New John Mayer album this summer
New record this Summer… Not a Born and Raised “plus”… A new group of songs to bring the whole thing up to date with Summer 2013. I have that hunger that always precedes something meaningful. See you all soon. And thanks for the warm welcome back to the stage. Getting back on it a little at a time.
John
I’m like
…and if [David Foster] Wallace teaches us anything it’s that you should be the sort of person who not only obligingly follows footnotes and endnotes but finds great value in doing so.Cohen, Samuel S., and Lee Konstantinou. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Print. xxii.
Friends don’t let friends not read David Foster Wallace.
Good on you, Joshua.
(Source: thelongbrake)
Ian Crouch for The New Yorker:
By now, this accursed bass drone feels as if it has always been a part of our cinematic lives. Yet its reign of sonic terror has been relatively brief, dating, with a few antecedents, to a string of trailers made for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” from 2010. The teaser for the film was released in 2009, and featured music by Mike Zarin. The movie’s third trailer, this time scored by Zach Hemsey, added a playful and clever string element over Zarin’s big booms. Both of these components were then absorbed into the film’s soundtrack, by Hans Zimmer, a composer who, based largely on his work on Nolan’s films in the past decade, probably deserves most of the blame for loosing this particular rock slide into the world.
It’s not just you who thinks that basically every movie trailer now sounds like Inception.
I was thinking about this very thing last night after seeing/hearing a trailer for NBC’s Hannibal, the music of which is a blatant ripoff of Zimmer’s “accursed bass drone.” Glad to know it’s not just me.
An opposite tendency [of the placebo effect]—and one that has been largely overlooked by the research community—is the nocebo effect. Put simply, it is the phenomenon in which inert substances or mere suggestions of substances actually bring about negative effects in a patient or research participant. For some, being informed of a pill or procedure’s potential side effects is enough to bring on real-life symptoms. Like the placebo effect, it is still poorly understood and thought to be brought about by a combination of Pavlovian conditioning and a reaction to expectations.
Dollops of the fantastic
On David Mitchell’s next book:
[Mitchell] says it has ‘dollops of the fantastic in it’, though not of the hobbits-and-elves kind. ‘Stuff between life and death. And the soul.’
Totally vague, and I’m already sold.
Via Interview with a writer: David Mitchell
this day maybe be rough and bloody and heartbreaking but it is here and it is now and it is bursting with untold potential and possibility and our response to it is of utmost, urgent importance.
I spotted David Lipsky’s extended interview with David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, in Suits S02E01, “She Knows.” With all of the movie, literature, and music references woven into the fabric of the show, this had to be intentional.
Now, a quote from AOCYEUBY:
I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us.
So, what’s the meta-meta-lesson, here?
