Review of Callow's new book in NY Review of Books.

Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum in Cineaste.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 6:09 AM on April 16, 2007

This is the link on why brains are not computers.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 7:12 AM on April 5, 2007

James wood review of Against the Day
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:25 PM on March 18, 2007

This thread is so MEFIy. Did the people here actually read this article? I don't have a lot of time right now, but:

(1) Most of it isn't even about TV or moral superiority, but about the way novels deal with tme and space. This isn't one of her best or more rigorous articles, but she throws off a number of interesting claims about characters in novels being bounded by fate and novels having to deal with certain confines (for example, only certain slices of time and space,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:10 PM on March 17, 2007

Action Philosophers has been a big hit in certain alternative comics scenes, but I wasn't very impressed. I think Gonick does a lot better job at synthesizing different pieces of information into a coherent storyline. In contrast, sometimes but not always Action Philosophers doesn't really read like comics, but like a series of unrelated pictures with wikipedia-like text overlaid on top; they're much more like those INTRODUCING [X] or A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO [X] books that you see in academic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:08 AM on March 8, 2007

If you're interested in the "science" behind this, check out John Horgan's Rational Mysticism. From my very rough recollection of his chapter on Wilbur, he doesn't seem to doubt that Wilbur can do what he's doing here. Although Horgan's just a journalist, he is a member of the Edge, and a bit of a meditation reactionary--he wrote a Slate article saying that meditation could ruin your health. However, Horgan did make Wilbur seem like a meatheaded, self-deluded but very intelligent... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:02 AM on March 7, 2007

I think someone, maybe Terry Gilliam, said that Watchmen would work great as a TV miniseries--that always sounded right to me: TV would give the drabness and length that Watchmen needs. Imagine Dekalog crossed with The Singing Detective.

But I think when people here say that Watchmen couldn't be made into a movie, it's not out of any intrinsic quality of Watchmen, necessarily, but because comics have typically not produced that many faithful or great movies. It's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 12:21 PM on February 23, 2007

I actually watched the Shandling interview a few weeks ago, after watching the last Gervais post here. I think people who think that Gervais is unfunny might be missing the point of Gervais and these segments. His humor seems to me to be very oriented towards character and his own physical body. I'm not saying this as a diehard Gervais fan--the little I've seen of Extras definitely seems less funny--but the best part of The Office was never the writing, but the overall concept of the show and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 6:41 AM on January 27, 2007

Are people here actually interested in Kanazawa's arguments and writings or are they interested in the idea of someone like Kanazawa writing obviously unscientific, blatantly racist editorials? I'm having difficulty telling which and it's scaring me.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 3:16 PM on November 7, 2006

Yeah, the art vs non-art question is really boring and relies on an inaccurate model of the romantic artist. A lot of art is based on rote repetition of conventional tropes and doesn't have anything to do with intention or expression. Anyways, even if the pictures themselves are uninteresting, the technique here is really incredible. Even if you were tracing a photograph (which, as has been argued recently, the Rennaissance masters did), this would still be incredibly hard using... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:13 AM on August 8, 2006

I read that article when it first posted on ALD and it seemed like just another in a long line of cliched but possibly accurate anti-theory articles. So it seems silly to just raise our hands in agreement and agree that theory itself is bad. I'm more interested in the conditions of the applicants themselves. I like Il Furioso's analysis about the financial and social immaturity of graduate students, something I've seen myself. Being a grad student seems like being in a leisured class in terms of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 7:18 AM on July 26, 2006

A lot of these responses seem (typical of mefi) incredibly defensive. Even if identity politics sucks, even if life is unfair--if I say "these certain privileges are unfair," then why is "other things are also unfair" a germane rebuttal? Consider if someone put up a post about, say, AIDS. How many people would immediately respond, "So what? Cancer and heart disease also kill people!"

Ditto adzuki.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 3:33 PM on July 10, 2006

I don't understand how the people who don't like this article simultaneously argue (1) the points are so obviously true there's no need to read the article and (2) the points are so obviously false and overgeneralized that there's no need to read the article.

Point (1) is erroneous: obvious problems still demand remedy.

Proponents of Point (2) largely seem to base their criticism on about 1-5% of the overall article. It is unclear if they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 5:59 PM on July 10, 2006

Re: Law Talkin' Guy

"I was reading these Chekhov short stories the other day--where he chronicles rural poverty in Russia--and though I was initially moved by the plight of the human qualities of how these characters suffered, I did some research and discovered that Chekhov made it all up! I'm willing to bet that the hospital he discusses, the different heroes and villains, don't even exist in reality! I was talking to a friend of mine who was moved by these stories... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 7:46 AM on July 11, 2006

Salvia--great, mature post!
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 5:01 PM on July 11, 2006

Gilberto Perez on Kiarostami
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:08 AM on June 9, 2006

That story about the meat forests is pretty famous. That dude pops up in Chinese poetry all the time as the favorite decadent king to loath.

I've had deer antler wine.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:03 AM on June 9, 2006

A possible list of my favorite comics would inclue Love and Rockets, Gasoline Alley, Dark Knight, Watchmen, Peter Blegvad's Leviathan, Grant Morrison's New X-men and JLA, Sandman, Clowes's Caricature, the original Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, Tom the Dancing Bug, Perry Bible Fellowship, the Delano, Ennis and Phillips runs on Hellblazer, Top Ten, the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four run, etc.

However, I think it's important, when someone asks for a comic book recommendation,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:25 AM on June 5, 2006

Hey, what doom patrol issues are missing from the trades?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:22 AM on June 6, 2006

I guess for now, I just mean the Gasoline Alley Sunday strips that were reprinted in two issues of Drawn and Quarterly. (I bought Walt and Skeezix, but it never arrived.) The Sunday strips were amazing--possibly the most perfect visual texture I've ever seen for a comic: formalistic but gentle, experimental, quirky, colorful, childlike. A lot of times, he doesn't just rely on beauty, like Nemo does, but experiments with the grid layout to alter how comics treat time or spatial arrangements: a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:00 AM on June 7, 2006

The Yerka pictures are from a book he did with Harlan Ellison called Mind Fields. Ellison wrote a page-long short story to go along with each painting. One is about a tree that allows only black people to teleport, upturning the global class system. His favorite story is about a man who turns into a monster at night and sleeps in the woods, but has a phone (?) so he can call his wife.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:15 AM on June 2, 2006

Check out Chris Caccamise--the works look like they're made out of hard plastic, but they're actually just paper.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:47 AM on May 30, 2006

I think Jon Gray is one of the best book cover designers alive.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 3:19 PM on May 24, 2006

There was an interview with him in a recent book forum. My question is: don't a lot of people say that he represents everything bad about metafiction and postmodern experimentation--like a Borges or Calvino but without any sense of charm or depth? I haven't read very much, but I just wanted to get someone to confirm or deny the verdict.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 6:16 PM on May 19, 2006

Center for Book Culture is great. If you ever get a chance to read CONTEXT, do it, even though they've changed their orientation in the last few years. Also, the dalkey archive has a great 100 books for $500 dollars deal, which makes sense if you can find 10-20 friends to split it or if you're an institution.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:11 AM on May 16, 2006

I really like the idea-abundance of this. Can you think of any books that have a similar heuristic-happy quality? Is his mind hacks book worth getting?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 12:04 PM on May 8, 2006

great post
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 1:28 PM on May 3, 2006

Funny, I've been doing research on this recently. I haven't read the post yet, but if it makes you feel better--even though the judiciary is very deferential to the executive, this privilege is very rarely applied in cases not directly involving national security (i.e., weapons designs, obvious geopolitics ramifications, etc.). One of the only times this was applied in a non-military setting was when the Republic of China declared independence and several commercial tankers (belonging to HK)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:16 PM on May 2, 2006

I've been listening to this for a while. I like it, but it seems more fun than educational. They don't repeat the phrases enough for me to memorize them, I feel. Ideally, I should listen to each lesson like three times but I'm not that organized.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:09 AM on April 27, 2006

Well, I took it for a year and learned like 1000-1500 characters, though I'm a bit rusty. Clearly if you listened to it several times, you'd improved. My comment is just that it could have some more helpful routines: for example, more repetition or dialogues that paused for you to answer, rather than just listen to the other person answer. The program also has to do some tricks when it comes to the translation--if they translate it character-by-character, it drags the program on, but if they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:24 AM on April 27, 2006

That spore video was amazing. My question is about the asynchronous multi-player. Can someone talk about the reasoning behind this? I'm guessing it's to make the game more fair/fun (i.e., so a powerful player can't just nuke you before you've even started) and to manage the different stages of the game...?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 4:56 PM on April 22, 2006

The signal to noise ratio in this thread is great.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:42 AM on April 20, 2006

good post!
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 1:14 PM on April 19, 2006

Hey--I'm glad someone posted a link to the new Penguin covers w/ the comic book covers. I was pretty impressed when I saw that on the fantagraphics blog. Someone should post a link to the Tsichold Penguin redesign. The Thames and Hudson book of type has a comparison between the old Penguins and his design.

I think one of the great things about learning about graphic design and its history is that all designs are automatically historicized, obviously created, and stop... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:35 PM on April 19, 2006

I vaguely remember reading about this when it first came out, but never got to play it. I just finished the demo and it scared the hell out of me!
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:14 AM on April 16, 2006

Someone should like to the David Orr review in the NY times and the William Logan review in the New Criterion!
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:38 AM on April 16, 2006

I took a class with him. THough I can't say much interesting about it, he's interestingly different from other law professors in that he actually seems to have technical knowledge. However, he's incredibly similar to other open source enthusiasts, etc., in that he's sort of a technological utopian. Anyways, this post looks interesting.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:36 AM on April 16, 2006

I still think she had one of the ugliest, clumsiest, most cack-handed and club-footed writing styles I've ever seen. Her prose runs like a broken wheel.

You're being sarcastic right? It's not without reason that James Wood said she has arguably the most beautiful writing style in 20th century english.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 5:21 PM on April 15, 2006

are these episodes on youtube?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:00 AM on April 12, 2006

sorry--didn't see the qt link.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 9:02 AM on April 12, 2006

I've been reading a book on creativity and it discusses Cope in a chapter on artificial creativity and points out:

(1) Obviously the machine doesn't generate its own code, which is created by Cope, a trained classical musician. While most artists have a sense of autonomy and develoment, here it might be more accurate to say that Cope has designed a tool, rather than to say a machine has created classical music. The book talks about this in the same chapter that it talks... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 6:05 AM on April 11, 2006

I agree with Blacklite *as well* as many of the critiques here, but some of the critiques seem rather mean-spirited or silly to me. I mean there's a surprisingly large amount of hostility here to the link. Why is that? Anyways, I think it's important to put this in context. This appears to be an educational tool put together by some professors in their spare time. It's not suppose to be an original, unproblematized, high-budget treatise, but the online equivalent of Male Gaze for Beginners.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 2:12 PM on April 5, 2006

There's always a lot of antipathy here to social rather than scientific explanations. A lot of people here are defensively using science as a way to shield themselves from moral culpability (i.e., to put it in an egregious generalization: "It's okay for me to be sexist because my genes encode me thus, rather than my intentions"), but I don't see how science does such a thing. (And these posts about "canting one's head is biologically more attractive!" are just silly.)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 10:46 AM on April 6, 2006

That's an interesting response. I think the problem that many of us have with these evolutionary explanations is the fact that they are not ad hoc enough--that is, they are simplifying rather than nuanced. An evolutionary interpretation of this post would argue that something is true for the entire human species as a way to explain a fairly localized phenomenon, fashion ads. Although some posters are skeptical of the sort of media studies used in the link, it seems reasonable to me to explain... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 11:50 AM on April 6, 2006

I don't really want to respond to this thread, b/c I don't want to get addicted to it, but--

It seems demonstrably true that culture strongly influences aesthetics. Obviously, different cultures find different things beautiful, even to the extent that these things signify something as blatantly biological as sexual attraction: compare FGM to bound feet, or Rubinesque body norms to the current pre-pubescent, anorexic waif model.
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 12:53 PM on April 6, 2006

James Wood wrotes that when Woolf's collected essays come out, it'll be the most impressive collection of critical essays of the 20th century. Does anyone know when it's going to happen?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:41 AM on March 30, 2006

Is Serendipity all that? I went twice and it was closed both times. Isn't Moe's not just the best book store in Berkeley, but--gasp!--in the world?

I have to say I'm disappointed with most of the NY bookstores I've been to.

Virginia Woolf - is it worth buying this if I already have, like, Rainbow and Granite, The Moment, etc.?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 1:45 PM on March 30, 2006

Yeah, Gray Wolf is awesome! I was totally thinking of mentioning that.

I don't really like the Strand. Sure it has a lot of stuff, but I usually can't find what I'm looking for (typically not terribly obscure stuff)--a million books and mostly junk!--and it's sort of dirty, crowded, and stressful. It doesn't have the charming finds the same way the smaller bookstores in park slope do...
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 7:08 PM on March 30, 2006

If you think a TV-show being cancelled is anything other than a mild dent in your amusement, you need a library card.

This seems to be putting out a Books > TV hierarchy I'm not sure I agree with. The point isn't that one medium is better than another, but saying so ignores the value of specific works. A lot of us think AD is far more literary and dense than most fiction nowadays.

Hey, does anyone know when the season 3 dvd set comes out?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 1:48 PM on March 30, 2006

Dgaicun, do you have any advice on finding other interesting "vintage" film clips online?
posted to MetaFilter by kensanway at 8:47 AM on March 30, 2006