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Culturology #73 - Monkey Fist

Published

on July 23, 2010

. 4 Comments

There's some kind of trend involving, I sense, a growing appreciation for Young Adult and children's literature amongst the generally-literate folks that I tend to interact with or am aware of. This, I presume, has to do with the fact that people our age are getting slightly older and, like, having kids, or something, so therefore children's things--which are often simultaneously marketed to parents--are attempting to appeal to people who are similar to me (except that they have children). Or, slightly less cynically, creative people that came up in the same zeitgeist as me are now finding success in the culture industry, and making things that are of a similar sensibility to my own.

Which isn't to say that I do all that much consuming of youth culture. In fact, I don't really partake of any of it. Except for stuff that Nick turns me on to. Things like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Would I have been aware of the fact that Nickelodeon had made a cartoon show that was pretty good? Probably. Would I have watched it? Probably not. But, luckily, Nick had the foresight to get me to actually watch the show, and I quite enjoyed it. Not enough to read up or argue about its mythology, or to go to any comic-cons dressed up as a character or anything, but was happily watched all three seasons (and happily skipped the movie when it came out). Which brings us to this week's entry in the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub: Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

There is some embossed gold foil circle stamped onto the front cover of my paperback copy of this graphic novel, so I knew, even before opening it, that it must be good (it won a Young Adult Literature Prize from the ALA). Which is also nice to know ahead of time, when you've gotten a recommendation from Nick--that other people also think it's good, and it's not just another Irish Jam (not to use the same example as last week, but I've honestly blanked on any of Nick's dud recommendations (and in fact, am mostly now thinking of him giving me Casanova, which I think I might even like more than he does, so I'll let this runner die out (and start picking on Molly instead))).

And ABC is quite good. A little bit of it was kind of off-putting to me (more on that in a minute), but it does exemplify what I think must be the appeal of much YA literature, as read by actual adults (people, you know, like me, in their late twenties):

--a semi-complicated structure which then resolves itself quickly and neatly

The back-cover copy already let's us know: this book has three main characters, how are they ever going to be related? The reader will have the pleasure of finding out. And of course, the reader does find out, and rather swiftly at that (though, I have to note here, I think maybe I'm not a great reader of graphic novels; how long is it supposed to take to read a page of a comic like this? To read a whole section?). Though, in terms of these characters resolving into each other, I was a bit curious as to where the base-line reality lies in this thing. As I was talking about with The City & The City, it's often the case in fantastic tales, that it doesn't really matter how crazy the world it takes place in is, so long as that world is self-consistent. In the case of ABC, is Jin's world the same as Danny's? That is, in Danny's world, is he actually still just Jin, seeing himself as a white American kid, or did the transformation actually happen?

And, as a point of comparison, Audioshocker 2009 You-Don't-Suck-Award nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply probably stands as an example of a book with a similar structure which is resolved in a less YA-y way. The main distinction being that, though there are multiple characters that turn out to be transformed or disguised versions of themselves in other plotlines in ABC, the tale itself is told in more-or-less linear fashion, whereas in AYR, not only is there some character-crossing (some identity theft), but the tale is much more chopped up, and less obvious in its time-line (until the reader finally figures out what's going on (who is who and when they are).

--rather directly stated meanings/morals

I don't think there's anything wrong with being obvious. That's probably what makes YA literature enjoyable for grown-ups too; we don't always want to do the work of figuring out what a book is really about. The "transforming" idea, how emigration and life as a minority is always an act of transforming oneself, whether those codes come from within your community or from without, finds a happy home in the literal/actual acts of transformation undergone by these characters. So when that old lady at the herbalist early on in the story warns a young Jin about the loss of his soul and transforming, we understand it as a metaphorical turn about where one's identity comes from. And then when he actually transforms into Danny, it's given a fine fantastical resonance (as opposed to, say, the more alienating metamorphosis of poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle).

--a wrap it all up ending

Just for the record, it's my guess that the happy, fully concluding manner of ending literature for young people is probably a newer trend. Seems like once upon a time, authors were willing to traumatize their readers a bit more (mostly, as I look back on my own childhood (which is already too soon to get at what I'm trying to imply), I'm thinking of dead dogs here). I just wasn't thrilled with the "your best friend was my son, a monkey, and he hates humans now, so go win him back over" ending.

So, as for what I didn't like as much about this: (and this probably just reveals my usual biases) what's up with Tze-Yo-Tzuh? Or, more specifically, sending the monk and the monkey to go give gifts to Baby Jesus broke past the barriers set up by of my weak agnostic notions. Just a little much. I mean, I suppose it stands as a fine archetype of East-meeting-West, but the notion that we can get through globalized culture-mashing modern existence by recognizing that we all have the same Creator just seems... ugh, I dunno, just a little much. Given the amount of in-fighting between sects of the Abrahamaic religions alone, I don't know, I suppose I would have preferred something more secular to bring it all home with, that's all. I realize that it's a work of fantasy, but grounding it in a bit more reality at the end might also be useful to the kids that have the most to gain from reading it.

NEXT WEEK: Thoreau's Walden (and I fucking mean it!)

IN AUGUST: We'll get the month of my birth off on the right foot (to head) with some original fiction, then go from there.

Culturology #72 - There's Books in Them Thar Hills

Published

pete

on July 16, 2010

in Books, Culturology and Movies

. 6 Comments

Culturology's I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub rolls forward, with me back up on my book-reading shit and having completed the book that I claimed I (we?) was going to read for this week: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For those of you that are interested, there's apparently some amount of interest in Traven's personal history, insofar as, apparently, it was just a nom de plume, but know one ever knew--or, whoever did know never squealed--who the author actually was. Which I think is pretty rare, since for the most part we know what fake-author-name's real names were (George Eliot = What's her face, Mark Twain = What's his face, Molly = Nick, etc.). But I'm not really in a mode where I'm tempted to get swept up in such a thing. A fine book though, this one, whoever wrote it.

Perhaps some of you--presuming that you're more-or-less my age (late 20s)--have had a similar experience to this: because of watching cartoons, as I grow older and catch up with all the culture that's happened in the past, as I see, hear, or read iconic works for the first time, I realize that I was first introduced to the trope via a reference in a cartoon from my childhood. For instance, watching the "Goodfeathers" sequences on Animaniacs, and then finally, years later, actually seeing Goodfellas, and thinking "Wow, that was a violent, vulgar (you shut your mother-father mouth!) movie, I can't believe they based a kid's show around it." Or, like, every frame from Citizen Kane, which has shown up in one place or another.

In reading Sierra Madre, I encountered the source for yet another chain of references. My personal narrative of the trope goes like this:

1) In Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF, the pet-store guy, at some point, yells "Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!" Then, I believe, he throws something (some pet) out a window. This was funny.

2) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, the sheriff is deputizing some folks, and a bandit-esque kind of character declares "Badges! We don't need no stinking badges!" And my teenage self, smart as he was, realized that UHF was referencing Blazing Saddles.

3) This line comes from B. Traven's book! I read it with my own sub-section-of-brain-pieces-responsible-for-reading-and-comprehension!

4) I then realized that, given the first two things being movies, they were almost certainly referencing the movie adaptation of the book (starring one of those famous '40s actors), where the "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges." line must have been uttered. It comes full circle.

So that was exciting. I don't think anything else in the book matches that moment. So, if you haven't already surmised, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Western pulp, taking place in Mexico back during the end of the oil boom and during the perhaps long-running gold if-not-boom-than-like-some-people-consistently-out-there-looking-for-gold. I haven't read a whole lot of pulp fiction in my life, and most of what I have falls into either the hard-boiled/noir genres or sci-fi, so I'm not too familiar with Western or cowboy novels. So I don't know if this one was really better than any other or not. Part of me wasn't thrilled with the prose style, mostly because it's in an omniscient third-person narration that shifts freely between characters, and also tends to be a bit pedantic.

The pedantry isn't a huge deal, since it still does tend to be pinned to one character or another, as we follow a down-and-out American as he wanders about Mexico for a while then goes mining for gold with two other Americans (one of them being an old-timer that knows the ropes). So then they're mining for gold. There's some dialogue, some gold dust, a few hi-jinks, a little bit of danger. Then they stop mining for gold. Then someone's head gets chopped off with a machete, which is a little bit jarring, since there's no other violence to match it in the book. As if the author was thinking either "Fuck it," or "Boo-yah!" I'm gonna have this guy have his head chopped off. Felt more boo-yah-ish to me than anything.

I can't tell if that just means I've been well-trained by the contemporary-literature machine to unconsciously desire Raymond Carver-esque first person narration, or if not that then the kind of distanced third person of a lot of postmodern prose, or just a modern style thing generally, but I can't think of too many books that I've read that sit in such a place narratologically. I mean, plenty of other novels do it, but not in such a sudden and free-flowing manner as the Traven. So I tried pretty hard to keep myself for judging it on such grounds, but after a while it was still hard for me to--it's not quite suspension of disbelief, but there's a kind of realism involved in any given novel, where you have to, as a reader, by it or not, as a tale being told. But since this one's a kind of morality tale, I don't know, it just seemed a bit overwrought to me. But, it being pulp, none of this matters too much, since it all moves very briskly and is delightfully easy to read.

As another note, since I'm still not finished reading Walden, one of the blurbs on the back cover (from who knows how long ago) notes that perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would take the place of Walden as the book from which the young people might take advice. Though I still feel like it's still much more likely that I go live in a shack in the woods than go mining for gold anywhere.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

July 30th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden (this time I mean it!)

The top 9 movies I like that make people give me the "You like that?" face

Published

nick marino

on July 10, 2010

in The Top 9

. 10 Comments

You know that face, right? You're all like "Oh, that was great!" and then someone else is like "You like that?" and they give you that look of shock, confusion, and disgust.

Well, I get that look a lot more than others. So here's a short list of movies that ellicit that response the most.

9. Soul Plane. Everyone I show this to agrees with me -- this movie is good.

8. Music and Lyrics. In general, I enjoy most Hugh Grant movies.

7. My Bloody Valentine. It was awesome in 3D, okay?

6. G-Force. This was also pretty awesome in 3D.

5. Muppets from Space. I think this is the best Muppet film out there, if not the best film out there.

4. Drag Me to Hell. Don't get it twisted -- this is a comedy movie.

3. Street Fighter. Again, you gotta rememeber that this is a comedy.

2. Balls of Fury. This too is a comedy movie. And a damn good one.

1. The Ladies Man. So many people thumb their nose at this and they've never seen it! Give it a chance. It's hilarious.

P.S. The Back Issue Binge is going to become a non-weekly, whenever-it's-fun-and-easy-to-meet-up sort of thing. I'll try and let you know ahead of time when it's gonna show up.

Culturology #71 - On Reading Walden

Published

pete

on July 9, 2010

in Books, Culturology and Movies

. 7 Comments

As if posting a (if I do say so myself) rather substantial first entry to this summer's book club, by the end of it I suddenly found myself irrationally confident in my ability to read books and then write commentary about them. I should have remembered that, as of late, I've barely been able to maintain a bi-weekly schedule of posting (which is supposed to, of course, be a weekly schedule) about any old thing, let alone make consistent, specific, content-driven posts about actual things. So, I didn't read Walden this week, like I claimed I was going to do last week. I did read the first several dozen paragraphs, though, and I still intend to read the thing by the end of the month.

I would like to also note, though, that it isn't Walden's unreadability that kept me from reading it. Or, to restate, it's me that's the problem, not Walden. The timing just wasn't right for things to work out. Walden, we've still got a chance to make things work, I just need some more time first. My suspicion is that, in fact, I'll wind up writing about Walden's continued or renewed relevance for young people nowadays, and about how ridiculous it is to have been made to read it in 11th grade, when I was totally incapable of doing so (as I recall, I read some of the key passages, but definitely didn't read the whole thing, or if I did read it cover-to-cover, more just looked at the words, rather than actually parsing them, or I read the Cliff Notes, or the Cliff Notes were so boring that I couldn't even get through them). But I've gotta save all that writing for when I actually read the thing.

The main other cultural-digestive thing that distracted me from Thoreau was the release (and subsequent purchase (breaking a pretty consistent string of not buying media that I had going there for a while)) of a second By Brakhage anthology DVD set from the Criterion Collection. There is the part of the post where it becomes ever more painful what a nerd I am for art, but Brakhage was an amazing film-maker, and additional was an incredibly great aesthetic thinker and a brilliant reader of poetry. Combine all of that and he's been a huge influence on my own thinking about art, and especially lyric art, especially lyric poetry (which I tend not to write about for Culturology, since it's, like, rarified and probably snooty, and mostly, I imagine, uninteresting to almost everyone on the planet (and here I distinguish between poetry, which I think everyone on the planet can potentially enjoy and get a lot out of, and poetics (the theory of poetry) which is more for the poets than for the readers, in the end (even though poets, of course, are also readers))).

Brakhage is most known for his painted-on films, which are almost always silent, and which find as their inspiration closed-eye vision. Brakhage, on the various special features of the DVDs, talks about how he was really trying to make "music for the eyes." And I think, even from a popular-cultural perspective, in a lot of ways we can all see how all the arts aspire to be music. Or we have that experience, in listening to music, of finding it to be a direct line to emotional and visceral experiences in a way that happens more often and more consistently than with writing or visual art. But, before I diverge too far into talking about such things, maybe I should stop...

Brakhage is also well known because he was, for a long time, a professor of film and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. His most famous students are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who made the original South Park short while students of Brakhage's. He also, awesomely, has a cameo role in their first movie, Cannibal: The Musical (which I haven't watched in many years, but I recall being at least entertaining, if not as laugh-packed as, say, Orgasmo). So even though Brakhage didn't really have any use for narrative sound-film, and especially not for Hollywood movies, he still managed to play a role in a couple of his students' spring break project. Which is pretty rad. I like to imagine Parker and Stone approaching him about it, and Brakhage just chuckling and amicably agreeing.

So in that way, Brakhage as a further influence on me. Even though he was a total visionary and an incredible lyric artist (and thereby, is perhaps not as immediately approachable as some artists--at least from the aesthetic conversation perspective; I think his films are very understandable), and could probably be seen as being a bit of a snoot thereby (in one of his interviews he says something awesome to the extent of "I've never seen a Hollywood movie which required more than 15 minutes at a coffee shop afterwards to discuss" (that's a massive paraphrase, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting there)), he still managed to be a cool professor and show up in a random, goofy movie. Right on.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 16th: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (this will be read by then; I'm already halfway through)

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Culturology #70 - I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer

Published

pete

on July 2, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 8 Comments

Welcome to Culturology's second summer of bookloving bookclub action! (And you know who knows what we bookclubbed last summer? The Onion A.V. Club, who're wasting their time with A Scanner Darkly right now, which we all know is soooooooo 2009.)

China Miéville's The City & The City

We're starting things off with a pretty awesome book this summer, I think. The City & The City came to me as a recommendation from a fiction-writing friend of mine, as a book which is blurbed as if it's a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and actually manages to do so. And that's really what it does! I found it to be a very engrossing read (perhaps more like Chandler in this way than Kafka), the sort of novel which just thrives within its genre--a detective story--to keep the plot moving, but then contains such interesting scenery. I reckon that Neal will agree about this too, since it seems like it took him all of two days to read this one. There's, I think, a fairly large number of things to discuss out of this book, so I think I'm, as a start, going to just focus on one aspect for now, and see what comes up from there: genre.

Though this book is definitely a police story at heart, it straddles this fascinating line between fantasy and sci-fi as well. Put as simply as I can, the story takes place in a city, or rather, two cities which overlap each other, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which is/are somewhere past the Balkans. Although the two cities are separate city-states, they occupy the same geographic location, they are "grosstopically" right on top of each other. Some districts are all one city or the other, but many areas "crosshatch," where the two cities co-exist, their citizens being well-trained from childhood to ignore ("unsee") the other city. The origin of this is referred to as "the Cleaving," an excellent usage of language by Miéville, as "to cleave," awesomely, means both to split, and from a separate origin, to come together (this polysemy was also beautifully utilized by the poet Li-Young Lee in his amazing poem "The Cleaving"). Monitoring transgressions by either set of citizens across these invisible borders is the mysterious force of Breach.

Breach is the more obviously sci-fi element of the story, as they wield powers which are above and beyond those held by either individual city. They're revealed to be human, in many ways, by the end of the story, but even then their technologies and observation abilities are one of the points that stretches C & C beyond just being rather realistic fantasy. The other main source for fantasy-esque elements is the possible third city of Orciny, which according to legend, exists in the cracks between the two cities, and the never-satisfyingly-explained archaeological dig in Ul Qoma that produces a mish-mash of artifacts reminiscent of an ancient culture right out of H.P. Lovecraft (though the Lovecraftian elements fizzle away very satisfyingly before any real horror elements enter the novel).

There's been a recent spate, in the last couple of years, of authors mashing genres up with detective stories, to rather satisfying results (e.g. The Big Lebowski, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (not surprisingly also, apparently, in development as a movie by the Coen brothers), Inherent Vice). I think why it works so well, and this is certainly true of The City & The City, is that the detective novel allows for both a brisk, exciting, pulpy plot but also extensive world building. The cop, Inspector Borlú, needs a city to move around in, and since he observes with such a careful eye, the reader gets a very acute observation of the alternative reality he lives in. Here I see where both this book and a lot of these genre-benders owe a lot to the rise of respect within literary circles for comics and graphic novels in the last 20-30 years.

Certainly, world-building as a concept has been around since the novel came to being (Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance, is an amazing microcosmic work), but in (traditional) novels, the impetus has been one of realism, where the world represented is supposed to match the actual world within which it is written (Middlemarch, seems to me, is pretty much exactly what life must have been like for people like that in a time and place like that). But the kind of world/universe building in comics, which seeks to create self-consistent alternate realities that don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the actual world (this is why I think The Dark Knight was such a step backwards for comic book movies, its whole Gotham-is-Chicago method takes a massive step backwards in terms of world-building, since it hinges on actualism instead of self-consistent realism (though perhaps it needed to, since Schumacher took Gotham to such campy places in his movies)).

But The City & The City succeeds so well as a novel, that although at various points I did find myself thinking that it could be really well done as either a movie or a graphic novel, I think, in the end, that it's better off without any visual representation. This way, it's up to the reader to build and interpret the wild cross-hatching streets and the two city's different architectures, fashions, and mores. There would definitely be fun ways to show and hide the two cities depending on where Borlú is, but the book itself keeps you from seeing too much, which is part of what makes the book so engrossing. The first 60 or so pages were just fun reading to me, as the police procedural took its time getting out of the gates in order to slowly sneak in exposition of the circumstances of these two cities.

And once the book really gets going, though it never loses track of its police story roots, Miéville keeps enough turns coming that it never gets stale, so that even as plot points are revealed and mysteries both pertinent to the case and cultural-historical, it still feels like there's something at stake for Borlú up through the end. Though part of me was let down by there not being a bit more Lovecraft in there, overall I came away very impressed with both the concept and execution of this one. And we're off to the races!

I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Schedule:

July 9th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

July 16th: TBD

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Culturology #69 - Giggle Giggle Giggle

Published

pete

on June 18, 2010

in Culturology

. 0 Comments

Ask a person (or a group of people) for a funny number, and chances are they'll come back with the same one (not "one," meaning (1), you know what number I'm talking about...). If there are other numbers that are funny, I'll be curious to hear about them. Perhaps there are synesthetes out there that, rather than seeing colors when they hear musical notes, hear jokes when they see numbers. That'd be interesting.

Back when I was in school for symphonic music, I was doing research on the composer György Ligeti, when I discovered that he had written, back in his (relative) youth, he had written a satirical piece against his home government, called something to the extent of "Hungarian Military March," and given the non-consecutive opus number of 69. And that was fifty-sixty years ago.

I'm not really sure how old I was when I first realized that numbers could be funny, though I'm sure it was in the form of saying "You're number one," while flipping someone the bird, which I perhaps learned about from the movie Top Gun. Not the part about saying "you're number one," but the part about flipping someone the bird. Top Gun also being the movie that inaugurated my love of beach volleyball (that's not true; I don't like beach volleyball). Nor was I particularly good at figuring out dirty phraseology (as an example, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the phrases was "getting ahead with that girl," not "getting head from that girl"), let alone numerology (as much as I enjoy swearing, it was until I befriended Nick during college (this biography/chronology might also be bullshit) that my vulgarities stumbled down into obscenties). This is all to say that, for writing an article on a site like Audioshocker.com, this is perhaps the most notable milestone that Culturology has yet reached.

Oh... 420 is a funny number. And 4:20 is a funny time of day (twice a day!). Don't know why I was so delayed in remembering that one. Therefore, Culturology hereby decrees that 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating) is also a funny number. Perhaps the funniest number. You can learn more about this funny number by hiring a friend to dress in this costume. "The hat has a sign reading "420/69", which adds to the costume's authenticity." Authentic indeed (meaning, surely, that the hat being worn cost 420 pounds, 69 pence). Every so often, in critical/academic circles, the discourse can get all messed up in concerns about the authenticity of a given ethos (see, say, Theodor Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity). I think if Adorno had been writing in the times of easily-purchased sexy polyester costumes, he'd have felt differently about existentialism's "radical inwardness" (if you know what I mean...).

If I have any hopes left for Culturology (and I don't, really), it's to get to a point where as many people read it as the number that it has--the next best reason for sticking by 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating), 'cause I'm surely closer to having that number of readers than 69.

Culturology #68 - Oh, the Book Club is So On

Published

pete

on June 11, 2010

in Culturology

. 5 Comments

The first selection for the 2010 Culturology I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Bookclub has been made: China Mieville's The City & The City. So run out to your local independent bookseller and hop on board the CIKWYBLSB train! The City & The City, though I haven't started reading it, is a work of speculative fiction, and a police procedural. Online reviews, just glossed by me, like to compare it to Kafka & Dick (that's Philip K. Dick, who you might recall from 2009's Summer of Booklove Bookclub). Perfect summer reading! I'll look to write it up shortly after the solstice, so let's shoot to have it read by then.

And we (I) hear in Culturology's Miami Bureau (Culturology's only bureau) should also have some other literary treats in store for you later this month as well, so it should prove to be a most not heinous summer.

But what to blog about in the meantime. It's been a lousy spring for culture. I've mostly been wrapped up between work, teaching an undergraduate creative writing class, and plotting out the upcoming (only a month and a half away!) Time Log web comic with Nick (which, by the way, is going to be awesome, if I do say so myself). I think co-writing a comic gives me some decent street cred with my students, though I'm mostly trying to teach them about the wonders of poetry these days. Why? Because you know what many of my students seem to really like? Manga. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I thought it was just a nerd-college thing that people would, like, like manga. But apparently not. Even at a giant public university in South Florida with, by my count, very few nerds, manga reigns supreme.

Which is not to make any judgment on manga one way or the other. As a matter of fact, the only manga I've ever read was the complete Akira (while at CMU, as a matter of fact). And I thought it was great. I also recall, a couple of years ago now, as Nick and I were still in the process of making Time Log happen, Nick mentioning that manga was, like, really popular, and that the easiest way to get TL made would be to make it a manga (which, as you now know, didn't happen). But now my students know that 17th-19th century British poetry is way cooler than comics!

There being some compulsion which I'm missing, to try and make poetry new and vital for my students, and use even vaguely contemporary examples. But my general opinion is that any poem worth its salt makes itself new and vital again and again across time. Of course, explaining this notion to modern students isn't easy, since it seems pretty arbitrary to them why one poem and not another would be chosen. And that's actually a really valid complaint, since who cares what a bunch of old bearded white men decide what makes for good poetry? Except that canonization is an inevitable process--and one could point this out with manga, or comics in general as well. As I've stated plenty of times before, some cultural things become recognized as being good because they are good. Or because they're good for good reasons. And it's a human enterprise; we've got to take someone's word for it. It's just a matter of not taking it for granted when we do partake of canonical pieces of the culture, and be sure to actively engage it and be able to decide for ourselves if it's worth passing on in our own personal canon of recommendations.

And so, yes, I would recommend both Akira and The Prelude. And now I command you to read The City & The City!

Figment.com Private Beta - Signup Now!

Published

neal

on June 7, 2010

in Books and Misc

. 0 Comments

Yallz may or may not know, but for the past several months I have been interning at Figment.com. We are getting ready to launch our private beta soon and I want to invite you all to sign up.

But wait, I haven't told you what Figment is yet! Well Ok, here is the deal: Figment is an online reading and writing community focusing on young-adult literature. Short stories, poetry, novels, maybe even essays and graphic fiction in the future -- the possibilities are endless. More specifically though, we want to engage mobile users and break away from coffee shop laptop curse. Why not read a novel on your phone or write a haiku on the bus home from school? We want you to be able to participate wherever you are and with whatever you have. Figment is about high availability, a wide selection, and user participation. Figment was inspired by Japan's cell-phone novel culture, and an article published in the New Yorker by our co-founder Dana Goodyear.

We see this as a great way to connect teens to each other and their favorite authors. I really hope you will all sign up and write yourselves in.

Culturology #67 - The Haplonomicon

Published

pete

on June 4, 2010

in Culturology

. 2 Comments

So I almost started the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Bookclub this week, but I think I'm gonna let it slide until it's actually summer, so not for a couple more weeks. Why? Because for a minute there, I thought I had my book picked out: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, but then when I went to actually acquire a copy (that is, take my Dad's copy from his house while I was home for Memorial Day weekend) I realized that the paperback is obscenely thick (1168 pages (I didn't actually check the page count while holding the thing; I just looked that up on the Internet)). Does this make me a much shallower reader than I generally claim to be?

The aphorism generally goes "don't judge a book by its cover," but it's not so much the cover that I'm judging it by, but all that there between--and not the actually words, but just their volume. The cover seems fine, and I, like many folks who were fans of the Evil Dead; movies (especially Army of Darkness, I'm a huge fan of the the "nomicon" suffix. In fact, while I'm still a resident of North Miami (affectionately called "NoMi" by some (or at least by the free shuttle bus that the city offers)), I should probably host some kind of convention, so as to call it the "NoMicon." It'll be all about North Miami: our museum of contemporary art, our library, our night life. Pretty simple. Simple enough, maybe, to call it the Haplonomicon, or "Simply North Miami."

Hopefully I won't be so busy planning the convention to not also start up the IKWYBLSB as well. So I'm still taking recommendations for what to read. Otherwise it's gonna be something like Thoreau's Walden, which I've been meaning to read (technically re-read, maybe, insofar as I think I read some of it for English class back in 11th grade (though, if memory serves me correctly, I was so bored by it that I couldn't even get through the Cliff's Notes of it)). But Thoreau's been in the air recently, at least in my (small) social circles. Seems like a thing worth doing. One of my older brother's just re-read it, and he claims that Thoreau often displays a very pleasant wit in his writing, that was certainly lost on my too-bored-for-crib-notes 16-year-old self.

And, all joking aside, I actually do find myself very pro-bookclub, in general. Maybe it comes from having taken so many literature classes, where I've gotten used to reading and discussing literature with a group of people. And bookclubs, at least ones with folks you're interested in dealing with, can take the best parts of those academic discussions and free them from the bullshit that soaks most academic discourse to the point of no longer being particularly pleasurable. I surprise myself sometimes.

Considerations for a Digital Strategy

Published

neal

on May 24, 2010

in Misc, Movies and TV

. 0 Comments

I'm a little late to this party, but I'd like to throw in my 2 cents. Earlier in March, a classmate (Trey Trenchard) and I wrote a paper on digital strategy for Prof. Sam Craig's Entertainment/Media/Technology class at Stern. The following two passages are excerpts from the final paper. Our goal was to analyze the challenges, advantages, future landscape, and potential recommendations for Netflix to succeed over the next several years. Though we wrote the paper about Netflix & video content, I think it's also applicable to other industries including publishing and music.

What Channel is This?

Video content distribution is converging to an all-internet accessed world. Signs point to platform agnostic websites distributing video content through personal computers (i.e. Hulu), mobile devices, and most importantly, internet connected TVs. IPTVs are already on the market, and within five years, early adopters and roughly half of the early majority will have started the exodus away from traditional TV watching behavior.

IPTV’s ability to disintermediate parties between the producer and consumer, along with the FCC’s forward-looking agenda of universal access, will hasten its acceptance as well (Ed Note: my partner Trey is a lot more optimistic about Net Neutrality than I am). It is important to recognize that the opportunity to access all video content from a website, on your television, on demand, makes traditional simulcast/broadcast TV completely obsolete. Broadcast and traditional cable TV will not disappear in the near future; however, their cachet will drop substantially.

As we move toward this world, the importance of distributor (TV channel and networks) and producer brands decreases. Today, most consumers do not associate video content with its producer. They do however associate video content with certain TV channels. As this disintermediation occurs, physical channels on a cable box will no longer exist and channel ‘brands’ will slowly die as antiquated groupings of content. Over the past decade, digital video recorders, EPGs, and syndication have already begun to loosen the association between channel and content. There are several key ways that networks create value. In this new world, all of these benefits, with the exception of advertising, will be provided by a subscription video content aggregator. Ad-based distribution will likely be taken over by a market leader such as Hulu, contributing to the complete demise network loyalty and identity.

Creating Value Through Curation

As the online library of content continues to grow (professional & amateur), we can no longer see/read/hear everything. We simply don't have the time or resources to sort through everything ourselves to find what we want, or what we may like. As a result, the ability to curate content is paramount -- and users will be willing to pay for such this service.

Netflix’s curation features need improvement. Its effectiveness in generating accurate recommendations pales in comparison to systems at sites such as Pandora, Last FM, and iTunes (Genius). Being a gateway to online content presents few barriers to entry, however, it is possible to dominate and even create a winner-take-all scenario in this business, like Google has accomplished with its search engine. What allows Google to command a 65% market share is a marginally better search algorithm. The same is true for Pandora. Even though Last.fm offers a multitude of innovative features, Pandora’s ability to classify sound and automate its curation via an algorithm is responsible for its market leading position.

If Netflix can improve this feature, it will command significant leverage, and can establish itself as the premier destination for online video content. With a sizable lead in this technology, a producer who does not distribute through Netflix risks losing potential viewers. Additionally, Netflix’s curation tool can effectively market the content better than a network or studio can with their small marketing spend, making it more profitable for producers to forgo selling their work to a network or studio, instead retaining the rights and get paid by Netflix per view. (Ed. Note, we are assuming that Netflix continues to expand and invest in the Watch Instantly streaming service / library)

To speed up the process of improving the curation function as quickly as possible, we recommend either creating partnerships with Pandora and/or Google. Partnering with Pandora would give Netflix access to pieces of their curation algorithm and the engineers who have been building this best-of-industry platform. In addition, we recommend Neflix copy the Last.fm “scrobbler” function. The scrobbler methodology archives every piece of musical content one has played on their computer or mobile device and sends this info to Last.fm’s servers. Employing a similar methodology, Netflix could more accurately curate video content by not only recognizing what someone enjoys by telling the program as it does now (active selection), but also recognizing tastes by simply consuming content (passive selection).

Perhaps we knew this was coming all along, but instead of Netflix we should have find/replaced with Google. Or, perhaps we aren't nearly as prescient as we thought and everyone already knew all of this. Either way, we believe that producer/consumer disintermediation and an increasing demand for curation are important considerations when determining a digital strategy.

Google TV is certainly not the first attempt at 'IPTV', but it is likely to be the most well regarded. The last thing I need is another set-top box, but I excited about IPTV and what is coming next.