Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 155
January 22, 2015
Time Has Come Today Dept.
Sometimes it takes someone else to say what's on your mind. Sometimes they say it better than you do.
Seatbelts, folks; this could get bumpy.
My comrade-in-arms Zach B. has been talking at his blog about electing not to go with self-publishing as a default option. He laid out his position in a post titled "Humility", then defended it furtherby explaining some of the toxic attitudes he felt the self-publishing circuit encouraged. Among them is a reflexive hatred and distrust of conventional publ...
Factorysimile Dept.
Why Do All Records Sound the Same? — Cuepoint — Medium
Just as a modern politician’s job is to deliver seven second soundbites, [Maroon Five]'s job is to deliver seven second audio clips which will encourage young-ish people with a high disposable income to turn a little red knob at least 180 degrees clockwise. No wonder they look so stressed.
...Why does most music sound the same these days?Because record companies are scared, they don’t want to take risks, and they’re doing the best they can...
January 21, 2015
The Imperfect Potato Dept.
Not long ago I talked about how mainstream entertainment feels like the quest for a better hamburger, one where at the end of the day, all you have is a hamburger. So, I asked myself, what would my books constitute? And then out of nowhere, I thought: They're like potatoes.
Misshapen, irregular, imperfect,lumpen (how I love that word). Left in the dark (after they're finished), they sprout, by provoking me with their alternate possibilities. I could have done this, I could have done that. But...
January 20, 2015
But How Interesting Is Your Pain, Really? Dept.
There's a lot of damage in life for which the best prescription is "get over it", but I suspect a great many people don't want to hear that. (This was me once upon a time.)
Said folk know, on some level, getting over it is precisely what they need to do — but why would they vent and fume to others for so long, unless they were holding out for an exception to the rule? What they need is to get over it, but what theywant is for someone to come to them and say, "Yes, you're right, this is terribl...
My Dinner With André
The concept could not be simpler, or at the same time more audacious: Two friends, out of touch for years on end, reunite in a tony New York City restaurant and get caught up with each other. No gimmicks; no distractions; no injections of comic relief on the part of the wait staff or the chef; just two men of wit, intelligence, and sharply divergent worldviews sharing the lives they've been living. Most people, when confronted with the film's concept, say:That's it?To which I'd reply: That's...
January 14, 2015
Higher Standardization Dept.
What with one thing and another, I can never be sure if I have made myself surpassingly clear on a given point or not, so here goes. Part of why I pound as much as I do on the pop-culture pap machine (here, here, here, here, and here, just to cite a few recent examples) is because its effect on creators is all the more baneful and baleful than its effects on plain old audiences.
My opinion — prejudiced, pretentious, and self-important as it is — is that creators ought to hold themselves to a h...
January 13, 2015
Freedom Of (Unheard) Speech Dept.
When Art Is Dangerous (or Not) - NYTimes.com
It speaks well of our own relatively flexible system that it can accommodate criticism and dissent without lopping anyone’s hands off. But this is also a backhanded testament to our society’s successful denaturing of satire, and the impotence of art in our own culture. Autocrats from Plato on have advocated control and censorship of the arts to ensure the stability of their states and micromanage their people’s inner lives. In the mature democracies...
January 10, 2015
The Perfect Hamburger Dept.
Between one thing and another — book edits, lingering illness, other things I don't want to go on about in public — some more thoughts came together to clarify why homogenous entertainments are individually good but collectively bad.
Earlier in the week, I threw the dice and watchedThe Equalizer,knowing full well it has about as much to do with the TV series (which I loved, unabashedly) as21 Jump Street had to do with its own eponymous predecessor. It wasn't a bad movie — let's face it, nothin...
January 7, 2015
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Dept.
In one of my random notes from hither and thither, I have this phrase: "There's a lot of money to be made in both saving people from themselves and telling them what they want to hear."
File under Depressing But True, I suppose. Not a day goes by when I don't see opportunities — as a writer, as a human being — to sell my skills short for the sake of easy money, easy attention, easy anything.
Random example: romance fiction. There's a ton of it on Amazon and it sells like mad, and from what I ca...
The Urge Of The Utopian Moment Dept.
Every book I have written has been a process as much as it has been an artifact. You know how this goes: the act of writing the thing is also an act of trying to figure out what it's all really about, then focus on that and discard everything that doesn't fit the plan.
WithWelcome to the Fold, the one thing that remained consistent through every mutation of the project was a line from Slavoj Žižek, whose work I have only acquainted myself with in the know-thy-enemy sense. "The urge of the mome...
