I'm A Glutton For Punishment

Punishment by art anyway. I reread Richard Yates' 'Revolutionary Road' over the weekend, and then rewatched the film adaptation the other night. Both landed their hits like a prizefighter the first go-around, and for some reason I was drawn back to take them on again. The film is excellent, no doubt, but my god that book has bite. Yates was second to none in his ability to strip characters down to their dark, soft centers. The words he got them to say are some of the most acidic and devastating I've ever read in American literature. It's a shame that those words came from the author's own distressed soul, and the poor guy didn't even sell until after he was dead. That's a painter's fate. Great writers deserve better. At least he did.

'Transformers 2' Is Racist

Don't think a movie about robotic aliens disguised as motor vehicles can be racist?  Well, neither did I until I saw these two assholes.  Their names are Mudflap and Skids, and they have simian faces, speak ebonics, have gold buck teeth, and are illiterate.  But they must be important to the plot, right?  Some kind of social commentary about how all life forms need to move beyond lazy caricatures and progress toward a greater state of connectedness?  No, their job is to giggle like idiots, let loose a steady stream of cliched hip-hop slang, and disappear whenever a battle starts.  They serve absolutely no purpose but to be racist caricatures.  

I went to film school, and I have a reasonably grounded knowledge of filmmaking and computer animation and how much time and work go into creating characters like these.  It's literally hundreds and hundreds of man hours.  The director, the editor, the animators, the producer (I'm looking at you, Stevie), they all had to see these things a gazillion times.  And never did they stop and think this maybe wasn't a great idea?  Maybe these CGI Stepin Fetchits aren't the best way to please the kiddies in the theater?

I guess not.  And just for good measure, Michael Bay decided to throw a delightfully offensive real-life Sambo into the film for literally no discernible reason.  He pops up for about 3 seconds in a scene inside a Jewish meat shop, and all he does is sport buck teeth and a lazy eye and spout some plantation gibberish.  I'm not an easily offended guy, but this stuff is just stupid, and stupidity backed by truckloads of money offends me more than anything.

P.S. The damn thing made $200 million over the five day opening period.  Yes, $200 million.  And I helped.  Well, shit.  

'Transformers 2' Is A Terrible Movie

Rating: 1 star out of 5

It's not even July yet, but I have to declare the 2009 summer movie season a failure. I suppose it's too much to expect every summer to be like 2008, where we got two certified masterpieces ('The Dark Knight' and 'WALL-E'), plus a slew of other solid entertainments. But this summer has been a major letdown. There have been a few good ones ('Star Trek', 'Up', 'Drag Me To Hell'), but the bad side of things has been downright abysmal. 'Wolverine' and 'Terminator: Salvation', two of the season's biggest tentpoles, were limp, poorly executed affairs where we had to watch two very gifted actors waste their talents on muddled actioner schlock. Pieces of shit like 'Land of the Lost' and 'Year One' continued the descent of lewd ADD comics that kickstarted last year when Mike Meyers killed his career with 'The Love Guru'.

But now there's 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,' a $250 million studio buster and likely the biggest movie of the summer. And it's awful. I mean balls-to-the-wall, in-your-face, what-were-they-thinking terrible. The entire thing is like having a five-year-old kid scream cartoon songs while putting a metal pot over your head and hitting it with a baseball bat. The visuals are certainly stunning, as you'd expect from ILM, but the sequences come so often and last for so long without serving the story than they becomes just a mess of colors and sounds that eventually puts you to sleep. Oh, and it's racist (saving that for another post).

It's an old adage in Hollywood that big budgets make it harder for a filmmaker to create a great film. With seemingly unlimited resources, directors aren't forced to gut-check every little decision. They don't have to utilize their creativity to cut corners and wisely pick and choose what to cut and what to keep. In the case of 'Transformers 2', you get the impression that whatever godawful thought popped into Michael Bay's head ended up on the screen. There was no filtering process, no forced precision in the rewrites. Any unnecessary, bombastic, idiotic thing that crossed him mind got enough money behind it to become reality. And thus we have 'Revenge of the Fallen', a two and a half hour sensory rape that appeals to the knee-jerk brain spasms of our attention-deficient culture. The theater I was in loved the damn thing. I mean fucking loved it. I guess I'm the one that's out of touch. Silly me.

North Korea Is Completely Insane

Many people who know me believe me to be a 'liberal' when it comes to foreign policy.  I try my best to shirk titles like this and any other lazy terms seeking to confine someone's entire worldview into one rhetorical box, but people don't want to think.  They want to label you quickly, store you in a little stamped box in their brain and move on.  I believe nations should do more to avoid war than they do and I'm all for increased international dialogue, which is going to be essential as the world gets more complicated and more dangerous.

But there comes a time when a fellow nation on this little blue marble of ours makes it clear that they are, well, fucking insane.  Germany did it in the 1930s, and they had to be dealt with.  Our old friend Saddam Hussein did it in 1990, and he had to be dealt with (the second war is another issue).  Now North Korea is the raving loon smearing feces on windows and screaming at the sky.  I don't know any people who live there, but their regime, the national face that they project to the world, it completely, batshit, Cuckoo's Nest insane.  In this modern Information Age world, detonating mega-expensive nukes while your people starve, throwing ballistic missiles all over the ocean like a fireworks party, and publicly threatening to 'wipe out' the most powerful nation in the history of the planet makes you a goddam lunatic.  Period.  There's just no other way to describe it.

As I write this, there's a North Korean ship en route to southeast Asia apparently carrying some nasty cargo, and if we stop and inspect it (as the UN sanctions signed by us say we must do), then the crazy midget with the shades says, in a manner of speaking, that he'll blow us up.  They're even talking about shooting off a long range missile in the direction of Hawaii, I suppose as a friendly 'hello'.  Of course war is the last resort.  I mean the absolute, horrible, gut-wrenching last thing you want to do.  But the regime in North Korea has proven that they're not rational, they're not friendly, and they have no intention of working within the bounds of a civilized international society.  They're threatening the lives of millions of people in their vicinity, starving their own people, and now have access to the most dangerous weapons in the world.  It's not at the point where I tip in favor of action yet, but goddam, they're getting there.  Hopefully things calm down, as they usually do.  Hopefully.  

'Alice in Wonderland' Looks Scary

Lewis Carroll's original book was a heavy mind trip, a journey into a world both linked to precise mathematical orders and driven by illogical existential mayhem.  Much like our own.  Tim Burton seems to have kept his film on the same track, with special consideration given to the 'mayhem' part.  Recently released pictures of his Wonderland and its exquisitely demented inhabitants reinforce the preconception that the filmmaker is making one freaky flick, and I for one wouldn't have it any other way.  Carroll's novel was designed to shake you out of your own mind, to make you see things differently by looking at a world that seems to work so differently and yet works so much the same as this one.  Such a narrative methodology is inherently terrifying.

At the very least, Johnny Depp should make a badass Mad Hatter (pictured).  Burton has just the kind of artistic eye and tilt of imagination to bring the story to life in a way cartoons never could.  Hell, technology couldn't do it until recently.  I'm looking forward to this one.   They just don't make scary children's films like they used to (Disney is still the all-time master), and it would seem a shame for our overprotected youth to be spared the same old-school literary torment that made me into the perfectly adjusted person I am today.

Check out more pictures HERE.

Barack Obama Has Mad Ninja Skills

You may disagree with the man's fiscal policy or his plans for the overhaul of health care, but after watching this video you'll have to admit that he has some killer zen attack skills.  In an outtake from a television interview, the President zeros in on an intruding fly, patiently waits for his window to open, focuses mind and body on the target, and then executes the insect with ruthless precision.  He even mocks his defeated foe as it lies dead on the carpet.  There's got to be some benefits to having a Commander in Chief with such lethal skills.  Back in the day the guy would take up a sword and do his nation's killing with his own bare hands, like Alexander the Great or Charlemagne.  Those guys were pretty badass.  

CNN May Care What You Think, But I Don't

When I woke up this morning, I found myself wondering how the election strife in Iran was going. Not the least bit interested in informed journalistic investigation or intellectual credentials of any kind, I went straight for the best possible source: rimjob96 and his/her Twitter. Or maybe hardknob46's blog on Myspace. Hell, either one would do, because worldwide media has cluttered to the point where I don't give a fuck who gives me my info. It's all one big clusterfuck anyway, so why not seek out rustytrombone57's Tweet on Iranian women's rights based on Mike "The Lion" Weinstein's Facebook status updates drawn from skittlesgirl17's Myspace blog that she wrote during her 9th grade English class.

Luckily for the incipient morons who actually think this way, CNN knows just what kind of valuable news they're looking for. They've gashed away entire chunks of airtime to probe the dipshit-o-sphere and see what ramdon viewers are blogging or Tweeting or jerking off into cyberspace. Why rely on accomplished, certifiably intelligent journalists to provide one with knowledge of current events if you can ask the balding 45-year-old pedophile down the street or the 15-year-old girl getting you uncomfortably aroused while she skateboards past your lawn. Because they're just as likely as anyone else to be the great minds scrolled onto the television screen by Mark Sanchez or Wolf Blitzer or any other member of the deteriorating CNN hack machine.

I understand the need for these networks to fill airtime. And I understand that the journalists working at said networks don't exactly inspire a lot of trust these days. But at least they can provide SOME KIND of filter, some professional processing of the whirlwind of information coming in from around the globe. If they're going to spend their time parroting the words of unidentified internet drones, then there's really no reason for them to exist at all. I have a computer, and so do most Americans. CNN would better serve us by filling their slots with infomercials for salad slicers or amazing absorbing dish towels. I trust those people more than the army of attention-starved imbeciles throwing their thoughts into the cloud.

Oh wait, I'm one of those people. Hey, maybe CNN can post my entries in the middle of a news hour while qualified thinkers like Fareed Zakaria are forced to sit and force interest. Man, my information is valuable! Boy are you people in trouble.

Recommended Reading: 'Oryx and Crake' by Margaret Atwood

Atwood long resisted being labeled a science-fiction writer. She eventually gave in to the title, and that's likely because she realized that great science fiction, unlike its pulpy, shallow cousins, is a form on par with any other literary genre. Great science fiction compels us to think not only about where we'll go, but how we'll get there, why we'll go there, and even how those same driving forces got us to where we are today. Great science fiction can inspire us, terrify us, and give us a wider view of ourselves in our current condition. It can serve as a literary portal that allows us to glimpse ourselves in retrospect, like studying an ancient people and picking out their flaws and their virtues through the immaculate lens of hindsight. This experience is, of course, largely virtual and inherently constrained by our current reality and our current understanding. But it can be very cathartic...and incredibly frightening.

In 'Oryx and Crake', Atwood tilts decidedly toward the latter. Hers is a world after humanity, where it appears that the entire world population has been wiped out by a flash pandemic, and where only a lone human named Snowman remains. He looks after a small group of humanoid beings called Crakers, named after Snowman's childhood friend. Just how this state of affairs came to be is fleshed out through Snowman's memories of when he was named Jimmy, back when his closest friends were a brilliant young geneticist named Crake and an elegant, somewhat otherworldly beauty named Oryx. The three of them brought the world to this point, in their own ways (Crake being the most direct cause of the near-extinction), and Snowman's memories of that path create one of the most vivid, mournful, and horrifically plausible tales of apocalypse I've ever read in Fiction.

Oryx and Crake is not a loud, blood-spattered doomsday scenario. Rather, it's a humanistic look at where our technology could lead us, and how the inability of our understanding to keep up with our technological creations could lead to our demise. The future world Atwood creates, the one before the fall, is one where centralized government is more or less gone, and where a strict 'geekocracy' of sorts has taken root. People of higher intelligence have holed themselves up in Research Compounds, safe from the chaos and rampant dangers of the outside world. Here these higher minds plow full steam ahead with genetic research, their efforts geared more toward servicing the corporate machine than aiding human kind in any significant way. Except for Crake. His is a genius of extraordinary ability, a mind so precise and logically inclined that he views humanity like a defective machine, what with its silly hormonal stresses about love and its pointless preoccupation with things like art and beauty. Of course, he sees himself as the only mechanic fit to repair the machine, and this vain belief leads him to what is, for him, the only logical course of action. He builds a better human.

And hits the reset button.

I'll leave the other details out for any potential readers. But this is not a tale of righteous judgement for humanity's crimes or even a panoramic chronicle of the end of man. It's a very intimate apocalypse, narrated by a sensitive soul who saw it firsthand, who bore witness to the evolution of a mind many would call great but of a kind that, in our current world, is becoming increasingly more dangerous as technology and genetics give greater and greater power to individuals. We've seen men like Crake. They've been around for all of recorded history, but their reach was only so great. Now they're getting a pretty big soapbox...and a pretty big hammer.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Atwood's cautionary tale is the notion that it may be the atheist intellectuals with their logical-fueled lack of empathy, not the machinations of the state or the flourishes of religious zeal, who pose the greatest threat to our existence as the tide of 'progress' races forward. In the coming years, we'll be looking to these people to save us, to cure our diseases and improve of overwhelmed lives, and in turn we may give them so much power that the final knife will hit us square in the face.

Anyway, it's a really, really good novel. I'm going to think on it more to decide if I consider it great or not, and that may take a while, but do pick it up and give it a read. It's not often that you'll see issues like this discussed through literature with such grace and somber emotional honesty. This apocalypse feels too close to heart.

'G.I. Joe' Might Really, Really Suck

Rumors of the abrupt firing of 'Rise of Cobra' director Stephen Sommers appear to be false, but all the chit-chat and damage control undertaken by Paramount in the last 24 hours only increases the likelihood that the movie will suck.  Usually if some internet nerds start a B.S. rumor that quickly gets debunked, a movie studio will simply ignore it and continue with their work.  But an army of studio hacks apparently feel it necessary to litter the blogosphere with talk of 'good' audience testing and how much faith they have in their director.

Conclusion: this movie might be epically terrible.  And you don't need rumors to figure that.  The only thing Sommers ever did that was remotely watchable was 'The Mummy'.  Then he made 'Van Helsing'.  You can tell from the trailers that 'G.I. Joe' will have all the steady poise and narrative cohesion of a monster truck commercial made by Tony Scott after downing a speedball.  But leaked portions of a God-awful script and the apparent reluctance of many of the cast members to even discuss the project point to a potential disaster of Battlefield Earth proportions.  

Throwing The Economy Into The Shredder...

To Make It Better

In a pointed cover article for this month's WIRED Magazine, Chris Anderson posits that the collapse of the credit market and the subsequent global financial meltdown will result in a "new economy," where giant mega-corporations are no longer viable and where smaller, innovative start-ups and mini-corps will become the new drivers of the world market.  It's a solid little article in an issue packed with quality examinations of the current and future economic realities, so check it out.

The old maxim that big, disciplined companies always win appears to have been upended by the increasingly rapid changing of the playing field, where the corporate behemoths struggle under their own weight and find it harder to keep up, whereas smaller start-ups founded by eager, energetic minds will find it much easier to navigate the hyperfast jungle of information exchange that characterizes modern commerce.  I realize that the mega-giants will be able to stick their straws into these small ventures and soak up a lot of their ideas, but that can only work for so long, and it's likely the most they'll be able to do.  Simply gobbling up smaller companies to feed the monster like in the days of Rockefeller and Microsoft (whose days as an all-powerful monolith, in retrospect, have likely already passed) will not work so well, because the same problems of speed-of-change vs. ability-to-change will slow down those old and heavy top-down structures, and reduce profits.  

The idea is fascinating and, to me at least, encouraging, but the reasons for Anderson's predictions only feed my fears about the warp-speed pace of worldwide societal change.  We hit quite a snag this past year when the corporation-dominated business models of old struggled to keep up with an exponentially increasing rate of Information Age 'progress', and the time may well come when NONE of our man-made business models can match the pace, no matter how small they are.  That doesn't even fully account for the more abstract yet deadly serious problematics of Toffler-esque Futureshock crises or Human Information Doubling Theory (we'll save all that for another time.)

Like I said, I like Anderson's idea that the financial shakeup will result in the rise of a smaller, more efficient, more innovative capitalism.  But he seems to assume that the current rate of change will stay the same, fast as it is.  It won't.  Like Anderson, I'm hopeful for the end of mega-giants and I believe it could work out very well....for a while.  But the rate of change is only going to increase, the information is only going to get more overwhelming, and the evolution of human cognition will still only go so fast.  Buckle up.  It's gonna be a bumpy ride.  

J.D. Salinger Lives!

Ok, so he only piped up in order to sue some nameless hack writer and a small publishing house in Sweden, but still, it's nice to have the reclusive author's name in the headlines again.  The lawsuit is intended to stop the publication of an unauthorized sequel to 'Catcher in the Rye' called '60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye'.  First of all, that title is terrible, so I'm gonna have to side with the crazy old hermit on this one.  With a title like that, you have to assume the book is terrible as well.  Alright, you don't have to, but I'm going to.

Salinger's assault on copyright infringement and bad book titles brings up the debate over what the guy's been doing all these years.  A couple of his numerous ex-wives have confirmed that he was writing something during his 40-year hiatus from publishing, but what he was writing is anyone's guess.  It could be greatest novel in the history of the world...or it could be "all work and no play makes J.D. a dull boy" over and over again.  Who knows.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the strange genius locks all his work in a trunk and sets the thing on fire right before he dies.  Hopefully he doesn't.  The man is a living, breathing literary treasure, and hopefully he has a few more gifts to give us before he really leaves this earth. 

'Futurama' Rises from the Dead

Comedy Central has placed an order for 26 new episodes of the animated series 'Futurama', and Matt Groening's production crew is getting right to work.  Being a titanic-sized nerd, I jumped three times in the air at the news.  During its original run from 1999 to 2003, the series was superior to Groening's classic 'The Simpsons', which was suffering a lengthy dip in quality that it's only recently come out of.  It seems the entire 'Futurama' cast has agreed to return to the incredibly imaginative series, and new episodes should begin airing mid-2010.  

Fox News is Really, Really Stupid

I have to give it to Geraldo. He'd didn't have any pride left to

lose anyway, so at least that gratuitous leap into the pile

probably brightened his day.

The NBA is for Sissies

I like basketball.  I enjoy the sport and I enjoy watching the NBA.  But only to watch the superstars, the Lebrons, the Kobes, the D-Wades.  I don't have much interest in watching Mike Bibby execute a sound pick-and-roll and I don't jump with excitement when the Spurs pull off a fundamentally sound Drake Shuffle.  Only the superstars, but even watching them is becoming troublesome.  And that's because, in a manner of speaking, the NBA is for sissies. 

A couple weeks ago I witnessed (TM) Lebron James make an incredible 3-shot that bailed out his pathetic comrades and evened a contentious series with the bewildering Magic at a game a piece.  Alright, I thought, this is why I love basketball.  This is spectacle, this is athletic history taking place on a live national stage that only television can provide.  Surely the series would lurch forward with great enthusiasm and speed, showcasing the talents of some of the greatest athletes on Earth.  But it didn't.  Game 3 ground to a miserable pace.  Half the air time consisted of men standing at the free-throw line or refs waving their hands with yet another foul call.  If Lebron got coughed on...Foul.  If Dwight Howard got his arm pinched...Foul.  

You see these men, these gargantuan real-life superheroes of the modern age, aren't allowed to touch each other.  Not in this NBA.  A star the caliber of Lebron or Kobe is awarded an invisible cloak that sets off a whistle every time it's tugged, and instead of getting long exiting periods to watch these incredible specimens soar through the air and dunk over their hapless opponents like  conquering Pretorian overlords, we must sit there for half the duration, usually just when the game is getting good, and watch them attempt shots I could make in my backyard.

My father often complains that this sport is not basketball, what with all the traveling and the hip-hop machismo.  I'll agree with his conclusion, though not based on his points.  This isn't basketball, and I'd happily grant my father his wish of more traveling calls if it means letting these guys actually play against each other in the paint.  Dwight Howard could probably lift me off the ground and toss me through a third story window, yet he must be in serious danger if Derek Fisher tries to hold his hand during a post move.  

I don't have much interest in these Finals anyway, not with Lebron out of the equation, but the grind of watching the playoffs is beginning to wear on my interest in the entire sport.  Commissioner David Stern is a master tease.  He'll give me Lebron's Game 2 Three-Pointer, just to taste.  See, the NBA is exciting!  That shot will echo forever!  Isn't our sport great?  Then he gives me a two week stretch of Dwight Howard hurling free-shot bricks with no backspin and Kobe grimacing in anticipation of the call that almost always comes, at least to the bread-winners.

Well played, Mr. Stern.  Well played.  

The LSU Press is Going Broke

The Louisiana State University Press is close to becoming a victim of the recession (and of America's falling out with literature).  The prestigious publishing house puts out the Southern Review, perhaps the most luminous literary journal in the South, and its demise would be a big blow to American letters.  Maybe the school could divert some of the funds it has allocated for the bribing of high school football recruits.  The price of a couple Escalades should keep the LSUP ship afloat.  Don't think it'll happen?  Yeah, you're probably right.