Logan K. Young
Logan K. Young is a contributing writer for BLURT, Dusted and the Baltimore Sun. Among others, he's also written for Paste, The Big Takeover and Lambda Literary and been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Paris Transatlantic and the Trouser Press Record Guide. (You might've caught his byline, too, at defunct outlets such as P4K's Altered Zones, Crawdaddy!, Option and Cashbox.) Most recently, Young served as Editorial Director for the 2011 CMJ Music Marathon & Film Festival. A lapsed student of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, he's since studied at the Poynter Institute, Gotham Writers' Workshop and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. His latest book, Mauricio Kagel: A Semic Life, is available now.
Eat The Academy
On Preventing the Ceremonies of Dumb People in Hollywood From Being a Burden on Their Parent Companies or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
Kill screen from the Cartoon Network video game Orphan Feast
“I am giving an account of what…ought…to be.”
― William Daniel Defoe, A Friendly Proposal for Foundlings and Bastard Children Moll Flanders
Much like the birth of Christ, historians of film rarely agree on when it happened: the birth of cinema, that is. Perhaps even more controversial, however, is the question of paternity. Who’s your daddy, indeed?
Francophiles will forever laud Méliès, Teutons will zealously campaign for Murnau, the Russians <3 Eisenstein and proud Americans some of D.W. Griffith’s first, err, exploits. And yet, no matter the geographic genesis of film, one fact about its origin remains clear across the national board: it was, in fact, a silent birth. #Scientology.
If radio had delivered the psychologically bewildering disembodied voice (i.e. sound…
Singularity May Be Real, But Kurzweil’s Still A Jerk
Ray Kurzweil. Photo: Michael Lutch.
SYSTEM ALERT: Don’t listen to Ray Kurzweil!
He is dead wrong … just not how you think he is. If anything, his seemingly crackpot notion of Singularity — namely, that man and machine will be indistinguishable no later than 2045 — is so prescient and precise, to borrow a term from Battlestar Galactica, it’s frakin’ scary.
Look around you; we’re awful close as it is. From insulin pumps to robotic limbs to the chips embedded in Parkinson’s patients, an albeit fledgling Singularity is already here. And with IBM’s Watson having bested both Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy!, this inert, bipartisan Mr. Smith came to Washington earlier this month and quickly disposed of Reps. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Nan Hayworth (R-NY), Jared Polis (D-CO), former Rhodes Scholar Jim Himes (D-CT) and trained nuclear physicist Rush Holt (D-NJ). For heaven’s sake, we’ve got robots in Japan, right now, that can…
