Weekend Reads (Jun 17): Spider-Legos, Reddit Woes, Praise & Worship, Godzilla, Worf
Recommended weekend reading material for June 17, 2023.
If you’re a paying subscriber, then I hope you’re enjoying my latest playlist and podcast episode, both of which celebrate the 40th anniversary of Projekt Records, one of my favorite record labels.
Now, on to this week’s links…
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Across the Spider-Verse is on track to be one of 2023’s biggest, most successful movies. And it owes some of that success to a 14-year-old kid.
The name Preston Mutanga might not ring a bell, but anyone who has contributed to the $235 million and counting box office haul for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has seen his work on the big screen.
Mutanga is a 14-year-old from Toronto, Canada, who landed a role as an animator on Across the Spider-Verse after he recreated the film’s trailer shot-for-shot in the style of LEGO blocks and left producers Chris Lord and Phil Miller dazzled (via The New York Times). Not too bad for your industry debut.
Related: My review of Across the Spider-Verse. I didn’t like it as much as the absolutely perfect Into the Spider-Verse, but regardless, it’s a solid middle film that has me excited for next year’s Beyond the Spider-Verse.
Also related: According to Animation Obsessive, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently the #1 film in Russian theaters despite not actually being released there.
John Romita Sr. was responsible for creating what many consider the definitive Spider-Man look. Sadly, he died this week at the age of 93. He was one of Marvel’s most important artists, and his work was instrumental in making Spider-Man one of the world’s most popular superheroes.
Taking over in August 1966 with Amazing Spider-Man #39, Romita would go on to illustrate some of the most iconic stories in the legendary superhero’s history. As well as defining the classic look of the character that is still in the minds of many the ultimate version of Peter Parker and Spider-Man, Romita helped create iconic characters like Mary Jane Watson, Rhino, Kingpin, Shocker, and more. Although Romita would leave Amazing Spider-Man due to the workload in 1971, he would still go on to illustrate the character in the Spider-Man news strip series in the late 70s, and return to the character again and again in his career.
Romita also helped create other popular characters like Wolverine, Luke Cage, and the Punisher and worked on other Marvel titles including The Avengers, Captain America, Fantastic Four, and Uncanny X-Men.
Numerous individuals from the world of comics, including Tom King, Jim Lee, Mark Millar, Fabian Nicieza, and Dan Slott, have paid their tributes to Romita.
What happens when a mommy blogger’s kids start asserting their independence in ways that aren’t conducive to her brand and online persona? And what protections and compensations should kids who are featured in their parent’s YouTube videos, social media accounts, and blog posts receive?
The fact that young children were at the heart of these accounts has always been a source of shame — for me as a reader and for the industry as a whole. The subjects of this content are real children, like the Bird kids, who are starting to realize their entire childhoods, or at least large swaths of it, have been documented on the internet. And that means they are at the mercy of the internet’s judgment.
Currently, the children of content creators have no legally protected rights, but that may be about to change. Incidents over the past few years are beginning to demonstrate how kid-centered content can be a slippery slope into darkness, exploitation, and abuse.
Reddit has long been one of the internet’s most vibrant sites, but recent decisions by its leadership concerning developer fees have led to thousands of its communities going dark (some for 48 hours and some until further notice.)
The organized blackout comes after Reddit announced expensive API pricing changes that threaten to put some third-party Reddit apps out of business. Christian Selig, developer of popular Reddit app Apollo, said he would owe Reddit around $20 million per year under the new policy. As a result, Selig announced that Apollo will be shutting down at the end of the month.
[…]
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman addressed the topic in a Reddit post last week, but his comments were heavily criticized and received thousands of downvotes from Reddit users. Despite backlash from the community, Reddit has yet to reverse course on its plans so far, and the API changes are set to go into effect on July 1 if upheld.
The now-dark communities (called “subreddits”) represent some of Reddit’s most popular destinations with a combined subscriber count of nearly three billion.
Reddit’s decision follows a similar decision at Twitter to increase the costs of using its API, which poses a very real challenge to third-party developers.
As expected, Platformer’s Casey Newton has been all over this. His “warning” is exactly right: “Let this be a lesson to anyone else who ever builds a social network: tell your users that the community belongs to them for long enough, and at some point they’ll start to believe you.”
Due to its growing popularity, praise and worship music has become increasingly lucrative, blurring the lines between worship music and popular music and raising questions about the influence money will have on the music’s spiritual and theological value.
Worship songs don’t make money and climb the charts unless leaders at churches see them as theologically sound and valuable resources. As the industry seeks stable revenue, experts expect it will keep looking to the songwriters, recording artists, and worship brands that have already proven themselves profitable.
So even with more money to be made in worship songs, this inclination to stick to what works narrows the model for new artists and songs.
“Think about the limited canon of songs. A limited witness to the diversity of God’s kingdom. Limited expressions of beauty, because of a ‘market-shaped’ sound,” said Nelson Cowan, director of the Center for Worship and the Arts at Samford University. Worshipers recognize — and leaders try to recreate — the guitar-hook-with-delay Hillsong United perfected in the early ’00s in songs like “The Stand” and “Mighty to Save,” and the distinct vocal styles of singers like Kari Jobe and Jenn Johnson.
On the one hand, I’ll never begrudge musicians and songwriters exploring different ways to get paid for their music so they can feed, clothe, and house their families. On the other hand, money can so easily corrupt anything it touches, including the worship of God; there’s something gross about selling VIP tickets and “intimate on-stage experiences” in the context of praise and worship.
As someone who grew up in evangelical, fundamentalist circles, Chris Hubbs’ description of his own struggles with popular culture really resonate with me.
If you’re my age (mid-40s), all that music you grew up hearing in the late 80s and early 90s? I know none of it. Michael Jackson may as well not exist for me. I was scandalized by my cousin’s U2 Achtung Baby poster, both because it was a “secular” rock band (joke’s on me: they’re probably the most Christian rock band of the last 40 years) and because it had the word “baby” on the poster, which undoubtedly referred to some girl they were interested in, and being interested in girls was wrong until you were old enough to get married.
We’d occasionally listen to secular radio stations, so I was aware of Michael Jackson et al., but actually buying an album by any of those artists? Not likely. Best to save your money for Steve Green, David Meece, and of course, Carman. I did go to public school in junior high and high school, which offered further exposure, but it probably wasn’t until my junior year that I really started to venture out beyond evangelical culture.
Sir Paul McCartney has employed AI tools to create the “final” Beatles song.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the technology had been used to “extricate” John Lennon's voice from an old demo so he could complete the song.
“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he explained.
Sir Paul did not name the song, but it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called “Now and Then.”
I’m not sure what to make of this. This seems akin to “raising the dead,” similar to what the Star Wars films did with Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing in Rogue One. But the details make it sound like all they did was use AI to clean up the audio (i.e., identify Lennon’s voice from the rest of the noise), which seems far more legitimate and less problematic.
Via Kottke.
Cormac McCarthy, author of such bleak (and celebrated) novels as The Road, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, died this week of natural causes. He was 89 years old.
McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his stunning, post-apocalyptic, father-son love story called The Road. He wrote most compellingly about men, often young men, with prose both stark and lyrical. There was a strong Southwestern sensibility to his work.
“McCarthy was, if not our greatest novelist, certainly our greatest stylist,” says J.T. Barbarese, a professor of English and writing at Rutgers University. “The obsession not only with the origins of evil, but also history. And those two themes intersect again and again and again in McCarthy's writing.”
The Road is the only McCarthy novel I’ve read, and I enjoyed it very much. I read it nearly 20 years ago, and there are images and passages from the book that still stick in my mind as clearly as the moment I first read them, such is the power of his prose.
McCarthy’s most recent works were The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were published in 2022.
Tributes have come pouring in from Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Jason Isbell, and others.
If Walter Chaw writes about Godzilla movies, then you’d better believe I’m going to read it.
Godzilla became a source of nationalistic pride for Japan, a symbol of perseverance and rebellion, a flag to follow, and an ally born of the things that had been done to the Japanese people. I’m fascinated by him in the same way I’m disturbed by America’s superhero kink: yes, they save us from city-destroying bad guys, but they destroy the cities in the process. Watching Godzilla movies for an American will always be colored by the knowledge that they are about the trauma we inflicted on the Japanese people under the aegis of a draconian leader setting up his people for nauseating retribution. Watching them as a Chinese-American is even more fraught for the knowledge of what the Japanese army did to us under orders of their leadership.
A group of critics, authors, and academics have compiled a Black action star pantheon, featuring such legends as Denzel Washington, Michael Jai White (can’t wait to see The Outlaw Johnny Black), Pam Grier, and of course, Jim Kelly.
He arrived fully formed in Enter the Dragon, a confidently cool karate practitioner dressed immaculately, sporting an iconic spherical afro and bold mutton-chop sideburns. He was the epitome of ’70s hip. A late addition to the cast, it was only Kelly’s second film and first major role. But despite playing third fiddle to Bruce Lee, and with far less screen time and narrative importance than his paunchy Caucasian co-star John Saxon, Kelly still delivered one of the defining characters of the genre. He stood tall on a stage next to the greatest martial arts star of all time and gave Black audiences, who were already deeply invested in the kung fu film scene, a hero that represented their struggles. That may seem like hyperbole, but it’s not hard to imagine how electric it must have been to witness scenes of Kelly taking down racist cops projected in crowded inner-city movie houses, with raucous audiences who were dealing with the harsh realities of a racially unfair system every day in their real lives.
Finally, Giles Gough reflects on the significance of Worf’s character arc in Star Trek: Picard.
In essence, Worf is a third culture kid, (that is, a child who was raised outside of the culture of their parents) who only when he went back to the culture he was born into, was he able to appreciate the culture in which he was raised. It really underscores his meaning when he says I’ve been “working on myself” because it indicates a level of self-reflection the younger Worf didn’t have. In a culture that prizes status and titles, Worf is basically telling everyone he meets: “I’m really proud of the man who raised me” and my gosh, I just think that’s beautiful.
Worf has many iconic moments throughout the Star Trek franchise, but this one’s the most delightful.
Related: The third season of Star Trek: Picard was an absolute delight and an example of how to do nostalgia well, especially with the relationship between Picard and Riker.
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