October 10, 2022
"... Twitter isn’t remotely as popular as other social networks.... Twitter remains firmly text-based at a time when much of the world is embracing images and video."
"And at the other end of the spectrum, some humans exhausted by Twitter’s chaos and combativeness are warming to quieter, more controlled conversations. The kinds you can find in text messaging threads, or moderated conversations on Reddit or Discord. Perhaps the best realistic case for Twitter’s importance comes from writer Ryan Broderick, who calls it 'the main website through which all culture travels' in America.... [That's] mainly because it’s quite searchable, especially compared to TikTok (for now). It’s a guide to the rest of the internet, not a hangout.... Twitter’s usefulness as a political tool had a decade-long run that peaked during Trump’s presidency, [somebody] theorizes.... [A]s Musk himself pointed out, the non-Musk celebrities with the most followers on Twitter rarely use it anymore. Too much hassle, not enough upside.... Once internet users decide they’ve moved on to something else, they never come back. See: Myspace, AOL, Yahoo. Also see: Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to create a new metaverse business to replace his aging Facebook business. If you wanted to spin this positively for Musk, you could argue that he doesn’t want to turn Twitter around, but that he wants to turn it into something else entirely — a 'super-app' that would have ... everything...."
From "Elon Musk can’t fix Twitter because no one can/A $44 billion mistake," by Peter Kafka (Vox).
About that "super-app" that has "everything," Musk tweeted, on October 4th, "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app." Twitter is a place where you say tiresome things like that.
"While Elon Musk and Nick Cannon are the poster children for fecundity, billionaires and celebrities are the anomaly..."
"...and most families with a lot of kids are like ours: middle class. Generally speaking, the data indicates that the more income one makes, the fewer children one has. Having a baby roughly every other year for the last decade is... not as expensive as many might think.... Around the country and around the world, people are having fewer children, if they’re having any at all.... The anti-natalists run a wicked good PR game. Even among mothers, the 'wine mom' content is what rules social media: with kids portrayed as tiny dictators and mothers feeling the need to booze or hide in bathrooms in order to make it on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.... Having kids, especially lots of them, is now counter-cultural; it’s so far outside the norm that I’m used to random strangers commenting every time we’re all out in public.... I like to think that, by making not just one or two babies, but by bringing into the world a whole brood, we are doing our part to inject more vitality into it."
From "I Never Wanted Kids. Number Six Is Due In a Few Months. We just outgrew our Honda Odyssey" by Bethany Mandel (Common Sense).
It's a startling breach of etiquette to question a stranger about her childbearing choices, but consider the urge that drives this transcendence of normal politeness and distancing. We need humanity to carry on, even as we depend on private decision-making to make it happen. Unfortunately, we're also conflicted, worried that there will be too many people or — in our least beautiful moments — the wrong kind of people. And so we keep track of women and their childbearing. We always have and we don't seem able to stop, even as many of us would like to believe that childbearing is a woman's individual, personal, private choice.
Hating/loving graphic novels.
2 things I clicked on in today's NYT have famous people — people I greatly admire — taking opposite positions on comics.
Obviously, I could see it coming in the first headline: "Temple Grandin Is a Visual Thinker Who Hates Graphic Novels/'It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles,' says the animal behaviorist and advocate for autistic people, whose new book (with Betsy Lerner) is 'Visual Thinking.' 'I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations.'"
Actually, I hate graphic novels. It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles. I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations. When I read business books and scientific papers, I often look at the illustrations and graphs first. The next step is to read the text. When I am reading a novel or a memoir, I prefer to create my own pictures in my imagination. As I read the text, my brain creates a movie.
The other one is buried in that article about Keiichi Tanaami that I blogged about in the previous post. Asked what he is reading, he said:
I don’t really read novels. I read a lot of essays and other things, though. I read an enormous amount of manga. Fujiko Fujio often write stories about a character succeeding in life. I loved this kind of manga when I was a small child. The character would move to Tokyo, rent out a tiny apartment, study super hard and succeed. He writes those kinds of success stories. I love them. I still read anything by Osamu Tezuka. He writes many different manga, so I read them all.... I also read Fujio Akatsuka. He is a super famous manga artist....
"His studio, which sits just across the hall from the apartment he shares with his wife, is crammed full of the reimagined Picasso canvases, including one where he superimposed the face of 'Astro Boy'..."
"... a robot character invented by his childhood hero, the Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka — onto the face of the child in Picasso’s original. 'At first I thought I would draw 10 and stop,' Tanaami said, but he kept going until he had produced close to 400. Before he started, he 'didn’t especially like Picasso,' he said. 'But as I was painting work inspired by him, I came to love him.'"
From "Keiichi Tanaami Remembers Everything/At 86, the Japanese pop artist has a lifetime of vivid recollections — some more real than others — and a new show in New York" (NYT). The Picasso painting he reimagined 400 times is "Mother and Child."
There's an interview with the artist. I loved the stuff about his routine: "I do the same thing every day. I wake up at eight in the morning, I take my time until around 10 to eat my breakfast and work on writing jobs I have. I come here [to the studio] between 11 and 12, work until the evening, go home, draw some more and go to bed around midnight. I don’t have any hobbies, so all I have to do is make art.... I live a very disciplined life — even more so than those who have to commute for work every day. For instance, I have a bath time. You need to have these things decided. I have a fairly boring life."
Have you ever done art based on the work of another artist? Picasso did it himself — reimagining Velasquez. Why not take something you love or — better?! — something you dislike and copy it over and over, faithfully, then with variations, big and small?
Here's Tanaami's Instagram page. You can see tons of his work there, including the Picasso variations.
He does the same thing every day. How close are you to I do the same thing every day? I'm pretty close, but I like some variations. If you have a good "same thing," then on any given day, you can just do it, and that's great, or you can have a small or big measure of variation, and maybe that will be great too.
"She holds six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list, a stunning number of simultaneous best sellers from a single author...."
"When she self-published her first young adult novel, 'Slammed,' in January of 2012, Hoover was making $9 an hour as a social worker, living in a single-wide trailer with her husband, a long-distance truck driver, and their three sons. She was elated when she made $30 in royalties. It was enough to pay the water bill.
Hoover, 42, didn’t have a publisher, an agent or any of the usual marketing machinery that goes into engineering a best seller: the six-figure marketing campaigns, the talk-show and podcast tours, the speaking gigs and literary awards, the glowing reviews from mainstream book critics....
Her success has happened largely on her terms, led by readers who act as her evangelists, driving sales through ecstatic online reviews and viral reaction videos...."
I don't watch movies very often anymore for some reason.
I prefer short things, not necessarily TikTok short, but "How to with John Wilson" short...
When I do watch a movie, sometimes it's something new that I've been reading about — I saw "Elvis" and "Blonde" — but sometimes it's something quite random. Last night, I watch the 1921 Swedish silent movie "The Phantom Carriage."
I like to keep blog posts short, though sometimes I go long. Right now, I can go short, because the Criterion Channel made this minute-a-half presentation of 3 reasons to watch the movie (with an especially interesting image at the very end):
October 9, 2022
"Her daughter, Mary Clementine, who moved in to help as the disease progressed, said she and her brother laughed out loud when their mother told them she was working on a cookbook."
"'It will have four pages: P. B. And. J.,' she said. Peanut butter sandwiches with jelly or honey were such a mainstay when she was touring that Neil Young, whom she opened for in the 1970s, still teases her about it by sending texts that just say 'peanut butter.'"
Some very touching photographs at the link.
"With a libretto written by... first-time opera makers, the show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing. Her mumbles are then translated..."
"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."
"She is a writer dedicated to re-examining her past and cataloging her humiliations and anxieties with precision."
"Her work readily offers the general contours of her life: a working-class, Roman Catholic childhood in rural Normandy; an unwanted pregnancy and abortion before the procedure was legalized; her failed marriage and various affairs; and relationships with her family, especially her parents."
From the NYT presentation of information about the new Nobel Prize writer, Annie Ernaux.
Have you read her? Will you read her? Does that description make you more or less likely to read her?
It makes me less likely to read her. She's praised for "precision" and for offering "general contours" — which sounds contradictory. And we're told she writes about herself and given a list of what seem to be ordinary woes of womanhood. Is there some reason for this dull presentation?
"They lost every possession to their name. They showed up here in the same clothes they left in. And they’re all here."
"Quite a few players on our football team, members of the [junior ROTC], the band, the people here making this event what it is, they’re living on couches and in RVs or wherever they can find a place."
Said Naples athletic director Cassie Barone, quoted in an OutKick article reporting about the Naples High football team playing its Friday night game, at home, 10 days after Hurricane Ian brought a 10 foot storm surge nor far from the school.
Ron DeSantis showed up for the game and called it "a testament to the resiliency of our Southwest Florida communities." By the way, there doesn't seem to be much of an effort to "Katrina" Ron DeSantis.
My favorite part of the article is one of the section headings: "Football Can Lift The Community."
"I was totally naïve when I took the job. I spent my time and didn’t succeed. I realized the system didn’t work. I just wasn’t smart enough. I don’t know how they can build it now."
Said Michael Tennenbaum, "a former Wall Street investment banker who was the first chairman of the rail authority 20 years ago," quoted in "How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned" (NYT).
"I moved around using a joystick on my hand controller. The first time I did this, I got motion sick and nearly fell over."
"I quickly realized that the metaverse was, with the exception of its games and exercise apps, best experienced sitting down.... Meta forces Horizon users to design avatars that look like real people — no giant bananas or huge robots — and many people choose to look as they do in real life, but pseudonymity is still part of the appeal. I, however, did use my real name and told people that I was a New York Times reporter who was recording my experience with a tool built into my headset. This P.O.V. camera was a little creepy, because it didn’t notify others when it was turned on. When I revealed I was recording, people would sometimes shout, 'She’s a fed!' and run away.... Putting on the headset was annoying, but once I started chatting in Horizon, I had a good time and was reluctant to leave. I liked meeting people spontaneously without the increasingly heavy-handed algorithmic intervention of traditional social media platforms. But explaining the metaverse through the lens of Horizon feels akin to unpacking the potential of 'the web' by surfing AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, during the days of dial-up modems...."
Writes Kashmir Hill in "This Is Life in the Metaverse/Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters of the immersive, three-dimensional internet that Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on" (NYT).
This article went up 2 days ago and it was featured on the NYT podcast "Hard Fork" the same day, but it only has 109 comments. I scanned them and didn't see any that weren't pretty much the same as this one, the top-rated comment:
It just seems awful. Social media has promoted itself as "bringing people together," but that is far from what has happened in the real world. We think it's going to be some sort of School of Athens where deep and meaningful conversations happen, but it's just an opportunity to have your inauthentic self on display. If we need connection and belonging, maybe we should be having neighborhood dinners, where politics are prohibited, instead of strapping on a headset to get trolled by broken people. Hard pass.
How is sitting in the audience trying to make a debate happen?
I'm trying to read the NBC News article, "Kari Lake was booted from Arizona town hall audience before Hobbs took the stage/The scene, which took place a forum that has yet to air, is emblematic of the contrasting styles of the two candidates in Arizona's tight race for governor."
I have no quarrel with the headline — other than that "booted" suggests physical resistance to removal — but the text is slanted. It begins:
Democrat Katie Hobbs won’t debate her opponent in Arizona’s race for governor, yet Republican Kari Lake tried to make it happen at a candidate town hall that organizers say she disrupted.
Before describing exactly what Lake did, we're pushed to regard it as disruption. And we're told Lake "tried to make [a debate] happen," so I'm picturing Lake getting on the stage and attempting to argue with Hobbs.
Under the agreed-upon rules for the pre-recorded event, which was taped Monday and airs at 7 p.m. Saturday Arizona time, the candidates were not supposed to be onstage at the same time and Hobbs was supposed to go first.
Again, we're pushed to think that Lake got on the stage with Hobbs, and we're told that would violate the specific rules that Lake had agreed to.
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