Weekend Reads (Apr 30): Frank Peretti, Em Dashes, Neal Adams, Elon Musk
Recommended weekend reading material for April 30, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Christian nostalgia alert! Alissa Wilkinson and her Vox colleagues revisit Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, and consider how these spiritual warfare novels from the ‘80s shaped and influenced modern evangelical Christianity and right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon.
I think what was so appealing is the same thing that’s appealing about any conspiracy thinking: It ascribes meaning and purpose and logic to things that aren’t honestly all that meaningful or purposeful or logical, like random accidents or senseless struggles that ordinary people encounter every day. It made me feel meaningful, like a warrior who could join with other warriors to protect what was good. To be honest, the same sort of thing made the Left Behind books appealing — the main characters even formed a force to fight the Antichrist that they called the “Tribulation Force.” Which is so cool! Especially when you feel kind of helpless and ordinary in your real life.
When I started reading about QAnon’s rise as a belief system, I instantly saw the same sort of thinking at play — that its believers could save the world from a shadowy and hidden cabal of evil. Even if you didn’t ascribe to something quite as fantastical as that, though, there’s a strain of this thinking in all “us versus them” belief systems: that the real truth of what’s going on in the world has only been revealed to the faithful, and their purpose is to fight the other side.
I loved This Present Darkness when I read it back in 5th or 6th grade. And I loved it for the same reason I loved Carman’s music: with all the demon-busting and talk of spiritual warfare, it made being a Christian seem exciting, dangerous, and most of all, bad-ass.
Clive Thompson comes to the defense of the humble — and ever-so-versatile — em dash.
But the em dash? It’s weirdly all-fungible. It can be used in place of all of those punctuation marks I noted above, as the Punctuation Guide notes: “The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark. Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons — in each case to slightly different effect.”
So it’s a shapeshifter, which makes it hard to pin down. Yet that also makes it exciting for me — because it suggests you can bust out an em dash, for, like, no reason at all except that you feel like it.
Via Frosted Echoes.
Noted producer T Bone Burnett has announced Ionic Original, a new analog audio format that’s being billed as “the pinnacle of recorded sound.”
It is archival quality. It is future proof. It is one of one. Not only is an Ionic Original the equivalent of a painting, it is a painting. It is lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc, with a spiral etched into it by music. This painting, however, has the additional quality of containing that music, which can be heard by putting a stylus into the spiral and spinning it.
The first artist to get an Ionic Original release will be Bob Dylan, who has re-recorded several of his songs for the format.
Burnett’s announcement raises all kinds of questions. If it’s “one of one,” does that mean that only one Ionic Original will be released per title? Is it like an NFT? Will listeners really be able to tell the difference between Ionic Original and “regular” formats? And will it last longer than Pono, Neil Young’s failed attempt at a streaming service for high-resolution audio?
German electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze died this week at the age of 74.
Starting out as a drummer for a band called Psy Free, Schulze left the project in the late '60s to join Tangerine Dream as a drummer during one of the group's early incarnations. He worked on their debut album, Electronic Meditation, but stepped away from the project shortly after.
From there, he formed Ash Ra Tempe in 1970, with Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke, but left the group after only one album to pursue a solo career, beginning with 1972's Irrlicht.
Tributes to Schulze have come in from Artoffact Records, Moog Synthesizers, The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, Steve Roach, Martin Stürtzer, and Foetus’ JG Thirlwell (to name a few).
Another noteworthy passing: Neal Adams, the comics artist who helped establish Batman as one of today’s most popular superheroes, died this week at the age of 80. He had quite the career:
To call Adams’ career in comic books storied is to make an understatement. He worked on some of the biggest titles at both Marvel and DC. He co-created characters like the Green Lantern John Stewart — forever iconic to a generation who would grow up with the character as their Green Lantern in the Justice League animated series — the Batman villains Ra’s al Ghul and Man-Bat, Marvel’s Mockingbird, and many more. He illustrated Marvel’s Kree-Skrull War saga and the immensely popular Superman Vs. Muhammed Ali. He pioneered “relevant” comics like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, in which superheroes faced real-world problems like drug addiction instead of just colorful supervillains. He fought for creators’ rights, causing Marvel and DC to begin the practice of returning art to artists. His art influenced comic creators around the world.
In addition to working for Marvel and DC, Adams launched his own comic book company, Continuity Comics, which lasted from 1984 to 1994. Continuity titles included Armor, Bucky O’Hare, Cyberrad, Echo of Futurepast, and Samuree.
As streaming services like Netflix have become more successful, and face increasing competition, they risk turning into the very same “traditional” networks that they’ve overtaken.
It would be a savage irony if streaming, so long a haven for surprising and sometimes disturbing visions, evolved into a younger version of the networks. This scenario is still a ways off, to be clear. Amazon’s Small Axe, Apple TV+’s Severance, and HBO Max’s Station Eleven would all be unimaginable on a conventional network. But can platforms under financial pressure in an increasingly competitive marketplace continue to support this kind of work? Or will only a small number of privileged creators with overall deals be allowed to make work that doesn’t slot into the four-quadrant formula? Dungey points to HBO’s Euphoria as proof that there’s room for dark, edgy material on TV, but says she does see a shift at Netflix, where she was previously an executive. “They came out of the gate really looking to sort of zig where everybody else was zagging, and I think that they have been moving a little bit more toward the mainstream in some of their choices.”
The Uncharted movie has been pulled from theaters in the Philippines over a two-second shot that shows a contested map of the South China Sea.
A two-second frame in the movie contains an image of the so-called nine-dash line, which marks China’s claims in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway. The scene “is contrary to national interest,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The U-shaped line is a feature used on Chinese maps to illustrate its maritime territory in a region where Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, the Philippines and Malaysia all have competing claims.
It’s official: Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44 billion, meaning that the social network will become a privately owned company. Reactions have been mixed, with some prophesying all manner of doom and gloom while others see this as a win for free speech.
Over on my Twitter timeline today, people were going wild with the most definitive, histrionic takes on Musk’s acquisition will mean for the user experience. Twitter is about to be overtaken by trolls and harassers; Twitter is about to re-learn 10 years’ worth of lessons about content moderation the hard way; Twitter is about to see an employee exodus like none we have ever seen. And so on.
Maybe all of that is true, or maybe none of it is. At least some of the worries would seem to be justified, based on Musk’s pasts statements. But the cart feels way ahead of the horse here, and in any case predicting Elon Musk’s behavior is a mug’s game. For all its cultural importance, Twitter had a notably undistinguished life as a public company. For better and for worse, it’s now up to Musk to see whether it can fare any better as a private one.
But as Casey Newton points out in a followup piece, it’s hard to know just what, exactly, Musk is thinking about Twitter: “Oh sure, there’ll be a product tweak here or there. But for the most part he’s just here to settle old scores, and he plans to do it in the most personal way possible.”
Related: What are some of the changes that Musk has in mind for Twitter? Edit buttons, long-form tweets, and open-source algorithms, oh my! Via 1440.
Those claiming that Musk’s new ownership of Twitter is a win for free speech tend to be on the Right, which has long claimed that “Big Tech” companies are censoring conservative voices. I wonder what they’ll say about this case of censorship, in which Twitter hid tweets about a QAnon documentary.
Twitter admitted that it was restricting the reach of tweets about the series after the director, Cullen Hoback, tried paying to boost his own tweet publicizing the film’s iTunes debut on March 21. He was barred from buying promotion for his tweet. An email from Twitter’s ad department stated the film had been “manually reviewed” and deemed to be in violation of the social network’s “inappropriate content” policy. The documentary criticizes Twitter for the role it has played in the spread of QAnon.
Believing the response in error, Hoback’s production house, Hyrax Films, reached out to members of the Twitter communications team to request help. A response came three days later. To Hoback’s surprise, Twitter informed the suppression was intentional.
If you’re worried about what Musk’s ownership means for Twitter, then here’s yet another reminder to create your own website and syndicate your own content. There are a host of options out there for doing so: Substack, Micro.blog, Ghost, WordPress (obvs), or if you’re more technically inclined, you can roll your own with Craft, ExpressionEngine, or Statamic. (FWIW, Opus runs on Craft.)
While I find Musk capricious and mercurial, and I don’t think his ownership will be either the doomsday scenario or the panacea that so many other claim, I’m less worried about my “voice” being somehow affected because I have my own little place on the web that isn’t subject to a billionaire’s whims.
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