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RIP, Odetta

The New York Times reports:

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

That’s a shame. My parents and I saw her perform with a live show of A Prairie Home Companion about a year ago, and she was nothing short of incredible.

Tuesday various

  • Reading this post — the latest in John Seavey’s terrific storytelling engines series. Seriously, go read some of them — it occurs to me that I’ve never actually watched any of George Romero’s zombie movies. I should probably remedy that at some point.

  • Pushing Daisies has been cancelled. This makes me sad. If the universe was looking to off-set my sadness a little, it could finally give The Middleman a second season. I’m just saying.

  • I’m really intrigued by these examples of tilt-shift photography. Tilt-shift makes real locations and objects look like miniature-scale models. I find most of these photographs stunning, but I’m not completely sure why. After all, would the same images, shot without the camera manipulation, seem quite so incredible? I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but I think now what I find most interesting about the technique is how completely it tricks the mind. I’m constantly having to remind myself that these aren’t models, and that the exquisite attention to detail isn’t necessarily the photographer’s doing. [via]

  • “Renowned scientist Dr. Judd Nelson”… Now there’s something you don’t read every day. I’m still not interested in watching the show, however.

  • Christopher Beam makes a compelling argument for why stories of vampires continue to reinvent themselves: “stomping on old myths heightens the realism.” [via]

That’s one way of putting it

Tasha Robinson on Twilight:

It felt like it was being delivered in a language I don’t speak, a language where “You don’t understand, I really really really want to kill you and drink your blood, I can barely stop myself from tearing you open and feasting on your blood right now” is an accepted colloquialism for “You are cute and I like you. Would you like to go on a chaste date where we just stare into each other’s eyes a lot?”

The price of free speech

Neil Gaiman on why it’s important to protect all kinds of speech:

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.

Go read the whole thing. It’s an informed and considered response to what I think are legitimate concerns. It’s tough defending art you think is distasteful, but it’s the only way to defend art you think isn’t.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is headquartered right across the street from where I work. I really should send them my resume and volunteer…