Concerning Social Media
Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.
Yes. Just, yes.
(via @tcarmody, probably)
The Siege of Fulton Avenue
About fifty teenagers hunkered down for three hours in order to wait out the cops after a noise complaint. It reminds me of my days in Princeton, NJ, only some of my friends had weird parents that didn’t care if we drank as long as we didn’t drive:
It was kind of funny, and then just flat-out frustrating, how later on the papers would chalk up this decision to the considerable wealth of the area (median household income: $110,894), to the fact that these were kids raised by bankers and lawyers, kids with the gumption to know their constitutional rights. Because let’s be honest. Cops busted parties all the time, and this was just what you did: hunkered down, zipped your lips, and after about 30 minutes, the police would be on their way. It was an unwritten rule. A kind of discreet warning from authority to adolescents: Tone it down. Once, a cop had even come inside and played a quick round of beer pong, a drinking game not worth explaining. Another time, the kids videotaped the scene: officers standing around outside, yawning, leaving, the end. The exact scenario had played out in this exact house, as a matter of fact. Four or five times. Why should tonight be any different?
The police response, as the story evolves, becomes kinda weird, IMHO.
Update: The story is from 2005, but it doesn’t make it any less compelling.
Interview with an Ubu
The mainstream art world knows nothing of Ubu. Why would they be interested? Ubu is intended for people who don’t have access to the centres of urban culture and all the riches they offer. We often receive emails from people living in rural, isolated or suburban areas whose only line to the outside world is a web connection. For them, Ubu is an open-source museum and offers a full education on a type of culture that is unavailable, say, in their local mall or library. The museum world, although claiming to be interested in education, only serves those who can afford to come to them, a privileged class. Ubu is free and embracing of everyone, regardless of their geographic location or income.
tweet of the day
OS X Lion
Jason made the post I was going to make about the new Mac operating system, so I’ll link to his.
quote out of context
Current dolphin goods seem to be food, sex, kids, and conversation, with a fairly tight PPF. They don’t buy lampshades. Most of “dolphin economic growth” seems to come from finding more and better food, getting more and better sex, finding safer environments for the children, and learning to enjoy other dolphins more. It’s hard to store dolphin goods and thus it is hard for the Mengerian origin of money story to get underway.
Today at the hospital cafeteria
Construction worker, mid-40s, powerfully built. Two orders of macaroni and cheese, two orders of mashed potatoes with cream gravy, and a large container of green Jell-O. All eaten with a spoon.
I can’t stop crying.
But why does beauty exist?
Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention, an emotional reminder that there’s something here worth figuring out. Art hijacks this ancient instinct: If we’re looking at a Rothko, that twinge of beauty in the mOFC is telling us that this painting isn’t just a blob of color; if we’re listening to a Beethoven symphony, the feeling of beauty keeps us fixated on the notes, trying to find the underlying pattern; if we’re reading a poem, a particularly beautiful line slows down our reading, so that we might pause and figure out what the line actually means. Put another way, beauty is a motivational force that helps modulate conscious awareness. The problem beauty solves is the problem of trying to figure out which sensations are worth making sense of and which ones can be easily ignored.
(via @tcarmody)
Bill Callahan, Sycamore
One of the final songs from the show last night.
from the comments
The scene I first thought of was the end of Dark Victory, where Bette Davis has finally succumbed to happiness, has made a good life for herself, and her illness falls upon her again just when she thought she was free of it. Her best friend is with her, and she takes her friend’s hands and tells her to take care of the husband, who is away on a trip. The friend begins to cry, and Davis makes her way, blind, into the house, crawls up the stairs to her room, and passes peacefully. I was surprised at 16 to find myself sobbing during a lunch break at college, watching it on a 13 inch tv monitor in the tiny MSJC library, when I was supposed to be in History of Jazz (I ended up getting a B, mostly because I left to go watch movies for about an hour out of every 4 hour class) and it still touches me deeply every time I see it. She is so Good, and had overcome so much within herself really and truly.
to dance
I have been going through some deep introspection of late, trying to untie an emotional knot. Perhaps the most interesting offshoot of my subconscious dives has been the insistent assertion of the beauty of dance.
I have always loved dance, but I suspect not in the way that most people who love dance experience it. I have little interest in choreographed productions. I can appreciate the precision and athleticism and grace that goes into, say, a ballet, but I am rarely drawn to watch one. What I love is the Personal Dance. The dance that rises up and must come out, spontaneously, without ego or self consciousness of any kind.
As much as I love this dance impulse in myself (and Daryl can affirm that I cannot hear certain music without dancing–usually in my chair), what I love most are the rare times I can witness it in someone else. At its best, such dance is the purest expression of Joy. What I have realized in the past week is that I am more moved by the sight of Personal Dance than by any other form of art or expression. It touches me at my very core. It makes me want to jump up and cry simultaneously.
I can think of one film example in which you might understand what I am referring to. It is in The Motorcycle Diaries, a film brilliant on many levels. But there is a scene (not available on YouTube except as a glimpse in the trailer) where the Alberto Granado character, beautifully portrayed by Rodrigo De la Serna, jumps onto the dance floor, smiling and dancing in the pure way I am trying to describe. It lifts me out of myself every time I see it.
spam name
Coleman Pacheco.
What I Just Heard
from outside, in the dark: a very small child saying, insistently, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you….”
My Favorite Katherine Anne Porter Story
Dear clusterflock
Saddest film scene?
Keep Fuck Alive
Just now I told Cindy of my desire to post something about how angry I get when I watch a film on cable and find that its language has been sanitized–and of course she instantly gave me this title.
Isn’t it nice when a favorite film appears on cable and you can just watch it, even though you have it on a DVD? I like it when this happens, but the moment I see that the language has been changed so Betty can read her bible while watching–I turn it off and put the original in. For instance, we were watching Kill Bill the other evening, and they not only changed the language, they changed images as well: “I’m Buck and I like to Fuck” was changed to “I’m Buck and I like to…party,” and the keys to the “Pussywagon” read “Partywagon.” Let me spare no time in telling you of my contempt for people who will seize upon proprieties of “bad words” while caring not a jot about films featuring the patriotic bombing of grass hut villages.
I seriously think I want to become more active in initiating a backlash against the easy moral high ground claimed by people who don’t typically look closely at the grounds for anything other than their own gross appetites and spiritual cliches. People who tend to object to nothing but “bad words” are the people who will go see an art film and shit themselves with peeve because their limits were not consulted before creation and distribution.
I see students often now who trot out a practiced grimace when a literary work contains the word “damn” or “hell.” How long before the word “Pregnant” again becomes “in the family way”? I have had students object to the word “slavery.” But they balk when I ask whose interests are most served by not mentioning slavery–those who were victims of it or those who would just as soon have nobody reminded of the fact that it was ever present in America?
Language cleaners would do well to note that complete success, on their parts, would simply result in a new set of forbidden words. Humans need the opportunity to transgress, and they will find it. And an age-old inspiration for this is the feigned blush of the righteous.
U2, Elvis Presley and America
I remember playing this quietly — on the turntable, through headphones — every morning before I left for school my Junior or Senior year of high school.
You’ve Been Eminent Domain’d
I guess this is what you get when you put an extension on a house this close to the ever-widening DC beltway, but man… I still feel bad for these folks.
dear clusterflock
Alex Tabarrok asks.
pieface (not the record label)
from the comments
If there’s any bereaved (but not saps), I hope that they’d get together and have some talks. I’d like my body to get picked over for usable parts and the rest disposed of thoughtfully and with as little expense as possible.
Also, a heroic nude bronze on horseback in downtown Houston. With the penis scaled down appropriately, in the interest of decorum.
A real person
Fleet Commander: the giant touchscreen game.
It’s a student project based at University of Illinois at Chicago. (via Kill Screen)
The Inca Paradox
A discussion of whether the Inca method of archiving information using a system of knotted cords, called khipus, constituted a written language.
Individual khipus seem to have varied widely in color and complexity; most of the surviving examples generally consist of a pencil-thick primary cord, from which hang multiple “pendant” cords. From those pendants hang ancillary cords called “subsidiaries.” One khipu has more than a thousand subsidiary cords. Sixteenth-century eyewitness accounts describe khipucamayocs studying their khipus intensely to access whatever details had been recorded on them. According to Spanish chronicles of the 1560s and 1570s, some khipus appeared to contain information of the sort that other cultures have typically preserved in writing, such as genealogies and songs that praised the king. One Jesuit missionary told of a woman who brought him a khipu on which she had “written a confession of her whole life.”
dear clusterflock
What is your Myers-Briggs personality type?
