Touch of Evil

New York Times Magazine recently produced a series of classic, spooky vignettes featuring A-list actors/actresses (Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling, Gary Oldman, etc.). The "cinematic villainy from the year's best performers" is worth checking out, if you haven't already. CLICK CLICK CLICK.

"No Blades, No Bows, Leave Your Weapons Here!"

At the end of last week I was rooting around some old folders in the file cabinet, looking for media scraps to add to my newly realized bulletin board situation.



I found some fun stuff from the back log. The only newspaper clipping I guess I've saved is "The Outsourced Brain," by David Brooks, which is from about four years ago. I used to read the printed newspaper frequently in Richmond. Pick up a copy, perhaps some Camel Lights, and then head over to that diner on Broad St. for my lunch break. Clipping articles from newspapers wasn't something I made a habit of, but I recall taking in Brooks' perspective about how technology is facilitating man's quest towards "know nothing," like phone numbers or driving routes. I didn't (don't) really participate in the full bells and whistles.

In the four years since it's publication, social media technology has evolved considerably and saturated the lives of an astounding percentage of humans. My question in this realm has always been, this supposed brain space that is "freed" by these technologies, are we using it to know other stuff that makes it all worth it?

Just the other day, I read an article (digitally) about Facebook's plans for the future. Sounds like the evolution is just beginning.

3 Things to Love About China!

China has been in the news, well, a lot in the past decade, but I'm going to break down some highlights I found particularly amusing from the last week or so:

1. Blowin' In the Idiot Wind - Bob Dylan went to China, and what do you know, he did it for the money! He also let the Chinese government approve his setlist. The fact that he didn't say, "Lay, you Commie bastards, lay, lay across whatever song I feel like singing because I'm as American as Coca Cola and no one tells me what to do," really pissed off NYT's MoDo. Honestly I was surprised she expected more from him. Has she ever seen Richard Gere in "Red Corner"? Speaking out can get you kilt! Ten times worse than Maggie's Farm, I can assure you. In China you sing what the government tells you to, get your buttload of money (which we've been giving them in the first place), or stay home in the U.S. remembering that time you didn't go to China.

2. Taking Care of Yourself is a Full Time Job - The U.S. government talked smack on China regarding their "negative trends" towards human rights aka stepping their restriction up on lawyers, activists, bloggers, journalists, and pretty much anyone speaking Chinese. Then China released a report a few days later stating the U.S. was a poor, racist, and violent country that didn't have much business pointing it's finger at anyone else. TRUE! But, um, what's your point, China? We're Americans! You know we get crazy!

3. Time Travel is Not an Option - "TV dramas shouldn't have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say this goes against Chinese heritage," unlike the West where Time Travel is a deep, rich part of our heritage. I remember traveling in time as a little boy, and I'm sure I'd be a completely different person (aka Chinese) without those experiences.

Today's Stories

I woke particularly early this morning, and decided to read a lil NYT before moving along. Two articles struck me.

• Reagan and Reality by Bob Herbert - Gipper's got a new documentary coming out! Looks pretty interesting, I'll probably check it out at some point. I'm glad someone finally made a movie setting Gip's past record straight. It seems like when Bush's dumbass was president the Right deified Reagan for some reason. I'd see folks on Fox News talking about how he was the greatest President in history, and I'd wonder if they were saying it purely to be controversial. Maybe because he wasn't seemingly as bad as Bush was at the time? In 2011 I do often think foldly of GW's memory (my logical side thinks it's just because I was younger during his time in office). It seemed not a day could go by without him screwing something up. Iraq? Tax cuts? Oil? By the end, when you heard that the economy was spiraling into the biggest catastrophe since the Great Depression - it was like, "No duh. Look who's been running the show." But I bet "Reagan" is worth seeing. Good characters back then. Americans. I don't know, I consider myself out-outspokenly liberal, and certainly left-wing, but I have to admit the Right does have some charm... Reagan, Bush, Palin, and don't forget smokin' John Boehner! Yeah, I expect better out of them and their policies have ruined lives, but when not looking at life too seriously, hey, at least they're Americans!
  

• Wall Street's Dead End by Felix Salmon - As someone who works in the industry it does seem like this is the direction American investors and corporations are heading... "as the number of initial public offerings steadily declines, the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money." Thanks partly to Reagan (and don't forget Bush) the rich keep getting richer, and the majority are none the wiser. That's what keeps Americans from rioting in the streets, the obliviousness to the great swindle, the loss in value.

NYT Cover

Blogspective: Chuck On the Snowballing Weight of Technology

Great article from Chuck Klosterman in the NYT. Though I've never felt like I see eye to eye with Chuck (he's a bit older), I do deeply appreciate this perspective and metaphor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html

I was really intrigued by this phrase:

“It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the Internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me.” - Alice Gregory

It also kind of puts this soundtrack in my head:

What the Rich Don’t Need

From the New York Times:

WANT to give affluent households a present worth $700 billion over the next decade? In a period of high unemployment and fiscal austerity, this idea may seem laughable. Amazingly, though, it is getting traction in Washington.

I am referring, of course, to the current debate about whether to extend all, or just some, of the tax cuts of President George W. Bush — cuts that are due to expire at year-end. They’re expiring because the only way they could be enacted initially was by pretending that they were temporary.

In this situation, it’s not clear what should be called a tax “cut.” If the temporary law is allowed to expire as planned, does that represent a return to normal, or a tax increase? Conversely, if some parts of the current rates are extended, should those count as a tax cut?

Wait A Minute Chester!

Yesterday morning I dashed out of the apartment in search of ingredients; Campbell's Tomato juice, celery, olives, horseradish...the heavy hitters I already had (Old Bay, hot sauce, Worcestershire). I passed on the clam juice. Over a few Bloody Buddipx, I scanned paper numero uno of the new decade, NYT Vol. CLIX No. 54,907. There's a wonderfully inspiring overhead image of people celebrating in Times Square, many people in humiliating, but corporately sponsored felt top hats, cell phone or camera clutched in hand. If only the ball were a mounted 360 disco camera, big brother could case the world and zoom in right at 12:00. (There is a pair of noticeable bros, one left-handedly pinching something to his lips and inhaling vigorously as the other roars in excitement.) Not a goddamn thing in the paper seemed worth while, articles about voided charges for contract killers and how there are too many honor students to distinguish whose honorable and who's "honorable." I did find an interesting piece in the op-ed section. It was a simply illustrated opened card that read "Happy New Fear" in white styled font on the left panel. The right panel read:

From:

Nostradamus
Mayans
Asteriods
Deadly Diseases
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Global Warming
Evil Aliens
Typhoons and Earthquakes

and the rest of the gang...

I found this to be "not in good humor." And I have a sense of humor that is typically willing to skim the depths of dead babies clogging city drain pipes and bastard banishment islands of meat eating, cigarette smoking sinners. I also enjoy cynicism, but this op-ed piece struck me as sarcastic. Was I to think, "Yes, Ji Lee, thank you for reminding me, I'm hitting the streets right now..." or "So...are you joking about it or did YOU actually create it just now"

Thinking about this reminds me of the classicly confusing slogan from the inspiring commodity Cheeto's. Chester the Cheetah, that crazy cool cat, used to say, "it ain't easy bein' cheesy." Really Chester, cause it looks pretty, pretty, pretty fuckin' easy to wear Ray Bans and hang around eating snacks. Should I not eat Cheetos because it's too difficult, or am I eating them out of pity for Chester, or do we as consumers not really know the amount of work and effort that goes into not only discovering what the public wants, but also distributing it to them?



I guess the "joke" is that these are the types of fears we'll be facing in the new decade. And yes, Chester it's suddenly not so easy to face the 10's, but in my mind it's because of a different set of card senders:

From:

Dangling Consumer Cellular Technology
Disappearing Media Hardcopy
Desperate Credit Lender/Collector
Encroaching Social Network
Mutating Allergen
Manipulated DNA Strand
Increasingly Radical & Stubborn Religion
Pattern-based Suggestive Decision Enabler

I guess what Ji Lee's op-ed piece really has to do with Cheeto's is that I don't want to think about fear propoganda and what shape it'll take in the coming years (1...pessimistic sarcasm peddling to the simple minded), any more than I want to think about "difficulty" while eating snacks.

Two More Interesting Articles

This one is from Timothy Egan's New York Times blog titled "Working Class Zero."

The first nine years of the new century have yet to find a defining label, something as catchy as Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s or the “Silent Generation” of 1950s men in gray flannel suits. Bookmarked by the horror of 9/11 and the history of a black president, the aughts certainly don’t lack for drama.
But last week, lost in the commotion over the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson and the shotgun blast of rage in the Washington protest, something definitive was released just as this decade nears its curtain call.
For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey.


The second article comes via Drexel University. Gave me some interesting takes on Inglorious Basterds, a movie both loved and hated by many.

The plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is ridiculous. A group of Jewish American soldiers are recruited by a Tennessee mountain man played by Brad Pitt to kill Nazis during the Second World War. Along the way they discover a plan to screen a new propaganda film by Goebbels at a cinema in Paris. All the top Nazis will be there, Hitler included. Exterminating them in one fell swoop will end the war. A few twists later, that is exactly what happens. So what's the point? What is it about this counterfactual and openly farcical scenario that so intrigued Mr. Tarantino?


pic via New York Shitty

They're Out to Get You!

Robots will be the death of us all. The Grey Lady told me the other day that "Associations" were meeting about how to keep the robots chill and not hypertechnological, homicidal, brain-sucking, man-eaters.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon...

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity...

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

(read entire article)

It doesn't seem like this information is out of the ordinary, the idea that machines will take over man. But it does seem somewhat eerie... and seemingly inevitable.

Rise of the Machines

Banking crisis is among us. Why? Because we're on a path to becoming slaves to the machine, fucking Matrix-style, man. This article has me somewhat convinced our suppression is inevitable.

Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.

Religulous America

After seeing Bill Maher's HILARIOUS "must-see" movie Religulous, I wanted to share this NYT Opinion article with you. From The Pew Research Center:

“The clear exception to this pattern is the United States, which is a much more religious country than its degree of prosperity would suggest. Despite its wealth, the United States is in the middle of the global pack when it comes to the importance of religion. Indeed, on this question, the U.S. is closer to considerably less developed nations such as India, Brazil and Lebanon than to other western nations.”

A hard rain's a gonna fall.

Everybody's Doing the Goth (Still)!

From the NYT (I thought this was funny):

"“Lord Damien Stark’s Makeup Tips for the Bleak” (originally printed in Ghastly Magazine):
“Whiteface should create the illusion that you really are that pale, and not that you have a bunch of makeup from Walgreens caked all over your face. Done badly, Gothic makeup can look painfully stupid. After spending money on a decent base, take the trouble to apply it evenly. It’s appalling how many Goths overlook something so basic and vital to their entire aesthetic. Equally bad and unfortunately just as frequent is the tendency to overpowder and the tendency to end one’s pallor at the jawbone. I can understand someone having difficulty with liquid eyeliner, but some mistakes are just inexcusably stupid. Don’t make them.”"

Neighbors | Window Displays

Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times

McCain’s Green-Eyed Monster - NYT Op-Ed

by MoDo

"Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.

The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough.

Even his own mother, the magical 96-year-old Roberta McCain, let slip that she thought the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad was “kinda stupid.”"

Anxious in America - NYT Op-Ed

If the old saying — that “as General Motors goes, so goes America” — is true, then folks, we’re in a lot of trouble. General Motors’s stock-market value now stands at just $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota’s $162.6 billion. On top of it, G.M. shares sank to a 34-year low last week.

That’s us. We’re at a 34-year low. And digging out of this hole is what the next election has to be about and is going to be about — even if it is interrupted by a terrorist attack or an outbreak of war or peace in Iraq. We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.

[source]

The Chief Justice and Dylan

The last chief justice liked light opera. The new one cites Bob Dylan.

Four pages into his dissent on Monday in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers, John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes.

“The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “ ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).”

Alex B. Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions, said this was almost certainly the first use of a rock lyric to buttress a legal proposition in a Supreme Court decision. “It’s a landmark opinion,” Professor Long said.

[source]

The Two Obamas - NYT Op-Ed

"I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life (campaign-finance reform), all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics."

[source]