A much better day.

Well, today has been much better. I got my sketchbook back, wrote a couple of thousand words, came up with a name for my new piratess character (Margrethe "The Reef" Alexandrine Kensington: navigate about her carefully or you'll end up a wreck!), found an okay denouement for my last Kaede & Eshi story, hacked some interesting code, did some research for Moon, Sun, and Dragons, ate some good food and had a nice night with my family.

Much, much better. Although I confess to feeling a bit... dirty. I've installed .net on my laptop. Yes, my Linux laptop. And I think I like it.

The Beatles & Hustler Magazine

Recently, fellow blogger technoshaman complained about radio stations "playing the snot out of the Beatles" and says, "Heck, it wasn't even good."

I simply have to disagree. Scott McCloud in his Understanding Comics explains that once an artist reaches a certain stage of his art, he must make a decision: is he there to say something with his art, or about his art? Is his goal in reaching these heights of professional skill to produce moving works that are familiar to consumers, or to take the art and push it to its limit, to create new tropes that future generations of artists will exploit?

Listening to the earliest Beatles, albums such as Rubber Soul or Meet The Beatles, I remain startled by just how new and fresh the Beatles sounded. It may not be "new" in the sense that there were academic experiments that the Beatles co-opted later, but I cannot help but have the impression that Lennon and McCartney had their ears open to very new and fresh ideas in music and were ruthless in synthesizing those ideas into their music. Every album, they wanted to go someplace different, and they did. They managed to do this while churning out radio-worthy pieces that, yes, deserve a listen even today.

I had a similar reaction recently to a stash of Hustler magazines I stumbled across a few weeks ago. These were a box of the years 1977 through 1979, missing two issues I think, but almost intact. What struck me most about the series was the way everything in porn that we take for granted today Hustler did in the 1970s and mostly did it better. I can't think of many common tropes in modern porn that Hustler didn't cover in that three-year period: goth, loli, voluptua, post-menopausal, shaved heads, far-out locales, far-our costumery, messy scenes, various combinations of couplings. Hell, Hustler did a few things I've never seen in a magazine or photo-shoot since. Larry Flynt's photographers pushed the limits of what could be done within the censorious rules of the time by exploiting things outside the rules: oiling their models, or creating absurd scenarios, or using lighting that made the shoot seem explicit. These days, the models have better personal trainers and plastic surgeons (and thank the Gods hairstyles have improved!), but the layouts haven't changed a bit.

Neither The Beatles nor Larry Flynt may be considered the last word in the creation of rock'n' roll or pornography, but in their respective fields each made such an enormous leap forward in the production of their respective crafts that the world has changed because of them.