Review – Cave of Forgotten Dreams

At least Werner Herzog doesn’t manage to make this too terribly Herzogy. Not that he doesn’t try. His voiceovers and even some of the interviews tempted me to reach for the mute button. But overall his unwelcome contributions are vastly outweighed by the awesome subject: the paintings in Chauvet Cave. The beauty of the art and the vastness of time greatly outweigh Herzog’s inane jabbering. Worth seeing

AGF #4

Absolutely Goddamn Forbidden: random hops through time.

One of the most galling things a writer or director can do is yank the audience around by constantly shifting from point to point in their story’s timeline. Even under the best of circumstances this is a risky move. In general the time shifts in Godfather 2 work just fine. Coppola establishes clear visual distinctions between the 1910s and 1950s. He doesn’t switch back and forth rapidly or at random.

Even so, when Mad did its inevitable parody of the picture, in the final panels the two frames get knotted up together, with father and son having a conversation about what to do next.

More recently, I’ve noted an increasing tendency to set up separate threads only a few years (or even a few days) apart. The characters aren’t different ages, they don’t dress differently, they supply only subtle clues that the time frame has changed.

Perhaps this is some kind of stupid trick to make sure viewers are paying attention. If so, in the future these hacks need to work harder on meriting attention rather than tricking people into giving it.

Review – The Conspirator

With an actor at the helm, this picture naturally enough turns out to be an actor’s movie. Sadly, that also means it isn’t a writer’s movie, a cinematographer’s movie, an editor’s movie, a historian’s movie or even much of an audience’s movie. The story at hand is the semi-sad tale of Mary Surratt, convicted on scanty evidence and executed for participating in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Or to be more precise, it’s the tale of Frederick Aiken, the up-and-coming lawyer who gets stuck trying to defend her. Robert Redford ends up producing a picture largely about the evils of using military tribunals to try civilians, a lesson that seems more apt for Guantanamo Bay in the 21st century than the United States in the 19th. He banks a lot on Robin Wright’s ability to make the traitor Surratt sympathetic, a task at which she largely fails. See if desperate

Review – The Social Network

Middle class and working poor people everywhere, rush out and watch this movie right away. Because from a financial perspective, what could possibly compare to the “feel good” moment of discovering that the ultra-wealthy children of privilege lead such insanely dull lives? With millions – indeed billions – of dollars at stake, one might expect armies of mercenary ninja assassins dueling to the death to protect their overlords, or at the very least a legion of clever lawyers locked in tight courtroom exchanges. Instead we get a bunch of witless, spoiled Harvard brats squabbling over who cheated whom. As if Facebook needed any help to seem pointless. See if desperate

Fun Fact to Know and Tell 4

Stanley Kubrick, darling of audiences and critics alike, began his directing career making industrial movies. A typical example: The Seafarers, a promotional film for the Seafarer’s International Union.

For more on his movies, see the 8sails Kubrick filmography.

Review – A Soldier’s Story

Wow is the racism breast-beating ever thick in this picture. In a way that’s both justified and expected, as it’s the story of a murder that takes place on a segregated Army base during World War Two. Further, it’s based on a play, a factor that tends to blend in an extra layer of stiff and preachy. The script is reasonably good, and the actors are more than equal to the task. Just don’t turn to this production if you’re looking for light-hearted fun. Mildly amusing

Review – Death Race 2

So if they make another 1998 of these, will they finally come all the way back to Deathrace 2000? Let’s pray we never find out. If you’re sitting there wondering how the deadly NASCAR combat from the 2008 version got started in the first place, then wonder no longer. However, if you actually were sitting there wondering that, you might want to consider getting out of the house a little more often. Your addiction to loud noises and fiery explosions may have reached the “admit that you have a problem” level. See if desperate

Redo the math

The most recent edition of Mental Floss includes a sidebar full of simple math regarding shows from the BBC. Most of them looked fairly terrible, but one caught my eye. According to the formula, if you take The Wire and add Sherlock Holmes, then you get a BBC series called Luther. Intrigued, I added the first season to my Netflix queue.

The Mental Floss equation works if The Wire is equal to crime plus Idris Elba and Sherlock Holmes is equal to crime plus England. A more appropriate formula would have been Dexter plus 24 only with British accents.

Detective John Luther divides his time between chasing graphically brutal serial killers and having violent temper tantrums about his failing marriage. Dear American media: this is what happens when you give other countries the impression that it’s okay to base a show largely on bloody torture and a black guy with anger control issues.

Nor are matters helped by Alice (Ruth Wilson), the protagonist’s clever serial killing helper character. Just what the world’s been waiting for: Hannibal Lecter in a dress.

I probably won’t do a full series write-up for the Television section of 8sails. The first season was only six episodes, which doesn’t give me a ton to work with. The second season isn’t currently available, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m unlikely to anxiously await its release.

Review – Hellraiser: Revelations

The biggest revelation here is that not even Doug Bradley – who played Pinhead in every Hellraiser outing before this – has as much patience for these things as I do. This time around a couple of asshole teens vacationing in Mexico meet up with the Bum with the Box. From there it’s all Cenobites and murders and other random pointlessness. At least this was actually written as a Hellraiser movie rather than as something unrelated with an awkward Pinhead graft like the last three or four entries in the set. See if desperate

I neither see nor hear dead people

In the ongoing spirit of “if it exists, there’s a blog for it,” some folks have set one up for album covers that have been edited to remove dead band members. Initially this struck me as a case of “too much time on my hands” (was John Panozzo on any covers?), but some of them got me to thinking.

In particular, the Ramones and the Clash made me really sad. There’s something about absences in familiar images that sharpens the sense of loss.

On the other hand, it’s weird to note some of the bands that don’t currently merit an entry on the blog. In particular, I was surprised to learn that Ace Frehley wasn’t dead. Not that Photoshopping the Dynasty cover would have been much of a challenge.

Staban adds that Ace Frehley is also surprised that he isn’t dead. Indeed, he may have tweeted to his fans, “Oh, my God. What? Who's that thinking these thoughts? Me! I'm not dead!”

Still, his Wikipedia photo makes him look like Mickey Rourke. If that isn’t a fate worse than death, I don’t know what is.

Review – The Art of the Steal

After spending a fortune and a lifetime amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of late 19th and early 20th century art, Albert C. Barnes set up a foundation to strictly control access to it. He had a museum built and displayed the pieces in arrangements designed to help students better understand them. When Barnes was killed in a car crash, the artwork eventually ended up in the hands of the Philadelphia Art Museum, which Barnes hated and never wanted to have his collection. This documentary tells how this strange turn of events came about and thoroughly examines the issues involved from legal, ethical, financial and aesthetic perspectives. Indeed, the production’s one fault is that it’s perhaps a bit too thorough. Some of the coverage is downright exhaustive, not Shoah bad but still deserving of a more judicious edit to cut out some repetition. Still, the story is interesting and is well told here. Mildly amusing

Review – Captain America: The First Avenger

I’ve never been a super big Captain America fan, so I’m not quite sure how true this is to what a real buff would expect (I’m told by the fan I consulted that the script was a typical Hollywood blend of faithfulness and liberty). Personally, I was in the mood for something noisy and expensive, and on those counts this did the trick. Though I wasn’t crazy about the Captain when I was younger, I did like the Red Skull, one of the few genuinely villainous villains, a guy with no redeeming qualities at all whatsoever, ably played here by Hugo Weaving. Beyond that this appeared to be a lot of set-up for the upcoming Avengers movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Khartoum

For a movie that cost a ton to make, this sure is weird. Hero Charlton Heston and villain Laurence Olivier square off in an epic battle of bad accents, with the former making mercenary general Charles Gordon sound like a refugee from a bad sketch comedy routine mocking the English for sounding gay while the latter gives fundamentalist rebel The Mahdi all the gravitas of a clerk from the Kwik-E-Mart on The Simpsons. Ultimately Olivier gets the edge, because he buttresses his stereotypical performance with horrible “brown face” makeup. I was also surprised that the epic battle of Khartoum finally plays out only in the last ten minutes or so of the picture, dragging the audience through nearly two hours of prelude (complete with intermission). Mildly amusing

Review – Good

This picture might have lived up to its title if it had just stuck to its premise. Viggo Mortensen mails in his performance as John Halder, a bookish academic caught up in the turmoil of the 1930s in Germany. Hitler takes a liking to the professor’s novel about a man who helps his terminally-ill wife kill herself. Goaded by the attention and a desire not to run afoul of the new regime, our “hero” ends up enlisting in the SS, and of course things go downhill from there. In the brief scenes that focus on the moral and ethical questions raised by euthanasia, this is an absolutely fascinating picture. Sadly, that’s maybe ten minutes out of an hour and a half. The rest is squandered on the protagonist’s arguments with a Jewish friend and the dreary details of his soapy private life. Plus the deceptively non-linear time stream. Plus the odd, go-nowhere scenes in which Halder hallucinates everyone around him singing. VSee if desperate

Comfort Astrophysics

In my last year of high school and my first year of college, I learned something interesting about myself: I suck at math way too bad to ever consider becoming an astronomer. Thus I joined the ranks of thousands upon thousands of people inspired by role models to attempt careers for which they were ill-suited. For most folks this experience probably involves a popular athlete or actor. For me, the famous inspiration was Carl Sagan.

Even setting the math aside, he wasn’t always the easiest guy to be inspired by. Somewhere in the 1960s – once the Sputnik scare wore off and the United States regained the upper hand in the technological side of the arms race – scientists went back to being highly uncool. And in the realm of the nerds, Sagan was royalty. Those suits. That haircut. And oh that oft-parodied voice. Even for those of us who admired and respected the guy had to accept that listening to him was a little like learning about astrophysics from Kermit the Frog.

Nor did Sagan meet us halfway. His evangelical agnosticism was sometimes off-putting; often he pitted science against religion in arenas where conflict didn’t really need to exist. And though he wasn’t completely humorless – he was a good sport about it when Johnny Carson and others mocked him over the whole “billions and billions” thing – he could be excessively strident about his views. He could also be a bit of a jerk (witness the “BHA” flap with Apple).

His shortcomings tarnish his most famous work, the PBS TV series Cosmos. More than three decades after the series originally aired, his feverish fears about the arms race and other typically left wing concerns seem quaint if not completely dated. It wasn’t that he wasn’t right. It wasn’t fun living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Further, we still live with a lot of this mess. We should quit dropping garbage on the whales. Scientific research and education should get more funding than it does. It was just that he was so damn sincere about everything.

On the other hand, it was this very sincerity that made his discussion of astronomy so compelling. His love of the subject was obvious. It was contagious. I found it impossible not to be fascinated by star classifications and the like simply because Sagan put so much fascination into the way he explained them.

He also had a gift for finding clever ways to clarify complex concepts. I was particularly taken with his “cosmic calendar,” a visual representation of the entire history of the universe represented as a single Earth year. Such simplifications helped make the immense scales much easier to grasp.

I also loved the visual representation of the library at Alexandria. Sure, it’s unsophisticated compared to what could have been done with 21st century CGI. But even today it gets me to thinking how wonderful it would have been to actually stand where Sagan appears to be.

Most of all, I loved his sense of wonder. By selecting themes such as “The shores of the cosmic ocean,” he embodied both the adventurous spirit of past exploration and the potential for future quests for knowledge. It made me feel good to imagine earthbound humanity merely standing on a shore, looking out across a currently trackless sea that someday in the near or distant future we might learn to cross.

To be sure, a lot of my affection for Cosmos may be pure nostalgia. I was 14 when the series first ran, the perfect age to become fascinated by the universe. When I recently tried to watch a similar set of shows from Stephen Hawking, it did nothing for me. Still, what Sagan managed to create is a significant moment in the unending struggle to explain to people why they should give a crap about the world, the cosmos around them. It certainly worked for me.

Fun Fact to Know and Tell 3

Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 500,000,000 times. Estimated total game playing time worldwide currently totals more than 200,000 years.

For more fun stuff about Angry Birds (and gaming in general), check out the Media Survival Guide’s entry.

Review – Super 8

Yep, this is what happens when Amblin meets Bad Robot. I was concerned going in that J.J. Abrams would churn out another of his implausible-time-travel-twist “masterpieces,” or that in the alternate Steven Spielberg would stick his stamp on it from the producer’s chair. The result, however, was a pleasantly even mix of tween high jinks and elaborate alien-related government conspiracy. It isn’t quite E.T. meets Lost, but it comes close enough to entertain in a vaguely familiar way. I was particularly impressed by some of the young actors. Some of them seemed like they escaped from Nickelodeon, but a few (especially the leads) turned in above-average performances. Mildly amusing

Blackout

For future reference, today several web sites – including Wikipedia and the Cheezburgers – replaced their content with black screens in protest of “anti-piracy” legislation currently being considered by Congress. Several other sites (Google comes to mind) stayed up but found ways to symbolically join the protest.

So 8sails symbolically joins it as well. I couldn’t black out the site because I needed to show the Media Survival Guide to my students this morning. But these bills – SOPA and PIPA – are more than just garden variety government stupidity. Promoted by media giants such as Time Warner and Disney, these things in their unamended form would allow an allegation of copyright violation to serve as complete legal justification for blocking access to an “offending” web site. That would make copyright the exception to the First Amendment that swallows the rule.

It should tell you something about the interests involved that former Senator Chris Dodd called the protests an irresponsible abuse of power. High compliment, coming from someone who would recognize out of control authority when he saw it.

Oh, and speaking of students and the Guide, it seemed to meet with a favorable response. At least the Survival Cow was popular. We’ll see how it goes once they start using it.

The Dumbass Manifesto

 or The Gospel According to Product Liability Lawyers

I really want to know what silica packing gel tastes like.

Hot coffee is hot? Really? I had no idea.

The filling of hot apple pies is hot too? Will wonders never cease?

Finding the plastic baby in king cake is even better luck if you eat it.

I am startled to learn that rat poison is poisonous.

I could easily shave five minutes off my morning if only I could take a bath and use an electric hair dryer to dry my hair at the same time.

Somebody told me once that the best way to clean lawnmower blades is to start the engine, turn the mower over and reach in with my hands.

This also works with garbage disposals.

Kids love to play with plastic bags. Suffocation, smuffocation.

I fully intend to use the commentary tracks on DVDs for a purpose other than entertainment as soon as I can figure out what that other purpose might possibly be.

Further, I plan to infer resemblances between characters in the movie and actual persons living or dead.

I need to keep my engine running while I’m pumping gas. What if I have to make a quick getaway or something?

And why is it that it’s okay for me to talk on my cell phone while I’m in distracted control of a potentially accident-causing vehicle but not while I’m pumping my gas?

I have an allergy to fish. Tell me, o wonderous sign on the Long John Silver’s drive-thru window, is seafood prepared at this location?

One from a reader: a cell phone that came with this admonition, “Do not place in microwave, clothes dryer or pressure cooker.” Now, I can see the deal with microwaves and dryers, which come with their own timers. But when using a pressure cooker, it would be really handy to toss a phone in so the chicken can call you when it’s done.

My eight favorite Martin Luther King Day movies

We just managed to survive a month largely dedicated to one specific holiday. Every year Hollywood cranks out still more Christmas-themed movies, further adding to the hype and hysteria. Nobody in their right mind wants to see Martin Luther King Day receive similar treatment.

For starters, by now we’re all sick of holiday craziness. One of the beauties of MLK Day is that it automatically comes with built-in dignity, a welcome antidote to the month of December. Further, many suggest that we treat King’s celebration as a “day on” rather than a day off. The idea is to get out into the community and do something good for someone rather than sitting around the house watching holiday-themed movies.

However, there are at least a handful of films out there that celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dedication to social justice, racial equality and nonviolence. Enough at least to allow you to devote some TV time to something more than mindless entertainment.

In a way this list wrote itself after I set one simple standard: each movie had to be primarily about somebody who wasn’t white. It’s amazing how frequently movies about civil rights struggles turn out to be about a white person’s experience of the problem. Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning come immediately to mind. Fortunately, I was able to come up with eight exceptions (even if half the pictures on the list were directed by Spike Lee).


Gandhi – Both Dr. King and this movie were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India. Ben Kingsley does a great job in the title role, helping audiences truly appreciate the man and his importance not only in his homeland but in the world as a whole.

Malcolm X – Dr. King and Malcolm X are often inaccurately treated as the carrot and the stick of the civil rights movement. And of course as the stick part of the equation Malcolm X often gets cast as a white-people-hating demon. This movie does an outstanding job of considering its subject as a multi-dimensional person rather than a cardboard boogeyman. What a shame nobody (to my knowledge) ever made a movie this good about Dr. King.

Catch a Fire – For the next three entries we cross the Atlantic to Africa, where many places have racial problems that make America’s still pretty bad situation look like a birthday present. This movie about an anti-Apartheid rebel does an excellent job of examining not only institutionalized racism but also the root causes of violence and the true value of pacifism.

Hotel Rwanda – And then sometimes the violence gets completely out of control. How can anyone keep a peaceful spirit in the middle of a world given over to mass slaughter? This tale of a hotel manager trying to rescue people from genocide demonstrates the value of nonviolence even in the most extreme conditions.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony – This documentary about protest music in South Africa is an excellent portrait of a brutally oppressed people finding subtle ways to fight back. Though I don’t think Dr. King would have thought much about the violent content of some of the lyrics, at least singing about violence is a step removed from actually committing it.

When the Levees Broke – Back home now. In the United States we have a genuinely astounding ability to pretend that problems aren’t actually happening. This epic documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminds us that no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we’ve erased race and class lines (or at least rendered them irrelevant), they’re still very real and have very real consequences.

Bamboozled – The mainstream media really don’t take criticism well, not even when they richly deserve it. Thus it came as no surprise when this movie got buried in initial release (I’d never even heard of it until I happened to notice the disc in the video store). The production paints with a broad brush, satirizing racial ignorance by suggesting that a TV show designed to be as racist as possible could turn out to be a smash hit. Oh to live in a world where such a thing seemed less possible.

Do the Right Thing – And finally, here’s the “if you see only one” moment. More than two decades have passed since this movie’s theatrical release, and in that time the film industry (even Lee himself) has seldom if ever had anything this honest to say about the uncomfortable subject of race.

Fun Fact to Know and Tell 2

In an average 65 days YouTube users add more hours of content than the four major broadcast networks have created in the last 65 years.

For more interesting stuff about YouTube (such as current usage statistics), check out the entry in the Survival Guide.

Survival Guide update

I promised myself (and y’all as well, whether you knew it or not) that I wasn’t going to clog the blog with a bunch of updates on Survival Guide progress. As I’m getting at least a little done almost every day, it would become a daily thing to keep up with it, boring everyone in the process.

But this week I hit a couple of big moments. As of this writing, the first four chapters are available online. And more than that, the first eight chapters (i.e. half the book) are available in “beta test” format as a PDF. You can check “the herd” for access to the online chapters, and you can download the PDF edition from 8sails Press.

AGF #3

Absolutely goddamn forbidden: Michael Moore.

Actually not Moore himself. He does what he does and makes a tidy living at it. More power to him. But the cheap Moore imitators have to go.

We went ahead and finished Dive! yesterday. For the most part finishing it was about the same as not finishing it, as it continued on in the same usefulness-free preaching mode established in the first ten minutes. To their credit, the neo-hippies did set their whining aside for a few minutes to drag some food to a homeless shelter.

But then they bust out the Michael Moore let’s-go-make-a-nuisance-of-ourselves trick, sending a string of nagging letters to the corporate offices of Trader Joe’s. As if that particular store was somehow responsible for the problem. Naturally the chain’s PR people sent the guy a reply telling him to quit being a jerk (not in so many words, but the point was plain). And I have to admit I probably would have done the same thing if I’d been the PR person.

So seriously, low-budget indie whiners, find some different footsteps to follow in. Impress your audience with the sharpness of your wit or the justice of your cause, not the audaciousness of your nagging.

One big lump

Garbage dump, my garbage dump,
That sums it up in one big lump.
– “Garbage Dump” by Charles Manson

On Saturday we abandoned our first movie of the year, a masterpiece called Dive! Living Off America’s Waste (I deleted a superfluous colon in the title). It had been awhile since the staff had to let a movie go, at least in part because we’ve been focused more on other media of late.

This particular film fell victim in part because it got that damn Manson song stuck in my head. They didn’t play it, of course. But they could have and likely would have if it had come from a less mass-murdering source. The theses of the picture and the song aligned seamlessly.

The idea these neo-hippies are trying to get across is that we throw away an obscene amount of food. That’s true, and perhaps if we’d given it more of a chance they might eventually have gotten around to some bigger picture solutions to the problem. Sadly, the lead-off was so off-putting that it discouraged us from pursuing it further.

The picture alternated between neo-hippies Dumpster diving, neo-hippies gobbling Dumpster-dived food, and stock footage of starving children in other parts of the world. And over everything lay a lattice of whiny preaching about how people in the United States systematically throw away perfectly good food.

This should probably go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Digging through the trash for food is not a solution to the food waste problem. If more than a handful of us were so bereft of gainful employment that we had the time and energy to feed ourselves in this manner, the Dumpsters would run dry in short order. Altering food disposal policies isn’t exactly a panacea, either. The production ignores a lot of legitimate concerns about food quality and safety.

Further, the Starving Biafran Babies aren’t a legitimate part of this equation. The argument assumes that pork chops that hit their sell-by date in Kansas City can somehow be magically transported directly to hungry families in distant lands (who will of course gobble them up because their cultures are the same as ours and they eat the same food we do). In reality the relationship between wasting less food here and serving more food there includes so many complex variables that the connection is tenuous at best.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer in the “person in the mirror” approach to social ills. And I would never begrudge someone a hearty meal of spoiled strawberries if such things were to her tastes. But when the practice takes the form of a sanctimonious documentary, what we end up with is a stupid, 21st century version of Catherine of Siena drinking pus from a sore. “Look at what we’re doing. This is all your fault. Don’t you feel bad?”

Not as bad as I would if I tried to eat that expired fish.

Fun Fact to Know and Tell

Are you reading this blog via a dial-up modem? If so, take heart. America Online – the world’s largest dial-up service provider – still has 3.5 million customers, even in the age of high-speed connections. That’s down quite a bit from the service’s high water mark of 30 million subscribers, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

To learn more about AOL, check out its entry in the 8sails Media Survival Guide.

Legal and marketing need to talk more often

So some guy sues PepsiCo, claiming that he found a mouse in a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Possible PepsiCo responses:

1. No you didn’t.

2. And even if you did, we have enough lawyers to turn your frivolous suit into your darkest nightmare. We’ll bury you under so much paper that Hoarders will show up to do an episode about you.

3. Um, you know those bottles are made of transparent plastic, right? So you surely should have seen the alleged mouse before you took a big swig.

4. And if you’re suing us just because of an alleged mouse that you didn’t even drink, what’s your recovery? A buck and a half for a bottle of Mountain Dew? Or are you going for millions based on the mental anguish caused by a dead mouse? Good luck proving that eggshell skull nonsense.

5. Did we mention “no you didn’t”?

Instead, here’s what Pepsi went with:

6. You couldn’t have found a mouse in a bottle of Mountain Dew because Mountain Dew contains chemicals that would have dissolved the mouse into a wad of gelatinous goo.

You guys seriously need to work that into your next ad campaign. “Cool, refreshing, mouse-dissolving Mountain Dew. Introduce it to your digestive tract today!”

Yum-O!

Show idea – Antiques Roadshow: Gaza Strip

This would be just like the British and American versions, only of course shot in the title location.

Typical scene:

Farmer: I found this in my goat pasture. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe a warhead?

Appraiser: Yes, this does in fact appear to be a warhead. Do you have any idea how long it was in your goat pasture?

Farmer: Not really. I found it after some of the goats dug it up. Is it valuable?

Appraiser: Normally my answer would be “no.” It’s actually a little hard to find a goat pasture that doesn’t have a warhead buried in it somewhere. However, if we turn this particular warhead over and inspect the bottom [camera zooms in as Appraiser turns the warhead over] we find a marking that indicates that this particular piece is in fact a nuclear warhead.

Farmer: Wow. So how much is it worth?

Appraiser: I’d be guessing, but probably somewhere between $300 and $10 million, depending on whom you sell it to.

Oh, and just in case the idea of a nuke ending up in a pasture sounds absurd (or that such an event would only happen in a place like Gaza), um, no.

Auld acquaintance

I thought I’d take a page from the Academy Awards’ book and do a parade of dead people (always the highlight of the Oscars ceremony, at least when they don’t screw it up). This year we lost some real notables, such as Harry Morgan and Anne Francis. And some assholes, such as Kim Jong Il and Osama Bin Laden. And some folks who were genuinely important to the world, such as these:

Steve Jobs – This would have been a big media moment based solely on the amount of coverage it got. But we should also pause to remember the contributions made by the Willy Wonka of the Computer Industry. Sure, some of Apple’s innovations were genuine breakthroughs in computing and media. But for every wow-that’s-brilliant Everlasting Gobstopper, the company hatched at least two or three whimwormulous chocolate-churning rivers (the Lisa) or giant candy bars turned into regular-sized candy bars (releasing new products less functional than their old products). Anyone who’s ever installed the first release of a new Apple operating system has some idea what it feels like to turn into a giant blueberry. [Credit where credit is due: the term “whimwormulous” comes from a Saturday Night Live skit in which Al Gore played Willy Wonka’s accountant brother.]

Elizabeth Taylor – Normally “Hollywood royalty” wouldn’t be eligible for the list because that’s pretty much everything we’re against. But I’m making an exception for Liz Taylor for two reasons. First, she actually did a few good roles over the years. But more importantly, she left her massive jewelry collection to charity, instructing in her will that her jewels be auctioned off and the proceeds used to fight AIDS and help animals. The auction ended up bringing in five or six times more than experts predicted, a $130 million gift to some genuinely worthy folks. Hopefully everyone who mocked her for her weight gain and her divorces is at least a little sorry now.

Vann Nath – It’s a miracle that anyone caught up in the killing fields of Cambodia survived the 1970s, let alone making it all the way to 2011. Despite being targeted as an intellectual, Nath placated the Khmer Rouge by painting pictures for the government, including portraits of Pol Pot. One of only seven inmates to survive the notorious S-21 prison, he devoted the rest of his life to painting brutally frank pictures of his experiences and working as a human rights activist.

Kate Swift – One of my obsessive tics as a writer is the careful alternation between “she” and “he” (just went back and changed the order) for generic third person singular examples. It’s one of the few pause-and-think-about-it distractions I actually appreciate, because it helps make the message more inclusive. Kate Swift and her partner Casey Miller pioneered this sort of scrutiny of passive sexism in language. Though some of her suggested corrections never caught on – such as “genkind” in place of “mankind” (I find “people” works as a reasonable substitution in most cases) – she at least got us all thinking about what we say and how we say it.

Sherwood Schwartz – Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a story of a lovely lady. Sherwood Schwartz brought us both Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, forever cementing his spot in the Postmodern Ironic Revival Hall of Fame. Though The Bunch never did much for me, I admit to faithfully following Gilligan reruns when I was a kid. To this day I can’t hear “March of the Toreadors” without thinking of Polonius.

Don Harman – If you don’t live in the Kansas City metro area, just go ahead and skip to the next entry. Many of us within the WDAF broadcast radius managed to have at least a little affection for weatherman Don Harman. As is typical with members of his profession, on air he came across as a goof. But he was a pleasant goof, the kind of guy you’d laugh at politely rather than shoo out of your cubicle at work. Clearly there was some darkness behind the scenes, as he killed himself late this year. Turns out he was the sort of person you don’t realize you miss until he’s permanently gone.

Borders Books – Speaking of things I didn’t think I’d miss. When it was still around, Borders struck me as the Wal-Mart of bookstores. It was a huge chain that tended to run small, independent stores out of business. But then it turned out it wasn’t the biggest fish in the pond, driven to bankruptcy largely by competition from Amazon. Though I figured I wouldn’t particularly care about its demise, I found I actually missed having a big bookstore to wander around in, especially when I needed to kill some time between an afternoon event and dinner.

Russell Hoban – When I was growing up, society’s gender stupidity held that boys were supposed to like stories about boys and girls were supposed to like stories about girls. At least in my life, Frances the Badger put a stop to that. Frances is – in words intended to describe a different badger – “really pretty badass.” She deals with common childhood challenges – new sibling, finicky eating, jerk friend – with an earnest cleverness that’s impossible not to love. And as if that wasn’t enough, Russell Hoban also gave us The Little Brute Family, who were wonderfully entertaining aside from being a little more treacly than Frances. Wonderful illustrations from Garth Williams and his then-wife Lillian didn’t exactly hurt. Plus he enjoyed a separate career writing novels for adults. The world is a poorer place when such people pass.