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The Passage
Essentially, The Passage is a worthy literary attempt at a post-apocalyptic vampire zombie novel. The premise is solid–mysterious virus developed by the military is tested on random subjects, and then something goes wrong, and the the vampire zombies lay waste to anything with warm blood. Told over the span of a 100 years, Justin Cronin introduces a sprawling cast of characters, some superfluous and forgettable and others quirky and memorable, and heftily takes his literary license on a gleeful Mad Max joy ride through a barren Western United states. There are numerous subplots that divert the story without fulfilling ends or turn into tangents for Cronin to verbosely develop a character to advance a theme he’d like to fit in. Themes of love, hope, redemption, social class, consumerism, military industrial complex, faith vs. science and even a dark twist alluding to Jesus and the 12 disciples, blend together like a bloated science fiction western.  At times you’re left wondering what the point is, and others are engaging scenes of suspense.
This is the beginning of a trilogy and it’s hard to envision the other two books requiring wordy flair. Hopefully, Cronin gets an editor to continue his zombie vampire saga.
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Creativity and divergent thinking as a strategic national asset
Thomas Friedman views immigration and the melting pot that is America as a strategic asset of creation:
…America’s most important competitive advantage: the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together. We live in an age when the most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative — to spark and imagine new ideas, be they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer drugs. And where does creativity come from?
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Bookshelf porn
Bookshelves are sexy, like the librarian with trendy glasses:
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Detroit Art City
Economic collapse means you can build a lot for your buck amongst the rubble, especially if you’re an artist in Detroit.
But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.
TED, Banksy and Make Magazine are some of the big names, and the mayor has hired a special position to help coordinate art events.
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Play nourishes creativity
In publishing her latest book, Jillian Tamaki says this about the importance of play to the creative spirit:
But I do sincerely believe that without personal work and comics, I might go nuts. For the most part, there is little Sense of Play in commercial illustration (there are a few glorious exceptions to this rule). And the Sense of Play is really what nourishes creativity and, ultimately, good work (paid or otherwise). Sometimes, I think, it’s actually more important than rigorous practice.
I have a day job that pays the bills, but my creative projects save my soul.
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Coordinated camera flashes at a concert
At concerts, the pop of a camera flash is constant. You see it on TV at the Super Bowl or some other event. At a Robbie Williams concert, for a Nikon ad, he called upon the crowd to raise their cameras and take a picture. The result:
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The Black Keys – Brothers
Brothers by The Black Keys is a dirty blues rock album. You can hear The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix coming from two guys. With bass and drums leading the way on what seems like every song, it gets a bit repetitive. There’s enough diversity in the arrangements that you can tell the difference between songs but only after a few listens. The Only One, Ten Cent Pistol and I’m Not the One are stand out tracks.
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Dennis Hopper – Bucharest Nights
Eccentric and edgy Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper avidly collected art, and photography was a lifelong active hobby. In 2005, he published Bucharest Nights
, a collection of “digital paintings” at night with a digital camera. The majority of the images are ghostly and ethereal. Stark figures in golden tones against a black backdrop, light trails down a street, neon glows from a casino. A few are stunning but for the most part the book contains good pictures that work better on a whole as a body of work. The random photos of naked women taken with film, jarringly contrasts the preceding 30 or so pictures as if you were listening to soft trance music and someone turned on a buzz saw.
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Peter Gabriel – Scratch My Back
Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back
continues the trend of cover albums. However, Gabriel covers both his peers and those who may have been inspired by him.
The album begins softly with David Bowie’s Heroes that builds into an aching crescendo. All the songs have a lush, symphonic, orchestral arrangements–strings, pianos, horns–and often to a repetitive degree. Sometimes this works, in covering the Magnetic Fields’ Book of Love, it becomes a tender ballad despite the odd lyrics. Paul Simon’s The Boy in The Bubble and Arcade Fire’s My Body is a Cage become soulless. He closes with Radiohead’s Street Spirit which goes out in a baritone drone.
Covering songs is always risky, and there are risks on Scratch My Back. They’re interesting choices, but none will reach the level of Johnny Cash remaking Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.
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Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
philosophically explores the premise of life as a series of games and infinite games. Finite games have an end and rules may not change, whereas infinite games are never ending and the rules must change. Directly, think of Super Mario versus World of Warcraft. With the Mario games, there’s a set of rules (stomp the mushrooms, fireball the goombas, save the princess, don’t die), but with Warcraft, there’s an entire world with a constantly changing set of rules and dynamics of play.
Understanding that, there are several other tenets:
- Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries
- Finite players are serious, infinite players are playful
- A finite player seeks to be powerful, an infinite player plays with strength
- A finite player consumes time, an infinite player generates time
- A finite player aims for eternal life, an infinite player aims for eternal birth
Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).
Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical. Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.
