Saturday Dispatch
Hello on this wintry Saturday, wherever in the world this newsletter might find you.
I disappeared into a cosmos-sized rabbit hole this week, thanks to Claude Code. If you’re not already familiar, prepare to be. Claude Code is an arm of Claude, a generative AI assistant from Anthropic, one of several serious competitors in the AI race. Claude is like a sunnier, more attractive alternative to OpenAI/ChatGPT, which looks like a NASA interface in comparison. I’ve taken to using Claude after reading more about the founder, who seems to be the most vocal about the potential ills of AI as he builds very powerful AI.
Claude Code is effectively a coder/developer in your back pocket, to help regular people design and launch websites, apps, and programs. In one week, I used it to design (from the ground up) and launch two websites: my personal site, and another for my new restaurant in New Orleans. I’m not a particularly tech savvy person; after a few hours of fucking around in Claude Code, I was able to launch two sites that were honestly better than anything I had ever paid to have designed.
Plenty of people smarter than me (there are a lot of them) have explored the ramifications of this potential sea change. As a business owner, it is incredibly exciting to think about the opportunities this technology opens up. After spending a week on Claude Code, I told my brother (a coder/developer) that his job was about to get really fucking easy, and that he might want to consider looking for a new job.
Late last year, I was completely charmed by the trailer for the film The Love That Remains, which went into limited release today. I was reminded about it after seeing a post from Criterion Collection. The director, Hlynur Pálmason, had made a companion piece to the film, called Joan of Arc, currently streaming on Criterion.
I watched it yesterday afternoon, and it was an inventive, beautiful, satisfying little film. Hlynur’s images are sumptuous moments, brilliantly photographed. The movie awakened something within me - I haven’t encountered a filmmaker that I’ve responded so strongly to in many years. It immediately took me back to my high school years, when I was writing scripts and making movies with my friend Pearce, who went on to study filmmaking at Temple University. I was filled with a sense of possibility, but also of melancholy at the realization that I might never be able to make something so beautiful.
After watching Joan of Arc, we watched Godland last night. Released in 2022, the film made waves at Cannes when it was released. I recall clocking it as something I wanted to watch, but never got around to it. It was an absolute stunner. I am still sitting with it today, but I remain bowled over with the beauty of Pálmason’s output. He seems to brilliantly capture the quiet moments, the in-between and underappreciated, the victories and defeats of everyday living. It’s such a powerful medicine to cure us from the tepid bullshit we are fed by Netflix and their ilk.
I’ve been going deep on interviews and press about Pálmason this morning. His images are so strange and powerful - if I worked at Dior, Gucci, Hermes, Chanel, or any other major fashion house with taste and a big budget, I would be reaching out to this guy to shoot my next campaign in a second.
