Our local public radio station, WBUR, just ran a piece about corporate execs who are in rock bands. (It includes a mention of my friend Jon Cahill, who by day is a graphic designer, and who designed the splendid cover for my non-splendid children’s novel, but who at night plays in The Limitations.)

It makes me wonder. My parents’ music sounded old-fashioned to me when I was a kid. I don’t think my generation’s music — The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel, to list some prototypes — sounds nearly as old fashioned to our kids. Sure, there was something sui generis about the Beatles, but Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman (more prototypes) also made remarkable and complex music, although it took me until my late forties to recognize that.

Why has my generation’s music stood up so well? Why doesn’t it sound as old-fashioned to our kids as the theme music for the Our Gang series?

[Tags: music generations ]

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Hypothesis: Entertainments in which the actors are visibly having a good time with one another, and are winking at the audience, don’t age well.

Evidence: Rat Pack movies. Burt Reynolds movies. Jimmy Fallon sketches.

Evidence to the contrary: ___________?

[Tags: entertainment movies ]

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From an article in the Boston Globe — by a reporter who saw the trick done in the flesh — here’s a video from the site of Bruce Kalver, magician:

[Tags: magic optical_illusions ]

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My wife and I saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park last night so you won’t have to.

I’m about to tell you what the movie is about, but I won’t go further than what you’ll read in the typical capsule review. So, if you don’t want to know that, please count this as a [SPOILER ALERT].

The movie is about a teen-ager who may or may not be involved in what may or may not be a fairly random-sounding murder. It’s told in a jumbled-up chronological order. It’s not a murder mystery, though. It’s focused tightly — and literally, since much of the rest of the frame is often blurred — on the boy’s day-to-day coping with the maybe-murder. And here’s the key to the movie’s ultimate failure: If you assembled the pieces chronologically, it’d be clear that it utterly does not address the moral, psychological, and spiritual consequences of the boy’s involvement in the movie’s central event. The disentangling is not of the boy’s feelings or culpability but of a timeline arbitrarily snaggled by the film-maker. He cuts up the narrative simply to keep something from the viewers. That’s a cheap way to manufacture revelation.

The result is a movie that is told from no one’s point of view. The boy remains a cipher. We don’t think he’s heartless or psychotic. He seems to be simply emotionally guarded the way many teens are. He is effectively portrayed as a subordinate member of his social group, under the wing of a dominant friend, and appealingly nervous about hanging with the hardcore guys at the local illegal skateboarding park. But we don’t get past his bangs and fetching face. We don’t know why he is heartless to his girlfriend. An important event with his girlfriend (no spoilers here!) is shot carefully so we don’t get any sense of how the boy felt about it. We don’t see any emotional change before and after the movie’s central event. We don’t see him wrestling with the consequences in any except the most pedestrian ways. You could edit out the central event and not affect the movie.

Maybe Van Sant is trying to show us a teen who is so alienated that not even an event as horrific as the one he shows us — an intense and graphic scene out of a horror movie — can get a response from him. If so, it’s got to be an indictment of an entire generation, or perhaps of the teen years themselves, for Van Sant seems to tag the protagonist as typical to a fault. Are we supposed to think that teenagers are that impervious to events outside their own narcissistic sphere? If so, then this movie is Van Sant saying “I just don’t get kids today.” But I don’t think that’s his point. I think he thinks he’s showing us the turmoil under the skin.

Except he forgets about the part where he shows us the turmoil under the skin.

* * *

By the way, Ted Fry of the Seattle Times is among those who disagree with me. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Gus Van Sant’s capper to a trilogy of experiments in elliptical narrative and lyrical structure is a masterful triumph of art, craft and empathy for the complicatedness of being a real teenager. With “Paranoid Park,” Van Sant has solidified his niche as a singular American film auteur whose vision melds formal skill and abstract invention with an intuitive sense of the poetry movies can exploit to convey their unique interpretation of life.

Yeah, that’s what I meant. [Tags: movies van_sant paranoid_park reviews ]

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Big deal. My own algorithm for solving the Rubik’s cube puzzle is faster and requires only a hammer and a quarter pound of superglue.

(But seriously: Wow.) [Tags: legos rubik ]

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West Wing helped keep the Bush years from shriveling my hope to the size of a tick carcass by reminding me that government could — at least in some alternative universe — be smart, fact-based, principled, and for the people. So, of course Obama’s rise has reminded me and millions of other West Wing fans of the Matt Santos (= Jimmy Smits) campaign in the last season.

Now it turns out (according to the Guardian) that the West Wing writers based Santos on Obama, at least to some degree.

Go Santos Obama!

[Tags: obama matt_santos west_wing politics entertainment ]

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Remember Grokster? It was an attempt to be Napster without having a centralized database of songs and users. It was shut down by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.

Go to Grokster.com now and you are not only told that Grokster is no more but that you are at risk simply by having gone to the site.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 123.123.123.123 AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.

(The IP address they give is the right one.)

The site then suggests:

In the meantime, please visit www.respectcopyrights.com and www.musicunited.org to learn more about copyright.

RespectCopyrights.com really should be called FearCopyrights.com. It’s an MPAA scare site that doesn’t let you know you still have rights when using copyrighted material. (It captures the back arrow key in your browser, which is not only annoying, controlling and disrespectful, it’s a way of driving up the hit count.) MusicUnited is an music industry pro-DRM propaganda site. Hey, it’s their right. It’s a free country. Sort of.

[Tags: copyright copyleft grokster riaa mpaa broadcast_flag drm ]

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Finishing Crysis has confirmed my disappointment that PC Gamer chose it as Game of the Year, especially with Bioshock as a contender. Jeesh, what’s a game got to do to win Game of the Year around here?

Crysis was good. The graphics are the most photo realistic ever, even though I had to stop ’em down and revert to DX9 to run the game — and this is with a high end machine and graphics card. But, the plot is totally familiar, the enemies were derivative — Matrix-y vermin, HalfLifey striders — , and the game play was fun until it ran out of steam in the final acts where increasing the size of a boss replaces having a new idea. Overall, Crysis is good but not great, much less best of the year.

Bioshock, on the other hand, was far more creative. It was an improbable yet convincing world, beautifully rendered, with fantastic sound and terrific comic acting. It was involving not just as a narrative but as a place. Yes, there were some nits ,the DRM was especially insulting, and the gameplay was occasionally off — solving the pipe flow puzzle gets tiresome after the first couple of dozen times — and the very last scene sort of sucked, but Bioshock violated rules in the name of creativity and actually had some ideas in it.

In the fullness of time — now — the crowning of Crysis over Bioshock will be seen as the folly it is.

PS: The Orange Box was also better than Crysis, and is officially your PC Gaming Value of the Year. [Tags: crysis bioshock orange_box pc_games games ]

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The Berkman Center has an amazing string of events set up this spring, in part as a celebration of the Center’s tenth year. You can see the list here.

And don’t forget Monday evening’s performance by and conversation with Brad Sucks, a thoroughly webby musician with a pure heart and low self-esteem. It’ll be in Griswold Hall Room 110 at Harvard Law. It’s free and open to all; rsvp to [email protected].

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This Mon, Feb 11, at 7pm, there will be a Very Special Web of Ideas: A concert by and conversation with Brad Sucks (AKA Brad Turcotte), the webbiest musician on the Web. We’ll listen to some songs performed live and talk with Brad about what the battle over “business models” means to someone making music.

Note that we’re not holding this one in the Berkman Center. It’ll be in Griswold Hall Room 110 at Harvard Law. It’s free and open to all; rsvp to [email protected].

[Tags: berkman brad_sucks brad_turcotte music RIAA ]

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