The Cultural Intellect

Amos Lee Never Gets Old

Matthew Iles — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:17:08 +0000

We pride ourselves on finding new music here, discussing good music here, and ultimately that means we listen to music – a lot.

When the new John Mayer hit (link to podcast), I listened to it straight through several times. Less than a week later — even though I like it! — it’s already started to drive me crazy. This is an inevitability with almost any musician across any genre. Squeeze it too much too often and you might just love it death.

Amos Lee, however, is immune to this fate. Inexplicably, whenever the Flavor of the Week tunes start to lose its sweetness, I know I can run back to Amos. Here are three reasons why:

He’s really damn good. I know, I’m really opening your eyes here. But it’s true. There’s an earnestness to his music that can only be achieved through his moderate commercial success. He’s got the voice, he’s got the guitar, and his music sounds like he’s right there playing in your living room.

His music is extremely varied. Never accuse Amos of cookie-cutter songs. Never. From Night Train — “I’ve been working on the night train / drinking coffee taking cocaine” — to Southern Girl — “Something ’bout a Southern Girl make me feel right / In a Mississippi morning, she’s angel in flight” — Amos never lays the same hand twice.

His music can be dark and downright scary — “Out in the desert, it’s as still as death / It’s as if mother nature were holding her breath” — and it can be light and airy — “I’m in love with a girl who’s in love with the world, though I can’t help but follow / Though I know someday she is bound to go away and stay over the rainbow.”

Listen to his music over and over and it’s like a constant roller coaster of emotion. You can never get tired of it.

He can sing about anything and make you empathetize. Taking cocaine in empty train stations, getting locked up for assault and battery, girls leaving him…from the extreme to the common, we feel like we’ve been there before. Probably his greatest asset: he sings the blues with a side-smile. His friends might kick him while he’s down and everyone might be telling him to shoo, but he’s always got just enough optimism to make you think it’s all gonna turn out alright: “It’s the love that pulls us through.”

“So when they tell me to keep on dreamin’ / that’s just what I’m gonna do.”

Amen, Amos. Amen.

How To Find The Perfect Photo

Matthew Iles — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:04:26 +0000

(two zero nine/flickr)

Read time (step-by-step only): <1 minute.
Read time (total, w/ examples): 2-3 minutes.

Move over, Google Images. Hello, Flicker.

Okay, okay, I know this Flickr thing ain’t exactly new, so forgive me if I sound like a little bit dated.

(One of my favorite quotes is from my Dad: “No good music was made after 1979.” A great attitude for getting left in the past.)

The Breakdown:

1) Go to flickr.com, sign in or set up a Yahoo! account if you don’t have one (don’t worry this process doesn’t make you set up an email account or jump through rings of fire; username, password, move on.)

2) Click “Search” -> “Advanced Search” in the top right.

3) Type in your image keyword, i.e. what you’re looking for.

4) Scroll down and select “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.” This means the search will only return photos that have been approved by the artist for use anywhere rights-free.

5) Hit search, then select “Interesting,” to have them sorted by most interesting as voted by the flickr community.

6) Enjoy! If you’re embedding in a blog like here, click “Share This!” on the top right of the photo page and copy and paste the HTML. Otherwise, the URL will do just fine.

ETIQUETTE: It’s accepted social practice to put the flickr username and flickr in parentheses for attribution. Like this, (dukemgi2, flickr).

Discrete and Abstract Examples –

Mos Def:

(shoehorn99/flickr)

Politics:

(stitch/flickr)

Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden:

(thomashawk/flickr)

Music:

(theenginedriver/flickr)

Why Twitter Really Grinds My Gears

David Freed — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:40:54 +0000

Well thought-out, researched journalism is being replaced by Twitter’s 140-character discussion limits. Instead of an insatiable thirst for knowledge, my generation is instead drowning in tweets.

For the record, I hate Twitter.

That Twitter thrives in America today is an indication of the ADD culture that has permeated my generation. At 140 characters at a time, how am I supposed to feel connected to my friends and family?

The short-attention-span livelihood so many of us lead leaves us very little room to actual gain real insight into the people and events around us. By having tweets sent to us by people we don’t actually know, are we supposed to feel as though we are actually connected to a world otherwise alien to us.

For those who are not rich and famous, Twitter provides a channel for regular joes to feel as though our cultural icons are accessible, real, even our friends.

One critique of Facebook is that it makes people less social in real life. Rather than going out and living, people are stuck at home on their computers browsing the billions of pictures available. Many argue Twitter, on the other hand, is simply a mini-blog to keep your friends aware of what you are doing, thus facilitating interaction through impromptu meetings.

I completely disagree and see Twitter as simply more evidence that we are a nation of procrastinators. Although technology in general has enabled us to accomplish things much faster than ever before, it has also opened our eyes to a myriad of available information and our inability to consume all of it. As such, we are continually overwhelmed at the amount of things we have to do, thus lowering our individual effort to each specific action.

Think about it. As you’re sitting there, half-reading what I’ve written, you’re probably listening to music, have a tab up on Firefox or IE with your email streaming in, and periodically glance at your phone lying next to you.

According to Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non (or, “without which there is nothing”) of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your daily experience—from mood to productivity to relationships.

Yes, part of me would like to know how the_Real_Shaq is doing on his diet or how many miles lancearmstrong has ridden on his bike today. But the real part of me, the better part of me, would rather live my life and make my life a success while being surrounded both digitally and otherwise with people who care about me as much as I care about them.

I’m Going To The Future. But Can I Ever Come Back?

Matthew Iles — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:35:14 +0000

Nerd Alert: Recently, the books I’ve been reading before I go to bed haven’t been the usual formulaic thriller or my semi-conscious snobbish attempt to make it through one of The Classic. Instead, I’ve been reading about time travel.

And let me tell you, it’s freakin’ awesome.

This all started with an article I found called “13 Things That Don’t Make Sense,” which is a quick-hit list of some of science’s most profoundly stupefying paradoxes and unsolved mysteries. Then, I picked up a book on entanglement, which is this philosophically bizarre concept too complicated to wrap my head around, but it promised to usher in the advent of teleportation one day. And God knows, we’d all love that.

Time travel, though, is truly fascinating because of its stubborn ability to defy scientific attempts to prove it impossible. In fact, one hundred years ago, it was impossible. But then Einstein showed up, sci-fi writers entered a Golden Age, and time travel was soon considered a very plausible future discovery.

But it’s not the time travel you’ve read, seen or dreamed of. This is very strange, to me anyway, so try to follow.

We can travel forward in time, but not by making time conform to us. Think: H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, in which the main character pulls a lever and the world around him speeds up as he sits still in his device. This is too easy, apparently.

Instead, to travel forward in time, you need to travel far out into space. Very, very far out and very, very fast. Something about moving extremely fast makes time slow down for the traveler, but in a way that you don’t notice it. (Like how you can move normally in a car, despite the fact you’re actually moving 80 mph.)

I feel a lot of people have read an explanation similar to this — The Twin Paradox — but it still rubs off weird. How come I can jet off in a spaceship, come back after a year, and for everyone else it’s been 100 years?

Watch this video. And forgive the cheesy graphics and the fact that they named Einstein’s fake twin brother Bertrand. Make sure you stick with it until the light-mirror clock. It’s so cool and actually starts to make sense.

The bad news about all this, though, may be that there isn’t as much support for the ability to travel backward in time. Because, in essence, the above explanation says that you don’t speed everything else up to travel forward…it’s slowing yourself down time-wise by going really fast spatially — jeez, this stuff is complicated — and letting the world pass by as normal.

It’s not like you could instead move extremely, extremely slowly and have the clock turn back. Just ask couch potatoes anywhere; the world still spins in spite of them.

There’s a lot of questions here, but the one I’m most interested in hearing about from people is this: If you could travel to the future, but knew you could never go back, would you still go?

The Sea Monster That Can Upgrade Your TV

Matthew Iles — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:05:56 +0000

While this may look like a creature borne from the imaginings of the Recess Bully we all grew up with and hated, the mantis shrimp — which is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, and that’s one of the least weird facts about it — may hold the key to upgrading our televisions, indeed even our entire visual field, with those big buggy eyes.

And it starts with something called circular polarized light, CPL, which is a form of light that no creature on Earth can perceive. Except, that is, ol’ Manty here. Unlike other forms of light such as black-and-white, color and linear polarized, CPL are too difficult for organisms to process due to their coiled wavelength nature. But CPL is very valuable in that it more densely packs information into its tight spirals than, say, linear polarized ever could.

Also, as if it’s showing off or something, the mantis shrimp also boasts a visual field that can distinguish 100,000 different colors — ten times as many as humans.

This biological technology, which researchers say “far surpasses any current material manufacturing capabilities,” could lead to breakthroughs in how we’re able to see our world.

But be careful, these little guys mean business. Their claw-pinching action is the second-fastest recorded movement in the animal kingdom, and they are known for pulverizing their prey or anything else it deems threatening. Read that again — pulverizing, as in, to dust.

Which raises the obvious question: How far are you willing to go for a few more colors and pixels on your TV screen?

Yeah, me too.

For extra science fun, check out Wired’s “What’s Old Is New: 12 Living Fossils.” Since Manty hasn’t changed in approximately 500 million years, you know he makes the list. Check out what else did here.

Music Videos That Transcend The Song They Were Made For

Matthew Iles — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:59:58 +0000

Music videos have experienced an interesting, exhilarating and, as of late, troubled life. But even as Music Television becomes less and less like music television and TRL no longer exists at all, some artists out there still know how to make a good video.

Sometimes, in fact, they transcend the song itself, making you forget all about the lyrics being sung and just watching how the video and audio combine for one solid story.

Here are two classic examples.

Obviously two very different genres of music, but nevertheless the videos become somewhat of a short film. And it’s not even like the music dictates what the video should be. (At least, I’m pretty sure Kanye’s and Lykke Li’s weren’t about trippy, outer-space adventures where your head pops off from time to time.)

Know of any good music videos that accomplish this same feat? Let us know! Place a comment below.

And check back tomorrow for two more music videos, two of my all-time favorites actually, that seriously get you deeply invested in inanimate objects in just 3-4 minutes. Must watch material.

Dreadhead, Shredhead

Matthew Iles — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:56:49 +0000

Sports fans are constantly debating the greatest of all time. Debate isn’t strong enough, actually. I mean, people fight over this stuff.

“Barry Sanders is a punk cry-baby.” “Bitch, I’ll kill you!”

Alright, maybe I’ve seen some extreme “debates,” but the point rings true nonetheless. Music has similar discussions regarding 1) bands and 2) guitar players. With bands—well, this might make parents feel super old—but The Beatles are starting to occupy a space in music’s memory the way that we anoint Vince Lombardi as one of the greatest football coaches (see? sports!) despite the fact that few people engaged in the argument were actually around during his heyday. It’s almost a foregone conclusion, and so any other arguments over this are really about who’s No. 2.

Guitarists is similar. Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. No one really seems to debate this much, and the two are so different that to argue for who’s one and who’s two is really just a matter of taste. Red wine or white wine? In the end, it’s less about the wine and more about the occasion. Same for these guys.

But those dudes have come and gone, their time has passed. Hendrix rocked Woodstock with his teeth-gnashing and Star-Spangled Banner prowess forty years ago this summer. Clapton first caught our attention with his crying guitar around the same time. But people still play guitar just like coaches still coach. So if Hendrix and Clapton are unquestioned royalty, who are the worthy princes?

Okay, so maybe there's some talk about him. But still...

I don’t care what anybody says, and yes he does have a song called “Used to Get High,” but John Butler is someone who doesn’t get talked about enough as a musician in general. Now, in regards to his guitar playing specifically? Well, roll the tape.

Who do you think is the best active guitarist? If someone says Jason Mraz, I will throw up.

A Return to Profits

Matthew Iles — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:38:23 +0000

Or, How Newspapers Should Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

Supply and demand. Simple economics, right?

Except, that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore in the news industry. There’s still a strong demand for news, and there’s certainly a supply. But it’s a choking, suffocating, we-stopped-treading-water-hours-ago drowning supply, as major newspapers around the country are hemorrhaging money fast enough to make those stock graphs teeter near a complete and straight-down nosedive.

How, though? This is business, damn it. Newspapers sink cost to create a quality product that consumers demand. But since the advent of the Internet, since this era was coined the Information Age, consumers no longer consume in the traditional sense. That is, they don’t see the sense in paying for it.

Oh, they consume. Like unprejudiced locusts, people scour the web for the answers they seek, jumping from site to site—skimming, scanning, subscribing, and sharing.

A sense of digital entitlement among Internet users has pervaded our culture. Starting long ago in the Age of Napster, when the euphemism “file-sharing” was quickly created to replace its uglier synonyms “copyright infringement,” “song stealing,” and “Internet piracy,” people began to think that since they could obtain certain things for free online meant they should be able.

Basically, the Internet provided a real-life stage for the age-old question: “If you knew you could get away with stealing, would you?” And, perhaps to the disappointment of more moral generations to come, we collectively answered, “Hell, yes.”

Which brings us to today’s news: The Health of Journalism. In 13 short years of wide-spread Internet use, the American public has not only become accustomed to obtaining its news for free, but also become unappreciative of original news reporting and writing. Quite simply, people take their news for granted these days.

In a March 2009 survey conducted out of the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t miss the loss of their local newspaper much or even at all. Perhaps more worrisome for the industry, 48 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 39 answered the question similarly.

For a little while, publishers and editors thought they could rely on online advertising from their websites to buoy the loss of revenue from subscription cuts. But as with nearly every other Internet company that executed a drive-traffic-first, make-money-later business plan, this plan fell solidly on its face.

So now the newspaper industry has one tough predicament on its hands. It must convince readers to return to its product—a product they take for granted, consider disposable and believe replaceable—and simultaneously persuade them to pay for it.

Micropayments, industry-owned advertising groups, single web-subscriptions across multiple publications…seemingly anything plausible and possibly profitable was discussed at a recent industry convention in Chicago.

At least one thing was in agreement: Content must be paid for. After all, this is business.

Now that various digital platforms are becoming the medium of choice for so many news readers, it makes sense to charge for what is expensive to report and edit professionally. —Rick Edmonds, Poynter

One of the forefront leaders of this intrepid march into the unknown is the Gray Lady herself. Despite the crown-jewel-investment-turned-thorn-in-the-side that is the Boston Globe as well as some more local and internal troubles, the New York Times is spending money (lots of money) on research and development of fresh news consumption methods and technologies—and, of course, ways of enticing people to pay for them.

One ideological, even if small, change within the company’s approach is the relabeling of its customers. Instead of referring to its audience as “readers”, the Times has stressed the not-all-that-semantic shift to “users.”

Here’s an interesting video interview the Nieman Journalism Lab out of Harvard had with Nick Bilton, the Design Integration Editor with the New York Times. (Sorry, the video couldn’t be embedded.)

One of the extremely cool innovations out of the NYTimes recently is its Times Reader 2.0. It’s an offline application that mimics the look and layout of the real-deal newspaper, loads “Breaking News” stories whenever they’re added to the site, comes with a browsing function that allows for quick skimming of article headlines (just like over morning breakfast!) and, yes, even has the daily crossword. The free download can be found here.

Currently, you get the front-page articles, the business section, the crossword and some other mini-extras all for free. And for only $3.45 per week, you can get every section of the Times to your desktop everyday—even the weekly Sunday magazine section. For comparison sake, daily home delivery costs $7.40 a week, and that’s with the current sale of 50-percent off.

It’s just one step in what plans to be a long haul toward staving off the industry’s collapse, but it’s one that makes an important break from recent attempts of the last few years. The Times Reader is comfortable in its own skin, comfortable in rejecting the old models and practices and trying something truly new.

For too long, newspaper leaders clung hopelessly to their Linus blankets, and as the Internet became less a passing tide and more a complete and utter game changer, terms such as tradition and timeless and nostalgia offered little in the way of a lifeboat. And it seems, supporting itself with only its last few gasps of air, the industry is ready for change.

Now, of course, the really hard work begins.

Peter Callesen: The Mundane Becomes Magnificent

Matthew Iles — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:39:43 +0000

Artist Peter Callesen has made a career for himself out the same material we buy, use and throw out in small, makeshift basketballs everyday—plain white paper. Through what must only be painstakingly delicate work and breathtakingly creative concepts, Callesen has truly hit the mark. Not only are we moved be the objects and shapes he makes from the paper, but so many of his works show the scraps, the leftovers as well, which adds a certain how-the-hell-did-he-do-that quality to them.

And he’s not limited in size either.

The Short Distance Between Time and Shadow, 2006

Distant Wish, 2006

Fall, 2008

Fall and The Short Distance Between Time and Shadow are both excellent examples of his ability to create two images, two works within one. The tree and the skeleton, for instance, are both remarkable in their own rites, but then the combination of life and death in one piece creates so much to look at, so much to think about and so much to feel.

[A4 sheet paper] is probably the most common and consumed media used for carrying information today. This is why we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper. By taking away all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white A4 paper sheet for my creations, I feel I have found a material that we are all able to relate to, and at the same time the A4 paper sheet is neutral and open to fill with different meaning. The thin white paper gives the paper sculptures a frailty that underlines the tragic and romantic theme of my works.” -Peter Callesen

Can you imagine the papercuts this guy must get? Occupational hazard, I suppose.

More after the jump. Seen @ Black*Eiffel. Peter Callesen Homepage.

Erected Ruin, 2007

Når alt kommer til alt, 2006

Drag Me To Hell? Yes, Please!

Michael Burakow — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:03:58 +0000

Hair in the mouth is the worst.

When you hear the name Sam Raimi, what do you think of?

Ok, movies, good start. What else?

Spiderman? Yeah, that too, but what else?

How about the movie, the cult sensation in fact, that launched his career: The Evil Dead. This then sparked two other sequels, which likewise became cult classics. Besides directing these, he has also produced numerous other horror films, including The Grudge 1-3, Boogeyman, The Messengers and 30 Days of Night.

Horror is where Raimi has his filmmaking roots, and it finally seems as if he is making a triumphant return with Drag Me to Hell. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Raimi—more for Spiderman 1 and 2, but The Evil Dead sure is fun. But when I first saw the preview forHell, I thought, ‘Well shit, another cliché horror film with nothing new to bring to the table, and seemingly sub-par special effects as well.’

Here’s the trailer.

Yeah, the bug lady had a staple in her forehead. You know…the usual.

Ok, thoughts? To me, doesn’t look bad, doesn’t look great—just another fun popcorn flick.

BUT (yes, a definite but), I am entirely intrigued. Have you seen the latest reviews?

Currently on Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 100% Fresh rating! Check out some of these reviewers’ comments:

“‘A delirious haunted house carnival ride.‘…’a slickly made, engaging horror film that evokes the spirit of much of the director’s early work.‘…’Drag Me To Hell was quite simply the most perfect horror film I’ve seen in a long, long while.‘”

Being an avid horror fan, and usually left unimpressed by such movies as One Missed Call and Pulse, which are both remakes of Japanese films might I add, I am thrilled to see this movie is getting great reviews—so far.

Maybe this has something to say about originality and straying away from the remakes of classic and well-done ORIGINAL Japanese horror films. I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna check out this movie the minute it hits theaters May, 29.