Weekend Reads (July 20): Richard Simmons (RIP), Tumblr’s Legacy, Conspiracy Theories, Multiverses
Recommended weekend reading for July 20, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Fitness guru Richard Simmons died this past weekend of natural causes. He was 76 years old.
Simmons’ workout style was upbeat and welcoming. In a commercial for one of his popular “Sweatin' to the Oldies” videos, he enthused, “If you’re looking for a lively, entertaining, stimulating, humorous, colorful, frolicking, playful, inspiring, safe, low-impact workout that’s full of kicks, thrills, gusto, fervor, passion, fury, bustle and action you don’t have to look any further. This is it!”
No other fitness celebrity looked like Richard Simmons. And no one else in exercise videos of the era looked like the people in his classes, according to historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. “They were all ages, they were men and women. Most notably, a lot would have been considered overweight by standards at the time.”
Related: Earlier this year, LuElla D’Amico reflected on Simmons’ unsung ministry to those in need of dignity.
More recently, TV and comedy icon Bob Newhart died after several illnesses. He was 94 years old.
Starting in 1960, when his comedy monologue recordings became bestsellers, Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy that did not have its roots in the Borscht Belt or vaudeville but was instead based on observation and psychology. His work opened the door for later, wackier comics like Steve Martin. In his deadpan, stammering delivery as well as in his subject matter, Newhart was quietly subversive, and he touched a nerve both in urban areas and elsewhere.
And sadly, one more: Hong Kong cinema icon Cheng Pei-pei died after being diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition back in 2019. She was 78 years old.
In a career-spanning six decades, Cheng burst on to the scene in the 1960s, becoming a star for Shaw Brothers Studios, the Hong Kong production company modelled on the Hollywood studios that became internationally famous for action films and period martial arts epics, a genre that is known as wuxia. In all, she made 20 films for Shaw Brothers, including the previously mentioned Come Drink With Me as well as Princess Iron Fan and Golden Swallow. Cheng regained international notoriety for her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and her prolific output continued until recently, with her last major role coming in Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan (2020).
Within minutes of Donald Trump being shot at a rally this past weekend, conspiracy theories from the Right and the Left were running amok on social media.
What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.
[…]
It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.
Related: Back in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, I wrote about the allure of conspiracy theories, which “offer their adherents a sense of agency where they have none and a sense of control over essentially uncontrollable events.”
Ryan Broderick argues that we’re in the “content slop” age of pop culture.
Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so. The Charli XCX “Brat summer” meme does not feel like slop, nor does Kendrick Lamar’s extremely long “Not Like Us” roll out. But Taylor Swift’s cascade of alternate versions of her songs does. The jury’s still out on Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon did not, to me, feel like slop. Dune: Part Two didn’t either. But Deadpool & Wolverine, at least in the marketing, definitely does.
Via Pixel Envy, who also has some thoughts on the matter.
My entire raison d’être for running Opus could arguably be distilled down to a desire to promote and elevate stuff that isn’t “slop.”
Related: Speaking of “content slop,” one of the great tech blogs of yore, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (aka, TUAW), resurfaced earlier this month. However, this new incarnation is super sketchy. “The names and bios of dozens of real journalists who actually worked for TUAW a decade ago are listed on the website, and all of them have had their real images replaced with AI-generated ones, and their old work misattributed to other people and turned into AI slop by a summarization tool that has destroyed their original work.”
Will Rinehart considers Tumblr’s role in the rise of modern “wokeness.”
Old Tumblr also had limited filtering options, which meant that users were exposed to a range of topics. The effect was that niche communities and fandoms freely intermingled with identity politics. Katherine Dee, one of the best chroniclers of internet culture today, interviewed approximately 100 former Tumblr users and found, “Most people I spoke to shared that the first time they were exposed to anything related to identity politics (especially queer identity or feminism) was on Tumblr, and almost always within the context of fandom, e.g. representation in a favorite fan property.”
Oddly enough, I was never much of a Tumblr user. I had an account, and there were a handful of sites that I visited on a semi-regular basis, but I missed out on the site during its heyday. I was interested in the idea of Tumblr and its UI, and how it presented a different approach to blogging, but that was about it.
In the first in a series of essays, Steven Greydanus tackles the topic of multiverses in pop culture, and specifically in superhero movies like the MCU.
On the one hand, as I’ll argue in this series, I do think there’s a sense in which, the more we learn about the MCU, the more nihilistic a place it seems. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that this is intrinsic to multiverse storytelling — which, of course, is another way of saying that I’m not convinced that multiverse hypotheses are debilitating to moral thinking in reality. I’m not convinced that resistance to the multiverse concept from either a scientific or an apologetical perspective is necessary or warranted. I think we should be open-minded about multiverse hypotheses in the real world, and a fortiori we should be open-minded about them in fiction.
Viggo Mortensen, aka Lord of the Rings’ Aragorn, calls out modern film critics.
“In terms of the reviewer having some understanding of film history, how movies are made — the level is really low,” he added. “There are some good reviewers, some really interesting conversations are had from journalists in terms of their reactions to films, but it’s not great. As a director, certainly as a director-producer, I pay attention. It matters to me more, a lot more than as an actor because the fate of the movie, whether it’s going to be distributed well, whether it’s going to be seen in movie theaters — a lot hangs in the balance as to how it’s received critically.”
He also has some pointed words about Amazon’s treatment of 2022’s Thirteen Lives, a historical drama based on the Thai cave rescue in 2018 that Amazon released on streaming instead of theaters.
Freddie deBoer addresses the age-old issue of “separating artists from their art,” as evidenced in recent cases involving Alice Munro and Neil Gaiman.
Can you, personally, overcome bad feelings about an artist sufficiently to continue enjoying their work? I don’t know. That’s a you question. If not, you have my solidarity. But only you know if those feelings are real or performance. Can I judge Neil Gaiman and read his books without the former influencing the latter? Yeah. What I think people really want is for it to necessarily be the case that we can’t, that the art is permanently ruined for everyone. That’s why there’s all the yelling, to try and establish that reality. But Wagner still sells a lot of records. It is a genuinely tragic habit of thought that’s overtaken our culture: someone did something really bad, and so something must happen. Attention must be paid. But nothing ever has to happen. Usually nothing much happens at all.
Artists who have created magnificent, beautiful, soul-stirring works of art have also committed horrible acts of assault, abuse, and degradation. That’s probably been a fact since humans started painting cave walls, engraving shells, and carving bones. If you consider yourself a moral person, then you want there to be repercussions for such actions. That’s particularly difficult when the artist in question is dead. But if the artist is still alive (e.g., Gaiman), what then?
Does an artist’s bad behavior undo any beauty or soul-stirring that you previously experienced through their art? If it doesn’t, and you still find their art meaningful, then does that say something about your morality? After all, it’s possible that the same indecorous desires that caused an artist to become a terrible human being are also present in their art — and why would you want to expose yourself to that? (By that logic, of course, it’s just as possible that their art was the way in which they strove against their baser desires.) In any case, we want there to be repercussions for bad behavior, and rightfully so. Sometimes, then, continuing to find a “canceled” artist’s work meaningful can feel like you’re absolving them of whatever horrible things they’ve done.
At the risk of sounding blithe and clichéd, I’ve settled on this for an answer: It’s complicated. That’s it. On the one hand, I view many discussions of “canceling” so-and-so with a certain degree of skepticism, because that often feels far too neat and tidy given how reality actually works. It feels like a performance. On the other hand, if someone tells me they can no longer listen to the songs of David Bowie and Arcade Fire, watch the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, or read the stories of Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling, I get it. I really do, and I’ve made similar decisions for myself. Because after all, we all want to be thoughtful and moral individuals who take a stand against immoral behavior whenever and wherever we see it. But when it comes to art and the impact that artists have on our hearts and minds, it’s not nearly as simple and straightforward as we’d prefer it to be.
There are a lot of great artists mentioned in this survey of the history of UK post-rock, which highlights albums by Seefeel, Hood, and Pram (to name a few).
Post-rock is the rare genre you can pretty much trace right back to a single source. The term was popularized by the critic Simon Reynolds, whose 1994 feature for British music magazine The Wire highlighted UK groups like Seefeel, Disco Inferno, and Main. By Reynolds’ definition, the post-rockers employed “rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and power chords.” Reynolds also pointed to the growing availability of digital technology — a factor which, in the UK, felt particularly crucial. Whereas breakout Chicago post-rock groups like Tortoise and Isotope 217 naturally found themselves in dialogue with their home city’s jazz players, in the UK, cross-pollinations occurred between bands and various homegrown strains of electronic music: notably jungle, the sounds emerging from club chill-out rooms, and the more abstracted dance music released by labels like Warp and Rephlex.
My latest piece for Christ and Pop Culture is about one of my favorite songs of 2024 so far, a thoughtful slice of indie-rock that brings me some peace and perspective during this crazy election year.
Just as Doctor Strange helped me survive the 2016 election, Luxury’s “Fur / Ticker Tape” — and by extension, the rest of Like Unto Lambs — has proved to be something of a tonic for this year’s election. Indeed, I’ve often found myself muttering “With this world / Let me make my peace” under my breath as a prayer of sorts as I read the headlines and the latest accounts of humanity gone terribly awry.
Related: My full review of Luxury’s Like Unto Lambs, which has been in near-constant rotation here at Opus HQ since it’s release in May.
The original Paramount logo is one of the most widely recognized logos around, but following the merger with Skydance, the new Paramount logo is more like the “fleece vest” of entertainment logos.
[T]he new post-merger logo is great if your goal is internal corporate synergy — and that may well be the case since the logo was used in a document that discusses things like strengthening balance sheets, enhancing free cash flows, and unifying key IP. But it also saps the Paramount logo of its personality. The end result is a dull logo that looks more suited to a direct-to-home-video brand than one of the most storied media companies in the world.
Via TLDR Design.
Related: Why did the Paramount logo used to have 24 stars?
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