Nick Douglas inspired me to put up a muxtape, and I am inordinately proud of it:
Andrew Sullivan posted an excerpt from from an Atlantic story about media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Here’s part of it:
This is how Murdoch understands journalism—as content, a word he uses all the time, rather than as a form of literature or public service, and as a commodity whose value largely derives from its instant retail malleability.
It reminded me of the closing sentences of the chapter on the press from Understanding Media:
May this not explain the strange obsession of the bookman with the press-lords as essentially corrupt? The merely private and fragmentary point of view assumed by the book reader and writer finds natural grounds for hostility toward the big communal power of the press. As forms, as media, the book and the newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.
Calls to improve the “quality” of journalism are kind of ridiculous, as are concerns about Murdoch’s outlets style and tone. I’m not giving the guy a pass. It’s just that he succeeds because he’s not quibbling over news as “literature” or “public service”—he understands that the quote-unquote level of quality has next to nothing to do with how well the news companies he owns perform. I may find that offensive or obnoxious, but if I actually want to do something about it, I have to acknowledge how the media in question function before I call him out for simply taking advantage of their natural strengths.
Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
Beat the drums of tragedy and death.
And let the choir sing a stormy song
To drown the rattle of my dying breath.
Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
And let the white violins whir thin and slow,
But blow one trumpet note of sun
To go with me
To the darkness
Where I go.
— L. Hughes
Much has been and will be made of the fact that Brian Eno produced Coldplay’s new album, Viva La Vida, because Brian Eno is perhaps best known for having produced, with Daniel Lanois, the bulk of U2’s hits. Already, I’ve heard comparisons to Achtung Baby bandied about.
So let me say for the record that we’ve been only briefly acquainted, Viva La Vida, but I’ve listened many times to Achtung Baby, I know Achtung Baby, Achtung Baby is a friend of mine. You’re no Achtung Baby.
You’re still a pretty good album. But come on. No one who got on board with A Rush of Blood to the Head is gonna stop paying their fan club dues over “Violet Hill.”
From time to time, if I find myself at Andrew Sullivan’s blog and there’s nothing new on Gawker or io9 (the Internet is not that big for me), I look to see what’s up on Marc Ambinder’s blog, which is more or less next door to Andrew’s. It’s not a bad place to go for information—it has been useful during this primary season—but I really don’t think Marc quite understands the technology he’s dealing with.
I mean, first there’s the fact that (as I happened to mention on Gawker) he turned off his comments recently. It was indeed getting pretty ugly in there at times, but, y’know, such a cut-and-dry dismissal of one of the most interactive aspects of an interactive medium seemed a little heavy-handed to me, and definitely indicative of the fact that The Atlantic in general and not just Marc doesn’t seem to really understand how to manage the new media. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A lot of folks tend to look down their nose at Gawker as some kind of lowbrow, mean-spirited peanut gallery, but I have yet to find another online community that’s as worthwhile for intelligent discourse, and it’s because Nick Denton and his people know how to apply the technology—TMITFMP.)
But more irritating to me is Marc’s occasional posting of his corrections.
Dude. Unless you are updating the offending posts themselves (and from what I can see, you are not), your corrections are useless. Pointless. Without a meaningful end. Once the post with the error drops off your front page, most readers who find it in the future are going to do so through a search engine or by way of some equally nonlinear method. They will never see your correction, and so the mistake you made will continue to perpetuate itself on and on until the end of time.
If you’re going to correct something on a blog, the correction needs to go in the post to which it corresponds, at the bottom or the top; the strikethrough function may also come in handy. By all means, feel free to augment this with a separate post explaining what’s been corrected, but that should be a secondary action.
Monday, May 19, 2008 11:58 p.m. I am 27 min, 40 sec in and decide I am going to live-blog this stupid, stupid movie which I am giving another chance, as a courtesy to stevens, Nicka, and others at Gawker and io9. Six minutes ago, I looked at the time remaining on the DVD player and went, “Holy shit, there’s an hour and 56 minutes of this shit left?!?”
Thoughts so far: The comic-bookish cinematography still seems pretentious (the last time I saw Hulk was in the theater in 2003), mostly because it doesn’t evoke comic bookery—it evokes movie arty-ness, which is basically, from a common-sense and from a McLuhanesque perspective, the opposite of comic bookery. That said, the tone does feel right—very tense, very on edge; it reminds me of the Bill Bixby series. Eric Bana is a good actor, but he’s kinda buff; he definitely does not bring Bixby’s air of wussiness to the role, appearance-wise. (Note: As far as I am concerned, the best Hulk film to date has been The Incredible Hulk Returns, a 1989 TV movie that also featured Thor. Honestly, it was so fucking awesome.)
The dad stuff so far is just weird. Oh, hey, he’s just hanging out outside Bruce’s window with his three dogs in the middle of the night, and then he disappears seven seconds later!!! I guess that is supposed to make us feel SUSPENSE-IFIED, but it just seems stupid to me. Also: Bruce Krenzler? One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the Marvel movies so far is that most of them have done a pretty admirable job of not deviating from canon too terribly (I don’t expect perfection; some stuff is bound to get lost in the transformation to summer blockbuster). Did this Krenzler shit come from anywhere in particular? Stan Lee says the name first in his inevitable cameo—is that supposed to lend it some credibility? Stan, your creations are BIGGER THAN YOU—you have no credibility in this regard. Further, it has just occurred to me that WHERE THE FUCK IS RICK JONES? I don’t remember him showing up in this. Christ, Daredevil got Ben Urich in there, and even got Joe Pantoliano to play him!
OK, back to the film…
Tuesday, May 20, 12:25 a.m. I forgot to add that dreams sure have figured big into the story so far. One character having crazy narrative-propelling dreams? OK, fine. But Bruce and Betty? It works, because the dream content is, well, dreamy—I mean, a big green mushroom cloud would get stuck in my brain, too—but barely. It’s not a plus.
12:30 a.m. The trippy dream interludes—especially the one that just ended with the Hulk waiting in the closet—are not doing it for me.
12:33 a.m. “You must know. I can…see it…in your eyes. So much like your mother’s.” Note to self: If I ever alter myself genetically so that my son carries a latent mutation that will reveal itself if he’s ever exposed to gamma radiation and then he just happens to grow up to work with gamma radiation, I should be more forthcoming with him if I want something from him, and not creepy in a vapidly stereotypical “cryptic old man in a movie” sort of way.
12:42 a.m. “Betty, I’m your Army father. Now I’m going to ask you how much you know about this ‘Krenzler’ character. Then I’m going to tell you that I can’t tell you anything about him. This makes sense, because we’re somewhat estranged. Have you talked to your Aunt Margaret lately? No? I guess you haven’t heard the news, then. No, no, I can’t tell you about that either.”
12:45 a.m. Seriously, anyone, go watch the scene where Betty meets with her dad 38 minutes in and tell me you haven’t seen it before in a Lifetime movie. “I’m here. We’re not communicating, nor are we really even verbally jousting. Now I’m crying. Now I’m leaving.”
12:49 a.m. Bana’s Hulking out now, and this is pretty cool. The intensity is well executed.
12:52 a.m. The CGI is shittier than I remembered, though. A disappointment in a post-Yoda, post-Gollum era.
12:59 a.m. “Bruce, it’s weird that I found you passed out in your backyard just in ripped pants, and also the lab exploded, but I’m not going to freak out. I’ll get the door. Oh, it’s my dad and some men in dark suits. As protocol dictates, I’m going to not say anything and let them walk on in.”
1:03 a.m. You know why all of this is SO FUCKING BORING? Because we already know EVERYTHING. We know Nick Nolte is Bruce’s father. We know he’s responsible for Bruce’s mother dying and for Bruce becoming the Hulk. We know he has it out for General Ross. We know Talbot is going to push Bruce too far. There is no “What’s going to happen next?” here. There is only “Something is going to happen next.”
1:10 a.m. I’m sorry. The dialogue is so awful—Nick Nolte’s especially—that it seems deeply obvious that Ang Lee felt a condescension bordering on contempt for the source material. Over-the-top comic-book-speak works sometimes—it worked in Blade, for example. But that was because the over-the-top action balanced it out. Here, it has to carry all of these dramatic scenes in a row, and it just escalates into the ridiculous.
1:15 a.m. Are you kidding me? I’m sorry that I keep having to stop and write, but a scene after Betty goes to visit Bruce’s father, her dad is trying to find out from Bruce where Bruce’s father is. The scene doesn’t indicate that Bruce has kept the fact that his father working as the lab janitor from General Ross, but apparently the highly connected general can’t do what his daughter did and call fucking information. This is retarded.
1:24 a.m. Random phone call from Dad to say he’s sending mutant dogs after Betty, followed by random visit from angry Talbot. I swear, it is a testament to the inherent ability to suspend disbelief or to something, anyway, that I’m not laughing so hard tears stream out of my eyes. This is an insult to storytelling.
1:30 a.m. Lee made his Hulk big, I will give him that, and I like it when the Hulk is big.
1:35 a.m. Hulk ripping apart mutant dogs is kind of cool. I know some people make fun of the murder-poodle, but I kinda like it—poodles have always scared me. They are mean little bastards.
1:41 a.m. I wish I could do screen-grabs from DVDs on my iBook (I’m sure there’s a download, but the standard OS X prevents it), because I would like to show some examples of this: Much is made of the comic-book-style cinematography to which I refer above, and there is some; but there’s also a lot of shots where the screen is just divided into individual blocks. Just because comic book pages are also divided into blocks, that doesn’t mean the screen looks anything like an actual comic book.
1:57 a.m. This movie is too long. It’s picking up some now, but it’s too long.
2:02 a.m. This is definitely the high point of the film. Nick Nolte’s weird monologue to Betty where he explains about killing his wife didn’t sound totally stupid. And now the sleeping gas is decidedly not putting Hulk to sleep. Ha ha, Talbot. You’re stupid.
2:05 a.m. Yeah, that foam is not going to hold him. Didn’t you guys ever read Secret Wars? Dude held up a fucking mountain.
2:07 a.m. My interest has waned again, as it’s just occurred to me that the Hulk, as a character, particularly in his Bixby/Ferrigno incarnation, is more or less Rambo in First Blood. And First Blood is a seriously excellent movie. There’s no reason it should have been so hard to make this a good, simple, satisfying story.
2:10 a.m. Always good to see Hulk leaping. Weird how such a simple movement, the way he holds his body, can be so closely associated with a character.
2:13 a.m. Weird scene where Ross phones the president. Could have been handled with a single line of dialogue. Sloppy writing.
2:17 a.m. It’s fun watching Hulk fight helicopters. Also, Lee and Co. seem to be going out of their way to make sure soldiers don’t actually get killed. I admit, I like that in a superhero movie.
2:23 a.m. The fact that the Hulk’s one line of dialogue is “Puny human” is just weird to me. Did he ever say that in the comics? Ever? They couldn’t work “SMASH!” in there somewhere?
2:27 a.m. Betty is approaching Hulk…and now he’s Bruce again. They could end the movie on this note—it’s a nice one, and appropriate—but oh, no, there are 23 minutes left and a Crazy Metamorphic Dad to fight.
2:34 a.m. Wow. The two-hour mark is exactly where this shit runs off the rails again. “It’s all right, son. Go ahead and cry.” “Don’t touch me! You aren’t my father!” [Rolling of eyes]
2:36 a.m. Y’know, my roommates were watching 28 Weeks Later this evening, and there’s this scene where the military just goes ahead and lets this man hang out alone in a room with his zombie-virus-infected wife, and it made about as much goddamn sense as it does for Thunderbolt Ross and crew to let Bruce Banner’s insane father hang out alone with him. (I don’t care if they’re near the deadly electricity thing. It still makes no sense.)
2:40 a.m. They’re just watching as Crazy Dad goes off. Like, Oh, yeah, it was a pretty crazy day, but let the man talk.
2:46 a.m. Is the jellyfish some kind of Asian symbol I’m not appreciating?
2:51 a.m. That final scene in the rain forest almost made it feel like a real comic book movie.
OK, so, Hulk wasn’t as bad as I remembered it being. I enjoyed parts of it—more, I would say, than my commentary above would indicate. The dad stuff was still weird and extraneous and poorly executed, but the fight at the end was shorter than I recalled, and that definitely helped. Some plot holes gaped, but then, I was actively looking for them; I bet I could find some in, say, X2 or Spider-Man 2, too, if I was looking that hard.
Mostly, I guess the overall feeling was just a little off. I know the Hulk is a more serious character than, say, Iron Man or Spidey, but this didn’t feel like a superhero movie exactly—there’s a simplicity in most of the Marvel movie catalog that doesn’t obtain here. I think most of it is that there wasn’t a real supervillain for Hulk to square off against. (His father, yes, but again, the whole plot line was incredibly stupid.) And that’s OK, but I do understand better why the movie gets hated on—it just doesn’t feel of a piece with the rest of the current Marvel films. That said, if someday directors have a chance to take on superheroes as protagonists and aren’t as bound by canon as Raimi and Singer have been, that could lead to some interesting art, and Hulk could easily be seen as a forerunner of that movement.
In the meantime, while this wasn’t the steaming pile of gamma shit I recently referred to it as and was afraid it would be, it’s still not as entertaining or as generally good as Daredevil. I’d watch Hulk again someday, but if I was flipping past FX and it was on, I’d be able to tear myself away pretty easily. I can never do that with Daredevil.
I really have no business complaining, given how much (not very) of the workload has fallen on me, but honestly, a wedding, in my opinion, is not something any sane couple should attempt until they’ve built the kind of trust and deep-seated love that only comes from having been married for at least thirty years.
This used to be posted on an older, now-defunct blog of mine, and is reposted here because the information remains relevant. Science doesn’t change its mind!
Scientists would have you believe that science can explain everything, but this is patently absurd. Can science, for example, explain how some jars can only be opened by moms? Can science explain magic, or wishing fountains? No, no, and no. And what about dragons? Science has never been able to explain anything about dragons.
Until now.
I first advanced my controversial “dragon bones” theory late one night at Ladybear’s house, after we’d had a lot to drink. Ladybear didn’t understand it then, and I can’t blame her, although I did make fun of her for it. (“You call yourself a natural-history museum docent? More like a natural-history museum doesn’t.” And other zingers.) Anyway, the theory is complex and nuanced, but I will attempt to summarize it below in a single paragraph:
Some dinosaurs survived past the Cretaceous Period and into medieval times, terrorizing villages and hoarding gold until finally being slain into extinction by armored knights.
Even as I write this, I can hear your scoffs, because I have long-distance time-travel hearing (explain that, science). But hold on. I’m sure some important questions and concerns have already sprung into your mind, and I will address them now.
Dragons breathe fire. Dinosaurs did not breathe fire, so how could they have been dragons? This one puzzled me at first too, until I thought about it more. The answer is evolution, people. Isn’t it obvious that fire-breathing dinosaurs would survive longer than their non-fire-breathing counterparts? If you ask me, breathing fire would be one favorable trait. In fact, what’s most amazing is that the dragons didn’t evolve right past us and up to the top of the food chain. Goes to show that thumbs are still the favorablest trait ever.
Geological evidence shows that all the dinosaurs died millions of years ago. I think I pretty well refuted science back in the first paragraph, but let me address your concerns about “geological” evidence: Family trees—no matter how good of records you keep—are just not a valid source of dinosaur-related information. A quick perusal of the Web shows that a lot of so-called scientists have been taken in by this too, though, so don’t feel bad.
No, seriously. It would be statistically impossible for dinosaurs to have survived into medieval times. Just like, I suppose, it was statistically impossible for the United States hockey team to take the gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics? How about not giving up? How about believing in yourself? How about America?
OK, but all the dinosaur bones we’ve found are from millions of years ago. If dinosaurs survived into medieval times, then where are all the “dragon bones”? People burned them.
Um, bones don’t burn. That was the foundation of Ladybear’s argument against my hypothesis, and where my now-famous theory got its name. The smarter among you will have already figured out that there are at least two distinct possibilities for what happened to the dragon bones, both of which are probably responsible in part for the “complete lack of physical evidence to support this absurd theory,” to quote a letter I received this week from the MacArthur Foundation, who have once again refused to award me the genius grant I so richly deserve. Anyway, the two possibilities for what happened to the bones:
1. People burned them. Oh, bones don’t burn, you repeat. Unless you’re on the sun, I reply. Now, I’m not saying that Leonardo da Vinci got rid of all the dragon bones by sending them to the sun in a flying contraption—because there would be no way he could fit all of them in there. I am saying, Where on Earth would you find a source of fire as hot as the sun? And the answer, as you’ve already figured out, is: other dragons. Even a second-level mage knows that dragon fire is at least as hot as the sun. Dragon bones would provide villagers with useful shielding material against other dragons’ fire, but eventually, even these would give way under the heat, and turn to unidentifiable ash.
2. The Vikings made boats out of them. I’m not talking about the Minnesota football team, although I know, it is confusing. But no, it turns out that long ago, around medieval times, there was a Norwegian football team called the Vikings too. Not having buses, and da Vinci-brand flying contraptions only being available in Italy due to trade embargoes, etc., these Vikings had to get to their visiting games in boats, which they called dragon ships. Some people think this is because their prows were carved into dragon heads, but that’s only part of the story. Obviously, being big, resistant to fire and other types of damage, and already curved, dragon bones were the perfect material for boats. Sadly, the Vikings probably ended up hunting the once-proud beasts into extinction, much as the Indians hunted the bison into extinction. Just as sad is that hundreds of Viking ships—and all of the MacArthur Foundation’s precious “physical evidence”—sunk to the bottom of the ocean not long after medieval times, when Greenland, formerly known as Atlantis, finally resurfaced near the Arctic.
As a parting salvo, I would remind you that scientists will tell you that dinosaurs evolved into birds—which completely makes sense, since it’s well known that many species of dragon can fly as well. Anyway, this is just a short list of things to keep in mind the next time you visit a museum and some doesn’t tries to tell you what’s what. Remember: Science is about clear thinking, and to think clearly, you have to get the facts.
Please note that even more than two months ago, I suspected the Democrats would fuck this up for Barry.
Democratic process at work, my ass.
Sometimes, you have been in therapy for three months or so, give or take a week, and your therapist has warned you that all the shit you were packing in for the past six or seven years and numbing with getting high is going to start burbling up, now that you’ve stopped, but still, when it hits you all of a sudden, you’re simultaneously so nearly weepy (because it’s all coming up) and so joyful (because it’s all coming up). And you think about how you’re well into your cups and not producing particularly potent prose, but you don’t even mind. You’re going to be OK. You’re gonna be OK.
Shantih, shantih, shantih.
