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The New York Review of Books Popcorn Park

"Spider-Man looks like what it is, a work of large-scale industry. If you admire it, it's in the same way you might admire a World's Fair or a suspension bridge. The Amazing Spider-Man came up from the bottom; not many people were looking for original invention in ten-cent comics in 1962. Spider-Man, the movie, descends from above, trailing clouds of magazine covers and licensed toys, and thus has a ponderousness its model altogether lacked. The scenes of digitally simulated combat—like most scenes of digitally simulated combat—have little more life to them than the rapidly shifting arrangements of numbers on the screen of an electronic calculator. Not for one moment do we believe that any entity is colliding with any other entity: the heft of actual being and actual contact is replaced by a terminally weightless play of microdots."

John Katz The Empire Stumbles
"We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month, at least in cinematic terms -- if we were watching. Star Wars was challenged by millions of rebellious kids, who decided to choose a new kind of myth. The next generation unseated its elders -- as is the right of every generation - and is making its own culture, moving away from ours. In doing so, these kids balked at mega-hype, rediscovered earnestness, simplicity, the love story, some patriotism, punctured a billion-dollar balloon, and maybe even sparked a (relative) movement away from whorish sellouts, back to simpler story-telling. I, for one, sure hope so.

The evidence: In its first four days, Star Wars: Episode 2 -- Attack of the Clones sold nearly $117 million worth of tickets. When Spider-man opened two weeks earlier, it earned $115 million in just three days."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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