I've had a theory for a while, and it's generally unpopular... I'm almost the only one who holds it. Of course, popularity is not correlated with validity AT ALL (sometimes quite the opposite), but still, if you advance an unpopular theory, you should be sure you have something compelling to offer the opposition. So this is the first time this one's coming out.
This theory has to do with the general angst and disapproval of "hipsters" in popular culture. It's pretty ubiquitous at this point... "Fuckin' hipsters" is an alarm sounded all over New York, the Lower East Side, and (I assume) everywhere else. It's a stigma that can be applied to neighborhoods (Williamsburg), beers (PBR), articles of clothing (pork pies), filmmakers (Wes Anderson), musicians (Connor Oberst), and people (that dude who lives in the apartment above you). They get so much bad press, you'd they were EVERYWHERE, a plague of locusts on our Manhattan avenues. There are some powerful voices attacking the Hipster... Nothing Nice to Say, a generally amazing punk comic, has run a number of strips whose target was the Minneapolis hipster. More notably, Time Out New York just ran an article called "The Hipster Must Die."
But where are they? I can't fucking find them. I occasionally see a dude in a fedora, or a girl in eccentric post-hippie attire, or someone drinking a PBR, but none of them seem like the shallow bad-faith revolutionaries that are such a bugaboo of modern media. For a while, I figured they were specifically a plague on the streets of Willyburg and Minneapolis, and that I wasn't seeing them because I just wasn't in the right place.
But then, one day, someone called ME a hipster. Normally, I'd have just laughed and said, "Oh yeah, you bastard? YOU'RE the hipster, I'm just a kid who lives in Brooklyn" (kind of like in an article in The Onion). But instead I made the mistake of looking at my own life and tastes and noticing that I share a range of attributes with the stereotype. I genuinely like Wes Anderson, and I like bullshitting about Postmodern film. I have a philosophy degree. I like Bright Eyes. I used to be a punk, and now I listen to The Postal Service and Ted Leo (among many other things). Despite the reassurances of my friends ("hipsters are out there, but you're totally not a hipster!") I started to dwell on it: what's a hipster? Did I have the necessary or sufficient characteristics? Who is it I'm supposed to be differentiating myself from?
Hence my theory arose: there's no such thing as a "hipster." The hipster is an assemblage of half-hearted characterizations, designed as a sort of cultural "folk devil." These are characteristics that are benign, taken individually. Drink PBR? What's the problem? Listen to indie rock, talk about the politics of the bands? You may be a music snob, but who cares? Live in Williamsburg? Sure, it's a growing neighborhood. If you're a friend of mine, you can fit three, four, five of these characteristics and not be a hipster, cause it's all in good faith. But if I don't like you, and you exhibit even ONE of these qualifications, you're a damn hipster. I hate you people.
This "cultural folk devil" concept (which I am currently coining as a variation of the classic "folk devil") is actually fairly common. There are always large groups who have been stigmatized and blamed for culture's problems, from Jews to Teenagers to Fags. These days, this kind of stigmatization has gone from "evil" to "annoying"... we tend to label concepts as stupid, bothersome, played-out, and obnoxious. Admittedly, it's a step up, but it's still a bad social habit. Some of the cultural folk devils stigmatized in recent times have been "sXe (straight-edge)," "emo," "postmodernism," and "chavs." It's up for debate whether each of these deserves its widespread ire. However, all of these ideas and subcultures have at least existed on some level.
I repeat: the hipster doesn't exist. It's an imaginary scapegoat, a convenient target for our disapproval and ridicule. I know this because I've looked for a definition that was worthy of my own distrust, and I've found nothing of the kind. It's sort of a cultural stereotype, so my main avenue has been asking friends, but none of them seemed to have a good definition for me. Finally, looking for something comprehensive, if not exactly "precise," I consulted Wikipedia. Even if it's rarely well-written or accurate, it's at least a good representation of generally-held cultural beliefs on certain topics.
The article on hipster is here.
As you can see, there's NOTHING to go on. There's a vague mention of PBR, and a reference to metrosexuality, but there's really nothing else to reference.
Okay, wait, there's one thing... irony. And in a way, that redeems the definition. If a hipster is someone who adopts an aesthetic with no intention of buying into it or taking it seriously, then I can understand some of the pan-cultural ire they earn. Maybe that's what everybody is talking about? Williamsburg is a neighborhood where people tend to be ironic? PBR is an insincere choice for a favorite beer? Wes Anderson is an ironic filmmaker?
The definition has slipped through our fingers, folks. Even if Wes Anderson is ironic, or people tend to like Wolfmother just for the novelty value of self-deprecation, there's no worthy link between the far-flung accusations and the core complaint. Irony is too hard to pin down, and it's been used effectively in too much art, literature, and music for it to really make sense at the center of a stereotype. So we pile on these auxiliary characteristics, and build ourselves a specter that amounts to nothing.
If you want to make a stand against a culture of irony and excessive bad taste, then assert your own good taste. Become a fashion designer, play the ukulele, write for BlogCritics. Make a positive statement about what's awesome, whether you're speaking with your tongue in your cheek (hipster-style) or you're buying into it 100% (traditional nerd style). It's a worthy cause. Stop distracting yourself with random catharsis, dumped on a scapegoat represented by a term you can sling, but can't really define. No sterotype apparitions need to die for culture to be reborn. We just have to fucking DO IT.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Stardust and Beowulf: Gaiman infiltrates Hollywood
What happens when two fads converge on Hollywood and form an unholy union? What sort of devilry is spawned, and is it bliss, or is it a crime against the universe? I think there's a test case running right now, and I've damn excited to see where it goes.
The test subjects?
First, a recent preoccupation with comic book movies, leading from the first X-Men and Spiderman movies, through Sin City and Hellboy (the comic book heavyweights) to The Fantastic Four, The Punisher, two adjacent Hulk movies, 300, some more existential entries like A History of Violence, and various millions of secondary adaptations.
Second, a sudden interest in adaptations of traditional fantasy novels, starting with Lord of the Rings and continuing ad nauseam: Eragon (not a personal favorite), Narnia, The Golden Compass (forthcoming), Troy, and the whole massive run of Harry Potter adaptations. Some of these adaptations are impressive; some are inexcusable. I won't spend too much time passing judgment on them.
At last united, in the glorious manifestation of... what what? Neil Gaiman becoming a Hollywood personality.
He wasn't entirely off the radar before his recent Hollywood offerings... Gaiman was behind Mirrormask, which I have yet to see, and he was instrumental in creating one of the most well-endowed mythological anime films ever to hit the big screen. However, it's Stardust and Beowulf that will prove Gaiman's worth on the big screen. The first was just recently released... the second is lingering on deck, with trailers sneaking into public consciousness.
Gaiman is a brilliant storyteller, worthy of his fans' reverence. He's a novelist who has made his name in graphic novels. He did honor to the role of the traditional novelist in American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Neverwhere, and he gained his renown with Sandman, a graphic novel cycle that proved the medium could be beautiful and epic. Stardust was a novel that was published in an illustrated edition... almost a graphic novel, but not quite. It provided a space for the collision of the graphic novel and the traditional fantasy story, and now, it's provided a space for the collision of popular fantasy and comic book movies.
As such, I'm surprised at how little press the movie got, and I'm thoroughly impressed with how well-done it was. There's always a lingering fear about adaptations... will it honor the original, or will it take a good seed and bear an ugly, mushy, decrepit harvest of fruit? Here, I'm going to articulate a mini-review of Stardust, just as a way of backing up my opinion that the movie was worthy of the storyteller's name.
Stardust isn't an epic of war and romance... it had no pretension to being another Lord of the Rings or Matrix. It has less in common with high fantasy than it does with the fairy tale -- a focus on characters playing out personal adventures within a larger speculative and moral space. The film continued in this tradition, which was so immanent in the novel. The dialogue was smart, but not cumbersome, and no over-the-top drama was forced upon the story to make it marketable. Even the high-minded themes... fratricide in pursuit of kingship, the struggle to fit a role where you don't feel at home... were rendered personal and sympathetic. Thus, the actual fantasy drama, with its requisite love, evil, and violence, was palatable, even as a normal-length movie.
Thus, a successful experiment. Neil Gaiman wins round one.
The next round is going to be Beowulf, for which Gaiman wrote the screenplay, and it'll be more tricky. The story of Beowulf is difficult to adapt, because it's such an historical landmark in literature. It's a tale rooted in poetic language and a lost culture, so the acceptance rate for a visualization is going to be low. Both Beowulf and Grendel are such icons that any depiction of them may strike an audience as anti-climactic.
I was thoroughly skeptical when I saw the trailer, but I've gained some enthusiasm. I think that casting Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother is an excellent decision, and it shows Gaiman's skill in handling heavy material. He uses his power as a storyteller, and he refashions a few specific ideas in order to make it his own, turning Grendel's mother temporarily from a rampaging beast into a beautiful temptress. This is something that Peter Jackson never really did with Lord of the Rings -- his Lord of the Rings was obsessively oriented around reproducing Tolkien's vision as faithfully as possible. He did an amazing job. I think the story of Beowulf is so big, however, that Gaiman can never hope to do what Jackson did with Middle-Earth. Instead, he has to do what he's already started to do: he has to personalize the story, and in a sense, distance himself from it.
Despite my best intentions, I am in fact looking forward to Beowulf. Gaiman is a powerful force, a champion of literature in both its historical and its emergent incarnations. He's already proven that his storytelling skills work across media... now I want to see what he can do with Beowulf, an almost impossible adaptation.
By the way, for the other brilliant reconstruction of the Beowulf myth, read Gardner's Grendel. It's quite an experience.
The test subjects?
First, a recent preoccupation with comic book movies, leading from the first X-Men and Spiderman movies, through Sin City and Hellboy (the comic book heavyweights) to The Fantastic Four, The Punisher, two adjacent Hulk movies, 300, some more existential entries like A History of Violence, and various millions of secondary adaptations.
Second, a sudden interest in adaptations of traditional fantasy novels, starting with Lord of the Rings and continuing ad nauseam: Eragon (not a personal favorite), Narnia, The Golden Compass (forthcoming), Troy, and the whole massive run of Harry Potter adaptations. Some of these adaptations are impressive; some are inexcusable. I won't spend too much time passing judgment on them.
At last united, in the glorious manifestation of... what what? Neil Gaiman becoming a Hollywood personality.
He wasn't entirely off the radar before his recent Hollywood offerings... Gaiman was behind Mirrormask, which I have yet to see, and he was instrumental in creating one of the most well-endowed mythological anime films ever to hit the big screen. However, it's Stardust and Beowulf that will prove Gaiman's worth on the big screen. The first was just recently released... the second is lingering on deck, with trailers sneaking into public consciousness.
Gaiman is a brilliant storyteller, worthy of his fans' reverence. He's a novelist who has made his name in graphic novels. He did honor to the role of the traditional novelist in American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Neverwhere, and he gained his renown with Sandman, a graphic novel cycle that proved the medium could be beautiful and epic. Stardust was a novel that was published in an illustrated edition... almost a graphic novel, but not quite. It provided a space for the collision of the graphic novel and the traditional fantasy story, and now, it's provided a space for the collision of popular fantasy and comic book movies.
As such, I'm surprised at how little press the movie got, and I'm thoroughly impressed with how well-done it was. There's always a lingering fear about adaptations... will it honor the original, or will it take a good seed and bear an ugly, mushy, decrepit harvest of fruit? Here, I'm going to articulate a mini-review of Stardust, just as a way of backing up my opinion that the movie was worthy of the storyteller's name.
Stardust isn't an epic of war and romance... it had no pretension to being another Lord of the Rings or Matrix. It has less in common with high fantasy than it does with the fairy tale -- a focus on characters playing out personal adventures within a larger speculative and moral space. The film continued in this tradition, which was so immanent in the novel. The dialogue was smart, but not cumbersome, and no over-the-top drama was forced upon the story to make it marketable. Even the high-minded themes... fratricide in pursuit of kingship, the struggle to fit a role where you don't feel at home... were rendered personal and sympathetic. Thus, the actual fantasy drama, with its requisite love, evil, and violence, was palatable, even as a normal-length movie.
Thus, a successful experiment. Neil Gaiman wins round one.
The next round is going to be Beowulf, for which Gaiman wrote the screenplay, and it'll be more tricky. The story of Beowulf is difficult to adapt, because it's such an historical landmark in literature. It's a tale rooted in poetic language and a lost culture, so the acceptance rate for a visualization is going to be low. Both Beowulf and Grendel are such icons that any depiction of them may strike an audience as anti-climactic.
I was thoroughly skeptical when I saw the trailer, but I've gained some enthusiasm. I think that casting Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother is an excellent decision, and it shows Gaiman's skill in handling heavy material. He uses his power as a storyteller, and he refashions a few specific ideas in order to make it his own, turning Grendel's mother temporarily from a rampaging beast into a beautiful temptress. This is something that Peter Jackson never really did with Lord of the Rings -- his Lord of the Rings was obsessively oriented around reproducing Tolkien's vision as faithfully as possible. He did an amazing job. I think the story of Beowulf is so big, however, that Gaiman can never hope to do what Jackson did with Middle-Earth. Instead, he has to do what he's already started to do: he has to personalize the story, and in a sense, distance himself from it.
Despite my best intentions, I am in fact looking forward to Beowulf. Gaiman is a powerful force, a champion of literature in both its historical and its emergent incarnations. He's already proven that his storytelling skills work across media... now I want to see what he can do with Beowulf, an almost impossible adaptation.
By the way, for the other brilliant reconstruction of the Beowulf myth, read Gardner's Grendel. It's quite an experience.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
The Simpsons Movie: a film and a history
The Simpsons Movie was worth my time and money, and I recommend you all see it... you can find all that stuff in my review of the film over on BlogCritics. Here on Benefit Of The Doubt, I'm going to give you a little more developed, less opinionated view of the film, and how it relates to what has become a legacy of FOX and Matt Groening.
I loved the movie, and I have to say, it wasn't because it was ground-breaking. That's a positive spin on a hard truth, which is sort of what this blog is about: looking at media artifacts in terms of what they did well, and what they claim to do. The Simpsons Movie never really claimed to be revolutionary, and thankfully so; if anything, it came across as reminiscence, albeit some of the most entertaining reminiscence this cycle.
If you thought too hard, you might have been a little annoyed by some of the derivation the movie leaned on. In particular, none of the conflicts were anything new... Marge has spent a number of episodes resolving her issues with her marriage to Homer (like 7F20 and 7G11), and Bart has spent a number of episodes struggling against Homer's bad parenting (like 9F12). Lisa's unlikely romance was taken from a cluster of episodes, as well, down to the fact that her potential boyfriend has a cool UK accent (as per episode 2F15).
Whether or not to expect a fresh plot is up to the viewer, and for most, the recycling game won't wreck the film. Those who are looking for some emotional satisfaction will find a dramatic rise and fall in the movie, even if it's on a track they've traveled before. These conflicts are just the first of a few ways in which The Simpsons Movie was a retrospective on the series.
The second, and most salient, form of nostalgia inherent in The Simpsons Movie was the range of humor the writers tapped. There are fundamentally different styles of humor characteristic of every Simpsons era... the first season was rude slapstick and awkward anecdotes, mostly in the context of the characters' everyday lives as a one-dimensional dysfunctional family. The heyday of the Simpsons, seasons two or three through eight or nine, were centered around constant clever lines, observations, and breakdowns in expectation, delivered with perfect pacing. These episodes were the marathon of characterization that have delivered a fully-formed family and community to the viewers. After these golden years, the Simpsons began slipping into ridiculous antics and non-sequitors, only a few of which still had the wit of the earlier stretch.
The Simpsons Movie managed to tap almost every style of humor described above, and it made them all work in their unique ways. From goofy politics (a depiction of a new President, or the gay cops a la episode 4F11) to absurd, repetitive slapstick (the familiar Wrecking Ball scene) to brilliant revelations of character and relationship (virtually every line written for Grandpa and Mr. Burns), we can find examples of humor from every age of our favorite animated series. As I mentioned in my review, this kind of reference wasn't a drawback or an annoyance... it was a prompt to set our minds wandering over a whole history of awesome Simpsons memories.
There's one other element to the intense "nostalgia factor" engendered by The Simpsons Movie. This film, at the tail end of this franchise, generated some of the more interesting promotion I've seen in recent years, and definitely some of the most ubiquitous. From the 7-Elevens recreated as Kwik-E-Marts to the site Simpsonize Me to the endless barrage of commercials, billboards, and images on television, it seems we've been flooded with images of Groening's brainchild baby. You might see this as tragically obnoxious, an insult to the series. But (with Dom's help, I must admit) I've gotten past this.
After all, there was once a time when The Simpsons had to be on EVERYTHING, from t-shirts to cereal boxes to candy bars. Viewers probably remember this time well, and without a hint of disapproval. After all, we thought those shirts were FUNNY, dammit. But nature took its course: along with the decline in viewership, there was a steady decline in ubiquitous merchandising in recent years. If you were a fan of the show, I don't think you rejoiced to see it all disappear... you may have even started to miss it. And now, the movie has brought back that shameless saturation of Simpsons stuff. This is what it was like in '96... everywhere you looked, that recognizable family of silhouettes. It makes me proud to remember the good ol' days.
And that recollection is what makes The Simpsons Movie so strong... it's a window into a beautiful history of smart humor and adventurous writing, a tribute to a permanent fixture in American consciousness. As a retrospective, a mirror and a map of the series and its philosophy, this movie is a resounding success. In a way, it makes me want to get back into the series.
And in a way, I guess, it makes me want the series to end.
I loved the movie, and I have to say, it wasn't because it was ground-breaking. That's a positive spin on a hard truth, which is sort of what this blog is about: looking at media artifacts in terms of what they did well, and what they claim to do. The Simpsons Movie never really claimed to be revolutionary, and thankfully so; if anything, it came across as reminiscence, albeit some of the most entertaining reminiscence this cycle.
If you thought too hard, you might have been a little annoyed by some of the derivation the movie leaned on. In particular, none of the conflicts were anything new... Marge has spent a number of episodes resolving her issues with her marriage to Homer (like 7F20 and 7G11), and Bart has spent a number of episodes struggling against Homer's bad parenting (like 9F12). Lisa's unlikely romance was taken from a cluster of episodes, as well, down to the fact that her potential boyfriend has a cool UK accent (as per episode 2F15).
Whether or not to expect a fresh plot is up to the viewer, and for most, the recycling game won't wreck the film. Those who are looking for some emotional satisfaction will find a dramatic rise and fall in the movie, even if it's on a track they've traveled before. These conflicts are just the first of a few ways in which The Simpsons Movie was a retrospective on the series.
The second, and most salient, form of nostalgia inherent in The Simpsons Movie was the range of humor the writers tapped. There are fundamentally different styles of humor characteristic of every Simpsons era... the first season was rude slapstick and awkward anecdotes, mostly in the context of the characters' everyday lives as a one-dimensional dysfunctional family. The heyday of the Simpsons, seasons two or three through eight or nine, were centered around constant clever lines, observations, and breakdowns in expectation, delivered with perfect pacing. These episodes were the marathon of characterization that have delivered a fully-formed family and community to the viewers. After these golden years, the Simpsons began slipping into ridiculous antics and non-sequitors, only a few of which still had the wit of the earlier stretch.
The Simpsons Movie managed to tap almost every style of humor described above, and it made them all work in their unique ways. From goofy politics (a depiction of a new President, or the gay cops a la episode 4F11) to absurd, repetitive slapstick (the familiar Wrecking Ball scene) to brilliant revelations of character and relationship (virtually every line written for Grandpa and Mr. Burns), we can find examples of humor from every age of our favorite animated series. As I mentioned in my review, this kind of reference wasn't a drawback or an annoyance... it was a prompt to set our minds wandering over a whole history of awesome Simpsons memories.
There's one other element to the intense "nostalgia factor" engendered by The Simpsons Movie. This film, at the tail end of this franchise, generated some of the more interesting promotion I've seen in recent years, and definitely some of the most ubiquitous. From the 7-Elevens recreated as Kwik-E-Marts to the site Simpsonize Me to the endless barrage of commercials, billboards, and images on television, it seems we've been flooded with images of Groening's brainchild baby. You might see this as tragically obnoxious, an insult to the series. But (with Dom's help, I must admit) I've gotten past this.
After all, there was once a time when The Simpsons had to be on EVERYTHING, from t-shirts to cereal boxes to candy bars. Viewers probably remember this time well, and without a hint of disapproval. After all, we thought those shirts were FUNNY, dammit. But nature took its course: along with the decline in viewership, there was a steady decline in ubiquitous merchandising in recent years. If you were a fan of the show, I don't think you rejoiced to see it all disappear... you may have even started to miss it. And now, the movie has brought back that shameless saturation of Simpsons stuff. This is what it was like in '96... everywhere you looked, that recognizable family of silhouettes. It makes me proud to remember the good ol' days.
And that recollection is what makes The Simpsons Movie so strong... it's a window into a beautiful history of smart humor and adventurous writing, a tribute to a permanent fixture in American consciousness. As a retrospective, a mirror and a map of the series and its philosophy, this movie is a resounding success. In a way, it makes me want to get back into the series.
And in a way, I guess, it makes me want the series to end.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sublime and Unstable in Danny Boyle's Sunshine
This is a riff on a review I posted a week or two ago on BlogCritics. I'm going to cut some of the review fat and elaborate on the philosophical theme a little. Be warned... there are no explicit spoilers, but I've been fairly liberal in alluding to plot points.
Danny Boyle's current film, running on a lower profile than some of his previous work, is a sci-fi thriller called Sunshine. Like Boyle's other films, like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, Sunshine is about a traumatic experience that taxes both the mind and the body. The Earth is at the mercy of a dying galaxy, and a small crew of a ship called the Icarus II is charged with piloting an apocalyptic bomb into the sun in order to restart its fusion mechanisms.
Boyle flaunts his influences. At times, the film seems like a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially during the first half, when the imagery is dominated by slow, balletic interstellar maneuvers and stunning lights and colors. This half of the film is also when the psychological elements are most developed, and it’s this first half that audiences should remember most fondly. This also may be when Boyle seems most an artist: the visuals are unique, sublime, and engaging, and the film looks like it might develop as a ghostly portrait of a crew, rather than as a horror sci-fi scramble.
After the first hour, there’s a key change in tone and pace, and Sunshine becomes less about psychological balance and nuance and more about tension and claustrophobia. The key scene, where the transition takes place, is the crew’s exploration of another ship, the Icarus I, and this scene is punctuated by one of the most ruthless little cinematic tricks available to the filmmaker (a trick popularized by Tyler Durden in Fight Club). This tense, ghostly stretch is where the film breaks down into certain accepted horror conventions.
Reviewers reacted both positively and negatively to this shift. Certain horror aficionados simply didn't find it stimulating enough, and others saw it as eccentric and indecisive. However, as I turn my thoughts back to the film, I can see that it was a whole structure, designed with a creative vision behind it. And I think this vision is centered around a traditional philosophical concept in art called the sublime (also addressed in detail on Wikipedia).
The sublime, according to traditional aesthetic philosophy, is the pleasure derived from regarding nature and not being able to fully understand or assimilate it... the pleasure of being overwhelmed. The better-known philosophers differentiated this sharply from beauty, which could be represented and appreciated by human faculties (i.e. a painting could be beautiful, but it could not be sublime). The sublime is linked with an almost masochistic pleasure, because it usually goes hand-in-hand with a degree of danger, or lurking fear of the unknowable.
For the first half of Sunshine, the sublime was certainly a theme. The characters were reaching toward the sun, intellectually and sometimes physically, and it was almost within their grasp. The earliest deaths in the film are the result of the astronauts letting the beauty of the sun overtake them. They are all overwhelmed by it... it undercuts their powers of reason and invades their dreams.
The first half of Sunshine is a distillation of sublime reflections... it's taken its cues from Kubrick's masterpiece, and it's turned them outward, so the cold, dispirited emptiness of the characters in 2001 is replaced with the hopeful sadness and resignation of the crew of the Icarus II. However, this tone changes dramatically after the crew visits the Icarus I. At this point, the film's psychology shifts from disconnected reflection on nature to the sliding terror of a mission going out of control. The Icarus I seems to represent the danger of losing yourself in your reverence.
If the change in pacing and atmosphere aren't enough, we're introduced to a character who has most certainly slid from veneration into obsession, inhumanity, and madness. Okay, so he isn't developed as a character, so much. Rather, he sweeps through the second half of the film as a sermonizing force of nature, an obstacle that the crew has to deal with to complete their mission. He's hardly even shown on screen, except shrouded in low-lit film grain or obscured in shaky camera motion blur. In this sense, it's not quite a horror film, because the horrifying figure is never shown... he stays a figment, an embodiment of the desperate gravity of the situation.
Ultimately, I think it's the deaths in Sunshine that bring out this theme, and bring unity to the whole thing. The first and last deaths are sad, but they're also celebrations, as characters stand before the overwhelming power of nature and let it snuff them out. It's worth noting that almost all the deaths are either the characters burning up, or freezing to death, either under the sun's gaze or in its absence. The film is poised on the edge between beauty and terror... an edge represented by the sublime in all its philosophical incarnations.
And Danny Boyle makes a noble effort to approach this unapproachable ideal, in all its metaphysical impossibility.
Danny Boyle's current film, running on a lower profile than some of his previous work, is a sci-fi thriller called Sunshine. Like Boyle's other films, like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, Sunshine is about a traumatic experience that taxes both the mind and the body. The Earth is at the mercy of a dying galaxy, and a small crew of a ship called the Icarus II is charged with piloting an apocalyptic bomb into the sun in order to restart its fusion mechanisms.
Boyle flaunts his influences. At times, the film seems like a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially during the first half, when the imagery is dominated by slow, balletic interstellar maneuvers and stunning lights and colors. This half of the film is also when the psychological elements are most developed, and it’s this first half that audiences should remember most fondly. This also may be when Boyle seems most an artist: the visuals are unique, sublime, and engaging, and the film looks like it might develop as a ghostly portrait of a crew, rather than as a horror sci-fi scramble.
After the first hour, there’s a key change in tone and pace, and Sunshine becomes less about psychological balance and nuance and more about tension and claustrophobia. The key scene, where the transition takes place, is the crew’s exploration of another ship, the Icarus I, and this scene is punctuated by one of the most ruthless little cinematic tricks available to the filmmaker (a trick popularized by Tyler Durden in Fight Club). This tense, ghostly stretch is where the film breaks down into certain accepted horror conventions.
Reviewers reacted both positively and negatively to this shift. Certain horror aficionados simply didn't find it stimulating enough, and others saw it as eccentric and indecisive. However, as I turn my thoughts back to the film, I can see that it was a whole structure, designed with a creative vision behind it. And I think this vision is centered around a traditional philosophical concept in art called the sublime (also addressed in detail on Wikipedia).
The sublime, according to traditional aesthetic philosophy, is the pleasure derived from regarding nature and not being able to fully understand or assimilate it... the pleasure of being overwhelmed. The better-known philosophers differentiated this sharply from beauty, which could be represented and appreciated by human faculties (i.e. a painting could be beautiful, but it could not be sublime). The sublime is linked with an almost masochistic pleasure, because it usually goes hand-in-hand with a degree of danger, or lurking fear of the unknowable.
For the first half of Sunshine, the sublime was certainly a theme. The characters were reaching toward the sun, intellectually and sometimes physically, and it was almost within their grasp. The earliest deaths in the film are the result of the astronauts letting the beauty of the sun overtake them. They are all overwhelmed by it... it undercuts their powers of reason and invades their dreams.
The first half of Sunshine is a distillation of sublime reflections... it's taken its cues from Kubrick's masterpiece, and it's turned them outward, so the cold, dispirited emptiness of the characters in 2001 is replaced with the hopeful sadness and resignation of the crew of the Icarus II. However, this tone changes dramatically after the crew visits the Icarus I. At this point, the film's psychology shifts from disconnected reflection on nature to the sliding terror of a mission going out of control. The Icarus I seems to represent the danger of losing yourself in your reverence.
If the change in pacing and atmosphere aren't enough, we're introduced to a character who has most certainly slid from veneration into obsession, inhumanity, and madness. Okay, so he isn't developed as a character, so much. Rather, he sweeps through the second half of the film as a sermonizing force of nature, an obstacle that the crew has to deal with to complete their mission. He's hardly even shown on screen, except shrouded in low-lit film grain or obscured in shaky camera motion blur. In this sense, it's not quite a horror film, because the horrifying figure is never shown... he stays a figment, an embodiment of the desperate gravity of the situation.
Ultimately, I think it's the deaths in Sunshine that bring out this theme, and bring unity to the whole thing. The first and last deaths are sad, but they're also celebrations, as characters stand before the overwhelming power of nature and let it snuff them out. It's worth noting that almost all the deaths are either the characters burning up, or freezing to death, either under the sun's gaze or in its absence. The film is poised on the edge between beauty and terror... an edge represented by the sublime in all its philosophical incarnations.
And Danny Boyle makes a noble effort to approach this unapproachable ideal, in all its metaphysical impossibility.
Friday, July 13, 2007
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.
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.
Finding the PoMo in Super Paper Mario (a Postmodern statement)
I'm gonna confess... I've been playing a video game quite a bit. Or at least, I've been facilitating and observing its being-playedness by a passing resident of the household. That game is called Super Paper Mario.
Okay, so in the history of Mario, we've gone from a fully-restricted two-dimensional world (Donkey Kong) to a non-restricted two-dimensional world (Super Mario Bros. through Super Mario World and beyond) to a three-dimensional world (Super Mario 64 through the forthcoming Super Mario Galaxy). Paper Mario is, in a sense, a reflection on the history of the two-dimensional Marios, which the game undertakes by offering a third dimension.
Now, because it's oriented around a two-dimensional game, the third dimension isn't that well developed. That's why it's called Paper Mario... the game is conscious of, and in a sense apologetic for, its two-dimensionality. However, for what it lacks as a three-dimensional game, Paper Mario makes up for as Postmodern Mario. Meta-Mario -- that's what we've been playing, and it's a fascinating experience.
To start, there's a level of historicism in Mario that's been a defining feature of postmodernism for a long time. Just as pop-art brought kitsch and self-conscious reference to art, SPM brings to the Wii a salvo of self-conscious references to Mario history, from the enormous 8-bit Mario you become when you grab a star, to the Princess's ability to float... it's sort of futile for me to list them. There are millions.
There are also references to the world outside the game. Occasionally, the characters mention you, the player, in order to explain their discussions of controller buttons, which Mario himself apparently doesn't understand. One of the enemies even has the Wii "processing" animation playing in its eye. These are discursive and semantic break-downs of the fourth wall that parallel Mario's own breaking of the fourth wall when he "flips" from 2-D space into 3-D space.
And about that "flipping" action, which takes Mario beyond the standard platform game world . He reveals hidden enemies, items, and landscapes that are on other two-dimensional planes, thus retreiving a certain more literal meaning of the phrase "parallel dimension." Most NPC's in SPM can't sense or interact within these alternate planes, making Mario unique, a sort of bodhisattva... come on, doesn't anyone else read a certain Eastern mysticism in that move? A moment of transcendence, perhaps? The same theme that appealed to Heidegger and Jung seems to have appealed to the Nintendo developers. Mario even learns it from a sage.
PoMario. That's the game, my friends. PLAY IT.
Okay, so in the history of Mario, we've gone from a fully-restricted two-dimensional world (Donkey Kong) to a non-restricted two-dimensional world (Super Mario Bros. through Super Mario World and beyond) to a three-dimensional world (Super Mario 64 through the forthcoming Super Mario Galaxy). Paper Mario is, in a sense, a reflection on the history of the two-dimensional Marios, which the game undertakes by offering a third dimension.
Now, because it's oriented around a two-dimensional game, the third dimension isn't that well developed. That's why it's called Paper Mario... the game is conscious of, and in a sense apologetic for, its two-dimensionality. However, for what it lacks as a three-dimensional game, Paper Mario makes up for as Postmodern Mario. Meta-Mario -- that's what we've been playing, and it's a fascinating experience.
To start, there's a level of historicism in Mario that's been a defining feature of postmodernism for a long time. Just as pop-art brought kitsch and self-conscious reference to art, SPM brings to the Wii a salvo of self-conscious references to Mario history, from the enormous 8-bit Mario you become when you grab a star, to the Princess's ability to float... it's sort of futile for me to list them. There are millions.
There are also references to the world outside the game. Occasionally, the characters mention you, the player, in order to explain their discussions of controller buttons, which Mario himself apparently doesn't understand. One of the enemies even has the Wii "processing" animation playing in its eye. These are discursive and semantic break-downs of the fourth wall that parallel Mario's own breaking of the fourth wall when he "flips" from 2-D space into 3-D space.
And about that "flipping" action, which takes Mario beyond the standard platform game world . He reveals hidden enemies, items, and landscapes that are on other two-dimensional planes, thus retreiving a certain more literal meaning of the phrase "parallel dimension." Most NPC's in SPM can't sense or interact within these alternate planes, making Mario unique, a sort of bodhisattva... come on, doesn't anyone else read a certain Eastern mysticism in that move? A moment of transcendence, perhaps? The same theme that appealed to Heidegger and Jung seems to have appealed to the Nintendo developers. Mario even learns it from a sage.
PoMario. That's the game, my friends. PLAY IT.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Celebrity Women: Helplessness in a Jar
Via PopPolitics, I discovered a fascinating look at images of beauty and weakness. It's written by Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth. The basic idea is that our current celebrity trash culture is obsessing with women who are helpless and falling apart, like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, rather than paying any attention to the many women who are successful in their personal and professional lives. Wolf points out that this is part of a historical mass-media trend... depicting and idolizing the frail, wilting women who vindicate the men who get to handle them "delicately."
This is an important cultural trend to note, and I'm not going to argue that it's outright inaccurate. We DO see a lot of fucked-up women on screen, and a lot of them come complete with a "perfect life" celebrity archetype: Paris the spoiled playgirl, Britney the suddenly-successful teenager falling prey to the world of stardom. I DO wish we'd see more powerful women in entertainment media, praised and exalted for their strength and femininity.
However, Wolf forgets some important nuances that differentiate the classical "fragile beauty" ideal from the real-world sensibilities she's critiquing. We see Britney and Paris and Anna Nicole very differently than we see Marilyn, or than 19th century artists saw their figures. Back then, it was a privilege for women to be frail, and a mark of status for a man to protect someone sickly and helpless. They were genuine glass trophies, good for fretting, gossiping, and watching over the household.
Today there's a different spirit in the postmodern air. Nowadays, instead of idolizing the culture of helplessness, we shake our heads at it to distance ourselves from it. Anna Nicole wasn't beautiful because she was nuts... she was a comedy act. She was the big Other, the person we watched voyeuristically to escape from our own perfectly reasonable lives. Okay, so it's not portraying women in a good light, per se... but I think at least we're conscious of the excessiveness, the exceptional nature of these absurd celebrity specimens.
And it's not just women who inspire this kind of voyeurism, either. We put the same bubble of amusement around Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Ozzy Osbourne, and more recently David Hasselhoff... we love them, but mostly because they're comically surreal, and because our lives look nothing like theirs. Further, there have, in fact, been reality television shows where dozens of humorously-demeanored men had to crawl all over one another for the favor of the female character. You've seen I Love New York... don't try to deny it. The bottom line: I don't know if we can expect a realistic, intelligent portrayal of a female OR of a male on mainstream television.
If you really want to get a look at the social outlook on women, look at the actual social world, where outlooks are played out. Dating habits have very little relationship to these cultural obsessions with mania and frailty. In the world of everyday romance, women aren't held on pedestals because they're a burden, or because they need to be protected. We call that "high maintenance," and the vast majority of us look down on it. The same goes for men... Tom Cruise may be a heart-throb for a lot of women, but that fan club has gotten MUCH smaller since he started preaching the Word of Hubbard, and I don't think many women are saying, "He's been so HOT since he went crazy!" Normal men (and women) would have the same problem: crazy, unbalanced, and mania-prone aren't compliments.
But still, we can appreciate the occasional celebrity public humiliation and self-destruction, because they're behind glass (i.e. a television screen). They're the spastic, convulsing rejects of our collective self-image. Amusing specimens. Don't give them too much more credit than that.
This is an important cultural trend to note, and I'm not going to argue that it's outright inaccurate. We DO see a lot of fucked-up women on screen, and a lot of them come complete with a "perfect life" celebrity archetype: Paris the spoiled playgirl, Britney the suddenly-successful teenager falling prey to the world of stardom. I DO wish we'd see more powerful women in entertainment media, praised and exalted for their strength and femininity.
However, Wolf forgets some important nuances that differentiate the classical "fragile beauty" ideal from the real-world sensibilities she's critiquing. We see Britney and Paris and Anna Nicole very differently than we see Marilyn, or than 19th century artists saw their figures. Back then, it was a privilege for women to be frail, and a mark of status for a man to protect someone sickly and helpless. They were genuine glass trophies, good for fretting, gossiping, and watching over the household.
Today there's a different spirit in the postmodern air. Nowadays, instead of idolizing the culture of helplessness, we shake our heads at it to distance ourselves from it. Anna Nicole wasn't beautiful because she was nuts... she was a comedy act. She was the big Other, the person we watched voyeuristically to escape from our own perfectly reasonable lives. Okay, so it's not portraying women in a good light, per se... but I think at least we're conscious of the excessiveness, the exceptional nature of these absurd celebrity specimens.
And it's not just women who inspire this kind of voyeurism, either. We put the same bubble of amusement around Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Ozzy Osbourne, and more recently David Hasselhoff... we love them, but mostly because they're comically surreal, and because our lives look nothing like theirs. Further, there have, in fact, been reality television shows where dozens of humorously-demeanored men had to crawl all over one another for the favor of the female character. You've seen I Love New York... don't try to deny it. The bottom line: I don't know if we can expect a realistic, intelligent portrayal of a female OR of a male on mainstream television.
If you really want to get a look at the social outlook on women, look at the actual social world, where outlooks are played out. Dating habits have very little relationship to these cultural obsessions with mania and frailty. In the world of everyday romance, women aren't held on pedestals because they're a burden, or because they need to be protected. We call that "high maintenance," and the vast majority of us look down on it. The same goes for men... Tom Cruise may be a heart-throb for a lot of women, but that fan club has gotten MUCH smaller since he started preaching the Word of Hubbard, and I don't think many women are saying, "He's been so HOT since he went crazy!" Normal men (and women) would have the same problem: crazy, unbalanced, and mania-prone aren't compliments.
But still, we can appreciate the occasional celebrity public humiliation and self-destruction, because they're behind glass (i.e. a television screen). They're the spastic, convulsing rejects of our collective self-image. Amusing specimens. Don't give them too much more credit than that.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Sir Patrick Moore presents: The Ancient History of Social Standards
There are so many funny ways for politics and pop culture to intersect. Benefit of the Doubt makes an essential assumption that a lot of them are good... whether it's literature referenced in movies, or memes with powerful aesthetic concerns, or theorists who celebrate the growth of popular culture, we can all find the positive momentum in entertainment media, as long as we're willing to look.
But every so often, we find an exception. Enter Sir Patrick Moore, 84-year old British TV host of The Sky at Night, which I'm not ashamed to say I've never even heard of. Apparently he's got a lot of pop culture clout in pop science and science-fiction communities. However he got that capital, built up over a long career in television, he just spent a bunch of it... more, in fact, than he ever built up, at least with this viewer.
Sir Patrick Moore has decreed (yes, I'll just come out and say it) that women have made television suck. WOAH! With both Hollywood and academia wholeheartedly supporting progressive causes, I don't think any of us expected to see a pop intellectual regurgitate such an outdated conservative viewpoint! He said some lovely stuff, like:
"The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days."
and
"I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."
HA! Wow! It's been a long time since I've heard such a straightforward illustration of gender essentialism. Mr. Moore, aren't you supposed to be up on new developments? Like, the developments that have occurred in the last century? The "golden age" of television supported an outdated status quo, it was full of cultural biases and homosexual tension, and it exhibited a social awareness befitting a well-trained monkey. Television has been getting smarter, more aware, and more complex ever since the "golden age."
Unfortunately, Mr. Moore represents a discouraging trend, especially in his discussion of science fiction. Alongside the profoundly intelligent, gender-aware science fiction of authors like Ursula LeGuinn, Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, there's an old-boys club of authors whose work I generally haven't read... people like Larry Niven... whose characters are flat and one-dimensional, and whose gender and relationship paradigms read like testosterone fantasies. Male character saves helpless females from rape, male character has sex with multiple women during debaucherous youth, male character eventually grows up and accepts ideal female who obediently falls madly in love with him. Some mass-market authors' work comes across as clinical and sloppy when it comes to emotional dynamics. Sir Patrick Moore's public statements have a similar sloppy regressiveness to them, and it's unfortunate.
Luckily, we can see the wheels of social progress turning, even now. Apparently, according to some spokesman for the BBC, Sir Patrick's "forthright" views are "what we all love about him". Maybe it's just me, but I can't help chuckle at that phrasing... forthright views? It's what we all love about him? Those words sound equivalent to "quaint" and "nostalgic." Sounds to me like Mr. Moore is being tolerated, but quarantined.
And that's what's going to happen to regressives in a progressive society. Sir Patrick Moore has just officially dated himself to irrelevance... he'll continue to be honored, to appear in history books and tribute specials, and maybe he'll be impersonated or modeled on some referential television show, but his "forthright" views on women, who make up a huge part of both the critical community and the consumer demographic, will get him chuckled at. He's managed to go from respected thought-leader to strange cultural artifact, the entertainment equivalent of an antique.
Thanks to RT for heads-up on this story. Even now, I'm recognizing that there's a lot more to be written about women in science fiction, and about the strange relationship within that community between progressive (read: sensitive, intelligent) and regressive (read: sloppy, masculocentric) strains of thought, but that discussion will have to wait until another day.
But every so often, we find an exception. Enter Sir Patrick Moore, 84-year old British TV host of The Sky at Night, which I'm not ashamed to say I've never even heard of. Apparently he's got a lot of pop culture clout in pop science and science-fiction communities. However he got that capital, built up over a long career in television, he just spent a bunch of it... more, in fact, than he ever built up, at least with this viewer.
Sir Patrick Moore has decreed (yes, I'll just come out and say it) that women have made television suck. WOAH! With both Hollywood and academia wholeheartedly supporting progressive causes, I don't think any of us expected to see a pop intellectual regurgitate such an outdated conservative viewpoint! He said some lovely stuff, like:
"The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days."
and
"I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."
HA! Wow! It's been a long time since I've heard such a straightforward illustration of gender essentialism. Mr. Moore, aren't you supposed to be up on new developments? Like, the developments that have occurred in the last century? The "golden age" of television supported an outdated status quo, it was full of cultural biases and homosexual tension, and it exhibited a social awareness befitting a well-trained monkey. Television has been getting smarter, more aware, and more complex ever since the "golden age."
Unfortunately, Mr. Moore represents a discouraging trend, especially in his discussion of science fiction. Alongside the profoundly intelligent, gender-aware science fiction of authors like Ursula LeGuinn, Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, there's an old-boys club of authors whose work I generally haven't read... people like Larry Niven... whose characters are flat and one-dimensional, and whose gender and relationship paradigms read like testosterone fantasies. Male character saves helpless females from rape, male character has sex with multiple women during debaucherous youth, male character eventually grows up and accepts ideal female who obediently falls madly in love with him. Some mass-market authors' work comes across as clinical and sloppy when it comes to emotional dynamics. Sir Patrick Moore's public statements have a similar sloppy regressiveness to them, and it's unfortunate.
Luckily, we can see the wheels of social progress turning, even now. Apparently, according to some spokesman for the BBC, Sir Patrick's "forthright" views are "what we all love about him". Maybe it's just me, but I can't help chuckle at that phrasing... forthright views? It's what we all love about him? Those words sound equivalent to "quaint" and "nostalgic." Sounds to me like Mr. Moore is being tolerated, but quarantined.
And that's what's going to happen to regressives in a progressive society. Sir Patrick Moore has just officially dated himself to irrelevance... he'll continue to be honored, to appear in history books and tribute specials, and maybe he'll be impersonated or modeled on some referential television show, but his "forthright" views on women, who make up a huge part of both the critical community and the consumer demographic, will get him chuckled at. He's managed to go from respected thought-leader to strange cultural artifact, the entertainment equivalent of an antique.
Thanks to RT for heads-up on this story. Even now, I'm recognizing that there's a lot more to be written about women in science fiction, and about the strange relationship within that community between progressive (read: sensitive, intelligent) and regressive (read: sloppy, masculocentric) strains of thought, but that discussion will have to wait until another day.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
SPECIAL REPORT: Follow-Up on Literature: Suspicious links to video games?
Literature linked to more dangerous behavior for your children. Brutally maladjusted past-time of “playing video computer games” has long been recognized as one of predominant social ills among youngens. However, recent research at miksimum has linked this scourge to the older, more ubiquitous execration of LITERATURE, first profiled in our most recent post. Our sources have linked literature to dangerous video games like WoW (acronym for World of Warcraft, unrelated to the diarrhea-causing potato chips), which is rife with themes and references to “classics” like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d'Arthur (a French title, no less! Pfffttt!). These kindred rituals share with video games more than the merely cosmetic devices of “swords,” “goblins,” “magic” and “epic romance”… they’re linked to insidious patterns that have plagued the youth for generations, including “getting lost for hours in a vibrant fantasy world” and “having a wild imagination.” After we follow Jack Thompson’s lead and neutralize all the video games, we must take the next step to assure that no more will ever be made: we must burn the books that inspire us! Err, them!
Thursday, June 07, 2007
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…
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.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Pirates of the Carribean III: Gore goes Lynch
So a new Pirates movie has hit, and in the spirit of my previous in-depth analysis, I thought I'd come to this one with some critical observations, as well. I was struck by... I don't know, by the sort of indescribable character of this movie. Try to describe the plot. You can't. Try to describe the themes or the core relationships. You can't. It was sort of overwhelming.
Obviously this has caused a wide array of critical reactions. Richard Schickel gives the film a reasonable characterization, although he didn't seem entertained by his findings: "They're everywhere, these not-so-merry miscreants — in Singapore, in Antarctica, on a desert island, in a secret pirate cove, riding mid-ocean waterfalls (very odd, that bit), exchanging broadsides while being whirled about in a maelstrom. It is very exhausting, and it makes no sense whatsoever." Here you have a good idea of the impression people got from At Worlds End... strange and incoherent, engaging in its eccentricity, but generally unfathomable.
There's something weird that shows up in these reviews, though... when they reject the movie for its strangeness, these reviewers also snark cynically at the public approval the film is bound to receive. Schickel ends his review by suggesting that "some close variant" of his Pirates III criticism "could be written week-in, week-out every summer movie season." Similarly, and even more cynically, Frank Swietek of ONE GUY'S OPINION says Pirates III "will doubtless repeat the inexplicable boxoffice success of its predecessor—testimony to the lemming-like proclivity of today’s audiences not only to rush to even the worst retreads but in some cases to do so repeatedly." Damn! Such contempt!
But what are we really critiquing here? Seriously... was it too confusing for the critics? In the work of some filmmakers, we see ambiguity and lack of resolution as assets. In the case of a Disney movie, have we no option but to recast them as "confusion" and "lack of focus" and to reject them as failures? Critics need to work out their demands... you can't judge a movie negatively for being weird, incoherent, and dense, and at the same time, criticize it for being another piece of meaningless Hollywood trilogy fluff.
Deep in the writhing mass of special effects and half-realized on-screen relationships, there was something really fascinating going on in Pirates III. It was Gore Verbinsky's cinema freak-out, a desperate, unbridled flash of filmmaking, something... how do I put it...
Lynchian?
Yeah, David Lynch. Anyone who attacks this movie as being too weird or incoherent can go chew on that name for a while. Mulholland Dr. was a tweaky roller-coaster of a film, and it shared a lot of creative and stylistic techniques with Pirates III: unexplained reappearances of characters, strained and shifting loyalties and relationships, and recurrent motifs that were hard to pin down to a particular significance.
There are a few specific elements that made me think of Mulholland Drive as I was watching Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End.
First, Jack Sparrow's on-screen delerium was very Lynchian. He spent whole chunks of the movie interacting with himself, and frequently murdering other versions of himself. Two of them were little shoulder-mounted Jacks, like the old couple in Mulholland Drive who were shrunk to the size of a rodent. Others were alternate-reality versions, Jack Sparrows that laid eggs, Jacks that had been assimilated by the Flying Dutchman, Jacks who were into bestiality. There was no good reason for this tendency... just a lingering postmodern sense of the surreal and absurd, giving us reason to ask: just whose head are we wandering around in here?
Second, the recurrent theme of the crabs was like something from David Lynch. Mulholand Drive also had a few themes that kept coming back into the narrative, like the little box with the key, and these frequently had no clear symbolic significance or obvious associations. There are a number of ways they could fit into the narrative... they could represent something abstract, like deliverance, or they could represent the call of the sea to Jack. They seemed to be metamorphic presences, turning into objects and people and disappearing back into the environment again. They were never capitalized on or made clear... they just showed up and established their surreal presence, and then vanished again.
The mad, forgetful Bootstrap Bill was another strange, surrealist character figure, particularly in the scene were Elizabeth finds him on the Dutchman. He's pathetic and imprisoned in his own uncertainty, caught between mindless loyalty to Davey and futile, misguided hope in his son. Being part of the ship has made him tragic and amnesiac, able to repeat a conversaion as if he's having it for the first time, and it establishes his character as a unique, unpredictable force, both emotionally and narratively. In this sense, he shares a kinship with Mulholland Dr.'s Diane Selwyn, who first appears as a distraught, disturbed, and emotionally crippled actress at a low-point in her career.
There's also the sick anatomy stuff that keeps kicking us gently in the face. The scene where Jack's doppelganger licks his own brain is priceless. The death-by-tentacle lobotomy is pretty brilliant, too. These are the signature scenes of a filmmaker who REALLY wants our attention.
I'm not going to sit here and say I liked Pirates III because it was, like a Lynch Film, a profound, avant-garde piece of art cinema or a masterpiece of surrealist post-modern narrative. But it did share something with Lynch: it was an explosive, ecstatic act of filmmaking, almost childlike in its lack of inhibition.
This is the maelstrom... take it as it is: a mad cinema freakout that none of us could have expected from Gore Verbinsky, hard to follow, but insanely engaging on a dramatic and aesthetic level. Don't hold back, Gore. I'm right behind you.
Obviously this has caused a wide array of critical reactions. Richard Schickel gives the film a reasonable characterization, although he didn't seem entertained by his findings: "They're everywhere, these not-so-merry miscreants — in Singapore, in Antarctica, on a desert island, in a secret pirate cove, riding mid-ocean waterfalls (very odd, that bit), exchanging broadsides while being whirled about in a maelstrom. It is very exhausting, and it makes no sense whatsoever." Here you have a good idea of the impression people got from At Worlds End... strange and incoherent, engaging in its eccentricity, but generally unfathomable.
There's something weird that shows up in these reviews, though... when they reject the movie for its strangeness, these reviewers also snark cynically at the public approval the film is bound to receive. Schickel ends his review by suggesting that "some close variant" of his Pirates III criticism "could be written week-in, week-out every summer movie season." Similarly, and even more cynically, Frank Swietek of ONE GUY'S OPINION says Pirates III "will doubtless repeat the inexplicable boxoffice success of its predecessor—testimony to the lemming-like proclivity of today’s audiences not only to rush to even the worst retreads but in some cases to do so repeatedly." Damn! Such contempt!
But what are we really critiquing here? Seriously... was it too confusing for the critics? In the work of some filmmakers, we see ambiguity and lack of resolution as assets. In the case of a Disney movie, have we no option but to recast them as "confusion" and "lack of focus" and to reject them as failures? Critics need to work out their demands... you can't judge a movie negatively for being weird, incoherent, and dense, and at the same time, criticize it for being another piece of meaningless Hollywood trilogy fluff.
Deep in the writhing mass of special effects and half-realized on-screen relationships, there was something really fascinating going on in Pirates III. It was Gore Verbinsky's cinema freak-out, a desperate, unbridled flash of filmmaking, something... how do I put it...
Lynchian?
Yeah, David Lynch. Anyone who attacks this movie as being too weird or incoherent can go chew on that name for a while. Mulholland Dr. was a tweaky roller-coaster of a film, and it shared a lot of creative and stylistic techniques with Pirates III: unexplained reappearances of characters, strained and shifting loyalties and relationships, and recurrent motifs that were hard to pin down to a particular significance.
There are a few specific elements that made me think of Mulholland Drive as I was watching Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End.
First, Jack Sparrow's on-screen delerium was very Lynchian. He spent whole chunks of the movie interacting with himself, and frequently murdering other versions of himself. Two of them were little shoulder-mounted Jacks, like the old couple in Mulholland Drive who were shrunk to the size of a rodent. Others were alternate-reality versions, Jack Sparrows that laid eggs, Jacks that had been assimilated by the Flying Dutchman, Jacks who were into bestiality. There was no good reason for this tendency... just a lingering postmodern sense of the surreal and absurd, giving us reason to ask: just whose head are we wandering around in here?
Second, the recurrent theme of the crabs was like something from David Lynch. Mulholand Drive also had a few themes that kept coming back into the narrative, like the little box with the key, and these frequently had no clear symbolic significance or obvious associations. There are a number of ways they could fit into the narrative... they could represent something abstract, like deliverance, or they could represent the call of the sea to Jack. They seemed to be metamorphic presences, turning into objects and people and disappearing back into the environment again. They were never capitalized on or made clear... they just showed up and established their surreal presence, and then vanished again.
The mad, forgetful Bootstrap Bill was another strange, surrealist character figure, particularly in the scene were Elizabeth finds him on the Dutchman. He's pathetic and imprisoned in his own uncertainty, caught between mindless loyalty to Davey and futile, misguided hope in his son. Being part of the ship has made him tragic and amnesiac, able to repeat a conversaion as if he's having it for the first time, and it establishes his character as a unique, unpredictable force, both emotionally and narratively. In this sense, he shares a kinship with Mulholland Dr.'s Diane Selwyn, who first appears as a distraught, disturbed, and emotionally crippled actress at a low-point in her career.
There's also the sick anatomy stuff that keeps kicking us gently in the face. The scene where Jack's doppelganger licks his own brain is priceless. The death-by-tentacle lobotomy is pretty brilliant, too. These are the signature scenes of a filmmaker who REALLY wants our attention.
I'm not going to sit here and say I liked Pirates III because it was, like a Lynch Film, a profound, avant-garde piece of art cinema or a masterpiece of surrealist post-modern narrative. But it did share something with Lynch: it was an explosive, ecstatic act of filmmaking, almost childlike in its lack of inhibition.
This is the maelstrom... take it as it is: a mad cinema freakout that none of us could have expected from Gore Verbinsky, hard to follow, but insanely engaging on a dramatic and aesthetic level. Don't hold back, Gore. I'm right behind you.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The RIAA continues to cut off its own atrophied members
That's one of the nastier titles I've come up with for my blog posts...
For people into serious media analysis... stuff beyond the realm of content and editorial, and more on the level of changes in technology, attitudes, and forms... you might be interested in the RIAA seeking royalties from broadcast radio, and thus attempting to change a long-standing relationship between commercial enterprise, distribution, and music.
First impressions: this is just another sleazy move by the RIAA, which has been drifting down the dark hole of greed and desperation ever since Napster showed up on our monitors. There are much deeper implications here, though, because this change in policy reaches back through the history of broadcast and electronic media. If you dig into the current legal policies regarding royalties, you get a pretty complicated mess, established over the course of broadcast radio.
So for the sake of simplicity, let's look at some of the effects this will probably have.
1) The labels, and the artists, will most certainly get more money from the major distributors. Broadcast giants like ClearChannel will most certainly be able to pay these new royalties. Certain forces won't be threatened with dispersal, just because some new royalty requirements appear.
2) This will become a big, perhaps prohibitive, burden to some other radio stations, like the few remaining college radio stations. This has a multitude of further implications... online distribution, (what's left of) Internet Radio, and "sharing" (God no) might become one of the sole remaining forums for consumers to discover new artists.
These two, taken together, suggest a general narrowing of the musical market. This could be good for the RIAA in the short term (hey, they're the ones peddling the top-40 stuff that will stay in the fiscal filter), but something tells me it'll be bad for them in the long term, because it'll rip the diversity out of their market, and this is never good for the health of the media.
There's another effect this new arrangement will have:
3) The RIAA is going to damage a formerly positive relationship with radio stations and broadcasters. The broadcasters have probably been one of the last real allies of commercial record labels... now that relationship will be soured, and this could have any number of unpredictable effects on the music mass market.
Considering all these variables -- and I'd love to hear some more info, if anyone has it, because there are a LOT of variables here -- this push by the RIAA starts to look like a matter of short-sighted desperation. Both broadcast radio and the CD industry are dying slowly, drowning in the influence of new technologies, and as I see it, the RIAA, a bloated beast unable to adapt, is responding by cutting off its own atrophied appendages.
I don't think this is going to save it.
For people into serious media analysis... stuff beyond the realm of content and editorial, and more on the level of changes in technology, attitudes, and forms... you might be interested in the RIAA seeking royalties from broadcast radio, and thus attempting to change a long-standing relationship between commercial enterprise, distribution, and music.
First impressions: this is just another sleazy move by the RIAA, which has been drifting down the dark hole of greed and desperation ever since Napster showed up on our monitors. There are much deeper implications here, though, because this change in policy reaches back through the history of broadcast and electronic media. If you dig into the current legal policies regarding royalties, you get a pretty complicated mess, established over the course of broadcast radio.
So for the sake of simplicity, let's look at some of the effects this will probably have.
1) The labels, and the artists, will most certainly get more money from the major distributors. Broadcast giants like ClearChannel will most certainly be able to pay these new royalties. Certain forces won't be threatened with dispersal, just because some new royalty requirements appear.
2) This will become a big, perhaps prohibitive, burden to some other radio stations, like the few remaining college radio stations. This has a multitude of further implications... online distribution, (what's left of) Internet Radio, and "sharing" (God no) might become one of the sole remaining forums for consumers to discover new artists.
These two, taken together, suggest a general narrowing of the musical market. This could be good for the RIAA in the short term (hey, they're the ones peddling the top-40 stuff that will stay in the fiscal filter), but something tells me it'll be bad for them in the long term, because it'll rip the diversity out of their market, and this is never good for the health of the media.
There's another effect this new arrangement will have:
3) The RIAA is going to damage a formerly positive relationship with radio stations and broadcasters. The broadcasters have probably been one of the last real allies of commercial record labels... now that relationship will be soured, and this could have any number of unpredictable effects on the music mass market.
Considering all these variables -- and I'd love to hear some more info, if anyone has it, because there are a LOT of variables here -- this push by the RIAA starts to look like a matter of short-sighted desperation. Both broadcast radio and the CD industry are dying slowly, drowning in the influence of new technologies, and as I see it, the RIAA, a bloated beast unable to adapt, is responding by cutting off its own atrophied appendages.
I don't think this is going to save it.
Monday, May 21, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Jerry and Jean: The split ends of ideology
Celebrity deaths are a few among the many posting opportunities I missed recently... I never said anything about James Brown or Anna Nicole Smith, and I wish I had, because these were cultural icons worthy of note. Another one kicked it today, and I think I'm gonna take the opportunity to make up for lost time.
The man in question was Jerry Falwell. He was quite a shit-kicker in the political and social domain, a die-hard member of the "rude disrespectful uber-conservative" clique that also includes Fred Phelps, Jack Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter. He's gone through a whole spectrum of socially conservative beliefs... and I only characterize them as such because I'm a very level-headed critic. Most of my friends would call them "regressive," "patently indefensible," and/or "retarded." These positions include segregationism early in his career (he supposedly reformed this belief, probably when he realized racist legislation wasn't really going anywhere); dubious positions on Apartheid; that (in his own words) "AIDs is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals"; that secular education is tearing at the fabric of our society; and that 9/11 heralds the apocalypse.
Just today, Falwell died of sudden cardiac failure, or something like that.
Falwell doesn't really represent a noteworthy demographic, because I believe (with hope) that not enough people agree with him to call it a "demographic." However, he definitely represents a subsection of American popular culture, and a disproportionate amount of the American media consciousness. Even as Falwell discredited his own party, he probably always accomplished his goal: he shifted the public discourse back into a domain of "morality" and "social norms" and the need for God as a political icon.
This whole thing actually makes me think of another public figure, less public than Falwell, but much more influential in the intellectual world, and a worthy foil for the present discussion. That's Jean Baudrillard, who died this past March. Baudrillard was for the left what Falwell was the the right: a sort of ideological extremist, a man at the far limit of the attitudes he embodied. Baudrillard was famous for his analysis of simulacra and simulation, and for the idea that representation has taken over reality, and of the experience of it. Glance at his Wikipedia article. It's a surprisingly good discussion of such a complex thinker.
Where Falwell was a great institutionalist, believer in social, moral, and divine regulation of our thoughts, actions, and behaviors, Baudrillard was an institutional iconoclast, attacking (sometimes excessively) the foundations of our identities and beliefs. He saw all the totems of our belief structure -- truth and falsity, good and evil, gender, war, politics, and media -- as arbitrary inventions of a faceless society and an alien consciousness. Baudrillard referred to himself as a nihilist, meaning he saw every given and argued truth as a groundless representation of something we can never reach.
Where Falwell was a reactionary, Baudrillard was a radical. Where Falwell was an epitome of the narrow mind, devoid of any perspective on the world, Baudrillard was the epitome of a jaded postmodernist, a man without faith.
Karma (or nature, or fate, or whatever unconscious mechanism is running our universe) balances the scales of ideology, and once again, the cultural landscape is smoothed out, ever so slightly. I hope these two fuckers are having one hell of a conversation in whatever strange afterlife will take them both.
The man in question was Jerry Falwell. He was quite a shit-kicker in the political and social domain, a die-hard member of the "rude disrespectful uber-conservative" clique that also includes Fred Phelps, Jack Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter. He's gone through a whole spectrum of socially conservative beliefs... and I only characterize them as such because I'm a very level-headed critic. Most of my friends would call them "regressive," "patently indefensible," and/or "retarded." These positions include segregationism early in his career (he supposedly reformed this belief, probably when he realized racist legislation wasn't really going anywhere); dubious positions on Apartheid; that (in his own words) "AIDs is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals"; that secular education is tearing at the fabric of our society; and that 9/11 heralds the apocalypse.
Just today, Falwell died of sudden cardiac failure, or something like that.
Falwell doesn't really represent a noteworthy demographic, because I believe (with hope) that not enough people agree with him to call it a "demographic." However, he definitely represents a subsection of American popular culture, and a disproportionate amount of the American media consciousness. Even as Falwell discredited his own party, he probably always accomplished his goal: he shifted the public discourse back into a domain of "morality" and "social norms" and the need for God as a political icon.
This whole thing actually makes me think of another public figure, less public than Falwell, but much more influential in the intellectual world, and a worthy foil for the present discussion. That's Jean Baudrillard, who died this past March. Baudrillard was for the left what Falwell was the the right: a sort of ideological extremist, a man at the far limit of the attitudes he embodied. Baudrillard was famous for his analysis of simulacra and simulation, and for the idea that representation has taken over reality, and of the experience of it. Glance at his Wikipedia article. It's a surprisingly good discussion of such a complex thinker.
Where Falwell was a great institutionalist, believer in social, moral, and divine regulation of our thoughts, actions, and behaviors, Baudrillard was an institutional iconoclast, attacking (sometimes excessively) the foundations of our identities and beliefs. He saw all the totems of our belief structure -- truth and falsity, good and evil, gender, war, politics, and media -- as arbitrary inventions of a faceless society and an alien consciousness. Baudrillard referred to himself as a nihilist, meaning he saw every given and argued truth as a groundless representation of something we can never reach.
Where Falwell was a reactionary, Baudrillard was a radical. Where Falwell was an epitome of the narrow mind, devoid of any perspective on the world, Baudrillard was the epitome of a jaded postmodernist, a man without faith.
Karma (or nature, or fate, or whatever unconscious mechanism is running our universe) balances the scales of ideology, and once again, the cultural landscape is smoothed out, ever so slightly. I hope these two fuckers are having one hell of a conversation in whatever strange afterlife will take them both.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Like a cast shadow: Remind Me (Royksopp) and Agenda Suicide (The Faint)
Remember, not too long ago, I mentioned this term by Eco, “riding the same cultural wave?” It’s a concept I’ve appropriated and adapted more or less beyond recognition, but it continues to serve me well, because I’m always finding strange correlations between apparently unrelated art and entertainment design. Tonight, it’s music videos.
The videos: Agenda Suicide by The Faint and Remind Me byRoyksopp. Part of the point of the post: to draw attention to these two brilliant, beautiful music videos, so everyone can pause and appreciate the wonderful things you can do with an idea these days.
When I think back on my dreams, I notice that they never feel like a continuous environment to me. My dream-space is almost like a stage, or a movie set, artificially extended but essentially tiny and set aside from anything like a real world. Both of these videos make me feel that way, as well.
This loss of immediacy sends the videos to two different places: for the Faint, it’s self-destruction. For Royksopp, it’s transcendence.
END NOTES:
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Grindhouse: More needle, more red
Okay, so in this last post, I discussed two musical acts, Samiam and The Go! Team, simulating lo-fi recording quality to various effects in recent albums. Well, I went and saw Grindhouse not too long ago, and guess what? It's related!
Grindhouse is a ton of mindless fun if you need something fast-paced and laughable to get you through a boring evening. If you want a review whose tone parallels the movie, check this one out. If you don't like the review, there's a good chance you won't like the double-feature. As for me, I liked them both. And for those who took an interest, Rodriguez is apparently making the Machete film whose mock-trailer appeared before Planet Terror. The awesomeness is propagating.
On to the (I guess) point of the post, though. To make this kitschy reference-fest really work, both Tarantino and Rodriguez had to emulate some old stylistic quirks that filmmakers haven't had to deal with in a long time. Pretty much all of Planet Terror was treated with film grain and strange color shifts, and Death Proof started out with a lot of strange cuts, bad editing, and sloppy production. Again, we're talking about the same stuff as we saw in The Go! Team and Samiam... the intentional emulation of production issues for the sake of a tone, stylization, or conceptual treatment.
A friend mentioned to me that Tarantino's editing flubs were less consistent than Rodriguez's. At first, Death Proof seemed to be a real editing mess, with certain scenes cut awkwardly or repeated. However, as it went on, it became fairly clean and well-produced, right up until the end when there was a five-minute beat down taken directly from one of my own 8-year old video game fantasies. Rodqiguez's color shifts and film grain were more consistent, applied throughout the whole movie. This could be construed as a couple points in favor of Rodriguez's style, and against Tarantino's.
But when I think back on it, the consistency and intensity of Rodriguez's treatment made it seem profoundly intentional, even to the point of being artificial. In this sense, because it was so evenly lo-fi, Planet Terror was thoroughly kitsch. Tarantino's bad editing, because it only intervened at a few key moments in the film, felt more cohesive and more believable. It's almost inconceivable that Rodriguez shot on really crappy film and that all his color shifts were natural and authentic. On the other hand, I could really believe Tarantino's editing screw-ups occurred because he didn't bother cleaning up the rough cut of his footage.
So according to my reading, Rodriguez's lo-fi was kitsch (a.k.a. reference, homage, in-joke). Tarantino's was a genuine aesthetic (i.e. a creative element, a theme).
We can look at the previous discussion in this light, too... Samiam's lo-fi could have been, and probably WAS, the result of a careful discussion and an authentically lo-fi recording session. The muddy sound was an aesthetic. The Go! Team's cracks and pops were more of a device, conspicuously left in the carefully remixed and reproduced music, to give homage, and as such, they were unnaturally conspicuous. For Samiam, lo-fi was a concept. For The Go! Team, it was a stylization.
Concept versus style, aesthetic versus homage... I'm such a goddamn graphic design nerd.
Grindhouse is a ton of mindless fun if you need something fast-paced and laughable to get you through a boring evening. If you want a review whose tone parallels the movie, check this one out. If you don't like the review, there's a good chance you won't like the double-feature. As for me, I liked them both. And for those who took an interest, Rodriguez is apparently making the Machete film whose mock-trailer appeared before Planet Terror. The awesomeness is propagating.
On to the (I guess) point of the post, though. To make this kitschy reference-fest really work, both Tarantino and Rodriguez had to emulate some old stylistic quirks that filmmakers haven't had to deal with in a long time. Pretty much all of Planet Terror was treated with film grain and strange color shifts, and Death Proof started out with a lot of strange cuts, bad editing, and sloppy production. Again, we're talking about the same stuff as we saw in The Go! Team and Samiam... the intentional emulation of production issues for the sake of a tone, stylization, or conceptual treatment.
A friend mentioned to me that Tarantino's editing flubs were less consistent than Rodriguez's. At first, Death Proof seemed to be a real editing mess, with certain scenes cut awkwardly or repeated. However, as it went on, it became fairly clean and well-produced, right up until the end when there was a five-minute beat down taken directly from one of my own 8-year old video game fantasies. Rodqiguez's color shifts and film grain were more consistent, applied throughout the whole movie. This could be construed as a couple points in favor of Rodriguez's style, and against Tarantino's.
But when I think back on it, the consistency and intensity of Rodriguez's treatment made it seem profoundly intentional, even to the point of being artificial. In this sense, because it was so evenly lo-fi, Planet Terror was thoroughly kitsch. Tarantino's bad editing, because it only intervened at a few key moments in the film, felt more cohesive and more believable. It's almost inconceivable that Rodriguez shot on really crappy film and that all his color shifts were natural and authentic. On the other hand, I could really believe Tarantino's editing screw-ups occurred because he didn't bother cleaning up the rough cut of his footage.
So according to my reading, Rodriguez's lo-fi was kitsch (a.k.a. reference, homage, in-joke). Tarantino's was a genuine aesthetic (i.e. a creative element, a theme).
We can look at the previous discussion in this light, too... Samiam's lo-fi could have been, and probably WAS, the result of a careful discussion and an authentically lo-fi recording session. The muddy sound was an aesthetic. The Go! Team's cracks and pops were more of a device, conspicuously left in the carefully remixed and reproduced music, to give homage, and as such, they were unnaturally conspicuous. For Samiam, lo-fi was a concept. For The Go! Team, it was a stylization.
Concept versus style, aesthetic versus homage... I'm such a goddamn graphic design nerd.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
First Quarter Movie Trailer Wrap-Up
I've been really slow on the media criticism lately, so I though I'd get back in practice, and play some catch-up, by reviewing a bunch of the trailers I've missed over at Apple Trailers. There are a number of interesting things mixed in with all the boring-looking, formulaic crap. I've mentioned some highlights below.
Vacancy - It's probably worth seeing Luke Wilson in a different kind of role, for the same reason we gave Jim Carrey a chance in The Truman Show. This is also a stripped-down horror plot that still seems compelling, and that's hard to manage these days... with movies like Final Destination and The Invisible, and even The Ring, reaching into more elaborate and sketchy dramatic mechanisms, I'm willing to give a shot to a good old locked-in-an-abandoned-room suspense thriller.
Day Watch - You probably haven't seen Night Watch. You should. You don't hear much about, or from, Russia, and they're developing a pretty cool franchise right under your nose.
Nomad - There's something that promises to destroy this movie, if even a few people notice it... a bad coincidence in timing and promotion. All it takes is one word, or geographical reference, linking it to a big film phenomenon with which it would not want to be associated.
Slow Burn - I have to give it credit for combining some interesting thematic elements and stylizations. What do these terms have common? : visibility - light - color - ethnicity - representation - simulation - truth - deception - darkness -
Resident Evil: Extinction - The last couple Resident Evil trailers (including this one) seem to be excuses for visual effects people to mess with reality in masturbatory ways. Somebody had an awesome time modeling Vegas, and all of the planet Earth, as a dystopian wasteland, and they really needed to show it off. There was probably a dude in the next office who was like, "You're doing that? Well, shit... I'm gonna make a fake futuristic commercial for Vegas Tourism, and then I'm gonna have it break up into static and intereference." These are the people that made the first half of the trailer kind of cool. The last half is kind of boring.
Paprika - Sometimes all it takes to sell a movie is a few clips. If that's true of any director, Satoshi Kon is that guy. His other films - Perfect Blue being a personal favorite - are all masterpieces. Of course, this particular trailer has the added bonus of a rad song in the background.
Penelope - Christina Ricci in a role I'm excited about. I was a little disillusioned at her Black Snake Moan role, where she lost all but a booger's worth of waist and got victimized for a couple hours. It looks like a cute movie. I REALLY hope it doesn't blow its "ugly duckling" load and end up with a happy conclusion that involves the protagonist becoming conventionally beautiful. Shrek knew what it was doing on this one.
Jindabyne - Reminiscent of Deliverance, and I hope the existential dread factor is comparable. If you want a preview of the story, which sounds deliciously ambiguous, read the description. If you want a preview of the tone and mood, which is heavy on mysticism and lurking darkness, watch the trailer.
In the Land of Women - Looked like it could be cool for a while... the effect of age in romantic/sexual power dynamics is something worth exploring in a new way. Unfortunately, the big kiss with the music pick-up was an abominable addition to the trailer, and it erased any interest I have in seeing the actual movie.
Wild Tigers I Have Known - This fits in a special category of movies for me: things that look fascinating, and that I should definitely see, but rarely get around to watching. Brothers of the Head is in there, and until recently, all of Almodovar's movies were in that list, as well. The trailer is surreal and beautiful, and the write-up may make you more interested, or less interested, depending on how much a concrete plot summary appeals to you.
Vacancy - It's probably worth seeing Luke Wilson in a different kind of role, for the same reason we gave Jim Carrey a chance in The Truman Show. This is also a stripped-down horror plot that still seems compelling, and that's hard to manage these days... with movies like Final Destination and The Invisible, and even The Ring, reaching into more elaborate and sketchy dramatic mechanisms, I'm willing to give a shot to a good old locked-in-an-abandoned-room suspense thriller.
Day Watch - You probably haven't seen Night Watch. You should. You don't hear much about, or from, Russia, and they're developing a pretty cool franchise right under your nose.
Nomad - There's something that promises to destroy this movie, if even a few people notice it... a bad coincidence in timing and promotion. All it takes is one word, or geographical reference, linking it to a big film phenomenon with which it would not want to be associated.
Slow Burn - I have to give it credit for combining some interesting thematic elements and stylizations. What do these terms have common? : visibility - light - color - ethnicity - representation - simulation - truth - deception - darkness -
Resident Evil: Extinction - The last couple Resident Evil trailers (including this one) seem to be excuses for visual effects people to mess with reality in masturbatory ways. Somebody had an awesome time modeling Vegas, and all of the planet Earth, as a dystopian wasteland, and they really needed to show it off. There was probably a dude in the next office who was like, "You're doing that? Well, shit... I'm gonna make a fake futuristic commercial for Vegas Tourism, and then I'm gonna have it break up into static and intereference." These are the people that made the first half of the trailer kind of cool. The last half is kind of boring.
Paprika - Sometimes all it takes to sell a movie is a few clips. If that's true of any director, Satoshi Kon is that guy. His other films - Perfect Blue being a personal favorite - are all masterpieces. Of course, this particular trailer has the added bonus of a rad song in the background.
Penelope - Christina Ricci in a role I'm excited about. I was a little disillusioned at her Black Snake Moan role, where she lost all but a booger's worth of waist and got victimized for a couple hours. It looks like a cute movie. I REALLY hope it doesn't blow its "ugly duckling" load and end up with a happy conclusion that involves the protagonist becoming conventionally beautiful. Shrek knew what it was doing on this one.
Jindabyne - Reminiscent of Deliverance, and I hope the existential dread factor is comparable. If you want a preview of the story, which sounds deliciously ambiguous, read the description. If you want a preview of the tone and mood, which is heavy on mysticism and lurking darkness, watch the trailer.
In the Land of Women - Looked like it could be cool for a while... the effect of age in romantic/sexual power dynamics is something worth exploring in a new way. Unfortunately, the big kiss with the music pick-up was an abominable addition to the trailer, and it erased any interest I have in seeing the actual movie.
Wild Tigers I Have Known - This fits in a special category of movies for me: things that look fascinating, and that I should definitely see, but rarely get around to watching. Brothers of the Head is in there, and until recently, all of Almodovar's movies were in that list, as well. The trailer is surreal and beautiful, and the write-up may make you more interested, or less interested, depending on how much a concrete plot summary appeals to you.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
The Go! Team and Samiam with needles in the red
Just downloaded The Go! Team's album Thunder, Lightning, Strike, and I can't stop listening to it. Am I the last person to hear about this? Is this blog entry gonna date me, like, two years and twenty hipster credibility points? It's an unexpected, addictive little album, purely and painfully anthemic. This isn't music that makes you lock yourself up and contemplate... this is soundtrack music, stimulating enough that the stimulation seeps into the rest of your activities. Some music turns you inward -- The Go! Team, playing remixed superhero disco anthems with middle school chants, turns you outward and gets into the rest of the world through you.
The album has a nostalgia about it. Now, I personally have an aversion to things that are self-consciously nostalgic, just like I have issues with "retro" and "kitsch." It's a neophilic instinct, not wanting to assume that people used to do things better, or be better off, than we are today. I have a theory that such nostalgic assumptions are a bad mental habit that we've picked up as we've filled out our cultural memory, and I assert myself as an idealist and a progressivist who thinks things are getting better in the long run, or if they're not, at least they're not getting worse.
Still, there's something to be said for feeling like a part of a long history, even if I wasn't around to appreciate most of that history. Thunder, Lightning, Strike invokes a Brooklyn of the 70's, with afro-haired disco queens and kids in bell-bottoms on street corners. You get the same nostalgia when you see a fire hydrant broken open in Harlem... it still happens, but it's an icon of an earlier time. I'm telling you, I wasn't even there for any of this. I was born in '82. Still, media has turned us all into time-traveling immortals, and just as I've seen Colonial Williamsburg on school trips, I've also seen life in the '70s through movies like The Warriors.
One of the ways The Go! Team manages this kind of nostalgia -- besides using basically all the raw elements of music from the '70's, including melodies, riffs, samples, and instrumentation -- is to record and produce their album with a lo-fi texture. Pitchfork Magazine mentioned this in their review of the United States release... they called it "needle-in-the-red sensibilities." It's the mark of authenticity in lo-fi recording, the testament that somebody recorded on an 8-track and had to fiddle with Radio Shack wires, instead of paying tons of record company cash to waltz into an outfitted studio.
There's something funny about this device, though. These days, recording and remastering equipment is so cheap and available that there never needs to be a drop in recording quality. It's a form of fakery, making your sound buzzy so it fits into an older aesthetic. I'm tempted to say, though, that in the 70's and 80's, when this aesthetic was unavoidable, it wasn't harnessed or respected by these artists. It's made the transition from inevitability to novelty. So what is it contributing? Why did somebody make the creative decision to create an album with crappier fidelity?
There's another album I've listened to recently that harnessed the power of crappy recording. Samiam, a California post-hardcore band that was breaking emo ground back in the early '90's, has created a lot of very pretty, well-produced albums. They've been awesome, due purely to the band's talent and songwriting skills. You won't find a more profound dynamic anywhere in punk-influenced music.
But Samiam's last album, Whatever's Got You Down, wasn't studio-polished. The vocals were guttural and clumsy, and the instruments were muddy and loose. Some fans took offense at this. Why make your music sound like crap? You can make gorgeous sounds without stomping on it and running sandpaper over it.
Of course, I'm going to vigorously defend both of these stylistic choices. What I'd like to note is that these two bands both had reasons for their stylistic treatment, although these decisions were probably very different.
The Go! Team was definitely trying for nostalgia. The gritty texture is a way of turning CD's and digital audio back into magnetic tape, at least in some small way. The music isn't trying to break brand new innovative ground, or if it is, it's trying to do so through retreival of an aesthetic that's slipped out of style.
Samiam's situation is a little different... they come from an intersection of scene with a love-hate relationship with accessibility. Punk rock has always wanted to be "pop" in certain ways: simple, short, enjoyable, visceral, and driven by hooks and songwriting. In others, the DIY music scene has actively distanced itself from pop in favor of "artistry": they don't want to be mass-produced, limited by market concerns, or forced into legal and economic subservience to their merchandise and their distributors. Samiam has always been smart and independent, but like all good punks, their flirtation with "accessibility" has been intermittent. The lo-fi sound on Whatever's Got You Down was an assertion of the band's creative license in the face of pressures to post-produce, remix, and polish their sound for the hi-fi synthpop crowd.
In both cases, though, the sound quality was a statement, an active part of the sound rather than a passive barrier to be ignored or overcome. As with a lot of media phenomena, this goes back to Marshall McLuhan, the godfather of media studies. He noted that a medium tends to be transparent until it's replaced and made obselete, at which point it becomes an object of attention and a factor in the content. Digital audio and hi-fi recording has basically replaced the ticks and quirks of analog production, and finally, after fighting those crackles and pops since the days of the phonograph, we've finally come to a point where they're part of the language we have at our disposal.
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