H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who sent this link to her mailing list.
June 24, 2013
Don’t judge a book – especially a science fiction book – by its cover
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April 16, 2013
Andy Baio: Copyright is the new Prohibition
Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick explains:
Andy Baio has an absolutely fantastic video presentation that he did recently for Creative Mornings/Portland on what he’s calling The New Prohibition. It’s half an hour long, but absolutely worth watching.
[. . .]
This video lets him talk a bit about the aftermath — to explain the true chilling effects of the threat and the eventual settlement. Baio is a creator. It’s in his blood. It’s what he’s always done, but after this he was afraid to create. Being threatened with a lawsuit, even if you believe you’re right, is a scary and possibly life-altering moment. Lots of people who have not been in those shoes think it’s nothing and that they could handle it. You don’t know.
As he notes in the talk, copyright law is probably the most violated law in the US after speeding and jaywalking (and I’m not even sure copyright infringement is really in third place in that list). But getting rung up for one of those gives you a “bad day” situation, not a ruined life. Copyright, on the other hand, can ruin your life. And chill your speech and creativity.
And this is the worst part: so many people, especially kids, are at risk. Baio also famously highlighted the prevalence of the phrase “no copyright intended” on YouTube. Tons of kids uploading videos use clips of music and videos with a phrase like that. Or with statements about fair use. Or with copyright law quotes. All, as he notes, to try to find that magic voodoo that wards off a possible lawsuit. Most of those people aren’t being sued.
But they could be.
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January 17, 2013
MMO armour: not just fantasy, but total nonsense
At Massively, Justin Olivetti has a quiet little rant about how ridiculous most MMO game armour really is:
This is probably a rant best saved for another day, but I want to know when it became completely acceptable not to demand that MMO studios explain the building blocks of their game universes. The devs know that we’ll just draw on tropes (usually fantasy) to fill in the gap, so most of the explanations they give for in-game reasoning have to do with a weak backstory of a class instead of why, say, a liquid potion binds together bones and allows you resurrect completely after being chopped into 60 pieces.
I get why tropes are depended on so much, but in my opinion, they rob these games of the potential to be more immersive and lifelike. Pretty much most elements of MMO games break down even when you apply the game’s own internal logic (what little has been revealed) to it. Chief among these borked elements? Armor.
MMO armor just doesn’t make sense, nor does it hold up to even a light level of scrutiny. Today we’re going to cast aside the “it’s just fantasy, go with it” excuses to investigate why your gear is completely ridiculous from a common sense standpoint. Heck, I wasn’t even breathing hard by the time I counted to 10 on this one.
Related: “Why do you hate the shape of breasts in plate armor so much?”
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BargainBinBlasphemy
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December 17, 2012
Camille Paglia on “the shallow derivativeness of so much contemporary art, which has no big ideas left”
Emily Esfahani Smith talks to Camille Paglia about her latest book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars:
For Paglia, the spiritual quest defines all great art — all art that lasts. But in our secular age, the liberal crusade against religion has also taken a toll on art. “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination,” Paglia writes. “Yet that cynical posture has become de rigueur in the art world — simply another reason for the shallow derivativeness of so much contemporary art, which has no big ideas left.” Historically the great art of the West has had religious themes, either explicit or implicit. “The Bible, the basis for so much great art, moves deeper than anything coming out of the culture today,” Paglia says. As a result of its spiritual bankruptcy, art is losing its prominence in our culture. “Art makes news today,” she writes, “only when a painting is stolen or auctioned at a record price.”
[. . .]
More than 20 years ago, Paglia took another journey through art in her breakout book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. It launched her career as an irrepressible and politically incorrect cultural critic who was suddenly everywhere on the media circuit, speaking on topics ranging from Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor to date rape and educational reform. In the book, Paglia argued that Western culture has been a succession of shifting sexual personae (Mona Lisa is the original dominatrix; Dickinson was Amherst’s Madame de Sade). The book contained all the Paglia hallmarks: an infatuation with sex and beauty, strong prose, and an evisceration of feminism. Needless to say, Sexual Personae raised hackles and branded Paglia as the enfant terrible of academia and feminism.
That was then. While she is still more than willing to dig into what is left of the feminist movement — “feminism today is anti-intellectual” and “defined by paranoia,” she says — these days, she directs the venom of her sharp tongue to the dogmatic champions of secularism, liberals who narrow-mindedly dismiss religion and God. There is one, in particular, whom she cannot stand: the late Christopher Hitchens — like her, a libertarian-minded atheist. The key difference between the two is that he despised religion and God while Paglia respects both and thinks they are fundamental to Western culture and art. Paglia calls Hitchens “a sybaritic narcissist committed to no real ideas outside his personal advancement.”
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
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December 3, 2012
“Wookierotica” in Oz
The Register is always willing to go the extra parsec to get the NSFW story. Here’s Simon Sharwood on a burlesque show with a Star Wars theme being performed in Australia this month:
The show’s creator says the performance doesn’t necessarily involve nudity, as he dislikes notions that burlesque always has to end up with a pile of smalls on the floor.
As the NSFW video below shows, the production will certainly leave you feeling rather more kindly disposed to storm troopers. You may also find out whether Jabba the Hutt bought Princess Leia just the one bikini.
The show is billed as a parody and is definitely not in canon. It’s also proving hard to suppress: since debuting late last year, it has enjoyed several seasons around Australia. A new run of shows kicks off in early December at Sydney’s Vanguard Theatre, just in time for Vulture South’s Christmas party.
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October 8, 2012
“It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead”
Camille Paglia in the Wall Street Journal:
Today’s blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro’s “My Sweet Lord,” a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.
It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the arts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today’s college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.
[. . .]
Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.
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August 29, 2012
QotD: Government funding for the arts “stinks in God’s nostrils”
There’s at least a third reason to stop state funding of the arts, and it’s the one I take most seriously as a literary scholar and writer. In the 17th century, a great religious dissenter, Roger Williams (educated at Cambridge, exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony), wrote the first case for total separation of church and state in the English language. Forced worship, said Williams, “stinks in God’s nostrils” as an affront to individual liberty and autonomy; worse still, it subjugated theology to politics.
Something similar holds true with painting, music, writing, video and all other forms of creative expression. Forced funding of the arts — in whatever trivial amounts and indirect ways — implicates citizens in culture they might openly despise or blissfully ignore. And such mandatory tithing effectively turns creators and institutions lucky enough to win momentary favour from bureaucrats into either well-trained dogs or witting instruments of the powerful and well-connected. Independence works quite well for churches and the press. It works even more wonderfully in the arts.
Nick Gillespie, featured guest for “Economist Debates: Arts Funding”, The Economist, 2012-08-29
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July 29, 2012
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The amusing “real” story of how Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired to write Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Out in a field just off I-27 south, maybe 15 minutes away from Amarillo, our beloved Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned this statue, “Ozymandias.” Of course, being a merry prankster, he pretends on an introductory plaque that these “ancient ruins” in fact inspired Shelley’s poem.
H/t to “Fishplate” Jeff for the link.
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June 11, 2012
An epitaph for the original Arts and Crafts movement
Colby Cosh has an interesting slant on William Morris and the original Arts and Crafts movement (for the record, I’m quite a fan of a lot of A&C artifacts, if not quite so much of their philosophy):
In the 19th century, William Morris preached a social revolution in which exploitative “useless toil” would be replaced by “useful work”. He dreamt of a world that would reject shoddy mass-produced goods in favour of objects made with care and craftsmanship. Any business that sells “artisanal” goods, whether the goods be curtains or crumpets, is essentially quoting Morris and referring to his promise.
That promise, of course, failed spectacularly. It did not even survive Morris’s own time. His “libertarian socialism” of crafted objects and honest work found itself drowned out at every turn by leftist alternatives which, more sensibly, accepted the power and inevitability of mass production. 20th-century Marxism wasn’t opposed to factories; it worshipped them, fetishized them. The fatal problem with Morris’s appeal is that he was just plain wrong about mass-produced objects necessarily being unlovely junk. We have been to Ikea; we know better.
Morris felt very strongly about this, and from his own historical standpoint, he was certainly on to something. It’s impossible for us to imagine what kind of things factories suppurated into the marketplace before things like statistical control charts were invented, or before items like micrometers were themselves mass-produced to a consistent high standard. Morris lived in a world where individual masons and cabinetmakers and weavers really were losing their livelihoods to a tide of undifferentiated, undistinguished banality; his feelings of alarm now seem fussy when we read him, but that is because only the better-made Victorian objects have physically survived destruction or disposal and reached our time.
Soon enough, however, the art of industrial design would come to the rescue. If Morris could have lived long enough to see the Studebaker Commander or the IBM Selectric II or, yes, the furshlugginer iPhone, he would have packed in the Arts and Crafts talk and gone straight to work designing pickle-jar labels. (Morris was not too consistent when it came to the ultimate logical consequences of a world made by hand, anyway. The influential Kelmscott Press he founded in 1891 favoured early printing techniques and letterforms, but it was, at any rate, a press; unlike his spiritual ancestor William Blake, he didn’t set out to mimic the appearance of illuminated manuscripts by the actual method implied in the etymology of the term “manuscript”.)
While I picked this section of the article to quote, you really should read the whole thing. It’s some of the most thought-provoking writing I’ve seen in months.
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April 19, 2012
Pentagon sleuths foil Anglo-Canadian military plan
The story of Ensign Chuck Hord’s memorial portrait in the Pentagon, with both British and Canadian military angles:
In a Pentagon hallway hung an austere portrait of a Navy man lost at sea in 1908, with his brass buttons, blue-knit uniform and what looks like meticulously blow-dried hair.
Wait. Blow-dried hair?
The portrait of “Ensign Chuck Hord,” framed in the heavy gilt typical of government offices, may be the greatest — or perhaps only — prank in Pentagon art history. “Chuck Hord” can’t be found in Navy records of the day. It isn’t even a real painting. The textured, 30-year-old photo is actually of Capt. Eldridge Hord III, 53 years old, known to friends as “Tuck,” a military retiree with a beer belly and graying hair who lives in Burke, Va.
[. . .]
Capt. Hord at the time was director of the Multinational Interagency division, a new Pentagon office designed to coordinate military logistics between the U.S. and its closest allies.
Office colleagues say Capt. Hord developed close bonds with his British, Canadian and Australian counterparts. Their office boasted its own beer fridge.
Several of Capt. Hord’s work colleagues attended the 2004 party, including a British captain who smuggled the portrait into his car and put it on display at the office. Capt. Hord, amused, called it an act of “buffoonery.”
[. . .]
Back on the wall in the office, visitors often asked who it depicted. “They all looked at it and said, ‘Man, what year was that? It looks like the 1800s,'” said Canadian Lt. Col. Brook Bangsboll.
That was the light-bulb moment. On one of his last days at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Bangsboll went to a jewelry shop to have a brass plaque engraved, egged on by colleagues and co-conspirators. “We didn’t know what to do so we said, ‘Let’s just lose him at sea,'” Lt. Col. Bangsboll said. “It makes it interesting and kind of mysterious.”
He kept the circumstances of the ensign’s death vague because he thought some nosy Navy historian would spot the ruse if the plaque cited a specific battle.
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April 3, 2012
Creativity as mainly hard work, plus a bit of talent and inspiration
As I’ve said before, I’m not at all a creative person but I’ve always admired those people who are creative. However, Jonah Lehrer suggests that perhaps I’m just lazy:
“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code,” writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book Imagine.
In his book, Lehrer examines the inner workings of what we call imagination. He looks at the neuroscience behind sudden insights, how the brain solves different kinds of problems and which personal traits help foster creativity. He also shares how external forces factor into the creative process, how to design a workspace to enhance your chances of having an epiphany, why creativity tends to bubble up in certain places and how we can encourage our collective imaginations.
Above all, though, the message of Lehrer’s book is that creativity is not a super power. Anyone can be creative — it just takes hard work. “We should aspire to excessive genius,” says Lehrer, who took some time from his book tour to sit down with Mashable and answer a few questions about the mysteries of how we imagine.
[. . .]
Yo-Yo Ma says his ideal state of creativity is “controlled craziness.” How can we learn to harness that?
What Yo-Yo Ma is referring to is the kind of creativity that occurs when we let ourselves go, allowing the mind to invent without worrying about what it’s inventing. Such creative freedom has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue — most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. It’s also the kind of creativity that little kids constantly rely on, largely because they have no choice. Because parts of the brain associated with impulse control remain underdeveloped, they are unable to censor their imagination, to hold back their expression. This helps explain the truth in that great Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
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March 11, 2012
The creativity switch
As a life-long non-creative person, I found this article to be of interest:
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use “creativity” as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
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February 28, 2012
Hacker-Artist group UX roves under Paris streets
A fascinating article in Wired talks about a French group that does the opposite of vandalism — unauthorized repairs to neglected historical objets d’art:
This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde — confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new — its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.
What has made much of this work possible is UX’s mastery, established 30 years ago and refined since, of the city’s network of underground passageways — hundreds of miles of interconnected telecom, electricity, and water tunnels, sewers, catacombs, subways, and centuries-old quarries. Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms. The group routinely uses the tunnels to access restoration sites and stage film festivals, for example, in the disused basements of government buildings.
H/T to CuthSpies for the link.
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December 18, 2011
Tyler Cowen on “aesthetic stagnation”
Responding to an article in Vanity Fair by Kurt Andersen, Cowen lists a few things that must be taken into consideration:
1. Movies: The Hollywood product has regressed, though one can cite advances in 3-D and CGI as innovations in the medium if not always the aesthetics. The foreign product is robust in quality, though European films are not nearly as innovative as during the 1960s and 70s. Still, I don’t see a slowdown in global cinema as a whole.
2. TV: We just finished a major upswing in quality for the best shows, though I fear it is over, as no-episode-stands-alone series no longer seem to be supported by the economics.
3. Books/fiction: It’s wrong to call graphic novels “new,” but they have seen lots of innovation. If we look at writing more broadly, the internet has led to plenty of innovation, including of course blogs. The traditional novel is doing well in terms of quality even if this is not a high innovation era comparable to say the 1920s (Mann, Kafka, Proust, others).
4. Computer and video games: This major area of innovation is usually completely overlooked by such discussions.
He also includes something which — at least for me — counts as a “killer app” for this kind of discussion:
7. Your personal stream: This is arguably the biggest innovation in recent times, and it is almost completely overlooked. It’s about how you use modern information technology to create your own running blend of sources, influences, distractions, and diversions, usually taken from a blend of the genres and fields mentioned above. It’s really fun and most of us find it extremely compelling
That “personal stream” is so pervasive that we generally don’t notice that it’s a hallmark of the modern era. We don’t get our news from single sources anymore: not just a single local newspaper, or a single TV newscast. We can easily find like-minded communities for just about all our niche interests with relatively minimal effort. In the past, such communities were severely distance-challenged to even form, never mind to thrive.
That we now can easily control and direct our personal streams to include and exclude in such fine gradations is something that few could even imagine 20 years ago. In a sense, we all have “clipping services” providing us with interesting and relevant snippets, but we can literally have hundreds of such services — at little or no cost — to chase down our merest whims for fresh information. It doesn’t show up on the GNP as a gain, but it’s very much a differentiator between today and just a few years back. Yet we don’t notice because we’re immersed in it.
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