79. Champions League
I.
Wise Guy is a two-part documentary about The Sopranos. It comes highly recommended for anyone wishing to revisit memories of this fantastic series. The documentary series centres on creator David Chase and beautifully illustrates how Chase mirrored his own life in the New Jersey mafia family. Reality and fiction are also cleverly interwoven in the editing, with plenty of archive footage and behind-the-scenes material.
Chase had been in the TV world for years before he made The Sopranos. For the HBO series, he wanted to break with convention. The Sopranos looked more cinematic than other series; at times, it was more violent. Edie Falco, who plays Carmela Soprano, thinks that was possible back then but isn’t now. “You could push the boundaries so that people felt uncomfortable,” she says. “Without any warning. It’s about wanting to surprise people and make them feel uncomfortable, and teaching them to deal with it. That’s life, my friend. You don’t get warned first when something bad happens.
Falco isn’t a fan of trigger warnings. If we’d had to take everyone and everything into account, The Sopranos would never have turned out so well – you can often read that between the lines in this documentary. People were hurt during the making of the series. “I did get angry sometimes,” says Chase. “Because nobody on the writing team made anything up. Perhaps because I often said no to their ideas.”
I don’t know if Chase is a pleasant person to work with. But he clearly had the final say, and some writers left after falling out. It’s quite interesting how the documentary deals with this. Actors agree that they felt a lot of pressure and had little freedom. But that made the show better, they say. “He set the bar highest himself,” says Chris Albrecht, former HBO director. “He was never satisfied.”
It was like playing in the Champions League, so to speak.
---II.
James Earl Jones wasn’t physically under Darth Vader’s mask, but he did give him his menacing voice. With his deep, menacing voice, the character became believable enough to strike fear into countless planets in a galaxy far, far away.
Darth Vader’s voice lives on. A few years ago, Jones donated his recorded voice to the Ukrainian company Respeecher. With the help of artificial intelligence, Darth Vader’s distinctive voice can continue to exist – without Jones’s acting.
Jones was thus one of the first actors to give permission to train an AI model using his voice. Perhaps fittingly, for a character who is already half-mechanical, Vanity Fair in 2022. It’s pure science fiction, too.
AI-Vader has already been heard in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. What the future holds for Darth Vader remains unclear. But given that Disney likes to bring back old Star Wars heroes, it’s not inconceivable that we’ll hear new lines from the villain that were never spoken by Jones. The echo of a spirit.
In the Star Wars universe, deceased actors have often been brought back to life using computer technology. Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in The Rise of Skywalker, for example. Or Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. And a digitally rejuvenated Luke Skywalker appeared in The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian. Even deceased characters can return to Star Wars films as blue apparitions, thanks to The Force. Disney could go on indefinitely. Perhaps they shouldn’t. I believe more in a final farewell.
III.
The stream of great music releases shows no sign of stopping, as Eefje de Visser has released her new album. Heimwee features melancholic tracks in which she sings about words such as dreams, twisting, humming and clouds. When you listen to Eefje de Visser, it feels as if you’re floating. I can’t describe it any other way.
I was talking to the owner of the Plato record shop in Utrecht (which has recently moved to a lovely, more spacious new premises on Voorstraat) about coloured vinyl. Heimwee is available on black and white vinyl. Almost all new releases come in multiple colours. I have Fontaines D.C. in bright pink. Coloured records are often pressed in smaller runs. Music purists aren’t always fans of this. The quality of coloured vinyl is said to be slightly lower.
Third Man Pressing, part of Jack White’s independent record label Third Man Records, writes that coloured vinyl produces slightly more noise. “But it still sounds great,” the company writes. Black remains the standard.
But black is coloured too, says Plato boss Willem: “Vinyl is naturally transparent. In the past, it was made black with carbon to harden the material.” So if you play coloured records with a poor-quality needle, they might turn grey a little less quickly. But in terms of audio quality, the differences are minimal. “You need very good equipment to hear the difference,” says De Vries. “But transparent vinyl produces the clearest sound.”
PS.
Marcel van Roosmalen started out writing reports, then moved on to TV programmes, and now produces a TV programme about reporting. You could say he’s come full circle. Van Roosmalen on Reportage is a somewhat tricky format: a ‘making of’ for a report that will never be broadcast. Van Roosmalen visits the Tata Steel Chess Tournament and the Dutch Open Darts.
You see everything that is normally edited out of TV reports: the drive to the venue, waiting for a press officer, and the conversations in between interviews. “For me, it’s about the boredom,” the presenter said this week on WNL. “That says more about real life.” Delightful cringe TV.
How can you make money from blogging? I’m under no illusions, and certainly not after visiting this brilliant webpage, which drags you into the deep, dark recesses of the online advertising market. I reckon reading on a desktop is best.
What if the millennium bug had triggered a robot apocalypse? You’d end up with something like Y2K, a new horror comedy from production company A24, whose trailer already looks delightfully deranged.
---The Amsterdam-based clothing store Patta is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. I’m a big fan of their collaborations with Nike. They did their first one in 2009, which resulted in the Chlorophyll, a green and white Air Max 1 model. To mark this anniversary, the shoe was re-released (sold out in no time).
Patta is a great brand anyway, born out of hip-hop culture. A few years back, Peter Leferink of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute praised brands like Patta for their ability to appeal to young people who feel their voices aren’t being heard. “The fashion world is pretty white,” he said. “Brands like Patta and Daily Paper show a realistic and diverse street scene.” Patta founders Edson Sabajo & Guillaume Schmidt were guests on the podcast Yous & Yay: New Emotions to talk about their work, music, networking and much more.
Adult Swim is adapting the famous horror manga Uzumaki by author Junji Ito. It’s about a small town on the coast of Japan that is driven to madness by a mysterious spiral shape. The anime appears to remain stylistically faithful to the manga, in black and white with plenty of shading.
---I’m currently reading Het Archief by Thomas Heerma van Voss, about an editor of a literary magazine who tries to cling to a world that is gradually disappearing. As publisher Das Mag (which once published the literary magazine Das Magazine itself) writes: an ode to the niche, to rituals and to the tireless clinging to the things that, meaningful or not, make life worth living.
On this website, you can write words using satellite images.
I found the documentary To The End (now in cinemas) a beautiful portrait of musicians who have always lived on the edge of their abilities and are now realising they are getting older. We follow the members of Blur in the run-up to their concert at Wembley Stadium, the high point of their career. To mark the occasion, they made a new album: The Ballad of Darren. Albarn poured a lot of himself into it; it’s no wonder he bursts into tears when they listen to the songs for the first time. That man lives for music (and drags the rest of the band along with him, albeit with some reluctance).
---This is a good analysis of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. Writer Casey Newton was present at the live recording of the Acquired podcast, where Zuckerberg was interviewed. He felt at ease there, writes Newton. “And that led him to do something he almost never does in public: reflect.”
Zuckerberg has been undergoing a transformation of late. He’s letting his hair grow and is more outspoken than before. He wears a shirt he designed himself, bearing the words ‘learning through suffering’ in large Greek letters. He is increasingly reluctant to apologise for the mistakes his company makes. And that does give Newton some cause for concern, given Zuckerberg and Meta’s position of power.
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