During O, Miami, I met many incredible poets. I also met Kool Moe Dee and Monie Love, both of whom turned out to be incredibly caring and eloquent people.

I also met James Franco, which probably means something to all you fans of the Spider-Man movies. Here's pictorial evidence :

This, I think, would officially be the closest I've ever gotten to an encounter with pop culture. I think you can tell from our facial expressions that it really meant a lot to both of us.

The next most recent encounter, before the festival, was a time two winters ago, when I was walking down the street in Chelsea, Manhattan, just after a large snowstorm, and walked past Willem Dafoe (I know, the other Spider-Man actor!, crazy!), and I was looking at him, being all, like, "I think that's Willem Dafoe!" and he looked right back at me and without even nodding, acknowledged the fact that he was, indeed, Willem Dafoe, and that no words or body language need pass between us.

And one of my best friends kind of looks like Elijah Wood, who is easily confusable with Tobey Maguire, and my mom used to watch Wings a lot, so I feel like I've pretty much met all the important actors from the Spider-Man movies. And Kirsten Dunst. Kirsten Dunst.

The show, done in conjunction with Abe's Penny micro-magazine, also features a lecture space where we're having several readings, taking place throughout April. Christy Gast, who runs the gallery, asked me to pose in a few places in the gallery, to take some preview pictures. And, by chance, I was wearing my Audioshocker.com t-shirt (this only a day after being pictured in the Miami Herald wearing a Dogfish Head brewery t-shirt (brewing up a minor scandal of my own)), so I thought it was only right to share a couple of preview images here as well, a day in advance of the show's opening on Saturday night.

Pete at the Abe's Penny Poetry Podium

"My Name is Pete, and I'm a Culturologist."

And maybe, just maybe, I'll have time for some Culturological bulletins here and there in the meantime.

Exhibit A

For a long time, I really prided myself on my thorough-going ambivalence to The Radioheads. By the time I was aware of their presence on the pop music scene (via friends listening to "Creep" or those animated videos from OK Computer) I understood to write them off as "whiny post-grunge opportunists" and "tools of the corporate hit-making apparatus." So even tho OK Computer came out at a time when my susceptibility to such things should have been quite high (I was a sophomore in high school), I never even bothered to listen to the album straight through.

In fact, I made it all the way through college (when Kid A and Amnesiac were released to massive accolades) without ever listening to OK Computer all the way through (though I did give at least cursory listends to the aforementioned smash electronica hit albums). It wasn't until I went to graduate school for the first time (Fall 2004) that I finally listened to OK Computer straight down (due in some part, I'm sure, to the fact that one of my roommates that year was the aforementioned Dan, whose favorite band The Radioheads are). To put it succinctly: I didn't realize what a good band Radiohead was until Coldplay came out.

And then Radiohead did their whole In Rainbows thing, which liked more for the "pay what you want" model of its release. The album itself was pretty lame, and I was sad to read/see interviews where the band talked about how much they liked it (I thought Hail to the Thief was way better). But it was nice to see some anarcho-socialist principles in play with an album self-released outside of the accepted corporate-driven control structures of pop music, with consumers empowered to pay what they believed the content of the album to be worth. And some of the tracks were fine.

But now, with The King of Limbs, we're back to paying standard-issue fees for digital versions of the album ($9? Get out of here...). And Radiohead have proven themselves as just another pop band churning out singles (see the above video), not really interested in pushing forward their music stylistically, or continuing to sit on the forward guard of the new music market. Oh well. A band that was pretty interesting there, for a few years, is boring again. Yawn.

The glorious stanza is this one:

His bony beird wes kemmit and croppit,
Bot all with cale it wes bedroppit,
And he wes townysche, peirt, and gukit.
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane.
Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit -
"Ye brek my hart, my bony ane."

Pretty evocative. Fuck Yeah! There's another classic stanza in there was well, in the history of racy verses:

Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dunbar is also a forefather of printing the word "cunt" as well, but I really think that both "tyrlie myrlie" and "crowdie mowdie" (especially the latter) are better.

I fell into a kind of stupor entering 2011, and one of my apparent New Year's resolutions was to allow Culturology to slip into an unannounced hiatus. But we're back, because of developments on the scene of nasty novelty rock that we here at AudioShocker just shouldn't let go unnoticed.

Back in the Fall of 2006, having spent the previous two years living in Boston, I found myself back in Pittsburgh for four months. Nick and I took full advantage of my time there, not only getting Dirty Weekend back together for an epic reunion show at the 31st Street Pub and recording fine demos of two new songs, we also recorded a handful of new tunes under our The Frank Sanchez Band moniker. When the ghost of Frank Sanchez occupies our bodies, Nick and I can sing some pretty filthy things. But I should touch on one other thing...

Going to college in the first years of the millennium, certain cultural experiences were pretty standard for the course, and two that I associate pretty closely are 1) Watching CKY videos (CKY2K coming out just in time for my and Nick's freshman year of college) and 2) Listening to songs by Boston's cock-metal favorites, Anal Cunt. Maybe because there was an AxCx song in CKY2K. Anyway, it was mostly for their track titles, which were super-offensive, but occasionally, one--looking back--must admit, made one chuckle. "I Got Athlete's Foot Showering at Mike's" is a classic. I don't think I watched CKY stuff very often, or ever listened to these songs very much, but they were out there.

So, when you come to record vulgar variety songs of your own, you tend to be aware of your influences. My biggest influence was Nick (I think my own song-writing was safely of the lonely nerd novelty genre, until he coached me along the Way of the Dirt), and his influences were... I'm not even sure... 2 Live Crew, certainly... and, Rod Stewart, I guess. Bill Cosby? But never did we say to ourselves "Let's record songs like the kind Anal Cunt makes."

Fast forward to 2010. Those 2K6/7 Frank Sanchez songs have been up at MySpace for nearly half a decade already--and listened to about twice a year. And Anal Cunt has just put out a new album. Anal Cunt, presumably, still has the strong following of shock-giggling teenagers that they've had since making the scene back in the late 80s. The Frank Sanchez Band, thankfully, goes mostly unnoticed there on the ol' internet. So, without further ado, I present two you two exhibits:

EXHIBIT A: The Frank Sanchez Band - "Fuck Yeah" (2006)

EXHIBIT B: Anal Cunt - "Fuck Yeah" (2010)

Listen to it here.

As much as I want to take some kind of credit for this--that one of the 49 listens of "Fuck Yeah" on MySpace was by Anal Cunt, and they were like "great idea,"--the moral is, mostly, that there are only so many ideas to be had out there in the world of offensive rock music. But we got to this one first. And then, thankfully, retired. (Like Frank Zappa would say, "they're just words," but after a while, I think most of us get tired of them...)

It's nice when a TV show that used to be funny and then stopped being funny gets funny again. So it has me thinking of other times when that's happened. I'd say South Park pulled off a similar trick, since it was quite funny when it first came out, but then got pretty old pretty fast--by the middle of the second season, in terms of the whole foul-mouthed 3rd-graders things. But then, in season five, the Towelie episode came out, which was hilarious, and got me to watch South Park again for a while, until it got old again. But since the Towelie episode, the show has consistently had some great episodes every season, and plenty of chunky ones. The last great peak, though, was across seasons nine and ten, between the "Trapped in the Closet" episode and "Cartoon Wars" (the latter of which finally and ultimately won me over to the South Park cause).

Sadly, The Simpsons never had a similar surge. I realize that some people have thought that The Simpsons are funny during the past decade of seasons, but the show has never returned to the heights of its 3rd-7th Seasons. There was some talk of a resurgence a couple of years ago, but that seemed, again, more like a decision made by over-zealous fans that are over-educated and don't like it when TV points out how mindless and lazy they are as middle-class consumers, who then decided that, damn it, The Simpsons was funny again. So that they could feel better about watching The Simpsons instead of, I don't know, voting.

What I've been wishing for a while now is that somehow those direct-to-dvd American Pie spin-off movies would suddenly become hilarious. I mean, it was a long time ago that American Pie came out, but I remember it being pretty genuinely funny. And it always seems like direct-to-dvd should have the kind of culture in the States that it has in Japan (or, more correctly, that I presume that it has in Japan, based on watching, like, three direct-to-DVD movies from Japan).

I'm still hoping there's more examples of shows that went from good to bad and then back to good again (maybe SNL counts, when one of its cast gets funny for a couple shows before sucking again?), but I'm guessing they're mostly going to come from the ranks of basic cable networks, since mostly, once I think gets old, it gets put out to pasture. On the DVD commentary track to the Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob follows the Simpson/Thompson family to Cape Fear (or whatever it was called, is that what it was called?), the commentators point out that in that joke where Bob steps on the rakes for such a long time, there's this balance where the gag is funny for a couple takes, then stops being funny, but then, once it goes on for way too long, becomes extremely hilarious. And so maybe that's really the phenomenon here: these shows are still just hitting the same beats, and have managed to stick around long enough that the repetition of the same shit over and over again has gotten funny again.

Is it just me, or was this show popular because people like Mad Men and Breaking Bad so much? Like, people want so badly for there to be good programming on cable television, that they just will themselves into believing that a show which is mediocre at best is one of the great achievements of contemporary televised entertainment. Now, I like zombies as much as the next person, and I think there are probably are interesting things to be said about the current trend of putting the "geist" back into "zeitgeist," but, having gone ahead and jumped on this bandwagon, and watched all six episodes of The Walking Dead, I'm mostly left scratching my head about what people see in this.

The biggest thing that I see is what South Park figured out years ago: the conservative powers that run our censorship boards don't mind grotesque violence. There's a massive double standard between censorship of violence and censorship of sex or speech acts. So zombies are pretty much the safest vehicle for cutting edge cable-TV violence, since they don't have sex and don't talk. In a lot of ways, The Walking Dead is about little more than acts of "Look what we can show on cable TV nowadays! Amazing!" It does nothing new for the zombie genre, nor for the TV drama genre, or anything else, other than there's lots and lots of rotting flesh and gun shots to human skulls. I haven't read the comic book, but I presume a lot of the flat-ness of the zombie mythology is they fault of the book, and not the TV show.

Again, there are probably interesting questions to ask about zombies, so maybe this show was an excuse for zombie nerds to talk about zombies? I'm not really a zombie nerd. I don't really want to talk about it.

1) The mid-term elections.

2) Conan O'Brien's new show on TBS.

And boy did they both suck!

I've written before about late night television, and tuning back into Conan's new show confirmed the conclusion I came to back in Culturology #55:

One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved).

There's obviously something spurious in my continued need to state that I don't care about something anymore, since clearly I continue to care just enough to keep bringing it up (and, Norm MacDonald should still have his own talk show, and I would watch that). So maybe this is the last time that I bother with Conan, since he's just getting more and more boring. In a way, basic cable is safer for him, since there can't really be any ratings demand.

Speaking of the mid-term elections, I don't think there's a better insult available in my repetoire right now then "You are a Republican!" So, now that Conan isn't funny anymore (now that I'm not 17 anymore), I feel like he must be a Republican. Jon Stewart stopped being funny, what, five years ago? Republican. Does your television show involve sitting at a desk? Republican.

I think Teabaggers probably hate and distrust most not-totally-obviously-insane-and-bigoted television personalities, but I think, basically, if you're on television, than you're a Republican. Even if you're a Democrat, or "liberal," or whatever, if you're on TV then you're basically a Republican. There was some thing on the internet the other day about some Republican-minded survey group releasing a list of what shows Democrats watch versus what shows Republicans watch. But, sorry kids, all TV is right-wing TV.

And though this guy is an industry insider, his claims seemed to genuinely be coming from the perspective of a lover of music. So his sadness at the democratization of music via internet-enabled music sharing and publicizing comes because this new system is not producing music that he thinks is good. Goodness, as I've discussed in the past, is an impossible thing to peg down, but it most boils down to having a justifiable rationale for believing that something is good or not. This is how, for instance, I can still respect Nick even though he likes terrible movies; generally speaking, he can say why he likes a thing, or I can more or less estimate, based on various trends I've witnessed across the past decade, why he thinks what he thinks is good.

So here's our industry insider's problem: like many people his age, he learned/decided what goodness was during the hey-day of 70s album rock, and his idea of goodness involves a band being able to sell out an arena, and greatness involves being not only able to sell out said arena, but also to be able to do that for several consecutive nights. And arena rock is perhaps, a true victim of the internet. Since bands (new bands) don't make that leap to arenas anymore, since they don't get enough fans, since fans, thanks to the internet, have too many choices between too many bands.

The basic argument goes like this: once upon a time, several major record labels had the machinery and infrastructure in place to give a band a chance to record an album, to disperse that album to several million fans over night, and then to put that band on a national or global tour, playing shows in front of tens of thousands of people every night. This system then generated enough capital to fund the putting on of the band's next album-tour extravaganza. Without the money generated by the music industry, bands cannot be as good as they used to be, because they can't afford good equipment, studios, engineers, or even the time to properly record an album and then take it on tour. And the bands that do manage to be good, despite their lack of resources, do not play shows to sold out arenas. If you don't play shows to sold out arenas, you are not great. Thus, we can only, in contemporary times, have nostalgic outings to arenas to see the great bands of yesteryear, as they remind us that once upon a time, there was a time called the 70s, and the 70s were great.

It's a similar argument to one that's also being had amongst book-loving people about what the role of the big publishing houses should be, and to what extent independent and especially self-publishing systems should be trusted and utilized. The music industry, even this outsider would admit, treated most of its acts like machines and commodities. But is this abuse of our popular musicians worth it in order to make the best possible music? Will indie labels and the internet ever produce any arena rockers? Certainly, independent record labels now have the infrastructure in place to nurture and support relatively large and popular acts, but is it at the sacrifice of the epic awesomeness of an arena show? Can the indie methodology continue to scale up? Should it?

I had a moment yesterday, having finished doing some work that felt good, where I flashed onto my on-going self-imposed famine from most things American-pop-cultural, and allowed myself some serious self-congratulation. Partially because I have not for a moment been bored since removing regular internet connection, television, newspapers, magazines, comics, and radio from my regular on-goings. Also, since the beginning of August (since coming over to Berlin), I have been living without a personal music-listening device. I have music on my laptop, which I listen to regularly when in my room with my laptop, but I have neither an iPod nor a portable CD player. I, as has been documented here before, have never had an iPod--remain fervently anti-Pod--but up to this point in my life, since first receiving a Discman for Christmas when I was 12 (along with a boxed-set of Weird Al Yankovic's music to that point (up through "Jurassic Park")), have always had a personal CD player handy, and have always traveled with one.

But, it turns out that the technology that facilitates my anti-Podism is backwards compatible! I so despise iPod culture that I've decided to do away with listening to music on ear bud headphones while doing any of the following activities: flying, walking around, running errands, riding trains, subways, and buses, or using my laptop in public places. This has worked out pretty well so far. My biggest test were two 13 hour train rides to and from Budapest. But never has a 13 hour train ride felt so short!

These devices have their upsides, I admit, and there's definitely been moments where I've wanted to hear music that I would have had with me had I bring CDs along, but don't have since I don't have their .mp3 representations on my laptop. And for sharing music with others, the devices are nice (that's come up a couple of times now). And, for instance, the other day I went and saw Black Mountain play, and they were incredibly awesome, so I would've liked to buy their new album, but I didn't have anything here to play it on! So maybe, some day, I will break my fast from these devices, and use them (again or for the first time), but with an increased awareness as to how unnecessary they are. I think everyone should try this. Since when were we supposed to constantly be able to listen to music anyway?

I don't really like to be this self-congratulatory, but I guess it comes along with the territory of being a cultural elitist, and especially being a cultural elitist with a long-running and multi-variegated series of acutely incisive bursts of cultural criticism (har har har). I need someone like Weird Al to show up and parody this bullshit for me, cut me down a peg or two.

Which brings up the usual problem of my really pretty thoroughly having checked out of following much pop culture at all. And I'm not quite up to the task today of giving a truly personal account of coming unplugged from mainstream culture. Except that, for instance, now I know that the American tv show The Office takes place in Scranton, PA, which I learned yesterday while doing some important research about Scranton. So that's where I'm at, culturally, dabbling here and there, but mostly wondering what's going on in Scranton. A kind of metaphorical Scranton of the heart, but Scranton nonetheless.

So once one realizes that they're in such a place--this figurative Scranton--one must then take the adjoining metaphorical coal mine tour, to really see what one has going on in the deepest recesses of one's supposed cultural vacuum. And then you realize that it's inescapable. Only with years of practice, for instance, would I be able to expunge all the Simpsons references from my worldview. I was just talking last night, in my still-far-from-fluent German about creative choice and one's mother tongue. Like, it wasn't up to me that I speak English. And my parents could have raised me multi-lingually, but they didn't. So here I am, more or less stuck with English, and sometimes bored by it, so always trying to make it interested again (or learning other languages, which can then inform back onto my mother tongue).

And in the same way, I guess once upon a time I started watching, say, The Simpsons (though I had pretty much stopped keeping up with new episodes by the time I got to college, back in 2000), but I don't really remember why. Except I thought it was funny, I guess, but I can't actually recall the day when suddenly my brothers and I became the thorough devotees that we were (though I do know that it was extremely aided by syndication, with the massive number of repeats being the ingraining force behind the total reference-making ability that I have through the first 6-7 seasons of the show). So, even if I made the choice to watch the show, I was definitely massively influenced just by syndication alone. And that hardly seems like my choice.

So there's all this cultural stuff, then, constantly replaying itself in syndication in my personal version of the zeitgeist. So then, is it ever really possible to actually fall out of touch? What if I move to Scranton?

As long time readers of Culturology (that is, Nick (and maybe Neal)) may recall, one of my favorite things about popular culture in Germany is the way they re-title movies, presumably, in order to fit in with German idiom. The classic example of this is 2008's In Bruges, which was titled See Bruges... and Die? in German. Where the English title was subtle and understated, the German title just went ahead and put it all out there. Another great example from that era (you know, back in like, 2006-2008, when movies didn't all suck?) was 3:10 to Yuma, which became, in German, Death-Train to Yuma.

So, on this trip, my most recent return to Germany, I am already defaulting to looking around to see what kind of titles foreign movies have in Germany. But it's been such a shitty year for movies that even the German titles are a let down. One exception might be Get Him to the Greek, though, as it's German title is just Man Trip. And further evidence that Germans want to be able to tell what a movie is about based on its title alone is Avatar's German sub-title, which I like to translate as Avatar: Sallying Forth to Pandora.

So why don't Americans want to know what movies are about? This of course ties in with the internet-era monstrosity that the notion of "spoiler alerts" has become. That somehow, if we know what a movie is about in any specific way, or know what is going to happen in it, then we can't possibly enjoy it. This is juvenile and foolish. So, then, even though we're the juvenile and foolish ones for feeling like the essence of a movie is (the sanctity of) its plot, it's the German titles that come off as stupid, and the Germans as the foolish ones for needing to know in simple fashion why they should bother going out to see a movie.

Though, the American movie industry still seems to make boat-loads of money despite not producing much shit that's actually worth watching, and then sometimes terrible movies (say, The Aang Legend) actually do way better abroad than they do in the States. So we're each and everyone of us--any of us with the social and financial wherewithal to go see movies at all--special little snowflakes of stupidity.

But I do want to mention, I suppose to Nick & Neal, that I can take a hint, guys. How, now on the side bar, under "Current Features" I'm no longer listed on my own, but instead lumped in with "and books." Now, certainly, most of the (non-comic) book-related material on the blog comes from Culturology. But not all of it. But is there really enough stuff about books on Audioshocker that it deserves to have it's on little link there like an annoying shadow cast by the awesome obelisk of Culturology?

And well, I guess I'm not really gonna add any content other than that little snippet of griping, 'cause I don't have a whole lot else to say for myself, except that Hesse's Siddhartha, in the original German, is great reading. And South Park, dubbed into German, is a fun way to bone up on one's language skills.

...the first block i walked i only had to fight one street tough, who didnt even get in my way.  the next block i fought two street toughs, the next block i fought four.  the next block i had to fight eight, and i did some math and knew at this rate i would have serious problems.  cause they were all low level street toughs they were easy to fight, but with too many of them i was getting bruised and bloodied from getting whaled on from all sides.  plus i thought i might be hallucinating from the pain, i was seeing weird bright shapes and this nightmare version of jesus, in a purple robe like a kimono with lightning shooting out of his nail holes, he was hanging back at the outside of the fight, watching, and i didnt know yet whether he was for or against me.  so i knew i would have to face the street tough leader.

I CHALLENGE YOUR BOSS, i exclaimed.  as he emerged from the shadows of an alley i could recognize The Chief because he was so many feet taller than the rest of the toughs.  he had war tattoos all over his face and he was carrying a weapon that only a dungeons and dragons freak would know what it was, it was like an axe head at the end of a long pole.  he took off a ceremonial ninja star from a chain around his neck and threw it fast at my arm, where it shattered my japanese watch.  YOU MOTHERFUDGER, i shouted at him, not like i was losing it but just real cold, YOU DONT EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH ITS ON.

i went into a defensive crouch, i could feel my stamina was at an all time max.  The Chief charged at me and threw a body punch, i just clenched my gut and felt his hand break against my rock hard abs.  but he just laughed and fucking bent my left knee inside out with a low leg sweep.  christ that hurt, but i kept my concentration and when he thrust at me with his weapon ihead butted the pole in half.  grabbing the axe head i RAMMED IT into his collar bone, i felt it stick in the bone and i could see he was bleeding pretty bad from his aorta but he stepped back and prepared for one more onslaught.  i tried to stand up onto my left leg but the inside of my knee felt like a handful of bottle caps.  the weird shapes were whirling all around my headcackling at me.  oh man, i thought, this is looking bad but i got to stay PSYCHED TO FIGHT.

i saw the purple robe next to me and without even thinking about it, HELP ME, NIGHTMARE JESUS, i said.  without saying anything he jumped up into my arm, folding his body into the shape of a flying kick.  right when The Chief charged me i threw Nightmare Jesus full on into his face, and when the lightning from his foot stigma touched The Chief's head he torched instantly, like holding a lighter up to a dirty mattress.  when the smoke and screaming were gone all the other street toughs had run away, i knew i had beaten them for good.

i was in front of the unitarian church now, but Nightmare Jesus blocked my way to the door, and i understood that the price of his help before was that it had to be me versus him.  this was the most spiritual fighter i had ever faced and during our combat space and time lost all meaning.  i blacked out for the whole fight and dont remember a thing, all i know is when i woke up he was on the ground in front of me looking like a can of sardines someone had dumped out on the pavement.  i picked up his barbed wire crown and put it on my head, IM THE KING NOW, i said inside my mind.

i looked behind me and no opponents were left standing, just unconscious or dead bodies, and one pair of blood footprints leading from my burned out car to in front of the church.  plus the second pair of blood footprints right out front from where i had to fight the j man.  i went down into the basement.

when i limped into the octagon i knew i was too late.  the referee was about to put the division championship belt around Mad Leroy, the thousands of people up in the stands were cheering and a whole symphony was playing crowning music.  but then everyone saw me and it got completely quiet.  Mad Leroy looked at me really intense for a whole minute and, oh shit, i thought, hes going to fight me.  cause now i knew i could face anything but he was on top of his game right now, and id lost too much blood plus the one knee and most of my hand.  but then Mad Leroy just kneeled down in front of me.  everybody in the crowd and the symphony all just stood up, they didnt even cheer, it was a silent salute.

thats when i learned about myself what they were all trying to tell me.  that i was the baddest ass one just for making it there that night.  the referee put the belt around me and i felt like my heart was cracking open like an egg, and like a great mighty bird of violence and championshipness hatched out of it and filled me with its wings.  i am the one.  i can put myfoot through the whole worlds head, not anyone could stop me.  i will beat them all down.

THE END

EPILOG

a lots changed since that night of fighting last week, i know ill never have an awesomer fight so im staying out of the octagon for good.  im a sensei now, and my foot to head move that made that guys head explode in the alley is studied by all the mixed martial arts academies.  i only fight people with my mind.  and ill train any younger fighter whos strong enough, not just a strong body ... but SMART ENOUGH to know how to say ILL NEVER QUIT, ILL NEVER GIVE UP NO MATTER HOW TOUGH.

SUPER FOOT TO HEAD

so a while ago i kicked ass in a mixed martial arts competition, someone wrote about it in a short story called Foot To Head. i never read it cause i dont read about my own fights ... i fight them. but i know that storys nothing compared to the contest i went to last week, where i whipped so many people before i even got there. so check it out.

there were some other fighters but the big ticket item was me versus a guy called Mad Leroy for the division championship belt. Mad Leroy is just this mad, tough, tough, bad dude. he used to be an offensive tackle in this independent pro football league that was illegalized for being too intense, and you know how some guys get a barbed wire tattoo around their biceps, Mad Leroy just fucking wears a piece of barbed wire around his arm. theres rumors that he sharpens his knuckle bones and i still dont know if thats true, but one thing i do know is he is SERIOUSLY HARDCORE. that night i wanted to fight with him so bad.

first i had to get to the venue though. it should have been easy, they set up the octagon in the basement of a unitarian church near my neighborhood just twenty blocks from my apartment. normally i would have walked there but i took my car because it was extra hot that night plus i wanted to save my leg strength. but part of the way there my car got a flat tire, in the middle of this really bad neighborhood. my neighborhood and the church neighborhood are kind of bad but all right, but theres ten blocks in between that are seriously dark and evil, like the worst neighborhood youve ever imagined. FUUUUUUDGE, i shouted, i didnt really say FUDGE but i think my grandma is reading this short story because i told her it would be pretty hardcore. anyway, i said FUDGE, not because i was scared but because the flat tire was fucking up my being on time to the fight. i could have just driven on the flat but i once heard about a sensei who said face every challenge HEAD ON, NO HALFWAY MEASURES and i didnt want to bend the axle. i looked at my watch, which is always right because its a handcrafted old watch i got from an old japanese trainer who was a serviceman in wwii because i seriously beat down his nephew in a fight. the watch said i had exactly fifteen minutes to get to the octagon.

i jacked up my car and already i knew there was going to be trouble, because three street toughs were in an alley giving me the eye, and then the biggest one said to me hey little man, you having some car troubles there. ive got a slim build and i was wearing a baggy shirt but i was ripped underneath that, make no mistake, but they didnt know that. i knew there was going to be fighting cause of this electrical feeling i got. its like my brain came apart from my mind and started doing all these violence equations. two of the toughs started walking towards me on different sides and just as the first guy got too close to me i knew when to kick him in the abdomen so that he rolled over a garbage can and landed on some broken bottles. as part of the same move i wheeled around and hit the other guy with my open hand in his face, hard enough to give him something to think about later, by driving a bunch of his front teeth up into his soft palate. OH OH, LOOKS LIKE YOU FUDGED WITH THE WRONG MAN, i said to the third one, the smallest one, and he just turned and ran back into the alley. it was a blind alley, which he shouldve known, but cause he panicked i guess he didnt know anymore. too bad for him.

like i said before, the other guys short story about me was Foot To Head, i dont know why he named it that. maybe because of fighter energy flowing all the way up my body from my foot to my head or something. what i do know is this short story is Super Foot To Head because of the incredibly powerful way i put my foot to that guys head in the alley. imagine if you put three pounds of medium rare ground beef in a hollowed out honeydew melon and then shot it with a shotgun. IT WAS EPIC. when it was over i was just standing at the end of the alley breathing with busted up head meat dripping off my shirt, i was so much in the fighter zone. i looked at my watch, i had seven minutes left til the match. it was just the beginning.

when i walked out of the alley i could smell there was already more trouble cooking, cause there was an eighteen wheeler pulled up next to my car and two crooked truckers were boosting my cars tires and trying to siphon off my gas. i knew from the news earlier that there were a lot of crooked truckers on the streets that night as part of some crime wave so i was mentally prepared for them, though when the first one saw me he threw a tire iron at my head that busted my nose and only added to the challenge. it was a pretty bad hit, it was like watching a pigeon get hit by a car zero inches from my face. but the taste of my own blood only added to my anger and focus.

the other trucker dropped the siphon and came at me, i started out pretty good when i landed clean hits on him with my elbow and head. but then when i was blocking a punch he pulled out a sixteen inch jungle knife from nowhere and with a loud swish he SLASHED OFF the four fingers of my right hand. AAAUUUGGHH POOP FUDGE, i was yelling, and because i was so loud and in extreme pain the guy thought he could get away, but i grabbed his shirt with my left hand and even though it felt like sticking my arm in a garbage bag full of bees on fire i still hit him a couple times in his head with whats left of my right hand. his neck made a crunch sound like when you bite into a fresh piece of corn and as he crumpled to the ground i knew he was probably knocked out ... or worse.

the guy who threw the tire iron now was trying to get back into the truck to escape, unlucky for him im left handed though, i picked up one of the wheels on the ground they had been trying to boost. SUCK ON THIS, i yelled to him, as i chucked the wheel at him and hit him low, right where the gonads attach to the body. i had tried to hit the trucker in the mouth which would have made the suck on this line make sense, but i still horked it at him pretty good, there were pieces of his pelvis bone sticking out the small of his back when i went to make sure he was unconscious from the pain. one problem though, cause of the siphon there was gas everywhere and when the tire bounced the rim sparked on the pavement and VVROOOOM the car and eighteen wheeler ALL BURST UP INTO FIRE. NOOOOO, i said, but i still had to get out of there to get out of the way of the explosion.

now i was going to have to walk to the competition which meant fighting street toughs block after block. i could take them but it was going to be bad, cause now my right hand wasnt good for anything but hitting and cause i got some gasoline on me id have to watch out for fire. worst of all, my japanese watch told me i was already twenty minutes late for the match. i knew Mad Leroy didnt want to go home without a fight either so he wouldnt let the judges call a forfeit right away, still i had to get there quick or hed win the title by default. i thought about a different sensei from the one i talked about before though, he said IF YOU BLOCK MY WAY I WILL MAKE YOU PAY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES.

TO BE CONTINUED...

So what can we take from all this? Well, so far, two quotes in particular caught my eye:

"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."

This obviously appeals to the serious artist in me, as a major strain not only in my own work, but in conversations with my colleagues, is about concentration, and the value of concentration. And whether it is appropriate, in an ADD-raddled age, to still expect one's viewers/listeners/readers to, like, actually pay attention to what you've produced. This ties in to the question I was asking last week, where I was concerned that I read graphic novels too fast--that there's something there that I'm not taking the proper time to savor (I try to appreciate the art, and notice great layout and pacing when I see it, but in more standard fare, I'm often at a loss for what I should be noticing).

There's an interesting tension that arises in a lot of creative works, around repetition. I suppose especially in music and poetry, where there are refrains or formal patterns that repeat themselves. But it comes up a lot in comedy as well, via catch phrases, running gags, call-backs, etc. And even in comic books as certain frames or set-ups are repeated in certain ways to provide continuity through and across multiple books (I know that as I work on writing Time Log, I'm always looking for spots where I can set up a situation that directly mirrors another one that has already happened in the story (and maybe that really only makes sense in time travel writing, or maybe I'm just an amateurish hack (or all of these things)). But then, even once we've admitted repetition as a central element in cultural creation, some number of artists will immediately want to claim that there really is no such thing as repetition, since, as Thoreau states, change is always happening, so at best repetition is a kind of recycling uncanniness. And all of our lives are just hauntings.

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

And see there, isn't that nice? It sure is. But you can see that even reading just the first ten-thousand words of Walden allows me too much chance to indulge my artistic self, which is totally inappropriate for the usual wielding of the awesome cudgel of cultural criticism that I flail around with here.

But... I'm going to keep reading Walden, and dammit, I'm going to finish it eventually. I can see now how ridiculous it was to try and read this in 11th grade, on the time table of a high school English class. There's no reason to motor through this stuff! I mean, the fact that I've come around to deciding to read it myself certainly clues in the fact that I'm looking to be inspired by it (I'm trying to think of what, if anything, I was inspired by in 11th grade... maybe... you know, I don't really remember what I was reading in 11th grade, outside of stuff required for class. But I've always self-identified as a reader, so I must have been reading something...), so will probably continue to find quotes that I like.

And I think part of the problem is that I've been trying to read it as an e-book, rather than as a paperback, and that definitely isn't helping. In fact, I'll probably wind up taking the time here one of these days to go ahead and find an actual copy of the thing, 'cause then it'll be way easier to read.

Luckily I've got just the scheme to buy myself a couple more weeks to finally read it... original short fiction, written by my brother Nate, will be appearing for the next two weeks. It's a story which also serves as a great epilogue to Nick and my awesome Tournament Movie Tournament from back in the Spring. So stay tuned next week for Part I of... SUPER FOOT TO HEAD!

Which isn't to say that I do all that much consuming of youth culture. In fact, I don't really partake of any of it. Except for stuff that Nick turns me on to. Things like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Would I have been aware of the fact that Nickelodeon had made a cartoon show that was pretty good? Probably. Would I have watched it? Probably not. But, luckily, Nick had the foresight to get me to actually watch the show, and I quite enjoyed it. Not enough to read up or argue about its mythology, or to go to any comic-cons dressed up as a character or anything, but was happily watched all three seasons (and happily skipped the movie when it came out). Which brings us to this week's entry in the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub: Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

There is some embossed gold foil circle stamped onto the front cover of my paperback copy of this graphic novel, so I knew, even before opening it, that it must be good (it won a Young Adult Literature Prize from the ALA). Which is also nice to know ahead of time, when you've gotten a recommendation from Nick--that other people also think it's good, and it's not just another Irish Jam (not to use the same example as last week, but I've honestly blanked on any of Nick's dud recommendations (and in fact, am mostly now thinking of him giving me Casanova, which I think I might even like more than he does, so I'll let this runner die out (and start picking on Molly instead))).

And ABC is quite good. A little bit of it was kind of off-putting to me (more on that in a minute), but it does exemplify what I think must be the appeal of much YA literature, as read by actual adults (people, you know, like me, in their late twenties):

--a semi-complicated structure which then resolves itself quickly and neatly

The back-cover copy already let's us know: this book has three main characters, how are they ever going to be related? The reader will have the pleasure of finding out. And of course, the reader does find out, and rather swiftly at that (though, I have to note here, I think maybe I'm not a great reader of graphic novels; how long is it supposed to take to read a page of a comic like this? To read a whole section?). Though, in terms of these characters resolving into each other, I was a bit curious as to where the base-line reality lies in this thing. As I was talking about with The City & The City, it's often the case in fantastic tales, that it doesn't really matter how crazy the world it takes place in is, so long as that world is self-consistent. In the case of ABC, is Jin's world the same as Danny's? That is, in Danny's world, is he actually still just Jin, seeing himself as a white American kid, or did the transformation actually happen?

And, as a point of comparison, Audioshocker 2009 You-Don't-Suck-Award nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply probably stands as an example of a book with a similar structure which is resolved in a less YA-y way. The main distinction being that, though there are multiple characters that turn out to be transformed or disguised versions of themselves in other plotlines in ABC, the tale itself is told in more-or-less linear fashion, whereas in AYR, not only is there some character-crossing (some identity theft), but the tale is much more chopped up, and less obvious in its time-line (until the reader finally figures out what's going on (who is who and when they are).

--rather directly stated meanings/morals

I don't think there's anything wrong with being obvious. That's probably what makes YA literature enjoyable for grown-ups too; we don't always want to do the work of figuring out what a book is really about. The "transforming" idea, how emigration and life as a minority is always an act of transforming oneself, whether those codes come from within your community or from without, finds a happy home in the literal/actual acts of transformation undergone by these characters. So when that old lady at the herbalist early on in the story warns a young Jin about the loss of his soul and transforming, we understand it as a metaphorical turn about where one's identity comes from. And then when he actually transforms into Danny, it's given a fine fantastical resonance (as opposed to, say, the more alienating metamorphosis of poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle).

--a wrap it all up ending

Just for the record, it's my guess that the happy, fully concluding manner of ending literature for young people is probably a newer trend. Seems like once upon a time, authors were willing to traumatize their readers a bit more (mostly, as I look back on my own childhood (which is already too soon to get at what I'm trying to imply), I'm thinking of dead dogs here). I just wasn't thrilled with the "your best friend was my son, a monkey, and he hates humans now, so go win him back over" ending.

So, as for what I didn't like as much about this: (and this probably just reveals my usual biases) what's up with Tze-Yo-Tzuh? Or, more specifically, sending the monk and the monkey to go give gifts to Baby Jesus broke past the barriers set up by of my weak agnostic notions. Just a little much. I mean, I suppose it stands as a fine archetype of East-meeting-West, but the notion that we can get through globalized culture-mashing modern existence by recognizing that we all have the same Creator just seems... ugh, I dunno, just a little much. Given the amount of in-fighting between sects of the Abrahamaic religions alone, I don't know, I suppose I would have preferred something more secular to bring it all home with, that's all. I realize that it's a work of fantasy, but grounding it in a bit more reality at the end might also be useful to the kids that have the most to gain from reading it.

NEXT WEEK: Thoreau's Walden (and I fucking mean it!)

IN AUGUST: We'll get the month of my birth off on the right foot (to head) with some original fiction, then go from there.

Perhaps some of you--presuming that you're more-or-less my age (late 20s)--have had a similar experience to this: because of watching cartoons, as I grow older and catch up with all the culture that's happened in the past, as I see, hear, or read iconic works for the first time, I realize that I was first introduced to the trope via a reference in a cartoon from my childhood. For instance, watching the "Goodfeathers" sequences on Animaniacs, and then finally, years later, actually seeing Goodfellas, and thinking "Wow, that was a violent, vulgar (you shut your mother-father mouth!) movie, I can't believe they based a kid's show around it." Or, like, every frame from Citizen Kane, which has shown up in one place or another.

In reading Sierra Madre, I encountered the source for yet another chain of references. My personal narrative of the trope goes like this:

1) In Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF, the pet-store guy, at some point, yells "Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!" Then, I believe, he throws something (some pet) out a window. This was funny.

2) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, the sheriff is deputizing some folks, and a bandit-esque kind of character declares "Badges! We don't need no stinking badges!" And my teenage self, smart as he was, realized that UHF was referencing Blazing Saddles.

3) This line comes from B. Traven's book! I read it with my own sub-section-of-brain-pieces-responsible-for-reading-and-comprehension!

4) I then realized that, given the first two things being movies, they were almost certainly referencing the movie adaptation of the book (starring one of those famous '40s actors), where the "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges." line must have been uttered. It comes full circle.

So that was exciting. I don't think anything else in the book matches that moment. So, if you haven't already surmised, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Western pulp, taking place in Mexico back during the end of the oil boom and during the perhaps long-running gold if-not-boom-than-like-some-people-consistently-out-there-looking-for-gold. I haven't read a whole lot of pulp fiction in my life, and most of what I have falls into either the hard-boiled/noir genres or sci-fi, so I'm not too familiar with Western or cowboy novels. So I don't know if this one was really better than any other or not. Part of me wasn't thrilled with the prose style, mostly because it's in an omniscient third-person narration that shifts freely between characters, and also tends to be a bit pedantic.

The pedantry isn't a huge deal, since it still does tend to be pinned to one character or another, as we follow a down-and-out American as he wanders about Mexico for a while then goes mining for gold with two other Americans (one of them being an old-timer that knows the ropes). So then they're mining for gold. There's some dialogue, some gold dust, a few hi-jinks, a little bit of danger. Then they stop mining for gold. Then someone's head gets chopped off with a machete, which is a little bit jarring, since there's no other violence to match it in the book. As if the author was thinking either "Fuck it," or "Boo-yah!" I'm gonna have this guy have his head chopped off. Felt more boo-yah-ish to me than anything.

I can't tell if that just means I've been well-trained by the contemporary-literature machine to unconsciously desire Raymond Carver-esque first person narration, or if not that then the kind of distanced third person of a lot of postmodern prose, or just a modern style thing generally, but I can't think of too many books that I've read that sit in such a place narratologically. I mean, plenty of other novels do it, but not in such a sudden and free-flowing manner as the Traven. So I tried pretty hard to keep myself for judging it on such grounds, but after a while it was still hard for me to--it's not quite suspension of disbelief, but there's a kind of realism involved in any given novel, where you have to, as a reader, by it or not, as a tale being told. But since this one's a kind of morality tale, I don't know, it just seemed a bit overwrought to me. But, it being pulp, none of this matters too much, since it all moves very briskly and is delightfully easy to read.

As another note, since I'm still not finished reading Walden, one of the blurbs on the back cover (from who knows how long ago) notes that perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would take the place of Walden as the book from which the young people might take advice. Though I still feel like it's still much more likely that I go live in a shack in the woods than go mining for gold anywhere.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

July 30th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden (this time I mean it!)

I would like to also note, though, that it isn't Walden's unreadability that kept me from reading it. Or, to restate, it's me that's the problem, not Walden. The timing just wasn't right for things to work out. Walden, we've still got a chance to make things work, I just need some more time first. My suspicion is that, in fact, I'll wind up writing about Walden's continued or renewed relevance for young people nowadays, and about how ridiculous it is to have been made to read it in 11th grade, when I was totally incapable of doing so (as I recall, I read some of the key passages, but definitely didn't read the whole thing, or if I did read it cover-to-cover, more just looked at the words, rather than actually parsing them, or I read the Cliff Notes, or the Cliff Notes were so boring that I couldn't even get through them). But I've gotta save all that writing for when I actually read the thing.

The main other cultural-digestive thing that distracted me from Thoreau was the release (and subsequent purchase (breaking a pretty consistent string of not buying media that I had going there for a while)) of a second By Brakhage anthology DVD set from the Criterion Collection. There is the part of the post where it becomes ever more painful what a nerd I am for art, but Brakhage was an amazing film-maker, and additional was an incredibly great aesthetic thinker and a brilliant reader of poetry. Combine all of that and he's been a huge influence on my own thinking about art, and especially lyric art, especially lyric poetry (which I tend not to write about for Culturology, since it's, like, rarified and probably snooty, and mostly, I imagine, uninteresting to almost everyone on the planet (and here I distinguish between poetry, which I think everyone on the planet can potentially enjoy and get a lot out of, and poetics (the theory of poetry) which is more for the poets than for the readers, in the end (even though poets, of course, are also readers))).

Brakhage is most known for his painted-on films, which are almost always silent, and which find as their inspiration closed-eye vision. Brakhage, on the various special features of the DVDs, talks about how he was really trying to make "music for the eyes." And I think, even from a popular-cultural perspective, in a lot of ways we can all see how all the arts aspire to be music. Or we have that experience, in listening to music, of finding it to be a direct line to emotional and visceral experiences in a way that happens more often and more consistently than with writing or visual art. But, before I diverge too far into talking about such things, maybe I should stop...

Brakhage is also well known because he was, for a long time, a professor of film and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. His most famous students are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who made the original South Park short while students of Brakhage's. He also, awesomely, has a cameo role in their first movie, Cannibal: The Musical (which I haven't watched in many years, but I recall being at least entertaining, if not as laugh-packed as, say, Orgasmo). So even though Brakhage didn't really have any use for narrative sound-film, and especially not for Hollywood movies, he still managed to play a role in a couple of his students' spring break project. Which is pretty rad. I like to imagine Parker and Stone approaching him about it, and Brakhage just chuckling and amicably agreeing.

So in that way, Brakhage as a further influence on me. Even though he was a total visionary and an incredible lyric artist (and thereby, is perhaps not as immediately approachable as some artists--at least from the aesthetic conversation perspective; I think his films are very understandable), and could probably be seen as being a bit of a snoot thereby (in one of his interviews he says something awesome to the extent of "I've never seen a Hollywood movie which required more than 15 minutes at a coffee shop afterwards to discuss" (that's a massive paraphrase, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting there)), he still managed to be a cool professor and show up in a random, goofy movie. Right on.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 16th: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (this will be read by then; I'm already halfway through)

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

China Miéville's The City & The City

We're starting things off with a pretty awesome book this summer, I think. The City & The City came to me as a recommendation from a fiction-writing friend of mine, as a book which is blurbed as if it's a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and actually manages to do so. And that's really what it does! I found it to be a very engrossing read (perhaps more like Chandler in this way than Kafka), the sort of novel which just thrives within its genre--a detective story--to keep the plot moving, but then contains such interesting scenery. I reckon that Neal will agree about this too, since it seems like it took him all of two days to read this one. There's, I think, a fairly large number of things to discuss out of this book, so I think I'm, as a start, going to just focus on one aspect for now, and see what comes up from there: genre.

Though this book is definitely a police story at heart, it straddles this fascinating line between fantasy and sci-fi as well. Put as simply as I can, the story takes place in a city, or rather, two cities which overlap each other, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which is/are somewhere past the Balkans. Although the two cities are separate city-states, they occupy the same geographic location, they are "grosstopically" right on top of each other. Some districts are all one city or the other, but many areas "crosshatch," where the two cities co-exist, their citizens being well-trained from childhood to ignore ("unsee") the other city. The origin of this is referred to as "the Cleaving," an excellent usage of language by Miéville, as "to cleave," awesomely, means both to split, and from a separate origin, to come together (this polysemy was also beautifully utilized by the poet Li-Young Lee in his amazing poem "The Cleaving"). Monitoring transgressions by either set of citizens across these invisible borders is the mysterious force of Breach.

Breach is the more obviously sci-fi element of the story, as they wield powers which are above and beyond those held by either individual city. They're revealed to be human, in many ways, by the end of the story, but even then their technologies and observation abilities are one of the points that stretches C & C beyond just being rather realistic fantasy. The other main source for fantasy-esque elements is the possible third city of Orciny, which according to legend, exists in the cracks between the two cities, and the never-satisfyingly-explained archaeological dig in Ul Qoma that produces a mish-mash of artifacts reminiscent of an ancient culture right out of H.P. Lovecraft (though the Lovecraftian elements fizzle away very satisfyingly before any real horror elements enter the novel).

There's been a recent spate, in the last couple of years, of authors mashing genres up with detective stories, to rather satisfying results (e.g. The Big Lebowski, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (not surprisingly also, apparently, in development as a movie by the Coen brothers), Inherent Vice). I think why it works so well, and this is certainly true of The City & The City, is that the detective novel allows for both a brisk, exciting, pulpy plot but also extensive world building. The cop, Inspector Borlú, needs a city to move around in, and since he observes with such a careful eye, the reader gets a very acute observation of the alternative reality he lives in. Here I see where both this book and a lot of these genre-benders owe a lot to the rise of respect within literary circles for comics and graphic novels in the last 20-30 years.

Certainly, world-building as a concept has been around since the novel came to being (Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance, is an amazing microcosmic work), but in (traditional) novels, the impetus has been one of realism, where the world represented is supposed to match the actual world within which it is written (Middlemarch, seems to me, is pretty much exactly what life must have been like for people like that in a time and place like that). But the kind of world/universe building in comics, which seeks to create self-consistent alternate realities that don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the actual world (this is why I think The Dark Knight was such a step backwards for comic book movies, its whole Gotham-is-Chicago method takes a massive step backwards in terms of world-building, since it hinges on actualism instead of self-consistent realism (though perhaps it needed to, since Schumacher took Gotham to such campy places in his movies)).

But The City & The City succeeds so well as a novel, that although at various points I did find myself thinking that it could be really well done as either a movie or a graphic novel, I think, in the end, that it's better off without any visual representation. This way, it's up to the reader to build and interpret the wild cross-hatching streets and the two city's different architectures, fashions, and mores. There would definitely be fun ways to show and hide the two cities depending on where Borlú is, but the book itself keeps you from seeing too much, which is part of what makes the book so engrossing. The first 60 or so pages were just fun reading to me, as the police procedural took its time getting out of the gates in order to slowly sneak in exposition of the circumstances of these two cities.

And once the book really gets going, though it never loses track of its police story roots, Miéville keeps enough turns coming that it never gets stale, so that even as plot points are revealed and mysteries both pertinent to the case and cultural-historical, it still feels like there's something at stake for Borlú up through the end. Though part of me was let down by there not being a bit more Lovecraft in there, overall I came away very impressed with both the concept and execution of this one. And we're off to the races!

I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Schedule:

July 9th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

July 16th: TBD

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Back when I was in school for symphonic music, I was doing research on the composer György Ligeti, when I discovered that he had written, back in his (relative) youth, he had written a satirical piece against his home government, called something to the extent of "Hungarian Military March," and given the non-consecutive opus number of 69. And that was fifty-sixty years ago.

I'm not really sure how old I was when I first realized that numbers could be funny, though I'm sure it was in the form of saying "You're number one," while flipping someone the bird, which I perhaps learned about from the movie Top Gun. Not the part about saying "you're number one," but the part about flipping someone the bird. Top Gun also being the movie that inaugurated my love of beach volleyball (that's not true; I don't like beach volleyball). Nor was I particularly good at figuring out dirty phraseology (as an example, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the phrases was "getting ahead with that girl," not "getting head from that girl"), let alone numerology (as much as I enjoy swearing, it was until I befriended Nick during college (this biography/chronology might also be bullshit) that my vulgarities stumbled down into obscenties). This is all to say that, for writing an article on a site like Audioshocker.com, this is perhaps the most notable milestone that Culturology has yet reached.

Oh... 420 is a funny number. And 4:20 is a funny time of day (twice a day!). Don't know why I was so delayed in remembering that one. Therefore, Culturology hereby decrees that 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating) is also a funny number. Perhaps the funniest number. You can learn more about this funny number by hiring a friend to dress in this costume. "The hat has a sign reading "420/69", which adds to the costume's authenticity." Authentic indeed (meaning, surely, that the hat being worn cost 420 pounds, 69 pence). Every so often, in critical/academic circles, the discourse can get all messed up in concerns about the authenticity of a given ethos (see, say, Theodor Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity). I think if Adorno had been writing in the times of easily-purchased sexy polyester costumes, he'd have felt differently about existentialism's "radical inwardness" (if you know what I mean...).

If I have any hopes left for Culturology (and I don't, really), it's to get to a point where as many people read it as the number that it has--the next best reason for sticking by 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating), 'cause I'm surely closer to having that number of readers than 69.

And we (I) hear in Culturology's Miami Bureau (Culturology's only bureau) should also have some other literary treats in store for you later this month as well, so it should prove to be a most not heinous summer.

But what to blog about in the meantime. It's been a lousy spring for culture. I've mostly been wrapped up between work, teaching an undergraduate creative writing class, and plotting out the upcoming (only a month and a half away!) Time Log web comic with Nick (which, by the way, is going to be awesome, if I do say so myself). I think co-writing a comic gives me some decent street cred with my students, though I'm mostly trying to teach them about the wonders of poetry these days. Why? Because you know what many of my students seem to really like? Manga. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I thought it was just a nerd-college thing that people would, like, like manga. But apparently not. Even at a giant public university in South Florida with, by my count, very few nerds, manga reigns supreme.

Which is not to make any judgment on manga one way or the other. As a matter of fact, the only manga I've ever read was the complete Akira (while at CMU, as a matter of fact). And I thought it was great. I also recall, a couple of years ago now, as Nick and I were still in the process of making Time Log happen, Nick mentioning that manga was, like, really popular, and that the easiest way to get TL made would be to make it a manga (which, as you now know, didn't happen). But now my students know that 17th-19th century British poetry is way cooler than comics!

There being some compulsion which I'm missing, to try and make poetry new and vital for my students, and use even vaguely contemporary examples. But my general opinion is that any poem worth its salt makes itself new and vital again and again across time. Of course, explaining this notion to modern students isn't easy, since it seems pretty arbitrary to them why one poem and not another would be chosen. And that's actually a really valid complaint, since who cares what a bunch of old bearded white men decide what makes for good poetry? Except that canonization is an inevitable process--and one could point this out with manga, or comics in general as well. As I've stated plenty of times before, some cultural things become recognized as being good because they are good. Or because they're good for good reasons. And it's a human enterprise; we've got to take someone's word for it. It's just a matter of not taking it for granted when we do partake of canonical pieces of the culture, and be sure to actively engage it and be able to decide for ourselves if it's worth passing on in our own personal canon of recommendations.

And so, yes, I would recommend both Akira and The Prelude. And now I command you to read The City & The City!

The aphorism generally goes "don't judge a book by its cover," but it's not so much the cover that I'm judging it by, but all that there between--and not the actually words, but just their volume. The cover seems fine, and I, like many folks who were fans of the Evil Dead; movies (especially Army of Darkness, I'm a huge fan of the the "nomicon" suffix. In fact, while I'm still a resident of North Miami (affectionately called "NoMi" by some (or at least by the free shuttle bus that the city offers)), I should probably host some kind of convention, so as to call it the "NoMicon." It'll be all about North Miami: our museum of contemporary art, our library, our night life. Pretty simple. Simple enough, maybe, to call it the Haplonomicon, or "Simply North Miami."

Hopefully I won't be so busy planning the convention to not also start up the IKWYBLSB as well. So I'm still taking recommendations for what to read. Otherwise it's gonna be something like Thoreau's Walden, which I've been meaning to read (technically re-read, maybe, insofar as I think I read some of it for English class back in 11th grade (though, if memory serves me correctly, I was so bored by it that I couldn't even get through the Cliff's Notes of it)). But Thoreau's been in the air recently, at least in my (small) social circles. Seems like a thing worth doing. One of my older brother's just re-read it, and he claims that Thoreau often displays a very pleasant wit in his writing, that was certainly lost on my too-bored-for-crib-notes 16-year-old self.

And, all joking aside, I actually do find myself very pro-bookclub, in general. Maybe it comes from having taken so many literature classes, where I've gotten used to reading and discussing literature with a group of people. And bookclubs, at least ones with folks you're interested in dealing with, can take the best parts of those academic discussions and free them from the bullshit that soaks most academic discourse to the point of no longer being particularly pleasurable. I surprise myself sometimes.

I do think I'll do another Summer of Booklove reading club this summer, so I'm officially accepting recommendations or requests for books to read (my own reading habits tend to take these big swings away from fiction--I'm currently in a 5-month-long span of not really reading any novels (though I've been unsteadily chipping away at Ellison's Invisible Man for most of these five months (the book is amazing, and I'm glad to finally be getting around to reading it, but for whatever reasons (again, these kind of fiction droughts that I got through are rather obscure to me), it's taking me months and months to actually read it all). Usually what happens during these spans is I start to get all self-conscious and wonder if I'm finally caving in to contemporary culture and not reading books anymore, and then, once the fiction-blockage clears itself  I read a bunch of novels real fast all in a row, and feel better again about my ability to read. So maybe it'll be book-blogging the summer months that facilitates that pattern this time around.

Speaking of books, I've also been having the interesting experience recently of greatly liquidating my book holdings. Having so many books (mostly paperbacks, incidentally) strikes me, now that I'm post-grad school as being this kind of awful grad-school thing where, even though I would like to claim that I'm above such thing, it meant something to have all these shelves of books, most of which I'd read, on display in my apartment (which one can then imagine transporting to the claustrophobic confines of some professorial office at some small liberal arts college where everyone is impressed at how well read one is). So, the obvious remedy is to get rid of all those damn books.

I'm about to be donating the remainder to a local library, but the first step in reducing my holdings was to go through and just select all the books that I didn't care about at all, then to more thoroughly go through and get rid of the books that I knew I was never going to read ever again. Pretty quickly, I amassed a pile of books on my floor that amounted to many many shelves worth. Then I went through the books that didn't make the cut, and wrote down the ISBNs of the ones that looked like they might be worth selling on the internet. From that list, I wound up posting around 40 books on the internet, many of which I've now sold (making a couple hundred bucks in the process). Then I brought a few of my (also grad-school(ing/ed) friends over to see if they wanted any of the books I was getting rid of. At first, they were shocked that I would do something so drastic as to get rid of my books (and, come to think of it, I think  I had a similar reaction a few months back when Nick announced that he was getting rid of so many of his comics (many of which I wound up with)). But once they picked through them, there were very few that they actually wanted.

Which is part of the interestingness of this phenomenon: as soon as the books were off the shelf and on the floor, they lost all of their value. The remaining books, which none of my friends wanted, and weren't worth selling on the internet, are now going to be donated to a local library, which hopefully be able to find some use for them. I haven't yet found myself missing any of the books that I've hosed, and really wonder if I ever will. Seems doubtful. It isn't precisely a cathartic exercise either though; mostly I just get this sense of satisfaction at making my self-image slightly less douche-y (slightly more cathartic was my recent sale of my half-stack (for approximately 88% of what I paid for it seven years ago), but maybe that just feels that way because I've been living off that cash ever since).

Before the cull, I had 14.5 shelves of books. I'm now down to 7. Not too shabby. Which is also to say, I've still got a shit-ton of books in my possession, but it's a much tighter collection, and more practical feeling, since it's mostly books to which I will probably actually return (or books that I still intend to read). I've also been going through the process of trying to get a rid of a bunch of my records too, in a similar way, to get my collection down from two crates to one. And would like to do the same with my CDs, but they're kind of lost-thing at this point, since I don't have any of their jewel cases, and no one wants CDs at this point (though I guess people could take them, rip them onto their computers, and then just recycle the disc?)

Why would I only write about poetry? Well, because of the continually-cultivated cultural ambivalence that I was writing about last post, whereby I no longer pretend to care about stuff that I don't care about (this also includes not following the Pittsburgh baseball Pirates this summer (though, let's face it, that's pathetically easy, since their one of the worst teams in the majors yet again this year)). And I ran out of the kind of play-time  money good for going to a lot of movies in the theater a year ago (and it's also been a rather abysmal year for movies).

So maybe that's the question that I'm getting at, between Hollywood and the Pirates: maybe I'm not really taking any kind of cultural-critical action via this so-called ambivalence, but merely acting as an unsatisfied consumer. So then, do I either a) recognize that I'm just an unhappy customer and get back to complaining about crappy shit, or b) figure out a way to genuinely ignore the entire set of machinations of the culture industry?

How to genuinely ignore the culture industry? Maybe by writing about poetry all the time instead. Of course, there's also a whole list of complications on why poetry sucks too, and I don't really want to bother with those arguments either. Gah. It's like I'm becoming negative-beyond-negative here. Maybe I just need a good book recommendation?

(And also, to end (if only parenthetically) on a positive note:  Gentlemen Broncos just gets better and better in my mind the more that I think about it. So does Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)

Not that I have all that much to write about at this point. What I've been thinking about this week--and many of these thoughts developed last week while I was in Denver, Colorado (and neglecting to post an article) for the annual AWP conference, which puts something like 8,000 writers into one convention center and lets the fun commence. What it is that I was and am thinking about: I think, since beginning to write these articles a year and a half ago, I've been steadily trying to be less and less of a "hater" (I think the presence of Super Haters on the site has made it that much easier). Basically, I suppose, it comes down to not wanting to even bother with most of the culture that is out there and available to be engaged with in this country. Which doesn't mean that I haven't been negative about various things (especially towards hating itself, and irony-at-large), but I think that it really has given me what I would call a cultivated ambivalence towards almost all popular culture.

It came up for me in a conversation with a friend about poetry (which is to be expected), where I found myself arguing that it's good that lots of people in the country write what is essentially terrible poetry. Because the activity of poetry is better than the activity of watching television, and many other activities as well. Sure, sometimes bad poets are annoying and self-absorbed (of course, most good poets are also self-absorbed...), but the fact that they're doing poetry is a good thing. I'm not sure if I'd feel differently if poetry were more popular than it is--in fact, I think that if poetry was more popular, America would be a better place. But my friend was rather shocked at my stance, since I'm also something of an unrepentant cultural elitist, so how could I claim to support so many bad artists in their quest to make art which turns out to be bad?

Am I just being condescending? I don't mean to at all claim that my writing is any good; really, I support myself as a poet, good or bad. On some level, there's really no such thing as "good" or "bad," if one just looks at the activity taking place. For example: Capitalism is evil and destroying humanity and much of the planet's ability to support human-like forms of life. So, insofar as an activity doesn't participate in actively destroying the world, it doesn't matter what it's value-as-an-output is. So long as you write your poems in a green-friendly way (on recycled paper, with responsible ink, etc.) it doesn't matter what they say. There's nothing really to talk about, content-wise.

So, in a similar vein, admitting that there's something to talk about for products of popular corporate-sponsored culture already allows it too much sway. Hating is participatory, so already more harmful than ignorance. Which isn't to say that I haven't spent a bit of time watching television in the past handful of months, but it's been dipping steadily (and Conan leaving late night helped that out quite a bit, since that was the last time slot that I still found myself turning the tube on). The main thing that's finally pushing me to actually just getting rid of the TV that I own entirely are the increased presence in, say, the past six months, of advertisements by oil companies that basically say "oil is good, America" in a similar way as beef corporations say "beef is good, America" (it not being a coincidence that factory-farmed beef is as devastating to the environment as fossil fuels). So here's the last time I participate in admitting that there's such a thing as television advertisements. A list bit of hating: fuck you, oil companies (and an extra negative shout-out to Phil Mickelson for all those "partnering with ExxonMobil" commercials during The Masters (which I wound up watching in an airport bar while waiting for an hours-delayed flight out of Denver)--it is not okay to partner with ExxonMobil, for anything, ever).

I realize that ambivalence doesn't actually represent much, as far as oppositional behavior goes, but within the realm of "culture," it's got to be at least better than nothing. And if we can erase notions of good and bad when it comes to home-made or independently-made, or community-made cultural artifacts, realizing that most industrial culture is similarly devoid of actually identifiable qualities of value, then maybe everybody's cultural lives will get better.

But until we roll out that gimmick (and I'll consider bringing back the book club again this summer as well), I'll fall back on the facet of article writing that has, more than any other, gotten me to sixty-three blog posts in tw0-and-a-half years: slacking. It's even probably disingenuous to call these posts "articles" most of the times, and while I do stand by most of the insights that I've delivered in the past, I've mostly, especially this year, slacked it up quite a bit. I've actually got some things that I plan on writing about, but I'm sensing that I'm not actually going to get to them all (or any of them, really). As a test/motivation, I've scheduled this post to be published at 1:35p.m. Friday (already many hours late), to see if I actually manage to write it by then. If this is all you're reading, than I've failed.

But that up there isn't all that you're reading! Holy Crap! I've actually made it back to the internet before my self-assumed deadline! Crazy... So where was I?

Gentlemen Broncos.

That's right. A movie that if it played in any theaters, they weren't near me (were they all in Utah?). But I watched this a couple weeks ago now on DVD, and I tell you: definitely recommendable. I don't know that I've seen a less marketable movie in my entire life. It's the kind of movie that people like myself and my friends definitely go for, as it hits all these marks about B-fantasy and sci-fi novels, and also the movie adaptations of those novels. But Gentlemen Broncos is so unrepentantly weird and awkward that it stymies any attempt to convince non-nerds to go and see it.

A very strange movie, indeed, though, in it's willingness to follow characters that are all depressing in their own way, but somehow utterly sincere. Which is the final nail in the marketability coffin, since I would argue that GB even blocks attempts to enjoy it ironically. One either watches it and digs its vibe, or turns it off after about eight minutes.

And speaking of half-assing, Gentlemen Broncos hits its B-movie notes so precisely, that it looks like it was made by a bunch of 10 year olds with a camcorder, both in the three films-within-the-film and at the outer layer of the narrative itself. Which makes it that much more confusing. And that much better.

And with those few notes, I'm gonna go ahead and run this, hoping that Nick comments and that we can keep talking about this down in the comments section instead of me just blabbing about it here.

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-up, skip to the bottom to see a bracket image featuring the WINNER.)

This is Pete, back at the helm again (though Nick and I are still tag-teaming on the post (a big thanks to Nick for all his work on the bracket images for the entire tournament)), typing directly into the "Add New Post" box of the back-end of AudioShocker. I'm so grateful to Nick for his help during this tournament, in fact, that I'm even letting his alteration of my column numbering scheme stand. What a whirlwind tournament tournament it's been! Just a couple of weeks ago there was a pile of movies all out there, fighting in their particular styles, but now we're down to a veritable Thunderdome wherein two movies enter, but only one movie leaves. Let's take another look at our finalists:

Bloodsport

It should surprise no one that this movie made it to the finals. The clear number one seed, Bloodsport is the heir-apparent to its own throne. Stripping all the unnecessary plot away from it's father-film Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport in a way really defines what the tournament movie is all about. It's about humans fighting as if they were cocks. And its about aggrandizing the myth of the star. Bloodsport, along with Kickboxer, made Jean-Claude Van Damme's career. And resident JCVD-expert Nick will confirm that the Muscles from Brussels never did better than his first real vehicle, Bloodsport. Additionally, the information that appears on the screen at the end of the movie introduced America to the-man-the-myth-the-legend Frank Dux, kumite motherfucker (or pathological fight-liar), giving Bloodsport a claim to verisimilitude unlike that of any of the other tournament movies we watched.

The Karate Kid, Part III

No one should question The Karate Kid's appearance across the mat from Bloodsport here in the final. You can question whether Part III is really better than the original. In the end, it boils down to this: while the original movie is perhaps a better movie over all, and a truly great sports movie, the final chapter of the trilogy is the better tournament movie. And you might balk at even that, since the tournament figures more prominently in the original than in Part III. But look at two crucial aspects of Part III's tournament structure that make it unique:

-- Conflict between the student and the master. In all the other tournament movies, the protagonist is out to prove the validity of his or her fighting ability, and almost always to pay homage to the training of his master. There is typically some kind of fighting-centric lesson learned (embrace all styles, there's always an out, etc.), but in KKIII, the lesson that the master is trying to impart -- that you don't have to fight at all -- is ignored and railed against by the student. The master still turns out to be right in the end, but not before having to acquiesce to the student.

-- Training with the enemy. In no other tournament does the protagonist go out and train with the bad guy. Terry Silver is an absolutely fantastic villain (B-movie stock, for sure, but nonetheless) to train with. Terry's Quicksilver Method, pernicious as it is, has remained in my own memory ever since I first saw this movie back in 1989.

These points alone show the worthiness of Part III to be in the finals. But also, the fact that the movie features two grown men trying to terrorize an (ostensibly) 18-year-old kid's life is absolutely amazing. Their entire goal is to put Cobra Kai dojos all over California, and that's about it. Efficient, gripping, amazing.

THE FINAL FIGHT

Before finally declaring a winner here, the committedly culturological side of me also needs to point something else out: Bloodsport appeared in 1988, The Karate Kid, Part III in 1989. This is no coincidence. At the root of all the American-learns-Asian-martial-art (and I use "Asian" here fully aware of the ridiculousness of the notion that we can use a single word like that to describe the great variety of cultures in that part of the world; I use "Asian" here in line with the way it's actually used in movies like Bloodsport) plots is the cultural need to come to terms with the three consecutive wars that the US waged against various Eastern foes (Japan, Korea, Vietnam), ending with the ruination-machine that was the Vietnam War. I've discussed this before, in the JCVD roundtables, so I won't belabor the point, but these movies represent the end of the span of years that Hollywood spent trying to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Most people really see this work being done by movies like Rambo, and the even-more-archetypal Missing in Action, but the tournament movies (and movies like Kickboxer) are on the same arc, if perhaps in a slightly subtler way (that's right! who'd've guessed it, that anything about a tournament movie could be subtle).

And The Karate Kid, Part III, as a decade-ending, trilogy-concluding, B-movie cashgrab, represents, in many ways the end of the Vietnam vet as karate expert genre. John Kreese and Terry Silver, buddies from the same platoon in 'Nam, help each other out, though they've both clearly been heinously scarred by their military experience, having been driven to severe mania and psychopathy. And they're terrorizing a kid that could have been their own son, had they not been stuck in a jungle halfway across the globe. Daniel LaRusso represents everything they hate about America: a spoiled kid who didn't have to fear the draft, never had to fight for his country or watch his buddies die, and -gasp- has befriended an actual Asian. And, to my mind, all of this shines through the movie despite its melodrama.

In the same way, Frank Dux represents the military veteran that has found a better way to survive the US's war history. He not only convinces a master to train him in the ways of the East, but then goes there and wins (this arc being made even clearer with the chanting of "The White Warrior" in Kickboxer), and then beats the Asians at their own game.

So the winner is...

There really is very little at stake in the Karate Kid, Part III. Sure, it sucks for the baddies that their t-shirts all get thrown back at them, and sure, Daniel LaRussa has managed to stick up for himself yet again, and maybe all us viewers learned something along the way as well. But Frank Dux in Bloodsport is fighting on behalf of an entire nation. Even though the using-the-kata-to-win ending of KKPIII is awesome in its purity (and has better final fight music), nothing can top the final fight of Bloodsport, the quivering of Jean Claude Van-Damme's not-yet-ravaged-by-fame face, the mighty power of his punch. However, if it came down, out of all sixteen of these tournament movies, to which movie I'd be most likely willing to watch at any given time, I'd have to go with The Karate Kid, Part III, because it really is the most entertaining of all these movies, the most re-watchable, the most useful as a pop-cultural reference. Is that enough, though, to grant it victory? I don't know...

thus...

The grueling battle ends with victory for: Bloodsport!

Tournament Movie Tournament WINNER:

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-ups, then skip to the bottom of this post for the ROUND TWO bracket image.)

Enter the Dragon vs. DOA: Dead or Alive

Little known fact about Bruce Lee: he was also a champion beach volleyball player (and if you told him you were looking for a slightly more "mature" attitude, his pectoral muscles would inexplicably swell to three times their normal size). Facing this overwhelmingly talented, distressingly busty version of '70s icon Bruce Lee, the shiny, comfortably 21st Century characters of DOA didn't have a chance. "Based on a video game?" scoffed Lee, "Ha. Ha ha hahha haha ha."

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Enter the Dragon!

Battle Creek Brawl vs. The Quick and the Dead

Two wildly different versions of the West butted heads in this instantly classic match-up:  a shanty-town were all the citizens like to stop-and-stare from time to time, and a Texas that is populated almost entirely by burly men. And those burly men were quite good at hugging each other and getting angry, but, well, they just couldn't do much against gun-slinging A-list Hollywood actors. Staring down her gun at a critically wounded Jackie Chan, who knelt bleeding on the ground, pleading for her to take pity and just end his life, Sharon Stone snickered and walked away, leaving Chan's barely breathing body to be picked at by the vultures that were swooping lower and lower.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quick and the Dead!

Redbelt vs. Bronson Lee, Champion

The exploitation wizards that came up with Bronson Lee had no idea what they were in for, going up against David Mamet's well-dialogued Redbelt. Who'd of thought that one of the all-stars of contemporary theatre would also be a macho douchebag who was way into MMA? Bronson Lee didn't, and not only did he get his ass-kicked, but he was talked out of ever bothering trying to act again. Insult to injury, my friends, insult to injury. Perhaps either Charles Bronson or Bruce Lee would have stood a chance, but poor B.L. never did.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Redbelt!

Sidekicks vs. Bloodfist

This was one of the toughest matches to call in the whole first round, because both of these movies are so... uh... good! Bloodfist fared well in the early goings, as it took immediate advantage of being readily available on DVD to control the early goings of the fight. But once Sidekicks realized that its cult status, being available almost exclusively on hard-to-find VHS tapes and bootleg DVDs snapped out of its racist day-dreaming to conjure an early-nineties Chuck Norris that was still more or less in fighting form. And also, Joe Piscopo beat Billy Blanks in a swimsuit competition. Sidekicks sneaks into round two! It might just be worth watching!

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Sidekicks!

Mortal Kombat vs. The Quest

The longest, knock-down drag-out fight of the first round. Mortal Kombat came out waving around it's many shittily-animated arms, claiming re-watchability, and a superior level of Enter the Dragon knock-offery. But then Jean-Claude Van Damme ran around with some kids, took off his shirt, and did a split, and everyone in the audience, Christopher Lambert included, swooned. This one will be debated into the ages. Was it a fair fight? Were the judges biased by a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with the Muscles from Brussels? Are they rejecting all video-game based tournament movies until Marvel Vs. Capcom finally gets greenlighted? The world may never know.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quest!

Bloodsport vs. Best of the Best

Come on people. Bloodsport wins. Duh. Bloodsport won with its eyes closed.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Bloodsport!

The Karate Kid vs. Never Back Down

One of the greatest sports movies (let alone tournament movies) ever made faces it's most successful (and not all that successful, at that) knock-off. There may well have been things about the 2000s that were okay, but Never Back Down wasn't really one of them. No contest. Way to go, Daniel-son.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid!

Over the Top vs. The Karate Kid, Part III

We've met many people over the years that have claimed to have been entertained by Over the Top, but we don't really believe them. Meanwhile, KKPIII is a much better, way more over the top B-movie than Over the Top. It's not even time yet, in just the first round, to even sing the full praises of The Karate Kid, Part III. A sleeper candidate? A wildcard? Could be, could be...

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid, part III!

Tournament Movie Tournament ROUND TWO Bracket:

Be back next week to see which movies fight their way into ROUND THREE!

The ROUND ONE contenders:

Battle Creek Brawl: They tried to make Jackie Chan famous right after his brief appearance in Enter the Dragon. Despite flashes of his amazing charisma, it would take another decade after this movie for Chan to make it big (as big as Billy Kiss from Pittsburgh).

Best of the Best: Eric Roberts leads a team of American characters in a charge against a superior Korean Taekwondo team.

Bloodfist: Low budget fighting in the Philippines that spawned eight sequels -- more than any other movie on this list. With Billy Blanks!

Bloodsport: Jean-Claude Van Damme in the role that he never bettered, in his first and best movie. The clear favorite in the tournament.

Bronson Lee, Champion: What do you get if you cross Charles Bronson and Bruce Lee? A motherfucking champion, that's what.

DOA: Dead or Alive: Like Enter the Dragon, but with volleyball.

Enter the Dragon: The original. But is it the best?

The Karate Kid: One of the truly classic tournament movies, even if it's not as intense as the more adult fare of Bloodsport or Enter the Dragon. But can 1984's favorite plucky New Jerseyite win a whole tournament tournament in 2010?

The Karate Kid, part III: The oft-overlooked final chapter of the original Karate Kid trilogy. Most people think it went right from KK II to The Next Karate Kid, but first the Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi had to take on some seriously menacing Vietnam veterans.

Mortal Kombat: The entirely watchable first foray into franchising the iconic video game into a filmic empire. One of the many Enter the Dragon homages in the tournament. With Christopher Lambert!

Never Back Down: Karate Kid, reinvented for douchebags in the 21st century.

Over the Top: Sylvester Stallone never speaks above a whisper (he must have been really tired when they filmed this) in this B-movie, truck-driving, arm-wrestling, father-son-bonding classic.

The Quest: Jean-Claude Van Damme is a street fighting stilt mime scamp (possibly some sort of weird child labor offender... or fetishist), forced to escape New York City and stow away on a cargo boat, where he proceeds to get caught, get saved, and get sold into martial arts slavery in Thailand. Also directed by JCVD.

The Quick and the Dead: Sam Raimi's dolly zoom wild west classic. Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, a young Leonardo DiCaprio, and guns! What more could a tournament movie need?

Redbelt: David Mamet loves MMA. Who would've guessed? Clearly the artsy-fartsiest of the movies in the tournament.

Sidekicks: A very special vanity project for Chuck Norris, but is he really in this movie, or just a figment of our overactive imaginations?

That's the list! So now go, download the ROUND ONE bracket, and play along to see if your picks move onto ROUND TWO next Friday!

Given that, as I was suspecting last week, Brubaker/Philip's Criminal is definitely worth bothering with. A full notch better than Sleeper, mostly because they both seem more at home writing a straighter noir piece, rather than having to bother with sci-fi elements. The first arc, Coward, just hits on all cylinders (and the second issue's cover is one of my favorite covers ever (and I don't normally even notice covers all that much; so maybe my immediate enjoyment of this cover demonstrates some aspect of my taste in general (I think it probably does), and thereby further clarifies why I think Criminal is better than Sleeper.

Criminal also further brings up the issue of back-matter in comics, an area of content which, to me, reached it s height with Casanova, where I can't really imagine reading the book without the back-matter; it'd still be good, but not nearly as good as I feel like it was. Criminal has some of the usual letter-responses and shout-out type material, but then also features (and I guess, again, that most of you know this, since the book isn't, like, new at all) short essays by guest writers about aspects of noir that they like, or specific movies or books that seem worth talking about. So not as personal/interwoven as the Casanova material, but definitely substantial and an aspect of reading the book in general (since the quasi-scholarly material certainly heightens the sense of genre exercise from the book).

It's a conversation that Nick and I have begun to have, as we approach the printing date of our 10-years-in-the-making masterpiece, Time Log. The story itself is enough pages that we can just print it and use the inside covers for any publishing info & thank-yous that we may need, but there's also this sense that maybe we should add another 4 pages of content, in order to have some supplementary materials. But how necessary is this? If we did so, would we just be copping an aspect of smarty-pants comics that I like and some of which appeal to Nick? Or is this what readers want in the first place? To know about all the trials and tribulations that we've been through in the last ten years in order to finally get this book in print?

I don't think that either Nick or I are particularly confessional about our craft (if you can call it craft), and I'm not sure if Shawn is or not. Plus, it would cost just that much more to print an additional four pages. But is that what we need to do to get this comic read? Or should we just run some advertisements instead...

But now that I'm done for the moment reading novels (okay, that's not really true (I'm still in the middle of reading a (less contemporary) novel); you can take the nerd out of the library, but you can't take the library out of the nerd), I can get back to the other things that I like to read, namely, shampoo bottles comics that most people that read comics have already read. For instance, I finally just read Casanova, just in time for internet rumors that Fraction is finally working on the next arc. But, damn, that's a brilliant comic. I never really read comics as a kid, or even as a college student (got into it a little bit in college, reading stuff like Akira and other sundry technical university required readings), aside from a single issue at the barber shop where I used to get my haircut, in which Superman raced The Flash. The race was refereed by some kind of floating leprechaun guy. I forget who won, but I think it made the floating leprechaun guy unhappy. It's been a long time since I've been to the barber (though, full disclosure, I went to a Supercuts in December). So I've had a lot of catching up to do, since now that I like and read comics, I have decades and decades of catching up to do. Luckily, part of being in graduate school is having just about as much time as you'd like to have to dedicate to reading. Without getting into too much of a discussion about Casanova (because, again, I imagine that most of these conversations in the real world took place, like, a couple of years ago), I think what most impressed me about it was how it managed to feel both very unique and personal but also have a kind of broad appeal at the same time, which is a real queue (especially to a person like me, who has spent a fair amount of time here in Culturology talking about audience)). And, it probably goes without saying, but many thanks for Nick for plugging me in to just about every comic book that I've read.

Also just read Brubaker/Philips' Sleeper, which, coming after Casanova, seemed much more rooted in genre, and really kind of lacking on the sci-fi side of things. Liked the atmosphere and main character, and the global black ops kind of plot, but the superpowers seemed really pretty dull. But given the genre-related sense, I'm pretty stoked to start reading Criminal, the first five issues of which are now waiting on my table as the next thing I start reading, 'cause it seems like it pretty much has to be better than Sleeper was.

And speaking of Fraction and Brubaker, I also just read the first arc of the Last Iron Fist thingy that they co-wrote, which is pretty rad. And I'm looking forward to the next sequence, since it's apparently going to take place at a tournament, and I've just finished watching just about every tournament movie made in the last 40 years (look forward to some Tournament Movie March Madness here at Audioshocker, courtesy of Nick and myself).

And speaking of shit that's out of date, John Byrne is, like, a total asshole, right? Or am I incorrectly picking up that vibe from is early '90s Next Men effort?

Other comcis that I'm about to start reading, finally: Umbrella Academy, and Promethea.

I've also had the opportunity to read most of this stuff in single issues, rather than in their trade collections, which I think is also a massive bonus (especially with Casanova, since the book really works so well because of its back-matter). And maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I think it's really important that comics don't get sucked in to be entirely digital. Mostly because even the flimsy paper of physical comics will last longer than most digital storage mediums. And I want to be able to read comics in the case of a massive solar storm wiping out North America's power grid!

So what can I culturologize today? How about the fact that Avatar sucked? I guess that's not really that interesting, and a moot point, and just kind of blandly hater-ish. But such terrible writing, gah, that any time I actually managed to be sucked into it's Imax 3-D world, I was pulled right back out by the utter crap of its writing. But my favorable opinions of the continued recession-era 3-D craze continues. The future is now, people. Now now now now now (or, hmm... despite being "back with a vengeance" here at Culturology, I seem to still be half-assing it... though I feel bad about this...)

One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved). Really, now that football is over (football ended when the Steelers didn't make the play-offs and once I had already one my fantasy football league's championship game (that's right people, not only am I a hot-shit cultural critic, but I also kick ass at fantasy football)), I don't watch hardly any TV at all, except for some occasional snippets of international news on my local PBS station (German TV news on Wednesday nights!). And find myself, remarkable, having better things to do from 11:30-1:30 than watch desk-based interview television.

So let's see... what else happened... oh! I finally read (finished reading) Richard Powers's Generosity: An Enhancement, which readers might recall as my choice for the not-suck-y book of the year. It was really pretty good, definitely worthy of the prize (though I'm now reading another nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, and it's really pretty good too). Not Powers's best book, but a good book.

Alright, well, here at least, we see that Culturology is alive, if not kickin', and re-dedicating itself to getting its shit back together and having, like, real fine vintage-quality posts again soon enough.

I feel some sense of obligation to really knock things out of the park with this post, since I asked off of Mondays and Nick & Neal accommodated within a week, but we all know that that's not necessarily going to happen.  I think, though, that by February I should really be rolling again. You've got to give me a break, Culturology is now an entire entry-year old, and a little bit prone to a wee sophomore slump here. But we soldier on.

Since Nick, I believe, has finished his massive Jean-Claude Van Damme movie watching marathon--though we may still sneak in one more JCVD Roundtable to cover the Oughts (and we also have some other awesome JCVD offshoots coming up soon)--I do still want to mention that nothing that JCVD ever did is nearly as entertaining to watch as Jackie Chan when Chan was at his peak (I'm thinking Drunken Master and Police Stories I & II here). Especially the Police Story comparison needs to be made (or even Rumble in the Bronx, for that matter) because it's the exact genre that Van Damme never managed to do as well as Jackie Chan (and Chan's amazingly-willing-to-be-injured stunt team). This ties in, more or less, with my sense that the most important part about Van Damme is that he was 1) white and 2) not American (Nick and I already discussed this to some extent in the first roundtable), since it's my sense that the boost of martial arts stars in the States, as much as it had to do with the rise of Hong Kong film-making and Bruce Lee's lasting impact, was really about the fact that the US had waged three consecutive wars against various Asian countries.

You can more or less map Edward Said's "Orientalist" readings of Victorian literature as it pertained to British imperialism (say, especially, for this case, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda) onto Kickboxer as it relates to post-Vietnam War blowback. Where JCVD, in way that Chuck Norris never could, becomes Thai (learns the "ancient ways"), but still, despite his apparent willingness to adapt to a new culture remains the "White Warrior".

As opposed to Jackie Chan, who just did awesome stunts all over the place.

+++

Also, I feel like, since I wrote about it back in the summer, I should weigh in on this whole Tonight Show situation. Of course, back in my previous post, I basically said that, excepting a few rare occasions where guests like Norm MacDonald (who should have his own talk show) or William Shatner are hilarious, Conan O'Brien had gotten incredibly boring and bland (and that, really, as Nick pointed out, Conan hadn't been really funny for a decade already). The platform probably is outmoded. So I'm not really on O'Brien's side. I watched the show last night, just to see what it was like now, what with the controversy, and Conan's interview w/ Rob Lowe was really pretty hilarious, old form for Conan. Too little, too late, I suppose.

I'm sure Bob Odenkirk wishes he was doing more, but I almost think Conan would be good in a position with some new show similar to Odenkirk's with Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job, where he'd be the guiding light to some comics that were doing more interesting things, obviously inspired by their mentor's glory days. (It's a suitable comparison as well because, apparently, back in the day at SNL, O'Brien, Odenkirk, and Robert Smeigel shared what was the funniest office in Manhattan at the time.) Or Conan doing weird comedy for the internet, at least, instead of bland corporate shilling for NBC (or for Fox, or where ever he ends up).

Though my guess would really be that Conan just grew up at some point and doesn't really want to work very hard any more (I'm sure he works hard to maintain his new bland self, I realize that). So I guess i still don't really care, but I'm pro-funny. Bring the funny.

And I had a great, what I would consider to be a classic-style culturological formulation ready and everything. I'll get it out here, and maybe add to this if/when I get the chance, should conversation not bubble off as rapidly as I think it will.

Over the weekend, I third wheeled with a friend of mine and his girlfriend to go see the new George Clooney vehicle, Up in the Air, which is a great kind of movie to third wheel on, since it's the usual brand of "indie" rom-com that uses an episodic structure and general plotlessness to come off as quirky and indie as it's been perceived as by the general-ish viewing public. A general waste of a time of a movie, except for an awesome cameo by Sam Elliot (though I missed all his dialogue because I was too busy whispering Big Lebowski quotes to my friend's girlfriend (in typical third wheel fashion)).

But here's the point I want to make, about George Clooney:

George Clooney will always be disappointing as an actor because he's constantly trying to be Jimmy Stewart when he's really--and hopelessly--James Cagney.

-

I really don't know, myself, but it's been bothering the hell out of me. There's got to be something, right?

And, as usual, to remind you all that there are plenty of good reasons for us to be dedicating so much time to the Muscles from Brussels, I present you this non-Van-Damme-related clip of a daring feat of strength, that does not compare with Van Damme's stunning ability to play his own identical twin in a movie:

Roundtable #2

Pete: For this roundtable, we're fast-forwarding from the early successes of JCVD's introduction to Hollywood all the way to the apex and end of his decade-long run as a truly viable action star, with a discussion of Sudden Death (1995), The Quest (1996), and Maximum Risk (1996). Granted, there are plenty of movies between Kickboxer and Sudden Death to discuss, and then the whole span of 1997-2007 before JCVD to discuss, but in a way, talking about these three movies gives us a solid set of bookends within which to discuss Van Damme's various movies. None of these three movies are great, but none of them are terrible either. In fact, I would argue that Maximum Risk was really quite good, and doesn't start too look bad until compared with more recent movies like the Bourne Blah-Blah-Blah trilogy. And with all three of these movies, we get great examples of the fact that, whether or not any skeptics would want to admit it, Van Damme definitely spent some quality time with an acting coach or two during his transition from kung-fu tournament movie star to Hollywood action movie star. The Quest, as a historical epic and tournament movie, is a bit of anomaly, stuck between the straight forward (and based in Pittsburgh!) Sudden Death and the also straight forward (but Van Damme plays identical twins!) Maximum Risk. But there's plenty to talk about for each and across all three of these movies.

If I had to pick one, I'd probably pick Maximum Risk as the best of the three, but I'm guessing you'll pick differently, Nick, since I can imagine you favoring the ambition of The Quest, plus the added bonus of it's involving Frank Dux (who gets co-credit for the story idea with Van Damme (even if that's just because the plot is pretty much just Bloodsport, sixty years earlier). Also, let's check what movies Van Damme was up against... Schwarzenegger, in similar years, was in a comedy phase, making Junior and Jingle All the Way, but also made Eraser. Stephen Seagal made Under Siege 2, Executive Decision, and The Glimmer Man. Stallone made Judge Dredd, Assassins, and Daylight. Who's really in charge here?

Nick:

Actually, my favorite of the three is also Maximum Risk. It really is a proto-Bourne film, keeping most of the mysterious international intrigue aspects but ditching the horrid camera work of the Matt Damon series. I also have to agree that Van Damme's acting is pretty strong. It tends to improve with every film. Imagine how awesome Bloodsport would be if he could turn out the emotion of Maximum Risk? That would be amazing!

I also have to agree that it seems like The Quest was JCVD's attempt to do just that - make a richer and more emotional entertainment experience with the same core concept as Bloodsport. Unfortunately, it's just an oddball. While the tournament is incredible, the character work is bizarre. Van Damme is a Charlie Chaplin meets Bruce Lee vagabond who gets used by a cheeky "pirate" played by Roger Moore... WTF??? Furthermore, Van Damme's character isn't even likable. He's kinda sleazy with his weird Oliver Twist style crew of children thieves. When it comes to fighting, you root for him because you want to see Van Damme kick ass, but there's nothing about the character's personality that makes you want him to win.

As for Sudden Death, it's my least favorite of the three, but probably the most memorable. From my office, I can see the Mellon Civic Arena where the movie was filmed, and I know the other exterior locations. In fact, I'm pretty sure one scene was even filmed on Beeler Street (a small college road where Pete and I used to party).

Looking at those other films coming out during this period, it really appears like Jean-Claude was the most serious action star of the group. He never hit the screwball comedy genre like Arnie, and he didn't make a single sequel until the end of the 90s. Unfortunately, the way I see it, all this good mojo was soon scattered as Double Team and Knock Off absolutely ravaged JCVD's credibility for the rest of the decade.

Pete:

One thing that holds Maximum Risk back is its premise that JCVD had an identical twin brother (which, at this point, I believe, he had already done once). It just seems silly and incredibly vain. Also, how much of the credit for Maximum Risk should go to Ringo Lam? I know he's mostly a Hong Kong (I think) movie director, but also one of his movies was very influential on Tarantino in Resevoir Dogs.

The more I come back to thinking about The Quest, the less I like it. One thing about tournament movies in general is that they pretty much never feature fighting that's as good as the best kung-fu action movies, and it's very difficult to maintain interest in between the fights. Kickboxer does it the same way Rocky IV does, by focusing on the training and personal growth and the larger-than-life enemy. Bloodsport does it by mostly just having a lot of fighting, some entertaining scenes with an awesome sidekick, and sprinklings of a love interest. The Quest is more or less the same plot as Bloodsport (apparently, the only way that JCVD or Dux could imagine a woman caring about a fighting tournament was by having her be a reporter), but with all kinds of bloated filler and pseudo-adventure plot. Rather than action movies like Maximum Risk or Sudden Death, I think it was The Quest that represents more of JCVD's downfall than anything.

Are there any biographies available of Van Damme? One of us should read up on it. I was talking to a friend who worked in movies a bit, and who actually claimed to have one time worked with Van Damme's stunt double, who hated Van Damme for ruining both of their careers. Accusations of drug problems, vanity, and failure to meet commitments abounded. I can definitely imagine Dux and Van Damme doing a ton of blow and making out with each other in their minds while conceiving The Quest. I'll be curious to see Van Damme's late nineties escapades to see exactly how far he falls.

Sudden Death is definitely the most memorable, Nick, even though it's not great. Partially because it was conceived by the owner of the Pens as a way to advertise for his team, which is kind of awesome. But that's just it. JCVD, more than anything else is known for his bloated non-success movies, with maybe an afterthought for the fact that Bloodsport and Kickboxer were really pretty good. Did Van Damme ever make a true martial arts action movie?

Nick:

I'm not sure what you mean by "true kung-fu movie." Give me some examples!

I can't believe how down everyone is on The Quest. On A Podcast with Ross and Nick #24, we discussed this film and Ross is really down on it just like you. All I'm saying is that The Quest looks like an Oscar contender compared to Double Team, Knock Off, and Legionnaire. I thought The Quest was hokey here and there (and certainly bizarre -- a street fighting stilt mime stows away on a cargo liner and gets sold into martial arts slavery by a flamboyant pirate), but enjoyable. I also thought that the fighting tournament was sweet as hell.

Ringo Lam was probably a big part of the quality of Maximum Risk. He did In Hell, which was a solid Van Damme flick. He also did Replicant, which I hear is great... but the movie just arrived to my house from Netflix and the DVD was cracked in half (!!!) so I have to wait until they reship it. In fact, I was on a waiting list to receive Replicant in the first place, so I'm kind of worried that there is no replacement copy...

Still, I thought Jean-Claude was really good in Maximum Risk. But would I rewatch the movie? Hell no!

That leads me to an interesting point: which Van Damme films have the highest rewatchability? I think a movie that can be rewatched -- regardless of "quality" -- is a great indication of a compelling and memorable story. In my mind, that easily places Bloodsport at the top. I've watched Timecop a few times now, and while it drags here and there, it still maintains some fun. I've seen Street Fighter a few times in the past few years and I always get a kick out of it. I'm looking forward to rewatching JCVD, though I'm dreading its rewatchability factor... will it be high or low? Other Van Damme movies I would willingly rewatch include Lionheart, Kickboxer, and maybe Nowhere to Run. I would rewatch The Quest, but just forward it to the tournament scenes. In Hell definitely has rewatchability -- but the content is so visceral and violent that it would be hard to just pop it on and let it play in the background.

Pete:

I guess I mean an action movie where most of the action/fighting is in some kind of martial-arts-esque mode, beyond just the kick-and-punch of something like Maximum Risk. Jackie Chan's early movies, for instance. Or Jet Li's. Or Tony Jaa's The Protector (one of the best ever that I've seen, for it's Muay Thai-based fighting). To me, in Sudden Death, Van Damme may as well be Stallone or anyone else that can look worried and throw a punch.

As for The Quest, Nick, I think you've just got a higher tolerance for camp than most people. I recall how I felt like you almost felt as though I had betrayed you by not liking X-Men Origins: Wolverine; it's similar here: at some point, The Quest crosses this line where the good (but not great) fighting scenes in the tournament don't make up for all the rubbish that surrounds them.

I think I'll have a better opinion on the rewatchability once I've seen more of Van Damme's movies--I'm way behind you on that front--but Bloodsport is the most obviously rewatchable. I plan on rewatching JCVD before the end of all this Van Damme discussion, but I too dread that it won't be as cool a second time around.

I spent the bulk of my long weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) at Miami's own Miami Book Fair International, both as an attendee, seeing several amazing readings, as an exhibitor, both hocking promotional micro-issues of the online literary magazine I am editor of, and also hocking issues of the latest anthology that the poetry collective that I am a (founding) member of produces, and as an author, reading in a large group reading with the aforementioned poetry collective. So I've got books on the brain, folks. Three books, none of which I've yet read, caught my attention this weekend:

1. Richard Powers's Generosity: An Enhancement

Powers is a well-known author, but not as well known as he deserves to be. His books also tend to be labeled for the fact that they often deal with science, or with characters who are scientists. But Powers's universe is also populated with artists, writers, and musicians, and all of his characters are fully and humanely created and developed. I heard Powers read from his newest just-out novel, Generosity, and speak a bit about it as well last Wednesday. He read a section which featured a perhaps slightly-in-the-future, bizarro Chicago, in which a very powerful television personality tapes her show. The personality is essentially an Irish-American Oprah, and she is interviewing one of the books protagonists. But what was particularly interesting about the passage was how effectively it captured the machinations of an internationally successful TV talk-show, including the various prompters and monitors and pauses and contrivances and all. As it turns out, I've read all of Powers's novels up to this point, so I'm an easy audience to win over, but I was really very impressed by this reading, and by getting to see Powers read and speak in person. Very open, sincere, all-in with his talk with the audience.

2. Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply

I'd seen Chaon read a "ghost" story back at Carnegie Mellon in I think '03, and had read his book of short stories, Amongst the Missing, which I liked quite a bit, so it was cool to see him read from his new novel. Similar to Powers's novels, Chaon has built his novel by interweaving three stories. At his segment, he read early passages from each of the three strands. I could get no sense of how they are going to weave together, but each portion was strongly written, often with nice bits of wit included into somewhat intense scenes. For some reason, perhaps just that their last names are similar, I've associated Chaon in my mind a bit with Chabon (though also with Adam Haslett, since Chaon and Haslett had successful books of short stories come out around the same time), so I'm excited to see Chaon getting into novel writing. Even before reading this book, I'm hoping that Chaon will continue to produce more.

3. Dennis Kitchen's The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics

It can often be the case that hero-worship in comics is terribly boring and not worth the time, but Kurtzman's legacy deserves some praise. Given Nick and my exploits in trying to get jobs writing for one of Mad's more successful knock-offs, my own interest in Kurtzman should be obvious. But given the massive number of other creators and artists that Kurtzman discovered or helped or influenced is huge. This book seems very cool since it focuses on the art side, where we can see how not just Kurtzman's ideas were influential but also his layouts and the art itself. They also seem to spend a good amount of time with Kurtzman's work on the EC war comics Two-Fisted Tales, and Frontline Combat, which is good since they're landmarks in counter-self-censorship war comics and reveal that not only was Kurtzman a pioneer in satire but crucial in the develop of what action comics have become today as well.

This Week in Not That Guy #2: Christopher McDonald

For a long time, I think that McDonald really was a that guy. But then, at some point, I learned his name, and recognized him from too many things for him to be a bonafide that guy. I would say, up through at least Happy Gilmore, that McDonald was a that guy. Was it his seminal role as Shooter McGavin that turned things around?

Shooter: That Guy or Not?

He was definitely that guy that was the show host in Quiz Show, before Happy Gilmore, and was that guy--Shooter--when he showed up in Dirty Work. So perhaps--and maybe this reveals my predilection for art films--it was his role as Tappy Tibbons in Requiem for a Dream that elevated McDonald into the realm of the no-longer-that-guy. Though these are also more or less the only movies I recognize him from. But we're still only in the year 2000 here; let's see if anything becomes more clear in more recent years...

well, really his CV looks like that of a That Guy. But then, I semi-accidentally ended up watching an episode of "Numb3rs" back on Friday (mainly because McDonald and Lou Diamond Philips were guest stars, so I figured what the hell, why not), and McDonald, to me there, was definitely neither "that guy" nor even "Shooter" but actually McDonald himself. Must've been Requiem for a Dream that did it.

As if images of the "real" world somehow add veracity to the movie's fictional enterprise. The trailers for 4th Kind have this "you decide what's real." Though I don't really want to defend the actual world against fictional adaptations, I'm just feeling rather tired of the whole thing. Apparently, I guess, Paranormal Activity, was in a similar vein, insofar as it was similar to The Blair Witch Project. What a fad. Aristotle (without sounding too much like a graduate school A-hole (or sounding just like one, but intentionally so)), I reckon, would remind us that theater is intended as a mimesis of real life, but also that that representation of the real requires careful control and plot-making acumen. Little splashes of notions of things being "based on facts" or, like, looking, like, totally real are just surface level attempts at such things.

My other friend that mentioned T4K to me brought up the fact that apparently the alien abductions that are the subject of the movie were actually the actions of a serial killer. He was rather incensed at the notion of turning an actual spate of serial killings into an alien thing. I'm not sure if I agree or not, but a cursory internet search told me that the investigators of the supposed serial killings decided that it was probably just alcohol abuse and suicide doing most of the disappearing. And alcohol abuse is certainly fair game for reinterpretation as alien abductions.

This all somehow also matches my disdain for the contemporary memoir. So it is similarly vulnerable to the complaint that I hate this stuff without actually reading or watching it. But that's just it; I'm giving my reasons for not bothering with this stuff. I guess I just don't like stories that keep it real. They're real alright. Real boring.

This Week in That Guy #2: Stephen Tobolowsky

We had some discussion last week as to what, precisely makes a guy That Guy. Stephen Tobolowsky matches the criteria perfectly: he's in all kinds of movies and TV shows, but never in a particularly big role. Mr. Tobolowsky oftentimes plays the creepy politician or the villainous step father, amongst other roles. My most recent "that guy" moment was when I was watching the HBO series Deadwood, in which Tobolowsky shows up as a crooked commissioner.

The obvious point which complicates Tobolowsky's status as That Guy, is his seminal role as Ned Ryerson in 1993's Groundhog Day. "Ned? Ned Ryerson? Ned the Head? Needle-nose Ned?" In the comments last week, I was arguing that, for instance, the guy that played Puddy in Seinfeld doesn't count as a That Guy because he's just known as Puddy, too iconic a label to give him That Guy status. And this may be the case with Tobolowsky, as many people out there will always remember him as Ned "Bing Again!" Ryerson. However, I think in the 15 years since that role, Tobolowsky has made so many movies and taken so many (minor) roles, that he's overcome his Ned-ness to become a bonafide That Guy.

Here's something I found on youtube that has Tobolowsky in it:

Wow! What a That Guy!

As further evidence, Tobolowsky was also That Guy in The Insider, Memento, and Spaceballs, not to mention, like, every TV show ever.

This Week in That Guy #1: Paul Ben-Victor

I watch my fair share of movies and TV shows, and I often catch myself playing that viewer's game, where you recognize some actor or actress on screen, and spend the rest of the show/movie scratching your head and trying to remember what else you've seen them in. "Who was that guy?" you say, to your friends, and then you continue to speculate as to who they are and what other things you've seen them in. That Guys are oftentimes that guy either on TV, making lots of guest appearances on all sorts of shows, or character actors in movies, showing up in small-to-medium parts in all kinds of movies. Character actors are great--I tend to like these "real" actors more than the method-types that seem to garner so much praise, so I don't mean to belittle any of these That Guys by labeling them as such. There are much worse guys to be, and way worse kinds of That Guys to be.

The inaugural That Guy (and fellow--to Nick, Neal, and myself--Carnegie Mellon alum) is Paul Ben-Victor, who showed up most recently, for me, in Season Two of The Wire, which I watched on DVD back in the spring. As soon as he showed up on screen, he had me wondering, who is that guy? and trying to remember what else I'd seen him in. Let's meet him, via YouTube and (apparently) ExploreTalent.com:

That Guy

At the time of watching The Wire I realized that he was the guy from John from Cincinnati, the other not-nearly-as-good-as-the-wire HBO show. But you might also recognize him from True Romance.

This Week in Not That Guy #1: Brian Cox

You recognize Brian Cox. For instance, he's that guy that was the chief of the highway patrol in Super Troopers:

Not a That Guy

But if you think he's a That Guy, because of his easily recognizable presence in so many movies, you'd be wrong. Because he's Brian Cox, and everyone knows his name, and everyone thinks he's awesome (especially since the first couple X-Men movies). He's also awesome in Rushmore, and The Minus Man. Awesome actor, but too awesome, despite his numerous roles, to be that guy.

Why JCVD? I think Nick and I both reveal our motivation in this first discussion, because it certainly relates to the still-recent movie JCVD, where Van Damme plays a washed up version of himself. We'll certainly talk about this more when we get to the actual roundtable about JCVD, so I won't say much now, but part of this exploration, to me, is about learning how, exactly, and how well JCVD earned the ability to do self-parody of JCVD. Also, it's about broadening our horizons here at Culturology, since we've been notoriously pro-Schwarzenegger and pro-Statham as action heroes, but need to get to the slightly different genre of kung-fu action, where for a time at least, JCVD reigned supreme (at least in terms of Hollywood movies). Also, JCVD is often overlooked, as that guy that did the splits all the time, and the guy that wasn't Steven Seagal or Stallone or even Chuck Norris. But to remind you all that the kung-fu wave of the late-80s early 90s produced plenty of more terrible fare, I present you with this scene from 1993's Undefeatable:

Roundtable #1

Nick:

I'm not exactly sure where to start. Thing is, I think we both generally agree that Bloodsport is superior to Kickboxer. However, maybe we disagree about the WHYs and HOWs of its superiority... at least I hope we do (because that would provide extra dramatic tension).

My general feeling is this: Bloodsport is an amazing cultural document with a fascinating history, while Kickboxer is fun martial arts film with a solid training sequence and strong final battle.

If I could draw parallels to other films, I would compare the feeling I get from Kickboxer to that of The Karate Kid, Part II, while Bloodsport feels more like Enter the Dragon. In my mind, those parallels run fairly deep - Bloodsport is a gritty "street style" film in many ways, a descendant of the Bruce Lee school of martial arts film making. It involves disparate fighters coming together for an international tournament of questionable legality. Kickboxer is more about personal vendetta and self-improvement, similar to the entire Karate Kid franchise. In particular, Kickboxer has echoes of The Karate Kid, Part II in both its final battle and in its "a small town is being bullied by local thugs so they send an outsider to defend it" conflict.

In this sense - as bizarre as it may sound - I see Bloodsport as a trendsetter, while I view Kickboxer as a perfection of its genre. It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I feel that way, but that's my general impression.

Pete:

I do agree that Bloodsport is the more satisfying movie. Are you calling it an "amazing cultural document" because it's based on a true story--or true life--of Frank Dux, or because of the position it holds relative to awesome fighting tournament movies? I think both aspects are legitimately interesting, especially since many of Dux's claims, apparently, came under fire, in terms of what kind of achievements he ever really gained. It certainly does owe quite a bit to Enter the Dragon, given the best-fighters-from-around-the-world-all-fight-in-this-one-tournament style, except it lacks anything that really makes a hero out of Dux the way that Bruce Lee is a hero at a larger level for overthrowing the tyrant that runs the tournament/compound that Lee infiltrates. But I think that Bloodsport expects us to perceive Van Damme as a hero of equal stature to Lee. It seems to me that this is premised on the fact that Van Damme is white (Belgian, and one of the great things that both these movies share is the unnecessary explanations of why Van Damme has his accent).

Both Kickboxer (which actually goes so far as to have Van Damme's character hailed as "the White Warrior") and Bloodsport, being movies from the late '80s, have a post-Vietnam flavor to them, dealing as much (allegorical, I suppose) with PTSD as with the actual violence of the war. Hence you have the white characters heading to the distant Orient to reclaim some lost manhood or dominance. This is also why, to me, the sidekick character in Bloodsportt is more interesting than the brother character in Kickboxer, since the brother just gets his ass kicked, whereas the buddy in Bloodsport actually seemed to be beating Chong-Li before his macho attitude and swagger finally opened him up to defeat. And, since you bring it up, Nick, the Karate Kid movies also deal quite a bit with post-Vietnam issues, especially Part III, where two Vietnam veterans do all they can to ruin the life of an 18 year old kid (which is, in my book, pretty much completely awesome).

For me personally, as much as Bloodsport is more enjoyable, Kickboxer holds a special position because it was a mythical movie for me during my childhood. I was aware of its existence for a long time, but never allowed to watch it (until I was old enough that my parents didn't try to stop me from watching R-rated movies)--but even then, for whatever reasons, I never watched it until very recently. But I very specifically recall, especially because I liked the original Karate Kid trilogy so much, that there was this movie out there, called Kickboxer, which was just the most awesome and brutal movie there ever was. It's not really all that brutal (paralyzation and rape aside), and the Muay Thai choreography ain't that great (especially compared to the more recent extremely awesome Muay Thai movies from Tony Jaa (I don't think I've ever seen more (simulated) broken bones in a movie than there are in The Protector)), but it really is an awesome movie, both for its own time and for the ages.

Nick:

My hyperbole-esque "amazing cultural document" line was referring to Bloodsport's place among awesome fighting tournament stories at large. Without a doubt, it was a direct influence on Street Fighter and the entire rich birth of fighting video games (that's not to say that Enter the Dragon wasn't as much of an influence -- just a different type of influence because Bloodsport was a contemporary of video games and even has that awesome arcade game sequence in it).

Speaking of which... how meta is that whole thing? Van Damme plays a tournament fighter in Bloodsport, wherein he plays a fighting game as his first real competition in the film. Then the arcade smash Street Fighter II comes out a few years later and totally runs off the Bloodsport-inspired resurgence of martial arts tournament stories. Then Van Damme actually stars in the Street Fighter movie a few years after that. Then, to tie-in with the film, there's an arcade game released with Van Damme's face and body literally in the role of Guile. That really takes the whole thing full circle.

Anyway, to address another one of your points, I think the Vietnam themes in both Bloodsport and Kickboxer are there, but I see them differently. Simply by casting a European man in both those roles, it completely changes the meaning. While the scripts may have tried to address PTSD and other such Vietnam themes more directly, the actual films don't play on those themes in quite the same way with JCVD in the lead. Though his characters have American connections in both films, he himself is of European origin, and thus the concept of the "white characters heading to the distant Orient to reclaim some lost manhood or dominance" is transformed into something else. In fact, the "best friend" characters in both films - Ray Jackson and Winston Taylor - are really the characters attempting to reclaim some sort of macho manhood or dominance. And things don't really work out smoothly for them. Instead, Van Damme becomes the cultural wild card for the audience -- he's not from the country where the story takes place, but he's also not from America (or, at least, he doesn't represent the traditional "American man"). I see Van Damme's characters in these films being less about some sort of post-Vietnam white manhood and more about cultural exchange. Maybe I'm wrong about that because I'm looking back on stories from 20 years ago and commenting on them now. But I also don't think that particular Vietnam war theme is as direct as you make it out to be (Rambo and 80s Chuck Norris seem to do a better job at that notion of reclaiming cultural dominance for the American white male).

As for significance, Kickboxer is definitely more culturally quotable. The Hot Shots franchise even parodied the final Kickboxer battle in full. But I think that Bloodsport is the more revolutionary of the two, especially considering that the film was shelved for years until Van Damme got it re-edited and eventually released. The Dux thing is cool, but that's only a part of what makes the movie, to me, a cultural landmark in action and adventure cinema. I mean, when was the last time a low budget action movie was able to struggle its way to the top? Comedy, drama, even horror - but almost never an action.

Pete:

Speaking of meta, have you seen JCVD? I think it's actually a pretty solid movie, not great, but certainly entertaining for Van Damme's portrayal of himself as a washed up former star.

I agree with you about the Vietnam stuff; I think certainly it's Ray Jackson and Winston Taylor that are the "macho" straight-up Americans set to conquer. But I don't think the writer would have bothered with the accent explanations if it weren't to clarify that Van Damme's characters ARE American. Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger: he's always just an American tough, with an apple pie kind of name, and his accent is just ignored. So yes, Van Damme, is a different kind of American, but it's crucial that he be seen as American (from both the writer's and the viewers' perspectives). In Kickboxer you see it because Van Damme has respect for Muay Thai where Taylor doesn't, in the early sequence where Van Damme tries to talk Taylor out of fighting. And then Van Damme goes on to learn that style, so yes in a way it is about cultural exchange; but, given that once Van Damme becomes "Asian" by learning their fighting, he is hailed by the crowds as "the white warrior" which still has implications for East/West relations. And yes, there are better examples of the post-Vietnam thing to be found in Chuck Norris (and actually, I should admit, I've never seen any of the Rambo movies the whole way through), but if not explicitly about the war, there's still some kind of Orientalism afoot here, in terms of Van Damme's needing to learn the ways of the Mystic Orient in order to conquer it.

That's a good point about Bloodsport's low budget. It's hard to imagine another kind of movie that could meet similar success, since they really only needed a handful of sets to make that movie. Especially when you compare it to higher budget versions of similar plots--essentially, the video game movies of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat (it's been since college since I've seen either of these, but I feel like I would defend them both, and I know you love Street Fighter)--the more costly movies really don't do it any better.

Did Van Damme himself ever do any better than Bloodsport or Kickboxer?

Nick:

Yeah, I have seen JCVD. It's what got me started on my Jean-Claude Van Damme marathon. I think he's definitely self-aware and actually pretty sick of the Hollywood entertainment machine, and I find that refreshing. I don't think Arnold ever quite reached that point.

So far, I've watched all of Van Damme's catalog up through 1996 or 1997. None of those films have reached the heights of Bloodsport or Kickboxer. But that's as a whole film -- in general, his acting seems to improve with just about every movie I see (except for the huge dip when he made the Dennis Rodman team-up, Double Team, and the Rob Schneider team-up, Knock Off). I just recently watched The Quest, which is sort of like JCVD's big budget version of a historical Bloodsport. While the movie itself isn't as much fun as Bloodsport, it does have some finer moments (including excellent character work by Van Damme). The actual tournament fight in The Quest is probably perfects upon the concept behind Bloodsport, but it stills lacks some of the original's suspense and lo-fi charm. Interestingly, his best films following Bloodsport and Kickboxer seem to be complete departures from the tournament genre, those being Nowhere to Run and Maximum Risk.

If this were the military (or even a marching band), or an office, or anything else, really, there might be some chain of command through which I could take these concerns--an officer to whom I might say "Excuse me, Sir, but I fear that my postings are being held to a double standard." But it's not, so we're left just to read what are perhaps the shallowest, least consequential (though still trademark) self-referential introspections yet made by the internet's only non-Russian-speaking culturologist. But, after 045 posts, perhaps that's what you've come to expect (where I've just been lowering my expectations (and my average word counts)).

Now on to other things that I'm good at writing about: cartoons! I took some time out from enjoying Miami's first cold front of the fall to watch the new Simpsons Halloween special (their 20th, which means something, I suppose), though the anniversary probably should have been celebrated in a way which included some of the classic Treehouses of Horror (such, as, say, Four, and Six). The Horror-Treehouse episodes were long a bastion of funny in the unfunniest seasons of the Simpsons (Seasons 10-19), but I had even stopped watching them until last year--which was a promising but terrible year for the "ToT". Mostly, I was in front of my TV and figured what the hell, might as well watch it again this year.

But really, I don't even feel like being that negative about what was an uninspired and nearly joke-less Halloween episode (still better than last year's since last year's was, like, inspired, but did a terrible terrible job at it's inspiration). Why? Because I still dislilke the Family Guy family of cartoons (which have otherwise taken over the once-diverse Fox Sunday evening cartoon spectacular) so much that I'd rather pretend that I think the Simpsons are funny then say anything else. So my loyalty to the amazing funniness of the first 6-7 seasons of the Simpsons (and my nearly savant-like depth of referential ability to those episodes) continues unscathed.

Though this isn't really a tenable position. In fact, I feel myself in a very similar position to the one I was in back at the beginning of the summer with late night television shows (having tuned in for a while to check on Conan O'Brien's transition to Late Night), where it all just kind of sucks and I wonder why I've been watching it in the first place. I think, though, as much as I continue to determine that the few places in mainstream television that seem to still have an inkling of quality in fact have lost that inkling (for instance, on Nick's recommendation, I check in on Craig Ferguson's show for a couple of weeks, but his schtick got old really fast). Seems like maybe they're making pretty good shows over there on the HBO, but I don't have cable. But, as much as I am hereby renouncing further attempts to discuss the merits of television cartoons until further notice, I'd also like to notice this as a distancing of the culturological project from the internet concept known as "hating" (which was probably clear for a while now, going back to the classic arguments about irony from last year).

It's not my fault that so much stuff sucks. But I don't bask in that suckage. Essentially, I think that it sucks how much everything sucks. The ad-wizards making TV these days must be the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked. I've just got my fingers crossed that when I get to 35 years old (and cross that demographic barrier), suddenly things will be funny or good to me that I would have never concerned. In the meantime, though, all I've got for laughs is the Super Haters.

"im just going to throw it out there and suggest you cover the whole obama/nobel thing for monday. itll be fresh all weekend - and lets face it, what the fuck?"

So, you see, Neal sends me a recommendation, and I take it. I haven't quite determined what the culturological angle to the whole thing is just yet, but I can't waste any more time this afternoon. I, like most of us, have work to do. But I am, I think, in a reasonable position to appraise the whole obama/nobel thing since I don't read or watch the news much, and have thereby avoided any and all conversation of the topic (I was hanging out with a bunch of artists and writers, but no one was talking about the whole obame/nobel thing).

There's some chance to be glib and "libertarian" in bent with this commentary and say: "Oh. I guess they gave Obama the prize for killing those pirates back in the Winter." Edgy, right? And funny 'cause it's true?

I was talking, the other day, again with a handful of writer friends (yeah, I mostly hang out with writers and artists. Aren't I cool? (Yes, yes I am)), about cartoons (not just for kids!). Or actually, the cartoons on TV, namely Family Guy, The Simpsons, and South Park. It was nearly a year ago that I first made the argument here in Culturology that Family Guy is not okay to like, and I certainly haven't shifted from that stance (though, as usual, I admit that I've only seen maybe ten episodes ever, which, I guess, may not be enough to make a full judgment). The usual kind of talk about such things, like how The Simpsons, while still not as funny as it used to be (Seasons 1-7), has been pretty good as of late, or how it's kind of terrifying that the same sub-mediocre animator is now responsible for so much of what was once a relatively diverse set of cartoons. Blah blah blah. But I mentioned how, though I haven't seen much of the past couple of seasons, South Park is really a funny show. And a friend said, in a kind of hushed tone, "You know that they're Republicans, right?" The same kind of warning tone as, when talking about indie rock, someone says "But you know that Sufjan Stevens is a... Christian... right?"

I'd imagine however, that the South Park guys self-identify as "libertarian" or that their most rabid fans imagine them (and themselves) as "libertarian." But (and this is for all you folks out there that ever got behind Ron Paul), there's no such thing as Libertarianism. It's just conservatism (Republicanism) in disguise, designed to lure in people that find their stomachs curdled by the abject greed and misery-manufacturing of "free market" corporation-driven capitalism, with rather foolish notions of individualism (especially "rugged" individualism). It's basically just a systematic taking for granted of most of the major facts of contemporary existence. Government generates infrastructure, and it's the neglect by the government of that infrastructure which causes it to crumble. Nor do rich people deserve what they earn...

but anyway, I'm losing track of my point, other than to point out that I'm not a libertarian, like, at all. Totally.

Which is also to say, I don't think it's a big deal that Obama won the Nobel Prize. I mean, at least not in a negative way. It's obviously a big deal. I think a good, deserved, positive thing. And, so long as the USA is still a major player in global politics (and the truly cynical part of myself likes to imagine that Obama's Nobel Prize will be seen as a last bash for US relevance before the world plummets into climate change-driven disarray and catastrophe), the kind of dare-we-call-it-"hope" that Obama's election brought to not only our populace but the global population as well probably was the biggest peace-y-ist thing that happened this year. Besides, if Kissinger--who's cluster bombs are still killing children in Cambodia--could win one, or Al Gore could get one for making a boring movie that got seven yuppies to hop on the fad of recycling for a week and a half, than how relevant is the Peace Prize anyway (or am I just being stupidly American and provincial for asking that?)

And if I'm way off base, it's not really my fault. 'Cause they hired me to write about culture (you know, stuff like cartoons), not politics. So don't complain to me, complain to Neal.

Though I hit the theaters with frequency, the bulk of my movie watching, as with so many people these days, via an internet-based, DVD-rental-mailing system. Given the wide scope of my interests, without careful planning working-down-the-queue style movie arrivals (the kind of careful planning which got Bloodsport and Kickboxer to my door on the same day--a day where I had a big important meeting with my thesis adviser, so needed the ass-kicking celebration that evening (a duo of movies, by the way, which hopefully Nick and I will think of a clever way of discussing here in a future post)). As an example of less careful planning, the two movies I had over the weekend: Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns, an animated feature for young audiences, and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, a movie best known, probably, for its unsimulated sex scenes (but totally legit, since, like, it's on Criterion Collection...).

So both movies were Japanese, watched by me with English subtitles, but the similarities stop with that. I figure, at least with the audio in Japanese, my neighbors, if they heard my speakers, couldn't tell what I was watching ("Ugh, our stupid neighbor is watching kids' movies again," or "Ugh, our neighbor is watching pornography again."). Both movies featured a fair amount of screaming, though the prior featured the shrieks of a teenager being startled by the strange occurrences in a mystical land of cats, and the latter the orgasmic shrieks of a woman so in love and obsessed with her lover that she cuts off his penis at the end of the movie to keep it (based on a true story!). I keep my volume pretty low, as it is.

An interesting contrast, though, since Studio Ghibli (especially the works by Miyazaki, though this movie was made by one of his proteges) consistently produces movies with refreshingly strong female main characters, and movies with unsimulated sex scenes generally ruin the careers (I'm thinking of "mainstream" movies that feature such things, not of pornography-as-such--though you can also think of pornstars making "mainstream" (if quasi-artsy) movies, most recently Soderberg's movie that did-you-hear-it's-totally-made-with-a-hardcore-porno-star-as-the-lead-actress; always a matter of spectacle)) of the woman that take roles therein (certainly the case with In the Realms of Senses, where it was the lead actress's first movie part, and she only got offers for porno movies afterward, eventually showing up in a couple more movies and then moving away from Japan entirely). The male actors, generally, I think, just get big cultural high-fives (think for instance, of Gallo's Brown Bunny).

And of course, there's whatever argument to be made, at least in the case of well-made, carefully shot, generally "good" movies, like Realm of the Senses, that it's not subjugating it's female lead within the film they way that she lost respect in the actual world. But the whole notion of "unsimulated" breaks that ability to draw that line between the representational world of the film and the actual world that it represents, insofar as, being fictionalized, even the "actual" penetration represented on film is still relegated to simulation. So the claim of "unsimulated" is quite similar to the "nonfiction" of memoir--and, also similarly, prurient garbage. So, the art of the movie, some of which is quite nice, is still art, but the pornographic aspects are just pornographic and gimmicky. I think the blurbs would generally argue for some kind of boundary-walking going on, but that's really just a moving back-and-forth from one "realm," as it were, to another. Making artsy porn does just that.

And, given that I'm still working my way through Studio Ghibli's catalogue, and my preference for all-audience fare continues--who'd a thought that I was so conservative? (Though if there were no American Right, I'd have no problem being on the pragmatic/rationalist (in my mind conservative) side of the leftist spectrum.) Well, I'm leaving a lot out of this issue for the moment; there's a larger discussion to be had, and I'd probably give way on various points for the sake of discourse and truth-seeking, etc. But this can fall back, like so many of my arguments do, to the cushion of boredom--I like tales of masculine triumph as much as the next guy (see the eventually upcoming post about the above-mentioned JCVD movies), but, (and maybe I'm just a wishy-washy liberal humanist after all) a well-balanced, well-represented, and of course, interesting and well-made cultural melange seems to me to be the way to go, and it seems like, to bring pornography into the mainstream, or the quasi-mainstream of art movies, you'd have to go out of your way to downplay its unsimulatedness, which certainly wasn't the case, based on the DVD extras, with Realm of the Senses (and maybe the Kingdom of the Cats is real!).

So I'll just say that Bright Star is an excellent case of there being no weak actors in a movie. There really weren't. It was a solid script, but I could imagine it having gotten a bit out of control if it hadn't been carefully acted. So that's interesting. The movie also very accurately got at interesting things about writing poetry, which is also cool to see, since writing is one of those things that only rarely ever gets captured well on film.

Also, it was funded by, amongst other things, the Australian government and funds from the British lottery, and a mighty handful of other things (including, I should mention, BBC Films and Pathe, both of which are obviously pretty huge makers-of-movies), but it was funny to me at the opening when the cascade of funding sources was first displayed.

Over the weekend, I also went to a reading of short nonfiction pieces by local writers. Nonfiction, "creative nonfiction," memoir, whatever you want to call it seems like the big trendy kind of writing these days. What with folks like David Sedaris, or Dave Eggers, or whoever else. And things like radio essays on NPR (one of my least favorite things in existence; another of those strange things where I find myself agreeing with Republicans (another being that Michael Moore is annoying), that NPR is stupid and not worth listening to. Though, if I drove a car, I guess I'd wind up listening to NPR at least occasionally, though for the music, not the NPR.

Of the various reasons why I dislike this so-called creative nonfiction, is that it tends--and maybe this doesn't go for the really popular stuff, of which I've read very little; I tried reading Sedaris's Naked but put it down after finishing the first essay and never picked it up again--to be structurally unsatisfying. For instance, most of the pieces I heard over the weekend were basically either a) interesting stories, or b) whiny setpieces about difficult times in people's lives. Certainly, people's anecdotes can be compelling, and there are several anecdotes that I like to tell myself (like the time I went hunting for the lost Zildjian brother in Mexico with Ringo Starr), but they're never that intellectually compelling. I have emotions, certainly, but when it comes to literary texts, plot and action, and thereby structure, are super important, and anchor the emotional import.

Along with this "this is my interesting and compelling story" model of contemporary essay-writing, comes my other major beef: for all these pieces, the authenticity and veracity of the tale is awarded externally from the story itself. It need only be labeled as "nonfiction" and suddenly a piece of writing becomes what actually happened. I suppose the smarter of the essayists will admit that, of course, it's just their memory of the occurrences, and certainly someone else would remember it, and therefore tell it, differently, but this doesn't seem to interrupt the perception of truth in the essay's reading. That's why that Million Little Pieces was such a ridiculous scandal. Lazy readers wanted to believe that the thing was the truth without the piece needing to earn that and became very angry when it turned out they had been lied to. But had they read the book devoid of its "nonfiction" label, they'd have recognized the narrator as the unreliable narrator that he was, and called into question his telling and tale.

So, by never having to do their own work to develop their own authenticity, the bulk of nonfiction pieces are as lazy as their readers are. More lowest-common-denominator cultural trash. Congratulations.

Already a few weeks ago now, believe it or not (Happy Belated Labor Day, incidentally), I went out and saw Miyazaki's newest film, Ponyo, a return to explicitly child-oriented fare from the best-of-our-times animator. I like graphic profanity as much as the next guy (well, maybe not as much as Nick...), but I'm still a softy when it comes to successful all-ages cultural output. It happens basically never from within American boundaries (most of Pixar's movies (they having, notably, a massive collective crush on Miyazaki) being the one exception), but finding movies that tell compelling stories that are accessible and indeed moving to viewers of a wide span of ages is truly difficult. Most movies that seem like they might tend to add just enough annoying shit to get to either their PG-13 rating (the notion of PG-13 strikes me as one of the dumbest things currently enjoying cultural cachet) or R rating, to make sure that the appropriate demographic chord is struck.

But, again, I think I've discussed this sort of thing before, so I'll prevent myself from going on too much about it. Except to say that Ponyo is an interesting case of the all ages phenomenon, in that it definitely feels like a movie designed to be specifically for children--it's plotting and logic are definitely that of a young person--but it's stunning beauty, vision, and quality make it very appealing for all viewers (though victims of adult ADD would probably be bored witless). Basically, a case of something being Good for Good Reasons. Additionally, the film just incredibly captured the stunning excitement of being alive and being a human, with Ponyo's various "I'm human!"-esque outbursts just feeling so genuine.

But even if it was too kiddy sometimes, the static-to-only-moving-as-little-as-possible colored pencil backgrounds alone were an aesthetic feast. As much as some people make strong cases for the quality of non-Pixar computer animated movies (like Kung-Fu Panda or Madagascar 2 or whatever else), they just can't compare with the thorough-going world building of Miyazaki's movies; style and content in Ponyo are married at so deep a level that most of Pixar's output can't compete either (the only thing that comes to mind at the moment as coming close is the first half of Wall-E). Thus Miyazaki's movies' ability to be compared to the finest art cinema as well, in terms of the care of their construction.

It being after Labor Day now, the book club is officially over, but speaking of visually stunning things, David Mazzucchelli's new graphic novel, Asterios Polyp brings some serious awesome. Great story, strong strong design (simple lines for the most part, but very expressive, and ability to match various stylistic touches to various sequences or bits of content), excellent layout. I would guess that some folks out there balked at the ending, but I thought it really worked (in a rare nod to the anti-spoiler people out there, I'll spare the details for now; mostly because I think everyone should read this thing).

Comic books remain comic books, though. That's for more-or-less sure.

So what movie was it that finally broke my cinemaless streak? Maybe you saw this coming, but it was Taratino's Inglourious Basterds. I wouldn't necessarily claim to celebrate the man's entire catalogue (it's been yearsandyears since I saw Reservoir Dogs, for instance (I'm generally satisfied in that regard by occasionally saying "You're okay. You're gonna be okay." in a Harvey Keital voice and watching the little homage scene in Swingers, where the characters walk to their cars like the Misters (Color) do in RD)), but I do tend to like his movies. One generally knows what one is going to get: a loose exercise in genre, more interested in a superficial grazing blow at the genre in question, mostly focused on a talk-heavy plot and unanticipated turns away from genre-wallowing (back towards more dialogue).

Certainly the case with Inglourious Basterds, since it's much less of a warsploitation movie than it might've been--especially compared with the way it was marketed. Which is a relief, really, since several of the non-genre-y scenes were pretty fantastic. Also, so that way one doesn't have to think any more about the broader implications of the movie being about jewish people getting blood revenge on the Nazis, given the fact that is a permanently open wound in the Western World's past, present, and future which no piece of culture--no film, no book, no documentary, no History Channel special, no imaginary scene of Hitler being riddled with machine-gun bullets--can salve. I'm honestly not even sure what I think, in that regard, and though I do try to think about it, prefer, at least for now to focus on the structural aspects of the movie underneath the setting, costumes, languages, which were quite satisfying. Though I'm glad it was Nazis because Christoph Waltz was incredible as Colonel Handa (in a different setting, his character was essential the evil assistant principal or bad lieutenant), stole his scenes, best acting in the movie, hands down (though no one else gets as much face time, I don't think, and I've never thought that Brad Pitt was much other than mediocre in everything he does ('cept for maybe Snatch, where I can't help but like Mickey)).

One complaint I had with IG, which is similar to the one that I had with Taratino's half of Grindhouse, is that he doesn't seem to be able to keep himself interested with the genre-relative stylistic touches on these movies; that is, "Death Proof" didn't play around with the meta stuff nearly as effectively as Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," especially by the time the big car chase starts. Like QT gets distracted by having his characters say things, and forgets that the thorough-going genre thing, once started, is generally noticed as disappearing when it does, and such a disappearance is jarring. Like the kind of intro that the ex-Wehrmacht guy gets relatively early on in the film but is never matched again, and sound-tracking choices (yes, I know, when in doubt, with any movie (unless it's a Clint Mansell score for an Aronofsky film), assume that I'm going to gripe about the soundtrack). I don't even know that I'm arguing on behalf of the meta-film kind of stylistic touches, so much as wishing instead that they were just left out entirely, rather than half-assed.

And, speaking of heavily armed jews...

at long last, the return of...

The Summer of Booklove Bookclub: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

This being (last time I checked, anyway) Chabon's latest book. A slim little adventure novel which fully embraces its genre very satisfactorily (complete with cool drawings by the guy that does Prince Valiant). Chabon says, in the back-matter of GotR that he first conceived of this story as being about "jews with swords," pulling this book right in line with his other two recent ventures, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Audioshocker's pick for 2008 paperback of the year), and The Final Solution--a Sherlock Holmes story involving a Jewish child who has escaped the holocaust, his parrot, and an aging Holmes (another genre exercise (mighty trendy these days)). Good job, Chabon.

I'm not particularly steeped in Jewish history, so to me, reading this book, it mostly just seemed like an action/adventure novel; I didn't really notice anything until in hindsight after reading Chabon's above-quoted comment in the back matter. Not that that matters either. It doesn't really. What does matter is that Chabon really nailed the genre on this one (way better then he did with Final Solution, and more convincingly than his attempts to cop a Raymond Chandleresque prose style in Detective's Union; a completely excited, quick read. Did any one else read it? You should, really.

It seems like there's some kind of trend back towards classic detective novels going on in the zeitgeist these days. Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union was also very Chandler inspired, and the still-recent-ish movie Brick (a completely awesome movie that I wholeheartedly recommend) was Dashiell Hammett reinvented in a modern high school. Plus I personally just went through a major phase in the late Spring and into the Summer of reading a bunch of Chandler and Hammett, and I'm totally plugged into the zeitgeist (I once even played a gig at a gallery called Zeitgeist, once upon a time in Cambridge, MA). Is anyone else noticing this trend? Is two books by super-notable authors and one movie enough to label a trend? Am I missing obvious other entries in the detective-novels-are-hip-again encyclopedia?

Thinking about this Pynchon/Lebowski overlap, I immediately also wonder whether or not American Arts & Letter's second most famous recluse has seen the BL, and whether or not he was concerned about it if he had. Given Pynchon's two appearances on The Simpsons, I figure he must be at least as plugged into the zeitgeist as I am (and hopefully someday I'll be successful enough a writer that I too will get to disappear into reclusive obsucrity). Which got me thinking about the fact that both of the episodes that he's in are completely forgettable, which is too bad, but does get me in the mood for some arbitrary Simpsons list-making. Because that's just what the internet needs, more Simpsons list--making. So:

Top Three (why not 5, 9, or 10? because they ain't nearly exclusive enough) Episodes of The Simpsons Based on My Frequency of Reference in Everyday Conversation

1) "Bart the Lover": this is the episode where Bart writes Mrs. Krabapple personal letters as "Woodrow" and a picture of Gordy Howe. By my just-right-now recollection (the source of this entire list), I quote lines from this single episode way more than any other, to the point where this single episode competes with the entire series of Arrested Development for total-most-references-all-around (though Mr. Show and The Big Lebowski are both way higher than either other). The references are (without context, it'll be more fun if you remember them yourself!):

"I can't help but feel partly responsible for this."
"Dear Baby, welcome to Dumpsville, population: you."
"Five dollars? Get outta here..."

This may seem like not many--only three quotes--but I use all three of these all the time (pretty much anytime I buy anything that costs five dollars there're even odds that I say "five dollars, get outta here..."

2) "Home Sweet Homediddily-Dum-Doodily": This is the one where the Simpsons kids get put into foster care with the Flanderses. Partly because Bart gets lice from playing with a monkey with Milhouse, who says:

"Sooo cold..."

in a way that I replicate all the time (I used to conflate this reference with a the crack-dispenser guys behavior in Futurama, but have subsequently repaired that).

Also, Homers slo-mo screaming of

"Noooooo..."

as he leaps to prevent Maggie's baptism may well be a source for times when I scream "No" in a slo-mo voice.

3) "Life on the Fast Lane": Having one of my favorite--and most quotable--episodes from the very first season confirms me as an ultra-purist (not even the people that invented the series like that first season as much as I do). This is the one where Marge is tempted to have an affair with her bowling instructor. Several amazing quotes, most the result of, apparently, Albert Brooks's ad-libbing:

"One hundred and ten pins later, I am the better man."
"You can't go bowling without a lane." --I use this one all the time as a metaphor for "If you don't play, you can't win." kind of situations, like, if you don't submit your resume, you won't get a job. Can't go bowling without a lane, dude.
"You can't wear street shoes on the lane." --Often following up the last one, to clarify the literalness of the reference it comes from.
"It's not quite breakfast, it's not quite lunch, but it comes with a slice of cantaloupe at the end." --Any time brunch comes up, this comes out of my mouth.

Maybe this depth-of-reference demonstrates something of an obsessive streak (I've seen all of these episodes a dozen times each, easily), but you know, it's fun to keep track of.

Tune in next week for the long-awaited bookclubbing of Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road plus more musings on Inherent Vice!

Without fresh fodder, then, I'd like to return to a comment Nick made a couple of weeks ago, mentioning that he finally got around to watching Push, based on a recommendation of mine contained within a former Culturology post, and he couldn't even finish the movie, and hated it, and wondered how I could have been suckered by such a movie. It's a curious thing, since Nick and my taste in movies tends to be quite similar (except that he has a way higher tolerance for shitty comedies--and I go pretty far, relative to the norm, I think, in terms of enjoying bad comedies). This sudden disjunction between our movie-going tastes was highlighted at the beginning of the summer as well, with Wolverine: The Movie, where Nick couldn't believe that I didn't, based on my established set of movies-I-like, that I didn't like Wolvie: This Claw's For You. This is precisely the sort of thing that I take way too seriously, so I've been thinking about it a lot. I think it comes down to two things: category and expectation.

Category: To recap an argument that we really don't need to recapitulate here on Audioshocker (search "wolverine" to pick up some of the shrapnel): Nick thinks SNIKT!: The Musical was a solid action movie, I think it was tired and cliche-ridden, to the point where those oftentimes enjoyable action tropes didn't play out. As for Push: Push, I thought that, despite it's being a highly-flawed movie, the fact that it really went for something, showed some style, and was generally entertaining made it a solid movie-going experience. Nick's main problem with my disliking Berserk!: Logan's Tale was that I like so many other completely cheesy action movies with lame effects, how could I suddenly think this movie was the one that sucked, saying that if we viewed the aforementioned movie as a B-movie, we'd have had no problem with it, and probably enjoyed it.

But you can't watch an intended Hollywood blockbuster as a B-movie, it crosses the definitions (the categories, if you will). Here's another example: once upon a time, back in my first year of college, I would occasionally try to convince my rock n' roll friends that classical music was cool. I would do this by trying to play them what I thought was the coolest classical music around and saying "Isn't this cool?!?" A poor strategy, I'll admit (most people just don't like classical music), but once I had the interesting outcome of playing a friend Gorecki's Harpsichord Concerto, and having that friend make the decision, based on that, that I really really liked harpsichord music. So this friend misunderstood the category of the music: I was trying to play him "awesome classical music" but what he heard was "harpsichord music that my friend thinks is awesome because he really likes harpsichords." So, admitting to liking B-movies is not the same thing as admitting to like crappy mega-productions that may as well be B-movies.

Anti-Pull, in a lot of ways, is like a B-movie as well. It's pretty flatly acted, lacks a cohesive sense of style, and lacks the sense of pacing that better-made movies have. (See, so, comparing these two movies makes a ton of sense.) But Pushing Too Hard isn't a B-movie any more than Wolf: Man; I've already written about its being designed to specifically compete against blockbuster comic book movies, and several of its identity problems were almost certainly the result of studio interference (I'm not basing this on anything but a pre-established distrust of studios). If anything, these are both "comic book movies", even if one of them wasn't even based on a comic book. That being the category, Push was a better comic book movie than Wolverine.

Expectations: This is getting tired. The heading explains itself. I had no hope for Push being any good, so the fact that it was surprisingly entertaining made it seem better than it was. Wolverine, at least, should have been okay. I had low expectations, but not as low as the thing was terrible, thus it seemed even worse than it was.

Anyhoo, I'll still eventually get back out to the theaters, and then won't have to rehash old arguments anymore.

(And I'll get around to closing out the already defunct bookclub soon.)

But this leaves me still more-or-less treading water for the month of August, unless I break down and write more about books (anyone wanna hear about my new theory, based on Don Delillo's White Noise and Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, that the '80s totally sucked?). And a series of ill-timed internet-based distractions today has me posting this hours later than I was expecting (setting a record this Monday for being on the internet for so damn long)...

Plus, it turns out that the thing I do for my actual job, it turns out I did a major component of that thing in a way that means I have to do it all over again, so I've really gotta go and take care of it, while I'm still on the internet...

I promise! I'll get out of this summer funk soon... (meanwhile, Nick, I'll try to refer back to last week's comments section to re-address your dislike of Push)

Meanwhile, guess what? You get another week to read Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road for the Summer of Booklove Book Club!!!

All of which is to say that I'm scrambling a bit to get my shit back together in time for this article that's already happening, and already more like a LiveJournal post than a substantial article with the high level of incisive acuity that I usual bring to the cultural table. The closest I got to any full-blown media consumption in July was reading a giant stack of comics that Nick loaned to me, and one particular afternoon sticks out in my mind, as I listened to some classic metal on headphones and read "Essential" issues of the Fantastic Four. Metal + Comics = the adolescence that I'm only getting around to having now. But I don't particularly fancy the idea of writing all about all the comics that I've just read that all of you have probably already read (though I thought Neveda was pretty awesome, and of course the Bill & Ted comics are a must-read for all humans everywhere).

In my metal listening (I was basically just listening to Slayer and Death), I also opted, briefly for a foray into the more brutal black metal kind of scene of music to listen to some scarier music. The motivation goes something like this:

a) sometimes metal is pretty awesome music (depending on which sub-genres of metal you're talking about--I being a fan, primarily, of the doom/sludge kind of stuff (e.g. The Melvins, Sleep, etc.)).

b) sometimes its good to try other (sub-)genres of music, and I had access to the internet on my vacation that I don't have in my real life, so was able to do more internetting re: metal than I generally would

c) especially because of my interest in classical music (and Sufjan Stevens), I have been exposed to a generally high volume of music written with Christian inspiration and content. I'm basically agnostic about it, caring more about the music and how it sounds than its motivation or what it means, figuring that, hell, people can believe whatever they want if it turns out a good product. Therefore, I should be similarly comfortable in listening to music that is written with motivation from the other end of the religious perspective, namely, with the whole black metal thing, satanism, or at least paganism, or whatever. Of course, I draw the line at anything explicitly bigoted, 'cause that's no fun (of course, its hard to hear what they're saying, so who knows, really...), but if the dudes believe in their religion and happen to worship that bad guy, that should be fine, if the music rips.

Of course, playing music for the dark gods tends to involve way more brutal riff-age, which encodes hours on top of lonely hours learning how to play such riffs, which tends to keep me from being a real metal-head, since I've been brain-washed by my own classical training in music to have a slightly hedged interest in virtuosity in general; that is, just 'cause the dudes can play fast, doesn't mean it's good at all--this, of course, lines up with my preference for the sludge, since the riffs there aren't so much about speed as slow-burning awesomeness.

But, long story short, reading comics and listening to metal makes you a nerd. No two ways about it. So I switched to hip-hop, but mostly Handsome Boy Modeling School, Black Elvis, and Ultramagnetic MCs, which keeps well profiled as an unabashed nerd. What can I do? Without the usual levels of content in this article, I can't mask the nerdiness which lurks under the surface of just about everything that I do. Oh well.

(P.S. The next book club entry, schedule for this week, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road had been postponed until next week; get reading, folks!)

In the meantime, you can enjoy my review of the book (of poetry) Uh Oh Time, by Kenneth Hart, over at the Florida Book Review.

I wouldn't say so at the time--it's entertaining enough, and I like talking about music, etc, don't get me wrong--but there's something inane about the iPod listening-conversation game. (And it should also be mentioned that this particular iPod behavioral pattern is still way better than the let's-constantly-tweak-the-playlist-and-fuck-around-so-we-never-even-hear-a-complete-song game. This particular play list was all hip-hop, which is fine too, and brought up the usual kind of conversations about hip-hop that you'd expect a bunch of 25-35 year old white graduate students to have:

+ Does Jay-Z suck or not? (Jay-Z does not suck; he was probably the last rapper to get famous based on his being a great rapper, as opposed to other, more malevolent forces in the universe. Also, Jay-Z is a better rapper than common.)

+ What MF Doom album is the best? Does it belong in the pantheon of great rap albums of all time? (Operation Doomsday, yes, yes it does.)

+ Def Jux? (Fuck no.)

+ Is it time yet for '90s nostalgia? (This split the group more decisively, with the under-30s leaning away from it and the over-30s embracing it. Further evidence of the strange demographic no-man's land of being 26-29 years old. Though, and this is outside of hip-hop, obviously, I have been having a strange tendency to feel like listening to Mogwai and Low and Dirty Three, etc. recently, which could be considered a kind of 90s nostalgia in its own right.)

+ Oh man, is this [insert next track on iPod playlist] track fresh or what? (Yes, it's fresh.)

and so on and so forth.

Again, I can't really get all that worked about such a thing. Surely the random play list thing solves many of the modern party-givers life's problems. And maybe it's just a fault I have to get so self-conscious about such activities. And DJ-ing, as a notion, at least in clubs and music venues is still alive and well (despire the iPodification of contemporary radio (ClearChannel radio being basically iPod shuffles of the seven most-payolaed songs of the week). And I'm sure I've still got a few random CDs at the bottom of a box somewhere that say something obnoxious like "Party Mix" ('cause you know, I was always hosting those bomb-ass music parties, back in my day), which is only one step better. In this context, perhaps the best thing about being the age that I am is that I am just barely old enough to have made mix tapes (several of which I still have), and to have that tape-making culture backed up by having bought actual tapes of music at the music store. Those mix-tapes were just that much more carefully made than mix CDs, which are still better than random play list shuffles.

Though, I do wonder if I'm just being a curmudgeon and an unabashed atavist. One can pretty much pick any period of time and find huge swaths of the extant culture complaining about whatever the newest media technology was (except for maybe movable type, since it promoted a level of propaganda theretofore unavailable to the theocracies of that time). I'd like to think of myself as modern, and forward-thinking, but dagnabbit why do I feel like such and old man about this stuff?

Culturology Summer of Booklove Bookclub #3: Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

This is moved up a week, as per Neal's request, so hopefully you've all had time to read it by now. I'm expecting big things from Neal on this one too, comments-wise. It read pretty fast for me. A good-enough, if somewhat familiar, narrative, paired with the usual werewolf's-eye-view of what it's like to be a werewolf. And it claims to be an epic poem in free verse, which provides the central gimmick of the book (yes, its a gimmick--I was not at all surprised to read in the author's bio blurb that he works in advertising; I agree that the concept of an epic poem about werewolves in Los Angeles is completely awesome).

But the book is not a poem. Just because you take your prose and chop it up into lines that look more or less like contemporary international free verse does not mean that suddenly you've written a poem. Any one who reads poetry regularly (as I do), will recognize the not-a-poemness of Sharp Teeth, the main characteristic of which is a general lack of concern for the line, and how it might work as a structural, especially sonic unit. It seems that Barlow's main concern in chopping up his sentences into poem-looking lines was to make it clear that it isn't prose.

It does work occasionally though, in terms of using the line to control the pacing in rapid-fire sequences or to rattle off quick lists of various things. But when it doesn't work, the passages clunk around (perhaps only from a poetic perspective; the average reader might not notice the clunkiness if they're not more used to reading refined verse) and the language gets boggy, boring and plain and not even the not-prose layout can't save it. Which is too bad, because most of my disagreement with the book is at this poetic level; I thought the characters and the story were fine, and its plotted well enough (if straightforwardly). There is a level of paranoia and conspiracy that is alluded to but never fully paid off, which is also a disappointment, but if I imagine a "general" reader who doesn't know anything about poetry--and most people everywhere (except maybe in Ireland) know very little about poetry--enjoying this book quite a bit. It does verge a bit on becoming a Young Adult novel as well, but that probably comes with the territory with a book about how good it feels to become part of a pack.

If you've read this and want to know what a real Novel in Verse is like, pick up Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red which is an absolutely amazing example of what a modern poet might do to craft herself an epic poem, or novel in verse.

(Culturology, and therefore the book club, will be taking a vacation for most of July, so there aren't any more advance-warning deadlines for books until Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road to be read by the first Monday of August.)

Maybe it's an age thing, once again. I'm in the closing months of my mid-20s, soon to be embarking on my late-20s, and more and more I find this to be an awkward age. I probably sit at about the median age of my social circles, but that means that a fair number of people that I see socially on a regular basis are already in their 30s (mostly in their early-30s, but a few are in their mid-30s). I bring this up because of a certain logic that seems to exist in comedy movies, that movies about high school are written for a pre-teen audience (though the raunchy subset of high school movies finds a broader audience, I suppose), movies about college for a high school audience, movies about twentysomethings capering about (Saving Silverman, maybe?) for college students, and movies about thirtysomethings written for twentysomethings. So, by only several minutes into The Hangover, I found myself thinking "wow! I can't wait 'til I'm in my mid-to-late thirties!".

If this age-based thing seems too general, or off base, it's also further complicated by The Hangover's simultaneous existence as a caper comedy and as a Vegas movie at the same time. It may well, in fact, just be the fact that it takes place in Las Vegas that this movie is successful at all (how could a combination of Dude, Where's My Car? and Very Bad Things succeed otherwise?). Given that some many of its jokes seem so familiar, the thing won't age well, but then again, that's not really the point, I suppose. Comedy-for-the-ages is a different beast than comedies-that-make-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars (or even of less immoderate success). Take, for instance, Something About Mary and Kingpin, from all the way back in the '90s: Mary seemed like the ground-breaking movie at the time, as the culmination of the '90s gross-out movement, and made more money (I'd imagine), but Kingpin was the movie built to last--Bill Murray's comb-over alone will maintain this movie for centuries to come (not to mention possibly the best groin-hit (between Harrelson and the two baddies) of all time). I could rattle off a massive list of classic comedies but there's no real point to it; I'm fairly confidant that the trends would point to aspects of quality rather than quantity of viewers.

Crank 2 was way funnier than The Hangover. Very different types of movies, admittedly, but the comparison can be made since The Hangover definitely went for the still-new "this is awesome" model of movie-making. Except that very little of its concepts were particularly awesome, and the thing was quite slackly-paced. The pacing issue probably has to do with it being a Vegas movie, where the director, one assumes, is compelled to lovingly film all those beautiful hotel rooms and hallways and scenic vistas blah blah blah. As usual, with popular things like this, part of me hopes that it leads some minority of its viewers towards actually good things, but that probably isn't the case with this. Giggle! "So many crazy things happen in Las Vegas OMG!"

The only other point I want to bring up, dealing again with this movie's placement in the canon of all comedies ever, has to do with Zach Galifinakis's role. Dude's been doing the awkward-comic thing for a while now, to decent effect (anyone else remember his turn in Out Cold? I sure do). Owes something to Andy Kaufmann, I'd assume. And he does pretty well steal most of the scenes he's in--though, that's not much of a feat when you're competing against Ed Helms and some other douchebag. But awkward comedy is easy, especially for a mainstream audience, since it would seem much newer to them. Why? Because comedy is all about timing (for the best-timed joke in the history of movies, see the "It's Enrico Pallazzo!" gag from the first Naked Gun movie), and awkward comedy is based in disrupting that timing. I can't think of many things that I appreciate more than a well-timed joke (there were a couple decently timed gags in The Hangover but not many), and this can also appreciate blatant disregard for anti-timing, but in a movie where things more or less just move forward and jokes come and go, the awkward thing gets really boring.

And I guess that's why I tried to warn myself off of writing about this movie, since it was doomed to boil down to "popular movies are boring," which, while true, also leads to the similar aphorism that "elitists are annoying."

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This By Now #4: William Faulkner's Sartoris

I'm not sure by what this book should be hailed. It's Faulkner's third novel, and the first dealing with Yoknapatawpha County and its residents, but not first "major" novel overstates the case. The thing definitely shows signs of Faulkner having not quite his stride as a serious writer. But, given that it's the first of the whole spate of amazing novels that defined and developed Faulkner's primary literary universe, it's an important work. I don't know why I hadn't read it by now; I guess because it isn't as good as the sequence of amazing novels that followed it. In that regard, I tended to think of it as his first novel as I read it. Similar to reading Kundera's The Joke last week, I've found it quite rewarding to go back and read the earliest novel of a writer whose later works I enjoy quite a bit.

Pretty much every summer, going back to my sophomore year of college, I've gotten this urge to read Faulkner. Something about the humidity maybe, draws me towards his descriptions of Mississippi. So it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Sartoris. Reading one or two Faulkner novels a summer for eight summers in a row gets you there eventually. The plotting (really, the lack of plotting) in Sartoris once again matched the pace of my summer to this point, moving slowly, with not all that much happening. Given the amount of story that followed this book, though, its not surprising that its 300 pages take such a broad view and move so slowly, since Faulkner, here, is already trying to build so much of his imaginary world.

It's interesting to me as well that, reading it after so many of the other Yoknapatawpha novels, this book didn't feel like a "prequel" at all--that has something to do with the timelessness of Faulkner's story-telling, and the sort of shifts in time that take place in those other works. Given that, what makes it seem earlier is really in the craft.

Particularly disconcerting is Faulkner's treatment of African-American characters, often resorting unnecessarily to broad-strokes and racist stereotypes (an issue that he had corrected (at least to some extent) in his later works). I think most of us white middle-class readers are taught how to deal with this sort of stereotype-laden writing in Junior High, when we read Mark Twain, and are taught to ignore the "n-word" and consider it part of the social tapestry or whatever. But that's not really satisfactory. Produces a lot of white liberal awkwardness, if nothing else. What's strange here is that many of the black characters are well-developed, embark upon sub-plots and are treated fairly and humanely. Faulkner resorts to stereotype mostly in the background; in sentences that were either never written or edited out of later novels, or at the very least presented more complicatedly. Writing the novels about the South, especially during a timespan between the Civil War and The Great Depression, from the perspective that he had, Faulkner's racism--or the racism in his characters--is generally present in all his works, but complicatedly so; in Sartoris its not complicated at all, but at least the reader can take to heart that it eventually will be (if never completely satisfyingly so).

For July 6th: Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

As a brief update to last week's discussion of Conan O'Brien's new gig on The Tonight Show: my final night of TV watching (until I get around to purchasing a digital converter and I guess probably an antenna too) I went ahead and spent watching Conan O'Brien again, though my sense (and I've confirmed this with the few friends of mine that have also watched it) is that he's definitely watered down his shtick for the earlier time slot---which is a shame since its still late at night. But, on said last night of watching TV (though the next night I did go over to a friend's house to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals on TV--a great game, with my hometown team coming out improbably victorious (enthusiasts and followers of this column will have already known that the biggest crack in the walls of my cultural-elitist firmament is my unabashed love of Pittsburgh sports)), Conan's first guest was Norm MacDonald (here is the whole show on hulu, Norm's the first guest), and it was the first genuinely funny thing on his show up to this point. Though, I'm a sucker for Norm MacDonald (many people are; he's hilarious). I'm sure you'll agree.

Really though, the funnier interview is a classic from Late Night with Conan O'Brien:

Also, further evidence of Norm MacDonald's hilariousness include Screwed, Dirty Work, and his cameo appearances in The Animal (as a concerned member of the mob chasing Rob Schneider) and Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo (as a Scottish gigolo). Also, his shtick on Comedy Central's roast of Bob Sagat is totally classic.

Clearly, then, I'm not just suddenly jumping on the Norm MacDonald bandwagon. Sometime, way back in the '90s, I saw one of his stand-up specials, and it was the funniest stand-up I'd seen until Dave Chappelle's "Killing 'Em Softly" special. The only other contemporary stand-up to generate as many laughs from me would be Mitch Hedberg.

I give further props to Conan, since it seems like, since Norm doesn't really have anything going on, that he brought him on the show only because Norm is really funny. Way to go, Conan.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #4: Milan Kundera's The Joke

This is Kundera's first book. Interesting because of its history of translation and retranslation (as documented in the "definitive version" which I just recently read). Interesting because Kundera is mostly an interesting writer. Why I never got around to reading it until now? I'm not sure.

To me, Kundera is one of those writers that I can't help but like, even if it's only because certain aspects of his books are so good that they overcome consistent annoying aspects. Which I suppose is why it was rewarding to go back and read his first book, to see where all this started from. One of his newer books, and probably my least favorite of the Kundera novels I've read, Identity, I didn't like because it felt like the characters, rather than occupying any kind of "real" world--or straddling a line between a textual world and a real world (the way both Immortality, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are successful)--they just felt like Kundera characters living in a Kundera world. Which is still okay, and I'm sure that Kundera enthusiasts may even like that more, since such a book plays into the cult of the author.

The Joke, then, though carrying certain Kundera-signifiers (its being in seven parts, the broad scope of cultural references contained therein, a certain focus on music, its unabashed political stance, etc), was still a bit simpler, and just worried about telling the story its telling; that is, it has no meta-fictional aspect, which becomes such an important part of Kundera's later books. A pretty intense book, with a mostly despicable protagonist that the reader still feels impelled, if not to feel sorry for, than to forgive, since he's seen as being a product of oppression; that he fails in his revenge is the crux of his presumed coming of age--if we take The Joke as a Bildungsroman for an oppressed humanity that has a forcibly extended adolescence.

The comparison, which is probably wildly off-base, that I always like to make is between Kundera and Tom Robbins. Partially to do with the way they interject their own knowledge into the fabric of their novels, and for the generally grand scope of their plots and the way that scope is balanced by an intense focus at the same time on small interpersonal relationships. I don't know though; I don't get too many chances to test out the analogy (which is odd to me, since it seems like if these authors are similar, its like that people that've read the one have read the other, but that's not often the case--which maybe means that I'm wrong in comparing them (oh well)). Also, both authors are the type to kind of be read in phases; I haven't read all of either of their complete works, but tend to pick up a book now and then at a used paperback store, enjoy it (more or less), then think to read more of it, but not for another year or whatever.

Summer of Booklove Bookclub Reminder: Next up is Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth for July 6th.

It's been okay, I guess. I've always thought the dude was a pretty good interviewer, and that seems to still be the case, and likely to hold the show together while the rest of the shit shores itself up. The only particularly disconcerting aspect to me has been Conan's habit of shouting excitingly after the crappy rock bands on his show play their crappy songs. If I was an old person, I'd never want to hear that kind of shouting.

Watching Conan, I also realized that I'd never bothered to watch Jimmy Fallon as his replacement on Late Night, so after Conan's first show I went ahead and "stuck around" to see what that shit was like. Having The Roots as his "house band," gains him some points, but Fallon is remarkably similar in my mind to Carson Daly; that is, I have no empathy with the kind of idiots and jocks or whoever that actually think the guy is funny or an appealing host. But I was watching it, figured I'd stick it out for at least the whole episode. I thought I would anyway, until Fallon got to his desk, said a special "hello" to hold-over viewers from Conan that had never seen the show before, then proceeded to pull out a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and say that the night's show was sponsored by said beverage, then continued to have a conversation with his announcer about how good the stuff was. I realize that all television is advertising, but that's a bit much, isn't it? Turned the thing off. Disinterest has become boycott.

Really, though, I can't get myself all that worked up about talk shows.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #3: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

This book is a couple decades younger than the first couple entries of the Pete Can't Believe! books, having first appeared in English in 1997 (or maybe '96), but qualifies nonetheless because of the splash that it made almost immediately. This is another example of my predisposition away from popular things: just because the book immediately garnered all this acclaim and then more or less stayed around as a known good, that didn't mean that I should read it. Or, no, I'm being to hard on myself, I'd only really barely heard of it (I Can Believe It!), and am happy to finally have read it.

It's a mythic quest starring a hapless 30 year old who starts the book unemployed and steadily becoming estranged from his wife of several years. I'll give this as advice to any book readers out there: finding books accidentally where some piece of the protagonist's life matches yours always makes for better reading. For my own well-not-quite-thirty-really but very much jobless summer, the match was great, since the passages where the narrator reports reading a book, then taking a nap, and going to the store for a small number of groceries after that struck quite close to home.

I have some sense that there were a lot of references, or homage, or outright adaptation of older Japanese tropes and mores involved in the construction of the book, but they don't necessarily distract from the book in English read by a non-expert, since the dreamlike quality of the plot carries a lot of weight on its own (I don't have any particular desire to go into any kind of cross-cultural comparisons here, at all, with do nods to all the post-colonialists out there, but I would go far as to say that I do reckon that I, in reading this, read a different novel than someone more schooled in the roots of its mystical aspects).

The protagonist is also one of those hero types that does very little. He mostly does what other people tell him to do. That's part of his problem, I suppose. What he succeeds at doing best is clubbing a guy (maybe two) with a baseball bat. Which is actually pretty cool in its own right. But since he's kind of carried along in the plot by the various characters that are introduced and help him, it strengthens that bond between reader and action, as any reader (even in Choose Your Own Adventure books) is always carried along by the plot of what they're reading (I reckon this is why so many literary theorist's want to empower readers, since all readers are ultimately powerless to words of the text they're reading).

Or maybe I just think that under the influence of entry #2 of this reading sequence, associating If on a winter night a traveler's reader-protagonist with all other readers and protagonists. Nah... the parallel is there.

For July 6th: Sharp Teeth

For August 3rd: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

Star Trek was great, Wolverine pretty much blew (apologies, as usual, to Nick, for my failing to find its stalwart action movie tropes to be as exciting and enjoyable as I should have), and Terminator falls somewhere in the middle. Where I was hesitant to compare Star Trek and Wolverine, I feel the opposite impulse between the latter and Terminator. Mostly ‘cause they’re both more or less straight-up sci-fi/action flicks, and both come from similar pedigrees (having two quite good movies been made in their franchises with questionable third movies—though T-3 was way way better than X-Men 3). Wolverine riding his motorcycle out of an exploding barn? Meh. T-800 jumping off an exploding bridge holding an axe and using that axe to climb onto a giant flying robot? Awesome!

Beyond the explosions-and-leaping comparison, the obvious choice to put against each other are the special effects; it’s very easy to say “Terminator looked much better, and was therefore the better movie.” In fact, it’s one of those arenas where I have the most trouble getting an objective sense of my own taste. Ideally, I wouldn’t really care one way or the other about the look of the movie, and gauge it more for its editing/action/pacing, but its hard to ignore the fact that Wolverine looked so cheap and careless, whereas Terminator (and Star Trek, for the matter) had much bigger budgets (though also, arguably, more of a need for those effects) for the computer graphics. But sci-fi is one of those genres where I think it does matter. Look at Star Wars: what was it that separated those first three Star Wars movies from the pack of all the rest of the sci-fi in the ‘70s? It’s set-design, specifically the darkness of its sets (this isn’t necessarily something that I feel like I can actually fully argue, but it’s been my sense for a long time that the only reason Star Wars was ever popular is because of the darkness of its sets). Terminator 2? The Matrix? Special effects are what cement their place in action/sci-fi movie history. Total Recall sits at the absolute pinnacle of the greatness of pre-CGI special effects. Tron. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain will eventually have massive cult status for its non-computer-generated sci-fi backdrops. Jurassic Park. Even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie which exists in its own special corner of science fiction (I think its one of the best spaceship movies ever made), was recognized for its special effects—it was the “ultimate trip”.

Much rarer is the sci-fi movie known for its awesomeness without its effects. Robo-Cop is the one movie that springs to mind. Maybe Tremors. All the Star Trek movies seem to skirt the issue pretty well (despite whatever amount of mockery of the original TV show). And there are certainly movies that had great effects but sucked so much that it didn’t matter (though I’m drawing a blank here at the moment). So if Wolverine’s claws hadn’t looked so shitty, would it have been a better movie? It might have been—it may well at least have been way more enjoyable. But its main problem lies deeper than its half-assed visual sense: Wolverine utterly lacked ambition in its film making. Not that Terminator: Salvation set any records for mind-blowingly good ideas, but there was at least sense through all of its set-pieces that it knew it was going up against classics of the genre in its forebears, so had to provide some novelty to it. Compared to Terminator, Wolverine seems more like a B-movie than a blockbuster.

Culturology Summer of Booklove Book Club #2: A Scanner Darkly

As soon as I started reading this book, I realized that I should have picked a different Philip K. Dick book than this one. Although it certainly exemplifies a major piece of the PKD puzzle, its way more of a drug novel than real sci-fi. During the passages of the book where its just junkies hanging out and rapping with each other, it might as well be taking place in the mid-70s, rather than the imaginary 1997 of its fictional future. So I apologize for that; but there are still some interesting things to talk about here.

Philip K. Dick is known, of course, for his long-standing popularity as a writer whose books or stories are prime material for movie making. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, and many more were all based on PKD material. Part of the reason I picked A Scanner Darkly was because Linklater made a movie version of it a couple of years ago which I haven’t seen yet, and figured that at some point this summer I can spend some quality blog-time bitching about it (Linklater being about the least interesting (and most annoying) of the current set of young American filmmakers). But after reading the book, I’m not even sure that I would care to defend it against even a crappy film adaptation.

Its basic premise is pretty cool. In the future, drugs will be more powerful and more harmful than what they were, drug manufacturers will be more powerful as well, and the police will be more impotent than ever in stopping the trade. So Fred ends up narcing, and using his fair share of Substance D, which causes his brain to split in half (a trendy idea for a while there, back in the sci-fi day; the other must-read of split brain sci-fi being Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth), and is commanded to narc on himself as Bob Arctor. Bob/Fred is a sad character. And given PKD’s own history of drug abuse (apparently it was something like a massive acid trip/schizophrenic episode which launched him into the last phase of his novel writing, which was massively paranoid and infused with Gnostic religious leanings (see the VALIS trilogy, for instance)), I struggled in reading it to not just associate Bob/Fred with some vision of the actual Philip K. Dick. PKD also, apparently, for a while, had decided that the FBI was watching him, so started mailing them letters where he would narc on himself, so the paranoia that soaks through Scanner perhaps works so effectively because its writer really believed in it.

The idea of the drug manufacturer’s turning addicts into zombies in order to add them to their own numbers is appealing too, though it’s hard to see any kind of real-life analogue to it. It’s interesting to me, since we only get that information at the tail end of the book, but it’s really a scheme worthy of a mastermind criminal’s epic climactic “I did it” speech. I do enjoy paranoid fiction—Pynchon’s novels are all great for it—the sense that the world is built up of these massive schemes that the average person has no control over. The two basic ways to pay off paranoia plots are obvious enough: either someone is pulling all the strings, or no one is. I personally lean towards the no-mastermind plot resolution, but I think A Scanner Darkly’s ties up in a satisfactory way; if the drugs make you paranoid, it probably does work better for there to turn out to actual be a massive, carefully controlled scheme working against you.

Next Week: Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

For July 6th: Sharp Teeth

For August 3rd: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

DVD Round-Up

Beyond just reading novels and generally not working, not doing much of anything at all, really, I've decided to keep my internet DVD rental service within my budget, as getting a few movies a week to watch seems to take the edge off of having so many hours a day to be so painfully aware of my own uselessness (a pretty straightfoward reaction to being jobless, I reckon). So I've finally gotten around to seeing a bunch of movies that came out sometime in the past:

Once: This wasn't terrible. As much as I haven't gone for the whole singer-songwriter thing since the first half of my sophomore year of college, the music in this was okay, and the whole notion of making a small movie about making music is one way to get me to admit that not everything sucks. It's interesting to me too, 'cause I reckon this movie did well enough last year that people will be trying to repeat the success, and make more "indie-pop" musicals or whatever. But, as generally impressed as I was with this movie, I switch right back to my more usual cynical appraising as soon as I think of the idea that there would be a market for this stuff. Not that I want to dredge up any old issues of hipsters and what they ruin (see early Culturologies for the epic hipster conversation of 2008), but I'd imagine that this, if co-opted by indie-panderers, would become a style of movie which falls ever so neatly into that category of "the new sincerity," that explicitly post-ironic or anti-ironic aesthetic mush that gives cultural credence to treacle in the process of recanting its own usually heavily ironicized worldview.

Role Models: I realize that he wasn't directly involved with this movie, but I'm gonna go ahead and make the association: Judd Apatow is ruining American comedies. There's plenty to like about Role Models (not the least of which is the fact that the above-mentioned comedy-ruiner isn't actually involved). Actually, I almost went and saw this in the theaters. There are some good jokes, and Seann William Scott is a funny guy. David Wain is a funny guy. The Jesus bit from The Ten was funny enough to make seeing something with Wain and Rudd working together a reasonable thing to do. But I can't help but feel like this movie would have been funnier if certain other movies hadn't built a certain set of expectations for character arc and nerd-comfort in comedies. Maybe it's wrong to blame other movie-makers for the badness of something unrelated, but I feel like the comparison is an obvious one to make. At least we have the eminent release of The State DVDs to look forward to.

My attitude there is also influenced by having finally gotten around to seeing Pineapple Express, which was barely funny at all, and mostly bad. And Knocked Up was unwatchable. Normally, my attitude with this online-based DVD renting is that to get my money's worth, I must watch fully (not including special features or commentary tracks) everything that I rent, but I sent back Knocked Up after watching maybe its first twenty (if that) miserable minutes. And, for comparison, I did manage to watch all of

Leonard Part 6: This is a terrible movie. The only reason I managed to get through the whole thing was that the villainess was a crazy vegetarian woman who used henchmen dressed like animals, and lots of actual animals to accomplish her nefarious plots. This thing won a ton of Razzies back in '89, deservedly so. Cosby's at his worst. But it is made worthwhile because at a crucial point, Cosby defeats the head henchman by getting him to take a bite of a hotdog, which causes the henchman's head to explode (it appears to have been filled with sawdust, I guess to keep their PG rating).

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #2: If on a winter's night a traveler

This book is probably only on your radar if you went to college, and maybe even only if you studied some amount of English literature (though it was originally written in Italian, and translated into English). Why? Because it's probably one of the better examples of the kind of book which gets labeled as "postmodern" but is actually quite good. The structure is very interesting, with ten sections each being the first few pages of different novels which a character, addressed in the second person, gets involved with in interstitial chapters, in a wild international hunt for an elusive entire book.

Those of you that did study some amount of English probably see this as being indicative of the literary atmosphere in Europe after the ground-breaking critical work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, who liberated the text from the author, the reader from the author, the text from meaning, etcetera etcetera. The poor protagonist of If, then, is a kind of atavistic fellow who just wants to read a good old fashioned book, and doesn't like all this fragmentation and historicizing of the text. There's an awful lot of heady nonsense to be said/written (of course, if we're speaking post-Derrida, then everything is "writing") about If on, which is probably why I never bothered reading it until now.

Last week, I talked a little bit about the notion of the canon, and the fact that there are many different canons of work that all exist simultaneously, as different ways to sort the same set of books (the big set being something like All The Books That Are Readable By Demographic X). If on a, to its detriment, falls into the canon of books That Are Likely To Be Talked About By Annoying Lit Majors That Think They Know Something About Stuff, when, of course, they know very little. It's a reasonable stance, especially the further one gets from having been in an American college or university, to hate what's broadly called in this country "postmodernism".

But it's a really good book! I don't often go for books that use "you" like this (see Bright Lights, Big City for another--very different--example), but it works here, as its taken to such ridiculous heights as the poor Reader tries to keep a hold on any of the books he starts to read. In the end, if I were to read some sort of philsophical or theoretical aspect into If on a winter's, it'd be that it's pro-old-fashioned reading, rather than against it, and demonstrating that, as much as Barthes and his acolytes might proclaim the author's death, the reader is never all that empowered either. Language rules (the only theory that I know that actively works with this notion that language-itself yields the power in cultural works is the still-burgeoning "meme theory" which rises out of neo-Darwinism (the word "meme" was coined by heavy-hitting evolutionist Richard Dawkins, though, in anything I've read, he hasn't returned to the concept all that much).

Next Week: Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (this might actually take me more than a week to read, since its pretty thick).

For June 1st: Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly

For July 6th: Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

Other requests?

Since I'm not going to talk about that stuff, I'm left in the usual bind of having not all that much to say. Thirty-one blog posts (even though at least two of those are non-posts) is a lot to come up with, especially since I try pretty hard not to repeat myself too much. Certain themes come up again and again, certainly, but you know, I try to keep it fresh... I suppose I could be preparing more, and stop writing these things at the last minute, since that technique was mostly an artifact of the strenuous schedule that I was a Graduate student maintain during the semester, and now that the semester is over and I have no class and no job I could be rededicating myself to this column. But this is neither here nor there, is it?

Once again, I'm getting the impulse to broaden what it is that I talk about in these here columns, but my concern there is that, without the confines of popular culture (however out of touch with pop I might be), I'll get even more pedantic and obtuse than I already am. Which would be a crying shame.

This, too, then, though slightly longer than the previous non-posts, is still mostly a non-post. Ugh.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #1: Slaughterhouse-Five

As much as I'm a rabid fan of several things (let's say, Mr. Show, Pierre Boulez, and the first six seasons of The Simpsons as examples), I tend to be wary of books or movies or tv shows that spawn hideous armies of obsessive nerd fans. Given that I can admit to the rabidity of several of my own fandoms, this might be easily explained away as nerd insecurity or nerd delusion, but I don't think it's that easy. Especially given the amount of easily consumable crap produced by the culture industry, the opposite impulse, to glom onto something seen as "outside" the system or typical cultural consumption seems like a fine impulse, but being contrary doesn't necessarily lead to good taste.

My own impulses, then, as a consumer are both anti-mainstream and anti-outsider. I guess that's what makes me such a negative dude about so much of what there is in the world. I've talked about this before, my notion of things being "good for good reasons," and the fact that this goodness, as I perceive it, can be separated from its mode of production. So, just as some corporate popular stuff is actually good, much of what is produced independently or "alternatively" is total crap. Which is fine. I do still prefer independent garbage to mainstream garbage (or, there's a threshold of pretension over which independent badness becomes worse than corporate badness).

So most questions come up when deciding whether or not something is "good", or more accurately, when defending said notions of "goodness" to other people. This comes up, more than with anything else, I think, for me, when discussing books (or "literature"). Case in point: I refuse to read Harry Potter. I am too cool for it, and am not gonna read a bunch of mediocre children's books just because everyone else in the damn English-speaking world is. When I announce this stance (which I guess is already outdated since the HP thing has come and gone) to some other people, they are quite incensed, the main argument against me being that its hypocritical to read so deeply into the established canon of Western literature, to take the words and attitudes of a bunch of dead white men as being worth listening to, but ignoring the attitudes of the bunch of contemporary actually living, and supposedly diverse readers of Harry Potter.

Some of those folks, especially ones that took any literary theory classes in college, and have been seduced by the watered-down nonsensical version of "postmodernism" popular at many American colleges' English departments, extend that argument further to say that the canon should be dismantled, and that I, as an "inevitably postmodernized" reader should "unlearn" the precepts of my literary forebears. But there's always a canon, always will be a canon, and there cannot not not be a canon. We can water it down if we like, but there will always be classics, or books that you have to have read to join a given discussion (to book-club Slaughterhouse-Five, it will be much easier if you have read the book); to overthrow the white patriarchal hegemonic canon is not to overthrow the canon itself, but to modify its contents.

My canon, then, would be based on books that are "good for good reasons," and I'm willing to take a wide variety of people's words for it. But wide-spread commercial success is not a model for goodness that I at all trust. And there are plenty of other books to be read instead. The choice of reading, making and managing a reading list, seems to be what gets the obsessive nerds in trouble--the people who love Kurt Vonnegut so much that they read him over and over again, etc. Which is where I come to distrust the popularity; if there's a particular aspect of Vonnegut that makes him so nerd-popular, how can I be sure that other crappier aspects of his work are being overshadowed by the disproportionate goodness of whatever "good" parts?

But I have read several of his books in the past, and liked them quite a bit. I really liked Cat's Cradle and Mother Night. I guess I had never quite gotten around to reading Slaughterhouse-Five until now because it's the most famous, most popular of his books, and I more or less knew its conceit and plot already, from having heard so much about it.

So, yeah, it's a pretty good book. I didn't like it as much as Cat's Cradle, which probably makes me a simpleton in the minds of many Vonnegut fans, but I wasn't as impressed with the getting unstuck in time thing from S-5 as I was with the Ice-9 in CC. Especially because S-5 is quite outward in its anti-warness, the fatalism common to both books is harder to swallow there, since to me it muddles the parable (this feeling of muddledness is probably what gets me labeled as a simpleton by the smarter Vonnegut fans out there (in a similar way, I will accuse the movie Donnie Darko of being muddled, to find myself being accused of not being as smart as I think I am)).

Or maybe S-5's sci-fi elements are just the wrong ones for me. I am thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole Tralfamadore thing. What am I supposed to do? I can't whelm myself on the book's behalf, just because I understand that other people really like it. I would say, though, that there's no particularly good reason for me to have not read it by now, since it only took a few hours to read. Short books have something going for them. They definitely do.

Next Week: Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

And we'll figure out a schedule for the more official "book club" entries (which mostly involves me acquiring a copy of that book Neal wants to read--gotta go join my local library).

Well... are there?

The main question that I have is how many movies like this one Marvel will be able to make before the mystique runs out. I, and most other people as well, have plenty of reason to root for Marvel, since they're the little guy, and independent, and fully committed to making all these movies (DC being less concerned since they've got Time Warner behind them). It's hard to imagine anything like a general collapse of Marvel studios happening any time soon--or ever... maybe I, personally, fail to understand the demographic for, not Wolverine, but the inevitable (no matter how precipitous the drop in Box Office figures from this past weekend to next weekend) Wolverine 2, and any other X-Men: Origins stories. Since the movie-makers so obviously stuffed this thing to the gills with mutants, hoping for anything to stick well enough to be a spin-off, how many of these mutants are really all that popular out there in the real world that people would bother going to a movie about them?

Take Gambit, for instance. Cool character, cool powers. But the dude they cast as Gambit couldn't maintain his accent for a whole scene, let alone the whole movie. I can't help but feel like the idea was to plug Gambit in there in order to have him show up in more movies, possibly headlining one eventually. Otherwise, it's just, what? for the nerds who like to play spot the mutant? Not that nerds have ever been a viable demographic; they aren't. But if they were a market, I think the mangling of Deadpool and similar crimes-against-nerds pretty well eradicates the market for a while.

But that's it right? Marvel gets a marketshare so long as its got characters that will bring out the normals, as Wolverine is obviously capable of doing. And its not like formulaic movies aren't successful. So, again, since I'm generally pro-Marvel, I have hard time being that pissed off by the fact that Wolverine: The Movie was not very good. It's a bit harder to wrap my head around the fact that it looked so cheaply made (the CG looked decades old, certainly not up to the standard of the first two X-Men movies). But this is why I end up being so hopeful for non-comic-book superhero movies, since they have to work harder to get noticed, which I think would tend to lead to more ambitious (Push was definitely way more enjoyable than Wolverine).

Nor do I really think that it's bad thing if Marvel Studios churn out a couple of mediocre or bad comic book movies every year (I mean, they already are, and have been for a while). Gotta make money. And it's always inappropriate, in the realm of popular culture, to expect people to make good products. Goodness happens occasionally (the first two X-Men movies, Iron Man), but the norm will still be bad (X-Men 3, Wolverine, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Hulk, etcetera). And these movies don't effect the quality of the books, so so long as that's the case, everything should be hunky dory.

Speaking of books...

Culturology Summer of Booklove Bookclub #1: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

So I thought this was pretty good book. The tone is set immediately, with those epigraphs from Fantastic Four and Derek Walcott, and I think especially the first 80-90 pages were really compelling. The narrator's--Yunior's--voice is one that I don't think I would always like, in terms of its colloquialisms and informality, but it seems to crucial to this, since without the voice, Oscar would go from a GhettoNerd to just a plain old Nerd, which would've lost the entire book's project. So maybe it's wrong to point out some obvious lynch-pin to the thing like that, but it's what makes it good, worthwhile, etc.

One thing which stuns me about the book is that Oscar is basically an unlikable character. It's easy to feel bad for him, certainly, but in terms of actually caring about him, its more of a stretch. But his being so utterly out of place makes for compelling fiction. I suppose there's some amount of allegorizing that people might do in terms of contextualizing Oscar's "story" and his uprootedness, and maybe that's the right thing to do. I dunno. There's obviously some thematic connection to be made between being an immigrant and failing to belong socially in school and all that. Maybe I just feel unqualified to go into it.

But this is, like, a club, right? So what do you all want to talk about? I know at least Neal read it.

And, in terms of future books, let's do some brainstorming. I read a lot, so I'll probably just plug in whatever's next for me personally any given week, so we can plan ahead to stay more current than that. My reading list is currently stuff that I should have read by now but haven't. For next week: Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut. It's true, I've never read it before now. And I wanna read Blindness at some point this summer. And Neal wants to do Sharp Teeth; that's fine too.

(If this looks a bit off model, it's mostly because I just got a haircut, don't have a skinny, cartoon-style neck, nor any facial structures that are accurately represented there-above; there's a reason that Nick does the drawing and I do the writing in our collaborations.)

There! Now you can put a face, however shittily drawn, to the voice that has brought you these 25 or so deeply empirical studies into the machinations of the American Culture Industry. Though, as often discussed, as much as cultural neutrality seems possible, it never is. Like the movie I just saw over the weekend, Crank: High Voltage. I thought that this Crank was almost as awesome as the first Crank (which was completely awesome). The chart would look something like this:

Now, I realize that not everyone does or would think that Crank is awesome. Why? Because they are lame, and not ready for the future of action movies of this sort, which operate in the more-or-less linear fashion of "This is awesome. Now this. This is also awesome. Here's another awesome thing." etc. My appreciation of this movie was probably easy to predict, given my previous statements in favor of Jason Statham as pretty much the only true action start making movies right now. So it makes sense, that he's certainly a different type of action star, than say, Schwarzenegger (also completely awesome).

But I'm breaking one of my own rules, namely that I don't do reviews. So saying that the movie is awesome, but not awesome for everyone is not good enough. It's even hard to say that all action movies should be like these Crank movies, in fact, the opposite is probably the case. But there really is something to be said for movie-makers that adhere to this linked-awesome sequence model. What is impressive about Crank: High Voltage, then, is the fact that they managed to fit a lot more plot into this movie than the first one. That happens when you have a revenge movie, revenge always involves plot. I don't know that any of the techniques utilized (in terms of the scattered, wide-spread awesomeness) will ever leak back into more conventional action movies, though, not because of their frenetic pace, but because it requires a certain amount of meta-awareness on its viewers. It strikes me that (for lack of better terms) older and/or dumber viewers would be either a) put off or b) bored by the kind of we'll do anything if it seems cool kind of approach, since it might only be interesting to follow if you figure out that they're really only making the movie as a tongue-in-cheek affair, with the (already mentioned) mind towards awesomeness.

And it's box office showing, a paltry 11 million in two weeks, seems to back up my sense that, depsite its being way more entertaining than most other movies out there, Crank: High Voltage is too awesome for the average viewer. Bummer. Oh well, gotta cut this column short, in order to jump my motorcycle over a gorge.

SUMMER CULTUROLOGY SPECIAL!!!

Also, since its the summer, and the book-oriented section of AudioShocker seems to have fallen tragically by the wayside, I am going to implement a special Read-with-Pete Culturology Book Club to run for the next several months. Book Club commentaries will be seeded by myself in the post-space that used to be occupied by the Things That It Was or Wasn't Okay to Like. We will hope to avoid any general book-clubbing, like saying why or why not we liked given books or characters or plots, rather focusing instead on a more scientific appraisal of the various pieces of literature. Up first: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Totally appropriate for comics-readers as well. And it won a Pulitzer. Alright! Get Reading!

The reason that this would get me out there into the internet in order to watch this is pretty clear--as an Arrested Development enthusiast (it's not my favorite show ever, but I like it a lot, and appreciate the fact that when I make reference to it in conversation, way more people notice the reference then when I--preferably--reference, say, Mr. Show), I was excited to see that Mitchell Hurwitz was doing another show. Pretty standard reaction, I think. Plus some of the usual voice talents that seem worth listening to, with some obvious overlap with AD in Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Henry Winkler. The presence of Tom Kenny (of Mr. Show and Spongebob fame) as a voice talent also scores points.

The show itself, though, was pretty much a disappointment. It wasn't a struggle to watch, for its 20 minutes, but there wasn't much about it that struck me as "good." They seem to be working some kind of meta-show element in there, with various characters having "catchphrases," and there being occasional winks to the camera, and breakings of the fourth wall, etcetera, but given the kind of slackerly vibe the whole show gives off, its disconcerting to me that that element may well turn out to be never more than completely half-assed. Which is too bad, since "meta-" shit is super trendy these days, so it just comes off as so much contract-renewal pandering. Which is fine, shit's gotta pander, I realize that, but hear me out:

in terms of "meta" texts, what tends to work well about them (and I'm thinking mostly of the "postmodern" novels that were popular in the 70s-90s) is their complicating their given medium (whether its a comic, or a novel, or a movie) at the level of plot. When Milan Kundera interrupts The Unbearable Lightness of Being to muse about his own vantage on the characters he's created, he, as an author, is acutely aware of what this intereference does at the level of plot, primarily upsetting the realism of the cause and effect of the plot of the novel, toying with the reader in a novel (pun intended) way, and complicating the reading experience as a whole. Or when Paul Auster inserts a character into City of Glass who is named "Paul Auster" it complicates the relationship between the author and the other characters, yes, but also, importantly, effects the plot, since the reader now has to question whether some characters have more power than others, and whether or not the cause and effect can be taken for granted.

Let's take another meta-textual example, this time one which seems to have less impact on its text: the "Black Freighter" element of the ever-popular Watchmen. Some folks (Neal, for instance) argue that this aspect of Watchmen is completely unnecessary and boring, not even in need of reading. This stance comes about because the meta-comic doesn't really bear any effect on the plot of the comic-as-such; it adds a level of awareness certainly, in terms of the role of Watchmen as a comic about comics, and does a lot of character building, in terms of the men on the street roles of the kid reading the book and the newsstand guy that does all the talking at the same time--more important than you might think, since these two characters are crucial in developing concern in the reading on behalf of the citizens that get killed by Ozymandias's psychic-vagina-squid. The argument against the Black Freighter being, then, that there are other, better ways of building character without being unnecessarily "smart" (i.e. meta) about it. But from another aspect, we can see that the meta-comic actually does play an important role in the plot: its author, who has mysteriously disappeared, turns out to be a crucial aspect of Ozymandias's plan--the writer of the most twisted comic ever is also the author of the nightmare about the extra-dimensional vagina-squid that is implanted into peoples brains when the climactic event occurs. This is why, in one of the books, we actually see this author die, as he and everyone else involved in the project are blown up on the boat, his story--the Black Freighter--causes him to be selected to write the nightmare which is the crux of Ozymandias's plot; that is direct engagement with the plot, if I've ever read it.

But it does straddle the border. I tend to agree with the --generally populist-seeming-- argument that self-awareness in any given cultural artifact isn't necessarily a good thing. Think of the huge number of major studio quasi-"B" movies which attempt to wink at the camera and pull in the recreationally ironic demographic but end up making nonsense movies which fail at all levels. Winking at a two-way mirror on the fourth wall is not the same thing as breaking that wall (I can only imagine that Brecht would find much to complain about in contemporary "meta" culture). So, when Sit Down, Shut Up winks at the camera, especially given that pop cultural stuff has already been doing that move for a long time, it is not only not-fresh, but annoying and off-putting. There's some chance that they develop it further, such that it might turn into a cool thing; I'm not giving up on it yet, but as of now its hard to be optimistic.

Sit Down, Shut Up is not helped by the fact that it appears to be going in the post-Family Guy direction of general plotlessness in favor of snarky jokes, loosely assembled under an umbrella arc on an episode-by-episode basis (ditching plots is what ruined The Simpsons). Here again, if anything of what I've written, in terms of plot-importance being the aspect that makes meta-textuality interesting, makes sense, SD, SU will need to have more plot to work better. Though, one supposes, most humans just like plain old jokes, not plots, in their comedies, so maybe the show'll do just fine.

Speaking of plots, I've also been watching--this too is probably easily predictable--Dollhouse on the internet. Pretty good. Gets a lot better towards episodes 5 and 6, but its worth watching the first few episodes to get to the middle ones; it seems like the show is gonna be solid through the rest of this season, thought it already seems to be headed right for cancellation once this season ends. Oh well.

From my experience in "Academia" there's generally two or three attitudinal camps on what theory/philosophy's relationship with pop culture should be. There are elitists (like myself) who think that pop culture should be analyzed only insofar as it is popular; that is, I'm concerned, generally, with the mechanics of a given popular thing's popularity--questions like "what makes this cultural artifact so popular?" There is some spectrum, though, across various elitist viewpoints, as to whether any popular culture can ever transcend its capitalist origins (this problematizes, in the same breath, the notion of "high culture" as well, since "high" art is just seen as so much rationalization of leisure and complacency by the middle class--though, generally, at least in "popular" conception, the "split" between arts is either between the high/low or the popular/academic arts), or if its not transcendent, perhaps some popular art is good in spite of itself (that's generally my attitude). Another attitude, perhaps obviously, abhors the elitist stance, and wants to reach out to the popular audience, the bulk of any given culture. It doesn't mind the critical methodologies developed within various academic/intellectual communities; indeed, "philosophers" of this ilk embrace these interpretive practices but seek to apply them to anything that is interpretable, without concern to the modes of production of said cultural artifact. And another camp still despises both elitist culture and elitist criticism and seeks to generate new ways of interpreting popular art.

As might be expected, I have no problems with either the first or the last of the three approaches that I just described. And, as it turns out, based on their first chapters, these books of "pop philosophy" fall into the middle category. There's something, I have trouble putting my finger on it exactly, but there's something about this sort of "philosophy" that strikes me as strangely evangelical, as if, more than anything, these books are about luring people into their fields, more than anything in particular that might be said. Not surprisingly, then, both of the sample chapters involve Identity Politics. In the X-Men one, the writer inquires into what it means to belong, or to be different or special, and how one, who is "different" might or might not self-identify. For the Terminator, the discussion is of whether or not robots can ever "think" the way humans can, or whether or not robots could self-identify as being, essentially, human. The lure, then, for the imaginary reader of such an article, would be to get the reader to self-identify as a philosopher, and to begin to extend these kinds of "philosophical" investigations to other pieces of their cultural worlds.

Which would be all well and good; certainly, I couldn't claim to do anything but criticize, from whatever quasi-theoretical stance it is that I take here in Culturology, whatever artifacts I come across on a week-to-week basis. My ability to do so (whether or not its effective) certainly arises out of a certain amount of training in this field (whether that came in the classroom or from reading other books). But, with books like these pop philosophy things, the ideas are so watered down and glossed over, in order to attract readers at all, that they lack the kind of critical (and self-critical) efficacy that makes "philosophizing" about popular culture worthwhile in the first place (the basic question of such inquiry, which is a completely valid question, is: "I like this; why do I like this?" and notions of effectiveness come from how well that question is answered). The problem, then, is that, rather than inviting readers to learn more philosophy, I would charge that these books in fact invite readers just to do similar wishy-washy things to other bits of pop culture. (Granted, there are the obligatory nods to further reading, but the rhetorical stance of the chapters themselves seem to lack the kind of truth-seeking behavior that would effectively model the desire to read further.)

This all seems to be barreling towards the similar kind of "elitist" stance that seems to have become something of an idee fixe for me in the past month of posts here (similar to my (apparent) overuse of the word "atavist" in the month prior). Which is perhaps wrong; I try, usually, to ask more questions here than provide answers. But I can't get away from this notion of critic-as-specialist that is almost completely antithetical to the everyone-can-be-a-philosopher attitude that apparently exists as a demographic (since these books came to be published at all). The two aren't really mutually exclusive, though, huh? Maybe it's like punk rock, where the band on stage might be shouting about all the Noam Chomsky they've read, but the bulk of the kids in the crowd just want to be contrary and wear t-shirts with the word "fuck" on them. Is it better to be a punk at all then just a conformist? And for the few kids in the crowd that actually do go read Chomsky and actually do go learn some things, are they better punks than the conformist-punks? And should the bands themselves be doing more to recruit "actual" punks?

To my mind, this kind of discussion finds most of its answers in appeals to the pervasiveness of, if not capitalism, then of "the market," where everything, from artifacts to ideas, are readily turned into commodities and in competition with one another. Some number of philosophers or theorists hope that by being sufficiently aware of this process they might effect a reasonable critique of commodification despite the fact that their own ideas are subject to the market as well; some ideas are more easily marketable than others--hence, elitism, since elitists have found a way to reduce their market value by reducing any broad appeal of their ideas. Criticism, almost by definition, must be a niche market. The sort of foray into "popular" realms as exemplified by these books of "pop philosophy," though they might see themselves as doing something noble, inevitably reduce their importance as ideas in direct proportion to their importance as commodities. Whether or not that's a good thing, I'm not entirely certain.

1) Just because it's really easy to make fun of Neal, doesn't mean that you should. My approach sensed that a true form could be derived from poking fun at the guy that was too lazy to read Watchmen in its entirety, but really, that sort of zinging is best left relegated to the comments section, however fun, it may well distract from the content of the post itself.

2) It is very difficult to be both a) blatantly disrespectful and b) not come off like an asshole. If I had a point last week (I had several points, really), than one of them was certainly that elitists are not necessarily assholes. Of course, this is a difficult point to prove when you're going out of your way to be an asshole.

3) When dealing with "audience," whether for a single blog post or for a cultural phenomenon at large, it is very difficult to peg down exactly what you're talking about; that is, "audience" is a slippery notion, and oftentimes it slips in less-than-optimal directions.

As I think up and write out these posts on a weekly (always last minute) basis, certain themes come up time and time again. Though its mostly implied, there is a certain mission statement or set of principles behind what I've been calling Culturology. Many of these ideas have already been thematized and written about at some length, so there's some concern that in writing this right now I'm being somewhat redundant, but we're also in the midst of the worst time of year for movies, which tend to be the most obvious fodder for what I write about; thus a post like this, which mostly seems to be seeking to fill its own space, and not too worried about getting anything done.

One of the main concerns that I have, always, and this ties into my stance re: sincerity, is that any kind of cultural analysis or investigation or interpretation is always tainted by "subjective" taste to an extent that renders the "objective" notion of figuring things out impossible, or just plain false. Like what I was saying in the last couple of weeks about the notion of writing "reviews": to me, there's an essential difference between "reviewing" a given movie or album, and analyzing it to see how it works. It's the difference between saying "I like this." and "This is why I like this." Simple enough, right? Except that, at least in contemporary America, credence is generally given to the notion that everyone is a unique individual with unique individual tastes. This can't possible be the case, but at the same time, then, I can't (and don't) claim that my own interpretation is particularly unique either (and actually, if you look back across my posts thus far, you'll see quite a bit of hedging in this direction).

So Culturology, then, sees itself as generating its own audience--if I think this way, then, surely, thousands of other people think similarly as well. This is why it is offended at the notion of writing towards or appealing to the so-called "general" audience. That opinions are just driven by "subjective taste" is uninteresting because, at the level of culture, Americans are much less unique than they think they are. Of course, my ideas will be slanted towards what I think, but at the same time, since they're worried about the broader patterns of culture, operating under the assumption that these patterns are general and not unique, Culturology doesn't need to take that additional step of concerning itself with the "general audience." We all generalize before we even get started doing anything.

So it's not that I claim to objective; rather, I claim that nobody is ever really that subjective. If most cultural decisions boil down to matters of taste or aesthetics, then those opinions are themselves also analyzable, simply because of the amount of sample data available. Looking at how and why such tastes arise--and I admit, one a week to week basis I'm not always as good at this as I might be--is a different matter than simply arguing for one taste or another. The main counterargument to this that I can conceive, is that this sort of culturological structuralism is itself only a certain set of tastes, but, again, while it is itself open to a similar kind of criticism, its also deciphering a different artifact that the standard kind of broad-audience reviews. One aspect of culturology certainly is the reviewing of reviews, and we can (and have before) argue what the role of criticism (of media) and critique (criticism of criticism) are and should be, but at least, I hope, its a bit clearer now what it is exactly that I think I am doing here.

I'm not sure what exactly compels me to respond to Neal's renewed accusations (see the comment line of Culturology 23)--it's certainly not out of respect for his ideas, so I would suppose that, basically, I've got nothing more pressing to write about this week, and generally don't like it when there are casually negative things floating around about me. This, of course, stems from last week's discussion of Watchmen, and Neal's charge (in paraphrase) that I was being elitist and not appropriately considering the movie's audience. Now, I am unapologetic about my elitism; frankly, I think I've earned it, insofar as I never claim to be an elitist, as such, but don't argue about it, necessarily, when such accusations are applied. I reckon that its in the nature of all human cultures that there will be elitists, and if not intellectual elitists, then certainly there are humans that excel at what they do. Intellectual elitists, who I think, more or less, are what Neal was griping about when he was griping about my culturological approach, then, are no different from anyone else that is good at what they do. The problem is that America, for several decades now, has been breeding a generally anti-intellectual culture which a) encourages people to be idiots and b) recommends that they resent it when other people are more educated than they are.

But I'm not going to let this post get out of control; I have no intention of just soap-boxing here like some righteous nerd. Again, though, I think that I do have plenty of nice things to say, and I have said them (my commentaries on both Coraline and Push, for instance, were quite positive). Which still isn't quite the point...

Neal's argument that I failed in my criticism to consider Watchmen's wider audience before panning it (I didn't pan it, Neal accused me of panning it) is a perfect example of how fundamental American anti-intellectualism leaks into the thought processes of (we presume) a (relatively) educated commenter such as Neal:

1) Consider the appeal to an "everyperson" audience for the movie: my criticism was unnecessarily negative (and, indeed, blinded by its negativity) because I failed to be aware of the fact that I was watching it from the vantage of a comics-fan, thereby failing to consider how "normal" "movie-goers" would feel (I use "feel" here over "think" since we can't be certain that this everyperson "thinks" at all, insofar as it is my thinking which problematizes my "feelings" about the movie). First of all, I said at the top of my post that I had no intention of writing a review. It's not my job, as a culturologist, to let "people" know if the movie is good or not. I'm here to provide a well-considered interpretation of any given cultural artifact. If a given artifact sucks, but doesn't completely suck, I'm under no obligation to say "but it didn't completely suck" unless that incompleteness is culturologically interesting. To extend that and then accuse my criticism of being incomplete due to its lack of "nice things to say" misses the point entirely.

2) Neal's implied concern for the "everyperson" is itself a brand of elitism. He, and the thousands of other (we presume) (relatively) educated Americans like him have absorbed enough American pop culture to believe that there's something to this idea that smarty-pants people like myself are just bored assholes with too much time on our hands. Which is not to say that I'm not, to some extent, an easily-bored asshole, but rather that the "audience" for most culturological investigations is going to be primarily made up of people who are similarly easily-bored. The fact that we might hate on things that less easily bored people might like in our boredom does not disqualify our opinions, it merely points out a difference in demographics. There certainly are "critics" who consider themselves to be writing for a "mainstream" audience (once I get around to those X-MEN and philosophy things, I'm sure this portion of the conversation will be extended), but I would argue that either a) their goals are different from mine, in so far as they are evangelical about their elitism, whereas I am preaching to the already-converted or b) they are failures as critics, and are simply producing more populist swill, rather than anything of critical merit.

3) Since Neal's concern for the "everyperson" is itself an elitist action, he's actually worse than I am, since he's condescending to the people who he is apparently trying to protect. He is out amongst the sheep, shouting and smacking their asses with a stick, trying to get them to move to the next pasture, whereas I merely place a block of salt in the next field, knowing that they will flock thither upon thirst for salt (that is, I'm leading by example, he's an idiot). Though, we must also consider the notion that Neal considers himself to be an "everyman." Does this complicated my accusations? It may, but I think I would have an easier time demonstrating his elitism than he would have demonstrating his "normalcy." But, is it ever possible for an elitist to genuinely concern for the intellectually inferior?

Yes. And it's that answer of "yes" that keeps most culturology worth doing. It comes back to what I was saying at the top of this post: intellectual elitism is no different from the multitude of other elitisms and specialties that abound in all cultures, it just so happens that smart people have been vilified in the current cultural epoch. But I freely admit that my intellectual specialization has common at the cost of lack of expertise in other areas. We are all members of our cultures, even our personal identities are more the result of other people than ourselves; this is what allows us to specialize in the first place. In becoming a critic, I understand, and count on the fact that other people will become readers, creators, or whatever else. We all have our roles to fill. Mine is to be a culturologist, and apparently, Neal's role is to be an idiot.

Gah! where to start? Okay... Watchmen had one of the worst soundtracks I've ever witnessed. Lazily, lazily done, with what must have been a mind towards "intertextuality," where, if all of the songs used were already famous from other movies, that would establish some kind of web of references to mirror the kind of inter-text play of the Watchmen book. Of course, this fails, especially as the music supervisor was also looking for great levels of incongruity along with the familiarity of the soundtrack. It's as if the only music they had to choose from was the Forrest Gump soundtrack. The most egregious fouls were using "The Times They Are A-Changin'" during the terrible opening credits sequence, a random placement of "The Sound of Silence" over the Comedian's burial, well, actually it goes on and on, but I suppose I have a particular beef of using bits of of Philip Glass's soundtrack to Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi during one of the horrendous Dr. Manhattan/Mars scenes. It's one thing to lift songs already popular from other movies (using Ride of the Valkyries in Vietnam I suppose was the most obvious "reference," though similarly annoying to all the others), but then to go so far as to snip an actual soundtrack from another movie and use that? Fucking lazy. Though I suppose there are some idiot Philip Glass fans out there (most Glass fans are idiots) that thought it was awesome to hear his music in a mainstream movie like that (forgetting that Glass already writes terrible soundtracks for other movies as well). But given that Koyaanisqwatsi is actual a brilliant cinematic artifact, the lifting of the music is cheap and shitty in Watchmen.

Which brings up my other main complaint about Watchmen (if I had to write a review it would go something like this: "I don't regret having watched it; it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I never need to watch it again."): who the hell was the intended audience for this movie? My experience in watching the thing was that I was constantly adding information from the book back into the movie as I watched it. Which is fine, and especially easy to do given that the look of the comic really was quite well adapted into the movie. Although, despite having the "look" pretty much dead on, they lost much of the style of the Watchmen, which, as I understand it, while definitely in a somewhat pulpy style, was also quietly innovative back in the '80s. But the movie failed as a movie. It was inelegantly paced, bloatedly long, and Snyder's fight sequence style, with all of its slow-mo/fast-mo and pose-striking just seemed bizarre to me, especially in contrast to how much he tried to play up the "normal, pathetic humans" angle of the main characters when they're out of costume. So this post is rapidly devolving into a list of complaints about the movie, which I was hoping to avoid, but probably just what it deserves...

But, again, I can't imagine that any "fans" of the book were satisfied by the movie, and I can't imagine that any newbies felt like the movie made any sense or was very good. I do think that the movie demonstrated that the central plot of Watchmen is a very solid plot (insofar as that's all that's left in the movie from the book, anyway, with the "extras" stripped away), so in spite of being mismanaged by Snyder, the plot still demonstrates its quality. I also think much of the period aspect of the movie was misguided, since Soviet plots in Afghanistan simply don't have the same kind of resonance with audiences as they did 25 years ago. This kind of "faithful" movie adaptation ends up being an exercise in idiocy, since anyone with half an imagination will prefer the comic book to the live-action movie (one notable exception was seeing Rorschach shiver when he turns down a warmer coat in the Antarctic). One of the things that made Iron Man successful was that they updated his creation story, bringing an old story into modern times. Updating Watchmen may have been difficult, but really, given how much of the rest of the book was discarded anyway--the stuff that tied it closer in to comics and written-media consumption in general--made it possible to shuffle the backstory up a couple of decades as well.

Instead, we're left with a failed artifact of turning a comic book into live action, where all that history is left with is a strange kind of half-assed nonsensical "acting out" of a text. Major letdown. I truly hope that this particular trend in comic book movie-making dies a swift and painful death (hopefully the relatively poor numbers for Watchmen will catalyse this decline). The world is much better off with better made, original, non-comic book superhero movies than vacuous exercises in treating comic books as storyboards.

Which brings up the issue that is at hand with any given critical enterprise: whether or not one can really say more than just "this is good or bad." Not that goodness/badness isn't a worthy inquest in its own right--it certainly is. However, generally speaking, the goal of Culturology is to make this interpretation of the goodness-badness spectrum as scientific as possible. The reaction to that that I'm trying to preempt here is the one that says that my notion of "science" is just a bunch of bullshit rationalizing what is really only my own taste in the matter (such as with Pinkerton--I presume that the reaction from the emo set would just be that I'm a douchebag whose afraid of his own emotions and doesn't get what good music means). Which is why I don't claim to be offering reviews of the various things that I write about--I wouldn't be offering a 13-years-later "review" of Pinkerton, rather I'd be trying to analyze its current cultural status, and whether or not its quality (or lack of quality) matters in that context (my general argument, I suppose, is that its more important for mainstreaming until-then only localized scenes of what was/is known as "emo," one of the worst travesties of supposedly "independent" or "post-punk" music).

But, yes, I'll admit, my taste does affect what I write about, and the stance that I take. But, to take another example, writing about what the words mean in a commercial for corporate swill-beer is not the same argument as "this stuff tastes life shit." But, does making a supposedly distanced, thorough critique of a cultural artifact require a certain amount of negativity? I suppose the argument hinges on whether being positive--liking something--is more delusional than being negative--disliking it. I think the common conception towards this is that it is easier to get more distance on something that you don't care that much about, or dislike. Indeed, I don't think my stance towards all the pop cultural garbage which helps keep America's middle-class powerless and placated is necessarily negative on a piece-to-piece basis; my beef is more with the trend as a whole, and I would argue that, in fact, its this bigger picture which keeps the negative/critical enterprise more than just a matter of taste (and let's, for at least the time being, ignore the conversation from back in Autumn, about whether or not criticism ever does anything but implicitly enforce the status quo which pre-conditions it).

As another example (and further evidence as to why, exactly, this post seems to lack any specific examples): I was in Key West over the weekend, which you may well be aware is the southernmost point of the Continental United States, an ex-smuggling town with a history of permissiveness and a reputation for being a good place to be a drunk or a writer or both. Which mostly holds up--it really does seem like a good place for literary drunks to live for a while and write. But all is not well in Key Westville, as its main drag becomes more and more commercial, being infiltrated as it is by either actual national chains or other stores/bars which pander to the demographic which supports such things. This is not a matter of taste. In a small, mostly quiet tourist town, what the hell is an American Apparel and a bunch of other, similar "mall stores" doing on its main drag? I suppose I might be accused of supporting a vision for an "authentic" Key West, but to me the logic is pretty clear, regardless: in a tourist-industry town, do the tourists really just want to go shopping at the same stores they could find in their malls back home, or something more unique?

The friend I was visiting Key West with grew up there, so was able to provide a good deal of insight into this. To his mind, a lot of it actually can be blamed on Girls Gone Wild, which strikes me as a rather bizarre insight. But it goes like this: Key West used to be a lazy/quiet place, with more middle-aged or at the very least, alterna-crowd tourists, but in the age of handheld camera videos of titty flashing, suddenly the fantasy fest (which I presume y'all are aware of) became a commodity-vehicle as opposed to just an enterprise in hedonism. This boob-flashing vision of Key West then bleeds over into the more general conception of the place, bringing in more of the bland humans that don't mind going to the same old stupid mall stores, thus turning the main drag into an outdoor mall not dissimilar from Miami's Lincoln Road (which also sucks). My friend told me as story about the period of time when the town had a Ben & Jerry's shop but no Starbucks, and all the tourists would come off the cruise ships, go to the Ben & Jerry's, and there ask where the Starbucks was, acting all shocked when it turned out that there wasn't one. To me, its unquestionably bad, since having the same shit everywhere undermines what tourism is supposed to be, and even worse preempts the opportunity for tourism to ever improve itself, in terms of what the travelers might learn. And culture, really, if you think about it, is a lot like tourism.

As much as we here at Audioshocker are ever mindful of comics-related enterprises, I tend to take a cynical slant towards the recent boom in comic book movies, with its charge obviously being led by the movie-making wing of Marvel; namely, that there's no way the comic book movie fad will last. The ever-approaching Watchmen movie is an obvious point of discussion here: perhaps more than any other comic book (or graphic novel), Watchmen comes with a sizable built-in audience. Obviously, it's not the size of the audience for the Harry Potter movies, but it's well-known enough to appeal to the kinds of studios that make comic book based blockbuster movies. But I'm sort of backing towards the point here: there are very few comic books that large audiences care about. They're easy to list:

Superman
Batman
X-Men
Spider-Man
Hulk

and that's about it. Hulk almost doesn't make the list, since, eventually, bungling all the movies that they make with him will kill the fanbase. Iron Man isn't on that list because I argue that it was the movie that made him popular--Robery Downey Jr., really, and not anything having to do with the comic books itself.

So, the popularity of the other sundry comic book movies coming out has to do with a wide-audience interest that was built on the success of the movies about characters that the larger audience cared about. So, people will continue to come out in droves to see Marvel movies, but only because they currently associate Marvel's movie-making machinery with solid entertainment, not because they give a shit about Ant-Man or Nick Fury or even Captain America. Unless there are millions more closet comic book readers in America than I'm estimating that there are. Which means that any given studio which can make a movie which looks and sounds like a comic book movie should be able to meet with similar success as Marvel. Currently, Marvel is at the advantage because they've got decades of stories and characters to draw on, and have aggressively stream-lined their movie-making process (I think, once we get some distance on all these movies, it will be very easy to talk about the movies they make as an aesthetic whole--many stylistic features, such as the soundtracks are already being assimilated into a palpable "Marvel style"). It's only a matter of time before non-comic book derived entities close the gap to get a bigger piece of the market share.

Which is fine with me; I'm mostly concerned for the best movies possible being made, so if a movie is "good" while copping the whole comic book or superhero thing, that's good enough for me. Push is already a step closer to that goodness. It's got a decent premise, with perhaps too familiar powers involved (a spectrum of psychic abilities, with the different characters each having different abilities, requiring them to work in teams), but it's major plus is that it was ambitious as a movie. It didn't shoot low and it didn't wink at the camera. In fact, for the first two-thirds of the movie I thought it was really doing quite a good job. The major problem with it is that it didn't feel like it was planned out as well as it needed to be, so had a couple slightly strange continuity issues and more noticeably, some problems with its pacing. The ambition is a big thing; it really shows that these non-comic book movies really could catch up with the comic book movies.

There's a kind of movie which is bad in a way that makes it fun to try and make it better. Push also meets this criteria, which is nice, since my bias against "ironic enjoyment" of bad movies is well documented. I much prefer talking about an almost-good movie and how to make it better than to try and laugh at a movie which is a failure. But, of course, that kind of discussion isn't something I'd necessarily want to have "in public" since it's really nerdy to talk about how to make sci-fi movies better. Even though my ideas are good ones. They should hire me to write the sequel.

In other movie news, two of the trailers that played before Push were for movies called, respectively, "Fighting" and "Knowing." The both look incredibly terrible, but it cracks me up that such similar gerund-titled movies are coming out at the same time. It reminds me of the many instances of studio competition around given movies, where one studio hears that another is making an airplane disaster movie so it rushes to make one as well. I've always thought the best example of this is when David Lynch's Mulholland Drive came out at the same time as Arlington Road. Mulholland Drive being, of course, one of Lynch's true masterpieces, and Arlington Road being completely terrible. And the plots weren't similar at all--one is only left assuming that some studio wanted to compete with Mulholland Drive, so picked a road name for their movie too. This makes Fighting versus Knowing that much funnier, since they generally represent opposite ends of the spectrum of behaviors.

Obviously, the thing is completely racist. Even if we take the cartoonist at his word (which we don't need to do), it's clear to me that he was drawing on a long history of racist imagery in the United States, even if he didn't consciously decide to do so. In an email conversation with Nick he brought up the fact that he's mostly disappointed because it's not a good cartoon--it's not funny, and it's a shame that it suddenly gets all this attention. I don't regularly read too many political cartoons (I once, at a dinner party, met a real life political cartoonist, and he was about the most annoying, pretentious, self-loving person I've ever tried to talk to about something as light-hearted as cartoons), but it seems to me that expecting them to be funny isn't necessarily the correct way of reading them. Granted, the "best" political cartoons may well be the funniest, but it's also the case that they're often just trying to make some point, or get some message across, or in the case of the New York Post, be a lightning-rod for controversy, as, despite threats of boycotts, controversies tend to increase rather than decrease circulation.

One argument I've heard, in terms of giving this particular cartoon a break, is that Bush was drawn as a monkey all time. That is the case, but it was always a caricature, easily recognizable as Bush, whereas the chimp shot dead in this cartoon is just a chimp. "Aha!" says the cartoon-defender, "Here we can definitely see that it's not racist, 'cause this chimp in the cartoon only points to the actual primate in Connecticut, and has nothing to do with Obama." But this is actually where can definitively identify the racism of the cartoon (and, though he isn't completely in agreement with me on what follows, I owe the noticing of this to the aforementioned conversation with Nick): normally, a political cartoon will assign a particular label to its allegorical characters, with banners or labels on the various people or things that say "Democrats" or "National Greed" or some other similar thing. In this cartoon, the chimp has no label. He know, from the caption that this chimp represents the person who wrote the economic stimulus bill. Since Obama is president, and has spear-headed the move to get a bill passed, the reader takes this the writer of the bill to be Obama. This could have been avoided with the usual labeling, with a sash, or a t-shirt on the dead chimp that said "Democrats" but there's nothing there. So, even if the dude that drew the cartoon wasn't going into it planning to be racist, but not thinking himself that the chimp needed a label, he's drawing on a long history of racist images to assign a label to his image. Any argument that he intended the cartoon to mean "monkeys wrote the economic stimulus bill" is undermined by the fact that he failed to follow the proper protocols of how political cartoons work.

And now for something more timely, since stuff that happens on Sundays is still mostly topical by the time Monday rolls around. I don't actually want to write too much about the Oscars, since I general find the awards to be mis-assigned and the proceedings to be incredibly dull. I was at an Oscar party which included a pool for correctly filling out a ballot, so I do have a record of how accurately I predicted the award winners. I was correct in only 10 out of the 21 categories that were announced on the televised ceremony, which proves, once again, that my taste is better than the people that voted for the awards. So, wow, I'm really blowing the chance at being timely here. Oh well.

The pro: The world-building of Coraline was really pretty stunning. This was the most welcome aspect of the movie, that it wasn't going for straight-up crowd-pleasing 3-D effects, but rather had truly embraced the 3-D medium to improve the look of the world. There is one particular shot (which the filmmakers them selves clearly recognized for its awesomeness, since they returned to it three times) where Coraline is walking on a path at a top of a cliff and the house where she lives can be seen down below that best exemplifies the benefit of digital 3-D, as the depth of field greatly enhanced the experience of the animation. I oftentimes found myself most drawn to these types of aspects; the stars through windows, the ability of one character to truly stand in front of another. My memory of childhood 3-D experiences (few and far between, back in the '80s), recalls only that the 3-D happened only every-so-often, and mostly then in the form of those out-of-the-screen kind of effects (this is related to that technological breakthrough, I think, that we can now sustain 3-D worlds without making the audience sick). If Coraline had moved much slower and taken more time in moving through its plot, I wouldn't have minded, given the joy of just looking at what they had made.

The con: The action, I felt, as much as it might have been enhanced by the 3-D looked blurry and ill-defined to me. The main affect of this was that only in one or two places did I feel like the stop-motion was truly featured. This may be fine for some folk, but given that without it's obvious stop-motion-ness, the movie might as well have been computer animated, this strikes me as a major drawback. I'm not sure if this has to do with the 3-Dification--that the viewer just can't see the shit as well when it's stereoscopic, or if it's a result of the additional depth of field; that is, in a normal 2-D viewing experience, the direction of the action on screen is quite clear, and the viewer is guided by the action to follow it where it goes. With the illusion of the additional dimension, the viewer loses this guide and is confused into an inability to follow the animation as well. I'd have to go back and watch Coraline a second time to see whether or not I could follow it better, knowing, at least to some extent, what was happening, but I would guess that it was as much to do with the projection as the viewing.

This brings up a larger point, as to whether or not the stop-motion animation should have been more apparent. There's something intentionally atavistic about making a movie in this way--essentially any animation can and therefore should be made on a computer. There is, of course, a spectrum of techniques, from the good-old-fashioned hand drawn, cell animated cartoon, to the hand-drawn but digitally animated, to the all-out computer animated cartoon. And, of course, good and bad examples of each. Before I make a judgment on Coraline, though, I think I also need to appraise whether or not it was intended as an animation for-adults or not. "All audiences" strikes me as something as a misnomer, as most kids' movies contain a certain number of jokes-for-guardians, since they're the ones footing the bill. There are some movies that are just not adults-only; that is, not containing any aspects which will cause the moral police to warn people against it. So "all audiences" doesn't fit there, as the film isn't necessarily "for kids" either. Most animated features are immediately pegged as being kids' movies, but, along with this 3-D craze, I also sense a greater demand for cartoons-for-adults brewing as well (this is a similar sort of calling-back to earlier times (in this case, say, 1930-1945) as the 3-D thing, since it is well known that cartoon-movies used to be as much for adults as anyone else).

There is a famous article by the great paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, where he looks at the "neoteny" of Mickey Mouse, showing how Mickey Mouse swiftly evolved over the years to look more and more child-like (and therefore approachable, lovable, and most importantly, marketable). Of the many evils of Walt Disney, this can perhaps be seen as one of the worst; that Disney, in a manner similar to, and pre-conditioning the later Happy Meal innovations of McDonald's, aggressively sought a young audience, realizing that the then-booming American bourgeoisie, post-World War II, would have a new amount of wealth with which to coddle their increasingly spoiled children. What this did was significantly alter the perceived audience of animated fare from the historically broad (or even specifically adult) audience to a set of middle-class parents-and-children. In more recent decades, finally, several auteurs, or also groups of dedicated animators, most notable Miyazaki (if you need a specific example, I'd say Porco Rosso may be the best obviously-for-a-grown-audience that he and his studio has made), and Pixar (granted, this is a bit more complicated since they have always been producing films under the funding-umbrella of Disney, though I would argue that neither Ratatouille nor Wall-E were intended as a "childrens'" movies as such), have re-pioneered the notion that an animated film is as legitimately filmic as any live-action venture.

It is, of course, often quite difficult to identify the intentions of any given film, re: its ideal audience, but it can be done. I can already imagine the counterargument to my claim here, though, in that it will be said that any movie that I claim is "not for kids" is more accurately a movie-for-kids that I happen to like and think is good. Maybe so, but given that I'm an adult, and a highly discerning one at that, I think maybe this isn't so bad; it is not so great a misstep for a culturologist to presume that he is as good example of a cultural audience as anyone else. The argument pro-adult-audience for Coraline is that the mood of its world-building relies on a sense of the uncanny--with the alternative world being an eerily "better" version of Coraline's actual house--which is a mainstay of the horror genre. Horror-for-kids is generally non-existent, as it would scare the shit out of them. And the book it was based on was a "YA" book, not a kids' book, so that counts for something as well. Which is not to say that I mean to say "this shit was scary, therefore it's not for kids," but rather that the uncanniness which abounds in the middle-third of the movie is a characteristic of more sophisticated fare than that of more common kids' movies.

However, the final act of the movie, where it switches gears from an uncanny discovery narrative to a find-the-bobbles action sequence betrays the sophistication of the first two acts of the film, and gives serious fuel to the argument that Coraline is, you know, for kids. Especially given that the bobble-hunt is not at all of a puzzling variety, nor a caper, but much simpler. It is hard to imagine any "sophisticated" viewer not being disappointed by this. After all of the careful world- and mood-building, Coraline is given a jewel which allows her to "see through" the artifice of the other-world, and thereby very easily gather up the magic baubles which she needed to get. There is little tension through this sequence, as the "riddle" which is presented barely lives up to the concept of trickery. It is as though the makers of Coraline realized that, given the fact that their demographic was still going to primarily be parents-and-children, they could make two-thirds of a good movie, and the parents would just be relieved that it was going to get to its ending quickly once the final sequence was started, and the kids would hardly notice (if at all) the shift anyway.

So, until an even-better 3-D animated movie is made, it will be hard to come to any final judgment on the issue. But of course, given that 3-D will almost certainly still just be a fad, we may never see it reach its full aesthetic potential. The only way, as I see it, that it will be reached, is if a studio gives backing to a filmmaker who is more thorough-goingly willing to make an animated film for a grown audience in 3-D; it strikes me that the subtler aspects of that 3-D world, which must be more appreciated by the grown audience which has the wherewithal to compare it to that which came before, are the aspect which will need to be more thoroughly refined. Maybe someone will make a 2001: A Space Odyssey style, slow-paced animated film, and then we will truly be able to see whether or not anything good will come of the current 3-D resurgence.

Nick: WALL*E just happens to have a tape recorder built into his chest to record and play back old Disney movies. *shameless*

Pete: I'll start with the easiest one first. The movie that Wall-E plays back is Hello, Dolly, which was first a musical on Broadway, and then turned into the movie version which Wall-E is obsessed with; this movie was released by Fox, not Disney, and was clearly chosen for its thematic relatedness, not any kind of "shameless" historical studio-plugging.

Nick: okay, color me corrected. but it's still the type of bland schmaltz that Disney wheels and deals in. and why the f*ck would a robot with artificial intelligence and a responsible directive have a tape recorder? you think they could have at least given the damn thing a DVD recorder or something a bit less far-fetched, right? i mean this is supposed to be a fictional fantasy that is a future extension of our own world that we live in right now, correct?

Pete : Okay, this particularly point has boiled down to just an "opinion," which isn't as interesting critically (I suppose, then, that my goal for this debate is to convince you to admit that Wall-E is a good movie that you just don't happen to like, rather than there being anything "wrong" with it). I would imagine that many people out there, and many people in Wall-E's intended demographic, in fact, like musicals, and think that they're good entertainment and not schmaltz at all. I think, given that all the other Wall-E robots are dead when the movie starts—remember, he raids their corpses for spare parts—there is already something special about Wall-E as part of the premise of the movie. I think for many viewers, myself included, this was not "far-fetched," anymore than there being an intelligent trash compactor at all. Maybe the VCR is a bit atavistic, but at the same time, again, it doesn't seem that crazy to me; the robot did, after all, have all kinds of access to all the trash everywhere in New York. But this is the sort of thing that happens in any kind of animated fantasy. I mean, Panda's only eat bamboo, so what the hell was Kung-Fu Panda doing eating noodles? That's just ridiculous! (See what I mean?)

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Nick: i find the character motivations either ignorant or irrational, and i find the entire premise of the film to be built out of vaguely offensive cultural assumptions about love, self-interest, and responsibility

Pete: One of the basic notions that the viewer is expected to accept is that Wall-E himself is lonely there on the abandoned Earth. One might think that he doesn't become lonely until he is made aware of a mysterious Other (the female robot, once she shows up), but I think there's sufficient exposition in the beginning to show that Wall-E is more-or-less aware that Earth has been abandoned by humans. Also, since Wall-E has been watching Hello, Dolly so obsessively, he is aware that when EVE shows up, he is to fall in love with her; by this we see that the "cultural assumptions" of Wall-E are in direct reference to already existing tropes. Given that, I don't see at all what you mean about the character motivations being "either ignorant or irrational." Yes, the plot is not "original," but what about that makes it ignorant?

Nick: i never complained about the unoriginality of the plot. in fact, i love a good story whether its been done many times before or not. but i do feel that the failings of the WALL*E plot are easily explained. i mean "ignorant and irrational" in a sort of tag-team way that applies to most of the character motivations: 1. to me, it's completely insane that a robot would fall in love with another robot just because they are of the same "species" (wouldn't he instead have a crush on a roach, his primary accompanying life form on a day-to-day basis?) - this motivation to me equates to the typical homogeneous thinking of Disney where white characters hook up with other white characters and black characters hook up with other black characters (see High School Musical for more) because they look the same; 2. it's beyond insane that the humans would decide to return to Earth - physically, they're all going to die, and emotionally there was little-to-no precedent for that kind of sweeping (and poorly-made and self-destructive) decision in their satellite culture; and 3. why in the hell would WALL*E fly out all the way into space after a robot he barely knows and only has a purely lust-style infatuation with, despite the fact that she tells him "NO!" again and again... WHY? because WALL*E is a creepy robot stalker.

Pete: This is a tricky one. Wall-E as a "creepy robot stalker." I think you're misusing the notion of "species"—white characters hooking up with white characters and black characters with black characters is NOT an issue of species, but an issue of the biologically insignificant notion of "race." Now, Wall-E has two relationships in the movie: 1) his friendship with the cockroach, and 2) his "stalking" of EVE. So, why didn't he "hook up" with the cockroach, well, it's a matter of "species," here. His relationship with the cockroach is more like a human would have with a dog (your own notorious "exploits" with various 4-legged mammals aside). So, yes, EVE is the first being in a long time that Wall-E could have even conceivably had a "relationship" with, but is that speciesist or even racist? I don't think so—what else could it have been? And the sad-sack character chasing after the boy or girl that is out of his or her league is a well known plot that's been around way longer than just Disney; given all the things that are innovative about Wall-E, I don't see the familiarity of it's basic plot structure as a problem.

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Nick: to me, WALL*E was the story of a robot who inexplicably falls in love with the first robot "he" sees and then stalks this feminized machine out into deep space, upon which said "man" robot ultimately sends an orbiting satellite full of obese humans back to a near-barren planet that by all accounts is uninhabitable (despite the fact that one very small specimen of plant life was discovered amid the vast landfills).

Pete: Again, the "inexplicable" aspect of Wall-E falling in love can be explained by his loneliness and his own expectations as created by his obsessing over Hello, Dolly. I do agree, though, that there was no particular reason to have the plot be so boy/girlish when we're dealing with asexual robots, however, I don't think that this detracts from the quality of the story, once its seen as being non-progressive in its politics. And the humans totally go on to refound humanity on Earth, so I have a hard time excepting that as a mark against Wall-E's motivations

Nick: ***see previous answer***

Pete: I'll take this opportunity to expand a bit on what I see as being the aspects of Wall-E that are most excellent. The main one is it's structure. The movie divides pretty evenly into two sections, the first part on Earth, and the second on the spaceship. They're actually fairly separate from each other, each existing unto themselves as smaller plots. This is a vast improvement over most animated features, in that the exposition of the movie is already in service of the plot; that is, all the key information that the viewer needs in order to understand how and why the spaceship exists is embedded into the world-building process of the first part of the movie, so its not noticed as exposition as such, but rather important details to Wall-E's interaction with his home planet. Also, having both romantic leads barely talk and communicate almost entirely visually is an incredible achievement, especially in an age where most animated movies are marketed based on what super-stars are giving voice to the characters. The, as I'm calling it, world-building nature of the exposition is a technique that's rare in all movies—so, even if the "story" and the character motivations are familiar, the plotting and structure are still innovative an fresh.

It strikes me that championship games like the won yesterday also clue us in, as armchair anthropologists, to the great narrative-making traditions of man kind, as the great highlight plays become epic lore, and are compared to the great stories of the whole canon of traditional sports stories (e.g. was not James Harrison's 100 yard interception runback for a touchdown one of the greatest single plays in Super Bowl history?). Or if you're not into the whole sports thing, consider C3P0 telling the Ewoks the great narratives of Skywalker et al. In sports, of course, it makes even more sense, as the heroes of these stories, regardless of where they are from originally, are hometown heroes (I certainly wouldn't be the Steelers fan that I am if it weren't for the fact that I grew up in Pittsburgh).

It's generally recognized that sports competitions are stand-ins for wars or inter-tribe violence, since the costs to both sides are significantly reduced by a more symbolic or constructed competitive interactions, and similar benefits can still be dispersed to the victorious side. And, of course, at this point in our history, not only was the action of the battle been reduced to a game, but the spoils have been reduced to shiny, pretty trophies. Not that I think we should still be playing our sports games with land, cattle, or women at stake, but, you know, it's interesting to think about, right?

That's generally my stance--that it is okay to make up historical or anthropological stories to explain contemporary behavior based on perceived ancestral rites. Such stories are often derided as "just so stories" (a reference to Rudyard Kipling's poems about how various animals came to be) and such ungrounded myth-making, but I tend to think that some myths are more accurate than others, and its not so far-fetched to think that we can't from out current vantage, figure out more-or-less how things used to be. So, sure it's a fiction, but it's less of a fiction than, say, claiming that aliens came from outerspace and taught some American rugby players that the game would be better if there was forward passing involved. And given the number of athletes that give credit for their achievements directly to God, I feel like some kind of anthropological understanding of sports to be absolutely necessary to make my continued interest in sports tenable (the Pittsburgh Pirates used to have a third baseman who would cross himself after every time he got a hit, and I used to imagine that his little prayer went something like "Thank You, God, for my .243 batting average).

Though, I suppose the argument could be made that what I am doing is making intellectual something which is not, as if I need to rationalize my enjoyment of something which is rife with various things that are repugnant to me. By that argument, my whole reading into the sports thing is really just an aspect of the matrix of entertainments that "sports" is. So all I'm really doing, in writing this particular post, is furthering a well-established mode of sports-enjoyment which is already well-established (indeed, I don't think that I've said very much in this post that is either unique or "new" (though, don't worry, dear readers, as now that the Super Bowl has happened I'll be back to writing about the more usual aspects of culture that I claim are of interest to culturology (for instance, go see the movie Let the Right One In, completely awesome movie). But, of course, one of the main goals of sports writing, which it turns out that this post must be, is simple mindless content generation, and what am I doing here but filling in yet another post to which I have gotten far too late with not nearly enough to say.

So what are the obvious things that make hardcore (or, more broadly punk (or, more correctly, maybe hardcore-punk (or, in the case of Bad Brains, the then-burgeoning genre of metal-influenced hardcore)))? Pace, noise, anger... part of it, I think, can be understood if I also mention the main band that I liked in my adolescence, before coming to punk as a better answer to the problem of what to listen to: They Might Be Giants. The thing that I still like about them (well, still like about their old albums (cutting off right around Factory Showroom; I don't really know what they're up to these days) is the way that their vocal lines were oftentimes longer than the lines of the accompaniment--what they sang often rolls along over atop the music beneath them, usually, in fact, over-running the pace of the rest of the music. Punk, on the other hand, reverses this, where there is continual noise at the instrument level, and a more rapid-fire staccato delivery of the vocal lines, oftentimes in rather complete disconnect with the rest of the music. It may seem like a bit of stretch to identify these two musics as opposite sides of the same coin, but when you consider the ever-so-neatly-gelling interaction of music and singer in almost all popular music, these signposts of alternative options seem more similar.

Not that I'm claiming to be a punk--I've always been against aligning myself with much of anything--I could never get into the idea of having to dress a certain way or affect various personality traits in order to identify with a certain genre of music (I never liked wearing tuxes to play symphonic music either). But still, and with a due amount of tongue in my cheek, I certainly would claim to be somewhat countercultural--actually enjoying any punk (and honestly, most of it fucking sucks) certainly sets one against most other humans on the planet. And there is a certain joy in saying, in answer to the "what's your favorite song?" question, just after someone else has said "[insert Radiohead song here]," "well, one of my favorite songs is 'Fearless Vampire Killers.'" It's almost better not to mention that the "vampires" in question are the hegemonic patriarchs of capitalism.

The other good thing about hardcore is its generally difficult to turn into pop (whereas, punk, of course was notoriously easy to convert (again, my stance for the purpose of this post is aesthetic, not political; I am not currently railing against the fact that many kids out there that potentially could effectively rebel are sucked right back into the system with quasi-rebellious corporate rock (whether that was emo, nu-metal, pop-punk, or whatever)). The last time that there was any obvious dialogue with hardcore was back when grunge was the big thing, and I would argue, of course, that that was the last time that mainstream rock music was any good (other than giving Rage Against the Machine a little bit of credit).

Almost all discussions about aesthetics, however, are painfully after the fact; that is, in making any kind of argument about the quality of hardcore music against the quality of pop music, I am almost certainly just going to be rationalizing my tastes after the fact. Taste is certainly some part immanent and internal, but also, obviously, socially constructed. My enjoyment of this so-called "metal influenced hardcore" pegs me as being almost certainly white and middle class, and probably well-educated. And, again, since this argument is not political, that really doesn't matter. And most Americans prefer bland music. That's just the way it is. Is it fair to characterize their music as bland? I think so. Which is not to say that, at core, hardcore isn't bland (since the chord progressions are pretty much that same as any other (with more parallel motion and chordal progressions by half-steps and minor thirds)) for the most part as well, except for the above-mentioned example of the way the vocal lines interact with the rest of the music.

I could also tie in various other genres of music that are also similarly un-boring, but that remains the basic argument of what I'm getting at, that liking a song like "Fearless Vampire Killers" isn't nearly as political as it might seem to be when looking at what genre it falls into.

And I'd rather spend that time reading Steelers coverage (great game last night, here we go Steelers!), so, sorry folks, no Culturology this week.

This probably stretches the bounds that I initially delimited for culturological investigation, but it should be known that I do tend to watch NFL football. This needs little rationalization; I'm from Pittsburgh, where watching the Steelers is a matter of course (the Nielsen rating figures say that something like two-thirds of all households in Pittsburgh tune in to the Steelers games each weekend during football season). Now, and again, referring back to the one podcast that I guested on at the end of last year (so long ago, already, isn't it?), I there made the claim that I don't have Television. This isn't exactly correct--a friend of mine gave me her old TV back in May when she was leaving town. This is part of living in Miami--at some point, people will offer you a TV if you let them know that you don't have one. However, though I do own a television, I do not feel like I was lying when I said that I don't have Television. I have used my TV to watch only three categories of things: DVDs, Football, and a couple of the debates + election night coverage. Not even Late Night w/ Conan. It doesn't occur to me to watch anything, and I don't have cable, and once broadcasting standards switch over to digital in another month I won't have any channels at all.

One thing about watching football--and, yes, I did watch all four divisional playoff games over the weekend, capping it off with a glorious win by the Steelers over the Chargers--is that, especially when one isn't used to watching Television, a great amount of commercial fatigue is experienced. The last time that I watched football on such a consistent basis was back in 2004, when I was fresh out of college. At that time, initially, I found that the best ameliorative for commercial fatigue was to comment cynically on the content of the various ads. This, eventually, though, fell quite flat--in deciding to engage with these advertisements at all, however quasi-critically, though I was making the important distinction of not taking them for granted or granting them the right to unquestioned existence, I was basically admitting that they were successful program of getting me to recognize that their almost certainly unethical products existed. So I decided to stop criticizing commercials, much to the relief of my roommate who himself was getting quite tired of getting me griping about every single commercial that came up.

But, then, what am I left to do? I couldn't help but start back on the old program of criticizing commercials as I watched them over and over again over the weekend. Did you know that there are several pick-up truck manufacturers, all of whom would like you to recognize that their truck is the best? Also, that there are several varieties of beer out there, all of which combine taste, refreshment, and lack (the absence of calories) in astounding variety? I would've never guessed. Luckily, my better judgment restrains me from actually, like, riffing on these issues. Except for one thing that struck as something of a breakthrough:

Coors brewing advertised it's beer--just regular old "Coors"--as having a "full-flavoured taste." This strikes me as a breakthrough because I don't recall the last time that a macro-brewer admitted that there was such a thing as "flavor" in the first place. The general lingo hinges on "taste," in a barefacedly fascist move of announcing to its consumers that they will (I mean that in the imperative rather than conditional sense) prefer this beer of that one because it has "more taste." Taste, though, of course, is a quality, not a quantity, and additionally a subjective quality; that is, it's perceived by the taster as opposed to an objective quality (e.g. "fizzy," or "yellow"). So, the central claim that not only is there such a thing as intrinsic taste, but it can be quantified and measured (my claim that this is, essentially, fascist, is that those subjects that accept these beer makers at the words are made subject to a top-down program of aesthetic control; that is, relinquishing their own subjective experience to a more powerful authority), is patently false.

What is curious to me, then, is what the ad-wizards at Coors think they mean when they say that Coors tastes like flavor, especially given that "flavor" is the correct word to describe the objective qualities of a given beer--drinkers taste the flavors of the beer. Have they finally figured this out? Are they finally going to wean the advertisement-viewing public off of the notion of beers have quantifiable tastes? That would be for the best finally, as we can all, then comfortably, take a swig of our favorite, fully-flavorful macro-brews and proclaim, proudly, that "This tastes like shit!"

I suppose if I were going to play along and make some resolutions as an scientific (read empirical) investigator of culture, they might be things like the following:

1. I will cynically (ironically (again, in the podcast, we discussed a bit of a semantic shift on the topic)) enjoy at least one piece of industrially produced cultural swill that I would otherwise not even recognize the existence of. I will not let my well-documented bias against the recreational cynics that provide secondary support to a cultural industry that doesn't need their help to maintain its vile vice-grip on America's collective creativity interfere with my sincere attempts to be ironic this year.

2. Actually, you know what? I don't really want to bother with this exercise...

Anyway, so that's better than nothing, and look! we're already part way down the amount of minimum page-space that I hope this post will absorb.

One thing I did want to mention: I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire over my little Winter Break there, and thought it was really quite good. I was just talking to a friend about it yesterday, very briefly, and he felt that it was completely ripped off of the movie City of God. Did anyone else notice this? I didn't/don't really think that that's the case. There are perhaps some legitimate comparisons to be made between there being highly stylized sequences through areas of abject poverty in both movies, but after that I don't think they were all that same at all. I don't know much at all about the whole Bollywood thing, but to me it seemed like Boyle, rather than trying to reinterpret or reenvision the Bollywood film, instead sought to make a fully contemporary version of a Bollywood movie, which answered to contemporary international aesthetic demands, rather than the apparently still kind of '50s era Hollywood studio movie aesthetic that still rules in Bollywood.

Also, the Slumdog soundtrack finally has me on the M.I.A. bandwagon. It's got that song with the ka-ching noises in it from Pineapple Express and a couple others as well. Way to go M.I.A. Though some would argue that the fact that I'm pretty much oblivious to most of the aspects of pop culture that I claim to be writing about in these posts (generally never watching TV (no, not even Conan O'Brien) and never ever listening to the radio), I do like the experience of catching on to something that everyone else has known about for a year or more totally beyond the curve. It also pretty well trend-proofs me as well, I reckon.

I was going to spend the next bit of this post appraising Boyle's career output, but imdb.com isn't working right now and I can't remember what all of his movies are. Except that I'm generally lukewarm on Sunshine in that it was not better than either Solaris or Event Horizon. Sam Neill running around all naked and demented was probably more awesome than the guy that gets naked and runs around all crazy like in Sunshine. The only thing I can remember to comment on about 28 Days Later is that I'm still completely confused as to how Godspeed You! Black Emperor agreed to have their music used in such a chopped up form in that movie. Some fucking anarchists they turned out to be. What other movies did Boyle make? I'm pretty sure there are others (though I can admit to kind of conflating him with J.J. Abrams in my brain) but without imdb I'm useless...

I also saw The Wrestler over the break (I'm planning on catching a bunch more movies in the next couple weeks so I'm not too worried about blowing my movie-talk wad on this first post back). It was also quite good. The B-story involving Mickey Rourke's character's estranged daughter was disturbingly canned/cliche/trite/etc. though. She actually says "You missed my birthdays!" in on of her few scenes. Feels very tacked on--it's clearly only in the film to act as a catalyst to get Rourke together with Marisa Tomei's character outside the confines of her strip club--and is distractingly underdeveloped in an otherwise very well-constructed plot. It's also good to see that Aronofosky can still so carefully control his visual aesthetic even when copping the kind of documentary feel that he went for. With Aronofsky, I'm generally quite willing to forgive the melodramatic aspects of his first three films, given that I'd rather watch well-constructed sincere fare than shoddily made ironic trash (say, American Beauty, for instance), but this time the melodrama, however real-to-Jersey it might be gives me greater pause than with Requiem for a Dream or The Fountain.

Also, I'm canceling the "Things that..." sequence from Culturology. I'll try to think of something to replace it. Have any ideas? What else should I be spouting off about?

And to make a few pronouncements, so that the post isn't a total waste:

2008 Album of the Year: Portishead's Third

2008 Movie of the Year: In Bruges

2008 Book of the Year*:  Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union

One of the best things about In Bruges was that it was released in Germany under the title "See Bruges... and Die?"

See you in 2009!

*Okay, well this was published in 2007, but the paperback wasn't printed until '08, so I'm counting it.

1) Well, first of all, I need to address Kirsten's comment to Culturology 10.5: In paraphrase, she makes two main points: a) This argument, in general, is an old one, and that the "side" of the argument that I've been advocating is that of the generator-of-artifacts, and b) Ironic enjoyment is crucial to the ongoing health of art/culture, because it is essentially an act of critique, and without critique art/culture would lack the drive for refinement or critique. Actually, I'm going to leave point "a" pretty much alone; I think it's a bit off base, in that the position from which I'm writing, if we are going to agree that ironicizers are critics, is really a meta-critique more than a rebuttal from an artist's point of view. That is, and I'll get back to this more a bit later in this post, I am not concerned with defending the artifact, but rather trying to determine what it is that ironic enjoyers are doing and why it is that I don't trust them, and don't in fact see their activity as being useful to the world of pop culture.

Which leads me to point "b." To place the kind of ironic enjoyment that we've been discussing (and the examples that you yourself give) on the same level as cultural criticism at large is a vast overstatement of what's actually happening when people laugh at the shittiness of shitty pop culture. First of all, for criticism to play an active role in the ongoing evolution of a segment of cultural production, that sector must first of all recognize the importance of the criticism. At least in American popular culture, the whole notion of critique has been absorbed into the structures of entertainment themselves - it is not actual criticism which is welcomed, but rather a certain appearance of such a thing, with a mind towards the market that the quasi-criticism might attract. The primary drives for adjustments of cultural products are demographics and revenue, both of which depend not on criticism but rather focus-groups and market projections. For exceptions that prove the rule, consider the actually good TV shows that were "critically lauded" but "unpopular" (say, for instance, Arrested Development).

To put it another way, there is criticism-from-without and also criticism-from-within; to have the kind of dynamic relationship between artist and critic that Kirsten was talking about, it requires a criticism from within (which, again, can be as simple as the artist recognizing that his/her work is prone to criticism in the first place). This is the sort of principal that lies behind the distinction between movies and film that I was making back in Culturology 006; that we simply can't watch all cultural artifacts from the same point of view when they demand wildly different things from their viewers. Where I think Kirsten goes wrong is in seeing ironic enjoyment as criticism-from-within. This kind of ironic laughing at bad pop culture, while certainly correct in noticing that something is bad, is not productive--is not in dialogue with that artifact. In fact, I argue that it absolutely hinges on the fact that other people don't get the joke. If the people you're criticizing don't get the joke, than how can you expect them to refine their craft based on your laughter?

Which is not to say that criticism from without is not a vital process in its own right (it's mostly what I do, as a critic, as a matter of fact). But again, part of that criticism is an appraisal of the object-of-criticism on its own terms. In this way, we can see criticism as being essentially sincere. The Marxist critic of the capitalist culture industry may well be heavily ironic or cynical in her or his appraisal of pop culture, but it is a critique which comes from a context of sincere belief in alternative structures of cultural existence. The ironic enjoyers have no such stance--they are implicitly arguing for the status quo (yet another season of shitty TV shows to laugh at) while copping an attitude of elitism. Hipsters ironically enjoying House are no more critics than kids that listen to Nu-Metal are rebels.

This brings me to the last point (or set of points) that I want to make on the topic: the kind of popular culture that can be ironically enjoyed is not necessarily "sincere." Pop-cultural artifacts are for the most part products. They can be analyzed and critiqued as such (like picking which brand of canned tangerines to eat). At the same time that I'm not a particular fan of across-the-board ironic enjoyment, I also don't think that critiquing pop culture, necessarily is at all useful--I do enjoy it and find it enjoyable to read about--if we are going to actually be critics, than we should be criticising the system and not the individual bits of output. The kind of sincerity which underpins systematic criticism is the kind which should be embraced, just as the kind of irony that recognizes its own limitations can also be embraced.

At any rate, hopefully this third post now brings things closer to a satisfactory sense of completion (if not closure). I do feel like, if nothing else, it pretty well explicates the stance from which I'm reading culture (which was the intention in the first place--it should be pretty easy now to see how I love Total Recall but hate Donnie Darko). And I should be crawling may way out of all this abstract muck for next week, with more direct and contemporarily-exampled discussions of all things media.

1) In the context of this particular discussion, I am using the word “culture” in a way that is virtually synonymous with “entertainment.” That is, I’m not trying to speak towards any trends that are broader than the middle-class Western point of view from which I’m writing. Essentially, culture (or entertainment) is a solution to the problem of leisure, i.e. the solution to the problem of boredom. I think this is actually pretty clear in the opening paragraphs of Culturology 010; I was just spelling out the kind of art that I tend to prefer to the variety of pop culture that is viable for ironic enjoyment.

2) I think Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is a good example of what we’re talking about when we talk about ironic enjoyment. There, they take old movies—this assumes that the original sci-fi movies being commented upon were essentially sincere in their motives—and then recontextualize them with their wry dissection. It’s oftentimes quite hilarious, and generally successful, I think. And it’s the model, more or less, for one of the main aspects of what we’ve been discussing as ironic enjoyment; basically smart, witty people make fun of dopey artifacts.

3) Ironic enjoyment is too easy. This kind of externally generated irony hinges on the fact that there are other readers (in the broad sense of reading which would include listening, viewing, etc.) that don’t get what you’re getting. So I’m not really concerning myself with the, shall I call them, the masses. If everyone got the joke of laughing at the ridiculousness of, say, Face/Off, then it wouldn’t be any fun to get that joke; there must, first of all, be an audience for any given movie or music group or whatever else that likes it uncritically. But, as soon as you’re smart, critical, or realize that something is amiss; ironicizing that viewing experience is an easy move; you’ve mostly got to crack jokes as you go along with viewing-as-normal. It’s as easy as making fun of someone in an incisive way and then saying “Just Kidding!” It’s too easy because it’s reactive, rather than being generative.

4) This brought me to the next point, about the current popularity of sincere indie-culture, or at least the music wing of it, anyway. Which I don’t think needs further clarification. It’s still off the mark because it lacks the kind of self-awareness that I see as critical for well-considered culture to succeed; instead, post-ironic sincerity just gives otherwise ironic people a reprieve from thinking about things. A lot of hardcore and punk suffers from this as well, and emo too (emo ends up even further down the spectrum of terribleness from hipster culture since they lack any kind of self-awareness (I’m not sure if Reggie and the Full Effect counts in this or not)).

5) So I guess where I lost everyone was on this notion of reading things as being “good for good reasons.” Basically, what I see as a better stance as a consumer of culture than a heavily ironicized stance is to be able to float from one genre or another, or from one demographic to another, or from “high” art to “pop” art, and be able to maintain a kind of heuristic that determines whether a given artifact is successful (enjoyable) or not, on its own terms. This includes both the things which succeed on their own terms, sincerely (say, for instance, Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony) and things that only become interesting when read ironically (say, Commando). It also notices things that don’t work, sincerely (say, Donnie Darko or American Beauty), and also things that should never, ever, been appreciated ironically (e.g. VH-1).

6) Movies like what Nick was pointing out in his comments, that seem to straddle the line between purely enjoyable or ironically enjoyable, or that can go both ways, I think, are successful most of the time because they were produced with some amount of awareness towards that possibility. Verhoeven, given his filmic output—I’m thinking mostly of Total Recall, Robo Cop, and Starship Troopers—is surely one of the masters of this.

7) I don’t think “irony is dead,” and I think the conversation about it in such terms is generally futile and ill-informed.

8) Ironic enjoyment is “smart.” I agree with characterizing it was active rather than passive, but moreso, I think it’s reactive, rather than passive, and rather than something being actively ironic, like, say, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

9) I think it’s important to main distinctions between the “good” and the “bad” (and, yes, the “ugly” too, I suppose), no matter how difficult that may seem to be in the contemporary context of cultural relativism and reader-response theory. Taste, I admit, is generally subjective, but I do think there’s an element of objectivity—generated, again, by an awareness of context/intent/etc.—in determining whether something is good or not, on its own terms. I would imagine that the people that think that irony is dead also think that criticism is dead too. But, seeing as popular culture tends towards the easiest possible route to success; namely, formula and cliché, there will always be a need for criticism of those formulas. And if the critics want to go ahead and get some laughs out of ironicizing the trash that’s fine, but their energy, I think, is better spent in generating artifacts of their own.

Which I only mention because, although I am a cultural elitist, I am not a completely rigorous snob. The main symptom of not being a completely rigorous snob is what I would call snob-angst; namely, I am not completely comfortable with the fact that my tastes tend towards the obscenely intellectual. Who is to blame for this? Anyone but myself. So far as I can tell, most intellectualism finds its source in the same thing as the more popular affliction of attention-deficiency: boredom. Humans get bored. Most of life (well, middle-class Western life, at any rate) is really really dull. The solution to this boredom? Either to a) do a lot of trivial, technologically-driven stuff, and enjoy the comforts produced by the Western Culture Industry, or b) try to figure out why you're so bored all the time. As soon as one starts trying to determine why he or she is so bored all the time, one quickly finds oneself stumbling down the path to intellectualism.

That is, it's doing versus thinking. So the thinker, when angsty, notices the perceived non-thinkers, and the fact that they're doing things, and decides to do things him or herself. Generally speaking, these artifacts of thinkers doing things are the cultural touchstones that mean the most to me. This is where, as alluded to in past posts/comments, the issue of ironic enjoyment comes up, in that it's the intellectual appreciation (whether for laughs or disgust, or whatever else) of a cultural item that was generated without thought (I'm distinguishing, here, between "thought" and "planning"--planning being the system of ideas involved in generating pop-cultural commodities).

So, yeah, I ironically enjoy things too (the movie Congo, for instance, is a great example, I think, of a movie that can be ironically enjoyed), but in the end, I have an appreciation for craft through which I very consistently get more enjoyment out of finely constructed, thoughtful works than out of the sort of "slumming it" posture of self-awarely watching (or listening to) swill. Also, ironicizing crappy things in order to enjoy them is easy. Look at  the whole demographic of young American humans that are categorized as "hipsters": it's an entire subculture built entirely around ironized pleasures. Too me, even when hipsters are enjoying actually good things for actually good reasons, they're keeping their ironic stances in their back pockets, able to be reestablished at moments notice. This ability to fall back on irony so quickly is why the more rigorous appreciator of culture needs to be wary of it; the easiest position to take is not necessarily (in fact rarely is) the strongest or most useful.

At the same time, the ironic set realizes this too (the subculture collectively realizes), leading to what might be labeled as a "new sincerity" or "post-irony." Hence the success of such indie-pop musical acts such as Sufjan Stevens, John Vanderslice, Mountain Goats, Beirut, etc. So shouldn't I just be on board with this relatively recent renewed independent-cultural drive towards sincerity? Not really (as much as I do like some indie-pop), because it still has misappraised the usefulness of irony. The new sincerity still sees irony as a stance (or posture) rather than a device (whether literary, or critical), and is reactionary in motive, and therefore, post-ironic sincerity is--you guessed it--boring! Which was the problem that subcultures were trying to solve in the first place. And before you think that it's just me being bored, and not the hipsters, recall that the primary (intellectual) solution to boredom is thinking about one's boredom. Ironic appreciation is an inherently "smart" appreciation because it hinges on the fact that other people don't get what you're getting, but a thoughtless ("dumb") ameliorative such as making things that you specifically don't have to be ironic about abandons the intellect (however mismanaged, some intellect is still better than none) that generated the irony in the first place.

Then what, exactly, am I advocating? Based on what I've just written I seem to be contradicting myself a bit, since ironic enjoyment is seen as both being good and bad, and I'm also rejecting one already-existing "solution" to the problem of the ironic stance. But that's just it--irony, when utilized to enjoy things that suck, is a fine thing, but when it becomes a social posture its devalued, and any given escape route from that posture, other than abandoning it wholesale (becoming too smart for it) is destined for failure. The criteria that I use, personally, is gauging whether something is "Good for Good Reasons," whereby the good reasons can be ironic or not, sincere or not, and produced either intellectually or industrially. And further, those good reasons are a flexible thing, so I can recognize and decide whether other people's decisions towards goodness are good/reasonable or not.

Things that it is Okay to Like

7) Jason Statham. This falls in line with two obvious culturological trends: a) Generally speaking, in the world of movies (as opposed to film) I tend to enjoy action movies, and b) I tend to enjoy action movies because they straddle the line between ironic and actual enjoyment. With the recent release of Transporter 3, Statham seemed like the obvious choice for me to carry the banner for this week. The world fell in love with Statham after his rather brilliant, wry turns in both Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch (incidentally, I know some people don't like Snatch, but I think it's great), and then, seemingly overnight, Statham became an action star. I would have never guessed that such a thing would happen, but apparently, in addition to having a background in actual con-jobs and black market type stuff, which got him the job in Lock Stock, Statham also knew, like, Kung Fu, and could do (most of) his own stunts in action movies. So it makes perfect sense. So, to me, it's the perfect kind of success story. To me, action movies are a perfect example of how a pre-established set of viewing criteria allow the viewer to do very little work to appraise the movie itself, basically with an "Is this awesome or not?" query set. So, of course, there are plenty of lame action movies, but good action movies never need to be compared to anything outside of genre, and the critical viewer finally gets a chance to enjoy something on its own terms, while still maintaining the ironic distance of saying "I am watching an action movie, and this is an inherently ironicized (in that I'm "slumming it" in a genre picture); therefore I can enjoy this on its own terms."

Things that it is Not Okay to Like

7) The Vocoder. Shouldn't this argument be finished by now? What a terrible invention. But the fact that T-Pain is still on any amount of the pop-cultural radar-he just put out another album, right?-seems to think otherwise. I reckon that robo-sung hip-hop is an example of some people's guilty pleasure (I'm not worried about people that unthinkingly like it), though I don't know that the guilty pleasurers are driving the industry, but seriously, this whole douchebags-with-vocoders model of hip-hop is just plain tragic. I don't drive a car, so I don't listen to the radio, so I rarely have to hear any of the music for myself, but it still just seems, like, too bad that the vocoder is still thriving.

First, the trailer for Fast and Furious. There are many many things about this that are completely brilliant. First of all, the title. I think all of us out there remember how dramatically The Fast and the Furious captured America's imagination back in 2001. The mid-summer release captures a happy-go-lucky, pre-"Okay, we admit it, Global Warming exists."-auto-enthralled American culture that we will never have back, a sort of last bash for upper-middle-class materialism that was shaken to its core by 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth. And yet, even as America embarked upon its immensely expensive, illegitimate war based on the economic principals of "Blood for Oil," the franchise came back, with 2003's epic, and more efficiently titled 2 Fast 2 Furious. This movie, close to my heart now, took place in Miami (parts of it were shot in front of a friend of mine's family's restaurant)--and also, the movie played here for some incredibly longer amount of time than the rest of the country (Miami's upper-middle-class materialism has never, ever, been shaken to its core). And how can we forget 2006's conclusion to the Fast/Furious Trilogy: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift?

Okay, well, I admit it, I never saw Tokyo Drift, but every time I'm in a car with other people driving around a parking garage which has its floor painted, and the tires squeal, we inevitably make reference to the infamous drifting technique, which, apparently, was made popular in, well, Tokyo. The biggest problem that I see with this movie is that the title has lost all the horrible efficiency of the SMS abbreviations in the title of the second movie in the franchise.  Now, I've never actually been in a car that was "drifting," but I did grow up in the Northeast, so have been in several cars that were doing what we liked to call "donuts." (One of my proudest moments of my High School education was driving around in a couple of cars with three or four friends late one night after it had snowed quite a bit, doing "donuts" and purposely driving into snowbanks and things, driving over the snow-covered lawn, etc. and coming to school the next day, in day light to see the absolutely incredible and unmissable number of tire tracks that we had left all over the school's property--this is an experience which should sound familiar to many of all you out there as well, I imagine. In fact, I prepped a screenplay for the series, called The Fast and the Furious: Pittsburgh Doughnut, but as of yet have not heard back about it. I assume they passed on it because the title was too long.

Which brings us back to the trailer linked to above. Movie #4: Fast & Furious. No articles, and an ampersand! And Paul Walker and Vin Diesel are back! One can only assume that both were on the losing end of the recent credit crunch. Walker's profile has been even lower than Diesel's, but to me, it's like neither of them ever even left the franchise. And now it appears as though they're working together. Oh Snap! But, much like Homer Simpson in his letter to Mr. Burns after Bart donated blood to Burns and got nothing but a card in return, if you couldn't tell, I am being sarastic. The Fast and the Furious stank. If I recall correctly, I only even saw that movie because a friend of mine's girlfriend wanted (like, actually, wanted) to go see it (she did take the time to explain to me afterwards that I would have liked the movie more if I knew what it was like to drive a nice car (which I didn't, and don't)). If there was ever a movie which I think will defy any kind of ironic enjoyment, it will be Fast & Furious. One might project Fast & Furious as the first movie in a second trilogy of movies, and therefore expect there to be five more movies in the F&F franchise altogether. I don't see any other way of seeing it (the third trilogy can be based on the real life of Al Gore III). But hopefully we will see the owners of the Fast/Furious ouvre take a step back from their work, and much like Heidegger and his Being & Time, abandon all of the projected further volumes of the series.

Next, Bedtime Stories. Adam Sandler is finally in a Disney movie. He really punk'd us all by making that one movie, Punch Drunk Love,  that was kind of, like, unique (as a dude with three brothers, I was fascinated by the fact that the seeming main point of Punch Drunk Love is that, if you have seven sisters, you will be fucked up). Still, though, I'm somewhat fascinated in watching Sandler age. I stand by Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore as being movies that were fun to watch, and actually pretty funny, but since then, the above-mentioned exception aside, all his movies have been somewhere on the scale from dismal to offensive to most sensibilities. In Bedtime Stories, though, Sandler looks older than the last time I remember seeing him in a trailer for a movie. Good. At some point, I wonder if Sandler will Carlin out, and look more or less the same for the next 35 years of his life, though I don't know that Sandler, post-SNL is doing enough drugs for that. Get snorting, Adam!

And, finally, Star Trek. It seems to me that I am both a) not quite nerdy enough (despite having seen, I would guess, I solid 90% of all the TNG episodes ever) and b) not a big enough fan or anti-fan of J.J. Abrams (I've never seen Lost and I was pretty ambivalent towards Cloverfield) to really comment on this. Plus, the blogosphere being what it is, I reckon there's enough people out there worrying about it that my opinion is inessential. However, I will say that casting Harold as Sulu is a brave, brave choice.

And wow! wouldn't you know it? I think, though I don't keep any kind of word count going on my Culturology posts, that if I start trying to discuss QoS at this juncture in this post it'll take way too many more words. That's almost for the best, though, since I am dedicated, in general, as often mentioned, to being just slightly out of date with things here.

Things That it is Okay to Like

6) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The basic trend, so far as I can tell, with the things that I deem to be okay to like, is that, generally speaking, I want to be finding "guilty pleasures" within my own cultural-consumptive patterns, but I tend to pick things that I am proud to like and need to be, I feel, either defended or have the generally counter-cultural angle of enjoyment about them pointed out (assuming that my tastes are still, at least somewhat, counter-cultural (Oh darn this counter culture, it's got me all bugaboo)). That being said, the case here is that I actually quite like IASiP, though I only watch it over on hulu (I don't have cable), and I think plenty of other people do to. I'm only confirming it as something which is okay to like, because I can't remember the last time I liked a show while it was actually airing on TV (okay, it's South Park). I famously never watched Arrested Development before it showed up on DVD, though I quite like it now. Why didn't I watch it then? Because it was on Fox, and how could anything be good if it's on Fox? The main negative, as I see it, to IASiP is that it's easy to watch, and a lot of the comedy is easy, and it's about privileged, crass, youngish white people. But, oh well, there's, like, jokes in it.

Things That it is not Okay to Like

6) Weezer's Pinkerton. I was recently driving somewhere in a car with several other mid-to-late-20-year-olds, and we decided to listen to Weezer's first album, you know, the one that's blue. We all agreed that with the exception of a couple of songs; namely, "Buddy Holly," and "The Sweater Song" (though the song about sweaters is redeemed purely by the nostalgia factor of recalling all of the dialogue spoken therein), that it's still a solid album and a touchstone for our pop-cultural coming of age. Personally, the blue album was one of the first pop-rock CDs that I had the wherewithal to purchase when it came out (back in '94, when I was in 6th grade (I had, up to that point mostly just listened to my Dad's classic rock and They Might Be Giants)). Our conversation then shifted to how dismal a band Weezer was when they reemerged with their terrible third album, you know, that one that's green. However, I found myself at odds with the rest of the car when it came to Pinkerton. I say, and maybe it's just that I was preternaturally anti-emo back when it came out, that I never really liked this album, and at best, it's a shitty CD with a couple of good songs on it. Everyone else disagreed, that it's a great album, with a couple of shitty songs on it. In my life, though, since I never liked the music, I've probably only listened to Pinkerton, maybe... optimisticaly, six times. The "Things" portion of Culturology tends to be the section that inspires the most debate, so I'm mostly using this opportunity to see what everyone else here at Audioshocker thinks, with my figures crossed that at least a couple other people out there know what I'm talking about, and agree that Pinkerton is mostly crap, and always was.

So here I am, already behind schedule, and with nothing in particular to write about. So, rather than entirely skip a week, or write about something too nerdy for my own standards of what culturology means to me, I'd like to report a small piece of actual day-to-day living from my actual life and ask for any advice y'all might have, since it's pretty much the weirdest thing I've encountered in a while.

I live in a rented condo in a small building in North Miami, Florida. As with most condos, there's a bulletin board by the mailboxes where occasional pieces of information are posted, most often basic things like "Whoever spilled that stuff in the elevator, clean it up." or "Don't park around back tomorrow, there will be a paving company repairing our potholes from noon until 6." Standard things. When all those hurricanes devastated Haiti, there was a poster up asking for donations of food and clothing. This is the first time I've lived in a condo community, but it's a cosy building and seems nice enough.

A couple of days ago, however, I came home to find a new sign had been posted on the bulletin board. A standard 8 1/2 x 11" computer printout with some red marker highlights added. It said something to the extent of

"ATTENTION! Our community needs your prayers and benedictions. Please pray for our community for protection from the EVIL that surrounds us. With all of your prayers we will hopefully be completely rid of this evil right away. Thank You."

Some of it was bilingual as well, but I've left the Spanish out. The main thing is.. what the fuck?!? There's been no reports of crime or anything else, nor any sense of illicit happenings in the neighborhood. It seems like, had there been a break-in, for instance, then one would put up a poster saying "There's been a break-in, please increase your vigilance and do not let strangers through the main gate." or there was some other general unpleasantness, there'd be a sign saying, like, "Hey! Watch out! Don't get raped!" or whatever.

Unfortunately, I've only lived in the place for a couple months and don't really interact with any of my neighbors much, so I really don't know what to make of the sign. But I figured, in case I'm tortured and killed by evil spirits one of these nights, there'll be this public record that it's not like they didn't warn me.

In Minnesota, Al Franken, the Ted Nugent of Liberal Political Comedy, is a mere hundred of votes behind his competitor Norm Coleman. Norm Coleman is not the Ted Nugent of anything, so it is clear where our loyalties should lie. All Tuesday night, and then for the rest of this week, I have looked forward to posting a victorious Nugent Way Update, announcing the newest Nuge-Elect of the US Senate, but no such luck. Franken has already gained several hundred votes (the margin is currently all the way down to just 221 votes) but Norm is still winning, and grumbling about voter fraud as well, as if to preempt any full-on swing in the vote tallying. So I'm here on the edge of my seat, but I wanted to get to this now rather than wait another week (as much as Nick and I will be running Zombie Palin probably until Inauguration Day, I am still rather obsessed with trying-and-failing to keep things topical) to mention it.

The question is the same, really, anyway: Who is the current Ted Nugent of the Senate? Franken obviously has so much Nuge-cred that we would be unseating whoever was the current Nuge, but if he doesn't win, than who has managed to cling to their crown? Robert Byrd (D, WV)? Orrin Hatch (R, UT)? No, friends, its even more obvious than that: John McCain is the Ted Nugent of the Senate! In fact, I would go so far as to say that if he had made the Nugent Way part of his presidential campaign, things would have gone much better for him. I mean think about it: McCain did something kind of awesome back in the '70s, just like Nugent, and without really doing much else but being conservative managed to keep in the public eye for the next three decades. McCain was of course involved in several failed reality TV programs (the campaigns of 2000 and 2008), just like Ted Nugent. And when John McCain shoots a bear, the first thing he does is drink its blood before it gets cold.

With McCain's humiliating defeat nationwide and the even greater humiliation of associating himself with Sarah "Dumb as a Zombie" Palin, he's gotta be hoping that Franken loses his race, so that McCain can at least retain his Nugent Status. Someone needs to let McCain know to get off that "Maverick" garbage and start saying it like it is: "I am John McCain and I am the Ted Nugent of the US Senate!"

And now that this post is dedicated to political things, I'd like to bring up one other imporant matter. I've never been one for conformity, as such, but I think--and I think a lot of you out there agree with me--that it's about time that men in America once again felt obligated to wear hats. This stopped with a President (when Kennedy didn't wear one to his inauguration [okay, a little fact-checking has turned up the fact that Kennedy did, in fact, wear a top hat to his inauguration, but took it off to deliver his speech, but the urgan legend of "hatless Jack" stands, so I think my reasoning is still valid]) so it can start again, with a President. As you may be aware, Obama already has a new website, change.gov, up to, I guess, get things rolling on that whole change thing. A part of this website is a place where you can write them your ideas for the future of America. I would like to hearby start an electronic-letter-writing campaign. Go to http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision and let the president-elect know that you want him to wear a fedora to his inauguration. He would look kick-ass in a fedora, and so will you.

Things that it is Okay to Like

5) Pixar Movies. Generally speaking, I have felt like my choices for things that are okay to like are more obvious than my choices for things that aren't okay to like. But this example is something of a platform shift for me, from the prior generally positive ambivalence to Pixar out-and-out approval. I thought Wall-E was great. And most of their other movies are genuine successes (I think Cars was the worst of the studios output, and that one about bugs wasn't great either). In a similar manner as AC/DC for their partnership with Wal-Mart, I'm able to forgive Pixar for their partnership with Disney. It really was Wall-E that pushed me over on this one though, since it was quite unique and I think more working towards making a movie at all rather than a kid's movie (I think most of the Pixar output is kid's movies that adults can like, which is somewhat different from the model of Wall-E (which is almost the opposite)). So, hurrah! for not only the technological advancements that keep Pixar well ahead of the pack visually, but also the aesthetic dedication to actually producing animated fare which it is actually okay to like!

Things that it is not Okay to Like

5) Nicolas Cage. Specifically, the Nicolas Cage of the rare movies he's made that are actually good and the few movies he's made that aren't terrible. Though he's made enough terrible movies in the past few years to do much of the work of obviating his not-okay-to-like-able-ness, Cage still gets brought up as one of those actors that makes a lot of trash, sure, but does manage to make some damn good cinema now and then, and that we shouldn't hold his consistent selling-out against his more genuine efforts. So far as I can tell, the movies Cage has made that people think are good (with asterisks by the few that I approve of) are: Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona*, Wild at Heart, Leaving Los Vegas, Con Air*, Bringing Out the Dead*, and Adaptation. Maybe a few others. This ignores his successful streak of action movies back in the decadent mid-to-late '90s (The Rock through Gone in Sixty Seconds) or his more recent apparent success with the National Treasure movies. The man is a terrible actor. He is replacable in all of his good or supposedly-good movies (though, of course, Wild at Heart would have been such a different movie if Cage hadn't brought his own Snake Skin Jacket to the set). It's about time we gave up on the man. And also warn John Cusack that he's treading down the same path, and will end up in Cageville if he's not careful.

Actually, though, its good to know that last year was good for movies. As much as I'd like the motto of Culturology to be "Live for Now" (I looked for an audio and/or video for the Iron Cross song to match that, but unfortunately couldn't find one), it seems to be more the case that I will always feel not quite up to date when trying to confront popular culture on a weekly basis. But other then the new Bond movie in a couple of weeks and the new Darren Aronofsky movie coming sometime in the winter, there ain't a whole lot to be looking forward to, movie-wise. But I really brought up Kevin Smith so that I can brag about my one connection to Kevin Smith movies:

In the movie Dogma, early-on, I think (I'm not really sure, I only saw the movie once, and that was a long time ago (can you believe it? I don't like movies that are supposedly edgy comedies with religious-conservative values at their core), the Devil takes the main female protagonist to a Mexican restaurant (maybe the restaurant is hell or something?). But at any rate, the Mexican restaurant at which they shot that scene is right down the street from where I grew up in Pittsburgh. I've eaten there many a time. Even funnier, the Mexican restaurant in question is in the middle of the suburbs, and is called the Ben Franklin Inn. That's right, they're not even trying to pretend to be authentic in anyway. But I guess their pseudo-Mexican decor was good enough for Kevin Smith!

My attitude towards Kevin Smith is in some way similar to my attitude towards Oliver Stone. They both seem inexplicably popular to me. Both have maybe made a couple good movies, but seem to be extraordinarily overrated given that they tend to produce flawed, oftentimes just plain boring films. I pretty well buy into the cult of the director-as-auteur (as already intimated, many of my favorite directors are definitely in this category (P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg (I recently had a reference to the movie Scanners fall utterly flat at a Halloween party I was attending--pretty awesome (both the movie and the failed reference to it)), Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, etc.). But somehow Smith and Stone have these cults that surround them even though their movies are mostly crap.

Maybe it's an issue where trying to make a distinction between movies and films would be useful. Though that kind of distinction-making is hard to do without just falling into blatant elitism, perhaps we can say that a film defines its own parameters for being viewed/read, and movie operates unironically within excepted style standards as defined by studios and marketers. Smith, almost certainly, would agree that he's interested in making movies; Stone I'm not so sure of. And don't just think that I call things that I like that are all artsy-fartsy "films" and swill that I hate "movies"--there are definitely good movies (see "Things that it is Okay to Like #1") and just as many bad "films" as there are bad "movies" (in fact, they're probably even worse). But I figured I'd introduce the notion (film vs. movie) here to see if it's actually functional.

It's generally accepted (I think) rhetorical praxis to consider all cultural artifacts as texts that can be read, whether music, film, books, clothing, design, or whatever. What this distinction between movies and film might be useful for, then, is determining how, exactly, a given cinematic artifact wants to be read. Michael Bay certainly wouldn't want us to approach his movies as anything but mindless entertainment (for a great joke about Bay, see South Park's "Imaginationland" episodes) and compare him to, say, Bergman, but Jim Jarmusch almost certainly begs for the comparison to Bergman. I think it's generally the case that a given movie/film tells us how we want to consider it. For example, Donnie Darko (yes, it's a movie that I never get tired of hating on), begs its viewers to see it as a David Lynch-esque dark, complicated film, but in fact it's just another nostalgia-driven suicide-fantasy movie. Or American Beauty, with all of its pretensions and quasi-independent trappings, still being a run-of-the mill, shallow, misogynist suburban melodrama movie.

And of course, given these distinctions in readings, the measures of success are different as well. American Beauty, like, won awards, right? It was (maybe) a great movie. But appraised as film, it falls well short of being readable on its own terms. Somewhere lurking behind this discussion is the broader issue of capitalism versus socialism and the cult of art for art's sake, with the central inquiry being whether the profit economy can ever generate cutlural goods whose truth-value trascend their exchange-value, but I probably shouldn't get into that here (or, not yet, anyway). I'm mostly curious--is it reasonable/useful to try and make this distinction between art film and commercial movies?

Things that it is Okay to Like

4) AC/DC. They only enter into this conversation (the conversation of things that are okay to like) because of their recent decision to have their latest albums distributed only through Wal-Mart. I think the problem with this is clear, since Wal-Mart is one of the evilest things in existence these days. I haven't actually listened to the new album as of yet (I refuse to shop at Wal-Marts so it may be a while), but it's been pretty well received/reviewed, so far as I can tell. It's generally not the case that I personally have AC/DC recordings on hand to, like, rock out with when the urge for such out-rocking calls, but I tend to think their music, like, rocks. Good tracks. I can only assume that they're getting old, and some marketing people said something to the extent of "The album is a dying concept anyway, blokes, and if you release it through Wal-Mart only, we'll pay you this much more." Or perhaps even more likely, the decision may well have been barely theirs to make, so I struggle to hold it particularly against them. My approval of them as likable I suppose just has to do with the fact that they still exist, and that seems fine. Sort of like how it's impossible to dislike the Rolling Stones, even though they've been making boring-ass terrible music since, oh 1971 or so.

Things that it is Not Okay to Like

4) 30 Rock. I've only watched one or two episodes of this show. I guess they weren't terrible. But what's with the hype surrounding it? Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan are actually funny, but it seems like the show gets most of the "buzz" that it gets (or has gotten much of the "buzz" that it has) because of Tina Fey. She was the head writer on SNL during its worst-ever years (though, I guess I wasn't really watching it in the '80s, and apparently it sucked then too), and sucked at everything that she did on the show. Mean Girls? Totally overrated. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and argue that people like 30 Rock because Tina Fey is a woman, and thank God, we finally have a funny woman on the TV, writing funny things for people that want to laugh. Post-feminism at its worst. And I'm not arguing that men are funnier, or that women are inherently not funny (I think Amy Poehler is very funny, for instance (especially in her non-SNL endeavors)), just that people give Fey more credit than she deserves only because she's apparently bucking the patriarchy. I'd like the patriarchy to be bucked just as much as the next guy. I just wish it was someone funnier doing it.