Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: a table-tennis movie that’s really about being made obsolete, the Chappelle special that isn’t stand-up, Borges on whether there’s any such thing as the “real” Odyssey, the strange story of how the world’s best movie projector became impossible to build, and a forgotten book on where ideas actually come from.
1. Marty Supreme : When a Better Tool Changes the Rules
I watched Marty Supreme for the second time a few days ago and liked it even more than the first time, though it still comes close to my limit for how stressful a film can be. It’s less anxiety-inducing than the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, but that’s not saying much.
This time, I noticed the craft more: the period detail, how every background face is interesting. But I also caught something central to the film, a major theme that I had not even noticed the first time.
When Marty plays Japanese champion Koto Endo, he’s completely thrown off. He holds the paddle differently and makes shots Marty can’t anticipate. I assumed it was kind of like a karate champion encountering a jiu-jitsu black belt for the first time.
After losing, Marty throws a tantrum and there’s a throwaway line about Endo’s paddle. It sounds like a sore loser making excuses, and that’s what I thought it was.
Except he was right!
The film is loosely inspired by American table-tennis champion and hustler Marty Reisman. Endo is based in part on Japanese player Hiroji Satoh, who arrived at the 1952 World Championships with a paddle covered in thick sponge.
Traditional “hardbat” paddles had thin rubber attached directly to wood. Sponge compressed and sprang back, producing unfamiliar speed, spin, bounce, and trajectories. It even changed the sound of contact. Players who spent years building finely tuned instincts for how a stroke looked and sounded found themselves with a useless toolkit.
Satoh won the world championship. Sponge spread rapidly. Table tennis became a different game.
That changes how I see the whole film. It goes from a story about Marty vs. Endo to one about the old guard raging against a technological shift.
This pattern repeats everywhere. Someone becomes exceptional under one technological regime, then a new tool changes which skills count. You’re still just as good. It just stops mattering. Silent-film stars when talkies arrived. Hand-drawn animators when the studios moved to CGI.
Marty wants the game frozen at the moment when he is best positioned to dominate it. But he hasn’t just met a better player. He has met the next version of his sport. [Liberty]
🎬 Marty Supreme (2025)
2. Dave Chappelle’s Best Special Isn’t Stand-Up
I have been a Dave Chappelle fan for a long time. I’ve enjoyed just about everything he’s done: Killin’ Them Softly, For What It’s Worth, Chappelle’s Show, and the run of Netflix specials. But the Chappelle work I keep coming back to - and recommend to friends, no matter their opinion of his comedy - is not stand-up comedy. It is a forty-minute speech he gave at his old high school in June 2022, released on Netflix the following month as What’s in a Name?, and it is one of the most thoughtful defenses of free expression I have ever heard.
The context matters. Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, is where Chappelle went as a teenager, and in October 2021 the school announced it would rename its theater after him. His special The Closer had come out the same month and drawn intense criticism for some of its controversial jokes. Some students objected to the naming, and the school held a contentious Q and A with Chappelle. And on June 20, 2022, at what was supposed to be a naming ceremony, Chappelle stood in front of the students who had opposed him and made an unusual proposal. “Rather than give this theater my name, I would like to give these students my message.” He asked that the space be called the ‘Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression’. The school agreed.
What makes the speech worth watching is the elegance with which Chappelle treats his critics. He does not dismiss the students. He remembers being one of them. He tells the room what art is for and what it costs, and he makes the case, without hyperbole or heat, that a school named for Duke Ellington should be a place where the hardest ideas can be tested out loud. Netflix put the speech on the platform in July 2022 without fanfare, and it later won the 2024 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. But at heart it is a working artist explaining to a room that had opposed him why the freedom to say difficult things is worth protecting. [Jimmy]
📺 What’s in a Name? (Dave Chappelle)
3. Which Odyssey Is the Real Odyssey?
I went into Nolan’s The Odyssey last weekend knowing almost nothing about Homer’s poem. I came out so enthralled by both the theatrical experience and the story itself that I decided to read Homer’s Odyssey and see the film again in a week.
As I did some brief research into which translation to pick (a customary ritual before reading any ancient text), I came across this essay by Jorge Luis Borges in which he explores the art of translation by comparing several English versions of a single passage from The Odyssey. The differences can be large: Pope turns one ship into an entire fleet, while Butler makes Homer sound like a series of “sedate news items.”
Borges calls the belief that translations are inferior to their originals a “superstition.” The same words, even within one language, can invite different interpretations depending on who reads them, when, and where. A translation is thus one of many possible perspectives on a text, rather than a necessarily inferior copy of it. Borges writes, “To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can only be drafts.” (I think the mismatched ‘nine’ and ‘H’ are deliberate, to avoid any direct comparison or ranking.)
How much of what we call fidelity is really familiarity? How much belongs to the author’s style, and how much to the language itself? Which translation is most faithful: the most literal, the most florid, or the simplest?
I won’t spoil Borges’s answer, but the essay made my search for “the best” Odyssey translation much easier. [Vatsal]
📄 The Homeric Versions by Jorge Luis Borges
4. We Stopped Building the World’s Best Projector, and Then Forgot How?!
Unlike Vatsal above, I haven’t seen The Odyssey yet. But I read a fascinating piece about how we’ve lost the knowledge of how to build new 70mm IMAX projectors, so we’ve been repairing and rebuilding old ones, hoping they last.
To open more locations for The Odyssey, IMAX spent over a year tracking down old broken projectors to salvage their parts. Despite this effort, there are still only 25 theaters in the U.S. and 41 theaters worldwide that can do true IMAX 70mm film. That’s 11 more than Oppenheimer had in 2023 (just 30).
How did we get to this sad state of affairs? How did we lose the ability to make more of the very best projection format that humanity has ever created?
The industry’s shift from film to digital is mostly to blame. And sadly, IMAX let that institutional knowledge go. By the time film projection began its vinyl-like revival, the expertise and supply chain had already atrophied. The original design files and manufacturing blueprints were created roughly half a century ago (yes, IMAX was founded in 1967! I didn’t realize this until I looked it up), and they were never properly maintained. The engineers who understood these machines have mostly retired or passed away.
Building another projector today is like recreating an Apollo-era spacecraft. It’s technological archaeology. [Liberty]
📽️ Why Aren’t There More IMAX 70mm Screens? (Variety)
5. The Best Book on Creativity Nobody Has Read
In 1940, an English music scholar named Rosamond Harding (better known, if she’s known at all, for writing the standard history of the pianoforte) published a short book entitled An Anatomy of Inspiration. And yet, despite its thinness, this unassuming paperback probably sits at number one on my HPL index (highlights per line). It was basically yellow by the time I was done with it.
Instead of coming up with new platitudes about creativity, Harding did something far more useful. She collected what the people who actually made things said about how they did it -- the letters, notes, and routines of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and dozens more.
What they had in common surprised her. They described themselves less as inventors than as discoverers. The idea arrives on its own, unbidden. The genius is not in producing it, but recognizing it. Just as a farmer can’t grow a crop himself, an artist can’t have an idea. All either can do is cultivate the conditions for its arrival.
For anyone trying to understand the creative mind, it casts a light I’ve found nowhere else. Why it has been forgotten -- out of print, nine ratings on Goodreads, none on Amazon -- is beyond me. Especially given the slop that usually passes for books on creativity.
Two hundred pages. Hunt down a copy if you can. [Dylan]
📘 An Anatomy of Inspiration, and An Essay on the Creative Mood by Rosamond Harding
📖 You can borrow an ebook version for free on the Internet Archive
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I definitely need to watch that Chappelle special now!