Parabasis

Boy Am I Glad I Don't Live In Arizona

In case anyone was confused about whether or not Arizona's recent immigration law was about a gradually building war against brown people motivated by white resentment about this not being their country anymore... well, may I direct you to this:

Just a week after signing the country's toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

The bill forbids Arizona schools from using any curriculum that promotes "the overthrow of the United States government" or "resentment toward a race or class of people." It also disallows any curriculum that's "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" or that seeks to "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

You might also want to check out this article in the Wall St. Journal about efforts to clamp down on... I kid you not... public school teachers who have accents.

It's Not Metropolis but...

People in New York will soon be able to see this:

It's kinda like Metropolis.... right?

Another Great Essay On Writing...

... That Anne Lamott piece I linked to the other day got me thinking about other pieces of writing about writing (or creating in general) that I find freeing and inspiring.

One that I treasure deeply is Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence which, amongst other things, is an assault on the idea of sui generis art that not only argues for redefining what originality is so that it's a creatively useful concept, but is an object lesson in how that new definition might work.

I've linked to it many times over the years, mainly to discuss its relationship to intellectual property, which is the essay's subject.  But lurking within Lethem's entry into the Copyleft movement is an honest and generous discussion of how creativity actually works. 

And did I mention the entire thing is available for free on the internet?  I didn't.  Oh. Sorry about that. Here it is.

We have a lot of wonderful, creative people reading this blog.  What writing about creating do you draw inspiration from?

The return of Metropolis

The trailer for the new restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (now with 25 extra minutes of footage found in Brazil).  Anyone else excited for this?  I felt a little geekily faint.

Posted Without Comment

Greenberg addenda addenda

I'm with you, Isaac, re: Nicole Holofcener. As luck would have it, The A.V. Club has an interview with her posted today. Bask in her superiority...

Finale

I largely missed the discussions of closure on television going on over here last week. The wonderful world of the Idiot Box is part of my beat here at Parabasis, so I figured I'd dive in, anyway. I'll shy away from the gender politics of traditional structure and all, thank you very much. But, as we're coming up on one of my favorite times of the year, May Sweeps, and the rush of season finales, I got some things I want to share.

(continued after the jump!)

Quick Greenberg Addenda

I wanted to keep the earlier post on Greenberg's position in the modern day rom-com genre, so I didn't get a chance to mention two things:

(1) It's been interesting to watch Baumbach's descent into outright misanthropy over the past few years.  Kicking And Screaming, his first (and still best) film certainly has a jaundiced eye, but there's also a level of affection and understanding for the characters.  We think that Grover, Otis, Max, Chet and Skippy are a pathetic lot, but we also root for them and sympathize with their struggles to get a hold of their lives.  Mr. Jealousy, which remains out-of-print-but-streamable and is probably his most likeable and mainstream film, is a bona-fide romantic comedy.  Then, after a long gap, we get The Squid and the Whale, Margo at the Wedding and Greenberg in quick, increasingly nasty succession. Similarly, in Squid you have incredibly likeable actors working overtime to get you to sympathize with their characters.  Not so in Greenberg. It's fascinating to watch Rhys Ifans expend so little effort on making Ivan someone you care about, and to watch Ben Stiller work overtime to get you to hate Roger. And the portraits of the side characters are remarkable for how dark they are.  Everyone except Florence who appears in the film-- even for a line or two-- is a terrible person. 

(2) I can't help but think how much more I would've liked Greenberg had Nicole Holofcener written and directed it. Luckily for me, Holofcener has a new movie out this week called Please Give and I can't wait to see it. 

File This Under "Parenting, Awesome"

Uber Linkage

• This might be my favorite Jaime Hernandez comic.
• Tony at Halcyon Blog tackles the proposed Shakespeare Moratorium at some length.
• Mike Daisey responds to the Chicago Tribune review of How Theater Failed America, which was penned by Chris Jones, who really doesn't like it when people point out systemic problems in American theatre.  
• Anne Lamott, a writer I normally dislike, pens a column I loved on Shitty First Drafts (H/t Adam).
• My friend Aaron Rich really, really, really hated Greenberg.
• Click here and say goodbye to your productivity.

Love Conquers Nothing

 

Let us posit for a moment, that you are the kind of person who has some level of either ambivalence or outright hostility to the latter-day male-centered romantic comedy. Let’s say that you were one of those people who—even if you enjoyed Knocked Up-- were frustrated by how unrealistic the central relationship was. Or maybe you rolled your eyes when you saw the preview for Adam when you learned that it was about the improbably relationship between a man with Asperger’s Syndrome and Rose Byrne. Perhaps this unease stretches all the way back to Benny & Joon, and you just wanted to scream at the movie screen that there was no way the two of them living together unsupervised was going to work. 

Well then, Greenberg is definitely the movie for you. If you find yourself annoyed at the too-sweet portraits of mental illness and the whole undeserving-man-is-redeemed-by-love-of-tolerant-woman tropes that frequently bound out of Hollywood, then Greenberg will be the tonic for your aches and pains.

More, after the jump!

Flarging Blarging Snurging Gragrging Blarg

Senate Republicans have again reduced me to incoherent rage. Again. I doubt I'm the only one.

I meant for my first post here at Parabasis to be some highfalutin talking about the wonderful world of the arts (or at least television). Clearly, I've failed in that. Ah, well. Better luck next time.

When Great Art Happens To Bad People

  

I know this blog has been a string of linking-to-other-people-with-minimal commentary over the last couple of days, but we've all been busy. And it's sunny out.  Anyway, writer Erik Tarloff has an interesting article up at the Atlantic about what to do with great art that is also offensive. He cites the 200 uses of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn, not to mention the anti-semitism in a large quantity of Western Literature. It's an interesting read, and his conclusion (that we need to engage with it, including engaging with the parts of it that make us uncomfortable or are offensive) is one I agree with.

In terms of educational settings, I think this is an example of where diversifying curricula, particularly in high school, makes engagement with offensive texts much easier.   If the only perspective students are getting, over and over again, are (a) dated, (b) white and (c) male, than parents wary of having their children read the n-word two hundred times in a novel that ends with a white character humiliating a black character for the reader's amusement is a little more understandable.  And their suspicions about how that material will be handled in class (which is what this all really comes down to) are possibly well-grounded. Diversifying curricula also allows for these works to speak to each other in a dialogue. 

All Memes Must Converge

 

Please Welcome... 99Seats

So for those of you who haven't read this, J. "99Seats" Holtham and I have been talking for quite awhile about him coming on board as a co-blogger on Parabasis.  WIth the decision to expand Parabasis' writing staff and focus, this seemed the perfect time to go ahead and make it official.

99Seats has been one of my favorite blogs since pretty much its first post, and I'm lucky to count J. as a co-writer, artistic collaborator and friend.  I hope you enjoy his input here as much as I know I will.

More On Video Games and Art

From Olivia Collette, who disagrees with Roger Ebert but (like Ebert and myself) finds the TED talk that sparked the discussion to be thin gruel indeed:

Can any game be art? I’m not sure about that. People have brought up chess a lot, and my problem here is with the mathematics of the game. It’s functional and objective-driven. This doesn’t take away the enjoyment of it, but there’s no engagement with the imaginary, which is what’s so distinct about video games. There’s no “what if” fancy in chess. It doesn’t make it a lesser game, just an inappropriate comparison.

RTWT here, lots of good stuff.

Your thoughts?

A Greater Reward

When I was in the seventh and eighth grade, I fell deeply in love with the Australian Industrial-Pop band Severed Heads, particularly their song Greater Reward:

So it was a nice surprise to find out that Tom Ellard, founder and lead singer of the band, has his own blog where he reminisces and writes on a variety of topics with a sharp, self-and-everything-else-depricating sense of humor. I particularly enjoyed his post on Kurt Cobain, assassin of New Wave which you can read here. 

Twilight is History's Greatest Monster

Not content to have ruined literature, cinema, vampires, adolescence, women, sex and Forks, Washington, the unstoppable public menace that is The Twilight Saga is now destroying a small town in Italy. 

Thanks a lot, Stephanie. 

The Value of Books

Jason Mittell outlines why in this day and age he might want to publish his newest work as a book (instead of a digital monograph).  Many of us bibliophiles don't really examine why books are so awesome because it seems undoubtedly obvious, so it's nice to have Mittell outline some concrete non-Hayekian reasons here. Most of the reasons have to do with the incentives that exist within his particular marketplace (academia).  But some of them ring true outside academia. Particularly this one:

Books are more permanent and long-lasting than digital forms. This is probably my biggest concern. I have a shelf full of amazing Voyager CD-ROM titles from the early 1990s that I’d love to look at again, but they haven’t worked on contemporary computers for years. The presses I’ve talked to see this question of long-term access and sustainability for digital titles as a huge question mark, but just because there’s not an answer yet doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try formats and then hope to port them as systems change. Waiting for the perfect solution to future problems leads to paralysis.

Good stuff. You can read more of it here. He also links to this blog post about the differences between book writing and blog writing as part of a broader conversation on the future (or lack thereof) of film criticism. 

Lots of food for thought. Enjoy!

The Death of Networks, Vol. 3

Video gaming is hurting prime time viewership of network shows, according to Nielsen, who separately conclude that online video ads are more effective than their televised cousins.