A They Live remake without the sunglasses would be like a Pulp reunion where they refused to play Common People.1 You could do it, but why would you?2
[They Live remake news via MeFi user brundlefly, posting here]
I do hope the world's luckiest baby hasn't just used up his entire lifetime ration of good fortune in one go.
Zadie Smith was teaching at Harvard seven short years ago, right when Mark Zuckerberg was inventing Facebook:
At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.
I wish she hadn't twice used the phrase "open internet" to describe Zuckerberg's vision of a world wide web where every web site that matters is linked via Facebook Connect1 but her essay reviewing both David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto is still well worth a read.
Coincidentally, I read another account of technology exposing a generation gap today over at Crooked Timber. The post was prompted by a study suggesting that the average US teenager between the ages of 13 and 17 sends or receives a total of 3,339 text messages per month. As was pointed out in comments, this figure isn't quite as shocking as it first appears, once you consider that it's effectively counting every single sentence in a conversation as a distinct text message (and possibly counting each message sent to multiple recipients multiple times). The really interesting generational difference was pointed out by cj in comment #36, who linked to an anecdote at Alas, a blog about how students reacted to the notion that it had once been commonplace for couples to communicate by writing one another letters:
"But so much will have happened between the time the letter was sent and the time it was read. How did you remember what you wrote about?"
BERG's The Journey illustrates various simple ways to make the process of taking a train just a tad more bearable by virtue of placing a few snippets of relevant information in passengers' paths. Most of the ideas aren't terribly high tech; it's more about thinking about what information passengers might find useful at each stage in the process of buying a ticket, getting on a train and taking a journey.
I'm not wild about the notion of being informed that this is my train's favourite route, but some of the other ideas about presenting journey-specific information on your ticket and using the signage in the station and on the train to give practical information like which carriages have the fewest seats booked would be really helpful. I particularly like the idea of printing information on the back of your ticket highlighting the time when you're due to pass an interesting landmark/building, though I have a horrible feeling that the train operating companies would prefer to sell that route-specific space on the ticket to advertisers.1
[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]
Danny Baker is going to be off the air for a while:
"Hello cats and kittens,
Apologies for the cloak and d. over recent weeks. However as it appears this is going to continue for the forseeable I really ought to offer up some sort of breadcrumbs trail as to what's going on. (As you know I am queasy about introducing vulgar real life onto the vaudeville stage so let's keep this crisp.)
After a pretty mouldy diagnosis about a month back I finally begin chemotherapy on Monday with further radiotherapy from January. Yes radiotherapy; can you beat it? This being so, the old treehouse baggy pants will be donned but sparingly. Once the quacks have soundly thrashed this thing I shall return like a rare gas and as if out of a trap. In the meantime I am watching Tommy Steele box sets (and has there ever been a more lying title to a film than TS's "It's All Happening"?) and urge you all to keep yakking up a storm and laugh extra loud at the incumbents.
Thank you for all the best wishes and concern from those who suspected as much about my "condition" and by all means keep ringing up Baylen and Amy to demand more and more Atomic Rooster and Spooky Tooth records.
So. Manly handshake. Walk right on. In the words of King George, "What what and there it is…" "
DB
Here's hoping Britain's Greatest Living Radio Broadcaster will be back sooner rather than later.
Alyssa Rosenberg's review of the first episode of The Walking Dead draws an unexpected parallel between Frank Darabont's adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic and Gone With the Wind:
AMC's new series The Walking Dead is everything you've heard: the queasiest show on any television channel, anywhere; a well-written pitch-black comedy; and a revitalization of the zombie genre on the small screen. But while the gore's gotten much of the attention, Frank Darabont's adaptation of Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard's comic books also lies at a fascinating intersection of two genres that are having hot moments: Westerns, and shows set in Atlanta.
[...] The Walking Dead is situated squarely, and consciously, in the [post-apocalyptic] tradition. From the moment Rick Grimes (the excellent Andrew Lincoln, utterly transcending his sweet blandness in the role he's best known for in Love, Actually) awakens – gut-shot, in an abandoned hospital, only to find the parking lot full of executed corpses, a vivisected body crawling through a neighborhood lawn and his family gone – we're waiting for him to shower, get back in uniform and ten-gallon hat, and mount a horse headed back to Atlanta.
[...] Given the role the Civil War plays in so many Western stories, whether it's the lost Confederate gold in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly or the origins of the James gang as Confederate guerrillas, it's fitting that one of the best recent Westerns set in the present day should return to the site of one of the Civil War's most famous campaigns. Only this time, it's the zombies who will never be hungry again.
I trust that one of the free-to-air channels will pick up the UK rights once FX has done with it.
Springfield Punx1 does Doctor Who.
So good – especially Donna and River Song.
[Via Blastr, via The Medium Is Not Enough]
Ken MacLeod on depicting the places where he grew up in his fiction:
In an age of increasingly metropolitan media focus, it's easy to accept that Paris, London, New York and all the other cities so readily evoked by their recognisable skylines in disaster movies and in technothrillers should have their place in imagined futures. But other towns and villages and open spaces will still be there, and deserve their piece of the action as part of our futures. Even futures that didn't happen. Without the Martians, who would have heard of Woking? Today, maybe in grateful civic recognition of this, Wells's alien invaders are memorialised by a fine steel statue of a Fighting Machine looming over the pedestrian precinct in the town centre.
Ten Lords A-Leaping (or, The Most Quintessentially British Story I Read Online Today):
Artw: I'm voting less-than-obviously-not-insane. Though with a member of the house of lords the correct term is "eccentric".
Slightly off-topic, but I still have a bunch of delightfully dotty thank you letters from some British lords.
The evening newspaper I once worked for in Cambridge (UK) got me to organize and write a fun feature on The Twelve Days of Christmas – with a local slant.
There were (and are) tons of House of Lords members attached to Cambridge University (masters of colleges and the like) and I eventually persuaded five fairly elderly chaps with titles to pose for the "ten lords a-leaping" photo – along with with five ordinary mortals with the surname "Lord" – that I found through the Cambridge phone book.
(It took quite a bit of explaining, but the regular Lords liked the idea of meeting the real Lords, and vice versa.)
We got the whole lot to join arms for a delightfully wobbly chorus line portrait outside the newspaper office (and I remember introducing the then vice-chancellor of the university, Lord Adrian to a local builder, called Adrian Lord, which they both found extremely funny).
We sent everyone a copy of the picture – and every one of the (posh) lords politely sent thanks (on their crested personal stationery). They were just signed "Adrian" or "Botts" or "Denby" and the oldest lord – he was in his late eighties, at least – wrote – possibly tongue-in-cheek – that he still hadn't a clue why he'd been required to vigorously waggle his leg for our newspaper photo, but that nevertheless he had enjoyed the occasion immensely!
posted by Jody Tresidder at 3:54 PM on November 3 [27 favorites]
Adam Goodheart has started a new column for the New York Times, telling stories from the American Civil War:
[...] Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war's centennial, a scruffy young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers published all over the country between 1855 and 1865. As Bob Dylan would recount in his memoir, "Chronicles: Volume 1," he didn't know what he was looking for, much less what he would find. He just immersed himself in that time: the fiery oratory, the political cartoons, the "weird mind philosophies turned on their heads," the "epic, bearded characters." But much later, he swore that this journey deep into the Civil War past became "the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write."
In the months ahead, this part of the Disunion series will delve like Dylan into the sedimentary muck of history, into that age of unparalleled American splendor and squalor. Several times each week – aided in my research by two of my students at Washington College, Jim Schelberg and Kathy Thornton – I will write about something that happened precisely 150 years earlier. My subject may be as large as a national election or as small as a newspaper ad. I won't be trying to draw a grand saga of the national conflict (much less searching for any all-encompassing templates). Instead, I'll try to bring the reader, for a brief present moment, into a vanished moment of the past – and into a country both familiar and strange.
Sounds promising.
[Via kottke.org]
Astronomer/"Killer of Pluto" Mike Brown has posted two pieces on finding Sedna and – seven years on – how he's still trying to figure out why Sedna is where it is.
A lucid explanation, in layman's terms, of a fascinating mystery.
[Via James Nicoll]
Brian Eno, talking to Pitchfork about making music with computers:
Pitchfork: You're credited with "computer" on the album. There were two things that I read about years ago, when you were speaking about computer music, that might have changed over time. One had to do with the idea of electronic music so often being created on a grid. Where sounds were locked into place and ultimately certain genres of music were dependent on that. But at the time, you talked about how that was maybe problematic in terms of the development of music. Do you feel like that has changed at all? Is that something you're dealing with now or that has been overcome in how you work with music with computers?
Brian Eno: I think it's a really, really important issue. I think we're sort of deep in the grid period of making music — well, we're probably emerging from it a little bit now, I would say. [...] You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is it glossy production values and it's griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
I just got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight. And we're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music. Because that's what we're doing, after all. All the programs we're using started their lives, really, as word processing programs and the concepts that typify word processing, like "cut and paste," "change typeface."
[Via The Awl]