Weekend Reads (Oct 14): Taylor Swift, A24 Films, AI vs. Authors, the Rothschilds, Crash Test Dummies
Recommended weekend reading October 14, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
There’s no denying that Taylor Swift is a cultural juggernaut, and kudos to her, she’s used her success and popularity to change the music industry in some positive ways.
It’s rare to ascend to the pinnacle of pop stardom, as Swift has, and rarer still to impact the business so profoundly. Since the debut of her first album at age 16, Swift has shown a preternatural gift for engaging with her fans, inspiring the kind of devotion that leaves them to await each new song, album and merch release with bated breath — not to mention the kind of fervor that can crash Ticketmaster (and result in a Senate Judiciary hearing).
During Swift’s reign, she has used her untold influence to change seemingly every aspect of the music industry — from helping inspire a vinyl revolution to changing the way concert tickets are bought and sold. And when it comes to the music itself, she’s navigated shifts in her sound with savvy and (for the most part) grace, retaining the base of devoted young fans who have grown up alongside her while expanding to new audiences through her embrace of everything from pop to trap to folk to hip-hop.
Via Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Guitar World interviews Slowdive guitarist Christian Saville about the band’s latest album, Everything is Alive, and how he achieved that trademark “Slowdive” sound.
I think it’s something that’s developed. Johnny Marr was my hero when I started, and I wanted to play like him. However, I realized I lacked the ability or was too lazy. So, I think Slowdive ended up with these big, beautiful, drone-y sounds because we used these tunings where the strings are droning. And I like that because it's simple, and it seems to be effective.
I’m not saying it works for everybody, but it works for us. But the reality is that I can’t do anything too complicated, so finding these simple little things that bounce off what everyone else is doing is essential.
Via Space Echo, which has a nice overview of Slowdive’s pedalboards.
Related: My review of Slowdive’s Everything is Alive.
One of my favorite online music zines, Treble, turned 20 earlier this month. Founder/editor Jeff Terich reflects on the site’s history and why music journalism still matters to him.
The advent of streaming made physical media more or less obsolete, and the growth of Spotify’s own in-house playlists — as well as the way in which TikTok’s algorithm can put an obscure indie group like Duster’s play counts in the millions — likewise changed how we think about discovering or discussing music. Which is to say, it’s made the utility of music criticism likewise obsolete in the eyes of some users. After all, if the algorithm already knows what you want, why bother reading about music? The problem with that, as other writers will tell you, is that it removes the all-important element of context. And perhaps not everyone needs context to know what they like or they don’t, far be it from me to wag my finger. But I read as much about music as I write about it, and probably more so — sometimes because I’m more interested in a perspective than a recommendation. The best writing about music can be just as stunning to witness as the music itself, no matter how much the algorithm would rather you just kept scrolling.
A24 Films has made a name for itself by releasing such unique and acclaimed films as Everything Everywhere All at Once, Uncut Gems, The Witch, and Lady Bird. However, all of their critical success hasn’t necessarily meant commercial success, so now the arthouse studio is looking to produce more commercial fare.
An agent with insider knowledge of the studio told The Wrap that A24 acquisition executive Noah Sacco went around to talent agencies this summer looking for “action and big IP projects.” And that’s what audiences should expect more of from A24 in the near future. The agent confirmed that the studio is “deemphasizing the traditional character/auteur-driven dramas” for more fare geared toward the general audience. “Everyone in the independent film space is aware that A24 needs to pivot to more commercial films alongside its arthouse slate,” a distribution executive told The Wrap. “With a $2.5 billion valuation, it’s pretty obvious that they need to expand into more commercial films.”
[…]
[T]he studio won’t move away from auteurist fare entirely. A production executive close to A24 also told The Wrap that it’ll still release dramas from directors like Aster, Trey Edward Shults, and David Lowery, just less of them all around. And this is the same direction other small indie studios went to survive, too. Miramax, The Weinstein Company, Annapurna, and Paramount Vantage all attempted to shift their focus after successful runs of auteur fare, to varying degrees of success. “The auteur business is a lousy, high-risk business that does not attract potential buyers,” said the top agent. “That’s a big problem if you’re looking to sell or seek additional investment.” So if A24 wants to remain viable in the film marketplace, it must adjust its tactics.
This might seem like A24’s selling out, but honestly, I’d love to see what an A24 version of a John Wick-esque action movie might look like.
Influential artist and writer Keith Giffen, who helped to create iconic characters like Lobo and Rocket Raccoon and worked on titles like Legion of Super-Heroes, Justice League International, and Defenders, died earlier this week after experiencing a stroke. He was 70 years old. (Be sure to check out his posthumous post on Facebook. Genius.)
The comics industry is notorious for exploiting writers and artists (see Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) even as superhero properties rake in billions, so comic creators are speaking out and taking matters into their own hands.
The entire industry is undergoing a reckoning, from mainstream publishing to creator-owned spaces. This spring, a conversation that had previously existed only in whisper networks leaped out into the open, after the tragic death of comics creator Ian McGinty at the age of 38. In an obituary soon afterward, McGinty’s family said he died “of natural causes,” but his passing had already sparked a discussion of overwork. Cartoonist Shivana Sookdeo created the #ComicsBrokeMe tag, and thousands of people used it to share their heartbreaking experiences within the industry, such as poor treatment and poverty wages.
As a member of the comics and publishing community, Sookdeo told Polygon that the volume of responses didn’t surprise her. “I knew it was kind of just under the water like an iceberg. I don’t think anyone can be prepared for something to go that far, but I suspected.”
Struggling creators, however, are very aware that they can’t rely on the industry to fix itself. “At the end of the day, we’re dealing with corporations who only care about maximizing profits,” cartoonist Sloane Leong told Polygon over email. “Human dignity isn’t a factor for them.”
AI tools like ChatGPT need to be trained on something to understand language, and a lot of their learning materials are coming in the form of pirated works by the likes of Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, James Patterson, and Zadie Smith.
Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that is, it requires the kind found in books. In a lawsuit filed in California last month, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden allege that Meta violated copyright laws by using their books to train LLaMA, a large language model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4—an algorithm that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts. But neither the lawsuit itself nor the commentary surrounding it has offered a look under the hood: We have not previously known for certain whether LLaMA was trained on Silverman’s, Kadrey’s, or Golden’s books, or any others, for that matter.
In fact, it was. I recently obtained and analyzed a dataset used by Meta to train LLaMA. Its contents more than justify a fundamental aspect of the authors’ allegations: Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.
The author, Alex Reisner, also (1) addresses the defense that this falls under “fair use,” which allows people to use copyrighted material for parody, quotes, and derivative works, and (2) reflects on the “culture clash” between the tech and publishing worlds.
Back in July, I wrote about the allegations swirling around the anti-sex trafficking film Sound of Freedom, which became one of the summer’s biggest films. The man who inspired the film, Tim Ballard, has since been accused of assaulting several women.
According to the lawsuit, Mr Ballard used a tactic called the “couples ruse” to fool traffickers by pretending he and a female partner, who travelled with him, were a married couple.
The lawsuit said that initially Mr Ballard, a Mormon, kept to a strict set of rules while undercover, including “no kissing on the lips and no touching or exposing of private parts”, but that over time things changed.
Mr Ballard began to use his religion and “spiritual manipulation to coerce [the women] into sexual contact”, the lawsuit alleges. Many of the alleged victims were also Mormons, says the lawsuit.
Last month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints condemned Ballard’s “morally unacceptable” activity, criticizing his claim of close friendship with the church’s leader.
I’d normally steer clear of this sort of thing because it can so easily seem like indulging in celebrity gossip. It’s troubling, however, to see people (and Christians especially) voice such strong support for Ballard — who’s reportedly considering a run for the U.S. Senate — even though he looks increasingly shady.
Bonnie Kristian reviews Jewish Space Lasers, which explores 200 years’ worth of antisemitic conspiracy theories centered on the Rothschild family.
I knew going into Jewish Space Lasers that money would be a big part of the story. It’s impossible not to anticipate that, if you have any knowledge of our culture’s stereotype of Jewish people as — in the phrase of the first chapter’s title — “greedy, cheap, and blessed.” And I knew, too, that centuries of gross and officially sanctioned antisemitism would come into it; the history of how some European Jews came to be bankers was already familiar.
But much of what Rothschild recounts was new to me, supplying a remedy for an ignorance both happy and untenable: happy because it came from a lack of exposure to explicit antisemitism; untenable because antisemitism is persistent and pernicious, and because it is difficult to push back against evil if you fail to recognize it when you see it.
Up until now, crash test dummies have been modeled after the male body, which means that modern vehicles aren’t as safe as they could be for women. But that could change now that female crash test dummies are finally available.
According to Verity Now, a US-based campaign group striving to achieve equity in vehicle safety, women are 73% more likely to be injured – and 17% more likely to die – in a vehicle crash. Earlier this year, a study of 70,000 patients who had been trapped in vehicles found that women were more frequently trapped than men.
Part of the problem is that test dummies modeled on the average female body are rarely used in safety tests by car manufacturers – because only “male” dummies are mandated for tests by regulators.
Via ZME Science.
Finally, sharks are among Earth’s oldest lifeforms, having appeared in the planet’s oceans around 400 million years ago. By contrast, humanity has only been around for about 300,000 years. But — and this will really bake your noodle — sharks are older than even the North Star, Polaris.
In actuality, Polaris is a system of three stars orbiting around one another. At a distance of 430 light-years from Earth, those three stars appear as a single point of light in the sky. Most of the sharks who have ever existed, couldn’t have seen the North star because it didn’t yet exist. All three of the stars in the Polaris group have an estimated age of just 70 million years, showing up only in the last 15 percent of the age of sharks.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes to my brain.
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The piece on crash test dummies is quite fascinating in the context of transgenderism. First, it’s an admission that male & female bodies are different (to say nothing of endorsing the currently unpopular view that there only two genders).
It also begs the question of whether a trans man or trans woman is more likely to be injured/killed in an auto accident. Funny how real life brings certain things into focus.