charliecurran
Joined 15 years ago
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269
Submissions
30
Member since
Aug 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
My absolute favorite discovery this past year has been Monica Belevan's Covidian Aesthetics blog.
Some of the best writing about being alive right now to be found if you're interested in anthropology, art history, and philosophy. Can't recommend it enough.
Comment · 7 years ago
God damnit Hacker News...as someone who recognizes the artwork in the header image because the artist is a good friend and was at my wedding several months back...
This is straight up surveillance that will cannibalize what it's observing.
They're quite creative, they're gonna dazzle your machine vision. Why build tools to hinder/distort/build paranoia into something you're interested in if you genuinely are?
Comment · 8 years ago
You'd think / hope - but those kinds of rare throws seem to happen at peak disruption (think the 70's), instead we get Avengers 5.
Comment · 8 years ago
That's why Lew Wasserman's innovation in building the modern talent agency at MCA / packaging films was the death of the former studio system, and genesis of the contemporary star system.
Comment · 8 years ago
Scorsese can only make so many films at a time.
Comment · 8 years ago
Just tweeted this thread // this is a weird flex. Fun time to be a filmmaker rn.
2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix.
3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage.
5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman.
6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.”
7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of.
8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to be alive.
Comment · 8 years ago
This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm.
I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency.
I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions.
"So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it - it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for? In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance? We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." - Brian Eno
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-jo...
Comment · 10 years ago
Interesting read.
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