The Art of the Deal as Entertainment

Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over — sometimes correctly, as with the BP oil spill, whose coverage has been rich in process and until recently short on meaningful developments. The Romanian religious philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote about mesmerizing narratives that he called origin myths. He said they helped people feel a sense of authority over an otherwise chaotic world. Today our origin myths are more mundane, but we still see the deal as a primordial act. We might do well to call these decadent versions “LeBron Announcements” or “Conan-Leno Matches”: rituals of symbolic participation in games-within-games that are way above our heads and occur within heavily guarded inner circles that we can peek into but never truly penetrate.

solid explanation. all this lebron/conan/leno stuff pissed me off too. NO BODY HAS/HAD ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING YET.

not just disguising, we’re bait-and-switching one of the few things in this world that is mildly controllable: our very own accomplishments.

Vonnegut on Technology

On replacing human contact with electronic contact:

…

Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something. [Gets up and dances a jig.]

emphasis mine.

McSweeney's: Tom Skerritt's speech to the cadets in Top Gun

pile:

“Even the worst among you here at Top Gun, or the worst of the rest of the best of the best, are better than even the best of the rest of the best.”

how you use the internet:  change your profile picture on facebook then re-blog some top gun.

The dangerous art of the right question

bobulate:

Venkatesh Rao on the dangerous art of the right question. Four questions that are, in fact, terrible from the world of business:

1. Who is our customer?
2. What is our market?
3. What is our goal?
4. What problem does our product solve for the customer?

They’re terrible, he says, because they’re devoid of information. Instead:

Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand. They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.

Here’s why things work this way:

There are two types of questions. Formulaic questions and insight questions. …. Formulaic questions can be asked without knowing much. If they can be answered at all, they can be answered via a formulaic process. …. Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation.

So how do you ask these questions? Here are three ways:

1. The Poirot Method
2. The Jack Welch Method
3. The 42 Method

And what are those you ask? For those answers, you should head over to read the piece in its entirety.

[via]

this reminded me of dave gray’s new gamestorming book.

Questions for the Novelist Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Immigrant’s Handbook

The death of reading is a longstanding fear of futurists.

Maybe we’re all wrong and there’s going to be a huge comeback in 10 years where all the kids are going to drop their iKindles and start reading like crazy. “Dude, did you read the latest Turgenev? It’s so sick. This dude is like all over the subject of love and serfdom.”

That would be nice.

I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

Silence is so over.

Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

Why do you think you write about the present when so many novelists are immersed in the past?

How could one not write about today? It’s so fascinating. When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.

…

Any thoughts on the Russian spy ring that was just dismantled by the F.B.I.?

I think this is a holdover from when Russians knew so little about Americans, before YouTube, and it was impossible to figure out what makes these people tick. But I think it’s very easy to figure out what makes us tick.

What is that?

Fear. And hamburger.

great little exchange.

De inventione punctus

All signs sug­gest punc­tu­a­tion is in flux. In par­tic­u­lar, our signs that mark gram­mat­i­cal (and some­times seman­tic) dis­tinc­tions are wan­ing, while those denot­ing tone and voice are wax­ing. Fur­ther­more, signs with a slim graph­i­cal pro­file (the apos­tro­phe and comma, espe­cially) are hav­ing a rough go of it. Com­pared to the smi­ley face or even the ques­tion mark, they’re too visu­ally quiet for most casual writ­ers to notice or remem­ber, even (or espe­cially) on our high-def screens.

Everything I Know About Tennis I Learned from Cow Paths

Modern technology has created a tennis monoculture, one that is best seen in paths of dead grass.

great observation about grass court play in 2010 vs. 30 years ago.

Sunday Routine - David Chang - But It’s So Nice Inside

ZONING OUT I try to do nothing. I don’t know — I’m not trying to reach nirvana or anything, but doing nothing is awesome. I’m trying to do more of nothing. I wish I could say, “Hey, I’m reading The Paris Review or crushing The New Yorker.” But you know what? That’s not happening.

Ira Glass on Being Wrong

One of the reasons I was interested in doing this interview is because I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It’s not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.

Brands: Please Pay Attention to This

mikehudack:

“A charismatic brand can be defined as any product, service or company for which people believe there is no substitute … Among the hallmarks of a charismatic brand are a clear competitive stance, a sense of rectitude, and a dedication to aesthetics. Why aesthetics? Because it’s the language of feeling, and, in a society that is information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.”

— Marty Neumeier in “The Brand Gap”. I am rereading this book slowly to ponder his wisdom and let it swirl in the grey cells. I thought about this quote all weekend. He goes on to explain a charismatic brand’s magical ability to bridge the gap between strategy and creativity. (via gbattle) (via caterpillarcowboy)

Yes. This.