It’s attempting something with less instant gratification and more potential long-term reward: building out a new wing of the Star Wars IP palace, and attracting a new or at least different kind of audience.

On TV, shows like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi invoke Luke, Leia, Yoda, and other standbys to diminishing returns; the brain trust is reportedly paralyzed as to where to go next at the multiplex, though a project from Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof recently hired a director.

So he felt free to “bring my thing,” putting his own stamp on the material rather than straining to recreate someone else’s success. For Andor, Gilroy hired production designer Luke Hull, who he described as “non-Star Wars in every way,” and otherwise urged his collaborators not to “change their attitude.” Gilroy wanted them to bend Star Wars to their own talents, rather than adapt to fit their preconceived notion of Star Wars.

Many now find Japanese society’s prevalence for mask wearing and the numerous vestiges of preventative measures (social distancing in some restaurants, compulsory temperature checks and hand sanitizer upon entering facilities with cramped quarters, just to name a few) all an overcautious holdover from another time.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as “senso comune” (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as “cultural hegemony.” In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). Accordingly, Gramsci approached the subject of taste with the same vigor that other Marxists reserved for political economy. He reserved special rancor for Eugène Sue’s popular novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843). In the novel, a Prince Rodolphe metes out vigilante justice in Paris’s seedy underbelly. Gramsci said the French serial provided “the romantic setting in which the fascist mentality is formed,” since it presented social problems as something to be solved by a superhero figure rather than through class struggle. 

At 1.36 billion people and counting, India will soon be the most populous country on earth. Pakistan with a population of 216 million and Bangladesh with a population of 163 million are number 5 and 8 in the world rankings. In the next decade the region will be home to one quarter of humanity or more.

I picked out Western Asia, stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan, as a zone of regional polycrisis. I was delighted to see Esfandyar Batmanghelidj developing this theme in a recent twitter thread.

Geography matters because regions are tied together by the gravitational pull of trade, through flows of migration, or cross-border cultural and political currents, through the friendships and antagonisms of neighbors, by proximity to particular geographic features - major rivers or canals (in Central America), choke points (like the Horn of Africa) - and by relations to major external powers (Russia, China, USA).

This was my mom’s shirt. She got it in Paris in the late ‘70s, I think from some discount designer shop where they cut the labels out. I wore it in high school until I busted out the side seam, when I got too big for it. I chose this because it’s a reminder that clothes mean so much just as artifacts: They’re these souvenirs that get to function, you don’t have to put them in drawers, you can keep using them, but with all these memories attached. That’s my highest hope for the clothing I make.

So some people might bug out when they see what you charge for a shirt, but you make the case that it’s a price-tag where the “weight” of the piece is reflected, rather than an artificial cheapness.

Blackbird Spyplane: I like that you use the word ‘weight,’ because there’s a false sense of weightlessness to how we tend to encounter clothes. Especially online, where you can tap on some .jpgs and a garment arrives at yr door like magic. So much of the consumer culture is about making us treat clothes like they just materialized into existence. Evan Kinori: “The shift, just in our generation, has been so extreme, even from what was considered ‘fast fashion’ in the ‘90s — that was wholesome compared to what happened when H&M and Zara blew up. Things got so much faster, so much more about making us clueless about how things came to be in front of us, focused entirely on the consumption end of the experience. In the ‘50s there were, like, Home Ec classes telling you how to darn socks or sew on a button. It’s sad that no one knows how to do things like that anymore — a crazy success of capitalism.”

But mostly, money-ness comes about as the result of someone with more power than you demanding something of you. Take the hut-tax: in the early 20th century, British colonial rulers in the conquered lands of Africa demanded that each person owning a hut pay a tax in shillings. If you didn't pay your hut-tax, British soldiers would burn your hut down. This was an effective means of getting conquered Africans to take on brutal plantation duties – all you had to do was offer payment in shillings and anyone with a hut would line up to do your job for you.

Money, therefore, arose out of liability: farmers valued coins because they had a nondiscretionary liability that could only be settled with those coins (their taxes). People who weren't farmers would also accept coins, because they knew that the farmers needed them, and since they needed to trade with farmers, anything the farmers would accept was therefore valuable to all. This money story is a lot more morally fraught than the story of gold arising spontaneously out of the need to give back change for a cow. It involves gross acts of coercion. It's kind of nice to think that money arose spontaneously out of free trading, but it didn't.

He filmed with small crews, often doing camerawork hands on, editing at home; in leaving Paris for Rolle, he turned a small Swiss town on Lake Geneva into his own plein-air studio. (I interviewed Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who called the town Rollywood.) Godard made his domestic activities and local observations converge with the history of the cinema and the grand-scale politics of his era. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. The best of recent movies are both personal and grand, innovative and political, engaged with the overt crises of the moment and with the submerged ones of the history of the art, and they’re as insubordinate regarding expectations and conventions as they are contentious in their emotional life. Godard achieved his goal: leaving his legend behind, his work has become, very simply, the central reality of the modern cinema. In his office, Godard told me that he thought the cinema was nearly over: “When I die, it will be the end.” He was wrong—and it’s his own fault.

It was then his criticism (collected, along with his interviews and other writings, in a book called “Godard on Godard,” translated by Tom Milne) that guided me into movie-viewing. His films—including those of the seventies, largely under the journalistic radar—have remained my cinematic North Star.

Even after abandoning the Marxist orthodoxies of his work in the late sixties and early seventies, he never left politics behind: his “King Lear,” from 1987, is rooted in the Chernobyl disaster; his 1996 film “For Ever Mozart” dramatizes the civil war in the former Yugoslavia; and his 2010 feature is titled “Film Socialisme.” Nonetheless, having jumped off the speeding train of the sixties, Godard never quite got back into the center of the times. His later films are, to my mind, even more innovative, even more original than the ones that made his name. They’re also more defiant. If his earlier films signify that anything is possible, his later ones push possibilities so far that they virtually defy younger filmmakers to even try. His way of sustaining his own cinematic youth was largely to overwhelm the new generation of young filmmakers with his own artistic power. There’s a sublime spite in his later work that emerges similarly in interviews (of which he was a deft dialectical master, throughout his career). It comes off not as a cantankerous old man’s rejection of his successors but as an eternal youth’s fight for a place in the world and a chance to make it a little better than he found it. Having moved to the margins, he made himself an outsider again and lived and worked—and struggled—like one. To the end of his life, he was still fighting his way up and in, even from the heights of cinematic history that he had scaled.

They recognized the genius of filmmakers (such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks), who were then often considered either anonymous craftsmen or vulgar showmen, largely disdained or ignored by established critics. At twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Cahiers, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of rigorously reasoned artistic freedom; at twenty-five, he wrote an instant-classic essay on film editing, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. Though all his prime New Wave cohorts had been critics, Godard was the only one who overtly and explicitly made his movies into living works of movie criticism—who made his filmed fictions overlap with his theoretical inclinations and viewing passions alike.