For a moment there, Things appeared quarterly, and it just so happened I got particularly into one single LCD Soundsystem track each quarter: Q1 was New Body Rhumba, Q2 the music video for Oh Baby, and this then continued, but Things did not.
My 2024 Q3 LCD Soundsystem obsession was “How Do You Sleep”, which is widely read as an authentically emotional lament for a friend and business partner that went rather dramatically off the rails. After a sparse percussion-heavy intro, this incredible airy synth bass hits at 3’38” ultimately carrying the lyrics to the dramatic denoument signalled up-front by the track’s name. I recommend listening to it once without really concentrating too much, then reading the high-level story behind the lyrics, then later listening more carefully to the lyrics with the story in mind for maximum effect.
Then in Q4, out of nowhere Kottke recommended this 2011 manual mashup of “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” with a Miles Davis improvisation. Many mashups rely on a baseline familiarity with one or ideally both tracks, but this fully stands alone and is worth a listen (and watch, to see the combining at work on two Youtube instances, no longer possible due to a copyright strike against the Miles Davis track).
Repetition Legitimises
While we’re jazz-adjacent, this two-word phrase captures a brilliant nugget of human nature: repetition legitimises! If you hear a strange collection of notes it might not seem like music, but if they then repeat it legitimises it as a piece of music in the mind. Here’s where I first saw the phrase:
You get this even more dramatically with Steve Reich tracks like “It Ain’t Gonna Rain” in which the repetition of a spoken-word sample transforms the way you perceive it into something with a rhythm and a melody. Repetition legitimises!
Of course, this doesn’t just go for music. A lot of people are wearing masks for COVID, so people feel like they should too. A lot of people stop wearing masks for COVID, so people feel weird about wearing a mask again and stop. Repetition legitimises!
Your newspaper / social-media algorithm of choice keeps showing you stories about Outgroup X doing bad things. Wow, sure seems like Outgroup X just does bad things all the time! Better elect someone who says they will clamp down on Outgroup X. Repetition legitimises!
Meanwhile in my algorithmic feed
Given enough of your viewing data, Youtube – like a lot of short-form online content services – gets pretty good at recommending stuff you would like. One side-effect is that you might see something you think is really great and share it with friends – who are then not that interested, because it was actually algorithmically perfect for you and not many others. For example, I linked to a bunch of Youtube videos above that I love, but you probably only clicked on one at most and found it merely slightly interesting!
My other source of algorithmically supplied content is Reddit, which by now is fairly well-tuned at showing me things I’m either interested in or can’t help but pause to look at because they’re awful.
So, here are some fairly random things that turned up there that I think are pretty great. I’m curious how much your mileage may vary:
But, we can go deeper! Here’s some things that I also think are pretty great, based on the way they build on another weird thing I’m already familiar with. If you’re not familiar with the original thing these probably only half make sense, but you can probably decode what’s going on anyway? I’ll give some pointers after each image if you want to check.
Meteors hit the earth all the time, and those that make it to the surface without burning up are called meteorites. Their size follows a power-law distribution (tiny ones are common, rather large ones are very rare), and as a result we get a roughly log-line plot between how often we get hit by meteors of exponentially larger sizes:
Brought to my attention by Chris Impey’s book “How It Ends” (page 136) is a cute corollary: we can expect to find craters on earth of different sizes, and larger craters will usually be from meteors that hit longer ago (more on that later).
Here’s a few notable examples.
The Tunguska Event happened about 126 years ago, in which a 30m object exploded 6-10km above the earth causing widespread devastation in a remote area and shattering windows hundreds of kilometers away.
Barringer Crater (aka “Meteor Crater”) in Arizona is estimated to be 50,000 years old and caused by a 50m meteorite, leaving a 1.2km diameter crater.
The Manicouagan Reservoir is an annular lake formed in the remains of a 100km diameter impact crater formed 214 million years ago by a 5km meteorite.
Finally, the Chicxulub crater is not as pleasingly obvious on a map, but was inferred from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission STS-99. The diameter is 200km, the age is only 66 million years, and the asteroid causing it estimated to be about 10km. You may note the age aligns with the extinction of the dinosaurs and indeed this is thought to be the origin of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
So, I took these and a few other notable craters and made a chart of size vs recency:
The power-law axes are doing a lot of work to squash these points towards a line, but you get the general idea.
But, as Things readers, I know what you’re thinking: this doesn’t quite add up. In particular, there are some other factors at work:
The upper right of the chart pretty much can’t be populated or you wouldn’t be reading this right now (you probably don’t get to reading-Things-level biology even 1m* years after a 10k meteorite crater event)
The bottom left ‘should’ be more populated as those smaller meteorites are more common – but we lose the ability to see those over 1m+ years due to natural erosion and tectonic plate shifting
Even accounting for the above point, this is not at all a complete sampling. I just picked the top obvious craters I could find. In particular, there will also have been many large meteorites that landed in the sea (or on land that is now undersea). See this nice map for reference.
Perhaps over a billion years the solar system is in general calming down, with fewer giant impact events in general (Josie pointed this out).
*Speculation by me
All told, just based on my chart of obvious craters and age, it’s tempting to think we’re kind of “safe” and that big meteorites are a thing of the past, and maybe we are a bit, but with all the above caveats that seems unlikely.
As some nice context, at the time of writing a 90m meteor has an estimated 2.3% of hitting the earth in 2032, with an impact similar to the Tunguska event.
Sauropod Giganticism
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a very long time indeed, and many of them were enormous. Since the most recent giant meteorite helped put an end to them, we haven’t seen such giganticism on land. Why is that?
Making that question even tougher to answer is this great study, helped by recent decades of substantially more fossil finds, that shows Sauropod giganticism evolved repeatedly over millions of years. The full articles is here, but this is the lovely visualisation of that pattern – each coloured line is an example of giganticism emerging:
The direction of causality means in this case we can’t really say repetition legitimises. The article sketches out a few factors that push Sauropods towards growth, but the question begged by the above chart remains, ultimately, unanswered.
My Album of the Year 2024
Inspired by a tree (specifically Tāne Mahuta), this Jon Metcalfe album fills me with wonder and hope even in the face of probable cosmic annihilation, especially when it gets into Night.
As you may recall from Things 43, I’m a bit of a Star Wars fan.
So in terms of Things I found interesting in December, there was really only one. If you hate Star Wars I’ve got one other Thing for you below, a bit more music, and then it’s wall-to-wall Space Opera. I’ll save spoilery stuff until the very end and give fair warning.
Meine Schmusedecke / Patchwork Pals
At the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2010 (which I wrote about in this Things special), one of my favourite short animations was Lebensader by Angela Steffen. Last year at the DOK Leipzig film festival I was pleased to recognise her hand in a series of very short children’s animations about the adventures of some animals on a patchwork quilt.
There is an English dub, but I most enjoy the original German – I don’t know the language, but that’s what I like about it: the context and certain similar-sounding words make it a lot of fun to guess what’s going on. It’s about 3 minutes, and you should at least stick with it until the fox shows up:
Things Updates: Music and Dialogue
In Things November 2015 I quoted Dennett’s recommended method of dialogue, which involved carefully identifying areas of agreement, disagreement, and accurately re-stating your opponents position before attempting to debate it. Tarim wonders if this is inspired by “Buberian Dialogue” (pdf link):
The emergence technique proposed herein is sometimes called “Buberian dialogue.” The technique calls for two discussants, a moderator and an audience. The discussants each say their initial piece. It is the role of the audience to listen for what the two discussants have said or implied which might be in common. The audience is called upon to inform the discussants of these commonalities (which the moderator captures on a white board) and then for the discussion to turn to the revealed items. This occurs through three or more rounds. The aim is for a transformational experience. There is no effort to reach consensus or conclusion. Rather, the goal is for a transformation to take place in how the discussants view each other in the context of the debate. If a more human based respect emerges, the technique is successful.
Just imagine a political debate taking place through this form!
Tarim also adds his nominations for notable musical reworks (which began in Things with covers, reworking in general, and other examples from Things readers), while noting that unfortunately most of his favourite covers are those he heard live:
Frank Zappa’s takes on Bolero and Stairway to Heaven:
And finally Far-Cue, a “3 piece punk band who do notable versions of: Mike Batt’s Remember You’re a Womble, Motorhead’s Ace of Spaces and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.” Youtube videos exist, but “they just don’t capture the essence of Far-Cue” – which I can well imagine!
So what is this ‘Star Wars’ thing anyway
I grew up with Star Wars, and it’s now so much part of the cultural furniture that it’s quite hard to see what it really is.
Strip away what you already know, and think about how odd it is to launch a franchise with ‘Episode IV’. So odd that Fox didn’t allow it, and it was just ‘Star Wars’ until George was allowed to change it for the 1981 re-release (and of course he’s continued to change the films whenever he has the chance). This is just the most telling sign of what Lucas was trying to do: recreate the adventure-serial movies he enjoyed in his youth, in which you would usually be encountering a random episode and hearing talk about back-story you knew nothing about – “You fought in the Clone Wars?!” The other biggest clue is that he had first tried to get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and being unable to get them, decided to just make his own thrilling space adventure instead. (As if annoyed how many people don’t realise this, Lucas mentions it repeatedly in all of the commentaries on the most recent DVD/Blu-ray release!)
The best modern analogue for what Lucas was doing is probably Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, in which Rodriguez tries to make an exploitation B-movie as good as he always wished they were.
This is all very reasonable; the really weird part is how ridiculously successful it was. Here’s the US box office of the top 10 grossing movies in the 5 years running to 1977:
In 1975 Jaws was an outlier, a freakish break-out hit… and then Star Wars almost doubledJaws’ US domestic takings. Worldwide, across all re-releases and adjusted for inflation, ‘Star Wars’ (aka Episode IV or A New Hope) is second only to Gone With the Wind, which came out in 1939, when 45% of the US population went to the cinema weekly, as opposed to 1977 when that figure was down to 10% (pdf source). Incredible.
I personally think three main factors helped Star Wars achieve this excessive success.
Generational Nostalgia
It seems for various reasons that people have their greatest ability to create influential cultural works between the ages of 30-40. That age group also commands a large amount of the money going to entertainment: those without children are at a peak ratio of earnings to needs, those with children will spend to entertain the whole family. This means entertainment that resonates with the 30-40 year-old generation can prove disproportionately popular, and nostalgia for their youth is a good approach. (When you enter this age group yourself, the first sign is that shops start playing the pop music of your youth).
Back to the Future went back from 1985 to 1955; Hairspray, The Wonder Years, Grease, Happy Days, and perhaps most nakedly That ‘70s Show all did a similar nostalgic leap. So in 1977 an audience existed that, like George Lucas, was nostalgic for the adventure serials.
This is also why we see favourite movies of the 80’s coming back 25-35 years later with sequels or remakes: Alien, Terminator, Robocop, Total Recall, Ghostbusters, Rocky, and Indiana Jones to name a few of the biggest.
Hairspray actually benefitted from the effect twice (set in 1962, made in 1988, remade in 2002). Star Wars has arguably benefitted three times: the initial adventure-serial throwback, and then the prequel trilogy and (just about) sequel trilogy each resonating with the generation that grew up with the previous Star Wars movies.
The Hero’s Journey
Aka the Monomyth, this is a story structure George Lucas studied and then consciously followed with Star Wars, and is one of the most popular story types that exist. Whatever else is going on, with this at the core you have a very strong narrative hook.
Execution
Episode IV’s script is weak: “This bucket of bolts is never going to get us past that blockade”, “Boy, it’s a good thing you have these compartments!” The pacing is also weird – at age 7 a friend and I were playing with our Star Wars toys when we realised we could watch the movie on VHS; after about 20 minutes we got bored and went back to the toys.
But apart from that (!), much of the execution is really incredible for the time. For one thing, Lucas founded a special effects company and a sound company that were each so successful they remain leaders in their fields even today. Relatedly, I suspect Ben Burtt’s sound design in particular elevated the film dramatically above other genre fare of the day (lightsabers, Vader’s breathing, blaster bolts, alien languages, background hum on ships… hundreds of convincing, world-building sounds in a single film).
How do you follow the most successful film in a generation?
Lucas found directing Star Wars incredibly stressful. With so much success, the world’s expectations would make directing a sequel even worse. I also suspect he knew a sequel would be held to a higher standard, and this adventure-serial schtick was going to wear thin. The one thing he had going for him was that the arc of the Hero’s Journey had plenty of life left. So he brought in a different director, got some pretty good script-writers, and took a back seat.
After seeing Star Wars films frequently throughout my life, it was only after a 5-year hiatus that I could re-watch them somewhat afresh as an adult, and realised that The Empire Strikes Back really is a step up in quality. Return of the Jedi then concluded the Hero’s Journey beautifully and assured Star Wars a long-lasting place in the minds of a generation.
In light of all the above, the seemingly weird prequels make a lot more sense. With financial security behind him, Lucas was able to get back to doing what he really wanted: adventure serial movies, complete with cheesy lines, melodrama and slightly wooden acting. I think the prequel trilogy is just the kind of movie Lucas wanted to make all along, and he actually got better at achieving that rather than worse.
I suspect the greatest problem for the prequels was that they’re not doing the ever-popular Hero’s Journey, but rather some sort of rise-and-fall tragedy, which the nuance-free adventure serial form is terrible at supporting.
At the end, George Lucas came over from the more star-studded premiere that had taken place in the nearby Odeon, and addressed the crowd. He was quickly drowned out by a chant that spontaneously arose from the fans: “We want nine! We want nine!”
Lucas calmed the crowd, and answered the request with these words I can still hear now:
“Star Wars is the story of Anakin Skywalker. It begins when he’s 9… it ends when he’s dead… there is no more story.”
[Update – I rediscovered the recording I made of that intro! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC reporter’s wording was closer than my memory – T.M. 16th April 2017]
As we now know, Disney thought there was at least $4bn more story, and they’re set on proving it, with new Star Wars episodes and spin-off films planned for every year from 2015 – 2020.
With all that history and no more Hero’s Journey story arc, how could Disney possibly satisfy the expectations of three generations of fans?
Well, that looks quite plausible. I particularly enjoyed the way a seemingly new and haunting piano progression evolves into a familiar theme – Han and Leia’s love theme in fact, which is a particularly apt choice following the end of Return of the Jedi.
At the time of writing, The Force Awakens has set the record for (unadjusted) US Domestic box office, and more impressively is at number 15 in the worldwide inflation-adjusted box office, putting it ahead of The Phantom Menace, Return of the Jedi, and just about on track to overtake The Empire Strikes Back, which would make it the most successful Star Wars film since 1977.
So that seems to be working.
I would say The Force Awakens has three major elements which could be ‘spoiled’, so is well worth trying to see with as little knowledge as possible. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should really do so before reading the rest.
Here’s a video to make it less tempting to read on:
The Force Awakens: True Successor or big-budget Fan Fiction? (SPOILERS!)
Over the first half an hour of the film I alternated between feeling that scenes, characters and designs were either not Star Wars enough, or just too much like old Star Wars. I finally realised I was holding the movie to an impossible standard, and substantially enjoyed the rest of it.
But by the end, it was undeniable: The Force Awakens looks a lot like a remake of 1977’s A New Hope. To try to make that assessment more fairly, I picked the most important 10 story elements from each and put them side-by-side:
Episode IV: A New Hope
Episode VII: The Force Awakens
Opening arc of The Hero’s Journey
Opening arc of The Hero’s Journey
Scrappy underdogs vs. Fascist Military
Scrappy underdogs vs. Fascist Military
Destroy planet-scale superweapon
Destroy planet-scale superweapon
Death of the mentor
Death of the mentor
Protagonist triumphs through skill and faith
Protagonist triumphs through skill and faith
Males free female from captivity
Males free female from captivity (subverted)
MacGuffin in a droid: superweapon plans
MacGuffin in a droid: location of old hero
Escape from a death trap
Male frees male from captivity
Triumphant return of a protagonist
Bad guy turns good
Conclude with award ceremony
Conclude with ambiguous meeting with old hero
So that’s 50% alike, 20% related, 30% new.
I can’t help wondering if this was actually the master plan: take the structure of the most successful of the series, add a scriptwriter of the most well-regarded, have the original cast pass the baton to the new, and laugh all the way to the bank. It seems to have worked.
In terms of style, I was very pleased to find it kept my favourite things from all of the Star Wars films: the adventure-serial (more mysterious back-story), family melodrama, and a script much more like Empire than any of the others (which makes sense, given Lawrence Kasdan’s involvement).
Let’s Get Nerdy (MORE SPOILERS)
Finally, as a Star Wars fan I can’t leave off without addressing some of the questions people tend to ask immediately after seeing the film.
How did Kylo Ren get beaten by amateurs?
The movie goes to extraordinary lengths to show Chewbacca’s bowcaster as some kind of devastating superweapon. Kylo Ren then gets shot with it, and the movie emphases his heavy bleeding and difficulty with the wound. Meanwhile it’s fair to assume Finn has some training in melee combat, and so is able to slightly injure Kylo’s sword-arm before being beaten. This means when Rey enters the fight, she’s fresh, and has been demonstrated capable in melee combat, while Kylo has two serious injuries!
How can Rey be so good with the Force so quickly?
I wondered this while watching the film, but it’s worth benchmarking. Anakin could drive pod-racers at inhuman speed at age 9, and demonstrated some sort of telepathy / far-seeing (in Yoda’s simple test) with no training. Luke deflects three blaster bolts while blindfold on his second try, uses the force to make a missile shot that was ‘impossible, even for a computer’, and later extracts a lightsaber from ice, again with no formal training.
By contrast, Rey does a Jedi mind trick on her third go, and beats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber summoning contest; in the latter case we again have his injuries to consider, and she was also pulling in the same direction as him.
Why did R2 take so long to wake up?
This requires some mumbo jumbo about R2 taking a while to process the information of BB-8 returning with the map piece and to come out of hibernation. The real reason is if he woke up immediately, it would create a difficult story-fork between fighting Starkiller Base and seeking out Luke.
Where are these planets relative to one another in the galaxy?
It’s unclear how Starkiller Base can really be “aimed” at another solar system, but apparently it can. We’re told it can somehow shoot through hyperspace, hence the ability to hit something light-years away. Dramatically less justifiable is that in a completely separate solar system, it’s possible to look in the sky and see the beam traverse and hit several planets in real time.
The only ‘explanation’ is that Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction: planets are simply locations that are ‘far apart’, hence their uniform environment and the fact that everything that takes place on a planet seems to happen in one very small part of it. The worst offender in the original trilogy was arguably Empire, in which the Millennium Falcon apparently travels between two solar systems without a hyperdrive in a matter of weeks.
Who is Rey?
Child of Solo and Leia? Seems very weird they did not mention her when discussing their past troubles in The Force Awakens.
Grandchild of Kenobi? Seems very weird given that in Empire it is Kenobi’s ghost who says “That boy is our last hope” and Yoda who says “No… there is another”. Unless Yoda followed up with “Oh, and didn’t you also have a kid at some point, how are they getting on?”
Child of Skywalker? It seems insane he would abandon her with no training, and the whole bit with Kylo turning to the dark side and disrupting things comes much later.
In terms of trying to second-guess the series, I think it’s worth remembering that A New Hope set up Empire’s surprise-parentage twist by explicitly lying about it! As reliable old Ben told Luke, “A young Jedi named Darth Vader […] betrayed and murdered your father.”
