Posts by Tim

I love the headline announcing that The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat would be the Times’ new op-ed columnist: “A 29-Year-Old Joins Times Op-Ed Lineup.” It’s like they hired a talking horse, or this kid!

One of the ironies of this is that Douthat is really just David Brooks with a beard — not necessarily a bad thing, but he’s not very “young” at all. If anything, he’s maybe too much the natural candidate; it’s weird for the Times to make it out like they’re reaching here (while at the same time denying that that’s what they’re doing).

As for the title of my post — I’m being a little cheeky, because I’m also twenty-nine, but I don’t think the Times should have hired me; if they were looking for a young conservative, I think they should have hired Douthat’s Grand New Party co-author Reihan Salam, who is genuinely young and weird in addition to being talented and smart. I’ll be happy to be wrong, but I predict that Douthat at the Times will try too hard to be gray and lame; Salam would have been offbeat and fun, like Maureen Dowd is allegedly supposed to be.

One reason why Alan Moore (like lots of other people) may have thought that Watchmen was unfilmable was the use of subtle associations and tiny messages that could only be revealed by long scrutiny of the individual pages and panels. According to Moore, in Watchmen we see:

sort of “under-language” at work … that is neither the “visuals” nor the “verbals” but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two. A picture can be set against text ironically, or it can be used to support the text, or it can be completely disjointed from the text — which forces the reader into looking at the scene in a new way… the reader has the ability to stop and linger over one particular “frame” and work out all of the meaning in that frame or panel. (Quoted in “Reading Space in Watchmen.”)

Well, movies don’t allow that same kind of attention at full speed in the theater. They DO allow it in the freeze-frame — and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen title sequence actually slows down and freezes the frame for you. Now Meredith Woerner’s got the goods on the easter eggs in the title sequence for Watchmen, and at least one is a doozy:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice has a big Batman reference. First, check out the posters to the right. Look familiar? And isn’t that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death? And according to commenter Rainbucket, the opera bills say: “Die Fledermaus” (The Bat). So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

Via Nerdcore.

P.S.: I haven’t listened to these yet, but apparently there are some Watchmen podcasts that go through the book panel-by-panel the same way Woerner goes through the title sequence. These via Mystery Man on Film.

Kevin Kelly on technology and group identity:

Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance.  We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces, or crafts our identity.

Most of Kelly’s aticle focuses on tool cultures among Highland tribes in New Guinea, but Kelly’s also recently written about technology adoption among the Amish — which is, of course, unusually explicit about the relationship between technology and group identity. 

I’m not sure about this hedge, though:

In the modernized west, our decisions about technology are not made by the group, but by individuals. We choose what we want to adopt, and what we don’t. So on top of the ethnic choice of technologies a community endorses, we must add the individual layer of preference. We announce our identity by what stuff we use or refuse. Do you twitter? Have a big car? Own a motorcycle? Use GPS? Take supplements? Listen to vinyl? By means of these tiny technological choices we signal our identity. Since our identities are often unconscious we are not aware of exactly why we choose or dismiss otherwise equivalent technology. It is clear that many, if not all, technological choices are made not on the technological benefits alone. Rather technological options have unconscious meaning created by social use and social and personal associations that we are not fully aware of.

But aren’t these choices still deeply social? Partly it’s about access: if you don’t have daylong access to the web (or access to the web at all) you ain’t twittering, son. But you’re also not likely to do it if your friends and coworkers and neighbors don’t twitter. Group identity is a lot more complex in the modernized west, sure — but pure individual choice it ain’t. In fact, our adoption of technology actually helps us form new groups and social identities that are not quite tribal/ethnic — or it helps us reinforce those bonds. 

P.S.: My title, “tool culture,” isn’t from Kelly’s article, but from paleoanthropology. One of the things I love about the study of groups like the Neanderthals is that we have evidence of their tool use long after we have fossilized remains. We can actually distinguish between Neanderthal and human settlements based on their tools. 

Neanderthals and homo sapiens definitely coexisted. People aren’t sure whether Neanderthals interbred with modern humans or not, which makes it hard to know when exactly the Neanderthals died out. Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, if a group of anatomically modern humans adopted Neanderthal tools? That technologies could reach not just across ethnicities, but across species as well? 

Der Spiegel:

“We noticed that American products and the American way of eating are trendy at the moment,” Judith Witting, sales manager for Sprehe, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Americans are more relaxed. Not like us stiff Germans, like (Chancellor Angela) Merkel.”

The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word “fingers” in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. “It’s like hotdogs,” Witting said. “No one would ever think they are actually from dogs.”

For Americans in Germany, though, there is a risk that the product might be seen as racially insensitive. Fried chicken has long been associated with African-Americans in the US — naming strips of fried chicken after the first black president could cause some furrowing of brows.

Witting told SPIEGEL ONLINE the connection never even occurred to her. “It was supposed to be an homage to the American lifestyle and the new US president,” she said.

Don’t get dizzy now: Jason Kottke picks up on a word I kind of made up in response to one of his posts and runs with it:

Retronovation n. The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback’s use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural’s glass bottle, and General Mills’ introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals. In general, the local & natural food and farming thing that’s big right now is all about retronovation…time tested methods that have been reintroduced to make food that is closer to what people used to eat. (I’m sure there are non-food examples as well, but I can’t think of any.)

No sooner does Jason oh-so-gently throw down the gauntlet than Waxy, who almost certainly meant nothing of the kind, answers the question by linking to an amazing post about a transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan about Raiders of the Lost Ark:

(Key: G = George; S = Steven; L = Larry)

G

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times, has some suggestions to remedy the venial sins of cyclists:

NO. 1: How about we stop at major intersections? Especially where there are school crossing guards, or disabled people crossing, or a lot of people during the morning or evening rush. (I have the law with me on this one.) At minor intersections, on far-from-traffic intersections, let

When I wrote my last post, I googled “North by Northwest” to check the train route Cary Grant takes in that film. I came across a term I hadn’t (to my knowldge) seen before: kinetic typography.

Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. Similar to the study of traditional typography of designing static typographic forms, kinetic typography focuses on understanding the effect time has on the expression of text. Kinetic typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text.

A classic example of kinetic typography is the Saul Bass-designed title sequence for North By Northwest:

This concept reminds me of Walther Ruttmann’s great documentary film Berlin, which did kinetic typography the old-fashioned way: take a big, horking street sign and zip past it on a train:

It also reminds me (of course) of Bob Brown’s “Readies” and Eugene Jolas’s Revolution of the Word.

But kinetic typography in these senses are in some sense old hat — how are we taking kinetic type and making it new?

Here is a YouTube playlist of new, digitally produced exemplars of kinetic typography, assembled by Jo

New York to San Francisco in one week on an Amtrak sleeper car. My wife forwarded me this email with one sentence: “This is my dream trip.”

There are two reasons why people lose economic confidence. In the first case, there’s enough instability that you just don’t know what’s going to happen. In the second case, you have a pretty good idea about tomorrow, but you know that things are going to be genuinely bad.

If you know things are going to be genuinely bad, then given sufficient resources, you can prepare for them: save money, make a budget, gather information and make plans. In particularly, if you know (for example) that your income is going to drop or your rent is going to go up by a preset amount, you can budget accordingly. But if you really have no idea about tomorrow — whether you could get your pay cut, or get outright fired, whether gasoline prices could halve or double — then you just lurch from day to day, not knowing quite what to do, afraid to spend, afraid to save, generally, afraid.

This is where colleges and universities are now:

Colleges

In English, the names of (some) vowel sounds are given by a smaller subset of those sounds — so “A” involves one of the pronunciations of “a,” ditto “E,” “I,” and “O,” with the exception of “U,” which by all rights ought to be “oo” instead of “yoo.” Let’s just chalk this up to the Y-as-an-assistant-vowel phenomenon, whereby the “U” in words like “cute” or “fume” is pronounced “yoo.” And “I” is a dipthong, but that’s neither here nor there.

Consonants are generally either given by a pronounciation of a consonant plus a vowel (“B” = “bee”) or a vowel plus the consonant (“S” = “ess”). “W” is weird, as is “H,” “Y” is and always shall be a mess. “Q” is, surprisingly, not bad; even if it slights the typical sound of the consonant — arguably, so does “C.”

Consonants are even harder than vowels to articulate completely in isolation, so it seems obvious that you need SOME vowel with the consonant. But why do some letters get the vowel in front and others the vowel in behind? And while most letters get the short e in front or the long E behind, this isn’t universal – “J” and “K” could just as easily by “Jee” and “Kee” (assuming that “G” was “ghi” or “gay” or “goo” or something else).

You could say that as a general rule, names of letters avoid being homonyms with meaningful words, but “B,” “C,” “J,” “P,” and “T” violate this rule — in the case of “B,” pretty drastically.

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that there is some partial motivation for the sounds we use — maybe “M, “N,” or “S” appear more often at the end of words than other letters, so they get known by an end-consonant sound.

Think with me — imagine an alphabet where all the names of consonants were reversed, so that:

“B” = “ebb”

“C” = “ack” / K = “eck”

“D” = “edd,”

“M” = “mee”

“N” = “nee”

and so on. What would be wrong with that pronunciation of the alphabet?