Serving all your Pinata needs since 2003
May 28, 2004
Matt’s slowly getting his Internet connection back so we should have a brand new “Films you OUGHT to like” production journal next week, sorry for the delay. Not that we’d ever let things like petty technical difficulties interfere with our primary mission of bringing you a new episode every seven days.
Visitors to our increasingly multinational forums know that lately we’ve been having a good laugh at all the various Google searches that have lead unway websurfers to our site. Sure there’s a lot of people searching for Dead End Days, but there’s also a lot of people who stumble on days while looking for very different content. Searches for
“xerxes tire-iron dada”, “scripts for comedic macbeth”, “bizarre news giant wasp nest”, “swordsman mower”, “nude pictures free sprinting public” and “pomp and cirucmstances wav” have all lead at least one unway web-surfer each to our virual doorstep. One discovery that still completely baffles our collective brainpower is the fact that if you search at google for the string “the history behind pinatas we are the number one ranked site. Forums guru Firefox is convinced that these odd results are only aplified by my propensity to blabber on about completely unrelated subjects so I figure by being increasingly vague we can only ratchet up the odd Google hits we see. In that spirit (and also since it’s late and I really have nothing of import to discuss this week), here is a review of Akimatsu Ken’s new manga Negima! that I reviewed for Amazon Canada… can’t wait to see what’s in the server logs next week! See you next Tuesday for Matt’s long-delayed production journal!
–
Negima Vol. 1
by KEN AKAMATSU (2004)
Akamatsu Ken is unquestionably talented both as writer and artist and clearly proved in his earlier hit series Love Hina that he has unique ability to turn campy farce into melancholic poignancy at the drop of a hat. The balance of emotionally satisfying payoffs offsetting the campy innuendo-based humor was a cornerstone of Hina’s success.
I have to wonder if Akimatsu’s new work Negima: Magister Negi Magi is going back to the well one too many times. Even the staunchest fan of Hina could recognize that there’s only so many times you can play the same “uncomfortable misunderstanding” double-entendre gags before they start to feel stale. It’s another testament to Hina that the final volumes of that series were some of the strongest after the series started to wane. Volume 1 of Negima, on the other hand, feels like a large step in the wrong direction; It re-visits much of the same setting and tone covered in earlier Akamatsu works, but without the benefit of covering original territory.
Ten year old Negi Springfield, upon completion of his magical studies degree at a prestigious (unnamed) British school for would be “guardian magi”, is assigned to teach English at a Japanese junior high school. Forced to temporarily room with a couple of his buxom students who are both his social juniors but chronological seniors the requisite misunderstandings, moral outrage(s) and wacky hi-jinx ensue. Clocking in at rather long pagecounts for manga stories this first volume contains the requisite “introductory” set-ups as well as a particularly tepid tale of dodge-ball rivalry with the evil girls high school next door.
Del Rey has done a fantastic job of bringing another body to the North American manga publishing dance and will hopefully put some pressure on perenial powerhouse publisher TokyoPop. The all-around quality of the book is top notch, with a detailed translation that includes all sound effects (especially handy for an Akamatsu title) and a nice afterward of “bonus features” (mostly design docs from the development of the series). I wish Del Rey the best (although their other launch titles are not particularly appealing to me) as competition could only benefit the North American comic/manga markets.
But what of the content?
While ratcheting the number of residents of his new all-girls school to a startling thirty will no doubt please manufacturers of Negima-related merchandise (and show that Akimatsu and his assistants are at the height of their artistic game, even when rediscovering some very familiar character designs), it leaves little time in this initial volume of stories to paint more than the barest strokes of personality. This dearth of character development, even with the titular protagonist, deprives this volume of the wonderful character interactions that were the heart of Akimatsu’s earlier works raising them above the sum of their parts. Revisiting Hina staple scenarios such as the ever popular “boy hiding in the girl’s baths” simply shows the skill that was used in the former work to keep it light and airy comedy rather than coming off as a bad teenage manga version of “Porky’s”. In the same vein the sheer number of competing elements in the story: Negi’s unstable magic powers, the absurdity of a 10 year old English teacher, the lead heroine’s troubled personal life, and general survival in an all girls dormitory leave no time to establish any of them properly leaving forced and trivial sequences of events that clash more than flow.
While I am certainly open to the possibility that more page time will allow for this story to develop vastly, this initial volume left me disappointed. What I had hoped was a chance for Akamatsu to start anew and branch off in a new direction instead feels strongly like re-warmed Love Hina with a dash of chibi Harry Potter thrown on top of old “Ah! My Goddess!” parodies. Less of a work of love, and more some kind of hideous marketing amalgam of very well-worn manga territory.
The final verdict? There’s still enough potential that I’ll pick up the next volume, but certainly not enough to recommend it at the moment, especially to those those looking for a “jumping on point” to Akimatsu’s work.
Please Direct Your Hate Mail…
May 25, 2004
Where is this week’s production journal? Please direct all inquiries to: Matt.
Sincerely,
- The Mgmt.
[UPDATE] - Okay M-dogg is off the hook, he is fighting the crippling disease of having had no ‘net connection at all since last week. Crack DED emergency tech-support teams are en route with an emergency transfusion of routers and ethernet cabling so hopefully we’ll get the goodness flowing by the end of the day…
What’s up docs?
May 21, 2004
Twenty five episodes without being so much as a day late, the Calgary Flames heading to the Stanley Cup Finals, and the return of the Creepy-ass Chinese-walking-death fish … I’m pretty sure those are all signs of the end times approaching, are they not?
No technology fueled soapbox-rants this week, I promise… okay, maybe just one. I don’t understand why even, non-propeller heads aren’t lapping up the SCO/IBM/Linux lawsuits, this story is getting so crazy that lately I can’t tell if I’m reading Groklaw or the National Enquirer. Shady deals between large companies, betrayal, intrigue, vanishing source code, a mysterious interview, a fake book, a magic German briefcase – this is compelling stuff folks.
A couple of weeks back I managed to pry Mike away from the warm embrace of Editing System 3000 (The Editing Machine of the Future) by dragging him to go see a midnight screening of Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus at the excellent Toronto-based annual documentary festival HotDocs. A lush, lyrical and laconic examination of the spirit of the American South, SFTWEJ was not without it’s flaws but also not without it’s considerable charm. One of the great things about documentary, even bad documentary, is it’s very hard to spend an hour or two experiencing someone else’s viewpoint on any issue and not come away with fresh insight into your own outlook on life. Even Moorewatch at a non-stop Farenheit 9/11 festival would doubtless come away with a new look into their own beliefs (if only via what aspects of their belief system were horrendously offended by alternative points of view being presented (or misrepresented depending on which “fair and balanced” US News source one chooses as their primary source)). If it’s not an outlook, there’s usually a new fact that can be mined, a new trivia question to learn, a new person to respect (or loathe). In the case of “Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus” I came away with an amazing list of musicians and authors to check out, as the subjects of the film are completely engrossing and compelling.
An aside - off my mental list, I’ve so-far only been able to snag a couple of CD’s by the chillingly good Handsome Family. While I’ve yet to listen to both with the full attention required I can immediately report that they have written the finest song ever to feature a bottomless hole as both metaphor, and quite literal giant-pit-that-does-not-end-no-matter-how-long-you-fall. It’s called “Bottomless Hole” and so insidiously unnerving that I’m not sure when I’ll be able to sleep without a night-light again.
What was great about this particular screening is that the fine folks at HotDocs simply gave tickets away gratis to the late night affair. This meant that not only was the cinema packed, it was packed full of lots of people who like free things, but would otherwise never consider going to see a documentary. I’m sure some loved it and some didn’t (and some talked throughout the whole freaking thing. But I’m sure everyone was at least more enriched than the average screening of “New York Minute” (and no, I’m not linking it - you do your own dirty work).
My point is that two of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen all year, SFTWEJ and the hypnotically superb Rivers and Tides (on the mesmerizing rise and fall of the creations of enviro-artist Andy Goldsworthy) are the types of films that most folks out there would never consider watching unless threatened with physical harm – not because they’re not good, but because people tend to confuse documentary with “learning channel” programming, or “edutainment”, or “skim milk” (you know bland watery stuff that’s “good” for you). Although a little more difficult to track down, seeing a documentary now and then is often worth the effort, and occasionally pays vast dividends; Perhaps the most sublime cinema experience I had in 2003 came watching Winged Migration (which is “a film about birds flying” like a symphony orchestra is “some guys playing some notes on a couple of instruments”). Lots of folks think it is the kind of thing they should “do” it’s just a hard choice to make when you’re faced with the luxury of fifteen Waynes sibling films at the ticket kiosk. So to help you out I’ll share the best reason to see documentaries (or foreign, indie, and “alternative” cinema for that matter). If you keep this in mind next time you feel like paying $8 for a small coke you’ll be well served:
Remember - it really annoys the pompous overstuffed black turtleneck wearing cineastes when the “rabble” invades their dark citadels making them so less elite.
So piss off a beatnick socialist… go see a documentary today!
Why is there a watermellon there?
May 18, 2004
Hi all, those of you who track the great stone wheel of our Tuesday production journals know that it should be Matt here today bringing you another cherished installment of Movies that you OUGHT to like (and if you don’t you suck). However, since Matt is without e-mail connectivity today, and I didn’t want another severely delayed posting, I offered him a break until next week. I have no idea why but he seemed to be concerned that I’d use this space for yet another thousand word rant on perhaps the latest salvo of ludicrous misinformation in the ongoing battle between Linux and Not-Linux - but I assured him this was not the case.
In the spirit of Mr. Hoos; excellent essay series on the landmark cinema of our times I am therefore happy to bring you the first installment of my particular spin-off:
The year is 1984 and the Hollywood studios are chasing that most elusive of beasts, the smash hit. With the notable exception of Paramount’s chart-topper Beverly Hills Cop, grossing an impressive 200 million, it’s been a tepid year for the US studio blockbuster.
1983 saw at least four films gross more than 40 Million at the boxoffice: Terms of Endearment ($108M) Sudden Impact ($67.6M) Never Say Never Again ($55.5M) and Scarface ($44.7M). 1985 saw a return to form with five entries breaking the 40 million mark: Rocky IV ($128M) The Color Purple ($94.2M) Out of Africa ($87.1M) The Jewel of the Nile ($65.6M) and Spies Like Us ($60.1M). But the poor middle-child 1984? 1984 had Beverly Hills Cop, and… Beverly Hills Cop. I’m sure 1984 tried, but let’s be frank when the David Lynch helmed Dune and the disaster on celluloid that was Supergirl: The Movie make the box office “best of the year” list there is no way it tried hard enough. If 1984 were in grade school, I’m pretty sure it would get “ideas are organized appropriately and logically” in the teachers comments section, and we all know that was code for “will be flipping burgers in 10-14 years”.
My point, such as it is, is that 1984 was ripe for a fresh new mega-franchise, a bold new direction to launch sequels, novels, comic books, lunch boxes and action figures. 1984 was ready to crown the next king of the mega-blockbuster. That king wasn’t Peter Weller, that mega-blockbuster would not beThe Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and we are all poorer because of it.
This movie had it all. Literally. It is a cinematic version of an “all dressed” potato chip that literally contains every possible flavor humanities palette has ever known. Starting with a stacked cast any producer would die for (John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Spongebob Squarepants’ Clancy Brown), the film was overflowing with so much talent it could even leave Jamie Lee Curtis on the cutting room floor (she played the title characters mother in a never-used opening sequence). The film’s production value was lavish, bordering on opulent with production design out the ying-yang by J Michael Riva (who went on to design blockbusters and masterworks alike with Goonies, The Colour Purple, the Lethal Weapon and Charlies Angels franchises…) and a blistering electronic score like only synth guru Michael Boddicker could coax from the finest computer hardware the 1980s had to offer. The film had a studio (20th Century Fox) already working on a sequel (Buckaroo Banzai and the World Crime League) and that was readying a dizzying array of comic book crossovers, novelizations, and other merchandising.
Alas, the sequel never came to pass, the merchandise remained conceptual, and the glorious franchise never quite got off the ground; Because for all that it had, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension also had enough plot in it to fill twenty movies and plot of such disparate tone and character it was rendered inaccessible to all but the most dedicated of audiences.
In a nutshell: The improbably named Dr. Buckaroo Banzai (Weller) is the half-Japanese half-American son of two prominent theoretical physicists killed in a scientific mishap. Driven to excel in all aspects of his life as a result, the film starts with Buckaroo successfully completing his parent’s failed experiment by driving his rocket car through a mountain by jumping into the titular 8th dimension. Well, actually the film technically starts with him helping a New Jersey neurosurgeon (Goldblum) implant computer chips in a patients head in a clinic in New Brunswick, then running off to the American southwest to drive his rocket car through a mountain. While most mere mortals would stop there, Buckaroo is just getting warmed up as he still has a press conference to attend, a rock concert to perform, and maybe take a stab at saving the world from destruction by an alien menace. You see as the Earth’s premiere scientist/stuntman/media personality/rock star… Buckaroo and his friends/backup band/research scientist/mercenaries “The Hong Kong Cavaliers” keep a pretty stuffed day-timer. As a fighting force so bizarrely varied GI Joe would be proud the “Caveliers” look like someone blended thirty years of pulp magazines and poured them into action figure moulds. Blonde pretty-boy “Perfect Tommy” (Lewis Smith) looks like an escape from a Culture Club video while Reno Nevada (Pepe Serna) would find a welcome home in any gangster flick you care to mention (according to his resume he was actually Angel Fernandez in Scarface, cool). Goldbum strides through the film in giant sheepskin chaps and a 10 gallon hat… because… that’s what he does, damnit. The fact that all these strong willed gentlemen can put their obvious fashion differences aside and simply kick ass for the forces of good and justice can only be further testament to the obvious leadership skills of the multi-faceted Mr. Banzai.
The underlying formula that drives the film is:
More Plot = More Better
Much More Plot = Much More Better
If the film were the Starship Enterprise it would only take the opening credits until you could hear Mr. Scott yelling “She ‘canna take any more Captain!”, and yet the filmmakers relentlessly keep shoveling more plot than one has ever seen in one place into the boiler, full warp ahead.
As such we are nary a half hour in and we’ve already met Penny Priddy (Barkin) the long-lost identical twin of Banzai’s murdered wife Peggy (Buckaroo catching Penny trying to kill herself during a rock show Buckaroo was headlining). Weller abruptly stopping the band mid-song and warbling a strained “Is someone out there not having a good time?” is still one of my all time favourite cinema moments. We’ve also met the insane Dr. Emilio Lizardo (Lithgow) who is really a “Black Lectoid” John Wharfin who is an all-around-space-Hitler-trapped-in-the-body-of-Emilio-Lizardo. Despite the end credit assurance that Lithgow did, in fact, have an Italian dialogue coach on the film, he screams his lines in a discordant m
Episode 24, how do I love thee?
May 14, 2004
Far be it from me to deprive you of a new episode while I finish up this week’s essay to go with it. Check back by noon as I should have my thoughts together by then.
It’s an interesting little essay I think I’ll call :
Why most of Gizmodo’s daily outpouring of various techological marvels don’t capture my imagination in the same way, I’m not entirely sure, but there’s the promise of a direct personal connection with technology in robotics not seen outisde of lodging a microchip directly into your brain. I blame Star Wars for that… in fact the first book on robotics I ever bought was a 0.25 examination of our “automated friends” narrated by the elder statesman himself.
It’s that “humanization” of robotics that makes it so easy to imagine them doing wrong, programmed by some mad scientiest type to conquor the known Universe. It’s easy for people to understand how Robots could directly hurt them, what with the ”pushing down the stairs” and all. It’s less easy to get people concerned about what evil intent their toaster, or banking service, or automatic vote-counting machine may hold in it’s cold electronic innards.
Which brings me to today’s thrust - one of the reasons that the miraculous advances we’re making in technology do need to be scrutinized ad-nauseum is humanity, as a whole, has a very poor track record for abusing new technologies in the most depraved ways possible.
Jane Pinckard is one of the most literate writers and futurists about the societal impact of video games that I am aware of. She has written one of the defining essays of the year about genderplay in electronic entertainment and is a frequent speaker on her findings. Game Girl Advance, the site she founded, is one of the most erudite repositories of critical thought on the development of entertainment media on the Internet, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to see the 8-bit pastime develop into a truly mainstream media. Yet if you were to survey the floor at this years E3 (the yearly Mecca for all things “gamer”) I would suspect she would instead be almost solely recognized as the person who wrote the article about her own very personal connection to sex in video-games. Now it’s easy to brush this off as a story ready-made for the Internet’s rabid sound-bite devouring maw, frankly it covers the entire “Good Internet Story” meme-checklist: uniqueness (check), voyeurism (check), geek culture (check), and sex (check). But there is a greater truth at play, that when provided with new electronic entertainments mankind’s first instinct is usually to abuse that technology horribly, otherwise normal individuals seemingly dancing at the command of some kind of dark id-monster lurking in us all.
Case in point, ATT Labs Research has an amazing interactive multi-lingual demo of their formidable text to speech software. You type in blocks of text which are then spit out as synthesized .wav files in various crisp voices. It took your loyal DED creative team less a few minutes before we were cranking out dirty limericks, and long winded curses that would make Spider Jerusalem blush.
Think back to playing with toys as a child especially, heaven forbid “girls” dolls. How long before you got tired driving for groceries and waiting for Ken to come home from work and started putting Barbie in compromising situations?
How many of the future genius programmers of the future are sitting in their parents basement cranking out the next Sasser, soBig, or MyDoom relatively confident in their anonymity?
How many locker-room cell phone photographs sit in hidden directories on hard drives?
How much pornography clogs the bandwidth of the Internet each day? Terabytes? Petabytes?
Frankly, it’s important to be concerned about the technology that we adopt because we are giving it more and more control over vital societal functions. Even New Yorkers (ever the yardstick for jaded detachment) were surprised recently to learn that majority of traffic control buttons in their fair city had been disconnected since the 1980s , all traffic control long since turned over to automated systems.
In this light of exponentially increasing technological adoption the old concept of “black box” technology (that one just has to assume is working fairly) is completely unacceptable. The potential for misuse (and potential rewards for misusing) said systems increase daily. What if some programmer innocently rigged the traffic system to get to home from work faster each day? What someone purposely coded the system to give faster emergency vehicle response times to affluent areas? What if someone stuck in an Ambulance in traffic died because of it? One of the real benefits of the Open Source Software movement is that publicly accessible source code is publicly auditable source code. While this can be a tough concept to grasp (that an “open book” will lead to software that is considerably more secure in the long run) one only has to do a cursory investigation comparing DieBold, Election Systems and Software, and say Open-Vote to get a pretty good immediate impression on what the very tangibles benefits of Open Source Software.
So while my ongoing infatuation with personal robotics may seem quaint compared with say, activating SkyNet, there are technological battles being fought right now which will determine the accountability required of systems that will ultimately control important aspects of your everyday life. That’s why it’s important that each of us try to frame the short term gimmicks and fads of new technology (and the press-release fueled fluff and feature obsession of much of “technology journalism”) in the larger context of addressing the true transparency, accountability, and electronic liberty issues that I have no doubt will ultimately be as to our generation as civil rights reform were to the generation before us - the battleground that will define the type of civilization we share in the years to come. And if it helps keep my floor clean at the same time, all the better.
“Dead End Days” Shoot Haiku Bonanza
May 13, 2004
One of the goals of these journals was always to reflect on the creative process itself. Shane often discusses the brass tacks of physical production (the yin to Jay’s conceptual creative yang). Matt waxes nostalgic about the “great” works that have inspired and are the standards by which all film is measured. Rob occasionally posts about a specific facet of production, separate from the process as a whole. It occurred to me as we went into our May monthly shoot that one perspective that was missing from these journals was conveying the rote drudgery of the act of “filming” itself. Far from being a star-studded thrill-a-minute ride, anyone with even a passing knowledge of the medium, knows that 99.99% of a shoot is really dull. Unpack equipment. Move equipment. Block. Move equipment. Shoot. Move equipment. Shoot. Move equipment. Shoot. Move equipment. Pack equipment. Rinse. Repeat. In order to capture the moment to moment reality of life on a “Dead End Days” shoot, I tasked the cast and crew with recording the “in between” moments of the shoot with the classic Zen form of expression - the Haiku. 17 syllable postcards into our fabulously exciting existence, I give you the:
Poor little Jenny,
trying to eat a bagel.
Film crew’s in the way.8:30 am
Where’s Matt and Robin?
Need them to start the filming.
Their car is broken.9:30 am
Producer works out.
Doesn’t really know how though.
Pulled rotator cuff.10:00 am
The muffins of death,
with plastic and rock filling.
Beware your first bite.10:01 am
“The” in a Haiku.
Stupid-cheap and/o lame cop-out?
Shane tells Brad “Get Bent.”11:00 am
Driving to Brantford.
Where are our important props?
They’re in Toronto.12:30 pm
Silence on the set.
Tension mounts, primed potential.
Bugs fly in Matt’s ear.3:00 pm
Craft table break-time.
Pressing topic of the day:
White Supremacy.5:00 pm
Set in a warm room,
a slow, verbose, dialogue;
The cast and crew doze.11:00 pm
The weekend is done.
Dead End Days is in the can.
Matts’ car will not start.
probably not branch into poetry as a viable career alternative any time soon.
Please Stand By…
May 12, 2004
Okay I wasn’t sure anyone actually read the production journals until I got flooded with “where’s the journal this week” e-mails. As this weeks “impossible to recreate” journal was scribbled in a notebook and part of a napkin, I can’t type it in until I’ve found the notebook… and napkin. Having narrowed the search down to a couple of equipment boxes it will hopefully be up by late tonight. I probably could have found it last night if I had looked harder… but… you know… hockey.
Enter, the Numbskull
May 7, 2004
Despite whatever foul lies Matthew tells you in this space, Rocket Ace Moving Pictures HQ is firmly gripped with playoff fever, especially as the team of choice for Firefox and myself are, against all reasonable expectation, still in the race. This is a particularly big deal, as for us ex-pat Calgarians, admiting that you have been a life-long Flames fan is often received by others like an admission that you have pleurisy. Unfortunately the month long string of West-coast games is starting to take its toll on my already fragile psyche… when you spend as many late hours as we do, carefully whittling new episodes (from a piece of birch, a soda can, and some good intentions) even just a few extra lost hours of sleep on top can be dramatic. When you keep desperately chugging another tasty caffinated beverage for the strength to keep your eyelids open for yet another second overtime… that’s something else entirely.
This is just a fancy way of saying we’re pretty tired - but for you fine folk? A sleepless year or two is totally worth it.
Blah blah, forums, blah blah t-shirts, blah blah blah see you on Tuesday for a nifty production journal that I’m quite looking forward to sharing with you.
May the fourth be with you.
May 4, 2004
When Star Wars: Episode I was released into theatres, and you couldn’t speak but for the collective sigh of disappointment, I remember certain people/critics/radio disc jockeys defending the prequel on the basis that the original films were nothing but special effects spectacles. The extension of this argument – parroted by none other than Frank Oz himself, who should have known better – was that the reason nobody seemed to like the film was that our collective expectations were just too high. There was no way for this film to live up to the hype, they lamented, casually making it our fault, not theirs.
Now without delving too deep into just how asinine and offensive that assertion is – that we’re essentially too stupid to differentiate between good and bad movies given how heightened a frenzy surrounds them (not that they had anything to do with the hype, heavens no!) – does anyone love the original Star Wars films on the merits of special effects alone? Now I may personally prefer puppets to computer programs, and ragged, beat-up X-Wings to computer programs, and a guy in a wookie suit to He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (another computer program), but I’ve never spoken with a single person who loves the original trilogy because the Death Star blew up real good, or the spaceships were neat, or the lightsabers were…okay, I’ll give you the lightsabers. Retrospective Star Wars analysis has become something of a cottage industry (on top of the well-entrenched and infinitely lucrative Star Wars book/video game/toy industry), which strikes me as ever more proof of their impact on successive generations – a resonance not confined to gender/class categories – and indicative that there must be something more to these films than special effects.
Like, say, the story.
There have been many a groundbreaking special effects fiesta that will have long been forgotten (along with, and I’d bet money on this, this new trilogy of Star Wars prequels) as our children and their children discover and rediscover the story George Lucas told (or, more accurately, re-told) before he became a reclusive, delusional megalomaniac. Like oral folk and fairy tales told for generations, then committed to paper and told for generations more, Star Wars is a simple story with a relevant theme: Power Corrupts. The Original Trilogy was partly a response to draconian Nixon incentives. The prequels are a response to…well…suffering a higher tax bracket, I guess.
In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King quotes Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri: “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness.”
Age of cynicism indeed. How easily I find myself angry these days. Angry at the blatant hypocrisy, the greed, the out and out lies, but mostly at how well it seems to be working; poorly orchestrated, but effective nonetheless. And there’s a niggling sense of betrayal – that the grownups lied to us. That we grew up into and will inherit a world that is not good, not righteous, not truthful. That everything they taught us, everything we know is wrong, including the stories they told. If we can’t believe and live in those stories, then where can we live?
The Dark Side?
For whatever stock one can put in polls, I read recently that sixty-one percent of Americans believe that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq. This is not a contentious or debatable issue, it’s plain untrue. Yet a majority of the population of this most powerful, modern, and wealthy nation believe it to be true. Sixty-one percent. The age of information. Astounding.
The filmmakers behind The Corporation use DSM-IV diagnostic criteria (the standard mental-illness diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association) to characterize corporations as active psychopaths. In Errol Morris’ Academy-Award winning documentary The Fog of War, Robert MacNamara claims that a Cuban-American nuclear war was prevented through choosing compassion over aggression (could we dare to expect such compassion from Bush’s cabal?). The Pentagon (the Pentagon!) released a report naming global warming as the most pressing concern facing human civilization. In book after book after book (Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning among my personal favourites), a litany of scholars, entertainers, and ex-administration officials stand alongside senators, diplomats, and journalists to decry the treacherous path their country has taken. And we’re running out of oil.
Time to get down to brass tacks, yes? Public discourse and debate is at an all time premium, right? Human inventiveness and ingenuity ahoy!
Heather Mallick, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, recently appeared on Fox News stalwart The O’Reilly Factor. “Mr. O’Reilly is not a smart man,” she writes, “he’s like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation… You know the type. They let wasps nest in their hair so they can lure weasels, trap ‘em and eat ‘em slow over the summer… It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response.”
Who among us does not see shades of the Empire loose in the world today? See Darth Vader addressing the nation on the nightly news? Feel that same creeping dread and hopelessness the Rebel Alliance must have felt when flying off to fight the Death Star? (Though they put on a good face, didn’t they? Good old Wedge.)
The screening of The Corporation I attended, was followed by a Q & A. A guy up front asked what he was supposed to do now. I knew exactly how he felt – helpless, so much information to absorb, to process; so depressing, overwhelming – but I knew the answer. And the answer was that he’s got to figure it out for himself. We all do.
This isn’t a call to arms, merely a passing along of information. And don’t let it get you down: to some extent, things have always been thus. Which is why it’s so important to keep your ear to the ground. Keep well informed. Think critically. Talk about what you see. Turn it into a story people will pay attention to. Keep those stories in circulation. The world is a story, but you have to tell it.
King says, “We wrote knowing that none of the stories we told would change the world. But we wrote in the hope that they would… The truth about stories is that’s all that we are.”
May the force be with you.
[Anyone who has spoken to JRo or I for more than five minutes probably gathers that there's many things we don't always see eye to eye on. Regardless of the minutia of things we bicker about, it's actually interesting when you look at the things that we are in complete 100% agreement on. Jay, myself, and Eddie Izzard all firmly believe in the concept that "Corporations don't have to be these huge sort of raping / pillaging things" - just by different avenues. While Jay (rightly) feels that corporations need to be held to higher standards of global citizenship, I have long come at the conclusion from the polar opposite position coordinate of looking at what corporations need to do to increase investor returns. Clearly the current system of trying to generate consistantly increasing short term returns is critically flawed (I'm sure it has nothing to do with an entire generation that has statistically had an expensive lifestyle, comparatively little savings, and is looking for unrealistic stock market returns to fund it's impending retirement). This is all just preamble for what I wanted to point out, that with Google's long awaited IPO this week many are noticing the very creative dual-class share structure the Google management team is bringing in to shield management from short-term shareholder interference. I am firmly a believer that long term goals and innovative focusing on narrow core competencies is a win-win situation as it will lead both to corporate citizens that behave less like a dozen ADD-riddled monsters duct-taped together, and ultimately increase shareholder revenue by blending the advantages of private management with the economic advantages of public ownership. Whether it pays off for Google specifically remains to be seen, but I think it is a very positive sign that new companies are beginning to recognize that a policy of massive consumption of disparate monoliths leading to the creation of a bloated stagnant obesity that has to cannibalize itself to meet quarterly projections at any and all expense has not proven to be a winning business strategy. - Brad]
