Archive for the 'Culturology' Category

Culturology 035 – Demographic Disposition and Bland Comedy

Published
by
pete
on June 22, 2009
in Books, Culturology, Misc and Movies
. 3 Comments

Having received several quasi-favorable reviews–not high praise exactly, but admissions of funniness–from a couple of reliable sources, I went ahead over the weekend and went out to see The Hangover, to see what all the fuss was about. Given that the movie’s already been in theaters for three weeks, there’s not a whole lot I can say here that hasn’t already been said, but it was kind of funny. But it was also clear why the thing has been so popular, since it’s not not-funny either.

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

Culturology 035 – Chairman of the Bored

Published
by
pete
on June 15, 2009
in Culturology
. 3 Comments

As the summer solstice approaches, these longer days seem to be luring me towards posting these columns later and later in the day on Mondays; I’ll do what I can once the days begin to shorten again to have them up earlier in the work day, but for now, please accept my apologies, Tuesday’s content, for my late-Mondayness nearly infringing upon your solidarity.

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.

Culturology 034 – Up Late and Bored Stiff

Published
by
pete
on June 8, 2009
in Books, Culturology, Misc and TV
. 3 Comments

I, like many Americans (I haven’t followed this too closely, as is my promise, as always, to half-ass my interaction with anything as popular as television–though with the upcoming conversion from analogue transmission to digital, I should be losing my reception entirely in a matter of days), tuned in to most of Conan O’Brien’s first week of hosting the Tonight Show. Out of curiosity, I suppose, and some loyalty to the years of my life where I was something of a Conan devotee (usual only bursts of devoutness a few months in length, correlated to a combination of TV-having and availability at the time slot in question). More loyalty to Conan the Simpsons writer, though, since the episodes that most obviously bear his mark are some of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all. Which is to say, I tuned in not necessarily hoping that it be all that funny, and mostly to see Conan sell out to old people demographics and not be nearly funny enough.

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

Culturology 033 – Just Because They’re Not After Me

Published
by
pete
on June 1, 2009
in Culturology and Music
. 9 Comments

The wonder-beautiful month of May has swept on by, in a mere blink of the culturological eye. And no wonder, given the steady stream of blockbusters that seeped out of Hollywood’s underclothing every weekend. Watching movies is a bit like watching baseball: after the first month of the season, one is tempted to draw major conclusions and determine how the whole season is going to play out, but must bide ones time as well, as so much is certain to change as the weeks progress. But it was a pretty good month for movies, all things considered (well, not all things… I really only went out to like three movies (I would’ve seen Up, but I was out of town over the weekend, and my friends all went to see it without me, and since I more or less make it a rule to never go to movies by myself, I probably won’t see it until its eventual DVD release)), and to me, the movie the really tied the month together, and gives the best sense of what the summer might hold is Terminator: Salvation.

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

Culturology 032 – Funemployment DVD Special!

Published
by
pete
on May 18, 2009
in Books, Culturology, Misc and Movies
. 14 Comments

So Nick? Did you wind up seeing Star Trek? Pretty good, right? Probably, like, a better movie than Wolverine was, huh? Good enough, in fact, that in the box office figures, this past weekends new should-be blockbuster release, Angels & Demons barely beat it out while Wolvie experienced his second straight weekend of precipitous decline. I wasn’t about to run out to see A&D, either.

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?

Culturology 031 – Gleaming the Nerdcube

Published
by
pete
on May 11, 2009
in Books, Culturology, Misc and Movies
. 11 Comments

I’ve never been one to shy away from a fight (about cultural/artistic stuff, anyway), so given Nick’s better-make-up-for-everyone-else-on-the-planet-hating-this-movie inexplicably (okay, it is explicable, and well within Nick’s usual taste) positive attitude towards the Wolverine movie–as much as I understand why it might make sense that I liked the movie, I still can’t go back and make myself think it was better; I was entertained, mostly, but distractedly so–my initial impulse this week is to join the already-happening, seemingly inevitable conversation about the fact that Star Trek was a way better movie than Wolverine, listing such details as the fact that, despite Wolverine having a bigger opening weekend, Star Trek will certainly make more money in the long run and not experience nearly as a steep a decline in box office figures from its first to its second weekend. But I’m not going to. It’s not that interesting. The movies are separate beasts. I was rather wholly satisfied by Star Trek; I think that it was a very strong “reboot” as well. I’m generally a sucker for sci-fi any way, but I did enjoy their method of clarifying why this new Star Trek was going to be different, and it didn’t matter that it would be different.

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).

Culturology 030 – Vertically Panning the Camera over Screaming Heroes

Published
by
pete
on May 4, 2009
in Books, Comics, Culturology, Misc and Movies
. 4 Comments

I, like so many humans in America, over the weekend, ran out to see the new X-Men: Wolverine movie. As usual, though I certainly have an opinion about the thing (it was about as bad as I imagined it could possibly be), I am hoping to avoid anything of a “review” here, instead hoping to find signs of any deeper trends lurking in the murky swill of the nearly unquaffable beverage that was Wolverine.

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.

Culturology 029 – Too Awesome to be Popular!

Published
by
pete
on April 27, 2009
in Books, Culturology and Movies
. 6 Comments

Only two weeks ago, I played the cry-like-a-baby-it’s-the-last-week-of-my-semester card in order to put a band-aid on the hemorrhaging wound of the content-less culturology post for that week, so I must come clean now and state, for the record, that I am done with my semester (of Graduate school). In fact, I also recently lost my summer job, so writing this weekly column is the closest thing I even have to employment. Of course, Nick and Neal don’t pay me to write this thing (well, they pay me in love and ice-pops, but that hardly pays the rent), so its not really like employment, so I don’t really have to suddenly up the quality of my culturological investigations. But I think I set the bar pretty high for myself. At least I think I do, though objections are occasionally raised re: my generally pompous attitude, text-heavy, unnecessarily complicated ramblings on the various subjects tackled, and most recently, and absence of graphics or pictures, to assist the reader in understanding. This week, since I still don’t have that much to say, I’ve at least tried to meet Neal’s request for an added visual element, if for no other reason than to pad out an otherwise thin column.

(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!

Culturology 028 – Meta-tele-vision-ality

Published
by
pete
on April 20, 2009
in Books, Comics, Culturology, Misc and TV
. 6 Comments

Well, dear readers, I must admit that I am still in the death throes of my current semester, wrestling the alligator that is the novels of George Eliot (not a dude), hoping to pry its jaws open and pull out a twenty page paper which, more or less, affects a comparison of the narrators of her to major novels (Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda–Middlemarch, incidentally, is a pretty incredible book; I realize that the only thing that generally gets read here on audioshocker is comics, but its not the worst thing ever to read a Victorian novel now and then). That being said, with my culturological obligations in mind, I did manage to just watch a little bit of television here on the internet, in order to generate a criticism thereof. Now, I don’t watch a whole hell of a lot of television, so I may be somewhat off in what I think, but, here’s what I think of the first episode of Sit Down, Shut Up, which I just finished watching, like, ten minutes ago.

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: Continue reading ‘Culturology 028 – Meta-tele-vision-ality’

Culturology 026 – Identity and Audience

Published
by
pete
on April 6, 2009
in Books, Culturology and Misc
. 3 Comments

After the last couple of weeks of attacking the notion of “audience” in critical writing, I’ve finally gotten around to reading those sample passages of the “Philosophy of…” books about X-Men and The Terminator that Nick linked to a couple of weeks ago, and I immediate find myself wondering who the audience of these texts are. Hypocritical? Maybe, but hopefully not. The tone of both the sample chapters are pretty similar, in line with the “…for Dummies” kind of books that have been popular since the ‘90s, so it’s not, as I had initially feared, in the mode of saying “here is what you aren’t noticing,” but rather, “here are some (supposedly) interesting things that we can talk about from these popular stories.” So that’s good, I suppose, but at the same time, given the massive amount of condescension involved in such an enterprise, I wonder who exactly would read this book and be both interested by the ideas and not offended by the oversimplification involved.

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.