ALEX CAMPBELL'S TUMBLELOG

A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. The waitress informs the couple that the place serves only local, free-range, “heritage-breed, woodland-raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” The conversation does not stop there. Peter asks if the hazelnuts, too, are local. Nance needs to know the size of the parcel of land where the chicken roamed freely. (Four acres.) The waitress excuses herself and returns to the table with a file folder and a photograph. “Here is the chicken you’ll be enjoying tonight,” she says, with therapeutic solemnity. “His name was Colin.” Peter seems appeased: “He looks like a happy little guy who runs around.” But then he wonders if the animal had “a lot of friends—other chickens as friends?” The waitress, who finds this a reasonable question, admits, “I don’t know that I can speak to that level of intimate knowledge about him. ‘Stumptown Girl’, in The New Yorker (Portlandia: “Of the hipsters, by the hipsters, for the hipsters”)

Let’s look ahead to what’s on the [Hollywood studio film] menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.
‘The Day The Movies Died’, by Mark Harris

Let’s look ahead to what’s on the [Hollywood studio film] menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

‘The Day The Movies Died’, by Mark Harris

heyitsnoah:

Famous logos set in the world’s least favorite font.

(via Comic Sans Project)

reblogged from heyitsnoah

Dramas don’t suffer at the hands of the networks in the same way that sitcoms do, and, more important, they don’t make us suffer as much. They usually emerge from one person’s imagination, take more risks, and have the power to really hook us. We say that we “love” certain sitcoms, but we become “obsessed” with dramas. Two new dramas that may—may—have potential are ABC’s “Pan Am” and NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” even though they can’t, by any stretch, be called original. Both are the direct spawn of “Mad Men”—shows set in the early sixties that aim at conveying the changes of the era which led us to where we are now. The new shows are more concerned with hitting their marks and getting the sociology right than with character, but “Pan Am” has a bit of style to it, and a note of darkness, and the formula might just work.

‘Another World’ by the always wonderful Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker (via Nextness)

Dramas don’t suffer at the hands of the networks in the same way that sitcoms do, and, more important, they don’t make us suffer as much. They usually emerge from one person’s imagination, take more risks, and have the power to really hook us. We say that we “love” certain sitcoms, but we become “obsessed” with dramas. Two new dramas that may—may—have potential are ABC’s “Pan Am” and NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” even though they can’t, by any stretch, be called original. Both are the direct spawn of “Mad Men”—shows set in the early sixties that aim at conveying the changes of the era which led us to where we are now. The new shows are more concerned with hitting their marks and getting the sociology right than with character, but “Pan Am” has a bit of style to it, and a note of darkness, and the formula might just work.

‘Another World’ by the always wonderful Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker (via Nextness)

The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”

For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.

‘Flick Chicks’, by Mindy Kaling in The New Yorker

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. ‘Flick Chicks’, by Mindy Kaling in The New Yorker

Liking Jay-Z’s new blog, Life and Times

“You can make a film in Hollywood without Steven Spielberg’s blessing, and you can publish software without Bill Gates’s blessing, but you can’t succeed in fashion without Anna’s blessing.”

‘Anna Wintour’s Brand Anna’, WSJ

Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. ‘Social Animal’ by David Brooks, The New Yorker, January 17th, 2011

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

- Noam Chomsky (via thesuccubusmanifesto, androphilia, miketodd07)

Sound familiar?

reblogged from erickd

A fascinating study of subcultures:

“Each ‘exactitude’ consists of twelve distinct portraits structured in a grid. Think of it as street fashion meets cultural anthropology meets data visualization — a visceral exploration of subcultures, group identity and individualism.”

(via brainpickings.org)

Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what’s okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position! “The best questions to ask on first dates”

somethingchanged:

Aleks Krotoski’s 1984 Project on Flickr: telling the first 369 words (three complete paragraphs) of George Orwell’s classic one word, one day at a time.

reblogged from somethingchanged

I’ve missed that kind of television togetherness, which has largely vanished in the era of DVRs and video on demand; even if you’re watching something that a friend is watching, too, there’s a very good chance you’ve time-shifted it to whatever’s convenient rather than when it was on the air. That makes me think we ought to change the expression “on the air” to “in the air,” since so much of what comes through our televisions these days is hovering rather than streaming, just hanging there until we beckon it, rather than it commanding us to come to the living room and take a seat. ‘Free Range: Togetherness’ by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker

His role as a musician feels like that of a buyer of rare rugs: he has very particular, often exquisite taste. He doesn’t have the vocal instrument of the verifiable greats, but he makes the most of his and his collaborators’ talents. Often, West simply figures out how to be funny, or, increasingly, just says what he’s thinking, as if he were losing interest in the idea of music itself and were instead finding as many ways as possible to tell you about himself. Sasha Frere-Jones on Kanye West’s new album, in The New Yorker

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