In Which I Get Excited About Seeing The New Wallace and Gromit Short

The last legitimate Wallace and Gromit installment, A Close Shave, is over a decade old and my hope is that A Matter of Loaf and Death will cleanse my palate of the middling, feature-length W&G --- which Dreamworks evidently mucked with, and mucked up, much more than I'd thought. According to this Telegraph piece on creator Nick Park:

[T]he experience of working for a big, pushy American studio left a sour taste in Park's mouth. He found the experience stressful. It didn't suit his nature. This, after all, is a man who is happiest when out bird-watching with his binoculars in the English countryside. 'I would get these notes saying, "Shouldn't Wallace have a cooler, more modern car?" and I would say, "No, you're missing the point. The irony doesn't translate. It's cool because it's not." Having made three half-hour films already, I was in a position where I could say, "No, Wallace wouldn't do it." There is a false assumption that if things look old-fashioned children won't relate to it. Well, my favourite programme as a child was Dad's Army.'

"9th Annual Year In Ideas," with the Matthew Phelan Taxonomy

The moment all of you opened this year's installment of the New York Times Sunday Magazine's Ideas issue, many of you were curious about why it had not already been organized by the degree to which I found each idea either depressing or uplifting. Get excited; I did* it:

Most Depressing

Infant Sleep Is Destiny :: If your baby's sleep habits are like every stereotype of a baby's sleeping habits you've ever heard, your baby is doomed to lead an unproductive loser-y life.
Predictive Smiles :: Because I don't try to make nice or smile often, all my marriages will end in divorce.
Counterfeit Self, The :: Basically just about any minor deceptive practice you engage in (from lying on your resume to buying knock-off clothes) will snowball until you are basically Tom Ripley.

Most Life Affirming

Treating P.T.S.D. With Tetris :: From a very diluted (but analogous) bit of personal experience, I can tell you that this is true. It's also true of Laplace transforms.
Good Enough is the New Great :: The tech merchandise arms race is coming to a close! Men's magazine gadget ad revenue will need to be replaced.
Drunken Ultimatums :: The revanchist impulse is hard wired into us and I can stop feeling guilty about it.
Myth of the Deficient Older Employee, The :: Creed on the Office is an offensive stereotype—and this new research will keep some of us from getting canned just before retirement, unlike old people today.

* I didn't do them all; I have work I should be doing. Get off me!

Wow Just Wow [ONN Edition]

By any criteria—Melding Of Found And Filmed Footage, Make-up, Concept, Jokemedy, Audio Mixing, Pacing—this sucker is brilliant.


Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

A Very Good Piece Of Economic Analysis

I don't really have it in me, today, to write more than that about this.

Read Tom Scocca On Jonathan Safran Foer's New Nonfiction Book [If You Like To LOL]

Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please. [via the Awl, honestly just read the Awl every single day]

When Googling Soda Jerk, I Found This

Bruce Sterling's "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature"

SUMMARY: Easily, not the dumbest thing Bruce Sterling has ever written.

Naturally, everything he says applies just as urgently to cartooning and ought to have been on the agenda for MOCCA's Making Good Comics in a New Era panel.

Below are a few of the challenges* that I have comments about:

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

Also true for printed text paired sequentially with images. It's also conceptually indistinguishable from Sterling's #14, which is more a corollary than its own independent "challenge." (Who is editing this blog? Was s/he laid off?)

Something to keep in mind with this point is that: until you become a famous graphic novelist (whose very name is a Brand unto itself), film, TV and animation are your mortal enemies in the attention economy marketplace. Like the other losers (e.g. literature, nonfiction writing and the static visual arts) your twin hopes used to be that your production cost was still relatively lower and that the flexible pacing of your medium's consumption afforded audiences the breathing room to digest smarter, and thus more significant and lasting, idears.

Needless to say, the (relative) democratization of the means of video production, as well as the cheapness of digital distribution, have undercut those hopes significantly. Film, TV and animation will always be more expensive, but by much less than they used to be. And further, the public's ability to parse, edit, repost and generally scrutinize moving images has radically improved thanks to these technologies. The "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" musical sketch from the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, should tell us something about the ascendancy of cinema studies in academia and its convergence with homemade YouTube montages. Namely: the shelf life of every genre convention in the moving picture medium has been dramatically reduced. If that's not a recipe for exponential sophistication, than I don't know what is. (However, I would be willing to debate the amount of drag force that a glut of "lowest common denominator" Reality TV, YouTube response videos and the like are effecting on this exponential up tic.)

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

This is probably the only leg up we have on our rivals in moving images, whose work can "follow the vernacular" as it hightails it (heh) into the universe of cellphones and streaming video. Comics will always be cheaper and can pour themselves into all kinds of niches faster and deeper. Provided, of course, that they can stop trying to appeal to their own limited niche audiences. You know what they are!

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Okay. So, clearly, this is not a challenge, but an artfully elucidated statement of fact. Can I attribute this to laziness on Sterling's part? A bit of creative license that forces the critical reader to re-evaluate his entire blog post as capital "P" Poetry? And, if the latter, why not use the cooler British spelling, "spectre"?

There's more (#'s 3-7 obviously), but I'm reticent to spend more time on it.

[Link via Wired]

* ("Challenges" sounds like self-help to me—but I realize that it can also sound like some "NASA-grade inspiring," Camelot-era bullshit.)

The Babysitters' Club Theme Song

Summary: Giggling holiday consumerism. Headbands in vibrant colors. A reaffirmation of the reliability of friends, specifically girlfriends who share membership in a childcare guild.

Some Music Videos

Someone I know compared this Swedish-based group Liechtenstein to the Vivian Girls in the limited sense that both of these all-girl trios seem capable of coasting on their looks in lieu of having anything particularly amazing to offer sonically. As this blog post's label indicates, I am in no position to weigh in on whether this is true for either band. I bring it up because I am fascinated with this concept as a corollary to the glass ceiling specifically for attractive and ambitious career women: the more perversely degrading glass floor. That being said, I liked their set (sonically!) on Friday at Don Hills and recommend seeing them and Cats on Fire when both bands play at Bruar Falls in Brooklyn on Tuesday.



I was supposed to get a song from these guys on a mix CD from someone, but in the interim, I've broken down and just started listening to them on my own. So (obviously) the song is called "I'm In Fighting Mode" and the band is British trio Let's Wrestle.

Confrontational Dorkiness

Never has "white guy dancing" been done with such a defiant, "Fuck you!"

December 21st: Important To Do Item [Humor]

I'm not the boss of you, but if I were, I would encourage you to go see this on company time. Magnet Theater

This Is A Great Video Blog

Thing I Didn't Know I Loved With All My Heart: Heavy Sarcasm

I guess it's a sign that I'm getting older, but sometimes when I look at party photos of cool hipster parties, it just seems like the kids are younger and younger. I think one of those signs that you're getting over the cool hill is when you start noticing you're older than anyone in a band worth listening to. I feel geriatric for being old enough to rent a car. At this point in my life, I might as well throw in the towel and start wearing Clarks and talking about the produce I bought at the farmer's market. I mean, this kid barely looks out of high school, right?

[Via Sorry I Missed Your Party]

Some Kind Of Monster

I know maybe this isn't James Hetfield, but isn't it? In spirit?

Slavoj Žižek Is A National Treasure.

It's a real shame he's not ours.
This recent interview covers all kinds of great territory—the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, Oliver Stone's failures as a polemicist, Žižek's defenses of the movie 300, of racism (yes!) and of dick jokes, as well as some of his praise (faint praise) for my boy Thomas Frank and Judith Butler's underrated partner, Wendy Brown.

[via BeepBoop, shared by susie]

I Wish Italian Spiderman Was Funnier

The trailer that took the internet by semi-storm in November of 2007



The 10 installments of it over the course of this past summer.

Alec Baldwin On Planning Your Social Engagements

"Whenever you see an invitation that says 'What could be more magical than an evening under the stars in the Hamptons?' you press delete." This and other pearls of wisdom from the hilarious and awesome Alec Baldwin can be found in this recent and sprawling (I know. What other kind is there?) New Yorker piece.