Tag: 09.04.03

Looking At All The Web

What if you could look at the entire world wide web all at once and make all the possible connections between information? “If this process was applied across billions of web pages—in effect, looking at the entire web at once—it would be possible to spot trends. A new film, for example, might have received terrible reviews from critics, but proved popular among middle-aged women. A new camera model might have some features that are popular, but others that users find too complicated. In short, there might be information hidden on the web that cannot be gleaned from any individual page, but becomes apparent when many pages are examined together. And that information could be of great commercial value.”

Joan Didion And The Cult Of Personality

Since the publication of The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion has been celebrated as one of America’s leading practitioners of a new kind of highly wrought personal journalism. In the New York Observer, Susan Faludi claimed that Didion taught a generation of writers how to make journalism “a personal expression.” And Martin Amis characterized her style as “self-revealing” in an essay in which he went on to call her “a human being who managed to gauge another book out of herself rather than a writer who gets her living done on the side.” But has her writing ever been that immediate, that personal, that raw? Has her confessional style ever been much more than just that—a style?”

All About The Artists? What’s Creative (Class) About That?

Is Richard Florida’s “Rise of The Creative Class” really about art? “It’s not just that Florida relies on words like ‘funky’ and ‘eclectic’ to describe art scenes – words that tend to signal a passive enjoyment of the scene rather than genuine interest in art itself. Or that someone devoted to creative thinking uses empty phrases like ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘pushing the envelope’ instead of proposing real innovations. It’s true that Creative Class is dedicated more to a dissection of the economic situation rather than solutions for creating what Florida calls ‘people climates’ – that is, the kind of place that these creative-class types would like to live. But Florida tends to glide over the solutions (as well as some of the more outstanding problems) with vague recommendations such as ‘invest broadly in arts and culture,’ an idea he puts right up there with tax breaks for technology companies.”

The Disney Obsessives

There is a group of people who have burrowed in to Disneyland and plan their lives around it. They “talk a lot about the Magic of Disneyland, that wonderful, childlike feeling of giving in to this world that Walt created, of letting the place make you happy. They want to hold on to that magic and feel it all the time, but it’s perhaps not as easy as when they actually were children. And so they become Talmudic. They go deep inside the history of Disneyland, study every inch of it.”

Atlanta’s Cash-Flow Backup

Arts organizations often find themselves in cash-flow difficulty, only to find banks reluctant to loan them money. “Low-budget arts companies in metro Atlanta can now apply to borrow from a new pool of money supplied by the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund. The fund, which makes annual grants to nonprofit groups in a 23-county area, has announced that it is making $200,000 of its $6.5 million endowment available for an Arts Loan Fund.”

The Lester Bangs Cult

Lester Bangs “died in 1982 at 33, the victim of an accidental Darvon overdose. In the generation since, he has come to occupy his own corner of the pop-culture pantheon, been mentioned in songs by R.E.M. and the Ramones, and even portrayed, in a bit of fact-meets-fiction reinvention, by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous. The more iconified he’s become, the greater the distance between his image and his writing, between the myth of Bangs as gonzo genius and the reality of what he had to say.”

Naming Harry

Looking for clues as to the next Harry Potter installments? “Harry Potter and the Chariots of Light, Harry Potter and the Mudblood Revolt, Harry Potter and the Alchemist’s Cell and Harry Potter and the Quest of the Centaur have all been registered as trademarks with the UK Patent Office.”

Gender-typing – The Computer That Can Tell What Sex You Are?

A new computer program is said to reveal whether a piece of writing is by a man or by a woman. Authors of the software claim “the simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction.” But let it be noted that an ArtsJournal editor testing the program was able to consistently leave the computer gender-confused…(that means wrong!).