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March 31, 2005
Mashup: Family Circus vs. H.P. Lovecraft
This project reminds me of another bootleg classic, "You're Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown," a very illegal minicomic which featured a series of Peanuts strips with the word balloons replaced with disturbing, sexually explicit dialogue.
Beatrice.com: I Will Tell You About Something Else Horrific I Witnessed*
Posted by tedf at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)
Dylan's "Rainy Day Women" in Bullet Points
Click here. (Thanks, Gavin!)
Posted by tedf at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2005
Little Children by Tom Perrotta
I just finished Little Children, the latest novel by Tom Perrotta. Perrotta is one of the few contemporary novelists whose voice rings completely true to me - no postmodern fireworks, no MFA hyper-refinement, just clean, candid, slightly wry prose. The writer he most reminds me of is Nick Hornby, and if you're a fan of High Fidelity, you're sure to enjoy Perrotta's The Wishbones.
I first stumbled across Perrotta's first book, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, in an airport bookstore. I have no idea what it was doing there, but it was an instantly compelling series of snapshots of childhood life. The Wishbones, his first novel, is a wonderful story about a musician grappling with the reality that he's never going to be a rock star and may have to settle for domestic stability. The film The Wedding Singer, which came out shortly after the book, has so much in common with the book that I've always wondered if it's more than coincidence. Perrotta's next novel, Election, was filmed by Alexander Payne, and featured Reese Witherspon's breakout performance. I've always preferred the book, actually - it's just as funny, but a little more generous and less smirky than the movie. The one Perrotta book I haven't read is Joe College. All Perrotta's books hit close to home, but this one was a little too close - it's about life as a Yale student in the 1980s, drawn from Perrotta's own experiences. (I went to Yale from 1987-1991, missing Perrotta by a couple of years, I think.) I'll probably get back to it at some point, but reading it felt just too uncomfortably familiar when I first picked it up. I had the same reaction when I tried to read Nelson George's novel about working as a struggling rock critic in New York.
Perrotta's great subject is arrested adolescence (or, in the case of Bad Haircut, just adolescence) - the way the imprint of our high school identities continues to structure our lives into our thirties (and perhaps beyond). Little Children extends that theme into parenthood. The protagonists in Little Children are parents who still don't feel like adults. Todd is a stay-at-home dad who's studying to pass the bar exam, but gradually realizes he likes hanging out with his kid and doesn't really want to be a lawyer. He starts skipping out on his studying to watch the local kids skateboard and play in a midnight football league. Sara is a mom who stumbled into marriage and parenthood in a post-college daze, never able to recapture the sense of community she felt in her years at the school's women's center. They start an affair when they meet at their childrens' playground.
The rest of the plot involves a convicted child molester who moves back home to the neighborhood on his release from prison, and the community's response. That stuff drives the narrative forward, and allows Perrotta to play the parents' fears for their children off their own desires for happiness and escape. But it's a little too sensationalist, and distracts from the observation of everyday suburban detail that's the heart of the book. There are amazing little set-pieces where Perrotta captures the social dynamics of: playground moms competing over mothering skills; ex-jocks taking a "touch" football game a little too seriously; and book clubbers debating the sexual practices described in Madame Bovary (specifically, whether a vague reference to a "shameful" sexual act implies that she has anal sex).
Perrotta's also great on the weirdness of kid culture. Sara, for example, is amazed that her kid is so transfixed by the Thomas the Tank Engine movie, a debacle starring Peter Fonda, Alec Baldwin, and a bunch of animated trains. She observes that her child would gladly watch it every night, "despite its art-house pacing and insistent Freudian undertones."
Perrotta's tone usually tends toward the sunny, and the darker hues in this novel have encouraged some critics to hail it as a breakthrough. More likely, he's finally writing about more traditionally literary subjects - Updike territory - and critics are rewarding him. The relief of this book is that writing about suburbia hasn't neutered Perrotta's voice. Rather, it brings out how so many thirtysomething moms and dads still feel like teenage misfits deep inside. And I guess the politics of Perrotta's books are in how he embraces that inner teenager - it's the rebellious teenager inside us that roils against the workaday world, that chafes against the constraints of adult lives constrained by the demands of capitalism and patriarchy. Todd's and Sara's affair is their little rebellion against suburban conformity. Perrotta is also enough of a humanist to not blame the spouses, but rather observe how they chafe against the demands of adulthood, as well. (Compare this generous approach to the misogyny of American Beauty, which celebrates Kevin Spacey's character's embrace of his inner adolescent, but doesn't extend the same sympathy to Annette Benning's character, who's pegged as the enforcer of suburban ideology: capitalist work habits, consumerist conspicuous consumption, patriarchal gender roles, and bourgeois propriety.)
Perrotta, like Hornby, is one of those writers I can imagine growing old with. They're a few years older than me, and they seem to be marking out the terrain of adulthood just as I step into it. As I grow older, I can imagine more of their generational cohort taking shape. I think of it this way: when I was a teenager, the contemporary artists who spoke to me the most were musicians in their twenties, looking back on their adolescent frustrations. There weren't many novelists I could respond to as directly, because there weren't many teen or twentysomething novelists, period. In my twenties, I read a lot of autobiographical cartoonists such as Joe Matt and Chester Brown - bohemian peers who had found a forum to describe lives not very dissimilar from my own grad student life. Now, in my thirties, my generational peers are finally starting to write novels. Novels are no longer just about other people; they're about people like me.
Read too much of that stuff, and it can become solipsism; that's the rabbit hole that made Joe College too dopplegangerish to read. But reading a few writers like Perrotta and Hornby is also intensely reassuring and rewarding.
Posted by tedf at 05:50 AM | Comments (0)
Gardening 101
For some reason, out of the blue, this weekend I decided I wanted to plant something. Actually, what happened was a breakthrough: I realized that what I wanted wasn't an entire garden - that had always seemed way too daunting - but just something that looks nice when I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking at the patio through the glass sliding doors. That means I didn't need to even plant stuff in the ground - just get a few "containers," stick them on the patio rail, fill them with soil, and stick some flowers on top. I didn't need to start from scratch with seeds, either - they sell these little starter flowers in six-packs at Pike.
I read through a bunch of books of container gardening at Borders, but I still don't know what I'm doing. My eyes glaze over when they start using the plants' Latin names. But Kate and I got a bunch of stuff planted before it started raining on Sunday, and now everything already looks taller than it was to start with. I'll report back on whether the plants survive my green thumb.
Posted by tedf at 02:54 AM | Comments (1)
March 26, 2005
Contest #2: Pick Tedlog's Logo
OK, it's time to get another contest rolling. Here's the challenge this time: to design the "favicon" for Tedlog. A favicon is the tiny icon that shows up to the left of the URL in an address bar and to the left of the page title in a bookmarks list. IE 5.0 and most other modern browsers support favicons. For now, I've designed a functional red block with a white "T" in the middle, but I'm sure the collective intelligence of Tedlog can do better than that.
I've found a convenient free site for designing a favicon online. You can also just build a 16x16 bitmap image in any Paint program. Email your entry to me at ted@tedfriedman.com, and I'll post all the entries online. Once I've collected the entries, we'll take a vote via Comments for the winner. The winner will receive a copy of Naomi Klein's No Logo.
For a nice selection of favicon examples, check out MpP Favicon Gallery. For more examples of icon design, check out the perfect coffee table book for geeks, Icon Design.
Posted by tedf at 12:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2005
And the Winner of the Pick Ted's Hair Contest Is . . .
Jere, with her description of haircut #7 as "relaxed, friendly, and approachable."
Here's the winning look:
Jere wins a 6-month subscription to thehairstyler.com. Second place goes to Jack the cat, who suggested short hair all over my body, as well as moving my ears to the top of my head.
To catch up on the original contest announcement and all the entries, click here.) And look out soon for Tedlog Contest #2.
Posted by tedf at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)
Minnlow
Minnlow was a beautiful grey Maine Coon with a stunning white stripe down his nose. His parents were champion show cats, and he always retained their regal bearing. Hanging out with Minnlow was like being with a celebrity.
He was also an amazingly stubborn and resourceful kitty. We waged a multi-year battle over access to the outside world. We used a product calls "Cat Fence-In" to secure the back yard by adding netting to the top of the fence, but Minnlow would case the perimeter and always find a weak spot. Sometimes he'd climb up the fence, set up camp at the top, and spend hours clawing at the plastic loops until he made a hole big enough to squeeze through.
Here's Minnlow pestering Moby:
Minnlow passed away two years ago of a heart defect.
Posted by tedf at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
High Culture Jamming
Kottke.org links to an awesome story about a British artist who snuck into four New York galleries and hung his own paintings. The MOMA piece survived for three days, and two of the other ones are still hanging.
This strikes me as a great spin on the whole Duchamp tradition of hanging a urinal on a gallery wall and calling it art. When a famous artist does that, it's really just a celebration of his own authority to declare what counts as art. This is a much more legitimately subversive jesture. I hope one of the museums has the sense of humor - and guts - to keep the piece up, or even buy it.
Stealing gallery space (kottke.org)
Posted by tedf at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
The Bravery's "An Honest Mistake"
Anybody else notice how much this single sounds like Stacey Q's classic "Two of Hearts"? I don't really mind all these new '80s-nostalgia acts. I really like The Killers, in fact - their new video looks like a lost ABC classic. But given what a ubiquitous trend this is, "The Bravery" seems like a particularly disingenuous name. How about "The Craven," or maybe "The Calculated to Appeal to Former WDRE Listeners"?
Posted by tedf at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
Jews in American Popular Culture Lecture on MP3
OK, I'm going to try something else new here: podcasting. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a podcast is an audio blog that can be automatically downloaded, via software such as iPodder, directly into an iTunes playlist, and from there transferred to an iPod.
If you use a podcast aggregator such as iPodder, you should be able to subscribe to all future podcasts by adding this feed: http://www.tedfriedman.com/index.xml.
I'll also provide links to all the audio I post though this blog, of course.
What I've got for you all today is a guest lecture I gave for the Introduction to Jewish Studies class last spring. The class is the core course in GSU's new minor in Jewish Studies. My talk is on "Jews in American Popular Culture."
Update:
Looks like I'm having some trouble with the Movable Type plugin that syndicates the podcast. The link above works fine, but hold off on subscribing through iPodder for now. More info to follow . . .
Posted by tedf at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2005
Hootie Returns
In the last few days, I've been getting more and more hits for this essay on Hootie and the Blowfish I wrote about ten years ago. It's even turned up in a couple of blogs, Dead Parrot Society and The Long 21st Century. That's a healthy change of pace, since the other spot my name has turned up recently is in this blog, in which one of my dopplegangers writes about his heroin addiction. (Still, that's better than the Ted Friedman who always used to turn up in Lexis-Nexis searches - a disbarred lawyer so infamous in certain New York law circles that a certain kind of sleazy activity would be knowingly referred to as "a Ted Friedman kind of thing.")
The reason for the renewed interest in Hootie is clear: those strange Burger King commercials featuring Darius Rucker in western gear. I love Dave LaChappelle, the deleriously over-the-topphotographer/music video director who made the commercial. (He should get to make an SF epic - it could be The Sixth Element. And his video for Xtina's "Dirty" is one of the most gloriously perverse things MTV has ever aired.) But I find this ad really depressing. Rucker looks abashed, humiliated. His singing is almost mournful (although also quite lovely - he still has a beautiful voice). And the racial politics are deeply creepy. Rucker's long been mocked for being a deracinated black man in a white frat band, but I've always admired his willingness to play the kind of music he likes, no matter how whitebread. And I found the old-fashioned sentiments of "Hold My Hand" a sweet throwback to '60s peans to cross-racial brotherhood like "Joy to the World." But here, the commercial seems to be mocking Hoote for how far he's willing to go to humor the white man. He's even singing about fried chicken. I imagine LaChappelle thought the image of a black man as a cowboy would be an empowering reversal of cliches - like that cowboy character Laurence Fishbourne played in Pee Wee's Playhouse (a clear influence on LaChappelle). But something went horribly, horribly wrong between concept and execution.
Update:
Check out today's Boondocks on Hootie.
Posted by tedf at 03:38 AM | Comments (2)
My Current Project: Rethinking Myth
The Pick Ted's Hair contest continues here. In the meantime, I feel I should elevate the tone of this blog a smidge by talking a little about my current research project.
Basically, what I'm trying to do is rethink the idea of popular culture as myth. This is a subject that was explored by some academic writing in the 1970s, but was largely dropped for other, hipper formulations. However, I think it's still a compelling framework, for several reasons:
- Myth may not be a hot topic among film academics, but it's very influential among screenwriters, who take Campbell's The Hero's Journey as a template for storytelling.
- Campbell also has a huge cult among new agers and other spiritual seekers. Myth may be a framework for talking about both ideology and spirituality at the same time.
- While psychoanalytic film theory may seem to be at a dead end, turning from Freud to Jung offers new approaches to thinking about the intersection of culture and subjectivity. Certainly, the universe of Hollywood is populated by archetypes - heroes, shadows, wise men, tricksters. Jung may offer a vocabulary to make sense of these figures, and chart their differences.
- Myth also offers a way to think about participatory fan culture. Hollywood provides the mythos, fans rework the stories, just as the Greek playwrights reworked the familiar stories of their age.
- In a globalized world, the ubiquity of Hollywood stories raises questions about the universality of myth. Campbell argued that what he called "the monomyth" is universal. Jung likewise argued that there's a "collective unconscious" we all share. Does this help explain the worldwide appeal of stories like Star Wars? Certainly, Campbell's and Jung's universalism is unfasionable in anti-essentialist academia right now. Universalism can often mean casual generalization of ethnocentrism. But in a world that needs to imagine a community bigger than the nation, isn't there a place for recognizing the ties that bind us all together? Can't a more subtle, open universalism be a kind of cosmopolitanism?
I taught a class about some of these ideas last fall, Narrative, Myth and Ideology. This fall, I'll be teaching an undergraduate class on some of the same ideas, The Hero's Journey. I'm working on the syllabus for that one right now. I'm also reading up on Jung, who I'm liking even more than I expected to. I recommend Introducing Jung
and Jung: A Very Short Introduction.
So far, I've written one essay as a first hack at some of these ideas: Star Wars and the Dialectics of Myth. If you have a chance, please do check it out and post your comments.
Writing my first book was often a lonely experience. I'm hoping that this time around, I can work out a lot of my ideas here, online.
Posted by tedf at 03:09 AM | Comments (2)
March 20, 2005
Pick Ted's Haircut Contest
OK, I think it's time for the first contest at Tedlog.
I haven't changed my haircut in about 15 years. I wear my hair as long as I can grow it, in a ponytail. Once every year or two, I get the split ends trimmed. Simple, economical, efficient in expressing a leftish alternavibe. But probably never really the most flattering way to frame my face.
So, now that I've got a book coming out and I'm going up for tenure, I've decided it's time to shake things up and create the new Ted. I've already started by growing a beard, which I'm surprisingly happy with:
The next step is the hair. Kate found an amazing site, thehairstyler.com. You can upload a picture, and they'll paste a bunch of different haircuts on it. We sorted through hundreds of options, and came up with these dozen nominees:
(You can click on the above picture for a bigger view.)
The sources of the celebrity hairstyles, by the way, include Christian Bale, Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe (twice), and some guy who used to be on Party of Five.
So, I'm leaving it up to you, the assembled readers of this fledgling blog. Which hair to wear? (You can identify your choice by number. The top row, left to right, is #1-5. The second row is #6-10, the third #11 and 12.)
Oh - I almost forgot. Whoever makes the most compelling case for a specific haircut wins a six-month account with thehairstyler.com, courtesy of me.
Posted by tedf at 02:44 AM | Comments (21)
March 19, 2005
Is Super Mario on Crack?
Here's a great NYT piece on the increasing representation of drugs in video games. In the upcoming remake of Narc, players can take pot, ectasy, crack and LSD. Each drug affects gameplay - some challenges become easier, but you risk addiction if you overdo it.
As the game designers point, out this isn't any different from what Super Mario's alway's done:
"There's always something you can use to enhance or alter the player-character's abilities," Mr. Cline said. "We were the first game to call them pot and coke and crack."
The New York Times > Arts > Music > An Arbiter of Hip-Hop Finds Itself as the Target
Posted by tedf at 07:22 PM | Comments (2)
Moby, Real Up Close and Personal
Here's what I mean about enjoying textures more than identifiable images. This is a patch of Moby's fur.
Posted by tedf at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
Amicalola Falls
Last weekend Kate and I visited these falls just north of Atlanta. I think I actually enjoy photographing visual textures more than identifiable people, places, or things. I don't even mind when stuff's a little out of focus. As least, that's what I tell myself.
Posted by tedf at 12:09 AM | Comments (2)
The Dude Up Close and Personal
The Dude has taken over the couch Mo used to sleep on. He gets very relaxed when he's hanging out with us while we watch TV. He doesn't like giving up his spot when we have company over, though - we had to leave room for him on the couch the other night while we all played the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition. He didn't do too well, though - he's more of a jazzbo.
Posted by tedf at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2005
Moby Maxing and Relaxing
Here's Moby, the kitty I didn't get to last week. She's 8 years old, and has been a little cranky about the introduction of The Dude. She's also having some problems with her back legs - a combination of arthritis, bursitis, and hip dysplasia caused by too many hard landings over the years. But she's doing better for now with anti-inflammatories and MSM supplements, so she may be able to get by without surgery.
Moby is the floppiest cat I've ever met. When you pick her up, she's like a big sack of guts. When she sleeps with us, she'll contort herself to get as close to our heads as possible - sometimes I'll wake up and realize what I thought was a pillow was really Moby.
Posted by tedf at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
Jonathan Sterne on "Torture Chic"
A former editor of Bad Subjects, the great leftist pop culture zine, has just begun serving a prison sentence for protesting in front of the School of the Americas. Co-editor Jonathan Sterne writes about the distressingly casual acceptance of torture in American TV in this thoughtful editorial:
Posted by tedf at 01:24 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2005
Buffy's Joss Wheedon to Helm Wonder Woman Movie!
This is great news for fans of both Buffy and WW. I can't think of a better choice.
Posted by tedf at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)
Tour of the Pixar Workspace
Moriarty points out that we're living in a golden age of animation today. People will look back at this current Pixar run as one of the great moments in film history. These photos give a sense of how Pixar keeps its corporate culture fresh and creative. (Via Boing Boing).
Posted by tedf at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2005
Beatallica Back Online
Lars Ulrich seems to have learned the PR damage of quashing free expression . . .
Boing Boing: Xeni on NPR: Beatallica back, thanks to Lars Ulrich, fair use crusader.
Posted by tedf at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
This Could Be Great, But I'm Wary . . .
Yahoo! News - 'The Lord of the Rings' Coming to Stage
Posted by tedf at 03:36 PM
African-American Actors Supporting African Film
Yahoo! News - African-Americans Offer Hope to African Film
Posted by tedf at 03:34 PM | Comments (1)
Joining the Rockcrit Guild
Here's a nice entry from my friend Chris Molanphy on the mixed pleasures of joining the illustrious world of Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll voters:
molanphy: HIPPY-HOPPY, PAZZY-JOPPY: MY TOP RECORDS OF 2004
For more incestuous rockcrit, check out this really great piece Chris wrote a while back about the brilliance of Rob Sheffield, the principal author of the new version of the Rolling Stone Record Guide.
Posted by tedf at 02:29 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Bill James Rethinks Clutch Hitting
This is big news: apparently, the great baseball analyst Bill James has an article in the latest issue of Baseball Research Journal in which he suggests many of his most controversial and influential claims - that there's no such thing as clutch hitting, for example - may have been unfounded.
According to the Society for Baseball Research website,
>>>"In his article, “Underestimating the Fog,” Bill James suggests in BRJ #33 that a wide range of conclusions in sabermetrics may be unfounded, due to the reliance, as he puts it, “on a commonly accepted method which seems, intuitively, that it ought to work, but which in practice may not actually work at all.” Does clutch hitting exist? Do catchers have an impact on a pitcher’s ERA? Bill James tackles these difficult questions and more in classic sabermetric fashion."<<<
Salon's King Kaufman elaborates:
>>>"The titular "Fog" comes from the metaphor James uses: "In a sense it is like this: A sentry is looking through a fog, trying to see if there is an invading army out there, somewhere through the fog. He looks for a long time, and he can't see any invaders, so he goes and gets a really, really bright light to shine into the fog. Still doesn't see anything."
The sentry, James writes, reports back that the coast is clear, "but the problem is, he has underestimated the density of the fog." That's where baseball is with the clutch hitting question, and several others he discusses, such as whether there is such a thing as a pitcher's ability to win games, distinct from his ability to prevent runs.
"We're trying to see if there's an army out there, and we have confident reports that the coast is clear -- but we may have underestimated the density of the fog," he writes. "The randomness of the data is the fog."<<<<
This is part of an lengthy evolution for James, as he's moved from the pure number-crunching of his early analysis to a more interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical research and other kinds of evidence. I think part of his self-imposed backlash stems from seeing what his work has led to: yes, the statistical savvy of "Moneyball" teams like Oakland and Boston, but also the stathead armchair arrogance of websites like Baseball Prospectus, whose relentless attack on conventional baseball wisdom has become its own kind of orthodoxy. The 2005 volume of BP's yearbook, the closest thing we have today to the Baseball Abstracts of old, has plenty of intelligent stuff, but it's marred by the smug prose of writers desperate to prove they're smarter than all those old jocks who run most teams. They're probably mostly right, but they still overstate their case, dismissing anything that doesn't show up in the stats. It's not just that, as is said about economists, they know the price of everything but the value of nothing. It's also that they don't know quite as much about prices as they think they do.
My own thinking about clutch hitting is that clutch hitting per se doesn't exist, but choking does. Put it this way: I can't see why a player with a given skill set could suddenly perform beyond that skill set under certain conditions. If he could, why wouldn't he always play that well? Wouldn't that imply that great clutch hitters are just slacking the rest of the time, playing at less than 100%?
Rather, I think most players play to the best of their ability most of the time. However, there are certain high-pressure situations that stress out even seasoned pros. Professional sports players are used to encountering incredibly high-adrenaline, pressure-packed situations. Every night, they're performing live in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. But even they occasionally hit a new level of intensity that can shake them up. You can see it at the beginning of a Super Bowl, for example - teams almost always come out tight, making extra mistakes before settling down. And occasionally you'll see entire teams come unravelled - like the Yankees against the Red Sox in the playoffs last year.
So, a clutch player isn't somebody who plays beyond his/her skills in certain situations. Rather, it's somebody who retains all those skills in the face of intense pressure. If many of the other players around that player are "choking" to various degrees, however, the clutch player will stand out. If Reggie Jackson's playing at 100% in October, but the Dodger pitchers are only at 80%, Reggie's doing to look like Mr. October. The fluctuations of small sample sizes will take care of the rest. (Reggie's so-called clutch skills didn't help the Yankees much when they lost in 1981.)
I just ordered the Baseball Research Journal issue with the Bill James article from the University of Nebraska Press website. I'll report back when I have a chance to read the whole article.
Posted by tedf at 12:56 AM | Comments (1)
March 12, 2005
Illo Watch
My friend Andrea has started a great blog on a subject I never would have thought could generate so much smart commentary: the daily New York Times editorial page illustration. Andrea's analysis combines Edward Tufte's focus on informational clarity with a long-time comix fan's appreciation for the aesthetics of line drawing. And I don't know where she learned so much about the history of illustration - it's one of those weird subjects that doesn't just fall through the cracks (the way comics do) but falls through the cracks between the cracks (between, say, political cartoons and graphic design). If anyone's going to write "Understanding Illos" - a version of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" for this vital little field - it'll be Andrea.
Here's her take on one of the more provocative recent NYT illos:
Illo Watch: "A Force for Good," 3/3/05
Posted by tedf at 02:29 AM | Comments (1)
March 11, 2005
Mo, Part II
Now I'm worried that that last photo didn't do Mo complete justice. One thing he loved was shoulder rides - if you picked him up, he's clamber on to your shoulder for a better view, then expect a guided tour.
Posted by tedf at 06:21 PM | Comments (1)
Morannon
OK, just one more kitty photo. This is our late, beloved Mo, caught in the act. Mo showed up at our doorstep 2 1/2 years ago wearing a tag that said "Morannon. I pee the house." How can you turn down a kitty named after the gates of Mordor? We found his owner - a vet tech who'd adopted him - and returned him, but he kept on wandering back to us, following the railroad tracks that lead from their neighborhood to ours. Eventually, we all agreed he was our kitty now. We had a couple of great years with him, but he was already 12 or so when we met him, and in January he passed on. We all still miss him very much.
Posted by tedf at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)
The Dude, Part 2
Whoops - that pan & scan effect on the first photo of The Dude wasn't intentional, though perhaps appropriate. Here's a better close-up.
Posted by tedf at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
The Dude
OK, time to try my hand at another blogging tradition: Friday catblogging. Here's our new kitty, The Dude. He's about 2 years old, adopted from the great Atlanta rescue organization Furkids. The idea is for him to stick to our fenced-in backyard - at 17 pounds, we didn't expect he'd do a lot of jumping. But he didn't get that memo, and we keep finding him lolling in our front bushes.
Posted by tedf at 05:49 PM | Comments (2)
March 09, 2005
Electric Dreams on Amazon!
Check it out! I'm famous!
The book won't actually come out until the fall, which is why it's "not currently available." Man - if I'm already checking out the Amazon page now, just think how often I'll be neurotically clicking on this link once it has a sales rank number.
Amazon.com: Books: Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture
Posted by tedf at 12:56 AM | Comments (1)
March 08, 2005
The Aviator
I finally got around to The Aviator today, as my spring break movie binge continues. I'd been avoiding it because it had all the signs of Oscar bait: whitewashed biopic, hero with a psychological disability, movie about movies, bloated running time. It is all those things, but I'd forgotten how much fun watching a Scorcese movie always is, no matter what the putative storyline. Nobody moves the camera like Scorcese, and every scene flows into the next with effortless grace. The first 2/3 of the movie is a real treat, as Marty avoids worrying too much about the character arc and just lets us enjoy one spectacular scene after another: Hughes filming dozens of planes from the cockpit of another in Hells Angels; Hughes and Jean Harlow at glamorous premieres; Hughes and Kate Hepburn flying over LA.
Sadly, since this is still Oscar bait, we eventually have to get around to the triumph of the human spirit, and so what sounds like a pedestrian business squabble between Hughes's TWA and Pan Am gets turned into a climactic Senate hearings showdown between Howard and a corrupt senator manipulated by Pan Am, played with real glee by Alan Alda. The movie asks us to see Hughes as the fiesty underdog taking on Alec Baldwin's evil Pan Am monopolist, but it really just looks like a pissing match between two moguls, one of whom we happen to feel a little sorry for because we've been watching his life story for two hours and we know he's on the verge of succumbing to his demons. The film implies that if Hughes hadn't taken on Pan Am, the latter would have sat on its monopoly on international air flight, and the skies might never have been opened to transcontinental jet flight. But I didn't get any sense that if the situation had been reversed, Hughes would have been any less brutal in trying to quash his own competition. And while monopolies are certainly bad things (see Microsoft), deregulation can be even worse (see the present state of the airline industry).
You'd think the climactic political battle would have a bit of contemporary resonance - not only because of the Microsoft parallels and the state of airlines today, but also because the corporate purchase of political influence hasn't exactly died down in the 58 years since the film is set. But the movie's so desperate to bring us to a rousing close that there's no room for those kinds of parallels to emerge. Instead, Hughes turns the tables, grills the senator, then storms off, to the very unlikely applause of the assembled audience. The History Channel is running a "History vs. Hollywood" episode on Hughes that I'll have to check out - I'd be very surprised if the actual hearings so closely followed the plot of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The representation of Hughes's OCD is basically well-handled, but not revelatory - he washes his hands a lot, starts involuntarily repeating words, and ends up collecting his urine in milk jars. The roots are laid at the hands of childhood trauma (a cholera epidemic in Houston as he was growing up) and a semi-eroticized fixation on the memory of his mother bathing him. The film pounds this message home with too many script callbacks and a final visual flashback to the opening bathing scene. This pat Freudianism is unlikely to overcome the contemporary audience's historical condescension; watching the movie, you can't help but think, "if only he had Prozac . . ."
The most interesting part of Hughes as a character is the confluence of his risk-taking and neurosis - compartmentalizing all his anxiety in his hygeine seemed to be part of what allowed him to risk his money and his life on a series of crazy schemes, from the most expensive movie ever made (Hell's Angels) to a series of radical airplance designs.
This drama, in the end, is clearly Scorcese's real connection with the material. Like Apocalypse Now and so many other overblown auteur labors of love, this is a drama about the creator-as-megalomaniac-as-genius. The funny thing is, Scorcese himself breaks so few rules in making it. (The whole film runs like a watered-down version of Good Fellas, which itself was a kind of glossy reworking of Mean Streets.) Scorcese seems to have tamed his inner Hughes, and learned how to work within the system. Maybe now that Oscar's given him yet another brush-off, he'll say screw it and make some truly crazed films. That would be a real happy ending.
Posted by tedf at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2005
Travellers and Magicians
I just saw Travellers and Magicians, which is apparently the first fiction film ever made in the Kingdom of Bhutan. I was particularly curious about the film because its director is apparently also a Buddhist monk, and the film's been promoted for its Buddhist sensibility, as was Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring Again, the South Korean drama released last year. As somebody very interested in Buddhism - at least the Americanized variations taught by Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, Shinzen Young, and others - I was both intrigued and frustrated by both films. This film's structure is pretty standard world cinema fare. A young man in a rustic small town wants to escape to see the world - in this case, specifically to move to the US. Over the course of the film, he learns to appreciate the beauty, slow pace, and community of his life at home, and abandons his plans to emigrate. I always worry that movies like this have less to do with authentic expression than with playing to international audiences' stereotypes and vanity. The American viewer is made to feel both smug and envious. On the one hand, we think, of course our hero wants to move here - doesn't everybody? On the other hand, we wonder, "how could he possibly want to leave the stunning Bhutan countryside, the leisurely pace of life, the rich sense of belonging?"
But as with Bride and Prejudice, the movie involves a performative contradiction. While it preaches staying down on the farm, it only exists because its director discovered the bright lights of the big cities - Sidney (where it was edited), Cannes, and the rest of the stops on the international film circuit. And of course, we Americans can only enjoy the film because we lead lives cosmopolitan enough to catch films from Bhutan at the local artplex. If I embraced the equivalent "simple life" - living without a TV in Vermont, say - I'd never be exposed to a film like this. So can't I feel a little bad for our protagonist, who wears an "I Love NY" t-shirt, but learns to accept the limited horizons of his hometown and never see the Big Apple?
The best thing in this movie is the Buddhist monk who bonds with our hero as he hitchhikes to the capital, from whence he plans to head out for the states. The monk tells a story which becomes a film-within-the-film about another restless young man who learns the value of settling down, and that part is a little too didactic. But the monk character himself is wonderful - calm, twinkling, always generous without ever being a sap. It's the vibe I feel in people like him that makes me so impressed by Buddhism. Growing up Jewish, I always found my rabbis pompous and distant - why would I want to grow up to be like them? I've similarly never been impressed by the presence of most other religious leaders I've seen - whether TV preachers, nuns, or the pope. But Buddhists like the Dalai Lama, Pema Chodron, and this character radiate a wonderful sense of wisdom and peace. (It's not just Buddhists who can find this peace, of course - I saw Desmond Tutu on the Daily Show last year, and he just blew me away with his palpable sense of joy and compassion.) Anyway, that's what spiritual wisdom ought to look like, I think. Maybe it's easier to acheive isolated in the Himalayas than info-overloaded in the Atlanta exurbs. (The monk warns at one point, "avoid the city. It's depressing.") But maybe there is a middle ground. How about a cabin out in the country, but with a DSL line and a Netflix account?
Posted by tedf at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2005
A Different Kind of Cat Food . . .
Posted by tedf at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)
Bride and Prejudice
OK, I'm going to try a new feature at Tedlog: brief movie reviews. I just saw Bride and Prejudice, the new crossover Bollywood musical by the director of Bend It Like Beckham. It's not as perfect as the last film, but it's a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of Bollywood in theory, but I still haven't seen too many of the movies. I love musicals, and I love the idea of an alternate filmgoing universe in which audiences have no problem with characters who periodically break into song. Hollywood today is so embarassed by musicals, it feels compelled to cloak them in the trappings of "realism." So the musical breaks in Chicago, for example, have to be explicitly framed as "fantasy" numbers. It really bums me out that most of my students find classic musicals almost unwatchable. They just can't suspend disbelief when characters they're supposed to care about stop everything to sing, then go back to the story like nothing strange just happened. At the same time, of course, we think nothing of it when a modern action movie pauses every ten minutes for the equivalent moment of nonnarrative spectacle - a chase, explosion, or shootout, known by some screenwriters as the "action beat" or "whammy."
So, I'm really thrilled to see the Bollywood sensibility spill over to movies like Moulin Rouge. And I'm psyched to see Bollywood itself build more of a US cult. That cult has its roots in the "desi" community of the Indian diaspora, of course, but hopefully it's starting to spread to hipsters of all ethnic backgrounds. I wouldn't be surprised to see Bollywood become the next version of Hong Kong action movies, anime, and Japanese horror - an import that grows an influential American cult, slowly seeping into the American mainstream via emigres, appropriation, and crossover hits. I'm not sure if romance movies so old-fashioned they don't even allow kissing will ever get to be as cool as Chow Yun Fat diving to the ground while shooting with two guns at once. But wouldn't it be cool if they were?
As for the movie at hand, Bride and Prejudice certainly wasn't as much of a knockout as what I take to be the Bollywood gold standard, Lagaan. (Although for all I know, cognezenti find it overrated, and there are 50 much better movies I just haven't seen yet.) But it's got charm, energy, and fun to spare. It probably helped that I don't know the plot's source material, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, any better than I know Bollywood. Both sides of the hybrid were equally exotic to me. (I only knew Darcy was supposed to be the catch because of the references to the character in Briget Jones's Diary.)
The director has said she liked the idea of transplanting Austen to India because of some of the parallels she found between the two societies - arranged marriages, closely knit families, long-time traditions and hierarchies being challenged by modernity. That all works smoothly, although I didn't find the juxtaposition as productive as, say, Emma becoming Clueless.
The film tried to make some political points about feminism and cultural imperialism. But compared to Bend It Like Beckham, which explored the impact of assimilation on the second generation so elegantly - celebrating the kids' new independence while remaining sympathetic to the parents' goals to retain the important parts of the old culture - the issues are raised much more bluntly here. The romantic leads have several arguments about cultural imperialism that seem way too on-the-nose, and are left surprisingly unresolved. (He, the American scion of a hotel dynasty - Darcy as Paris Hilton? - wants to buy a hotel in Goa and turn it into a five-star resort, so visitors can see India without getting their shoes dirty. She, a proud native of India, tells him that he just wants to turn India into a giant Disneyland - India without the Indians. He retorts that it's useful economic investment. She asks, but who gets the money? The question is dropped, but later we learn that his family has failed to buy the hotel, on his recommendation - she changed his mind. What's weird is that no alternative is broached. Couldn't they imagine a more equitable investment strategy, rather than no investment at all? Couldn't he come up with a structure ensuring local control, a democratic workplace, and culturally sensitive interaction with the community? Wouldn't that be better than punting altogether? It's a weird moral for a film that elsewhere celebrates hybridity so enthusiastically.)
Other weird aspects of the film's politics appear to be holdovers from Austen. Early on, it seems to our heroine that Darcy, the rich guy, is a jerk, while another character, the son of Darcy's nanny, is the real mensch. Later, it turns out that she judged them too quickly. The moral seems to be that just because you're poor it doesn't mean you can't be a cad, and just because you're rich it doesn't mean you can't be a great guy. Which is true enough, but not really the most hard-hitting stance one could take in a film which implicitly addresses the global inequalities between north and south.
Likewise, several dark-skinned servant characters are seen only briefly in the movie, never granted any subjectivity, and even used for brief laughs at their own expense. Again, I'm sure Austen didn't do any better on that score, but it made me long for the democratic vision of a film like Gosford Park, where everybody on screen counts.
If this isn't a perfect movie, it's still a pretty great one. How can you not like a movie with a love song on the beach featuring singing lifeguards, surfers, and a gospel choir? (Come to think of it, From Justin to Kelly probably had a scene like that too. Maybe I should go ahead and rent it . . . ) Another song blends effortlessly from mariachi music to bhangra to Hollywood shlock. If the film doesn't always work through its egalitarian impulses, its heart is definitely in the right place.
Tentative DTMTBD rating: 2 - Much better than Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's dead. (For more on the DTMTBD rating system, click here.)
Posted by tedf at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2005
The Digitization of Third Cinema
This Reuters story marks a really important development. Just as digital filmmaking has the potential to level the playing field between Hollywood and US independents (cf The Blair Witch Project, Super Size Me, etc.), it also could help democratize global media.
Yahoo! News - African Films Go Digital to Buck System
Posted by tedf at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2005
Sony Shuts Down Beatles/Metallica Parody Band
This would seem to be just the kind of stuff the Supreme Court ruled fair use in the 2 Live Crew/”Pretty Woman” decision. But how much good is it to have the law on your side when the other side has all the lawyers?
Yahoo! News - Parody Band Forced Offline by Sony Publishers
It’s pretty easy to find Beatallica MP3s still online. Here’s one link.
Posted by tedf at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)
Great Story on a Dead Corporate Art Form
Yahoo! News - Industrial Musicals Offer Odes to Tractors, Toilets
Posted by tedf at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
Raindrop
Posted by tedf at 02:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2005
TCM Series on the History of Product Placement
Posted by tedf at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)
Superfriends/Office Space mashup
Courtesy of JS van Buskirk:
This video-mash of footage from Superfriends cartoons combined with the audio track from Office Space is stupendous. It’s not just that the creator managed to get the lips to sink up really well, but there’s also the hilarious choice of clips and shots, and the judicious use of original Superfriends sound effects. This thing is about the funnies thing I’ve seen all week. Month.
Posted by tedf at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)
"Bush in 30 Years"
In the spirit of “Bush in 30 Seconds,” the 2004 contest to create an anti-Bush election ad, Moveon.org is now sponsoring “Bush in 30 Years.” The idea is to create an online ad in Flash on the problems with the Bush Social Security plan. More details here:
Posted by tedf at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2005
Open for Business!
OK, this website is now fully operational and open for business! In addition to this blog, the site has archives of my writing, syllabi, multimedia projects, and other assorted stuff. Just about every page is enables with Comments. I’ll be using the blog itself both to post interesting media news items and to expound on topics relating to politics and pop culture.
Posted by tedf at 03:39 AM | Comments (3)