Category: Culture and anti-culture

The triumph of dullness

Here’s a list.

Who’s missing? Here’s a name: Yes. Here are some other names: King Crimson, John Mayall, the Pogues, Deep Purple, Fairport Convention, ELP, Joe Satriani and Weird Al. I can add many more, and so can you. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame claims that “… musical excellence shall be the essential qualification of induction,” but are the Sex Pistols really better musicians than the band that recorded Fragile? In my lexicon, “critic” is a synonym for “idiot.” It’s nice that someone remembers the Small Faces, but induction into the R&RHoF is as meaningless an honor as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Not entirely unrelated: Twelve extremely disappointing facts about popular music.

(Via Professor Mondo.)

Bonus stupidity: Pearl Harbor? It was all America’s fault.

Jeepers creepers

Two weeks’ accumulation of curiosities and silliness.

I recently discovered that Tex Avery’s documentation of the big, bad wolf’s remarkable courtship behavior is available at the Internet Archive.

[flowplayer src=’http://www.archive.org/download/RedHotRidingHood_557/BannedCartoons—texAvery-RedHotRidingHood1943.mp4′ width=640 height=480]

More of Avery’s research can be found here.

Continue reading “Jeepers creepers”

Miscellaneous notes

I discovered this downtown this past weekend. I’m not sure what it is, but because it is big, prominent and ugly, it’s probably art.

Some perhaps not-unrelated art news.

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Chinese science education might not be quite as rigorous as thought.

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… Studio 4C has taught me that, if it’s pretty enough, I won’t mind if it’s nonsense

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Election notes:

I like his attitude.

End post-mortem discrimination.

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For guitar aficionados, a proposition from a thread on Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton:

Roy’s playing: like a funeral. Danny’s playing: like a carnival.

If Buchanan’s playing is funereal, it’s one hell of a service.

Bonus video: a twelve-year-old Joe Bonamassa plays Gatton’s telecaster.

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The idea of a maid café is a bit creepy, but this one might be worth visiting for its name.

(Via dotclue.)

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A couple of notes for volcano watchers:

There’s a natural jacuzzi near El Hierro in the Canary Islands.

Nyamuragira in the Congo is putting on a nice display of lava fountains.

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Trivia and silliness

Life continues insane. Banging my head against the wall hasn’t done much good, so I’m seeing how well tearing my hair out works. Here is some frivolity to amuse you while I try to figure out how I ever got marooned on this ridiculous planet.

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Ubu speculates on sequels to various anime series:

Grenadier: In which Rushuna has to go into the hospital for back surgery.

In the sequel to Divergence Eve, it’s the entire female cast.

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I found it here.

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Professor Mondo has posted a couple of tunes from his band’s forthcoming EP. You can listen to them here. If you like ’60’s garage rock, you might find them quite listenable. I particularly recommend “Garden Girl” if you have a taste for cheesy Vox organ.

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A couple of major events come up next month.

• Warren Harding, thinking outside of his wooden box, is campaigning for President in the 2011 elections, cleverly cutting his opponents off a year early.

• You’ve heard of Plan Nine from Outer Space, Manos: The Hands of Fate and Robot Monster, of course, but how about King Kung Fu? It’s allegedly as bad as any of them, and it was made right here in Wichita. One of my acquaintances in the SCA had a role in the movie. He refuses to discuss it. ((Another SCA friend was in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. You can identify her by the paper bag over her head.)) It will be shown on the big screen, quite possibly for the last time ever, a week from tomorrow. I probably should attend this historic event, but I’m pretty sure I have something else I need to do then.

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“Truly, you are a frequent flyer!”

(Via the Anchoress.)

Ducks and monkeys

For most of the summer, non-migratory Canadian geese controlled the north bank of the river on my way to work. Now it’s occupied by a corps of ducks. Is there something going on I should know about?

Also in my camera: public enemy #3.

Another approach to weeding:

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There has been some loose talk recently about monkeys typing Shakespeare. This gives me an excuse to mention a couple of favorite short stories. Russell Maloney’s “Inflexible Logic” is the second-best tale on the topic. The best is R.A. Lafferty‘s “Been a Long, Long Time,” which unfortunately is not available online. I did find another Lafferty story, though, which might illustrate why I have a shelf of his books.

Nightmares, mostly academic

From the aptly-named “Overthinking It,” an analysis of the political economy of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic:

But the strong feminist themes of the series are built on a foundation of political contradictions. The most fantastic element of the show is not that ponies can talk or that dragons exist; it is the illusion that an egalitarian society can be maintained among groups with massive biologically inherent gaps in ability and economic utility. By even the most cursory of sociological and economic analyses, the society in MLP: FiM should be highly stratified along class and racial lines. And there are clear signs of that stratification, except they are obscured by a propagandistic focus on the power of “friendship”.

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“Unoriginal,” yes; “genius,” no:

… Goldsmith describes a course he teaches entitled “Uncreative Writing.” In this course, “students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity,” and rewarded for “plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing.” The course also involves such misadventures as modifying Wikipedia pages by inserting additional spaces between words and holding classes within the online game Second Life. The final exam consists of purchasing a paper from a paper mill and presenting it to the class as one’s own, on the basis of answering the question, “Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write?”

See also Professor Mondo’s note on Pierre Menard.

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I ain’t no damn academic and never will be, thank God.

“Gene, your writing style is very clear and concise. Very muscular. But it is not academic writing. It is popular writing. If you persist in writing clear prose, you will never get far in academic writing. Academic writing must be turgid and convoluted. You must force your reader to read your sentences four and five times before she can understand what you are trying to say. You must obscure the concepts that just anyone can understand. You must, as literally as possible, grab your reader by the throat and pull her face into the text, holding her captive until she can escape by understanding the essay in full after struggling and wrestling with your words.”

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Announcing the Société des Bozars:

We grant that television is a tragic addiction, and we yield to no one in our sympathy for its unfortunate victims. But why must the rest of us be prisoners of other people’s filthy habits?
Join the Société des Bozars today and raise your standard against aesthetic pollution. Make a pledge to patronize only establishments with no visible television sets.

One bonus of joining is that you need never set foot in an airport concourse or a McDonald’s again.

32 words of storage and other words

Computer science in 1958.

Godzilla: The Musical.

Via the author of the preceeding, a “live”-action realization of Edward Gorey’s The Gashleycrumb Tinies.

One of Gorey’s other works is The Inanimate Tragedy. Here’s an inanimate horror story in one photograph.

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Life continues to be insane. ((A special award goes to the TSA agents who, mindful of the deadly threat posed by frail octogenarians, patted down my parents on our flight out here last week.)) Perhaps by October things will return to what passes for normal, but don’t count on it. Activity at this weblog will continue light and spasmodic.

Query

What does “top” mean, as in NPR’s “Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books“? It clearly doesn’t mean “best.” The only Philip K. Dick title on the list is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a book much inferior to The Man in the High Castle, Martian Timeslip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ((Can you devise a more portentious title?)) or even Ubik. Gene Wolfe, the best science fiction and fantasy writer currently active and perhaps the best writer of any kind alive, period, barely makes the list at #87. Ray Bradbury makes the list four times; he’s good, but he’s not that good. Ditto Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. Isaac Asimov is in it three times, which is three times too many. Missing entirely: R.A. Lafferty, Joanna Russ, Thomas Disch, Italo Calvino, Cordwainer Smith, Lord Dunsany, Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore), Poul Anderson, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Tim Powers, John Bellairs, Algis Budrys and many more I’ll think of later.

Prelude to a sleepless night

I’d like to meet the man who invented the subwoofer. I don’t want to shake his hand; I want to slug him in the solar plexus. It is hard to think of any other innovation that has done as much to make life in the 21st century needlessly unpleasant. I feel lousy tonight, and I’d like to go to bed early. However, the inhabitants of my neighborhood believe that it is their inalienable right to party all night long on weekends, and that includes playing bad music loudly. I cannot not listen to music, no matter how stupid, and low bass notes can penetrate ten feet of concrete. Sometimes the neighbors will turn the garbage down or off if I ask them, but I have to get out bed and dress first, and when I get back home, it can be an hour before I’m drowsy enough to think about sleep again.

I’ve observed many times that the worse the music, the more loudly it is played. My hypothesis is that the chief pleasure in playing rap, techno ((“Disco for robots”)) and the like lies not in what minimal musical virtues the recordings might have — you’d have to be pretty damned stupid to find such drivel intellectually or aesthetically interesting — but in tormenting those who cannot escape the exaggerated, mindless beat.

From Parma Tyelpelassiva

Recognize this?

Man naeg mathal, ae maethor veren,
Erui reniol ar nimp?
I thâr pellen uin ael
Ar ú-linnar in aew.

Actually, you do know the poem of which this is the first stanza, though probably not in this translation.

There’s more poetry here, and much else about Tolkien’s languages, including downloadable courses. ((It’s oddly refreshing to see such an old-fashioned website.)) Here’s an overview of the Elvish languages.

Recent discoveries

Stephane Grappelli as the cat in Peter and the Wolf.

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“Just once, I’d like to meet an alien menace that wasn’t immune to bullets.”

(video removed)

An outstanding example of obsessiveness: a fan-made Doctor Who anime.

(Via Chizumatic.)

Update: And it’s gone, which is a pity. The video was an impressive piece of animation. The auteur’s site is here.

Update II: You can watch it here.

Quote of the week

At around age 6 while living in Korea, I somehow came to have a spiffy catalog from America that listed all Fisher-Price toys that were available for mail-order. The catalog had all these incredible toys that neither I nor any of my friends have ever seen. I read that catalog so many times, imagining playing with those toys, until the catalog eventually disintegrated in my hands one day.

The catalog was the book that confirmed to me — who was six, mind you — that America must be the best and the greatest country in the world. Later when I came to America, my faith was validated.

(Via .clue.)

Good havoc, bad havoc

I’m currently downloading the restored version of Da nao tian gong, or Havoc in Heaven, a Chinese animated film from the early 1960s. Ordinarily I would mention this on my animation weblog, but the film is worth noting for historical reasons:

The Shanghai animation scene had gotten going in earnest in the early 1950’s, once things had settled down from WWII and the Chinese Civil War, and had gotten bigger, better, and more successful. This film was the last one made there, and it was a critical and commercial success, getting all kinds of awards.

Shortly after this film was released, the entire industry was shut down by the Cultural Revolution. It’s one of the lesser crimes of that terrible event, but a crime nonetheless. The sheer mastery of the animation form in this film offers the promise of much that might have come after, but didn’t… because it didn’t fit within Mao’s idea of how the nation should be.