should Mexican restaurants always be decorated like 19th century ranch homes?

Near our home is a newish Mexican restaurant that bills itself as a “modern Mexican delicatessen.”

Like many Mexican restaurants, it is decorated as if it were a 19th century Mexican ranch home. It has dark wood beams, stone and brick walls (they’re painted-on, like trompe l’oeil) and the shelves are lined with knickknacks resembling pre-Columbian icons and statues.

When you order chips and salsa at this modern Mexican deli, the chips come in a plastic basket woven to resemble wicker and the salsa in a plastic cup styled like a black rock molcajete. In sum, the interior is designed to create a feeling of a pre-modern life even if the ingredients are not.

Would a restaurant that bills itself as a “modern American delicatessen” be decorated with a wagon wheel and bales of hay?

Inside the Cracker Barrel
modern American deli Cracker Barrel

Would a bright, airy decor, light materials and/or photos of contemporary Mexicans and their homes make the food taste less authentically Mexican?

When is Mexico?

is it then?

or now?

business/design/latin america

metaphors we use that belie any mind/body split

when you want to say something, but can’t, you “bite your tongue.” the sharp, quick pain of anxiety – a desire that can’t be sated. the need to urinate.

when someone tells you something that makes no sense and you can’t contradict it, you become “sick to your stomach.” nauseous, as if suffering from vertigo – which way is up or down?

ideas/language

the delight of what comes next: the relief of being displaced across time and space.

watching a movie. going to church. racing a car. surfing the web. visiting a museum. playing a sport. all are ways to experience the relief of being displaced across time and space.

the present is where what is happening breaks into the already happened, like water pouring on hard concrete.

we bend this arc outwards by focusing on what happens next. engrossed by a picture, story or game, it is not just our pulse which quickens but our internal clock. we experience time as flowing faster when we are lost in that future moment.

when we approach what is coming we experience the joy of what can be done rather than that which can no longer be changed.

as with steering a motorcycle at high speeds, one looks ahead, to the curve that is emerging. in chess or in soccer, one anticipates the moves possible at a time to come. through intoxication, we impair our ability to retain what just happened, blocking our short term memory in order to regard only what is just emerging; what is still possible.

even nostalgia throws us into a future tense, as we replay a sequence of events in order to experience what came next.

ideas/play

Is literalism a faith? The problem with wizards and vampires.

Perhaps the reason why literalists have fretted over the popularity of books like Harry Potter and movies like Twilight is not that they fear children will learn to believe in wizards or vampires but rather that children will learn to make believe.

The pleasure of make belief is that it is a form of play – a game.

Literalism requires the believer to take someone else’s word for it. Literal belief is thus a question of power – of submitting oneself to another. (cf., struggle, surrender, kneel.)

Interpretation invites the audience to play along: it assumes an independent reader who must be seduced – the willing suspension of disbelief. Rather than submission, it requires co-operation.

ideas/movies & television/play

“It has absolutely no meaning.” Yet.

“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 or story without meaning. If anything, Alien has too much meaning.

When we are astounded, awed, terrified, it is because what we already know is insufficient to explain what we are in the process of learning. The greater the meaning created, the more “viscerally” powerful the art work.

Scott is a genius precisely because he is focused on awing the audience: his goal is to produce the awesome which is necessarily the new, the disruptive, that for which words do not yet exist – ideally, that for which the appropriate words will never exist.

But it is incorrect to say there is no intelligence in art for intelligence, as we are reminded, consists of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Whereas scientists are focused on the first category, the religious on the second, artists elaborate the third.

art/ideas/movies & television

living in the age of digital singles, what of digital shorts?

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 songs and then entire genres, converting rap and funk into hip hop and then hip hop into pop. And, after a series of missteps, record companies are beginning to take apart their business models, using sites like YouTube as A&R and dabbling with such technical and pricing innovations as allowing consumers to rent songs (i.e., new forms of bundling.)

Digitization is also having a transformative effect on video production and consumption.

The primacy of the network or channel is being usurped by that of the series, thanks, in part, to the digital video recorder. The new business of distributing short video clips is having a very healthy run on YouTube. Cameras and editing software are cheap enough to come standard on portable media devices like the iPhone and iPad. And television companies are beginning to shift their weight by taking cautious first steps into digital distribution.

One outcome of this transformation is already clear: consumers have signaled that they’re open to great variety in video entertainment. Properly developed, new formats could provide video producers with new revenue regardless of what happens to existing formats.

business/movies & television/technology/work

play yourself

stories are how we make sense of the world. they impose a structure on what would otherwise feel chaotic – “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

whether via an internal monologue (that whistling noise is coming from the tea kettle because it is on a lit stove) or in conversation with others (religion, science, politics, literature, movies, etc.) stories help us understand not only what has happening but also why.

though not often discussed as such, games are a form of storytelling. in games, multiple players participate in the construction of a shared meaning.

the more fun the game, the more it makes sense. the converse is also true. the more the game makes sense, the more fun it is to play.

the Socratic method, which pits two participants against one another, is a kind of game, the product of which is a meaningful story.

likewise, a game of soccer is an occasion to ask and answer questions such as: which side will win? which team is better? which player is better?

if it is unclear who has won a game, it ceases to be a game. thus, the outcome, the “moment of truth,” is integral to the experience of a game.

games must always be challenging if they are to be meaningful. thus, they consist of rules that, by design, impede the player so as to reorient him in a new direction. a game is necessarily humbling for the player. we enter into games not to win, per se, but to learn by losing. in fact, they allow us to experience loss (say, death) via simulation.

continue…

art/ideas/play/work

Bad action movie plot: Chinese hackers and Mexican cartels

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 international crime syndicate, wherein Chinese hackers are linked up with Mexican drug traffickers to insert in-the-flesh proxies in American companies via janitorial services.

On the one hand, it would probably be far more valuable to a foreign power to produce a “Manchurian CTO,” etc.. On the other, some people tend to really disregard the “hired help.” It’s easier for the butler (or maid) to have done it if he/she is considered “dumb” due to their foreignness.

ideas/movies & television/work

extending play: from lp’s to mp3’s and beyond

One of the benefits that record companies enjoyed when albums were the prevalent packaging for pop music was the upward pressure this scheme placed on song prices.

In a typical pop* album, there will be a few hit songs as well as some songs that never really catch on. Yet even these less popular songs have become best-sellers thanks to the album format.

At face value, an album that costs $10 and has 10 songs would appear to be pricing each song at $1 per. In practice, consumers and producers are negotiating a more complex pricing structure where some songs are worth more than others.

If I feel that at least two of the songs on a $10 album make it worth buying, then these two songs are worth around $5 each to me. In some cases, one truly great song is worth the full $10. (Dexys Midnight Runners, I’m looking at you.)

During the heyday of pop album sales, labels would have had a hard time selling very may copies of a single for $10, yet that’s often what they accomplished. Alternately, it allowed them to sell songs that would have been priced at a dime or a quarter each for at least as much as a hit single would fetch.

It’s important to remember, though, that albums owe their existence not to clever business plans (though those never hurt) but rather to the greater pleasure this format – this device – created when it was introduced.

The invention of the LP or long-playing phonograph by CBS Laboratories and Columbia Records gave consumers the new pleasure of buying, storing and being able to experience more music. This pleasure is what drove consumer demand for albums. That albums also allowed record companies to make more revenue per purchase or to drive up the price of pop tunes was a side effect.

Albums were dominant for so long because of a gap in technical innovation – most likely due to a lack of competition. There simply wasn’t a more attractive format for listening to a series of songs, without interruption. Until there was one and consumers moved on.

The compact cassette format, which electronics company Philips first developed in the 1960s and then licensed for free, certainly made it possible for consumers to escape the bounds of the album via mix tapes. But it did not make it easy to do so. Thus, home taping never killed the music industry while home computing practically did. Thanks to the optical disc.

It is perhaps ironic that the optical disc was first developed by the Music Corporation of America. Just as the MCA was giving up on the format – eventually selling it to the electronics firm Pioneer – Philips and Sony were working with the same principles to develop a new audio format. The two companies soon combined forces to popularize the Compact Disc, ushering in the era of digital music.

Every new or back catalog song released in the CD format meant another song digitized for digital playback and, in short order, ready for digital distribution.

If Sony can be credited for setting off the digitization of music, it had significant motivation to do so. As an integrated media company, Sony could make money when a Sony CD player was sold and when a Sony music CD was sold. The more music was made available on CD, the more consumers would be motivated to buy CD players. The more CD players sold, the more convenient CD’s became.

The CD quickly became the first mass market digital music player, enabling such shifts in behavior as the “shuffling” of songs on individual and multiple albums. By the late 1990s, personal computers equipped with CD drives, the mp3 file format and the internet provided even more pleasures and changes in consumer behavior as well as consumer expectations.

Part of what made Apple’s iPod and iTunes products so successful in the 2000s, is that the company tapped into considerable consumer demand for the ability to store, play and buy songs individually rather than as part of albums as well as the already established pleasure of listening to many songs, of the listener’s choice, in a row, without interruption.

By providing consumers with more pleasure, those who develop new formats and technology have been able to negotiate new terms and prices, rent-seekers be damned.

The trend continues as cloud computing and the mobile web permit businesses like Spotify to renegotiate what consumers are willing to pay for music – not just for access to songs they already like but also to songs they have yet to discover. (Sounds a little like bundling, don’t it?)

*Pop is a genre defined not by a series of songs played in a set sequence but rather by standalone ditties. If artists, consumers and labels shifted towards other genres, the album could make a natural comeback.

previously: David Simon on HBO, pricing as signaling in television programming

next: video in the age of digital singles

funny, related: using lasers to cut vinyl records to make sample-based music.

business/music/technology/work

the microscopic battles that conquered the Americas

If the Spanish who arrived to the Americas in the 1400s had become infected with native viruses that felled them, they might never have become the conquistadores.

It was by pure chance that the native Americans were physiologically unprepared for the viruses brought along by the Spanish. That the mere presence of the Spanish would prove deadly for so many natives had the side-effect of re-enforcing the former’s cultural, political and military advantages.

Had the opposite occurred, the Spanish might well have lost faith in their plans, or, at least, a great deal of blood and treasure.

update: oh, there’s a whole body of work about this.

ideas/nature/power

Noise as signal: overdetermined music from The Jesus & Mary Chain through My Bloody Valentine and Autechre to I Break Horses

music videos on YouTube:

I Break Horses Hearts (2011)

Crystal Castles Celestica (2008)

The Field Sun & Ice (2006)

Autechre Gantz Graf (2002)

Fennesz Shisheido (2001)

Kid606 Catstep (2000)

Nobukazu Takemura Icefall (1999)

Atari Teenage Riot Anarchy 999 (1999)

Queens of the Stone Age: Regular John (1998)

Oval Do While (1995)

My Bloody Valentine Soon (1991)

Dinosaur Jr. Tarpit (1987)

Sonic Youth Schizophrenia (1987)

The Jesus and Mary Chain Never Understand (1984)

related concepts discussed on Wikipedia: headroom, impressionism, white noise, gloss, distortion, overdetermination, cognitive load, harmonic distortion, psychoacoustics, auditory illusions, overtones

art/music

Why thrillers set in space can be more vivid than those set on Earth.

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 technological mediation.

If space is death, the space ship is also a casket – a vessel in which to cross the river Styx. In movies like 2001 and Alien, the protagonists mostly fight to live yet they are always already entombed, enveloped by the void of space.

What makes these movies thrilling is not a suspension of disbelief but the directness with which they can summon our innermost fear by projecting us into limbo; floating, weightless, ghosts in purgatory.

ideas/movies & television

The agony of success: Kings of Pastry and The Pixar Story

The ancient Greeks defined excellence as becoming one’s self – nothing less and nothing more. To become excellent is thus to recognize and fulfill one’s destiny – the recognition and fulfillment being one and the same achievement.

In contemporary America, the pursuit of excellence is often described as self-actualization or success. Both terms diminish the power of excellence – the pursuit of which can drive a person to madness and/or ruin. (Consider the fate of professional athletes, let alone artists.)

Two recent movies, Kings of Pastry and The Pixar Story, are breathtaking reminders of excellence as both awesome and devastating to behold.

The agony of success, indeed.

movies & television/work

For whom is government the problem?

The Republican Party of Wisconsin, a private organization, is conducting a daring attack* on behalf of its benefactors and co-conspirators. Their target is not a budget line item or an unfunded mandate but the legitimacy of public resources.

Theirs is but the most recent campaign in an ongoing effort to undermine the ideology at the heart of the American experiment: equal representation. That is, the existence of a public body diverse enough to deliberate and powerful enough to carry out the will of the people.

continue…

power

What’s so vulgar about The Hangover? Not nearly enough.

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 noted that there were many contributing causes it also suggested the main cause of death was a flawed risk model: record companies were spending huge sums on just a few albums in the hopes that these big bets would hit jackpot. Unfortunately for all involved, the labels were picking the wrong albums – perhaps, and ironically so, out of disdain for popular tastes.

This past week, I watched two movies at home: The Hangover, a seemingly vulgar yet entirely anodyne comedy from 2009 and Jeremiah Johnson, a potentially treacly yet startlingly ruthless western from 1972. Where the former attempts at being for the people while mocking their intelligence, the latter, despite its high-brow tendencies, is as blunt and dangerous as a rioting mob.

continue…

movies & television/power