Victory Has Defeated The Simpsons

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(Programming note -- my goal is to post at least once a week at the beginning of the week, and so far this year, my track record hasn't been horrible.  Recently, I've been devoting a lot of my non-work-hours to planning a move from New York to Seattle, and this blog has suffered as a result.  I can't promise anything, but tune in on Mondays and I'll do my best to stick to a weekly schedule.)

I had a near perfect New York weekend a few weeks back, starting with a Louis CK benefit show for PS3 Elementary on Friday (minus the fifteen minutes he had to spend lecturing rambunctious PS3 teachers to stop heckling him), the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts at the best cinema house in all the five boroughs -- the Nitehawk -- on Saturday, and unstoppable party machine FM Belfast at The Studio at Webster Hall on Sunday.  It was an embarrassment of riches and left me with far more to contemplate than I had time to write about ... the fine art of heckler confrontation, the spinelessness of the Academy awarding the Oscar to the flavorless Pepsi-commercial that was Paperman instead of Adam And Dog, the challenge of convincing friends to take a chance on a new band they haven't heard before ...

Instead of all that, the winner this week is The Simpsons, and specifically the question that stuck with me now weeks later (now that my schedule has opened up enough to type this post out): Why can't they make a modern-day TV episode of The Simpsons as simple and clever as "The Longest Daycare"? Maybe they were angling for the Oscar and, thus, needed to release the short in theaters to qualify. Maybe they were brushing up their animation chops as a trial run for the next Simpsons Movie (which is apparently not going to happen any time soon)? Or maybe it was just too experimental -- a dialogue-free segment without B- and C-plots or celebrity stunt casting to keep things "zany." But ... why does it have to be zany? If I'm right, if it's the latter explanation, then I'd like to spend a minute lamenting this staple of my childhood before casting it off the iceberg of Great TV Shows That Were.

"And the Oscar for Best PRACTICAL Effects Goes To ..."

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We're hours away from the pinnacle of the 2012 Awards Season, and I'll make no bones about being excited -- perpetually, inextricably -- by the Academy Awards.  It's the Super Bowl with sequined dresses, a monster truck rally with orchestral interludes.  It's every good reason to scream at the TV with friends over arbitrary and meaningless decisions.  Like a NASCAR race, I'm half in it for the crashes, like (well) seeing Crash expose the cowardliness and self-satisfaction of the Academy voters who favored that tripe over Brokeback Mountain and Munich (let alone the not-even-nominated A History of Violence).

I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the Oscar contenders this time around, other than a suspicion that Argo will emerge as this year's "safe" choice (by engaging Middle Eastern politics and terrorism without all the baggage of Zero Dark Thirty) -- that is, unless Silver Linings Playbook takes the cake in the same lighthearted spirit that gave the Oscar to Shakespeare in Love over The Thin Red Line and other headier historical dramas.  I do have more to say about whether awards shows such as this, and indeed the entire critical establishment we still rely upon to single out "quality" artworks amongst the rabble, still play a useful role in the era of internet anarchy, where anyone with an internet connection can bypass the cultural gatekeepers of the Analog Age to find an audience.  For the time being, however, I have something far more modest in mind.

No Need To Be Gun Shy on Video Game Violence

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"I think real violence on film is completely acceptable and should be seen. ... When you don't show the consequences it makes it seem like it's okay. I think video games and that stuff should be as violent as possible, but age-appropriate. It should be realistic."- Darren Aronofsky (2009)

 “Apple is treating games as shallow commercial entertainment experiences because they have been taught by game developers that that is what games are.” - Braid developer Jonathan Blow regarding Apple's App censorship policy (2013)

Last week, the Senate took the next tentative, lumbering step towards responding meaningfully to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting by hearing testimony from a wide spectrum of gun control advocates and opponents.  While our government is designed to operate with the response time of the Titanic in iceberg-laden waters, this time around it seems that Congress may actually respond in a meaningful way to gun violence in America, and the momentum has put gun control opponents on the spot in a way they haven't been in possibly decades.

A recurring tactic amongst these opponents is to point a wagging finger at video game violence, starting with the earliest comments of Wayne LaPierre (Executive VP of NRA and presently their most prominent spokesperson) following the massacre and culminating in the recent comments of Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, who said last week that he thinks "video games [are] a bigger problem than guns" (emphasis added).  Unfortunately, such comments do a significant disservice not only to the real and pressing issue of gun control, but also to the substantive, important conversation we ought to be having about the influence of media and entertainment on our culture -- as well as our propensity to miss opportunities again and again to harness that power constructively.

The "Eye of the Beholder" is Just the Beginning

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(Yes, this post is about Modern Family ... sort of.  Just go with me here for a minute first.)

I'm an addict for cultural criticism. When I walk out of a movie -- particularly one that I felt strongly about (whether positively or negatively so) -- the first thing I do is pull up Rotten Tomatoes to scan through the reviews, particularly by critics who had an opposite reaction to the film than I did.  In the case of any TV show I watch regularly, I'll almost immediately look at A.V. Club's TV Club recaps to see their reaction.  When I stumble upon a new critic who captures my attention, I find myself obsessing over digging through their back catalog to see how they felt about my most (or least) favorite movies, or albums, or whatever.

"Someday my Prince will come ..." - A Cockamamie Theory About Zero Dark Thirty

Since writing my last post about talking about Zero Dark Thirty, I finally saw the film in question and found myself agreeing with a lot that I'd read before about what the movie has to say about torture -- even the comments that contradicted each other.  But I'm not going to delve into that here, given that others have said better and with more authority anything that I could add to the discussion.  (Those looking for more on the torture debate can go here, here, here, here, here, or here.)

I also found myself agreeing with those who found the main character, Maya, too oblique a character to establish any strong connection with the audience.  That is, until I had a thought about two-thirds of the way through the film that led me to put together one crazy, cockamamie theory about this movie, which I will explain below ....

SPOILER ALERT!

"We're going to need a script" - Politiczing Film, Filming Politics

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"This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today."

"The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright." - Birth of a Nation (1915)

"We're going to need a script." - Argo (2012)

For the spoiler-averse, this week I'm discussing the intersection of art and politics, citing in this discussion Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, as well as a number of tangentially related films that are probably "spoiler"-proof (like Triumph of the Will and Battleship Potemkin).  That said, with the exception of Argo, the article does not delve much into "spoiler" territory.  (In fact, Argo is the only film discussed at length here that I've seen as of this writing.  UPDATE -- I caught Zero Dark Thirty yesterday, and I wrote a little more about my thoughts on that movie here.)

I like to think that it's entirely possible for us as the audience to separate our personal politics from how we engage art.  That's not to say that I think we can (or should) put on political blinders when we pick up a book, sit down at a theater or enter a gallery.  Art invariably expresses some point of view, and that point of view almost always has a political dimension - particularly, in any event, when it comes to art worth discussing.  Yet, it should not prevent us from praising good art to recognize simultaneously that we may disagree with that point of view or even find ourselves disgusted by the message that the art conveys.

Or at least that's what I like to think.

The Golden Age of Deconstruction

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"Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bear the purely abstract?" - Vasily Kandinsky (1911)

"All electronic music is sampled. The synthesizers are all coming from some source." - Gregg Gillis (2012)

This week, I'll be discussing the following (none of which really lend themselves to "spoilers" by their nature, but be forewarned all the same):

•  The Clock, a 24 film directed and edited by Christian Marclay and showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 21, 2013;
• Girl Walk // All Day, which can be seen online in chapter installments; and
• Holy Motors, which is currently in limited release nation-wide.

As always here, what follows is less a review than a ramble, in this case inspired by what I think is a Golden Age of contemporary culture that is catching up with the deep and wide potential of the Remix.  This may be the Golden Age of Deconstruction, by which I mean that we are seeing the first generation that grew up with unlimited access to recorded video and music learn to take apart and reassemble those clips with abandon until their core essence has risen to the surface.