Archivos mensuales: febrero 2015

Son todos iguales. Y más o menos así:

Éste es el anuncio que habita en el mundo de las ideas y del cual todos los demás no son más que meras sombras.

(vía faraox)

Atonement (2007)

Empieza con:

Hay películas de las que no esperas nada y te lo dan todo, para luego quitártelo… Ese es precisamente el caso de Atonement (Expiación. Más allá de la pasión, 2007), cuyos primeros cincuenta minutos son toda una lección de cómo elevar a lo sublime, a nivel Joseph Losey, algunos de los memes románticos más trillados del mundo. Si cito precisamente a Losey no es por casualidad, pero ya volveré a ello un poco más tarde.

Y le sigue un análisis excelente.

Una idea curiosa, y habitual, es creer que el pasado fue más ingenuo. No se nos ocurre pensar que en realidad, el mundo pasado fue igual de malo que nuestro presente e incluso, en muchos aspectos, peor. No me refiero en lo material, donde habitualmente somos conscientes de que las cosas han mejorado. Hablo del trato mutuo, con una llamativa tendencia a considerar que en el pasado todos se comportaban como caballeros victorianos, exhibiendo una educación y un gusto exquisitos.

Evidentemente, no fue así. De hecho, muchas de las aflicciones modernas hunden sus raíces en el pasado. Y no hay mejor ejemplo que la idea de “vinegar Valentine”, tarjetas enviadas por san Valentín expresamente para insultar a alguien:

Happy Valentine’s Day, I Hate You

Collectors Weekly: And they were intended to reject romantic overtures?
Pollen: Yeah, but not only that. There were so many different kinds. You could send them to your neighbors, friends, or enemies. You could send them to your schoolteacher, your boss, or people whose advances you wanted to dismiss. You could send them to people you thought were too ugly or fat, who drank too much, or people acting above their station. There was a card for pretty much every social ailment.

Lo que recuerda mucho a uno de nuestros modernos trolls de internet. Uno se imagina con facilidad cómo el deseo de justicia acaba convirtiéndose en un ataque indiscriminado a todo lo que se mueve y te “molesta”.

Y lo que decía antes del pasado:

Collectors Weekly: Do you think contemporary recipients would be surprised at their tone?

Pollen: Yes, some are quite shocking. The cards are quite a surprise to those who think the past was always so safe and the present is so very daring, and that we’re much more libertarian now than we have ever been in any other period in time. I think we only have to look back at this sort of stuff to see that that’s not the case.

Nobody was safe, really, from Vinegar Valentines. There are some that insult alcoholics in a way that we would find completely unacceptable. Today, few would send a mass-produced card to someone they know is an alcoholic. We are fine with irony, but insulting someone for their drinking habit and actually meaning it? That’s the difference.

There are a lot of the comic cards produced now, but they are not meant to be taken seriously. That’s why you can call somebody a bitch in a card, because you don’t actually think they’re a bitch. But in the Victorian valentines cards, it seems that you would send it to somebody who you’d actually have a serious problem with. That’s how I read them, anyway.

Incluso destaca en la entrevista el poder, en este caso, del anonimato. Da la impresión de que en el presente la tecnología se limita a amplificar lo que siempre ha sido una constante humana.

Eran tarjetas que se producían en masa a partir de 1840 (con altos y bajos hasta los años 40 del siglo XX) y, en las primeras épocas del correo, era el receptor el que pagaba por recibirlas. Se pueden imaginar la cara que se les quedaba.

Al final del artículo hay una buena colección de tarjetas, para su deleite.

Me empieza a caer bien Tom McCarthy. Creo que voy a leer su Satin Island.

Tom McCarthy Goes to TED

Yes, then it does veer into satire. TED talks for me are the kind of perfect example of, like, smart stupidity — and basically Christian conservatism in disguise. The televangelist saying I’ve got the solution to everything in 15 minutes and it all comes down to neuroscience or some graphic user interface. And so my guy goes to Frankfurt and tries to give this talk that problematizes it and of course he’s got no purchase at all from the audience, who wants some quick meaning-biscuits.

Y también:

All the art projects I do are literary projects; the art world is just the place where they can be realized. Art is the only place where you can say, “I need a radio station, and all this other stuff, and it’s gonna cost quite a lot of money and it has no value and you can’t sell it,” and a curator can say, “Yeah, you’re right, let’s do it.” But I don’t really see a categorical difference. London had this explosion in the ’90s of an art scene and suddenly that was where all the action was. In the same way that in France in the ’50s and ’60s all the characters like Lévi-Strauss and Derrida and Deleuze, they all became philosophers. A century earlier they would have been novelists.

Esta entrada la he escrito con Byword. De hecho, lo uso tanto (en OSX e iOS) que ahora mismo tengo el reflejo de hacer simplemente cmd-espacio y teclear una “b” para que salte de inmediato. Adoro Byword. Adoro que sea sencillo y que haga justo lo que quiero. Y cuando he terminado de escribir, un par de toques mandan el texto a uno de mis blogs.

O como dice David Sparks:

Byword doesn’t have every feature on the market. It does, however, make it possible for me to write just about anywhere and when I’m doing the hard work of moving the cursor across the screen, Byword gets out of my way and lets me get on with the work at hand. I’d guess that at this point I’ve written something like a half million words in Byword. You’d think I’d be ready to move on to something different. I’ve got nothing against Typed or any of the other Byword competitors. Many of them are fine applications but the thing is … Byword, I still love you.

Yo no he escrito tantas palabras usando Byword, pero no veo que vaya a dejar de usarlo en el futuro cercano.

Pues eso: Why wormholes (probably) don’t exist

The Universe is a slippery little weasel: we are often surprised by new discoveries. However, the likelihood of wrongness increases with the grandiosity of the claim. For large stable wormholes of the type claimed in this paper (or the types in Interstellar, Contact, Deep Space Nine, and other science fiction) we need to be wrong about a lot of different things that touch on several branches of fundamental science. We would need general relativity to be wrong in its own claims about itself, and we would need to fundamentally revise the way we interpret astronomical data. Much as I love the idea of wormholes, I love the reliability of general relativity — and reality — more.

Por desgracia, Hay gente que ha leído demasiada ciencia ficción.

El Honest Trailer de La Lego película. No acaba de ser tan cortante como otros, porque queda claro que la peli les gusta. Pero la versión de la canción es tremendamente divertida:

Bien explicado:

Now, imagine that after growing up like this, pieces of the culture you were once shamed for started showing up among those who had once oppressed you (and in many ways still do). Imagine that all those things you held dear while the outside world tried to make you believe they were stupid, embarrassing, unsophisticated—imagine that all of a sudden these things were taken up by your tormentors (read: white people). Think of my parents, who left everything in India and came to the US when they were just 22; think of my parents packing away all their old clothes and buying these ugly American clothes with the small amount of money they had. Imagine them, so far from home, and still packing white bread sandwiches to bring to work. Imagine them giving up everything they loved, everything that was life to them, and having to wear and eat and read bland American culture. Imagine my poor mom seeing Madonna wear a bindi, but still knowing she can’t wear one at work because she’s disrespected enough there anyway.

6 Insulting Movie Adaptations of Strong Female Characters. Por supuesto, en el primer puesto, Irene Adler, que ha sufrido horrores con el Sherlock de Moffat.

Sería muy divertido que lo fuese: una broma “artística”.

Pero sabemos que es un sueño. Se trata simplemente de Star Wars VII: En busca de más dinero, como ya predijese en su día el sabio Yogurt.