When I offer you my f***ing submarine you'll take it. You'll like it. And you'll say thank you. | | | | "Three Identical Strangers". Separated at birth and adopted by three different families. Their reunion becomes a sensation but also unearths a secret that has radical repercussions.
(Neon and CNN Films) | | | | |  | “When I offer you my f***ing submarine you'll take it. You'll like it. And you'll say thank you.”
| - | What ELON MUSK really meant |
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| | rantnrave:// I have a long memory. Or “infinite rearview mirror.” It allows me to relate things from the past to new experiences. It’s also a curse. I hold onto things. Good and bad. Forgetting can be a blessing. My mind and memory are tough to turn off. Especially, when my head hits the pillow. My mind races through ideas, tasks, wants, and worries. On a bad night, it feels like I’m inside a SALVADOR DALI painting. On a good one, like the notes and lyrics to a song just came to me and I see the path to finishing in minutes. It just flows. REDEF is about mixing ideas. I grew up with HIP HOP, DJ's, dance music, and sampling. And remixes. Everything is a remix. Sometimes perfectly woven together. Sometimes random associations. This weekend was one of those weird times where a few things just collided and related to one another. On Saturday at a screening for SACHA BARON COHEN’s new show I ran into JONATHAN GLICKMAN who runs film for MGM STUDIOS. We met when I was on the board. He loves movies and knows I love them too. We talk about them all the time. He ran over to me and said I had to see the new documentary, THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS. I had no idea what it was about. But I trust him and he knows my curiosity. I called my friend VAN TOFFLER and we made a plan to see it Sunday night at the ARCLIGHT in HOLLYWOOD. A description from GOOGLE: “Identical triplets become separated at birth and adopted by three different families. Years later, their amazing reunion becomes a global sensation but also unearths an unimaginable secret that has radical repercussions.” When I was a young kid in NEW YORK CITY my parents would take me and my sister to SAMMY’S ROUMANIAN STEAKHOUSE at least a few times a year. Classic Jewish food. From chopped liver to shell steak to veal schnitzel to potatoes with schmaltz. A very lively place with singing. The patrons join in. In fact, one night the singing was so loud, my father got a headache. And he had no inner monologue. He walked up to the resident singer, a cantor, and offered him $100 to sit down and stop. That was 6 months before my BAR MITZVAH and one day my parents and I were interviewing cantors to help with the service. The first one that walked into our apartment? The guy my dad gave the money to. Go figure. Anyway, I was always fascinated by three of the waiters in the restaurant. They were triplets. I’d never seen triplets before. They all dressed the same. For some reason, years later, and due to the remix of my mind - I thought they were the triplets from the famous 1977 hockey comedy SLAP SHOT, The HANSON brothers. Just how my mind works. But while I was watching the movie with Van, something hit me. Were the triplets on the screen the ones from Sammy’s? I looked it up on my phone and sure enough they were. BOBBY SHAFRAN, DAVID KELLMAN, and EDDY GALLAND. Freaky. Back to the movie. It’s a remarkable story. Just when you think you know where it’s going, another sharp suspenseful turn. It’s a thriller. It’s emotional. It tugs at your heart. Can make you smile one minute and gasp another. Cry after. And then go into a furious seated rage around the unfair and cruel things that happen to them. The separation. The reason behind it. The post-adoption fame and tragedy. It’s a story of chance, family, sleuthing, power, parenting, coincidence, love, sadness, science, treachery, tragedy, secrets, ethics, loss, frustration, and learning. Hard to explain without spoilers. Ultimately, one of the biggest questions of the film is nature vs. nurture. The sameness of three triplets separated at birth and adopted by three different families and how that affected them and how they turned out. I recall in THE SOPRANOS, Tony talks about having the “putrid Soprano gene.” A set of behavioral traits he thinks he inherited that aren’t beatable. It’s something that stuck with me. And as I started to see a psychologist after my heart surgery debacle I would often ask if I could be different from my father. We had a tough relationship. He had traits I didn’t want. Could I beat my nature with learned behavior? Was it indeed my nature? You can recall sort of what I’m talking about via the comedically sinister RANDOLPH and MORTIMER DUKE, THE DUKE BROTHERS from TRADING PLACES. Their heredity vs. environment bet. Are we destined to come out a certain way? Or can you control your destiny. I’m going to be thinking about the film for months. Probably when my head hits the pillow. For these brothers, it's their life and it runs beyond the gamut. See it with a friend or parent or sibling or spouse. You need to discuss it on the way out and then some. Van and I started in on it the minute we got up. And it all hit me at once. Memory, Dali, Jewish food, Slap Shot, Sopranos, Trading Places, and more associations. And this my friends is how some of my "rantsnraves" are made. It takes one idea and the related strings just flow. I chair the digital advisory for SUNDANCE. Last year was the first time in 15 years I didn't go to the festival. Of course, I missed this film. It won the U.S. DOCUMENTARY SPECIAL JURY AWARD FOR STORYTELLING. It deserved it. If this was a script pitched to me, I'd think it was too far-fetched. Run to see it, it's one of those WTF stories... Happy Birthday to DOUG HERZOG, WARRINGTON HUDLIN, CRAIG BARNETT, MATT GALLIGAN, SHELBY BONNIE, and MICHAEL GROSS. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| | | immigrants and children of immigrants |
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 | The Outline |
| Targeted advertising has become so uncanny, it feels like we’re being surveilled. Two artists want to hear these stories. | | |
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 | Wired |
| The special counsel has collected a mountain of evidence in the Trump-Russia investigation, but so far only a tiny amount of it has been revealed in official indictments. Here are nine areas where we should expect answers as the inquiry unfolds. | | |
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 | VentureBeat |
| If you’ve visited any website lately, you’ve noticed a pop-up that asks you to grant permission to collect data and notify you by email about updated privacy policies. That’s because of a new privacy and data protection regulation in Europe. | | |
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 | Nature |
| Uncertainty, hostility and irrelevance are now part of daily life for scientists at the US Environmental Protection Agency. | | |
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 | Pajiba |
| Scarlett Johansson is a very good actress who is often great, occasionally marvellous, and has never been nominated for an Oscar. Her name often comes up in conversations about actors who have never received an Academy Award nomination but thoroughly deserve one. For an actress of only 33, this stands as a symbol of her critical recognition and respect among her peers. | | |
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 | Monday Note |
| Indulge me as I devote a few Monday Notes to a look back at my life in high tech. This week, the pre-tech years that I spent looking for a way to "make it", a period that Irv Yalom, a kind Palo Alto therapist and noted writer, calls a "psychosocial moratorium". | | |
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 | CNN Reliable Sources |
| The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, who champions progressive candidates, says mainstream news outlets give an "institutional advantage" to "the right wing that is fundamentally unfair." | | |
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 | BuzzFeed |
| Sacha Baron Cohen - a consummate troll himself - is a perfect foil to the current political climate of grift and trolling. | | |
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 | recode |
| His philanthropy funds veterans, women, voter protection and trustworthy journalism. | | |
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 | CNET |
| Whiskey-sponsored immersive theater. Snickers escape rooms. Immersive branding is just getting started. | | |
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| | | won the world cup, so there |
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 | US Lacrosse Magazine |
| Twenty years later, the 1998 men’s world championship final between Team USA and Canada remains among the greatest games -- and events -- in lacrosse history. | | |
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 | Vanity Fair |
| In summer 2016, Richard Plepler flew to Dallas to attend a business dinner with a relatively new contact of his named John Stankey. The two men could not have appeared more dissimilar. Plepler, the urbane C.E.O. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| With massive user bases and tiny payout rates, streaming services offer a conundrum for modern music fans. | | |
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 | Strong Towns |
| Gas stations and dollar stores have taken the place of the corner store in most neighborhoods. Can this ship be turned around? | | |
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| The Outline |
| With the success of his movie "Sorry to Bother You," the musician and long-time radical is having an unexpected second act. | | |
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 | Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Imagine if a news photographer at a football game had to get permission from every single person in the stadium before taking a single shot -- or else face hundreds of civil lawsuits. That's what new model legislation wants to bring to public airspace. | | |
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 | Quillette |
| Free speech has recently become a cause célèbre of the nationalist and racist right-wing in the United States, as provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos bring their roadshows to college campuses, flout the values of progressive students, and then publicize and ridicule those students’ emotional or sometimes violent responses. | | |
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| Vanity Fair |
| John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin on crafting a comedy classic sharp enough to make a man laugh himself to death. | | |
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 | The New York Review of Books |
| The BBC's reporting of the scandals around the Brexit referendum is not biased or unbalanced: it barely exists. It is as though the US networks had decided the Mueller investigation was no concern of theirs. | | |
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 | McKinsey & Company |
| What will it take to make strides toward decarbonization for industrial sectors? Significant investment and coordinated effort among businesses, governments, and other stakeholders, to start. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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