Double Dose of Solipsistic Bullshit

Good work, Cruz. Good birthdaying. You got me this shirt and that's pretty swell. And it would've been a great day if it hadn't been for the fact that I also recieved a package from the National World War II Museum containing a free book. I mean of all of the days to get a book to me, you had to choose the one where I got a book about how we fucked up the Krauts. Can't compete with that shit, buh. Just can't be done.

I also bought an aloe plant, but you don't care about that either, do you, Cruz? Didn't consider for a second that I was going to buy some nice indoor plants to make my living situation that much more livable. Did you? Did you, Cruz?

Now, is the museum in a seceded part of South Africa and does the book primarily concern itself with Hitler's

So, anyways, sure we're podcasting partners, admittedly. And, yeah, he gave me this sick manatee shirt, alright. At what cost, though? Will I ever know that true cost of the World War 2 now? I don't know. I'm wearing an awesome fuck ass shirt.

Good job, dick. Way to obfuscate history.

Also, posting something on Facebook and getting it for nothing in the mail makes me feel like a pornstar.

Speaking of which, Cruz and I released a new episode of White Guys, Square Glasses (which is barely even accurate or a show at this point). Listen to it. Tell a friend. Send complaints to WGSGshow@gmail.com.

Good night and God bless.

SERIOUSLY THOUGH: The book I received was The Guns at Last Light (which is the third part of the Liberator Trilogy which makes me think that someone is trying to backdoor their fantasy novel over the bones of

FUN FACT: Pornstar apparently still isn't a word! Neither is videogame! Some petition Obama about this shit. Seems like he doesn't have enough going on for my tastes.

Cinecult: Ain't No Lobos

There ain't no Andy and if there is, he's a son of a bitch.

I just got out of Toy Story 3.

What I am surprised about is that I could feel this much emotion over a kid's film about toys. Their primary existence seems to revolve around being played with, which is a pretty bizarre concept, especially when you consider that there's a right way and a wrong way to be played with. I guess you could go down the rabbit hole with that one and talk about Descartes and the meaning of consiconess and blah blah blah. . . Or, well, at least I could disappear down the rabbit hole with something like that, at least for 500 words or so.

But, anyways, you basically have these characters with an almost religious devotion to Andy and yet, somehow, despite every logical reason on the books, I find myself crying over and over again. I'd like to think I do this with many movies and I'd like to think I'm more sensitive to films than most other people, but as a 23 year old man, I still find it a bit odd to be crying over toys.

Which is now where I'm going to disappear down the rabbit hole.

Toy Story 3, more or less is a film all films are more or less striving to be. It's a movie that uses what are basically lies to reach at a deeper truth. I was talking to my friend Cruz the other night and he was talking about The Killing Fields and how the journalist who wrote the non-fiction book would show the movie during his class. He would show it with the caveat that what is in the movie is not what happened, but what you get is what it felt like.

And that's what cinema is supposed to be about, and all art, I suppose. The poet, in whatever medium he is working in, is not supposed to literally reflect life back at the audience, but his job is to instead, reflect a reality back. A mediocre movie like Watchmen is about exactingly and literally throwing scenes, characters, lines, and images back at the audience without accounting for the fact that cinema works differently than comic books. It doesn't seek to forge a reality for the viewer, instead all it wants to do is regurgitate X number of scenes until we hit the two and a half hour mark.

There's plenty of ways to make a pointless movie, but I think one of the prime factors in all lame movies is that they don't know what the fuck a movie is capable of. It's got a certain grammar and a certain cadence and without disappearing up my own ass too much, I think I can say that Pixar gets it. They know how to make a beautiful, good looking story with wonderful characters, plotting, and a ton of jokes and they bring this all together to build to an idea that is bigger than the sum of its parts. I don't think people like Zack Snyder care about something like that and I'm fairly certain that they don't understand that something like that can even be accomplished. And, while I'm thinking about it, neither does an egomaniac like M. Night.

Toy Story 3 doesn't suffer from this blindness. It uses these ridiculous, fictitious characters to someone make an emotional and profound statement about mortality. It's making true art. Proper art. And even if you don't give a shit about the dynamics or the theories or the whatever behind movies, I think we can all more or less agree that there's something beautiful about a flick like Toy Story 3, which aspires to be and succeeds in being something more than a way to keep 10 year-olds busy for 100 minutes.

Here Comes a Reasonable Argument!

Prepare to get angry!

You angry yet?

Okay!

We're talking about vidjagames. Not too long ago Roger Ebert started a fire storm among the nerd community by saying that not only were videogames not art, but they could never be art. As a person who has played videogames from the age of five on and has studied art, I can say with some amount of authority-- however shaky it may be-- that the vidjagames ain't aren't. Will they never be art? I don't know. Short of taking the spice poison, I'll never see into the future. There's a pretty good chance they will be. Some day, but not today.

Anyways, here's something he said recently about growing old, art, and videogames:

I didn't want to play a video game. If I should dislike it, I already had a preview of the response awaiting me: I was too old, I was over the hill, I was too aged it "get it." That became the mantra: "Ebert doesn't get it." I disagreed with them about age, which I know more about than most of them, but I had some sympathy about the concept of not "getting it." There are many, many things I believe many members of our society don't "get," but I don't think they're too old or too young to "get" them, only differently evolved.

It's a Bit Like This

I should get around to watching a Tartovsky movie one of these days.

I spend so much time watching movies where people blow up or punch each other in the head that I feel like I'm missing out on something. I guess I always feel like that. There's so much out there to learn about and to know about, but I've never gotten around to most of it. As much as I love people getting kicked in the head, I realize there's a bit more to life than that (though, people getting kicked in the head, or wherever, is a pretty important aspect of life, I think).

One of these years I suppose I should make time for the more well thought out parts of our nature. There is a lot of it, after all.