DISQUS

You lump a variety of media and arts -- high, low, and middle -- into one large category of creativity. All fine and good, I suppose. I daresay the genres hardest hit will be the high arts and the prestige projects, whereas the low- and middle-brow mass market offerings will suffer less and probably only temporarily. I don't anticipate the wellsprings of talent and creativity disappearing totally, though they may go dormant for a while. Why not? Because we have an inexhaustible appetite for entertainment, and the current downturn is only a phase. That said, it's now revealed that we may well have been living in a veritable golden age of the arts, paid for on the borrowed time and affluence of future generations. We can't perpetuate the charade any longer. Everything we've been pretending about affluence and plenitude is due to be recalculated.

This post makes me laugh. There are elements of truth about children rebelling against the values of their parents (not grandparents, as another commenter pointed out). But it's spin, or revisionist history. That it's wholly plausible but somewhat less than accurate makes it pretty appealing, like the reader is privy to a secret no one else knows.

Any era has its themes and ethics, but in a pluralistic society like the U.S., the dominant themes never apply to everyone -- they're just noisier. The Ozzie and Harriet 50s theme held for a long while, even though it probably didn't apply to even a majority of society. Its tarnishing in the hands of a few ungrateful brats may make for good entertainment, but the truth is undoubtedly less desperate and dramatic.

Good work is its own reward. The Hollywood distraction with awards (upon awards upon awards) may sometimes highlight performances and films that would otherwise go unnoticed, but the hype surrounding awards (who has them, who doesn't deserve them, and who is thus far overlooked) is a wildly misplaced emphasis.

Part of the wisdom of the framers is knowing that citizens must also be empowered to resist the excesses of government itself. When those in power take steps toward fascism, removing citizens' rights, including gun ownership, then we have more to worry about than a few psychopaths who stray beyond reason.

Your anger over violent crime is understandable, but you're projecting your emotion onto the object rather than the action or the actor. Ownership of firearms may not be for everyone (I don't own one), but it is a basic right acknowledged in the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. There is wisdom in that, whether you understand or agree. It's a complex of arguments I won't repeat since they're so commonplace.

The development and production weapons of war interests me more than ownership of conventional firearms, and almost no one talks about it. The sheer number of A-bombs, H-bombs, bunker busters, stingers, daisy cutters, etc. that the U.S. produces, sells, keeps in its arsenal, and yes deploys against its enemies is staggering. Much more than with private gun ownership, they transform our thinking and our options for how to act and how to be in the world, since average citizens can't elect not to have them, which is to say, we all have them by proxy through our government. And for generations, our government has shown little hesitation to use them against our enemy of the moment to further American policies at the cost of many, many foreigners' lives.

The actions of a gun owner who snaps and shoots up a mall is puny in comparison to the institutionalized violence carried out in our names.

I read a slightly older book by Robert Jourdain called Music, the Brain and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. Based on your review of This is Your Brain on Music, they sound very similar. While the neuroscience underlying our sensual and emotional response to music may be interesting to some, I'm left thinking "well, duh, just about anyone could tell you that intuitively." Also, the inevitability of assembling lists of any sort invites so much nitpicking over the choices that the point of the list tends to be lost. However, the lists are not intended to be prescriptive; they're merely illustrative. So nitpick is you want, but I daresay you're missing the point.

The overall thrust, that musical organization stimulates and enhances organized thinking, runs somewhat counter to the commonly held intuition that music first and foremost evokes emotion. It's a case where the end results don't fully agree or correlate with the underlying perceptual apparatus as revealed by the science. But no matter. The pleasures derived from music need little scientific explanation to be compelling. The real payoff, of course, is getting to know the music on its own terms and understanding the connections between things, which even among listeners may require those 10,000 hours mentioned in the book.

Absolutely right. Although movies can at times be purposely political, they are typically too costly to make to risk anything other than the widest possible appeal, which is foreclosed by being too partisan, even toward something as nonpartisan as pacifism. Of course, media theorists recognize that all writing, indeed all creative endeavor, is on some level propaganda, but most movies are only passively so. OTOH, political operatives, press offices, and pundits have taken to throwing out heavily propagandistic rhetoric whenever possible to reframe debate: things like "Why do you hate America so much?" and "They hate our freedom." It's really quite facile but oddly effective.

Though Rand's philosophy as extolled in her two novels has mostly been discredited as laughably naive, and worse, ruthlessly self-involved, it continues to appeal to many who are, well, laughably naive and ruthlessly self-involved. There is no convincing them that the mechanisms of free-market capitalism, despite delivering considerable wealth to both the state and the top tiers, ends up being a bigger drain on humanity than a benefit. Trying to deprogram a Randian thinker is akin to convincing a fundamentalist that god is dead.

I can really get behind this post, which is pretty uncharacteristic for me (my support of your sentiment, that is -- it's fully characteristic of me to disdain and disapprove). However, I have to note that you appear to have more than a passing familiarity to things you hate. When I don't like (or indeed hate) something, I stop watching, reading, or listening. Are you being force-fed this stuff or something?

A sentence! My kingdom for a correctly written sentence! Pick just about any sentence out of this post and there is some punctuation, grammar, or syntax flaw. I'm so distracted I can't even tell what your point is.

Sure, I'm picking on this post, but many of the others on this site are just as bad. Do you folks read what you write before you hit publish?

Phooey. Now commence killing the messenger. G'head. See it that makes you a better writer.

In her book Generation Me, Jean Twenge writes about the self-esteem movement that repeats the mantras "You can do anything" and "You can be anything you want" but without the limitations you wisely note. She also believes it's a recipe for disaster and reports on the depression and despair felt by an entire generation whose experience in life often fails to match such irrational exuberance.

As for earning the right to inspire others to keep swinging, I think Christopher Reeve took it too far when he appeared in an "inspirational" commercial showing him walking again when in fact he couldn't. Sure, he overcame a lot and may have been superhuman in some ways, but he eventually died of his injuries. He doesn't deserve a pass on distorting reality and selling a bill of goods to the public.

The Bond franchise is probably the only subject about which I can indulge in the ridiculous fanboy aesthetic this site specializes in. So much has been written about Bond movies that there is precious little novel commentary to make. I agree that the Brosnan series was almost as much a caricature as the Moore series. But Dalton had previously tried (and failed) to bring Bond back to his roots in Fleming's fiction.

A feminist deconstruction of Bond is a wholly misplaced emphasis, IMO. The whole point of Bond, whether clown or cold warrior, is escapist fantasy. Of course he beds every woman available -- that's a standard male fantasy, to which plently of women respond, too. Making the Bond girls more substantial may quiet a few PC folks, but that doesn't make the preposterously enjoyable characters ring any truer.

Willing to risk bad writing? I would rather that most writers simply learn their craft well. Frankly, most don't, despite being able to write grammatically and insert a few high value words extracted from a thesaurus.

I've heard it put that there are too few writers who truly have something to say, but a mass of would-be writers who desperatedly want to say something. Sometimes even established writers fall into that second category.

Mediocrity compared to what? Cinema and television don't even begin to rank as high art compared to, oh, literature, painting, music, poetry, sculpture, all the traditional forms and media that have existed for centuries. What do collaborative forms (which are heavily infused with killing commercial interest) really have to offer but low expectations? For a pop culture critic to complain that movies and television aren't good enough is like a food critic complaining that the macaroni and cheese isn't really very good. Maybe you should take the opposite approach and wonder why any movies manage to be entertaining at all after they've passed through the creative gauntlet.