November 30, 2007 11:15
Tivogate (Like Watergate, But With "Tivo")
Okay, I think I have a story here. A news story. Real journalism, not just jokes about what religions superheroes are.*
Here's the scoop: a bunch of my Hollywood jerk friends have gotten calls from DirectTV offering free High Definition upgrades for their satellite TV receivers. But when the DirectTV guy installs the upgraded HD receiver, what he doesn't tell them is: HE IS PUTTING IN A CRAPPY DIRECTTV DVR WHICH SUCKS AND YOU CAN'T USE TIVO ANY MORE. That's right. They are secretly replacing our Tivos with... non-Tivos.
I know two people this has happened to. Two people. That is what journalists call "double sourcing." (I mean, I assume that's what it's called.) The DirectTV DVR is beyond super-horrible, say the Hollywood jerks who've had these inferior dealies foisted upon them. I've seen these craptacular DirectTV DVRs, and I concur. If Tivo is an iPhone (beautiful, elegant, intuitive, expensive), the DirectTV DVR is a rusty can being chewed on by a goat.
Behold the difference: The DirectTV DVR has no Now Playing page. No Wishlists. No Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down feature. How are viewers supposed to register their antipathy towards Landscapers Challenge? Stark, ugly graphics. No Tivo bloop noise. NO TIVO BLOOP NOISE. (The most soothing sound in this world or the next has been taken away, like Victorian Nanny Curldlepinch pulling the pacifier from a golden-curled babe while father is in Batavia looking after the family's rubber interests.) If you left your Tivo on East St. Louis' most crack-ridden corner overnight, this stripped-down shell of a DVR is what you'd have left in the morning.
I called DirectTV to get deeper into this story, and spoke to a guy named Willie. (This is called "reporting.") Willie told me that DirectTV just launched a bunch of super satellites into the sky which are going to blast amazing new HD channels onto our HD TVs -- and Tivo DVR technology isn't "good enough" to get these new channels and their extra features. What features? Interactive sports statistics, cooed Willie. (I hate non-interactive sports statistics, so these must be great.)
What happened to the wonderful marriage between Tivo and DirectTV? "We don't partnership with them anymore," said Willie, bravely creating a brand new verb. So now DirectTV is trying to bully Tivo out of the HD market by a) broadcasting signals that Tivo can't receive, and b) sending a dude to your house to secretly install the DVR equivalent of an Oriental Chicken and Rice Lean Cuisine.
A quick call to Tivo confirmed this. (By the way, Tivo customer service is also beautiful, elegant and intuitive.) Even the best 3-Series Ultra Excalibur Platinum-Class Tivo can't get the new HD DirectTV channels. The Tivo phone lady, Liz, suggested I get digital cable if I wanted to use HD Tivo and get access to the most HD channels. Undergo the life-rending hassle of switching from satellite to cable? Just because I have an emotional attachment to my DVR? Are you on crack... whoever that question might be asked to... Liz, I guess.
Damn DirectTV for jamming an inferior product down consumers' throats via bullying and guile. Is Tivo doomed to be like the Tucker automobile, too good for this world? (As dramatized in what is widely-acknowledged as the greatest Francis Ford Coppola movie of all time, Tucker: The Man and His Dream.) Is Tivo yet another tragic jewel, ground into glass by the lazy mediocrity of corporate monopolies?
Here's what you can do. Don't let DirectTV sneak in and replace your Tivo with their elephant loaf of a DVR. You don't need more HD channels that let you see Chris Matthews' forehead veins in 1080p. Just use your terrific old Tivo until we're all watching TV on the internet, which will happen in about fifteen seconds from now. Then laugh joylessly as both Tivo and DirectTV go the way of the dodo.
* What religions superheroes are: Spiderman -- Church of Latter Day Arachno-Jesus, Conan the Barbarian -- Cromish, Zorro -- Zoroastrian, Martian Manhunter -- Spethodist (Space Methodist), the Flash -- Scientologist (that's the same thing as "Scientist," right? A Scientologist... someone who totally believes in science), and Brother Voodoo -- Voodoo.
November 30, 2007 11:54
Is It Possible to Like Both C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman at the Same Time?
There's a short piece in this week's Time in which I chat with Philip Pullman. It's here.
I don't know if it comes across in the article -- which I wish were longer and better -- what a warm, intelligent presence Pullman is. He focuses this very appealing, avuncular, charming beam of interest at you while you're talking. He takes what you're saying seriously. He's also very willing -- as not all interviewees are -- to say what he means, and be passionate about it, even when he's on the record. And having breakfast. And answering the same questions for the 1,000th time.
For example, we talked about C.S. Lewis. Pullman is regularly called upon to breathe fire on the subject of Lewis, and he did so with relish. What -- Pullman asked himself rhetorically -- would you think about Christianity if your only source of information were The Chronicles of Narnia?
I think you’d come away thinking that the highest Christian virtue is martial valor. Courage in battle. You’d also come away believing that a lot of other things are part of the Christian message. Such as the disparagement of women. Such as a suspicion and hatred of people with dark skin who smell of garlic.
You’d also come away believing that the greatest task of a Christian would be to get out of this world, get out of this earth, as quickly as possible and go to the next one. Because what Lewis does with the children in that story is to take them through all these adventures, they see wonderful things, and they learn great truths, and so on, and then he kills them. Instead of letting them go free, as I think would be the moral thing to do, the Christian thing to do, to use these truths they've learned and these strengths they've gained to make the world a better place. To do good! But he takes them away. Doesn't allow them to do that! Lucky children, you're dead! You can relax now!
And so this intelligent but uninformed reader would consider that this Christian religion was a mighty peculiar thing, which involved fighting, hatred of women and minorities, and a loathing of this physical world that we live in, and a wish to escape from it.
He could have stopped there. He did not. Pullman went on.
His [i.e. Lewis's] comments about women throughout are loathsome. His attitude to children who are fat and have freckles, for example – for God’s sake! What is the point? Someone once compared him to that sort of teacher who sides with the bullies in their class, against the weak children, and that’s exactly right, that’s exactly the position Lewis takes up. It’s a foul position, morally speaking.
That isn't even everything, by a long chalk. Pullman's positions are never un-nuanced -- absolute positions are among the things he has no patience with -- and he did have some praise for Lewis. Some. "[He] was a man of great intelligence and a very fine critic. He said some very sensible and interesting things about writing for children, for example. But when he wrote fiction, something strange entered into him."
It's odd for me to think about Lewis that way. I've been fascinated with Lewis since I was a little kid, and I found myself wanting to defend him. But even I can see that there are ugly passages in the Chronicles -- I once called Lewis a death-eater in Time, because of the way he writes about the Calormen. And Lewis did make a fetish of innocence and childhood, in a creepy way that Pullman very bracingly inverts in His Dark Materials (to Pullman growing up and learning about the world are actually good things). But I don't know! Can't I love them both? Tell me, Interweb!
November 28, 2007 12:10
I Saw The Golden Compass
There was an advance screening last night. I always forget how awful advance screenings are -- a few people who go are fans, but most of the crowd are either college or high school kids who are just after a free movie, and don't care what they're seeing, or crazed shut-ins who somehow get on the lists for these events, for whom this is their only pleasure in life, and who bring garbage bags full of home-made food into the theater, and yell at you if you leave before the end of the closing credits.
Anyway, the movie. I had just reread the book for a piece about Philip Pullman that will be out on Friday, and I'd also seen a 20-min. clip reel a few weeks ago that showcased the special effects. I was very, very excited. Perhaps too excited.
I'll cover the good things first, which is easy, because there were only two of them. One, the casting. Nicole Kidman makes a perfect Mrs. Coulter: she's hot and she's cold. Daniel Craig was manly and smart and vaguely amoral as Lord Asriel. Eva Green, sporting a dead-on Marina Sirtis Betazoid accent, was somehow ethereal and badass simultaneously as witch Serafina Pekkala. (Though you kind of kept expecting her to make out with Lord Asriel, since Green was Craig's Bond girl in Casino Royale.) Newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, as Lyra, does what she has to, i.e. stands up straight and looks a lot like Nicole Kidman. Best-in-show goes to the unstoppable Ian McKellen voicing the armored bear Iorek Byrnison.
Good thing number two: the daemons. I had always thought Pullman's trilogy was basically unfilmable because of them. I mean, every time you have 5 people in a room there's a herd of animals in there with them? And nobody can touch anybody else's animal. How's that supposed to work? But they make it work. All the daemons look alert and interesting, like they belong in the scene. And the actors do a good job of pretending they're, you know, actually there. There's a nice, showy moment when Mrs. Coulter slaps her monkey demon across the face, then turns to the camera, so that you see the fading red finger-marks on her own cheek.
And now the bad things, which pretty much includes everything else. The screenplay is appalling: there's so much plot to be gotten through that nobody has time for anything but exposition. It's like somebody bent your arm behind your back and angrily frog-marched you through the novel. People are constantly popping up unexpectedly in convenient places for no reason, just because the filmmakers didn't have time to explain how they got there. The screenwriter -- also the director, Chris Weitz -- abandons almost all of Pullman's eloquence in favor of sheer speed. Look, it's the Gyptians! It's Farder Coram -- hey, there's Lee Scoresby! You see these people for one incredibly awkward 30-second scene, in which they give a wooden little monologue about who they are and where Lyra's supposed to go next, then they're gone.
That means the characters have no time to rest and be people, and the world has no time to feel real and rich. And it means compressing key scenes into movie-drivel shorthand -- fans of the book will never stop cringing at the handling of Pullman's best horror-moment, when we meet a child who's been the victim of intercision. (He doesn't even have his fish!) Everything becomes cliché action-movie bombast. It's not enough for Lyra to escape from Bolvangar, she has to destroy the Oblation Board's evil machinery in a hilarious Bond-via-Austin Powers explosion. It doesn't help that Weitz -- who did great, tender, funny work adapting Nick Hornby's About a Boy -- has no gift for filming action...
So to sum up: there were some nice things, but mostly I thought it was fairly terrible. I haven't even gotten into the very worst part, which is the ending, which I won't mention partly to avoid spoilers, but partly because it's so bad it's literally unmentionable. My chief worry going into the movie was that they would soft-pedal the anti-church aspects of the novel. Which they did, but quite tastefully -- that didn't bother me at all.
And it's not that the movie isn't worth seeing. Nothing could have stopped me from seeing it -- if this post had fallen back through time, and I'd read it yesterday, I would still have gone to see the movie, if only for the daemons and the bears. I just wish it were better. It's been mentioned in the press that Tom Stoppard wrote a screenplay version of The Golden Compass that the studio discarded. When I interviewed Pullman I tried to get him to talk about it -- he said it was more 'philosophical.' I'm sure there's another universe in which the Stoppard version was filmed instead. Oh, for a subtle knife, that I could travel to that happy world.
November 26, 2007 12:08
Beowulf: The Spoiler Post
In a sacred Campari-induced vision this weekend I glimpsed a glorious future in which movie theaters are so tricked-out with high-tech stuff that we will all have to specify on the rare occasions when we happen to see movies in a non-3D, non-iMax (iMin?) format, instead of the other way round. So let me give you a taste of things to come when I say that I finally caught Beowulf on Sunday, in its flat, 2-dimensional, one-story-high form. A few impressions follow. The impressions are fully spoilerized, so stop here if ect. ect. ect.
-- Per Matt's post, I should have seen it in 3D. There are lots of exaggeratedly perspectival shots -- tracking shots over plunging chasms, ect. - that are clearly meant to be watched that way, to the point where the mere knowledge that Matt saw those shots in 3D detracted from the actual pleasure I would otherwise have derived from them.
-- There's really a lot of naked Angelina Jolie. I mean, I thought we would get like one PG-rated sideboob shot of her. Instead there's 20 straight minutes of her swanning around with her large, very slightly asymmetrical molten gold snoobs waving every which way. She appears to not sort of have any as it were obvious genitalia, though. What, I'm just saying.
-- I was surprised at how cruddy and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within the mo-cap animation looked. Not that I minded all that much, but there were moments when I thought I was watching Shrek: The Stabbening.
-- The above sounds whiny, as if I didn't actually like it, so I should state the obvious, which is that Beowulf was incredibly fun. Smart and hyper-violent and yeah, kinda sad. That bit toward the end where Beowulf is standing on that steel-grey beach, yelling at that Frisian dude to kill him, and you feel that his whole legend is a lie, and it's eaten him away to a hollow Nordic shell of himself -- I felt a genuine pang. Though I still don't know if I buy that he had to cut his own arm off in order to rip out his dragonson's still-beating heart. Seems a little impractical, and kinda over-symbolic since it links him (duh) with Grendel, who got his arm ripped off. We are all monsters now. Ect.
-- I still don't know what it was about. I mean, the screenwriting was fantastic -- it goes without saying that Gaiman and Avary are incredibly smart, and they hacked a ton of extra plot onto the original poem in a way that didn't feel false at all, just fun and clever, and it brought out a lot of rich buried subtextual stuff. The whole Oedipal anxiety over male succession; the weirdly sexual, penetrative nature of sword-combat; the transition from pagan to Christian. Ect. This is Proust compared to 300. But there's a kind of weird symbolic algebra at work in the movie that leads you to a sense that sex is bad (since it produces monsters) and fighting is good (it destroys monsters and produces glory). Which is a weird thing for a movie to be about. I'm just saying.
-- The door is wide, wide open for a sequel. Beowulf II: Wiglaf's Journey!
November 22, 2007 11:00
THANKSGIVING RE-RUN: Nerd Archives -- September 24, 2005
EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Selman is on holiday. Please enjoy one of his classic column... article... things. Seriously, don’t you know blogs don’t have editors? That's why they're all so great.
Anyway, by now we all know of the tragedy that has befallen Professor Dumbledore. No, not the gay thing. That he DIED. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released in July, 2005. But that fall, I was a little behind on my reading, and had no idea what terrible fate lay in store for Albus. (Seriously, that he died is much worse.) Truly, the manner in which Dumbledore's death was revealed to me was most unpleasant. I saw this t-shirt:
So here is the ACTUAL LETTER I wrote over two years ago, in response to that traumatic incident.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE FAT GUY IN THE HARRY POTTER SPOILER T-SHIRT:
Hey you -- fatso! Your t-shirt just spoiled Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince! Right there in the yellow, lightning bolt Harry Potter font, your t-shirt blurted out the tragic plot twist that happens on page 596! I'm not going to repeat the spoiler here, but trust me: your spoiler shirt just spoiled the book, you oozing sack of goo!
Why would you -- or anyone -- want to ruin Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince? Your shirt attempts to answer this in a most disingenuous fashion. For underneath the phrase about what happens on Page 596, also in enticing, yellow, lightning bolt Harry Potter font, is written “I JUST SAVED YOU FOUR HOURS AND $30”. Your t-shirt just spilled the book’s biggest plot twist -- and then had the gall to act like it was doing me a favor.
Fact: this was not a favor. This shirt does not care about saving me time or money. It wanted to ruin the book, pure and simple. And now that you, your sarcastic hate-shirt, and your duplicitous hate-font have done this to me, what are my options?
1.) Fight you. This is problematic. I am now at home writing an open letter, so I don’t know where you are. Also, I’ve never been in a fight before, and you are a tall, fat man who must be somewhat strong from lugging all that fat around, if not good at fighting per se.
2.) Insult you. I could point out -- in an open letter -- that you are fat. Well, you are fat... but you were hanging out with some cute girls in Manga t-shirts and a guy with dreadlocks in one of those cool dreadlock hats. So you don’t seem like that much of a loser. Also, you aren’t really that fat. Barrel-chested, more like it. Also, you might never read this open letter -- even if you did, you might not know that you were the slightly fat guy it was referring to.
3.) Spoil something for you. I could make a t-shirt with a spoiler written in the font of a franchise you like, return to the mall in Chinatown where I encountered you, and wait. The problem with this is that I don’t know any spoilers. Also, I don’t want to ruin other franchises for innocent t-shirt-readers in a friendly-fire scenario, and possibly engender hateful open letters aimed at me.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you thought your spoiler would bring more mirth than displeasure. Maybe you calculated that in the three months since the book was released, most fans would have read -- and have been pleased by the plot twists of -- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. So when they saw the shirt, they would smile and feel relieved. “That shirt didn’t spoil anything for me, thank goodness,” would be the attitude. “I sure dodged a bullet.” And with that relief would come cool, healing laughter.
But I haven’t read the book, chubby! And, frankly, I don't think you deserve the benefit of the doubt. I bet you wish you got the spoiler shirt the day the book came out, so you could have spoiled as many spoiler-free minds as possible with the spoilers on your sort-of-fat belly. But who is to say? Perhaps now it is I who is being unkind.
Maybe the best revenge is to buy the book and read it right away. You didn’t save me four hours and thirty dollars. You GAVE me many hours of Harry Potter magic, fun and adventure. And I will still enjoy the book, despite knowing the one big thing that's going to happen. It's not the destination that is the sublime joy of reading, it's the journey... you colossal tub of sweating blubbery crap.
November 20, 2007 10:25
Jewperman Returns
All right, all right. Enough with the Superman is Jewish already. Time just ran "Superman's Inner Jew," in which the debate over whether Superman is Jewish rages on. He does seem at least a little Jewish, right? Think about it: if you pronounce "Superman" and accent the first syllable, "Superman" even sounds like a Jewish last name. (Like Glouberman. Or Superselman.)
Of course, everyone knows Superman does not practice the Hebrew faith, let alone keep Kosher or make love through a sheet. Superman doesn't go to Temple, and he's great at sports. His attitude towards the Middle East is vague. (Maybe he should shrink Israel and put it in the bottle next to Kandor.)
Ethnically, Superman would be a member of his biological parents' faith. But when Krypton was about to explode, you didn't see Jor-El praying to some stupid Red Sun deity or whatever to save his ass. He did something about it. Maybe Jor-El was a Space Atheist. A "Spathiest." Or at least a Spagnostic. Culturally, Superman was brought up by Ma and Pa Kent as a Methodist. (Still, I hope he pulled his punches when he and the other Smallville farmboys were beating up the non-super Jewish kid in town.)
However, masters of the obvious love to spout on about how the Superman myth represents the Jewish immigrant experience. Kal-El came Moses-like from another world, and he had adopt a WASP-y secret identity to fit in. (I wonder if Lois Lane would have spent so much time trying to marry Superman if she knew her dream beau was even a metaphor for being Jewish.) And here's a word of advice for the Man of Steel: if you want to hide your secret Jewishness, don't pick a secret identity in THE MEDIA.
In fact, the whole Super-Jew-assimilation metaphor gets very muddy when you factor in a certain schlemiel named Clark Kent. A nervous, glasses-wearing writer? The stammering klutz who can't get a date? I'm sure behind closed doors the kindest word Perry White had for Clark was "nebbish." (Perry WHITE? Get it?) Other than the name, Clark Kent is hardly a WASP-y assimilation disguise. He's more like Superman's sterotypical Semitic Halloween costume: a six-foot four Fielding Mellish.
So, the Superman with the cape is one of the chosen, while the Superman with the glasses is a self-hating putz. Perhaps the whole mess catalyzes the inherent contradictions of the modern Jewish American identity... is what someone who's forgotten he's writing a semi-funny blog about hobbits would say.
Anyway, a much better question than, "is Superman Jewish," is, "is Superman lame?" The answer, of course, is yes. Superman comics are boring. Super boring. Where's the suspense? The guy can do anything. The real Jewish hero is Batman. With his driven work ethic, high intellect, body hair, and survivor's guilt, just call him Bruce Wayneovitz.
November 20, 2007 10:08
New Cloverfield Trailer Up
It's here. I could embed something from YouTube, but you'll want the hi-def.
So yeah, there's sort of no word or number or physical gesture that would adequately convey how rabidly I want to see this. This is me falling for clever marketing: I know it's happening, but I can't stop it. Even though the Blair Witch thing immediately collapsed under the weight of its own success, plus that of its meh sequels, which inexplicably abandoned the formula that made it great, it was kinda great at the time, and this has that same you-are-there tingly stuff, plus a bit of 9/11 gravitas -- those falling papers are very 9/11. Plus the horse-carriage with no rider. Spooky!
And we get a wee glimpse of the monster in this one. Somebody isolated the clip here:
November 19, 2007 3:33
This Just In: Time Writer Says Newsweek Is Wrong!
I'm on record as thinking, and saying, that Steven Levy, Newsweek's lead tech writer, is really really smart and really really knowledgeable and a really really good writer. He really really is. I have no desire to get into any kind of blogospherical wrangle. That's not my thing.
But why, why, why would Newsweek put Amazon's Kindle e-book thing on the cover? The idea that books will become digital is a delicious, well-aged canard that has been kicking around for at least 10 years. Quite a few companies have come at it from more or less this angle before. All have failed, as will Amazon. I can explain why the Kindle will fail in one very brief sentence: holy mother of Caxton, this thing costs $399!
Yeah, I know, the iPod was insanely expensive too. And yeah, unlike its predecessors, the Kindle has a well-developed (I assume, I haven't seen it) and well-designed content delivery infastructure from which it can sip, like a delicate hummingbird, the infinite nectar of the library of Babel. And yeah, the Kindle does wireless, and you can search within a book (something you can't do with the Kindle's competition, the Sony Reader, which I panned here).
So what? You can't drop it or get it wet, and it needs recharging, and it's hard to read. It's still not time for e-books, because books aren't broken, and e-books are. And they cost $399. The time will come, no doubt, but not yet. Yay verily, the goat's entrails are knotted, and the sky disgorgeth a hail of frogs. I defy any commenter to credibly claim that he/she is going to buy one.
(And just by the way, has anybody written anything about the fact that digital books could kill off the publishing industry really really easily? I mean, like that? Music and movies have some resistance. With them, the file sizes are big, fidelity is lousy, and those artists have lots of ancillary revenue streams to live off once their stuff starts getting mass-pirated. But books are tiny, they come through at ultra-high fidelity (duh, words don't get compressed), and authors don't tour or sell merch or sound any better at the multiplex. Seriously. The Internet is the common cold, and music and movies have some antibodies to it, but book publishing is the boy in the bubble. E-books better have some sick DRM on them, or we're looking at a mass die-off.)
November 19, 2007 11:05
5 Reasons Why Venice is for Nerds; plus, Iain Banks
1) Extremely Efficient Caffeine Delivery Systems. The Italians, they've really nailed something here. You roll into some hole in the wall, you ask for coffee. They don't bring you coffee, they bring you espresso, for maximum caffeine density. You don't even have to sit down if you don't want to, you just do it like a shot. A chair would just harsh the buzz. Then you're gone, back out into the city, vibrating with mild stimulants. By the end of the week I was rolling doppio, twice a day.
2) Extremely Efficient Alcohol Delivery Systems. You can drink wine pretty much all the time. Factor in the massive caffeine intake and your whole consciousness is constantly being re-engineered, chemically, over the course of any given day. It's way cyber.
3) They Don't Play Sports. Well, they probably do, but it's not like there's a stadium in Venice, or even much in the way of playing fields. You're in a medieval city hacked out of nothing in the middle of a lagoon -- where are you gonna put your jocks? Plus I'm sure the ball would always be falling into canals and such.
4) It's All About Culture Contact. At first I wondered why I felt like I was walking through a Star Trek episode all the time -- more so even than usual -- until I realized that Venice is basically all about alien cultures interacting. It was a major point of call for western traders heading east and vice versa, all of whom would leave bits of language and art and technology and such behind them on their way through, along with their money, of course. It's your basic wretched hive of villainy. I wouldn't be surprised if there are Jawas running some of those old junk shops. Who would've noticed? (Yeah, I'm mixing references here. Leave me alone, I have a caffeine headache.)
5) It's an Artifact. There's no way to explain the weirdness of Venice till you go there, but if you haven't been, I can't emphasize this enough: the whole thing is a construct. They built a city out of practically nothing in the middle of a lagoon, by sinking millions of wooden pilings into mud. It's this massive half-ruined piece of medieval gadgetry -- Venice is as much a technological artifact as the Death Star, or the Ringworld (or Halo for that matter), or a Dyson Sphere, or one of Iain Banks's orbitals.
Speaking of whom, I cadged an early copy of the new Iain Banks novel Matter to take with me on vacation. I had actually thought that his last Culture book, Look to Windward, might be the last in the series, so I was extremely extremely excited to get a look at the new one, and it's up there with Banks's best work -- it's hard to imagine a better author to tour Venice with, what with his interest in jaded cultures and inter-civilization contact and constructed habitats. Much of Matter takes place on an artificial planet called a Shellworld, which consists of concentric hollow spheres. It's a huge book, and the cheapo Kinko's binding that the manuscript came in burst asunder early on in the week, so I was hauling around Venice with these thick stacks of loose paper. But it was very worth it. More on this anon.
November 17, 2007 1:24
I, Whore
At Nerd World, there's a very real mandate to inform the world of nerds about major events in the world of nerd-dom. Well, on Sunday November 18, at 8 PM on Fox, a major nerd event is about to rock your nerd world. An episode of The Simpsons will air, titled "Husbands and Knives," that has the most inside comic book references of any television show ever.
And that episode is written by me.
Here comes the defensiveness: yes, I'm telling you to watch something I wrote. Guess what? I'm not a journalist. Or even a real critic. I detest accountability. I'm just an on-strike Hollywood jackass trying to write mildly amusing prose. (My technique: put the jokes in parentheses.) I am NOT objective.
But -- OBJECTIVELY -- this show is great. There are references in the first act of this thing you never thought you'd see on Adult Swim at three in the morning, let alone on Fox during prime time. Here's a taste of what you'll get: the guest voices are Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Dan Clowes. DAN CLOWES? On network TV??? How the Hell did we pull that off? Fox doesn’t want Alan Moore, they want Mandy Moore. Hell, they would rather have Mighty Mouse than the author of Maus. (At least Mighty Mouse is cute and doesn't talk about 9/11.) Scoring these indie comic book mega-talents to be in a regular TV show for regular people is a F-ing miracle! And that's just the tip of the nerd-berg! That's all I'm going to say. No spoiler alert is powerful enough to protect your pants from the nerd-splort of dork porn we crammed into this show.
More defensiveness: do you think I feel good about hyping my own product like this? I don't. Remember, I'm on strike. I'm all about the WGA. I don't cross the picket line. I carried a sign for 27.8 miles last week. (Talk to my pedometer, bitch!) The last thing I want is for Fox to cash in on this episode with huge ratings. I want to stick it to the man.
But -- as a journalist, I'm accountable to the public trust. I must inform my audience of significant events which will effect their lives. And that audience, is nerds. Nerds who need to know that density of superhero, graphic novel, manga... (SPOILER ALERT)... James Bond, Archie, Wolverine and even Hergé -- THAT'S RIGHT, HERG F-ING É -- jokes in The Simpsons episode "Husbands and Knives" airing Sunday November 18th at 8 PM on Fox will make their nerdy heads explode!
You have a right to know.
(Guilty link: http://www.unitedhollywood.com)
November 14, 2007 9:35
Song of Awesome
Do yourself a favor. Go to the really big movie theater. Put on the grey sunglasses. And see Beowulf as the bards of old would have wanted: on an IMAX screen in 3-D.
Beowulf is so rich in craft and detail that you would think it took a million people a million years to make it. (Maybe it did.) Not only that, but it's the least dead fish eye-iest of all the motion capture CGI movies. (Feel free to quote that in the ads: "Least Dead Fish Eye-iest!" -- Matt Selman, Time.com.)
The animation is microscopically detailed, not just in the fantasy set pieces, like the flight of the world's most expensive golden dragon, but in the intimate character details, like John Malkovich's messed-up mustache. Some of the oddest images are the most searing, like that of Grendel's empty, ripped-out arm-socket, with its deep black star crack in the center.
The little I remember about Beowulf the poem, which is nothing, since I never read it, is that it was incredibly boring. Not this. You feel for these Danes. When Beowulf gets everything he ever wanted, the emptiness of it is crushing. Crispin Glover voices a sorrowful portrait of the mad and accursed bastard creature, Grendel, whimpering only in lonely, high-octave Olde English. (That is, Crispin Glover's regular voice.)
But you need to see Beowulf in 3-D. Here's how good the technology is. There's a scene where Beowulf fights Grendel in the nude, so his crotchal-area is conveniently blocked by various convenient objects (this is a PG-13 saga). But the 3-D is so immersive, I found myself trying to peek AROUND the 3-D crotch-blocking objects, straining to get a peek at his Nordic package. That’s right. IMAX 3-D made me gay. (Please do not use that quote in the ads. Oh, all right. You can use it.)
November 13, 2007 5:51
In Which I Criticize A Magazine That Came Out Over Six Weeks Ago
How do you not buy a magazine with Gollum on the cover? A publication about Gollum is to me what the One Ring is to Gollum himself: a must-have. This being said, the Entertainment Weekly sporting everyone's favorite Ring-fiend and the headline "Return of the Ring" was a wank. A total wank. No new information about The Hobbit movie. Just tons of recap of the old Peter Jackson vs. New Line controversy. Super wank.
The EW guys cynically put Gollum on their cover to sell guaranteed copies to dorks -- it's the exact same way People would put Princess Di on their cover to sell guaranteed copies to housewives.
I guess that makes Gollum the new Princess Di. (What? They both craved jewelry, were attracted to power, died tragically, and made reluctant love to Dode El Fayed.)
Anyway, here is the one paragraph in the issue of EW that justifies the entire cover story:
"There has been a détente,'' says one insider. "There is now the beginning of a discourse between Peter Jackson and New Line that's running parallel to the litigation proceedings."
That's right, guys. Devote an entire magazine to a rumor. A RUMOR. Articles, sidebars, timelines, and all in the service of... a not-for-attribution quote. Ug.
Look, we all want P.J. to make the Hobbit. (If not him, let me put a word in for Henry Jaglom.) But give us something more than this empty soufflé of old news. Give us something to hang our hopes on, something with real journalistic oomph! Give us... "The Hobbit" FANTASY CAST.
Speculative casting is where Entertainment Weekly really outshines the other members of the Fourth Estate. So why hide your best side? Spit it out, EW! You know, Sean Connery as Thorin Oakenshield, Jake Jake Gyllenhaal as Bilbo, jam Legolas in there somehow, Alan Rickman as the voice of Smaug, Robbie Coltrane as Bombur -- with Photoshopped pictures of the actors in Middle Earth armor and everything. (Why I am telling EW how to fake cast a pretend movie? Would I tell Chuck Yeager how to fly a jet?)
This is the hard-hitting stuff that EW is great at. Maybe, just maybe, the best.
November 11, 2007 5:55
Strike Journal, Week 1
I have a confession to make. I love picketing. Every day, I spend four hours walking back-and-forth on a sidewalk in front of 20th Century Fox Studios. Four hours of protesting the movie and TV producers' corporate greed. Four hours of light, low-impact cardio. Four hours of cool, breezy fresh air. Four hours of cars honking at me in support. Four hours of chatting with smart, funny people. Four hours of avoiding Jesse Jackson. I look forward to picketing when I go to bed. I wake up, excited to grab my sign and walk the line. What famous or interesting people will show up today? What book-on-tape will I listen to when I get bored of talking to famous and interesting people? I can't wait to picket!
I hope this strike is resolved. I hope everyone can go back to work as soon as possible. I hope the AMPTP gives the writers a fair residual on digital distribution. Easily the cheapest way to settle this thing -- for them. But since when have corporations cared only about the bottom line? (Sarcasm.) No, they'd rather slap down the heart of their industry, just to show off that they can. Classy.
Well, the one thing the producers didn't count on is... picketing is great! It's simple. It's outside. It's slimming. It's UNIFYING. Before picketing, when I'd see a herd of unfamiliar writers from some other show, I'd think, "Look at those jackasses. They think they're so funny, with their t-shirts and their glasses and their scripts... weak." Presumably, the other TV staff is looking at us and thinking, "Look at those other jackasses. They think they're so funny. Especially the one with the receding hairline and ugly beard... tool." Now, everyone is HAPPY to see everyone else. We're all brothers and sisters in arms, not assorted groups of misanthropic people pods. Maybe picketing is the antidote to cynicism and loathing!
Of course, it's only been one week. But I have A LOT of picketing left in me.
NOTE: If you care at all why this strike is happening, check this out:
November 10, 2007 3:20
I Love Easy Comedy
It's probably a good thing that the "Dubledore is gay" story is old news. If J.K. Rowling dropped that bomb yesterday, it would be hard to resist writing a bunch of obvious jokes about this entry-level comedy-delivery premise. I mean, a gay wizard? Who could say no to that? It writes itself. I.E. it's easy. Too easy. But the pull of easy comedy is hard to resist.
When the gay Dumbledore story broke (back in the pre-writers strike era), we all knew it was too easy. I tormented the younger, cooler writers at work with a mock-hacky/genuinely hacky gay wizard run, now happily forgotten. (All I remember about it is an unmentionable romance between twin Gryffindors Padma and Pavarti Patel.) Being part of a writing staff is great because you can quickly and painlessly get the easy comedy out of your system, and more on to... hard comedy (whatever that is).
Of course, Saturday Night Live did a gay wizard sketch, theirs starring Bill Hader as the out-of-the-closet Albus Percival Wulfric Brian. I enjoyed this sketch A) because I like gay Harry Potter jokes, and B) because I savor the humiliation of the sexy, shaved warlock extras. (This is the part of the post where I switch topics because I have run out of things to say about what I started writing about. Good thing blogs are not actual journalism, or writing, or anything. Good thing blogs are nothing.)
When watching SNL, It's always fun to think about the production headaches of a live comedy show. Imagine, the behind-the-scenes suckiness for the poor producer who had to hire a bunch of non-speaking hunks, dress them up as magical rough trade, then direct them to dance in a homosexual fashion -- while not screwing up LIVE TELEVISION. Delicious.
In a show with such a rich history of crazily-dressed, humiliated extras, it's amazing that no fame-crazed "background artist" has ever made a break for the foreground. It would be so, so, so easy for a gay background wizard to go nuts in some actor-y way on live TV, and achieve YouTube glory for at least a week. (If this has happened, please stop reading now.) SNL must have some hardcore clause in the extras' contracts that scares the hell out of anyone thinking of putting on their own comedy show in middle of any scene set in a busy restaurant, crowded party or wizarding bathhouse.
(NOTE: If blogs were actual journalism, instead of what they are, which is nothing, I could find out the answer to the questions raised in the above paragraph by doing something called reporting. But I don't do that. That's for reporters. Reporters have to be accountable. That's why I became the kind of writer that only makes things up. Or takes real things and changes them enough so I can say I made them up.)
November 9, 2007 11:06
I'm Going to Venice for a Week
I don't know if there's anything nerdy in Venice. Though all that half-ruined masonry does remind me a bit of Gears of War. Anyway, that's where I'll be next week. Posting will be intermittent-to-nonexistent.
Except for Matt, of course. Matt's going to be huge next week. A bit unfair, making him blog solo right when he's starting out, but maybe it'll be like a rite of passage. This is the way of our people. He will emerge a man, or he will die! This is Sparta! [insert Simpsons sound effect of running footsteps fading into the distance]
November 8, 2007 7:23
The World Rejoices As One More Person Blogs!
My name's Matt Selman. I write for The Simpsons. Well, I used to. (Strike!) Time.com has awesomely offered me a gig co-blogging on Nerd World. The other guy, Lev Grossman, seems pretty good at it so far. Lev is an actual journalist. He's intelligent and funny and drinks four big glasses of wine at expense-account dinners. So why did they ask me to post on Nerd World? Because my friend who gave me this gig thinks I am a giant nerd. Now, I'm not the nerdiest geek in the dorkiverse, but my credentials are solid.
Here's a few excepts from my Nerd C.V.:
1982 — Named pet mouse "Colossus," after the organic steel X-Man of the same name
1983-4 — Only physical activity: "Kangaroo" on the Atari 5200
1984-1989 — Most-worn T-shirt: "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Bill and Opus"
1986-89 — Played "Wizardry" with my father on a Macintosh SE/30. (I would fight the monsters, he would "map" the levels.)
1992 — During a game of Trivial Pursuit, after a question to which the correct answer was "Batman," I argued that the person who (correctly) said "Batman" was wrong, because Batman's real name is "The Batman." I was not kidding.
1995-1999, 2001-2002, 2004-2007 -- San Diego ComiCon Attendee / Panelist
1998 — Opening day attendee of "The Star Trek Experience" ride at the Las Vegas Hilton. Afterwards, drank "Tranya" in Quark's Bar and Restaurant with a guy who has a full-scale model of Han Solo in carbonite in his living room, except with the guy's face, not Solo's.
1999-present -- Ragged, asymmetrical beard
2000 — Girlfriend said she thought Superman got his super powers from Kryptonite, "you know, like Popeye and spinach." (Married her anyway.)
As you can see, I'm a mid-level, journeyman nerd. A seven on a scale of one to Lev Grossman. My posts will be nerdy, I assure you. Will my posts be self-indulgent? Probably a seven on a scale of one to every other blog in the universe. Will they be funny? Not if I have to write one every day. Which... I do.
(Note: Amazingly, my Microsoft Word spellcheck apparently doesn't know the word "blog." Update: Word spellcheck also doesn’t know the word "spellcheck.")
November 8, 2007 2:39
Matt Selman Is Here!
Matt will be co-blogging with me from hereon out. He's very nice and smart and has actually done something with his life, namely working on The Simpsons for like forever. He's in IMDB and has Emmies and everything. Please give him a warm Nerd World welcome! I don't know what that means. I had wine with lunch, I'm going to go lie down.
November 7, 2007 1:22
The Finland Shooter's YouTube Profile
YouTube pulled Sturmgeist89's account, but it lives on in Google's cache. Incredibly disturbing.
November 6, 2007 12:57
What Google's Doing: Just for a Second Pretend that I'm a Huge Idiot
Pretend I'm a huge idiot. I'll make it easy for you.
Here's what I get. In the past two weeks, Google has announced two very similar initiatives: a new applications development environment for social networks, and a new applications development environment for cell phones. Obviously, I'm not a developer, so I'm not in a position to evaluate the actual usefulness of what they've got. But I do see what they're doing: introducing free, open platform-like products into closed, fragmented sectors in the hope that they will be embraced and create free, open standards in said sectors.
What I don't get is why Google is doing this. (Stay with me here. Remember: huge idiot.) I mean, I get that they're doing it to make money, and that they aspire to do so in non-evil ways (yes, I actually believe this about Google.) But how does the money-making happen, exactly? I've heard it argued two ways.
One, Google believes that free, open standards are inherently good, and create better experiences for consumers, thus creating more traffic/usage, which Google can sell ads against. Step three: profit.
Two, these are defensive moves, designed to suck oxygen away from competitors. You've got a fancy social network? We'll help your rivals by making it easier to develop applications for their networks. You sell operating systems for phones? OK, but see what we did here: we just gave away an operating system for phones. It didn't cost us that much to make or support this stuff, but it's good for consumers and measurably injures you.
And we have scooters! Look at our beautiful scooters!
I guess both one and two could be true at the same time, and probably are. But is there a third option? What am I missing? Interesting how old-school and Microsoft-like Google's strategy is here, undercutting somebody with a free product because they can. And because it's all open source, it plays to the world as good, not evil. Yay for good!
OK, now stop pretending I'm an idiot.
November 5, 2007 10:33
In Which I Attend a Robot Race
Dawn is the coldest time in the Mojave Desert. Dawn is also really, really damn early. It was at dawn that I rolled into the Southern California Logistics Airport, a deactivated Air Force base in Victorville, Calif., an hour and a half east of L.A. This was the site of the DARPA Urban Challenge. Why did they start the damn thing at dawn? I guess robots don't need sleep.
Briefly: the Urban Challenge is DARPA's sort-of-annual race for autonomous robotic vehicles. This year the challenge was about navigating an urban environment: obeying traffic laws, parking, merging with traffic, and so on. Winner gets $2 million. Eleven teams had made it to the finals. They were waiting in the pit areas with their cars, shiny off-the-lot vehicles encrusted with lots of sensors -- LIDAR and GPS and such -- and with huge racks of servers in the back serving as their brains. These things aren't remote-controlled: they drive around by themselves.
I donned a dorky safety vest and lined up with the techies to watch the start. The atmosphere was a lot like a bullfight: when these cars were activated -- they were released onto the course four at a time -- nobody seemed entirely sure what they would do. For the most part they just drove off down the street, slowly and a little jerkily and uncertainly in some cases, signalling politely as they entered the first turn. It's quite creepy watching a car with an empty driver's seat drive -- there's a strong odor of Christine about the whole business. (For the record, every car has a kill-switch so it can be shut down remotely.)
The buzz in the pits was all in favor of Carnegie Mellon's vehicle, a modified Chevy Tahoe with a big GM logo on the side known as Boss. But Boss had a rocky start, some kind of GPS problem that had it stalled in the pits for a nervy 20 minutes while geeks rummaged around in the back. The culprit was probably interference from the other cars lined up behind Boss, though just in case they turned off the Jumbotron, too. Professor William Whittaker, the roboticist who heads the team, was fuming on the sidelines. I discovered this when I attempted to interview him. I don't really blame him. It was stressful.
Once the cars were away, the whole event went weirdly quiet. The course was big enough that you couldn't see anything from the grandstands, so most of the teams gravitated to a big tent where they could watch footage from the DARPA choppers that buzzed overhead. Jamie Hyneman, the guy with the beret from Mythbusters, provided color commentary. (Those are your tax dollars at work, folks.) The atmosphere was collegial. Everybody applauded when a car did something right.
I wandered around annoying hardworking techies who had better things to do than talk to me, then I walked out to the course area, which included a four-way stop sign intersection that seemed as good a place as any to hang out and wait for a crash. The air base was an eerie place -- much of it was ruined, abandoned houses that looked like the aftermath of some cataclysmic zombie attack or other catastrophe. I never witnessed a crash, though I did watch as the Cornell car (another Tahoe) came to a total stop on a straightaway, unable for some reason to grok the complexities of its environment. Machine vision is a mysterious thing. You almost felt a little bad for the car -- it was trying so hard! A couple of IT guys had to climb into it to get it going again, while Stanford's car -- a 2006 Passat named "Junior" -- looked on coolly, waiting to get by.
Elsewhere, Team OshKosh, which fielded a truck so massive the course had to be widened to accommodate it, had a close encounter with a building. MIT's Range Rover bumped into Cornell's vehicle, a clip that will live forever on YouTube:
I had to leave before the end, to catch a flight, but in the end Carnegie Mellon carried the day, as expected, with Stanford and Virginia Tech close behind.
To sum up: the actual performance of the vehicles was pretty primitive, by enlightened human standards, but when you look back at previous years it's actually evolving with frightening rapidity. At the first event, in 2004, nobody even finished. The idea of autonomous or minimally-manned robotic military convoys in 10 years doesn't seem particularly implausible, and with the plague of roadside IED's in Iraq, you can see why DARPA is plowing money into this. The car manufacturers want this stuff too: based on conversations with the competitors, they're desperate for some kind of driver-assistance technology that will reduce traffic fatalities.
I can relate, Plus, if my rented Ford Mustang had been autonomous, I could have slept on the drive back to the airport.
November 2, 2007 5:21
Now in Paper-Vision: Time's Best Inventions
Some of my favorites include this car, this methane-powered rocket engine, this weird blood-type conversion device, this snowstorm, this self-erasing paper, this bendable optical fiber, and this widget, which fires a GPS tracking device at fleeing vehicles.
We picked the iPhone as Invention of the Year. (Were we wrong?) But the best piece in the package is, unquestionably, this one entitled Warren Buffett, Adjust My Bra.
November 2, 2007 1:17
Somebody Says Smart Things About Facebook, and It Isn't Me
I'm in L.A. for DARPA's Cannonball Run-style robot race, an attempt to simulate in machines the ineffable human emotion we know as "road rage." TG Daily has excellent video of some of the bot-crunching action.
Anyway, I'm too busy and important to think clever thoughts about the incredibly costly and complicated slapfight going on between Google and Facebook (with Microsoft and MySpace acting as seconds, like in an olde-tymey duel). But apparently Josh Quittner isn't. You should read his coverage on his blog, the Netly News, for a smart take on what's going on. Josh -- I call him by his first name, because I used to work for him, and am currently beating him at Scrabulous -- breaks down Facebook's potential responses to Google's OpenSocial "standard" for developing apps for social networks: ignore, capitulate, or something in between.
Personally I think OpenSocial is an incredibly brilliant move on Google's part -- a classic example of Googlian bigthink. Don't fight the war, make the guns, and make sure everybody else keeps fighting.
November 1, 2007 11:45
Dollhouse: Joss Whedon's Return to TV
That's the news: he's got a contract for a series, according to TV Week. Here's the pitch:
“Dollhouse” stars Dushku as Echo, one of a group of secret agents living in a futuristic dorm. Each has the ability to be imprinted with custom personalities and abilities for special assignments. When they return, their newly acquired memories are wiped. The show follows Echo as she takes on a variety of assignments—some romantic, some adventurous, some uplifting, some illegal—and gains awareness of her role and confinement.
I don't know, it all sounds very Aeon Flux. But I never see much in Whedon's pitches -- I was convinced Buffy would flop. It's all in the execution. Which in his case tends to be brilliant.
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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