Media Diet Miscellany 04/28/2009
I did a fair bit of reading last weekend.
Crooked Little Vein: Got about 50 pages in. It's very Warren Ellisy, but has two major flaws. One is that, like Desperation Jones, it has the distinct flavor of "hey I found a cool thing in my research and I want to write about it!" It's gratuitously scuzzy and grimy and filthy. In Transmetropolitan, Planetary, and Global Frequency, the scummy stuff all fits into a great narrative. In Crooked, it's just there for sensationalism. The second is that the plot is, so far, painfully contrived. I stopped reading right around where Ellis ran afoul of the "if your characters are commenting on the problems with your story, you need to rewrite" rule. I like Ellis' writing quite a lot, but I sure as hell don't owe him reading a story that sucks. I am not going back to Crooked unless someone tells me that it gets astonishingly better after the saline-injection episode, and until then I am also broadcasting my opinion that it sucks and is not worth your money.
Cradle to Cradle: This, on the other hand, I'm determined to see through, even though it also aggravates me. McDonough and Braungart have some bad habits, among them a tendency towards hysteria about the dangers of the modern world, obliviousness to class issues that drives me up the wall, gaping lacunae about just how their preferred scenarios will come about, and a laughable tendency to anthropomorphize nature. Keep in mind that that's "a laughable tendency to anthropomorphize" by the standards of someone who habitually self-represents as an enormous bipedal tiger-woman. However, they also give me reasons to keep reading. So far, really the most compelling thing is the form of the book itself, closely followed by the authors' case studies. They're much better when they're saying "and the things we're proposing, when we tried them, had X, Y, and Zed positive results" than when they're speculating. That gives me a great deal of sympathy towards them. Their message is very well-suited for pitching at both regulators and business-folk, I think, and I hope that they've been busy in the decade since they published.
Their message brings to mind an image from Zoobooks decades ago. There was an issue of Zoobooks that was basically "Environmentalism For Eight-Year-Olds," and it had a compelling image about extinction. At the middle of a two-page spread, it showed a dude on top of a pyramid. The pyramid was made out of cubes, each one representing a species - they were all transparent and had a member of the species inside. There were also large, ominous human hands reaching in from out of shot, snatching cubes away. I dug that image a lot because of a few things it emphasized. Using a pyramid instead of a triangle conveyed an important message about hierarchy: the top of a triangle reads as "supremacy," where the top of a pyramid reads as "most-supported." The swaying, uncertain dude at the top of the pyramid made it clear that losing chunks of the pyramid directly threatened human stability. The hands showed clearly human agency in environmental destruction. The top of the pyramid loses stability fastest as blocks further down are removed. It was a really good bit of design.
Another thing that makes me very well-disposed towards them is that their preferred approach to design and creation can be summarized like this: create nothing that you can't easily recover valuable resources from. They criticize the current practices of recycling on the grounds that they "downcycle," they only allow materials to be recovered into less-useful forms - for instance, the metal in cars. They propose instead that goods be designed so that they can easily be, after their useful life, easily disassembled so that very little value is lost, so that the materials stay useful. Instead of a whole car being melted down into a mixed sludge of low-quality metal, they envision taking it apart so that the various metals in it can be re-used as high-quality metal. This requires designing things so that they're easier to disassemble than they are now. That, in turn, means that you're giving aid and comfort to people who like to tinker - and those people are high-value consumers, it's wise to cater to those people. Why? Well, that leads to the next thing.
The Tipping Point: Gladwell's splashy debut has aged noticeably, especially in its case studies. It's still pretty compelling, though. Continuing from the above, tinkerers tend to be the sort of person that Gladwell calls a Maven, someone with a passion for discovery and investigation, someone who tends to develop a deep knowledge of the products and services that catch their attention. Like Blink, the first thing I read from Gladwell, Tipping Point has points where he just glosses over the usefulness or application of the ideas that he's talking about, but also like Blink, it's a popularization and it reads quickly enough that the omissions don't get too glaring. Together with Cradle to Cradle, this soothes the cranky anti-consumerist part of me by reinforcing my beliefs that passivity and sticking your face in the trough of mass-produced culture and products is a Very Bad Thing. In the future that I want to live in, everyone has a relationship with the culture - it is something that you interact with and contribute to and build upon, not something you consume. Also there will be no Hot Topics, which is good because Hot Topic is one of the flagbearers of the idea that if you consume the right artifacts, you will be part of the right culture. That's part of why they catch so much flak from members of cultures that they sell artifacts of. Of course, the big ideas aren't the only parts of the book that stuck with me: there's also the Lexus anecdote. In 1990, just after Lexus first introduced its line of luxury cars in the United States, the company realized that it had two minor problems with its LS400 line that required a recall. The situation was, by any measure, an awkward one. Lexus had decided, from the beginning, to build its reputation around quality workmanship and reliability. And now, within little more than a year of the brand's launch, the company was being forced to admit to problems with its flagship. So Lexus decided to make a special effort. Most recalls are handled by making an announcement to the press and mailing a notification letter to owners. Lexus, instead, called each owner individually on the telephone the day the recall was announced. When the owners picked up their cars at the dealership after the work was completed, each car had been washed and the tank filled with gas. If an owner lived more than a hundred miles from a dealership, the dealer sent a mechanic to his or her home. In one instance, a technician flew from Los Angeles to Alaska to make the necessary repairs.
Was it necessary to go to such lengths? You could argue that Lexus overreacted. The problems with the car were relatively minor. And the number of cars involved in the recall - so soon after Lexus had entered the marketplace - was small. Lexus would seem to have had many opportunities to correct the damage. The key fact, though, was not the number of people affected by the recall, but the kind of people affected by the recall. Who, after all, are the people willing to take a chance and buy a brand-new luxury model? Car Mavens. There may have been only a few thousand Lexus owners at that point, but they were car experts, people who take cars seriously, people who talk about cars, people whose friends ask them for advice about cars. Lexus realized that it had a captive audience of Mavens and that if they went the extra mile they could kick-start a word-of-mouth epidemic about the quality of their customer service - and that's just what happened. The company emerged from what could have been a disaster with a reputation for customer service that continues to this day. One automotive publication later called it "the perfect recall."
That's a great narrative, and it's a good example of stickyness - it's a compelling story to me, and so it sticks in my memory and I look for excuses to repeat it.
Making Comics: I love Scott McCloud so, so, so much. Every time I reread Understanding Comics or Reinventing Comics, I feel exhilarated and want to write a comic. Making Comics is just the same. However, it's also much less abstract than Understanding or Reinventing, which is the point. I still got a lot out of it because as a reader of comics, it told me more about things to look for and signals that can deepen my understanding of the comics that I consume. That's a pleasant experience. There is also, of course, the last-ten-pages pep talk that's part of why reading McCloud's books about comics is so exhilarating. All three end on this great note of "now that you've read all this neat stuff, here's a quick recap in a form that presses your emotional buttons and GO COMICS WOOOOOOO" in a way that totally gets me. I forget about absolute bullshit and just get caught up in wanting to create. Even if McCloud's books were not as polished or full of nifty ideas, I'd still give them quite a lot of slack for being great morale-raisers. Also, eee, eee, OMG, Scott McCloud TEDTalk. Go watch.
Zodiac: Gave this a quick re-read. Still delicious, still relevant after more than 20 years. Pollution and overblown concerns about terrorism are still with us, and lovable anti-heroes are an eternal treat. This is, I think, an overlooked Stephenson work - of course, about half of the recent entries in this blog have involved Neal Stephenson's work, so take my opinion carefully. Oddly, reading this alongside Crooked Little Vein, I was struck by the similarities in Ellis and Stephenson's styles. I'm hankering to compare Transmet and Cryptonomicon later, since they're both within easy reach for me. The cranky hero who gets dirty a lot, swears, drugs up, and still fights for Truth and Justice, it's a neat story. Zodiac kind of underlined the dissatisfying nature of Crooked, though. I have a theory that Zodiac and Cryptonomicon would be great action movies, while Snow Crash and The Diamond Age would make great anime. That's an alternating pattern, but I'm not sure how to classify The Baroque Cycle, which is theoretically in an anime spot (well, there have been lots of steampunk shows/movies/OVAs, so it's not impossible) and Anathem, which cuts way back on the 'splodey and actiony from the other five (although there's still plenty of Vale-lore and intrigue, so maybe it's a more cerebral one). Another good thing about Zodiac is the female characters. Stephenson's books are, in one way, really, really macho, but on the good side, he goes out of his way to create female characters who are integral parts of the story and not succumb to the stereotypical problems of women in sci-fi. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers (one or two female characters per book, and only The Diamond Age immediately comes to mind as passing the Bechdel Test) tend to emphasize the masculinity of the stories, but it's important to see an author working on it and not lapsing into the all-dude story. So that's something else to like about Stephenson: better than average when it comes to sexism in sci-fi.
You should totally read Zodiac, especially since I'm pretty sure you haven't.
Crooked Little Vein: Got about 50 pages in. It's very Warren Ellisy, but has two major flaws. One is that, like Desperation Jones, it has the distinct flavor of "hey I found a cool thing in my research and I want to write about it!" It's gratuitously scuzzy and grimy and filthy. In Transmetropolitan, Planetary, and Global Frequency, the scummy stuff all fits into a great narrative. In Crooked, it's just there for sensationalism. The second is that the plot is, so far, painfully contrived. I stopped reading right around where Ellis ran afoul of the "if your characters are commenting on the problems with your story, you need to rewrite" rule. I like Ellis' writing quite a lot, but I sure as hell don't owe him reading a story that sucks. I am not going back to Crooked unless someone tells me that it gets astonishingly better after the saline-injection episode, and until then I am also broadcasting my opinion that it sucks and is not worth your money.
Cradle to Cradle: This, on the other hand, I'm determined to see through, even though it also aggravates me. McDonough and Braungart have some bad habits, among them a tendency towards hysteria about the dangers of the modern world, obliviousness to class issues that drives me up the wall, gaping lacunae about just how their preferred scenarios will come about, and a laughable tendency to anthropomorphize nature. Keep in mind that that's "a laughable tendency to anthropomorphize" by the standards of someone who habitually self-represents as an enormous bipedal tiger-woman. However, they also give me reasons to keep reading. So far, really the most compelling thing is the form of the book itself, closely followed by the authors' case studies. They're much better when they're saying "and the things we're proposing, when we tried them, had X, Y, and Zed positive results" than when they're speculating. That gives me a great deal of sympathy towards them. Their message is very well-suited for pitching at both regulators and business-folk, I think, and I hope that they've been busy in the decade since they published.
Their message brings to mind an image from Zoobooks decades ago. There was an issue of Zoobooks that was basically "Environmentalism For Eight-Year-Olds," and it had a compelling image about extinction. At the middle of a two-page spread, it showed a dude on top of a pyramid. The pyramid was made out of cubes, each one representing a species - they were all transparent and had a member of the species inside. There were also large, ominous human hands reaching in from out of shot, snatching cubes away. I dug that image a lot because of a few things it emphasized. Using a pyramid instead of a triangle conveyed an important message about hierarchy: the top of a triangle reads as "supremacy," where the top of a pyramid reads as "most-supported." The swaying, uncertain dude at the top of the pyramid made it clear that losing chunks of the pyramid directly threatened human stability. The hands showed clearly human agency in environmental destruction. The top of the pyramid loses stability fastest as blocks further down are removed. It was a really good bit of design.
Another thing that makes me very well-disposed towards them is that their preferred approach to design and creation can be summarized like this: create nothing that you can't easily recover valuable resources from. They criticize the current practices of recycling on the grounds that they "downcycle," they only allow materials to be recovered into less-useful forms - for instance, the metal in cars. They propose instead that goods be designed so that they can easily be, after their useful life, easily disassembled so that very little value is lost, so that the materials stay useful. Instead of a whole car being melted down into a mixed sludge of low-quality metal, they envision taking it apart so that the various metals in it can be re-used as high-quality metal. This requires designing things so that they're easier to disassemble than they are now. That, in turn, means that you're giving aid and comfort to people who like to tinker - and those people are high-value consumers, it's wise to cater to those people. Why? Well, that leads to the next thing.
The Tipping Point: Gladwell's splashy debut has aged noticeably, especially in its case studies. It's still pretty compelling, though. Continuing from the above, tinkerers tend to be the sort of person that Gladwell calls a Maven, someone with a passion for discovery and investigation, someone who tends to develop a deep knowledge of the products and services that catch their attention. Like Blink, the first thing I read from Gladwell, Tipping Point has points where he just glosses over the usefulness or application of the ideas that he's talking about, but also like Blink, it's a popularization and it reads quickly enough that the omissions don't get too glaring. Together with Cradle to Cradle, this soothes the cranky anti-consumerist part of me by reinforcing my beliefs that passivity and sticking your face in the trough of mass-produced culture and products is a Very Bad Thing. In the future that I want to live in, everyone has a relationship with the culture - it is something that you interact with and contribute to and build upon, not something you consume. Also there will be no Hot Topics, which is good because Hot Topic is one of the flagbearers of the idea that if you consume the right artifacts, you will be part of the right culture. That's part of why they catch so much flak from members of cultures that they sell artifacts of. Of course, the big ideas aren't the only parts of the book that stuck with me: there's also the Lexus anecdote. In 1990, just after Lexus first introduced its line of luxury cars in the United States, the company realized that it had two minor problems with its LS400 line that required a recall. The situation was, by any measure, an awkward one. Lexus had decided, from the beginning, to build its reputation around quality workmanship and reliability. And now, within little more than a year of the brand's launch, the company was being forced to admit to problems with its flagship. So Lexus decided to make a special effort. Most recalls are handled by making an announcement to the press and mailing a notification letter to owners. Lexus, instead, called each owner individually on the telephone the day the recall was announced. When the owners picked up their cars at the dealership after the work was completed, each car had been washed and the tank filled with gas. If an owner lived more than a hundred miles from a dealership, the dealer sent a mechanic to his or her home. In one instance, a technician flew from Los Angeles to Alaska to make the necessary repairs.
Was it necessary to go to such lengths? You could argue that Lexus overreacted. The problems with the car were relatively minor. And the number of cars involved in the recall - so soon after Lexus had entered the marketplace - was small. Lexus would seem to have had many opportunities to correct the damage. The key fact, though, was not the number of people affected by the recall, but the kind of people affected by the recall. Who, after all, are the people willing to take a chance and buy a brand-new luxury model? Car Mavens. There may have been only a few thousand Lexus owners at that point, but they were car experts, people who take cars seriously, people who talk about cars, people whose friends ask them for advice about cars. Lexus realized that it had a captive audience of Mavens and that if they went the extra mile they could kick-start a word-of-mouth epidemic about the quality of their customer service - and that's just what happened. The company emerged from what could have been a disaster with a reputation for customer service that continues to this day. One automotive publication later called it "the perfect recall."
That's a great narrative, and it's a good example of stickyness - it's a compelling story to me, and so it sticks in my memory and I look for excuses to repeat it.
Making Comics: I love Scott McCloud so, so, so much. Every time I reread Understanding Comics or Reinventing Comics, I feel exhilarated and want to write a comic. Making Comics is just the same. However, it's also much less abstract than Understanding or Reinventing, which is the point. I still got a lot out of it because as a reader of comics, it told me more about things to look for and signals that can deepen my understanding of the comics that I consume. That's a pleasant experience. There is also, of course, the last-ten-pages pep talk that's part of why reading McCloud's books about comics is so exhilarating. All three end on this great note of "now that you've read all this neat stuff, here's a quick recap in a form that presses your emotional buttons and GO COMICS WOOOOOOO" in a way that totally gets me. I forget about absolute bullshit and just get caught up in wanting to create. Even if McCloud's books were not as polished or full of nifty ideas, I'd still give them quite a lot of slack for being great morale-raisers. Also, eee, eee, OMG, Scott McCloud TEDTalk. Go watch.
Zodiac: Gave this a quick re-read. Still delicious, still relevant after more than 20 years. Pollution and overblown concerns about terrorism are still with us, and lovable anti-heroes are an eternal treat. This is, I think, an overlooked Stephenson work - of course, about half of the recent entries in this blog have involved Neal Stephenson's work, so take my opinion carefully. Oddly, reading this alongside Crooked Little Vein, I was struck by the similarities in Ellis and Stephenson's styles. I'm hankering to compare Transmet and Cryptonomicon later, since they're both within easy reach for me. The cranky hero who gets dirty a lot, swears, drugs up, and still fights for Truth and Justice, it's a neat story. Zodiac kind of underlined the dissatisfying nature of Crooked, though. I have a theory that Zodiac and Cryptonomicon would be great action movies, while Snow Crash and The Diamond Age would make great anime. That's an alternating pattern, but I'm not sure how to classify The Baroque Cycle, which is theoretically in an anime spot (well, there have been lots of steampunk shows/movies/OVAs, so it's not impossible) and Anathem, which cuts way back on the 'splodey and actiony from the other five (although there's still plenty of Vale-lore and intrigue, so maybe it's a more cerebral one). Another good thing about Zodiac is the female characters. Stephenson's books are, in one way, really, really macho, but on the good side, he goes out of his way to create female characters who are integral parts of the story and not succumb to the stereotypical problems of women in sci-fi. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers (one or two female characters per book, and only The Diamond Age immediately comes to mind as passing the Bechdel Test) tend to emphasize the masculinity of the stories, but it's important to see an author working on it and not lapsing into the all-dude story. So that's something else to like about Stephenson: better than average when it comes to sexism in sci-fi.
You should totally read Zodiac, especially since I'm pretty sure you haven't.