AudioShocker

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?

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).