Essay: "The Difference Between Being Addictive and Good"

When people talk about the quality of a work of narrative art (whether a book, a show, a film or a video game) they often talk about how addictive or compulsive it is. I played it for 8 hours straight, they’ll say, or we watched a whole season over the weekend, or I couldn’t put it down. The recently released Diablo 3 has been called “the most addictive video game of all time.” This is meant as praise, I suppose, although it’s interesting that “addictive” is obviously not seen as being an attractive quality in most other circumstances.

Likewise, when people criticize a work of art, they often talk about how it lacked this quality, how it was boring or tedious. World-weary reviewers take pride in saying they found The Da Vinci Code dreadfully boring, that they were immune to its charms.  In other words, that it did not work on them.

There seem to be remarkably few people who believe that a work of art can be both addictive and dreadful, but that’s what I’ve come to believe.  Works of art aren’t addictive because they’re very good. They're addictive becasue they're designed to be that way.

Essay: "Avon contra Stringer - Part Two"

Last week we discussed Proposition Joe's arrangement with Marlo, where Marlo provided muscle and Joe hooked him up with good drugs.  Now just think, in the context of organized crime, how ridiculous that is.  What would be Joe's recourse if Marlo refused?  A lawsuit?  If you rely on the other guy for the muscle, then you will only have the “connect” as long as he lets you keep it.

Essay: "Avon contra Stinger - Part One"

Spoiler alert! The Wire is the best show ever and this blog post assumes you’ve watched all five season.

When you rewatch great television, what was unpredictable seems inevitable. That’s the hindsight bias. When try to predict the future, we’re bombarded with information, some of it pointing one direction, some in others. When we look back and try to explain the past, the information that pointed towards what actually happened looms very large. That’s why we’re so good at forgetting how bad we are at making predictions.

Review: "Harakiri"

As you probably know, harakiri (or seppuku) is a gruesome form of ritual suicide. It was practiced by the samurai in Japan and was perceived as an honorable death, preferable to being executed, or continuing to live in dishonor. The samurai would sit down, cross-legged, and disembowel himself with a knife or his short sword (his wakisashi). Another samurai (the second) decapitates him with a katana (the long sword of a samurai) once the messier work is done.

Essay: "Why Pay for Art?"

Do you remember those stupid anti-piracy ads they used to run before movies? There was this one with a guy who supposedly painted sets, talking about how piracy personally hurt him. I remembered snickering: yeah, that’s what happens when a movie flops – they stop painting the sets.

The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I think that there isn’t really any good rationale for paying for art at all.

Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part Two"

Tim Burton is attracted to weirdos and outsiders and so his explanation for Batman’s war on crime is very simple: Bruce Wayne was a little nuts. Keaton’s Wayne is reclusive and eccentric. He has trouble interacting with people and comes off strangely in ordinary social situations. Only in his hideout (the Batcave) is he relaxed and calm, in control and confident. For him, dressing up as Batman satisfies a deep need, or compulsion. Although it’s not sexual, I would say it’s almost like a fetish. Batman is who he really is.

Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part One"

I saw Tim Burton’s Batman in theatres when it came out. I was nine years old and it blew my mind. But at that age, the Adam West Batman television show also blew my mind, and so I have learned to take my youthful assessments of artistic representations of the Caped Crusader with a grain of salt. I recently re-watched Batman for the first time since the Chris Nolan movies came out. I think the general consensus on the Internet is that the Nolan movies are much better than Burton’s but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has held up very well.