| After Altamont |
[10 Jun 2015|02:59pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/06/sticky_fingers_by_the_rolling_stones_one_of_the_greatest_albums_in_rock.html The first thing that must be said about the Rolling Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers—which is being re-released this week in one-, two-, and three-disc editions, depending on how deep you want to wade into your own pockets and “previously unreleased” marginalia—is that it opens with the most morally vacant piece of music to ever hit the top of the charts. “Brown Sugar,” which in spring of 1971 became the Stones’ first U.S. No. 1 hit since “Honky Tonk Women” two years prior, is a rollicking and shockingly blithe rumination on slavery and sexual violence that unfolds over the greatest Keith Richards guitar riff that Keith never wrote (the riff, and the song, are Mick Jagger’s creation). The song’s Wikipedia entry describes it as “a pastiche of a number of taboo subjects, including slavery, interracial sex, cunnilingus, and less distinctly, sadomasochism, lost virginity, rape, and heroin” (quite a collection of links between those commas); in a 1995 interview with Jann Wenner, Jagger himself summed it up as “all the nasty subjects in one go.”
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| The Curious Case of Mencius Moldbug |
[10 Jun 2015|04:16pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/curtis_yarvin_booted_from_strange_loop_it_s_a_big_big_problem.html What does a bizarre project to reinvent software from the ground up have in common with 19th-century reactionary political philosophy? That question has become the unlikely heart of a computing controversy involving this September’s Strange Loop programming conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 2009, Strange Loop is a yearly three-day conference with talks and workshops on new computer science technologies. The conference had accepted an apolitical presentation on a fairly obscure project by a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin, only to reject it last week after it received complaints about political views Yarvin espoused on his blog.
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| “We Just Keep Trying to Beat Every Show With the Funny Stick Until It’s Funny” |
[10 Jun 2015|08:54pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/06/phineas_and_ferb_finale_interview_with_show_creators_dan_povenmire_and_swampy.html One night in a Pasadena restaurant in the mid-’90s, the animator Dan Povenmire—then working as a writer on the Nickelodeon series Rocko’s Modern Life—doodled a simple cartoon on the butcher paper covering his table: a triangle-headed boy with a pair of round bubble eyes and a mouth agape in nervous alarm. It’s an expression that’s hard to imagine on the wedge-shaped face of Phineas Flynn, the unflappably cheerful young inventor that triangle-headed kid would become—but mouth shape aside, the character is pretty much fully present in that first sketch. As Povenmire would recall when Phineas and Ferb finally had its premiere on the Disney Channel nearly 16 years later, “I tore that piece off and told my wife, ‘This is the show I'm going to sell.’ ”
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| Behold, My Tribute-inator! |
[10 Jun 2015|08:55pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/06/phineas_and_ferb_series_finale_saying_goodbye_to_the_disney_channel_show.html Were an alien to arrive on earth and ask me what was so great about the Disney cartoon series Phineas and Ferb—the kind of situation that could very plausibly arise on an episode of Phineas and Ferb—he might scratch his head with one gooey tentacle over the confusing and seemingly self-contradictory answer. “Well,” I’d say, drawing a deep breath, “it’s a simple, sweet-spirited celebration of childhood, creativity, and having fun. Each half-hour episode is divided into two 11-minute freestanding stories in which the same exact plot structure recurs every time, with slight variations. Stepbrothers Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher build impossible inventions in their backyard over the course of a summer’s day. Their uptight teenage sister, Candace, spends that whole day trying to bust the boys to their mother but never quite manages to show her their outlandish creations (a full-size roller coaster, a portal to Mars, a dancing metal exoskeleton) before they mysteriously vanish. And though the kids are totally unaware of his existence, there’s an evil villain character, Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who spends his days constructing his own absurd machines to be used for nefarious ends (though unlike Phineas and Ferb’s ingenious contraptions, Doofenshmirtz’s tend to underperform and then explode). But he’s not that bad a guy really—he’s just kind of an insecure bumbler who’s secretly fond of his nemesis, a platypus secret agent who, as the boys’ seemingly inert house pet, is the only connection between these two disparate storylines.”
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