This Internet Has Been Rated G

I recently read an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times entitled "You Can't Say That on the Internet" all about the de facto censorship of the Web through algorithmic gatekeepers that are too dumb to know the difference between artful nudity (A Modigliani nude let's say) and the crass porno crap most of aim to avoid. The author, Evgeny Morozov, cites a number of examples, but the two that stood out to me were Apple's censorship of the word Vagina in Naomi Wolf's latest book title (they displayed the word as V****a) and the blacklisting of about 400 words (from bisexual to swastika) from Google's autocomplete function. While these examples may seem relatively trite, it's the underlying cultural shift they represent that brings me pause.

America is no stranger to censorship; book burnings and blacklisting have been a part of our culture for at least as long as we've been a nation. However, these acts were committed by other people and were usually public and with clear perpetrators and motives, making them easier for free speech crusaders to target and fight. But how does one fight a math equation? With the consolidation of most internet activity into the hands of a few large corporations (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google), our online behavior is becoming more and more subject to the whims of these equations which make value judgments on our words without applying the human filter of context, judgment, and discussion. And for the most part, we don't even realize it.

My mind tends to wander to worst case scenarios fairly quickly, and in this case I foresee a dark future where our dependence on the internet has led us to cede our indignation over censorship and desire to protect our free speech to corporate automatons, whose ostensible power slowly strips our culture of all provocation. We can't let algorithmic drones be the arbiters of language, content, and copyright. While they can help us manage the awesome breadth and depth of internet fodder, we can't automatize the whole system. There needs to be human oversight to protect our humanity. A sanitized internet would reflect a sanitized society, and as a creator and producer I can't think of anything more scary.

On The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

For all the folksy sentimentality of The Curious Case of Benhjamin Button, I still find a strange and stirring poetry to it. It’s usually within a science fiction or fantasy construct that I find the most intriguing or poignant lessons about humanity. These bizarre and fantastical situations, and how we imagine we would deal with them, foster a sentiment that feels very real, more real than in many other standard dramas or stories. Perhaps it is in the imagining that we lay bare our dreams and desires, our greatest fears and weaknesses, our attempts to understand how the world works. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button poses a grossly theoretical existential crisis that gets at the very root of mortality and humanity. In Benjamin, humanity epitomizes the deity of time. But not only are we the supreme representation of that formless idol, we are also its single masterwork--its Pieta, its Mona Lisa. We should accept ourselves—the myriad of emotions and experiences that make up a single human lifetime—as a series of brushstrokes on the greatest canvas unimaginable. Our choices, our feelings, our connections with others, bring texture and color and life to this lone work of art that is the ultimate definition of Time. Fear does nothing but make you as the brushstroke less joyful—but the paint meets the canvas all the same. Better to try and hold on to the idea that every moment is worth the same as every other—that they all add to this painting in equal dimension and force. Better to enjoy as many of those moments as possible, so as to make each stroke a little less painful in the application. To see this, it takes an aberration in humanity--a Benjamin Button. When our imagination extends outward, we are finally able to look inward.

Thoughts on "Other Desert Cities

A couple weeks ago I saw Other Desert Cities, Jon Robin Baitz’s latest entry to the crowded Parthenon of dysfunctional family dramedies.  In the play, the burden of a misunderstood tragedy, perpetuated by a secret, has caused innumerable tiny fissures in the foundation of a great American family, leading to its eventual collapse and rebirth.  And while this definitely rises above the melodrama of his television show Brothers and Sisters, the similarities did give me pause at first.

In simplest terms, the story is about a daughter who returns home at Christmas to visit her parents, aunt and brother. A once-promising novelist, she announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family's history - a wound that her parents don't want reopened.All the character archetypes are familiar—the sister is the whiny, ubereducated woah-is-me liberal, her younger brother, the overlooked child who self-anesthetizes via superficiality and a biting sarcastic streak, mom and dad of the old republican guard, and the crazy alcoholic Aunt who likes to dish out truths but can’t take them herself.

In the first act the roles feel somewhat stale and predictable.  While the dialogue is snappy and fun, the situation feels worn and stale.  Rachel Griffiths, Justin Kirk and Judith Light bring little dimension to their roles.  They come off as flat, and not particularly engaging.  What saves the first act from mediocrity is the wonderfully bitchy matriarch Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach, whose nuanced performance as head of the family was moving and believable.  Part Ronald Reagan, part Swede Levov, this character’s layered complicated role and conflicting sense of self comes through in his constant stopping and starting of thoughts, his pleading with his wife and child, his desire above all to keep the past dead and buried.  Here we start to realize that all is not as it seems, that the image of republican rigidness and self-righteousness his son and daughter see is merely a role, one that in the final act of the play is effectively turned on its head.  It is revealed that how we have come to understand his character is really just a single perspective, lacking all the evidence.

Few plays have pulled off the twist ending with more aplomb than Other Desert Cities.  These old guard conservatives are a lot more complicated than the one-dimensional caricatures their children see.  Families, like politics, operate on the same type of carefully constructed fictions that require utter devotion to in order to survive.

The Gang's All Here: The Muppets Movie

The other night I took a walk down memory lane. The vehicle was The Muppets, a surprisingly good movie musical about the things that get left behind in our rush to be grownups. The gang was all there –Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie and Animal. And by the time I heard the bom bom bom of The Muppet Show theme song, I had already been transported well back into my childhood. How many movies these days allow us to live out our nostalgia intact, without ruining the very essence of the thing we miss? These muppets haven’t been dumbed down or tampered with or coaxed into playing some saccharine version of themselves. They may be a little older, a little banged up, but as soon they appear on screen its clear they have the same charming presence and quirky personalities as they did in their heyday.

The power of seeing your childhood victorious on screen can be an easy thrill, but it doesn’t have to come cheap, and with this film it sure doesn’t. Witty and at times venturing into the absurd, this muppets film is pure theatrical showmanship with a tinge of mania and desperation. What if Kermit doesn't succeed and the muppets lose their theater? The same fear is present for the filmmakers, who have been given the burden of one last chance to see if there’s still any love (or money) left in these characters. Fortunately, in Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segal’s deft hands, there appears to be life after death. They take a risk with Chris Cooper rapping, and with the chorus of chickens singing a G-rated version of Cee-lo Green's Fuck You, but both gambles turn out to integrate seamlessly into the fabric of what Muppetdom and this film are all about. The muppets live for the pure joy of entertaining and their happiness is infectious. I found myself wiping many tears of laughter and delight from my eyes and already making promises to myself to come back to see it again.

Cartier: "Painted Love"

Elegant execution. Sometimes, Art + Commerce do play nice.

Phantom Tollbooth Documentary!

I can't even begin to express how excited I am for this.  This book made me fall in love with language and fantasy in equal parts, and has taught me that being curious is always way more fun than feigning boredom.

First thoughts on Amor Towles "Rules of Civility"

Like all good writing, Amor Towles Rules of Civility deftly transports you into its intended environment. Here, it’s the chink chink of glasses, the heavy stench of cigarette smoke, and the bright baubles of the well-heeled classes of late 1930s New York. The mysterious but plucky Katey Kontent is our guide, and her fondness for Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is no accident. Even from 140 pages in, the comparisons to Pip are evident, but what keeps this from traveling toward an expected and unsurprising conclusion is the lack of idealism and naiveté with which Katey confronts her world. This doesn’t appear to be a bildungsroman. Not too far into the novel, it becomes clear that Katey has already reinvented herself once when she moved from the Russian ghetto of Brighton Beach to the prim but poor Mrs Martingale’s boarding house. The opportunity comes again for her and her friend Eve on New Years Eve in 1937, when they come across a wide-eyed, deep-pocketed New York blueblood. A series of events follow that bring Katey and Eve out of the Lower East Side and up Fifth Avenue, altering the course of their lives forever.

Only half way through the novel, I’m still in the dark as to where they end up (though we know from the Preface that Katey has made it to 1969 with a husband in tow), what’s lost in the journey, and whether it’s for better or worse. But the thrill of the era is captured so resplendently in each paragraph that it seemed a shame not to jot my thoughts down on impulse. Whether it turns into a great novel or is merely the best-written pitch for a film I’ve ever come across remains to be seen. Either way, it makes me thirsty for a dry martini and an extra hundred pages. I doubt I’ll be ready to leave the party by the time I get to the end.

Outside of Time and Space in Bombay Beach

Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo drag,
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes.
Wasn't making any great connections,
Wasn't falling for any intricate schemes.
Nothing that would pass inspection,
Just thinking of a series of dreams.
--Bob Dylan "Series of Dreams"

What defines a well-lived life? What makes a man rich? Or happy? Some version of these questions lies at the root of most cinematic endeavors, and Bombay Beach is no exception. The film takes place in an insular, dying, desert seascape outside of time, populated by atypical individuals who seem like they were plucked from the negatives of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans. The lives of this band of eccentrics have been written off by society as bleak and hopeless, but this very isolation and abandonment has cultivated a different, no less vibrant and loving community.

In the neighborhoods in and around Bombay Beach there is no Obama or Romney or Bachmann talk. There is no anxiety about “the future of things”. There is no media or marketing or malls.There is no constantly updating Facebook stream, or Linkedin profile, or rss feed. There is a dying sea and the sun and long stretches of road and sand. There are tin roofs and trailers. There is garbage and wire and flea-bitten mutts that snuggle with empty beer cans and restless children. But through the eyes of director Alma Har’el’s camera, Bombay Beach also contains magic and innocence and whimsy. There is deeply felt emotion and friendship. There are games of pretend and large group potlucks. Here, in this surreal place where time does not rush ceaselessly into the future, a moment is felt for its full weight. It's not a means to an end but is the end itself. While the lives of these economically marginalized folks are captured for what they are, Har’el finds a romantic spirit embedded. The film’s folksy and dreamy score complement a shooting style in which her subjects appear like mythical beings, entering shots larger than life, captured in the soft light of the magic hour, or up so close that every wrinkle and freckle is heavy with reverence.

And then there is the dancing. The choreographed moments dispersed throughout the film bring the already alien landscape of the Salton Sea further out of time, essentially constructing an alternate post-apocalyptic version of America that is breathtaking in its strangeness. We see the shadow of a large man and wife spin against the siding of house, and a group of children clasp hands in a choreographed dance of the game red rover. One of my favorite moments is a masked dance between two teen lovers in a gazebo lit up by Christmas lights. Somehow it doesn’t feel forced. Somehow it feels honest and beautiful.

Har’el’s Bombay Beach is graceful in its decrepitude and wise in its ignorance. Whether the residents profiled feel the same warm glow and magic she projects onto them and their lives is another story. Regardless, it is a strange and intriguing landscape so distant from the America I know. One I would very much like to visit, even if only in a dream.

Bombay Beach // Trailer from Alma Har'el on Vimeo.