About Chris Dick

Chris rides on his digital sway-backed donkey tilting his lance, quixotically at all sorts of causes -- some hopeless, some perhaps -- not. I enjoy your feedback. Long live rational debate.
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Truth in Fantasy

By |2021-02-20T10:50:05-05:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , , , |

Truth in Fantasy The Bard Would Applaud Buffy Some people have trouble with fantasy as great drama. I've never understood why. Realism in art does not necessarily mean a kind of dutiful depiction of the mundane, the kitchen details of everyday life.  It can be that and be great art (Ibsen); but the kind of realism that really matters is psychological, the realism of protagonists growing and changing, living, laughing, suffering and dying through the arc of a story that resonates -- a story that is a true journey in the sense that character [...]

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Memento Mori

By |2021-02-23T21:46:08-05:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , , |

I just put a memento mori app on my phone.  For those of you who did not take four years of Latin in high school, which is no doubt most of you who are not close personal friends with Methuselah, memento mori means remember you are mortal, -- that is, remember that, like Monty Python’s infamous parrot, you are going to be bloody well deceased some day, kick it, shuffle off this mortal coil, end up stone cold dead. In ancient Rome when a successful general returned to the City after a conquering spree in foreign parts, [...]

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Failure to Communicate

By |2020-05-03T13:57:39-04:00April 22nd, 2020|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: |

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” said the nasty prison warden in Cool Hand Luke – so true it seems. Why do we talk past each other so much?  Why do dialogues so quickly become duelling monologues, debate turn into debunk, speech into screech?  Books such as Daniel Kahneman’s 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' are filled with impressive experimental verifications that we often do not reason well; that our thinking is hobbled by an array of cognitive biases and that we are prone to making lazy intuitive judgments that we do not trouble to verify [...]

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Music in the Digiverse

By |2020-04-21T07:58:47-04:00April 17th, 2020|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

I recently wrote a piece on changes in the music industry brought on by the migration of virtually everything from creation, through promotion to distribution and consumption online. I used the rise of Gen Z phenom Billie Eilish, and the role played by social media in her ascent as an example of the powerful changes that are reshaping the industry. I left one set of observations to treat separately in a short follow-up piece. Although everyone under thirty is familiar with what I will call the web multiplier effect on the popular song, I would like to draw out [...]

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Billie Eilish

By |2020-07-22T20:47:01-04:00April 16th, 2020|Categories: Culture, Featured Culture|Tags: , , , , |

Every once in a while this culture vulture finds talent and perhaps more than talent in places where I might never have looked even a few years ago. The ability to discern outcrops in the cultural landscape has been transformed by technology -- we can see so much farther and so much more clearly without ever leaving our computer cockpit.  Since it is an article of faith with me that creativity at the highest levels is an inexplicable enigma and can crop up anywhere at any time, this extended vision is a wonderful thing. Thanks to the [...]

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Why Are You So Angry?

By |2020-05-03T10:54:08-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

I have an American friend – an estimable person in ever so many ways. A great companion, funny, lively, bright and loyal, the sort of man who’d always have your back if the chips were down. He is a devout Irish Catholic from a large family.  He attended Dayton University where he started all four years as a defensive back.  Now retired, he put in forty years with a small steel fabrication company that moved him to the Carolinas where he still lives with his lovely Canadian wife. My friend’s political stance perplexes me. His rage against [...]

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