Weekend Reads (December 7): Year-End Lists, Michelle Yeoh, Influencers, Prayer Apps
Recommended weekend reading material for December 7, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
It’s December, and you know what that means: everyone’s publishing their year-end lists. Treble, The Quietus, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, Consequence, and Bandcamp have all started sharing their favorite albums of the year. Meanwhile, Treble and Pitchfork have shared their favorite songs of the year. Over at A Closer Listen, they’ve shared their picks for the year’s best packaging.
For what it’s worth, I’ll be posting my favorite songs of 2024 on January 1, 2025. Until then, check out my previous year-end mixes.
Re. books, David Gutowski has posted his annual list of “Best Books of 2024” lists. I’m sure you’ll find something interesting there.
Re. video games, Polygon, The New York Times, and Time offer up their gaming picks for 2024.
On a more somber note, IMDb pays tribute to all of the actors and filmmakers that we lost this year, including James Earl Jones, Shelley Duvall, Maggie Smith, Carl Weathers, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Newhart, and Roger Corman.
The earliest known country recording was found in a box of wax cylinders. The performer was a Black man, and its discovery re-highlights discussions surrounding the role of Black performers in country music history.
Rhiannon Giddens, the musician and historian whose banjo playing opens Beyoncé’s No. 1 country-chart hit “Texas Hold ’Em,” says she wasn’t surprised by Martin’s discovery. But she’s also not a normal listener. Her research has shown that there’s often a difference between who created music and who is credited with that creation. Country music, she notes, is merely a marketing tool invented to help sell records. Early in the 20th century, recording companies created the term “race records” to compartmentalize the sound and try to attract Black listeners to buy certain songs. (Vasnier himself was advertised as “The only Colored comedian who can do it.”) In reality, country, blues, folk, and bluegrass are intertwined in American culture and the Black experience.
“We shouldn’t have to do this at all,” Giddens says. “Like, this should have been part of the story all along. But fine, we spend the energy doing it because you see what’s happening right now in the United States, the divisions and how even a discussion of whether Beyoncé is allowed to make country music becomes a political part of a political agenda.”
Via The Verge.
Pete Volk highlights six films that made Michelle Yeoh an action superstar, including Supercop, her 1992 team-up with Jackie Chan.
Once it gets past a complicated setup, Supercop really clicks, leaning on the chemistry of its stars and the audacity of its set pieces. Yeoh is excellent as the stern inspector juxtaposed with Chan’s foolhardy officer, giving the lead pairing a dynamic similar to that of many screwball comedies. There are also the stellar fight scenes and jaw-dropping stunts that epitomize a Chan movie of this era, including the above scene near the end where Yeoh jumps a motorcycle off a small hill and lands on top of a moving train (there’s a behind-the-scenes glimpse at this and other stunts in the end credits). In fight scenes, her kicks stand out, specifically her overhead scorpion kicks in multiple fight sequences. She talked about this movie and others in a recent GQ interview, saying “I will never be crazy enough to do those stunts again.”
Supercop was my introduction to Yeoh, and suffice to say, she blew me away. Just check out this motorcycle stunt, which Yeoh performed herself. Even more impressive, she’d never ridden a motorcycle before making the movie.
The Verge’s Mia Sato explores the ramifications of a lawsuit accusing one beige-oriented influencer of ripping off another beige-oriented influencer’s style. But can an intentionally generic style be copyrighted, especially when algorithms play such a heavy role in determining what’s popular and trending?
“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains.
Soto also notes the low regard in which influencers are held: “[A]lthough influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected.”
I’ll confess, while I find Soto’s article fascinating, I probably rolled my eyes once or twice while reading about some influencer’s trials and tribulations. Watching some of their videos, “vapid” really is a pretty apt descriptor. And yet, Soto’s article also points out the ways in which the system, with its algorithms, is rigged against influencers, even those who earn a good living.
Properly interpreting and understanding the themes of movies, TV shows, and even comic books can be tricky, but as Adam Serwer writes, some folks on the Right are particularly bad at it.
Shortly before former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew his nomination for attorney general, Elon Musk posted on X that Gaetz was the “Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison.” Generally speaking, one’s model for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary people face. (Were Dredd’s zero tolerance for lawbreaking evenly applied to obscenely wealthy scofflaws like Musk himself, it would surely be less appealing to him.)
Musk’s media illiteracy is not particularly shocking — it seems to be part of a broader trend tied to the rise of Donald Trump. Genre stories that are meant to highlight the dangers of fascism, cruelty, or selfishness instead end up being misinterpreted or even condemned by those who find fascism appealing or see cruelty and selfishness as aspirational virtues.
Related: Back in 2022, Trump-endorsed Jerrod Sessler expressed his frustration with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider and made the bone-headed claim that “We’re Not Gonna Take It” supported “traditional, conservative American values.”
Nick Heer reflects on the passing of Delicious Library — which I wrote about last week — and the state of modern software design.
I do not need to relitigate the subsequent years of visual interfaces going too far, then being reeled in, and then settling in an odd middle ground where I am now staring at an application window with monochrome line-based toolbar icons, deadpan typography, and glassy textures, throwing a heavy drop shadow. None of the specifics matter much. All I care about is how these things feel to look at and to use, something which can be achieved regardless of how attached you are to complex illustrations or simple line work. Like many people, I spend hours a day staring at pixels. Which parts of that are making my heart as happy as my brain? Which mundane tasks are made joyful?
Heer raises an interesting question. So much of what makes real world items feel appealing and “broken in” is the effect that time has on them. (Think of a dining room table worn down by decades of meals, a cast iron skillet with years of seasoning, or your favorite pair of jeans.) Given its essentially ephemeral nature, is it even conceivable for software to achieve a similarly timeless feel? That seems unlikely — modern software is usually in a constant state of flux as developers are compelled to add new features and functionality — but it’s an interesting notion, and one I’d love to see more designers and developers consider.
You might want to think twice before installing that prayer or meditation app on your phone.
The reason these sites have been able to secure funding from deep pocketed venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, J.D. Vance and others is that they also turn a huge profit in data collection. Almost every app collects personal data from users to sell to advertisers but in the case of prayer apps, that data can be extremely intimate. Are you asking for prayer for a struggle with addiction? A failing marriage? Self-harm? A miscarriage? The legal jargon you agreed to on these apps gives them the right to sell that information to third parties.
Huckabee’s right: This type of data collection “feels extra icky when applied to the spiritual context, where people are often divulging their most intimate and personal selves.”
When it landed in the early ’00s, 2Advanced’s website set the standard for web design, using Flash to create an immersive and ultra-cool online experience.
2Advanced.com became a beacon of inspiration for web designers and developers worldwide. It showcased what was possible with emerging web technologies and pushed the boundaries of creativity. Forums and design communities buzzed with admiration and analysis of its every iteration. Tutorials and blogs dissected the techniques behind its magic, attempting to emulate its style.
Via Frontend Focus.
Back in the early ’00s, my fellow web designers and I were obsessed with Flash sites like 2Advanced, which proved that the web could transcend the limits of print design and be its own thing. The original site shut down after Flash went away, but 2Advanced Studios have rebuilt their classic site using modern web technologies like Rive and React, and it’s a pretty awesome time capsule of web design circa 2000.
Marking its 50th anniversary this year, Christopher Hunt reflects on his own experiences with Dungeons & Dragons whilst growing up in a Christian household.
I discovered D&D at age 12, just when the game was becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Questions about spirituality in the game roiled in the public discourse as part of the “satanic panic” of the era. As they say, “Any publicity is good publicity,” so while these controversies eventually faded, they induced skyrocketing sales on D&D merchandise. As a Christian kid, I argued with my parents about the merits of the game, making the case that D&D was make-believe — like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia — and that the players were in effect making a story together. They didn’t like how much attention I gave to the game and the friends I played it with. And images of devils and demons and occasional instances of nudity in the books certainly undermined my arguments.
Finally, George Ayoub laments the death of community newspapers.
When a small town newspaper closes, the loss severs another definitive connection that knits a community together through the stories of its lives and times: high school sports highlights from a busy Friday night; the births and deaths, triumphs and tragedies of neighbors and friends; the latest on the ebb and flow of Main Streets from new businesses to continued traditions; even an editor’s opinion of a new law, a proposed change, simple praise or polite criticism, enough to keep people talking and debating at coffee shops and bars.
In sum, community newspapers are community stewards, chronicling history with an ever-present shining light on the present. When that illumination is darkened, when the town’s written narrative ends, a community loses yet another semblance of its whole.
From the Blog
Thanks to algorithmically generated playlists, online music stores, and streaming platforms, it’s easier than ever to discover new music. But back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when I experienced a massive expansion in my musical taste and awareness, that wasn’t the case. Instead, I relied on mail-order services like the now-defunct Rioux’s Records.
Originally started by Jason Bryant around 1996 to support the artists and labels of Michigan’s “space music” scene (e.g., Windy & Carl, Füxa, Burnt Hair Records), Rioux’s offerings eventually grew to include releases from a broad spectrum of indie, underground, and experimental artists and labels.
Getting the latest edition of Rioux’s email catalog (view an example) was always a thrill because it contained so many new (to me) artists and releases, and Bryant’s descriptions were those of a true fan and music lover, not some marketing/PR hack.
Musical discovery may be easier now than it’s ever been, but algorithms and recommendation engines will never compare to the personal and human touch of a distributor like Rioux’s.
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