Shelly Kraicer

Forcing a TTC streetcar (~70 ppl) to wait for 3 cars to turn left in front of it (each w a single person inside) is infuriating. What kind of self-sabotaging fools run Toronto transit? They clearly don't use it; they treat it as charity for the poor: minimum service to keep the undeserving moving.

Transit signal priority is such an obvious, cost-free way of increasing speed (hence capacity) of LRTs & streetcars. I took the circum-Peripherique LRT in Paris & never encountered a red light. Just took a Florence tram from centre to airport: only one red light, which immediately changed to green.

On Reddit the TTC operators say the problem is self sabotage, TTC is operating much slower than the Metrolinx tests, on purpose

www.reddit.com/r/TTC/s/1toQ...

And the glorious fugue-coda restored (temporary, for us, just now) the world Mozart temporarily destroyed with those crushing discords. The orchestra seemed genuinely delighted and energized by their collaboration with Savall. I'd say it was a successful experiment. @berliner-philharmoniker.de 5/5

The Mozart K.551 Symphony was as thrilling as expected. Savall and Berlin Phil balanced (with minimal vibrato) the horror of the unprecedented ( almost unbearable) discords of the 4th movement development. ... 4/

@berliner-philharmoniker.de The Berlin Phil now has a Bluesky account.

The Digital Concert Hall of the Berliner Philharmoniker The Digital Concert Hall is the streaming platform of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Here you can see the orchestra’s concerts live or on demand in the archive.

Concert is replayed tomorrow online i think. Requires a subscription but the Berlin Philharmonic does I think offer a free initial trial. This experimental collaboration would be a great way to use it. www.digitalconcerthall.com/en

Savall has them using less-to-no vibrato. Fascinating. Rameau’s Naïs suite was a bit scrappy. But Gluck’s Don Juan ballet was a revealed masterpiece, played w so much excitement and delight. Mozart K.551 coming up. How much is Savall going to shake up the Berlin Phil’s habitual warmth & smoothness?

fascinating to hear Jordi Savall conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (live now, it’s intermission) My favourite musicians from two different worlds: early music with special performance practices; the Central European core 19c tradition.

corner of Gehry in Toronto

Here’s a cladding test corner of the new Gehry Forma skyscrapers going up in Toronto. The originally off-centred disruptive design has been radically simplified, or rather conservatively simplified. I hope these buildings will still be great. Toronto hasn’t exactly been a site for Gehry’s best work.

That's the film's politics: a gray static noisy blur. The opposite of what we need right now. 3/3

... nihilism out of a blender, where various parodies of left-wing paranoia (justified) and right wing rapaciousness and cruelty get mashed together, diced, interwoven: the interference patterns Lanthimos thinks he is generating aren't meaningful: they're static noise. ... 2/

A complete mystery to me why BUGONIA is so well received, by critics I read. The film is long and repetitive and distasteful: sometimes even repellent. But it's its politics, or rather non-politics, that scrambles my reaction. The film is pure nihilism, I suppose:... 1/

Minor note: WHEN A WOMAN's opening jazz figure is astonishingly close to the jazzy riff that opens Godard's Breathless (also from 1960). 3/3

WHEN A WOMAN hides its depths behind fascinatingly rich social exploration, anthropology, and experimentation. But the most profound questions hide inside, in Takamine Hideko's lowered, oblique gaze, infinitely questioning and wise and despairing and powerful. 2/

Naruse Mikio's WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS is a near-perfect film whose core of existential horror implicates everything: gender, class, and history. My first time watching it, part of TIFF Cinematheque's brilliant essential retrospective of Naruse's post war features.. 1/

Simply amazing that the Supreme Court declared an end to legal race discrimination in the affirmative action case two years ago and now allows overt racism in both immigration arrests and redistricting.

Using race to help minorities? Bad. Using it to discriminate against them? Very, very good.

Kennedy’s Methodical 2-Decade Quest to Dismantle Vaccine Policy

rfk jr wants to kill your kids, it’s really that simple.

“… quest to shake up America’s vaccine system”.

Dear Dangerously Incompetent NYT Editors,
The word you are looking for here is “destroy” or “subvert”. Perhaps “undermine” if you’re being overly cautious. “Shake up” is a choice to naturalize the attempted murder of children.

In a major coup for someone, Alan Dye leaves Apple I learned a long time ago not to make it personal when it comes to criticizing Apple. As someone on the outside looking in, I can (and do) judge what Apple does, but it’s hard to ever know th…

sixcolors.com/post/2025/12...

This is great news for *Apple*. Dye's baleful influence on interface design – jettisoning usability for flash – won't be missed by me :)

They key scene I think of when I think about Godard's aphorism that every fiction film is a documentary (of its actors).

Happy Birthday Jean-Luc Godard! 🙏 #BOTD
(3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022)

“And even if nothing would be as we had hoped, it would change nothing of our hopes.”

Jean-Luc Godard, quoting from Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance in his final feature Le livre d’image (The Image Book, 2018).

But for those (of us) who are, despite everything, seduced by a whiff of the fetish, a flash of the commodity, it comforts and entertains, for a moment. But doesn't provoke, ever. 2/

I’m an absolute Godardian. But Linklater’s NOUVELLE VAGUE is a fetishization, a commodification of what was accurately and durably designed to be unfetishizable, uncommodifiable. To that extent, it betrays the core of its subject. 1/

IndieChina 2025 A list of films from a cancelled film festival of independent Chinese cinema in New York. tickets.indiechina.org/welcome

And here’s a list I compiled on Letterboxd of IndieChina 2025, a new series of independent Chinese films that curator/director Zhu Rikun attempted to organize in NYC last month but that was obstructed by transnational pressure and finally cancelled.
boxd.it/Q2QQQ

Cinema on the Edge (2015-2016): a touring series of Chinese independent films Cinema on the Edge (organized by Karin Chien, JP Sniadecki and Shelly Kraicer) screened 29 independent Chinese films in New York City in 2015, We then turned it into an international touring series: C...

Here’s list on Letterboxd of the independent Chinese films that Cinema On the Edge (Karin Chien, JP Sniadecki, and I) screened in NYC & around the world in 2015-2016. Unlike IndieChina this year, we were able back then (with only surmountable difficulties) to show the films as planned.
boxd.it/Qrb7q

Trial Transcript of General Xu Qinxian, Former Commander in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Who Refused to Comply with Martial Law Order During 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests Footage of Xu Qinxian’s 6-hour trial for refusing to violently suppress students is revealed for the first time.

This is interesting reading in light of current developments in other jurisdictions.

hrichina.substack.com/p/trial-tran...

Let's not underestimate the government here, I would want to add.

A few takeaways from my reporting Hong Kong lecture:
Context is everything.
Talk & listen to local people (not just your taxi driver).
But always consider their safety.
Give credit where you can.
Know what you don’t know.
Acquiring In-depth local knowledge requires time, experience & humility.

U.S. to Press Europe and Other Allies on ‘Mass Migration,’ Document Says

It's not just that the United States has stopped trying to promote liberal democratic ideas internationally. It's that the United States is actively trying to promote the contrary. It's trying to turn more countries into Hungary.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...