Comments on: The Cultural Speedometer

By: Geoffrey Allan Plauche

Geoffrey Allan Plauche — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:21:28 +0000

“Unfortunately, this obsession with speed has spilled over into other art forms as well. Of particular concern to me is how publishers expect books to be uniformly “fast-paced” these days. Get in the door, push, push, plot point, dialogue, bang, boom, climax! We’re done, on to the next book. Even if your novel is packing excess pounds, the worst thing you can do is write something that’s considered… slow.

Endless, wordy description? Slooooow. Lots of subtle character development? Slooooow. Taking hundreds of pages to make your point? Tooooo sloooooooooow.”

Except for epic fantasy novels, it would seem.

By: David Louis Edelman

David Louis Edelman — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:39:14 +0000

Lou: I’m not nearly cool enough to have seen an actual Hong Kong flick. Or M1-5. But point taken, speed can be really intoxicating.

Joel: Hmm, never actually thought about how the cultural speedometer would apply to music. I dunno… maybe I could point to the fact that speed metal is pretty much dead and hip-hop is no longer in its 30-different-samples-a-minute phase as arguments to bolster my point.

By: Joel Shepherd

Joel Shepherd — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 07:58:21 +0000

I dunno, I think it’ll be fast for quite a while. But then, maybe the phenomenon will affect different mediums differently. TV and film are certainly faster, but a lot of really slow, tedious music is more popular than ever. Maybe music becomes people’s escape from hyper-kinetic visual media. And maybe that’s something good to be said for hyper-kinetivity (I think I just made up a word) because TV has radically improved recently, films are still okay, but popular music has just nosedived into turgid sludge.

For fast-paced TV, I don’t think you can go past The West Wing. That dialogue can leave you dizzy.

By: Lou Anders

Lou Anders — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 23:16:33 +0000

Have you seen M1-5? Or for that matter, Hong Kong flick “Internal Affairs”? Both shoot vital information at you so fast its intoxicating.

By: David Louis Edelman

David Louis Edelman — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:39:43 +0000

For me, the current marker is that scene in (Steven Soderbergh’s) Ocean’s 11 where Matt Damon steals the vault codes from Andy Garcia’s character during that whole phony “confrontation” with Bernie Mac. (”Cracker!”) You literally have about half a second to register what Damon’s done; blink and you miss it. As soon as that starts looking slow and obvious, I will officially declare myself wrong.

By: Lou Anders

Lou Anders — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:41:21 +0000

Or our descendants will have chips in their head that allow for even fast rates. But I take your point. My own experience of it: BATMAN:THE ANIMATED SERIES is infinitely superior to the new animation THE BATMAN. But the pacing of the earliest episodes is now excruciating to me. I keep seeing them wasting valuable time & costly animation on long establishing shots and dragged-out scene work!