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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects.
I get sick every time I go home for Christmas, and while it isn’t helped by lack of sleep and alcohol abuse, I’m pretty sure 75% of it is the 3-5 hours I spend on what is, essentially, a flying petri dish.
So thanks to The Wall Street Journal for these tips (which I’ve summarized):
- Hydrate (drink water, use saline spray).
- Clean your hands with alcohol-based hand sanitizer
- Use disinfecting wipes to clean off tray tables before using
- Avoid seat-back pockets.
- Open your air vent, and aim it so it passes just in front of your face. Filtered airplane air can help direct airborne contagions away from you.
- Stay the hell away from people who look sick
The air vent thing was new to me! Now I’m off to get disinfecting wipes and some saline spray.
Update: thanks to @aweissman for this suggestion: “i do this and it almost always works: basically OD on Vitamin C before you get on the plane – right before. Use EmergenC or a similar product, drink it all up while waiting.”
See also: Daniel Pink’s travel tips. Episode #1 is about avoiding illness. I like his ointment-in-the-nose trick. And don’t forget (environ-)mental health tactics: earplugs, headphones, eye mask!
I attempt to explain how this came about, in the podcast and in one chapter of my forthcoming book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.
I will read this book.
I like this litmus test that Damien Hirst suggests:
If I put a painting outside a bar at closing time, and it’s still there in the morning, it’s a crap painting.
He also suggests the market for art is bigger than you think, even at his prices:
I remember flying into L.A. at a time when my paintings were 20,000 to 50,000 pounds and looking at the swimming pools here and thinking everyone who has a pool can afford one of these. The market is so much bigger than anyone realizes.
I hadn’t thought about it that way. Also, on the idea of masterpieces vs. ubiquity:
You also have to ask yourself as an artist, “What would be more appealing … to have made the Mona Lisa painting itself or have made the merchandising possibilities — putting a postcard on everyone’s walls all over the world?” Both are brilliant, but in a way I would probably prefer the postcards — just to get my art out there.
All this reminds me of one section in Andrew Potter’s The Authenticity Hoax, a part where he writes about Robert Hughes’ criticism of Damien Hirst’s work:
“The idea that there is some special magic attached to Hirst’s work that shoves it into the multi-million-pound realm is ludicrous,” [Hughes] wrote. But there is a special magic attached to Hirst’s work. That magic is the spectacularly successful brand known as Damien Hirst. And for those to whom the brand is successfully markted—hedge fund types, tycoons of all sorts, generally anyone who happens to be cash-rich but taste-poor—it makes his products worth every cent. […] Some people think a Lamborghini is vulgar, and lots of people can afford yachts. But put a Damien Hirst dot painting on your wall and the reaction is, “Wow, isn’t that a Hirst?” The point is, Hirst is not selling art, he’s selling a cure for rich people with severe status anxiety. Judging Hirst’s work by the criteria of technical skill, artistic vision, and emotional resonance is like complaining that the Nike swoosh is just a check mark.
Damien Hirst prepares to unleash another round of art for buyers – latimes.com
5. To name is to rule. […] After watching sugar being poured into two glasses of water and then personally affixing a “sucrose” label to one and a “poison” label to the other, people much prefer to drink from the “sucrose” glass and will even shy away from one they label “not poison.” (The subconscious doesn’t process negatives.) Rozin has also found that people are reluctant to tear up a piece of paper with a loved one’s name written on it. Arbitrary symbols carry the essence of what they represent.
I also like this bit on rituals and luck:
People who truly trust in their rituals exhibit a phenomenon known as “illusion of control,” the belief that they have more influence over the world than they actually do. And it’s not a bad delusion to have—a sense of control encourages people to work harder than they might otherwise. In fact, a fully accurate assessment of your powers, a state known as “depressive realism,” haunts people with clinical depression, who in general show less magical thinking.
We need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t.
[The app] uses a global positioning network to activate different themes as the listener wanders through the park. The app contains more than 400 tracks, each tied to a location. They were written to fit together harmonically like a sonic jigsaw puzzle.
I’d download it on iTunes if I lived anywhere nearby. Oh, and how cool would it be if they had a bigger map with famous recordings from around NYC? Take the “A” Train at the relevant time? Maybe cue up a random clip from a CBGB show if you’re strolling down the Bowery? Or a Gaslight Cafe recording if you wandering around Greenwich Village? Or a bit from Heartbeats/Boats and Buoys if you wander over near the river? Please tell me someone has beaten me to this idea.
Filed under: sound sculptures.
Bluebrain’s App Central Park (Listen to the Light) – NYTimes.com
On a recent evening, Ms. Monroe-Cassel used boar tenderloins to recreate a dish served during a wedding feast with 77 courses in “A Storm of Swords.”
I really hope I invented this word: cuisplay.
Pete Beatty (@nocoastoffense) sums it up: “In which @kylebeachy invents skateboard crit”.
You’re Not Me: Nyjah Huston and Inflationary Spectacle | The Classical
“It does feel satisfying to hit something.”
Making things is a better way to spend your time than staring at the wall contemplating what little time you’ve got left.
Last Notes: The wild, sublime music that composers write on their deathbeds. – Slate Magazine
Getting up and going for a run everyday doesn’t need to be “justified” a few months later by competing to finish an arbitrary number of miles in a certain amount of time against a bunch of other unhappy losers. No, you run because keeping a healthy body and clear mind is part of your job as a human being. Because its a commitment you made to yourself that you’re obligated to keep no matter how tired, how busy or how burn out you feel. In other words, it’s practice—proof of your ability—in always having a little bit extra in you.
It seems fair to ask when a game’s expansiveness becomes an affable form of indentured servitude.
There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.
See also Brian Eno on surrender.
Home Movies: “Tower Heist,” “Melancholia,” and the battle over video on demand – The New Yorker
Mark Larson 