win and tonic

Coming Attractions

richasapo:

Can you learn the true nature of a man just by watching his appearances in the media? Well one man will have to, and the man he’s learning about will be himself. When a supposedly harmless experiment/publicity event goes wrong, Hulk Hogan’s brain is wiped clean of all but the most basic functions required to remain alive. Now a team of scientists must recreate as much Hulk as they can before anyone finds out by downloading every piece of Hulk-related media they can find into the newly vacated cavity. Old wrestling tapes, Hogan Knows Best, even Rock ‘n’ Wrestling and Mr Nanny. This summer, a hilarious comedy about a man made of pure Hulkamania becomes the heartwrenching tale of a family trying to recover their lost father which becomes a thrilling action spectacular when one rogue scientist tries to turn the aftermath of the disaster to his advantage by uploading all the Incredible Hulk media he can find into the brain of Hulk’s old wrestling nemesis Rowdy Roddy Piper. Can Hulk defeat Hulk? What terrible fate will befall mankind if he can’t? Find out, in FINDING HULK, in cinemas this summer

reblogged from richasapo

richasapo:

Go open your cutlery drawer and then slam it. Hear the way it rattles? That’s my new album. I’m using this message to conceptually frame every instance of a cutlery drawer rattling anywhere as a single musical work by me, entitled Jesus Christ, And His Wedding To Grace Jones In Hyperspace (10000AD). A single work, being performed all over the globe at once by trillions upon trillions of people and lasting from now until either the end of cutlery or the heat death of the universe (whichever comes first). You’re already my musicians, all of you. You have no choice in the matter

reblogged from richasapo

themadeshop:

Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.

— Leon Wieseltier, Against Identity (via austinkleon

I may need to read the entire (very expensive, oy) book to ensure I have the entire context, but this quote goes against everything that I know about the intrinsic worth of one’s creative output and I’m not sure if my almost visceral aversion toward this challenge of my worldview is because 1. I’m confident with anecdotal and empirical evidence that it is actually incorrect (as empirical as evidence can be when discussing the worth of anything (see: currency, the assignment of any number of brain chemicals to things outside the self (read: love), the electoral college)), 2. This challenge to my way of thinking is causing my lizard brain to retaliate in a not entirely unpredictable way in an attempt to defend of my own deeply treasured outlook on life and those around me, or 3. I am a stubborn child who doesn’t want to update his worldview because I am comfortable here.

Backpedaling as far as I am about to might be off-putting but please, bear with me:

Intrinsic worth is a philosophical concept that states basically this: Because we (humanity) are alive and aware, we have an assignment of worth that is automatically non-zero. Now, first: this sort of dips into the “zero tolerance” end of things that I have a particularly long and verbose opinion on (in short, “zero tolerance” has zero use in our society: Everything is a spectrum, there are too many variables when there is even one sentient mind present in the equation, The Intolerance of Intolerance, &c &c), but this sort of self-congratulatory worldview hasn’t settled with me as much as of late. We are variable in a mathematical equation in which variables from before The Big Bang and well into the future are arranged on both sides of an equal sign - we aren’t special. And that’s okay! I’m hardly a nihilist - in fact, therein lies my appreciation for humanity, because it was impossible and yet here we are makes me weep in reverence if I think about it for too long. The fact that life is short and I have an awareness of my own tiny slot of it is pretty freakin’ rad.

So that doesn’t really sit well with me these days, the intrinsic worth of humanity I mean, because all life is simply a state of matter and information - who is to say that a blade of grass has more value in the universe, on any metric, than the star stuff that it is comprised of? Because proteins act like a machine then the sum of its parts are greater than those parts laid end to end? If so, to what end?¹

But so there exists a sort of economics of eudaimonia. The pursuit of happiness, or, at perhaps its most reductionist state, comfort, is the drive that living things possess in order to propagate. This is why society was built: so that we could control our food, our environment, our social structure. We all just want to be happy.

And what has been a source of happiness for as long as we’ve been able to attribute “sentience” to our species?

Art. (Duh.)

Art is information, arranged or found, presented by a person with the intent to inform or delight. I’m pretty damn pleased with that definition, though I am sure there are those who make an art of out defying it (I did a thing there, did you see it). But there is an almost inconceivably large amount of metadata between an artwork’s conception and its presentation - hell, even before its conception. And one of those variables is one that I find to be very important: authenticity.

Mad Men depicts a world of advertising in its birth that shows how authenticity can be manufactured - or, at the very least, rearranged. Don Draper’s presentation of the Kodak Carousel is rather telling:

Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

The evidently direct line into people’s appreciation of objects and experiences is what makes Draper so good at his job. Pulling at heart strings &c but for what purpose? To sell a product.

And that isn’t evil, no, that’s not what I’m getting at at all. I’m not here saying that if your creative output is used as a means to put food on the table that it inherently inauthentic.

But perhaps it’s a little less authentic than expression born out of the sheer necessity to express.

“Perhaps”, because sometimes there exists an overlap of one’s passion and one’s paycheck. Adam Lisagor’s endorsements of things that he genuinely wants to share with you has an absolutely refreshing feeling of authenticity in advertising. He’s using his skills to share with you something that he believes will improve the quality of your life - and he’s effective at making you believe it, too. Part of that is presentation; but part of that is curation. He’s only showing us the cool stuff, and simply showing us what it can do.

But if we were to take two pieces of prose, say, that had equal amounts of aesthetic beauty (theoretically, as if there could ever be such a metric), and we told you that the first piece was a carefully edited and re-edited stanza of specially curated thought created for the sole purpose of getting published so that the author could then buy a yacht with its profits, but that the second piece was born from a bout of hypergraphia from a lonely person struggling with depression - which would you value more? (And, maybe worth investigating further, is that Okay? And where did that come from? Is it a selfish urge on which the whole basis of “liking” and “hearting” and “faving” things in social media is a way to say “Yeah! You are someone like me who can gain success and notoriety, and I want to believe that through the encouragement of others I can achieve the same!”? Or is it more altruistic than that, beneficial to society in some larger, perhaps more skeumorphic way in today’s post-post-industrialist world?)

So what I’m getting at is that authenticity is a metric, but not the metric for appraising the worth of one’s creative output - but, again, a very important one, at least for me. Ugly things that are authentic can seemingly eke toward - approaching, at least, if not surpassing - apparently beautiful, inauthentic things in terms of appraisal. When the punchline to this incredible finger-tutting video was a brand name, I was a little disheartened - until I realized that it was probably made by someone around my age making something cool in exchange for money. And that’s awesome. (Or perhaps just maybe something something Monkeysphere, though I way more like to think that authenticity in advertising in a post-DVR world is a thing that exists) I think back on the Old Spice Guy campaign, run by a couple of witty dudes who think quick on their feet. I think of my friend Chris and the unexpected fame garnered from his pixel art of a feline pastry. And I think of all my friends who are literally making a living from their art, people who draw pictures for an admission price or a commission list, or authors who made a goddamn media label all because of the internet’s appreciation of a book about boners and feelings.

But then I think of my adoration of Justin Vernor after having locked himself in a cabin in snowy Wisconsin for three whole months following a band breakup, a string of failed relationships and a debilitating illness and simply making things as a form of therapy when suddenly he finds his creative output the baseboard of astounding success, and maybe, just maybe, I might realize that perhaps “authenticity” isn’t the word I want to value highest in my appraisal of one’s creative work, but “romance”.

reblogged from themadeshop

moledro

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.

The delicious antithesis of this is one that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing recently and often: finding someone that lives within your own generation who is able to influence your outlook on the world in a positive manner with their creative output, and then getting to eat a sandwich with them.

Make friends with creative people as often as the opportunity presents itself to you.

reblogged from dictionaryofobscuresorrows

While acknowledging that it’s impossible to argue someone into loving something they hate, and vice versa, it’s still often enjoyable to attempt the argument. When we talk to people whose opinions directly contradict ours, we’re forced to defend our tastes, define our opinions, and analyze why we react the way we do. Which is why we have Why Don’t You Like This?, in which two of our staffers will attempt to discover whether people with opposing opinions can get beyond “No, you’re wrong!” and have a civil, constructive, and possibly even convincing discussion about their points of contention. Because no matter what talk radio says, there’s still a middle ground between “We agree utterly” and “I’m right, and you’re stupid and evil.”

I forgot about AV Club, but then I remembered that it’s great.

Chris Onstad: Uncanny things that make me feel strange happen [in Jim Woodring’s comics]. That’s why I’ve been buying them for 20 years. Actually, I don’t mean to say “buying.” I mean to say “enjoying.”

Comics Alliance: You don’t buy his comics?

CO: No, I buy them, but that’s not my relationship with them. Money is just a means to get happiness.

CA: There are a lot of people who see that notion very differently, particularly in the context of webcomics or digital comics. Money is often seen as a direct expression of one’s enjoyment.

CO: That’s a really artificial and wrong way to describe the things you enjoy about life, by codifying them in the units of money used to get them. Are you really taking joy in something by counting it out in terms of its monetary value, which is arbitrary? Walk around, have a smoke.

CA: Well, I think it’s different if you’re saying that the way you articulate your enjoyment of something is by financially supporting it. Instead of buying versus enjoying, some people might frame it as buying versus illegally downloading something.

CO: That’s sort of a new concept for people. It really struck me — you know the band Vampire Weekend? My friend was like, “Hey, have you heard of them? Let me play you this track of theirs on MySpace!” I listened to it and thought, wow, these kids really did their homework. They sounded like African new wave mod Simon and Garfunkel stuff. And my friend said, “I’m actually going to buy this album!” Then the lightbulb went off, like, oh shit — that’s what people do with Achewood. They say, I’ll buy your merchandise both because I like it and because I want to support the art in my own small way.

— Chris Onstad on His Return to the Uncanny ‘Achewood’