Death of the mainstream?

Great post Andy. Although I think that Gorillaz aren't popular enough to constitute the defining band of our generation, I do think that their qualities as a virtual band melding different genres etc. do hit on many of the defining qualities of twenty-first century pop culture. Alan suggested Outkast as another possible candidate, but we mainly agreed that there just isn't a band like Nirvana or The Beatles nowadays that is so universally popular and captures the mindset of the nation's youth.

Maybe this is due to the splintering of popular culture into so many little niches. In the age of mp3s, netflix, amazon et al, there's so much access to media beyond what's mainstream that it's hard for one dominant culture, musically or otherwise, to emerge.

An interesting statistical idea behind this shift in cultureal representation is that of the "Long Tail." Here's the article from Wired Magazine that first used the term in that sense. It's pretty interesting stuff. Maybe we're truly witnessing the age where nothing exists culturally but splintered pastiche, echoes of former movements. It seems that's part of what you were saying a group like Gorillaz embodies, Andy, which is why I think they are a particularly interesting example within today's popular music.

Laughing Gas, These Hazmats

Bill Simmons just wrote a great article prophesying upcoming moments in the NBA playoffs through the lens of Pearl Jam lyrics. Spurred by this, Bryan and I started talking about how much we regret not being able to see a truly generation-defining band while in college. Simmons was talking about Pearl Jam, but I think that Nirvana is an even better example. College students were nuts for Nirvana to a degree that I don’t think our generation can really comprehend, because Nirvana occupied a sort of societal pinnacle. Bryan and I actually spent some time trying to figure out what band fills that role today, and our initial verdict was that there simply isn’t one. I love Queens of the Stone Age, but they just don’t pack the same punch as Nirvana; whether you liked or hated Kurt Cobain, you had to have some kind of opinion on the topic. It wasn’t just MTV viewers: eighties-rockers hated the band for their supposed role in the death of hair metal, while the alt/underground crew fell in immediate love with them for their roots in the hardcore and alternative scene. Again, whether or not you liked Nirvana, you had to recognize that they were saying something. Today, what are popular music acts saying?

This isn’t me going on about the end of good rock; instead, my point is that Bryan and I were wrong. There is a band that defines our generation: Gorillaz. In a certain way, they epitomize our culture at the moment. Gorillaz is the cartoon-band side project of Damon Albarn, the frontman behind Blur, a nineties Britpop act. So why Gorillaz? Let’s go over the parameters. They get airtime on both mainstream rock and alt-mainstream radio stations (read: the ROCK of Boston, and BRU). Their music is best categorized as a mix-up of rock, electronica, and rap. They’re utterly faceless, in that their “live” shows are prerecorded and feature artificial, animated band members. Their music is good, too! In essence, Gorillaz is a very good, popular band making music that really follows the modern ethos of pastiche. And (this is where it gets good), the band is a mask, an artificial construct lying overtop of real people.

The interesting thing is that the mask isn’t even hiding anything! Everyone knows that Damon Albarn is behind Gorillaz. There’s no secret identity – it’s essentially nothing covering up for nothing. This brings up the difference between Nirvana and Gorillaz. Nirvana’s lyrics were mainly incomprehensible, but gave an impression of hidden meaning and of depth (it’s of course debatable whether this depth was actually present). Nirvana was constantly out in the front of pop culture, and just as constantly flipping off both their fans and the music establishment. To push their fans’ buttons, they played a concert dressed in drag, and then months later performed “Rape Me” on SNL against the wishes of the shows producers. There was something impenetrable, perhaps willfully so, about Nirvana. When Kurt Cobain’s diaries were published a few years ago, a lot of people were pretty outraged because he was supposedly such a private person. If Damon Albarn printed his diaries, no one would give a shit. But he doesn’t; he makes good music with his fake band. Unlike Nirvana, Gorillaz is first and foremost out to have a good time, and yet Damon Albarn doesn’t even want us to see him doing it.

Another way to look at it is to try to understand, in a cursory fashion, what bands of a given era were saying. I fully admit that this is a massive oversimplification, but bear with me. In the 1980’s, the dominant theme was one of decadence; Guns and Roses was perhaps the culmination and the defining popular voice of that culture. Take one look at the lyrics to Paradise City – it revels in pomposity, overblown guitar solos, and a masturbatory double-time ending. The lyrics to Nightrain (still one of my favorite songs:

I got one chance left
I’m a nine live cat
I got a dog eat dog sly smile
I got a Molotov cocktail with a match to go
I smoke my cigarette with style

Axl Rose is singing about pretty much nothing at all, but he thinks he’s saying something important – about himself, and getting tore up and having a blast. That’s pretty much eighties popular rock in a nutshell.

Then, with 1991, comes Nirvana and all of their dissatisfaction and sarcasm towards this era. Nirvana’s sound is one of revolt against their forebears, perhaps even of denial of their descendancy from this tradition. Best exemplifying this could be the title alone of a song off In Utero – Radio Friendly Unit Shifter – in which he sings “I love you for what I am not / I do not want what I have got,” and then, “This had nothing to do with what you think.” Kurt Cobain won’t sing about himself, not in concrete terms, and denies us even the right to interpret his lyrics.

The way I’ve always looked at the music of the early nineties is as an era of rage at the underlying emptiness of both its own culture and that of the eighties, at that problem of decadence built atop nothing. Essentially, anger at Guns and Roses. From Nirvana’s Territorial Pissings:

When I was an alien, cultures weren't opinions
Gotta find a way to find a way when I'm there
Gotta find a way, a better way
I had better wait

I think it ties in pretty well.

And then, in the 00’s, we have Gorillaz. From Feel Good, Inc.:

You've got a new horizon its ephemeral style,
A melancholy town where we never smile,
And all I wanna hear is the message beep,
My dreams, they've got to kissin’ because I don’t get sleep, no

Gorillaz has given up being angry at the emptiness, and established it as a means in and of itself towards making music. We’ve moved from reveling in a lack of cultural meaning, to being furious at that emptiness, and finally to a certain blithe acceptance of it, a mask, nothing built atop nothing.

Jenny Chang's Favorite Movies Of All Time

I've notice a generally negative trend on these posts, from illegal drug use to "bad" movies that I approve of (Sideways; Love Actually; anything with Hugh Grant). Putting a positive spin on things, I would like to post my favorite popular movies of all time with little to no explanation/order to them. Some of them*, like Silence of the Lambs, have been absolutely instrumental in my child development; others are comforting in that their characters are more sexually disturbed or violent than I will ever become.

1. La cite des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children), 1995
2. Notting Hill, 1996
3. 37.2 le matin (Betty Blue), 1986
4. Die Hard, 1988
5. Casablanca, 1942
6. Les Nuits Fauve (Savage Nights), 1992
7. In the Mood for Love, 2000
8. The Silence of the Lambs, 1991*
9. Jason and the Argonauts, 1963**
10. The Hours, 2002
11. The Cider House Rules, 1999***
12. Maria, llena eres de gracia (Maria Full of Grace), 2004 ****

* My mother forced me to watch this with her when I was 7,
because she was too frightened to watch it alone
** Medusa and Hannibal Lecter terrorized me for years after,
in my dreams and the moments before sleep arrived
*** Sentimental for the fact that we used to steal ether from
the organic chemistry labs for personal inhalation
**** Not my favorite, but I highly recommend this to anyone
who directly or indirectly supports crack slangin'

Best and Worst Bad Movies

People spend way too much time deciding on the perfect movie to watch, I’ve decided. Ever been in a group of 3 or more people, and with so many dvd and divx selections at your fingertips, still fail to find one single movie everyone will be willing to devote the next measly 90 minutes to? In contrast, someone will flip on the TV and Happy Gilmore will be playing on Comedy Central for the hundredth time that day, and the same individuals who’d heatedly fought over which Woody Allen movie to watch last night, then fought over whether they even want to watch Woody Allen, well maybe one of his movies that he’s not in, y’know, the serious dramas, but wait I like the ones that he’s in, he’s witty and charming, no he’s stupid, let’s watch Hot Shots, NO we’re not watching fucking Hot Shots—those same people now happily flop onto couches to catch the same old Adam Sandler movie we’ve all seen a million times.

Sometimes I feel like you just have to overcome the initial movie-watching static friction, and that once a movie is already playing people are much more willing to just watch whatever junk is ‘on.’ People will claim to prefer self immolation than be exposed to one minute of a particular movie, but just remember, these people are selfish liars and they are lying to you. Besides, immolation is kinda fun.

Last night, Bevan and I had a hankering for “Lost in Translation,” but Josh said that it was on his top five list of movies he would really truly hate to watch at that moment. This claim isn’t particularly convincing, given the fact that he likes the movie to begin with. Josh responded by saying that although he likes the movie, he really would like to watch it LESS than certain movies he actually hates. All this talk, combined with the garbage below about crowning “Sideways” one of the worst movies ever after only watching half of it, (merely a not-very-good-movie in my opinion), has inspired me to create the following admittedly subjective but undoubtedly definitive lists:

Top 10 movies I have seen all the way through but will actually refuse to spend another minute watching right now and forever:
(I tried to list only movies a fair number of people do enjoy. Finding stuff like “Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2” is too easy.)

10.) Little Nicky
9.) Toys
8.) Boondock Saints
7.) The Shawshank Redemption
6.) Zoolander
5.) Patch Adams
4.) My Big Fat Greek Wedding
3.) Malibu’s Most Wanted
2.) The Blair Witch Project
1.) Love Actually

("Sideways" is probably somewhere around #68. "Lost in Translation" is not on the list at all. I wanted to watch it last night and didn't get to, Josh, you dick.)

And conversely, (inversely? I don't know the difference)...
Top 10 movies I have seen all the way through, readily admit to smelling like poop, but would watch again in a heartbeat:

10.) Three Ninjas
9.) Howard the Duck
8.) 10 Things I Hate About You
7.) Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
(If only for that stripper-cake scene my friend Adro had the timecode memorized for in the 7th grade. Steven Segal is just gravy.)
6.) White Men Can't Jump
5.) Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time
4.) Good Burger
3.) Hackers
2.) Suburban Commando
(Sadly, the only Hulk Hogan/Christopher Lloyd team-up ever to be captured on film)
1.) The Wizard
(I hardcore annoyed my Dad into buying me a Nintendo Power Glove immediately upon seeing this)

first blog entry ever

i heard this segment on NPR. it's about a woman with an incredible memory... researchers think that she's unique in medical history. she can recall just about any detail of her life from the past 30 years. it's hard to imagine how differently she experiences everything. i'm not even sure that i'd prefer to have her ability...i can imagine it being really awful not being able to forget traumatic experiences, etc. anyway, it's pretty fascinating (although you'll have to get past the journalist's monotone voice).

RE: glimpsing movies

1) Sideways is a terrible movie.

2) The metaphor of art as fractal is flawed in this case, I think. The idea of a fractal is dependent, like Josh/Alan said, on the complete form's containment in its component parts. This works in a number of things, and is particularly beautiful mathematically. It's probably true for movies to a more limited extent, but it doesn't hold up as justification for quickly judging a movie. You can't watch 2 minutes of a movie and expect to be given an adequate representation of the involved themes, because you can only break the movie down so far. You have the movie in its entirety, and then can break it into themes, or scenes, or character interactions, or individual moments. As you view more limited chunks, you're getting a smaller sample size and thus have less of an understanding of the movie. The themes may still be present, ala the fractal model, but I think there's a greater chance of misunderstanding what's put in front of you. Limited pool of information equals less context, and you might have just seen one of the outliers.

Example: Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a beautiful shot through a screen door. If I had just watched that scene, I would have thought it was some artsy horror film, and I would have been way off. I think you watched the movie for about that long, heard the title, and made your judgment.

Statements such as "I don't have interest in this movie" or "it looks like shit" are perfectly justifiable; you've made a judgment based upon your viewing, however limited it might be. But I don't think you can reasonably argue that you have a good impression of a movie's themes from such a limited viewing. It's perfectly fine to be disinterested by what you've seen, but fractal or no fractal, there isn't enough room to grasp the movie's overarching narrative.

3) I really don't like Sideways.

*NOTE* It has been brought to my attention that points 1 and 3 negate point 2. I would like to add that I have justifications for not liking Sideways. I found the characters alienating, unsympathetic, and unrealistic. The movie might still have been a fractal, I just didn't care.

fear and loathing

Trying (or not) to sound like the blindly bush-hating publication that it might be if you're the kind of person that likes to put labels on things, rolling stone magazine frightened me by suggesting that Sandra Day O'connor said bush is leading america into a dictatorship and as proof linked to this.
After listening to the story, I wished two things:
1) that I hadnt actually just read through rolling stone magazine
2) that I could post this link and beat Josh to the Jug

Glimpsing Movies

Transcript of a conversation from last night

Alan: What are you watching?
Bryan: Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Alan: Ah, this seems like an original story.
Bryan: Why don't you judge after having seen three minutes of it?

Transcript of a conversation from last summer (poorly recalled and lexically fabricated)

Alan: Sideways is maybe the worst movie ever made.
Diana: You've only seen half of it!

I beleive in the necessity of encountering a work of art in its entirety, that is, in the form intended by its creator. This is why hearing a good song snipped and edited by a radio station appalls me. This is why I read whole novels, and why I do not like "survey" literature courses, especially ones based largely on a bulky Norton Anthology of Literature.

But I recognize that it is often necessary to extrapolate criticism of a part of a work to the work in full. In our media-saturated society, we have endless choices for entertainment and edification. To make the most of our choices, we must engage in extrapolation based on proportionally tiny bits of information.

Our extrapolations are especially suited for commercial moving image forms such as blockbuster movies and television. These forms gave us the trailer and the remote control, which ask us to assess whether we would enjoy a movie or program after seeing one minute or even one second of footage.

Cooler media such as print demand fewer such assessments. But it is still necessary to extrapolate our opinion of books based on very incomplete information. We do this every time we start a book and decide whether to continue it or not. If we don't do this, we will have a less optimized literary experience.

Furthermore, art often takes the form of the fractal: its complete form is contained in its component parts (metaphor credit goes to Josh Gan. The fractal and the energy well are two of the most useful Josh Gan rhetorical metaphors). I beleive that a movie's attitude and style are often contained in each of its scenes. The other weekend, I watched five minutes of The Wedding Singer, and just from observing the scene in which Drew Barrymore practices her wedding kiss on Adam Sandler I could confidently project all of the following onto the movie as a whole.

1) It is a mostly conventional, commercial movie
2) It is light-hearted and populist
3) The presence of Adam Sandler prevents it from degenerating into total romantic cheesiness.
etc.

I was not ready to publish a review of the movie, nor did I feel I fully appreciated its aesthetic or entertainment value. But, incompletely informed though I was, I felt competent enough to determine whether I would want to watch it, to whom I would recommend it, and how I would rate it in terms of conventionality, attitude, and watchability. Thus, I stand by my assessments of movies of which I have only seen a fragment. And truly, anyone who has seen even a tiny bit of Sideways can tell you it is just a godawful film.

Red-opsin polymorphisms

So I'm writing a paper on non-visual transduction in retinal ganglion cells and came across something I've been told but never had a full appreciation for... until now!

Jeremy Nathans, who worked one floor below my lab in the Wilmer Eye Hospital when I was a wee-little freshman, was the first to isolate the three opsins responsible for color vision in 1989... red-, green-, and blue-opsin:

Since then, many functional polymorphisms for these genes have been identified, resulting in amino acid changes in protein structure. Take for example, the Ser180Ala common polymorphism in red-opsin. This residue is located in the alpha helix of the binding domain for opsin-retinal (retinal being the molecule responsible for firing) interactions, and the change from serine (polar) to alanine (nonpolar) causes the red absorption spectrum to SHIFT down. People with the alanine residue have a lower sensitivity to red light than do people with serine in the same position.

... But that's just one polymorphism. A quick search on PubMed finds 36 polymorphisms on red conopsin only, many of which are quite common! Imagine the possibilities... and that's just the visual system! The same applies for olfactory epithelial tissue!

!!!

Isn't it glamous?!

Josh Gan

I'm calling you out. Post, or we all know that you have no Picard in you. And by that I mean I've fucked Patrick Stewart and you haven't.

Lust. Depravity. Beer.

On the subject of LEGAL neurotoxins (n.b., legal - an important distinction for you unprincipled trolls & wastes of tuition/parental support), I've found a new favorite for the beer-drinkers out there... Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale ("Pater") has my vote this month. The dreamy Belgian brew is as easy on the eye as it is down the throat. A nice, smoked-chocolatey flavor with a tart finish. Raisined body and a lovely head.

Completely gratifying. If only men were so simple.

Don't forget about the Joshes! (The wicked sexy guitarist and the one who loves him)

"Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol / Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol"
--Queens of the Stoneage, "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"








...C-C-C-C-C-Cocaine?

Top Three Couplets about Valium Found in Popular Music Lyrics

3) "Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that dash"
--Lou Reed, "Take a Walk on the Wild Side"
2) "Cool, calm, just like my Mom / with a couple of valium inside her palm"
--D12, "Purple Pills"
1) "If you take more of those / you will get an overdose"
--Rolling Stones, "Mother's Little Helper."

Snakes on a Plane

If you haven't heard about this already, go google the phrase, "snakes on a plane" and read up on the upcoming movie starring none other than Samuel L. Jackson. The basic premise is that Sammy is a Fed. transporting a prisoner on an airplane. An assassination attempt is made on the prisoner by unleashing crates of deadly snakes onto the plane mid-flight.

This was brought to my attention by a webcomic I read (the caption simply gave the instructions to google the above phrase). I was intrigued and slightly disturbed by this film's existence. As such, I dug around in the internet for a while, reading various articles/blogs about the subject. It has created quite an internet buzz, mostly due to the ridiculous nature of the film's concept and title.

While that in itself is interesting, there are far more amusing/disturbing aspects to this upcoming project. For instance, the producers at one point wanted to make the title give more of a thriller feel, so they changed the title to "Pacific Air 121." Following this, Samuel L. Jackson insisted they change the title back because (and I paraphrase here), "I signed on to a movie titled 'Snakes on a Plane.' I'm making a movie called 'Snakes on a Plane.' Change the title back mothafucka." Actually, he publicly stated, "That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title. You either want to see that, or you don't." (This second quotation is real, the first is not)

In addition to this amusing fact, the internet cult following has resulted in numerous parodies of the film concept producing the fictitious Sammy J exlamation, "I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!" The cult following has also resulted in the producers and director to decide to do a second shooting to add further footage to the movie, making it "more R rated." According to an internet article, "the filmmakers added more gore, more death, more nudity, more snakes and more death scenes." (link).

I ask you, friends, acquaintances, strangers, where in the plot of this movie is there room for NUDITY, let alone more of it? The gore, snakes, and death I can understand, but nudity? Are people having sex on a pile of snakes? Does the hot, slutty, untalented chick with implants go down on a guy while topless only to find herself sucking on a snake moments before her death? It makes no sense.

Oh, and the movie also features Kenan of Kenan and Kell.

Facebook's on the block

That's right, the creators of thefacebook.com are looking to sell the site, for as much as $2 billion, possibly to a media giant like Viacom. Read about it here.

Behold: the Yeti Crab!

Marine biologists have found a new species of white, hairy, smelly, disgusting-looking crab. Check out the enlarged image in the article. It makes me shudder.















I also read that the hairy lil guy would taste like rotten eggs if you were to eat it, because it dwells near undersea sulfer vents. Delicious.

What a time to stop eating meat.