surprisingly resilient in the turmoil of the 20th century. In the Deng era there was a huge resurgence of many religions and ideas that had been thoroughly criticised throughout the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism being a big one. This article makes a pretty good argument that it never "died out", and its resurgence was less revival and more an example of ancient tradition experiencing organic evolution through the stressors of the 20th century. I also remember reading a book about Cultural Revolution culture that basically argued that it was often based off aspects of traditional culture (such as the yangbanxi model plays being based off Beijing Opera), which often had the ironic effect of indirectly inducing more interest in traditional Chinese culture in many of those who were exposed to it. That book also contained a large number of anecdotes from people suggesting that in practice they maintained a lot of traditional customs in the countryside outside of the purview of authorities during the CR, that in spite of the official party line they continued to practice what they knew. Chinese culture survives reasonably well in my opinion, and there are many visible manifestations of that in the rural celebrations and religious festivities that still continue within the country.
It's also helpful to consider how China fits into larger East Asian context in this regard. Pretty much no East Asian country survived its modernisation period intact; even Japan, a country which is (IMO incorrectly) perceived as uniquely preservationist, was no stranger to iconoclastic campaigns that criticised Japanese culture and in general had its culture hugely altered in virtually every way during modernisation. I would say that many aspects of Japanese culture that exist today and are thought to be ancient practice date back 20th/late 19th century at earliest, given the immense change the Meiji period wrought. It's known that Meiji destroyed a large amount of feudal castles, but he also issued a shinbutsu bunri doctrine forcibly separating Shintoism and Buddhism, pretty much ending the centuries-long syncretism that had characterised Japanese religion; this separation continues into the modern day. Due to the Buddhists' deep association with the Tokugawa shogunate, there was a period of violent iconoclasm against Buddhists and their relics known as haibutsu kishaku, which saw approx 40,000 temples and their relics destroyed; there are some Japanese prefectures completely lacking extant pre-Meiji Buddhist temples for that reason. Shintoism was reformed and repurposed into a cult of the emperor (State Shinto), an alliance which Buddhists also tried to emulate for survival, and this period also saw Buddhist priests brought down to the level of the laity once the Meiji state abolished the dictums that priests should avoid meat and remain celibate. To this day, Shinto as a distinct and unitary religion is actually a modern concept whose organisation derives from Meiji-era State Shinto. Japanese Buddhism is still characterised by the lack of its Vinaya Pitaka disciplinary code for practitioners, and they often eat meat, which is very not in line with Mahayana tradition. Many other related aspects of Japanese culture that are seen as traditional are actually modern - for example the association of torii gates and shimenawa ropes with Shinto shrines or the custom that Shintoists wear white while Buddhists wear black are actually distinctions that really only stem from Meiji period separation policy. There's also other things I could talk about, such as the forced closures and decline of food-cart yatai culture, or the adoption of Gregorian dates for the Japanese new year and heavy westernisation of the celebration.
All this is to say that sure China did not survive the 20th century unscathed, but deep cultural modification is something that occurred in most East Asian countries during their modernisation, I don't think it's at all a given that China has been the most modified by modernity or iconoclasm in the region. It's always very jarring whenever I see the "death of Chinese culture" being brought up; the amount of times it gets mentioned is just disproportionate relative to the degree of cultural loss it experienced, especially when you compare it with the rest of East Asia.
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