Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.

The Fight of Our Lives:

This level of denial renders daily care, doctor-patient conversations, and treatment decisions much more difficult than they already are. Desperate patients cling to life-sustaining treatment even as it destroys their quality of life. Some doctors will continue to offer treatment as long as the patient is willing to endure it. The patient and their families exist in an emotionally painful and physically exhausting state between denial and acceptance with the long-shot hope of a cure always just out of reach like a mechanical rabbit on a dog track. And they run after it on and on into futility.

Saved by an Atheist:

...the biggest influence on my spiritual journey was the novels and philosophy of Albert Camus, a French existentialist of the 1940s and ‘50s—and an atheist. C. S. Lewis warned, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” Camus should have been safe territory for me, but as I like to say now, I was saved by an atheist.

[...]

Though Camus, who died 50 years ago this year, wasn’t the “high and dry nineteenth-century type” of atheist, nor did he return to Christianity, I’ve maintained a similar fondness toward him. He saw the world coldly, not as he wished it to be, but as he found it. He was brutally honest, yet hopeful. He was moral, in the sense that he believed in right and wrong and worked for what was right. His disbelief remained an obstacle in his search for meaning, but Camus continued to look for reasons to hope, to find meaning in life.

5 Myths About Philadelphia’s ‘Blogging Tax’:

The city of Philadelphia has been under fire on the web for what’s been called a “blogging tax,” a new business tax under which several local bloggers have been billed on business revenue earned on their sites. As a blogger who lives in Philadelphia—and the newest member of the Wired.com team—I feel I have to dispel some myths guiding the “WTF?” reaction many writers had to this story.

But I also want to point to some larger problems beneath the surface. This problem is much bigger than blogs in my city.

Firefly‘s cancellation was Joss Whedon’s “greatest grief” (via):

That trip ended back in the office just in time to hear that the Fox Network had cancelled Firefly before its first season had even been completed. As Whedon later recounted, he now had his answer to the question posed in the car. “Oh! So, uh, just once more. OK!”

But it wasn’t just once more. And he knew it. Since that ugly LA afternoon, Whedon, now 46, with an Emmy on the shelf and an Oscar nomination in the drawer, has tallied up a few more examples of why no sensible person should go into the film and television business. And why he can’t stop. Obsessive? “People who aren’t obsessive go home at the end of the day and don’t think about their work,” Whedon says. “I’ve read about them.”

The cancelled Firefly (“still the greatest grief I have about my career”) begat his first film as director, the Firefly “sequel” Serenity. It didn’t do Batman business but as a space-western with wit and social consciousness it made money and, along the way, gave him another young female character who—literally and metaphorically—kicked arse.

Christopher Hitchens’ Greatest Hits (via):

Hitchens has made a sideline of offering some of the most delicious skewerings of people in the public sphere to appear in print over the past 20+ years, and he has no problem putting revered feet into the fire. On the Penn and Teller episode devoted to questioning the accepted saintliness of Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Gandhi, Hitch was a natural choice as a guest as he was probably the only mainstream pundit who had bashed all three in print.

Here then is a collection of excerpts from Hitchens’ columns in Slate, Vanity Fair and some of his books that shows the Crown Prince of Pillorying at work.

Dowling Duncan’s interesting ideas for the Dollar ReDe$ign Project (via):

Why the size?
We have kept the width the same as the existing dollars. However we have changed the size of the note so that the one dollar is shorter and the 100 dollar is the longest. When stacked on top of each other it is easy to see how much money you have. It also makes it easier for the visually impaired to distinguish between notes.

Why a vertical format?
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

4AD, the record label that gave birth to indie cool, celebrates 30th anniversary:

Next month sees the release of a new 4AD album, Halcyon Digest, by American band Deerhunter, yet the only sign of such a feat of endurance for a small company working in the most ruthless of creative industries will be the little “3X” that appears at the end of all 4AD album catalogue numbers this year. Minimalism has always been 4AD’s style.

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck:

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.

The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.

Why has Internet discourse devolved into a “war of every man against every man”?

I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this just applies to online interactions these days, though those interactions do seem to have a higher likelihood of devolving into nastiness.

Apologies for the recent onslaught of Sufjan-related posts—and it isn’t over yet: my review of All Delighted People is coming soon—but hey, it’s Sufjan Stevens we’re talking about. “I Walked”—the fourth track from his upcoming The Age of Adz full-length—has just been posted to Sufjan’s Bandcamp site, and you can listen to it below.

Immediately obvious is that the track is almost entirely electronica-based, which is in keeping with Asthmatic Kitty’s press release. The next thing that comes to mind is Björk’s Vespertine, particularly in the choral vocals that come drifting through the cold, brittle beats in the song’s second half—if you replaced Björk’s pixie-like voice with Sufjan’s hushed intonations.

The Age of Adz will be released by Asthmatic Kitty Records on October 12 (CD, MP3) and November 9 (2xLP). You can pre-order your copy here.

That Sufjan Stevens has been a busy little boy. First, he announced an ambitious autumn tour. Then he released a nearly 60 minute EP entitled All Delighted People that can be listened to for free (or bought for a nominal price). And now, he’s announced a new album entitled The Age of Adz that is coming out this fall. From the Asthmatic Kitty website:

The Age of Adz (pronounced odds) is Sufjan Stevens’ first full-length collection of original songs since 2005’s civic pop opus Illinois. This new album is probably his most unusual, first, for its lack of conceptual underpinnings, and second, for its preoccupation with Sufjan himself. The album relinquishes the songwriter’s former story-telling techniques for more primal proclamations unhindered by concepts: there are few narrative conceits or character sketches; there are no historical panoramas, no civic gestures, no literary maneuvers, no expository illustrations drenched in cultural theory, no scene, setting, conflict, resolution, or denouement. Sufjan has stripped away the fabric of narrative artifice for a more primitive approach, emphasizing instinct over craft. The result is an album that is perhaps more vibrant, more primary, and more explicit than anything else he’s done before. The themes developed here are neither historical nor polemical, but rather personal and primal (if even a little juvenile): love, sex, death, disease, illness, anxiety, and suicide make appearances in a tapestry of electronic pop songs that convey a sense of urgency, immediacy, and anxiety as never before seen in this songwriter.

The complete tracklist is below:

1. Futile Devices
2. Too Much
3. Age of Adz
4. I Walked
5. Now That I’m Older
6. Get Real Get Right
7. Bad Communication
8. Vesuvius
9. All for Myself
10. I Want To Be Well
11. Impossible Soul

Other details worth noting include:

• The Age of Adz is “unhindered by concepts”, which makes sense given Sufjan’s earlier statements regarding the futility of conceptual albums.
• The album is more electronic-oriented, à la Enjoy Your Rabbit, but still contains brass, string, and choral arrangements.
• It is partially inspired by the artwork of Royal Robertson, a schizophrenic sign-maker and self-proclaimed prophet.
• The album ends with the 25-minute “Impossible Soul”, which doesn’t surprise me given Sufjan’s foray into super-extended compositions on All Delighted People.

The Age of Adz will be released by Asthmatic Kitty Records on October 12 (CD, MP3) and November 9 (2xLP). However, if you pre-order the album in the next three weeks, you’ll receive an MP3 download on September 28. (I’ve already pre-ordered my copy.)

Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.

Why does contemporary Western culture hate itself so much?

The self-accusations are familiar. We are imperialists, racists, and purveyors of unsustainable consumption that threatens to engulf the world in an environmental disaster. The colonization of the New World amounted to genocide. Our greed supports brutal tyrants. Capitalism depends upon the exploitation of the world’s poor. On and on goes the litany of shame.

To a certain extent, our present self-laceration reflects one of the virtues of Western culture. Socratic philosophy and Old Testament prophecy combined to create a strong impulse toward self-criticism as a way to overcome self-deceptions and false loyalties. It was not an accident that St. Thomas began his analysis of the truths of Christianity by surveying the objections. As he knew, the pressure of criticism pushes us toward a fuller and more self-aware grasp of the truth.

Yet, as [Pascal] Bruckner recognizes, our postmodern age does not seem to view criticism as a way of refining and deepening our loyalty to the real achievements of Western culture, not the least of which is the freedom to criticize. We seem to relish denunciation for its own sake.

Why? To begin, the notion that the West is the Great Satan feeds our egoism. As Bruckner explains, “This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.”

Cults of an Unwitting Oracle: The (Unintended) Religious Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft:

There are two other possibilities for why some people are drawn to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. First, since Copernicus and the dawn of modernity, the Earth is no longer the center of the universe, with the gods above us watching our every move. The universe is a vast, foreboding, and empty place. Stories of extraterrestrial visitors have clamed a powerful hold on popular consciousness, despite the fact that scientists, regardless of their herculean efforts, have yet to discover one shred of tangible evidence for alien life in the cosmos. Nevertheless, aliens have clearly replaced gods and demons for many in our modern society. For some, they are watching us, living among us, giving us secret information from their highly evolved planets. Reports of alien abduction, UFO-government conspiracies, and prophets in tune with alien entities have proliferated in the media over the past few decades. Who can forget the 39 members of Heaven’s Gate who, in 1997, under the leadership of Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997), committed suicide in order to transmit their souls into the Hale-Bopp comet, which was “really” an alien spacecraft that would take them to an interplanetary paradise? This is just the tip of the iceberg of UFO religions that have steadily arisen. Lovecraftian religions can be seen as a part of this larger trend, albeit the Cthulhu gods are not as “caring” as some of the other alien gods.

Secondly, and related to this, Lovecraft’s mythos, in stark contrast to its creator’s own ethnocentric views and overall xenophobia, is a perfect mythology in a multicultural world. Lovecraft’s gods are not bound to any ethnicity, as are the gods of Greece, Rome, Israel, Arabia, Northern Europe, the Americas, Africa, etc. Although they were invented by a New Englander, they are by definition cosmic and out of this world. They are extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional, and post-race. Like other alien gods, Lovecraft’s gods are of a cosmic ethnicity that makes our continued squabbling about race and ethnicity on this planet seem infinitely petty.

Scientists are using virtual reality to run ethical tests that would otherwise be unethical:

Male volunteers in the Spanish experiment see a virtual room with a woman in front of them caressing their arm. Meanwhile, the illusion is reinforced by someone actually running their fingers down their arm in real life.

Looking in the mirror, the person looking back is a young girl wearing a skirt.

A little later, things take a sinister turn. The volunteer is shown a view hovering above the scene instead of acting as the girl. The previously affectionate woman inexplicably lashes out, slapping the girl twice on the face.

The idea is that having previously been the girl, the volunteer feels the shock of what has happened more personally.

If you’re a blogger living in Philadelphia and you make any money with your blog, the city wants to charge you $300 for a “business privilege license”:

...even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there’s the potential for it to be lucrative—and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising—the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads—regardless of how much or little money is actually generated—qualifies a blog as a business. The same rules apply to freelance writers. As former City Paper news editor Doron Taussig once lamented [Slant, “Taxed Out,” April 28, 2005], the city considers freelancers—which both Bess and Barry are, in addition to their blog work—“businesses,” and requires them to pay for a license and pay taxes on their profits, on top of their state and federal taxes.

The Scott Pilgrim Ending That Was Never Shot (spoiler-ish):

Anyway, in the months leading up to its release in theaters this month, Edgar Wright did some last minute retooling on “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” changing the ending from what test screening/preview audiences saw earlier in the year. But little did we know that Wright had another idea in mind that unfortunately he wasn’t able to get capture at least for posterity.

I have a hunch that when most people hear the term “instrumental rock”, they think of that particular strand of post-rock that’s given to sweeping orchestral arrangements and long, expansive compositions. Even bands like Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai, which certainly plant their flag in the louder end of the spectrum, are difficult to think of as actual rock bands, due to their experimental tendencies.

Atlanta’s Gold Standard, on the other hand, is “instrumental rock” in the most literal sense of the term: their songs are all sans vocals and they’re not concerned so much with experimentation and intricate arrangements as they are with melting your face. That’s not say that their music is simple, though. There may not be any elaborate string arrangements embellishing their songs, but the band will still knock you over with a flurry of blows from their power trio set-up.

The late, great Roadside Monument comes to mind on tracks like “Church Bells”, particularly in the rolling, hypnotic bassline: like Johnathan Ford, Chris Ware coaxes a stunning amount of grace and finesse from his instrument without ever sacrificing the low-end. Lee Corum’s drumming is a paradox: it seems to be going all over the place and this close to falling apart at any moment, and yet rather than distract, the chaotic-ness adds a jazz-like energy and vibe to the music.

Meanwhile, George Asimakos’ guitar is the band’s secret weapon. Most of time, he’s content to wind his way through the band’s songs, providing some extra tonal color here or subtly affecting the song’s course there. But on “Motor Skills… Are Hard To Control” (interesting title considering the band’s music wouldn’t survive even an ounce of imprecision) and the aforementioned “Church Bells”, his guitar slowly emerges as the focal point, and providing a necessary emotional catharsis in the midst of his bandmates’ tumult.

Gold Standard recently released an EP entitled, appropriately enough, CD-EP: download it here or listen to it on the band’s MySpace page. They are currently recording their debut full-length, which will be released this fall on Room 10 Collective. More info can be found here.

Otakon is reporting that Satoshi Kon has passed away at the age of 47 (Madhouse, Kon’s studio, has confirmed the details). Kon had been working on Dream Machine, his first children’s feature, at the time of his death. No cause has been announced yet.

This is simply a tremendous loss: Kon was a hugely talented director responsible for some of the most thought-provoking anime in recent years. Kon’s works included Paprika, Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue, and the TV series Paranoia Agent. These titles were often dark and disturbing, full of themes of alienation and psychological distress, but behind them all was, I believe, a concern for humanity and the effects of modern, consumerist society on our hearts and minds.

Though they often dealt with difficult topics, Kon’s works were never exploitative, and were all done with the highest degree of skill, artistry, and originality. He will be missed.

Below is the opening sequence from Paprika, which showcases not just the technical skill that Kon brought to his works, but also the creativity that was a hallmark of his career.

Those looking for an introduction to Satoshi Kon would do well to read Grady Hendrix’s overview, which was written in anticipation of a 2008 Kon restrospective in New York.

You knew it had to happen sooner or later. Somebody mashes up Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the Matrix movies and uploads it to YouTube. However, I bet you didn’t expect it to be this good, did you?

On the surface, science fiction—with its futuristic and/or alien settings, spaceships, robots, and rayguns—seems like the most escapist of genres. But the truth is that sci-fi has been responsible for advancements across the board in society, or so NPR’s Laura Sydell claims in “Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers To Build Our Future”.

As a boy in India, Amit Singhal dreamed of space, the final frontier. “Those were my favorite times as a little child on a hot summer day, sitting in a room watching Star Trek,” he says.

Singhal now works at Google, where he is in charge of maintaining all of Google’s search algorithms. “But my main job is to dream what search would look like a few years from now,” he says.

And what do those dreams look like? Singhal was intrigued by the way Star Trek characters simply talk to a computer to find out about almost anything, so now he’s working on Google’s voice-recognition search products.

The Star Trek world “really piqued my interest in technology,” Singhal says. “And that translated into an interest in search, and, for the last 20 years, I’ve been doing search.”

This reminds me of an anecdote from a developer of a music-sharing tool—the name escapes me, unfortunately—about how his initial inspiration came, at least partially, from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a character was able to pull up any music they wanted from the Enterprise‘s computer.

Science fiction is wonderful at engaging our imagination and inspiring us to reach out for new horizons—which translates into new technology, inventions, and perspectives. What’s more, it can foretell the future, in a way, by looking at current trends in technology and society and imagining their potential ends.

Several years ago, I attended a L’Abri conference where the primary theme was exploring our rapidly changing concepts of humanity in an age where so many things—e.g., robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering—challenge traditional definitions of humanity. In hindsight, we should’ve watched Ghost In The Shell, which deals with this very theme in some very thought-provoking and mind-blowing ways.

In this sense, science fiction and its creators can serve as a prophet of sorts, by giving us glimpses into potential futures—futures that science fiction itself is helping to shape. However, science fiction serves another prophetic purpose, which Sydell explores near her article’s end.

...talk to most science fiction authors, and they will tell you that their work is usually cautionary.

“While the futurists are plowing ahead and excited about this possibility or that possibility, we’re always standing there going, ‘Hang on just a second. Let’s think about this a little more,’” author Connie Willis says.

Willis, who has won numerous Nebula and Hugo awards for her work, has imagined everything from alien life forms to a Hollywood where actors are replaced with digital replicas. Willis says the gadgets and technology in science fiction are meant to intrigue, but they are really ways to talk about the present and take on hot issues that readers might otherwise avoid.

“They already think they know what they think about any given hot topic of the day,” she says. “But if you can convince them that you’re talking about a planet millions of miles away and hundreds of years in the future or the past you can actually get people to examine more closely what’s going on right now.”

The Old Testament’s prophets weren’t necessarily concerned with the future so much as they were concerned with the present. They raised moral, ethical, and spiritual questions within the populace, challenged corrupt power structures, and sought to make people rethink how and why they were living.

Science fiction can also play this sort of prophetic role. I read an essay by Karl Sabbagh that theorized that someday, it may be possible to discover the exact thought patterns that make violent acts—e.g., rape, murder, terrorism—acceptable to the one thinking them. And once those patterns were identified, technology such as chemical suppressants introduced into the world’s water and food supplies or genetic modification could be used to remove those patterns.

My first thought after reading the essay was “I liked this better when it was called A Clockwork Orange.” Sabbagh’s solution to the eternal problem of humanity’s tendency towards violence sounded like the nefarious plans of a totalitarian government from any number of sci-fi novels, movies, etc.

And recently, the U.S. Marine Corps announced that they were researching the use of robots in combat training, robots that use artifical intelligence to develop their own tactics and alliances in order to give human soldiers more realistic simulations.

Can anyone say “Judgment Day”?

We live in a world that is changing at a rate that would’ve been inconceivable even 20 years ago. New technologies are emerging every day, technologies that have the potential for tremendous good but that also carry with them severe ethical and moral questions (stem cell research being an obvious example). And oftentimes, it seems like noone is asking and pondering those questions. Rather, the position taken is that if we can do something—i.e., if we have the ability, know-how, and expertise—then that’s the only justification we need for doing it. No thought is given to whether we should or ought to do it.

At the risk of sounding facetious, it makes me wish more people read and watched sci-fi—if only because artists (e.g., authors, filmmakers) can be so adept at asking the big questions, at taking that sort of prophetic role in society. Again, I refer to Ghost In The Shell, which explores the spiritual ramifications of changing the body too much with technology, the changing nature of politics when sovereign nations are linked by a borderless internet. Or Blade Runner, which raises questions about the responsibilities we have to the machines we create. Dune explores, in a tangential way, the moral and spiritual implications of genetic engineering. Snow Crash looks at, in a satirical manner, a future where advertising, corporations, and technology have run amok. And the list goes on and on.

While science fiction can ignite our imagination, I believe that it can also have a similar, albeit more subtle, effect on our conscience as well… if we choose to look past the spaceships and aliens.