A strong critique to the “Gladwellian” thought.
Oldish GQ article that scared the crap out of me. It profiles Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin.
“I thought it was strange that he only wanted to kill people he knew,” she says, sipping instant coffee. “If he had killed people he didn’t know, in another neighborhood, it wouldn’t have been as bad, but he killed people he knew.” Indeed, the Maniac befriended people so he could kill them. Among his favorite books was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Disturbingly, that last bit makes total sense.
Boston Globe article on the waning of long form content, or as it’s colloquially known, the TLDR(Too Long, Didn’t Read).
There’s a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we’re becoming a “society of scanners.” They say the Internet is a “link medium.” We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as “charticles,” which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, “combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article.” The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement — a cartoon! — and lots of pleas to check the Web site.
I linked to this video in the previous post, but I think it deserves it’s own space.
dancing about architecture.
Over at Daily Meh, Simen wrote a fascinating post about music writing and criticism. The post sparked my neurons and for the most part I agree. But on a philosophical level, I don’t. I think capital letter Art is whatever you put into it. Simen seems to believe that Art has an inherent “beauty” or essence. It’s a “chicken or the egg” problem. It’s not that I don’t think that music is a little more than a commodity, but most music, specially popular music, can be explained. Here’s a part from the post that tickled my brain:
I really don’t know how to capture in a text the essence or feeling of a work of art that isn’t text. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be tried, I’m just saying we may have to accept that it’s something we can only ever achieve in the limit. Permit me my own slightly dreamy metaphor: we’re like flies, and the essence of a work of art — by which I don’t mean any metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but simply the part of the artwork we appreciate the most and the part that is uniquely expressible in the artwork’s chosen medium — is a lightbulb. We can only circle closer and closer. If we get too close, we get burned; if we look directly into the light, we get blinded. Our attempts are nothing but descriptions of perilous journeys around and around the essence, and these roundtrips would need infinite time to fully capture the whole, so in practice we’ll never get there.
Some thoughts.
Popular music doesn’t need a lecture. There’s nothing more oxymoronic than the rationalization of emotions. You don’t need to read an essay on Lada Gaga’s overuse of “popo” and “papa” syllables on choruses to understand that it’s just silly fun. However, music is not a medium that exists in isolation. Most art forms overlap with others and music is as much visual as auditory. It’s not just a piece of organized (or disorganized) sound. Excepting instrumental musical, music is also textual. There are lyrics that are as expository as any story or as “stream of wordy” as a haiku poem. What I’m trying to get at with this is that sure, it’s like “dancing about architecture”, but only in the sense that you’re never going to transpose the actual hearing experience. But I wouldn’t say that it’s a hopeless pursuit. There’s a lot that can be understood in music and objectively agreed upon. Not everything is a holy moment. (<–Highly recommended video) If the essence of something can’t be explained, then it probably has no essence.
Of course there’s good music writing and bad music writing. The Beatles would be as popular today even without the criticism and zillions of cultural essays, but their mythos wouldn’t be as big. Some genre’s of music like Jazz, Avant-Guarde, or Noise, wouldn’t be at the place they are today if it wasn’t for music criticism. (*Though I think that people that write a 1000 word essay on Merzbow are probably insane.)
So yes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but when someone is passionate enough and manages to transfer that experience and enthusiasm to words, maybe they deserve to dance a little.
Fred’s technique is similar to Liu’s, but instead of painting himself, he uses large photographs. He goes to various spots in NYC, take a photo, then returns a few days later with a poster-sized print of the photo. When he holds it up in front of him, he nearly vanishes into his surroundings, save for some giveaway feet and shadows.
I liked this one too.
The Questionable Value of the Real Time Web
No matter what web enthusiasts and “real time” evangelists preach, there’s just a lot of info you don’t really need to know right this moment. Sure, as the above linked post mentions, some people depend on the time they receive information in order to do their job, but the rest of us don’t need to know right now that a dog barfed some chicken bone.
Constant interruptions of our attention on one set of things harm our ability to concentrate on another set of things. If I swallow 10 hours of my time keeping up to date with the latest details of the #balloonboy saga, I can’t spend those 10 hours doing other things. The value we lose by wasting time is relative, but most of us do have something better than nothing to do with our time.
NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning
As always, Merlin Mann offers some excellent cutthroat advice on writing.
The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to figure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?
Let me start by saying that this is a totally non scholarly review. I have no idea of why or how it fits in the literally canon. I wasn’t paying so much attention to its religious undertones/overtones or its victorian setting. Not because I didn’t care for that, but my approach was simply to just read a good old scary story.
Dracula’s influence in the horror genre is undeniable and it’s the quintessential vampire novel. It’s “the novel that started it all”. Like I mentioned before, I was really surprised on how much more of a monster Dracula is than how he’s portrayed in films.
This brings me to the angle I have with this review and the reason for the title of the post. There’s something definitely interesting about Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Dracula character, that is. But I’m not sure what exactly. What was it that first time readers, particularly Hollywood, saw in the Dracula character that they decided to turn him into a morally complex villain? Because I’m not sure there’s much complexity in there. Besides the first four chapters, if the Count has more than ten pages of dialog, it’s a lot.
And really, Dracula’s interestingness is what has made the novel endure. Nobody is really a fan of Jonathan Harker or Dr Seward. Well, there’s Van Helsing, but Jesus! This guy is so smart he’s stupid. Even in the end, after the researching and the extensive journaling, he still wonders why Mina falls asleep so deeply during mornings. I wonder if this is Stoker making fun of the “journaling fad” at the end of the 19th century.
You can’t say that Dracula is a typical and simple villain though. That’s for sure. Hell, he’s the Superman of monsters. He can walk through walls like a lizard, control his victims minds, summon a rat attack, can turn into bats, dogs, and wolves, can create and control mist and oh, he’s freaking immortal. But he’s still just a bad guy. He’s like the shark in Jaws. His motives are simple: feed to survive and “spread his seed” every now and then.
But still, there’s something there that clicked with people. I’m sure that Stoker didn’t set out to make an anti-hero and the intention was to make a scary and powerful villain. But I suppose there’s something about the moral ambiguity of the vampire in general that’s appealing. The Count is Evil, but he’s not Evil for the sake of being evil. He’s not the HA, HA, HA, laughing villain. He has to kill to survive. Perhaps that’s what sparked the imagination of writers and film makers.
To conclude: Dracula is as good as classic horror can get. It’s an essential read if you’re a fan and it’s unquestionably entertaining. Spooky country scene setting. Old castles on top of cliffs. Howling wolves. Female voluptuous vamps forming out of thin air. Psycho sexual erotica. Asylum patients. Bats, rats, and mist. Telepathy. Graves. Blood transfusions. And finally, beheadings and stakes through hearts. This is totally metal.
I assumed that it was going to happen sooner or later, but I never thought it was going to be so easy to falsely report someone as dead.
Earlier this week, social media sites had found that Facebook has a page dedicated to memorialising people’s profiles once they’ve croaked it (as seen on BoingBoing) or for when someone’s friends want to play a joke on someone. I may have made a slight mistake by posting this special “I want to make people dead” page to my Facebook wall. My “friend” Johnny sees the page and decides it would be an excellent idea to register me as dead with Facebook.
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