YOU MIGHT FIND YOURSELF

Video

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:47:35 -0700

My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally...

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:40:22 -0700

My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character:

The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.
A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.

—Stanley Kubrick reaching out to Arthur C. Clarke, which eventually resulted in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Those Who Have Gone "Before"

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:27:41 -0700

Those Who Have Gone "Before":

By: The Film Experience

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t had the chance to see the earlier movies yet – pleasechange that as soon as possible, I beg you – or to get series veterans riled up for its imminent return (like that’s even necessary), I wanted to share five reasons that, for me, the first two Before… movies are some of the finest romantic dramas in the history of cinema.

The characters are real, and precise.
Unless you’re paying attention to the cover of Jesse’s book in one scene of Sunset, neither of these characters have a last name, which is almost always fiction-code for “they are Everyperson stand-ins for the human experience”, and typically means that they’ll be a bit foggy in the expression. Nothing could be less true of either Celine or Jesse, both of whom are built with a basketful of specific character traits, whether it’s their fully fleshed-out back stories and current activities (e.g. Celine’s fond relationship with her grandmother and political engagement), or behavior that happens so naturally it doesn’t even seem like acting (e.g. Jesse’s habit of backtracking with a giggle every time he says something that Celine disapproves of), or even something as simple as patterns of speaking (e.g. the idiosyncratic use of “officially” in both films). And, obviously enough, it’s because they’re so exact and specific that they’re so appealing and easy to relate to; any time a writer wants to create a blank, universal situation, all they really do is make character who seem vague; because Jesse and Celine are so impeccable in every detail, it’s easier to think of their situation as applicable to real people and not just a concept.

The characters aren’t idealized.
This is maybe contained within the last point, but important enough to pull it out on its own. If there’s one problem with modern romantic movies that makes all of them a bit tedious, it’s that the protagonists are too squeaky-clean, with their flaws depicted as charming quirks that anybody would love to be around, not irritations that a lover has to learn to understand and overlook. Celine and Jesse are, by and large, awfully pleasant and easy to like, but neither of them is a cardboard saint. Jesse is a bit preening and cocksure in Sunrise, after the fashion of every crisply-dressed jackass you wanted to punch in a bar, and he’s openly romanticizing the idea of cheating on his wife in Sunset. In both movies, Celine is intensely married to her opinions and takes obvious, if subdued delight in declaring those opinions loudly and forcefully enough that she makes her partner feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. They’re both prone to self-deception, and it’s pretty clear that they’re both a bit self-righteous. None of this is meant to make us dislike them, but it’s certainly enough to raise the question of whether they’d be a bit frustrating in real life. Of course they would, and it’s by allowing the romantic leads to have some dark shading that the films can suggest even more that they’re pretty realistic.

The films have a tremendous sense of place.
To a great degree, Sunrise is about knocking around Vienna, poking into corners and sightseeing, and doing it with somebody you have fun spending time with. And just as much, Sunset is about not paying any attention to the sights of Paris as you’re walking around with somebody that you need, desperately, to reconnect with. So the relationship each film has to the city it takes place is very different, yet both of them succeed in capturing something very important about the feeling and texture of that city: without ever once having to rely on postcard-friendly shots of buildings and landscapes, the films act as the best possible advertisements for the cities by depicting them as alive and moving, full of little details that add to the texture and depth of the films whether the protagonists are engaging with the city, or ignoring it.

The craftsmanship is deliberate and precise without being overwhelming.
Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a director, but the Before films are pretty clearly his masterpieces. Not because you can see him working for it, though. In fact, the guiding hand behind the movies is so quiet as to be completely invisible, particularly in Sunset, which is made up almost entirely of two-shots facing the characters. This simplicity isn’t the same as carelessness, though; what Linklater’s camera does here is to strip out everything that would be a distraction from the characters and the actors. It’s not the same as “getting out of the way”, as we sometimes dismissively say of direction that bows down in favor of letting the actors go on in bland long takes (think of any of Woody Allen’s sub-par films); it’s clearing the way, using some awfully complex and ambitious tracking shots (in Sunset), or very carefully-framed shots (in both films) not to draw attention to the cinematography, but to draw attention to the characters. It’s invisible filmmaking without which the films wouldn’t have nearly the impact they do, for the randomness of just filming actors is nothing like the deliberate care of foregrounding the actors without being showy.

The movies leave us wanting more.
The ending of Sunrise, with Celine and Jesse romantically committing the kind of abject stupidity that could only be mistaken for wisdom by the young and intellectual. The exhilarating ellipsis as Sunset draws to a close with its legendary “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” / “I know”. The films have so far performed the most dramatic kind of balancing act of convincing us of the emotions in the central relationship, and then refraining from paying that relationship off as most films would. Instead of being frustrating, this ends up being the most exciting and involving part of all, creating the sense that the characters have lives going on beyond the edges of the movie, and that makes our novennial reunions with these characters all the more inviting. I don’t know if Before Midnight will have a similar note of deliberate incompleteness in its closing moments, but based on the films so far, I expect to be just as invested in the lives of Celine and Jesse in 2022 as I am here in 2013.

Vitsoe

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:16:41 -0700

Vitsoe

Palm Graphics

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:30:55 -0700

Palm Graphics

Photo

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:35:35 -0700

From Here You Can See Everything

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:04:00 -0700

From Here You Can See Everything:

By: James A Pearson

Our current era of on-demand television series does more than facilitate binge-watching—it encourages it. David Foster Wallace already told us what happens next.

Against my better judgment, I’m watching another episode of The West Wing as I write this. It’s streaming on Netflix in a window next to this one. It’s my third episode of the night, my 80th or so this month.

When I left Uganda this winter I had finally broken the 300-page barrier in David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest. I’ve started it three or four times in the past and aborted each time for attentional reasons. But 300 pages felt like enough momentum, finally, to finish. Then I hit my first American airport, with its 4G and free wi-fi. All at once, my gadgets came alive: pinging and alerting and vibrating excitedly. And even better, all seven seasons of The West Wing had providentially appeared on Netflix Instant. I’ve only finished 100 more pages in the two months since.

I always binge on media when I’m in America. But this time it feels different. Media feels encroaching, circling, kind of predatory. It feels like it’s bingeing back.

The basic currency of consumer media companies—Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, NBC, Fox News, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.—is hours of attention, our attention. They want our eyeballs focused on their content as often as possible and for as many hours as possible, mostly to sell bits of those hours to advertisers or to pitch our enjoyment to investors. And they’re getting better at it, this catch-the-eyeball game.

Consider Netflix. These days, when one episode of The West Wing ends, with its irresistible moralistic tingle, I don’t even have to click a button to watch the next one. The freshly rolling credits migrate to the top-left corner of the browser tab, and below to the right a box with a new episode appears, queued up and just itching to be watched. Fifteen seconds later the new episode starts playing, before the credits on the current episode even finish. They rolled out this handy feature—they call it Post-Play—last August. Now all I have to do is nothing and moralistic tingle keeps coming.

It’s a simple opt-in/opt-out trick. The classic case study here, strangely enough, is organ donation. Countries that require their citizens to opt in before they’ll be considered organ donors often have donor rates in the teens or lower, while countries that presume their citizens are organ donors—unless they explicitly opt out—often have 90-percent-plus rates. Netflix, instead of asking me to opt in to the next episode, just presumes I want to watch another one in 15 seconds, unless I opt out. As I’m sure the Netflix brass happily projected, my episode-watching rates are up.

All sorts of media companies are deploying new tricks. Facebook notifications are no longer confined to Facebook; they’re on browser tabs, on phones and tablets, in as many emails as you forget to turn off, and recently started to feature an annoying little sound on my laptop (one that can thankfully be turned off, unlike Netflix’s Post-Play). It seems like every new phone app I download wants to send me push notifications, so its developers can grab my attention whenever they like. Even a competitive-cooking show my mom watches on basic cable doesn’t cut to commercial between back-to-back episodes anymore, and is designed so every mid-episode commercial break is also mid-cliffhanger.

A recent study on human willpower, involving college students and baked goods, should be cautionary here. Its results suggest that our willpower gets tired, like a muscle, so when we use it a lot in the course of a day we end up hardly being able to use it at all by day’s end. It seems to follow that, faced with media’s stronger, more regular seductions, we’re bound to give in earlier and more often. Perhaps this helps explain why the ends of long American workdays often feature alcohol, dessert, and hours of consumer media.

Then there’s the actual content. It’s probably clear to anyone over the age of 18 or so that content has undergone a sort of Incredible Hulk de-evolution that makes it both dumber and somehow also much more powerful. A good example of this (brought to my attention by a random post on Facebook) is TLC, founded as The Learning Channel by the former Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, together with NASA, to enrich American minds, but which now grips American eyeballs with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Ratings, no doubt, are up.

The media of my childhood, mostly weekly television shows and overused VHS tapes, was like a good pet. Sure, it was a little costly to keep around, but it was lovable, and I could always shut it out in the yard for a while. Now, though, media is always with me, always trying to snag my attention and siphon away as much as possible to sell to advertisers. It feels like it’s evolved from a cute little pet into a frighteningly efficient parasite.

Media has all the basic necessaries of an evolutionary form. Take television. It reproduces episode by episode and season by season, with variation, under the weight of the selective pressure of ratings. And unlike genes, which can only reproduce vertically from generation to generation, the elements of television can propagate laterally, as networks copy each other, spreading beneficial traits more rapidly across the medium. Shows that succeed in the ratings game survive and reproduce for another season and are copied, while shows that fail are killed. It seems newish series like Honey Boo Boo and Hoarders and Storage Wars have evolved some sort of primordial cocktail of novelty and faux voyeurism that, when delivered with quick edits and dramatic Muzak, is nearly irresistible to a large subset of American eyeballs.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a film (also called Infinite Jest) so entertaining that anyone who starts watching it will die watching it, smiling vacantly at the screen in a pool of their own soiling. It’s the ultimate gripper of eyeballs. Media, in this absurdist rendering, evolves past parasite to parasitoid, the kind of overly aggressive parasite that kills its host.

Wallace himself had a strained relationship with television. He said in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram” that television “can become malignantly addictive,” which, he explained, means, “(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems is causes.” Though I don’t think he would have labeled himself a television addict, Wallace was known to indulge in multi-day television binges. One can imagine those binges raised to the power of Netflix Post-Play and all seven seasons of The West Wing.

That sort of binge-television viewing has become a normal, accepted part of American culture. Saturdays with a DVD box set, a couple bottles of wine, and a big carton of goldfish crackers are a pretty common new feature of American weekends. Netflix bet big on this trend with their release of House of Cards. They released all 13 episodes of the first season at once: roughly one full Saturday’s worth. It’s a show designed for the binge. The New York Times quoted the show’s producer as saying, with a laugh, “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day.” They don’t say what kind of laugh it was.

The scariest part of this new binge culture is that hours spent bingeing don’t seem to displace other media consumption hours; we’re just adding them to our weekly totals. Lump in hours on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and maybe even the occasional non-torrented big-screen feature film and you’re looking at a huge number of hours per person.

In 2009, according to the media research company eMarketer, the average U.S. adult consumed about 10 hours and 32 minutes of media per day. (That’s including multitasking, so if you spend an hour browsing on your iPad while watching TV, that counts as two hours.) By 2012 that total was up over an hour to 11:39 per day. That’s almost eight hours more per week, per person. Now multiply that by America.

Before reading Wallace, I thought the only real use for absurdity, besides pure, often strange entertainment, was the reductio ad absurdum form of argument, the kind that uses a statement’s absurd or just plain false implications to show the statement itself must be false. (Like, for instance, “If the world is flat then we can have a peek over its edge.”) But Wallace uses absurdity differently, as a sort of funhouse mirror of truth. Lured in by outrageous images, we find they are reflections of ourselves. This is truth through absurdity, veritas per absurdum.

In Wallace’s book, a Canadian terrorist informant of foggy allegiance asks an American undercover agent a form of the question: “If Americans would choose to press play on the film Infinite Jest, knowing it will kill them, doesn’t that mean they are already dead inside, that they have chosen entertainment over life?” Of course vanishingly few Americans would press play on a film that was sure to end their lives. But there’s a truth in this absurdity. Almost every American I know does trade large portions of his life for entertainment, hour by weeknight hour, binge by Saturday binge, Facebook check by Facebook check. I’m one of them. In the course of writing this I’ve watched all 13 episodes of House of Cards and who knows how many more West Wing episodes, and I’ve spent any number of blurred hours falling down internet rabbit holes. All instead of reading, or writing, or working, or spending real time with people I love.

An optimally adapted parasite takes as much from its host as possible without damaging the viability of the host. In order for us to stay viable hosts for the media parasite, we need only enough waking hours away from media to make money and to spend that money on advertisers’ offerings and/or media’s costs (and of course to feed ourselves and, like, stay alive). Media will gladly take all our other hours. Think about normal adult American life: After working, spending, and consuming media, how many hours do we really have left? Of course it will never get all of our spare time. But it captures more of our hours every year. Media is on an evolutionary trajectory, a curve bringing it closer and closer and closer to Infinite Jest.

“this is not a phone, this is an iPod”

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:57:10 -0700

“this is not a phone, this is an iPod”

Photo

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:32:19 -0700

It is often difficult to describe to those who live in a free...

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:23:27 -0700

It is often difficult to describe to those who live in a free society what life is like in an authoritarian regime. You don’t know who to trust. You worry that you, your family, or your friends will be arrested and jailed without due process. The fear of political violence or death, whether through direct assassinations or targeted “accidents”, is constant. Such was the case in Kenya, especially during the 1990s. —Wangari Muta Maathai – Unbowed p. 206.

unequal-design: Wild Style

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:21:23 -0700

unequal-design: Wild Style

Yuichiro Miura, 80, becomes the oldest to scale Mount...

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:25:37 -0700

Yuichiro Miura, 80, becomes the oldest to scale Mount Everest. Miura explained his attempt to scale Everest at such an advanced age: “It is to challenge (my) own ultimate limit. It is to honor the great Mother Nature.”

Filth

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:27:45 -0700

Filth

Peking duck in Beijing. Many great dishes are named for their...

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:06:00 -0700

Peking duck in Beijing. Many great dishes are named for their creators, but oddly, no one is honored for Peking duck, perhaps the greatest culinary invention of all. Imagine what went into that dish’s development: knowing that to blow the slaughtered bird up with air and hang it for 24 hours will free the skin from the flesh as fat drips slowly out. Then to devise the savory glaze of rice vinegar, honey, plummy hoisin sauce, ginger, sesame oil and a pinch of hot chili peppers. The bird is then set vertically on a rack in the oven and brushed with sauce intermittently as the roasting proceeds. And to think of serving, most authentically, first the skin wrapped in hot thin crepes seasoned with hoisin with brushes of scallions and cucumber slivers to be followed by the meat and finally a heady soup of cabbage simmered with the bones of duck carcass. (Less traditionally and less ethereally, skin and meat are sometimes wrapped up together.) Having had Peking duck often, I was newly beguiled several years ago at the Da Dong Beijing Roast Duck Restaurant in Beijing, where women at the table were served the first course of crisped skin with small dishes of coarse, diamond-bright crystal sugar to be sprinkled on. I was told that a long-ago Chinese empress considered spices too strong for delicate feminine palates and thought sugar more appropriate. Certainly it delighted this feminine palate as the crackling sweet sugar mollified the underlying oiliness of the skin.

Part of a top 10 list of Mimi Sheraton’s most memorable meals

Don Jon

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:48:59 -0700

Don Jon

Scotty Nguyen’s infamous 2008 World Series of Poker...

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:13:00 -0700

Scotty Nguyen’s infamous 2008 World Series of Poker $50,000 HORSE Final Table drunken rampage. One of the funniest videos on Youtube. When I need to do a Vietnamese accent, I always go back to this video for source material.

Brian Koppelman (Rounders cowriter, Grantland contributor): In...

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:59:40 -0700

Brian Koppelman (Rounders cowriter, Grantland contributor): In the last poker scene of Rounders, Matt Damon’s character — originally we had written it so that you didn’t see his cards, so that you didn’t know he had the straight that mirrored Johnny Chan’s straight. And the director said to us, “We should show the cards,” and I said, “No, if you know the cards it’s not going to be as interesting.” John [Dahl] said, “Let’s put them both up in front of an audience. The same exact movie. The only difference is in one version you can see Matt’s cards, and in the other version you can’t see Matt’s cards.” And we played our version, the one where you couldn’t see the hand, and it went great. The crowd was really surprised when the cards turned over — it was awesome. But when we played the one where you could see that Matt had flopped the straight, the crowd was on the edge of their seats hoping that [John] Malkovich would fall for it. They were completely engaged. It was exactly the hole-card phenomenon. They wanted to be inside Matt’s head. (via)

(Editor’s note: And if you want to get super nerdy about it, this write-up overanalyzing the final hand is a pretty entertaining.)

Running low on YMFY stickers. You guys love to get up!

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:59:00 -0700

Running low on YMFY stickers. You guys love to get up!

Me Love Tumblr Long Time

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:38:21 -0700

fieldstudy:

Big news for Tumblr today. I’m a bit of a Tumblr fanboy — a fan of the service, the community, the amazing team, and of David Karp who has been a continually impressive CEO.

I published my first post just over three years ago. Since then, I have created 15+ blogs and this will be my 450th post on this blog alone.

Tumblr has meant a lot to me. But I really want to talk about what I feel it means to the millions of people that have found a home there. And I’ve put a lot of time in to trying to understand why that is.

Tumblr is about a specific type of identity. I’ll come back to that in a bit. First, a little more on what identity can mean to users these days.

For a long time, the internet was a haven for anonymous identity, people who wanted to be someone entirely other than their real-world selves. Anonymous identity is an important part of the internet, but the problem is it is not liquid. You cannot translate that anonymous social capital into real world capital.

On the other side of the spectrum is real identity. When Facebook bucked the MySpace trend and required new users to sign-up with a real name, it set itself apart as a network where the social norm is to represent some version of your real world self. This representation is as liquid as identity gets. This is the social capital you might use to make friends, find a job, and operate in the real world as a credible person.

But Tumblr is something in between. It’s where your aspirational identity lives. Aspirational identity is a projection of where you want your real identity to be in 2, 5, 10 years.

These are not new ideas — aspirational identity has been around since kids have been lining their bedroom walls with posters of sports cars and rock stars. What makes Tumblr an incredible home for aspirational identity is that it allows users to escape the confines of their real identity and have this future view of themselves validated. You could be a high school-aged boy growing up in the rural midwest who is obsessed with dance, or a teen girl from a struggling family that dreams of traveling the world. Your circumstances might destroy your confidence, limit your opportunities, and strangle your aspirations. But on Tumblr, on a simple platform for self-expression, you have an audience ready and willing to validate not just who you are, but who you see yourself becoming. We are all, in some way, bound by circumstance. Aspiration is how we move beyond those bounds.

What I love about the internet and Tumblr specifically is this: it has given form to what people want to become. It has made aspirations real, tangible, living, and changing.

Think about aspirational identity and real identity on opposite ends of a weighted scale. When we are young, who we are might be less important to us than who we want to become. (Think about young children playing house or pretending to be an astronaut.) College might be where aspiration and reality reach equilibrium. We are shaping who we really are, driven by who we want to become. Then later in our adult life, we suppress aspiration and focus on our “real” selves.

This might spell doom for Tumblr. Is it a home that people just eventually grow out of and move on from? I don’t believe so. I think this Tumblr-using generation has somehow figured out what we would all do well to learn. Aspiration is important to all of us and, we start to lose something of ourselves when we settle into our real identity and stick there. It is the interplay of aspiration and reality that make us dynamic, always-moving entities that are interesting precisely because we can’t be pinned down. These are the people that are inventing and re-inventing themselves all the time and that ghost of an identity that lived only as dreams and whispers before now has a form for full expression.

—

Anyway, this is a long-winded love letter to Tumblr. I have high hopes for their future. I’ll be sticking with them for a long long time.

Geoff Mcfetridge for Heath

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:35:31 -0700

Geoff Mcfetridge for Heath