Search Results for: TV

A Professional Writer Never Skips Exercise

Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there’s one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it’s exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You’ll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that’s pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you’ll think about the fact that you should’ve been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

Heather Havrilesky, in The Awl, on the life of a professional freelance writer.

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Photo: fanofretail, Flickr

We No Longer Drop Dead as Frequently as We Used to

Jacob M. Appel practices medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and his writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. In the Kenyon Review, Appel’s “Sudden Death: A Eulogy” examines living in a world where we no longer suddenly drop dead as frequently as we used to:

The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

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Photo: Pargon

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Matthew Weiner: The Art of Screenwriting

Longreads Pick

The Mad Men creator on his early inspiration and the making of Don Draper:

You know in Reds, when they’re interviewing the witnesses, and Henry Miller says, People today think they invented fucking? That kind of thing. The old people you’re looking at, they may have been more carnal than we are—drunker, less responsible, more violent. So many of those film noirs are about how soldiers reintegrate themselves into society. The private detective is haunted by the shadow of having killed people in the war. Don’t even get me started on The Best Years of Our Lives. The move to the suburbs, the privacy, the conservatism of the fifties—that’s all being driven by guys who, for two years, had not gone to the bathroom in privacy. I’m not the first TV person to be puzzled and fascinated by the fifties. The two biggest shows of the seventies are MASH and Happy Days. Obviously that moment is some sort of touchstone for culture. Is Hawkeye not related to Don Draper? He’s an alcoholic Boy Scout who behaves badly all the time. I just wanted to go back and look again.

Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,452 words)

'The Most Stoned Kids on the Most Stoned Campus on Earth'

Above photo: Not Moppy and Molly

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What exactly did 4/20 look like on a college campus a decade ago? In 2004’s “The Fully Baked Adventures of Moppy and Molly,” published in Rolling Stone (pdf), Vanessa Grigoriadis profiled a young couple celebrating at UC Santa Cruz:

The first 4:20 for Molly and Moppy came at 4:20 A.M.—they set the alarm next to Molly’s bed for 4:12, which was enough time to pack celebratory bong loads and snuggle back under the covers. Later that day, after classes are over, Moppy and Molly pass a couple in the middle of a fight, something about who should be taking care of the dog. “It’s 4/20!” Molly shrieks. “It’s a good day, man!” They link up with a couple of friends who are having a long, involved conversation about the etymology of 4/20: Ideas range from a police code fro possession; the number of chemicals in THC; the number of molecules in marijuana; the address of the Grateful Dead’s home in Haight-Ashbury; the date Haile Selassie first visited Jamaica. It’s also Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of Columbine. “I think it’s a marketing tool for the big pot growers, who harvest on 4/20,” says one guy.

“Crazy, dude,” says Moppy.

Students are swarming into the meadow from every direction. From the top of the hill, there’s a cloud of marijuana smoke hanging just under the tree line, and you can hear the drum circles going and everyone hollering and hugging one another. The guy who had shaved a marijuana leaf and the number 420 into his hair last year is nowhere to be seen, but there’s a freshman dressed up like Cheech and a much-discussed twelve-inch joint. Molly, who’s wearing a fuzzy white Kangol hat that looks like a snowball, dropped a few of her cupcake on the way, which is a nice ground-score for someone, but she passes around the rest to Sasha and some bongo players. “I just got here,” says Sasha. “We were at home doing solar rips [lighting a bong with a magnifying glass and sunlight], trying to tell from the angle of the sun what time it was. We thought it was 2:30, and it was almost four, dude.”

Four-twenty itself is like New Year’s at a party without a TV. People start spontaneously hugging. “My fuzz is attracting weird frequencies,” says a guy with a white fuzzy hat identical to Molly’s, and they rub heads together. At 4:25, a cop car pulls into the meadow at about a mile an hour. The cop gets out and stands next to the car. There’s only one of him. But half the people in the meadow start streaming out nonetheless, like a videotape run in reverse. “Run for the woods!” Molly screams.

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Photo: Flickr, US National Archives

When Instruments Are Replaced by Computer Software

At Oxford American, writer and musician Ginger Dellenbaugh looks at how the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there may be so few people mastering it today:

Recently, I met a friend at his studio in East Nashville to listen to some of his new demos. The second track featured a beautiful pedal steel solo.

“Who played that?” I asked.

“No one,” he answered, pulling up a window on his computer. “It’s Wavelore.”

Wavelore is an online company that offers software for the replication of what, until now, were instruments that were difficult to convincingly reproduce digitally: dobro, pedal steel, theremin, zither. The Wavelore Pedal Steel Guitar is a software library that uses single note samples, instead of pre-recorded licks or patterns, to let you design custom pedal steel guitar sounds without ever getting near an actual instrument. If you play around with the pitch bender and add some reverb, it is difficult to distinguish the software from a real player when it’s set into a track. There is even a function that distinguishes between blocking (muting) a string with a pick or with the side of your palm. The sounds I had thought were played by a session player were, in fact, oblong black boxes on my friend’s monitor where the pedal steel line was represented by constantly morphing, nebulous green wisps. Technology has finally caught up with the complexities that had protected the pedal steel from digital replacement: one can now get an authentic pedal steel sound without using a real player.

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Photo: Graham Hellewell

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi / Boston Globe staff

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

***

Read more…

It’s Adventure Time

Longreads Pick

The writer spends some time with the creators of “Adventure Time”—a wildly popular animated TV series on the Cartoon Network—to discuss what makes the show so magical:

We began by talking about humor. Children’s humor, I suggested, is commonly thought of as a kind of “diversion” from fear or sadness. But Adventure Time confronts very dark themes head on: The apocalypse, the possibility of loss and pain, grief and mortality. Yet somehow it makes these grave things seem so simple, unthreatening, even hilarious.

“It’s funnier when you’re sad, I think,” he said. “I’ve heard laughter is releasing stress from your body, like when you go, ’HA! Haaaa!’—you know, you get it out of you. My favorite kind of humor is dark comedies, because I think, mmm… I guess that’s my personality, maybe I’m more cynical about things, so I laugh stuff off easily, and life is really scary?”

Source: The Awl
Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 45 minutes (11,383 words)

A Family, a Fire and the Aftermath

Longreads Pick

Grant Cunningham’s violent death ricocheted over 18 years in the final fate of his brother Blair:

The air was cool and damp, the temperature hovering above zero but feeling colder, the last bite of winter pushing back against the warm spring sun. By the last Saturday in March, 2013, Blair Cunningham had moved into a new apartment. His mother helped him set up the place, and it was sparsely furnished with her extra towels and linens, an old coffee maker and a TV, a bed she bought for him.

He was back in the old neighbourhood in Mill Woods, living just down the street from where he grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, when his brother and his dad were still alive; a time before Blair knew about murder and justice.

Published: Mar 29, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,783 words)

Watching Team Upworthy Work Is Enough to Make You a Cynic. Or Lose Your Cynicism. Or Both. Or Neither.

Longreads Pick

Abebe goes inside the viral site Upworthy to discover their motivations and their formula for reaching a huge audience:

Its choices are the ones you’d normally associate with a race to the bottom—the manipulative techniques of ads, tabloids, direct-mail fund-raising, local TV news (“Think This Common Household Object Won’t Kill Your Children? You’d Be Wrong”). It’s just that Upworthy assumes the existence of a “lowest common denominator” that consists of a human craving for righteousness, or at least the satisfaction that comes from watching someone we disagree with get their rhetorical comeuppance. They’ve harnessed craven techniques in the service of unobjectionable goals—“evergreen standards like ‘Human rights are a good thing’ and ‘Children should be taken care of’ ”—on the logic that “good” things deserve ads as potent as the “bad” ones have. “I think marketing in a traditional sense, for commercialism—marketing to get you to buy ­McDonald’s or something—is crass,” says Sara Critchfield, the site’s editorial director. “But marketing to get people’s attention onto really important topics is a noble pursuit. So you take something that in one context is very crass and you put it in another. People will say, ‘That’s very crass,’ but in the service of doing something good for humanity, I think it’s pretty great.”

Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,081 words)