PopCult: July 2007 Archive Page

Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen. --Queen guitarist to complete doctorate (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

This brightened my day.

Now, I love black backgrounds more than anything else in the design business, and yet I was still very surprised to acknowledge how dark theatrical posters are and that, specifically, in this context, the top 25 grossing movies of all time across all ages didn't run a very wide gamut. Only at the tot level did color start to play a real role. And while the psychological and emotional explanations of what colors mean are too varied to take any which one as authoritative, it is nonetheless telling that black is the color of choice in movie posters. --Chris Eichman
--Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies  (Under Consideration)

The top of the image represents NC-17 posters, while the bottom represents G movies.

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti --Breaking News: Something Happening in Haiti (The Onion (Satire))

Great commentary on the accelerated news cycle.

Barker: "I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"? --Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (Roger Ebert | Sun Times)

Film reviewer Roger Ebert fisks novelist and gamer Clive Barker. Filing this for a rainy day.

bootlegs are wierd the only time i gop online is to blog on this my space woich juliet you are free to bring oiver to m,y site as its mine and i own it, anyway i dont know i told all myf riends an dyou too to be there 1030 sharp because weve been allabout goping on time and i was told 1030- then there was one of the mopst remarkable technicaL PVERSIOGHTs in my entire career- the oplder dudes whove done hgouse sound from, SIR a jillion times forgot to TURN ON THE SUBWOOFERS. so i beeged for 15 mopre minutes to figure out why the hell a real band wich would be moine sounded like a trebley backing band to an american idol songbird, tweeters are the hiogh end and woofers tge low but sib woofers are the bass and the toms and kick growl and i rtold stu the truth= chicks just do not end up with drummers of his strentgth and aptitude- whatver that fguy nedsx to keep him happy - wich sinc ehe has a farm on tghe Isle of Wight and just nothing fazes him - isnt to hard- hi sintetion is just to play cdrums and imA bit of a dudem, im thinking and i think im right abou tthis we need obne more Samantha level ro0kc ballsy song - even though has that fine razors edge al;mist cheeze but not bridge wich quuickly turns ballsy= mne and pete wrote one "car crash" wich wqe doid at studio b when LP was prepping for her biog and hey i aint getting in any trouble again so no fucking names- --Courtney Love --nyc wtf?Warning, horrific spelling and grammar per usual! (Courtney Love's MySpace)

This is sort of a random chunk out of a 7000-word blog entry. One single paragraph in the middle is about 3500 words long.

I had previously blogged a speech Love gave in 2000, which was a well-argued, detailed explanation of how the recording industry makes millions off of bands that (according to Love) barely make any money at all. I found that speech persuasive and enlightening, but I find what she wrote in her MySpace page to be completely incomprehensible. The really funny thing is that people are leaving comments praising Love and thanking her what she wrote...

Wow. I guess it really is the thought that counts.

It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." --Josh Getlin and Martha Groves --Harry Potter and the diminished returns (CalendarLive.com | LA Times)

But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.

Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party?

[...]

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide. --Ron Charles --Harry Potter and the Death of Reading (Washington Post (will expire))

I have sampled the books, but as much as I enjoy the setting and the characters, I find nothing on any given page that stands out to me as being good writing.

My nine-year-old is reading the books on his own.

Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. --Clive Thompson --These Games Are So Bad, It's Not Funny (Wired)

On a balmy morning in June, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé, a theater director, and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the 21st century, just another hip lass with loose curls, a scoop-necked top and denim skirt with naughty front slits.

Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back--oh, 150 years or so. --Lizzy Ratner --The New Victorians (New York Observer)

Yes, as we all know, the Victorians held unmarried cohabiting theatre people in the highest social esteem.

An article about neo-Victorians that doesn't refer to The Diamond Age, the Goth aesthetic, or SteamPunk? Tosh!

This article takes a rather thin concept and stretches it rather unimpressively.

[Update: when I mentioned this article, and Miller's function as an example, my wife said "150 years ago, she would have been the daughter who humiliated her family and ruined all of her sisters' chance of respectable marriages."]

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac -- both 18 -- cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can." --Linton Weeks --The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It (Washington Post (will expire))

Hmm... a reporter sits in on a summer film class, and is shocked --- SHOCKED!! -- to learn that the students who are motivated enough to pay for it are likely to think in visual terms. What is this world coming to?

To be fair, the subhead is "Students in Film Class a Microcosm of a Visually Oriented Culture," so the WashPo makes it clear these are not random students. And even among English majors (who one would think are more likely than the average student to be interested in reading), I do often notice that even students who are excited by writing often approach a first-person narrative as if they are describing a movie. Thus, they write "A big smile spread across my face" or "I gave him a puzzled look," conveying the interior state of their first-person protagonist from an external, visual point of view. Most have never considered alternatives, such as quoting dialogue ("You remembered the violets!") or the protagonist's unvoiced thought ("Was Smitty trying to use a 20-gauge reamer on a blown gasket? God, what I wouldn't do to get away from these clueless hicks!"). If you plan the story to SHOW why the protagonist likes violets, and even if you don't actually stop to explain what a 20-gague reamer is and why a hick would think it was appropriate to use on a blown gasket, when the protagonist's reaction to the violets or the reamers convey information about character, setting, plot, etc., then the details have done their job.

'One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios -- carefully crafted "what if?" stories that let us imagine several different outcomes', the book says. It suggests holding a 'scenario party' (seriously) where you can 'pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends'. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like, but let's knock about some shocking 'what if?' scenarios over a glass of wine to make ourselves feel simultaneously terrified/terrifically important. It's the closest you'll get to a naked admission from the climate change lobby that its warnings of floods and pestilence and swarms of locusts are based on its members' own fevered, teenage imaginings rather than a scientifically revealed forecast of what is to come. --Brendan O'Neill --The planet's burning. Let's party!  (Spiked Online)

A snarky, class-focused review of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook.

RUR Cats (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme.

In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as "automaton."

As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them "labori" would be too stuffy. His brother Josef, a cubist painter and author, muttered, "Then call them Robots," drawing on a Czech word meaning "menial labor" or "servitude."

The illustration is from a Josef Capek's children's book, A Doggie and a Pussycat: How They Wrote a Letter.

Okay, that was pretty obscure, but now I can get on with my life.

It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today's television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it's true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don't have the time to think, let alone to read. They are working harder and less efficiently than ever (and in many cases, for less money than ever). In this environment, there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport - because that's how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.

And so we return to the central question: why is this television show referred to by so many literate viewers as a novel? --Has the novel been murdered by the mob? (Guardian Unlimited)

The last TV show I actually followed was Babylon 5, which ended in 1998, so all I know about The Sopranos is what I pick up from articles like this.

We prefer to take the money we would have spent on Cable TV and use it to buy DVDs that we really want to watch. Also, family members will sometimes fill up a videotape with shows like Zaboomafoo and Between the Lions, and the kids will watch them over and over. So we actually have a pretty big library of videos for the kids to choose.

My five-year-old is used to waking up at about 8am for a "show, drink, and a snack," and I typically include something fun-but-educational in the list of three or four suggestions I make when I let her choose what she wants to watch. Then, typically I will fall back asleep on the couch with her, or I might get my laptop out and check my e-mail. My nine-year-old son will often wake up before the movie is over, and usually they will start playing together when the movie is over. For one of his three daily lessons (7 days a week, year round, though we will count a family trip to a local historical site or ordinary kid stuff like piano lessons or swim classes), Peter will sometimes watch a documentary or a move set during the time period he's studying.

So I'm not pretending that the television set is not a part of my life. My wife does watch TV news on a regular basis, and she enjoys some of the late night talk shows, but I'm usually putting the kids to bed and sometimes falling asleep on the floor after reading the good-night story. We've been trying to find a good evening to watch Time Bandits together as a family, and I'm looking forward to that.

But right now, my five-year-old daughter has just finished writing a poem about snow, and I'm off to help her cut paper snowflakes. If I can find an index card, I'm going to cut a hole in it that's big enough for my children to crawl through.