"It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a
marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly
speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of
important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to
humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that
their needs are met.
...
What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to
improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism
has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but
also inevitable? " --Quiet Babylon.
This is part of a (slightly) larger argument that the Singularity--the production of sentient entities born of human creations that are self-sustaining but definitely not human--has happened, and it happened when people created corporations. As a thought experiment, or a series of sci-fi/surrealist stories, I quite like that notion. It reminds me of the Community episode where Subway is allowed to corporalize itself in human form in order to be a legal student of Greendale, and own a business in Greendale's cafeteria. Fun!
Later Days.
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Friday, March 1, 2013
Friday, March 2, 2012
Friday Quotations: Moar XMas Rap
"If years were seasons, then this December would be the December of our December."
Later Days.
Monday, January 16, 2012
My writing isn't constrained, it's tortuous.
This might wind up being a long 'un. To give you a taste of what you're in for, and let you judge whether you should bail now, here's some of the bullet points: blogging ethics, constrained writing, Christian Bök, installation art, the TV show Community, cliched sayings, consumer good vs. creative work, academia, and student projects. (Good God, am I writing a blog post or a dissertation chapter?)
Still here? Good. I had a conversation with two friends today about constrained writing, writing wherein the author deliberately puts some sort of restriction on the writing. And by "had a conversation" I mean, I walked in on them discussing the issue, and quickly picked a side. Our discussion went on for a bit, but it wasn't until I went for a run a little while later that what I should have said came to mind.
You may have noticed that I don't summarize conversations I had with friends very often here--or if I do, it's a deliberately one-sided account that minimizes everyone else's participation. That one-sidedness is only mostly because of my tremendous ego. The other part is that I feel that I don't have any right to speak for others, even in summary--at least, not in a public, semi-permanent forum like this blog. That puts me in a bit of a conundrum when I get into a discussion I want to blog about. If I was being really fair, I'd probably take these ideas back to the friends in question, we'd hash out some concept over a long discussion, agree to write the blog post together, and slowly let it collapse due to the difficulty in coordinating for such a length of time for such a minor result. Instead, I opted for expediency. I'm stretching my non-involvement of others rule to its limits here, and I acknowledge that, and apologize in advance for misrepresenting anyone. (It's also ironic, for reasons that will become apparent later, that I'm testing limits with this post. But more on that later.)
Constrained writing--and here's my first paraphrasing, since it was the term one of the friends came up with--is simply when an author places some sort of constraint on themselves in their writing. It could be that short story Carol Shields does where she doesn't use the letter "e." It could be something as simple as a poem where every other line rhymes. The best example, I think, is another one purloined from the original conversation: Christian Bök's Eunoia, a book of poetry wherein each of the five chapters is composed of poems whose words contain only one of the five vowels. So the "e" chapter has a lot of words like "eke" and "seen" and so forth. And Bök places other rules on himself("borrowed," this time, from Wikipedia):
Each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing.
Each of the chapters have "to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage."
All the sentences have to have an "accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism."
The text has to include as many possible words in it as it can.
The text must avoid repeating words as much as possible.
The letter "Y" is to be avoided.
Bok's book is perfect, because it encapsulates both sides of the argument: the obvious challenge of the endeavor, and seeming pointlessness of it. And that, paraphrasing villainously, was my other friend's argument against constrained writing, one that I agreed with: at the end of the day, it seems to fail the question of "why bother?". You place all these rules and restrictions--albeit very interesting rules and restrictions--on the writing process, and the result is a subpar poem that doesn't make a lot of sense.
When I got thinking more and more about it, I realized that my issue with the constrained poetry was similar to my issue with nonrepresentational art, mostly in terms of installation art, but also abstract as well (and if the reference to abstract makes you think I'm basing this on the chapter from the W. J. T. Mitchell book I read a little while ago, you wouldn't be far off.). Namely, that even if the end result is interesting, and I'll fully acknowledge that installation art can come up with some pretty damn interesting end results, the original idea is more interesting to me than than those results. With Eunoia, for example, the poems are mildly amusing, but ultimately rather banal. It's the original idea and constraints that are worth talking about. Why bother, then, with the final product, if it's just a mediocre, pale instantiation? Why not leave an interesting thought experiment as an interesting thought experiment?
Well, you can't put a thought experiment in a gallery, for one thing--or show it on TV. I think that's one of the albatrosses that were weighing on the neck of the show formerly known as Community. It had clever ideas. It had more clever ideas than it knew what to do with (or, more importantly, than the audience knew what to do with). Create a flashback episode filled with flashbacks that never happened? Clever idea. Do an episode where there's a conspiracy theory about the class on conspiracy theory? Clever idea. Construct an episode around an elaborate mash-up of Pulp Fiction and My Dinner with Andre that uses Cougar Town as the basis of a discussion of what it means to be a genuine human? That's so clever you're going to need an extra bucket to mop up the cleverness that's slopping over the side. And that's the problem. The show is so busy with its high concepts sometimes that it forgets to put similar effort into the execution. (Compare it to Modern Family, which has the opposite problem--the high quality writing and cast performances have to do everything they can to distract the audience from the fact that the actual plots are derivative, utterly cliche, and tired.) And as much as I love this show--and I do love it, every Cougar Town bit of it--I have to admit that, sometimes, its big idea is the main attraction, and the episode itself should have stayed at home.
So the direction I appear to be flailing toward, then, is keep the idea and lose the product. But that equation is missing an important step, maybe the most step. To return to the original discussion, the pro-constraint friend argued that by placing such constraints on language, you push it to its limits, and it's at the limits that things get interesting. I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I've written under constraints, whether it's creative writing (thanks NaNoWriMo) or poetry or whatever, the process is infinitely rewarding. And I imagine it's the same for the constrained writers, the poets, the installation artists, all the way down to Community's noble cast and crew. The process is the most important part of a constrained work, or perhaps any work. Creation under such restrictive conditions becomes a process of personal revelation and amazement--at least, for the artist.
For the audience, the response can range from a similar fascination (especially if you're familiar with the artist, the idea, and the method), to a sort of confused boredom, to, at worst, a feeling that you're being excluded. There's nothing quite so unfunny as a joke you think might be on you. And that's a problem, one that goes all the way from modernist art to the Neilsen demographics: sometimes, the work of art seems like nothing but a joke that you're not in on. How good is a poem from Eunoia if you don't have the list of constraints he's operating from? To me, the most interesting part of these constrained, experimental practices isn't the final product, but the process and emotional responses that lead to it. I'd much rather watch a documentary on Jackson Pollock than go to one of his galleries.
For what it's worth, I think one of the best solutions, in the classroom, at least, to the process/product problem is the one routinely exercised by a professor I took a course from in the first year of my doctorate. He has his students do their final project, and encourages them to be creative and innovative--that is, baffling, as the end result often winds up being. But he also has them write an essay explaining both the project and the process of creating the project, and how both sprang from and contributed to an overarching idea. If po-mo artists had to stand next to their work and cite sources, I'd be a lot happier. (This method particularly fails when it comes to Community, I'll admit, unless you happen to be a viewer with Joel McHale on speed dial.)
But there's one more side of this process-product-constrained writing thing I want to consider. I'm sure everyone here's familiar with the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey." The thing is, for most people, after a day's work, they don't give a brass monkey about the journey(ie. process); they want the destination (product), thanks. There's a whole heap of problems with this view, as you can sweep a lot of inhuman practices under the rug by ignoring how a product gets to the hands of the consumer. But in a mass production society, it's the product that matters. Two and Half Men is a terrible, terrible show, but it is what is says on the tin: it's a comedy. Make 22 episodes a year, run it until it becomes completely unprofitable, then milk it in syndication for another five years. Put it to pasture for a few more, and you can bring it back out--as retro nostalgia. A well marketed mass-produced television product never dies, it just temporarily depreciates.
And here, if anywhere, is the place to champion constrained writing and all its ilk and brethren. Because if there's anything constrained writing needs to be, it's unique. Once it's reached the point of convention, it ceases to be constraint at all and becomes another genre. Constrained writing's uniqueness, however, is not in the final product, as a perusal of my personal scapegoat Bok will tell you. It comes from the big idea, and it comes from the process of making that idea from something abstract to something tangible. The process is the best part, and it's where installation art meets folk art, where Community meets stand-up.
And that's not to say that my divisions are absolute either--there's usually at least a glimmer of interesting nuggets even in the most soulless of corporate products, and constrained writing fits into mass economy just like everything else. Sometimes I want a box of Kraft Dinner, and sometimes I want a meal I made from scratch (okay, with me personally, the weight's on the former's side, but the metaphor stands.) To grossly paraphrase my friend's early point, the interesting stuff is found when you push something to its limits, but the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
And as for constraints--I bet you didn't realize this, but I wrote a WHOLE POST WITHOUT USING FRENCH! It's true! Sacre bleu!
....Awwwwww nuts.
Later Days.
Still here? Good. I had a conversation with two friends today about constrained writing, writing wherein the author deliberately puts some sort of restriction on the writing. And by "had a conversation" I mean, I walked in on them discussing the issue, and quickly picked a side. Our discussion went on for a bit, but it wasn't until I went for a run a little while later that what I should have said came to mind.
You may have noticed that I don't summarize conversations I had with friends very often here--or if I do, it's a deliberately one-sided account that minimizes everyone else's participation. That one-sidedness is only mostly because of my tremendous ego. The other part is that I feel that I don't have any right to speak for others, even in summary--at least, not in a public, semi-permanent forum like this blog. That puts me in a bit of a conundrum when I get into a discussion I want to blog about. If I was being really fair, I'd probably take these ideas back to the friends in question, we'd hash out some concept over a long discussion, agree to write the blog post together, and slowly let it collapse due to the difficulty in coordinating for such a length of time for such a minor result. Instead, I opted for expediency. I'm stretching my non-involvement of others rule to its limits here, and I acknowledge that, and apologize in advance for misrepresenting anyone. (It's also ironic, for reasons that will become apparent later, that I'm testing limits with this post. But more on that later.)
Constrained writing--and here's my first paraphrasing, since it was the term one of the friends came up with--is simply when an author places some sort of constraint on themselves in their writing. It could be that short story Carol Shields does where she doesn't use the letter "e." It could be something as simple as a poem where every other line rhymes. The best example, I think, is another one purloined from the original conversation: Christian Bök's Eunoia, a book of poetry wherein each of the five chapters is composed of poems whose words contain only one of the five vowels. So the "e" chapter has a lot of words like "eke" and "seen" and so forth. And Bök places other rules on himself("borrowed," this time, from Wikipedia):
Each of the chapters must refer to the art of writing.
Each of the chapters have "to describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage."
All the sentences have to have an "accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism."
The text has to include as many possible words in it as it can.
The text must avoid repeating words as much as possible.
The letter "Y" is to be avoided.
Bok's book is perfect, because it encapsulates both sides of the argument: the obvious challenge of the endeavor, and seeming pointlessness of it. And that, paraphrasing villainously, was my other friend's argument against constrained writing, one that I agreed with: at the end of the day, it seems to fail the question of "why bother?". You place all these rules and restrictions--albeit very interesting rules and restrictions--on the writing process, and the result is a subpar poem that doesn't make a lot of sense.
When I got thinking more and more about it, I realized that my issue with the constrained poetry was similar to my issue with nonrepresentational art, mostly in terms of installation art, but also abstract as well (and if the reference to abstract makes you think I'm basing this on the chapter from the W. J. T. Mitchell book I read a little while ago, you wouldn't be far off.). Namely, that even if the end result is interesting, and I'll fully acknowledge that installation art can come up with some pretty damn interesting end results, the original idea is more interesting to me than than those results. With Eunoia, for example, the poems are mildly amusing, but ultimately rather banal. It's the original idea and constraints that are worth talking about. Why bother, then, with the final product, if it's just a mediocre, pale instantiation? Why not leave an interesting thought experiment as an interesting thought experiment?
Well, you can't put a thought experiment in a gallery, for one thing--or show it on TV. I think that's one of the albatrosses that were weighing on the neck of the show formerly known as Community. It had clever ideas. It had more clever ideas than it knew what to do with (or, more importantly, than the audience knew what to do with). Create a flashback episode filled with flashbacks that never happened? Clever idea. Do an episode where there's a conspiracy theory about the class on conspiracy theory? Clever idea. Construct an episode around an elaborate mash-up of Pulp Fiction and My Dinner with Andre that uses Cougar Town as the basis of a discussion of what it means to be a genuine human? That's so clever you're going to need an extra bucket to mop up the cleverness that's slopping over the side. And that's the problem. The show is so busy with its high concepts sometimes that it forgets to put similar effort into the execution. (Compare it to Modern Family, which has the opposite problem--the high quality writing and cast performances have to do everything they can to distract the audience from the fact that the actual plots are derivative, utterly cliche, and tired.) And as much as I love this show--and I do love it, every Cougar Town bit of it--I have to admit that, sometimes, its big idea is the main attraction, and the episode itself should have stayed at home.
So the direction I appear to be flailing toward, then, is keep the idea and lose the product. But that equation is missing an important step, maybe the most step. To return to the original discussion, the pro-constraint friend argued that by placing such constraints on language, you push it to its limits, and it's at the limits that things get interesting. I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I've written under constraints, whether it's creative writing (thanks NaNoWriMo) or poetry or whatever, the process is infinitely rewarding. And I imagine it's the same for the constrained writers, the poets, the installation artists, all the way down to Community's noble cast and crew. The process is the most important part of a constrained work, or perhaps any work. Creation under such restrictive conditions becomes a process of personal revelation and amazement--at least, for the artist.
For the audience, the response can range from a similar fascination (especially if you're familiar with the artist, the idea, and the method), to a sort of confused boredom, to, at worst, a feeling that you're being excluded. There's nothing quite so unfunny as a joke you think might be on you. And that's a problem, one that goes all the way from modernist art to the Neilsen demographics: sometimes, the work of art seems like nothing but a joke that you're not in on. How good is a poem from Eunoia if you don't have the list of constraints he's operating from? To me, the most interesting part of these constrained, experimental practices isn't the final product, but the process and emotional responses that lead to it. I'd much rather watch a documentary on Jackson Pollock than go to one of his galleries.
For what it's worth, I think one of the best solutions, in the classroom, at least, to the process/product problem is the one routinely exercised by a professor I took a course from in the first year of my doctorate. He has his students do their final project, and encourages them to be creative and innovative--that is, baffling, as the end result often winds up being. But he also has them write an essay explaining both the project and the process of creating the project, and how both sprang from and contributed to an overarching idea. If po-mo artists had to stand next to their work and cite sources, I'd be a lot happier. (This method particularly fails when it comes to Community, I'll admit, unless you happen to be a viewer with Joel McHale on speed dial.)
But there's one more side of this process-product-constrained writing thing I want to consider. I'm sure everyone here's familiar with the saying "It's not the destination, it's the journey." The thing is, for most people, after a day's work, they don't give a brass monkey about the journey(ie. process); they want the destination (product), thanks. There's a whole heap of problems with this view, as you can sweep a lot of inhuman practices under the rug by ignoring how a product gets to the hands of the consumer. But in a mass production society, it's the product that matters. Two and Half Men is a terrible, terrible show, but it is what is says on the tin: it's a comedy. Make 22 episodes a year, run it until it becomes completely unprofitable, then milk it in syndication for another five years. Put it to pasture for a few more, and you can bring it back out--as retro nostalgia. A well marketed mass-produced television product never dies, it just temporarily depreciates.
And here, if anywhere, is the place to champion constrained writing and all its ilk and brethren. Because if there's anything constrained writing needs to be, it's unique. Once it's reached the point of convention, it ceases to be constraint at all and becomes another genre. Constrained writing's uniqueness, however, is not in the final product, as a perusal of my personal scapegoat Bok will tell you. It comes from the big idea, and it comes from the process of making that idea from something abstract to something tangible. The process is the best part, and it's where installation art meets folk art, where Community meets stand-up.
And that's not to say that my divisions are absolute either--there's usually at least a glimmer of interesting nuggets even in the most soulless of corporate products, and constrained writing fits into mass economy just like everything else. Sometimes I want a box of Kraft Dinner, and sometimes I want a meal I made from scratch (okay, with me personally, the weight's on the former's side, but the metaphor stands.) To grossly paraphrase my friend's early point, the interesting stuff is found when you push something to its limits, but the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
And as for constraints--I bet you didn't realize this, but I wrote a WHOLE POST WITHOUT USING FRENCH! It's true! Sacre bleu!
....Awwwwww nuts.
Later Days.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Paintball Episode's Really Good, Too
This is a post on TV.
Over the last few days, I've been watching the DVD commentaries for the first season of the sitcom Community. (Wonderful show. You should be watching it. And if you already are, you should be watching more of it.) In particular, I'm watching the episode where Peirce (played by Chevy Chase) convinces Annie (Alison Brie) to let him write the school song. The commentators mention that the original storyline was much darker, with Peirce ridiculing and mocking Annie until she rejects him with an angry speech over how he's determinedly driven away everyone in his life that's ever shown him any kindness or pity. The network made them rewrite the scene, fearing it was too dark for early in the series. That anecdote was when Peirce's character finally clicked for me. In broad strokes, Peirce's backstory is that he's a successful businessman, now retired, who has returned to community college because he realizes (in a self-denial kind of way) that despite his success, he has nothing meaningful in his life. The character fluctuates back and forth between early onset senior dementia and pratfalls, and the generally unpleasant, unlikeable man that he's been for most of his life. (For an example of just how unlikeable he can be, see the recent D&D episode.)
And that brings me to the Simpsons. (Stay with me here; I'm going somewhere with this.) Continuity on the Simpsons TV show is actually very similar to comic book superhero continuity. That's because both are essentially unaging; time moves for us, but not for the characters. Bart is still as 10 years old now as he was 10 years ago, and Superman's never going to get gray hairs. One of the consequences of this timelessness, however, is that the characters are trapped in amber. There isn't so much change as the illusion of change. In the Simpsons, this is doubly so, by nature of it being not just a timeless cartoon, but a sitcom, where things are almost always dragged back to the status quo by episode's end. The series' major changes are almost always changed back: Krabappel and Skinner were dating, now they're not; Barney did join AA, but he fell off the wagon; Wally West did take over as the Flash, but now it's Barry West again; Spider-Man was never married to Mary Jane (Okay, I've drifted into comic book territory again. Sorry.).
My point is, such a set-up is not disposed towards character arcs and development. Change does happen, but so incrementally and minutely that it's generally not worth noticing. But there is, I argue, one character in the Simpsons who has had, through various flashbacks, a fairly nuanced existence: Grandpa Abraham Simpson.
In over two decades of Simpsons experience, Abe Simpson's past has been plumbed a lot. We know he was in WWII, and was the leader of a platoon. We know he came back from the war. We know he was a terrible father and husband; he cheated on his wife, drove her to leave him, and his son felt no remorse about putting him into a home. And over the course of the actual series, he's changed a great deal. In the early seasons, he was a grumpy old man that dispensed advice to his grandson and fought for some consideration by others. Slowly, the scales tilted and he became more of a rambling, crazy old coot. There's pragmatic reasons for this shift; "cranky old man" isn't as funny as "crazy rambling Grampa," and toning down the crankiness in favor of the craziness gets more mileage out of the character.
But the resulting arc is rather disturbing. Abraham Simpson was a man whose success peaked when he was in the battlefield, and never quite reached that level again. He was self-serving and callous to the people who loved him, until they left him. He struggled bitterly against the loss of dignity that comes with age, but ultimately succumbed to senility and became a twisted joke, a parody of his former self.
Not very funny, is it?
And yet, in its individual pieces, it is funny. It's only when you look at the long term that it appears as something else. The same general arc, I'd argue, seems to be happening to Peirce in Community. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's a sitcom archetype: the waning old man. We see it in Martin's character in Fraser (albeit in a toned down form; still, compare Martin from episode 1 to Martin 3 or 4 seasons later), and Frank in Everybody Loves Raymond. I think the best example would be Archie Bunker's character (he said, having never actually seen an episode of the show in question). It's a symbolic decline--the old, dominating patriarchy that ignored women and uttered racial epithets and repressed their feelings is replaced by a new, gentler breed of... well, younger patriarchy that dominates in a different way. (Homer Simpson: "I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are!")
I'm not sure exactly what conclusions can be drawn from this. I do know that I felt almost relieved when I thought I'd "figured out" Pierce. Does this imply that a part of us wants to see these elderly male figures fail, that an atavistic part of ourselves (okay, myself) wants to see them punished? Does it demonstrate the insidious nature of genre television, in that is generally disquieting to see a break from trope form? Does such television act as a moral salve for society at large, justifying our own poor treatment of the elderly? Should I be concerned over who is being marginalized and disempowered for the sake of my entertainment?
Homer: Man... fall down. Funny.
Me: Mmmmmm...
Later Days.
Over the last few days, I've been watching the DVD commentaries for the first season of the sitcom Community. (Wonderful show. You should be watching it. And if you already are, you should be watching more of it.) In particular, I'm watching the episode where Peirce (played by Chevy Chase) convinces Annie (Alison Brie) to let him write the school song. The commentators mention that the original storyline was much darker, with Peirce ridiculing and mocking Annie until she rejects him with an angry speech over how he's determinedly driven away everyone in his life that's ever shown him any kindness or pity. The network made them rewrite the scene, fearing it was too dark for early in the series. That anecdote was when Peirce's character finally clicked for me. In broad strokes, Peirce's backstory is that he's a successful businessman, now retired, who has returned to community college because he realizes (in a self-denial kind of way) that despite his success, he has nothing meaningful in his life. The character fluctuates back and forth between early onset senior dementia and pratfalls, and the generally unpleasant, unlikeable man that he's been for most of his life. (For an example of just how unlikeable he can be, see the recent D&D episode.)
And that brings me to the Simpsons. (Stay with me here; I'm going somewhere with this.) Continuity on the Simpsons TV show is actually very similar to comic book superhero continuity. That's because both are essentially unaging; time moves for us, but not for the characters. Bart is still as 10 years old now as he was 10 years ago, and Superman's never going to get gray hairs. One of the consequences of this timelessness, however, is that the characters are trapped in amber. There isn't so much change as the illusion of change. In the Simpsons, this is doubly so, by nature of it being not just a timeless cartoon, but a sitcom, where things are almost always dragged back to the status quo by episode's end. The series' major changes are almost always changed back: Krabappel and Skinner were dating, now they're not; Barney did join AA, but he fell off the wagon; Wally West did take over as the Flash, but now it's Barry West again; Spider-Man was never married to Mary Jane (Okay, I've drifted into comic book territory again. Sorry.).
My point is, such a set-up is not disposed towards character arcs and development. Change does happen, but so incrementally and minutely that it's generally not worth noticing. But there is, I argue, one character in the Simpsons who has had, through various flashbacks, a fairly nuanced existence: Grandpa Abraham Simpson.
In over two decades of Simpsons experience, Abe Simpson's past has been plumbed a lot. We know he was in WWII, and was the leader of a platoon. We know he came back from the war. We know he was a terrible father and husband; he cheated on his wife, drove her to leave him, and his son felt no remorse about putting him into a home. And over the course of the actual series, he's changed a great deal. In the early seasons, he was a grumpy old man that dispensed advice to his grandson and fought for some consideration by others. Slowly, the scales tilted and he became more of a rambling, crazy old coot. There's pragmatic reasons for this shift; "cranky old man" isn't as funny as "crazy rambling Grampa," and toning down the crankiness in favor of the craziness gets more mileage out of the character.
But the resulting arc is rather disturbing. Abraham Simpson was a man whose success peaked when he was in the battlefield, and never quite reached that level again. He was self-serving and callous to the people who loved him, until they left him. He struggled bitterly against the loss of dignity that comes with age, but ultimately succumbed to senility and became a twisted joke, a parody of his former self.
Not very funny, is it?
And yet, in its individual pieces, it is funny. It's only when you look at the long term that it appears as something else. The same general arc, I'd argue, seems to be happening to Peirce in Community. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's a sitcom archetype: the waning old man. We see it in Martin's character in Fraser (albeit in a toned down form; still, compare Martin from episode 1 to Martin 3 or 4 seasons later), and Frank in Everybody Loves Raymond. I think the best example would be Archie Bunker's character (he said, having never actually seen an episode of the show in question). It's a symbolic decline--the old, dominating patriarchy that ignored women and uttered racial epithets and repressed their feelings is replaced by a new, gentler breed of... well, younger patriarchy that dominates in a different way. (Homer Simpson: "I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are!")
I'm not sure exactly what conclusions can be drawn from this. I do know that I felt almost relieved when I thought I'd "figured out" Pierce. Does this imply that a part of us wants to see these elderly male figures fail, that an atavistic part of ourselves (okay, myself) wants to see them punished? Does it demonstrate the insidious nature of genre television, in that is generally disquieting to see a break from trope form? Does such television act as a moral salve for society at large, justifying our own poor treatment of the elderly? Should I be concerned over who is being marginalized and disempowered for the sake of my entertainment?
Homer: Man... fall down. Funny.
Me: Mmmmmm...
Later Days.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Vacation Recounting Interlude: Oh God, It's That Time Again
I'd like to take a break in retelling my Toronto trip with a brief (okay, not so brief) complaint. It's orientation week on campus. Apparently, this requires much marching around campus in identical clothing while chanting loud slogans. The purpose is to familiarize new students with the campus, and provide a sense of community, especially for those that live in residence. I understand this purpose. I support the concept. I merely question the method. By the time I was in my last years of high school, "school spirit" was already something to be viewed with suspicion. And if you want me to do a frackin' cheer about how happy I am to be there, you've already gone a long way toward making me wish I was not.
So by the time one becomes a university student, then, the group cheer thing seems a bit... hollow. Isn't there better ways to foster a sense of community? Through, I don't know, free pizza or movie nights, or so forth? Through positive social change? Through alcohol? (I'm just coming up with ideas, here, people. Underage drinking is wrong.) Any of these would seem better to me than the idea that all we have to be proud of is that we can show up in a square and scream about how Shamu met his demise on the business end of a canoe. I suppose the whole cheer thing might create community in the sense that people bond by going through embarrassing situations together, but surely that sort of thing can only go so far.
But maybe these students actually like this sort of thing. In which case, well, I guess I'll have to bear it. We'll see how many cheer rallies there are in the middle of midterms.
And yes, I realize that it's somewhat hypocritical to be complaining about this when I made fun of the university people who complained about being disturbed by little dancing girls. In my defense, I can only say that this level of enthusiasm stops being cute if you add a decade to the children's age. And if that doesn't work for you, then my only other defense is that I recently converted to curmudgeonism, and I'm still in the vocal practicising stage.
God help you if you walk on my lawn. Or play your dagblastit music too loud. Darn kids.
Later Days.
So by the time one becomes a university student, then, the group cheer thing seems a bit... hollow. Isn't there better ways to foster a sense of community? Through, I don't know, free pizza or movie nights, or so forth? Through positive social change? Through alcohol? (I'm just coming up with ideas, here, people. Underage drinking is wrong.) Any of these would seem better to me than the idea that all we have to be proud of is that we can show up in a square and scream about how Shamu met his demise on the business end of a canoe. I suppose the whole cheer thing might create community in the sense that people bond by going through embarrassing situations together, but surely that sort of thing can only go so far.
But maybe these students actually like this sort of thing. In which case, well, I guess I'll have to bear it. We'll see how many cheer rallies there are in the middle of midterms.
And yes, I realize that it's somewhat hypocritical to be complaining about this when I made fun of the university people who complained about being disturbed by little dancing girls. In my defense, I can only say that this level of enthusiasm stops being cute if you add a decade to the children's age. And if that doesn't work for you, then my only other defense is that I recently converted to curmudgeonism, and I'm still in the vocal practicising stage.
God help you if you walk on my lawn. Or play your dagblastit music too loud. Darn kids.
Later Days.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)