Miscellaneous Outrage

Get Bent: an address to Hollywood in the 21st century

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments
Those of you who have followed this blog for more than a month or two have probably figured out by now that my posting frequency is, by and large, a function of my ire. Things have been pretty quiet recently, what with the economy bouncing back, the stock market at record highs, and now with gas below two dollars a gallon, it’s a pretty good time to be a while male in America. I mean, there’s still the whole “France Thing,” and our fair capitol’s not entirely consistent stance vis-a-vis the relative location of money and mouths, which is, of course, not to mention those knuckleheads in Nigeria. Fortunately cool heads tend to prevail, and the tears in my eyes every morning while I read the daily news really are probably just a sinus thing.

I’ll be sure to redouble my echinacea supplements right away.

Yep, chronic head cold aside there’s a lot to be thankful for in this coddled first world life I lead, but here in the Center of the Universe we do have the burden of remembering that First World Problems are still, technically, problems. And these are the sorts of problems that were really chapping my ass when I walked out of the most recent installment of the Hunger Games earlier this week.

Ok so before I get started, full disclosure: I never read the books, and so I’m both unable and unwilling to go down that rabbit hole of discussing how well a film interpreted the work of the novelist.

I did have some thoughts about the story and the film as it stands alone. I like to think that I followed right along with the not-at-all subtle critique of Western foreign policy in the 21st century, and I chuckled a little that the story was crafted for consumption by a community that is most closely analogous to the antagonistic themes throughout.

Stanley Tucci acted circles around James Franco as they each sculpted a caricature of Ryan Seacrest.

In fact, the acting in the Hunger Games trilogy is, by and large, excellent. I do have a soft spot for Jennifer Lawrence, Philip Seymour Hoffman (RIP), Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland, and whoever cast these films pretty much pulled together my fantasy acting team for making fun of the government. There are a lot of really great things to be said about these movies, but my overarching takeaway here can be summed up pretty concisely:

Fuck you.

That’s right. Fuck you, Francis Lawrence. And fuck you too, David Yates. And especially fuck you Mr. Peter Jackson. There’s been a troubling trend recently of adapting popular books to film and dragging them out as long as humanly possible, over as many films as the dues paying public will shell out. What the fuck is that? The Hobbit over three movies? Are you kidding me? That was the shortest book, dick.

There must be a lot of pressure to extend these high-dollar film dynasties over as many iterations as the people will tolerate. And for good reason, I guess, because people keep paying to see them. But they come at the cost of telling a story. For instance, I could endorse spreading The Hobbit across a mini-series affair if the indefatigable Mr. Jackson had managed to use his many hundreds of minutes to develop characters and plot, rather than descending for hours at a time into a self-indulgent circle jerk of CGI fight scenes and pithy one liners. Those of us who have it scratch our cartoon violence itch over Hannah-Barbera cartoons and Fruit Loops on Saturday mornings, thank you very much.

By treating a movie like a syndicated television drama and curtailing the story arc with a cliffhanger, candidly teasing the viewer to come back next week, filmmakers are degrading the movie watching tradition. The theater should be a place where viewers can allow themselves to succumb wholly for a few hours to the discretion and folly of the director. Where artists can craft the arc of a story and unfurl a human drama or slapstick comedy or whimsical fantasy. Episodes of film cheapen the experience.

And don’t get me wrong, some stories need more than two or three hours to be told. Lonesome Dove was a triumph, and to fit Michael Corleone’s plight into a single go would have cheated Puzio’s legacy into a glossed over cartoon. But Simon Wincer rightly chose an appropriate venue, and Coppola found a balance of long and intermediate scale story arcs and created one of the greatest achievements of the medium.

When a feature film ceases to hide its role as anything other than a 120 minute trailer for the next edition the artists have given up the trade to the marketing department. I find myself forced to draw a line in the sand. So here are my terms:

I will pirate every major blockbuster film that I feel unnecessarily prolongs its existence over multiple iterations. I will encourage others to do so. I will also log onto both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and leave it shitty reviews, regardless of how I feel about it.

I’m not so naive as to think that this will make any difference at all. But we’re in a place and time where I think it’s worthwhile to protect our right to say “fuck you” when it feels right.

Rage Revisited

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
I’ve been trying to quit, or at least spend much less time on Facebook recently. I’ve had a hard time cutting ties entirely because of certain promotional requirements, and I like being invited to things, and, frankly, most of the traffic to this site comes from there. I still find myself signing in once a week or so, and when I did so last night came to the stark conclusion that we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

No less than 80% of my newsfeed was occupied by VMA this, Miley Cirus that, and apparently Taylor Swift was adorable. You don’t say. Meanwhile, headlines elsewhere on the internet depicted a conversation that has been going something like this:

Syrian Civilians: Shit.
Syrian Military: That was totally not us.
Obama Administration: Are you really serious right now?
Putin Government: It’s cool, we’ll vouch for them.
Obama Administration: You have to be kidding.
DoD: Say I won’t.
Putin Government: You better not.
US Border Patrol: I do what I want, FTW! LOL!
Obama Administration: No, no, no. These people are different from those people. Stop looking over there.
Congress: C’mon, we’ve definitely demonstrated our ability to make controversial, time sensitive decisions. We really mean it this time, we love votes with sex appeal. Just don’t come crying to us when you’re sick, is all.
American Public: I wonder if Robin Thicke’s mother knows what that song is about?
Missoula: Go Griz! That’s definitely a real team that plays in a real league, and not an institutionalized racketeering ring! Let’s impart on these boys a culture of impunity and encourage our state to aim high with DUI deaths! Maroon out, yeah!

And these aren’t idiots I’m friends with on Facebook. These are smart, critical thinking, sometimes Ivy League educated young people. So what the fuck? Have we been so bludgeoned with constant sensationalized news that we’re numb to the implications of it? Do we just not care? Do we really care, but feel like Facebook just isn’t the forum for actual discussion?

I got to thinking about getting off of a plane in Seattle a year or two ago. I had walked through a bustling terminal, past a moving walkway and down an escalator. As I waited for my checked luggage, I texted my parents to pull from the cell phone lot. Outside, gray clouds hovered low enough to obscure the tops of the buildings, and a constant drizzle let oil slick puddles form over storm drains. Twice a minute speakers emitted a barely-too-loud automated voice to remind us that, for our safety, the Transportation Security Administration recommends that we live in fear whenever convenient. A peace officer on a Segway (really, guys, a Segway?) scooted along a line of stressed and waiting loved ones to usher them along, lest some nefarious plot manifest (it’s for our safety, after all). On the way home we stopped for gas and at the pump were confronted with a newly installed television screen, advertising the unbelievable deals on Red Bull and corn dogs that waited just inside the shop. The whole scene made me feel as though I had boarded a plan in Missoula, and disembarked in Blade Runner‘s bruised and broken Los Angeles, 2019.

The experience reminded me of a webcomic published at xkcd:

More Accurate

The mouseover text on the original site reads, “We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

It made me think for a moment that perhaps an impending dystopian future is not what we have to fear, but that we have already arrived. And with the ill have come the pleasant distractions that allow us to tolerate it. Sure, we don’t have flying taxi cabs, but really, have you ever navigated Google Earth on an iPad? Whoa. And then there’s always this.

Kidnapped

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with friends, recounting my boss’s most recent affront to decency. The details of the offense aren’t important, to be honest I can’t even remember the specifics now. In fact it’s telling that the instances of late night, frantic, badgering text messages about nothing and the infliction of stress from his home life upon his employees are so common that they no longer stand out as news.

“Man, you really need to get out of there,” my friend Shaun reiterated after several years of giving the same advice. “I know, I know,” I dutifully replied as always, “but it’s just so flexible.” And then the excuses kept flowing. “He can’t help it . . . it’s really not so bad . . . I have easy hours and make okay money and can get all the time off to go play that I need.” As I was unenthusiastically cycling through my routine of defenses of the job that I know I shouldn’t still have, I had a revelation: I had Stockholm Syndrome.

To compare myself to a hostage who eventually begins to sympathize with his captor is perhaps a little bit melodramatic. But considering the downturned economy, the current post-college job placement rate for Millenials, and the brutal competition for professional jobs in this recreational wonderland called Missoula, Montana, it really isn’t that far fetched to see that employers can get away with paying low wages and acting like children and still have a constant stream of overqualified resumes coming through the front door. It’s a buyer’s market, and after three years I continued to justify and forgive unacceptable behavior by my employer.

And so I took a leap. I quit. I quit, to the chagrin of my parents, without a long term plan for how I’ll keep myself alive and not move back in with them. “It’s easier to get a job when you have a job,” they’ve assured me time and time again. But there’s a certain complacency that comes with job security; the fact that the checks keep coming I believe curtails creativity and industry. Colin Wilson called it (and went on to document it thoroughly) the St. Neot Margin. His conclusion was that complacency and the lack of stress leads to a sort of creative equilibrium that precludes growth.

Not long ago I complained to my uncle that I was “trying to quit my job.” He replied, somewhat aghast, “What do you mean trying to quit? It takes like 8 seconds. It’s like firing somebody.” I replied that I liked to eat, and that as much as I love my parents I have no interest in moving back in with them. “Yeah,” he said, “you’d be surprised at how scrappy you get when it’s the end of the month and rent is due.” In a way I think this is a pure example of Wilson’s Margin, and had to take my parental advice with a last grain of salt. A year ago I was at a gin-soaked fundraiser, talking myself out of quitting (I’d been considering quitting this job since the first few months I had it) with another guest who was a decade or so my senior. I explained my parents’ position and before I could finish this conversationalist replied, “Your parents’ job is to look out for you. To give you the safe advice. You just have to consider whether the safe advice is the good advice.”

Performance Enhancing Drugs

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
It is difficult, anymore, to look at elite level athletics without feeling the tingling and hushed stigma of drug use. With accounts of Lance Armstrong’s systematic use and distribution of EPO and other drugs, and his intimidation of those who were resistant to The Program occupying the headlines of publications that just a few years before would not deign to publish the triumphs of the sport, it should come as no surprise that road cycling is now construed by many as a hotbed of doping and unsportsmanlike drug use. And it’s true. Witch hunt or not, the investigations and improvements to testing procedures over the last decade have shown that drug use in the pro peleton has been pervasive, perhaps even endemic at the highest level of the sport. But while drug use in cycling seems to garner much more attention than the same problems in other professional athletics, it would be naive and ignorant to believe that it is not a present and persistent influence in other sports.

The extensive use of banned substances in the MLB and NFL over the last several decades is well documented. Even the NBA, from its ivory tower of lucrative and performance driven popularity was forced recently to confront the issue when Orlando’s Hedo Turkoglu tested positive for steroids. At least in policy, these professional organizations acknowledge that performance enhancing drug use is something that should be stigmatized. While no sport in the US punishes the use of banned substances with the same draconian fervor of elite cycling, each governing body as a system in place for imposing sanctions on players.

Athletes may face fines and suspensions of varying severity, and records set with illegal assistance can be stricken or bear an asterisk to note in perpetuity that they were garnered by dishonest means. But despite the (sometimes vapid) strides that professional athletics have taken to disincentivize drug use, the practice continues. And what’s more, banned substance use is not confined to the highest level of sport. Doping bans, while uncommon, are not absent from the ranks of the NCAA and a recent study showed that of the 1500 high school football players who were interviewed, 6% admitted to using some kind of performance enhancing drug. Clearly the very real benefits to performance still outweigh the just as real detriments for some athletes. The fact that doping is persistent in sports leagues that are associated with academic institutions should not be surprising, as doping in schools has been experiencing a crescendo for years.

The first (and only) time that I used a performance enhancing drug it was not to increase my speed on the bike. It was not to jump higher, or run faster, or pick up heavy stuff better (you can confirm all of this anecdotally by asking me to do any of those things and watching). I joined, by some estimates, 25% of today’s university students when I took a couple of Adderall and sat down to finish an otherwise insurmountable quantity of work (40-50 Ben-Hours) in a day. It was incredible. For 8 hours, I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink water, or go to the bathroom. I didn’t check my email or Facebook once. I didn’t even stand up. I worked in a manic fervor for 8 straight hours and finished the last obstacle between me and a Bachelor’s degree with literally minutes to spare.

While using performance enhancing drugs to get a B.S. in Geology from the University of Montana is sort of like using steroids so that you can win in tether-ball at summer camp, the impulse to attain a competitive edge  in academics is easy to understand. With the increasing competition for positions in prestigious undergraduate  and graduate level programs the pressure to excel can easily overwhelm nagging crises of conscience. What’s more, beyond the difficult-to-enforce laws against selling or using prescription drugs without a prescription, there are no widespread systems for academic or student conduct sanctions if a student is found to be enhancing his or her performance with a pill. There are almost no legal or procedural consequences to this kind of doping. And isn’t this every bit as dishonest as copying answers on a test or committing plagiarism, both of which can lead to expulsion in egregious cases? It seems to me like to keep the academic playing field level, there needs to be some kind of policy limiting the illicit use of concentration enhancing drugs, even if it means that my degree winds up with an asterisk.

Aegis of Wit

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

My most recent plight to publish has been underway for a number of weeks now, and while not forlorn I am discouraged. So not to cause confusion, I should insist that a number of weeks is not a long time. This is a task which has taken the greatest minds of the English language years. But I’ve yet to really have begun, and am far from having dared to submit a piece and endure the slings and arrows of an editor’s pen. I’ve come short of being visited by even a single linear thought. It seems such a shame that meandering, free associating spatter can flow so easily, but at the merest effort to compose with method or meaning the mind’s eye snaps shut and shunts the supply of words. It cripples the brain and paralyzes the fingers, and I trust even that the choice words would follow and scintillate and dazzle if I could just transcend this substantive impotence. Alas, I am hamstrung by clever and pithy one-liners that float naked on the page as I grasp desperately to conjure some context in which they’ll be read.
Which begs the question: what is it to be read? To write for inner discovery or to sneak a private missive is beautiful and pure; to ejaculate notions onto a page and expect that others will read and care and give credence to your musings is to ask the world to stop and wait a moment as you choose between ham and sausage with your morning eggs. I wonder if there’s bacon. But here we have this public forum to experiment at risk of castigation and ridicule, which seems to distract from the Old College Try. So we hide behind sarcasm and wit (and the first person plural, as though there exists some covert alliance of coward writers, sulking in the shadows with silent expectations that the Paris Review will be calling any moment now to lavish praise on our inconsistent and meandering blogs), telling ourselves that when it’s not received that it’s only because it was an off the cuff shot. Not a serious thing.
But sarcasm manifests as a scowling, pockmarked visage of insecurity, and wit for wit so often is that bastion of self-righteous elitism from which we fling oil soaked flaming arrows at guiltless, guileless passers-by: an ignoble pastime; but in pursuit of sincerity we walk that line between what may be art and self-indulgent melodrama, as fine as the razor’s edge that in an instant cleaves life from flesh (on which side that fell, I can’t be sure). To be sincere and received as not is a crippling proposition, much worse perhaps than riding out a jest taken at face value. So this secret guarded coalition of trepid souls will stay the course and sit and gaze inwardly for that past-due flash of brilliant prose which will receive nothing less than it deserves.