In case you haven’t already seen the notice we posted today on our home page, Salon is super-proud that the short story by Cory Doctorow we published last year, “0wnz0red,” is a Nebula Award finalist. Congratulations to the author. If you haven’t read the story yet, hey, this is the Web — it’s still there. What are you waiting for?
The poetry of spam
As part of a recent cycle in the arms race between spam senders and spam filters, the spammers have begun raiding the English dictionary for random obscure words to seed their subject lines, helping evade intelligent filters like SpamAssassin. Thus I am seeing some of their messages. And I have to say, though I am no happier at receiving their e-mail than anyone else, and have less than zero interest in the herbal viagra and penis patches they are peddling, the random verbiage in their subject lines sometimes catches my fancy.
Perhaps spam is, as my colleague Sumana Harihareswara has proposed and chronicled, a kind of folk art. Consider some of the recent examples I’ve culled. These are juxtapositions of words that might inspire a new generation of band names, or spark a screenwriter’s imagination. Herewith, the subject lines, and my attempt at interpretation:
interlace possibility
— A TV engineer daydreams of romance
origami inflation
— Paper money is always at risk
yarmulke bedaub
— No baptism please, we’re Jewish
antimacassar asymmetry
— Headrests in need of some thoughtful rearrangement
And my favorite:
aerogene flagstaff phantasy haze
— special effects smoke generator deployed for Jimi Hendrix Arizona gig!
Art is so much a matter of projection, anyway. The Rain Parade had an album title, “Emergency Third Rail Power Trip,” which struck me — when, as a resident of Boston in the mid-1980s, I purchased the LP — as a psychedelic word-poem about electrocuted megalomaniacs. When I moved to San Francisco I discovered its more prosaic origin, as a utility sign posted near the BART tracks.
BONUS LINKS: Spam poetry.
Other Google links for spam poetry
Move right along
MoveOn.org has winnowed down the 1500 entries in its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest to 15 finalists, via an open online vote. This one is my favorite among the finalists.
There’s an absurd dustup being fanned by the Republicans about how one of the entries in the original 1500 likened Bush to Hitler. Excessive? Sure. Godwin’s Law manifestation? Sure. But look, guys, it was an open competition: far as I can tell, MoveOn screened the entries for basic video quality and to screen out obscenities — it wasn’t exercising editorial control. Note that the Nazi comparison didn’t make it into the finalist round. If this is the best MoveOn’s opponents can do, it doesn’t say much for them.
There and back again
I finally saw “Return of the King” yesterday (life with two four-year-old boys keeps my moviegoing to the bare minimum). It delivers exactly what the first two films suggested it would — which is to say, it’s a marvel. There are certain spots where director Peter Jackson actually improves upon Tolkien: It’s been a few years since my last re-reading of the trilogy, but I don’t recall the lighting of the beacons from Gondor to Rohan being such a soaring moment, with what look like isolated Himalayan-high eyries passing their message across the roof of the world; and Aragorn’s passage through the Paths of the Dead feels as if it has some extra fillips of chill. Jackson closely follows Tolkien’s script for the ebb and flow of fortune during the Battle of the Pellenor Fields, and the result, with bows to Kurosawa, is a battle scene up there with cinema’s all-time landmarks. And the exquisite presentation of Gollum’s tormented split personality, begun in “The Two Towers,” runs its awful, world-changing course.
There are of course some minor disappointments: Denethor is turned from a figure of Shakespearian tragedy into more of a Jacobean-ogre caricature; the loss of “The Scouring of the Shire” (entirely understandable from the vantage of running time) upsets the balance of Tolkien’s bittersweet conclusion. But overall, the movie is an improbably wonderful achievement, a cinematic realization of Tolkien’s world that can proudly stand next to its original. When Barad-Dur collapses, in ceaseless cascades of plunging ebony masonry, it’s as if all the movie trilogy’s vertiginous pinnacles of terror — from the bridge of Khazad-Dum to Orthanc to Cirith Ungol — are falling at once, and forever.
BONUS LINK: A research project exploring reactions to the LotR movies around the world needs you to answer its questionnaire. [Link courtesy Henry Jenkins]
Round up the usual links
Holidays allow for a certain amount of catchup reading. Here’s some of what I enjoyed:
Gary Wolf’s piece on the Dean campaign’s use of decentralized, Internet-style organization didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t gleaned already from decentralized reading — but it put all the pieces together beautifully, and should be required reading for those inside-the-Beltway pundits who still don’t understand what’s happening in their world.
If you want to understand what’s happening to the U.S. economy — for instance, why inflation is so low, and why jobs are so scarce — Charles Fishman’s piece on Wal-Mart in Fast Company is eye-opening. Since Wal-Mart is notoriously close-lipped, and so are the people who work with it, in order to put the story together, Fishman had to use the old reporting trick of finding sources among former employees of Wal-Mart partners. (Since the article’s point is that Wal-Mart’s demand for low prices sometimes drives its own suppliers out of business, there were more of these than might normally be typical.) The piece ends up portraying a company — “Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith’s invisible hand” — whose brutal efficiency at driving its suppliers’ prices down has served as an accelerator to globalization, a boon to consumers’ pocketbooks and a giant engine of economic dislocation for American workers. Classical economists would see nothing but good in the result. But the turbocharged displacement of livelihoods and corporate stability gives one pause.
For fun at the intersection of geek culture and high culture, there’s Alex Ross’s New Yorker piece on the subterranean kinship between “The Lord of the Rings” and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. I don’t agree with everything Ross says but it’s a smart piece for those of us who are fans of both masterworks.
Finally, here’s a BBC story by a psychologist who claims that good luck isn’t a matter of luck at all. “My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.” [Link courtesy Metafilter]
Happy New Year!
Costikyan vs. the Times
Greg Costikyan takes apart yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story on videogames:
| We then have some yada-yada from Bonnel about how games are similar to primitive dance, which is nonsense; the case he could, and should, be making is that play is as fundamental to humans as story, and games thus appeal to a fundamental part of what it is to be human, just as stories do. But this would, of course, sabotage the argument that games are form of storytelling–which I don’t think I need to debunk again… |
Face time
Edward Tufte’s diatribe against PowerPoint, which I wrote about six months ago, is back in the news thanks to some recent exposure in Wired.
Tim Bray articulates something important about this subject that I learned several years ago: Slides should complement a talk, not replicate it:
| …You have to get away from the idea that what’s in your slides is the content of your presentation. Slides aren’t big enough or rich enough or smart enough to themselves contain any presentation worth listening to for more than about ten minutes. Instead, your slides are a visual auxiliary to your material; no more, no less. |
You can build slides as a set of illustrations to parallel what you’re saying, or even offer a comic counterpoint to it. Some really adept speakers use slides as a sort of loose score, creating a riffing rhythm between slide and speech (Lawrence Lessig is a master of this technique). The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides.
In an age of information overload and telecommunications abundance, the simple fact of a speaker and audience sharing a physical space and real time is precious. A speaker owes listeners the courtesy of turning to face them and giving them something of herself. If all I wanted to do was read your slides, I can download them, thanks.
Commons good
Creative Commons is doing important work: Pushing back against the juggernaut of overly restrictive copyrighting, and striving to create new models for intellectual property that encourage openness, collaboration and creative reuse while respective the rights of creators.
If you missed their big party on Sunday, as I did, you can catch up with the latest news from the group — in entertaining, Flash-file format —
here. (This short animation is a follow-up to the group’s introductory movie, which lays out the basics of the Creative Commons ideal.)
Interesting news: Creative Commons is unveiling a new “sampling OK” license, and to introduce it to the world Brazil’s Gilberto Gil will release a new recording under it.
Introducing I-R-Us, Josh Kornbluth’s pro-tax blog
If you read this blog regularly you know that I go back a good ways with Josh Kornbluth, the San Francisco monologist/performer (“Red Diaper Baby,” “Haiku Tunnel”). Josh’s most recent show — a hit here in the Bay Area, and soon to open in New York at the Bank Street Theater — is titled “Love and Taxes,” and it recounts, in excruciating comic detail, the consequences of Josh’s many years of failing to file, and what it took him to make things right.
One of the points of the show — beyond providing two hours of great, neurosis-fueled entertainment — is to get audiences to think a little more deeply about taxes, to get beyond the simple knee-jerk of resentment. Cut through the right-wing rhetoric about waste, acknowledge the real problems of government giveaways to corporations and special interests, and you’re left with the very real fact that our taxes pay for important public goods — like education, and medical care, and research, and public safety, and defense, and… You get the point. When the Bush administration’s tax-cutting orgy finally exhausts itself and the nation wakes up with a multitrillion-dollar-deficit headache, we will all miss those things our taxes purchased.
So it’s a propitious moment in history for Kornbluth to begin a new blog, I R Us, propounding the case for taxation. (Full disclosure and/or proud credit-taking: I put it online for him.)
Now, taking arms against America’s long hate affair with taxes may seem a little quixotic, but then Josh, as a child of Communists and a creator of live theater, is no stranger to lost causes and long shots. I think you’ll find his writing hilarious and his ideas provocative. I don’t doubt that he’ll attract a certain number of gawkers who will find the notion of a “pro-tax blog” impossible to take seriously. But then, I think Josh has years of experience dealing with hecklers.
If you want to go straight to some good posts, there’s a running dialogue, a kind of faux-FAQ, that begins here and continues here and here.
Charlie Varon: Wit from woe
Longtime Salon readers may recall a feature we ran in the late ’90s known as the “21st Challenge” — a reader-response humor competition that had its 15 minutes of fame in the form of our “Error Message Haikus,” which went round the world on a million e-mail lists and wound up being mentioned in the Microsoft trial (without credit, alas!).
Charlie Varon was the co-creator of those contests. He’s better known in the Bay Area as a remarkable playwright and performer responsible for some of the past decade’s most original political theater (his shows have included “Rush Limbaugh in Night School,” “Ralph Nader is Missing,” and “The People’s Violin”).
I’m a little biased here, because I’ve known Charlie since we were in high school together and worked on the weekly student paper (he was my first editor, and still one of my best), but so what? I think Charlie is making some extraordinarily original political comedy in these dark days: it’s angry without succumbing to cynicism, hilarious without resorting to sarcasm.
You can hear it for yourself on a new CD he has self-published, titled “Visiting Professor of Pessimism.” It’s a live recording of a show in San Francisco that Varon performed in the middle of the Iraq invasion last spring. The pieces are character-sketch monologues that look, with clear-eyed, heartbreaking humor, at the terrible compromises of the war on terrorism, the awful deadlock in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the dilemmas facing Americans committed to peace.
And it kicks off with a parody BBC newscast announcing, among other things, a new breakthrough in genetic engineering, mixing genes from root vegetables and business leaders: “The goal is to breed a humble corporate executive — or, failing that, a ruthless potato.”
You can listen to free samples here, here, or here. Or read more here.