collection

Steal everything shiny

March 17, 2023 / ,
A magpie in a tree.
I call my collection my “magpie file,” because I’ve heard magpies steal shiny things.

Why keep a collection? There’s plenty of reasons. My collection is a source of inspriation, a reservoir of elegant ideas and beautiful language, a trust fall with the artist in my brain that maybe he’s connected dots that I haven’t yet.

Another great reason: Today I read about the “afternoon fun economy,” the post-pandemic growth of recreation during regular working hours. This was a New York Times article, so lots of golf.

I thought to myself, “Wait, didn’t I recently read about a study debunking the ‘happiness tops out at $75k‘ idea?” I can find stories about the study (like the one I linked), but I can’t find the specific article I read, which mentioned a sort of conversion between salary and free time. Time off work far outstrips salary after a point in contribuitng to perceived wellbeing, but I can’t find the exact numbers anymore. I wish I had added that fact to my collection.

Plus, somewhere in my liked TikToks is a clip of Richard Wolff discussing how profits could be distributed among the working class as free time, which in turn could contribute to their wellbeing more than a nominal pay raise. Time is not money — time is far more valuable. But that clip is as good as gone.

In other words, don’t be a conscientious collector: archive everything in terms you understand. Steal everything shiny.

A decent mountain

March 12, 2023 /

An excerpt of the manifesto for The Berg, a proposed artificial mountain in the center of Berlin:

While big and wealthy cities in many parts of the world challenge the limits of possibility by building gigantic hotels with fancy shapes, erecting sky-high office towers or constructing hovering philharmonic temples, Berlin sets up a decent mountain. Its peak exceeds 1000 metres and is covered with snow from September to March… Hamburg, as stiff as flat, turns green with envy, rich and once proud Munich starts to feel ashamed of its distant Alp-panorama and planners of the Middle-East, experienced in taking the spell off any kind of architectural utopia immediately design authentic copies of the iconic Berlin-Mountain.

A rendering of a mountian in the center of Berlin.

The reward promised by physical beauty

March 9, 2023 /

Jessica DeFino on patriarchal norms:

It’s worth noting that the reward promised by the capitalist patriarchy — the reward promised by physical beauty — is not “everyone loves you and is nice to you.” The reward is proximity to power and wealth. Think of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. These men are made fun of constantly and yet, retain their power and status.

(If that name sounds familiar — DeFino’s, not the rich boys — it’s because I champed up her newsletter in a recent post.)

Right and wrong

March 7, 2023 /

Bridget’s entry in Dustloop, a wiki for the Guilty Gear fighting game franchise:

She will very frequently die to hits another character would survive with a decent buffer to spare. Combined with her lower than average damage, Bridget has to be right many more times than she is wrong.

Marvel movies will not save the world

March 6, 2023 / ,

From Raquel S Benedict’s “Healthy Junk Media and the SnackWell Effect” — it’s short, and I’m choosing from many great quotes here, so just go read it actually:

And on the other side, unapologetically indulgent junk is a hell of a lot more satisfying than bland diet junk. Not all junk food is created equal. An In-N-Out cheeseburger is much tastier than a Trekking-Mahlzeiten canned cheeseburger, just as Blade is an unquestionably better vampire flick than Morbius.

A really great essay, and the first time I’ve had to really grapple with the worthiness of whatever it is I’m doing here! Not in a bad way, in like a really great way. These ideas should always be in conversation. Essays like this one raise good questions, and in clarifying your own answers to those questions you clarify you understanding of the world as a whole. Of popcorn movies, in this case.

What I learned: I agree with Benedict that Marvel movies will not save the world. What I do want to take seriously is the emotional experiences that individuals can have with those movies! And of course, I agree that if something is going to be trash, it had better be hot trash.

Three more things I’ve been thinking about

March 4, 2023 / ,

Ian McKellan as Gandalf with his head in his hands in a greenscreen room.

Not to overwhelm with lists, but I’m not on an essay-writing clock right now and it’s the best way I can keep passing on things I love! Three recommendations:

  1. Jessica DeFino’s The Unpublishable would 1000% have made my list of model Substacks had I been lucky enough to discover it before writing that post. Something that’s become super important to me as I navigate my own Substack, is that writing about genre is often about masculinity. Fantasy and action and superheroes and horror and westerns often privelege a male point of view. So I’ve been really making an effort to circulate good feminism into my reading. The Unpublishable is about consumer beauty culture, and one of the major engines of beauty marketing is that upholding beauty standards is (sold as) fun!
  2. A legendary essay which the latest edition of The Unpublishable reminded me of: Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny. I need to give it a good reread, and also probably thumb through Blood Knife in general, so consider this me putting a pin in it.
  3. Not a recommendation per say, but I’m thinkin a lot about Ian McKellan on the set of The Hobbit. In case you didn’t know, he had what lots of publicaitons packaged as a “breakdown” on the almost completely greenscreened set. He’s been acting since 1958. Do you think anyone with a front seat to the increasing demand of publishers and the decreasing purchase of actors (and crew) would have responded any differently? Can we at least agree that using a greenscreen to film the interior of a house is a little much?

Strange metaphysical surplus

March 2, 2023 /

From Dominic Pettman’s bizarre, incredible opening address to the 500th anniversary of the death of Francine Descartes, the robot daughter of René:

She learned to become accustomed to the strange looks she received from waiters, shopkeepers, hoteliers, and people in the street: people who seemed repulsed by her mechanical gait, her artificial smile, her uncanny too-blue and too-shiny eyes. Her wind-up limbs. Just as she learned to bite her leather tongue when her father-maker voiced his strident opinions concerning animals, and their want of a soul of any description; his conviction that dogs, cats, pigs, and horses were simply God’s fleshy clocks, bereft of this strange metaphysical surplus that humans claimed to have, yet could never prove or render tangible.

(Francine is a real legend about Descartes, by the way.)

 

Bicycle for the mind

February 26, 2023 / ,

Michael Fassbender speaking as a young Steve Jobs.

Andy Hertzfeld on Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs:

None of it happened, but it’s all true.

The film (starring Michael Fassbender, not Ashton Kutcher) recounts Steve Jobs’ life through subtext, through suggestion, rather than through lovingly recreated scenes from his real life. The effect is much more powerful. Andy Hertzfeld was portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg in the film, and though he hated the Kutcher version, he loved Sorkin’s.

As an example of what I mean, here’s my favorite quote from the movie, versus the real quote it’s based on.

Sorkin:

The most efficient animal on the planet is the condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer — a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore, but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tenser lamp — the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind.

Jobs:

I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Which one is more real? Which one is more true? Are these two quotes saying different things? How you answer those questions says a lot about what art is for.

Better songs

February 21, 2023 /

Kudzu on a cemetary gate.

Saeed Jones, “Kudzu“:

How you mistake

my affection.

And if I ever strangled sparrows,

it was only because I dreamed

of better songs.