Author Archive GD

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Choose Your Own Adventure – With Sex!

Getting Dumped book cover

Adult-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

I have continued to wander the wrong side of the literary tracks with an exploration of choose-your-own-adventure e-books, a genre I discovered in a Wall Street Journal article about e-book data collection. I was simultaneously thrilled and creeped out by the data that Amazon can now collect on the reading habits of its customers – on my reading habits.

More frightening than the loss of privacy (which is really inevitable at this point) was the potential influence of that data on the creative process. It’s not at all challenging to imagine a future world where books are focus-grouped in a process that would have prevented most of literature’s greatest works from ever seeing the light of day had they been subjected to it. Read More

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Turandot is Death Metal Opera

Turandot at Seattle Opera

Turandot staged at Seattle Opera, 2012

I often harp on the irrelevance of genre distinctions, but even I have to admit that some musical tastes are incongruous; for example, opera and heavy metal. ‘Bel canto,’ after all, is simply the Italian for ‘pretty song,’ and let’s face it, metal includes a lot of ugly, ugly music. Opera is classical, classy, appealing. Heavy metal is brutal, thuggish and off-putting.

And yet… and yet…

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Open to Romance

Bride of the Monster poster

Ed Wood’s artistic vision

I try not to be unduly influenced by labels. The Spoonman on the street corner, the experimental-progressive underground rock band, and the latest Top 40 pop ingénue may all have something to contribute to the cultural dialogue. McG may never give the world a Citizen Kane, but I firmly believe in the artistic merit of John Woo’s ballet of violence.

If Ed Wood was really such a terrible director (and he was) why do we still watch his movies? Yes, we enjoy making fun of them, but dozens of other directors of B-grade horror movies have long since been completely forgotten. Wood’s movies have staying power because they were the expression, however flawed, of an artistic vision, and despite those flaws, they were expressed with a conviction that speaks to the audience more fluently than the vehicle itself. Read More

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Sigur Rós’ Challenging Video for Fjögur Píanó

Sigur Ros Valtari coverA lot of great art is divisive, but it is the rare piece of art that is divisive within the same person, at least if that person is me. I can only think of a couple of examples in my own life where I came away from a book or film thinking, “That was amazing. I never want to see it again.” Amores Perros is the first example that comes to mind. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is another. The Red Pony is a third. Read More

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Where the Muse Takes Me

Joseph Paelinck - The Dance of the Muses One of the many things I love about the movie Dogma is Salma Hayek’s portrayal of The Muse – a feminist spirit determined to create her own art, reduced to dancing in a strip club where the patrons are consistently struck with great ideas. The creative muse is always portrayed as female, perhaps because artists in the past have usually been male. Or at least, female artists have not seemed to rely as heavily on the idea of the muse. Perhaps because women have seldom had access to that room of one’s own that offers the luxury of a tryst with the muse, female artists have had to take a more workmanlike approach to their art. Read More