Feedback and justification are cornerstones of the human condition (psych students and therapists argue amongst yourselves). Though we like to pretend we don't need the approval of others, the opinions of others about our selves or our work often proves or disproves/justifies or negates our individual worth. Celebrities are a good, though extreme, example. They live life--for better and worse--at the judgmental whim of the entire planet. Anything they do gets photographed, reviewed, scrutinized, criticized, and made fun of, down to what they ordered at Starbucks. More than a few lucrative businesses and careers are completely, parasitically dependent on the lives and work of celebrities.
It's an infectious and soul-crushing habit. To believe it is our right to judge one another openly is just bad for the soul, but what do you expect when it's what we find to be entertaining? I thought reality TV was going to be a one-season phase--Survivor is going on a dozen seasons or more, there's a Reality Show category at the Emmys now, so it's clearly no phase--and the basis of the whole genre is judgment. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, America's Got Talent, So You Think You Can Dance (what an extraordinarily arrogant title for a show), The Apprentice, America's Next Top Model, and the like all revolve around this formula: perform, judge, eliminate, and embarrass as many people as possible along the way. And what of those that put their entire families up for public consumption: Anna Nicole did it, the Osbournes, the Hogans, the Kardashians, the kids on Laguna Beach, The Hills, Real Housewives, whatever. And don't try to tell me you don't judge those on Wife Swap, Trading Spouses, Supernanny, and The Moment of Truth. Hey, I'm not innocent there, I think they're nuts for doing it.
This habit of passing judgment is so widespread, it is becoming too automatic, too broadly accepted as civilized behavior. With reality TV (a misnomer of the highest order) comes the misconception that we actually know these people; and we judge our own selves far too harshly by drawing comparisons to the flatteringly lit, carefully-conceived, (though not always as carefully controlled) images of the rich and famous. It all goes with the voyeuristic tabloid culture in which we've found and lost ourselves. We are a small part of the masses, comfortable in our armchair ability to give fame and adoration and taketh away. To reference a rather profound speech in Ratatouille, delivered by Peter O'Toole as the supreme food critic Anton Ego: "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." I'm not sure that The Hills is all that meaningful in itself, but we tend to lose sight that even the densest, silliest, most obnoxious person in the world is still a person.
I had a freaky Resident Evil kind of dream this morning. It's been several hours since I got up, so the details aren't as vivid anymore, but I think I can still put it together.
I was in a city, and society had collapsed due to a zombie takeover (I'm prone to zombie dreams, this isn't the first). I'm still human, and in a resistance-type group with other humans. The city around the walls of our compound is all ashes, rubble, and fire. The sky overhead is a blanket of apocalyptic smoke. Our stronghold falls under attack, and I get separated from everyone else. No idea if anyone but me is alive, I start running from the zombies coming after me. And they don't lumber along like the walking dead really should, but they are hauling ass like 28 Days Later. They catch up to me, have me on the ground, and I'm fighting to keep from getting eaten. The one whose got her fingers around my throat says to the others (in a perfectly normal voice), "You know what's wrong here? She still has her head on." And she proceeds to try and tear my head off with her bare, dead hands. (I totally blame this scenario on watching the Heroes season opener yesterday.) Now this is the point where I go lucid. I realize I'm dreaming. I wriggle away, and think that all I have to do is get out of the city. I decided that the zombies couldn't be outside of the gated-off portion of the street that--lo, and behold!--is about 20 yards in front of me. I make the dash to the gates, and get through to the other side, where it's nice and sunny and clean.
I didn't know your dreams were allowed to contradict you, but apparently mine do. The zombies disregard my new rule about the urban border, and come through the gates after me, into the sunny side of the street. I back away, onto a sidewalk. They look to their right, towards the source of a noise, and SPLAT. The whole lot are squished by a bus the size of a freight train. I wake up.
Took the kids to storytime today at a major bookstore chain. The guy who used to run it (we'll call him Bill) recently left his position at the store, and someone else is now doing it. Bill was very good at storytime, and he was quite popular. He was animated and creative, and often had props to help make the stories more fun. He also played banjo pretty well, and would get the kids up and moving to music in between his two books. There was even, most times, a theme each week and he made coloring pages the kids could have afterwards. It was like the Cadillac of story hours.
So we were pretty spoiled. And I am not trying to talk down to the girl kind enough to step in and read to our kids, but her attempt this morning was not a great success. She's young--early 20s at the most--and I'm guessing doesn't have kids. Which isn't really a prerequisite for reading to them, but it helps to know how to engage them. I think, therefore, that storytime is harder to do well than any of us really imagined. And, poor girl, Bill is an impossible act to follow. Plus he'd likely been at this for several years.
As an audience, we tried to be gracious and helpful by doing a songtime largely on our own, but the idea of storytime, for us, is that we don't have to work as hard as we do when we're home. We'll keep the kids behavior in check, sure, but not do as much of the entertaining. It was a little like watching a comedian die onstage.
Kids can be tough critics, and they can smell fear. They may not know what to call it, but they know when an adult who's supposed to be in charge really isn't, and they'll go for the jugular. So I feel for the girl, and she may know now that unless you can improvise like Robin Williams or play the banjo, you need to come in with a plan. I simply don't know if I'm going to wait around for the learning curve to kick in.
I'm not even really sure where to start. Celebrities want publicity. Tabloids need pictures of celebrities to move product. Paparazzi get paid a lot to get the shots that they sell to the tabs, and the more candid, apparently, the better. People might see the photos printed by the tabs while they wait in line at the store and buy them.
It's the nature of the fame beast to lose your anonymity (which is the point), but along with that comes a disproportionate public interest in silly things like what you ate for breakfast. And what photogs do to get a photo of you eating your breakfast is appalling, and sometimes dangerous.
There are places in the U.S. that are universally known to be staked out by paparazzi. In Los Angeles alone, it's The Ivy, Robertson Blvd., and Kitson most notoriously, though there are others. (Sidenote: Do photogs get a special permit to clog up LAX or something? How is that not a "security" risk? I got harrassed there once for having an unopened bottle of root beer.) My point on this front is that this is one solution: Have places where those who want to be photographed can go, and if a photog takes a picture of a celeb anywhere else, keep it, but it's illegal to sell it. No more street chases or kids getting knocked over in the park, the photogs get some money (though likely not as much--boo hoo), and the fame-seekers get their faces in print. Still OK would be public appearances and outside studios and theaters where fans usually are anyway, premieres, you know, things related to their work.
The media tells us so much about famous people we should utterly disregard. I admit I do sometimes read entertainment mags, but I'm usually more into the interviews, where both parties have agreed on the information released. This trash-digging, rumor mill, judgmental, cliched high school nonsense that we were all supposed to have outgrown is really no good for anyone.
What is it about us that is so stunted we cannot be happy for others' success? Americans love an underdog, but once the underdog is top-dog, we kick him and take away his kibble. We exalt others because we want to believe any of us can be "great" (insert your own definition here), but once someone is exalted, we don't like to feel that this someone is actually better than the rest of us, so we send out the wrecking ball to crush the pedestal we built to make sure they don't think they are, too. It's bizarre.
So which came first in this tabloid culture? Supply or demand? Either way, demand will be the one to decide how long and how far this goes.
When bits of literature become "common knowledge" they are often so distorted, or so abbreviated, the original is forgotten, or becomes more of an aside to the broad perception, if the original considered at all. (My screen name here is from that speech, by the way--you'll see.)
I haven't read the play in years, though it has been on my to do list for a couple of months now. I still plan to get to it, but time is short at the moment, and it's not exactly light reading. Hamlet is not a happy story. It is about a prince of Denmark. The prince's uncle killed his dad, the king of Denmark, and married his mother, the queen. Homicidal uncle becomes king. Not to ruin it for anyone, but it doesn't end well. Anyway, the speech. It's famous because it's an unbelievably brilliant, profound musing on death--as the devil we don't know--versus the trials of living that can become nearly unbearable.
In the speech, Hamlet compares death to sleep--far less frightening than the idea that we cease to exist--which makes him somewhat hopeful in the prospect that death might actually be preferable to life. But the fact that we simply don't know, once we have given ourselves over to death's sleep, "what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil" is enough to "give us pause." He goes on to muse that sometimes the only thing keeping us from taking our own lives to end the suffering is the fear of what comes after the deed is done; a deed that cannot be undone.
Religions have lots of answers for this, but the truth is that none of us knows what is on the other side--yet, someday, we all will. Sometimes this knowledge is comforting, and sometimes it's utterly terrifying. And how each of us gets there is answered only by time.
I was just trying to remember at what point a movie's success or failure was judged on box office take, with such specific focus on its opening weekend. I don't remember this ever mattering when I was growing up, when I still really cared about going to a theater and being one of the first in line to see something.
Could have been somewhere after the ridiculous amount of money made by Titanic that many started taking notice of opening weekends. Although Jaws (released in 1975!) is credited with being the first movie to hit blockbuster status--first to bust the $100 million cherry--when did it really start to matter what each and every movie makes? And I don't mean to the studios themselves. I'm sure it always mattered to them. I mean, for the rest of us that stand to collect no profits or shoulder no losses, why do we need to know? Box office status has its own idiot-point-heavy segment on every entertainment news reel. What does that have to do with quality of the product? The media reports these figures after every weekend like the dollar is the only unit of measurement for quality.
Seeing those extraordinary numbers, though... most individuals, and even some countries, will never see that much money in the whole of their history, and any one movie studio can make it in a single weekend. Most people can't even truly comprehend millions of anything, let alone dollars. But millions and millions are spent in the production and marketing of movies, betting careers and reputations and future opportunities on nailing the #1 spot every week. It's a bizarre ritual, and I imagine very stressful for those with their heads on the block.
But for those movies that do okay to poorly at the box office, there is the silver lining of DVD sales, which can bring a weaker performing movie back from the brink, and sometimes right into the black. It probably wouldn't be enough to get a sequel greenlit, no matter the quality of the work, but you can often obtain a notoriety that makes a little-seen theatrical release into a "cult classic" and potentially a "classic." Or at the very least a collector's edition DVD and a lot of con appearances.
I just read an article about New Kids on the Block playing to a sold-out crowd in Canada. I'm afraid that, although I was the right age to be an NKOTB fan the first time, I never was one. I was more into L.A.'s Pirate Radio and KROQ, and not so much into the pop thing at the time. I wasn't gothed out, but I wore a lot of black.
I'm happy that they are able to get back on the stage, selling out tours in Canada and the U.S.--I would have felt really bad for them if the whole thing flopped--but it gets me to thinking. With all the nostalgia remakes in movies over the last decade or so (The Stepford Wives, The Mod Squad, The Avengers, Transformers, Speed Racer, and coming soon: The Day the Earth Stood Still, among many others) and in TV (Knight Rider, 90210, The Office--I've even heard Fringe is like another X-Files) and music acts coming back (NKOTB, Spice Girls, and of course the many musicians/bands that never stop touring, like The Stones), I have to wonder if we're just dried up for ideas. We all know the adage that says there are no new ideas, though bringing back things that were cool ten years ago gets parents to thinking they can connect to their kids by sharing something old brought back anew. Maybe it works, I don't know, but it certainly sells tickets.
The world is owned and operated by corporations. Corporations are like toddlers: they like things that are tried-and-true and bring instant gratification. They don't like to test new ideas (though they're the ones with the money and exposure to actually make new stuff happen). So maybe it's not that we're out of ideas, it's just that we're a little short on the cojones to constantly try out new ones. I just worry that this attitude is (to bring back an old soundbite phrase) trickling down to the rest of us. Prices of goods go up at a rate much faster than that of wages. So our evenings out become real luxuries. You don't want to drop $40 on a night out at the movies, for example, if you're not pretty sure you're going to love it. I totally get that. A few years ago I went to see an older musician's concert, and admit I was most excited for the songs I already knew and loved than for his new stuff. That has to be frustrating for him.
I always wondered what it was like for someone who's famous to try and go back to civilian life after their run in the spotlight is up. Apparently it's not just fashion that goes in cycles; you just wait ten years, and do it all again.
OK, that's not exactly true. I love a lot of shows that are on right now (and more that will be on in February--the return of Joss!), which inherently creates the potential for a lot of wasted time. It's like having a friend who talks you into eating your weight in chocolate cake. The common response would be "you suck for bringing me that cake," but what you're really saying is "I suck for being too weak-willed to resist your caloric influence." Let's face it, TV is empty calories for the brain; it's passive entertainment that requires little from me but gathering cellulite. But there is a decadent buffet of quality (quality=scripted, sorry) programming that I will find difficult to resist entirely.
I have a family, and I live in a place that values an earlier prime time than other parts of the world. The offspring are in bed after prime time has begun, so it's a challenge to see everything I want to see on TV as it shows. (And this whole government-mandated-load-the-landfills-buy-HD b.s. is something else entirely.) Which is why I love love love that you can find most good shows online now. And there's usually one or two major sponsors, so no more of this 20 minutes of commercials nonsense. Wait, I have something in my eye...
I'll admit it. If not for the impending doom of the analog signal, I'd still be using rabbit ears and my VCR. As a matter of fact, I'd be doing that now, right up until Dark February, if my decade-old TV hadn't finally decided to meet its manufacturer. But I don't like to think of it as losing a TV, so much as gaining a butt-groove in my office chair.
Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway) at the All Things Digital conference talking about the Luke Arm--seriously incredible work--as well as education and the cricket crisis in America. A little long, but it's in three parts, and worth the time.
At the risk of dating myself, I loved The A-Teamas a kid. For several years after the show was gone, visits to Universal Studios guaranteed a look at The Van, which was a must for the trip to feel complete. The idea of watching the show on DVD as an adult was pretty exciting, which is part of the reason Transformers did so well at the box office.
I watched two episodes of season 2 last night. (Is it me, or was the show only half hour episodes in season 1, and are suddenly hour-long eps?) This is clearly a show made for 8-10 year old boys and their tomboy counterparts. Lots of implied violence--everyone shoots at each other, but no one gets shot, even at close-range--things blow-up randomly, lots of vehicular stunts (my personal favorite), Hannibal's mastery of disguise, and elaborate plans that always come together. And of course, Mr. T (though Murdoch is the one that really cracks me up). So there's still a lot of great stuff, but my gift-with-purchase comes in the form of noticing things like the seriously poor production quality. Is that because I'm now used to sophisticated CG and the benefits of astronomical budgets or because I'm an adult and have seen a lot since I was 8? Probably both.
Episode 2 of season 2 has all the good, the bad, and the ugly to which I refer. The guest stars are typically, consistently, terrible actors (which I love), all scenes are shot somewhere in LA (dig that crazy smogline; and to borrow from Austin Powers, South Africa "looks nothing at all like Southern California"), and wow, what is Amy wearing??? But specific to this episode, some highlights: Murdoch invoking Peter O'Toole; BA taking apart a luxury apartment's elevator to armor a bakery van; and the invention of bread guns. The beauty of a low budget is that you have nothing to lose, so you get creative. (See Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 for Sam Raimi's effing awesome homemade camera rigs in action.) I heard some talk of re-making The A-Team. Why, why, why? The budget would be huge, and I seriously doubt there would be anything as cool as a bread gun.
Email is awesome. Except for spam. But the concept of it is pretty amazing for anyone who bothers to think about it. The downsides? My penmanship is getting pretty bad, and the only things to look forward to (holidays and birthdays notwithstanding) when getting my mail are magazines and Netflix. These things are great, but the only person who writes me letters is grandma.
I don't know many teenagers really, since I am not one any longer and I am not a parent to one yet, but I am fairly certain that they don't do handwritten letters. Maybe the occasional mandatory thank you card or, like me, a letter to grandparents. Do they even pass notes in class anymore now that there's texting? Circle one: Yes/No.
A lot of people don't even send party invitations in the mail.
I am an occasional graphic designer, specializing in print, not web, which was a conscious choice. I can design websites--that's not much different than print design in that your job is to aesthetically arrange text and images in a space--and can do some web coding. At the same time, I'm against paper itself as a rule in that it's wasteful and takes up real estate, though recycling helps, yet I am also deeply into painting and drawing, and using the Wacom just doesn't feel as cool as doing it for real. But I greatly favor digital photography. Go figure.
My point is that so much personality--and sometimes meaning--is lost in email and texting. (Ahem. Especially if you accidentally send it to the wrong person.) It's like the computer is middle management for our relationships. And while I'm grateful for the ability to shoot off a quick note on gmail, and post my thoughts online instead of writing in a journal, I miss the look and feel of a letter from my best friend who lives in another state, or a really cute or creative invitation to a party, or the nice way my favorite pen brings out my best cursive lettering, shopping for stationery, even the act of putting a letter in the mailbox and anticipating the response.
Type can be produced by anyone with a keyboard, and written material forged much more easily and anonymously. Handwriting is so much more powerful than type in that you can really imagine the writer, sitting at a desk, thinking about the words you're just now reading, then committing them to paper. Think of the weight such a thing has when you say "in their own writing" or "in their own words," especially when the author is no longer among us. Handwriting is proof of an individual's existence. What really separates letters from email is that they can be kept for awhile as mementos. A lot of history has been pieced together by such heirlooms.
One who has more ideas and interests than time to spend on them. I write, draw, and read often, and siphon my more complete thoughts here. The images on this blog are sketches and photos of my own.
