Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 169

And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Interruptions Dept.

Well, I think most of the dust has settled by now.

For those not fully in the know, I've spent approximately the last ten to twelve months of my life relocating from the New York area to the Space Coast (near Cape Canaveral) in Florida. This involved selling my house — no, first fixing my house, then selling it — then trying to extract a shipping container from my driveway in the middle of some of the worst snowstorms in years, then driving two-and-a-half days cross-country with my wife and tw...

And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Blog Dept.

Well, I think most of the dust has settled by now.

For those not fully in the know, I've spent approximately the last ten to twelve months of my life relocating from the New York area to the Space Coast (near Cape Canaveral) in Florida. This involved selling my house — no, first fixing my house, then selling it — then trying to extract a shipping container from my driveway in the middle of some of the worst snowstorms in years, then driving two-and-a-half days cross-country with my wife and tw...

Fixed In The Mix Dept.

From the liner notes to Karlheinz Stockhausen'sHymnen:

What I termed the serial thinking or the general serial form in the fifties, or what I designated as musical through-organisation then, has by no means been forgotten or become superfluous. Rather, it has been integrated into a more comprehensive concept: integrated into the musician's mental armament. It is now applied in such differentiated areas, that it can no longer be identified only in the domain of material (or in the characteristi...

The Fantasticks (And The Realisticks) Dept.

Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Real - NYTimes.com

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of “The Hunger Games,” the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macond...

Fan Smart, Fan Dumb Dept.

Slightly older, but still worth commenting on:

Please Jesus Don’t Let Roberto Orci Direct STAR TREK 3 | Badass Digest

... there's a dark lining to this silver cloud - Orci is sticking withStar Trek. The guy is a big Trekkie, despite his personal philosophies being an absolute affront to the memory of Gene Roddenberry, and he's still working on the third film. But worse, he's pushing hard to direct the movie.

Emphasis mine, because it illustrates something I always find fascinating about fandom:...

Gone Baby Gone Dept.

Here is one common counter-argument to the notion that death is simply a transition to a hitherto unknown form of existence:

Responses to People Telling Me to Get Over the Death Thing

"You're just changing form" — This argument has its roots in new agey concepts that borrow liberally and inaccurately from dead religions and a Dummy's Guide to Buddhism. In various forms it states that what constitutes the essential "me" will continue in the redistributed particles that formerly comprised my body...

The Curation Is Worse Than The Disease Dept.

The Amazon Effect » The Illusion of MoreThe Illusion of More

... the best stuff almost always comes from the healthy center of an industry, where experienced professionals have the resources to cultivate something the market doesn’t know it wants yet. The best stuff comes from high-risk bets. It’s not too hard to sell a slightly scandalous S&M trilogy or mass-market paperbacks or diet books. But stewardship of the next Toni Morrison is hard and takes experience and real risk because that kind...

Squinting Into The Future Dept.

Steven Savage has talked aboutRobinson Meyer's piece in The Atlantic about how looking to SF for ideas about the future via things like the Google X lab was a mistake. Steve's piece is worth reading, and he invited me to draft my own response — something I wasn't even sure was possible given how thorough his own essay was. So, while I'll respond on kind, consider this more of a string quartet to his symphony.

The big question I would pose to Meyer would be this: if looking to SF for a vision o...

The Right Thing And How To Do It Dept.

George R.R. Martin Is Like Your Kooky Uncle in This ROLLING STONE Interview | Badass Digest

Our society is full of people who have fallen in one way or another, and what do we do with these people? How many good acts make up for a bad act? If you're a Nazi war criminal and then spend the next 40 years doing good deeds and feeding the hungry, does that make up for being a concentration-camp guard? I don't know the answer, but these are questions worth thinking about. I want there to be a possib...

Big Apple, Little Apple Dept.

Part of me wants to hammer the keyboard with both fists over a rash of store closings in Manhattan: the Rizzoli bookstore, J&R Music World, Pearl Paint. J&R and Pearl are chains, but had the mentality of indie shops run by knowledgeable curators. Rizzoli was more or less irreplaceable. (If the Strand is next, I'll eat my hats.)

To me, losing this stuff isn't about having that many less places to shop. It's about having that many less perspectives on what a store can be, what it can provide peo...