We pursue happiness and paradoxically it leads to resentment and then unhappiness, and an explosion of mental illness.  We seek freedom, and yet we live in a world more monitored by CCTV cameras, [and] which has become dominated by what De Tocqueville called ‘a network of small, complicated rules that cover the surface of life and strangle freedom’. More information; we have it in spades. But we get less able to use it [and] to understand it [and] to be wise.

If you’ve ever wondered why we seem to have become ironically knowing, and why our public discourse seems to be endlessly self-referential, this video explains it.

Video: The Divided Brain

I love watching movies and TV shows, getting lost in art, or listening to music, but despite all the high tech gadgets and gizmos I have for consuming content, neither my big screen TeeVee, nor my surround sound system, nor my car radio, nor my smartphone with the fancy music app provides even half the pleasure of sitting down with a good book.

With this in mind, I was captivated at the news of  whimsical and delightful paper sculptures that have been mysteriously appearing in the libraries of Edinburgh. Read all about it here.

The common wisdom is that the ease of entry into the internet as a broadcasting (or distribution) method has opened the doors to anyone and everyone for entry. This is certainly true. Anyone can start a podcast with only a mic and a Mac. It costs peanuts to make a video and post it up on YouTube. And now with tablets and e-readers, every Tom, Dick, and Harry has discovered their inner author and has long or short form stories available at Amazon or Smashword.

What’s lost in all the gloating about the little guy being able to finally bypass the traditional gatekeepers and at long last opening the floodgates of creativity is any reflection about whether the world is better for it. This would be true only if you believe that the availability of a vast slush-pile of poorly executed crap which previously only editors and media executives could access is a cultural improvement.

As for me, all this “unleashed creativity” on the web has given me a new found respect for the ability of the established media institutions to curate and prune the piles of raw sewage they must have to wade through in order to present even their paltriest works. At least, they get paid to do it; I am extremely reluctant to spend my precious free time trolling through a slush-pile trying to find something worth partaking.

I would’ve thought that this award should go to someone who’s had a long career, and who has not only used humor to merely entertain, but done so in a way that is also thought-provoking. Oh, and also was a uniquely American voice. Playing amiable dolts, as Will Farrell seems to mostly do, only reaches the level of light entertainment, and only barely.

Tina Fey, who was given the award last year, may perhaps be slightly more deserving, if only for being the mastermind behind the razor sharp 30 Rock. But even she’s hardly someone that I would think is ready for this award (yet). She’s funny, but no more than, say, Janeane Garofalo, or Roseanne Barr.

I might concede that perhaps someone on the awards committee decided that appealing to a younger demographic is the direction to go in, although I somehow doubt that the title of the award matches this goal. (Try The Ashton Kutcher Award. I bet the youngsters would know who that is.) I’ll also grant that the award seems to be given to someone still living — otherwise I’d wonder why not Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball, Will Rogers, Charles Schultz, or James Thurber. Yet I can think of more deserving humorists and comics who are still among the living: Carol Burnett, Mel Brooks, Dave Barry, Joan Rivers, Gary Trudeau or Scott Adams all come to mind as people who might have better qualifications for this award.

Either the Mark Twain award lives up to its pretensions as something awarded to talent that has reached iconic levels, or it becomes merely another overblown, over-hyped award celebrating pop culture — akin to the VH1 Awards.

This article in GQ explains everything you need to know about why movies have gotten so dumb, including the sad truth that dumb movies sell well.

Underneath All The Cheese is a Cracking Good Story

A thoughtful viewer might decide to skip this re-telling of the Spartacus story.  The 13-episode series aired on cable last year, and received slightly condescending, or even hostile reviews. But I kept hearing a lot of good words about it from ordinary viewers, and finally thought I’d give it a try. The worst that would happen is I’d have to turn it off, but it’s not like I have any personal rule about having to finish whatever I start watching.

Once I got past a somewhat clunky first episode, I was astonished to see a tale that keeps growing in power and depth. Yes, it’s full of glistening half-dressed and nude bodies, with lots of stylized slo-mo fights that show blood spurting and pooling all over – which in my view is a sure recipe for campy schlock. Yet even this works to remind us that life in these times was Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish, and short”. Everybody in this story is looking to get ahead, scrabbling for purchase on a more comfortable life, grubbing for favors from their betters, and lording it over those beneath them. A slave’s lot, at the very bottom, was hopeless indeed.

Since little is known of the real Spartacus, the producers and writers create an imagined story about how this man could’ve come to do what he did. The series takes the story of Spartacus up to the moment he overcomes his owner. We see how he gets taken as a slave, gradually becoming more and more degraded, gets turned into a fighting machine, until we wonder if all humanity will be ground out of him. (A special note of interest is the dialog, which is neither contemporary, nor Shakespearean, but some sort of hybrid mixture, and is especially effective at reminding us that this is a different world than ours, and that different mores apply.)

From what little we know today, Spartacus escaped with a band of 60 -70 gladiators, which grew into an army of 70,000, as more and more slaves escaped to the countryside and joined them. This army kept the legions of Rome at bay for 3 years, while marching up and down the length of the Italian peninsula. It must’ve taken someone with personal charisma, leadership, and tactical skills to accomplish this. Whoever Spartacus was, it seems unlikely he could’ve been an ordinary slave turned bandit. These 13 episodes go a long way towards explaining how it could’ve happened, and why this story still holds our attention even 2,000 years later.

Of course, science fiction doesn’t have to be space based. The central question of any science fiction story is “what if”. The question of what if aliens lived among us is equally as scifi-ey as what if we could travel in space.  What if ancient creatures were cloned so that they could live again? (Check out Jurassic Park.) What if the old gods never went away, and still roamed among us? (Check out Neil Giaman’s American Gods.) What if we all lived in a fascist society, where our every living moment was watched by Big Brother? (Check out George Orwell’s 1984.) What if books were illegal and had to be burned, and instead we all were forced to watch TV? (Check out Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451.)

It would be too easy to bash SyFy for their tame lineup of shows featuring freaks on earth, pro-wrestling, and reality shows chasing after paranormal phantasms, but they’re merely giving their audience what they’ll settle for. They have also proudly announced a new joint venture with Universal to make feature films. That’s “real” movies, which presumably will appear in megaplexes around the nation. No mention is made about what sort of movies they plan to make. Perhaps Mansquito 2 on the big screen is something we can all look forward to. (What if a man and a mosquito were combined?!?! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME!)

In their previous life, when SyFy was just the Scifi Channel, they used to do promo spots featuring “if” in “scifi”, but now that no longer works for them. “Yf” just sounds fey and stupid.

Inventing Our Futures

Good science fiction, like any other great dramatic work, is both immediately entertaining, and and also universal in that it stands up well over time. But really good science fiction also shows us our future. H.G. Wells predicted the atom bomb, and transplants. Jules Verne predicted submarines and the trip to the moon. Star Trek’s “cloaking device” is on its way to reality, as is its replicator. Unfortunately, we now seem to have lost our nerve and our imagination, and almost all scifi in any media has been reduced to freakish superheroes and doltish villains.

Max Headroom. Not a freakish hero nor doltish villain, but surprisingly prescient.

Twenty some years ago one television show predicted what things would come to. Max Headroom, despite the title character’s smart-alec ubiquity at the time, showed us a world dominated by mega-media-conglomerates, blip-verts, a black market for body parts, blanks (people off the grid), and some sort of proto-interconnectivity of digital devices remarkably like the internet we know today.

To quote Blank Reg (a cyberpunk character from the show):

“Welcome to Big Time television, all day, every day, making tomorrow seem like yesterday. And remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it.”

Max Headroom: The Complete Series is available from Shout!Factory.

I guess a detective show featuring two charming and low-key losers trying to turn their lives around while scratching out a living sniffing out secrets in a beach side town was not what American viewers wanted to watch. Instead, the unvarying parade of earnest cop shows, featuring handsome young people and gruesome special effects having to do with startling and outlandish murders, will continue unabated. (I weep for you, America. I guess you’ll never figure out the difference between a dumb show and a smart show.)

At least the series had a self-contained story arc, and an ending that was fitting, not like The Riches, who were left forever frozen, in a seemingly insolvable jam. So if Terriers ever becomes available on DVD, go take a look at it.

Yes, it’s about time.  If there was ever a documentary crying to be made, it’s the one about this famous-in-every-household interviewer for Interview magazine. You know, the same Interview magazine that sits on coffee tables and doctor’s waiting rooms throughout the land, with its self-absorbed, never ending conversation about the all-important nexus of fashion and culture.

Actually, sarcasm aside, I’ve been a long-time fan of Ms. Lebowitz. I first read her work in Glamour magazine (which was many more years ago than I care to think about). Among all the beauty and fashion advice her voice was a welcome if incongruous dash of mordant wit, not unlike as if Oscar Levant had risen from the dead and decided to write strictly for teenaged girls.

Variety magazine, in its review of the documentary, decries it’s top-heavy, single note examination of the subject, but also admits that:

“Given the number of dunderheaded pundits holding forth nightly, Lebowitz does feel like a throwback to a wittier era.”

I already missed the several airings, but I think I’ll trouble myself to catch a repeat. 

WWII on Facebook:

I grew up in a Volkswagen family. Here’s a break down explaining one of the greatest print ads ever:

From the And-You-Thought-Your-Boss-Was-Bad department, get a load of these 1970′s vintage office memos from the owner of The Tiger Oil Company in Houston. (Thanks to the Letters Of Note blog.)

Finally, I had no idea that there were so many beautiful libraries all over the world. Here’s a smorgasbord of them, from Stockholm to Salamanca to St. Petersburg,
to the Sorbonne, and to the State Library in Victoria, Australia, and all points in between. (To paraphrase Craig Ferguson, you remember what a book is? It’s a sort of very long blog with paper in it.)