Great moments in history: Toulouse-Letrec pooing on the beach (1898)

Temporal distance and reverence dehumanize historical figures. It makes them seem beholding some kind of higher standard than everybody else. Which is not true. We're all human after all. Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Montfa (commonly known simply as Toulouse-Lautrec) was a great painter with unique sensibility. As a trailblazer of post-impressionist age, he further explored the mundane moments in exquisite detail. But that's not what this post is about.

Toulouse-Lautrec was also quite an eccentric as confirmed by this infamous series of photos. The images document Toulouse-Lautrec in the act of defecating on the nondescript beachside. It is like one of those post-Fluxus performance documents except a 70 or so years earlier so it is way cooler. 

And it would have been great to leave these image as they are barren of context. But you would like to know how they came around - so here it is.

The year is 1898. It was a tumultuous year for Toulouse-Lautrec. For the last fifteen years he was to trying to break out in the Paris art scene. The results were middling, he had an occasional showings here and there but he was far from a bonafide success. But now it seemed like he was going to make it. 

Around this time, his lifelong friend Maurice Joyant, a gallery owner, had arranged an his exhibition in Goupil and Cie. It was supposed to be something crowning moment for Henri. But it ended up being a whimper. It definitely wasn't a success. Mostly because Toulouse-Lautrec wasn't considered a serious artist by Goupil and Cie crowd. Look at Henri from their perspective - that guy was a joke. He did posters for Moulin Rouge, that red scarf poster was garish, he was painting prostitutes and his nude stuff looked either ugly or weird. It didn't worked out. 

Remember that Van Gogh's big retrospective that put him on the map and started a chain reaction of reappraisal of various post-impressionist artists from 1880s-90s took place in 1901. Toulouse-Lautrec's show was too soon and the surrounding narrative had no drama to engage the snobbish crowd. 

The exhibition's lack of success spelled the end of Toulouse-Lautrec's life in Paris. Henri was sick and tired - lifelong alcohol abuse and syphilis took its tool. He was forced to move back to his parents, who also didn't happened to be fans of his works. But Joyant tried to cheer up Henri so that he would fade away completely.

One of the things they used to do was walking on the beaches of Le Crotoy in Picardie. It was a popular vacation place amongst French artists. One day Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Joyant were walking on the beach just like any other day. Joyant took a couple of photos of Toulouse-Lautrec fooling around, including defecation. 

At the time these photos went unnoticed. It wasn't until much later, after Henri passed away and became recognized as one of the greats that these photos came into prominence. So that's that. 

A bit later in 1898, Toulouse-Lautrec was sent to an asylum which perpetuated every singly distress and misery he had and added a couple of new ones in the process. Eventually, in 1901 the long-term effects of alcoholism and syphilis had a better of him and he passed away age 36. 

In a way, these defecating on the beach photos are his LAST HURRAH. Just think about for a bit. Let it sink in. Feels right, huh? 

MFT: Frenzal Rhomb - Not So Tough Now (1996) - parade of secret tracks

 

Frenzal Rhomb's 1996 album Not So Tough Now is not just really good punk rock album. It also has one of the greatest listings of secret tracks ever. Back in the 90s secret tracks became a commonplace and their vinyl-era mystique went away. 

So why not mock the entire concept? That's what Frenzal Rhomb did. Check it out:

Noncewords as brandnames are nothing new. But hey, this one is really good dont you think? 

The trick is that it looks like the word "chocoboom". But it is not, because it is written in ukrainian using ukrainian letters that look like english letters. 

It actually reads "сносовоом" aka "snosovoom". I really the way this word sounds - it is like a spell that sucks you into that haunting state where everything is still and you understand the connections between the things.

Sex Pistols – 1977 US “Never Mind the Bollocks” Cartoon Promo Poster

Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks had a cartoon promo poster made by Warner Bros' Records. It is a quick and snarky recount of their history. 

Cool bit of history. 

Stephen Berkman - Woman Hand-Knitting a Condom

This is a photography of a woman hand-knitting a condom. Ok. If you wonder whether it is practical or not - try not to think too hard about it. The dating is presumably late 19th century. People loved to photograph stupid things then.

The photo was made by Stephen Berkman for his book Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years. It is a collection of stylized photographs that tells the story and shows the ouevre of Zohar Studios. The story goes - its founder Shimmel Zohar immigrated to United States in the 1850s and opened his photo studio on Lower East Side. He intended to capture the gist of the time he lived in. The studio was popular among the locals and managed to capture the weirder side of its clients.

It is a simple yet effective premise to showcase some inventive retrophotography while avoiding being mid-2000s hipster pretentious. It is also a good way to smoothly immerse the viewer into the world. Having a narrative behind a collection of images is much more engaging than just dumping a bunch of oddball images with no context.

The book is a great example of hauntology done right. From the aesthetic standpoint, you have a combination of early photography quirks (after all, one of the most prominent photos of the early years was an autoportrait as a drown man) with 20th century subversive explorations of psyche as seen in the works of Joel-Peter Witkin with an oddity grounded by the way of Diane Arbus. 

Things get weird, but not weird as a statement or weird for the sake of weird - the scenarios fit the narrative "oh yeah, this thing would be fun". And it is a tough balancing act because of temptation of going overboard. 

The other great photo from the book is classic bodypart substitution called "Obscura Object" in the head of a woman in a strict dress is replaced with a train whistle. While it is closer to things Man Ray was doing in 1910s-1920s

William Carlos Williams' This is Just to Say: The Game. On Calum Rodger's "Gotta Eat the Plums"

 

Poem as a point and click adventure. Given the fact that pretty much every walking simulator "art game" is trying to evoke those "poetic" "instances" and generate "poetic experience" by its non-gameplay - it would have been obvious just to adapt a poem into a game.

At the very least, adapting the text into a game mechanic and interpreting the plot would be a good creative challenge - definitely more focused than usual nondescript "pushing through some images and feeling feelings doing that".

But for some reason, I've never seen such projects up until now. I've seen interactive poetry, I've seen games that quote poems, but no game adaptations of poems (Dante's Inferno doesn't count).

And now Calum Rodger did just that with "Gotta Eat the Plums". William Carlos Williams' poem This is Just to Say (aka the one about being sorry about eating the plums) is probably the best candidate for such experiment.

In the recent years, This is Just to Say had experienced a resurgence because of twitterbots doing procedural variations of the text and numerous parodies trending on social media (even i did a variation last year). It is easy to see why the poem is popular - it is relatable and easy to follow.

We all had moments like this, so the poem soaks all those experiences and permutates with each reader' reflection. On the other hand, it retains boundary-pushing drive of modernist poetry while almost poking fun at other poets of its time like of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Basil Bunting or e.e. cummings. It does the same things but in a simpler and more efficient manner.


"Gotta Eat the Plums" lets you to experience the poem from inside out, to get the poem. It is an attempt to recreate the thought process, the drama roiling behind the text. You play as William Carlos Williams up at night, hungry. He came down to "investigate" the kitchen for something to eat. That's the first part of the game.

 

You can turn the music on if you want. The soundtrack is Erik Satie's Gymnopedia #1, because of course, ye olde vaporwave vibe, pal. It gets maddening after a while. You can also look in the window and contemplate the starry night sky. There is also a cat walking around, expecting to get his piece of the action. You can look at his dish, but there is nothing for a poet. You can consider the asphodel as a solution.
But the main task is to search the kitchen cupboards for consumables. You don't want to cook anything so you are left with no choice but to open the refrigerator.

There you find an icebox with plums.

That's where the gear shifts gears and turns into a battle of will and hunger.

The thing is - the plums are not yours and it is probably a good idea to suck it up and find a way out of without making grounds for the conflict.

You can wrestle with your conscience for some time, but the hunger is stronger and the only way you can proceed is to eat those plums.

And then, overwhelmed with guilt, you'll write the note, that is actually a poem the game is based on. Curtains.

"Gotta eat the plums" makes "This is just to say" new. That's how you do an adaptation of the piece. Enough said.

AC/DC - TNT Sheet music aka The most beautiful thing in the world

Some types of merchandise are not like anything else. Case in point - this thing. It is a promotional booklet for AC/DC fan club. It features some cheeky illustrations, questions for hardcore fans, and also some sheet music. Because that is what you are looking for when you are looking for AC/DC merchandise.

The thing is - AC/DC is probably the last type of music you would expect to be transcribed into sheet music. It just doesn't combine that way. AC/DC is too awesome for this antique concept of sheet music. Writing it down is like freezing a breath so that you would have a document of a breath. It is an interesting concept on paper, but it just doesn't really work beyond an entertaining thought.

AC/DC is all about willing the cool into the realm of real - it is not carved in stone like sheet music, you don't need to learn to play exactly like it was recorded by the band - if you really want to appreciate AC/DC - you need to go the other way - it is like catching the wind and doing aeolian things.

But this particular piece of sheet music is really cute. Looking at TNT as sheet music got some sort of morbid curiosity factor. It feels like one of those Martin Creed artworks - totally counter.

Ian McKellen and The Fleshtones - Sonnet XX

Online readings are all the rage right now. Musician are giving concerts online, poets are recording their performances, live book readings pop up here and there. The future is here. I was dreaming about it for years.

Things went so far that even Sir Patrick Stewart is reading Shakespeare's sonnets on Instagram.

But it is not what this post is about. Patrick Stewart is great at performing Shakespeare's sonnets, no argument here, but he can't hold a candle ещ other esteemed Shakespearean actor - Ian McKellen.

The story goes. Back in 1987 Andy Warhol had a show on MTV. It was aptly titled "Fifteen Minutes" and it was all about capturing zeitgeist the hard way. One of the episodes featuring the band Fleshtones. They were gearing for a tour to support their new album, so a segment on a Warhol show was just what they needed. Eventually, they taped two segments for the show.


One segment was a glorified lip-sync of their bulldozer lead single  "Return of the Leather Kings."



The other segment featured a band jamming in the background while Ian McKellen performs a Shakespeare's sonnet 20 while wearing the most unfashionable jacket ever as if he was Serge Gainsbourg. 




McKellen performs the sonnet with so much subtle swagger and it gels so well with the music - you instantly want them to record an entire album like that. Just because it is so simple and yet so cool. Things just can't get any better.

The resulting track was later released on the "Fleshtones Present: The Big Bang Theory - Time Bomb!" compilation. The credits went like that: Zaremba / Milhizer / Spaeth / Warren / Streng / Shakespeare. 

Helen Zaltzman's "nmiigea" aka John Lennon's "Imagine" in reverse alphabetical order

Check out this interesting take on John Lennon's Imagine by Helen Zaltzman. "nmiigea" is a reinterpretation of the song with the lyrics arranged in reverse alphabetical order. Why? To "quell anxiety and stress and sleeplessness". The whole thing is presented in the form of an aspirational lyric read-out with soothing guitar muzak in the background.

"nmiigea" is a total conversion of the source material, the song is hijacked and reconfigured into something else to the point of losing any semblance of its original form. Reverse alphabetical order approach completely eviscerates the narrative of the song and consequently evaporates any themes it was transmitting. Instead you get a roundabout incantation of the words devoid of prior coherence. The mental connection to the source material provides space to think about the relativity of the matters.

Some words are repeated over and over, the others only happen once or twice. Either way, there is a gaping chasm in the midst. You know what it is and ahe words are there and they are spoken but they don't come together as they should.

One way of perceiving the piece is by concentrating on the sound of the word. It works from my perspective/ Since english is my second language i'm to able to distance myself enough to take the spoken words as sounds first and words second (makes me rather tolerant to silly lyrics).

The other viable option to let the stream of words to go in and form incidental images, narratives, phrases as you perceive it. The resulting permutation may go places or stomp around the source material - depending on your mood.

As it is - "nmiigea" is an interesting rumination on the way words bear meanings and how these meanings transform in the context and form then narrative. It is an exercise in excising the thick of it. What if there is no apparent context, no narrative to hold it together. What does it mean then?

Tom Cruise's Savagest Moment - Lucio Fulci's Aenigma 1989

Tom Cruise is one of the few modern Hollywood actors who channels the spirits of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. His increasingly elaborate setpieces rely less on drama on more on cinematic techniques and physical prowess - they awe, something Fairbanks and Flynn were going for too. Unlike folks like Dwayne Johnson, Cruise manages to remain somewhat relatable and plausible in his stunts. And these long sentences are here to more or less kick things off to something completely different.



This clip is from the Lucio Fulci 1989 flick titled Aenigma. It is a splatter schlock fest about ghosts and death and sleaze from the master past his prime and up his own ass. But it doesn't really matter because this movie features Tom Cruise. Kinda. In fact, Aenigma features what is probably the savagest moment that ever featured Tom Cruise. Or if being exact, Tom Cruise's image.

The episode depicts a woman climbing on a window. She is trying to figure out who is calling her name and where the sound is coming from. She looks around standing windowsill, the voice comes from the back, she turns around and looks at the wall with Tom Cruise 1986 Top Gun publicity still.

The voice says "Kim! Kim! I'm waiting for you". And then the ravaged ghoul ghost appears, the woman is engulfed in horror, shrieks and falls off the window down on the ground to her death.

At the same time, the ghost casually disappears. We are left to gaze at Tom Cruise for another moment. This whole thing doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And it is good. I like how random it is. It just stays with you as a nugget of nonplus.

Robert Giard - Sliced American

This is a photograph of something folded. I don't even know what exactly. And i don't want to know. It just looks curious. And nothing more. 

I like looking at it. And then not looking at it. There is this indistinct milquetoast sense of mystery that is not exactly thrilling nor peculiar - it is just there. 

Christian Morgenstern - BIM BAM BUM poem

Heavy emphasis on the images is one of the great things symbolist poetry brought back to the spotlight in the latter half of XIX century. After years of being buried in the verbosity of romantic poetry, symbolism cut the fat and tried to get straight to the point. 

Despite that, symbolist approach managed to overstay its welcome and become a passe by the time XX century rolled in. Part of the problem was plain and simple misuse of images, they became nothing more than a mere garnish of the text, an outlet for the flowery language, the one used for furbishing instead of actually serving a thematic or narrative purpose in the text.

But it wasn't necessary a bad thing. Case in point - BIM BAM BUM.

Why procedural text generation is the best?

Here's an article from LIFE magazine from March 3 1961 about a text generator that does some form of beatnik poetry and it is almost as good as a real thing. At least for the disinterested and uninitiated. 

The tone of the piece is a mix of tongue-in-cheek amazement and goodhearted irony. But nevertheless it is really curious piece of history. 1961 was the very infancy of the Natural Language Processing - but even then there was this semi-mocking tone regarding what NLP is capable of.  And the poem is decent enough. 

I think Lew Welch would have been a fan of this thing - there is this smoky blur of similarity of his cadences and of the generated poem.

Anyway. As a writer, text generation is one of my areas of interest. It is a tool worth exploring. And not because it can do job for you. 

The poem itself is the representative of the procedural text generation variety. In essence, it is a cookie-cutter template-based way of producing text out of available elements without taking context or semantics into consideration. It is as blunt and unelegant as it gets. Usually, the results are clumsy and borderline demented. But only if you expect it to do text writing the right way. If not - it can be incredibly efficient at its job if you know how to use it.

I can go even further and claim that of all its types, procedural text generation is probably the greatest application of natural language processing ever.

Here's why - it is a simulacrum1 operating with a simulacrum2 based on a simulacrum3 to do simulacrum4.

Cue Inception BRAAAAAM.

Let's unpack this.

3 Procedural Text Generation is based on an assumption that grammar rules and vocabulary is all there is for language. Such vital parts of the language as onthological and aesthetic contexts or semantics are left out of the picture for sake of keeping things simple. In other words, PTG assumes that "map IS territory". 

1 Then there the generative infrastructure - it is more or less a Rube Goldberg machine. Eerily futile, blunt instrument. 

It is a structure marked by placeholders and there is an inventory out of which the result is constructed. In fact, this structure is the text, except it is not, but it shapes the result. 

There can also be some rules that affect the choice of words, but it is optional. It can run at random just fine.

2 Traditionally, the formation of text is bound by narrative. Its intention is to transmit some sort of information.

On the other hand, the intention of PTG is to generate a text entity, not narrative or evoke imagery. Thus, the central element of PTG mechanism is more or less doing snapshots of the indeterminacy.

From the existential standpoint, the choice is rooted in numerous factors. But what if we take out factors completely and leave it blank - what kind of choice it will be? It won't be because it is a completely different thing now. It just operates similarly. That's where procedural text generation magic kicks in.

4 Basically, what happens is - a bunch of stuff is being thrown together and by accident it generates sense to the reader because the reader bears the baggage of experience and context and is able to embalm a piece of text with meaning. The text itself remains empty. It was made to be made.

This is substantially different approach that explores other facets of perception and cognition. 

On the other hand, because the text in this set-up is not actually the text but the template and its inventory - it turns the creative process the inside out.  Instead of conveying meaning - the spotlight is on the framework and its potential to generate combinations. 

The sum of parts generates new entity that contains information shaped in a certain way that is not really saying anything but can be interpreted if necessary. 

As a result, procedural text generation allows us to peek at the strange parallel dimension where things look mostly the same but function differently. The whole method opens up different creative possibilities in terms of interaction with the text and constructing narratives.

FreddieMeter - Queen + voice recognition bullshit

Here's a little singing contest variation dedicated to one and only Freddie Mercury. It is called "FreddieMeter" because you know - it meters the Freddieness.

Why? Because he was sooooo great, you know? And he had such a great voice, do you know about that? Can you sing like Freddie Mercury? How close is your timbre and melody? Let's find out!

Give me a break.

While Freddie Mercury was great-ish (probably) and stuff (for sure), i don't think this posthumous celebration of his talent is all that necessary. The man has a body of work and it is literally everywhere and if you want to celebrate him - just listen to his music and stop looking for a reason to shove it down the throats under some new pretense via marketing effort. It doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation

Seriously, it is dumb experience marketing gimmick cringe. You take a hyped-up topic like Machine Learning and combine it with mildly promising idea of voice comparison. Then you need to make it broadly available so you regress it to the simplest form. And then you tack your brand on it so that it would "matter" more and generate that special kind of "engagement".

The reality is a bit different. Here's what FreddieMeter really is - it is a throwaway piece used to momentarily spike the interest in the brand and then go away without notice because no one will care about it beyond the inital splash. There is just nothingness all around.

Also - with this service you can compare Freddie's voice with Paul Rodgers via some audio input tweaks. Paul Rodgers is cool too (and he's probably a Chtulhu who got Doug-Quaid'd with some plastic surgery, hypnosis and Revolver Ocelot-level of mindrewiring), and did a Queen album too. It is probably the most useful thing you can do with it.

The other part of the problem is that it was created by the Google aka "the big tech company". Which is a kind of a red flag, you know? The thing about big tech is that they are infovore - they feed on information, and they want their information diverse and they will go a distance to get it. Case in point - this thing. It is a ploy to get more data. And brands go for it because of "whatever works" mentality.

I mean - this service will likely generate some audio-visual data of people singing or lipsyncing. This data will likely go down into some facial and voice recognition and transcription research stuff - and at some point down the line it will be commodified as some service.

The fact that there is a statement "Your audio doesn’t get uploaded to servers to be analyzed, so your vocals stay private" doesn't really mean anything - you need to know what to check in order to find out whether it is really true, and most of the people just don't care and follow the impulse. It is foolproof because it seems harmless.

Then there is a problem of purpose - what kind of endgame this project expects? What is the end goal? Just to have some fun and "celebrate the icon"? So, you can record your voice singing some Queen songs and compare with the way Freddie Mercury sang it. And that's it. This use case is flimsy to say the least.

What kind of insight does it really offer? That your voice is more or less reminiscent of Freddie Mercury's according to some broad criteria and lots of hidden parameters? OK, what is the benefit of having this kind of information? What it is good for? It's not a white elephant artistic technical achievement, so why bother spending resources on that? Because Queen brand paid for it so that they can raise awareness and celebrate? Do you really need to do it that way? There are so many questions left and somebody got paid for this.

The idea itself is fine. But that's not how you can use it and find out something interesting. One of the problems with these kinds of projects is that their mechanics allows much more than the business need requires. Which makes the case for the thing known as "the waste of effort". And this begs the question "why bother?". And the answer is - 'cause it generates data that can be used elsewhere. Period.

But how you can use it more productively?

One of the ways this idea can be applied for the common good is language learning. Speaking practice is one of the integral elements of the process and it is not really available for everyone. This kind of service can bridge gap and help people learn foreign languages in a less complicated way.

On the other hand, this kind of approach can be used to study the chrological changes of the way people speak througout the years and time periods. You can trace the evolution of speech patterns, tone, timbre of the voice of a specific individual or a group or community. And that is going to tell you a lot of things about how the way of verbal communication permutates and adapts to the surrounding world.

You can also singalong with Chuck Shuldiner. He's dead too and deserves to be celebrated.

Sam Kinison - Homosexual Necrophilia

Spinning a stupid, obnoxious and annoying things is a lost art. It is one thing to write sonnets and paint landscapes - making a cohesive, comprehensible narrative out of one-note dead end braindead silly joke is an accomplishment worth including on your CV.

Sam Kinison was a master of doing such things. He could come up with a joke about dust particles in the air and turn it into an apocalyptic mayhem, a god's ultimate judgement Antonin Artaud style.

Just check out this routine.

In it Sam Kinison takes a stupid dead end premise and goes full-on "let me work it". He talks casual homophobia, institutional corruption, fear of death, life after death and other things while remaining in the pink part of outrage spectrum just to irritate everybody with the fact that he doesn't really go overboard.

There are so many ways you can botch this time of the joke and he manages to make it just right.




He starts by setting up the premise - a recount of how he read a story about homosexual perverts doing necrophiliac stuff. The story goes - homosexual necrophiliacs go to the morgues and mortuaries and pay money to managers in order to quality spend time with fresh corpses. Important to note - he recounts not the story itself, just how he read it and how initially reacted to it. This approach gives him a considerable distance from the subject matter. He can't take a hit for making this joke because he just shares his experiences. Neat.

After establishing the narrative - he bounces off the predictable audience reaction and takes off any responsibility for the outrageousness of the story by insisting that he only read about it in the paper and that in this case he is in the same position as the audience.

Then, instead of elaborating on the story, he starts to mock around the premise. At first he states his position on the subject matter in an extremely exaggerated matter. Then he starts to tear the thing apart as outrageous and obnoxious.

The joke culminates with Kinison reenacting the way this whole thing might have happened.

He lays down on the floor face down and pretends to be a corpse. He imitates its internal monologue and then switches the role to homosexual necrophiliac doing his dirty business while keeping the corpses internal monologue intact right when he starts to freak out because of the penetration. And it ends there.

As a result, you have a sentence spinned out into a routine.

BBC Newsnight Sirens Sing-Scream 2014

Taking things out of context is one of the most effective creative techniques out there. Sure, there is an element of vandalism and appropriation at play, but creativity was never about keeping the contextual sanctity of the original. Context is for IP-holders. Things are much more interesting when you go beyond and try something different. Even if it is just taking one element out of the whole and presenting it on its own.

Case in point - this thing.


This is an excerpt from the conclusion of an episode of BBC Newsnight from December 2014. In it we're shown a scene from the play Sirens by Ontroerend Goed theater company. They were staging this play around that time at Soho Theater, so it was pretty sweet promotional plug. You can't ask for a better way of exposing your play to the wider audience.

The bit is prefaced by clumsy and somewhat awkward explanation from the presenter. He attempts to prepare the viewer for what they are about to experience. He describes the whole thing as "short taste" His tongue is firmly in cheek but he keeps a straight face. That was classy.

The excerpt itself is a bunch of women screaming, crying, hollering, screeching, shouting, shrieking, squalling, roaring, yelling, bawling, yawping, yawling. The presenter describes it as Sing-Screaming. It is the beginning of the play so it makes sense to make a bang from the get go. The whole thing is a kind of "irreverent feminist manifesto for the 21st century" that captures the spirit of the age. The problem is that this bit is taken out of context and put through an ironic filter.

In the context of this particular bit - the play and what it is about - doesn't really matter. There is not enough information to make a point and the excerpt itself is pretty self-contained and self-explanatory. What you experience instead - is the video that features two parts - the preface and the exceprt. Lack of cohesion between the two and the fact that both are torn out of their respective products makes them an odd pair.

Funny thing is - it works that way.

Nitzer Ebb performs John Cage's seminal "4'33"

Here's a video of seminal British EBM band Nitzer Ebb performing John Cage's iconic conceptual art opus "4'33". The guys are doing their best with this classic piece. They give their all.

Among other things, this means I have a reason to talk about 4'33 and the trick it manages to pull off.

4'33 is one of those compositions that can't be really ruined. You can't do it wrong by design due to its inherent ambiguity. It works any way you turn it. Sideways, upside down, inside out, backwards - it persists and prospers. Even if you try hard to do mess it up - you will still get an interesting result. That's a testament of John Cage's ability to engage performers and listeners.

On the surface, the composition consists of the musician performing nothing, just sitting around not playing an instrument for a couple of movements.

Some interpret the composition as being silent. But it's not really correct. The thing is - the performance doesn't occur in the vacuum. There is a lot of stuff going on around the place. These things get into the spotlight due to lack of action in the foreground.

Unfortunately, the silence of the composition is perceived as a pretentious gimmick and it completely overshadowed an original intent of the piece.

On the other hand, 4'33 is the composition one needs to endure. And its not an easy thing to do. It is really hard to comprehend negative space, especially when it is superimposed in such manner. The situation generates mildly tickling cognitive dissonance that wreak havoc in the padded cell of the mind.

You get all sorts of thoughts passing through, you start to notice little things. Listening or performing 4'33 is really an eventful experience that is different each time. What is even more fascinating is to reminisce on the listening to 4'33. In this case you get even more zany experience as things blend and bleed through into something completely different.

Bizarre Wikipedia Edit War on Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a time in Hollywood"

Wikipedia is many things for many people. Some view it as the go-to place to check some basic facts, others view it as a template for the future universal source of all knowledge, a sort of an imperfect start of a the great thing. There are some people who genuily try hard to make it so, and there are other people who fuel the so-called Wiki Wormhole with unexpected and downright weird things found in the far corners of the world and the web (AV Club even runs a column about that).

Finally, there are people who take an advantage of Wikipedia being a massive compendium of seemingly sourced information to intentionally distort and manipulate certain facts in order to orchestrate an instances of confusion and conflict.
The usual victims of such actions are articles on politics, political theory, public figures of all sorts and most of the science-related articles.
The editorial boards and active users try to keep things straight for the benefit of the public. But sometimes the trolls persist and this causes so-called "edit wars" in which the story of changes and attempts to find out the reason why becomes more prominent than the subject itself.

That's what happened this time.

Quentin Tarantino's new film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" came out into a wide release in late July. The film garnered a positive buzz and made a splash at the box office. As any significant film release - it got a page on Wikipedia. For a while it only had an official plot synopsis and the list of cast.

But around the time the press screenings rolled out and the wide release date was coming up, it was expanded into a full-blown plot description with spoilers, et al. This things happens all the time and usually it is not a big deal.

However, things weren't that simple this time.

The big thing about "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is that it is a historical fiction that applies a bit of artistic license over a depiction of certain historical events. In this case, it is a murder of Sharon Tate and several of her friends in 1969 by the cult leader Charles Manson and the members of his "family".

In the Tarantino's version of events, the murder never happened due to chain of events that diverted the attention of the "family" members to the film's protagonists Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth who quickly dispatched them in a gleefully gruesome fashion. And everyone lived happily ever after, because the film is a fairy tale. It is a spin on the historical event that tries to imagine what could have been if things went a little differently.

However, the Wikipedia description of the concluding section of the plot that appeared in late May after the film's Cannes premiere was drastically different from what actually happened on the screen. It retained the story point of murder plot falling apart, but it took things into much more outlandish direction.

Here's the bit in question:

The fact of that this plot description was fabricated and misleading was repeatedly pointed out by the film critics. As Andrew Woods put it: "Don’t even read it if you don’t want to know what DOESN'T happen." (great statement, by the way). 

Incorrect and downright made-up plot descriptions happen all the time, thats a part of Wikipedia's crowdsourced nature, especially for the anticipated media releases. The difference from this situation is that upon release the information gets corrected and everybody move on with their lives. 

But this time, when users tried correct the plot description, they hit the wall. Why? The thing is - Wikipedia guidelines have a line that says "it is not acceptable to delete information from an article because you think it spoils the plot". 

And so - each time users edited the bit - the fake one turned up again. It happened multiple times going into the release week. The film's "talk" page shows a fascinating story of what was going down behind the scenes. 

The initial discussions were about casting controversies, how much of the film's plot the summary should reveal and whether the editors should respect Tarantino's wishes to avoid spoilers. 

Then things took a turn sideways and started to get weird. It all started when one of the editors claimed that he saw the film at the Cannes premiere and stated that the plot description on Wikipedia was false. However, the other editors started to argue whether Cannes viewers can be considered as a verifiable sources of information. As one of the editors put it "You have once again have not explained how I, as an editor, am able to verify the plot summary". 

Despite that, multiple users requested to fix the section and the things kept rolling back to the made-up bit again and again up. It was a loop. And it went on up until the film's wide release in UK and North America in late July that put a definitive end to the debate and reinstated the real conclusion of the story to the plot description.

To be honest, this particular edit war is a great narrative in of itself. It shows the struggles of sourcing and depicting information on the web and it points out how shaky things are when the sources can't be verified and the public involvement goes out of control. 

But it overshadow the thing that started it all - falsified conclusion of the story in the plot description section. 

***

The made-up ending is interesting thing from the conceptual standpoint.

In essense, this kind of retelling is taking an artistic license on a plot point that itself took an artistic license on an actual story. And as such, it is a showcase of derivative creativity - another spin on an idea, a variation on a variation. It functions in the same context but drives the story in a different direction using the same moving parts of the plot.

If anything, this kind of spinning and slightly making things up is how people do things since the beginning of time. We do it all the time as a kids to impress others just to look cool. The made-up ending is something like that.

Deriving from the existing and experienced things is how the cognition amps up the imagination. After a while things get complicated, the line of sources and the bleedthrough of various elements mix-up more and more to the point the derivative piece becomes a thing of its own with its own distinct themes and identity.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" wikipedia made-up ending is a testament to the dedication of the Tarantino's fanbase. Whether it was mean-spirited or not is beyond the debate. The fact is - it was misleading and it caused something of a fuss. 

But it shows the level of investment into the work of art similar to pro wrestling "fantasy booking". And we all should do it from time to time, just not make that much noise about it.

GLTR aka Giant Language model Test Room

Natural language processing applications are having their long-awaited cultural moment. Unfortunately, the spike of the interest was not caused by some aesthetic and conceptual breakthroughs but rather due to rampart malicious use of the technology.

The phenomenon known as "fake news" is the next step in the development of the information warfare tools and it is getting more and more sophisticated as time goes by. In fact, it becomes so sophisticated it becomes hard to distinguish the text written by an algorithm from a text written by a living breathing human being.

That's the reason Giant Language model Test Room aka GLTR exists.

What is Shelton Benjamin thinking?: SmackDown LIVE, July 2, 2019

Here's a little segment from WWE Smackdown Live from July 2, 2019. It features Shelton Benjamin, one of the company's performers, being asked about the chances of the championship changing hands at the upcoming pay-per-view event "Extreme Views".

Shelton doesn't give a traditional answer. Instead of providing a verbal reply, he does a little staring routine, rolling his eyes in different directions, intensely thinking while the camera zooms in on his face. He figures out something, makes a vicious smile, glances into the camera for a bit and walks off without saying a word. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds.

It is short and sweet vignette designed to highlight some sort of a plot development and character involvement. Except, it is not. It is a non-sequitir.

The thing is - WWE has a habit of doing throwaway things with no intention of ever really committing to something. Shelton Benjamin is a good example of this phenomenon. He's employed, but not really featured in a meaningful way. The last time he was spotlighted was prior to Wrestlemania when he fought championship contender Seth Rollins in a losing effort. It came out of nowhere and it went nowhere. This vignette is the same. It turned up for sole reason of padding an episode, added nothing to the narrative and was promptly forgotten afterwards.

But it is so different from WWE's usual throwaway stuff it sticks on memory.

As it is, it is rather curious performance piece. There can be a statement about non-verbal communication hidden deep inside. After all, a skilled actor can express a lot of things with his eyes and their movement. But since, the vignette is devoid of context and lacks any substance, it depicts a literal dead end void. It doesn't make sense and yet it persists. The thing is so pointless, it fascinates.