As you might imagine, I could go on for quite some time about what I imagine the terms of this contract *should* be. Â But for now, here’s a link to an interesting discussion of what they appear to be to a number of generally smart people in DC.
Month: January 2011
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHjKBjM1ngw[/youtube]
Border fences are monuments to human failure.
This Patton Oswalt article – Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. – has been making the rounds. And not just amongst the geeks. For me (hey, shut up), this was a great exploration of something we’ve lost at the hands of the Internet:
The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!
But then reflect on the advantages. Waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace. People who were obsessed with Star Trek or the Ender’s Game books were all obsessed with the same object, but its light shone differently on each person. Everyone had to create in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. What if Leia, not Luke, had become a Jedi? What happens after Rorschach’s journal is found at the end of Watchmen? What the hell was The Prisoner about?
If you just went “yes!”, then you need to click on over and read the rest of it. Â If you haven’t already seen it and a dozen critiques of it, that is.
Funny, I was holding this in pocket for today, and a friend posted it as her year end video yesterday. Gogol Bordello‘s Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher):