Tropic Thunder

I just saw Tropic Thunder, and I was a little underwhelmed by how offensive it was. After reading about all the controversy in the paper, I was expecting some really depraved shit and I didn't get it. I almost felt like the movie was in fact criticizing people who profit making movies about retarded people, and I thought what some of what they said was salient. Has this gone over everyone's heads? Is it just me? Were people paying attention to the movie, or did they get pissed and walk out when they heard a forbidden word?

Bonobos

Does anyone ever wonder if bonobos are just the liberals of the chimpanzee community? For those of you who aren't up on your primatology, you can read about bonobos and their more patriarchal cousins the common chimpanzees on Wikipedia. What if a long time ago, bonobos and common chimps lived together, and the bonobos were the liberals of their society with the common chimps the conservatives. I remember in the early days of the Bush administration frustrated liberals would always joke about moving to Canda; what if bonobos did something similar? Sometime in the ancient past, some primitive liberal chimps said:

"We are tired of this conservative chimpanzee government. We are crossing the Congo River and not coming back."

These liberal chimps would later become the modern day bonobos. You don' t have to tell me this is an awesome idea, because I already know. Do you think something similar could happen in the human future? Do you think that different branches of society with different politics might be isolated from one another long enough for those politics to impact their biology?

DOS

Does anybody else miss MS-DOS a little bit? I do, and I thought some the other day about why. Operating systems today both look too good and still work too poorly, and that doesn't fit with my primal expectations about how fancy machinery should work. In 50s sci-fi, you saw sentient robots that still looked like toasters, and somehow I feel like that's a natural expectation. If computer screens are going to start looking like the future, why aren't the machines driving them acting like the future? Shouldn't they be talking to me and cooking my breakfast by now? It just doesn't seem right that they've become so shiny and flashy without conforming to other futurist expectations.

DOS on the other hand felt more like a primal fantasy of a computer. It was just you and a blinking cursor, and it didn't do anything you didn't initiate with one of a vast universe of arcane typed commands. It was like communing with a reclusive machine spirit that demanded exactly the precise incantations to respond. I feel like a caveman could become comfortable with DOS, imagining that a spirit lived in the keyboard which demanded his or her appeasement.

Madden

When I first started at Wash U, getting drunk and chasing freshmen girls around seemed like a much cooler use of my time than playing video games. I was thus a bit skeptical when Tyler and Brian told me Madden was crunk. However, after playing a few games, I was hooked, and that addiction has blossomed into a beautiful and ongoing video game romance I treasure to this day. Below I will try to give a summary of some of its highpoints.

At first Tyler and Brian were both vastly better than me, and I played a long string of back to back losses. Brian said something to the effect of "I've never seen anyone so excited about losing over and over" which I interpreted as a compliment. In time, I got decent enough to beat the CPU on All-Madden, and I started to play Tower's team in the Dauten franchise league. A while later, I developed the ability to beat it consistently, and I would have the opportunity to play Tyler or Brian in the playoffs (I had also developed the ability to make these games interesting). These were always challenging and emotional games.

I should start with my rivalry with Tyler, who was always the Superman to my Lex Luther. When I started playing, it had been my specific goal to learn to beat Tyler, and I ran into him in the playoffs far more often than Brian. Tyler would usually practice a small number of big yardage plays to a ridiculous pitch of perfection, and beating him always involved guessing how to counter a couple of known but overpowering and versatile deep passing plays. Tyler was also the running guru I originally studied under, and his running game was nothing to be sneered at. His prowess in beating the computer by a zillion points also meant his teams were very talented, and he was all in all a very challenging opponent. I think we went approximately 50/50 over the history of those games, although I was never sure how I was pulling off the wins I did.

I only played Brian in the playoffs a couple of times, and they were both close games that left me uncertain how to appraise him. Like Tyler, he was very good ar ridiculously stomping the computer and his teams were very talented. He would usually beat Tyler, which I thought very impressive, but then often lose to Tower (who I thought to be second-tier, no offense). He also used play-calling I thought would never work if I personally tried it, and his success with it mystified me. Nevertheless, Tyler often beat me and then lost the Super Bowl to Brian, making him the frequent Dauten (and later Trinity) champion.

Another Madden highlight was the Madden tournament Jon hosted in 06. Me and Tyler ended up in the championship, which I thought was pretty cool because we had previously honed our skills mostly playing one another. I ended up winning; I dug out my victor's t-shirt this past week, and it made me think we should have another tournament. Any of you reading this that are interested in making that happen, holler at me.

Me and Tyler also played "drinking Madden" once, which was a very spontaneous and informal (and fun) game. The rules were basically that if you scored or did something cool that made the other person look stupid, they had to drink. This turned out to be a lot of drinking, resulting in me and Tyler draining most of a 4 litre Carlo Rossi BAJOW. Tyler later puked straight red wine all over Jon's shirt, which was hilarious.

More to come...

madden and dos

and also bonobos

Tupac Shakur

What was so great about Tupac? Unfortunately, not his rap in my opinion. Lyrically, I think it unfair to put him on the level of some of the other "Greatest Rapper" nominees. What he did have was a smooth, interesting delivery and wildly charismatic on-mic persona; the latter alone could have taken him places, and together these traits were more than enough to conceal his other failings and allow him a different kind of greatness. And what kind of greatness was this?

People want artists to live their art, and for the totality of an artist's life to harmonize with their work can be mesmerizing. No one in popular music has ever done so well as Tupac. For example, many rappers diss their rivals; Tupac took the extra step of fucking his rivals wife, and he did not hesitate to tell the fans. Many rappers describe crime and gun violence; Tupac was shot, left the hospital 3 hours after surgery, went to jail for sexual assault and got out just to taunt the DA and shooter from the microphone. He seemed to be describing his life, and never before or since has it been so hard to deny the sincerity of an active gangster rap artist.

Tupac also had the benefit of rapping in an era where the court of public opinion was still out on gangster rap. Tupac seemed to embody his music to such a degree we had to look on him as an expert witness, and in some ways he was an extraordinary advocate for the genre. However scandalous his lyrics and off-mic adventures, in interviews he was hypnotically articulate and charismatic. He seemed as if he were the philosopher-king of gangster rap, and his magnetism compelled you to see him this way also.

One can regard an artist as a technician who produces specific, well-defined pieces of art; a rapper is someone who writes lyrics and records rap albums. If one thinks of an artist this way, and judges them purely by the things they have produced, then Tupac is only mediocre. However, one can also consider an artist in a broader sense; an artist is a public figure who has a status in the public imagination which can transcend their art. Considered in this way, Tupac is a unique in the history of hip-hop. His whole life was a work of art that paralleled the music he produced, ending in the sort elaborately foreshadowed tragedy one sees often in Shakespeare but rarely on CNN. He was himself an unparalleled gangster rap narrative, and for that he was a great artist.

Writing Is Hard

I was writing something else, and I decided to stop in the middle to rant about limitations I perceive in my education. Throughout high school and college, I was taught to produce a very specific type of writing; I was taught to write expository or argumentative papers arguing a specific point to an impartial observer. The papers averaged about 7 pages in length, very rarely longer than 15 pages or shorter than 3. When I think back on this education, I remember being taught very specific things about how to organize paragraph contents and where to place paragraphs of specific type. I feel like this education could easily produce someone who is able to robotically produce cogent, readable writing in this format and fail miserably at writing anything else. I think I have had some success breaking out of this trap, but I still suffer from a sort of generalized confusion when I try to write outside of the 7 page expo. / argu. box. When I write well outside of it I often do it by randomly perturbing my structure and style until I randomly produce something I enjoy as a reader.

I am a big hip hop fan, and I listen to a lot of artists that are not college or even high school graduates. At the same time, I often have the feeling that I am experiencing real visionary creativity of a nature I find it difficult to see someone of my background producing. I wonder what the artistic cost of formal education is; in particular I wonder what it costs to make that formal education conform to a uniform standard. I know there are ways of thinking that society needs to produce in its citizens in order to function, and that education is the way to produce them. However, I also feel that there has to be a price, and I wonder what it is. What kinds of creative doors are we closing?

What do you think?

Disgustingly Compromising

It may be 5 in the morning, but this article on human rights in China is almost certainly a disgusting sell out.