Category Archives: Pop Culture

Scenes from a Franchise

BatmanWhether or not Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” turns out to be any good when it’s released later this month, I want to just enjoy for a little while longer the situation that we’re in right now. That is, we live in a world in which the most recent Batman movie, Nolan’s three-year old “Batman Begins,” was actually a very good film. For my money, it’s about as rich a super-hero movie as any Hollywood has produced, but I’ll even settle for just a pretty good movie based on what came before it.

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And Muxtape for All

MuxtapeIn some respects, I think Muxtape, the popular site for creating so-called “MP3 mixtapes” is a triumph. Ostensibly a tool for creating personal playlists from nominally legal music tracks, it is in actuality very much a piece of social software. Except that the traditional trappings of social software — buddy lists, presence management, intra-membership messaging, etc. — are almost entirely missing. In a sense, it’s a kind of anti-Facebook, and in that functional asceticism, it’s really kind of a marvel.

On the other hand, minimalism has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. To be sure there’s real beauty to Muxtape’s enormous and simple music playback interface — its single-tasking posture may yet turn out to be as iconic as the original Google home page — but it’s also frustrating.

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Go Speed Racer Go

Speed RacerMost of you reading this probably have only a few days left, at most, to go see what in my opinion will surely prove to be one of the most underrated films of the recent past — before it’s withdrawn from your local multiplexes entirely due to its almost universally poor critical response and its relatively anemic box office performance to date. The name of the movie is “Speed Racer.”

Don’t be fooled by its juvenile source material — an American adaptation of a Japanese anime franchise that originated in the late 1960s — or its unabashed formulation as a would-be summer blockbuster. It really is one of the only movies I’ve seen this year that really qualifies as high art, not just entertainment, but a leap forward in filmmaking. For designers, this movie should also be of some interest: its disappointing reception amongst both the cognoscenti and the popular moviegoing public are a testament to my theory that the combination of graphic design and cinematic storytelling is a surefire recipe for failure.

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Cover Stories, Old and New

Far be it from me to pretend I really know what makes for good rock ’n’ roll. Beyond the music and musicians that I like, I have no idea, really, what does or does not make sense for the rest of the listening public. But I sincerely do believe that, past a certain age, most acts really should stop releasing albums and just let their back catalogs stand as the definitive statement of who they are. There are plenty of good reasons for this, not the least of which is that the youthful theatrics of rock music are just an embarrassment when pantomimed by nearly anyone over, say, forty years old. Maybe forty-five.

Another reason is that, past a certain age — or perhaps a certain stage in a career — most acts’ new album cover designs lose that singular, epochal quality that was so common to their early releases. That is, where an act might once have released iconic albums replete with cover art that not only reflected their time but also defined it, those acts’ older, mid-life incarnations tend to release album covers that only lamely follow ripened trends.

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Frakkin’ Stupid

There must be something good about “Battlestar Galactica,” because in spite of how basically crap I find it, I tune in faithfully every week (though sometimes, like this evening, I do so belatedly thanks to the convenience of my DVR). Usually, I spend the hour sneering or rolling my eyes as the episode unfolds; the show is fascinating to me as an intersection between an old guard of cheap and not particularly good television making, and a new frontier of narratively — though not intellectually — complex and ambitious television writing.

Actually I think that I want to like it. But week in and week out, the show fails so spectacularly in its chintzy sets, its hyperbolic scripts, its crushingly serious sense of its own importance (has anybody ever cracked a joke on this show? If so, has anybody ever laughed?), that I can’t turn away. It’s too easy to compare it to a car crash that you can’t turn away from. It’s perhaps more accurate to compare it to watching a car that you know is going to crash.

Imagine some futuristic, fantastical auto dreamed up by some crazy genius. Except this mad inventor forgot to attach one of its front wheels, or just couldn’t afford to pay for the tire. Undeterred, the car careens down the street anyway, a kind of souped up, time-traveling Delorean with its wheel-less front bumper violently dragging along the ground, scraping a frightening wave of sparks off the ground as the metal chassis screams in agony. Sooner or later this thing is going to collide with a telephone pole. That’s what “Battlestar Galactica” is to me. How can I not watch?

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High-Fidelity Stereoscope

U2 3DYou could describe me as a somewhat reluctant fan of the Irish rock band U2. I was a big fan as a kid, but these days I only sporadically enjoy their music, and as they get older the band members’ penchant for dressing like dads just escaped from a Hot Topic store makes me cringe more and more. Still, I buy every new album they put out. I don’t really listen to them all that much, but I buy them. It’s something I do mostly out of habit and some vague idea that I may as well own all of their albums; I bought my first U2 record (cassette tape, actually) when I was fifteen or sixteen, I think. Oof. That’s twenty years of forking money over to these clowns.

Last night I threw another sixteen dollars on that pile when I went to see “U2 3D” at the IMAX theater at Lincoln Plaza. As an entertainment product, this movie is exactly as advertised: the Irish rockers filmed in concert, projected in three dimensions hugely against IMAX’s signature concave screen.

It’s not an unentertaining film, I’ll admit, though there was certainly more than enough of Bono’s hammy gestural histrionics to make me glad it only ran about ninety minutes long. I guess it helped that I knew all of the songs, too, but the real attraction — the only reason I was tempted enough to travel all the way uptown on a Monday for it — was the buzz I’d heard about this movie being a visual breakthrough.

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Word on The Wire

The WireThanks to the miracle of 21st Century television distribution — doorstep DVD delivery via Netflix and the more limited but also more instantaneous phenomenon of on-demand cable television — I’ve now fully caught up on the first four amazing seasons of “The Wire.” Narratively, this level-sets me just in time for the fifth and final season, which began airing yesterday evening on HBO. But having watched the prior fifty episodes in their post-broadcast state — allowing me to devour them two, three, sometimes four at a time — I’m not sure I’ll be able to content myself with a measly single episode a week. Wah!

It’s going to be a long season, to be sure, but it’s probably for the better that I’ll have to enjoy the remaining episodes over the course of several months. That will give me time to really savor these final installments before the show shuts down forever. I’ll say it again: “The Wire” is the best television show ever. Ever.

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Radio, Radio

Maybe the rule is that outdated media will skip a technological generation before coming back into vogue. Take radio, for instance, which was ailing for a while under the decades-long, imagistic regime of television. It’s not exactly back at full health, but with the advent of Internet audio, it’s more interesting than it has been in a long, long time.

If you count podcasts as radio, which I do, then you can say that I’m an avid radio consumer. In fact, many of the podcasts to which I subscribe are produced by the various public broadcasters available in the Western world: NPR, obviously, as well as PRI and the BBC too, so long as we’re using broad categorizations here.

Which is why I approached NPR’s new ‘youth-oriented’ program, “The Bryant Park Project,” with some trepidation. Any time a media outlet publicly declares its intention to reach a younger demographic, chances are good that the results will make me cringe. And I’m not even young anymore!

But as it turns out, “The Bryant Park Project,” which debuted on Monday, is not rife with affected jargon, zany sound effects or comedic narrative. To be sure, it’s cheekier than your average NPR show, and it has more than its share of ironic commentary. But it also happens to be substantive and entertaining — like a less stuffy version of “Morning Edition” that, hopefully, isn’t going to spend a lot of time interviewing Bob Dylan about why he’s such a genius. (At least I hope not.) The best thing about it is that it spends zero percent of its time condescending to its listeners. Well, okay, there is a fractional amount of condescension to be heard, true. But there’s far, far less than you’d expect from a program like this. I like it a lot and, more than ever, I’m convinced NPR knows what they’re doing in 21st Century media.

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Passing on Periodicals

Speaking of magazines, does anybody read them anymore? Which is to say that while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who continue to buy, subscribe to and read traditional periodicals, I realized recently that I’m not among them.

The other day, I was over at a friend’s house and was surprised to see that she had copies of Monocle and Good Magazine on her coffee table. Well, I wasn’t surprised by that so much as I was surprised by how interesting I found them, at least for the short spell in which I was flipping through their pages as my friend and I chatted. I have complaints about the art direction in Monocle, but between those two, I can’t deny that compelling stuff is happening in magazine design these days. Add just about any given week’s issue of New York Magazine to the mix, and you have a pretty good survey of some of the most absorbing design happening anywhere. The problem is that they’re like lipstick on a pig: some of the best design being done today is being wasted on magazine content.

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