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.

Allen Institute's Grover and the funeral pyre of text generation

If you are following the technology news for some time, especially the ones related to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, you can spot this strange tendency that underlines every new project or breakthrough in the field. 

It is not about doing something that goes beyond human comprehension, it is not about making something inspiring or astounding or simply distinct. No, it is mostly about doing the opposite - the generic, blend-in, nothing special, middle of the road, template-based kind of stuff that can pass of as human-made because it is so unassuming or just being like something an average human would do. It is lazy. And we are not even starting to talk about DeepFakeNews shebang. 

This peculiar tendency leaves a strange aftertaste. The one that can be described with word "meh". And it seems like it is really the whole point of it all, because otherwise it must a prolonged episode of mass delusion. 

Case in point - Grover by Allen Institute.

Allen Institute are big guns of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing Technology. Their AllenNLP is one of the most efficient tools for developing NLP models of all kinds. It is a Swiss Army Knife of NLP that brings the technology to every corner of business or scientific operation.

So - a couple of days ago Allen Institute had presented Grover. It is a natural language generation tool able to create texts that are very much like the ones written by humans. Or, if being exact, human copywriters. Just like regular SEO-enlightened copywriters, Grover creates articles that seem legit. Like you can actually read them and think you've just wasted a five minutes of your life kind of legit. And that's about it. Yey!

Grover is a showcase of how far the NLP technology had went over the last couple of years.

With all the text analysis tools and pattern recognition and recurrent neural networks you can dig deep into the thick of the text and understand its structure and how its elements connect with each other and do your own thing based on the template and it will be mostly comprehensible. To the point that the output is completely indistinguishable from human-made.

Grover shows how easy it is to make this kind of article. It is fascinating how good it is at doing these bland, generic, middle of the road, not really saying anything texts.

I've tried the topic "Why Chael Sonnen is so good at talking and so bad at fighting?" and got exactly what i would write if didn't really cared about the topic and just phoned it in with a thermonuclear impact. It's impressive and concerning.

The availability of tools like Grover poses a serious threat to the mass media and its consumers due to systematic spread of fake news on a huge scale from all possible directions (social media, comment sections, faux new resources, reposts-rewrites, content aggregation). Just think about manipulating public opinion on climate change or abortions with an avalanche of misleading content. But that's political stuff.

There is also another problem - information noise AKA useless stuff.

The name of the perpetrator is SEO. It's not a big secret that search engine optimization downright sodomized the very concept of writing. To the point it was boiled down to wonky guidelines that turned writing into a tossing of the lego blocks to fit the requirements. SEO copywriting made writing boring and generic chore. It is like socialist realist literature with a new coat of paint. It too wholly depended on interchangeable templates and was mindnumbingly unreadable garbage that was just occupying the space.
But it works. Search engines dig it. It is cheaper than actually paying to promote your content.
This spawned innumerable amount of trash content with little to no value, and also birthed the clickbait mindset driven by trends and not actual necessity. Do we really need that many "All you need to know about Cyberpunk 2077?"

Add some AI to the mix and you get flooding of the search engines with an actual spam content that perfectly fits the criteria, is not all that blatantly spammy and it wholly overtakes the narrative leaving no place for anything else. Yey! Kinda like what we have today, except instead of going ten pages down the search results to find anything worthwhile, you will go twenty five or fifty.

But I'm used to dig through garbage, it doesn't really scare me that much. What makes me sad is the waste of talent on such kind of stuff. It seems actual creativity and NLP doesn't like each other these days.

One of the fun things about natural language generation of the past was its problematic relationship with such concept as "sense".
The majority of old-time text generators just could not pull it off clean. There was always something off about their output. Sometimes it was slight, stupid and kinda cute, other times its propensity towards hallowed nonsense was legitimately impressive. There was always something truly unexpected.

Those markov chains text generators you can find on the web - they are capable of running nuclear weapon testing in your head if used "properly". Modern text generators like Grover and their sophisticated algorithms don't do that. They are too smart to have this kind of fun. It is not part of their design - they want to do business, boring things that blend seamlessly into the background. We can do better than that.

Lou Reed - Modern Dance

Some things are better to enjoy in a modified form. For example, without sound or color or simply a soundtrack or vice versa or heavily distorted or from another room or while the refrigerator is humming and the washing machine is drumming and the kettle is whistling and the teeth are rattling. You get the point.

Such is the case with the music video for Lou Reed's song Modern Dance.

I already covered the other Lou Reed music video on this blog and now Youtube recommended me this video, so why not have another about the great one?

Modern Dance is a song from Lou Reed 2000' album titled "Ecstasy". The song itself is a contemplation about going places in a manner of a modern dance composition. Which doesn't say much because modern dance is a mystery and its function in the lyrics is to defamiliarize narrative with an arbitrary detail that sticks out. Over the course of the song, the protagonist mentions options like going to Amsterdam and spending evenings at the Van Gogh Museum. Or Yucatan, "where women are women, a man's a man". Or just falling in love because that's a fine option too.

The video for the song is closely tied to the lyrics and yet it is something completely different. On the surface, it is on the nose mockery of the blatant performance art, but the more you look at it - the more earnest stupid fun it seems. There is no undercurrent - it is just what it is and it is really weird to realize that there is nothing to it except for what is on the screen.

And what is on the screen. There is one and only Lou Reed in a chicken costume, standing in the middle of the stage while two showgirls are doing the job. Lou just stands and stands and endures whatever girls are doing to him. The girls are doing basic walkaround routines. Their costumes adapt to the national symbols of the countries mentioned in the lyrics. So you get a tartan suit, french beret, a sombrero and so on. At the same time, the girls are slowly but surely tear the costume apart, throwing feather away.

In the middle of the video - Lou's chicken suit is cleared off the feather and he sits around like a bag of nutshells. Then we cut to girls preparing the soup - throwing mock vegetables in and mixing the thing with the giant spoon. Then the narrative fragments into the glimpses of tearing the feathers, Lou sitting around, Lou being boiled in the soup, Lou dancing with the girls, being boiled in the soup, being torn apart, dancing, boiled, dancing. Then the song ends, he takes of the chicken head and walks away.

When you watch this with the sound on - it is just there. It doesn't do much because you are focused o the song. But if you turn the sound off - things change. You start to piece together a narrative. The video starts looking like one of those old vaudeville documentations that capture the routine but none of its context. It feels odd, misplaced and incomprehensive.

You see the man in the chicken suit. And he looks really passive. Sometimes he lips a phrase to punctuate the narrative, but for the most part, he is just there. The girls are walking around in, changing costumes all the time, then they start to tear the chicken costume apart because they want to make a soup out of this chicken. The man is still passive and so he ends up in the pot and girls continue to dance because that's what they do.

BSPH: Alan Vega - Ghost Rider

New versions of the old songs are nothing new. Usually, it is a shameless cash-in on one's glorious past, an exploitation of the devoted fanbase. But sometimes an artist manages to subvert the original and reinterpret it in a way that brings a couple of new shades to the original and somewhat changes its substance.

Case in point - Alan Vega's solo version of "Ghost Rider".



"Ghost Rider" is a song written by Alan Vega and Martin Rev of legendary synth punk band Suicide. It was originally released on the band's 1977 eponymous album. Alan Vega had released his version of the song in 1981 on an album titled "Collision Drive".

This version is a slight elaboration on the original with a couple of new flourishes, an expanded lyrics and a completely new sonic aesthetic that somehow manages to fit the theme and the tone of the song even better than the original. It is a weird example of the successful reinvention of the song by its author. The song retains the intensity of the original, but manages to be distinct enough to hold on its own and build upon the original.

In its core, the "Collision Drive" version of "Ghost Rider" is a rockabilly song. Unlike the monotonous solid drum machine grooves slashed by the thudding synth vamp of the original version, "Collision Drive" version is played by actual musician and that brings a completely different dynamics to the song.

The song is rolling with that rockabilly straitjacket swing. In fact, its skeletal primitivist arrangement owes a lot to early The Cramps stuff.

The monotonous stomp of the song consists of the one track mind drums, detuned piano, constipated guitar lines and thumping bumbling bass.

The song starts and ends with the pitch sweeping whopping wailing drone - an allusion to the revving engine. It is joined by 4x4 permabasskick polka dot beat that creates a rock solid groove underlying of the song. The drums are on the offensive in a meat mincing way.

Over the course of the song, the drums are joined by clapping. This brings some reminiscence of the classic Stooges stompers. In a way, it sounds as if the song was submerging into a quicksand substance with those claps.

The bass part is weird. It plays the iconic three note motif so sloppily it merges into a subsonic quakes - it is not as much a bass line as a melodic undercurrent as it is a physical pushing of the song forward with its groove. Funny thing is that at times the bass player gives up on playing the motif and he just plays along some stuff that sometimes sticks out of the tune. This bass combined with morose detached drums creates a beat to behold. It is disjointed and yet it works due to its ferrocious tenaciousness.

The other elements of the groove are manic guitar and honky tonk detuned piano. Both guitar and piano are playing simple two note rambling riff that goes on top of the song as if it was attached to it with a duct tape. They work as a background flashing behind - a sonic wallpaper. They ignore everything that goes on in the song.

The lyrics are slightly expanded with a couple of more phrases fleshing out the title character of the song - The Ghost Rider. There are more references to the Ghost Rider being on fire, swinging the chain and being an utter force of destruction blazing away. No mentions of the blue jumpsuit though. I guess it was out of fashion then. Weirdly enough, the way the lyrics are structured resemble a good old Delta Blues chantey. It boomerangs around - goes for a walk on the theme and then goes back to the central refrain.

BSPH: Oxbow & Marianne Faithfull - Insylum

 "Insylum" is a song collaboration of the American noise rock psycho punk blues band Oxbow and singer-songwriter Marianne Faithful. The song is an interpretation of the classic Willie Dixon song "Insane Asylum". However, it is reworked to the point of being a thing of its own.

"Insylum" was released in 1997 on Oxbow's album "Serenade in Red". The song is punishingly abrasive hard-edged interpretation of the classic blues song spliced with the hard rock reiteration of the blues by the likes of Led Zeppelin.

This song is a great example of a creative use of cliches and subverting them into something else with its own substance. "Insylum" is a Frankenstein monster of the song that seems like a casualty of a transporter accident in "Star Trek". "Insylum" is deformed and barely hangs together. At the same time, the song contains this weird imposing aura. Every second of "Insylum" means it. This song is not a pleasant listen, this song erupts the void upon the listener and makes him gaze into it looking for something nonplush nondescript.

The song stomps its way through with that particularly nasty bone crunching 1-2 step that grows with intensity throughout the verse until it breaks down into a hysteric chorus.

The lyrics of "Insylum" are about longing and yearning in its most brutal and devastating form. In its core, "Insylum" tells a typical story of the relationship falling apart and subsequent attempts to fix it. The catch is that the lover is locked up in the asylum and probably for a reason. Because of that the song slowly morphs from trying to get things back to accepting the reality of the situation.

The song is all about sonically depicting the throes of the protagonist who just can't take it anymore but slowly getting over it. This notion is delivered by an assorted collection of seething sobbing, crying, torturous howling, wailing, bailing, grunts, random sideline snorts, and opaque babble.

The song starts in medias res and then immediately takes a u-turn in an opposite direction. It kinda walks backwards all the time and it creates a sense of suspense - you almost expect this song to stumble and fall apart.

The rest of the dreadful atmosphere is accomplished with a mindful use of blues cliches wrapped into an additional layer of coarse fuzz and tingle. It is a dark-dark song.

The guitar parts are slightly malformed and tremblesome. They play some classic blues lick with an additional deep to the feel, but ut is not as much playing as it is erupting upon the song with its melting lava burning the ground in its way. Then there is a little organ that almost mocks what is going on in the song with its tingling hiss.

The MVP of the song are the drums by Greg Davis. His drum parts are less about constructing a rhythmic backbone of the song as they are all about the suspence, ebbs and flows of tension. The majority of the drum arrangement is a simple 1-2 16th beat that acts that plays waiting game staring contest with the listener until it breaks into a brutal beatdown.

The use of bass in this song is also very unconventional. Dan Adams' bass follows the drums and adds some shiny blacks to the beat. At the same time the bass line is delineating space in which the action is going. It is something like echolocation - flickering contours that may or may not resemble something familiar. If there is a way to depict the monsters produced by the sleep of reason - this is a good example of making it right. The bass line itself reeks of dread. 

The other strange thing about the song is an anticlimactic closure it delivers in the end. Over the course of the song the arrangement slowly devolves into a carnival mockery - it gets ridiculous with its intensity and then it stops as if it was all play. It leaves an unsettling feeling afterwards.

"Insylum" is a master-class in layered subversion of cliches and forging something new out of the old parts. The way it preparates the blues conventions, reinvents its most generic elements and adds the new flourishes to the age old narratives is spectacular.