Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Tolkien

Published
by
Cineris
on January 11, 2008
in Culture, Literature and RPGs
. 1 Comment

Last night I listened to the new episode of Fear the Boot, and I felt compelled to have a little rant. The episode itself was conducted by guest hosts, and one of the guest hosts mentioned that she had trouble reading Tolkien. Some of the other hosts were sympathetic. “The descriptions are so long!” and the usual other litanies were repeated.

It always irks me when I hear this. Tolkienis bad? I guess if Tolkien is hard to read then Dickens must be impossible to read. Heck, all Victorians are right out. And before that? Well, anything earlier than that may as well be hieroglyphics. Even though I don’t consider myself a part of the “geek” subculture, or whatever you’d like to call it, it’s always irksome to encounter these attitudes in people identifying as belonging to a subculture which ostensibly has higher intellectual standards than pop culture. I guess the bar has sunk so low where something that requires even the modest intellectual effort of reading is too much to ask.

It’s not like this is purely a matter of time either. Looking to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series will show a series of fantasy books with a tremendous amount of attention to description of things like heraldry, armor, and lineages. These are pretty common elements in fantasy literature that’s any good. It strikes me that objecting to the very methods by which authors craft their fantasy worlds for their reader is about as sensible as objecting to science fiction for having too much science in it.

I once knew a woman who loved Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but thought Tolkien was dull. Wheel of Time is cool! It’s got a hip, tormented hero (who has like 5 women fawning over him)! Tolkien is dull, it’s got a hobbit. Wheel of Time has exciting battles where its main hero uses Goku’s Kamehameha technique to wipe out entire armies! Tolkien just has some helpless hobbits, guys with swords, and so-called wizards with some knowledge of chemistry.

At some point, I think, it might be worth it to just step back and say, “You know what? I like all these derivative knock-offs more than the original model. Maybe I don’t like what the original was trying to do at all.” And, hey, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with popcorn entertainment like DragonBall Z or Wheel of Time. It’d be better for everyone if we were clear about our tastes instead of paying lip service to things we don’t like.

Fallout

Published
by
Cineris
on January 9, 2008
in Anime and Culture
. 0 Comments

So Shamus recently made a post on, to put it broadly, the direction of the arts industry. The whole thing was apparently sparked off by an ongoing conversation on some other blogs about anime, “fansubs,” the open source movement, programming and art.

On the one hand, the process of creating anime as we know it does require a certain scale which makes it infeasible for anything but a well-funded company to produce. On the other hand, I’m pretty skeptical of accounts that fansubs substantially cut into profits. Granted, the extent of my knowledge of fansubs consists of watching a few clips on YouTube, and in interacting with rabid anime fans. My impression from the latter is that, outside of the corporatized piracy which is rampant in Asia, fan subtitled videos don’t represent a serious threat to anime sales in America. Fansubs seem to be thought of a stopgap allowing the truly rabid fans to get their fix early, but these fans are also the same obsessive personality type that insist on owning the releases anyway.

I guess I’m getting on a bit of a tangent from where I wanted to go. Darin, a commenter on Shamus’ site observes:

I have seen the end of Hollywood, and it is Open Art. CGI is getting very good at presenting realistic characters. And maybe you don’t even care how realistic they are. What happens once we get to CGV? Computer Generated Voices on the par where they sound “close enough”. And if computer power keeps increasing, I say that we’ll reach a point where someone will create a movie software package. Design the actors (CGI & CGV), write the script, gather the CGI scenery, and plot the movements and camera angles. Turn the crank and out pops your “movie”.

This strikes me as correct. I think we’ve still got another ~10-15 years before it becomes plausible for your average obsessive compulsive creative genius to make their own CG movies. It’ll probably take another 20-30 years or more before it becomes accessible enough for all but fringe elements. The confounding factor here, I think, is that it’s doubtful that existing media will survive that long. We’re already seeing a transition in how media companies distribute (and, to a lesser extent, create) their content.

Even though I can see a future where the bottom drops out for current media companies, I think it’s pretty unlikely we’ll ever reach a “tragedy of the commons” situation where all our resources (in this case, anime) have been exhausted. Human beings crave culture and entertainment, often in specific forms. I find it exceedingly unlikely that a sudden end to existing business models would wipe out a cultural movement that’s got, say, thirty years of material built up and generations of people weaned on its specific style.

Politics and Awful Art

Published
by
Cineris
on January 3, 2008
in Culture and Literature
. 2 Comments

A bit of a follow up to an earlier post where I linked to Mencius‘ thoughts on “An Almost Pure Empty Poetry,” and the circlejerk that is the Poetry Establishment; I came across this article at Overcoming Bias with a similar theme on the badness of poetry, and how ideologues are often blinded to the obvious faults in their own verse for the sake of “sticking it to the man,” or whatever ironic epithet you may choose to poke fun at the reflexive 1960’s anti-establishment mentality.

The trouble, as the author of the article points out, is endorsing bad poetry for what is perceived as good policy. Which makes it particularly hard to endorse this article, given that it’s largely told as a working through of craft in which the author gradually refines a small section of verse from,

I was not your destination
Only a step on your path

To the far inferior,

I was never your city,
Just a stretch of your road.

Although the process itself the author uses to reach the latter seems very sound, it’s obvious to me from the comparison of the two products that both are bad. But at least one has a directness and verve and clarity of purpose that’s conducive to the message that’s trying to be versified.

I suppose in the spirit of not justifying bad verse with policy, we shouldn’t discount the policy because of the bad verse? Oh well. At least the comments provided a link to these clever little anecdotes.

Tryfle Follies

Published
by
Cineris
on December 17, 2007
in Culture and Literature
. 1 Comment

I ran across this post by Mencius of Unqualified Reservations. The article, despite it’s rather impressive length, is a definite must-read. Mencius looks at a few poems by a man named Tryfon Tolides, in his book called “An Almost Pure Empty Walking,” and savages them:

I hasten to note that no one could possibly consider An Almost Pure Empty Walking a major work. In fact, it is unusually bad. But it is not atypically bad. And its badness has a kind of Platonic simplicity to it - an almost pure empty badness - that will help us, I feel, in the ugly work of diagnosis that lies ahead.

The real meat here is looking at everything that surrounds the poetry — Looking at the incestuous ponzi schemes that have poisoned “the Arts” in general or Poetry specifically and led to the creation of an artistically-stagnant, in-bred crowd of self-proclaimed elites.

I am reminded of something I overheard someone saying many years ago while discussing Greek playwrights. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was this: “Isn’t it reassuring that even thousands of years ago all of these great creative geniuses thought like I do?”

Top Ten Horror Movies

Published
by
Cineris
on October 31, 2007
in Culture, Personal and Visual
. 0 Comments

In the spirit of the season, a list of my top 10* horror movies.

10. The Mothman Prophecies - Slow build up, but a very creepy film. Has stuck with me more than a legion of gorier, cheesier films.
9. Hellraiser - The endless sequels haven’t done this series much good, but the original retains the paranoid escape mentality and the strange vision of what lies beyond good and evil.
8. Jeepers Creepers - The sequel ruined the original, but alone it’s done with restraint and effectiveness that hits close to home.
7. Phantasm 4: Oblivion - I saw this movie a long time ago and without seeing the prequels, yet it sticks with me to this day.
6. Cube - See here.
5. Final Destination - Beats out Cube for hitting closer to home on my fear scale. Flashbacks to this movie when getting on a plane are inevitable.
4. Ringu 2 - I debated whether I enjoyed the original more than the sequel here, but I’m going with the sequel for the way it expands beyond the first film.
3. Alien - Claustrophobic paranoia while being stalked by the universe’s most deadly being, and your life is being treated like an expendable asset by a faceless corporation? Yes.
2. Poltergeist - Beats out Alien on the close to home factor. A movie that turned trees outside of windows, static on TV, and innumerable other household sights into fearful things.
1. The Thing - These things are always fungible, but The Thing hits all the right spots for me. A tight focus and a driving paranoia. The ending is what really nails it for me.

*For the moment, may be subject to revision without notice.

It’s Never Scary on TV

Published
by
Cineris
on October 29, 2007
in Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

As Halloween rolls around, I’ve been trying to take advantage of the usual glut of horror movies on Television to catch up on things I’ve never seen before.

I just got done watching Halloween: H20: Twenty Years Later. The movie was alright, but what really struck me was how irritating it was watching it from a television station. Fortunately, I don’t even bother watching any television shows “live” anymore, and so therefore can skip the commercials. But even with the ability to skip through the commercials really quickly, I’m feeling particularly irritated with watching these things off of television at all.

Typical scenario: Mike Myers is seen walking down a corridor with a knife in his hand. The Halloween suspense theme is playing. Then, in the bottom of the screen, a row of symbols flashes by and coalesces into the television network’s symbol.

Great, any sense of tension was just blown. This happened constantly as I was watching the movie. If it wasn’t the network label appearing in the corner, it was an ad for another show on the network. There must have been at least three other shows being advertised during this horror movie, one of them a comedy and another a romantic comedy, total mood killers for the ambiance of a horror film. Do I care about these shows? No. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want that cluttering up and distracting me from something I’m already watching.

It seems like the network people want to discourage anyone from watching anything on their networks at all. If it really bugs me, it wouldn’t be hard at all to simply move entirely to watching everything on DVD. The only real benefit to TV at all is the serendipitous finding of something you might want to watch, but couldn’t remember you wanted to watch. Amazingly enough, I can browse throw a station’s offerings via the local TV guide or the streamed-in content guide, I don’t need to have ads plastered on top of my shows to know when something else is playing.

Yeah, I guess that deafening silence means I should just forget the crazy idea of television stations caring about my viewing experience at all.

Cube^3

Published
by
Cineris
on October 21, 2007
in Culture and Visual
. 2 Comments

Cube2

As October’s been passing along I’ve been trying to catch up a bit on some of my backlog of horror movies. Cube and its two sequels were movies that I’d heard of before via friends, but never seen. Last weekend they popped into my mind for whatever reason, and I ended up picking up the trilogy to watch.

For the time being I’m going to limit my discussion to the first film. I’ll get to the sequels later. The concept of the movie is pretty simple: People are stuck in a cube, which is comprised of smaller cubes. In fact, the concept seems so sketchy that I was worried if the movie was going to be able to carry itself. Thankfully, it did so really well. The movie paces its revelations well enough that, even though you think there’s nothing further to unfold, there is. It works out well and keeps what could be a kind of tedious exercise, a group of people crawling through identical cubic rooms, interesting until the very end.

Although Cube is a horror movie, it’s not a slasher flick or the torture porn that passes for horror these days. Cube actually reminds me of what I thought of when I first heard the concept for Saw — “A serial killer who puts people in situations where they kill themselves,” ingenious, I thought. Sadly, Saw didn’t live up to my high hopes, but Cube is in the vein I was hoping for, a cerebral sort of horror.

Cube1

Here’s where the spoilers begin. I’ll probably also be making comparisons to the sequels, so fair warning.

Continue reading ‘Cube^3′

Last of the Time Lords

Published
by
Cineris
on October 8, 2007
in Culture, Politics and Visual
. 0 Comments

About a week ago, after watching the second part of a three part finale to the third season of Doctor Who, I got to thinking about the show. For awhile, meaning for most of the first season and about half of season 2, I was a big fan of Battlestar Galactica. My feelings on the series soured after a particularly bad second half of season 2, and a generally pretty mediocre season 3, with a spectacularly bad season 3 finale.

Some spoilers behind the cut.
Continue reading ‘Last of the Time Lords’

Tunnels and Trolls

Published
by
Cineris
on October 3, 2007
in Culture and Politics
. 21 Comments

Just a fair warning, this is a touchy subject for some people, and kind of off my typical subject matter. After reading 150+ comments over at Shamus’ site, I felt pretty compelled to add in my two cents.

If you read the comments to that post, you know how this one really brought out the real trolls of the internet. All manner of them, they came from the depths, with their warts and boils and their horrifying breath rasping out battle-cries such as, “Race and gender are social constructs!” It was frightening, and a few intrepid posters foolishly went at them with their swords sharpened. Trolls cannot be slain by conventional weapons, in fact, they only become more and more agitated by them. Trolls can only be killed by fire.

Those of us who don’t live in solipsistic darkness where external reality is only what we believe or imagine it to be can recognize that these claims are patently false. Skin color is not a good proxy for race, but races are genetically real concepts. Gender is sex. Despite the attempts by Feminists to redefine this word, Feminists have never made a serious attempt at delineating or measuring the influence of sex as opposed to gender. Gender therefore means only what Feminists decide it means as it is convenient for them at the time. Until science has made a great deal more progress, the influence of “sex” as opposed to “gender” is largely unknown and isn’t worth discussing, particularly not with those who think that their thoughts determine what is real.

Both of these are tangents, however. The real battle in the comments took place over the idea that “Rape is about power.” This is actually a shibboleth repeated by Trolls to determine whether the beings they encounter in their darkness are other Trolls, or if they are interlopers from the surface world. If it turns out the being was not another Troll, 1d3 Trolls are summoned within the next round.

“Rape is about Power” is not a verifiable claim. At best, this is a consensus, not a fact. In the world of Trolls, enough of a consensus may determine reality, but in reality it does no such thing. This sort of consensus is particularly suspect given the well-documented and overwhelming political bias of the Psychology field. As a further strike against the validity of this claim, a quick Google search revealed hundreds, possibly thousands of feminist agitprop sites using the formulation, MYTH: Rape is about sex. FACT: Rape is about power.

Even if “Rape is about Power” were true, what does that tell us? Aside from completely misleading us about when, where, why, and how rapes occur, it tells us nothing. One may as well say “Money is about Power.” Yes, and? An understanding of power relationships is already included in folk-psychological understandings of rape. Pseudo-expertise insisting that “Rape is about Power,” though, is far poorer in that it excludes the most obvious and influential factor in rape, sexual desire.

The claim is made not to illuminate our understanding of the subject to help prevent it, but instead to cast it into the Trolls’ delusion of “The Patriarchy.” According to this ideology, rape is a systematic expression of power by this mythical “Patriarchy” over women. Yet another tool in the toolbox, amongst things such as “Truth,” “Science,” “Marriage,” and so on. In reality, the claim “Rape is about Power” is about power. The entire point of this claim is not to help women or stop rape, it is to frame the unacceptable act of rape in terms that Trolls control. It is both a cavern that entices the curious into the darkness of the Trolls, and a weapon that can be used to frame those who oppose the Troll’s perception of reality as being supportive of socially and morally unacceptable behavior.