Chuck

James Van Der Beek and them sisters from “Sister, Sister”

Straight from Photoshop into your nightmares The title is from Mike Doughty’s song “Busting Up a Starbucks”. If I’m interpreting it correctly, the song’s about impotent outrage at “corporate culture,” pop culture in particular. So at least for the rest of this post, that’s exactly what it’s about.

And what a coincidence, because that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Granted, the whole “high art vs. low art” debate is nothing new, but either I haven’t been paying attention, or within the last decade or so it’s taken a really nasty political turn.

Used to be it was just about intelligence and coolness. So the small nugget inside me which remains in denial and full of hope that I might one day be Cool, forces me to treat everything I like as a guilty pleasure. And I play Diablo while making fun of Dungeons and Dragons. Or I obsess over “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” while mocking both the ones who write fan-fics as “losers” and the ones who write academic books in defense of the show as trying too hard to justify their obsessions. Or I get teary-eyed at the Main Street Electrical Parade while complaining about empty spectacle and meaningless entertainment. I’m not sure exactly why those of us in the nerd and geek communities are so desperate to simultaneously knock down and defend the things we love, but it probably is due to this fantasy we all have of taking off our glasses and showing up for the Big Dance as the coolest kids in the whole school.

But now, to maintain my status as a Well-Mannered, Responsible Liberal, I have to rail against all of it because it’s all the work of the Huge Soul-Crushing Media Companies. Two of which have been my employers, making it even more difficult. Has there always been this gross, simplistic, nasty political tone to it all, or is that a recent partisan development? I mean, I’ve heard simple-minded people shout “television is the opiate of the masses!” and “corporate rock sucks!” and various complaints about media conglomerates and how “indie” automatically equals “better.” And of course I’ve heard plenty of people talk about Disney as if there’s a cabal of Eisner-led liches in Burbank strangling kittens and southeast Asian factory-worker children and using their blood to make pentagrams. (Which of course there isn’t, and I haven’t seen it.)

But now the accusation is that enjoying pop culture means you’re complicit in evil — EEEEEVIL! — for giving money to these horrible companies that you’re just too stupid to see through. We’ve been so indoctrinated with the philosophy that Big Corporations are Bad that it’s gotten mixed in with the high art/low art debate and become yet another way to polarize everyone. Every company larger than 200 employees is now Standard Oil, and there’s no such thing as a good corporation. Our only recourse is to boycott the media, buy organic, and if we must watch films, they should have Parker Posey in them or be directed by Europeans or Canadians. To do otherwise is no longer just stupid, it’s wrong.

Either people are getting more stupid and simple-minded, or the stupid people are getting more vocal, or I’m getting more moderate in my advancing years. I remember back around the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and how self-satisfied I was for boycotting the company; it made me feel as if I were really doing something. And it pains me to realize now that in spite of all the comic books and videogames, I grew up, and realized that it’s not about me and my petty grabs at being important for making meaningful choices against a cruel world. That instead, it’s a huge number of people all trying to make meaningful choices, and frequently making mistakes.

It’s comforting to be able to pick out the villains like Kenneth Lay and put a face to the huge, nebulous injustice, but I suspect that the reality is even more depressing. I believe the reality is that there are indeed many outright self-serving bastards trying to screw everyone else, but they’re outnumbered by the people who are really trying to make a difference (in the case of entertainment, to be creative) but impeded by the sheer size of the machine and its layers of bureaucracy. And all of them are far outnumbered by the people who just really don’t give a damn, but are only trying not to get fired.

As for the song: even if I’m completely off about my interpretation, it’s still a catchy song and a great turn of phrase. You can listen to it on his official site if you’re into that sort of thing.

And while I’m writing, my favorite line from the album is “You snooze you lose, well I snost and lost.”

By the way, Doughty’s in San Francisco September 30th and October 1st, playing at The Independent which is stumbling distance from my apartment. Who wants to go with me?

Subliminal

The other day, I was trying to buy a pack of cigarettes from someone who just wasn’t getting the concept. Usually I say, “American Spirits mediums” and if they don’t get it, I say “the light green ones.” This was too much for the poor clerk to handle, so I was having to point vigorously while thinking up other ways to describe them. While I was explaining, “no, not the green menthol ones, the lighter green ones…” I thought, “it’s exactly the same color as the background color of my website.”

Whoa. That was completely unintentional; I just like the color green. Or do I?!?

Angelias

I had another bout with insomnia last night, even after “helping” Alex move, and then drinking a whole lot of beer, the two things that should guarantee I fall asleep immediately. So what that means is that I finished another four episodes of “Alias,” and there’s just two discs left in Season 3.

At this point in the series, it’s reminding me a lot of the TV series “Angel.” Not in the content or the tone, but in how I’m responding to it. “Angel” is my quintessential love/hate TV series — there were so many characters and plotlines that I just despised, and which annoyed me enough to just give up on the show over and over again. But when they did well, it was some of the best television ever made.

They had the lame “lawyers are really evil” and “LA is really phony” gags that they just never put to rest, and they had some really loathesome characters that were supposed to be sympathetic, like Lorne the demon guy and Angel’s son. But then they’d have a killer storyline like the one where Faith came back and had more depth to her character in those two episodes than in an entire year of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Or the whole fourth season of “Angel,” where they had basically written themselves into a corner and had to cover up a pregnancy, but came out of it with a great season arc that all fit together and had episodes which were genuinely scary (and I didn’t think TV could scare me anymore).

And season three of “Alias” is kind of like that. Most of it just shatters all the “I know it’s implausible and over the top, but it’s supposed to be” good-will I’d built up. All the plot twists and change-ups and revealed secrets just seem like bored writers in afternoon meetings, moving characters around on a grid without even trying to come up with real motivations for them. The characters have gone from being two-dimensional but lovable, to one-and-a-half-dimensional and so boring that even they seem to be bored with what they’re doing. Here’s yet another scene where Jack breaks the rules to save his daughter. Here’s another scene where Dixon encounters somebody behind bars and vows vengeance. Here’s one more scene where Sydney shows teary-eyed determination. Here’s still yet another girlfight with the evil Allison Doren (who got an extraordinarily anti-climactic send-off). I’m still fine with being earnest, but that will only take you so far if you don’t have an engrossing story to back it up.

And the big villain of the season was so completely obvious from scene one, that I can’t tell whether or not the reveal was supposed to be a surprise. There are still two discs left, and I’m sure that they’ve got more plot twists to throw at the story, but so far it’s been a real yawner. (Although I will say that as soon as she started playing evil, she became 1000 times sexier. What that says about me, I don’t know and don’t want to think about.) And granted, the whole bit about Sydney’s missing two years was getting stale, but instead of throwing in some twists to make it interesting, they just blew their wad and explained the whole thing away.

So that’s the hate; where’s the love? Well, this is also the season where they really got the big budgets, it looks like, and they’d built up enough reputation to attract even bigger-name guest stars. And they had the freedom to do interesting stuff that didn’t quite fit in with the formula. Like the episode with Ricky Gervais as an IRA bomber: pretty neat. And the one with David Cronenberg as the doctor who sent Sydney on that whole dream-sequence episode: very, very neat. And Isabella Rosselini as the superspy that helps Jack: pretty lame episode overall, but she gave a great performance, even though she looks even more uncannily like David Foley in drag the older she gets.

I’m still unspoiled for the rest of this season, so I have no idea what the big cliff-hanger is going to be. And considering that the next season isn’t available on DVD until mid-October, I’m actually going to have to wait to see the resolution of this cliff-hanger. It’ll be interesting to see how long I can hold out before begging people to tell me what happens in season four.

Country Mouse

I just went out for my 1:30 AM cigarette, and there was a guy hiding behind the stairs wearing only boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and socks, holding a baseball bat. When he heard me come out, he started giggling and gingerly skipped up the block a ways. After a minute or so, he skipped back and hid behind a different staircase next door, and then slipped around and stood behind a van.

What kept it at “what the hell?” level of interest instead of “holy shit psycho bat guy!” was that I could hear his buddies a couple doors down, out on the sidewalk drinking. But what sucks is that I stood out there to see how the whole thing played out, but one of his friends walked by with a beer can and pointed at him, and the dude just followed him back to the apartment, holding the bat. I expected a lot bigger pay-off.

Now I like to think I’m pretty open-minded, but it’s stuff like this that makes me think I’m just not cut out to live in the city. Merry Prankster Bat Guy was weird but pretty tame. More annoying is the huge lesbian with the scalp tattoo who plants herself on my steps to smoke cigarettes and talk on her cell phone. And whoever it is that leaves half-eaten sandwiches in plastic bags at the top of my stairs (that’s happened twice now). And the woman who walks by once a week at 2 AM having a long, loud, angry conversation with no one in particular. And the guy I already mentioned who always wears shorts no matter how cold it is and is always washing his car or cleaning out his garage in the wee hours of the morning. And the guy who walks by fornightly playing a digeridoo. And that weird guy who’s always out on his doorstep at 1:30 smoking a cigarette and then goes back inside to write about it on his weblog.

And this is a relatively boring neighborhood; I wonder what goes on in the rest of the city?

Displaced

Still in Burbank at my comfortable media-company-catering suburban-luxury hotel, watching reports of New Orleans on the news and wondering what to do. Can’t do anything about that in particular (except donate), and considering I’ve never actually been to the city so I don’t even have anything useful to say.

I’ve still got about four hours before a meeting, and only a short while before I have to give up the room and my internet connection. Seems like it’d be a good time to get some work done, at least it would if I didn’t have a case of the stare-blankly-at-the-screen going on. I don’t get how people can get work done on planes and in hotel rooms and coffeeshops and such; I suspect they’re not really anything getting done, but just faking it. So how to kill four hours in Burbank? Based on all the signs and billboards, a lot of people around here are really, really eager for me to watch their TV channel or see their movie. Beats being outside, at least.

I keep hearing about all this great stuff you can do in LA; what’s up with that?

Minor Update

The “Weblog” link at the top of the page now takes you to an archives page that lists recent activity on the site. Could be useful to see where comments have been made; mostly it’s just me dinking around with the site.

The “Links” page is still sketchy, until I figure out something useful to do with it and how to make it work with WordPress. The idea is that it’s going to be a “hey, this is neat!” repository so I don’t have to make a whole post just to say “hey, check this out.”

After Life

A couple weeks ago I was threatened by my friend Matt to reconsider my opinion of the videogame Resident Evil 4, or I couldn’t be friends anymore. Well, I re-tried the game and I still don’t like it. I don’t like shooting games without a mouse, anyway, so I was already annoyed. And when the villagers pushed a boulder on top of me, and the only way I could escape was by furiously pushing the A button like a monkey, I completely lost interest.

So in a desperate attempt to save our crumbling friendship, I rented the movie After Life from Netflix, and finally watched it last night to take a break from putting off the work I wasn’t doing. A few years ago, Matt had recommended the movie to me, but I could never find it.

It’s a neat movie. The premise is that after you die, you choose one memory from your life to take with you for eternity. It’s filmed like an indie movie, but doesn’t fall into all the pretentious traps that indie movies usually wallow in. It’s not overly obscure in order to hide the fact that it’s not really saying anything, and it also doesn’t have a single message you’re supposed to take away from the movie once you get past all the symbolism. Instead, it does what an “art film” is theoretically supposed to do: present an idea and let you make your own conclusions about it.

There’s enough of a plot — concerning the counselors who help the recently deceased choose their memory and then recreate it — to show different takes on the central question and to raise more questions about what exactly it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. But they’re presented as different ways people would answer those questions for themselves, not as an attempt to give The One True Answer. It avoids getting over-sentimental or relying on effects or gimmicks, presenting everything as completetly straightforward; it could be mistaken for a documentary, if filmmakers had unrestricted access to the afterlife clearing house. And as a result, the images are even more powerful — instead of relying on special effects, the movie depends on your own memories and how you form them and see them in your own mind.

But of course, you’re left asking yourself the same question: what memory would you choose, if you chose one at all?

My first thought was that it would be the first time I saw the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disney World with my family. I have such a strong memory of that, of being safe, protected, amazed by the spectacle of it, and being overwhelmingly happy. And of course, not long after I thought that, the movie showed one of the recently deceased choosing a memory of Disneyland, and the counselor telling her that all the teenage girls do that (ouch!) and helping her pick a better memory.

And after that, well, I’m stumped. I don’t have a single memory that incorporates all my friends and family, and they’re too important not to take with me. I need to either have all my friends together to do something ridiculously fun, or else get used to the idea of being a counselor.

Man-child

Space Mountain via blurry cameraphone I just got back from Disneyland.

I got into Burbank a little after 5:00, and I’m already caught up with my work (or more accurately, I’m at a complete deadlock with my work and would need some kind of divine intervention to get past it). So I could either sit around the hotel for hours, or I could take advantage of my annual pass, drive down to Anaheim and ride the new Space Mountain as many times as possible.

Turns out “as many times as possible” was once. Tuesday night at around 8 pm, and the wait was 80 minutes. Even with all that, including the hour drive and the kids behind me getting all up in my personal space the whole time in line (because they were excited, so I can’t fault them for that), it was worth it. The ride is that cool. I’ve just got to go with somebody else now, so I can actually talk about it instead of just writing about it on my weblog.

After all that, I didn’t feel like waiting for anything, although the waits for everything else in the park were under 30 minutes. I went on the Matterhorn right as the fireworks were starting, and that was pretty damn cool. Not quite as spectacular as riding Big Thunder Mountain when the fireworks are going on — on Big Thunder, you come out of a tunnel and see the fireworks spread out all over the park, and it’s amazing — but still a great sight. Some of the fireworks are launched from the top of the Matterhorn itself, so the show was going on all around us.

And apart from that, I just had a beef skewer, a Dole whip, and a chocodile (from a 7-11) for dinner. If I were accountable to anyone, I’d be in so much trouble right now. Now I’m going to stay up too late playing my new videogame. Maybe I’ll build a pillow fort in the hotel room.

The Importance of Being Earnest (About “Alias”)

What’s wrong with me? I forgot to talk about “Alias” some more.

I watched the last episode of Season 2 last night. The big surprises from the Season 2 ending were already spoiled for me, so I didn’t get as big a shock as the first-time viewers. But I’ve got to say: even though I knew it was coming, that was one hell of a fight. I guess graduate students can only afford apartments made out of balsa wood. I’d heard about the big cliff-hanger/twist as well, so that wasn’t a shocker; I was just waiting to see how they actually did it.

Everything from here on out to the zombies is still spoiler-free for me, so I’m waiting to see what they do with Season 3. I’ve heard varying reports on teh internets. Netflix will show me the way, since I’ve already got the first disc queued up.

With these shows that I’ve gotten obsessed over in the past (“Buffy” and “X-Files”), they’ve always had episodes where it seems as if they’ve painted themselves into a corner, and then magically turned it all around to reveal a whole new room. “Alias” takes more of the brute-force approach — they paint themselves into a corner, and then demolish the house. But it keeps moving; you’ve got to give them that.

Another thing I noticed about “Alias” after watching the bonus features and commentary (since there were only 2 episodes on the last disc, I had to watch something): it’s really hard for me to maintain a healthy cynical detachment from this show. I realize that the show is formulaic and filled with ridiculous contrivances and plot-twists, but they all realize that, too. It doesn’t matter. It’s like a roller coaster — if you keep telling yourself it’s fake and there’s no way you can get hurt, it sucks all the fun out of it.

There was a bit of an interview with Jennifer Garner on there, where she said that during the filming of the finale she kept crying in between takes because she felt so bad for Sydney Bristow and what she was going through. She said, “I mean, I know that she’s a fictional character of course, but she’s real to me.” That’s the key to the whole show. You can either roll your eyes at that, or you can take it at face value and play along.

They’re all so dead earnest about the show, which is why you can hear about double- and triple-agents and ridiculous plot contrivances and DNA strands and retinal scans and not be distracted by the absurdity of it all. And you can really think things like, “Man, how bad would that feel to have your mother who you thought was dead but actually turned out to be a double-agent spying on your dad who was also a double-agent and now she’s stabbing you with a cattle prod because she’s working with the man who killed your fiance in order to steal ancient super-powerful artifacts that grant immortality? That would really suck!”

And because they’re so dead earnest about it, I actually liked watching the blooper reel, which I normally despise. It’s just fun to see them all get to smile for once. And I got a kick out of watching the rest of the promotional stuff, even though I know it’s all just marketed and manufactured to be a star vehicle for Jennifer Garner and show star-struck brainless TV-watching masses just how charming she is. But dammit, she is charming!

I’ve been tired of irony for a while now — everything trying to be all self-referential and “dark and edgy.” I’m getting a kick out of seeing something that just says, “Yes. We have zombies.” And they’re not afraid of looking stupid, and they’re not saying it’s some joke or a metaphor for something “deeper.”

Every time I change this site, I die a little

I had big dreams for this website, once upon a time. It wasn’t going to be just the place where I ramble on about computer mice and “Alias” that it has become. I was going to write all kinds of fancy web apps and gadgets in PHP and whatever else came along, making it kind of like the original Brunching Shuttlecocks site. I was going to write my own blogging engine, so I could get practice writing. I was going to do travelogues for the places I went, with a fancy photo gallery and write-ups like a travel magazine. And I’d be able to post random pictures, movie reviews, short stories, whatever else I could think of.

But then I gave up my own blogging engine because WordPress is simply better. And now Flickr’s taken over for the photo hosting, and it does much cooler community stuff than I could’ve thought of. All my travel photos are now up there, and I can’t even do a detailed write-up because it’s been so long I can’t remember where half those pictures were taken, and why they were significant. All the other stuff I’d planned fell to the wayside because I never had time.

My only consolation was that I could at least make the thing look nice, and so I wrestled with CSS to finally come up with something not great, but at least somewhat “different.” And that was fragile and broke under different browsers. So now I’ve even given up on that and just went back to the default WordPress theme, gave it a sickly gray-green background and added some old pictures, and I’m sticking with this.

And of course even this isn’t cross-platform like a website is supposed to be. I’ve tried it out, and the score-card is:

Safari for Mac: looks pretty much how I intended
Firefox for Mac: not bad, but it doesn’t handle fonts as well
Firefox for Windows: exactly like Firefox for Mac, except the halftone-image collie is missing from the headerbar
Opera for Windows: pretty good overall, although there are some weird spacing nitpicks
Internet Explorer for Mac: no surprise that it totally chokes on the spacing, but considering I didn’t put any IE-specific workarounds in, it’s usable
Internet Explorer for Windows: header, spacing, links, fonts, all completely fucked up

Now it’s no surprise that IE doesn’t render the webpage well; I’m about the 10 millionth person to bitch about Internet Explorer’s lousy CSS compatibility. But for it to render the page differently on the Mac and Windows versions? That’s just wrong.

So my plan is for standards compliance through petulance. I’m not going to put any of the workarounds to get it to work in IE; they wrote a crappy browser, so they should be the ones to fix it. I realize that I’m not running amazon.com or anything here; as I said, it’s just a place for unfocused rambling. But I used to think that if I’m going to try to learn something (e.g. webpage design), I should learn to do it right (e.g. accessibility, standards compliance, and cross-platform compatibility). Well, screw that.

P.S.: I realize that the “Weblog” and “Links” links are broken. I’m still working on that.

I Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Input Device

Way sexier than Ann Coulter I’ve grown to realize that my Microsoft Intellimouse Optical is the Hilary Rodham-Clinton of input devices.

I will admit that I’ve strayed. I’ve tried the newer, flashier versions. The sleek green one that came with my PC — oh, it looks nice, and at first grasp it seems a perfect fit for my hand. Form-fitting. Yielding, even. And oh, the buttons! Sitting up high, pert and perky in an unfamiliar and exotic location. But I soon realized that it was too exotic, too form-fitting. And too yielding — the scroll wheel just rolls over with no response, no interplay, a mushy, cursory movement that suggests it would roll over for anyone.

I tried the wireless version, with its big promises of the future and a life browsing with nothing tying me down or holding me back. But it was a short-lived passion. The affair lasted only as long as the supplied AA batteries, and when those died I realized how plastic the whole thing was.

And of course recently, my very public affair which many of you have no doubt read about, down to my lurid descriptions of the scroll nipple. I’m not proud of it, but yes I did try it. I breathed deep of the promise of Apple innovation, and oh yes I did inhale. But it ultimately failed me, refusing to turn around properly in World of Warcraft because I wouldn’t play by its rules and take my index finger off the mouse when right-clicking.

And standing beside me through the whole ordeal was my Intellimouse. It’s not the flashiest of the bunch — you could even call it “plain.” But she and I have a rapport built up over the years; we just work and play well together. And I’m starting to realize that it isn’t just the trusty workhorse that stands behind me throughout any Republican-led assault. It actually does an excellent job, and I just never noticed because it does it so well. After installing the Microsoft drivers for OS X, I can actually go back and forth through web pages using the left and right buttons, and it takes me back to when we first met and I first took her out of the package.

Also, my mouse was in charge of an ill-conceived and ultimately doomed plan for national health care.

Flickr and Raccoon Dogs

Now there’s the title for a 70’s action movie if I ever heard one.

I got my copy of Pom Poko yesterday and watched it on the commute back to San Francisco. I’m impressed; Disney released it unedited. And with a pretty tasteful translation — they always refer to them as “raccoons” and never describe them as different animals, which is kind of a shame but perfectly understandable; and they describe at the beginning that the males can inflate and transform their “raccoon pouch” and leave it at that. There’s no cautionary or explanatory material anywhere else on the DVD, and it’s really not needed. (There are also no bonus features other than the original trailers, and a second disc containing the entire movie in storyboard format, but that’s no big surprise as this was never a huge blockbuster release even in Japan).

And I ususally hate English dubs of Japanese movies, but they did a pretty good job with this one. Some relatively big names for voice actors, including John DiMaggio (Bender from “Futurama” and Doctor Drakken from “Kim Possible”), Brian Posehn (again), and J.K. Simmons (from “Oz,” Spider-man, and the yellow M&M). I guess Disney can afford to hire anyone they want. I’m thinking it’s pretty damn cool that the movie was released in the US at all, and the fact that it’s a well-done release is just an added bonus. I’m also very happy I don’t work for Disney’s complaint department.

I’ve also been looking more at Flickr.com and am starting to catch on more to the appeal of it. I’m always late to the party with these internet phenomena, but it’s still worth pointing out. What’s neatest to me is the support for public forums and groups, and the ways that people are using them. Those networking sites like Friendster and Orkut are neat for the first couple of days, but after you settle all your “hey, that friend knows that friend! Small world!” incidents, it’s pretty useless. They try to create “communities,” but it just ends up being “so you like ‘Mr. Show’ too? Cool.” followed by awkward silence. And silences between internet geeks are the most awkward silences of them all.

The flickr people have realized that you can’t just facilitate people’s getting together, you’ve got to give them something to do. And, what’s most surprising to me, people have actually picked it up and run with it. What with this being the internets, there are of course the predictable “look at me naked” and “hey u live in sf too thats cool!!!1!” groups, but most of the ones I’ve found have been surprisingly clever and creative. Usually when you give a ton of people on the internets the chance to be creative, they don’t do much other than reaffirm the idea that 99% of everything is crap. But at least on the groups I’ve seen, people stay on topic or with the theme — “Tiki culture,” “Route 66,” “Most photographed landmarks,” “What your world looks like at 5:00” — and it ends up being pretty cool.

I’m actually encouraged to take pictures again. And just for their own sake, not to be “artistic” or as part of some larger project or some special event, but just because it’s pretty fun. An internet creativity experiment that actually encourages people to be creative; I never would’ve thought it possible.

I realize that I could use my RAZR to post on Flickr, but at that point I’d be turning into one of those guys who always talks about moblogging and geocaching and uses the term “blogosphere” non-ironically and refers to himself by his online handle. And SolGrundy don’t play that, yo.