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Saturday, 01 December, 2007

Here's some of the stuff I've been reading and thinking about lately.

Art and writing

• “The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start”: I like the idea of art bringing people together:

  What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one's talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

  Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade—a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

• “You Say Fake Ads, They Say Satire”: Writers are finding a new outlet on Craigslist:

  Across the country, aspiring writers are using Craigslist not just as a place to offload their futons, but as a pixeled writing workshop where they test their stabs at social satire on some of the more than 30 million visitors that the site draws each month. Their personal ads ostensibly seek a soul mate, but what they’re really looking for is an audience.

• “J.K. Rowling's Crucio curse on fan's Harry Potter book”: J.K. Rowling says that if you want to publish on Harry Potter, you must pay. This is so ridiculous. My respect for Rowling is decreasing.

Music

• The Pipettes are playing in Sydney on the 29th December but we have the Big Read so will miss out.
• “The divine sound of silence”: Article reflecting on Britain's No Music Day. It's not supposed to be anti-music though:

  Social critics like to bemoan the iPod, complain that society has collapsed into everybody living in their own private Idahos. But in fact listening to music on an iPod, or accumulating songs through file sharing, is a way to reclaim music from the manipulations of the marketers, to escape the claws of the behaviorists. Carving my way through the crowded city, while listening to music on my iPod, allows me to feel in touch with my surroundings. Art that doesn't manipulate is what forms real social bonds.

• Fascinating article in USA Today about Magnatune. “At its core, Magnatune is an effort to create the first real Internet-era record label”:
  

  Buckman is convinced his customers are willing to pay for—not steal—his artists' music, and even pay more than is necessary, because Magnatune pays artists half its revenue from selling music.

  Which brings into play another layer of the Magnatune model. In decades past, it cost a lot to get recorded music to the public. Studios and equipment were expensive, so recording an album took a lot of upfront money. Then, manufacturing thousands of LPs or CDs and shipping them around the country cost a ton.

  It all meant artists had to sign with a record label that would advance the money to launch an act. The price to artists has often been restrictive contracts that pay little royalties.

  But every part of that model is changing. PCs, digital gizmos and software can be assembled into a high-quality basement studio for a few thousand dollars. Former Byrds legend Roger McGuinn is recording his next album on his laptop while on the road. And with high-speed Internet, CD burners in most every PC, and blank CDs that cost 30 cents, it makes little sense to manufacture and ship pieces of plastic. It's like, in the 1940s, when the first refrigerator/freezers made home ice delivery irrelevant.

Film

• Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd. This used to be my favourite Sondheim musical. Just watching the trailer gives me the shivers. I'm sure Depp's vocals won't live up to Len Cariou but Burton's direction looks absolutel fantastic and it will be thrilling to hear Sondheim's fantastic score in surround-sound. (Oh look, Timothy Spall (who played Mr Emerson in A Room with a View is Beadle Bamford!)
• Burton's next project is a 3D version of Alice in Wonderland.
• Salon.com says Beowulf is schlock (Neil Gaiman helped write the screenplay with Roger Avary) but Christianity Today liked it and recommended seeing it in 3D
• New York Times review of I'm Not There, the biopic of Bob Dylan in which Dylan is played by six different people—Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Richard Gere, Marcus Carl Franklin and Cate Blanchett. I'm interested to see how this works as a narrative. Both The New York Times and Salon.com have given it positive reviews.

Relationships and technology

• “Mind your manners online”: This is what I've been saying for yonks! So many good bits in this article, including

  The fact is that online communication is artificial, and so requires artificial behavior. For various reasons, people tend to behave worse there than they do elsewhere. They must learn to behave better if the Internet is to attain its potential as a communicative medium.

  Online communication is artificial because of its peculiar combination of attributes: It is written, it is addressed to people you don't know, and it takes place within an undefined communicative context.

  It is a truism that a negative written comment has a harsher impact than a spoken one. That's why most of us have learned to take a deep breath and count to 10 before firing off angry e-mails.

  But because online postings are addressed to people you don't know, or not even addressed to anyone at all, you don't actually have to stand behind your words.

  But the fact remains that good manners are more important in nurturing a civilized, dynamic, sophisticated discussion than knowledge or brains.

  If Web users made a conscious effort to see their posts as parts of a conversation with real people rather than as pronouncements, the online universe would be a more enlightening place.

  and

  The Internet is a mirror of humanity. It would be a fine thing, and an important thing, if when we look in that mirror, we see a reflection of the species that created the British Parliament, built the Taj Mahal and wrote the U.S. Constitution, or even just the species that says “thank you” to the toll taker. The Internet is vast. A little more civilization might even make it beautiful.

• Some schools in the US are using SMS to encourage education.
• In Africa, children are accused of being witches and then cast out of the family. Often this is used as a pretext for not having to feed them anymore. And they say superstition is harmless ...
• “The Day after Thanksgiving”: Breakpoint on the power of family meals:

  The research indicates that many young adults with eating disorders never had a regular dinnertime when they were growing up. They literally never learned how to eat a proper meal.

  Weinstein tells us that when the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse studied ways to keep kids from destructive behaviors, family dinners were “more important than church attendance, more important even than grades at school.” The Center has repeated that study several times since then, “and every year, eating supper together regularly as a family tops the list of variables that are within our control.”

  You see, there is a lot more to family dinners than meets the eye. They have “the power of ritual,” giving parents and kids the chance to connect, adding a sense of security to the daily routine. They are an opportunity for parents to teach about family history and traditions, so that they give kids a sense of identity. Even dysfunctional families seem to work just a little bit better when they make time to eat together.

  The point is, family meals are not just about food. As Weinstein puts it, “Supper is about nourishment of all kinds.” That includes physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

• The Salon Gift Guide: Some nifty ideas for the person who's hard to buy gifts for. I particularly like the idea of the Roomba 500.
• “For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device”: Apparently your 2-year-old knows the difference between a toy mobile and your mobile, and would prefer yours.

  “When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they're much less interested,” said Daniel Neal, Kajeet's chief executive. “They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they're smart enough to use it better than you do.”

• “It's gift-giving time, and I'm cranky about gift cards and pushy kids”: Cary Tennis makes some good points about the age in which we live, but completely misses the point about why we give gifts.
• “Love and Sex With Robots”: This has to go into my graphic novel somewhere. David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, reckons that one day we will choose to love robots rather than other people. We may even marry them. His argument is rather disturbing:

  You're thinking, Computer geeks, they'll go for it, but not me. You're thinking you'll be glad to have a robot as a butler, but love? You can't love a thing that isn't a person. What's love got to do with robots?

  Well, what's love got to do with pets? Levy points out that like robots, cats and dogs first pushed into human lives by providing services to our ancestors—cats kept homes free of rats, dogs were guards and hunting partners and herders. Love was only a side benefit of such relationships, a feeling cooked up in human brains and exploited by the animals, who got shelter and food and safety from the deal.

  But none of that matters anymore. The situation's evolved. Now we think of our pets as extensions of our family, as beings roughly on our level—they're not adults, but for many of us, they're comparable to children. We no longer put our pets to work, of course; their only purpose is love.

  Why did our feelings for animals evolve? The human brain is unrelenting in its tendency to anthropomorphize, to subconsciously ascribe human feelings and thoughts to animals and inanimate objects. We began to treat our pets as people because we're given to thinking of them as people—see the Onion's “Vacationing Woman Thinks Cats Miss Her.” But it won't end at cats and dogs: Levy cites several psychological studies showing that we tend to anthropomorphize machines, too.

  Technology is getting closer and closer to the point where robots will be able to mimic human behaviour. They may even be able to master the art of seduction (Futurama, anyone?).

  On the other hand, it'd be a pretty great video game. The possibility of easy sex with robots, Levy points out, will likely reduce the incidence of infidelity between human couples (infidelity with other humans, that is; Levy thinks that people will come to think of having sex with a robot as not constituting cheating, though he says we'll take some time to adjust to this view).

  More important, many people who, for whatever reason, can't find people to love them will find salvation in robots—and how can this be anything but salutary?

  “Almost everyone wants to love someone, but many people have no one,” Levy writes. “If this natural human desire can be satisfied for everyone who is capable of loving, surely the world will be a much happier place.”

  I suppose this is the logical outcome of the commodification of sex and the divorcing of sex from relationship. How will Christians respond if this starts happening? How is sex with robots different from this position on a Christian attitude to masturbation (which, I suspect, somewhat mirrors the Sydney evangelical perspective on it)? What should be the Christian response to sex toys?
  
  I don't have the answers but this article certainly made me want to make sure that pets are kept firmly in their place.

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