Category: uncategorized

~ Mark

They say you only live once but every time I come to work I feel like I’m starting a second life.

Kanye West on the transformative power of creative endeavors.

Louis CK Q&A – JonahWeiner.com

~ Mark

Well, this is awesome. (via) Here we have an edited transcript of Jonah Weiner’s interview with Louis CK that was used for the Rolling Stone profile last fall. Lots of good stuff here. Here’s Louis CK on the importance of those early failures and growing experiences:

Stand-up, I didn’t know what that was going to feel like. I guess I thought it would feel like it does in TV shows or movies: they’re going to laugh. That’s part of it, right? You tell a joke and then they laugh. It has this feel to it that I knew, and boy, when you realize how wrong you are, that’s a fucking cold slap in the face. I think that’s true of anybody’s first time. […] You need to enter stand-up with that cold slap in the face, or you’ll never really understand what you’re doing.

This next part rang really true for me. I thought for a long time that I was headed to grad school right after college, but each fall afterward I just couldn’t bring myself to do the paperwork. That’s me sending myself a message. CK on resisting college and keeping a day job while he chased his dreams (cf. Steve Reich):

An old teacher of mine got me an interview at NYU film school, and I brought all these videos I’d made, and photographs, a portfolio – I’d gotten into photography and stuff, and they said that they would accept me to go to film school. So I quit my job with that in mind, and I’d been doing stand-up, but not well or successfully, and then I never filled in – I got these forms from this guy to fill in, on the floor of my apartment somewhere, but I couldn’t get my brain to…I was supposed to go back to my high school and get my transcripts, and the idea of doing all that, just that paperwork – going to NYU film school was this dream come true for me, but I couldn’t fill out the thing, couldn’t fill it out and go to the Xerox machine and put a stamp on an envelope, all that stuff. It made me want to vomit. That sort of thing has always been the case for me, I can’t get that done. That’s why I have an assistant. Now if I just dream up shit I want to do, I have her to take care of it.

So I decided, “Fuck it, I’m a comedian. I’m just going to do that, I’m going to stay in Boston.” That’s when I worked at the garage. I stopped working at local-access cable. I drove a cab for a while. I started taking shitty jobs so I could do stand-up, I didn’t want an all-encompassing job. I liked that, I just liked having dead-end jobs and doing stand-up. I thought, “Fuck it, that’s what I’m going to try to do.” I had an instinct that if I just kept hammering it and hammering it, I had a head start on people, I was very young, and I was resilient, I didn’t mind living stupidly, I wasn’t anxious about making a living, just played it close to the bottom for a long time, and I knew how to do that, it didn’t bother me. I liked the freedom, I didn’t have a job-job, I’m not working for a company, I’m not going to a school, I live on my own.

And, wow, on the typical sitcom plot:

With a lot of these shows, I know what’s going on, and I think the audience does, too. Here comes the part where they’re going to walk in the door while the credits are still rolling. They’re going to trade quick barbs, “What did you do?” “I went to the store to get a coffee and they had the Michael J. Fox coffee today, so they spilled it.” “Oh, ha ha ha.” “What happened to you today?” Kind of inconsequential jokes. Joke, joke, joke, then somebody goes, “Somebody was here to ask you about this” – here comes the story, and it gets quiet, and then, “Oh, I can’t go, because I have this thing,” “He’s only in town for one day,” and now we’re laying pipe and it’s getting quiet. “What are you going to do about that?” “I don’t know,” because here’s a joke about the character that is an outside world joke or observational joke, and then the blow, the big fucking blow to get out of the scene – you have to have a blow, a big enough laugh, and it’s something really contrived: people sat there in the writer’s room, fucking eating fast food and going, “Where’s the blow for this scene, I want to go home.”

Then here comes the funny character, the guest star, who’s in town, and we find out what the lead character hates about him, and then there’s the guy, the character, that carries all the jokes. He says dumb things and keeps it going, there’s this energy, he’s like a circuit or something, just does this one thing. […] So there’s a guy on every show that does that, he has his one way, he has his variety, about eight different joke formulas, and you refill them with different stuff. He’s either the dumb guy or, like, Lisa Kudrow’s character on Friends or whatever. “I thought coffee was from Brazil.” “Ugh, no the guy’s name is Coffee. He’s from Italy.” Garbage like that. Then you start building the story, then you go away on an act break. Then you build a third act that just is the train wreck of not really much fun, but it pays everything off, it leaves everybody feeling exactly the same way they left, that they felt before the show started. That’s what shows are meant to do, is leave on par and leave a few jokes behind, to be printed in Entertainment Weekly’s sound bites.

On kids and growing up:

Having kids, you don’t escape from it, you seize onto it, it’s a big, stressful, exhilarating, real life thing. And it’s permanent, it’s something that you have to evolve for. Some people don’t, but I think you have to actually change your values system, and you have to revolutionize yourself in order to do it properly, because kids can’t raise kids, and I think you’re somewhat a kid until you have them, then you really have to grow up.

Lastly on being in control, experimenting, being wrong, being interesting:

I’m not a dictator, because I’m not in control of anything, I’m just deciding what to try. To me, it’s not that I control a bunch of people, it’s just that nobody controls me. There’s nothing above me except responsibility to the product. That’s the ultimate responsibility, is if the show sucks, then what was the fucking point of being in charge? I’m right about these things on the show, and when I’m not, it’s interesting to watch me be wrong. I don’t think you have to be perfect, you just have to be compelling in the work you do.

Louis CK Q&A – JonahWeiner.com

Right on Cue – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic

~ Mark

Age, like all power constructs, (race, gender, class) encourages it’s own ignorance. To not know is a luxury of power. You don’t have to know Their Eyes Were Watching God. But I damn sure better know The Scarlet Letter. (It’s bad enough I’m slipping on Twain.) Age turns ignorance into a luxury, and worse, if you don’t recognize it as a luxury you start to think everyone is as clueless as you. And of course you’re clueless that any of this is even going on. It’s just a bad look all around.

(via)

Right on Cue – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic

Super 8 as an Allegory on the Triumph of Digital FX « Pancake Dominion

~ Mark

When a filmmaker makes totally 100% sure that even the most moronic audiences notice some non-plot thing in his film, there’s almost always a solid reason for it.

This brings to mind complaints about, for example, Mel Gibson’s detailed, graphic violence or Tarantino’s fountains of blood and foul language. It might be excess, it might be artistic signature, it might mean something. Note to self: it might be better to assume thoughtful intent, rather than be dismissive or complain about part of a movie/book/song I don’t like. Seek ye first to understand. Whether it works or not is another thing.

Super 8 as an Allegory on the Triumph of Digital FX « Pancake Dominion

The Gollum Effect

~ Mark

Extreme couponers, if you count the value of their time, basically make a modest living doing below-minimum-wage marketing work for the coupon-based marketing universe that welcomes them as raving fans.

From the point of view of the stores, far from being hostile opponents in some asymmetric game of chess, these are merely cheap and committed marketers. They are encouraged to model, in extreme ways, the very couponing behaviors that the marketing machine wants others to emulate in less extreme ways.

Which is exactly what happens. So long as you and I casually clip and use coupons, inspired by the extreme couponers in our midst, the grocery stores still comes out on top. If the extreme couponers’ leadership behavior were to actually lead to large-scale loss-driving sedition by too many customers, the store could easily staunch the losses overnight, by making minor changes to coupon-redemption rules.

I hadn’t thought about it this way.

The Gollum Effect

Why We Stopped Spanking – Megan McArdle – The Atlantic

~ Mark

It strikes me as plausible that a world in which kids spend more time unsupervised requires a parenting style more reliant on swift punishment for detected wrongdoing than rewards for good behavior.

This is probably the best summary I’ve ever seen for 1) why I got spanked every so often, and 2) why I don’t really feel bad about that.

Today’s kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.

File under: parenting.

Why We Stopped Spanking – Megan McArdle – The Atlantic

The Language of Food: Entrée

~ Mark

Language mavens have probably been around pretty much since there were two speakers to complain about the vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar of a third. They can be very useful for historical linguists, because grammar writers don’t complain about a change in the language until it’s basically already happened

File under: purists.

The Language of Food: Entrée

Wall Street

~ Mark

Wall Street. First movie I saw in 2012, because money never sleeps. Michael Douglas and Martin Sheen are really good. I like how Oliver Stone worked in a couple small moments of respite–the sunrise on the beach, the “Who am I?” on the balcony–and then gets right back to business. The only other Stone-directed films I’ve seen are Platoon (pretty good), The Doors (eh), and Natural Born Killers (ugh). I felt a little sad to realize I have little interest in anything else he’s done.

Dumb and Dumber

~ Mark

Dumb and Dumber. This one makes me wonder how today’s comedies will come across in 2030. This is the first time I finished this movie, though I’ve seen the beginning chunk a couple hundred times. Maybe the slowest-starting comedy I’ve ever seen. The road trip and early Aspen scenes in the middle are the best.

The Karate Kid (2010)

~ Mark

The Karate Kid (2010). I accurately predicted this would be bad. Everything is bigger than it needs to be. The actors are way too young to carry their extremes. The emotions, the violence are waaaaaayyy over-the-top for their age. The 1984 film hit the right tone with hormonal high-schoolers. These kids barely have all their teeth. Smith has little of Macchio’s likeability, and I think a large part of it is because he’s a tween. Weak soundtrack that has too many “We’re on a magical adventure!”-type swelling moments. I could pile on more, but I’ll just point you to these 11 criticisms.

Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind – Mother Jones

~ Mark

From an interview with the creator of Brain Pickings:

When you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention—that’s stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus—you don’t get to ruminate. In a way, it’s a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It’s my comfort food.

Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind – Mother Jones

[Transcript] Tyler Cowen on Stories – Less Wrong Discussion

~ Mark

I’ve long thought of Cowen’s talk as a must-listen and listened to it multiple times. And now it’s been transcribed. And thus, a must-read. Filed under: storytelling.

Stories, to work, have to be simple, easily grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray.

[Transcript] Tyler Cowen on Stories – Less Wrong Discussion

~ Mark

People tend to think that creative work is an expression of a preexisting desire or passion, a feeling made manifest, and in a way it is. As if an overwhelming anger, love, pain, or longing fills the artist or composer, as it might with any of us—the difference being that the creative artist then has no choice but to express those feelings through his or her given creative medium. I proposed that more often the work is a kind of tool that discovers and brings to light that emotional muck. Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don’t so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up.

David Byrne. I was reading Colin Marshall’s thoughts on Bicycle Diaries and remembered this quote from my own write-up.