Cut from the Same Cloth: 9 by Shane Acker and MORE by Mark Osbourne

9 looked like it would be pretty amazing, from the well-edited trailer, and from the stamp of approval offered by Tim Burton. Unfortunately, it was far from the final word, either on grim industrial animation (Final Fantasy VII was more innovative by far), or in post-apocalyptic narrative. It was filled with tropes and cliches, and reeked of lazy scriptwriting... you could tell as soon as you heard the main character confront the "clan elder" and accuse him of being a coward.

Okay, so the movie's biggest flaw was the story itself, which was packed with dramatic cliches, such as the following:

• artificial intelligence has inexplicably turned on its human creators; and by the way, it has a single glowing red eye!


• the rag dolls seem to form a society of RPG archetypes: the big brute, the stodgy old wizard, the battle maiden, the enigmatic twins (who also fill the role of the lovable scientist), and (one of my favorites) the prophetic madman who draws mysterious scribbles on the walls


• small characters run across a bridge to get away from a larger character; chasing them turns out to be a bad idea for the larger character


• messiah character must make a pilgrimage to his place of origin to discover the truth about himself and his anointed task


• one minion, designated "extra creepy", wears a discarded doll head


• SPOILER: movie ends with a gathering of the living and the dead, appearing as translucent, glowing green figures (they're like little Jedi's)

This movie obviously wasn't made because Tim Burton was drawn to the originality of the writing. The merit of the film... which the writer may have wanted to focus on a little more... was the atmosphere, the visual style, and stylistic treatment, which went a long way toward setting a mood.

You may or may not know that this distinctive style and atmosphere is actually derived from an older, more compact piece of film. Though it's not really in the same mode, this original version of 9, by the same director, could be compared favorably with its long-form reiteration. It was so compact that it couldn't have fallen prey to the shortcomings snarkily listed above. It left the mystery mysterious, and it offered a simple, utilitarian narrative framework for its gothic treatment. It can be found below:



Okay, so Shane Acker's short film is pretty sweeeet... some gothic, some steampunk, some post-human melancholy, all hung on a nice little story of action and escape. Did it get a little overblown in the feature film? Yeah, maybe. But still, the originality is there in the short, right? And it deserves some praise and attention.

However, to find the real genesis of the most compelling ideas in this video, we have to dig even further back, climbing out of CGI and into, of all things, STOP-MOTION. I sense that the soul of 9, in both its forms, is actually "inspired" (to use a very generous word) by an older short film by Mark Osbourne (no affiliation with Ozzy) called MORE. MORE was a 6-minute narrative short, the first ever filmed on iMax stock, that got famous on the Internet for a while, and was eventually used by the band Kenna for their song "Hell Bent."

Here is the original:



It should be obvious how much of 9 is a reiteration of the style and concepts in MORE. The character design is the most obvious point of convergence, but a lot of the themes are there, as well. The rag-doll characters have hollow insides where they can protect things that are spiritually significant. Both (all three!) films end with a gathering in the shape of a circle, a ritual site of meeting and restitution.

On a broader atmospheric basic (atmosphere is a vehicle for theme, no less than narrative), both of these stories evoke the feeling of living in the aftermath of some great mistake... that something has gone wrong in the world, and these characters are drowning in its consequences, without ever fully understanding the nature of the catastrophe. However, MORE brings this theme out with more power and subtlety -- its weird clay Metropolis is the wrong turn that's taken on the way to utopia, and the main character, in a microcosmic metaphor, shows us that dreams can always lead one far in the wrong direction.

These are beautiful, melancholy, almost Baudrillardian stories of hopelessness, and upon this legacy, "9" builds an interesting mythology, even if it's not necessarily a groundbreaking movie. I'll cover that in my next post on the topic.

Watchmen: Bring It Zack Snyder

Comic books movies, especially early on, before they're well-explored, tend to inspire two perhaps contradictory emotional reactions in fans: on one hand, rabid excitement, and on the other, abject terror. Comic book kids are all eager to see a brilliant adaptation of a favorite graphic storyline, and they're massively appreciative when one works out (as many were for Sin City), but they also realize that the vast majority of comic adaptations crash and burn, failing to capture any of the essential elements of the adapted story.

Hellboy, for instance, embodied both sides of the equation. Mike Mignola's fans are diehards, and they were overjoyed to see Ron Perlman cast as Hellboy. They were ready for a beautiful, brutal gothic/mid-century throwdown. Unfortunately, they got a movie that represented the title character well, but dropped the ball on the supporting cast and the atmosphere. There was scarcely a gothic arch, and the World War II occultism was crowded out by big shiny apparatuses that looked more like plastic than tarnished metal. The themes of self-realization, defiance, and creeping Lovecraftian danger were dissolved in a messy stew of comic book cliches: we have to keep our identities secret! Love will save the day!

So for many Hellboy nerds (me especially), the dream was deferred, and we hold scarce hope for The Golden Army, which seems to be beset with more of the same downfalls.

There's another comic book movie coming out, based on what might be the most influential modern comic series, though it's certainly not the best-known. This comic series, since resold as a convenient graphic novel, is Watchmen. Alan Moore's graphical urban epic was about the demise of heroism, the struggle with real-world moral issues, and the consequences of disillusionment and war in a post-industrial society. It was complex and challenging, and a true masterpiece of the medium.

A film adaptation has been in the works for a while, and it's finally been created under the direction of Zack Snyder. When I first heard about this, it inspired the "fear" reaction. It's hard to imagine an accurate recreation of the world of Watchmen... it's a decaying, rusty New York City, but not a Gotham City kind of way. It's mostly shown in daylight, and the dregs of the city are bored locals and homeless vagrants, rather than innocent old ladies and the criminals who beset them. It's not a dangerous world, but rather a listless, uneventful world, shuffling toward the end of history. It's also a world of the 80's, and it still emanates nostalgia, remembering the Hollywood/disco glory of its 70's superheroes. These heroes, all retired after a wave of social reform, are the protagonists of Moore's story.

This is a complex milieu, and it's next to impossible to recreate on film, I would imagine. It's almost cheesy enough to cover the superheroes in skin-tight primary-color spandex, but Moore's world isn't quite ready to make that much of a mockery of itself. It has to find a postmodern balance between edgy and used up... between updated and outdated. This is why I was afraid for the film. I really couldn't imagine how any creative director could strike the balance required to make the world work.

From the initial stills from the movie, though, it seems that Snyder may be on his way to doing it right. He's picked some perfect actors, like the gaunt, severe Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. On top of the casting, we've seen some initial images of costume and production design, and these do a miraculous job of achieving the right look. The outdoor shots look great: the city is gritty and unadorned at night, and it's blank and pedestrian during the day. The costumes are bulky and plastic, which is probably necessary to reproduce the intentional kitsch in Alan Moore's art, but they're also dark and unironic, the stuff of superheroes who are vengeful, ready to return to their work in the world.

So I've gone from frightened to excited... from apprehensive to hopeful. This movie could really work. Now Snyder's production company has to gather the myriad themes and narrative threads in Moore's book, and they have to build them into a fluid, well-paced action movie with some believable moments of psychology and introspection. He hasn't won me over yet, but hey, I'm ready to watch.

Monroe and Lohan: Is there anything worth talking about?

Okay, so here's an interesting parallel for discussion: Marilyn Monroe versus Lindsay Lohan? The question was raised recently, as Bert Stern, famous for photographing Monroe during "The Last Sitting," decided to recreate said monumental event using Lindsay Lohan as a stand-in. Let's try to do what we do here, and dig under the cheesy provocation and sensationalism for some meaning. In this case, there's quite a bit to discover.

I think the metaphor is obvious, after all. Just as with Marilyn, Lohan is a Hollywood starlet, famous for her charm and her body and infamous for her spotty background and bad behavior in the public eye. Marilyn's last photoshoot was looked upon in light of her death, which occurred shortly afterwards; Lohan herself has been plagued with addiction and rehabilitation, and with the attendant paparazzi attention, and her rendition of the photoshoot will be colored by her own recent controversies.

Now, very few of us will be willing to buy Lohan as a new Marilyn. At the most basic level, this return to Monroe's farewell seems like a stunt, something that's been done before, and Lohan seems fairly soulless compared to Monroe, who has a whole mythology and legacy behind her. After all, Lohan is just one of a handful of Hollywood A-List brats currently in the headlines. Marilyn is a one-of-a-kind historical figure, and that's what makes her photoshoot meaningful and culturally relevant.

Another point that needs visiting... something that's important to any feminist critique of the occasion... is that Monroe's portraits seem so honest, at least to our jaded postmodern eyes. She isn't a plastic replica in those shots. She isn't surgically altered or airbrushed, and nobody was able to hide the vulnerable look in her eyes. The whole package -- the flawed soul -- is coming from Marilyn herself, the source of the legend.

Lohan's body looks painfully fake by comparison, and it's the kind of fake that I hope some of us are getting tired of. She's got big boobs, sure, and I'm not one to complain about that, but her figure is boyish, with no hips and scarce buttocks. Stern is obviously shooting for a modern fashion eye, trained by ready-to-wear and Twiggy and Calvin Klein, and it seems like a tired mockery of Marilyn's curves and slight pudge. In that regard, if anything, we can look at these two photoshoots as a lesson in how homogeneous and inauthentic our ideals of beauty have become. Silicon boobs and airbrushed skin, boy-hips and blond wigs. Yawn.

But this can't just be a long opportunity to Lindsay-bash. There's enough of that going on. I want to step back and note something important that a lot of the commentators aren't saying.

Why are these original photographs of Marilyn so important to us? Why do I have the automatic urge to reject Lohan's attempt at the role?

It's because Marilyn is a myth and a legend for our current culture. Her self-destructive habits are part of a beautiful, flawed panorama of life and success and hardship, and we're willing to see her as a whole person, and to see her bad behavior in perspective. She certainly deserves it.

Unfortunately, we're not able to give this benefit to the struggling, self-abusive starlets of our day. Lohan's not healthy, and she's a shitty role-model, but she's faced with a whole culture that's intent on demonizing her and exposing her shortcomings. What chance has she ever had to make us happy? Do these girls have to endure the slings and arrows of stardom, and simply have faith that some day, after they've OD'd, we'll look back on them and see their unique beauty and vulnerability, and read it as a positive contribution to our cultural heritage? What hope do they have that one day we'll forgive their idiocy and irresponsibility, just as we've forgiven Marilyn's?

Maybe the lesson here: enjoy the photos, and stop being so hard on the girls who are stuck in the molars of a culture that's trying to consume and devour them.

Cool Shit Alert: simulating a 3D environment on the Wii

THE COOL SHIT ALERT:

Johnny Chung Lee, a Carnegie Melon student and known Wii-hacking supergenius, has developed something that's not only an amazing technology hack, but simply an amazing concept in general. It strikes me that this would be revolutionary, no matter what technology it was exhibited on... the fact that the Wii makes it easy is just a testament to the versatility of Nintendo's hardware.

Here's the video. Be patient for the first minute and a half, as Johnny zips through a short explanation. Once you get to the demo of the display, it becomes rather mind-blowing.



When we think of 3D displays, we usually think of filtered glasses, allowing a screen to split an image into a "left-eye" version and a "right-eye" version. This creates the illusion of depth as the brain synthesizes the two images. Though it's also a two-dimensional take on 3D, Lee's display is working from a completely different paradigm.

Instead of simulating depth from a fixed point of view, Lee's program is simulating space by adapting a 2-D image to the position of the viewer. This is, in fact, more advanced than the traditional fixed-point approach used in movies like Beowulf. Here, the user can interact with the simulated space by moving around the frame and processing multiple viewing angles.

This could really be the next generation of displays for consoles and simulation. Even from the video, you can tell that it's mind-blowingly immersive, and it promises new heights of simulation and interaction.

I think it's also a testament to technology that this could be developed and disseminated by a man who is essentially an amateur, working with pre-existing tools and an incredibly innovative brain. He didn't need a room full of engineers to sit around and develop this with him, nor a corporate sponsor to give him financial backing and public exposure... he created it and publicized it himself, and nobody can ever take that credit away from him. That's a kind of visionary independence that's never been possible in any other culture or era.

Quickly, I'd like to throw in my own thought for expanding on this innovation. Perhaps somebody else has already suggested this, but I figure I may as well record it for posterity.

MY IDEA:

Okay, at the end of the segment, Johnny mentions that this will only work for one person at a time. This is because the display has to adapt to the user's position and adjust the image accordingly, and the same image can't accommodate two different points of view simultaneously. I'm not an inventor, and for me this is all speculative, but I have an idea of how to solve this particular problem.

I've heard of a technology that uses interlacing and wavelength filtering (i.e. through filtering glasses) to display two different images on the same screen at the same time. The screen would just interlace two images (image A and image B) that are projected for two different wavelengths, and the users (user A and user B) would each wear a different pair of glasses (glasses A and glasses B). The final result: user A would only see image A, and user B would only see image B. This would be a lovely alternative to split-screen viewing in two-player video games. Both players would be able to use the entire screen to steer their Kart.

Combining this technology with Lee's head-tracking wouldn't be difficult. He himself used a pair of safety goggles to track his head movement. If you just put filtering lenses in two pairs of goggles, you could give each of two users their own individualized content on the same screen. Thus, you could have the same scene, adapting to the positions of two different people at the same time, and you could create two-player games where each player got their own unique 3D experience.

COME ON, NINTENDO!!! DO EET!!! This is the future!

Christmas Meditations: Childhood Innocence in the Music Video Era

Christmas is a time to reflect on authenticity and obligation, especially when it comes to issues of maturity and disillusionment. It's an inescapable question... it's safe to say that anyone who knows the experience of the Christian holiday also knows how much it changes when you enter adulthood. Santa Clause leads the way for a loss of innocence, and over the course of a few landmark years, we stop seeing Christmas as a singular, mystical time and start to see it as a confusing mix of familial love and troublesome economic and social obligation. If any of you are like me, you probably spend a large part of the holiday searching within yourself for that excited, innocent child who could just enjoy the bright colors and ritualistic songs, and who could just indulge in attention and wish-fulfillment.

So here I am, looking into pop culture for some statements on the shifting winds of innocence and disillusionment. Interestingly, I've found the most salient themes during my diversion into the world of music video.

Sigur Ros's recent music video for the song Hoppipolla is a great example. Before you even think about the social statement it makes, try just watching it and feeling the spirit of the piece. It's simple and beautiful and thematically cryptic, but it represents something spontaneous and touching. It's a brilliant piece of short-form cinema, crafted around an excellent song.



Like I said, thematically cryptic: one of the beautiful aspects of this video is that it doesn't seem to be purveying a judgment or advocating any reform. If anything, it's an invitation to the viewer to imagine an entire life lived as a child, or at the very least, a final return to the joys of childhood at the twilight of old age.

Thus, there's something in this video calling us out of the severity of middle age, showing us the triumph of experience extracted from the prisons of ambition and self-consciousness. It's even making me ashamed to be writing about it this way... this essay is such a trite rationalization of a video that amounts to a siren's song of spontaneity and humanity. I have to write about the video, when I'd rather be creating it, or (better yet) simply living it.

But it leads me to consider another video that makes a complex statement on maturity and self-seriousness, but from a different direction. Take a look at B.I.G.'s video for Sky's the Limit:



Directed, of course, by the indomitable Spike Jones, it takes a simple casting quirk and turns it into a strange experience with traces of a complex statement on maturity within a music genre. Jonze's deadpan strangeness gives the video a different flavor than the Sigur Ros piece, and (as appropriate to the music) it's a less beautiful and more conflicted piece.

Jonze manages to bring a sense of tension to this video that makes it hard to read as message-bearing communication. We often envision rap as a posturing, inflationary cultural complex, proud but fraught with negativity. Granted, I'm speaking as a pretentious indie kid, the demographic that Jonze's videos normally appeal to, rather than as a street kid, the demographic that Biggie's music targets. Still, the very fact that Jonze directed this video... such a departure from his other source material, like Weezer and Fatboy Slim... opens up this contradiction in the first place.

Sky's the Limit is saying that beneath rap's posturing, there's something childlike. You can read this as a compliment or as a critique... are these children acting out this scenario because hip-hop is playful and spontaneous? This is a natural reading if you consider the tone of the music, which is generally reassuring. After all, [the] Sky is the limit and you know that you can have what you want, be what you want. Then again, if it makes you uncomfortable to see children in big bling, buying entirely into a decadent lifestyle of fast cars and easy women, you might see something different. Maybe the kids represent the immaturity of the rap scene, which (arguably) has spent the last ten years replacing defiance and strength of character with glamour and self-praise.

So is it about finding the past within the present? Or is it about losing the past through a painful process of disillusionment? It's hard to say... and that's what makes it a great video. Spike Jonze knows ambiguity, perhaps more than any other short-form director, and he's fully harnessed it here.

Whether you're grasping at the past or interrogating the present, whether you're searching for the sublime or for the naivety of your youth, this Christmas is probably a time to think about who you were and who you're becoming. These music videos offer one small take on an enormous question that we all have to keep asking... even knowing that we probably won't be finding an answer any time soon.

Cool Shit Alert: The Cadbury Gorilla

I really like this commercial: Gorilla Feels the Groove. I haven't written about a meme in a while, and this advert gives me a good feeling, so I think I can find an excuse to write about it.

First of all, why am I so attracted to it? It's the simplicity -- the gorilla's nonverbal acting, an expressed and gestured emotion, with a perfectly appropriate Phil Collins song. There's something profoundly sincere about the drumming and the monkeyface, looking toward the sky, and I think the fact that it's a gorilla makes it more austere somehow, and more authentic.

Cadbury beats Apple, in my opinion... as far as feeling the pure joy, vicariously making love to the music, Gorilla affects me more than the rockin' silhouettes, who look like they're having fun, but may be a little too awkward, or choreographed. It might be because the silhouettes seem to be dancing for, and/or addressing, the camera, whereas Gorilla seems to be alone in a studio, complete at peace with his Genesis. If that was a human making that enchanted face, I don't think I'd buy it.

Of course, you might take a second and look for meaning, thereby delaying the inevitable happiness that the commercial can bring. Make no mistake... the search for some sort of pun is futile. The commercial is a non-sequiter.

But you need to get past that to see why it's so damn successful. The point of a commercial is to induce an effect in the viewer, to take over a piece of mental space, and the Gorilla kicks some serious ass in that regard. First, you have to catch the audience's attention, like the Apple commercial does with bright colors. The extreme close-up of a Gorilla face does the trick, in my opinion, through a combination of fascination and confusion.

The commercial never explains the gorilla, but before we get so confused that we're bored, it moves on to the second effect: inducing a mental state. When you make the connection between the blissful, distracted expression and the ghostly soundtrack, you start to get it. When the bass kicks and the gorilla fully surrenders to the beat, you fall in with him. A few riffs later, you're in love with the song, and with the gorilla, and you're either laughing in amusement or tapping in empathy. Once you get the second effect, the carefully-crafted cerebral response, you get the product shot. There doesn't need to be an explicit connection. They just need to be correlated.

It's not manipulation, necessarily. If you're not making claims about the product, you certainly can't be lying. If you can craft such a simple image of pure joy, you've probably experienced it, and you probably know its nuances, and you probably want to bring it to your audience. This is my universalist optimism about good advertising... consumers are so savvy these days that the only way to seem sincere is to be sincere.

So I'm going to stake my faith in the idea that the director of this commercial doesn't give a shit whether I buy Cadbury chocolate. I think he was just using that forum as an excuse to bring the joy of music to his Gorilla, and through his Gorilla, to me.

Dove Onslaught and the Cold War of Culture

Dove's released a new video, OnSlaught, following the success of their PSA "Evolution" last year. I'm a big fan of the campaign... it's emblematic of a new sensibility developing in corporations, who are trying to create productive relationships with their clientelle, instead of just repeating taglines and saturating media with their logo. Those who want to destroy capitalism will still object, seeing this as another method of appropriation. Those who would rather meet the market half-way... people like me... should see this for what it is: a step forward for the culture, wherein the interests of the company, the consumer, and the society are becoming more intertwined and symbiotic.

This new Dove video is interesting to me, as a media student. Intentional or not, the ad references one of the most famous PSA's in history, the "Daisy Girl" ad created by Tony Schwartz in 1964. Schwartz has discussed his own inspiration in creating the ad, saying that it isn't designed to tell the public what to buy, so much as to activate the latent emotions they already have. In that way, Daisy Girl differs significantly from previous "sales pitch" and newsreel ads. Instead of pitching adjusted informational content, Schwartz creates a visual and audio environment that elicits an emotional response and taps an audiences anxieties and preconceptions.

Some people call this fearmongering, or propaganda... I see it as a new respect for evocation and the psychology of politics. Daisy Girl was an audacious PSA that addressed peace and militarism as resonant concerns for voters during the Cold War, and it made an abstract statement that spoke to the specific fears of the public. If corporations have harnessed this method to misrepresent products and play on anxieties and stereotypes, I don't think it's Mr. Schwartz's fault.

Onslaught, I feel, renews Schwartz's productive use of mass media. On the most superficial level, we're shown an intimate portrait of a child, and then our gaze is reversed and cast upon the dangers that confront her. There's no mention, textually or audibly, of sex, objectification, or feminism, but with the juxtaposition Dove presents, viewers realize that they know this imagery is dangerous and offensive. Try to explain it and you get lost in the words. Show it, out of context, in a river of sensory overload, and we're forced to confront it and deal with our own innate response.

And when these things converge -- the abstract, oblique theories (feminism, psychoanalysis, media critique) and the gut reactions (the intuitive revulsion and anxiety that Dove elicits) -- when these yield the same result, I'm disposed to believe it: that the beauty industry, with its fashion and cosmetic culture, is an ideological payload being dropped that needs to be diffused and neutralized.

Petraeus or Betray Us? A Subtle and Compelling Question

Lordy, I've done so much STUFF since I last wrote in here. I've seen four movies in theaters, started two novels, started and finished a graphic novel, and I've started writing some criticism for PopPolitics. The four movies were 3:10 to Yuma, King of Kong, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Eastern Promises. The novel I'm focused on is Spook Country, by William Gibson, and I'm looking forward to the train ride tomorrow morning, when I'll be reading it again. The graphic novel was The Nightly News, which was intense and comes recommended.

Sometime during this whirlwind of consumption, something political came to my attention: MoveOn.org ran a muckraking ad about General Patraeus, the commander of the Iraqi freedom defense military security awesome force (IFDMSAF). The ad makes a clever pun ("Patraeus or Betray Us?") to hook readers and put knots in conservative jock-straps, and then it basically argues that Patraeus is misrepresenting the facts to keep the IFDMSAF in Iraq.

Obviously, there's been an overwhelming media response, including the requisite posturing by editorial columnists and tweaking out by bloggers. I'm about a week late, but I think I should add my own pinch of salt to this heaping portion of mystery meat.

Here's the deal: the ad was aggressive, a very visible expenditure of the vast resources MoveOn has accumulated. Maybe it got into some peoples' heads. Maybe it just provided an easy target for conservative nay-sayers to take shots at. But seriously, "Betray Us"? What a juicy prompt for a slathering partisan frenzy of affirmation and condemnation. It takes a real message - the question about honesty and misplaced loyalty - and turns it into a bloody battle over propriety and respect, which are sort of the little bags of candy that manipulative people use to keep us distracted while the big people play.

All they had to do was put some more effort into the initial presentation. It's possible to get people engaged in a question without bludgeoning them with a rhetorical golf club. Get people interested BEFORE you make them angry... pull them into the facts before they have a chance to flatly reject your politics.

I think, in service of this goal, MoveOn needs to recruit some people from AdBusters. These guys are as radical and confrontation as you can get, but they always know how to frame an idea in a way that makes it striking and unfamiliar. I mean, AdBusters is pretty much pinned as a leftist radical organization, but if you decontextualize their work, you can see that it's interesting and intense before it's partisan. Unfortunately, their primary forum is a niche magazine that sells for impractical amounts of money.

AdBusters could frame an ad in such a way that it got attention, though, and they could definitely use their 1337 design sk1llz to drag some conservative cheerleaders into a serious, thoughtful argument. AdBusters knows how to disguise their arguments until it's just the right time for them to come out... MoveOn could use a lesson in that regard. In return, MoveOn could contribute their massive piles of Internet-generated wealth to distributing AdBusters' radical but carefully-articulated ideas, injected into the brains of the masses like heroin being forced on a helpless child by an insane homeless person.

The networkers, the designers, and the public, hungry for brain-food... sounds like a ménage à trois made in heaven, my friends. It's time to get on top of this.

Free Culture: Lessig and Frozen Yogurt

It's hard to find an authentic example of irony in pseudoironic postmodern culture, but this might be it. The other day, I was on the train when I saw a familiar type treatment on the back of a newspaper (and in this case, by type treatment, I mean both the words themselves and the way in which they were designed). It said "Free Culture," which is the name of a book I really liked by Lawrence Lessig.

The book is about creating a free environment for art and innovation, and it sketches a very convincing argument about the dangers of runaway copyright law. It's a refreshingly non-partisan take on the subject, and the discussion is rooted heavily in the realm of fact, history, and measured argument. Lessig argues that within any media environment, innovation has to feed off itself, and if intellectual property laws are too strictly enforced, the society will become closed and stagnant, and growth will be discouraged.

It was a great book, but I never expected to see it in a full-page ad on a daily newspaper. I took a closer look to figure out what was going on. Turns out it was an ad for Bloomingdales' free carrot frozen yogurt giveaway. The arrangement of the text isn't quite the same (the ad headline is on two lines), but both are in all caps, and they're in a similar, highly geometrical, sans-serif font. More importantly, it's the SAME PHRASE.

My intention here is not to cry plagiarism. Jesus, plagiarism wouldn't even make sense... there's no way for Bloomingdales to profit off a reference to Lessig's book. Outside the academic/economist/technologist circle, this book isn't exactly a world-renown piece of literature, and I doubt it's a demographic that Boomingdales is targeting right now. Oddly, the ad heading doesn't make a whole lot of sense on its own. "Free Culture" is a little too awkward a phrase to be useful if it's only being taken totally literally. So whether or not you assume their innocence, the advertisement doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

My assumption is that some designer saw Lessig's book on a shelf, or had read it a while ago, and they had the phrase "Free Culture" lingering in their head. I've seen it happen... a designer, writer, artist, marketer, etc. assumes they're pulling a line from their imagination, but they're actually peeling it directly from something they've seen or read recently. I've done it myself, in fact.

Of course, there's the irony that a phrase got pulled directly from a book whose mission is to allow appropriation to happen. It's a little fragment of postmodern poetry.

But there's also the little bit of insight here: Bloomingdales has proven Lessig's point, that media feeds on itself, and it only works because there's a rich, sometimes overwhelming space to draw from. Who know... maybe Lessig has helped Bloomingdales to sell some frozen yogurt? If so, I'd like to think he approves.

Healthcare! Viral Agents! And the well-being of the media according to Michael Moore and Mika Brzezinski

Oops... Michael Moore freaks out a little at Wolf Blitzer.

Here we see another moment of rampant leftist opinionation. It follows closely on the heels of this video of Mika Brzezinski, which contradicts it, in a certain way. Here are two people who really seem to care about what they're doing. For the moment, I'm going to talk about Moore, because... his clip is longer, I guess.

The man is not just running a media stunt. He's not a good enough actor to pull that off. No, indeed, Moore is stuttering and twitching because he's truly pissed at the segment that ran about Sicko, and I can understand why... the segment's mildly oppositional tone is irritating, and its argument is pretty incomprehensible. Let's look at that for a moment.

The segment concedes, almost in passing, that the US is #37 on the WHO's list of national health care systems. It makes an even briefer mention of the fact that we're the only industrialized nation without universal health care. After conceding these EXTREMELY important facts, the segment grants exaggerated importance to some rather empty arguments. The US is superior in terms of waiting times for non-essential medical procedures? Now THAT is a highly-qualified achievement. And then the segment inadvertently reminds us that the United States has worse waiting times for physician appointments than four out of five other industrialized nations, surveyed by some unnamed source. HOW does this demonstrate that service in the US isn't so bad? WHY are we supposed to care so much about Canada's wait times?

The segment was a pretty strange logical construction, and it seemed to take its points pretty seriously. This annoyed me as a viewer, but it really annoyed Moore, whose film was its subject.

As my roommate confirms (another good contribution from Dom), Moore has an unfortunate habit of wrecking his own credibility by freaking out at newscasters who are interviewing him. Why he spends ten minutes spazzing at Wolf about his underrepresentation is beyond me, especially when Wolf makes it clear that Moore has, in fact, been invited back, and Moore has consistently declined.

Contrast Michael Moore's credibility issues with Mika. She's part of the media industry that she's criticizing... mainstream television news... and as a result, she's pre-stocked with a solid reserve of credibility. She spends some of it here, but spent carefully, as Mika does it, the net result is more credibility in the future. After all, she's just demonstrated that she cares more about her job as a social function than as a service to her bosses. Moore has spent too much of his credibility on partisan rants, and at this point, his outburst at Wolf seems like a cliche instead of a statement.

In light of this shortcoming, I was glad to see the interview turn reasonably intelligent at around nine minutes. When Moore calmed the fuck down, his arguments became much more persuasive.

Jesus Christ... the equivalent of six 9-11's a year. Moore says he doesn't debate in sound bites, but as far as sound bites go, that's a powerful one.

Moore knows how to drive a point home, as he's demonstrated in each film he's released. However, in terms of standing up to the news agencies themselves, I think Mika Brzezinski does a better job from within the confines of the institution than Moore does from outside.

Street Fighter II is still King

My roommate just drew my attention to this remarkably simple video, featuring a fully stationary female guitarist rocking a song from one of my favorite games of all time, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior:




She's pretty awesome. This is what glam-riff guitar rock was made for, and she does it right... standing still, not giving us anything but that gorgeous post-disco soundtrack riff from the American Military Base in all our 14-year-old imaginations. At that age, I could beat my Super Nintendo version with Guile, Chun-Li, Ryu, Ken, and Blanka, and along with a couple other exceptional games, it was one of the only ones I could play over and over and over again. SF II deserves every homage made for it.

Special Report: Literature may be coming for YOUR child

We live in scary times. Just watch the news… that tenacious media bastion, reassuring us with a dose of truth in the face of everyday challenges. They’re the only ones you can trust these days, as newscasters are quick to tell: politicians, the homeless, minorities with their reverse racism, scientists with their global warming…

Atheists with their discrimination…

Libraries with their sexual predators…

Emo with its girl-pants…

It’s you against the world, with only the evening news by your side. Every day, FOX and ABC and NBC give you the low-down on the newest alert colors. For the former optimist, the inner enlightenment philosopher we all have to overcome, it begs the question: why has the world gone to shit?

I think I’ve got it. What’s the great link between “libraries,” “emotional drama,” and “godless enlightenment?” What bane, what threat to our collective complacency, do we find at the center of that sinister Venn diagram? What’s been sitting under our noses for hundreds… nay, thousands of years, feeding these cultural instabilities that are looming before us, threatening us all?

The answer is obviously literature.

Here’s what our field researchers have discovered.

REASON THE FIRST: It’s found in libraries.

How can you trust a place that’s so quiet, so self-enclosed, so free of corporate advertisements and loud noises? It’s not only (as Carl Monday pointed out) a breeding ground for sexual predators. It’s also a breeding ground for books, and this is much worse. Stephen Colbert was the first to see the danger, but he’s continually underestimated it. The book is the crack in society’s moral foundation, and libraries are the syphilitic, spongiform masses where those cracks begin to propagate.

REASON THE SECOND: Books are constantly expressing things.

You may say, “But Jesse! You’re expressing something right now! How can you so quickly condemn?” Well, I say to you, AWAY, shuffling abomination with your logic drool! You obviously haven’t SEEN what’s to be found in these books! Literature gives voice to all sorts of nooks and crannies of the human soul that are better left in shadow. Pederasty? Lolita. Childhood fratricide? Jude the Obscure. Self-inflicted eye-poking? Oedipus, one of the oldest of the so-called “books.” Homosexuality? You’ve read Oscar Wilde. Don’t tell me you didn’t pick up on it.

And by “expressing” these destructive impulses, books are obviously advocating for them… urging us to carry them out in our everyday lives. Forget Steal This Book… Kill This Baby is scrawled across every surface in our cultural history. No wonder emo kids are all cutting themselves.

REASON THE THIRD: I don’t actually have a third reason, which sort of offends my fairytale sensibilities.

At any rate, it’s time for us to take action against this lurking threat. These sin-holes, these tomes of the damned, these liberal fascist tools of Satan must be purged from our libraries… nay, the libraries themselves must be purged from the epidermis of our sacred culture. What would our founding fathers think if they found us harboring all these instruments of degeneracy?

There’s only one answer: they must be set ablaze. Firemen would probably be the best people for this job. I don’t remember who it was that suggested that course of action, but dammit, they were right.

Jeff Han shows us the tactile future

Ever have the passing premonition that you just mastered your discipline and already it's about to become outdated? I don't suppose it happens very often... either you're going into a fresh field that's got a lot of rich territory to conquer (nanorobotics?) or you're entering something that's proven permanently useful (nursing). I guess we all hope our profession is some idealized combination of those two... so practical, and yet with so much room to grow. For me, that's graphic design: something we all need, as long as we have mass production and advertising, and something that gives vast room for new innovation and creative freedom.

But when I see something like this, Jeff Han's insane multi-touch technology, sometimes it gives me the fleeting sense that I just won't be able to keep up, no matter how attentive I am to design and aesthetics. This shit is going to change my industry, along with the whole meta-industry of information technology, and dozens of sub-disciplines that are affected by it.

This should excite me, and let me tell you, it does. I was excited about it back when I saw it in Minority Report, before I had any idea that it was really on the horizon. Now I can start to see what it's going to do for interface technology. Through college, and in my current job, I've been learning to design for a certain very specific gesture that the mouse is based on: hovering and clicking, or hunting and pecking. It's been all about hot-spots and discreet areas on-screen, making certain things look intuitively like buttons, or tabs, or handles: one focal point at all times. With the mouse, we're still searching, focusing, and working in a simple sequence.

The multi-touch screen is going to make our experience more truly tactile. Now, we're going to be working with both hands at a time, holding one thing while we press another, integrating depth (i.e. pressure) and relationships (i.e. between fingers). It's a bunch of new axes, and it's going to require a whole new way of thinking... probably less like pointing at a picture and more like playing an instrument. I'm not sure I'm prepared to design this way, and I have a feeling it's going to take over the things I've been specializing in.

Even so, the possibilities are amazing. The old discreet systems of keyboard (strict set number of symbols in memorized positions) and mouse (one point at a time, searching and focusing at one area of the screen) weren't really cut out for the new wave of digital production. Some of my friends have asked, "What makes this so great, anyway? I don't see any problem with my on-screen controls..." And if they're using MS Word and Internet Explorer, they're probably right.

But the new wave of production specialists are going to be doing some amazing shit with this technology. In 3D graphics programs, we've traditionally been trying to translate three degrees of control into the two degrees available on-screen, and worse yet, we've been doing it with a one-dimensional mouse pointer. Now we can have the equivalent of three pointers on-screen at once, moving intuitively according to our gestures, and furthermore, we can use pressure to add another dimension. Controlling all those variables at once, what might the 3D artist of the future be able to do? Real-time modeling? What do you think: a 3DJ?

And speaking of DJ, how about video jockeys, those guys who do real-time video mixing along with music? That's another media space where keyboards often don't really cut it... you're working with dozens of factors, including frame-rate, hue and saturation, multiple clips and timelines, opacity, multiplication and repetition, and you're expected to do it all in response to the music you're listening to. It's hard to translate your listening habits into keyboard pokes, or (even worse) hunt-and-click mouse behavior... but with gestures, speed tracking, pressure sensitivity, point-to-point relationships, and all those other ridiculous variables that this technology allows, VJing could become more like dancing. This is a space for the artist of the future, hyper-complex and hyper-sensitive to all senses, to emerge and take over mass culture.

Don't discount the possibility that this will make your everyday tasks more intuitive, either. Replace the back-space key with a simple act of rubbing a word off the computer screen. Even more intuitive: watch that video to see Jeff Han group photos and organize images with his hands, like shuffling them around on an infinitely-large light table.

This is the future, people. It's some amazing shit.

The Abandoned: A concise history of horror movie cliches

So I keep seeing this poster for a new movie, The Abandoned, and I can't help thinking of... well... every horror movie made in the last ten years. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not even into horror movies enough to make that call. But I've never seen a better example of a use of design encapsulating all the cliches of a cinema subculture. Let me list them for you, just for fun.

Note: this is a matter of breaking the poster down into codes, through which method I shall demonstrate that it's a beautiful permanent record of recent horror movie cliches... even ones you may not have noticed before.

1 - Representative content code #1: Doll

This cliche has been around for quite a while, and it's thoroughly representative of the trend in horror film in the last twenty years or so. We all remember Chucky the possessed toy in Childs' Play (I, II, III, IV, V?), and we've also seen posters for The Puppet Master and The Leprechaun. Somebody help me out... what exactly is it about dolls that makes them such an enigma, and so easily turned into an icon for disturbed psychology? Is it the artificiality, and thus the objectification and/or machination of the human body? Is it the soullessness implied by the unfocusing, unreactive eyes? Whatever it is, it's a hell of a theme.

2 - Representative content code #2: Bloody tears

This one is less common than the "deranged dolly" cliche, but it's still everywhere. Let's see... recent examples... it figured into a haunting nightmare scene in One Hour Photo, it was a core image in Madonna's Like a Prayer video, and apparently it happened in Stay Alive and Stigmata. Obviously part of the appeal is the emotional weight of injury and trauma, and part of it is the power of its Christian implications. In case you were wondering, there actually is a condition that causes you to cry blood. It's called Haemolacria.

3 - Stylistic device: cracked photo treatment

This is in reference to the fact that the image on this poster is riddled with cracks and decay, looking like something somebody pulled out of a pile of crap in a dusty attic. This is an classic horror movie thing, too, but especially recently: all the posters for Saw, Hostel, Nightwatch, Jeepers Creepers, The Hills Have Eyes, and even as far back as Rosemary's Baby had this kind of stylization, which sets you, as the audience, at a distance from the object of fear. After all, if you give it too much of a face and too much of an identity, especially in the movie poster, you're ruining the punchline of seeing the monster in his full glory for the first time.

4 - Title Convention: The BLAHBLAH

I keep seeing horror movies with one-word titles, preceeded by the article "The". Now, the absolute paradigm case is a plural group of people identified under an ambiguous title, such as "The Messengers," "The Innocents," "The Others," "The Ugly," "The Unborn," "The Brood," or "The Uninvited." The Abandoned falls right into that core group... a non-specific description of a faceless, soulless mass that waits outside your door, living dead style. Of course, if you expand your horizons a little, you get a TON of other movies with "The..." titles: The Ring, The Grudge, The Birds, The Thing, The Exorcist, The Antichrist, The Beast, The Believers, The Beyond, The Burning, The Cave, The Cell, The Changeling...

God. There are so many. I shouldn't have started with the horror movie list.

Anyway, that's my observation for the day. I think we should commend the marketing geniuses behind The Abandoned for giving us such a concise record of horror culture, without a whole lot of extra "creative" stuff to water it down.

A question, perhaps for my readers ("The Nonexistent")... how much of this stuff goes back to literary horror? Obviously bloody tears go back to the bible, more or less. How about the other codes? It strikes me that "creepy dolly" themes are fairly recent, but they could potentially be traced as far back as The Golem from Jewish folklore. The "cracked photo" themes? Probably pretty recent, especially since they seem to depend on reproduction and alteration of illustrations. How about "The BLAHBLAH"? Were there a lot of horror stories with such titles, back before horror was truly a cinema phenomenon?

As someone who's outside the horror culture, these are questions I'm not qualified to answer. Does anyone have anything for me?

The context is the key: Michael Richards as a racist asshole

Here was the YouTube what-the-f'ck moment of the season... maybe the year: Kosmo Kramer goes racially ballistic. I'm sure you've all heard about this. I hope you've seen it, too. Actually watching it is a different from the second-hand experience. It's surreal and disturbing, like some sort of celebrity Real World meets Aronofsky shit.

It's ridiculous and unpredictable, but believe it or not, things can get weirder. After all, we can just write Michael Richards' outburst off as another insane celebrity, like Tom Cruise the Scientologist, or Mel Gibson the raving weirdo. But a few days later, Richards went on Letterman to apologize, and that's when it gets REALLY hard to process.

The guy on Letterman isn't a PR afficianado, nor a racist creep, nor a short-spoken apologist making a last grasp at credibility. He looks like a man on the verge of a complete breakdown. He absolutely can't explain the person on stage yelling "Nigga" (as it's spelled in the video subtitle)... he doesn't even seem to know who that guy is. Michael Richards claims he's not a racist, and he thanks the country for confronting him... he claims that he has to confront himself (and, to be more specific, to "do personal work")... he says he doesn't even know where that rage came from. He apologizes to people of all races, knowing that he hasn't just offended a few black activists. He's not even sure he should be on Letterman, because he's afraid he won't come across right.

He also says this: "Yeah, I tried to... I tried to do that [diffuse his own remarks by making them outrageous]. You don't have the whole thing there in what they're showing, everyone. I tried to jujitsu that..."

This, my friends, though subtle, is important. I actually tried to find an extended clip, so I could see the part of the routine leading up to the outburst. It's nowhere to be found, and I think it might have an effect on how the situation is interpreted. After all, what we're seeing is overt racism, angry, directed at an uncooperative audience member. It's the kind of violent racism that's been phased almost entirely out of popular culture. But when you take a clip like this out of context, you lose what a friend wisely referred to as "meta-messages."

In light of our culture's approach to racial and identity issues, meta-messages are hard to navigate these days. Dave Chapelle's show was clearly a satire on racial relations, a series of parodic stereotypes offered up by a black man that functioned as a comment on his own culture's self-perception. Compare this with Carlos Mencia, whose humor has taken some flack for being offensive without being funny. Or with South Park's questionable use of stereotypes in character casting. Or to Abercrombie's ill-advised Asian stereotype t-shirts.

Some of these examples make their meta-messages work: Dave Chapelle is clearly using assimilation and self-parody to frame his offensive remarks, and this is an accepted way to drain the power of out a stereotype (just ask the "queer" community). South Park employs a healthy dose of irony... Token's status as "sole black character" is obviously ironic, and it becomes a statement on racial identity when you realize that Token's parents are some of the wealthiest parents in South Park.

Other meta-messages don't work. Mencia tries to frame his offensive remarks in serious treatments of national issues, but he doesn't bring any complexity to the jokes he's making. At best, his rants about national identity are just fluff for his racial stereotypes, and at worst, he actually makes his stereotypes sound sincere and his explanations sound ironic. Not the best idea ever. Abercrombie also failed to make any constructive statement with their racially-motivated humor... with no nod or wink, the race became the punchline, rather than the stupidity of the stereotype, and that's why we call it "racism" rather than "irony."

Michael Richards lost his meta-message, too, and that's the danger of being a comedian in a racially volatile country. Was he building up to his offensive remarks? Maybe, but clearly the crowd got pissed, so they didn't get that, or they didn't care. Maybe he just stepped over a comedic line, to the point where the irony no longer justified the joke.

Or maybe it wasn't a problem with communication... maybe Kramer lost the meta-message in his own head. Maybe that's why he seems so shaken on Letterman, and why he has to confront himself. As a comedian, he's spent years learning to manipulate subtexts and meta-messages, and as an actor, he's spent years creating characters and manufacturing personalities. It seems like, for a moment, he forgot how to frame his thoughts in a protective barrier of self-mockery and sarcasm. Suddenly, the irreverent white boy became a volatile racist, and it scared him as much as it scared us.

"I'm a performer. I push the envelope."

I'm sorry you lost yourself, Michael Richards, but do yourself a favor and get that personal development taken care of.

The subtle art of Witty Kitty Photoshop Captioning in the context of modernist painting

Okay, so this is going to be a journey into one of my darker secrets, but I can't help but post on it. But before that, I want to say sorry I haven't been posting much... school and work are converging in an unholy aggregate to swallow my life till about Christmas. It's okay, I like it that way, but still... doesn't leave much time for free thinking.

So through a site I must confess I visit a lot... CuteOverload... I came upon another site. I won't be visiting it as much, but I've sent it to a LOT of people, and I find myself thinking about it perhaps more than it warrants. It's at www.knitemare.org/cats, and it has a lot of well-captioned photos of kitties (some with obvious Photoshopping). First, I just liked the funny references and the amazing photos of cats, and I liked picking out my favorites (among them: Superman, Invisible Bike, Hugs Tiem, and I made you a cookie). But after a while, I started making connections.

It was the Aggressive Cat versus Defensive Cat shot that did it. It felt disturbingly familiar, and after a while I started remembering a paper I did in college about an American Realist painting. This painting is by George Bellows. The picture shown here compares the Bellows painting to the cat photo. Marvel at the similarities.

It's not just because it's two cats fighting. On one side, you have the dark kitty, clearly dominating, and on the other side you have the light kitty, looking like it's about to collapse under the pressure. Both images have a lot of movement from aggressive to defensive, and in both cases the aggressive party seems to be overwhelming the defensive one, folding over it from above. They're too similar to ignore.

So after I found that little gem, I went looking for another couple fine-art/cat-art juxtapositions. I only found one more, and I made a juxtaposition of this one, too. It's a comparison of the "Rape is Imminent" photo (which has since been removed, for obvious reasons) with a painting attributed to Goya. This painting isn't universally accepted as genuine, but it's still associated with Goya's body of work. Besides his disturbing images of Saturn and The Colossus, Goya was commissioned to do a lot of portraits of women from court, and this painting is a little bit of a riff on this project.

Okay, so the connection here isn't so remarkable. Still, in both the cat and the Goya, the subdued figure in the background is the decisive feature, reversing the mood of the image. Goya's portrait of two court ladies is initially pleasant and distinguished; the image of the cat is initially cute. In both cases, the repose of the foreground is disrupted by the sinister figure lurking in the background. Why are they there? What are they planning? Why aren't they letting me enjoy the pretty ladies and/or cute kitty?

What does it mean that such remarkable parallels exist between fine art and sugar-coated amusement? Maybe it means the appeal of images is universal, whether they're exalted as fine art or dismissed as tongue-in-cheek irony. Maybe the shape and structure of an effective visual is the same in every case, from masterworks of portraiture to advertising photography to cute kitty snapshots.

Or maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe I just like pictures.

Michael J. Fox : seems real enough to me

So in this commercial, a political ad for Claire McCaskill, Michael J. Fox demonstrates the symptoms of Parkinson's disease while he advocates for embryonic stem cell research, or at least for politicians who favor it. It's started a lot of debate, and I'm going to throw in my media-critical two cents. If you're looking for my answer to whether Fox was "faking," you're not going to get it. I think it's a stupid question to be asking. I'll get to that part later.

A lot of the controversy here comes from Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that Michael J. Fox was either faking his symptoms or hadn't taken his medicine. That's made the video the #1 video on the Internet over the past couple days, and a lot of moderates who remember Fox from Spin City (or even Family Ties, for you old timers) have seen what he looks like at the later stages of the disease. Every so often, we have to thank misguided idiots for bringing our attention to interesting issues.

Now that this is THE Internet meme of the day, we've got a counter-ad from the opponents of the Missouri bill and of the politicians who support it. Again, it's a bad reaction that will probably just discredit the people who aired it. The production value is pitiful, like it was shot by an intern with his dad's camcorder, and the faces they recruited are unrecognizable, at least to me. They're also sensationalist and unsympathetic.

This sort of exemplifies the reactionary mode of the conservative world, though. These guys aren't good on the defensive... Rush makes blowhard comments to misdirect people from the actual political issue, and the Life Communications Fund mobilizes an embarrassing video, complete with unsympathetic actors and one-dimensional sensationalism. This is why I can't understand the success of the conservative clique these days... I can't empathize with them, and I can't seem to get a direct answer out of them on any of the important issues. At least this one guy is an exception, and the Life Communications Fund should probably hire him to produce their next campaign ad.

Seriously, though, I can get on board with Fox for a simple reason. I mean, the fact that he's a celebrity should turn me off, and I don't really care about what's-her-name, or the state constitution of Missouri, so why do I care? I've seen the public lives of superstars, and a lot of them are idiots.

Here's the thing, though... they're rarely vulnerable on screen. Fox is in an unpretentious office, talking directly to the camera, forthright about his opinion and how much it means to him, and he's showing me what his disease has done to his life. Whether Michael J. Fox was "faking" isn't a question that merits a comment, because whether Rush wants to acknowledge his status as a human being or not, he has Parkinsons. These are real symptoms for thousands of patients in the world, and Fox is one of them. He's letting us into a part of his life that's difficult, and being a public personality only makes it harder when you acually get around to laying yourself bare.

"But he's an actor, that's his job." No, you're an idiot. An actor plays characters. Fox is only representing himself, talking to us directly, and he puts that final personal note on the commercial by saying "Americans like me." This isn't a persona... it's a guy making his needs and his vulnerabilities clear. When you open yourself up to a ravenous public like Fox has, things will stick, and there will be people like Rush Limbaugh to make sure you don't get off easy. Michael J. Fox, a childhood star, lurching under the weight of a disease, was strikingly authentic, because making a personal burden public isn't a cheap way to get attention. Fox is offering something that people should see, and because they recognize him, maybe a few more people will notice.

Good call, Dove

Dove's released this here video, which shows the dizzying process that a normal person undergoes to become a billboard spectacle. It's a pretty cool video for a pretty amazing campaign... not directed at an issue that too far away to comprehend, like world hunger, or too abstract to really care about, like globalization. This is a campaign that's directed at the everyday lives of men and women, who pass from mass media experiences to lives in the home and the office, carrying around the baggage of confused standards and unrealistic self-images. We all do it, people... men and women... and Dove's right. It's stupid.

I think, at ten years old, a lot of us males generated a sort of ideal fantasy woman who we imagined seducing us as we got more comfortable with masturbation. TMI? Too bad. She looked a lot like the women in fashion magazines and hair product commercials, and she was an internal experience that the advertising world has spent years manipulating and trying to capture. Girl X, the unrealizable perfect woman, stands as a theoretical limit for a scale of beauty that we all carry around with us, men and women alike, and it's perpetuated by the old boys of fashion and advertising, who still think their popularity depends on approaching this limit as closely as possible.

Here's my abstract representation of the scale, as we tend to culturally understand it. Don't read too much into this... it's subconscious, and a lot of us spend tons of time trying to fight it, but it's still a ubiquitous cultural model that infects our thinking.

And I've noticed something strange. Almost every woman I've ever been intimate with, whether sexually or emotionally, from the shy to the sexually-secure, sees herself as part of the "Normal" section of the scale, but every one sees herself as being at the bottom of that section... like, right where "average" turns into "mediocre."

And it's not because I tend to like women with low self-esteem. This is also true of female friends who were smart and aggressive, and who are more than capable of well-informed reflection. Somehow, by taking away our control of our criteria for attractiveness, the media has caused a universal self-image pandemic. Every woman looks around her and sees the world teeming with girls who are prettier than she is. Maybe it's the ubiquitous "neurotic mom" syndrome... that's another trend I've noticed. All moms inadvertently transmit their habitual neuroses to their daughters in their earliest years.

At any rate, women have to realize something about the people who fantasize about them (I include in this category straight men, gay women, and all varieties of bisexual). First, we've given up on... no, in fact, we've literally lost interest in Girl X. We've realized she's as flat as the billboards she adorns, and if she were real, and we were dating her, she would probably ditch us to go to the gym and the tanning salon. We don't think about her when we masturbate any more. We think about our girlfriends and strangers we saw on the subway, because Girl X got REALLY BORING.

Second, even though we tend to see this scale as universal, it takes on a unique hue in every person's head. There are no identical scales of attractiveness... one gentleman prefers women in size 11 to 15, another likes girls with really strong cheekbones, a girl likes women with big thighs that taper down to small feet. A few select people, like Miss Amp, understand this, and she says it with a lot more attitude than I can muster.

Any self-respecting girl can, and WILL, find somebody who places them toward the "very attractive" end of the spectrum, and who will be overjoyed to date them, especially when they find out about the awesome personality that goes with that great body.

I don't know who I've really been writing this to, so I'll assume it's to everybody. Here goes...

GUYS: Don't be ashamed to like whatever it is you like in a woman. If you really like skinny girls with bags under their eyes, then go to the fucking Calvin Klein studio. But if you're like me, and you find a girl attractive because she's got fucking brilliant curves and a warm smile, then make it clear to everyone around you. Idle man-talk is standing squarely in the way of anybody having any perspective, because in idle man-talk, everyone is supposed to agree that the skinny chick with blonde hair is totally bangin'. More often than not, it's a goddamn lie that only one in twenty of us actually believe.

GIRLS: I know it's hard, but don't get suckered into this body-image shit. Whether something is listed as being "healthy" or not, whether it's talking about "self-image" or not, if it's telling you to lose weight or smooth out your skin tone, ignore it. When you look at other women, try to look directly in their eyes before you decide that they're too chubby, or overdressed, or boring-looking. We need to extract "health" and "self-esteem" from "looking your best" and "fitting" into anything, because we're at a point in history where improving your looks is directly at odds with improving your emotional health. There is no open space between indifference and neurosis... when you force your belt one hole tighter, the judgement train has already left the station.

The 5-year anniversary: five responses

I found five media responses to September 11th. Here's what I think of them. If you see this as the malinformed opinion of a gushy blogger grad student with too much free time, then feel free to dismiss it. If you're capable of seeing it as a social, communicative, and aesthetic critique, feel free to respond to it, or just to give it a quick glance to see if it resonates with you.


TACTICAL RHETORIC - President Bush

"Since the horror of Nine-Eleven, we have learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy – but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam – a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent."

"We saw what a handful of our enemies can do with box-cutters and plane tickets. We hear their threats to launch even more terrible attacks on our people. And we know that if they were able to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they would use them against us."

"... the war is not over – and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious."

Bush's words are so transparent they're invisible. He goes through a predictable series of steps: he engages the susceptible listener with empowering words, and within a few paragraphs, he turns his focus to the emnity that he's spent the last five years constructing. He makes a sharp, over-dramatic generalization about "the enemy" and he links them to the Islamic faith, and he injects a few words of alarmism and political self-aggrandization. If any single theme can be drawn from this monolouge, apart from the simplistic anxiety-mongering, it's that since September 11, America is defined by its enemy.


LINGERING SENTIMENTALISM - Rudy Giuliani on CBS News

"I'm thinking right at this minute that the twin towers used to be right behind me for the longest time, and I'm also thinking about how when they came down, this chapel where George Washington prayed was spared..."

Giuliani is the quintessential New Yorker, so he has the right to be sentimental. Unfortunately, mass media sentimentalism, broadcast over a major news network, is bound to distance us all from the event. Some of us don't have nostalgia, and don't want it... we want to move forward and find solutions. Others of us remember the event sentimentally, but when we're confronted with an onslaught of pre-packaged tragedy, appropriating and reselling our emotional response, we're forced to turn off our receptors and live in the silence of our apartments. Finally, the third group of us feels the weight of emotional memory, and Giuliani's sentimentalism is satisfying, but then we become vulnerable to the vast baggage of political rhetoric, advertising, and partisan manipulation that inevitably comes with any mass media package. Rudy should be sad and meditative. He should also keep all those things closer to himself, so we can keep them personal too. (see: entry #5)


LIBERAL BACKLASH - Keith Olbermann, live on MSNBC

"Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you."

Olbermann's words are ballsy. Such confrontational overtones are rare in popular media (see John Stewart as the notable exception), and it's almost unheard of in a major news outlet. As always in media studies, it's important to consider the relationship between for(u)m and content, so we find ourselves at an impasse: how appropriate is it to use the 5th anniversary of September 11th as a political battlefield?

Maybe it's disrespectful. This kind of political rant may come across as opportunistic and soapboxy when it coincides with the anniversary of a national holiday. It seems almost trite, and as such, it may also discredit the very valid points that Olbermann is bringing up. And creditability aside, is a day of rememberance the right day to lash out?

Or maybe, on this day when we commemorate America, Olbermann is the very image of an American voice. Once we give him credit for being right, then the pieces of his monolouge start falling into place... being outspoken is the first form of Americanism. Olbermann is offering his strong political opinion as a tribute to an important historical event, like calling out an opponent on his own appropriated, but still disputed, territory.

I reserve final judgement on this one.


META-CRITIQUE - Benefit of the Doubt

These guys are smart... in light of a great tragedy, it's always a good idea to step back and account for the general outlook. Benefit of the Doubt shows that the media is the psychological vector for the culture, and that through it, a pathological complex like American terrorism PTSD can unfold for an uncannily long time. The only disadvantage of Jesse's acute coverage is that he occasionally embarks on bizarre self-referential tangents.


PERSONAL GESTURE - Ze Frank

Ze Frank is probably one of the subtlest guys distributing digital media right now. That's not necessarily saying much, but in Ze's case, there's a mastery of form and message that you just don't get anywhere else. His video is irreverent, in a sense... there's a sort of avoidance in the long sequence of shots of the Brooklyn promenade, where you look across the river at Lower Manhattan. His song isn't somber, but it's sprinkled with relevant thoughts, distantly-connected meditations put to a funky beat and a repetitive chorus. In a sense, the pedestrian music video seem like Ze is making the event insubstantial and impersonal.

Then you realize what he's saying, and what he's up against... his thoughts follow their own form because he's not interested in manipulating rhetoric, or manufacturing sentimentality, or voicing opposition, or in critical analysis... he just wants to return to the situation with perspective.

Then you watch one of his last few videos and realize that this is the same walk he took on September 11th, 2001... and you discover that this is truly personal for him. You just have to dig a little to find that he's constructed that personal meaning from fragments of history and reflection. Whether we like it or not, it's what we're all going to have to do in the end.

The Next Wave (Julia Stiles on the digital revolution)

This video showed up recently on YouTube, and it's pretty brilliant. The 12-year old Julia Stiles as a hacker prodigy, covering the digital underground for the school paper in Ghostwriter. .. forget Marshall McLuhan and Neo. This is the Internet messiah that we all overlooked.

(in case you can't understand the multi-jigawatt decibel oscillations of this Internet hyperstream, scroll down... I've done the best I can to make a transcript, and I put it at the end of this entry.)

Anyone remember 1993? Some bloggers probably don't, and even for me it's hardly more than a pair of tail-lights in the fog of memory. It was two years before Hackers, and the infamous Time Cyberporn article, both of which brought a seedy infamy to the circonicum tubes of the Interweb. It was before iPods and the Star Wars Kid and All Your Base, before wiki and blogs and Penny Arcade, before anyone had heard of the RIAA or thought of free Internet music, before CSS and Flash and VRML (okay, so that one never caught on).

Yes, sir, 1993 was the springtime of contemporary culture. The Internet was still a seedling, and do you remember how much hope we had for it? It was going to revolutionize our culture, create a new era of communication and literacy, and break down barriers of age, ethnicity, and ideology. The Internet was an atom bomb whose fuse had just been lit, and we were all right there with Julia Stiles, listening for the majesty of the blast.

The Internet delivered on some of its promises, and it stalled out on others. Is media more democratic? Absolutely, and the phenomenon is only increasing. Is the whole world wired up and spinning in a state of digitally-mediated peace? No, not exactly... like every utopian technology, the Internet was appropriated by the wealthy and privileged, and it hasn't managed to break down that division quite yet. Even so, our lives are vastly richer, and we're vastly more intelligent as a culture, as a result of the Internet.

Even so, it seems harder to commit to the digital age now than it was to be excited for it back at the beginning. The flowering of digital technology has gone hand in hand with a growth of cynicism, the natural by-product of a culture that's suddenly exposed to all its own highs and lows. Images like this "Special Olympics" announcement, and the coining of terms like Godwin's Law (that people just have to bring up Hitler every time they have a fucking debate) are indications of our distrust of Internet discussion. Bloggers spend a lot of time disparaging each other, like in this blogger's post, where he bitches about MySpace users while profoundly misinterpreting Ze Frank's brilliant (and truly optimistic) post on democratization of design. As the Internet's become part of our daily experience, we've also come up with an array of words for our digital pet peeves: spam, trolls, pop-ups, flame wars, and noobs.

Where did our excitement go? Is disenchantment a necessary by-product of experience? Did the Internet live up to our expectations, and if not, where did it fail, and where did WE fail? Is cyberspace still a frontier, or is it a cultural junkyard, like every frontier we try to colonize?

I'm not immune to Internet cynicism... I shake my head in dismay when people disrupt Wikipedia articles, and I'm thoroughly tired of reading arguments where people exaggerate my arguments so far out of proportion that they can compare me to Hitler. But every so often, I feel overcome with appreciation for the digital revolution that's connected me with a world beyond little suburbia. Bloggers like Ze Frank and William Gibson and Lawrence Lessig bring it out, and at those moments, I can relate to that young Julia Stiles, an explorer on a frontier that's still unconquered territory.

If I was that twelve-year old talking to Julia Stiles, you know what I'd say to her?

"Yeah, I've read Neuromancer. Twice."

And then, just before I fainted from the pressure of talking to a pretty girl, I'd manage to get one more thing out. I'd say, "Yeah, Julia, you're right. This is the place where I can say whatever I want, and be judged on my words, not on my wrinkled shirt. As long as we put our faith in those console cowboys... as long as we keep believing in cyberspace, and investing our time and energy into making it more intelligent... then we can also have faith that it'll change the world throughout, and far beyond, our own meager lifetimes."

*swoon* *faint* *Nurse's office*




[transcript of dialouge from YouTube video]

"Do you know anything about hackers? Have you jammed with the console cowboys in cyberspace?"

"What?"

"Ever read Neuromancer?"

"Huh?"

"Ever experienced the New Wave? Next Wave? Green wave? Or cyberpunk? I didn't think so. I'll handle the hacker stories."

"Yeah, I think you should. Where'd you learn about all this hacker stuff?"

[pointing to the computer] "In there. It's a world where you're judged by what you say and think... not by what you look like. A world where curiousity and imagination is a power. [pause to return to real life] We need that paper here, people! Work with me! Work with me!"

[end transcript]