29 Comments
Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

"Dick Poop" is how I would describe images made with Grok 2.

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🗣️🗣️🗣️

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

re: pre-social media digital images, it's not exactly the same thing as still photos but this is why I love video archivists who upload old footage online just for the fun of seeing what stuff was like in the age when it was easy to take photos and videos of stuff but we weren't all posting it yet. the youtube channel "vampire robot" has lots of stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEJeVdf8Lg that's just a 13 minute long video about buying a ticket to the dark knight in 2008.

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omg lol... this is awesome. one thing that came up a lot in the Rap World Q&A was that they were trying to create the world that existed within the year after The Dark Knight came out.

I had an old coworker who was fascinated by old video footage on YouTube from school dances, just as that's an near-traumatic memory for any of us who were once awkward to relieve or re-see with adult eyes.

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

it used to be so hard to get stuff off your phone, to say nothing of the quality of what the phone could record. I record my band practices on my phone and end up with a solidly legible recording every time, it would be magic to garage banders circa-Great Recession.

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There’s a wonderful Soviet television documentary about western advertising called “THE TARGET IS YOUR BRAIN,” (usually on YouTube, worth watching, Adam Curtis found dead in a ditch) in which the narrator is always referring to ads as images— pronounced with menace as “eemazjes”— and delineating the difference between “images” and “pictures,” which is a taxonomy I think about all the time. A painting is an image, a photographic reproduction of said painting is a picture… a cropped version of said photograph is an image again… it’s all very John Berger. Came to mind while reading the mag!

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I love learning how my eyes perceive the world approx 33 and a half years into having my eyes... "adult education" makes life worth living...

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grok 2 and clarice starling mentioned. oh it's good to laugh

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

outing myself to the public for thinking the AI screenshot was a real ad and getting scared :S

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Fran Magazine is sponsored by Grok 2

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

I spend far too much time in my hometown for a young hip city-dweller, so I'm acutely aware of the feeling you describe, the NW burbs in particular - the uncanny feeling of everything appearing to stay the same even as storefronts, roads, and loved one's faces age and transform. I really hope Rap World gets a regular release soon.

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well, good news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkARD8oTzOM

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

wow, we did it!

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love this post. reminded me of this youtube clip i rewatch all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlOKBr9lLlc&ab_channel=JohnFrankensteiner

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omg yes I love this - Robby Muller is such a great example of this. I only saw Paris, Texas for the first time this year and loved how it looked, especially the night scenes. I also think his work on 24 Hour Party People feels really similar to the night digital photography look of both Naked (and to some extension, Rap World)

I go every other on a lot of PTA movies but he is like my favorite person to listen to when talking about other people's films

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Oct 28Liked by Fran Hoepfner

this is a new favorite FM of mine, thank u fran!

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this is great analysis on "another year," which i found startlingly mean when i first watched it (seemed to be saying something about single women left out in the cold from domestic happiness etc etc) but this is a read with much more depth. gotta rewatch. thanks fran.

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Thank you!! Another Year really opened up for me on second watch; I think it helps to know that he's gonna end the movie on a shot on Manville, and by and large, I feel like he's mostly taking her side and that Tom and Gerri's earnest happiness can be read as smug. That their adult son is so annoying says a lot.

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Did Marchese get NYT brainrot or was he always this bad and we didn’t notice because of how cool the Quincy Jones piece was

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

he had a real hot streak for a minute, like that Erykah Badu that I'm seeing *ctrl+T* was published back in 2018?! wow.

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yeah the Marchese heyday before his NYT move was pre-covid. I remember reading them at my old theater job before we all went on quarantine furlough. The before times

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The Isaac Chotiner of asking stupid questions

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I think I said this exact thing when explaining who he was to someone this weekend

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It's some combo of "always this bad" and maybe sort of a reverse Chotiner where you read to see which subjects can make Marchese look bad, rather than Chotiner's letting people hoist themselves by their own petard or whatever.

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I thought of Marchese when I was watching some of the Zane Lowe x Charli interview last night but also how his goofy sensitive interviewer posture reminded me of LMM x Emma Watson

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I can't sit thru a Zane Lowe interview in full but I will sometimes scrub through clips on reels/TikTok... I am curious to know what Charli has to say in an interview that's less combative than the NYMag one but not enough to see ZL interrupt her 349320932891 times. DON'T get me started on LMM x Emma Watson; as the world's only Watson scholar it is both a key and cursed text...

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Oct 24Liked by Fran Hoepfner

The Illusionist is sort of breathtakingly bad—although it was understandably pitted against The Prestige because of their concurrent release, it really presages Now You See Me’s handwavey “what if magic…were magic” contrivances, only WAY more self-serious. It does have this one unforgettable image towards the end, however, where Paul Giamatti (playing some kind of detective, who can remember) puts the whole mystery together and starts laughing ecstatically while the camera swirls around him for what feels like one thousand years, and it’s one of those things that looms so large in my mind while being completely divorced from the broader cultural context, such that I want to be able to post that screenshot and have it be instantly legible to others on an emotional and artistic level, but nobody knows what the fuck it is. Thank you, Dick Pope!!!!!

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I saw neither of those films when they came out, only finally catching up with The Prestige somewhere between Dark Knight and Inception (#DomCobb)... The Illusionist feels like it has been totally erased by cultural memory. I laughed out loud when I saw the wiki for it described it as a "romantic mystery" - though I guess that's a more elegant version of saying "movie about magician." Dick Pope also shot the perfect airplane movie The Outfit for which I have to say thank you as well.

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Hi Fran, I saw your name in the credits for the [redacted] scene in Rap World - did you make it on camera?

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