Abrahamic Nutters

On the other hand, there's this little dose of brilliance from Marcus Brigstocke:



[Via Pharyngula]

(His bio says he loves the Smiths and the Cure, but hates Lily Allen. What's up with that?)

"The Good, The Bad and the Queen" by The Good, The Bad, and the Queen

Steam-punk band, the Good, the Bad, and the Queen with a new video. It's sort of a post-modern revision of 19th century Orientalism where-in the exotic east becomes the political east. The images of Sufis (apparently) rocking out to the band's increasingly hectic tune speak volumes about our lack of worldliness, our unwillingness to engage others, and the danger presented by those who try.

BSG Or Just Moore BS

"Sorry, nobody told me you were one of us..."

For a short time this show was able to transcend it's humble, somewhat embarrassing roots, but now I just don't care about it or its so-called secrets. Nevertheless, there's this news:

So for all you "Battlestar Galactica" die-hards, here's a rundown of what to look for in the show's fourth and final season.

• Showrunner Ron Moore confirmed that the identity of the fifth and final Cylon will be revealed late in the series, perhaps as late as the final episode.

• This season will see lots of Adama-Starbuck conflict, especially the first episode. No one will be left saying "Gee, I wish there was more Adama/Kara scenes."

• Baltar's arc will be shocking and thrilling to fans of the character. Said Tricia Helfer (Number Six): "Baltar's getting a lot of action this season, and I haven't been involved."

• Moore is hoping to bring back lawyer Romo Lampkin from the season-three finale.

Who is the final cylon? How will Adama and Starbuck resolve their relationship? What will Baltar get up to? What can we learn of the mysterious House-like Romo Lampkin?

Who freaking cares?

I'm sure the answers to these questions and others will be just as arbitrary, just unmotivated, just as self-indulgent as everything else that's happened on this show.

You have to think that this show would be going past four seasons if it hadn't gone out of its way to be provocative for the sake of being provocative, while not actually having the writing chops to live up to its own hype. Ultimately all Ron Moore has achieved with his show is the large number of casual viewers and fans he's chased away.

Lost in the Labyrinth of the Faun

Guillermo del Toro has an incredible talent for making almost great movies. Which is to say movies that are almost great, movies that feel like they're going to be great, but somehow fall short (the Hellboy movie suffers from the same affliction). Indeed, for most of Pan's Labyrinth I felt like I was watching a new classic; a movie to put on the shelf and watch again and again.

Unfortunately as beautifully designed as the sets and costumes were, as amazing as the performances are, and as incredibly realized and brought to life as the movie is by the effects team, it doesn't add up to anything more than a mish-mash of ideas. There's the systematic brutality of war vs. the uncontrolled violence of fairy tales; fascist obedience vs. the rebellion of the imagination; childhood idealism vs. adult cynicism; life and death; the arbitrariness of reality vs. the rules-making of stories; etc. etc. etc.

del Toro know his stuff and he talks a good game (in the DVD extras), and the images he has created for the film, including the giant frog, the pale man, and the faun itself are visually arresting, as are the horrific scenes of violence, and the monstrous face of the Captain after a particularly gruesome scene. He knows enough to talk about rules of three, and to site Bruno Bettelheim as an influence. It was also clever to design the faun as a green man or druidic oak king figure and therefore tie him to the more primordial and dark aspects of the Pan archetype.

In the story of Fascist Spain, I was interested by the design of the Captain's house with it's low, sweeping roof-line, surrounded by endless forest, and whose doors are guarded by enormous iron locks. In this fairy tale setting, the Captain becomes an analog for every evil king. He has captured the Queen and hopes to usurp her throne by replacing the true heir (Ofelia) with his own son (the baby brother who must be saved). In the end, he is transformed into a monster by the horrific wound on his face and he is destroyed, without a son to follow him or even the solace of a story to remember him.

Except that the fascist storyline never really parallels the fantasy world. There is is no allegory. The Captain and the world he represents are too insular, too self-regarding: representatives of the banality of evil and the everyday institutional violence of fearful governments besieged by rebellion and terror. When the captain kills the farmer and his son, he blames his lieutenants for their lack of bureaucratic thoroughness.

Meanwhile the frog king and the pale man seem to have no analogs in the main story either. They belong completely to the fantasy world of childhood fears and anxieties. More importantly, the Faun does not turn out to be evil as I suspected he might, but he is merely a servant doing his duty to the rules of the fairy world. He tests Ofelia not to push her along the path of maturity or to help her face the reality of her situation (which del Toro knows ought to be the "use" of this particular "enchantment"), but to draw her deeper into her delusional world of fantasy and escapism, and ultimately the death wish of transcendence.

And that's the real problem with the movie. Ofelia's quest and struggle does not make her stronger, it only allows her and the audience to accept the senselessness of her murder. She's in a better place, and the faun was there not only to lead her to her death, but to teach her the pointlessness of living. After all she's not a mortal, she's a princess of the underworld; a goth suicide girl.

This also highlights the limited perspective we get when our main character is a child. She is someone who can't see beyond her own self, her own situation, her own fears and desires. She is incapable of heroism because she is incapable, unlike Mercedes the servant, of actively engaging in the world and understanding its true dangers.

And it is Mercedes, in the end, who is the protagonist of the story (which gives the movie an interesting symmetry with the structure of To Kill a Mockingbird where Scout is the main character, her father is the protagonist, and Boo like the Faun is the spooky impact character). She is the one who has the bravery and the inner resolve to pursue her goals, face up to reality, fight for what she wants (literally with a pairing knife!), and provides the rebels with their final victory.

I think we are intended to see Mercedes and Ofelia as two sides of the same person, and here we have a missed opportunity. If Mercedes had been Ofelia's impact character, the you and I are alike person, the movie would have tied together the two storylines into a unified whole. What's missing is a scene or two to show that Mercedes knows about the magic kingdom, that she understands what Ofelia is going through and can help her complete her quest and grow up. If the two were linked, we would have seen more clearly the meaning of innocence and sacrifice in the ending: that Ofelia in her world was able to achieve her personal goal by refusing to sacrifice innocent blood (her baby brother's), while Mercedes in her goal to assist the rebels in the woods does sacrifice innocent blood. Yes, the captain and his men are destroyed, but in order to do so Ofelia was unprotected and ultimately sacrificed. This gives resonance not only to the fairy story but to the real world situation the very grown up ability to regret the unthinkable costs of war and revolution.

But in the end, Mercedes and Ofelia occupy separate worlds, and Ofelia's welcome into the underworld seems like a cheap cop-out next to the reality of war. What we get is a movie that is more violent than Reservoir Dogs, that features scenes of brutality and torture, and that in the end gives us a senseless scene of child murder justified by pseudo-history and cgi theatrics. It's a story for children that no child can watch, and a story for adults with no deeper meaning or greater understanding of the human cost of war. The story, as told, has no justification, and the movie is ultimately a very beautiful and thought-provoking failure.

The Brazen Careerist

I've just discovered Penelope Trunk's career advice at Yahoo. I thought her tips were pretty benign until I started reading the angry and hostile comments left by the vast majority of the readers.

Here are some of her tips for workplace etiquette:

1. Forget the exit interview.

An exit interview won't help you, and it'll probably create bad will. If you have people to thank when you leave a job, do it at lunch. If you have ideas for how to improve the company, offer to consult. Of course the company will decline, because they don't care. Otherwise you wouldn't be quitting, right?

Stop focusing on the exit interview and focus on how to quit like a pro. When you get a new job, your old boss is part of your new network. It's up to you to make sure that parting ways goes as smoothly as possible so that you can shepherd this person into your network of supporters.

2. Don't ask for time off, just take it.

When you need to leave work for a few hours or a few days, you don't need to ask for permission -- you're an adult, after all. Make sure your work is in good order and send an email to the relevant people letting them know you'll be gone.

This will seem discourteous to older people, who expect you to ask rather than tell. So be sure to give a reason why you're cutting out. People like to know they matter and where they stand.

3. Keep your headphones on at work.

If you use social media tools, you're probably good at connecting with people and navigating office politics -- good enough that spending all day at work with headphones on won't hinder you.

If you don't know what what social media tools are, then you're probably not innately good at making connections and need to take those headphones off before you're crushed by office politics.

From what I can tell, her advice is really geared toward 21st century knowledge workers. People who are capable of being their own means of production and aren't reliant on vast corporate infrastructure to do their jobs. These are people who just need a phone, an internet connection, and their own wits to be successful.

My guess is that this doesn't necessarily apply to most people. If you work in retail, you have your shop and your inventory and your suppliers. If you're a doctor, even a surgeon pulling down six figures, you are dependent on the hospital and the hospital staff to supply you with all the things you need.

The knowledge workers of the future, on the other hand, are completely independent and work in fluid environments. Their boss isn't down the hall, she's in an office in London or Mumbai, or he's traveling to the customer's office in Toronto this week, Sydney the next. The idea that one's job is to supervise others, or that one needs to be supervised is for people whose lives or jobs are stuck in the 20th century. The people I've seen be successful are the people who take charge of themselves and their work and aren't easily pushed around. If they are doing X, and their boss says Y, they push-back rather than submissively changing tracks.

If that's the sort of thing that will get you fired, then you don't have a career, you just have a job. And you're probably in the wrong one.

Kung Fu Monkey at SDCC

John Rogers recounts his experiences at the San Diego Comic Con. Overall it's great stuff, but this sad realization is telling:

In the American media there are two constants. In politics, it is always and forever 1968, and liberals are Dirty Fucking Hippies. In culture, anyone who decides to poke their head out of the cultural world of the CBS primetime line-up is a sad, basement-dwelling loner screaming into his Hello Kitty pillow as crackling video dubs of the original Spider-Man cartoon flicker on his television.

I think he's responding (defensively, reflexively, but OK) to the notion that comic conventions are for mouth-breathing momma's boys. Nerds!

In this world anything that goes against the grain makes you a nerd. Anything that makes someone say, "well, that's different," makes you a nerd. Making an effort makes you a nerd. Acting like you care makes you a nerd.

Those two definitions of politics and culture, belong to the enemies of everything that's good and true. If we weren't such a sorry bunch of nerds, maybe we might do something about it.

St. Vincent Review in Pitchfork

Pitchfork gives a rave review to the Annie Clark's St. Vincent record, Marry Me. They actually like it more than I do which makes me feel better for feeling like I like it more than I should.

Anyway, here's what they have to say in their 8.0 review:

In the case of music like this, the devil to conquer is preciousness and indulgence. No doubt, in lesser hands Clark's quirks and eccentricities would mark the St. Vincent project a no-go from the start. But at every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life.

Good stuff.

7-26-07

The Washington Post has a story about Cloverfield and how companies are using the web to promote movies and television programs through online mystery games. The question now is, did Cloverfield misfire?

But after the initial rush of discoveries, fans began to question: Where is the rest of the game? Unforums.com, a forum devoted to alternate-reality games, features more than 6,000 posts -- which have been viewed about 400,000 times -- from players searching for clues since July 3, when the trailer first appeared before the "Transformers" movie.

If they have indeed found a "rabbithole," the fans do not know how to enter, and they're left hoping that J.J. Abrams will unleash a white rabbit to lead the way.

As with Alias and Lost, it's easier to create the possibility of a mystery than to explore or solve it. If you have a rabbithole, the rabbit better lead you somewhere. Otherwise, the whole scheme is just a monstrous waste of time.

The Importance of Meg White

I'm sort of a fence sitter when it comes to the White Stripes. It seems like Jack White is equal parts brilliant and stupid, which I suppose is his genius and appeal. But I thought this review of their recent show at Madison Square Garden was insightful, particularly this bit about Meg White's drumming:

A White Stripes concert also underscores the importance of Ms. White, whose drumming is more sophisticated than many fans (and many more non-fans) realize. She refuses to imitate a metronome, refuses to flatten the songs by making them conform to a steady pulse. Instead she seems to hear the music the way Mr. White does: as a series of phrases, each with its own shape and tempo. In “Icky Thump,” the title track from the group’s most recent album, which was released last month, she occasionally warped the rhythm by shortening one of the beats, perfectly in unison with Mr. White’s guitar. If her playing were mathematically precise, it would be less musically precise.

All of which is exactly right. She doesn't keep the beat so much as follow along to and express Jack's internal rhythms. Her playing shows you where the emphasis is and what Jack want the song to be. Just as Jack has boiled rock and blues down to just the riffs and the howls, she's boiled the drumming down to just the beats you hear rather than an actual rhythm. Everything else is filtered out as "white" space. It's a bizarre form of minimalism.

The Missing Impact of Luna Lovegood

J. Hull at the recently re-named Story Fanatic has a great analysis of the Order of the Phoenix movie (as well as a defense of these sorts of analyses). I think he hits the nail on the head.

The problem with the movie, and it may also be in the book, is the lack of an impact character who is pushing Harry or showing him an alternative path. There are characters that support and oppose Harry but no one that shows him a mirror of himself. This is made even more frustrating because early on the movie version introduces an interesting new character, and then never uses her:

When we first are introduced to Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) we learn that she and Harry Potter share a common past — they both have witnessed death first hand. As a result of such a tragedy the two of them can see creatures that no one else can. This is a perfect setup for an Impact Character/Main Character relationship, something the Dramatica theory of story jokingly refers to as the “You and I are quite alike moment.”

The "you and I are alike" moment is the key. And like the writer, I thought Luna's unusual relationship with the invisible creatures would be a decisive plot point in the end. Instead it was all but forgotten as the group flew to London for the big show down.

As J.Hull acknowledges, this characterization of Luna Lovegood is different from the role she plays in the novel, but had the screenwriter developed her character along these lines, it would have made for a much more satisfying movie.

Conservative Environmentalism

Never put it past conservatives to come upon a topic and then act like they discovered it. Roger Scruton has decided it fits his idiosyncratic definition of Conservatism to support environmentalism (and Andrew Sullivan agrees). Well, good for them.

Unfortunately, they seem far less interested in, y'know, actually saving the planet, then a) Attacking an out-dated straw-man version of leftist "statism" and b) using any given topic as an opportunity to re-invent conservatism in their own image (that is, as a philosophy wholly alien to the Republican party, and, I can only assume, the Tories as well).

Scruton writes:

What then is the conservative solution, if there is one? A revival of trusteeship is the only hope for the future, and this attitude is natural to human beings. They enter the world through no choice of their own, to be greeted, as a rule, by the love of parents and the security of home. The trustee is the one who recognizes that his home, and all that it means, are inherited things, things to be safeguarded and passed on. This attitude exercises itself at the local level in the voluntary associations and small institutions of civil society. It is the core component in that associational genius that Tocqueville discerned in the American people. It is the legacy of a political order that regards people, not rulers, as the source of authority and the fount of responsible decision-making.

Brilliant. His solution is a Trust. A concept from English common law that grew out of feudalism. He really is a capital-C Conservative. And this Trust will treat the earth as something to be "inherited", "safeguarded and passed on." Like a Lordship or a Country House. Sounds great.

And how will we organize ourselves? Certainly not through the government or some official agency. No, no. That's the State (boo!). We'll have "voluntary associations and small institutions of civil society". Like a Book Club, or a Home Owners Association. Great, because those are fun (and always super nice).

But remember, this is not elitism. This is not an aristocracy of land owners. Perish the thought. "It is the legacy of a political order that regards people, not rulers as the source of authority..." Oh yeah, you mean like a government of the people, by the people, for the people? Wait, what?

See, here's the thing these conservatives (even the placid British ones) can't seem to understand: if you attack the government, you attack the people. The United States collapsed the difference in its founding and in its Constitution some 200 years ago. So all this talk about "The State" and "Big Government" interference is just plain nonsense (and as a side note, if you want to attack the poor planning of government schemes, quit talking about Maoism or Stalinism and start looking at the planning that' s gone into the Iraq war courtesy of the Bush administration).

So aside from advocating an environmental policy based on private property stewardship (Capitalism, Consumerism, and Christianity), the other problem with this big C conservatism is the absolute certainty they have in "human nature" and "human motivation". Unlike any other science or philosophy, they have very little doubt that they have locked down what it is that people want and need. More than freedom, more than happiness, more than shelter, food, or beautiful things to look at, people need a sense of entitlement. They'll own up to the problems of the world, once they are reassured that they sit firmly in its center:

The job of protecting the environment is one that citizens must undertake, and we will—just as soon as we see it to be ours. The problem is not the lack of state initiatives but the surfeit of them and the general attitude, enhanced by every treaty and every leftist publicity stunt, that state control, not individual freedom, will make us take our responsibilities seriously.

See the problem with the Left is that they think environmentalism is about the Earth; The plants, the animals, the seas, and the air. But conservatives no better. They know it's really about the millions and millions of little kings in their multitude of little suburban castles hoping for a nicer yard than the guy next door.

St. Vincent - "Paris is Burning"

I love the way she uses the guitar in this performance, sometimes Spanish, sometimes synthesized strings. Just great.

Design For Life

This is a brilliant comment to a rather pedestrian article on the idea of a world without human beings (best portrayed in the show The Future Is Wild). From Slackie Onassis:

Given that 99% of all that's ever lived on Earth has gone extinct eventually, we should probably be more humble, less vain. But that's not a very marketable sentiment, when contrasted with 1) Capitalism, 2) Consumerism, and 3) Christianity -- which hold, respectively, that 3) Man is uniquely valued in the cosmos by a Creator, and that 2) we're entitled to everything, and that 1) whatever can't be priced, bought, or owned isn't worth having, anyway. Those sentiments will only hasten our extinction, likely by our own hand.

I don't know if they'll hasten our extinction, but these are definitely words to understand and live by accordingly. Capitalism is our system of value. Consumerism is our path to fulfillment. Christianity is our justification for everything.

What more do you need to know?

Jumping Someone Else's Train

Robert Smith to work with Ashlee Simpson? A member of Fall Out Boy is a mutual friend? Something inside me has died.

Gatekeeping or Self-Preservation? Editors vs. the Blogosphere

In the last two days I've seen two different attacks on internet writing from two different nostalgic, curmudgeonly perspectives. First there was this article on Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur in the Guardian:

The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Thanks to Web 2.0, newspapers, record companies, movie studios and traditional publishers are on the verge of extinction, he says.

And then today in Salon, Gary Kamiya has this to say:

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

I think the basic problem with all of this is this unfounded assertion that bloggers are rebellious adolescents raging against the publishing machine, when the truth is most bloggers are just taking the opportunity to participate in the larger world the internet has to offer. Most of the blogs I read are pretty thoughtful, and even if they are self-edited, the writer does take the time to refine his or her thoughts.

Second, is the false claim that all of this fabulous edited content is in fact producing violin makers instead of just legitimizing the schlock that the business side wants to publish to increase sales. From what I can tell most successful writers like Rowling and King go unedited (and their later books get longer and longer as a result). More importantly where are the gatekeepers when false memoirs and celebrity trash routinely race up the sales charts. The whole pretense is a sham.

So what they claim is a necessary function is actually just a lot of self-mythologizing and posturing on the part of professional writers and editors who can't stand to see their livelihoods de-professionalized. But the truth is that we are only at the dawn of the prosumer era. Just wait until the amateurs are producing their own albums, their own novels, their own movies and sharing them via the internet. Just wait until there is no difference between Random House and some guy's blog. Then take another leap forward to when individuals are designing their own vacuum cleaners, their own clothes, their own cars, and replication technology allows us to completely eliminate manufacturing and industry in the name of the hand-designed, the hand-made. Download the plans and set your replicator, and voila: a violin.

The point that's being missed is that blogging like anything else takes time to be developed and refined. We are only at the beginning, and we don't yet know what's good, or who does it best. If this were the 1500s we might be complaining about the endless reams of paper given to the amateurish writing of sonnets which was the fad of the time. Everyone, regardless of talent, was toiling away on sonnets. Most of them aren't worth reading, but does that mean we should also dismiss the one's scribbled down by Shakespeare? Of course not.

The other curious thing about all of this is the fact that most people seem to be pretty happy with the YouTube debate format that CNN used last night. So what's it to be? Democracy or self-preservation?

"The Bird And The Bee" - The Bird and the Bee

Finally picked up the full album from The Bird and the Bee (and for $5.99 from iTunes, how could I resist?) I really liked the first single, "Again and Again", but I worried that they wouldn't be able to sustain their quirky sound for a full album. The early reviews didn't help either, characterizing the album as nice but not great. But the truth is that this is a very lovely album that packs a lot of great stuff in a very short time. Songs like "Birds and the Bees" and "Preparedness" have the sleek sound of bands like Zero 7 and Frou Frou, while tunes like "I Hate Camera" and "F-cking Boyfriend" demonstrate a quirky sense of humor. It's like the perfect date: cool, sexy, funny, smart, and stylish.

Cheerleaders of War

Glenn Greenwald had an interesting piece yesterday rebutting the Weekly Standard's so-called 9/11 generation. He writes

... the "9/11 Generation" is no different than its predecessor. One group is comprised of an extremely small percentage of young Americans who volunteer to fight in combat. Contrary to Barnett's attempt to hold them up as the symbolic prop of the "9/11 Generation," they actually represent a tiny percentage of Americans in this age group. A far larger percentage of young Americans fought in the Vietnam war than have fought in the 9/11 era.

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It is no surprise, then, that the younger generation of the political movement led by the Vietnam-era chickenhawks largely emulates their cowardly and principle-free behavior. The defining attribute of the Weekly Standard strain of the "9/11 Generation" is the unprecedented ease with which one can cheer on endless wars without having to make even the most minimal sacrifices to sustain them. That is the unique and defining attribute of the Weekly Standard/Hugh-Hewitt strain of the 9/11 Generation.

I think this a point that is long overdue, and my only objection is that it wasn't made back in 2004 when the Young Republicans were out in force campaigning for the re-election of the President. Do you think any of those guys have signed up?

On the other hand, I live in Colorado Springs with Fort Carson Army Base, Peterson Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy. There are no chickenhawks here. And one can only hope that the next administration does more than just cheer-lead from the sidelines.

Mastodon - "Sleeping Giant"

Mastodon goes sci-fi crazy in their new video. It's like Rush's 2112 filtered through The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi.

See it here.

[Via Pitchfork]

Ryan Heshka's Neo Pulp

Via Cool Hunting, an interesting artist with a fun pulp style. More here.

Edward Hopper and the Mad Men

I enjoyed the first episode of AMC's "Mad Men" last night. It tells the story of an ad agency in the high modern Manhattan of the 60s: jet set style, skyscrapers, steel and glass, and skinny ties.

Unfortunately the shows greatest weaknesses are also its supposed strengths: the period smoking plays like Brazil style satire, the ad agency brainstorming runs the danger of turning into Shakespeare in Love style serendipity (Lucky Strikes are toasted to be tasty, hey that's good!). Additionally, the conceit that "behind closed doors, things are not what they seem", tells us a lot less about the 60s (or life in general) than the show thinks it does. It also borrows pretty heavily from the 50s era domestic dramas that Far from Heaven payed tribute to, including the closing scene where our hero returns home to wife and children in suburban Connecticut.

What the show does well though is give us interesting characters and places them in visually interesting situations. Maybe it's the fact that Christina Hendricks's green dress stole every scene it was in, but I couldn't help but think that the look of the show was much more inspired by the 40s and 50s than the 60s. For example in this painting by Edward Hopper:



Also notice in this shot the way they use the furniture and windows of the office to highlight the increased isolation and internal conflict of Jon Hamm's character:



As in this painting:




In both instances, the placement of the person within the scene is both visually pleasing and psychologically interesting. Lost in thought, the character is isolated from the world around him as well as from other people, and perhaps life.

It is this attention to the characters and the way that the scenes are shot that makes Mad Men successful. I'm looking forward to future episodes.

What Autism Can Tell us about the Art of Manipulation

Simon Baron-Cohen's article, "I Cannot Tell a Lie - what people with autism can tell us about honesty" poses many interesting, and I think very serious, questions about the nature of consciousness and human behavior. It's also interesting from the point of view of a writer to think about how characters in a story can be seen to embody different aspects of this rich psychology.

In the article, Baron-Cohen distinguishes between lean interpretations of animal behavior which can understand and learn from rules in an instrumental way, and rich interpretations of behaviors that demonstrate an awareness of other minds and the ability to manipulate others through deception.

He writes:

If what other animals are doing when they appear to be dishonest is not real deception, this begs the question of what counts as real deception. True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true. Defined in this way, one can see that deception is no trivial achievement! The deceiver needs to have the mental equipment to juggle different representations of reality. No wonder that scholars of animal behavior are wary of elevating a single instance of behavior to genuine deception, and prefer to reduce it to simpler mental processes like learned associations.

In human beings this rich ability to understand and deceive can be seen even in very small children. What's interesting is that people with autism and Asperger's syndrome don't seem to have this capacity at all. They have great awareness of their own experiences and beliefs, and have tremendous talents and mental abilities, but they cannot see into the minds of others.

From one perspective, I would say that this ability to empathize is essential to our core humanity and our ability to tell stories and learn from others. If one definition of storytelling is the lie that tells the truth, then empathy and deception are really at its core. We are fascinated by stories that allow us to see into the minds of others, to understand their motivations, inner conflicts, and desires. Many of our greatest writers, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Henry James to Leo Tolstoy have dramatized this particularly rich capacity by giving us clues into the inner workings of their characters as well as showing how characters manipulate and deceive each other through word and action.

More generously, Baron-Cohen concludes:

The unique qualities of human intelligence are characterized not just by the capacity for mind-reading (and deception), which has enabled humans to work in coordinated activity unusually well, but also by the capacity to systemize, which has enabled humans to understand how things work, and to develop innovative technology par excellence. People with autism, who can perceive patterns better and concentrate better than their peers, are also more honest.

What this distinction really highlights is that the differences in people are complimentary and interrelated. One quality allows us to empathize and understand things passionately, the other quality allows us to organize and see things with cool objectivity. For me, these are important things to remember when trying to understand human nature in general and how to write and understand characters specifically.

Great article and interesting insights.

The War Debate

Peter Galbraith in Salon writes:

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."

A commenter responds:

Pathetic. More pathetic, though, is why liberals are so eager for American to lose. You're all such self-loathing wimps wringing your hands over every little perceived problem. You're so deluded by Bush Derangement Syndrome that you'd just as soon as see American lose if only it'll make Bush look bad.

This is the entire debate in a nutshell. Those on the left read the tea-leaves for signs of change while the right thumps its collective chest and says fight on.

Britt Daniel Interview

A good interview with Britt Daniel of Spoon at the A.V. Club. Sample quote:

I remember driving up to a show in Denver on the Kill The Moonlight tour, and there was a huge line. I think the previous time we'd played in Denver, we played to 40 people or something. And so I was like, "Whoa! Something's going on here." And [tour manager] Ben [Dickey] was like, "Yep, something's going on here." [Laughs.] And I was like, "Really? Why are people coming to see us all of a sudden?" And he said something obnoxious like, "Because you're gonna be huge." I've always remembered that moment.

The new album is also quite memorable.

The Bird and the Bee - "Again and Again"

A band with a lot of style (and Inara George).

Cheney's Empire

Matt Yglesias is finally saying what I've been hoping someone would say for years now: there never was a plan to leave Iraq. We're stay-ers:

...here we are, over four years after the invasion, and it's time to face up to the possibility that the Bush administration's policies in occupied Iraq haven't been driven exclusively by a sincere and idealistic commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people and the principles of liberty and democracy. Shocking, yes. But not to put too fine a point on it, it's the imperialism, stupid.

Bush won't adopt a bargaining strategy that involves walking away as an option, because he's not willing to walk away. The objective is to retain Iraq as a platform for the projection of American military power in the region, to continue a larger regional struggle against Iran and Syria, to maintain physical control over Iraq's oil resources, etc.

That's right, it's the imperialism, stupid. We wanted a permanent base in the Middle East, just like we have in Germany, Japan, and Korea. The snag is that it wasn't a very good plan from strategic or logistical points of view. It leaves troops on the ground in a hostile environment (unlike those other places) and we don't have enough of them to accomplish our goals.

To defeat the insurgency we need more troops (more than even the surge could provide). More troops that we can't have without a draft. And if we have a draft, the public will revolt and demand withdrawal. So now we're stuck, trying to complete the same job with fewer resources. Can't move forward, can't move backward. Instead of Empire, we have Quagmire.

Fox News Attacks Mr. Rogers

This is so low, I'm left speechless. The Ectoplasmosis blog has the story and the video:

It’s a disgusting, vile little piece and it’s very likely that you won’t be able to get through all of it. To summarize. Fox News’ argument for Mr. Rogers being “evil” goes like this: he told two entire generations of children that they were “special just the way they are.” Then, in what can only be described as a despicable lie, the Fox News anchors claim that that’s precisely where Mr. Rogers left off. He never taught children anything except to merely exist in a static state of selfish self-entitlement. And that’s why my entire generation is comprised entirely of rapists, murderers, welfare recipients and drug addicts.

According to the video, this whole attack Mr. Rogers stems from the notion that today's college students are somehow entitled and don't feel like they have to earn their grades. Not that there is any actual evidence for this beyond the anecdotal grumblings of college professors and the generational resentments of the boomers in twilight once again asserting that the kids aren't all right (in spite of evidence to the contrary).

The real problem here is that a) Conservatives continually attack and undermine the education system b) Conservatives will attack anyone with progressive views no matter how benign and c) Its Boomer parents who turned College education into a consumer item (to be bought, not earned) with their over-emphasis on careerism and return-on-investment thinking (my kid and my money to insert name of college here).

If someone's paying $20, $30, or $40, 000 dollars a year on college tuition (or whatever it is these days), they make it all about the money. And what are they paying for? Straight A's, a degree, and a top job. Anything less than that leads to quality control problems ("what am I paying for?") and customer service issues out the whazoo! ("what's that liberal nutjob teaching you, anyway?)" And how's anyone gonna pay for all those loans with a Philosophy degree? (so you might as well get rid of everything but engineering, law, and medicine.)

It's not the kids, it's the parents. And for pete's sake, leave Fred Rogers out of it.

Bat For Lashes - "What's a Girl to Do"

A new band that also just happens to be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. The album Fur and Gold is released in the states, according to Pitchfork, on July 31.

Against the Day Update: Shamanism

I'm still reading!

So by now, Kit Traverse has been traveling across Asia with a British divinity scholar named Dwight Prance in search of the fabled Shambhala. Way out in Eastern Russia, Kit and Prance get into a discussion about the nature of Shamanism (pgs 776-777). It's great. Check it out.

Prance says:

"Shamanism. There isn't a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can't be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, an has taken steps to eradicate it."

"What? there's no 'state religion' in the U.S.A, pardner, we've got freedom of worship, it's guaranteed in the Constitution -- keeps church and state separate, just so's we don't turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o' course."

"The Cherokee," replied Prance, "the Apache, the massacre of Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you've found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you've simply killed."

"That was about land," said Kit.

"I suggest it was about fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you've ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened."

"The Civil War? That was economics. Politics."

"That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you're taught don't you?"

I love this notion that the religious debate is not really about faith v. reason, or theocracy v. secularism, but between oppressive state power and ecstatic personal freedom. What complicates western history is that sometimes the Church is the State, and most everyone sees themselves in the role of the Shaman, the holder of the true cause, battling the powerful forces arrayed against them.

In the Soviet Union atheism was the state's way of dealing with the shamanistic beliefs of the Eastern church and the Tsars. In the modern U.S., atheism and neo-paganism are quasi-shamanistic belief-systems that are oppressed by the Christianist state-empowered majority. American Christians in the mode of the Left Behind series see themselves as an oppressed minority of believers battling the evils of the anti-Christ, one world government, and secular humanism. In the war on terror, al-Qaeda and Jihadism represent a desire to achieve state power in order to battle the shamanisitic free-wheeling, feminist, liberal, gay-friendly, artistic West. But they themselves believe that the western nations conspire against their shamanistic version of Islam, and for them 9/11 was nothing less than their God's revenge.

It's not about what you believe, but how you believe. Are you free? or are your experiences mediated for you by the powers that be: consumerism, Christianism, nationalism; Fox news, neo-conservatism, and the religious right. Do you believe everything you're taught or are you in touch with powerful gods hidden in the landscape of art, literature, music and culture?

Genre Fiction vs. Genre Tropes

Cory Doctorow discusses the difference between genre stories and genre tropes (the signifiers of a genre) by distinguishing between sci-fi elements that are futuristic and sci-fi stories that are futurismic. He writes:

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices — but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.

Of course, the futurismic NCC-1701 was really based on Rodenberry's desire to do Horatio Hornblower stories in space. Not a hardcore attempt to think about the real social and scientific implications of FTL or transporters or replicators. The question is, can you go hardcore non-futurismic (or non-horrorismic, or non-fantasyismic) and still have anything that resembles a story in the mind of the reader. Or do you just get high-modern experimental meta-fiction which we've had for nearly 100 years now?

Band of Horses - "The Funeral" (Live at 2006 Pitchfork Music Festival)

A live video of one of the best songs by one of the best bands of 2006.

Never Smile at a Croc-o-phile

This a dopey "lifestyle" essay about Croc shoes. It's too bad we didn't have the internet back in the days of Members Only jackets and Izod shirts. Yeesh.

I have one pair that I wear in the yard and that I can kick off easily without tracking dirt into the house. Kids like them for the same reason: they're easy to get on and off without much fuss.

And yes, by this time next year no one with any self-respect will be wearing them in public. That's why it's called a fad.

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" Review

First, I'll just go on record that Prisoner of Azkaban was by far the best of the books and the best of the movies to-date. Great story, great characters, and excellent plot twists. It's also the only one that I thought really made good use of the Hogwarts milieu as a world unto itself. It was also the last book that wasn't so long you couldn't make a decent movie out of it.

At this stage of the game, the Harry Potter phenomenon is beyond criticism, so reviewing the books or the movies is sort of pointless. As with Star Wars, you're either a rabid fan or an innocent by-stander and with the book version of the Order of the Phoenix I moved from the first camp to the second. After barely slogging through the Goblet of Fire, I lost all interest in book five before Harry ever even made it back to Hogwarts. My memory of the opening chapters of the book was one stagy dialog scene after the next, full of fake legal debates and annoyingly secretive sentences that always went unfinished. It was too much like the Senate scenes in the Star Wars prequels.

So this was the first of the movies that I saw without the benefit of having read the book, and it was the first time I was really aware of how poorly these stories hang together for the innocent bystanders in the audience. Characters appear and disappear from the central plot without much explanation. The rules of how magic works in the Harry Potter universe are increasingly confusing and rarely explained. Most of the magic exists solely as a convenient plot device (e.g. the magical training room that appears for Harry's Dumbledore's Army, the late arrival of Hagrid and his giant half-brother).

Now you could easily say that the book fills in all of the gaps or explains things in better detail, but that doesn't really excuse the poor execution of even the quieter scenes. Here for example is a very nice moment from the mid-point of the story and quoted at length in Michael Berube's essay (PDF) on reading the books with his son. Harry is confused by Cho's reaction to their first kiss:

“Don’t you understand how Cho’s
feeling at the moment?” she asked.

“No,” said Harry and Ron together.
Hermione sighed and laid
down her quill.

“Well, obviously, she’s feeling
very sad, because of Cedric dying.
Then I expect she’s feeling
confused because she liked Cedric
and now she likes Harry, and
she can’t work out who she likes
best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty,
thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s
memory to be kissing Harry at all,
and she’ll be worrying about what
everyone else might say about
her if she starts going out with
Harry. And she probably can’t
work out what her feelings toward
Harry are anyway, because he
was the one who was with Cedric
when Cedric died, so that’s all
very mixed up and painful. Oh,
and she’s afraid she’s going to be
thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch
team because she’s flying so
badly.”

A slightly stunned silence greeted
the end of this speech, then
Ron said, “One person can’t feel
all that at once, they’d explode.”

“Just because you’ve got the
emotional range of a teaspoon
doesn’t mean we all have,” said
Hermione nastily, picking up her
quill again.

This is a wonderful little bit of dialog that expresses the various emotional cross-currents of the story and really captures both the heightened sensitivity and baffled ignorance of teenagers. It's also an excellent example of the holistic mind (in Dramatica terms) at work: searching for balance across the spectrum of experience rather than progressing linearly from one thing to the next.

But the director and the actors completely blow the scene. Hermione speaks it with no conviction, and Ron makes faces for Harry's benefit. There's no "stunned silence", just dismissiveness. Hermione does not deliver her last line nastily, but as a joke and they all share a laugh at all her silly girlish talk. I don't know if they didn't understand the scene, or if the kids just haven't the skill to play the scene correctly, but it was all a great disappointment. Worse yet, the scene has no impact on the rest of the film. Cho all but disappears from the story (as though she's been puritanically punished for the kiss).

So the whole thing falls flat. The fans don't care because they'll just go back and read the book again, and the bystanders don't care because it was better than nothing. But after the success of Azkaban, I can't help wishing that both the books and the movies were leaner, more focused, and more satisfying.

The End of a Sub-Genre

In case anyone cares, this a fantastic and negative review of Captivity.

I don’t want anyone to see this film — I want it to fail spectacularly. I want the filmgoers of this nation to prove that we’re above this sort of contempt and hate of the female sex. That we’re not actually a nation of sick, twisted frat-boy fuckers who’d get off on this sort of deprivation. That there is a line, and that we, collectively, recognize that it’s been crossed, and we won’t subsidize it anymore. That we can reluctantly accept the insulting comedies, the drab thrillers, and the tiresome, lifeless romantic comedies, but that this sort of noxious cinematic poison is not only deplorable, but morally criminal.

Let's hope this is the end of this particular brand of "horror." I certainly won't waste any more time worrying about it.

Cloverfield Updates at AICN

I'm already sort of bored with 1-18-08 and it doesn't help things when Moriarty starts getting all defensive about the so-called reporting on the Cloverfield fun and games.

But, I thought this was a surprisingly insightful paragraph buried deep in the article:

I have a theory about Abrams. I think he was a biiiiiig fan of Disneyland growing up. One of the great things about going to Disney (I lived near Orlando as a kid, so I always think about the Magic Kingdom when I think of the parks) is the way they don’t just have rides. The rides actually begin the moment you step into the park. Everything on the property is about setting a mood, getting you ready for the rides. When you’re standing in line, you get gradually immersed in these environments that drop you into the world you’re about to visit. Like the grave stones outside the Haunted Mansion or the docks on the Jungle Cruise or the ramps up into Space Mountain. You start the ride before you start the ride, and I think that sums up the attitude JJ Abrams and Bad Robot have towards entertainment now.

I agree, but I don't think its Abrams's attitude. I think it's the reality of how you interact with your audience these days. The fans love this stage of speculation and theorizing. It's become a form of entertainment in and of itself. And as Moriarty correctly points out, the goal is to create a self-contained world you can escape into. Just like with the Star Wars prequels, Lost from one week to the next, or the next Harry Potter book, it's all about immersing yourself in that world and thinking about what might happen next. The anticipation becomes part of the story (in the grand tradition of Hollywood propaganda).

Demographic Panic

Conservative blogger Vox Popoli sounds from deep inside the conservative echo chamber with some unbelievable nonsense about the demographic death of the west:

It's positively haunting to walk through some of the nearly abandoned towns and villages of Italy. There's one place that we like to go wandering in the mountains where perhaps thirty people live in a place that used to be home to hundreds. In several visits, we've never seen a single sign of a child outside any of the habitations that aren't abandoned yet.

Didn't the vision of a humanity without children used to belong to dark and dystopian sci-fi?

Everything presented in this commentary and the linked article from Mark Steyn is anecdotal. There is absolutely no attempt to verify the facts or to link this issue to larger social or economic causes. Are the kids really missing? Are they kept inside as they are in the US for fear of stranger danger? Do they choose to be inside playing on their computers and Wiis? What are the economic realities and financial penalties faced by parents? How does this compare to populations in urban areas?

As far as I can tell, the entire discussion is just white panic and thinly-veiled neo-Nazi rhetoric.

My other question is: why is it assumed that demographics win out? Aren't the most populous countries also the poorest? Isn't it true that the west has only gotten richer and more productive as population growth has declined? Aren't replacement numbers a little out-of-date in this era of post-industrialization and knowledge based jobs. And aren't countries like India and China going to face the same pressures to spend more resources on fewer children as farmers and factory workers give rise to Doctors and Engineers? Doesn't the same hold for immigrant groups as they adjust to the realities of life in the US and Europe?

The fact is that the decline in population growth says more about the success of the west socially and economically and is in no way a sign that the end is near.

(Oh, and I hate the fact that Vox Popoli and I both use the same Blogger template -- I think it's time for a change!)

Weather Delays and other Urban Legends

Man do I feel naive. Having just returned from a cross-country trip by air, I was actually surprised to read the latest "Ask the pilot" at Salon. Here's all you need to know:

Your attention please: With scattered exceptions, there is no such thing as a weather delay. They are traffic delays. Your flight was not late because of the weather. It was late because there are too many small airplanes carrying too few people, end of story.

There are too many regional airlines (ie, those little commuter jets you see everywhere) clogging up the skies. It's not the thunderstorms. I'm kind of shocked that this isn't news.

Cloverfield, aka 01-18-08

The whole Cloverfield thing has some pretty crafty marketing and the trailer has a crazy 9/11 feel to it. But here's my question: when have you ever heard of a bigtime hollywood movie being released in January? Isn't that when the studios usually dump movies they have no hope for?

It is however a good time for mid-season television, including the premier of Lost Season 4. I think Touchstone produces Lost, so that means this isn't a tie-in to the off-island conclusion of season 3. On the other hand, just think of how cool it would be to have this sort of monster movie mayhem as a consequence of all that's happened on the island.

Anyway, whatever's going on here, Paramount and Abrams are trying something pretty radical: secret greenlighting, no title, and an odd release date. Something tells me that there's more to it and I'm thinking it's TV related.

CéU - "Ave Cruz"

CéU's pop Brazillian jazz sounds pretty good in the summertime.

n+1 Article on China Mieville

Not sure when this article was published, but it is an excellent overview of Mieville's New Crobuzon novels by Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber.

Mieville's works are powerfully imaginative, embracing both steampunk and horror as a way of expressing his social, literary, and political views. What Farrell highlights is the way the novels attack and rework the genre's root conservatism, in the mode of Tolkien's anti-modernism, and escapism, in the mode of the fantasies and aspirations encoded in our consumer culture.

In [The Scar], we see the city from the outside, through its colonial relations and its willingness to use military force to secure commercial interests. Much of The Scar is set in the pirate city of Armada, and Miéville riffs on the glamour of swashbucklers without ever forgetting the relationship between high-seas adventure and the desire for economic gain. In The Scar, the yearning for fantasy always betrays, either by cloaking relationships of imperial exploitation in the spurious glamour of adventure, or by becoming an endless, ineffectual form of escapism. Either way, it’s a trap.

In this view, the romance of fantasy fiction blinds us to the political and social realities of both the time-periods we're idealizing (Feudal Europe, Victorian London, etc.) as well as the present day. We opt-out of reality rather than participate in it, and ignore the economic exploitation and political will to power around us.

In the Bas-Lag novels, the power of fantasy fiction is realized in its ability to remake the world and undermine these power structures:

For Miéville, fantasy shouldn’t merely justify what is, in the service of a self-defeating escapism or consolation; to the extent that it does, it’s merely remaking our political world, not Remaking it. Instead, fantasy should become a way of arguing about our social condition, of re-presenting our dilemmas, and creating a space for the imagination in which we can identify new possibilities of action. Fantasy can have a kind of political force that the ‘realistic’ novel can’t, precisely because it doesn’t take the real for granted.

The goal for all horror, fantasy, or science fiction should be to take us out of the comforts and escapist urges of familiar genre conventions. It should do more than rehearse and repeat the stories of the past (no matter how much we like them). Instead, we should always be mindful of what is real and use literature to strike a dagger into the hearts of the powerful. Writing should always be a political act of radical imagination.

Steampunk Socialites

The New York Observer coins a new term, "New Vicotorians", in a lifestyle article on the return of Gen-Y Millenials to more traditional views on marriage. The New Vic world centers around child-bearing, cooking, gardening, knitting, nesting and other modes of bourgeois domesticity that the boomers thought they'd successfully done away with.

...recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them.

Unfortunately, the article eventual devolves into yet another touchstone for female marriage panic. Girls musn't be spinsters in the New Vic world. And after all, isn't this just a new take on 80s era yuppie-ism?

Still, until everyone gets bored of playing house, I look forward to steampunk being the next major fashion trend for these Neo-Victorians and their trendy homes. With mid century modern on its way out, what would be better than Jules Verne inspired espresso makers, mp3 players, hd televisions, and cell phones?

LCD Soundsystem - "All My Friends"

Via Slate, the "melancholy greatness" of LCD Soundsystem.

Genre Storytelling vs. Genre Elements

Literacity raises some interesting points about how you can play with the tone and structure of horror stories to come up with mash-up genres: black comedy, "dark adventure", etc. My attempts to develop the sub-genres of horror were also mash-ups that combined horror elements with tragedy, or horror elements with adventure.

He says:

In essence, where we arrive is at a simple question with a lot of baggage: what, exactly, is horror? Or, to put it in a way pertinent to this article, where do we draw the bounds between a horror story and an action-adventure story? While I'm known to abhor genre when it limits writing, such blurred boundaries can indeed pose a problem when authors are trying to promote their work; the public will want to know whether a book falls within their taste.

The simple answer is that horror in a story deals with theme, mood, setting, character, etc. but the genre does not really describe how the story is told. It's the same in science fiction which can range from deep exploration and extrapolation of a known scientific principle to cowboy stories and Arthurian romances dressed up with space-ships and laser guns. Most science fiction stories are adventure stories but they don't need to be.

Interestingly, science fiction has spawned the steam-punk genre which often overlaps with the so-called "dark adventure" stories. This is easy to see in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Hellboy, as well as the fantasy novels of China Mieville.

Ratatouille Discussion

There's a good article and discussion on the movie Ratatouille at the Daily Dramatica blog (and I'm not just saying that because of my obnoxious comments). The basic premise of the discussion is that the movie feels to long because it cheats on its story limit:

Ratatouille begins with a Timelock. The story centers on the world famous Gusteau’s restaurant located in the heart of Paris. Gusteau, now deceased, established in his will that 2 years after his passing, if no rightful heir could be found, the restaurant would be passed on to the Head Chef - in this case, Skinner (brilliantly voiced by Ian Holm). The 2 year deadline is the Timelock; once that deadline has passed the restaurant will fall into Skinner’s hands. Several times throughout the first half of the film we are reminded of this Story Limit (what most refer to as “the ticking clock”). This constant reminder builds up an expectation in us: once that limit has been reached, the story has to end.

But the time limit is reached midway through the movie leaving the audience to wonder what's going on. My response is that there's really an option limit centered around the storyline of restoring Gusteau's back to its glory days of Five stars. This solves some problems but uncovers others.

Ultimately, I think the movie is so richly told that the story defies a simple story structure analysis and forces you to really dig into each throughline and work out all of the dynamics as though it was its own story. This may be violating all sorts of dramatica laws but I think it's interesting to think about.

For instance, the MC storyline is itself is almost a standalone story with Remy's desire to be a chef, his special gift, his life with his brother and father, the conflict between rat life and human life, and the ghost of Gusteau egging him on to pursue his dreams.

Then, the IC storyline contains the story of Linguini, his new job at the restaurant, conflicts with Skinner and the kitchen staff, the truth that Gusteau is his father, the timelocked limit that turns ownership of the restaurant over to him, AND the romance with Colette.

And all that's assuming that I'm correctly understanding the difference between what the OS storyline is about and what the other throughlines are about.

The great thing about a really good movie is that it gives you lots of things to chew on. It also gives you lots of ideas of how you can organize your own work.

The Memes are Cascading

This article in the New Republic also says less than it seems to at first blush.

Of course everyone knows about bandwagons. But the recent studies have offered some real surprises. Why does one singer become a superstar, whereas an apparently indistinguishable singer is now waiting tables? Why do some books or movies become blockbusters while equally good ones flop? Observers tend to treat successes and failures as the logical outcomes of well (or poorly) laid plans, or attribute them to large, intrinsic differences among people and products. But cascades, which are unpredictable and not very logical are created by small variations and even coincidences, and these often make all the difference. A few early supporters, or a single favorable review or report, can start a "yes" cascade--just as a few early negatives, or a bad first week, can produce a devastating "no" cascade.

The key point for the author is how rational people make irrational decisions by getting caught up in these waves, but for me the idea of cascades sounds a lot like other similarly weird "the world is not what seems" explanations for how the world really works.

This time instead of memes, we have cascades (perhaps waves are replacing particles in this new Einsteinian universe). But this time it's not the meme that's selfish, it's people who are easily swayed by others and have a tendency for group-think. So the answer really does lie in human nature. We believe what other's believe because the pathways are smoother. It gives us a sense of belonging and social approval. But why? And how is it that so many other people are able to short-circuit or ignore those cascades in favor of ideas that barely make a ripple?

Genes for Individuals, Memes for Groups?

An interesting response to Dawkins's book that actually moves the discussion beyond the religion good/bad argument. Here's what's interesting to me in David Sloan Wilson's discussion:

Consider genetic evolution by itself. When a new mutation arises, the total population consists of one group with a single mutant and many groups with no mutants. There is not much variation among groups in this scenario for group selection to act upon. Now imagine a species that has the ability to socially transmit information. A new cultural mutation can rapidly spread to everyone in the same group, resulting in one group that is very different from the other groups in the total population. This is one way that culture can radically shift the balance between levels of selection in favor of group selection. Add to this the ability to monitor the behavior of others, communicate social transgressions through gossip, and easily punish or exclude transgressors at low cost to the punishers, and it becomes clear that human evolution represents a whole new ball game as far as group selection is concerned.

With culture, mutations can be shared and advantageous new things can benefit everyone and not just the owner. It's like the internet. One computer is useful, a computer attached to other computers on the net is exponentially more powerful. From this perspective, religion is just another word for culture: a way of ordering, structuring, and transmitting the core information that is shared amongst a group of human beings. Basically, memes. Or the blogosphere.

What's missing from Wilson's discussion is that Dawkins considered memes to be just as selfish as genes. Some transmit more easily than others regardless of their usefulness or wisdom. He also ignores the fact a lot of the information that is socially transmitted is just plain bogus, superstitious or wrong. It's also not clear what distinguishes religious beliefs from more useful information like how to hunt, when its good to plant crops, etc. Nor does it explain how societies organize themselves into castes and cliques that determine shares of the wealth or is allowed to marry whom.

In the end religion is reduced to just those things that exist beyond human beings like nature and the after-life, or as a moralistic police force designed to keep the peasants in-line. It's Nietzschean resentment where the weak use memes to rule the strong, and choose the void for their purpose rather than being void of purpose.

Now that I've thought it through a little, the article really begs more questions than it answers. And, as has been said before, we don't need biology to explain how social transmission works. We already have Austen and Tolstoy.

Political Disconnect

Glenn Greenwald on the disconnect between what views are considered middle of the road and what views the country actually holds. The once unstoppable Republican behemoth is now an out of touch fringe metality:

On every key political issue of the past several months, the defining view of the "conservative" movement and the conventional wisdom of the establishment press is one that is shared by a small minority of Americans -- in each case within the range of 19-36%, but typically hovering around 25-30%, representing the same small band of hard-core Bush followers and True Believers who provide the President with his 25-30% floor for approval ratings. Conversely, these defining right-wing views are overwhelmingly rejected by Americans in virtually every area.

And yet these are the views that receive far more representation than any other in our mainstream press and are treated as though they are the serious, centrist views. The disconnect between the political discussion conducted by our media and popular American public opinion is hard to overstate.

Unfortunately, most of those true believers are my neighbors here in red state El Paso county Colorado. Nice people, but jeez, what does it take? More than watching the news, certainly, which has shamelessly and perhaps unnecessarily pursued this demographic in hopes of higher ratings.

Pitchfork and Spoon

Most reviews of the new Spoon album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, have been pretty lukewarm, but Pitchfork loves it:

With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon have once again found a gray area between the poles of pop accessibility and untested studio theorizing, modifying a formula that has grown to feel familiar even as it wanders, and refusing to square the circle while doing so. Through whatever process they use, the band has also managed to create yet another wonderfully singular indie rock record, unafraid of unfettered passion or self-sabotage, and which affirms a shrouded, hybrid style as unquestionably theirs. Perhaps it is fitting to refer to Ga Ga, and Spoon albums on the whole, as growers, then, but with a different definition: one that takes into account the bands continual, and continually rewarding, approach to creative maturation.

I'm a big fan so I'll have to check out the album for myself very soon.

Slow Return

I got home Tuesday night from a week-long 4th of July trip to Ohio, but I have not quite gotten back up to speed on the blogging. Colorado is blissfully cool and overcast after a week of hot and humid midwestern summer days. Still, Buckeye country has its occasional upsides and I can't say I regret the time spent.

Moon, June, Swoon

Since their sweep of the Yankees, the Colorado Rockies have gone 1-9 and fallen 8 games back. So much for baseball blogging.

Justice - "D.A.N.C.E. (Alan Braxe Remix)"

Just because it's Monday.