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Ugh. Well, at least he took Boston:
Hillary Clinton withstood a string of high-profile endorsements for Barack Obama to glide to a surprisingly decisive victory, while Mitt Romney held onto his Republican base to handily beat John McCain yesterday, in the most competitive and meaningful Massachusetts presidential primary in memory.
In one of the largest of voter turnouts in state presidential primaries, Clinton surged to a lead with the earliest returns last night, then never gave it up – in sharp contrast to the public surveys that had shown Obama closing in over the final week. With about 92 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, she held a 56 percent to 41 percent lead. Clinton had 47 Massachusetts delegates to Obama’s 29, according to preliminary counts.
Obama, who had the support of Governor Deval Patrick and Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, carried Boston by a small margin of under 10,000 votes, as Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s political machine kept her close. Obama also did well in liberal, affluent suburbs.
But Clinton ran up comfortable margins in urban areas such as Quincy, Worcester, Fall River, Springfield, New Bedford, and other more conservative towns in the Merrimack Valley and South Shore.
“This is still Clinton country,” Menino said in an interview last night. “Our campaign wasn’t about speeches; it was about work. All we had was people making the phone calls, knocking on doors. We weren’t involved in superstar campaigns; we were involved in workers campaigns.”
I’ve been talking about the election with a number of my friends (I prefer thinking buddies to drinking buddies), and so far the overwhelming opinion is Obama FTW. I tend to agree, as do Michael Chabon and Lawrence Lessig, but at this point I honestly feel like I’d vote for the Democrats no matter who they ran this time around simply because I feel the Republican party needs to be sent a message – and I’m a registered Republican. I’ve never voted Republican, mind you, because so far I haven’t seen the Republicans float a single candidate that actually represents what it means to be a Republican. I’ll be voting Democrat both because the Democrats seem to be closer to what my opinion of good government happens to be, and because I honestly feel that the Republicans need to be punished for the last eight years of wanton profiteering and mismanagement. For me, the next election should be transformative, but I’d settle for punitive.
Asshats.
February 2, 2008
11:34 am
So far this weekend I’ve knocked off another two films on my AFI Top 100 project: Network (1976) and A Night at the Opera (1935), and so far it’s been a fantastic weekend.
I know I should write more about these films, but really, you’ve gotta see these to believe ’em. When someone told me that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was just Aaron Sorkin drawing Network out into twenty-odd episodes, I scoffed – and now I totally believe it. It makes me even more depressed that there will never be a second season of Studio 60, but I believe it. In a way, Studio 60 is an odd mash-up of homage and meta-level remake: a story decrying the sins of television on television and eventually killed by television. TV scholars everywhere should have been curling up their toes with glee at the synchronicity between the common theme of network interference between Studio 60 and Network and the network meddling that wound up resulting in the show’s feeling so wildly uneven, which, of course, led to its untimely demise. (30 Rock didn’t help much either, of course, but now I wonder if the green light for 30 Rock was given so that the executives could present the American populace with an option as to which philosophy of television they’d rather believe. That the so-called “TV Generation” would pick the more upbeat candidate should come as a shocker to no one.) Network is now, as I suspected it would be, one of my favorite films ever. Absolutely fantastic writing, acting and message, with a great blend of workhorse framing not getting in the way of the dialogue and narrative and real knock-down awesome cinematography where needed (most notably in Ned Beatty’s boardroom scene). Seriously. Well worth the money.
A Night at the Opera, of course, is one of the Marx Brothers’ most timeless classics. The Marx Brothers, like Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, are, I think, a sort of Rorschach test of humor – I myself found Groucho and Chico’s one-liners priceless but Harpo’s screwball visual gags less interesting – still, in toto I loved the film completely and can’t wait to experience more of their work. Laura, on the other hand, didn’t warm as much to the film, which makes me suspect the ‘Rorschach Test’ theory. It’s also the case that my own sense of humor is, well, odd, and somewhat anachronistic – many contemporary comedies hold very little appeal to me, but I find the old stuff wonderful. I like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau more than Jon Heder and Efren Ramirez, for example; given my choices, I’d rather see old Marx brothers movies than Harold and Kumar. I liked the movie, but I liked A Night at the Opera much more.
I suppose the common element to both movies that I appreciate the most, which should surprise absolutely nobody, is the writing. Verbal wit beats slapstick in my book, and compelling, intelligently-written and brilliant dialogue coupled with a great, heartfelt message presented well will get me to make a beeline for the theater. I enjoyed Raging Bull, but I liked Network much more perhaps due to my own preference for intelligent plots; of course, at the same time, I think I liked Raging Bull a great deal more than Rocky (which I also watched last week) because De Niro is clearly a better actor than Stallone and the character was simply more complex. On the Waterfront proves that a character can be far from the sharpest crayon in the box and still complex and endearing; of this “Pugilism Trilogy” I think I may have liked On the Waterfront best, followed by Raging Bull and then Rocky. What do you guys think? Bill?
Obviously the hottest story on the wire this morning is Microsoft’s $44.6B bid for Yahoo! (That wasn’t meant to be exclamatory, but writing “Yahoo!.” just looked odd.) Given that the struggling Internet giant just announced on Tuesday that it would be cutting a thousand jobs, reported internal concerns that Jerry Yang can’t rally the troops and the departure of Terry S. Semel all point towards a great big “ACQUIRE ME” sign Scotch-taped to the company’s forehead, and the fact that Microsoft’s bid places a 62% premium over yesterday’s closing stock price ($31 a share bid versus $19.18 a share on the market) suggests that this might well go through.
If it does happen, the resulting megacorp may suddenly give Google new cause for alarm, which might (but probably won’t) lead to a merger between Google and Apple, followed rapidly by an entire raft of antitrust suits, and possibly both companies’ lobbying the Fed for recategorization of Internet and computing services as utilities.
Mr. Bastin, would you like to use your legal superpowers to explain why this won’t happen? 🙂
Jean Hannah Edelstein of The Guardian asks an interesting question today: Can the novella save literature? In the microessay (which is itself fitting), she argues:
Readable in a couple of hours, a novella demands far less time than a full-length novel: you can get through them in the same amount of time it takes to watch a film or two reality television programmes. If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.
And best all, an upswing in the publication of novellas would not confirm the prejudices of those who rail against the dumbing-down of literature: novellas require an intelligent author and an intelligent reader to appreciate the power of brevity. Without exacting quite the level of austerity presented by the task of writing a good short story, novellas challenge writers to use words like wartime rations: with care and thought and the extra level of creative gusto required to ensure that they stretch to make a miniature read that is just as satisfying as something more substantial. And the economics are right: they’re cheaper to produce (less paper, naturally), can be sold at enticing low price points, and can more easily be stocked in non-traditional outlets – whereas I’d be loth to pick up a Ă‚ÂŁ20 first edition of a book at a newsagent, I’d much rather purchase a Ă‚ÂŁ5 novella than yet another soul-destroying glossy magazine to accompany me on an hour-long train trip.
This is in keeping with some of my own recent thinking about the nature of narrative and the role of books in a modern entertainment ecosystem. Last year I finished my first real novel, Bones of the Angel, but it’s short, only about 200 pages or so. One of my best friends read it and remarked that it could comfortably be about a third again as long, and I’ve been mulling that over for a while now. What I think I’d rather do, one way or the other, is to publish it short and begin to adopt the short novel approach as a general philosophy because, dangit, I really do think Edelstein is right.
A few weeks ago I finally picked up John Maeda’s new book, Simplicity, which is a beautifully done slim volume of about 100 pages. It’s light, easy to consume and yet no less off for its nimbleness. I think that novels, or novellas, would probably benefit from the same approach. Jonathan Carroll, one of my literary heroes, uses a similar model and it’s paid off very well for him. So much of my own research and media diet has been made up of serialized narratives – comics, TV, film franchises, video games – that I think that a series of short novels might be the way to go, and maybe sprinkle a mess of short stories about those characters or their world in between ’em to act as “Monster of the Week” episodes, to swipe a phrase from The X-Files.
What do you folks think? Also, what if these stories were made initially available as PDFs for free download, using the Cory Doctorow model, accompanied by the option to order slim hardcovers of each one?
January 29, 2008
10:03 am
Okay, this is a fantastic data point in my recent research into niche media groups – specifically, the Jim Henson Company. As of today, Fraggle Rock and Farscape are available on iTunes.
Why is this big news? Because Farscape is infamous for being a difficult show to collect. First, because it’s been reissued in several different (and confusing) editions – the Starburst collections, which split each season up into multiple discs, are often found sitting side-by-side on the shelves of Borders or Barnes and Noble with the complete season collections. What the two editions have in common are the fact that they’re both excruciatingly expensive: The Complete First Season is only available on Amazon used for a whopping $296.99, and the Complete Second Season is on sale for $79.49, marked down from a ludicrous $149.98. Jesus!
Unfortunately, this makes sense for a niche product like Farscape or Doctor Who because they don’t have the same economy of scale as something like LOST – similar overhead and smaller budgets and smaller markets all translate into higher price tags – except when you start dealing with digital distribution, which chops out the costs of manufacturing, shipping and so on. On iTunes, Season One is a much more palatable $39.99. True, this wouldn’t include all the extras as the DVDs, but the Amazon listing for Season Two doesn’t seem to include any extras. Now, if only the iTunes store delivered each episode in a higher resolution…
January 27, 2008
11:37 pm
Since the last time I posted an update on this project, I’ve managed to watch A Clockwork Orange, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Unforgiven, and Raging Bull. If I weren’t still feeling relatively laid low by the bug I caught last weekend (this sucker’s a tenacious little SOB) I’d be writing up the kind of lengthy posts I’ve authored for some of the others. As it is, I just don’t have the energy for much more than a couple fleeting high points: Butch and Sundance may be the best buddy movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m taking careful notes to improve the relationship between the two main characters in my novel; A Clockwork Orange was deservedly awesome for about the first half hour and then veered off into predictability land; Raging Bull is an interesting case study of violence but not as interesting as this year’s There Will Be Blood, but it’s really interesting to see that hot on the heels of On the Waterfront; and Unforgiven was, as I think Jonathan Gray pointed out in an earlier comment, pretty much Clint Eastwood proving that he can still make Westerns, although it was a decent Western at that.
I think the next couple on my hit list are Rocky and Network, with maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest squeezing in there somewhere. Another thing I might do is lock myself in the house next Sunday while Laura’s at work, TiVo the Super Bowl so’s I can just watch the commercials, and watch nothing but war movies all day. I figure with enough tenacity, chips and beverages I could probably plow through Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Patton, The Bridge on the River Kwai, All Quiet on the Western Front and maybe even MASH by the end of the day. I’m dang near done with the Westerns after binging on those already – I think I only have Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch left to go there. I also need to do a comedy binge at some point, watching Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, The General, City Lights, The Gold Rush, and Modern Times. Ken, when’s the next time you’re going to be up this way?
Bonus points to those in the audience who get the lyrical reference in the title to this post, but it sums up my current state of the universe pretty much perfectly. I began coming down with something on Monday, was down flat on Tuesday, was back up on my feet (but exactly one Red Bull down from feeling normal) on Wednesday and now, Thursday morning, I’m somewhere between ugh and enh. There should be a clinical name for the stage of a virus that is, essentially, the hangover.
That said, my transmedia lecture yesterday afternoon went amazingly well – I began with the disclaimer that since I wasn’t feeling so hot I was struggling to bring my C game, much less my B game or A game, but once I got into the swing of things I was having a great time, bouncing ideas back and forth with the audience, and Henry showed up at the end of the show so I could deflect some of the questions about fanfic and areas I’m still shaky on over to him. Which was awesome, because as soon as I stepped out from behind the lectern I realized exactly how much energy I’d just spent on giving that talk. Woozy with a vengeance. Still, it’s nice to have reaffirmation that yes, teaching and lecturing about this stuff is still very much the way I want to go. Bonus points: I’ve been invited to be one of the judges for this year’s Sony Game Workshop, which is awesome since I myself have been somewhat involved in two of the things now, plus two of Chris Weaver’s classes, so I’m tickled pink to be on the other side of the curtain for a change.
In other news, I’ve been looking around the old site here and contemplating what needs to change in order for it to more accurately reflect my current state of existence. I need somewhere to put my academic work, which I suppose should fall under ‘writing’, but I’m not 100% positive. I do know that my portfolio is way the heck out of date; I haven’t even added the logo designs for C3, CMS, GAMBIT, NML… And the first of those was done in 2005. The CMS website isn’t there, nor is the C3 site, the GAMBIT site, the 2007 CMS research fair concept design, the C3 white papers, the C3 HTML email, the GAMBIT promo posters, the 2008 research fair promos, the 2007 C3 Futures of Entertainment design, the 2008 C3 Futures of Entertainment design… And I have buckets of new photos I want to add in, I think, but all this illustrates that I’ve been spending more time on the corporate side of life and not enough on the actual artistic side. More work! More time! Go, man, go!
Hmm. If I wanted to include an area where people could download my slides from various talks and lectures, where do you folks think I should put that? A new top-level area called ‘academia’ or ‘research’ or…?
January 21, 2008
12:15 pm
Last night Laura and I continued our trek through the AFI top 122 with Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, one of the films I’d been most looking forward to for several reasons.
One, I’m a big Jimmy Stewart fan. Cary Grant and John Wayne are both awesome in their own ways, but I’m a sucker for Jimmy Stewart’s aw-shucks delivery, and the through-and-through wholesomeness of his Jefferson Smith appeals to the anti-ironic optimist in me (which is almost constantly struggling for survival). This is amplified by the director, Frank Capra – the term Capraesque has come to mean a sort of overly saccharine, cheesy over-the-topness in Hollywood, but I’d argue that this is because so many other directors who have tried to emulate Capra have simply done it badly. The viewing public was subjected to a raft of Capra wannabes in the 1980s, which I suspect is largely to blame for the rise of irony and darkness in the 1990s. While I’m a big fan of dark entertainment, I’d also like to see a return to this kind of attitude. Innocence is the wrong word, but optimism might be the right one.
Two, I’m also a big fan of hopeful political movies and shows, as anyone who’s read my ravings about Aaron Sorkin on this blog well knows. Academics and social critics cluck their tongues and note that the aforementioned dark, ironic flavor to the zeitgeist is reflective of the downfall of the American empire. I fell hard for Sorkin’s The West Wing soon after I moved to Washington, DC in 2000, which is also one of the main reasons why I’ve railed so hard about the Bush administration for the last eight years – at the same time that I was listening to Sorkin’s paeans to classic American ideology I was surrounded by evidence of corruption, cronyism and incompetence at the highest levels. The despair that I felt was driven largely by a sense that politics had become irretrievably corrupted in an age when someone could so blatantly steal an election, and that despair gave way to complete surrender and acceptance when he was re-elected. Watching Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, however, suggests to me that this is where Sorkin first learned the tune, and the fact that the American government was shot through with such corruption back in 1939, and the film’s reminding me that Washington and Lincoln both had to deal with the same type of issue, reminds me that this so-called “downfall of the American Empire” is not a modern issue at all, but an eternal struggle inherent to any systemic ordering of power. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has always been true, but by the same token there have always been people in office who genuinely, truly believe that they’re doing the right thing. I’ve never once believed that George W. Bush is one of them – I have hope that someone like Barack Obama might be, but I’m also not that inspired by any of the candidates. Me, I miss Al Gore – good enough for a Nobel prize but not good enough to be awarded the Oval Office. Sheesh.
Getting back to the film, it’s possible that only Capra can do Capra because any modern attempt to do the same thing will simply be written off as heavy-handed – but the film is worth seeing for much more than just the shots that we typically associate with Capra now. Sure, there are the lingering shots on parts of the Lincoln Memorial with the particular passages he wants us to read highlighted in an illuminated band in the middle of the screen, and yes, there’s one shot where we’re shown Jean Arthur’s Clarissa Saunders falling in love with Senator Smith with all the subtlety of a megaton warhead, but at the same time there’s one long shot where we’re shown Senator Smith’s awkward twitterpation for Astrid Allwyn’s Susan Paine by tracking the way Stewart keeps fumbling with his hat. Allwyn isn’t in the shot at all, and we only catch a glimpse of Stewart’s face once or twice, because the camera tracks the hat in a moderate close-up as it twirls from hand to hand, falls to the floor, is scooped up, is brought hesitatingly up to his head, almost plunks down there, then is brought back to his side and dropped to the floor again. It’s a brilliant shot, and one that I’ll probably use to illustrate symbolism 101 in a classroom someday.
As restorations go, the Columbia Classics DVD is far from ideal. There are several scenes where there’s very clearly a scratch in the film or a hair on the lens, something that could be fixed very easily given a $300 piece of software today. The sound is only so-so and the package itself held only the disc with no liner notes at all. All of this makes me cock an eyebrow at the $27 list price of the disc, but the quality of the film itself has me going back and forth. The film is a must-see, but I can’t say that this particular disc is a must-own yet. If Columbia opts to do a high-def restoration and cleanup on this film, I’ll be first in line to buy my copy on release day. Until then, I’ll recommend that anyone pick up a copy at their library or through Netflix immediately, and to save their money until a better edition is released. Seeing the film can’t wait, but owning it probably can.
January 20, 2008
10:42 am
Today’s New York Times Magazine features a brilliant essay by Virginia Heffernan on Friday Night Lights and Art in the Age of Franchising:
The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.
This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.
This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel.
This is CMS through-and-through. Excellent, insightful stuff and a good introduction to the type of thing we’ve been researching in C3 for the last two years.
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