What does it mean to be a writer?

Constant self-monitoring to see if a thought is actually an idea.

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Books - Small Talk: Sebastian Faulks

Dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication.

You may be familiar with the LED Throwies.

Graffiti Research Lab

Here's David Denby on "Paprika":

The brilliant “Paprika,” directed by Satoshi Kon — a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults — is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane.

Set in a business world of long white corridors and glass walls and research labs, it’s a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained.

Paprika, the heroine, is an eighteen-year-old sprite — a kind of sexy Japanese Tinker Bell — who enters people’s dreams as a form of therapy. She explains to one of her patients, a detective haunted by a murder he was unable to prevent, that the first dreams we have when we fall asleep are like arty short films and longer dreams are like blockbusters.

“Paprika” asks, “Who shall control our dreams?,” which, given this film’s take on the cinematic nature of the unconscious, is really asking, “Who shall control the movies?”

See also the NYT review.

Not Kids’ Stuff

Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing.

... you are appalled by the sheer uselessness of their spray-painted opinions ...

Not everybody's a critic

Like the “Ghost in the Shell” animes, “Paprika” explores that intersection between the human and the machine, including the lands of enchantment you can travel to when you plug in, boot up and drop out.

See also the New Yorker review by David Denby.

Paprika

Originally a geologist, Ballen explains his career progression from documentary photographer in South Africa to fine artist whose goal is to "expand human consciousness hopefully in a positive way."

See also:

Roger Ballen was born in New York City in 1950 and has lived in Johannesburg South Africa for almost 30 years. Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen’s photography moved on in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to their inhabitants; through the late 1990’s Ballen’s work progressed. By the mid 1990’s his subjects began to act where previously his pictures however troubling fell firmly into the category of documentary photography, his work then moved into the realms of fiction. His third book Outland produced by Phaidon Press in 2000 was the result.

In the fall of 2005, Phaidon press produced its second book by the artist, entitled "Shadow Chamber". The book focuses on the interactions between the people, animals, and or objects that inhabit Ballen’s unique image space. Ballen’s recent work enters into a new realm of photography—the images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs.

A Conversation with Roger Ballen

It's the essay as Möbius strip; a literary illusion that ultimately makes less of an argument than it seems to, and yet tells us more about what's true, what's not, and why that doesn't always matter, than a more straightforward confrontation with the secrets and lies of pop music ever could.

...

Like many people of a certain age, I remember where I was and what I was doing the day Cobain died. I was in my third year of college, I was in a dorm; friends and I were drinking 40-ounce bottles of Colt 45 malt liquor, and when we heard the news, we laughed.

Cobain's swan song, performed on MTV's Unplugged a few months before his suicide, was a cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", about a woman who wanders into the woods after her husband is hit by a train. Cobain, so deep into the authenticity trap by then that he'd never escape, seemed to be making one last attempt not to "fake it", by reviving a song by his "favourite performer", and exiting the stage without an encore.

Leadbelly is a favourite of folk aficionados who to this day perceive him as a giant of "black music", even though the vast majority of his fans were white. When white producers brought Leadbelly to New York City in 1935 to play "traditional" music, Life magazine declared in a headline: "Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel".

Cobain, so deep into the authenticity trap by then that he'd never escape, seemed to be making one last attempt not to "fake it", by reviving a song by his "favourite performer", and exiting the stage without an encore.

About this book, Booklist says, "With plenty of interesting and contentious assertions to stimulate even casual readers, this is a heck of an argument starter."

Keeping it unreal

Despite warnings that reading is a dying hobby, we are confronted with an astonishing number of written imperatives each day. We are told to pull or push doors, keep clear of fire exits, use caution with automatic doors, and Eat at Joe's.

But it isn't only what is being said, but how these messages are being delivered. Typography is not simply a frou-frou debate over aesthetics orchestrated by a hidden coterie of graphic-design nerds. You need only imagine a STOP sign that utilizes the heavy-metal typefaces favoured by bands Dokken or Krokus to realize that clear, clean and direct typography can save lives, or at the very least prevent drivers from prolonged bouts of confused squinting.

Now seems like a good time to ban comic sans, because the evidence makes it clear that typography is to blame for the recent unpleasantness.

The gun control debate is really a proxy for a more fundamental argument about serif versus sans-serif fonts.

The official typeface of the 20th century

In follow-up to the recent batch of Southern sayings posts. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

A weary old hound dog (ping!), hindquarters practically drooping from the exertion of poor Southern life, slouches down a dirt road (ping!). Close by, the door opens to a tiny shack (ping!), and an aging black man, stock-thin and slightly stooped (ping!), steps off his porch with grave solemnity, favoring the cumbersome table-leg prosthesis that is his plight. Sweet Jesus, we haven’t been watching Born for Hard Luck but a minute, and already the damn thing has our heads ringing with its steady toll of bathetic po’-folk clichés.

See also the first such article, from 2002, 13 Essential Southern Documentaries.

13 Essential Southern Documentaries

As with William Gibson, author Steven Hall uses the communications revolution to play with new story ideas. Unfortunately, Hall is no Gibson and his writing is not a patch on the conceptual brilliance and terse noir style of the sci-fi master who has delivered genre-busting books Neuromancer (1984) and Pattern Recognition (2003).

Yet despite being a hideously cliched and limited writer, Hall is a surprisingly talented pattern-maker. He has an impressive ability to make narrative devices connect. And therein lies the book's appeal as an inter-textual pulp thriller for the online generation.

Not to mention any studio that may wish to boil down The Raw Shark Texts into a script that does away with the turgid writing and puts the focus back on Hall's inventive plotting and startling knack for images.

See also this review by Sophie Gee in the Sydney Morning Herald; she is more sympathetic:

The Raw Shark Texts inhabits the same conceptual universe as the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The Eternal Sunshine is one of many homages Hall pays. The Raw Shark Texts also engages Christopher Nolan's Memento, Paul Auster's detective fiction, The Matrix, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and, inevitably, Jaws. This last reference plays out in the novel's long climax: a literal re-enactment of the film, in which Sanderson and Scout come face to face with the shark-made-of-words.

The Raw Shark Texts is not cynical and knowing, nor is it fully in control of its own trickery. But that's precisely its charm - charm that made it the star of the 2006 London Book Fair, made Hollywood studios compete to acquire it and made 25 foreign countries rush to buy translation rights before it was even published.

When all's said and done, the memory-eating shark was a killer idea, fearlessly pulled off, and Steven Hall deserves his new-found status as a Big Fish.

The Raw Shark Texts