From One Hand Clapping.

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A bad portent for the new Star Wars episode: Even in a carefully posed cover photo for Premiere magazine, Hayden Christensen looks like a kid standing on line dressed up as Darth Vader:

The problem is that George Lucas has not made a single movie that wasn’t composed of stock characters. When he wants a movie to be more than a Saturday afternoon diversion — for example, when he starts to believe The Force is more than a plot device, that he’s exploring deep themes of good and evil, or that he can write a love scene — he goes off the rails. He can direct large action scenes, and in every movie there’s been one or two special effects that have been imaginative and cool — jumping to light speed, those gunner bots that transform from rolling balls — but he is so unaware that he’s dealing in stereotypes that he can base an entire movie around Ewoks or dive head first into racism.

All the variables have been explored. He’s got a budget big enough to make the movie he wants. He has total mastery of digital effects — which he pioneered, and hats off to him for doing so — so he can make anything happen that he imagines. He’s got a built-in audience so he could try experimenting. He has fantastic actors, including Hayden Christensen. So why have his movies marched steadily downhill? There’s only one variable left…

Having said that, I expect the new one to be better than the previous two. And no matter how bad it is, I’ll go see it. But I will not wear my JarJar outfit. I’ve learned my lesson. [Technorati tags: StarWars GeorgeLucas]

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Steven Johnson gracefully responds to a bunch of reviews of his book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, including mine.

In his response he says something that I don’t recall his book saying flat out:

…the long-format, multithreaded TV drama — when viewed as a single narrative spanning several seasons, and not as isolated episodes — is an incredibly rich platform for precisely the literary values Dave celebrates. We don’t have a lot of opportunities in culture to tell a story that lasts a hundred hours, but that’s exactly what we’re taking in on The Sopranos or Lost or Six Feet Under. I feel totally confident that those shows will stack up very nicely against Madame Bovary a hundred years from now, if not sooner.

My head is swimming with responses. Steve’s writing tends to have that effect on me.

First, I want to drop Lost and Six Feet Under from the discussion because I personally don’t much like either. The one episode of Lost I saw was (IMO, of course) melodramatic crap — sentimental flashbacks, trumped up Big Events — and Six Feet Under is undisciplined and random; it’ll do anything to be interesting. For purposes of Steve’s point, we should be able to substitute whatever we think is the best of long-form TV. To my mind, that’s The Sopranos. Likewise, if Madame Bovary doesn’t do it for you, then pick some other work of literature that you consider to be incontestably first rate.

Second, Steve’s point about having 100 hours to tell a story is excellent. That’s especially true on networks with the British TV sensibility of ending a series when the story is done. (Are you listening, Will? Are you paying attention, Grace?) A literal retelling of a complex, multi-character novel by, say, Dickens, might equate to, what, one season of The Sopranos? (On the other hand, how do you compare the complexity of a 100-hour series with The Iliad’s brief but poignant indications of the “back story” of its mortal characters that open out into the unspoken enormity of death?)

Third, my point initially wasn’t about the relative quality of TV and books. It was that books develop a sympathetic understanding that TV (and theater and movies) — and especially video games — don’t, no matter how good they are. Those media show us characters behaving in a world. At those media’s best, we understand how that world looks to the characters, how they’re interpreting their choices, how they understand one another. But books do something different. They don’t just show us characters in a world, they show us that world. By “world” I don’t mean the things of the world — a show like Deadwood is wonderful at showing us that sense of a world — but the world of interrelated meanings. This does not mean that books are better than everything else. It does mean that they’re better at this way of showing than anything else…and this way of showing has moral implications. (Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’m right about what I’m claiming to be a unique feature of books. You should be throwing Shakespeare in my face right about now.)

Fourth, Steve is right that The Sims is a highly ambiguous environment, and thus is a counter-example to my statement that video games present relatively simple, rule-based environments. But The Sims remains a simplification of real life, whereas Madame Bovary reveals the bottomless complexity of real life.

Fifth, there’s a practical sense in which I think Steve is wrong about how The Sopranos and Madame Bovary are going to stack up. In a hundred years, even high definition TV images are going to look as old fashioned as hand-cranked silent movies. And, the acting styles and camera styles are going to feel outdated. When you tell your kid that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, there’s not a chance she’s going to prefer it to Pulp Fiction. So, if The Sopranos stacks up to Madame Bovary in 100 years, it’ll only be because both are only ever viewed if your English teacher asigns them.

I actually didn’t mean to say in my original comments on Steve’s wonderful book that the great books are better than the great TV shows. I only meant to say that books do something valuable beyond what Steve points to when he’s defending video games and television. There’s nothing about videotape that makes it a medium incapable of containing art. I just don’t know how to do the comparison. There are points of similarity between Emma Bovary’s story and Carmella Soprano’s. In my heart, though, I think Madame Bovary, Sense and Sensibility and Ulysses are better than The Sopranos. (On the other hand, I’d argue for The Sopranos over Dickens any day.) Perhaps part of it is that Flaubert didn’t have the luxury of 100 hours, so he expresses more of the world in shorter bursts, and that tells us something about how the world bodies forth its infinite meaning. For me, part of the awe of art is its ability to transcend its own limitations. ( Yes, I do find something wonderful about well-rhymed poetry.) Having a hundred hours relaxes the limits. That doesn’t mean art can’t happen there. It just makes it very hard to compare it with more limited forms.

Are such cross-media comparisons meaningful in any case? On the one hand, no. They’re just too different. On the other hand, I’m confident that The Odyssey is better than Gilligan’s Island, so apparently I do think such comparisons are possible. It’s only when you get to the best of each medium that the discussion becomes as meaningful as whether wearing your baseball cap backwards makes you look stupid or, for that matter, whether bloggers are journalists. [Technorati tags: StevenJohnson ebigfy sopranos]

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I just finished it. It is the greatest video game in history. Ok, within its genre. Inventive, involving, endlessly cool. I liked it better than the original, but most reviewers didn’t.

As a guide to my tastes: I’m a big fan of both No One Lives Forever games, loved the original Doom but found Doom III just a tad tedious (load, shoot, repeat), loved every minute of Serious Sam, was surprisingly attached to Pain Killer, and have never made it all the way through a Myst game.

There’s a guide to Half Life 2’s plot and universe here. [Technorati tags: HalfLife2 videogames]

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I just finished Steve Johnson‘s new book, Everything Bad is Good for You, and not only do I think it’ll climb the best-seller lists, I’ll be glad when it does. [Disclosure: The book comes out May 5. Steve sent me bound galleys because we bonded at a conference last year. I was a major fan of his well before that.]

EBIGFY is a persuasive essay. Forget the didactic assignments you got in English class. I’ve been reading Steve’s stuff for some time now and I think I’ve discovered what makes his writing style so good: He thinks well. He turns corners and pulls you with him. It’s the kind of unexpected unfolding that makes narratives work, but Steve does it purely in the realm of ideas. He writes so well because he’s so damn smart. (Also, he just writes so damn well.)

This short new book has a strong and simple premise: Pop culture is making us smarter. The bulk of the book argues that pop culture is more complex than it used to be and more than we usually give it credit for. Look past the content of video games and TV, Steve says, and you’ll see that their structures are far more complicated and demanding than ever before. (Deadwood should be his new favorite example.) He graphs the complexity of social relationships in Dynasty and 24, for example, and shows that the former is like a family while the latter is like a village. In following 24, we get better at understanding complex social relationships. He compares Hill Street Blues, the first mainstream multi-storyline prime-time show, with Starsky and Hutch before it and The Sopranos after it. There is no doubt: We’ve gotten far better at parsing interwoven plot lines and making sense of plots that aren’t laid out for us like mackerels. Likewise, video games, he says, have gotten a bad rap because of their content, while once again their structure has been ignored. They teach us how to make decisions in complex environments, he says. Steve’s quite wonderful at analyzing precisely the ways in which games, tv shows, and, to a lesser degree, movies demand more from us than before — his examples of “multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks,” for example, are so insightful that they’re funny.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Steve is right about that. But does pop complexity make us smarter? Here he gets more speculative, suggesting that the rise in the average IQ might well be correlated with the way our culture is training us to be more actively intelligent. The causality is hard to prove, and Steve proceeds properly tentatively. We certainly have gotten smarter at following entertainments. Does that mean that we’ve gotten smarter outside of watching TV and playing video games? Or are we only better at following the new rules of TV narrative and video play? Common sense and intuition make me think that Steve is right: The complexifying of pop culture is making us smarter. But then I look at the election results and wonder. We seem more impatient with nuance than ever before in the political realm. Is pop culture training us to be smarter about anything except pop culture?

So, if it’s a persuasive essay, am I persuaded?

1. That pop culture is getting more complex and requires more involvement to understand? 100%.

2. That this is making us smarter outside of pop culture? I lean that way but I’m not 100% convinced. Steve acknowledges the difficulty of proving either the fact or the causality.

3. That we should be more positive about pop culture? Definitely. Even so, I think Steve occasionally underplays the value of the old media that compete for our time. Although he’s careful to say that he is not claiming books have less value than games and TV, I think for rhetorical purposes he doesn’t give books their due. Despite an hilarious few pages about how books would look if video games had come first, books do something that video games, TV, theater and films don’t do very well: Show us the world as it appears to someone else. Those media let us view how people different from us act in the world as it appears to them, but only in books do we actually live in that world. This, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, has moral value. Steve refers to this quality of books briefly at the end, but it struck me as ass-covering. And he misses the opportunity to talk about it while developing his argument. For example, in Part One he writes:

Most video games take place in worlds that are deliberately fanciful in nature, and even the most realistic games can’t compare to the vivid, detailed illusion of reality that novels or movies concoct for us. But our lives are not stories, at least in the present tense – we don’t passively consume a narrative thread….Traditional narratives have much to teach us, of course: they can enhance our powers of communication, and our insight into the human psyche. But if you were designing a cultural form explicitly to train the cognitive muscles of the brain…” (p. 58 of the non-final bound galleys)

To my mind, that seriously underplays the value of books and narratives. Great novels reveal a world; calling that an “illusion” misses the point, like saying Rembrandt’s portraits look like their subjects and leaving it at that. To my way of thinking, the most important lesson of narratives isn’t that they give insight into our psyches or teach us how to communicate but that they show us that events unfold: The end was contained in the beginning but not in a way that we could have predicted. Narrative is about ambiguity and emergence, and I suspect that Steve, the Brown-educated, lit-crit scholar and author of Emergence – buy it today! – knows that. Had he kept that aspect of books in mind during the section on video games, for example, his point about the complex hierarchy of aims in the game Zelda would have been less convincing. Sure, we make decisions in games based on a nested stack of goals, and we learn the rules of the virtual worlds we’re exploring. But those goals and rules are ultimately knowable and completely expressible. Although Half Life 2 is, as Steve points out, far more complex than the previous generation’s Pac-Man, for all its amazing physics and integrated puzzles and pretty good pixelated acting, HL2 gives us a toy world. The world of Emma Bovary, on the other hand, doesn’t resolve to rules and puzzles. It’s messy, ambiguous, and truly complex. Of course Steve knows this, but he underplays it when pointing out the hidden complexity of video games.

Now, Steve is not asking us to decide between books and contemporary pop culture. He obviously loves books. He wants to defend pop culture by pointing out values in its structure that we’ve missed as we’ve focused on its often-offensive content. And this he does brillliantly. And entertainingly. This book is so much fun to read. All I’m saying is that in making his case, he undervalues the old culture, which might otherwise have taken just a couple of lumens off the buff-job he’s done on the new one.

Let me be unambiguous in my recommendation: Read this book. It will change the way you view pop culture. And you will enjoy every page and every surprising turn of thought. [Technorati tags: ebisgy SteveJohnson]

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This is from the fine-print crawl on p. 26 of the new issue of Computer Gaming World:

Author Cory Doctorow is promoting his new novel witha virtual book tour. His first stop? The MMO Second Life.

The new book is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Cory promoted his previous book via Second Life. This time, though, Second Lifers are trying to create a book object in-world that they can read, with turnable pages, since Cory donated a copy of the text to them.

Not to mention that it’s so cool to come across Cory’s name in CGW.

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The Boston Phoenix this week runs an excerpt from Dave Van Ronk‘s memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street. The piece is about how Van Ronk lost control of his arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun, first to Dylan and then toThe Animals. Van Ronk was not on the Lessig side of the copyright battle. Anyway, I bring this up because Van Ronk ends by saying that late in life he discovered that the song isn’t about a whore house. It’s about the Orleans Parish women’s prison.

Add it to the annals of busted folksongnomies. [Technorati tags: vanronk risingsun]

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Fill in the blanks with answers within an order of magnitude and win the satisfaction of having guessed right:

One in ___ people who hit a moose are killed, compared with one in ___ who hit a deer…”

USAToday, April 15, 2005, “Moose brake for no one…” by Trudy Tynan

Select between the X’s to see the answer:
X     Deer: 1 in 75 …. Moose: 1 in 5,000     X [NOTE: Be sure to reverse the answers once you’ve revealed them because I, um, totally screwed this up. Sorry.]

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I got a preview DVD of a documentary about Enron that’s about to be released. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will remind you just how shameless the Enron guys were. Rather than dwelling on the thousands of people who lost their retirement money, it focuses primarily on the the conscious, willing, and intentional fraud Enron’s executives executed. The movie takes us step by step through the games the execs played, as if they couldn’t believe that anything guys as smart as them did could possibly be wrong. These were first class bastards.

The format of the movie is conventional: Some talking heads, some insider footage of rah-rah corporate meetings…although the footage Bushes senior and junior shot to pass their good wishes to one of the execs is a pretty startling reminder just how close Kennyboy and the Bush family are. The documentary takes us step by step down the path that led to Enron going from boom in the good sense to boom in the bad sense.

At 110 minutes, it felt a little long to me, and some of the stock footage (e.g., a guy in freefall) and music choices struck me as too predictable. But it tells quite a story. We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.

The movie will be released on April 22. [Technorati tag: enron]

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Between five years in the 1990s, how many attendees per year were injured by foul balls hit during baseball games in Fenway Park? A correct answer is any within 10x up or down. Oh, that’s too easy. Make it 5x.

Select between the X’s to see the answer:
X     From 36 to 53     X

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