Things I Don't Hate

This year's Ig Nobels are out!

This is an astute move. I cannot tell how pleased I was by the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to invalidate patents on isolated human genes or alleles. I don't know how extensive patent trolling really is, but many of the high-profile patent-infringement lawsuits seem to involve it, to the public detriment (e.g., NTP's threat to interrupt BlackBerry service). To me it is a symptom of what seems a legalistic (rather than just) economic and political climate, leading to public injury. Anyway, the first link of this bullet won't be a panacea and it isn't reform, but it's a start. If only there were a way to do something similar with copyright.

What I think of movies of within 3 months of now:

• There are too damn many 3D movies. A movie that is unappealing in 2D is sure as hell not going to be appealing with a price premimum of 25–50%. And here I'm only referring to new releases: 3D re-releases are even less appealing.
• Limited-release flicks that interested me enough to see: The Intouchables, To Rome With Love, Chicken With Plums, Farewell My Queen, Moonrise Kingdom
• Flicks to the opening of which I am looking forward: Anna Karenina, Frankenweenie
• Flicks the to the opening of which I am indifferent: Beasts of the Southern Wild (despite the fact that the little girl reminds me very much of my niece), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Life of Pi, Hotel Transylvania (I'm not actually indifferent to this: I'm hostile), ParaNorman, End of Watch

The Heart and Soul of Springfield is the Maison Derrière

So apparently The Playboy Club is cancelled. And also apparently it was subversive, if by subversive one means "taking timid steps towards reflecting contemporary social reality." Of course, Mad Men (from whose notes The Playboy Club wholeheartedly cribbed) did it first; but chickened out (after nearly 3 seasons; plus, it hasn't yet returned from its hiatus so maybe it doesn't count as a TV show any more). On the other hand, Mad Men doesn't suck, which was The Playboy Club's problem from the beginning. And I do mean beginning: I only lasted 15 minutes into the first episode before abandoning the show as an uninspired drama hoping its sex appeal would conceal that fact.

The thing is, The Playboy Club was doomed by trying to ride phantom coattails. Mad Men's coat isn't made of sex appeal. I dislike pretty much all of the characters on M. M., and I can't say I'm all that interested in the advertising industry. But the show is ethnographically captivating (in the same way that 1993's The Age of Innocence is, although for different reasons). I can't find the ref but I read somewhere that M. M. is uncommonly popular among higher-income viewers. The appeal of M. M. is not that of the average television drama. T. P. C.'s first episode was about a murder, which seems to be standard prime-time–drama fare: its main differences from other p.-t.–d.'s are being set in the 1960s and having its women (pardon me: "girls") spend most of their screen time in their 1960s underwear. It was plotted and costumed for the typical p.-t.–d. viewership but the marketing tried to exploit M. M.'s sophistication, suggesting it was a show for M. M.'s audience. Which it wasn't; it was M. M. for the Six-Packs. But the Six-Packs don't watch M. M., so that wasn't a draw (OK, OK, I'll be nuanced: some were disgusted by the association with the porn industry, some thought it would be too snooty, and some watched anyway because boobies); and even before it aired it was clear T. P. C. was going to be tawdry, which turned off the M. M. viewership. Plus it, you know, sucked. So those of the M. M. viewership who took a test drive didn't purchase.

The cancellation of T. P. C. might have something to do with wingnut-dominated cultural discourse, but I'm inclined to think it had more to do with the success (particularly the lack thereof) of the show (which may have had something to do with wingnut-dominated cultural discourse but I suspect had more to do with not being something anybody wanted to watch). Networks might be a little more sensitive to the explicit demands of the right than to the hopes of the left, but the dollar drowns us all out. It was an orphan bastard.

Musicals Are the Lowest Form of Entertainment

Last night I watched the 1947 musical Good News. It made my playlist because June Allyson starred and she fascinates me; I first saw her in 1955's Strategic Air Command (a weirdly propagandistic flick about the importance of America's having a strategic bombing force), and her hoarse voice struck me as discordant to the 1950s feminine ideal that her character represented, such that I thought it curious that she had been cast. (I have a similiarly inexplicable fascination with Gloria Grahame because of her upper lip. Seriously.)

So, anyway, I watched the '47 version of Good News. I have a friend who loathes musicals because the songs and dances add so little to the story. I don't entirely share that opinion but in this case I agree with him. Really, the story here was no more than a means to connect the songs and dances into an intelligible narrative. At that, at least, they succeeded. (This is not to say the narrative is plausible, merely that it can be understood.) After watching it the only things I really liked were June Allyson, her party dresses, her enviable ruffle-tipped peep-toe sandals in the final number, and a fine-looking Mel Tormé in a bit part.

The DVD's special features included two musical numbers from the 1930 movie. One of the excerpts begins with the end of a narrative scene and I noticed, as I often have with movies from the twenties and earlier, that the acting seemed very much like stage performances captured on film (or tape, these days). I am only a dilettante in movie history as in so much else, so I don't know whether this next impression is accurate; but while I have encountered a few perfunctory nods to the theatrical antecedents of film performances, it doesn't seem to have much attention paid to it. Rather, the things that seem to attract attention are the early novelties and the developments that have influenced subsequent filmmaking. If this is really so in film history, I wonder if it's just that the stage influences on early movies dissipated as moviemaking came into its own, or that the older movies best remembered today were among the earliest departures from the stage tradition, or that the stage tradition was simply so pervasive early on as not to be thought worth of notice (which also fits in with the earliest-departures notion). For example, I don't remember even Birth of a Nation for those of its stage-like qualities, although I do recall their being present.

At any rate, the musical excerpts from the thirties version of Good News seemed Vaudevillian, at least compared to what I know of Vaudeville. It's interesting to me to think how much more varied Vaudeville seems to have been, than the general perception (which still serves as my default perception of Vaudeville) admits. One of the musical excerpts, of the title song performance, has a guy doing an exhibition dance of truly impressive moves. When, at a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, I first heard of Valentin le Désossé, I had a hard time imagining movements suggestive of bonelessness. Prior to that I'd seen Tommy Tunes on an evening talk-show, where he spoke glowingly of Vaudevillian dancers' now-lost abilities and demonstrated the only move he'd been able to work out, which was cool, in the way that Jackson's moon-walk was cool. But it didn't seem especially impressive, and certainly not the cartoon bonelessness of Popeye or Olive Oyl when in the clutches of Bluto (or Brutus. I never have understood that). But, man, that guy in the title song solo dance? Now I understand Valentin the Boneless. That. Was. Awesome.

What also interested me about the thirties-version excerpts was the gracelessness of much of the dancing. It wasn't at all like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. It seemed to be either freakishly flexible, as above, or coarsely bony (and borderline naughty in consequence). The latter gracelessness is also an unexpected contrast with midcentury notions of femininity, and makes me wonder how different the implicit cultural theory of gender (in the abstract) was from that of today. Granted, it was the Roaring Twenties, girls wore scandalously short dresses, and publicly drank & smoked like fishes & chimneys. But there's the perception of that as a foray into rebellious freedom in the age of Prohibition, versus as a range of structural variation within the concept of femininity that isn't part of the, or at least my, default perception of early 20th century tolerable women's behavior. And this is not even considering the possible class dimension, which now that I have, was probably of considerable significance (so that, just as extinction means that evolution results in greater variation around ever more limited body plans, per Gould's Wonderful Life, so cultural history may exhibit subsequent moral [in the sense of mores] expansions of a limited subset of preceding moral ranges).

One thing that both movies did unusually well was to impress me with the real-life sizes of the men, women, and settings. I didn't at all have that larger-than-life feeling about the images on screen, and not simply because I was watching them on a smallish (for today) picture-tube television. But really, the 1930s version of Good News appears, on the basis of two musical excerpts, to be both more enjoyable and more interesting than the 1947 version.

As Intelligence Goes Up, Happiness Often Goes Down

Yesterday I took in The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. The movie itself isn't depressing, but its parallels are. The most depressing one by far is my conviction that the only population that learned anything from the episode is the politicians, including Barack 'Look Ahead Not Back' Obama. As history has so conclusively demonstrated, if you ignore history everything will be just fine.

If God be just – and that's a big "if" – there is a special Hell awaiting the vast majority of post-World War 2 Americans (including me), Easter notwithstanding.

When Aliens Attack

I finally made a burger that I would rather make again than go to a burger place. The secret seemed to be jamming up the heat so that the burgers were cooked to my liking in four minutes total. Toppings were mayonnaise, American cheese, and lettuce. Mmm, were they delish.

I ate them while watching Evolution, a comedy starring David "Foxx Mulder" Duchovny that I missed in theaters but finally remembered to netflix. Storywise it was a bit slow in the beginning although there were some great academic jokes and some joking allusions to the source of Duchovny's celebrity. But when it finally picked up it really picked up, and it turned out not to develop along the lines I initially suspected. At some point I grasped that, and realized how it was going to develop, but I still didn't understand what the movie is. It was fairly late – second half, certainly, perhaps well in – before I finally did: it's Ghostbusters, through and through. Quite remarkably so, in fact. And although it is not Ghostbusters's peer, it has the advantage of not being a 30-year-old pop-culture icon.

Dang! I just looked on the DVD sleeve, and learned that it's a 2001 movie! It came out that long ago?! I thought it was 2005 or 2006! I was still in grad school in 2001, finishing my data collection and beginning the write-up! Plus, I've been with Netflix for three years, and it was only a couple of weeks ago that I remembered to add the movie to my queue! Dang!