Weekend Reads (July 27): Fantasy and Politics, Online Piracy, The Cure, Library Music
Recommended weekend reading for July 27, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Modern conservatives like vice presidential candidate JD Vance claim to draw inspiration for their politics from fantasy literature like The Lord of the Rings. But as Karen Swallow Prior points out, that sort of politicized reading can miss the point and purpose of fantasy.
“Make America Great Again” tells a story that is rooted in an idealized version — a bad fantasy — of good versus evil. Good and evil certainly exist. Spiritual realities — both within and around us — play a part in these battles, to be sure. Yet, most of our everyday battles in ordinary life — including national elections and politics — consist not of Sauron versus Frodo, but rather of complicated people, situations and issues that are mixtures of good and bad. Complex people and their stories require the nuance of an expansive language to understand and tell. Indeed, Tolkien himself argued that “Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature.”
Related: Back in 2016, I wrote about the good and bad of politicizing pop culture. “The fact that liberals and conservatives have undoubtedly used Lord of the Rings to make points in favor of their groups’ positions implies that something about Tolkien’s text resonates across party lines — and that something is what we should be talking about.”
Speaking of JD Vance, he was recently the subject of an internet meme about his amorous activities involving couches. That’s an easy enough thing to fact-check and disprove… or is it?
To be clear, Vance did not write in Hillbilly Elegy about having sexual relations with living room furniture, and a Snopes debunk remains live about the viral joke. The archived version of AP’s fact-check also notes that there’s no such passage in the PDF of the book. But there’s also technically no proof that Vance didn’t have sex with a couch — there’s no way a journalist could truly know that. He just didn’t write about it.
The 2024 San Diego Comic Con kicked off this week, and Polygon’s staff has collected all of the biggest announcements, including trailers and release dates.
Another big event that kicked off this week was the 2024 Summer Olympics, which are happening in Paris. CNN reflects on the opening ceremonies, including the various musical performances.
Plenty of techno and Europop music accompanied by colorful dancers wearing all sorts of rave outfits — including one singer fully painted blue singing on a bed of flowers — turned heads around the world as the French displayed their party scene.
Earlier in the ceremony, the first moment that made people stop and stare was a performance by heavy metal band Gojira and their aforementioned headless Marie Antoinettes. In an opening ceremony full of classic rock anthems and dance tracks, the slamming drums and driving guitar was a surprising change of pace — indeed, it was the first time a metal band had played at the Opening Ceremony — but one that left a mark.
Gojira’s performance was awesome and Céline Dion’s performance of Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” atop the Eiffel Tower was one of those spell-binding moments that will go down in Olympics history. Très magnifique!
Also, I know they broke up back in 2021, but I kept hoping that maybe, just maybe, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo would bring back the robots of Daft Punk for a surprise musical performance. Ah well… there’s still the closing ceremony.
Services like Netflix and the iTunes Music Store purported to combat piracy by making it easy for people to find legal copies of their favorite movies, music, and other media. But as streaming services, Hollywood studios, etc., engage in frustrating behavior — like threatening users’ libraries — piracy is poised to make a comeback.
Last September, we learned that Hollywood studios were deleting finished, but unaired programs and parts of their back catalogues for tax reasons. Sometimes, shows have abruptly disappeared mid-season. This week, Paramount removed decades of Comedy Central video clips; last month it axed the MTV news archives. This is *our* culture, even if it’s *their* copyright.
Meanwhile, the design of streaming services has stagnated. The complaints people had years ago about interfaces that make it hard to find the shows they want to see are the same ones they have now. Content moves unpredictably from one service to another. Every service is bringing in ads and raising prices. The benefits that siphoned users from broadcast and cable are vanishing.
Via Pixel Envy. A good reminder that, while digital media libraries are incredibly convenient, they have their drawbacks. Specifically, you can’t always trust that the content will always be there. (If you’ve been reading my streaming recommendations for any period of time, then you’ll know that streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are constantly in flux.)
Even with the convenience of streaming services, and the increasing number of streaming services, more and more people are turning to physical media like Blu-ray, CDs, and LPs.
In our current era of digital streaming, finding a movie to watch, an album to listen to or a game to play can be an exercise in sofa-based instant gratification. But a growing number of people are rejecting what they see as ephemeral app-based media. Instead, users have begun returning to the assurances of physical media that exist outside the whims of streaming's powers-that-be. Turned off by the churn of licensing agreements, streaming rights, and other structural forces that undercut any sense of digital ownership and permanence, consumers are once again embracing DVDs, CDs and other forms of tangible media. Once purchased, these items belong to them and them alone.
I don’t have quite the budget that I used to — raising kids will do that to your disposable income — but I have made an effort to purchase specific releases on Blu-ray, like the recent 4K remaster of Fist of Legend. Companies like 88 Films, AnimEigo, and Eureka are doing good work by releasing high-quality Blu-ray editions of films that will almost certainly never appear on Netflix et al.
Jeff Terich reflects on the legacy of The Cure’s Disintegration, which occupies the #2 spot in Treble’s hall of fame.
Released in 1989, the band’s eighth album is their unassailable masterpiece, a timeless and ageless compendium of gothic grandeur, its sound as sharp and revelatory as if it were released yesterday while bearing the sound of an immortal relic. It’s almost too colossal to be a personal favorite — it’s the pinnacle of post-punk and gothic music, not merely an accomplishment but an ideal.
“Library music” is the term used to describe music originally performed by session musicians for use in film, TV, and radio ads. Which, as Dave Segal points out in this list of the genre’s essential recordings, makes for a strange and bizarre musical world. Consider, for example, Giuliano Sorgini’s Africa Oscura.
Library music was a male-dominated, Eurocentric field whose practitioners sometimes took liberties with other cultures’ music. This wasn’t done with malicious intent, but rather to expand the parameters of recordings suitable for films and television shows dedicated to those regions and peoples. One outstanding example is Africa Oscura by Italian composer Giuliano Sorgini. Recorded between 1974 and 1976 during the sessions that produced his revered Zoo Folle soundtrack, Africa Oscura goes heavy on hypnotic hand percussion patterns, eerie synth emissions, and animal and bird sounds. That this evocative collection tailored for documentaries about Africa went unreleased for over 40 years boggles the mind.
AI has impacted numerous jobs and fields, and attorneys are no exception. But the fallibility of AI tools like ChatGPT has the potential to cause some real legal headaches.
Law can be a slog, so it’s no surprise lawyers are eager to leverage AI’s ability to sift through databases of legal texts, case laws, statutes, and regulations. A tool able to summarize findings and highlight relevant precedents can save significant amounts of time and effort. But ChatGPT isn’t a search engine; it’s a large language model. It trains on data and generates human-like responses based on what it learns. That creative streak gives the chatbot a dark side: a tendency to serve up data that’s false or inaccurate, a phenomenon called hallucination.
Related: Surprise, surprise… AI trained on AI-generated content just generates garbage. “In one example, researchers fed an AI a benign paragraph about church architecture only to have it rapidly degrade over generations. The final, most ‘advanced’ model simply repeated the phrase ‘black@tailed jackrabbits’ continuously.”
Also related: A highly touted AI-powered text-to-video generator was trained on thousands of YouTube videos and pirated films. Because of course it was.
Alternate text is text added to website elements, like images, to make them more descriptive and useful for users who use assistive technology, such as text-to-speech converters. Eric Bailey found that playing Dungeons & Dragons has helped him write better alternate text.
Via TLDR Web Dev. I always enjoy seeing two (nerdy) interests of mine overlap. I also need to improve my own alternate text-writing skills.
From the Blog
20 years ago this week, Bark Pyschosis returned from a decade-long hiatus to release Codename: Dustsucker, a brilliant followup to 1994’s Hex (aka, the very first album to be labelled “post-rock”).
I suppose Codename: Dustsucker might be disappointing to those expecting something new and radical from Sutton. However, rather than try to make up for the 10-year absence by attempting something “revolutionary” or taking the band’s sound in radical new directions (à la Boymerang, his drum n’ bass side project), I suspect Sutton took a wiser, more prudent course: he simply decided to pretend as if those 10 years since Hex never took place, and instead, picked up where that album left off. As a result, the new album may feel incredibly familiar at times if you’ve heard Hex. But considering that Hex was such a mercurial album, that basically ensures Codename: Dustsucker cuts its own unique “post-rock” swath — quite a feat considering how glutted the field has become today.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.