Who cares what the music sounds like – I just love the genre names.
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Category: Culture
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Mask of the Week
The Marquardt Beauty Analysis mask.
According to the MBA mission statement:
MBA is dedicated to proactively researching human visual aesthetics, including its biological and mathematical bases, and to utilizing the results of that research to develop and provide information and technology with which to analyze and positively modify (i.e. improve) human visual attractiveness.
[…]
MBA believes that this information and technology can empower individuals within our species to have a greater and more clear understanding of human attractiveness and its role in our behaviour. Further we believe that this understanding can and will give each of us a more positive control over human attractiveness and ultimately over our own lives and fate.
Well, if nothing else, they’ve successfully demonstrated that people look better without lots of black lines drawn on their faces. You need to look at the ‘our research’ section to get the full glory of the MBA system. I will exercise great restraint and simply say that I find the theoretical underpinnings unconvincing.
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Modern poetry – mapped!
The Poetry Archive has got one of those tag-clouds so people can find poems by theme. From which we learn that the most popular subject in modern poetry is death. Woohoo. Potentially more cheerfully, death is closely followed by childhood, animals and love. After that come poetry, language and war. And so on. You can see for yourself.
It looks like ‘nature’ would score very high if all the appropriate categories were lumped together.
Not the most statistically rigorous experiment of all time (selection bias, much?), but kind of interesting.
I was on a train going over the river the other day, and saw the Houses of Parliament silhouetted against the winter sky. And I thought to myself – it may be a ludicrous bit of Victorian pastiche, and the decision to make the parliament Gothic may have been hideously backward-looking and a touch Disney, but it sure looks striking in silhouette.
This has encouraged me to develop the Matt Groening Theory Of Architecture.
Apparently, the speed with which the London Eye and the Gherkin have been absorbed into the tourist souvenir industry – i.e incorporated into snowglobes and so on – is very unusual for new buildings. But in a Groening interview I once read, he explained his theory of cartoon character design – that they should be instantly identifiable in silhouette. Just cast your mind over the characters in the Simpsons, and you’ll see what he means. Well, one thing the Wheel and the Gherkin have in common is that they have completely distinctive silhouettes.
He also said he made the Simpsons yellow so that they’d immediately stand out when people were channel-hopping, but I don’t think that would be such a good idea applied to buildings.
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“the happiest band in the world”
About a week ago I suggested you go over to Aduna to get the three mp3s of Orchestra Super Mazembe [they’re still there!]. Well, at no condition is permanent, a whole album – nine tracks – of OSM has been posted. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’m really excited. And, as ever, if you like the music, you can do the decent thing and buy some – possibly from Calabash, who specialise in fairly traded world music.
BTW, if you skip over my occasional posts about mp3 blogs because you don’t have an mp3 player and don’t normally listen to music on your computer, bear in mind that you can always write mp3s onto an audio CD and listen to it on your CD player. Believe me, your life will be better if it has some Orchestra Super Mazembe in it.
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Movie remakes
When Hollywood makes a film based on another film, it’s called a ‘remake’ and is seen as proof that the industry is creatively bankrupt and incapable of producing original work.
When they make a movie based on a novel, it’s called an ‘adaptation’, and it’s seen as artistic, admirable, and prestigious.
I think the industry might have some self-worth issues.