Weekend Reads (Aug 19): iMacs, Steve Albini, “The Ten Commandments”
Recommended weekend reading material for August 19, 2023.
In case you missed it, I recently announced a giveaway for Opus subscribers to celebrate the site crossing the 7,000 post milestone. There are giveaways for both paid and free subscribers with some really cool prizes, including some lovely artwork and one of my favorite books that I read this year.
The winners will be selected on September 1, 2023, so you have all of August to subscribe and enter if you haven’t already.
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.
Apple unveiled the iMac 25 years ago this month, and its revolutionary approach to design and personal computing (no floppy disk drive!) not only saved the company, but paved the way for Apple to become “the most important technology company ever.”
The iMac contradicted every rule of the PC industry of the mid-’90s. Instead of being modular, it was a self-contained unit (with a built-in handle!). Beige was out, and translucent blue-green plastic was in. The iMac looked like nothing else in the computer industry.
But the iMac wasn’t just a rule-breaker when it came to looks. Jobs made a series of decisions that were surprising at the time, though he’d keep repeating them throughout his tenure at Apple. The iMac gave no consideration to compatibility or continuity and embraced promising new technology when the staid PC industry refused.
I caught my first glimpse of the iMac at the UNL Student Union, where the campus computer shop had set up a display of the new computer — and it definitely drew a crowd. I wouldn’t own my first iMac until a few years later, when I bought an iMac DV SE, which I still have. Indeed, iMacs have been my go-to computer ever since, and I’m currently typing this newsletter on an iMac 5K.
Dave Holmes makes a case for 1989 and 1990 being the two weirdest years in popular music.
There is a moment in musical history, at the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s, that is not quite the former and not yet the latter. A formless, colorless span of time whose music can’t be lumped in with the peppy, preppy pop and rock of the Reagan era nor the groundbreaking indie, R&B, and hip-hop of the Clinton years, and is thus in danger of being forgotten. It’s not even a span of time as much as a silver. A slice: two or three strange years as one era evolved into another. This Slice is fizzy and sweet and ultimately not satisfying. It is the Diet Slice.
[…]
The defining characteristic of the Diet Slice is that it is the one time in pop music history when the ideal demographic seems to have been middle-aged. If the music of the MTV ’80s and the Nirvana ’90s were separate and high-Richter youthquakes, the Diet Slice looked America’s teenagers in the eyes and said: “Here is Michael Bolton, Cher, and Anita Baker. Have fun.” The Billboard number one single from 1989 was “Look Away” by a post-Peter Cetera Chicago. Go West dialed its synth-funk down and its middle-of-the-road tendencies up, and gave us its only real U.S. hit “King of Wishful Thinking.” Wilson Phillips held on, and then released us, and then we released them. Secretaries were living. Listen At Work Stations were thriving.
Via The Retro. Holmes’ article took me back to the days of listening to Omaha’s Sweet 98 while riding to and from junior high.
Steve Albini is one of the most respected and highly regarded music producers working today, having worked with everyone from Nirvana and PJ Harvey to Jarvis Cocker and Low. Over the years, though, he developed a reputation as an unapologetic contrarian (some might say “asshole”) who spoke his mind, consequences be damned — and it’s a reputation that he’s begun to reassess in recent years.
Possibly you are wondering why it matters that Albini — from afar merely a middle-aged American musician who tweets a lot about poker and US politics — was re-evaluating his past. He’s never written a hit single or performed on a late-night television show or sung a melody that could be described as catchy. His most famous song, “Kerosene,” is a six-minute case for the recreational merits of arson. But his significance vastly outweighs his fame. Even today, the mention of his name conjures a complete worldview that, years after its peak, still inspires deep respect and occasional controversy. Albini — and I can’t say this without it sounding a little silly because of the way the music industry has conspired for decades to sand off the edges of any once-transgressive cultural movement, but more on that later — is a genuine punk rocker. Not because he plays music with distorted guitars or exudes contempt for pretentious establishment figures — though he has done plenty of that — but because throughout his career he, perhaps more than anyone else, has attempted to embody the righteous ideological tenets that once made punk rock feel like a true alternative to the tired mainstream.
Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell reflects on her band’s legacy and then lists her favorite albums. Most of them aren’t too surprising… and then there’s Cat Stevens.
I was brought up on folk music. My mum and dad used to frequent folk clubs and my dad used to play banjo in a jazz band. That’s how he met my mum, playing at her flatmate’s twenty-first birthday party. And he also used to play sort of a basic folk guitar and he was the one that encouraged me to learn the guitar when I was little, like around seven-years-old. He taught me basic chords and he taught me how to play “Sad Lisa” and “Father And Son,” which are on this album.
Slowdive’s latest album, Everything Is Alive, will be released on September 1, 2023.
With its pointed critique of government elites and corruption, Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” has certainly struck a chord with many, particularly on the conservative end of the spectrum. But Hannah Anderson finds it unnecessarily disdainful.
I understand why so many feel “Rich Men North of Richmond” gives voice to their struggle. Perhaps the only thing worse than watching your hard work be exploited and your dreams go up in smoke is the sense that no one notices and no one cares.
But protest against wealthy elites and government corruption, no matter how justified, cannot ride on the backs of others who are also suffering. The price of accessing food through SNAP or a church food pantry must not be the poor’s dignity and self-worth.
Tyler Huckabee also weighed in with an open letter to Anthony: “It seems like a guy spending a couple tax dollars on a snack doesn’t really have the same culpability for your current state as a guy hoarding billions of dollars because he’s getting rich off your work.”
The parting of the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments is one of the greatest visual effects in movie history. And the story behind the shot is also impressive in its own way.
The parting of the Red Sea effect in The Ten Commandments was overseen by John P. Fulton, the incumbent SFX head honcho at Paramount whose efforts secured the film its only Oscar win. Meanwhile, Paul Lerpae contributed his talents with optical photography. As you’ll see, the biggest challenge of the effect was uniting various components and visual ideas that were created in different parts of the world by different craftsmen, often years apart.
Studios are increasingly reliant on influencers to get the (positive) word out about their movies. Where does this leave actual criticism?
While it is customary for film studios to try to control the narrative by organising advance screenings if they believe in a film or avoiding them if they don’t, the methods employed for the release of Barbie were more extreme. They are symptomatic of a trend that has been evolving over the past few years and that concerns not only the film criticism profession, but culture at large. If all discussion of a film’s merits before release is left to influencers, whose driving ambition is to receive free merchandise by speaking well of the studio’s products, what can we expect the film landscape to look like? Where will engaging, challenging and, if not completely unbiased then at least impartial conversation about cinema take place, and how is the audience to think critically of what is being sold to it?
Related: More and more folks under the age of 30 (i.e., Gen Z) are getting their news from celebrities and influencers rather than journalists and traditional news organizations.
Alisa Ruddell reviews Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, a reality TV series that challenges some of modern notions of what marriage is supposed to be.
Part of the oddity, and to some, the offensiveness, of Indian Matchmaking is the way in which an older, more communal, and more practical model of arranged marriage coexists with Big Romance and Self-Actualization models of marriage. Watching the strange juxtaposition of “something old and something new” in the show highlights the trade-offs we’ve made in the modern world — trade-offs many young Indians think look pretty good from where they’re standing.
Karen Swallow Prior reflects on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (one of my favorite poets), the writings of Eugene Peterson, and the Bibles of her youth.
I’ve changed my mind about paraphrases of the Bible (and some translations, too). Different texts, different renderings, even different translations fulfill different purposes. Don’t get me wrong: as a longtime student of language, I prefer close translations to paraphrases. But only if we understand the telos of a thing can we even begin to judge its excellence. A paraphrase has a certain purpose, just as a close translation does.
Besides, all of this human life is a paraphrase, isn’t it? Human life, as real as is is here and now, is also a semblance of the one who made us and a foreshadowing of what is to come. Yet, it is still full of meaning, a striving to communicate the essences of ourselves and all we experience and understand.
I always find something thought-provoking in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s newsletter, like his recent analysis of American conservatives piling on the U.S. women’s soccer team after they were knocked out of the World Cup.
Team loyalty is an arbitrary thing, whether you’re rooting for your hometown team or a team across the country that your parents loved. But once you proclaim your allegiance to a team, especially one that represents your country, you don’t turn on the entire team because you don’t like their politics of compassion. Here’s the irony: the team that beat the U.S. is from Sweden, a country conservatives routinely bash for being too liberal or “socialist.” American professor of journalism Christian Christensen at Stockholm University Sweden stated that Sweden “has become the symbol of everything that many American Republicans believe is wrong with Europe: feminism, environmentalism, and openness to refugees.” Trump has for years berated Sweden’s social programs.
So, if I’m following the logic conservatives have laid out, Sweden beat the US because they were even more woke?
Related: Historian Kevin Kruse explores the history of the national anthem at American sporting events, and surprise! It’s more complicated than you might’ve realized. “The NFL had been playing the national anthem before games since 1941, but it wasn't until 2009 that players would stand on the sideline for every performance. Prior to that, with exceptions for the Super Bowl or post-9/11 ceremonies, the players stayed out of it, waiting in their locker rooms.”
From the Blog
If you’re tired of looking through Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, et al. for your next movie, then try Kanopy. Like Hoopla, all you need to access their extensive library — which even includes some titles from the Criterion Collection — is a valid library card. Here are 36 of the best titles currently streaming on Kanopy.
Related: Here are 36 of the best movies currently streaming on Hoopla, another streaming service that can be accessed with a library card. (In addition to movies, Hoopla also offers comics and graphic novels.)
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