The Clock Is Ticking
These guys better get a move-on, before their story is overtaken by reality. (h/t)
Articles filed under Culture
Black Kids and White Kids
In light of the release of Black Kids’ debut LP Partie Traumatic, a solid B album according to the tough-but-fair critics at The A.V. Club, I was thinking about the fact that the band started in a Baptist Church (via WSJ).
The three founding members — singer Reggie Youngblood, drummer Kevin Snow and Mr. Holmes — first started playing music together in the late 1990s after meeting in the baptist church they attended. The three went on to play in various bands, sometimes together, sometimes separately, but they all grew indifferent to the ska and other music styles they were playing.
One of those styles, according to the Journal, was “Christian punk.” We think of Sunday morning as “the most segregated hour in America,” yet I wonder if that’s still true — after all, every other hour is really, really segregated, and my sense is that evangelicals have been making progress in breaking down racial barriers. This has straightforward implications for Christian-inflected popular music. Of course, you have to wonder — what constitutes “Christian music,” given that so much “mainstream” popular music contains powerful religious themes?
Anyway, I’m clearly clueless on this front. Fortunately, we have Patrol Magazine, the brainchild of ex-_Slate_ intern David Sessions, to help sort out the confusion. Patrol, please publish a smart, informed piece about race, popular music, Christianity, authenticity, and the hype machine. And Black Kids.
Watchmen: Full of Fight Things!
Reihan’s excited about the upcoming Watchmen movie. Me? I’m still suspicious. I reread the comic book graphic novel this weekend, and it renewed my belief that while, contra Terry Gilliam, it might be possible to adapt Moore’s 12-part epic into a two-hour film, it’s going to be really, really hard. Doing so will require a very strong screenplay and some equally brilliant performances and direction.
The new Watchmen teaser trailer merely confirmed what we already knew: Zack Snyder is a remarkably talented visualist. But it gave no indication that Snyder’s developed much ability as a storyteller, which, after 300 — a movie with appallingly little concern for narrative, character, or pacing — remains a serious concern. It doesn’t help that Synder’s running around making statements like this:
“I think there’s an IV drip of action that takes you through the movie, because there are superheroes that probably do fight things, and there are action-y things that actually happen to them.”
Indeed, the trailer takes the same form as the preview for 300: a montage of powerful images set to a moody pop song (Smashing Pumpkins, in this case, rather than Nine Inch Nails). I’m not even sure how much a teaser like this will appeal beyond fans of the comic. It’s clear to those of us who’ve read the original that Snyder’s going to recreate a number of its iconic scenes. But, for anyone else, it doesn’t provide much sense of what, exactly, the movie’s about (and, anecdotally, I talked to a number of non-geeks who were confused by it). I’ll admit: the trailer is very, very cool. But I’m also not convinced it’s much more than a fanboy dog whistle.
The Dark Knight Was Better Than Expected
How’s that for title specificity? I’ve been striving to follow these microcontent guidelines.
As for The Dark Knight, well, I was expecting to thoroughly dislike it as I found Edelstein’s analysis persuasive in the abstract. I also very much enjoyed his reply to his braindead critics, particularly this choice line:
*Note to readers: You blunt the force of your attack when you write to an author to say, “No one cares what you think” — because, uh, at least one person does.
Man, what a cool dude.
Moving right along, The Dark Knight was approximately three hours and seven endings too long. This does address the value for money question, but I guess that wasn’t my highest priority that evening. I agree with countless others on the Two-Face question, i.e., that he was one supervillain too many, at least for this installment of the franchise, though I certainly see where the creators were coming from.
But all that said, the movie exceeded my very low expectations — this was the movie Batman Begins should’ve been: truer to the spirit of Batman: Year One, it took place in a recognizable city, not a madcap fantasia. Not that there’s anything wrong with madcap fantasias — it’s just that the Nolan Gotham as featured in his first Batman film was pretty dreadful and uninspired when compared to the Burton Gotham. Which is why I was disappointed by the hospital at the close of the film and a few other unconvincing touches, which I won’t spoil for you.
I didn’t mind some of the other absurd moments, e.g., an acrobatic side-trip to Hong Kong that appeared to serve only a very minimal plot purpose. And I liked the fact that the movie harkened back to the Dennis O’Neil era of Batman, complete with penthouse, a gritty true-crime flavor, and a vicious Joker. I only wish they had scaled back their ambitions slightly, strange as that sounds.
The really crucial moment for me was the Watchmen trailer, which has raised my expectations to dangerously high levels.
Lesbos: Not Just from Lesbos
It’s official:
The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, had claimed that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violated the human rights of the islanders – who call themselves Lesbians – and disgraces them around the world.
He argued it caused daily problems to the social life of Lesbos’s inhabitants.
But the court disagreed, ordering the plaintiffs to pay court expenses of 230 euros ($366), although they could appeal against the decision.
It’s interesting to note the pleading in the alternative: if the court refused to recognize a human rights violation, Lambrou was prepared to claim a daily pain in the ass. Though we now know lesbos are not a disgrace to Lesbos, unreached by this case is the issue of people who are disgraces to lesbos.
Today's TAS is Sponsored by the Number 4
Hipster, square, suburbanite, preschooler — now matter who you are, I don’t really see how you could not love this (via Nathan and Yglesias):
On the other hand, this may be less a sign that Sesame Street is getting hip and more a sign that I’m getting kind of old. I remember watching Big Bird and co. as a kid and not understanding why my parents were so delighted by cultural icons from their generation making guest appearances. Now I’m the one getting gushy about watching an indie rock starlet cavort with the muppets. In related news, I’ve also started to think NPR is not just acceptable, but actually pretty awesome, and I recognize a lot of the songs they play in between segments because it’s the same stuff I’ve got on my iPod. It’s all down hill from here, isn’t it?
Update: For TAS’s electronically minded readers, here’s Bikini’s Postal-Servicey space-warp remix of the same song. Feel the that groove!
Rrringspot!
Apropos of the philosophical noodle-making that has gotten to be a habit around here, I’ve got a question.
Is there any objective way to distinguish true randomness from free choice?
That is to say (for example): if person (a) said that evolution is the result of random mutation plus natural selection, and that therefore there is no room for a human telos derived from transcendent values (since we ourselves are only here by chance), while person (b) countered that what appears to be random is really God using this mechanism as the most efficient means to achieve His ends, and that therefore “random” is the wrong word to use for the process by which we came to be here – would there by any way to settle the dispute?
Or (for another example): if person (a) said that there is no free will because human beings are deterministic Hobbesian machines, and therefore our language of right and wrong has no real meaning, and person (b) countered that, in fact, human beings are not deterministic machines because we are quantum-computers at the micro-tubule level, and person (a) countered again that uncertainty has nothing to do with free will, it’s just physical laws operating in their mechanical way just like any Newtonian laws – would person (a) be provably right or wrong? In theory, I mean.
My intuition says, “no” – that there’s really no room for the concept of an independent entity possessed of “will” in a worldview shaped by cause and effect; the only place for “will” to retreat to is the zone of true randomness, of complete uncertainty, which means that truly free will as such must be completely inscrutible. But in that fortress, it seems to me, freedom rests reasonably secure. Statistical laws govern the decay of a block of uranium, but whether or not this atom of uranium chooses to fission in this instant is a completely unpredictable event – fundamentally unpredictable, something which simply cannot be known – which is equally good evidence for the proposition that it’s God’s (or the atom’s) will whether it splits or remains whole, as for the proposition that it’s random chance. The choice of one or the other interpretation has everything to do with our emotional response to the event (and, hence, to the universe), and nothing to do with making accurate predictions (the latter being the proper business of science).
The above probably sounds like a hash of Schroedinger and James, which I guess it is, and which may not reflect well on me for making it. I realize that the specific conjectures Schroedinger makes about the nature of life and consciousness have been mostly proved false, but I’m curious whether, abstracted to this degree, there’s anything left of his (rather Hindu) speculations about the relationship of mind to matter.
Everything About You Is Bad
What’s the worst Facebook app? Well, Sparkey seems to have infiltrated numerous profiles without anyone really understanding much about it, but aside from the influx of annoying updates, it seems mostly benign. It’s refrain can be summed up as: People want to date you! Okay, well, that’s a little awkward, but flattering, I suppose. Instead, my vote goes to Compare People. The idea itself, ranking people according to a variety of personal factors — a sort of multi-characteristic Hot or Not — is kind of objectionable. Yes, most of us make continual comparisons between people, but that doesn’t mean that much good will come of making those mental comparisons public.
More insidious, though, is that it mails your ranking changes to you a couple times a week. Maybe that’s fine if you’re awesome. But apparently I’m not, which leads me to what I suppose is the real root of my hatred for the app: I get a note every few days telling me my rankings have changed, and invariably, every single one of them has gone down. According to Facebook, I’ve been getting comparatively worse in every way since I signed up for this thing. I’m all for bursting the self-esteem bubble, but shooting notes to your customers telling them how much worse they’re getting — at least in comparison to everyone else — doesn’t seem like such a good business plan. Compare People, I declare you the worst among all Facebook apps. See how that feels?
A Warm Gun
I have a backlog of things to post about, and work to catch up on besides, and then Alan Jacobs distracts me by writing about children and happiness.
Some thoughts:
1. The word, “happy” means, most closely, “fortunate.” The root, “hap,” is tied up in ideas of luck, accident, fate – the word, “happen,” comes from the same root. When thinking about maximizing happiness, it’s worth questioning whether such a state is possible – whether it’s possible to feel fortunate without some realistic concept of misfortune to contrast one’s state with.
2. Relatedly, the “pursuit of happiness,” if happiness is understood as “good fortune,” becomes a rather pregnant paradox. Setting out to “seek one’s fortune” is generally understood to mean embracing the taking of risk in the hope of fortune’s favor. “Pursuit,” though, comes from the hunt. It is a characteristic American audacity that we presume to stalk a goddess.
3. I suspect rather strongly that it would be easier to prove that writers have less “emotional well-being” and more frequent experience of “negative emotions” than non-writers, than to prove a similar comparison between parents and non-parents. I don’t know Wilkinson, but if he is anything like any writer I have met (or like myself), if you monitored his “emotional well-being” over the course of working on a piece of writing, he would demonstrate rather frequent “negative emotions” – probably far more frequent than positive. Again, assuming he is like other writers I know, I cannot imagine that Wilkinson, if offered a drug that would take away his interest in writing, would take the treatment, regardless of the evidence presented. He has not organized his life around “emotional well-being” – and neither does anybody else. Rather, I suspect he has organized his life around the pursuit – both in the sense of “the hunt” and “the vocation” – and, indeed, values “emotional well-being” in large part because that state is more conducive to any pursuit than “frequent negative emotions.”
4. Wilkinson thought this paragraph from the Newsweek piece was excellent and accurate:
“If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.”
Is this an indictment of parenthood, or of baby-lotion commercials? Can Wilkinson think of any product hawked on television that delivered anything resembling the emotional state promised in the advertizing? Parenthood isn’t really about happiness; it’s about continuity. But consumer capitalism isn’t really about happiness either; it’s about efficiency. Either may produce lots of “negative emotion” as an externality.
5. None of this is to suggest that “more kids is better” is the principle I hold or live by (I have one adopted son, and no biological children). Moreover, the emotional risks of deriving one’s purpose from one’s children are (if anything) greater than the emotional risks of expecting them to impart “emotional well-being.” None of us want to wind up like Mama Rose, after all.
6. Nor is this an attempt to suggest that happiness studies have no purpose. Indeed, it is very useful to understand that people do make choices that make them unhappy. And it is then very productive to ask those people why they do these things. Sometimes, there is no good answer, in which case they really ought to stop. Other times, there is a very good answer, in which case the question becomes not, “why don’t you stop,” but, “how can you be happier with this important choice you made?” And, to the extent that we as a society care about the aggregate impact of these choices, is there anything we can do to help?
Jason Statham's Giant Rubber Head
These behind the scenes photos from the shoot of a dream sequence in the upcoming Crank sequel are gloriously odd. I didn’t think a whole lot of the first movie — it had some spunk to it, but it was basically an ultra-violent, low-rent adaptation of Grand Theft Auto — but otherworldly strangeness like what’s shown in these photos might be enough to tempt me to a sequel.
The Lunatic Establishment?
Lee Siegel doesn’t think the Obama-as-terrorist New Yorker cover counts as satire:
If you accept this definition of satire, then the reason The New Yorker’s cover seems to have fallen short is precisely that it brought out into open, respectable space an idea of the Obamas that is still, happily, considered contemptible. The portrait of them as secret Muslims, in cahoots with terrorists and harboring virulent anti-American sentiments, exists for the most part either on the lunatic fringe or in what some might call the lunatic establishment: radically partisan entities like Fox News.
Sorry, Lee, your history lesson on the origins and background of modern satire was fun — how often do you see George Grosz namechecked in the NYT Week in Review? — but I just don’t think this cuts it. While polls indicate that a reasonable percentage of Americans still identify Obama as a Muslim, there’s no serious, mainstream belief that he and his wife are terrorist collaborators, gun-slinging militants who pal around with mass murderers and villains. And to suggest that Fox News, for all its sensationalism and inaccuracy, pushes or harbors the view that the Obamas are literally Islamic terrorists, is pretty laughable, and shows a fairly major lack of knowledge about a substantial portion of the American electorate. (Even the notorious fist-bump incident wasn’t quite as lame-brained as it first appeared.)
Instead, it seems to me that the cover counts perfectly under Siegel’s definition: it collected, amplified, and exaggerated all the most absurd rumors about the Obamas into something so obviously ridiculous no one could mistake it for anything else. I can’t say I found the cover all that amusing, personally, and given the opportunity, I doubt I’d have made the editorial decision to publish it. But if the main cause of concern over the cover is the belief that some significant part of mainstream conservativism thinks the Obamas are AK-packing terrorists who party with 9/11 masterminds, well, I suspect there’s a lot more to worry about than whether or not David Remnick knows his art history.
Christian Libertarians, Cultural Conservatives, and the Dilemma of Political Power
In reference to a Ross-Daniel back-and-forth, John Schwenkler says the following:
while I am similarly sympathetic to the corresponding Douthatian skepticism of the idea that a conservatism centered solely on apolitical calls for social and cultural reform – yes, even of the culinary sort – is going to be the thing to save America, that doesn’t mean that the conservative agenda can proceed forward in the absence of such elements, either. The relevant institutions and societal mores are in quite bad shape, and if all parties to the debate agree that they’re neither going to be recreated simply through creative economic and social policies nor spring up magically when the rug is pulled out from under the welfare state, then there ought to be a strong consensus that deliberate and concentrated “grassroots” attempts at bottom-up reforms should constitute an important part of the conservative project, too. I’m quite confident that Ross thinks this as well, and so that the disagreement here is primarily one of emphasis rather than substance – but it’s important to be clear that this can be a both/and, and not a simple either/or.
What follows is a meditation on the dilemmas this situation raises for conservatives and libertarians, especially Christian ones, and especially with regard to the strange third leg of the Revolutionary Stool — not liberty or equality but fraternity, AKA solidarity.
Read the full articleBad Bets
I didn’t see The Dark Knight till Monday of this week, but the buzz beforehand pegged it as long, dour, and tough — a brilliantly conceived downer. I knew opening day tickets were going fast, but I wasn’t convinced audiences would really go for it en masse, or at least not in a record-breaking way. Gloomy, morally ambiguous, and complex aren’t usually characteristics associated with massively successful summer blockbusters. Certainly, I figured, you’d have a lot of critics complaining that it took itself too seriously, that the whole thing was too unpleasant, and that there’d be attendant buzz about whether it was “too dark” for summer audiences — and that buzz, combined with the film’s length, would keep the box office down opening weekend.
So I made a friendly wager with Sonny Bunch: The Dark Knight, I proposed, wouldn’t break $105 million in its three-day opening.
The weekend’s not over yet, but on the strength of TDK’s record-breaking opening day, I’m ready to concede. Sheesh! Nobody knows anything (or at least I don’t), indeed.
Carr's impatience — and mine?
Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? is receiving a lot of attention, and most of the comments I have seen online are, unsurprisingly, negative. They tend to fall into two general camps: the first one claims that our online lives are making us smarter, not dumber, while the second one concedes that there may be problems but insists that we’ll innovate our way out of them. There’s a representative discussion, with unfortunately brief responses from some smart people, at Edge and there are more detailed responses at the Britannica Blog.
I don’t think I can summarize my thoughts on these matters here; they are very much mixed, and I’m still trying to sort them out (and may well be doing so for the rest of my life). But I do have some questions that I wish I could make all Carr’s respondents answer. They derive from what I think is the key paragraph in Carr’s essay, the one that explains why he wrote the essay in the first place:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
So my question for Carr’s respondents is this: Have you had a similar experience? If so, does the change in your concentration abilities bother you? To what do you attribute it? And if you haven’t had Carr’s experience, why do you think you have escaped?
I think it’s interesting that not one of the respondents to Carr that I’ve seen admits to having had such an experience (Danny Hillis comes closest), or even addresses the question — except for Larry Sanger, who says, charitably, that Carr’s problem is “ultimately a problem of will, a failure to choose to think. If that is a problem of yours, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.” I think we are supposed to infer from this that Sanger is impervious to such diminishments, but he doesn’t really say that, does he? I’d like to put the question directly to him, and to all the others.
(P.S. This will be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I am off to visit my family in Alabama and will not be bringing my laptop. This is not as ascetic a move as it may sound, since I will have my iPhone, but I won’t be posting and will be striving to recapture my diminishing powers of long-term concentration.)
An Oscar for Ledger? Maybe not so batty after all.
Terry Gilliam thinks the nascent campaign to get Heath Ledger an Oscar nod for his role in The Dark Knight is unseemly. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, summer blockbusters, even the best, just don’t generate performance awards at the Academy. The only exceptions to this are Russell Crowe’s win for Gladiator and Johnny Depp’s nod for Pirates of the Caribbean. So I have the distinct sense that there wouldn’t be much talk about Ledger getting a nomination had he not died — and I find that fairly distasteful.
On the other hand, the more I think about his performance, the more I think it might be genuinely deserving. The movie’s not without flaw — it’s a tad bit anticlimactic, and some of the plot points are delivered a little hastily — but, as I argue in my review, I do think it’s very strong, and I’m increasingly inclined to think Ledger deserves nearly as much credit as Nolan for its success. I don’t care much for the Oscars, and I take umbrage at the notion that they’re even a remotely reliable indicator of actual quality. But if they can be used to encourage more performances like Ledger’s in summer blockbusters — and maybe even more movies like The Dark Knight — then I’m all for it.
children and happiness
Meghan is reflecting on Will Wilkinson’s reflection on a Newsweek article on how having children doesn’t make people happy. The assumption all around seems to be that this tells us something about the costs of having children. But shouldn’t we also consider the possibility that this tells us something about the costs of monitoring our own happiness? Or the costs of having defined happiness in such a way — and having organized the structure of our lives around the pursuit of happiness in such a way — that having children compromises it? It’s interesting that we’re more willing to do a cost-benefit analysis of having children than to do a cost-benefit analysis of eagerly participating in a culture of narcissism.
Here’s my thought for the day. In 1991 Rolling Stone interviewed Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 50th birthday, and at one point the interviewer asked Dylan if he was happy. This seemed to puzzle him a bit, and he was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’”
And on that note, let me congratulate our Scene colleague and technical virtuoso Matt Frost: Beatrix, Eliza, and Ignatius have arrived!
Living in the future
It’s usually Peter’s job to provide the glimmering Edelstein sentences, but I’d like to submit this one: “Who’da thunk when Meryl Streep won her Oscar for Sophie’s Choice that 25 years later she’d be capering fatuously to Abba songs while, next door at the multiplex, Batman would be reenacting Götterdämmerung?”
It’s not only a great sentence, it’s a good question. It is a trippy future we’re living in, just not the one we expected. We don’t have the flying cars, but we do have Wagnerian comic books for movies. Who would have thunk it?
Less Is More in Monster Movies
I don’t think I’d call Hellboy II the worst movie of the summer, though I’m not sure I could actually hand out that prize. (The Happening, perhaps? In truth, I haven’t seen it.) But it was a pretty serious disappointment. Del Toro’s vision is still phenomenal, and not since the height of Henson’s workshop have practical monster effects been this sublimely strange. But like Chris Orr says, there’s just too much of it — he doesn’t know when to stop. He piles creature on top of creature and then makes more creatures out of those; the whole thing’s built on miniature images of itself — it’s like the golden rectangle of monster movies.
I’m as big a booster of overstuffed blockbusters as you’re likely to find. But sometimes less is more, and filmmakers who’re used to working on shoestring budgets find themselves overwhelmed. I’d rather have small and smart than gigantic and unwieldy: Remember — K.I.S.S. — Keep It Small, Stupid. There are benefits to having to work within limits, plus-sides to what often feel like uncomfortable constraints while you’re working within them. More choices isn’t always a good thing. Politically, I’m a libertarian, but when it comes to Hollywood, I think there’s a clear case for paternalism — and Hellboy II makes it in every frame.
If I'm Ever Interviewed, This Is What I Hope to Say
From Vulture‘s interview with Fonzworth Bentley:
Why do you call yourself the Penguin?
I’ve always been with the penguins — I wrote a song for my upcoming album called “The Penguin.” The way I look at it, the penguin is the flyest bird — he wears a tuxedo every day, but he can’t fly! But what if he tried? I’m gonna represent that penguin that can really fly. Two years after I wrote the song, March of the Penguins came out, and let me tell you, I was there opening weekend! I was one of the few, I was one of the few. But I was there, first row, for March of the Penguins. That was confirmation for me that things coming up in my writing, subject matter, made sense. [Emphasis added.]
I feel much the same way. The main difference, however, is that I call myself “The Marmoset,” for obvious reasons.
I’m a New World monkey
Like my peanut butter chunky
threatening conditions
One last little tiny note on what some people are calling Crackergate — the communion-wafer thief, the wrath of some Catholics, the counter-wrath of P. Z. Myers, yadda yadda yadda. (I don’t even want to insert the links any more.) Said thief says, I think, that he has been receiving death threats, and some people are truly shocked by this.
But here’s the thing: everybody who is anybody on the internet (or in media culture more generally) gets death threats, and they come from all directions. Michael Moore gets them; Michelle Malkin gets them. I know I’m a net-nonentity because I’ve never received any. (I keep telling myself that they’re probably caught in my spam filter. Makes me feel better.)
Consider this: one of my favorite movie reviewers, David Edelstein, has gotten hundreds of abusive and threatening emails over the years from people who disagree with his judgments. One guy in particular wrote, “I only wish harm to you and your family” — and why? Because Edelstein had given a bad review to The Mummy Returns. That’s right, chew on that one for a little while: somebody out there is cherishing fantasies of great suffering for the Edelstein family out of deep devotion to The Mummy Returns.
Seriously, though, it’s got to be highly upsetting to get an email like that, and worse to get one whose threats are more straightforward and explicit. But such rage has become so commonplace, especially online, that it’s impossible to take the threats seriously. In one sense that’s reassuring; in another it’s deeply, deeply sad.
