Monthly Archives for February 2017

On The Cultural Divide: Exactly Whose Bubble?

Okay, so this is on my mind this morning: Real America. The thing that’s evoked when certain people talk about why Clinton lost and why Trump won. The thing certain people slap down on the table whenever Democrats are discussed vis a vis Republicans. The thing that certain people always bring up in discussions of the Rust Belt decline. You know—Real America.

It’s not so much shorthand as an impossibly dense, collapsed star. The term simultaneously refers to politics, elections, economics, religion and cultural values.

Real America—there’s just so damn much to unpack there, but what I woke up thinking about is the Real descriptor. Because the implication is that whatever falls outside of it is, well, unreal. In this, it’s similar to the conceptual Jiu Jitsu of Pro Life: because if you’re not “for” life, then you’re, well . . .

Thus it only seems fair to give Real America a reality check: exactly how connected to, er, the real world are its bundled assumptions?

Is there any sort of credible evidence that steel manufacturing and coal mining will not only return, but somehow return intact in all their respective mid-20th-Century glories?

Is there any credible evidence that the relentless advance of automation and its attendant disintermediation will slow, much less reverse? Automation destroyed manual manufacturing first, but it’s also disintermediated publishing, animation, the Media, the US Postal Service and consumer purchases.

Is there any credible evidence that the elevation of ignorance and anti-expertise is in any way a good thing? When you need to have a brain tumor removed, do you want a business tycoon or a deeply knowledgeable surgeon at the other end of the scalpel? When you remodel a bathroom, do you turn to Fred, the accountant, who has never built anything at all, ever, but who has a real passion for the idea of building—or do you call an experienced contractor with references? Or, say, you find yourself 30,000 feet in the air, cruising at 350 miles an hour—who do you want in the cockpit: a model plane enthusiast or, you know, a pilot? When confronted by complex, potentially life-or-death jobs, who in the real world reaches for the ignorant, non-expert? You don’t and I don’t.

Is there any credible evidence that making the freedom to own a gun so absolute that potential terrorists and the insane have equal access to weapons is working out splendidly? Mass shooting and gun death statistics resoundingly say no.

Is there any credible evidence that who someone else is having sexual relations with is in any way a threat to your own sexuality, relationship or marriage? Would it be rational to say, “Oh my god—the folks in the house three doors down painted their bedroom the worst shade of blue, and now my own interior decoration is completely invalidated.”

Is there any credible evidence that the interconnectedness of the world will somehow be arrested, much less rolled back? You have a smartphone made in China with apps possibly developed in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere. So nationalize the manufacture of your phone and the development of said apps—are they still affordable? The point being we all want relatively inexpensive consumer goods—which is a direct consequence of an interconnected global market. And if people are now bitching about an increase in their ACA premiums, wait until they’re confronted with a now $1500 replacement for their old phone.

Bottom line, or rather, top-line question: just how much actual reality in contained in Real America? Like Pro Life, the name has been chosen in attempt to make the contained assumptions unquestionable. But they can be questioned, and are—every day, every week, every year by just moving through life. The grim and brutal reality is that if your steel mill has been gone for the past 20 years, there is probably no chance of it suddenly materializing again at the same convenient distance of your old commute. It’s a simple, nearly irrefutable fact.

I’d be less annoyed with the Real America moniker if it were more accurate—something along the lines of Aspirational Time-Traveling America, because in end all of the politics, elections, economics, religion and cultural values currently packed into Real America comes down to this: a genuine desire to live in the United States circa 1902.

If this were 1902, almost all the frustrations of Real America instantly go away. But exactly how grounded in reality is a regional desire to live 115 years ago? As someone who lives in Unreal America, I’m simply not sure if I need to make wholesale political accommodations for this point of view—it’s Amish-quaint at best and cult-delusional at worst.

On ‘Moonlight’ As Cinematic Nexus

A few thoughts on the other side of last night’s Academy Awards. Moonlight, my favorite film of the year, remarkably got most of the honor it deserved. Remarkable because over the last 20 years or so, the Academy Awards and I have increasingly parted ways regarding quality cinema.

This morning I pondered exactly what it was about Moonlight that was so deeply satisfying. My answer—and yours most likely will differ—is that the film represents a near-perfect meshing of dialogue with the visual. Put another way, it is a breathtaking example of the writing axiom “Show, don’t tell”—a dictate that, weirdly, is often ignored in mainstream filmmaking.

You can’t just listen to Moonlight to appreciate it, nor can you just settle back and watch it. It seems so simple, doesn’t? Mainstream film as the equal meeting, contrasting and melding of words and images. So why does it happen so infrequently?

Way too often—even now in the early 21st century—what mainstream movies are serving up is either an illustrated radio drama or compositions with with discrete commentary, as if we’ve opted for the audio tour of an art exhibition.

I’m looking at you, Aaron Sorkin—and you, too, Terrence Malick.

Sorkin personifies the exposition-as-dialogue school of film. His characters have no inner life, only a series of nonstop monologues about what’s they’re thinking and what that may mean for you, the other characters and them. And when they’re not talking about themselves, they’re opining on the metaphoric significance of their situations.

Malick quite simply wants to be a painter—and that’s very cool, except that he’s a filmmaker. Take Sorkin, turn him inside out, and you’ve got Malick.

In retrospect, this explains much of my hatred of superhero movies and the films of Woody Allen: For me, both are the worst of cinematic worlds—exposition-as-dialogue surrounded by singleminded and clinically astonishing and / or pretty visuals. Blatancy inside of blatancy, like the motion picture equivalent of Russian dolls.

Moonlight, on the other hand, got the balance exactly right. Evocative, dialogue by characters struggling to in some way articulate what’s going on in their heads met cinematography that wordlessly deepened the narrative even as it helped advance it. And thus Moonlight was robbed when La La Land won the Oscar for best cinematography because the visuals of La La Land were Prettified Blatancy, even in the context of film musicals—and most especially when compared to the roving, observing camerawork in Moonlight.

But on the other hand, Moonlight taking home the best picture Oscar has given me a tiny bit of hope that maybe, fingers crossed, Hollywood’s implacable desire to replicate successes will look beyond the coming-of-age take or even the African-American cinema peg and understand that the perfect meshing of dialogue and visuals is the main source of the film’s greatness.

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On Starting: Tap-Tap-Tap: Can You Hear Me?

Testing, testing, testing . . .

Can you hear me way at the back? How about over there on the side?

Good. Then we can proceed.

So right at the top, let’s talk concept and ponder differences.

This is intended to be a daily journal–a first-thing-in-the-morning affair, banged-out with a cup of coffee before the real work day begins. It’s less diary than a virtual commonplace book written as much for me as any public that may be out there looking over my shoulder.

And because it’s a side venture that I see more as notes than entertainment, the posts will mostly be (by necessity) first drafts–checked for typos (sorta/kinda), but not reworked into Shining Presentable Things that you can take home to the parents with no fear of disapproval–at least in terms of the prose-craft. See PixelSlinger as live-in-studio jazz: full of improvisation, instantly integrated mistakes and unexpected solos.

I’m the proprietor of CultureHack, Turbulent Indigo and a couple of respectively related Twitter accounts. PixelSlinger is Another Thing Entirely because it won’t regularly feature photos or excerpts from a novel-in-progress or political essays or media critiques or humorous essays.

Regularly–that’s the functional word here. Because on occasion, one or more of the above may pop up here–but, and this is important, only in the context of what the free-associative-tide of a particular day washed up. The intention of PixelSlinger is to be a random capture of things on my mind at the moment–stuff that currently hasn’t found a home over at the other two blogs and Twitter accounts.

As such, I expect this to be an unruly place with few neat content silos. I also predict that the lengths of the posts here will vary wildly. I’ll try to write pieces that take no more than 30 minutes to lash-together (because Real Work awaits), but I also envision that if I have something concise to say about an obsession du jour and can capture it in a single paragraph, that’s what I’ll do. Why waste your time or mine?

Given all this, the categories on this site will be based on type rather than topic. If I have topical baskets waiting there in the sidebar, I’ll probably feel obligated to fill them, however irregularly. And that would defeat the purpose of this place. Thus, you’ll find no “Art” or “Film”or “Society” categories here. But almost certainly you’ll come across posts about art and film and society–as they suggest themselves to me; as they inevitably have their turns as obsessions du jour. For the purposes of site search, I foresee creating a consistent keyword system for this site that will add the needed granularity while keeping the categories as broad as possible. Think variation of our old friend the hashtag.

Okay, that’s it. The launch and the premise set-up. We’re good to go. I’ll leave this post pinned to the front page for a few weeks so late-comers will understand what’s going on here.

See you tomorrow morning.