Photography, Death, and Memory

A friend of mine made this video for a class we are in. It is a good summation of a lot of ideas from the class. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Expanding on iTunes

iTunes started life as one of those little programs that was made to let you rip your CDs and listen to your music via your computer. As an app it was pretty quant back in the day. However, with its purchase by Apple and its pairing with the iPod the app suddenly became useful and with great meaning. Then the iTunes Store opened and that made sense. Why bother buying physical if you are just going to rip anyway?

However soon the iTunes Store began offering movies, TV shows, and apps for iPods and iPhones! Of course, if you are going to buy something in the iTunes Store it is only logical that the iTunes app be where you access them. Right?

Well, with the newest section of the library, Books (which has a whole separate app, iBooks, on the iOS) I am pretty fed up with iTunes being such a catch-all. So I propose some kind of closely knit set of apps in OS X that might best be called the iLibrary.

(It is either this or overhaul iTunes into some kind of iMedia program that melts in iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. That would be a bad idea for many reasons, including the before mentioned bloat of the app. Of course, they don't want to alienate Windows users.)

The iLibrary Apps:

iTunes - Has your music, podcasts, audio books, ringtones, (better than now) streaming radio stations, and maybe even music videos.

iVideos - Has your movies, TV shows, music videos, and has a robust Internet video viewer that can let easily watch and download videos from YouTube and other sites.

iPhoto - Like it is now, but with a less odd library system and a more full integration into my life. Yeah, I use it now, but only because it is there. Most of the time it seems like Finder's abandoned child/frame.

iBooks - Can store any form of text document from .doc to .PDF to any of those other crazy ones AND it can read most of them so that you could theoretically search for specific passages within documents. It would also be able to provide you with bookmarks, highlighting, personal side notes, and other meta-editing. I would also hope that Apple might be able to introduce a new ebook open standard that puts these sorts meta-edits into a common file type.

iApps - Where you iOS apps are. I would hope that pretty soon we can run iOS apps across platforms from the iPhone to the iPad to OS X. This is an off the wall prediction, but I don't feel like it is too crazy.

iKnow - This is only kind of silly. Redo the Address Book app and turn it into something more socially connected. Connect Twitter, Facebook, etc to make my contacts more dynamic and useful.


Each of these would have a permanent app in iOS. Because we would be used to the apps being separate on our computers it would stop being so jarring to find that I have to close my iPod app and find my iBooks app to read a book then go back to my iPod app to watch a movie. Considering that all of this media is in one central library app right now does anyone else find this annoying?

From here the "iLibrary Apps" would include a number of editing and creation apps that should do more than the quick adjustments that might be around in the storage and meta-data management apps.

They would also be able to easily interact with the media libraries that our computers seem to be becoming more and more these days, at least if you are a Mac user. They would also be easily integrated into both iOS and OS X as apps both places.

iBand - Keeps the usefulness of GarageBand, but also can provide a simpler interface for people just wanting to make ringtones or to edit down any other .mp3. This will give GarageBand the respect it deserves while at the same time eliminating the need to hunt for Lifehacker articles on how to make a ringtone every time T.I. drops another single.

iMovie - It exists now in both desktop and iOS form and is actually pretty good for what it does. If Apple just keeps these apps up to snuff they will stay useful to people like me who just need to edit simple raw video.

iProgram - Apple should buy out GameSalad and turn it into a native app. I think we have reached the point where Apple can loosen its stranglehold on its apps and the AppStore. This would also encourage Apple and larger programers to keep their own products fresh.


We also need something that deals directly with the settings on our Apple gear:

iDevice - Directly reads and deals with any iDevice connected to the computer. Looks like iTunes is sort of doing this right now with AirPlay, but this is more. Here you will edit your iDevice's settings (be it pod, pad, or phone), manage what is stored on it, etc. No more having to go to iPhoto if I want to put any photos from the device onto my main library. It can just do it. Also, I should be able to use it as a kind of flash drive, gotdangit.


While I am expecting some major iOS integration into 10.7 (Lion?) I would like to see these things added in as well. We are still several years away from OS 11 which I can only see merging together OS X and iOS much more fully, but until then these updates to the core functions of the Apple software could make the entire product line into some much more functional.

The Age of Deep Mystery

Today we feel so smart. We know how brain chemistry effects our desire for things like gambling or why companies give us choice in our pick of spaghetti sauces even if it makes us all crazy. We are always on the lookout for that Nash equilibrium. Min/Maxing is not just limited to RPG players any more. We are cracking the secrets of ourselves. We are finding out just how we all tick and how to tweak ourselves to get what we want out of life.

This is all mostly a process of demystifying our lives. By figuring out all these little things so we can profit from them, or at least be aware of them, we are working toward a kind of understanding of the world, but this is not just some kind of modern age enlightenment.

With every look at just what might sum us up we always admit there is a wall. This wall comes in many forms. We can't see that far out. We do not know how to directly observe that. There is no pattern in the noise. We can't observe its spin and position at the same time. In every case it is the same. There is a point where the universe becomes unknowable.

Most of the time this unknowableness is acceptable. We have already found the practical answers to things like sickness or marketing. Because of this, these are the things we romanticize now. Just think, we have cracked how evolution works, but we still have no idea how cells are able to make the proteins they need to survive. It's a random process. Not something we flick a switch on. This is not just beautiful to us, it is the way we find beauty in the world.

This mode of thinking is drastically different than any other way of thinking before. The thinking that there is a wall to what we know and no matter if we break through that wall in our knowledge there will only be another wall is unique. The Enlightenment could not predict no end to these walls. The Romantics were busy building walls. Einstein hated that this was suggested by his ideas. The only people who could have seen this were those who just assumed it was turtles all the way down.

The fundamental problem of our times is coping with this. How do we accept that there is no base to the world? If there is always going to be something we don't have the ability to figure out, then does that mean we have to have some kind of spirituality? Organized religion has yet to provide any kind of way of thinking that doesn't blatantly ignore this. Does this mean that not even God is immune to this fear?

Scott Pilgrim vs. Video Game Logic

If there is one thing that should be in more movies, it is 8-bit sound effects. While likely less realistic, they are strangely effective at communicating abstract sounds. That said, here is my review of the movie.

Scott Pilgrim is not a movie about a guy trying to win over a girl. It is about a relationship between the guy and a girl, as told from his perspective. In Scott's case that perspective is something of a guy that that recent NYT article was talking about. He is self-centered, disconnected from any relationship that does not seem to contribute to making himself better, and generally a sweet but asshole-ish dude. Also, he clearly was a child of the late 80s with constant thinking in terms of Video Game Logic. This VGL is actually very important to the movie so lets talk about that.

As a disclaimer, I have not read past the second book in the series of comics. I know this makes me a bad nerd. Oh well, I got distracted watching Doctor Who or something…

VGL was first named for me as a bunch of my friends and I were playing the XBOX game Ninja Gaiden. A remake of a beloved NES game, Ninja Gaiden was pretty awesome but used a seemingly strange way of telling us if a door could be opened or not. It had a red or green light. These sort of thing might have worked if the level was some sort of industrial site, but we were on a kind of passenger ship. And the lights were HUGE. In real life these lights would never exist, but here they were. From there on my friends and I began to notice all sorts of things that made perfect sense in video games, but not in real life. These include but are not limited to total easy changes in jump momentum, wondering into people's homes in strange small villages, and one use keys. All of these things would be questionable in many ways if the game space was the real world, but in the Mushroom Kingdom you just accept it and move on.

Scott has a bunch of what might be considered non-diegetic (to anyone but him at least) concepts like character stats, hit counters, "vs" displays, points, and even scene title cards. In VGL these are simply a part of playing the game. Mario does not see the timer that we do that forces him to finish a level quickly. That is just something we know about, thus non-diegetic or outside of Mario's world, but still a part of the game as a whole. These are unfortunately the only things that most people seem to be focusing on when it comes to the gamic influences on the movie as a whole.

Instead, I want to focus on why anyone would join together to create a League of Evil Exes to prevent Ramona (and Scott) from being free from the past's grasp. To this, I propose, that the League is nothing more than another projection of Scott's as he dates and gets to know Ramona. VGL then can become what is truly is, an easy oversimplification of the world in order to better make sense of it. After all, we have to simplify the world in video games because of things like graphics and simply user mechanics. It is for our sake that we don't have to manage every key we find or have a fight staged with health meters. Scott just takes it one step further. Each time a bump comes in his relationship with Ramona, Scott sees it as tied to a past trauma of an (evil) ex who he must defeat in order to get closer to Ramona and produce a sort of fairy-tale romance. The fights with her exes, like the applause in one scene are all in Scott's head.

This introduces a concept played up this summer by the last scene Christopher Nolan's Inception, but seems rarely brought up if not made explicit: the unreliable narrator. While there at first seems to be a omnipotent third-person narrator, maybe The Voice as played by Bill Hader, visual cues of everything revolving around Scott, the applause scene, and the lack of any subject of conversation but Scott all suggest that this whole thing is from Scott's view only. This is not that bold to suggest. However, we cannot trust Scott to not inflate his own story. Especially when even the version of himself he is presenting is so untrustworthy! The movie can then only be seen as what this shallow and kind of selfish dude understood his relationship to be.

This is kind of disturbing because this actually paints the very crowd it is meant to appeal to as a bunch of people who see relationship baggage as bosses on some quest to get laid or fall in love or something. Seriously, is coming to accept that a new partner was a school bully, a bit too ready to dump someone, bi-curious, or still kind of mad for a former lover so hard that we have to think about these things as personified forms that we can beat until they explode into bus fare?

Even the last "fight" between Scott and "Nega Scott" was nothing more than Scott putting off a confrontation with a part of himself that he simply doesn't see as something he needs to deal with. Going to brunch with a dark part of yourself is nothing more than saying that you are going to wake up hung over some time soon.

This Scott-sided view limits our ability to have any absolute understanding of the relationships or girls in them. Ramona and Knives overlap for Scott much longer than I think Scott, our narrator, lets on. Considering the way that time seems to skip forward throughout the movie, this should not be a shock. This would definitely explain and even validate the extreme reactions of the women when the find this out. This is important to consider because it would also serve to explain why Knives felt so totally wronged and why Scott ended up feeling that he had cheated on both of them.

Individually, both girls are clearly not ever remotely understood by Scott. Knives is constantly seen as only a silly love-struck teenage girl with a crush and a single minded desire to have Scott back. While it seems likely that Knives did hold a grudge against Ramona, it is never totally easy to assume that any of her other actions are simply to get Scott back. After all, she is still dense enough to talk nothing but good things about Scott's big ex in front of him. That seems like something that a girl out to win back a boy would try to avoid. While it might make him sad enough to return to you, it could also just piss him off. By the end of the movie it is clear that Knives might still like Scott, but has moved on to the wider social life he introduced her to.

Ramona is THE girl with a past. Being with Scott is in many ways totally escapist for her, just like moving to Canada and getting a job as a delivery girl.* It is clear that by the movie's end she is not over her exes. They may be coins to Scott, but to her they still exist as memories of times that have a version of her that she does not like any more. Her hope was that by going someplace new she could simply bottle those memories, but of course they had to come out for Scott to deal with. Besides feeling naive for thinking she could run away from the past, at the end of the movie she is nothing but embarrassed for having shown just who she once was to Scott. Her fights were only just beginning.

*The delivery profession is clearly seen as the lowest non-blue collar job out there. This is why Fry and the rest of the cast on Futurama are so easily depicted as sad and lonely people. They are just working for a delivery service. Yeah, it is to other planets, but still all they do is take packages across the galaxy, return to Earth, and watch TV. Likewise Ramona makes her job seem cool because she rollerblades while wearing goggles, but that is just a superficial look to make the job seem less like something that requires no skill.

The video game logic Scott applies to these girls prevents him from ever seeing these romantic interests as dynamic characters who have more complexity to them than just their color pallet changes (hair dyes). Accepting all this, we are able to see that the movie is not anti-feminist at a core level, but simply depicts them all as Scott's pixilated versions of themselves.

These are not totally naturalistic assumptions to make about a movie. This is why the movie was a box office flop. However, I expect that in the very near future as video game logic becomes more common Scott Pilgrim will become a classic.

Essays by Wallace Shawn

I got this as a Christmas present from my lovely girlfriend so I felt like I should write a review, just to show how much the gift has gotten in my head.

Wallace Shawn is a name whose face and nasally voice is likely very familiar to us to the point that whenever he shows up in some movie or TV show we all say, "Hey, its that guy, you know, [insert role and movie he was in]!" Before reading this I didn't realize that his most interesting reasons for being known were in his own writings as a playwright and essayist. This role as a New York creative type is given voice in his book Essays.

A compilation of fifteen previously published works including two interviews, dating from 1985 but mostly writing in the early part of the 2000s, the book is broken into two parts. In part one, Reality, Shawn is trying to come to terms with the end of the American century and his feelings on his own affluence. Both thoughts mingle together to the point of eventually becoming one as in the book's third essay "Morality." The second part, Dream-World, questions just how and why we access art in this day and age. While less seemingly focused compared to the first part these last few essays provide the breadcrumbs of thoughts that if reflected on will lead us into a deep thicket of the mind that Shawn seems content to frolic in.

The book is kind of a downer, overall. It would be hard for me to like Shawn if I did not already relate to him in some way. He is not afraid to bring up (albeit in a tame way) the suffering in Africa or the Middle East. It is a quick read, however, that I will likely pick up again from time to time knowing that I will likely find something new.