Posts Tagged ‘rec’
January 20th, 2010
Yeah, I said it. Wu-Tang Clan vs. The Beatles. 27 glorious tracks of it, in fact, collected in Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. So far it utterly pwns The Grey Album, but maybe I just like Wu-Tang better than I like Jay-Z. Your mileage may vary. Special thanks to Kay Thaney, she of Science Commons fame, for recommending this.
September 11th, 2009
No, not mine, Amanda Palmer’s.
I spent my day thinking about the future. I sat surrounded by designers and programmers, people with better clothes and longer resumés, and we talked about two kinds of future: long and short. Long is foresight: picturing a problem a year or ten away. Short is preparation: doing my homework. Wondering what my role in the classroom will be. Normally I start things off, I ask uncomfortable questions, I summarize, and things move on. But normally I’m in a different kind of classroom, one where we’re all sharing a similar lexicon of references, and it’s easy to jump from Freud to Haraway to BoingBoing without too much trouble. So today I listened. I took notes. I haven’t taken serious, meaningful notes in a long time. I haven’t needed to. It felt like a real first day of school.
Then I came home, and BoingBoing was all 9/11. And so was the news. And it felt like returning to a dead baby brother’s room at home and seeing that it had been kept exactly as it was eight years ago, the old toys carefully dusted off for this one special day a year, a gesture of love and pain and hopeless aching loss mingled with raw fury. I wanted to grab someone and say put it all away, it’s been eight years now, it’s over, this isn’t what they would have wanted, they would have wanted us to live.
But in truth it’s never over, no matter what tragedy you observe or endure, whether it’s large or small or private or shared. In one small cinema house sandwiched between the unyielding chunks of your vertebrae, it’s constantly playing — matinee, evening, midnight. And sometimes you’re lost and you wind up there, drawn in by the smell of stale popcorn and ancient carpets of no recognizable colour, sitting alone, watching, wondering why you can’t get up even though you know how this one ends, you’ve seen it before a hundred times.
it was just a few months later that the challenger exploded off the coast of florida.
there were lots of terrible jokes circulating the 4th grade classroom that year…mostly made about christa mcauliffe (“what color were christa mcauliffe’s eyes?? blue! one blew left, one blew right!” “where did christa mcauliffe take her vacation?” “all over florida!”).
i had an image in my head, for whatever reason, of an astronaut’s wife, waiting on a beach for her husband’s return, only to watch as his body parts landed on the beach in front of her.
but at least she’d have something – some reminder.
Your past becomes your future with little effort on your part. It twists and things flip over suddenly, like a Möbius strip, and everything is upside down for a while. But then you get used to it, you start marching along, until you hit that same point again, and for a little while up is once more down. You can’t help it. It’s not something you did. It’s the pattern of the world and the pattern of your life. It was in your past, which makes it your future. You will wind up there without having intended to, whether you like it or not. The only thing which is up to you is how soon you start walking away, toward that moment’s next arrival.
August 19th, 2009
Via Making Light, we have a foully erudite, fantastically observed explanation of why people still love Silent Hill 2, including why the story needed to be told via a game rather than a book, film, or zoetrope. (Wait until he mentions imperialism. Make sure your drink is well away from your keyboard.)
God, I have such a serious urge to go kick the shit out of some vomiting ghost babies, right now. Which is sad, because I’m woefully bad at playing these games — I love everything about them except how hard I suck at them. I even like the parts that Ben Croshaw hates, because the story told from game to game is a total tease that never fully explains the cyclical nature of the town’s sudden impositions on consensual reality. Unlike another famous survival horror franchise, Resident Evil, there’s no overarching goal to be met regarding the origin and ultimate destruction of the town’s threat. The series is about escaping with your life intact, if possible. That’s it. That’s the larger horror. You go to Silent Hill with a goal, you find out that your goal is a fool’s errand and you were an utter moron to even consider achieving it, and you leave with psychic wounds so big and so fresh they make your daddy issues look like a stubbed toe. It’s complete nihilism from start to finish.
It’s great.
July 31st, 2009
For the meanwhile, watch this:
”
The Internet is love. See you Monday. And if not then, Thursday. In Montreal. At WorldCon.
May 4th, 2009
I’ve been thinking about natural selection a lot, lately (and not just because I picked up Natalie Angier’s The Canon the other day). Turns out Bruce Cohen explains Darwin’s concept of “fitness” pretty well:
Survival or mortality selection – Organisms that survive at least to the end of their reproductive phase are fitter than those who don’t, because they’re likely to have more offspring.
Mating success or sexual selection – Many species have some form of mate selection process which makes some organisms more likely to mate or likely to mate more often and thus produce more offspring.
Family size or fecundity selection – The more mature offspring (that is, those that live to reproduce themselves) produced by an organism, the fitter it is. This takes into account the two major reproduction strategies:
-produce as many offspring as possible, putting as little resource into each as possible (squids, for instance, do this),
-produce fewer offspring, putting significant resources into each, to increase each one’s chances of making it to reproductive age (humans do this).
I brought these concepts up with my students the other day after watching Radiant City. Among other things, the film argues that the housing developments now sprawling across North America will have an incredibly short life cycle, and that if they don’t prove their own sort of reproductive fitness (ie the ability to sustain a population past a second generation by providing ample resources for growth, like jobs), they will die out and become part of conspicuous consumption’s cookie cutter fossil record. I wish I had had this list handy, at the time.
Also, I highly recommend The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. I know too little about the sciences in general, and recognizing this I picked up the book with a birthday gift card. I’m very happy I did. I just wish I could go back to my undergraduate biology teacher and apologize to her for not being a better student during that hellish winter when I was more concerned with penetrating Immanuel Kant’s murky depths than peering down a microscope. Truly I am sorry. I like this stuff a lot better now, I promise.
April 16th, 2009
I can’t help but second most of what’s in this post about The Matrix ten years later, especially this bit:
The movie also tapped into the anger a lot of people feel but never quite express, the pent-up resentments of our world that lead a packed theatre in the rural South to cheer a fetish-clad woman pounding the police into pulp. It fed the part in all of us that not only felt there was something deeply wrong with the world around us, but wanted to make “them” pay.
Seen in this light, many of The Matrix’s absurdities make sense. Using humans as a power source? Utterly, laughably impractical. As a metaphor for that nagging sensation that some vast structure is leeching your life? Perfect.
The writer of the post and I are the same age. We were both 16 when we saw the film for the first time in theatres. (Actually, I was 15; my birthday’s next week.) It’s surprisingly gratifying to read analysis of the film written by someone who had roughly the same experience. I remember leaving the theatre feeling like I could fly. I remember cosplaying Trinity at Halloween (who didn’t?). I remember the way that most action films thereafter felt like a pale imitation, because they hadn’t nailed the central point of the film’s “cartoon violence”…that the people in the movie really were just cartoons.
Go read the piece. David Forbes’ other work is stellar, and makes me feel like a total slacker.
February 26th, 2009
Amanda Palmer has a great post up regarding the discovery of art in everyday existence.
i used to think that being a street performer (i was a living statue for five years….i should really write a book about it) was the ultimate act of art, because NOBODY would ever recognize my art in any way that was acceptable, nobody would ever applaud, no reviewers would ever come, no critics would ever ponder whether i had a good or bad performance…. and if anybody wanted to take anything away, if they were brave enough, they did. and nobody told them to, nobody told them what to feel, nobody told them anything. it just WAS.
I mention this because, as chance would have it, I encountered an impromptu performance this afternoon after reading the post. A boy with long black hair and ripped jeans took out his guitar and picked his way through part of my bus ride home. I watched him unzip the case and cradle the instrument across his knees, Pietà-style, before going to work. His fingering was good — nimble and smooth but well-controlled, disciplined. He harmonized, somehow, with the guy talking job losses on his tucked-away cellphone and the two girls assuring themselves whether they’d be allowed into a party. The relationship between he and his instrument became the golden thread of love and dedication in the midst of all that uncertainty and doubt. Surrounded by people busy wondering if they were good enough, he was already working on getting himself there.
Then he plugged in his portable amp. I hunched over in my seat watching him fiddle with knobs and cords, knowing I’d have only a block before I would have to leave and that when I was gone, my time with this person would be over and I wouldn’t hear any more. Faster, faster, I silently urged. More, more. He played something that sounded like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“Thank you,” I whispered as I left. I was the only one who had spoken to him the whole trip.
He turned to me. For the first time, I saw his whole face. Young, dark, composed. Real nonchalance, not feigned. “Anytime,” he said, like we were already friends.
January 31st, 2009
I’m not entirely sure what Manhattan is doing on VisionTV, home of both televangelists and Murder, She Wrote. I do know, however, that the first film released to home video in letterbox (so as to preserve the original Panavision aspect ratio) is still beautiful, still well-written, still unnervingly observant. Say what you want about Woody Allen — and there’s a lot to say — but this bit slays me every time:
Isaac: On my prom night I went around this park five times, six times. If I had been with a girl, this would have been an incredible experience.
Tracy: Quit fighting it. You’re crazy about me.
Isaac: I am. You’re… You’re God’s answer to Job. You would have ended all argument between them. He’d have said: “I do a lot of terrible things, but I can also make one of these.” And Job would have said: “Okay, you win.”
January 27th, 2009
During the holidays, I promised myself that I would write about the books I gave at the end of 2008. They ranged from manga to cookbooks to hard sf to satire. I had no idea I’d get to brag so much about the books I got, too. (Spook Country needs its own post, because it’s just painfully good. It’s rare that I sit and ponder the simple beauty of a given sentence, but Gibson’s latest makes me sit up straight and pay attention like I’m back in catechism.)
Books Given:
Claymore, v.1, by Norihiro Yagi This series can never get enough love, in my opinion. Not only does it refuse to pull its narrative punches, but it’s unafraid of setting genuine limits on the abilities of its central characters. Moreover, the women of Claymore never dissolve into exhausted stereotypes of either bubbly beauty or mousy intelligence. These are hard women who do a tough job for little reward, because they think it’s the right thing to do. As is the case in many professions, their greatest competition comes not from outsiders, but from within their own community. (Also, there’s a lot of truly awesome demon slaying going on.)
Super Natural Cooking, by Heidi Swanson I keep up with Heidi’s latest at 101 Cookbooks, but I’d never given her any funding in exchange for the hours of domestic and gustatory pleasure she’s given me. So when Christmas rolled around, I jumped at the chance to send this book my parents’ way, as they’re interested in learning more about whole ingredients and how to incorporate them into their daily meals. Heidi’s writing has taught me so much, and I’m sure it’ll do the same for them. (Her Thai-spiced Pumpkin Soup is so good that my friend phoned me up after surgery to tell me how much he enjoyed his care package.)
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