The Mooresie

James Elkins: How to Look at Mondrian

He wasn’t especially careful with his repainting, which is a clue to how closely he expected people to look. Art historians have noticed his change of mind, and it has been said that before the early 1920s, Mondrian thought of his compositions as part of an infinite plane, which could go on indefinitely in all directions. Starting with paintings like this one, the canvas is the whole object, the whole universe, and there is nothing beyond it.

(via Metafilter)

Margaret Atwood & Ursula K. Le Guin – Space Canon

[…] they’ve evidently been friends for years.
[…]
Le Guin works very comfortably under the mantle of science fiction, having penned some of the classics of the genre, while Atwood waffles, preferring to stay in the mainstream literary conversation.

With respect to SF, Le Guin is invariably right and Atwood is almost always wrong.

Atwood: “What about Star Wars?”
Le Guin: “There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships.”

Kieron Gillen’s Workblog >> On Leaving RPS

What they don’t tell you is that they don’t pick the writers randomly. From that mob of people who want to be games journalists, they can pick. And, because these are not stupid people, they pick the best available. They’re not going to pay for better writing, but since it doesn’t cost them any more, they may as well have it.

In other words, don’t think about the fact you’re replaceable. Think about the fact that out of the enormous mob of people who wanted your job, you’re the one who got it. No matter how much they treat you with disdain, they actually think you’re the best.

In other words, have some pride.

TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome

“She says, ‘He got it right on the nose.’

” ‘Has that ever happened?’

“And she says, ‘No.’

“I said, ‘Holy shit.’ ”

And then [Drew] Carey remembers what happened next: “Everybody thought someone had cheated. We’d just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, ‘Are we ever going to air this?’ And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.”

And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. “I was like, Fuck this guy,” Carey says. “When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It’s not airing anyway. So fuck him.”

Treasure Island: How TV serials achieved the status of art

This is the final season of Lost, and while new dramas will continue to find both enthusiastic fans and critical acclaim, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something important is winding down. After all, the great dramas of the last decade are great precisely because they found certain limits of the form, because they figured out what it was possible to do with the available tools. That leaves future shows with few places to go, even when they are excellent (Breaking Bad) or promising (Treme). There just isn’t much new ground available.

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

“I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is,” he says. “But Bach peed, and he shat, and he had a lot of kids. We’re all just people.”