Stardate 01092004
Cynicism is for people who can’t afford Prozac
Throwing darts at pictures of doe-eyed waifs can be quite cathartic. Informing the innocent of the non-existence of Santa Claus has it’s own special rewards, as Miramax has discovered with BAD SANTA.
It was another special, confused, non-specific in public, “hap-happiest time of the year.” The cable networks trotted out all the REMAKES of our “beloved holiday classics.” I think I watched some new version of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE that featured divorce and other assorted middle class suburban angst.
I didn’t once accidentally channel surf to MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET and I watched two versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL and neither of them was the one from 1938 that I actually like. I think if Patrick Stewart wanted to play a better Scrooge, he should have pretended like he was playing Richard III. The special effects were kinda goofy, too. SCROOGED and MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL are the only interpretive versions I can stand to watch. The book itself is a scant 120 pages. I spent a lot of time with the FOOD NETWORK learning all about how to glaze ham, make a juicy turkey, have the perfect decorations, and the multivarious quaint holiday food traditions in America.
I love watching MARTHA STEWART IN THE KITCHEN. She does everything perfectly. Lately she’s been letting little things slide. I guess she realized that she set the bar in orbit and mere mortals would never be able to accomplish what she does with such precision and style. That is good for Martha, but terrible for all of us wannabe’s. She no longer glares at her visiting chefs and instead playfully says, “Oh well, an overdone cardboard fish is better than a stick in the eye.” And then she winks at the camera.
And there was news, news and more news. I hate the cable news channels but I’m obsessed with them. The news is really more about emotional manipulation than information, and THAT is the secret to good TV. So I watch the cable news channels because it’s good TV that people confuse as a perspective on “reality.” Fox News is ludicrously conservative. Like, you have presumably intelligent people making ridiculously thoughtless, absurdly one-sided statements that are intended to just push buttons and raise the emotional ire of “liberals.”
Classes will be held under the bridge by the river’s edge.
There was a very short time when I taught Media Studies in a high school. I designed the curriculum to focus on the evolution of media from the alphabet to the Internet and the inter-relationship of media, information, education and politics, culture and the economy. It was a very ambitious project to undertake with secondary students but at the time I thought it was very important to equip students with a critical framework to navigate an increasingly complex information geography in an increasingly complex information economy.
And also, I wanted to help them get past the emotional manipulation and rely on research and debate to gauge the importance, completeness or truthfulness of the messages coming through commercial media, be it about news, entertainment or commerce.
It was a sophisticated class intended to bring about a more sophisticated conversation about the influence and use of media in a culture of consumption. Naturally, a class that was intended to turn young people into critical, thoughtful, autonomous, energized individuals wouldn’t last and I soon abandoned public education.
In the process of watching lots of television as a masochistic act of research, I found a few things that were actually entertaining. I don’t get off on what I’m seeing, I get off on what I’m thinking about what I’m seeing. All those bits of experience get filtered through a critical framework and comes out the other end as “opinion” and “commentary” about these cultural products that are a cornerstone of the economy. There’s a lot of money in media, in case you didn’t know.
So naturally, I headed towards Hollywood to stare right down into the belly of it all and somehow ended up writing all about it for MoviePoopShoot.com.
The subtext of this column all along has been a desire to turn mindless entertainment into mindful engagement with our culture. There is value in making stuff that isn’t meant to be deep just as there is value in approaching those things through a critical framework where a conversation can develop about the meaning or importance of passive viewing.
Ad Absurdum or Smart Stupidity
MONTY PYTHON is a great example of intelligent absurdity, as is SOUTH PARK and THE SIMPSONS. Satire is not just social criticism, it has it’s own entertainment value. Writing this column has been a process of trying to discover what, in the public imagination, I care about. MoviePoopShoot.com is supposed to be about pop-culture but I’ve avoided as much as possible simply rehashing what everyone is talking about. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about ratings and I only have to produce two of these things a month. I don’t HAVE to milk a Michael Jackson story for MONTHS AND MONTHS simply because I have to fill 300 minutes a week.
TV, fat and sugar when combined, produce zombies. Zombie’s eat brains because that is the part of their body they have the least need for. I bet the frontal lobe is especially tasty as that is the part of the human brain that accounts for our imagination and language capacity, as opposed to the bitter hypothalamus, the reptilian brain, concerned with survival and instinct. We create culture from our frontal lobe. And then we created the frontal lobotomy. Which produces zombies. MUST … DESTROY… FRONTAL … LOBE.
See how much we fight ourselves and work against our best interest? There is a lot of fear stored in the hypothalamus, especially fear of the unknown so we approach the unknown with a lot of caution, trepidation and sometimes, outright hostility.
When we get past all that fear, maybe we can move more fully into the frontal lobe and from there into the scariest place of all, the heart. Personally, I’m looking forward to us humans being more telepathic and creating from love, rather than fear.
And that brings me right to the threshold of 2004. I now don’t know when I’ll be back in Los Angeles and I’m not sure that is going to affect what kind of content I bring to you every couple of weeks. And until I replace my camera, I’ll have to rely on either wire services to bring you photos you can just see on E! ONLINE or do without. I don’t like to use the wire services because the whole idea of this column is to be as first-person as possible.
Precious … bring me precious
I had an extraordinary year in terms of the up-front-and-personal coverage of Hollywood. The MoviePoopShoot crack team have really worked hard to build a media venture that has a modicum of legitimacy in the pop sphere and I was glad to spend another year helping make it happen and adding to the collective velocity of the site. Maybe I’m even a better person because of it.
I went to a number of industry conferences, attended Disney premieres (which changed my whole opinion about the Disney company in terms of their overall marketing concerns) and met a great many notable creatives working in Hollywood. I learned a lot about the business behind the business, worked on a film set, and spent some time in a few television studios visiting tapings of SHARON OSBOURNE, THE TONIGHT SHOW and GROUNDED FOR LIFE 'cuz I just dig Donal Logue.
And I got to do it all while overlooking the ocean in Malibu. I’ll never understand how THAT happened.
We can rebuild him
But easy come, easy go and the first few days of 2004 are full of uncertainty and re-invention. I just now got my computer running again after some slight flood damage and slowly I’ll have to rebuild what infrastructure I had to write the stories I’ve been writing. I have to replace some equipment, but first I need to generate an income. I have to look for a desk job, which is a daunting task, as I have the most disparate work experience imaginable and the job market is tighter than Scrooge’s fist on Christmas Eve. Target Corporation is looking for copywriters for their marketing department. Who knows, you may end up reading my work without even knowing it’s me. “Shop and Save!” I think it could be nominated for a Pulitzer.
The only problem with 9-5 in San Francisco is that most film screenings are during the day. Whereas in Los Angeles, they are all in the evening. I shake a fist in the air.
Arthur Miller proved once and for all with DEATH OF A SALESMEN that Aristotle, in his POETICS, was erroneous in assuming that tragedy and drama can only be milked from personages of high estate, like royalty and the aristocracy. Aristotle felt that the triumphs and tragedies of these people were experienced more poignantly because their personal lives affect whole populations. The death of Willy Loman may not have been the end of an empire, but his shared life was tense enough drama for those closest to him.
The Most Random Thing To Happen in 2003
My friend Gigi Fierro, the photographer/graphic designer I wrote about in the last ABOUT TOWN, invited me to Katrina Rey’s house for Christmas Eve dinner. Katrina is a jewelry designer from New York and all-around artisan who started a non-profit store to benefit AIDS charities called Positive Living. She also continues to make pretty little things and works also as a visual merchandiser. Gigi got the date wrong. It was actually Christmas dinner and I had plans so I didn’t go.
Through the weird machinery of the universe, Gigi ends up sitting next to MoviePoopShoot’s own Jeffrey Wells at dinner. Jeffrey lives in Los Angeles. Katrina lives in San Rafael which is in Northern California. It turns out Katrina is friends with Well’s ex-wife.
Holiday Mayhem
Over the holidays, I did see John Cameron Mitchell at HED-WIGGED OUT CHRISTMAS produced by Mark Huestis at the Castro Theatre. Mitchell read a short story by Truman Capote to a packed house. Last year, Huestis Presents brought John Water’s to the Castro for a raucous and gloriously overdone mall Christmas with strippers and drag kings.
I saw nothing else of national significance, unless you count running into Huey Lewis on Haight Street chatting in a very paternal way with some punk rock girls in striped tights.
Pirates of the Internetean
New Years Eve, I went to a party where on one wall was projecting KILL BILL VOLUME 1 which was significant because of all the trouble critics groups, such as the one I belong to, The Online Film Critics Society, went through to get whatever Academy screeners they could. Arrgghh, matey.
Miramax, which opposed the MPAA ban from the beginning, defied the ban and sent screeners to select critic’s groups as well as Academy members. Jack Valenti, the head of the MPAA who is stepping down soon for completely unrelated reasons, instituted the ban to stem the rampant pirating of films currently in release and though that Academy members and unscrupulous critics could be part of the problem.
Here I am, being a good, honest, scrupulous critic looking after the best interest of the entertainment industry and I show up at a party and walk into the very thing I was, generically speaking, accused of doing. If I watch the movie, does that make me an accessory to piracy? Obviously, some of the people I know don’t really care about the legality of downloading pirated, unlicensed material for whom it is as easy and natural as breathing. And that it only takes one good copy to clone thousands and thousands more.
No wonder the business model on which rests the music industry has fallen to it’s knees. Maybe peer-to-peer file sharing was intentionally exploited by people who WANTED to kill the music industry as it existed and sacrifice commercial success for a more diverse and accessible cultural exchange. Who were the early adopters of network technology after the Military and hackers? The people who saw the democratizing and diversifying value of a many-to-many media model.
HAPPY 2004, Y’ALL!
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
