Gleanings: from recent reading on music, social media, VR games, and feminist SF

In the ars gratia artis view, works of art are their own end and shouldn’t serve any external purpose, but most of us use art all the time. J. S. Bach composed a piece of music, now known as the Goldberg Variations, that was reportedly meant to occupy the restless mind of a patron while he tried to get to sleep. More recently, composer Max Richter (whom I wrote about here) crafted an eight-hour-long project called Sleep, which is meant to be heard while sleeping.

Yes, Virginia, another comment on acting

An actor acquaintance of mine, Jeff Still, recently shared on Facebook an Atlantic article about the contortions that film actors have begun going through in the name of creating a character. Surely you’ve heard of a few. Jared Leto acted like the Joker throughout the production of the recent Suicide Squad film, a process that included pranking the cast with used condoms and a dead pig. Leonardo DiCaprio, a committed vegetarian, felt he had to eat real meat in a scene of The Revenant. Adrien Brody starved himself and (by one account) broke up with his girlfriend before doing The Pianist.

This overheated approach to acting