“There’s nothing intelligent in Alien. It has absolutely no meaning. It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror and more terror.” – Ridley Scott To be self-aware about making art is an exceedingly rare stroke of fortune – probably, of the bad kind. But there is no such thing as a terrifying spectacle [...]
Computers have transformed music production and consumption by enabling the cheap and easy manipulation of sound. Digitization took apart music culture (industry included) and put it back together again in a very new way. Using free software, consumers took apart the pop album ushering in an era of digital singles. Using samplers, producers took apart [...]
The Vanity Fair expose on likely Chinese hacking of many important corporations and government agencies by Michael Joseph Gross describes a ploy I’d only known from Hollywood movie: infiltrators intercepting calls to the victim’s security dept. in order to field these calls and prevent detection. The scene prompted me to imagine a contemporary kind of [...]
I came of age at a time when outer space was a potent symbol in popular culture. This quote from an interview with historian Nicholas de Monchaux sheds light on why: [T]he space of outer space is… a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on [...]
The ancient Greeks defined
I remember exactly where I was when I read the obituary for the music industry on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: it was a gray and cold morning in March of 2002 and I was standing in line to get a coffee at the Atlas Cafe in San Francisco. While the report [...]
The movie series Carlos is a must-see thriller for anyone born in the last half-century. It fits neatly alongside other chronicles of political terror like Munich and The Baader Meinhof Complex – or, obliquely, The Falcon and the Snowman. As only a movie can, Carlos transports the viewer into the foreign world of the recent past. [...]
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure of the 140 character limit of Twitter. I may get a round Tuit and synchronize my use of Twitter with this blog. For now, here’s a dump of [...]
Imagine you are searching for your reading glasses only to find them sitting atop your head – or, perhaps worse, discovering that you are already wearing them. The Cubans have an expression for finding something that was right in front of you all along: “If it was a dog, it would have bitten me.” The most [...]
From Matt Taibbi’s tour de force portrait of John Boehner as a shill for highest bidder: “He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills,” grumbled Nancy Pelosi. “If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that. But when it comes to politics — no, I don’t cry.” [...]