An amusing little thing I threw together.
The tricks used in film to make something look dramatic are largely overlapped by the tricks used to make something look sensual:
Close-ups
Saturated colors
Slow motion
Fluid and/or circular motion
And beautifully, this particular sensual segment is rife with visual punctuation which perfectly mirrors the sharp rhythm of cinematic music. Maybe you'll recall this article I wrote a while back called "How To Remix Anything." By those standards, this video was practically begging to be created.
Good lord, it's been a while since I've written anything here! I lacked Internet for two weeks, was poisoned for a couple days, and simply didn't have motivation for however much time the previous two excuses don't account for. Today I will remedy this dry spell. Inspired in part by recent events in my life and in part by my developing capacity to generate my own philosophies on life, I want to talk about the concept of change.
"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living."
-Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"
Thoreau suggests that irrelevant wisdom is the only thing our elders can offer and that adopting said wisdom retards the progress of society. Things inevitably change and for old people to teach the young is for them to prepare new generations to deal with old problems. We've all heard older people say things like, "You kids have it so easy these days with your cell phones and your Internet" as if we of the new generation are spoiled because we don't have to walk twelve miles to school every day in the snow or fetch our water from a well or carry home the mammoth we tracked for a week and then killed with pointy rocks at the ends of sticks. Old people have experienced and learned to deal with problems that are not likely inherited by their children because of how rapidly human society has begun to evolve from one generation to the next. Old people demonstrate resistance to (or perhaps ignorance of) change when they fail to realize that new generations have as many problems and labors as the old ones did - the problems are just different. While it's true that we don't have to chop firewood every day or wash our clothes by hand in the local stream, we have to deal with things like competitive job markets, complex computer software, and diagnoses for medical ailments that were either totally unaddressed or simply did not exist a hundred years ago. Worst of all we have to deal with the shit those same old people left for us to resolve, like racial and gender discrimination and homophobia. I think it's worth respecting our elders for the energy they've invested in creating a good life for themselves and others, but the pleasantness of society and life in general will never increase further if we blindly adopt the antiquated ways they think we're missing out on. Improvement and invention are very often the stimuli for change so to resist change is to resist beneficial development. To put it bluntly:
"Tradition is the enemy of progress."
-Sign on a Native American boarding school.
You may ask then, am I anti-religion because of its emphasis on tradition? No. Religion does good things for many people. It strengthens the people who might otherwise be weak, unmotivated, or feel like their life has no purpose. Religion can enable them to do other things that benefit themselves and others. The unfortunate side-effect of religion is that it often inhibits the presently prosperous person from developing new ideas, values, and reasons. This prevents change from occurring by forcing young people to make decisions based on the values passed down from old people - values which Thoreau and I have already said may or may not be relevant or even rational in our modern age. My strong preference to make decisions based on my own rational thought over faith in the thoughts of others is why I personally am an atheist (for all intents and purposes) and a subscriber to the endless importance of change.
I will not, however, denounce stagnation like Thoreau so tersely does. I realize that a person's opinion on change depends on a deep-rooted (and perhaps even unconscious) philosophy about what the purpose of life is and therefore change carries with it no objective moral value. If you think the purpose of life is to improve the world as much as possible to make the experience of life a happier one, change is your friend because it represents progress. If you think the purpose of your life is to breed happiness by cherishing and spreading the ideas and bounty with which you and the rest of the world have already been blessed, then to you change represents digression. The world needs those anti-change "maintainers" just as much as it needs those pro-change "innovators." We can't all be artists and inventors because then there will be no one left to farm our vegetables or teach math to our children. But if we were all teachers or farmers or priests, we wouldn't have the luxuries or efficiency of 21st century life.
My advice to you this entry is to invest some thought into which philosophy of life most strongly influences the decisions you make and whether those decisions are the products of your own thinking or the result of trust in the thinking of others. Then realize that people who behave or think oppositely are not necessarily wrong or evil - the most likely explanation is that their goals for the future and for change are simply different than yours but no less righteous. Because of the symbiosis between "maintainers" and "innovators," I guarantee you that the philosophies you reject will at some (or many) point(s) benefit the ones you accept, so as long as a person's goals do not outwardly harm society or its people, don't judge or guilt the person for the philosophy they choose. You may find the wisdom of your elders to be either priceless treasure or anachronistic garbage but regardless of whether you tend to resist change or embrace it, at the very least, do not fear it.
The Pokemon World Championships ended in Hawaii yesterday. Naturally, Japanese players won a majority of the events. The prime event however - the video game senior division - crowned an American for the first time ever.
(Champion Ray Rizzo on the far right.)
After one Pokemon battle, this thin and pale but otherwise nondescript white guy is a celebrity. People are admiring him in Pokemon communities wordwide, but he fits absolutely no part of the "cool" image we're used to seeing in modern media. Here's an example of the image I'm talking about:
(If you've spent any time on the Internet recently, you've probably seen banner ads for this new abomination.)
Given these two pieces of recent media news, I think it's time I discuss what it really means to be "cool." Let's look at that Resident Evil poster a little more and make a list of the image's "cool" qualities:
Canted text. Attempts to defy convention by resisting horizontal alignment.
Rain. The figure is undaunted by bad environmental conditions which shows determination.
Guns. A staple icon of cool people. Why? Holding a gun asserts authority by threat and sets a person apart from common people since most people are not weapon-trained nor threatening. The ability to hold two guns at the same time sets her above other people who hold guns.
Glare of determination. Also a staple of cool people. It shows intense focus on a task which in turn shows confidence in completing said task.
Black garb. Black is both associated with death and with business and formality (again, threat mixed with determination). It's symbolically convenient that this figures business is death.
Jovovich looks "cool" in the poster because she is focused on a task (killing zombies) which she appears superhumanly capable of completing. This is your standard action movie poster. It packs in as many icons associative of coolness as it can to make as many people as possible think that Jovovich looks like she's got a job to do and that she's good at it. These simple associative tricks ultimately make this poster shallow and ridiculously hyperbolic to anyone looking as hard at it as we are. In the case of this poster, the image tries so hard to put on a facade of coolness that it has the unbearable stench of superficiallity. Unfortunately, the media is saturated with this facade. Particularly in anime:
(Characters like this further condition us to think that this strong, serious, contemplative, trench-coat-wearing, problems-with-your-father demeanor is "cool," but I dare you to try it in real life. I guarantee people will just think you're a jerk.)
As we see with Ray Rizzo, you don't have to look cool to be cool. In fact, genuinely cool people rarely fit the mold of coolness. Despite opposite visages, what Jovovich and Rizzo have in common here is that they both provoke admiration from their audience by displaying authority, dedication, and intent. Being cool is about being admired and admiration comes from doing things in intentful ways. Period. You don't even have to do something inherently "cool" to be cool yourself (as demonstrated by Rizzo's Pokemon mastery) - commitment is a very rare and coveted skill and people will admire you just for your passion. And if you're good at what you do (often a side effect of dedication) your coolness will be undeniable.
So your choices for achieving coolness basically boil down to two options:
The Jovovich Path: Contrive an image and conform to it until you become that image.
The Rizzo Path: Do something with enough passion that you become cool under the image you already have.
Option 2 is by far the easiest, most pleasant, and most genuine. And from what we've seen here, it breaks down to a simple two-step program:
Commit
Accomplish
Yep. That's it. Now take this lesson out into the world do something! Anything! You too can be a Pokemon Master!
Incidentally, I have indulged in nothing American today. My focus has been on German and Japanese music. As probably none of you know, I have a thing for creative blends of complex and simple things. If it helps you understand, my two favorite types or music are baroque and techno - one is usually intellectual, while the other is usually visceral. As a result, these two genres or music are practically incompatible. Here's one of the very rare exceptions I've found:
The classical chord progression is not something you would ever hear in techno music but it's easy to follow, loops well, and resolves to the tonic note, making it perfect for a techno remix. The genius is not in the song itself, but in Tiesto's ability to recognize what made Barber's piece exploitable.
Now let's go an a journey and actually do a remix of our own.
Here's the opening for Neon Genesis Evangelion, an enormously popular but otherwise mediocre anime.
This song is called A Cruel Angel's Thesis:
For a theme song, this is actually pretty good. The chords progress in some unexpected ways in the verses which help it sound unique, but it still implements plenty of musical tricks common to popular western music which makes the sound simple and predictable enough to be accessible to a young and modern demographic.
But wait...Here's George Frideric Handel's Passacaglia:
OMG! It's the Evangelion chorus written 300 years in advance!
Like techno and classical music, the fan base of anime generally does not overlap with the fan base of baroque composers. In other words, if you've heard one of these songs, you probably have not heard the other one. These are the gaps that I absolutely love to see bridged. Unlike techno and classical however, these two songs are not inherently incompatible (because they are almost the same song). So let's be pioneers and unite disparate audiences.
...
...
...
Done! I've blended Eri Kawai's a capella version of A Cruel Angel's Thesis with a low-tempo, piano version of Handel's Passacaglia:
My point here that all things overlap somewhere, even if the overlaps are as rare as with techno and classical music. It's the exploitation of these overlaps in art that I personally find very interesting whether in music or any other creative form. The two songs I just combined were already very similar but the principle is the same as in Tiesto's remix or Barber's Adagio: hunt for the elusive overlaps and then....
....blow them up to make something new and beautiful. :)
Ever get bored? Me neither. I never waste time doing stupid things on the internet. I especially would never watch this:
I just moved into a new house and due to the despair haunting this place and the shock of the sudden change I have neglected to devotedly unpack my things. Much of my time has been spent sleeping to recover physically and emotionally from the move. But since I'm fascinated by Internet culture, some of the remaining time has been spent going through this list made by (incidentally) a Portland man:
I was perusing one of my new roommates' bookshelves and found a book about Internet culture. Naturally I picked it up and immediately checked the copyright date. 1997. Ouch. Rutter's list (combined with his sequel) is a pretty comprehensive list of Internet phenomena since the rise of the Web 2.0 at the turn of the century. Before the media and user interactivity that defines Web 2.0, the Internet culture available was limited to hyperlinks, chain emails, and the occasional forum. Here's a timeline for your consideration:
1998: Google is founded
1999: Napster is launched
2001: Wikipedia is launched
2003: 4chan and MySpace are launched
2004: Facebook and Flickr are launched. World or Warcraft is released
2005: YouTube is launched
2006: Number of live websites hits 92 million
That's right. YouTube - a site that contributes more to your vitality than some of your organs - is only five years old! Dynamic Internet culture has just blossomed in the last ten years. We are witnessing groundbreaking history in the making! My point is that this will be in your kids' sociology (hyper)textbooks, so you have valid reason to stop whatever you're doing (be it unpacking, laundry, church, homework, showering, parenting, or whatever) and educate yourself with stupid crap like this:
Well, I'm leaving Facebook on the 23rd to reappear occasionally here. Most of the things I write in status updates are thing I would prefer to expand upon anyway. I may return to FB, but probably not for a while. And by then a better networking site may be up. My first few reasons for leaving are personal. The last three are practical.
Boredom. There is a negative correlation between how interesting I find a person and how often they update. Maybe it's just my friends, but the truly cool people seem to spend their time away from the computer using their face-keyboards (mouths) to tell people what they've been doing. What's left is a news feed full of frivolous descriptions and/or esoteric song lyrics.
Depressing people. Facebook has allowed me to watch people I know start to settle down and become stagnating adults. I find it disheartening to see 20-25 year-olds manually plateauing the rate of change they experience in their life be it with a steady job, a new baby, a wedding or any other restrictive, long-term obligation. Their lives have basically ended less than half way through. It is possible that the place they've arrived at is the place at which they think they will be happiest and those people are lucky to have found their purpose in life so early. But if an entry-level job and a pregnant girlfriend are the things that retard a person's motivation to accomplish more with life, I don't want to read about this tragedy.
Facebook is a social crutch. My social life is practically non-existent save for the interactions I have with people on Facebook. It is one of the only things preventing me from spiraling into fits of despair and loneliness. Without it I will struggle for a while, but the struggle should lead to a more self-motivated social life and ultimately to happier and stronger bonds with the people I meet. Facebook is a flotation device when what I really need to do is learn how to swim.
Not enough incriminating photos. Of me. Other people have plenty but 99% of my own photos are practically identical. Seriously:
This is not a criticism of Facebook. It's a criticism of how I spend my time.
The Open Graph API enables every web page you visit to became a page you can "like." Web developers just add some tags to their web page that Facebook can read and then convert into something that can be displayed on your news feed. At first I thought this was a cool, Open Web-type advancement because web pages can become FB fan pages with almost no effort. But you know that little plugin you installed a while back? It and the Open Graph protocol are specific to Facebook, meaning nothing else uses those tags and you do not get that awesome interconnectivity of websites unless you already have a Facebook account. Facebook has implemented Open Web ideas, but made them proprietary. Real Open Web development would read the page as-is and wouldn't require a separate plugin. Which brings me to my next point:
The Facebook Plugin. Downloads for internet apps to work? Seriously? That's an old and outdated trick and is not where the modern web is going. Granted, we still thrive on things like Java and Adobe's Flash Player, but the difference is that those things are made to be useful in ways limited only by the creativity of the people developing for them. The Facebook plugin, however, is only useful on one site: Facebook. Today's web is actually moving toward totally online applications like the Picnik photo editor or the Aviary audio editor. Google has embraced this idea in their Chrome OS:
and it's a perfect example of the concepts web developers should be pursuing here in 2010.
Privacy has always been a major issue for Facebook, especially recently. But none of these issues actually bother me. I'm just adding privacy to the list to look cool. Hosting personal information and pictures in a public place and then expecting total privacy is naive. (If you don't want people to see your drunken spring break pics, don't store your photo album in the county library!) In addition to those personal privacy concerns, there are concerns about how Facebook itself collects information about you for its own use. For example, bots occasionally scan your profile pages looking for keywords that they can use to choose which banner ads you see as you browse. Most people disagree with me when I say this, but I like targeted marketing. It makes it more probable that the ads I see will actually be of interest to me. I could go on a whole rant about privacy vs marketing but it's not one of my reasons for abandoning Facebook, so I'll end here.
If anyone is reading this, I hope to see you in my Facebook-absent future.
