Weekend Reads (Jul 30): Comic-Con 2022, The Cure, Black Metal, Beyoncé, Cultural Appropriation
Recommended weekend reading material for July 30, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
San Diego Comic-Con 2022 wrapped up earlier this week, and was packed full with trailers, movie announcements, and other things to make nerds everywhere tingle with delight. Rob Bricken has compiled an exhaustive list of everything SDCC-related, from Marvel’s fifth and sixth phases, to the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie, to awesome cosplay.
Related: I posted some thoughts on the new trailers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. And while I haven’t had a chance to blog about the latest Lord of the Rings trailer, suffice to say, Amazon’s got me excited.
How much would you pay to see Bruce Springsteen in concert? His manager is betting that some fans will be totally fine with paying as much as $5,000.
“In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing,” Landau said in a statement to The New York Times. “We chose prices that are lower than some and on par with others. Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range. I believe that in today’s environment, that is a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.”
Personally, I have a hard time justifying anything over a $50 or so for a concert ticket, and even then, it depends on various secondary factors (e.g., location, venue). I don’t care if you’re one of the greatest artists of your generation or not.
The Cure recently announced that their 1992 album Wish will be getting the 30th anniversary reissue treatment this fall. Back in 2016, the Treble staff offered up a comprehensive look at The Cure’s entire discography.
Over time, The Cure’s output slowed down, partially as a result of having more resources at their disposal in which to take their time, and partially because they could afford to take time off. And they’ve released a couple of really good albums in the last 25 years, but they’ve also only released five. So as we anticipate the possibility of new Cure material in the months or year ahead, it seemed an appropriate time to evaluate the band’s material on the whole, and see how their 13 albums stack up after all this time — which is the best Cure album, and which one, maybe, isn’t.
Related: 12 of my favorite Cure songs.
Writing for Christ and Pop Culture, Cameron McAllister explores the beauty, brutality, and banality of black metal.
The prospect of getting gored by a bull may not go down as easily as a margarita, but it does offer a much higher degree of intensity. Burke dubs this the sublime, a category that includes all the hallmarks of black metal: power, vastness, depth, intensity, and obscurity (to name a few). If most pop music resembles a well-manicured garden, black metal is a fierce winter storm raging in a dense forest. It’s magnificent from a distance, but you’ll freeze to death if you’re caught in the middle of it.
Most of the black metal I listen to is of the more atmospheric variety, aka, “blackgaze.” Daygraves’ Imperishable EP is one of my favorite recent examples.
Disclaimer: I edited McAllister’s article.
As a lifelong Nebraskan who has long been fascinated by the open prairie and as someone intrigued by the ways that sound can affect us, this was a must-read: Did the silence of the Great Plans drive some 19th-century settlers insane?
Velez wanted to understand if there was anything special about the soundscape of the prairie. He couldn’t go back in time to record, unfortunately, but Velez could gather more recent recordings from the plains in Nebraska and Kansas, which captured noises like the wind and rain, and from urban areas like Barcelona or Mexico City, which featured weather sounds as well as the din of traffic and pedestrians. He ran the recordings into a program that created visual representations of the spectrum of sound frequencies in the recordings and compared the results to each other and a map of sound frequencies that the human ear can pick up and hear.
Velez found that, while all the landscapes contained plenty of sounds humans would naturally be able to hear, the sounds of the city were more diverse, spreading more across the range of human hearing and forming something like white noise. But out on the prairie, there was little to none of that background din. And what sounds there were coincided with a particularly sensitive part of the human hearing range the brain notices more readily.
Via Frosted Echoes.
Beyoncé released a new album this week titled Renaissance, and it’s predictably become an instant success. But it’s also become embroiled in some controversy and accusations of theft.
Kelis expanded on her thoughts in two videos posted on Instagram. “My real beef is not only with Beyoncé because, at the end of the day, she sampled a record, she’s copied me before, she’s done stuff before, so have many other artists, it’s fine. I don’t care about that,” Kelis said in the first video. “The issue is… we are female artists, OK, Black female artists in an industry that we—there’s not that many of us, right? We’ve met each other, we know each other, we have mutual friends. It’s not hard, she can contact, right?”
As much as Kelis might’ve wanted Beyoncé to give her a head’s up, legal experts seem to agree that wasn’t necessary — legally speaking, anyway.
Jay Hoffmann recounts several online resources that empowered women in the early days of the web.
Though the digital divide would be slow to close — a problem that continues to this day — by the mid-1990’s, tech forecasters were predicting a more rapidly closing gender gap, somewhat reversing the predominantly male web of the first half of the decade. In 1995, [Stephanie Brail] started the email listserv Spiderwoman as a way to capture women coming online for the frist time, and give them a space to speak their mind, support one another, and stay on the cutting edge of technology.
Following its 2017 launch, Celsius’ founders claimed that its cryptocurrency handling was better and safer than a bank, all the while raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, acquiring billions of dollars in assets, and making outlandish promises to its users. That all came crashing down last month when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, leaving its users high and dry and in perilous financial straits.
It’s easy — and I am guilty of doing so — to have some levity when you read about people losing money on cryptocurrency. It’s easy to think that every person that lost is the same monster you’ve seen on Twitter — a now-rich goon that over-leveraged on monkey JPEGs, a millionaire that is now only a slightly less rich millionaire, and so on — a caricature of something you hate, symbolic of technological hubris that now suffers in a way that’s both satisfying and entertaining.
The reality is less comical, a well of sadness and despair created by a society with few opportunities for the average person to accumulate wealth. Alex Mashinsky and the people working at Celsius are scum, con-artists, and deserve nothing but suffering and pain for the outright lies they have told, the lives they’ve destroyed, and the lives they will destroy through their recklessness and utter, craven evil. Though it’s hard to measure exactly how widespread the damage is, I would gauge that Celsius has caused more widespread retail investor damage than Bernie Madoff, with $12 billion of assets locked up.
Via Pixel Envy.
I own a very small amount of crypto, mainly due to various experiments like the Brave Creators program. But at this point, what possible reasons would I — a relatively sane and decent human being who wants to be financially and socially responsible — have for investing more seriously in crypto?
Related: Dan Olson Explains Why NFTs and Crypto Are So Bad
It’s only been in space for a couple of weeks, but the Webb Space Telescope is already reshaping astronomy, revealing new insights into distant galaxies as well as planets in our own solar system.
After decades of planning and construction, JWST has hit the sky running. The issue now is keeping pace with the constant barrage of science coming down from a machine so complex yet faultless it almost defies belief that it was built by human brains. “It’s working, and it’s insane,” said Larson.
Finally, fashion house Dior has been accused of cultural appropriation after their fall line included an item that some say resembles a centuries-old Chinese skirt.
The pleated wool and mohair skirt has drawn comparisons to an item of historic Chinese clothing known as a “mamianqun,” or “horse face skirt,” despite being described by the French fashion house as a “hallmark Dior silhouette.”
The controversy began earlier this month, with Chinese netizens and state media outlets accusing the brand of failing to acknowledge the alleged inspiration behind its design. A recent editorial in the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, People’s Daily, said that Dior had “shamelessly” misrepresented the skirt as an original creation, describing social media outrage as “completely understandable.”
The skirt, which is priced at $3,800, has been removed from Dior’s website but is apparently still available for purchase in Hong Kong stores.
From the Blog
I’ve been a Star Trek fan for almost as long as I can remember, and one of the more exotic, mind-bending, and breathtaking Star Trek stories I’ve ever experienced is The Wounded Sky, a novel by Diane Duane published back in 1983.
In some ways, The Wounded Sky doesn’t feel like a typical Star Trek novel, despite featuring Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Enterprise crew. Rather, it feels like something more, a distillation of Star Trek’s optimism and philosophical bent transmitted through wild, poetic language that feels blessedly un-beholden to canonicity or franchise requirements.
Read my full review of The Wounded Sky, which includes some thoughts on one of my favorite episodes from The Next Generation.
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