Weekend Reads: The Cure, Substack, MonsterVerse Movies, Purity Culture, Scientific Ethics
Recommended weekend reading material for April 17, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
This week marked the 40th anniversary of The Cure’s third album, Faith, which was released way back in 1981. Ben Hewitt has penned an in-depth retrospective on the album, which is one of my favorite Cure albums.
Conventional wisdom has it as the second part of a desolate trilogy that starts with 1980’s Seventeen Seconds and culminates with 1982’s Pornography, yet it deserves to be seen as more than a mere step towards the event horizon. I’d argue, in fact, that while it’s by no means The Cure’s first great album, it might be the first great “Cure album”.
Nicole Raney has compiled a list of women who were instrumental to the early stages of electronic music as we know it. For example, Delia Derbyshire:
Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) is an electronic music composer whose career is defined by her long stint at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and for her contribution to the famous Doctor Who theme music. She has greatly influenced subsequent British electronic musicians. Recommended listening: Standard Music Library: Electronic Music and The Dreams.
One of my favorite music bloggers has launched a new website and in the process, moved away from Substack.
I don’t charge for this newsletter, so Substack doesn’t get my coin, but the company does get some credibility by having an NPR Music personality. Not to glow myself up, but folks tend to listen to what I say, which I don’t take for granted. So here it is, in short: I’m not down with a platform that actively seeks out (and pays) walking HR nightmares and transphobes.
Related to the above link, Peter Kafka summarizes the controversy that has surrounded Substack, which up until now, had received considerable praise for its platform.
First the why: Doyle says they left Substack because they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”
Obviously, I use Substack, and I’ve been a big fan of much of what they’ve accomplished, including their various efforts to help independent writers and bloggers. But to be perfectly honest, I haven’t paid much attention to their “Substack Pro” program, mainly because I use Substack as a secondary channel to help support my primary channel.
It’ll be interesting to see how Substack, once quite the tech darling, rides this out, especially in light of their recent announcement of Substack Local, “a US$1,000,000 initiative to foster and develop the local news ecosystem by helping independent writers build local news publications based on the subscription model.”
Meet the guy who helps right-wing extremists and conspiracy theories like QAnon stay online.
[Nick Lim] founded VanwaTech in late 2019. He hosts some websites directly and provides others with technical services including protection against certain cyberattacks; his annual revenue, he says, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although small, the operation serves clients including the Daily Stormer, one of America’s most notorious online destinations for overt neo-Nazis, and 8kun, the message board at the center of the QAnon movement, whose adherents were heavily involved in the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
My favorite part of the article? Lim’s illuminating thoughts on Orwell’s 1984.
Matt Zoller Seitz rhapsodizes about Godzilla vs. Kong and the rest of the MonsterVerse movies.
This is an ecologically conscious series that ultimately blames every monster incident on human arrogance, treachery, or faulty interpretation of kaiju intent. As such, it is the only franchise that cannot be enjoyed without the viewer accepting complicity in the ecological disaster befalling the planet while simultaneously trembling in awe at the sight of miracles and curses made tangible. These are tragic epics, and that’s the source of their awesomeness. There’s a somewhat humbling aspect to all of the movies, not just because the creatures are so large, but because their rampages are a karmic bill coming due. We knew long ago that it would come to this and here we are, watching cities burn.
I posted my own thoughts re. Godzilla vs. Kong earlier this month.
Craig Mod contemplates the beauty of coding and the peace it can bring during stressful times.
Code soothes because it can provide control in moments when the world seems to spiral. Reductively, programming consists of little puzzles to be solved. Not just inert jigsaws on living room tables, but puzzles that breathe with an uncanny life force. Puzzles that make things happen, that get things done, that automate tedium or allow for the publishing of words across the world.
[…]
The point being that a habit of reaching for code is not only healing for the self, but a trick to transmute a sense of dread into something: A function that seems to add, however trivially, a small bit of value to the greater whole in a troubling moment.
Via Daring Fireball. I deeply feel Mod’s essay. One of the reasons why I love having my own website, and why I frequently work on little personal projects, is because they represent a refuge, a place where I can feel a sense of control and competency. And sometimes, particularly when I solve an irksome bug or glitch, the thrill of enlightenment.
Ana Siljak reflects on the theological mistakes of evangelical purity culture and finds some parallels in the ongoing COVID pandemic.
In purity culture, the world and other people are potentially contaminating objects to be avoided. So many modern phenomena, however well-meaning, slip into this worldview: cancel culture and the Benedict option, the Pence rule and political dating apps, blocking people on Twitter and unfriending them on Facebook. Each of us maintains our purity by casting off the things and people that may defile us, by washing our hands of them: friends and neighbors, Trump supporters and Biden voters, Christians and atheists, those who test positive for COVID, or who think or act differently. In my hometown, a new habit has been born during the coronavirus epidemic — we instinctively cross the street when we see another person coming toward us. Necessary, perhaps, during a time of infection, but remember — so also did the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, lest they touch the “impure” blood of the man who lay beaten in the middle of the road.
In the latest news from the “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” department, scientists have created the first human/monkey hybrid.
[T]he scientists aren’t attempting to create a real-life monkey man. Instead, they say, they’re hoping to better understand cell communication at conception.
As a result of their work, the researchers hope they can learn more about human development, disease progression and drug therapies, and eventually, nurture entire human organs into life, making organ transplants via brain dead donors an obsolete procedure.
Not surprisingly, the announcement has been met with criticism that such experiments are dangerous and unethical.
Every time I see news like this, I can’t help but wonder if the researchers in question have ever read a single sci-fi story or seen a sci-fi movie. Because if they had, then they would know that experiments like theirs never go well.
Finally, Americans were asked to rank the U.S. states from best to worst.
There are endless rankings of the US states: whether they are the best places to live, the best places to do business, how much fun they are. Such judgements are made by economists, companies, and journalists — but what do Americans themselves think?
We asked people to choose the better of two states in a series of head-to-head matchups. States are rated based on their “win percentage”, that is: how often that state won the head-to-head matchup when it was one of the two states shown.
Via 1440. Not surprisingly, Hawaii and Colorado took the top spots. As expected, my own home state of Nebraska is located towards the middle. Personally, I love living in Nebraska, though I wish we had better leaders.
From the Blog
Faith is one of my favorite Cure albums, so naturally, I had to write something to mark its 40th anniversary.
Released in 1981, Faith rarely matches Pornography’s free-fall into the abyss for intensity. But what it lacks in misanthropic abandon, it more than makes up in haunting reflections on spirituality, grief, and death. Given the order in which the two albums were released, Faith feels like an attempt by Smith et al. to grieve the last, flickering vestiges of hope before ultimately shrugging their shoulders at the futility of it all, popping some acid, and embracing the despair for Pornography.
Pornography might get all the acclaim — it appears on lists of the darkest albums of all time and is considered a gothic rock cornerstone — but I find the grief undergirding Faith’s eight songs to be far more affecting than Pornogaphy’s raging despair. And it’s this same grief that allows Faith to contain some of The Cure’s most poignant and personal songs.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, sneak previews, and podcasts. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.