It's the sled.
It's actually planet Earth.
It's made out of people!
He wrote it on himself knowing it wasn't true.
He wasn't actually a detective, he was a patient.
Everyone dies at the end.
Everyone dies at the end.
He was the dead body in the room the whole time.
He was actually Luke's father.
He was actually a ghost.
They're actually the same person.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thing you know, I
You know a TV show is going to be crappy when the only ads on the DVD are for movies you've also never heard of.
You know it's not going to be a "down to earth, genuine romp" when someone uses the phrase "designer water."
You know there was a mis-cast when someone in the front credits has the same name as your grandmother, but is not your grandmother.
You know it's not going to be a "down to earth, genuine romp" when someone uses the phrase "designer water."
You know there was a mis-cast when someone in the front credits has the same name as your grandmother, but is not your grandmother.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
PSA: Spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam
In my spam email folder, the funniest spammer ID I've seen in awhile, advertising a "No risk Katy Perry Free trial."
The way I figure it, this must mean either that you can get an NSA one-time hookup with Katy Perry, or that the trial will be "Katy Perry Free," with no risk of her showing up.
I'm not writing back to ask, so reader's choice.
The way I figure it, this must mean either that you can get an NSA one-time hookup with Katy Perry, or that the trial will be "Katy Perry Free," with no risk of her showing up.
I'm not writing back to ask, so reader's choice.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Blog Fail, re: Failblog
Sorry it's been so long between posts -- I won the Microsoft Email Lottery, which as you must understand was a pretty big deal. Plus, in the interim I've been busy putting up pictures of Japan as my Facebook profile picture to help with the aftermath of the tsunami.
I've also been reading (the entirety of) Failbook. Enjoy.
I've also been reading (the entirety of) Failbook. Enjoy.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Accusations XVIII
People who keep posting the following as their Facebook statuses in response to the earthquake and tidal wave(s) off the coast of Japan:
Sensitive response fail.
Isn't this a bit like wishing a "gas chamber of peace and happiness" would envelop Jews after the atrocities they experienced in the death camps? Using the word "prayer" before the explicit (and illustrated) reminder of the devastating waves washing away Japanese coastal buildings and towns doesn't actually make it okay, dudes.
Sensitive response fail.
Friday, March 11, 2011
PSA: Twitter = new commercial delivery system
Well, today I joined twitter... @ohTHATalicia.
Follow me if you want. But read this warning first, because if you're a late adopter like me, you might expect things well past the beta stage of international acceptance to not suck by the time you get there: Twitter kind of sucks.
Maybe I'll get the hang of all that hash-tagging and @-signing and re-tweeting, and maybe in the future it will be SO FUN, but for now all my twitter feed (if that's even what it's called) looks like to me is a list of all the commercials I've been missing out on over the last few years of watching exclusively DVD'd content. Making each "tweet" 140 characters or less actually makes them worse; imagine if those 30 second spots that used to be so familiar to us TV viewers were crammed into 5 seconds each and you had to watch 30 of them in each commercial break. Yeesh.
Next I'll have to figure out what all this Angry Birds fuss is about.
Follow me if you want. But read this warning first, because if you're a late adopter like me, you might expect things well past the beta stage of international acceptance to not suck by the time you get there: Twitter kind of sucks.
Maybe I'll get the hang of all that hash-tagging and @-signing and re-tweeting, and maybe in the future it will be SO FUN, but for now all my twitter feed (if that's even what it's called) looks like to me is a list of all the commercials I've been missing out on over the last few years of watching exclusively DVD'd content. Making each "tweet" 140 characters or less actually makes them worse; imagine if those 30 second spots that used to be so familiar to us TV viewers were crammed into 5 seconds each and you had to watch 30 of them in each commercial break. Yeesh.
Next I'll have to figure out what all this Angry Birds fuss is about.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
PSA: Zombie Sheen
Last night I had a dream that Charlie Sheen's rantics were the result of a zombie virus. We were all waiting anxiously to see how it would progress and whether it would spread or not.
My dream was probably due in equal parts to the fact that I've got a bad cold, that I've been a pretty anxious person lately, and that I saw part of a zombie movie last night and had the Charlie Sheen "Winning" autotune song stuck in my head when I went to sleep.
It's also interesting considering my views on the fascination with Charlie (in terms of class), and what many scholars have observed about zombies (that they represent the lower class and fear of its uprising). I think it actually sums up my overly long post on this topic pretty well.
This is probably my most successful dream mash-up of ideas, with "Sesame Streets ahead" as a relatively close second.
My dream was probably due in equal parts to the fact that I've got a bad cold, that I've been a pretty anxious person lately, and that I saw part of a zombie movie last night and had the Charlie Sheen "Winning" autotune song stuck in my head when I went to sleep.
It's also interesting considering my views on the fascination with Charlie (in terms of class), and what many scholars have observed about zombies (that they represent the lower class and fear of its uprising). I think it actually sums up my overly long post on this topic pretty well.
This is probably my most successful dream mash-up of ideas, with "Sesame Streets ahead" as a relatively close second.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
New Word: Rantics
n. combination of "ranting" and "antics"; used to describe celebrities or other manic individuals whose strange behaviors include crazy diatribes, i.e. Charlie Sheen circa March 2011
In Defense of Poppery, XV: Why Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting matters to us.
Pop example: Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting, and subsequent media coverage of said ranting
What redeems it: Well, nothing. It's crazy ranting.
Okay, then what makes it important, or why do we want to watch it?:
I've seen two kinds of media coverage of Charlie Sheen's recent claims to being from Mars (a claim John Gray would probably back him up on, though I haven't seen that angle covered), having tiger blood, and doing more cocaine than the human body can handle.
I've seen the actual Charlie-Sheen ranting in highlight reel forms (such as with bunnies or on autotune), and I've seen the semi-ranting meta-coverage of the media and commenters asking us all why we're so interested in the crazy ranting of Charlie Sheen.
It's the second kind of coverage I want to discuss first, and then I'll justify our possible collective interest in the first kind of coverage.
Most people who are upset with Charlie Sheen coverage (we'll call it CSc) claim to have one of two reasons (or both) for annoyance:
1. Charlie Sheen is clearly mentally deranged or ill (either from drugs or a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder), and we need to pity him -- or ignore him. (Odd combination of prescribed responses, but there it is.)
2. Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting is not "real news" because "real news" is hearing about unemployment, the unrest in Libya, etc. Under this umbrella falls also laments that CSc is taking up time that should go to those topics, as well as protests that "it's just TV" and so we shouldn't care.
To the first objection, that Charlie Sheen is mentally deranged/ill, I honestly see no way in which either pitying or ignoring him would actually help Charlie Sheen. Perhaps it's schadenfreude for us to be so fascinated by his rants (though I'll discuss later why I don't believe it is), and perhaps we should "be better than that," but neither pity nor ignoring actually make us "better than that." The fact is that no collective attitude we take toward CS or CSc will improve Charlie's chances of rehabilitating himself or finding an appropriate cocktail of prescribed medications to deal with whatever disorder we've decided he has.
Pity and ignorance don't help people, and pretending that our pity or ignorance is morally better than our fascination is kind of silly.
To the second objection, that CSc is preempting more important coverage of more important events, I would say that the news people wish we would be hearing more about is either boring, difficult to watch, or both. This is the trap that environmental groups and human rights organizations and Tea-partiers all fall into: no sense of humor, and an urgency that implies no time to develop one.
People can't be constantly being reminded that polar bears are about to become extinct without either becoming apathetic or blowing their brains out. You need to give people some down time.
[Tangent 1: The Middle East has not been giving us very much down time in this 24-hour news cycle. We're obviously not living it (making the caring actually a lot more difficult to sustain), but we've been through a change of regime in Egypt, political unrest in several other countries, and (still) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, if you want us to care about Libya and unemployment and the crushing federal deficit, you need to let us watch Charlie Sheen for awhile to clear our brains.]
To the related objection that "it's only TV," and so we shouldn't care, I say that I agree that Two and a Half Men, as far as I can tell from the few five-second blurbs I've seen while changing channels, is a crappy show. But TV is the touchstone for all generations born since 1950. Saying that it's "only" a TV show is like saying "what's the big deal? He's just a famous person everyone in the realm recognizes and normally pays homage to, the modern equivalent of the king!" or perhaps more pointedly, "what's the big deal? It's just the English language, the mother-tongue through which we understand the world!"
We all speak TV. That's how you know that you wish evening news shows would show what you think of as serious evening news instead of Charlie Sheen rants. You weren't born thinking "the evening news should be about crime, the economy, politics, and other boring serious things, only." You know that because TV taught it to you. Your elitist expectations actually came from TV.
Which brings me, I think, to my observations on the bifurcation of the American mind when it comes to television. We all think it's important, and we all also know that we "shouldn't" think so because other things are "more important." (I mean, when people actually like a TV show, they describe themselves as helpless in relation to it; "I'm addiction to X show" they say. As though TV is a drug that we'd quit if only we had the moral fortitude.)
We watch CSc, and we simultaneously gripe about the fact that we're watching it.
I believe this relates directly to capitalism, since television is one of capitalism's greatest inventions -- a tool of the economic system from the start -- and the way capitalism needs us to be simultaneously consuming a massive amount of product, and also dissatisfied with the products we consume so that as soon as we're "finished" with the first thing, we move on to consume the next one.
[Tangent 2: The fact that TV is so obviously a capitalist tool is what makes it seem "low class." Low class things are characterized by their exposure of/to the mechanics of capitalism: the prototypical lower class people are factory workers, even though farmers may make about the same amount of money (or less). Farmers are portrayed as having "other benefits," ones indigenous to the countryside that disintegrate (literally) the closer they get to the city -- pastoral scenery, simplicity, nutrition, "down home" wisdom, etc. -- and that are viewed as "outside" the capitalist structure and the hurly burly world of money.
"They're poor in money but rich in spirit," we say about farmers. Those who leave the land for mechanized labor are "selling out"; those who stay on the land but begin to use factory-like mechanized labor devices are also "selling out."
How would a factory worker "sell out"? Would it even be possible?
Think about it for a minute. I'll wait.
If you thought of a way a factory worker could sell out, it probably involved some vestige of human bonds, like betraying a union or coworker. But the point is that machines and mechanical labor cannot be "sold out" -- they are the sellout. And so it is with TV.]
The complex structure of our society relies on urban spaces, factories, and television, and it so obviously relies on those things that they become the "low" -- while objects, people, artists and media that appear not to rely on those "low" things give the illusion of "rising above" and managing to be "high class." (In modernism, at least...where cities necessarily also produce the "high class," which is partly defined by its association with human production, standards, and "cultured-ness." If capitalism defines the lower class, so does it define the higher within its own workings, leaving farmers out of the spectrum despite/because of their supposed spiritual riches.)
So here's my long-awaited point: Charlie Sheen is a lunatic. And I think part of the fascination with his particular lunacies is that he has been completely unpredictable in a high/low kind of way.
He is a "low" kind of guy, in that his fame comes mainly from TV and some Oscar-unworthy movies. And he's acting "low," in that he claims to have done a ton and a half of drugs, and in that he is clearly bragging about himself, and in that he may be mentally ill.
But he's refusing to apologize for all those things in the way that "low" things should -- Charlie Sheen doesn't have a bifurcated mind about CSc, loving it and hating it at the same time. He just freaking loves it, as he tells us again and again. And instead of the usual apology, he's saying things that are actually out-of-control, insanely creative. They're far more like poetry than any script of Two and a Half Men.
Tiger blood? Adonis? One-armed children?? Where is he getting this stuff?
That's what everyone wants to know. That's why we keep listening. That's why it seems like such a killjoy when others attempt to diagnose him (again making him "low," controlled, in need of our help), because it seems to explain what's going on when he opens his mouth.
And maybe it does.
But maybe we also see our own possibilities and servitudes exposed in some of the craziness Charlie has been exhibiting. We are, after all, a nation that both polices the world and polices our policing of the world (that watches TV and says "we wish we didn't"). In Charlie Sheen, we see the specter of that hubris if it were unleashed, if we stopped policing ourselves. We see the destruction and creativity unleashed by that kind of arrogance.
I think we see both what we have created as the (semi)omnipotent audience and what we fear we could become as Americans. We are the crazy ranters who never thought we could be taken down, that we were "too big to fail" -- and here we are in a recession. Charlie Sheen stinks of impending disaster because we can smell it on ourselves, not because he's actually faced any disaster...because he's very specifically not facing disaster and is blissful in what we feel must be his ignorance. He's a metaphor for us that we created by our attentions. In a way, the narrative of his "breakdown" proves our power; in a more literal way, our attention to his recent crazy ramblings allowed more crazy ramblings.
And I think we can't look away because both halves of our capitalist minds are attracted to these rantings: reveling in the low, low class obsession with and proximity to bald power, and also the implied freedom in the creative claiming of that power -- without apology, as if Manifest Destiny had come back into vogue. Charlie Sheen seems to be rising above us as he speaks, not in the ways he describes (he's not actually from Mars, he doesn't have only one speed [Go], and he probably doesn't really have any tiger blood), but in his descriptions themselves. He is free from our capitalist anxiety and obsessive self-consciousness (though not our self-obsession).
He makes us wonder what "winning" means. Could he be winning? Could it be that this nut-casery is what we are exhibiting when we say we're winning? In the split seconds between watching a video of CSc and making an amateur diagnosis and dismissal of him as "crazy," Charlie makes us think about what winning is.
And therein lies the value of CSc, I believe.
What redeems it: Well, nothing. It's crazy ranting.
Okay, then what makes it important, or why do we want to watch it?:
I've seen two kinds of media coverage of Charlie Sheen's recent claims to being from Mars (a claim John Gray would probably back him up on, though I haven't seen that angle covered), having tiger blood, and doing more cocaine than the human body can handle.
I've seen the actual Charlie-Sheen ranting in highlight reel forms (such as with bunnies or on autotune), and I've seen the semi-ranting meta-coverage of the media and commenters asking us all why we're so interested in the crazy ranting of Charlie Sheen.
It's the second kind of coverage I want to discuss first, and then I'll justify our possible collective interest in the first kind of coverage.
Most people who are upset with Charlie Sheen coverage (we'll call it CSc) claim to have one of two reasons (or both) for annoyance:
1. Charlie Sheen is clearly mentally deranged or ill (either from drugs or a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder), and we need to pity him -- or ignore him. (Odd combination of prescribed responses, but there it is.)
2. Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting is not "real news" because "real news" is hearing about unemployment, the unrest in Libya, etc. Under this umbrella falls also laments that CSc is taking up time that should go to those topics, as well as protests that "it's just TV" and so we shouldn't care.
To the first objection, that Charlie Sheen is mentally deranged/ill, I honestly see no way in which either pitying or ignoring him would actually help Charlie Sheen. Perhaps it's schadenfreude for us to be so fascinated by his rants (though I'll discuss later why I don't believe it is), and perhaps we should "be better than that," but neither pity nor ignoring actually make us "better than that." The fact is that no collective attitude we take toward CS or CSc will improve Charlie's chances of rehabilitating himself or finding an appropriate cocktail of prescribed medications to deal with whatever disorder we've decided he has.
Pity and ignorance don't help people, and pretending that our pity or ignorance is morally better than our fascination is kind of silly.
To the second objection, that CSc is preempting more important coverage of more important events, I would say that the news people wish we would be hearing more about is either boring, difficult to watch, or both. This is the trap that environmental groups and human rights organizations and Tea-partiers all fall into: no sense of humor, and an urgency that implies no time to develop one.
People can't be constantly being reminded that polar bears are about to become extinct without either becoming apathetic or blowing their brains out. You need to give people some down time.
[Tangent 1: The Middle East has not been giving us very much down time in this 24-hour news cycle. We're obviously not living it (making the caring actually a lot more difficult to sustain), but we've been through a change of regime in Egypt, political unrest in several other countries, and (still) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In other words, if you want us to care about Libya and unemployment and the crushing federal deficit, you need to let us watch Charlie Sheen for awhile to clear our brains.]
To the related objection that "it's only TV," and so we shouldn't care, I say that I agree that Two and a Half Men, as far as I can tell from the few five-second blurbs I've seen while changing channels, is a crappy show. But TV is the touchstone for all generations born since 1950. Saying that it's "only" a TV show is like saying "what's the big deal? He's just a famous person everyone in the realm recognizes and normally pays homage to, the modern equivalent of the king!" or perhaps more pointedly, "what's the big deal? It's just the English language, the mother-tongue through which we understand the world!"
We all speak TV. That's how you know that you wish evening news shows would show what you think of as serious evening news instead of Charlie Sheen rants. You weren't born thinking "the evening news should be about crime, the economy, politics, and other boring serious things, only." You know that because TV taught it to you. Your elitist expectations actually came from TV.
Which brings me, I think, to my observations on the bifurcation of the American mind when it comes to television. We all think it's important, and we all also know that we "shouldn't" think so because other things are "more important." (I mean, when people actually like a TV show, they describe themselves as helpless in relation to it; "I'm addiction to X show" they say. As though TV is a drug that we'd quit if only we had the moral fortitude.)
We watch CSc, and we simultaneously gripe about the fact that we're watching it.
I believe this relates directly to capitalism, since television is one of capitalism's greatest inventions -- a tool of the economic system from the start -- and the way capitalism needs us to be simultaneously consuming a massive amount of product, and also dissatisfied with the products we consume so that as soon as we're "finished" with the first thing, we move on to consume the next one.
[Tangent 2: The fact that TV is so obviously a capitalist tool is what makes it seem "low class." Low class things are characterized by their exposure of/to the mechanics of capitalism: the prototypical lower class people are factory workers, even though farmers may make about the same amount of money (or less). Farmers are portrayed as having "other benefits," ones indigenous to the countryside that disintegrate (literally) the closer they get to the city -- pastoral scenery, simplicity, nutrition, "down home" wisdom, etc. -- and that are viewed as "outside" the capitalist structure and the hurly burly world of money.
"They're poor in money but rich in spirit," we say about farmers. Those who leave the land for mechanized labor are "selling out"; those who stay on the land but begin to use factory-like mechanized labor devices are also "selling out."
How would a factory worker "sell out"? Would it even be possible?
Think about it for a minute. I'll wait.
If you thought of a way a factory worker could sell out, it probably involved some vestige of human bonds, like betraying a union or coworker. But the point is that machines and mechanical labor cannot be "sold out" -- they are the sellout. And so it is with TV.]
The complex structure of our society relies on urban spaces, factories, and television, and it so obviously relies on those things that they become the "low" -- while objects, people, artists and media that appear not to rely on those "low" things give the illusion of "rising above" and managing to be "high class." (In modernism, at least...where cities necessarily also produce the "high class," which is partly defined by its association with human production, standards, and "cultured-ness." If capitalism defines the lower class, so does it define the higher within its own workings, leaving farmers out of the spectrum despite/because of their supposed spiritual riches.)
So here's my long-awaited point: Charlie Sheen is a lunatic. And I think part of the fascination with his particular lunacies is that he has been completely unpredictable in a high/low kind of way.
He is a "low" kind of guy, in that his fame comes mainly from TV and some Oscar-unworthy movies. And he's acting "low," in that he claims to have done a ton and a half of drugs, and in that he is clearly bragging about himself, and in that he may be mentally ill.
But he's refusing to apologize for all those things in the way that "low" things should -- Charlie Sheen doesn't have a bifurcated mind about CSc, loving it and hating it at the same time. He just freaking loves it, as he tells us again and again. And instead of the usual apology, he's saying things that are actually out-of-control, insanely creative. They're far more like poetry than any script of Two and a Half Men.
Tiger blood? Adonis? One-armed children?? Where is he getting this stuff?
That's what everyone wants to know. That's why we keep listening. That's why it seems like such a killjoy when others attempt to diagnose him (again making him "low," controlled, in need of our help), because it seems to explain what's going on when he opens his mouth.
And maybe it does.
But maybe we also see our own possibilities and servitudes exposed in some of the craziness Charlie has been exhibiting. We are, after all, a nation that both polices the world and polices our policing of the world (that watches TV and says "we wish we didn't"). In Charlie Sheen, we see the specter of that hubris if it were unleashed, if we stopped policing ourselves. We see the destruction and creativity unleashed by that kind of arrogance.
I think we see both what we have created as the (semi)omnipotent audience and what we fear we could become as Americans. We are the crazy ranters who never thought we could be taken down, that we were "too big to fail" -- and here we are in a recession. Charlie Sheen stinks of impending disaster because we can smell it on ourselves, not because he's actually faced any disaster...because he's very specifically not facing disaster and is blissful in what we feel must be his ignorance. He's a metaphor for us that we created by our attentions. In a way, the narrative of his "breakdown" proves our power; in a more literal way, our attention to his recent crazy ramblings allowed more crazy ramblings.
And I think we can't look away because both halves of our capitalist minds are attracted to these rantings: reveling in the low, low class obsession with and proximity to bald power, and also the implied freedom in the creative claiming of that power -- without apology, as if Manifest Destiny had come back into vogue. Charlie Sheen seems to be rising above us as he speaks, not in the ways he describes (he's not actually from Mars, he doesn't have only one speed [Go], and he probably doesn't really have any tiger blood), but in his descriptions themselves. He is free from our capitalist anxiety and obsessive self-consciousness (though not our self-obsession).
He makes us wonder what "winning" means. Could he be winning? Could it be that this nut-casery is what we are exhibiting when we say we're winning? In the split seconds between watching a video of CSc and making an amateur diagnosis and dismissal of him as "crazy," Charlie makes us think about what winning is.
And therein lies the value of CSc, I believe.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)