Once in a while I write a post and ramble and re-edit it so many times that it almost develops a coherent argument. Most of these longer posts are about science or philosophy of science, but movies have also been known to inspire verbosity in me.
Love is fragile, awkward, painful, and hilarious. Sometimes awkwardly, painfully hilarious. Love is all of these things, but above all it is something even more–love is not your fault.
This is the message I pondered through most of Un baiser s’il vous plaît, a kitschy romantic comedy with an occasional cruel streak that aired today at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the museum’s summer French film festival. I’m sticking with the French title here not because I’m pretentious (though I am) but because the English translation, Shall We Kiss?, might make you expect to see Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez dancing around and giving each other awkward glances. No, that would be the wrong impression. The actual awkwardness in this movie transcends anything a Hollywood actor could conjure up (except maybe Woody Allen), and this is probably why the writer-director Emmanuel Mouret plays the lead role himself. With a few nervous glances and breathily uttered “oui”s from Virginie Ledoyen to back him up, Mouret shows us that even the liberated French have the occasional embarrassing sexual experience–in this case, comically, excruciating so. Then again, they probably make up for it by having even more of the non-embarrassing kind.
(This is part one of a three-part series of posts about weird and wonderful things on YouTube, drawn from my own extensive surfing and observation. Parts two and three will be up soon.) UPDATE: Maybe not so soon, but at some point, hopefully
You’ve all experienced it. The Internet is like a rabbit hole. During the school year, you’re busy and can resist, but the minute you get home, your boredom and weakness for information leads you to click link after link, for hours, until that embarrassing moment when someone walks in the room and you have no plausible explanation for why you’re reading about the history of NAMBLA.
Sometimes, though, the things you’ll find are so fascinating that you just have to tell a story about them. Do you think your click-orgies are interesting (and embarrassing)? You have no idea…
The Procrastination Begins
It’s the week of my MCAT exam. Instead of studying my ass off, I’m looking up Starcraft replays on YouTube, commentated by the venerable Klazart. I get curious; who is this guy with a funny English-sounding accent, who talks about a computer game like it’s tennis–although in Korea, Starcraft is probably more competitive than tennis–and spits out names and career details of professional Starcraft players like he’s reading them off a Rolodex? After the jump: The everyday geek confronts the strangeness of an online gaming culture
There are varying levels of regret that come with not doing your homework.
Level one is the brief pang of irritation when you realize that you will be too busy this week to make up the reading or lecture you missed yesterday.
Level two is the acute panic and then furious, unsubstantiated creativity when a question about that reading comes up on the midterm several weeks later (and you write a verbose and incredible–i.e. not credible–essay in response).
Level three is the wistful recollection, two weeks after the semester ends, of how much more insight and academic joy you could have had if you’d done your readings before discussion section.
Level four is when you are on your deathbed and realize that you have lived an unhappy and unfulfilling life because you threw away a chance to truly appreciate literature and the human spirit in spring of junior year.
This past semester we were assigned some readings in my English class on the question of “What is a literary classic?” Because I am in level three-going-on-four of academic regret right now, and because I just read the new J.M. Coetzee book, I revisited–er, visited–his essay on the topic.
Bach’s music is not just the incarnation of certain musical ideas, but the incarnation of higher-order ideas of exposition, complication and resolution, that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.
["What is a Classic?" by J.M. Coetzee]
The folklore of Western science is filled with solitary heroes and geniuses. After I read a book about Galileo while in fourth grade, I decided that science was the most noble profession. It was because I was inspired by a romantic idea: working alone, or with the limited contributions of much less brilliant minds, the “true” scientist discovers something which revolutionizes his (it’s usually a he) field, as well as the way humans look at the universe. The discovery is named after the scientist, and he achieves ever-lasting recognition, an immortality to rival that of kings. This is science as Western culture’s antidote to the problem of life after death.
The idea of the heroic scientist isn’t just my personal fascination. Science students everywhere, even the nonscientific masses, see science in terms of a handful of famous personas and its history as the legacy of revolutionaries: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Watson and Crick. The culture of scientists themselves–who have studied and understood the nameless concepts behind the equations–is also dominated by this pantheon of names. Maxwell’s equations, Pythagorean theorem, Mendelian genetics. We name discoveries after people as if gravity didn’t exist before Newton, as if the weirdness of space-time didn’t come into being until Einstein put pen to paper.
Now that I’ve kept that inspiration long enough to work in a lab and read multi-author papers, I’m starting to suspect that the “lone hero” is an illusion. Not only that, but that it was just as much of an illusion a century ago, in the great Romantic age of scientific achievement, as it is today, in the age of online connectedness and interdisciplinary research. Is it possible that the individual-centered view of science has always been nothing more than an artifact of our individual-centered cultural imagination? (more…)
The fact that this realization still strikes me profound after a few days can only indicate 2 things: 1) that I think too much about the internet, and 2) that my thoughts about the internet are at least 2 years behind everyone else’s. But since we’re on the subject, I might as well share some writings I’ve found by those who don’t suffer from my propensity for lagging behind the times.
Tim O’Reilly, head of O’Reilly Media and one of the most influential figures on the development of the web in the last decade, has the following to say about a certain “collective intelligence” taking hold on the internet:
If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The “echo chamber” that critics decry is also an amplifier (Link to article here).
“Web 2.0″ is the buzzword for what I’ve been trying to place my finger on for the last month–that snazzy, interactive, smooth dynamic feeling of the web as exemplified by sites like flickr, wikipedia, and pretty much everything google has ever made (gmail and google maps being the most well-known ones). Apparently there’s been a conference every year since 2004 to explore how this “new Web” can be made even cooler.
While strictly speaking, Web 2.0 refers to a set of technical innovations and business models, these components are deeply connected with a paradigm of collectivist, highly self-referential content that must also enter into discussion. (more…)
stumbleupon
del.icio.us
The folklore of Western science is filled with solitary heroes and geniuses. After I read a book about Galileo while in fourth grade, I decided that science was the most noble profession. It was because I was inspired by a romantic idea: working alone, or with the limited contributions of much less brilliant minds, the “true” scientist discovers something which revolutionizes his (it’s usually a he) field, as well as the way humans look at the universe. The discovery is named after the scientist, and he achieves ever-lasting recognition, an immortality to rival that of kings. This is science as Western culture’s antidote to the problem of life after death.