Staff Picks

We have some terrific new DVDs and blu-ray discs to lend that I’d like to draw your attention to. We took advantage of a sale on Criterion items and purchased some that we are lucky to have. First of all, we got the luscious, new World of Wong Kar Wai boxed set, seven films by one of the most exciting filmmakers of the 1990s, some of which are available on disc for the first time in decades. We will lend the discs individually rather than as a set.

The boxed set of Les Blank’s films has been around for a few years, but this is the first time it is available from a Minerva library. Blank made numerous short documentaries, and American folkways were often his subjects, particularly music and food. I don’t think there is a film on the 5-DVD set longer than 30 minutes. All five discs will circulate as a set.

We have had the 3-disc set of Luis Bunuel’s late films since roughly January, but it doesn’t hurt to highlight it one more time. These blu-rays will circulate as a set.

The 3-disc set of Wim Wenders’s early films is a few years old but brand new to us and to Minerva.

The dream of the 90s is alive at MML, with Hou Hsaio-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai from 1998 which made several best-of-decade lists; Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diaro, a love letter to his home city of Rome; Slacker, which almost single-handedly defined 90s indie; and The GoodTimesKid, which was made in 2005 but embodies the spirit of 90s.

Two podcasts and an Atlantic article. First, Decoder Ring, from Slate, is a very thoughtfully reported show about American culture. This week, host Willa Paskin revisits the time 20 years ago when a literary fiction writer considered himself too cool for Oprah Winfrey.

On Vox Conversations, culture critic Anne Helen Petersen talks to writer Safy-Hallan Farah about her article exploring a similar topic: how cool is determined and how that has changed over the past few decades.

Finally, in an article that has received a lot of chatter this week, David Brooks also looks back 20 years to his book Bobos in Paradise for the Atlantic this week.

More than one of these podcasts/articles mentioned a book called The Sum of Small Things from 2017. I think I may have to check this book out…

I would like to recommend a new podcast called Now & Then. The show is hosted by two professors of American History, Joanne Freeman of Yale University and Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College, who are obviously friends and enjoy conversation with each other as well as sharing a deep knowledge about our past. (Richardson has Maine ties.) I have been familiar with both of them through past podcasts (Freeman was on a great show called Backstory that unfortunately ended last year), and Richardson seems to have gotten fairly famous chronicling daily events of the past couple of years on her Substack newsletter. Both of them have written books that are available through Minerva.

If you go looking for this one through your podcast player, be careful that you are not subscribing one several other podcasts with the same name.