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Tag: chuck klosterman

Published October 3, 2011

Monday Miscellany

I’m sorry for the lack of a weekend post, but to make up for it, here is a Monday round-up to get your week started right…

Owned — Josh Davis AKA DJ Shadow interviewed on the Intelligent Life blog:

My sense of value comes from the fact that music is my life… People always think it’s about money or my personal wealth or something like that. It’s about this art form that’s taken a drubbing in the last decade. I’m not talking about what a wonder it is that music has been democratised. Music between 1960 and 1970: how can you even chart that progress? Music between 1970 and 1980: entire genres come and go, massive leaps. Music between 2001 and 2011: I don’t think there’s a massive difference… We have access to all this music now and I’ve been hearing for 12 years what a miracle that’s going to be and how it’s going to revolutionise music. But I work in the clubs and I’m not seeing any evidence of this shift. People seem to think we own the internet as a collective brain-trust. We don’t own the internet. The internet is owned by the same people that own everything else. They make money from the advertising that you’re being shown as you look at somebody’s life’s work, and they’re not being given a dime.

You can listen DJ Shadow’s new album The Less You Know, The Better on NPR.

And on a semi-related note: Chuck Klosterman on music and nostalgia for Grantland.

The Idiot — Cartoonist Daniel Clowes interviewed at Flavorpill:

If I ever met a young cartoonist who is really amazing I would say just don’t do any interviews, don’t do any public appearances. Just remain a mystery. Because once you do one, then that becomes your opinion on record. Unless you get it exactly right that first time, you have to keep modifying it over the years, because I’m certainly not the same person I was when I did my first interview. I was probably 26 years old. I was an idiot.

Playing the Part — Grant Morrison’s Supergods reviewed at Robot 6:

[M]any creators Morrison discusses are his peers, rivals, colleagues and bosses — it’s nice to get a book like this that’s unafraid to engage in industry gossip from a working creator, but, at the same time, it makes one suspicious of the writer, who becomes an unreliable narrator of his own career. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that early on in the book, Morrison says he was acting a part, an invented persona as a sort of demonic, enfant terrible punk early in his career, publicly sneering at Alan Moore’s work and engendering animosity. How does a reader know he’s not still playing a part?

And finally…

From Business Week: Amazon, the company that ate the world:

Although the decision to design and build its own hardware is a high-stakes bet, it’s equally true that Bezos had no choice but to enter the tablet business. About 40 percent of Amazon’s revenues comes from media—books, music, and movies—and those formats are rapidly going digital. Amazon was late to understand the speed of that transition; Apple, which launched the iPod in 2001 and iTunes two years later, wasn’t. The iPad has only strengthened Apple’s hold over digital media. There’s a Kindle app for the iPad, but Apple takes a 30 percent slice of all content that app makers sell on the tablet and has restricted Amazon from directing iPad users to its website in order to avoid giving Apple its cut. Doing business on the iPad threatens Amazon’s already thin profit margins.

Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. “Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. “On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each others toes? Yes.”

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Published August 17, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Superhybridity — Tom Payne reviews Retromania by Simon Reynolds for The New York Times:

It’s not so much the selling-­out that saddens Reynolds. Rather, it’s our ready acceptance that the past is our only future: that after postmodernism, with its weary, overinformed view that there is nothing new to say, comes something called “superhybridity.” Superhybridity, a concept borrowed from an art magazine, exists because the Internet can bring whatever we want into our hard drives, so that we can sample it or mash it up: no culture, from any time or place, can be remote from us.

Anger — In light of the recent riots in Britain, Chris Arnot looks at the legacy of Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) with the author’s son David:

Something about the sudden switch from menace to charm, coupled with that jack-the-lad swagger, briefly brings to mind Arthur Seaton, the antihero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning… Arthur had already shrugged off the collectivist values of the postwar years. He was “trying to screw the world … because it’s trying to screw me.”

“Currently my head is empty. I am on holiday.” — Wim Crouwel at Designers & Books.

The Weird Outsider — A long profile of Jared Lanier, author of You Are Not A Gadget, in the New Yorker:

Like an innovative painter who alternately courts and scorns the establishment, Lanier often seems torn between embracing and repudiating his newly influential status. As we drove, he mentioned, with some pride, that he had been “banned” from the TED conferences last year, after publishing an essay about the narcissistic nature of the event in a London magazine. (A spokesperson for TED said that Lanier is welcome at the conferences.) He purported to be similarly unimpressed by Davos, the economic conference, which he has attended “a billion times.” “At one point, I was in an elevator with Newt Gingrich and Hamid Karzai,” he said. “There are really only so many times you want to be in that situation.”

And finally…

Writer Chuck Klosterman interviews Bill James, inventor of sabermetrics — the “ideological engine” behind Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ book on baseball — and author of a new book Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, for Grantland:

This line is fascinating if you’re interested in crime fiction:

The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes is dangerous because it encourages people to think that — if they’re intelligent enough — they could put all the pieces together in absolute terms. But the human mind is not sophisticated enough to do that. People are not that smart. It’s not that Sherlock Holmes would need to be twice as smart as the average person; he’d have to be a billion times as smart as the average person.

But this is just great:

There were so many terrible things done by kings and emperors and everyday normal people that are just incomprehensible today. The historian Suetonius writes about how Nero — beyond the many thousands of people he killed in his official duties— liked to sneak out of the palace at night and murder people in the streets, purely for entertainment. Now, whatever you may think of our recent presidents, it’s pretty safe to say they didn’t do that.

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