MaxFunCon 2 Zine
Hey MaxFunPals, here's the video of that thing.
Filtering by Category: Life
Cynicism
"You get to the age where you just like everything, ya know? Or you just find value in everything." -Patton Oswalt
I want to like everything. All of it. I don't, of course. And that's okay. A lot of it is terrible. Too many things escape their creators without the time and attention they deserve; short films that aren't short enough or blog posts that nobody proofreads. Still others are just what their creator intended, and I'll have to settle with disagreeing philosophically with speaking abominable internet phrases aloud or paintings that aren't blue. But very rarely is anyone struggling with an eye to producing badly. So I want to like it, just like I want to believe in all the ghosts and magic at the peripheral of our world, but sometimes that's hard to do.
What I don't want is to join in the (ever-less-)anonymous horde of internet commentators who shout dismissive, obvious, vicious, partisan, or thoughtless jabs at the news and gossip of the day. Much of the crowd, for instance, that was taking up arms in January in support of Team Coco demonstrated that they are not listening, they are just swarming around the flavor of the day when one week later they're fully engaged in this decade's equivalent of the e-mail forward re: Tiger Woods or the iPad announcement.
Social Media has allowed us to combine John Gabriel's GIFT with a rousing mob mentality. I hate the deluge of variations on a one-liner that clog facebook feeds and twitter streams for the first two or three days months after a news story breaks (here's looking at you, Mr. iPad Nano Jokester!). It is as though this is a group who is afraid to like anything at all, in case it turns out to be the wrong thing. This is far from the worst thing on the internet, but I think we can aspire to better.
So how to sort the signal from the noise? More to it, how to do so gracefully? Can I poke at Mr. iNJ without dropping to his level? Is there any reason to, or is it as inevitably ironic as complaining about the co-worker who talks behind everyone's backs?
Well, there's no sense being dismissive by class - to write off an entire genre of film would be - at best - to miss out on its most redeeming, shining examples. I don't know what the shining glorious example of a teen sex comedy is, but I've seen a couple that were a whole lot better than the advertising suggested. I'm more likely to watch a heist movie, but I'll bet at least half of the surprisingly vast American Pie saga is better than, let's say, How to Rob a Bank.
I imagine myself an open-minded sort. And yet, I find myself turning off more movies in the first ten minutes than ever before. I can't possibly see every show or hear every podcast that catches my interest, certainly not while maintaining the notion that I create as well as consume, and especially because for all the offal on the (comforting graphic of tasteful wooden) shelves, there's such an awful lot of good out there too. Not middling, not decent, not inoffensive, but terrific! Even by IMDB's standards, I've still never seen 95 of the 250 best movies ever. And really, of the 1650 or so that I've seen so far, there're less than 200 that I would enthusiastically recommend.
What I've settled on, for now, is narrowing the field. My plan last year, to Improve My LA Experience, wasn't just about surrounding myself with better things. It was about identifying the bad influences, the drains on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and excising them. So why not do the same here? Certainly an artist who has repeatedly disappointed could come around and create something I enjoy, but after a few strikes it might just take some extra outside recommendations before I'm keen to give them another shot. I'd be delighted to have new facts sway my opinion, but for now I don't know if I need to see another movie from Ang Lee or Paul Greengrass or Doug Liman or Ron Howard. And it's oddly liberating to unfollow Mr. iNJ.
Remaining open to new experiences doesn't require staying open to negative ones. I don't doubt that any number of chefs could make a delicious meal chock full of eggplants, but every experiment so far has been a round failure and I'm in no hurry to try again when there are so many other fine foods available. The important thing here is that closing off certain avenues already explored means making a note on your map, not bricking up the alleyway, and certainly not standing in front of it for the rest of your life, chasing off anyone who comes near.
With the unprecedented amount of choice available, a life spent focused on just the stuff you hate is something I find baffling. In the maelstrom of options, it can be difficult enough to focus on anything at all. Having so much choice is a luxury, and the opportunity to cultivate tastes is an even greater luxury, but there's a distinction between tastes acquired and acclimated. Either one can be numbing on its own, and I've found the acclimated tastes fall by the wayside right quick in the face of a quality alternative.
There aren't a whole lot of people, places, or things that I love. For me, that means a genuine boundless desire to grow and prosper and be joyful. It's the purest form of well-wishing (not well wishing). On the other hand, I have even fewer objects of enmity. There are people I would not do business with or want to call on the phone. There are movies I would not choose to see again. They have all been strained out of my day-to-day and year-to-year life. I rarely think of them, they are not even given the privilege of being the subject of my daily 5 minutes' hate. But I've seen and known people who do choose to spend their days being furious. The ones who are the best at it get themselves twisted up into this little, angry, ineffective coil of bitter. These are the bigots who lie in wait for someone to mention one of their favorite topics so they can spring out at you from their peanut brittle can of choice into a well rehearsed, if ridiculous, tirade.
Might as well be angry at the moon.
A brief message from Crossroads command.
“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas, letting all the ships in all of the oceans drop down to the bottom. The bomb will not blow out the bottom of the sea, and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.”
Making the best of it, here in the Future.
Don't kid yourself, we're living in the future over here.
Think of that storage! How many times could you store the data of your first hard drive on, for instance, your phone? Crazy.
It's not like I've operated a punch card computer here, but the rate at which neat stuff passes us by is fantastic. (Although, as Louis CK reminds us, we're still not happy.)
I noticed it today as I sometimes do - in an electronics store. And not for the first time. It's happened to me before, in a gamestop, when an employee was trying to describe the then-elusive and sold-out classic controller accessory for the Wii. Because I'm very helpful, I jumped in and said it looks just like a Super Nintendo controller. Yeah, says the clerk, but with sticks. Kid customer turns to me then. "What's that?" What's what? "What's a Super Nintendo?" Right. I'll just be going now. Can't be late for the bus back to the retirement center or I'm stuck in gamestop for a week.
Today, it was by my lonesome, in a Best Buy, checking out camcorders. And for around $100, I can get a thing that fits in my pocket and shoots 1080p. That's one hundred United States Dollars. That's crazy. And I considered it briefly. It'd be just fine to shoot some shorts for the internet, and I could do some post trickery and make it look perfectly usable - more than youtube needs, anyhow. The hardest part would be trying to get actors to take it seriously when it's sitting on its tiny tripod. The SVHS shoulder mounted monstrosities I shot on at SCTV weighed a ton, but at least you had an air of authority during an interview.
And even then, what I was doing was more or less a technological miracle! This used to be so hard - at least by comparison. It used to require taking dozens of actual photographs per second! You had to wait until Thomas Edison invented a way to develop your film before you could even see what you'd shot! And what do we do with all this completely amazing stuff? Well, we do the exact same thing humans have been doing with motion picture technology for the past 120 years. If only Étienne-Jules Marey and his big luxurious beard could see what he'd started....
Death at a Funeral
I saw a trailer for a new movie the other day, Death at a Funeral. It reminded me a lot of another trailer. For Death at a Funeral. Here's a look at both so you can decide which actor you think is best at saying all these great jokes!