post-artifact links

---Generation OS13: The new culture of resistance

---Jonathan Franzen interview in The Paris Review:

"Freedom was conceived and eventually written in a decade where language was under as concerted an assault as we’ve seen in my lifetime. The propaganda of the Bush administration, its appropriation of words like freedom for cynical short-term political gain, was a clear and present danger. This was also the decade that brought us YouTube and universal cell-phone ownership and Facebook and Twitter. Which is to say: brought us a whole new world of busyness and distraction. So the defense of the novel moved to different fronts. Let’s take one of those buzzwords, freedom, and try to restore it to its problematic glory. Let’s redouble our ­efforts to write a book with a narrative strong enough to pull you into a place where you can feel and think in ways that are difficult when you’re distracted and busy and electronically bombarded. The impulse to defend the novel, to defend the turf, is stronger than ever. But the foes change with the times."

---Christian Keathley's 50 Years On

---screenwriting visual grammar

---Venkat's "A Brief History of the Corporation":

"Peak Oil refers to a graph of oil production with a maximum called Hubbert’s peak, that represents peak oil production. The theory behind it is that new oil reserves become harder to find over time, are smaller in size, and harder to mine. You have to look harder and work harder for every new gallon, new wells run dry faster than old ones, and the frequency of discovery goes down. You have to drill more.

There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind.

Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you’ll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.

The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel."

---the making of jive talk from Airplane!

---promoting Kubrick's The Shining

---Iam Fleming and Raymond Chandler talk shop

---whither Scarlett Johansson?

---Lopez analyses De Palma's Blow Out

---trailers for Tabloid, Bellflower, The Black Power Mixtape, and The Technician

---Craig Mod's "Post-Artifact Books and Publishing":

"Years ago, I remember — before Kindles and iPads and before anyone knew of EPUB — hearing about the marginalia found in the books of Paul Rand’s library. I remember thinking how exciting it would be to browse his thoughts. To sort by them. To order them and share them. Use them as pivots for discussions. Comment around them. Draw lines from them and the books to which they were connected, to other books and the thoughts of other designers. To unlock, as it were, the marks of his telepathic experiences.

This is the post-artifact system. A system of unlocking. A system concerned with engagement. Sharing. Marginalia. Ownership. Community. And, of course, reading."

---Kevin B. Lee's video concerning David Holzman's Diary

---Memory Tapes' "Yes I Know"

---230 cultural icons

---Jeremy Grantham's grim prognosis and the distant future

---lastly, OFFF Barcelona 2011 Main Titles