Why Tron: Legacy Sucked

Why did I see Tron: Legacy last weekend?

I could say I thought it was going to be a good movie—Jeff Bridges! A Daft Punk soundtrack! Shiny things!—but I read the AV Club review and knew it wasn’t going to be “good.” Maybe I thought it would be entertaining, the way Die Hard 4 was kind of entertaining, or the way one of those CSI-esque shows on Fox that doesn’t make any sense but keeps chugging along anyway and sucks you into its bullshit world is entertaining. I didn’t think it would be boring.

Well, it was. Most of the scenes were of people talking, and mostly they were just trying to explain to each other (and the audience) what the hell was going on. The plot is about the people who live in a computer trying to come out and taking over the world with glowing disks and rods, or something, led by Evil Jeff Bridges, and opposed by Good Jeff Bridges and his son, who is played by a guy with only two facial expressions. There’s also some business with some Magical Beings who live in the computer and can “change everything” if they get out of the computer. All of this was treated extremely seriously, with the only comic relief coming in the form of a character who I can only describe as a homosexual Mad Hatter. The action sequences are either sub-Matrix martial arts fights, or stuff ripped off directly from the first Tron or the first Star Wars. Oh, and Good Jeff Bridges talks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski for reasons that are not adequately explained. “You’re really messing with my Zen thing man,” he says at one point. I guess that was supposed to be funny.

It was shiny, I’ll give it that. There were a lot of blinking lights, and when one of the computer people got killed they would collapse into a bunch of cubes. And sometimes entire motorcycles materialize around people! That was cool, but by the climatic, Star-Fox-inspired battle scene, I was back to being bored. It looked about as impressive as a video game, with a story that could have been a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Tron is the kind of movie that makes you incredibly curious about aspects of the story that are skimmed over, despite the mountains of exposition. Like, are all the computer people true Turing-test-passing AIs? And how does Bridges’ 1980s-computer have enough memory to handle all of them? Why does Evil Jeff Bridges only have about five henchmen with him at any one time; why isn’t he using his entire army to track down Good Jeff Bridges? Most importantly, why are the computer programs (apparently) men and women? Do they have sex?

Those last questions, about what kind of sex computer programs have with each other, are kind of unavoidable—there’s a scene at an actually-not-very-exciting-looking party where a couple of sexy lady programs are sitting on guy programs’ laps and we follow Beau Garrett’s hypnotic ass as she walks through the crowd. Seriously, do computer people have dicks, or what? Do they get pregnant? Don’t tell me that Good Jeff Bridges has been cohabiting with his only ally, the smoking hot Olivia Wilde, for what amounts to hundreds of years without knocking neon-covered boots with her. And clearly Olivia Wilde is attracted to Jeff Bridge’s Son The Shitty Actor—there’s an intense one-act play about a father-son-mistress love triangle buried in this movie, but that’s skimmed over. This is a Disney production, after all, and Disney’s house special is creating characters that ooze sexuality (even when the characters in question are animated animals) and then neutering them.

Tron follows a trend, exemplified by Avatar, of extraordinarily stupid science fiction blockbusters. Old-fashioned science fiction was written by people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who knew their science and wrote intellectually inquisitive stories and novels, albeit ones with wooden prose and thin characters. Hollywood sci-fi keeps the thin characters but doesn’t give a shit about explaining how anything happens or why. Science is just magic in Tron. How does a person go inside a computer and apparently remain a flesh-and-blood being who ages and bleeds? How do computer people made out of data become actual matter when they go outside of the computer? Doesn’t that violate the basic law of physics? No, because everything happens because of magic. You aren’t meant to ask questions or engage with the fictional world or think about anything when you watch a Hollywood sci-fi epic. Just sit back and let the effects wash over you, like you were watching a 120-minute car commercial.

People love this shit, of course—Tron earned 43 million at the box office over the weekend, and at least one sequel is likely. The user review section on Metacritic is filled with high ratings from people who thought it was great, and who use movies to distract themselves from the terrible, soul-crushing reality of their own existences. “It's a moovie for peat sake,” one of the reviews read. Movies like Tron aren’t meant to make you think deep thoughts, the comments section argues, they’re just mindless fun entertainment for you to zonk out to, sort of like heroin but less addictive and more expensive. People like me, who thought that Tron was really boring and not even comically bad most of the time, even when you are stoned and drinking wine in the theater and thinking of snarky things to say about it later, are not supposed to see this movie; we’re supposed to go read the New York Times and re-watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and go to art museums with scarf-wearing women with Etsy profiles. Fine, I’ll go do that. You assholes can have the next five Tron movies, which will be about as fun as watching someone else play a video game.

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Who Chuck Lorre is and Why He Sucks

The latest issue of the New Yorker contains a profile of Chuck Lorre by Tom Bissell (gated), which answers a question I’ve never asked myself until now—namely, who is Chuck Lorre? Turns out he’s the human force of nature behind the most popular sitcoms of our time, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, as well as not-exactly-classics like Grace Under Fire and Dharma and Greg. It’s a well-written article that has some nice behind-the-scenes details—did you know that all of those shows are actually filmed in front of a live audience?—but it also works amazingly hard at dancing around the fact that no matter how successful and hard-working Lorre is, he’s also a hack.

Ahem. Maybe the polite term for hack is “populist,” or “sitcom traditionalist,” or whatever phrase the New Yorker used to describe him. What Lorre has done throughout his career is create TV shows that are to television what Top 40 hits are to music and McDonald’s is to food. Two and a Half Men is a program for people who want to watch television but don’t care what they want. They want something comforting to rest their eyeballs on, something that won’t challenge them or force them to have an emotional or intellectual response. Fine, I guess. I’ve drunk too much cheap, shitty beer to question anyone’s taste. But the New Yorker, perhaps out of an instinct to not throw profile subjects under the bus, doesn’t quote any of the many, many people who hate Lorre’s lowbrow shows, and halfway defends his work with lines like:

Lorre’s standing among critics is not helped by his staunchly traditional approach to the sitcom. He is well aware of the shifts that have taken place in sitcom writing during the past twenty years, but he does not care all that much about them.

There’s little discussion about those “shifts” in sitcom writing, maybe because if the piece delved into recent sitcom history, Lorre’s attitude would come off as stodgy and willfully ignorant. The sitcoms of the 1980s, watched today, are astonishingly slow-paced and predictable, even the supposedly “good” ones like The Cosby Show. The reason for this is that the last 20 years have represented a revolution of sorts in sitcom writing, which resulted in shows from both sides of the Atlantic like Seinfeld, Newsradio, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, The Office, Spaced, The Office (again), Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, the first seasons of Malcolm in the Middle and 30 Rock, Peep Show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and most recently, Louis, Parks and Recreation, and Community, which competes in the same time slot as The Big Bang Theory, the first of Lorre’s shows to be acknowledged as non-terrible by critics. For a sitcom writer to “not care all that much” about that list of shows is fucking insane, like a film director ignoring all films made after 1970, or a writer refusing to read anything published after 1900. And for Bissell not to find someone to put Lorre’s attitude in context is a bit of a problem for the piece.

Another thing Bissell might have done is to get a critic to point out that, okay, the four-camera sitcom is out of fashion among comedy geeks right now (mostly because all that audience laughter slows the pacing down to a crawl), but it’s not like critics are racist against traditionally structured shows or anything. Newsradio and Seinfeld were four-camera shows, and those are beloved shows whose fans will buy the DVD sets of. Louis CK’s Lucky Louie has less of a following, but there are still a bunch of folks who swear it was brilliant. Who’s clamoring to buy the DVDs of Dharma and Greg? Critics don’t like Lorre’s shows because critics love good sitcoms, have been watching good sitcoms for years, and Lorre’s shows aren’t good sitcoms.

Like most purveyors of critically-reviled pop culture, Lorre hates the critics who revile him. Bissell’s article quotes a message Lorre hid in his production company’s “vanity card” that flashes on the screen for a second after the credits roll:

You [critics] have absolutely no power to affect ratings and the likely success or failure of a TV show. In that arena you are laughably impotent. You are not unlike a flaccid penis flailing miserably at a welcoming vagina.

Beyond the somewhat bizarre sexual imagery (“flailing” at a “welcoming” vagina? Like the penis is being whipped against a woman’s wet pussy lips in some vaguely kinky impotence fetish fantasy?), this is a fairly revealing statement. Lorre defines “success” for his shows as “high ratings.” He wants as many eyeballs as he can to be glued to his shows, and that’s the extent of his ambition. Is it any wonder critics don’t like him?

See, Chuck, sitcom critics—those poor schmucks—did not get into the business to influence ratings. They don’t care much about ratings, by and large, unless low ratings cause a show they like to get cancelled. They became critics not to tear you, Chuck Lorre, down personally, but because they watched way too much TV as children and fell in love with the sitcom form. That’s a bad thing to love, because the sitcom form doesn’t always love them back, but they can’t help it. They want to write about the shows they love seriously and analytically, and they hope to spread the word about these shows to other people, who might also fall in love with these shows. They want, at bottom, for sitcoms to be taken seriously as art, or at least not dismissed by intellectuals as 22 minutes of content indifferently occupying space between ads for erection medication and cars.

That’s why people like Todd VanDerWerff praise shows like Community and why every comedy geek I know puts Arrested Development on a pedestal. Those are some great, densely-layered shows that reward you when you rewatch them and sometimes have some emotional depth to them. They inspire love and occasional debate among they’re fans, and they actually have fans, unlike your shows, which have viewers. People love all of the shows I listed above—how many people love Two and a Half Men?

Finally, the people who worked on Arrested Development don’t think the show “failed” because it got cancelled. They’re proud of having made one of the funniest shows of the past decade. And the people working on Community, which is getting beat in the ratings nightly by your Big Bang Theory, aren’t worried about “failure.” Donald Glover told me during an interview I did a while ago that it’s an awesome feeling to work alongside a talented ensemble on a really funny show that inspires really passionate fans. What I wonder, Chuck Lorre, is if the folks working for your show have that feeling.
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Language Arts Sucks, Revisited

I was just rereading Michael Chabon’s excellent book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thinking about the circumstances that led me to read it, and my discovery of the whole mess of contemporary fiction authors that have influenced me and whose books I’ve carried in boxes from my parents’ house to my dorm rooms to my apartments. I’m lucky to have found the books I love, thanks to the people (not least my mother) who cared about literature and introduced me to authors they thought I would enjoy, and who turned out to be right. Later on, of course, there were the short story collections I went out of my way to buy, and the writing workshop syllabi that forced me to purchase contemporary fiction, and at present I’m pretty confident in my ability to find authors and stories I will enjoy, as long as I have the time to read them.

While thinking about all of this, I suddenly became enraged.

Why? Because I realized that I had taken seven years, in public middle and high school, of “Language Arts,” which was supposed to teach me how to write but also teach me how to read, and more importantly to point me in the direction of books. I learned something from those classes, I suppose, and god knows my teachers tried their best (well, most of them did), but god also knows that those classes did little to influence my love of reading. It might be accurate to say that my love of reading survived Language Arts classes, that I unaccountably love Shakespeare and 1984 despite my education. Most students don’t, and I often wonder if the way we teach literature is designed to stop students from reading.

I know I’ve written the same post before but fuck, isn’t there a way to teach through contemporary fiction that might engage students a little more than teaching them through ancient fiction? Imagine if I was taught The Fortress of Solitude in one of my AP LA classes in high school. It would have given the teacher the chance to talk about:

• Race relations in America. I know this subject is often touched on, but the history of blacks and whites usually stops around the time of MLK. Richard Wright is wonderful, but perhaps a little dated on some subjects? (Also, not insignificantly, this book discusses race from a white [Jewish] perspective.)


• Bullying, intimidation, how you feel when you don’t belong in a neighborhood


• The music of Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and a slew of old soul, R&B, and fuck groups like the Supremes, the Four Tops, and Marvin Gaye. How many kids know about the tragic death of Marvin Gaye?


• A tie-in to Dylan: The practice of Jewish performers changing their names to more “normal” ones. Why was this important? What does Jewish identity mean? Why did black performers not change their names—oh, yes, because they were given slave names by their masters. Whole discussions of the power of naming might ensue.


• Finally, the idea of superpowers in the real world. What would you do if you had the power to fly? Would you try to fight evil? How? Would you rather be invisible or have the power to fly?

That syllabus for the book I came up with off the top of my head would be far, far, more engaging than any Language Arts class I’ve ever had. With something like Shakespeare, or even Conrad, teachers spend have their time trying to get kids to understand what the fuck they just read, if the kids bothered to read it at all and didn’t give up on the text for being too difficult. (Also, with Heart of Darkness teachers have to wrestle with the question of whether the book is outrageously racist or not.) Would it be too much to ask that teachers teaching literature let their kids know that literature is something that doesn’t just happen in the past?
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Why Jonathan Franzen Sucks

Here's a link to something I wrote over at Letters to the Preditor, which is a fine site. The title should be self-explanatory. Read more!

Why Louis C.K.'s Life on Television Sucks

I just finished watching the last two episodes of Louie C.K.’s show Louie on Hulu, and I’m no longer sure that the best show on television is on AMC. Louie isn’t the funniest thing I’ve had the privilege to watch on my laptop, but it might be the most ambitious comedy program since—what? I’m trying to think here. Since Freaks and Geeks, at least, and Louie is funnier than Freaks and Geeks.

(Some spoilers in the next paragraph, if you care about that stuff. Go watch the show now!)

Louie is a hard show to describe. It’s probably doomed to unpopularity, thanks to it’s odd format—rather than having the recurring characters and 22-minute story arcs of traditional sitcoms, each episode is composed of two or three vignettes, often unrelated to one another. Or not. Some episodes are one long story. Some episodes feature Louie C.K. as a kid for nearly the entire time. Some episodes feature long stretches of Louie’s stand up, which is usually hilarious. Ricky Gervais appears in a couple of episodes, as Louie’s asshole doctor (“I wouldn’t give your face to a burn victim,” he tells Louie as the comedian lies in a hospital). Various comedians appear as themselves, and one long scene of them playing poker and discussing the use of and origin of the word “faggot” veers from obscenity to honest emotion in the space of a minute. These tonal shifts are common in Louie. In one episode he gets bullied by a violence-obsessed 18-year-old, then follows the kid home, where he discovers that the kid’s father beats him. “Don’t do that,” Louie tells the dad, only to be chased out of the house by the mother—then, in an odd turn typical of the show, the dad comes out and shares a cigarette with Louie, and the two men talk about the difficulties of parenting. In another episode, a terrifying doctor convinces a child version of Louie that he is responsible for Jesus’ death. Louie’s brother breaks down in tears at a restaurant because his mother refuses to tell him she loves him. Louie imitates a monkey having an orgasm on a comedy club stage. Louie gets alarmingly stoned, decides to buy a dog, and the dog collapses and dies as soon as he brings it home. As the van carrying the dead dog in a garbage bag pulls away, Louie’s two adorable daughters pull up in a taxi with their mother for a weekend at their dad’s.

Louie is sometimes surreal, sometimes cruelly realistic, but always concerned with the big, big issues: love, loneliness, abandonment, religion, family, and most of all impending death and how to live with it. (The opening credits have Louie walking around while an unseen chorus sings, “You’re gonna die!”) I don’t know what to compare it to in terms of depth and ambition—maybe Annie Hall?—but it’s worth looking at the comparison between Louie and another show centered around the life of a standup comic, the infinitely more commercially successful Seinfeld.


Both shows portray ordinary mundane life in exact detail. Seinfeld centers around trifles and tiny bits of social interaction that spiral out of control into bizarre webs of lies and recrimination, while Louie concerns itself with Louie’s attempts to live his day-to-day life in a worthwhile manner before he inevitably dies. The contrast between the shows is apparent most of all in the title characters’ on-stage comedy routines. Jerry Seinfeld is seemingly pretty well-adjusted, except for his fixation on the insignificant little foibles of modern life. His offstage life is equally inconsequential—he floats along, dating a string of models he would never consider marrying, let alone procreating with, and trying to avoid embarrassment more than anything. If the character of Seinfeld ever thinks about the purpose of life, he hides it well.

Louie’s standup is different. He asks questions about morality, he worries over his daughters, he talks about God and the Bible, he notes the slow decay of his body in exacting detail. In his life on the show, Louie is trying to find something to care about, and mostly finds it in his daughters, in the passing along of genetic information, life, and knowledge. Seinfeld—his character on the show, at least, and also the character of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm—never seems to care about anything, and is satisfied with that. You’re born, you grow up, you make enough money to eat out at a diner all the time, you argue with your friends about re-gifting and the placement of buttons on a shirt, you date gorgeous women, then you die, simply and without fanfare. Isn’t that a good enough summary of existence?

It isn’t for Louie, and that’s why his character is so miserable. Seinfeld was born without a soul and is fine with that, but Louie isn’t sure whether he has a soul, whether souls exist in the first place, and what you should do if you have a soul. More importantly, the answers to those questions matter to Louie, as they do to a lot of people—which is why we’ll never be as happy-go-lucky as the people on Seinfeld, or any traditional sitcom.

Intelligent people with even an ounce of self-awareness ask themselves at one time or another, “What is the purpose of my life?” On Seinfeld, a “show about nothing” the answer is: “There is no purpose, duh.” On Friends, to bring another sitcom into the mix, the answer is, “Find your soulmate in the most complicated manner possible, at which point you will be happy forever.” (This is also the message of every romantic comedy ever churned out.)

Louie, like nearly every work of art worth discussing, offers no answer, except maybe “Keep looking, there must be a purpose, because otherwise life would be awful and unbearable.” One feature of the show that slips by almost unnoticed is that religion—specifically Christianity—appears more often, and is taken more seriously, than any mainstream show since Andy Griffith. Louie is a character with not only an interior life, but a spiritual one as well. That’s not a common thing these days, and it’s nice to know that a show like Louie can exist on television.

I worry that I’ve made the show sound more serious than it actually is. Here’s the poker scene I mentioned above:
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Why Censoring Rap Music Sucks

I’m sharing the above music video with you not because Janelle Monae is one of the coolest people alive, or because the song is extraordinarily catchy, but because of Big Boi’s verse—or more specifically, the censoring of Big Boi’s verse. The line in question goes: “You gotta keep your balance or you’ll fall into the gap/It’s a challenge but I manage cause I’m cautious with the s----.”

Before I downloaded Ms. Monae’s whole album, I assumed that the censored line was “shit,” but that was stupid in hindsight, since “shit” doesn’t rhyme with “gap” and surely an experienced MC like Big Boi wouldn’t screw up like that. The word deemed inappropriate by the FCC and radio stations is actually “strap,” defined by my dictionary as “a strip of leather, cloth, or other flexible material, often with a buckle, used to fasten, secure, or carry something or to hold on to something.” Huh? What’s objectionable about that?

My first thought was Big Boi was referring to the practice of “tying off” with a belt before shooting up some heroin, but Big Boi has never rapped about using heroin before, to my knowledge, and I doubt he would advise his listeners to be “cautious” with it—more likely he would tell people not to use heroin at all. Some quick checking on Urban Dictionary revealed that “strap” actually means “gun,” an evolution of the old usage of “I’m strapped,” or “fully strapped.” So the censorship equation is strap=gun=bad=bleeped out.

This is the fundamental problem with censorship, or at least censorship as it relates to music, especially rap—it’s not just “curse words” that get cut, it’s words that touch on a host of different topics, from drugs to crime to sex, even when the message behind the lyrics is fundamentally positive. Like in Big Boi’s case, he’s not telling people, “Go out and shoot a bunch of people with your gun,” he’s saying, “I’m awesome, and furthermore, I exercise caution when I have a firearm in my possession.” He’s preaching gun control and restraint, but I didn’t even know that thanks to the short-sighted censoring of his verse.


More fundamentally, the censoring of words in rap songs doesn’t just wipe out words like “fuck” and “shit” and “bitch” that are defined by most people as “offensive” (although it’s hard to imagine the person who is still legitimately offended by these words). The censors have decreed that rapping about violence and drugs is out-of-bounds, even if the message of the song isn’t pro-violence or pro-drug. This is more than defended the tender ears of our children, this is an insidious plot to control the discourse of pop music—that’s maybe an exaggeration, but not by much.

It also might be an exaggeration to call the censoring of rap music racist, but (white) pop has been relentlessly concerned with sex, drugs, and violence for decades, and no one stepped in to tell the Rolling Stones that “Under My Thumb” was misogynistic (it’s nastier than anything Snoop Dogg ever said) or the Beatles that “Happiness is a Warm Gun” was unsuitable to be played on the radio due to its title. How can “Cocaine” be released by Eric Clapton as a single, yet when Big Boi mentions buying weed on “Bombs Over Baghdad,” the lyrics are censored to: “shoulda bought an o---- but you copped a d—“? Is the difference lyrical context, the standards of the times, or the skin color of the musician? What are the standards for censoring music beyond the bleeping of “the seven dirty words?”

Or to put it another way, how would the FCC choose to censor the Police B-Side, “Once Upon a Daydeam?” It’s one of the most brutal songs I’ve heard from a mainstream artist, yet there’s no profanity in it. But if Big Boi can’t say he’s cautious with the strap, can Sting sing about unborn babies being killed?

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Why the Song "Imagine" Sucks

Great pop songs tend to revolve around simple ideas. I Love You and This Is Awesome, I Love You and This Is Awful, Why Won't You Love Me, I Don't Love You Anymore And You Should Leave—those themes cover about 90 percent of the music enjoyed by the world at large. That's not a knock on popular music. There's a lot of variation and nuance that a good songwriter can squeeze out of those four standard tropes—if you don't believe me, listen to every Beatles album before Sergeant Pepper. (After that, the Beatles started writing songs about the topic that makes up the last 10 percent of pop music: We Are On Drugs and Shit Does Not Make All That Much Sense.)

But as some really excellent, really famous songwriters age (or alternately, start hooking up with really pretentious artists whose names rhyme with “Hoko Tone-o”) they try to branch out from these basic themes, either because they're tired of writing about love or because the Have Something Important to Say. Call it Sting Syndrome.* Like adolescents who just read A People's History of the United States, these songwriters stop doing (so many) drugs, look around the world, and discover, shockingly, that there are a lot of problems with it. That's how we get Michael Jackson's “Black or White,” Paul McCartney's and Stevie Wonder's awful “Ebony and Ivory,” and most of all, that's how we got John Lennon's “Imagine.”

Now, I don't know that much about Lennon's post-Beatles career, but I know that “Imagine” is his most famous song, a song I hear in grocery stores and laundromats, a song's whose legacy has lived on thanks to Yoko Ono, who acts like Gandhi wrote the lyrics and has constructed a monument of bullshit and light to it. It's one of the most critically acclaimed songs of the last century and number three on Rolling Stone's list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And I hate it.

Don't get me wrong—it is catchy. It's got that nice gentle piano riff and a good melody. This is John Motherfucking Lennon we're talking about, after all. The man could have written a song about how much he likes Triscuits and it would have been musically interesting and probably a number five hit in the UK. But the reason everyone likes “Imagine” isn't for its catchiness, it's for its lyrics, which are put on a pedestal along with “Blowin' in the Wind” and the famous bits of the Bible. If you want to read the lyrics, here they are.

Yes, that John certainly is a dreamer. No, he isn't the only one. Many people imagine what it might be like to live in a world with no wars, religion, or countries. That would probably be pretty cool. We'd sit around playing the sitar, smoking really primo dope, and having sex with one another in a variety of positions. So what? Imagining is easy. Everyone imagines, and that's the fucking problem. The difficult part is when you stop imagining and try to get from point A (your shitty life) to point B (the sitars, the fucking, etc). Martin Luther King wasn't a great man because he had a dream, he was a great man because he was willing to get arrested, beaten, and even die for that dream.

Compare MLK's dedication to the worldview expressed in “Imagine.” The song doesn't advocate any action, it doesn't detail any specific problems or solutions it just sort of drifts along and says, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if things were great?” Not every song needs to be a treatise on geopolitics but shouldn't a “meaningful” song actually mean something?

“Imagine” could be the anthem of the ineffectual hippie movement, the people who “broke down barriers” by taking acid, listening to trippy music, and being promiscuous. The song fetishizes thoughts and fantasies and ignores direct action. It explicitly asks the listener to “join the dreamers” in order to make the “world live as one,” which is one of the least-subversive ideas I've ever heard. It's subtle pro-capitalist, pro-establishment propaganda: the institutions the hippies supposedly opposed (the military-industrial complex, big business, etc) would prefer that they keep dreaming—while they're sitting in meditation circles and seeking transcendence, they can be easily ignored. Actually trying to change things is too hard for most people, which is why as the hippies aged and realized that imagining didn't do anything for anyone, they started figuring out ways to make money.

Ironically, young John Lennon was way ahead of the hippies. The Beatles covered “Money (That's What I Want)” early on and wrote cynical, mocking anthems like “Revolution 1.” They realized that the most meaningful, resonant songs are about the endless permutations personal relationships, not just putting your schmaltzy personal philosophy to music. Then Lennon grew his hair out and turned into a caricature of a painfully earnest hippie.

Case in point: the “Bed In” protest he and his new bride Yoko Ono performed in 1969. Non-violent protest is supposed to draw attention to the brutal nature of the forces you are opposing—they hit you, and you don't hit them back, thus drawing attention to the justice of your cause and the injustice of your oppressors. By contrast, sitting in bed and getting people to pay attention to your “protest” because you are famous is just being lazy. I've praised lying in bed before, but not as a form of political action; you should lie in bed because it feels good. Similarly, you should have sex and do drugs and listen to Rock and Roll not because you are expanding your consciousness or breaking down barriers, but because it feels awesome. The problem with the Bed In, Ono's monument to “Imagine,” and the song itself is that they assume that just imagining is good in and of itself, that wishing for an impossible world is somehow helpful.

Maybe if Lennon had lived longer, he'd have the decency to be embarrassed by “Imagine.” Maybe he would have revealed that whole phase of his life to be a complicated satire on the soft and ideologically muddled state of the anti-war movement in the early 70s. But he's dead and, unfortunately, the song he left behind is a meaningless, maudlin, sap-filled ballad that doesn't care enough about its own ideas to examine them. Yes John, it would be nice if there were no countries, but if you want us to get there, we're going to have to kill some people.

*For the young people who are not rock historians: Sting was the frontman for The Police, who recorded some really awesome albums and had a string of hits like “Roxanne” and “Don't Stand So Close to Me” and “Everything She Does is Magic,” which were all great songs about love. Then Sting went solo and recorded the most serious, straight-faced, boring pop-jazz albums ever. Listen to as much of so-serious-it-makes-you-want-to-look-pensively-out-the-window-into-the-rain “Fields of Gold” as you can and then listen to “So Lonely” to get the taste out of your ears and you'll understand why Young Sting kicks Old Sting's ass.

(Note: this blog is now a weekly, with daily (or so) links and shorter entries. Further information here.) Read more!

Why Newspaper Comic Strips Suck

I grew up in a house with a newspaper subscription, and every morning before the school bus came I'd get the plastic-wrapped Seattle PI (which is no longer in print) from the front porch and peruse it over my bowl of milk-softened cereal. I never paid much attention to the front page—except maybe on 9/12—and the sports section only got my attention during baseball season and on the Mondays after Seahawks games. The only part of the paper I read with any sort of regularity was the comics page.

Maybe you know what I mean by “comics page.” It's usually in the “Life and Arts” section with the horoscopes and the advice columns—20 or 30 horizontal strips (like the strips at the top of this post, which are all from today's paper) and as many one-panel strips as are required to fill the rest of the space, like this Family Circus:


Some people glance at the comics page every morning and forget about it, but I was drawn to the format in a way that seems extremely strange to me now. I bought collections of strips, I read my dad's old collections of Peanuts and Bloom County and Doonesbury (the latter two I didn't understand because I didn't know who Ronald Reagan and Oliver North were), and I followed my favorite strips like hipsters follow obscure bands—I was angry when the PI didn't carry the excellent Get Fuzzy, and I despaired at the drop in quality of The Boondocks as time went on. We all have subjects we're privately passionate about. For Eric Massa, it's the supple buttocks of his male staffers; for me it was comic strips.

The problem was, I didn't enjoy 95 percent of the comic strips I read. The strips mentioned in the previous paragraph I can read and enjoy to this day, but those are some of the best strips of the last three decades, by which I mean they were funny about a third or a half of the time and the rest of the time the artwork could make up for it. The majority of the time, newspaper comic are like the examples you can see on this page—unfunny or poorly drawn, usually both at once.

Look at Beetle Bailey or Wizard of Id. Really look at them, don't skim over them the way most people do and the way I did when I was 13. Generic jokes, the kind you can get out of a really cheesy joke book, and characters so indifferently drawn your eye just glides past them. Of course, the characters don't really matter, since they exist solely to spout the prepackaged setups and punchlines—does it matter that the wizard is a wizard? Or that Beetle Bailey takes place in the military? (Also, couldn't the wizard just heal himself with magic? And what “work” is he going to?) These strips, by any objective standard, are really, really fucking awful, unfunny things that shouldn't be reproduced anywhere, yet alone in hundreds of newspapers.

These are all “legacy strips,” franchises that had their heyday dozens of years ago and are now drawn by their creators' sons or inheritors. Sometimes they are produced by a team of writers, hard as that is to believe, and they often have surprisingly vast commercial empires—how many stuffed, suction-pawed Garfields have you seen in car windows? They are in the newspaper because they have “name recognition” and because if a newspaper tries to replace a comedic and artistic void like Hi and Lois with something preferable—like escort advertisements—a bunch of people write in to complain about the change. This brings us to the core audience for newspaper comics, who are:

1.People who read them ironically and comment on the Comics Curmudgeon.
2.Old people who read them because they've done so for years and don't care about the artistic or comedic value of comics at all.

The second category is much bigger than the first, which is why newspaper comics are so toothless these days that that adjective doesn't do them justice. They have negative teeth. They are so bad that when The Boondocks appeared, a fairly well-drawn, funny strip with definable characters and a perspective on the outside world, it counted as a revelation for me. You can actually do something with those three panels in black and white! There can be more to this art form than recycled jokes delivered from lazily sketched (in more than one sense) characters standing in undefined backgrounds!

Yeah, that's right, comic strips are an art form. Go back and read some Calvin and Hobbes or Krazy Kat if you don't think that comic strips can be art. Harvey Pekar, the creator of American Splendor—which never appeared in a newspaper—said that comics were “words and pictures; you can do anything with words and pictures!” But in the bleak reality of newspaper strips, no one bothers to do anything interesting with words and pictures. Maybe that's due to the strict deadlines, maybe the good artists are giving up on strips or moving to the web; whatever the reason, newspaper comics—still the most well-known branch of non-superhero comics—serve even less purpose than newspapers themselves. They aren't dead yet, but maybe they should be.

The horrible thing isn't that these strips are terrible. God knows there is plenty of terrible in the world today. The problem is that a kid like me, who reads the comics for some reason, will grow up and think that that is what comics are supposed to be. The form has an incredible amount of potential, and I'm lucky enough to have found some good words with pictures to read. But the way the average America—who still reads the newspaper in this day and age—experiences comics is through the comics page. That's like experiencing gun collecting by being shot. It would be nice if more people could experience comics the way that they can be experienced, but that will never happen as long as Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois dominate newspapers.


Further reading: check out David Malki's hilarious and informative “The Comic Strip Doctor,” especially this entry on Momma, maybe the worst strip ever printed. Read more!

An Open Letter to James Franco About Why His Situation Sucks

Dear Mr. Franco Jimmy James,

I know you don't know who I am, but I thought I'd write to you since we are both fiction writers and therefore peers, sort of, even though I'm not famous and have never been compared to James Dean. Still, we've both sat down in front of a computer and seriously attempted to write a short story, which sets us apart from most of the people in the world—we're colleagues, whether you or I like it or not.

As a colleague, I'd like to congratulate you on getting a story in GQ, which usually doesn't publish fiction. The story is from your forthcoming collection—the rather unimaginatively titled Palo Alto—and I have to tell you, it isn't terrible. I mean, if you handed me the manuscript without telling me who the author was, I would have thought it had been written by an MFA candidate who was trying to find his voice, which is I guess a fair description of you. Bits of it sound like a third-rate George Saunders story, and that's a compliment believe it or not. (Most people aren't aware of Saunders, but I assume you are, since you're taking writing classes and probably reading a lot of short fiction. If you haven't heard of him, check his stuff out.)

According to the internet, you're not one of those celebrities who gets bored and decides they want to sing (Scarlett Johansson) or write liberal op-ed pieces (Bono, Alec Baldwin), much to the public's annoyance. They treat their second career like a hobby and hardly ever have any talent for it, yet they receive all sorts of attention for these side projects—a major label will release their music, or the Huffington Post will give them a column. They're novelty acts, like this skateboard-riding cat, and like the cat, some of them don't seem to realize it. For instance, I'm sure Sting thinks his generic end-the-War-On-Drugs piece made it to the front page of Huffington purely on the merits of his prose and his logic.

You don't want to be one of those artistic tourists, James, I know. You take your craft seriously, you're doing the work, going to school, and you probably genuinely want the respect of the literary community. The problem is, everyone thinks of you as just another skateboard-riding cat. People were mocking your story on Facebook earlier this week, and I'm afraid I joined in. I couldn't help it. There are some unintentionally funny lines in there—like any developing writer, your prose gets away from you sometimes—and I was a little jealous that GQ was giving you the attention just because you were already famous. Yeah, the story was good for an actor, but I'm guessing you really, really don't want that good for an actor label.

If I were you, I'd be having lots of sex with unbelievably attractive women. Also, I would have published my work under a pseudonym at first so people could give me honest feedback. Like it or not, you aren't getting a book published because you're the next Raymond Carver, you're getting published because you're already famous. The literary community at large won't respect you, because no matter how earnestly you're taking this second career of yours, the perception is that your writing is getting attention that it doesn't deserve. And the public, the people who saw Spiderman and Pineapple Express and have never read a short story unless they were forced to in school, will probably just be confused by it. At best, maybe some of those people will use your work as a gateway to other, better short story writers like Richard Ford or Sam Lipsyte. At worst, you'll be the Scarlett Johansson of fiction. All this will change if you write a story or novel that blows everyone away—which I'm not ruling out—but for now, the most important words you've written are the three at the top: “By James Franco.”

Sincerely,
Harry Cheadle
PS—Check out this edited version of your story by my good buddy Giancarlo Ditrapano at the New York Tyrant.
PPS—Do you smoke as much pot as I think you do? Maybe we can get high sometime and talk about. Donald Barthemane.

“Just Before the Black” by James Franco [GQ] Read more!

Why Radiohead Sucks

Since the collapse of the British empire after World War II, the English mostly stopped trying to subjugate native peoples and turned their attention to a different, though related, field: rock 'n' roll. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, T. Rex, Pink Floyd, Queen, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, The Clash, Gang of Four, The Fall, The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Division, Blur, Oasis...it's hard to name a rock band that isn't English. Even His Holiness Jimi Hendrix had to go to their side of the pond to find success.

The British music press helps out by finding every band that looks halfway appealing and hyping them until they're the second coming of Oasis, who the media hyped into the second coming of The Beatles. Much like some people in the basketball media compare every good young player to Michael Jordan, every good young English band is the Next Savior Of Rock 'n' Roll. Remember the Arctic Monkeys? Neither do I.

Radiohead, of course, is different. They weren't over-hyped to start their careers, possibly because their first album, Pablo Honey, wasn't very good. And when they were anointed the Best Band Of All Time, Or At Least Of The 90s—this happened sometime between The Bends and OK Computer—they responded not by self-imploded, but by putting out Kid A, which even snobs who only listened to free jazz and “post-rock” had to admit was pretty good. In my part of Brooklyn, where it is traditional to scoff at the bands and things other people enjoy, very few people say they don't like Radiohead—except for “dean of American rock critics” and professional asshole Robert Christgau, everyone who cares about music made mostly by electric guitars has decided Radiohead is a good thing.

I'm one of those people: I have all of Radiohead's studio albums, Thom Yorke's solo project, and a fair number of their B-Sides (“Cuttooth” is under appreciated), I paid a hefty sum to see them in concert on their last tour, I carpooled to that concert with people I met through W.A.S.T.E, the band's social networking site, and I even wrote a fake Thom Yorke blog for a while. I'm listening to the recently-released “These Are My Twisted Words” as I write this. Until recently, if you asked me what my favorite band was, I would have said Radiohead without thinking about it.

The problem I have with them now is that in all the hours I've spent listening to nearly their entire catalogue, I've never heard anything that I would describe as “light hearted” or even “fun.” Radiohead Matters, they're Serious and Thoughtful and Complex, but for a band that plays pop music they take themselves awfully seriously. They kick ass live—for lack of a better term—but they run through their technically demanding songs like classical musicians: accurately, passionately, and with an almost total lack of improvisation or stage banter. Simply put, they don't usually look like they're having a good time up there.

That sounds nit-picky, but isn't it important for anyone who's doing anything as self-evidently absurd as playing rock music for a living be having a good time? Radiohead may be enjoying life, and I've read enough interviews with Yorke to know the guy has a sense of humor, but there's no evidence of that in their music or in his lyrics, which Christgau describes accurately as “how about that, Thom Yorke is bummed.”

Radiohead comes after a long line of important bands who took themselves extremely seriously, but nearly all of their influences were able to write a nice love song or crack a smile when the occasion demanded it. The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but they were also a lot more fun; sometimes they just wanted you to drive their car or hold their hand. The Clash were serious and politically minded, but also had some lighthearted head-bobbing songs (“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and “1-2 Crush On You”). Talking Heads, who wrote the song Radiohead is named for, had a whole lot of jokes in their songs and their videos, or at least they did if you got them (“Nothing But Flowers” is hilarious). Even The Cure had that song about Friday being better than all the other days, a level of silliness that would just make Radiohead embarrassed. Heck, even Pink Floyd wrote a few off-kilter love songs once in a while before Syd Barrett lost his brain on a trip.

These days if you asked me who my favorite band was, I'd talk about Talking Heads, who were as artsy as Jonny Greenwood or Yorke but didn't feel the need to beat you over the head with their importance. Or I'd mention the Flaming Lips, who are both crazier and more cheerful than any band to come out of the English music hype machine. Or maybe Pavement, who became a band around the same time Radiohead did, yet didn't end up obsessed with the end of the world (and wrote some of the best lyrics you'll find anywhere). Radiohead is a gloomy band, and these are some admittedly gloomy times, but just because cars and capitalism are slowly destroying us doesn't mean we can't flash a smile or wink at the audience once in a while. Yet Radiohead seems determined to keep a straight face through everything, and though they might be a great band, they'll never be a fun one.

Correction: My mistake! Radiohead did record a happy song, just to prove they could. Here it is:
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Why the Oscars Suck

As we've heard from countless acceptance speeches, receiving an award is an honor, a priviledge, and a deeply humbling experience, but giving out awards is a far more cynical act than accepting them. For starters, it takes an enormous amount of chutzpah for any organization to decide it has the authority to judge the “best picture,” “best album,” or (in the Nobel Peace Prize's case) “best human being.” Awards are never given in the spirit of altruism—the purpose is to honor the recipient, but also to elevate the ones doing the honoring. Award ceremonies satisfy a fundamental human need: everyone involved gets to dress up, make speeches, and feel important, even if all they did was make a film about blue people fighting tanks.

For the major award-bestowing organizations, then, the problem is to get the general public to care about the award they're bestowing. The Grammys do this by endorsing whatever music happens to be popular, to the point where people who love and care about music universally agree that the Grammys are a complete joke. This is obviously not ideal. The Nobel Peace Prize committee, perhaps tired of honoring humanitarians from countries no one has heard of, recently took a page from the Grammys' playbook and forced itself upon Barack Obama on the grounds that a lot of people liked him. (The war in Afghanistan counts as Bush's war, I guess, just like a relief pitcher in baseball isn't charged with runs scored by runners who were already on base when he came in.)

The Academy Awards face the same difficulty the Nobel people do. Most people do not know the names of the world's greatest humanitarians; neither do they see movies that deserve to be called the best movie of the year. We don't like to pay 11 bucks and sit for two hours to be challenged or disturbed or changed, which a good movie might try to do to us. As the top-10 grossing movies of 2009 indicate, we like shiny, shiny garbage, preferably with a message that we already know, like “be true to your friends,” or “don't give up on your dreams,” or “peaceful nature-loving aliens with disturbingly sexy bodies are preferable to evil corporations who employ sadistic ex-Marines.”

If the Oscars were the Pulitzer prize, or the PEN/Faulkner award, or the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, everything would be fine. Those awards frequently go to people who have accomplished things that—to be blunt—most people don't give a shit about. But the Academy wants to be loved by everyone—film industry folks, professional film critics, and the average joe who saw and loved both Transformers movies and thinks “Fellini” is a kind of Italian sandwich. Most of all, the Academy wants everyone to watch their award ceremony, and this is the real problem, because watching that ceremony is the dullest four hours anyone can have outside of a doctor's office waiting room.

For starters, there are the technical awards that not even most of the attendees pay much attention to: Makeup, Cinematography (vital, but ignored by the world at large) Art Direction, Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing (do you know the difference? Does anyone?), and Costume Design. Those awards are for people in those industries, everyone else can go grab a beer while they're being announced. Then there are the best short films, the best documentaries and the best foreign film, none of which anyone has ever heard of, and then there's the Best Animated Film, which is just whatever Pixar movie came out that year. The Oscar for Original Film Score gets awarded each year, sometimes not even to John Williams, and the world greets it with a collected grunt. The award for Best Original Song is only interesting because it led to a period of time when Three 6 Mafia had an Academy Award while Martin Scorsese didn't. Best Supporting Actor and Actress are sometimes referred to as major awards, but I dare anyone to name a specific winner from last year or any year. Best Director is a major award, of course, but also the most confusing besides sound editing/mixing—isn't the best directed movie also the best movie period?

The only awards that the general public cares about are for Actor, Actress and especially Best Picture, which is why those come near the end of the marathon ceremony. And this is where the Academy decided to tweak things to get more people interested. They expanded the field of nominees for best picture from five to 10, essentially to make sure that at least one or two bonafide blockbusters could get nominated. Thus, Blind Side got nominated despite middling reviews (a 52 on Metacritic), and District 9 slipped in even though it was the kind of thoughtful sci-fi film that usually get ignored by the Academy (see Men, Children of*). Actually, this year Avatar would have probably got a ton of nominations and therefore dragged in a lot of viewers for the Oscars even if there were only five Best Picture slots, but the important thing is that the Academy has no problems tweaking its format to bring in more eyeballs, and that might be a step toward Grammy-style critical irrelevance.

John Farr, the film writer for the Huffington Post, recently wondered if the Oscars were being corrupted by all the behind-the-scenes marketing and lobbying—if, in other words, the great and venerable Academy Awards were collapsing under the weight of two much hype. (The infamous letter that Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier wrote was only condemned because he directly insulted another film.) This complaint seems a little off-kilter. The Oscars are all hype and marketing—PR flacks sell the films to the Academy, and the Academy tries to sell the pomp and circumstance to the viewers. Complaining about marketing in the Oscars is like complaining about the pumpkin in pumpkin pie. To stay popular, the Academy Awards are going to have to endorse whatever movies are popular.

Farr ponders aloud whether the winning film will win for “lasting creative merit, or sheer popularity, as evidenced by box office?” This is something only a professional film critic who cared about awards would say. For film executives and producers, “sheer popularity” is the only thing worth caring about, and the best thing about winning an Oscar is that your film becomes more popular and rakes in the money on DVD sales. And unfortunately, the Academy also cares about popularity more than anything. So I'm betting that Avatar will win Best Picture, even though there are movies I think deserve it more and would benefit more from the wider audience that a Best Picture pedigree would provide (coughThe Hurt Lockercough!). But for Avatar, tonight's just a victory lap. It already won the box office, which is Hollywood's real highest honor.

*I know, Children of Men was nominated for three Oscars. But it didn't get a whiff of Best Picture, even though it was one of the best photographed, best written, and best edited films of the year. That was the year The Departed won for being directed by a guy who should have won a Best Picture Oscar 25 years ago. High five, Academy!

(Image from a Dan Savage column, by Misako Rocks!)

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Things That Don't Suck: Salinger's Death

Unless you've been living in an isolated cabin in New Hampshire, you'll have heard the news by now: J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, is no longer among the living. Like thousands of writers across several generations, I think of Salinger as one of my major influences, not so much for Catcher, but for his short stories and novellas dealing with the brilliant but troubled Glass family. (I used to read “Seymour, an Introduction” every year around Christmas as a cure for the wintertime blues.) In the four books he published in his lifetime (Catcher was his only novel) he demonstrated nearly perfect control of the English language; to borrow a phrase of his, his stories were “prose home movies,” precisely rendered portraits of movement and dialogue in which everything is in exactly the right place. “Omit needless words,” Bill Strunk advises us in Elements of Style, and Salinger shows us what that looks like.

But Salinger departs this world under rather odd conditions. He's not David Foster Wallace, dying at the peak of what should have been a long career, or Kurt Vonnegut, passing away after decades of critical and commercial success, or John Kennedy O'Toole, killing himself before his brilliance could be recognized. By all accounts, Salinger kept writing during his years of self-imposed isolation while at the same time refusing to let anyone publish or even see his manuscripts—now that he's dead, at least some of this work will see the light of day. Although a lot of his fans are in mourning right now, there's a lot of silver lining in this cloud: he lived to the extremely ripe age of 91, and now we'll finally get to see what he was working on this whole time.

It should be noted, too, that while the guy certainly had no obligation to publish books and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous publicity for the sake of a bunch of people he had never met, there was a nasty edge to his desire for “privacy.” Last year a Swedish author wrote a “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye that featured Holden Caufield and Salinger as characters; the book was banned in the US after Salinger cried copyright infringement. The book's publication wouldn't have affected Salinger's life in any way, yet he decided to fuck over a first-time novelist because apparently Salinger's characters and ideas are like precious jewels that he has to lock up in a cabinet and never let anyone touch. Years earlier a writer decided to write a sequel to George Orwell's Animal Farm, which was published as a “parody” over the objections of Orwell's estate, and guess what? It's a worthwhile novel that didn't diminish the value of the relevancy of the original in any way. (That might not be the case with the Catcher sequel, but still, it was awfully petty for Salinger to bring the suit.)

Then there's the case of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” the last of his stories to appear in published form. If you have a copy of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, you can read it, but thanks to Salinger's obstructionism, it never got anthologized or reprinted. It was nearly published by a small press until the Editor-in-Chief made the mistake of talking about it to a newspaper, which made Salinger very angry and he pulled out of a deal that could have helped a struggling press a great deal. There's the right to privacy, then there's screwing over people who just wanted to pay tribute to your work.

When I read Salinger, I don't give much thought to the man himself or his life, and that's probably the way he wanted it. He was a celebrity author who hated fame and never appeared to care about any of his fans, except the young women who he invited to live with him. I don't think I liked Salinger, the guy, at all. I just liked his sentences, and those, thankfully, aren't dying any time soon. Read more!

Why The Tonight Show Sucks

The entertainment media has been in a flurry lately, as you know if you're one of those people who follows celebrity news as a substitute for authentic human contact: The Tonight Show is getting a new host again, or more accurately it's getting an old host again, or even more accurately, Jay Leno is returning to his old host because Jay Leno is a parasite.

Supposedly, the conflict between Leno and Conan is a battle as timeless and important as the battle between Mordor and Minas Tirith. On one hand you have a big-chinned doofus custom made for Middle America, who tells jokes everyone can understand and enjoys the simpler pleasures in life, like having hundreds of breathtakingly expensive cars. On the other hand, you have this weird, tall, red-headed dork, who has a strange, jerky energy to him and does “edgy” things, like having a bear masturbate on his show. If you are a mouth-breathing tea-partier who buys tacky Jesus paintings, you like Leno. If you are a smarter-than-thou, pot-smoking, humanities-degree-holding 20-something who knows who Amy Poehler is and cares about the decline of The Simpsons, you like Conan, but you probably didn't watch his show all that much, which is why he got canned.

Which brings up the central problem with the media brouhaha over The Tonight Show—like baseball, we're supposed to care about network talk shows because of its history (blah blah Johnny Carson David Letterman blah blah), but also like baseball, if you sit down and actually watch it you'll discover that it's pretty fucking dull unless you're on mushrooms.

Here's how talk shows go: the host comes out (applause) and stands in front of a curtain and tells jokes about current events and weird news stories, some of which are funny. Then he goes down and sits at his desk while a band plays some generic riffs (why is he sitting down? Is he tired? Why couldn't he tell jokes at his desk?). Then he performs a “desk piece,” where he pulls out some semi-humorous props and displays like a more dignified Carrot Top, or they do a “remote,” a pre-taped segment where the host or someone else goes to a farm or a donut factory or a boxing gym and learns how to ride a horse or kickbox while cracking wise.

Then the whole purpose of the show: celebrity interviews! Sometimes, the celebrity will be a comedian, in which case he'll run through his material while the host nods, laughs, and goes, “That's hilarious!” once in a while. If the celebrity isn't a comedian, he'll tell a personal anecdote or talk about working with (insert name here). If the guest is a woman, there might be some mild flirting. All of this, of course, is in the name of promoting the movie/book/comedy album that the guest is putting out. Occasionally, things get weird, but this doesn't happen often enough to be a reason to tune in. At the end, sometimes there's a musical guest who plays a song, usually a middle-of-the-road rock or pop number that sort of reminds everyone who's still awake of Counting Crows.

It's not a bad format, and it's probably a fine way to promote movies that are bankrolled by the same companies that own the talk shows. But from a 21st century viewer's perspective, it leaves a lot to be desired. When Carson was doing it, there weren't many options—if you were watching TV at 11:30 pm, you were pretty much watching Tonight. Now you can watch whatever you want whenever you want, thanks to the internet and Netflix, so it's not a surprise that Conan's ratings weren't very good. What's surprising is that millions of people are still watching Conan and Leno run through the same thirty-year-old format night after night after night.

If you're one of those people who really likes Conan and was sorry to see him treated so badly by NBC (although they might be giving him 40 million dollars for his trouble, so maybe “badly” isn't the word), be honest: do you give a shit about The Tonight Show, beyond wishing bad things would happen to Leno? There are many, many comedy shows more interesting than Tonight out there, and just because we're supposed to care about late night talk shows doesn't mean we should. Read more!

Why Avatar Sucks

James Cameron's latest film, the many-long-years-in-the-making Avatar, has currently grossed 1.1 billion dollars worldwide, which is more than the entire GDP of Burundi. It cost about as much as the Panama Canal, but its finances are so complex we'll likely never know exactly how much money it took to make, market, and distribute the film. To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi: “That's not a movie, that's a space station.”

When discussing a movie that cost so much money to make, it's absurd to deconstruct it for themes and meaning the way you might a work of literature or art. (Though some people have given it the old colege try.) Avatar was created to make money, and by that standard it has succeeded beyond the wildest, wettest dreams of the studio executives. It looks pretty, the story and characters are made of 100 percent recycled materials, and it never asks the audience any hard questions. That's a recipe for box-office success, and if you ignore the disturbingly arousing alien sex scene, you'll probably enjoy it, unless you're Armand White.

Here's a plot recap: Marine goes to exotic alien world to work for Evil Corporation. Marine joins a program that allows humans to pilot alien bodies around. Marine spies on aliens, who turn out to be warm-hearted, nature-loving. Marine—surprise!--falls in love with an alien woman (commence disturbingly arousing sex scene) and discovers Nature Is Good. Marine leads battle against Evil Corporation. This takes a hundred and sixty minutes. If you stripped Avatar of its eyeball-bursting special effects, you'd be left with a longer version of FernGully.

But that's not why Avatar sucks—nothing's wrong with FernGully, after all. The reason Avatar sucks is tied to a phenomenon common to Hollywood films, something I'll call The Karate Movie Paradox

The name comes from a standard scene in a lot of movies about karate or another fighting technique: the Wise Old Man training the hero in the ways of Kicking Ass says, in his wise old way, “But you must never use these things I have taught you for anything other than self-defense. Violence is never the answer, young one.” (Check out The Karate Kid or Ong Bak for direct examples of this.)

That's a fine philosophy for the Wise Old Man to teach his students. The paradox is that the movies that contain this philosophy are violence delivery systems, paper-thin plots built around long action setpieces. Yoda may teach Luke to avoid conflict, but we want to see some fucking lightsaber duels and spaceship collisions.

We can expand this idea to include movies about evil corporations that are bankrolled by corporations, movies that extol the virtue of a native culture while casting non-natives in key roles (I'm looking at you, Braveheart), and so on. The short definition of the Karate Movie Paradox: Hollywood films have themes and messages that are directly contradicted by the reality of the movies themselves.

Avatar is supposed to be all about preserving nature, respecting animals, and honoring the Earth (or whatever planet you happen to be on). But there is pratically no nature at all on the screen—everything is state-of-the-art CGI effects. The characters keep repeating bromides about saving the trees they love from big, bad profiteering technocrats while surrounded by trees that are the products of real-life profiteering technocrats. The nature that is being saved in the movie is fantastic: glowing leaves, six-legged horses, plants that retract suddenly when touched. Some features, like the cliffs that float in the air, are startingly beautiful, if we're allowed to say that about a combination of computer-generated polygons.

The problem is nature on Earth isn't quite so fantastic. Trees don't glow, we don't ride dragons, and the people who want to build strip-mines and pollute aren't cartoonishly evil. Conservation in reality doesn't involve shooting arrows at mechanized infantry. It means driving less or not at all, drilling for less oil, recycling, eating less meat, and maybe going to the movies less. Protecting the nature that we actually live with, as opposed to the one manufactured by computeres, is boring, difficult and important, which are three words that simply aren't in the Hollywood dictionary.

Conservatives have attacked the movie for being “environmentalist propaganda,” but the movie's pro-Green/pro-pagan sympathies are only skin deep. If anything, it sets back environmentalism, portraying Greens as weird hippies who spout bullshit about the sacred communion between all life instead of rational people who say, “Hey guys, let's make sure the seas don't engulf Manhattan in the next 20 years.” Avatar's brand of environmentalism is misty-eyed, soft-hearted, and totally unrelated to the world we live in—in the end, it's as forgettable as Mr. Miyagi's preaching of nonviolence.

Which is good for the picture's bottom line. A genuinely environmentalist movie might force people to examine their lives, and might even make them feel bad about themselves. You don't earn 1.3 billion dollars at the box office by telling people what's wrong with them. With Avatar, everyone leaves the theater and piles into their SUVs thinking that they are good people, that they would be on the side of the peace-loving aliens, not the evil corporate soldiers. Talk about escapism. Read more!

Why Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Sucks

Christmas is here, the most capitalist of all our holidays, and with it comes a host of Christmas carols that often seem designed solely to drive shopping mall employees insane. These carols are part of our collective cultural DNA—somehow all of us, even the non-Christians, have the lyrics to “Frosty the Snowman” clogging up a corner of our brains. We hardly ever stop to analyze these carols, or even think about them for more than a second. Whether the carol is a thinly veiled warning to the followers of a vengeful and angry God (“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”), a litany of pagan nature-love (“O Christmas Tree”), or an incomprehensible story-song that no one knows the words to (“Good King Wenceslas”), Christmas carols are nothing more than background to our frenzied last-minute shopping trips.

One song that is a little more than background is “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” Written by an advertising executive in 1939 to appeal to children (seriously), it became so popular that it spawned several ubiquitous TV specials and a feature-length film. The song itself if the heartwarming story of a reindeer who learns that we are all special and can be helpful in different ways.

Ha ha! No, the song is actually about abusing those who stand out in any way until they become useful to the capitalist enterprise, then praising them and hoping they'll forget that you taunted them. Rudolph is only accepted by the other reindeer once he guides Santa's sleigh, and only then—if the “foggy Christmas eve” never happened, Rudolph would still be mistreated and no one would give a sack of coal. Luckily for him, his deformity turned out to be one that Santa could make use of.

It's an ugly story, and one that gets repeated over and over again outside of the North Pole. Just like Rudolph, the typical artist is usually abused and cast out by society, only to be praised by that same public once his art has become famous. From Van Gogh to Edgar Allen Poe to Kurt Cobain, the song remains the same: nobody likes you until everybody does (sometimes this process doesn't happen until you're already dead). Then, when everybody likes you, your suffering and years of ostracism are explained away. “Oh, sure we called you names, but that was because we didn't know how important you be!” say the public, or the other reindeer. “Now, how much for that painting? I just love your work!”

The ugliness of this cliched tale is that the artist (Rudolph) is expected to be fine with everyone who used to torture him. At the end of the song, when Rudolph is surrounded by his admirers—former enemies—how does he feel? Angry at them for being utterly two-faced? Is he secretly plotting his revenge against the worst of them? Or is he afraid that some day they won't like his nose anymore and he'll be cast out again?

One thing's for sure—unless Rudolph is a naive, gibbering idiot, he won't accept their shouts of glee at face value. He's saved Christmas, sure, but how long are these reindeer going to remember that for? Or someone else will save Christmas, and they'll tell that savior he'll go down in history too, abandoning Rudolph. But that sequel is not recorded in the song—maybe next Christmas will be foggy too, and Rudolph will remain in the limelight. Merry Christmas Rudolph. Remember: as long as you're useful, everyone will love you. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: The Flaming Lips

After downloading and listening to the Flaming Lips' latest album, Embryonic, I have decided that the Flaming Lips are crazy. Not crazy in the usual drugged-up-boozed-out-rock-band way, or the Syd Barrett/Brian Wilson “No, I mean actually diagnosed as insane” way. The Flaming Lips are crazy because unlike nearly every other popular recording group, they don't seem to care whether anyone likes them.

Clarification: a lot of people do like them a lot. In fact, Embryonic debuted at number eight on the Billboard Top 100, so they did sell a lot of records, but on the other hand: holy shit, this album does not sound like something that should be on the same list with Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, and Barbara Streisand, who were all in the Top 10 with the Flaming Lips that week. Weird synthesizer buzzes and clicks obscure drum-and-bass grooves, parts of the album sound like they were recorded by and for machines, and there's that extended two-note guitar solo during “Powerless” that's practically an anti-guitar solo. This is not a radio-friendly or fan-friendly album. It is, however, friendly enough to people uncool enough to still be taking psychedelic drugs in this day and age. Coincidentally (or not), Wayne Coyne's lyrics sound like the kind of insights one has when coming down from an 18-hour acid trip: “I wish I could go back/back in time/but no one ever really can/go back in time.” What? Whoa, man, whoa. We're traveling in time, but, only in one direction.

Embryonic isn't my favorite Lips album, and parts of it are hard to listen to, but I appreciate that a modern rock band is willing to make my ears hurt. The Lips could have recorded versions of their 1999 mostly-undisputed masterpiece The Soft Bulletin over and over again, but like time, man, they're constantly moving forward.

Most bands try to find a sound that fits them and mostly stick to it with small amounts of tweaking over the years. This is true even in the case of “experimental” bands: was Sonic Youth's last album a different from the one that preceded it? And as awesome as Radiohead's In Rainbows was, wasn't it a lot like OK Computer, which they recorded last decade? Some of these bands seem to be performing the same experiment over and over again, and getting the same results. Whether you like or dislike or feel completely neutral towards the Lips, you have to admit that they're at least willing to try new things, even if those things alienate their audience or are utterly incomprehensible. (See: Zaireeka.)

And it should be mentioned, finally, that these guys are getting old. They've been making music since the mid-80s and they've hit that age where most artists are content to play their hits in exchange for sexual relationships with inappropriately young groupies. Thankfully, the Lips never had any hits, except for that song about jelly and not using it. I suppose when you aren't successful doing something one way, it doesn't hurt to try it another way—then again, the Lips don't seem like they could stay in one place musically or artistically for very long no matter how rich they get. As their kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamlined live show indicates, they're fully willing to do almost anything—drop confetti from the ceiling, prance around in animal costumes, roll around the audience in a giant plastic ball—just for the hell of it, or to see if people will dig it. “What the hell, why not?” seems to be their motto a lot of the time, and that's not such a bad motto for any artist in any medium.

Further reading: this cool profile on Wayne Coyne. Read more!