 |
I
have seen the future, and it is squishy.
|
Now & Then (a Log)
Score One for Knowledge
Thank the gods! Arts & Letters Daily is back, having been saved by these guys.
I fixed the issue with the gray bar to the right; programmer-types (you know, the ones who have their monitor resolution set so high that items on the screen are just barely visible) were telling me that it got huge when they expanded their browser windows. (Away, huge gray bar!) Here's a little something for everyone's inner programmer, as well as an amusing account of the wacked-out calls gamely fielded by NASA's public affairs office (both via SciTech Daily).
This and That
One of Disney’s scarier recent initiatives is the creation of Celebration, an entire town devoted to the Disney lifestyle. The idea for Celebration came from Uncle Walt's dream of building an Experimental Prototypical Community of Tomorrow, which eventually became a theme park (EPCOT Center) instead. In the '90s, the Disney people turned Walt's utopian, Space Age dreams into a community bearing the well-intentioned tenets of New Urbanism as well as the problems that often come with trying something new and different. My one glimpse of Celebration came when I was working as programs coordinator at the museum, where we happily took advantage of the fact that the Disney Institute was flying in Alloy Orchestra for a performance to stage one of our own. The caveat was that I would have to transport the band to and from Celebration, where the group was workshopping and performing. What struck me most -- and I'm not sure why this came as a surprise -- is that Disney had managed to inject the artificiality of its parks (which work well for the parks, mind you) into a residential community. In Celebration, the design of every home, townhouse, and apartment building strictly adheres to one of the six approved town styles. The inclusion of different styles, instead of cultivating a diverse yet unified appearance, was stifling, as the styles played off each other in a disturbingly fluid manner. In the downtown area, the exterior of the theater where Alloy was to perform was awash in garish hot pink, a striking contrast to its minimalist design, and a successful attempt to bring the more overt qualities of the Disney brand to the heart of the town. Soon after Celebration's opening, a husband-and-wife journalist team, and cultural theorist Andrew Ross (whom a friend in college was fond of calling "the annoying Andrew Ross"), moved briefly to the community to breath it in, live in it, and write books about it. A nice analysis of the books (and in turn, the town) can be found here; a more personal and equally good account of the author of that article's visit to the town is here.
Disney Ambivalence, Part 2
It's not fiction, but Ray's latest entry is itself an example of the "writerly" quality he explicates within. Writerly as compared, in an admittedly extreme example, to Lucky (a hard copy of which I perused at my friend's house last night, and found -- much to my dismay -- I couldn't put down; I finally threw it forcibly onto the couch in an effort to exorcise it from my increasingly soulless soul), with its overt and tantalizing readerliness. Ray's may not be the easiest weblog read of the day -- requiring, as it does, a certain amount of mental stamina -- but the rewards greatly outweigh the effort (the effort being its own reward, sometimes). A side benefit is the pleasure found in watching him taunt his prey with a well-chosen word or phrase and finally skewering said prey with a damning argument too cogent to refute. (I'm terrified of him, personally.) In fiction, I like to see the writerly and readerly bound interestingly into one text; I want to escape, but I also want to be challenged during the journey, as I was with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. (Of course, when life stresses me out, I'm also prone to taking in purely escapist reads; hence my recent devouring of Kushiel's Dart.) Disney Ambivalence, Part 2 is coming soon...
The Reader and the Text
Cory links to The Sound of Magic, a site collecting and sharing music from the various Disney theme parks. Pity they don't catalog much of the older stuff; one of my most salient childhood memories involves the now defunct If You Had Wings ride in Tommorowland at Disney World, which I lived just over an hour away from. Back when rides required tickets of varying degrees of expense my sister and I would make a beeline for "If You Had Wings," one of the scant free rides in the park. (I was also quite fond of the People Mover -- probably the most boring ride ever conceived -- simply because it was free.) The theme song for "If You Had Wings," sung by a choir of celestial yet corporate sounding voices (the ride was sponsored by Eastern Airlines, and after that airline's demise, by Delta) became something of a standard for my sister and me, and we probably drove my parents nuts on the ride home with our attempts to recreate it. I can’t say I’m entirely fond of what Disney has come to stand for, but having visited Disney World nearly every year during my formative years I can’t help but feel nostalgic about the park. The best site I’ve found to stoke the flames of nostalgia is Yesterland, which lovingly pays homage the rides of yore. Listen to the “If You Had Wings” theme song (and read the wacky lyrics!) here.
Disney Ambivalence, Part 1
This is the work of Abbi Ball, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.