fine whine

I’m happy to have found some good entertainment lately. I watched The transporter with Jason Stratham and it was quite good (for what it was). I only had one criticism — a car exploded too, er, explosively. Otherwise it was well paced, not too kung-fu heavy and didn’t get bogged down in irrelevant plot diversions. It’s not a thinker’s classic but I enjoyed it very much. So that’s that. My recent discovery of the Diablo series of games also means I’m getting less sleep.

That said, I’ve still been reading several good books lately. A good number of them deal with commercialism, advertising or capitalism gone awry: Max Barry’s Syrup and Jennifer Government, Jim Munroe’s (of AdBusters fame) Everyone in silico, and now Alex Shakur’s The savage girl. I liked them all and would recommend any or all of them to anybody with a shred of intelligence and an accompaning sense of humor.

So anyway, in The savage girl Alex Shakur introduces the concept of “paradessence”: the paradoxical essence of a thing. Identifying the paradessence of a commodity is the key to its branding and selling. For example, the paradessence of Wi-Fi (does anybody seriously use that term? really?) is that it grants the freedom to move around at will while still being tethered to a computer. That’s somewhat of a weak example, but it’s Alex’s term, not mine, and he explains it better on this page of the book’s abandoned site.

And as I said before, I’ve been watching movies. Some haven’t been quite as good as the books I’m reading, and one in particular made me think for a moment. As soon as I saw the title screen for Star trek: the motion picture I was struck by its innate paradessence. Here is a movie about the distant, technologically advanced future, and they refer to it as a “motion picture”, a quaint term that was pretty dated, even in 1972. Does it fit? I’m not sure. Paradessence or not, it’s definitely an odd mix. And it’s a pretty dull movie, too.