Respect Authority

I swear to God, once you program me with a conception of freedom and equality - I'll kill you.

That being said, the finale was a little… disrespectful. Not to the fans, but to the show itself. Obviously fan boys will have a problem with the loose ends (Starbuck and the millions of coffee shops named in her honor, God and his time traveling mind minions) but the real outrage should be directed at Ron Moore - who’s ego nearly swallowed the show whole.

Battlestar, from the mini-series, was always a show that paralleled reality but it did so without penetrating it. It was about humanity when its chickens came home to roost… then surprise-attacked us and turned our social/political world upside down. It was brilliant because it was about 9/11 without being about 9/11. And because the protagonists were both the heroes and yet also the instigators, it was about us without actually being about us, because ultimately Battlestar Galatica is a television drama, set in space, with space planes and killer robots.

When, thankfully, the show was picked up and transformed into a full fledged series, it was given the latitude to use dramatic representations of familiar social struggles – like abortion, religious expression, and civic freedom - to advance more entertaining plots that revolved around gratuitous, post-apocalyptic sex scenes and, of course, space battles.
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Have you ever wondered what reality TV might look like if the entire population of our country played way too much Resident Evil? I’ve suddenly found new faith in the tired genre, and as usual, these groundbreaking heights of innovation have come from that neon alternate dimension floating in the Pacific Ocean, Japan.

This basically highlights the main difference between our two cultures — while we ‘Merkans are comfortable with our Coors Lights and watching pseudocelebrity princesses of vapidity fight over who has the coolest pair of high heels, the Japanese aspire to something greater, something more admirable… and that is, naturally, killing zombies with Tabasco sauce and plastic swords.

And so I worry for our mediocre TV culture and its 47 incarnations of The Real World. Will we ever be ready to submit our children to potential cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the name of comedy? Will we ever greet the day when we, as a country, can trick toddlers into fighting for their lives, watch it all, and laugh? For too long have we allowed our own economy to be the enemy, all the while losing sight of what terror really means: the stumbling, brain-eating undead courteously sending you a letter informing you that they will be breaking into your house.

Of course, if the living dead ever made it into VH1’s reality line-up, it’d probably resemble something more like a necrophiliac dating show hosted by Rob Zombie, possibly titled Night of the Loving Dead. And to think we call Japanese television weird.

Now, I haven’t been impressed with Seth Rogen for a long time. Pineapple Express would have been barely entertaining and way too long had the subject matter been anything other than weed, and Zack and Miri Make a Porno had just enough novel nudity and crude humor to be bearable - more a testament to the last-ditch desperation of Kevin Smith than Rogen’s comedic prowess.

That said, and much in the same way Will Ferrell managed to shock me with the record low that was Kicking and Screaming, I’m both surprised and disappointed to find that Rogen is already writing his own will on the silver screen - and it’s called Observe and Report.

About the illicit plight of some mall cop who’s hell bent on stopping a flasher run amok, Observe and Report is pretty much Kevin James’ Mall Cop with a different overweight lead and undoubtedly less family-friendly humor. The fact that the movie is being released only a few short months after Mall Cop — which in my opinion only got attention because it didn’t star some predictably washed-up former Old School cast member — only makes this newest turd of the silver screen more embarrassing for Rogen, who really should have called it quits for a few years post-Pineapple.

Besides, really? Two movies about mall security guards? Are we really so starved for content as a creative people that we can’t think of slightly less mind-numbing material? Or are movies now bound to travel the brief and disastrous route of quirky nonfiction books - where a few blockbusters about the history of salt, or milk, gave way to a generation of books documenting the completely uninteresting backgrounds of everything from toothpicks to T-shirts. Let’s make something clear: Good Will Hunting should not be interpreted as carte blanche to make movies about every janitor, grocery store clerk and mall cop out there.

Oh, and a word of advice to the casting director over there at Mindless Movies Inc. - shaving a chubby guy’s head and removing his ostentatiously geeky glasses does not a sexually appealing man make. Even for trashy makeup-counter girl Anna Faris.

This has got to be easily more effective than any abstinence only program. For his sake, I sure hope the force is strong with this one when he gets to high school. The jocks are going to be chopping his ass in half like Obi-Wan Kenobi before he even makes it past the parking lot, to say nothing of all the inevitable “Who’s your daddy?” jokes. Dude’s going to wish he could run away to Degobah (nerd joke).

Some people just aren’t meant to be parents, really. After all, that’s why our society tries so hard to keep Star Wars fans from having sex as it is.

Just as my morning cup of coffee is starting to seem an extravagant expense, I find myself miffed this morning at having spent a completely unnecessary and wasteful $21 at PetSmart yesterday. On what, you ask? What could I possibly be so enamored with at this store, which by the way perpetually smells like unwashed animals, that I would risk the financial insecurity of spending two digits’ worth of cash. 

This. You see, despite my near-ludicrous love for Godzilla, my erstwhile feline friend, I also have a growing affinity for the sanctity of my high-end furniture. In a fit of cathartic cleansing, my mother and her boyfriend purged their storage unit, created by the uniting of their two households in a creepy sort of sitcom-esque “Mom has a boyyyyfrieeend” moment, foisting on me piece upon piece of quality furninutre — suede ottoman, suede chairs, barely used futon. My new apartment, which would have otherwise looked much more like the aftermath of a college dorm tornado, instead appears oddly put-together, to the point that I sometimes find myself wondering how to reconcile this newfound aesthetic maturity with the fact that I still stumble home drunk and make frequent use of a two-foot bong. Read More ›

So it’s been about a thousand years since my last post, and despite Aaron’s uncanny ability to pick up the slack when I’m sucking wind, I know in my heart of hearts that you all missed me. Similarly, I know by now that you are undoubtedly going through some sort of prolonged withdrawal from reality television coverage, a sobering process that involves no shortage of tremors and migraines, to say nothing of your reluctant need to find reading alternatives — things like “newspapers” and “books.”

Worry not, dear friends, I have returned - and with me (thanks to having cable installed literally as I moved into my new apartment) a smattering of reality updates, which should not only make up for lost time but leave us in a good position to weather the dearth of TV options available to us come spring. Ready your DVRs.

Project Runway: In case you don’t take a daily gander at the cover of the New York Post, former Project Runway finalist Kenley Collins was arrested this week for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend in the middle of their raucous breakup — with her cat. Yes, she threw her cat at him. Ironically the charge is for possession of a (feline) weapon, and not animal cruelty, and I’m all the more disheartened to find that coverage of this little spat made the front page, while the tragic death of Natasha Richardson was relegated to page 5. Although I guess the headline “Pussy whipped!” was too good to pass up as front-page fodder.

Tough Love: This “He’s Not That Into You”-esque VH1 venture premiered this past week, to the chagrin of anyone who thought the channel would ever stop creating celebrities out of idiots. The premise of the show is a second-generation matchmaker, who looks exactly like the lame kind of guy your parents would want you to bring home, helping eight women discover what it is they do wrong with men, and how to fix it. The first episode includes two different instances of the ladies being forced to watch “objective” males denigrate their physical appearance and pass snap judgments on their character, which is apparently supposed to help them understand how to become better. (Lesson No. 1: Lose 20 pounds?) Having just seen the actual He’s Just Not That Into You, which was both guiltily awesome and completely hypocritical (a ludicrous number of happy endings), I suspect this show’s shelf life is about the same as that of the movie: two hours.

The Real Housewives of New Jersey: Against my better judgment, I’ve been devouring the latest New York incarnation of this show; class wars, Long Island-accented gossip and all. So you can imagine my elation upon discovering that the much-anticipated New Jersey season is both real, and imminent. Debuting May 12, TRHOFNJ includes the typical mix of stay-at-home moms (read: perpetual shoppers) and self-righteous employed women, whose businesses are generally financed through whatever more lucrative profession their husband occupies. But considering the New York ladies are, both in character and geography, only a hop, skip and jump away from what I’d consider Jersey trash, I can’t even begin to fathom what women actually from the Garden State will do — but I suspect it will involve lots of hairspray.

Sorry to leave you dedicated few shriveled up and a little to the right today, but the RA staff was a bit preoccupied with trying to keep our real jobs. It’s a tough economy out there, and for some reason nobody wants to sign up for my Ponzi scheme anymore, so it looks like my plan to either 1) get shamefully rich off fools or 2) go to jail and get free meals, cable, and mindblowing anal rape is a bit of a bust.

Fortunately, here’s a little sneak peak at the Where The Wild Things Are movie poster to help remind you what it was like when “wild” meant cutting loose like a careless party animal, and not letting your fingernails grow out or starting a collection of jars filled with your own urine as you shutter yourself away from the increasingly horrifying outside world.

The word whispering in the winds (hey, it sounds better than “I read this on like six different blogs today”) is that there will be a three-minute teaser in Dreamworks’ latest big budget turd, Monsters vs. Aliens. In case you’re saving that one for a Saturday afternoon smoke sesh, which will obviously make the movie seem much better than it actually is considering the experience will be devoid of both sobriety and scream-laughing children, you can check out some test footage from the film here, because I’m all over the Internet like the crystals on the dro. Like flies on a horse’s behind. Or really, like anything that appears in large quantities on anything else.

So yeah, you could say I’m wildin’ out about this movie. Wildin’ out more than Nick Cannon even.

IPATH, the skate shoe brand that you can always rely on for a stash pocket, recently put up some new footage from Australian emissary Richie Jackson. Aside from representing the proud former prison colony, Jackson also seems to be sponsored by the 1960s. Like, the entire decade. So his outfits may look a little silly in 2009, and I feel like I might be able to smell him from here, but his trick selection is incredibly unique and with perks like free love and experimental drugs, who could really say no?

It’s cool to see a relatively unpopular trick, such as the hippie jump, getting adapted to modern skating in a way we haven’t seen before. Perhaps more impressive than the ludicrous hippie jump flip combos, though, is the fact that Jackson pulls them off (for the most part) without looking like a total dork. And I mean, that’s fucking tough to do when you’re wearing a tasseled vest made out of an old couch.

Something tells me this probably won’t be the next big trend in skateboarding; but just because something isn’t fashionable as far as the skate media is concerned, doesn’t mean it isn’t fun anyway. Fuck, plenty of people still do pressure flips and slappy grinds when they’re goofing off with their friends, even if they’re not including them in their video parts. And considering how regularly we hear from disenchanted pro skaters, relating to us the tortures of getting paid to wake up at noon and skate every day while filming for a highly anticipated video, it becomes clear pretty quickly where the real heart of skateboarding lives. Maybe not necessarily in pressure flips, but wherever it is that skateboarding and fun collide most gruesomely for you.

And these weird hippie jump variations are definitely fun to watch; they’re innovative, they feel fresh while still calling back to fundamentals of skating, and most of all, they’re probably hard as fucking hell to do. Especially while tripping on mescaline for days on end, so I really have to hand it to the guy.

Boy, oh boy. This documentary sure has a case of the Mondays.

The best kind of conspiracy theories are the ones that aren’t particularly biased — they don’t side with a liberal or conservative audience, rather working under the ideology that we are all fucked. And when you hate everyone, it’s a lot easier to feel like you’re always right, which is, obviously, awesome.

Anyway, those now iconic Shepard Fairey portraits of Obama are reminiscent of Soviet propaganda not only in their aesthetic, but also in the fact that they, um, are propaganda. And they worked — regardless of whether or not Obama truly does have a benevolent agenda. I don’t know if Obama is evil, or if all the world leaders are evil, but I do know that sometimes it definitely does look like that. However, take the documentary as it is; considering ominous, suspenseful music is generally not included as an objective standard in documentary film making, it’s probably best to remain skeptical and put the feeding tube down for a few while you watch this.

What’s almost more interesting than all the status quo shattering conspiracy theories, ad hominem attacks, and super credible commentary by the likes of famed political analyst KRS-One, is the speed with which this 2-hour documentary was produced, with plenty of factual evidence to argue their points stuffed in the cracks between all the crazies. Fahrenheit 9/11 took years of production, meanwhile, The Obama Deception came out before Obama himself has even gotten a chance to use every bathroom in the White House.

This isn’t supposed to be a column about photography of urban decay; it just so happens that images of decomposing modern ruins compliment dark visions of the future particularly well. Still trying to figure that one out.

Late last week, TIME ran a photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre about Detroit’s golden oldies. This is the same glistening point on the map where earlier this winter a dead body was found encased in a block of ice inside an elevator shaft, where he had been for months. So yeah, Detroit… nice place to visit and all… only, um, not.

This was once Detroit’s main train station; today it has been converted into Detroit’s main source of tetanus. Seriously, no wonder Eminem is so pissed off coming from this place. Not only do you probably have cancer from the city’s proud collection of asbestos, but worse yet, there’s not even anything to do on the weekend.

In a way, Detroit functions as a sneak preview for any city in its decline. In a time when old industries and business models are showing their age and failing to keep up with technology’s exponential progression, any city that can not adapt to the demands of the present will inevitably regress exponentially.

And in a city that is increasingly resembling a ghost town, it’s hard not to believe in hauntings. Nonetheless, watching America’s ruins form before your very eyes is quite frightening all on its own.

It's like Where's Waldo for pain.

…Okay, that was maybe a little overly critical. The fact is, I’m not much of a fan of organized sports at all, but I think that’s probably just me projecting my feelings because I have always been terrible at them. Perhaps I shouldn’t be resentful of baseball, or dodge ball, or even badminton, any of the grade school gym class tortures so many of America’s future software programmers were forced to suffer through as unfortunately scrawny children, their intelligence somehow branded on them like a golden Star of David. And yet, knowing that their oppressors will eventually end their brilliant athletic careers at the ripe age of 18, from there on making the glorious transition to bloated, alcoholic failure, is somehow not reparation enough.

Either way, perhaps the blame does not belong on sports themselves, nor on the eight year old trolls grinding my face into the dirt of my grade school’s sparse football field so long ago, but rather, on my parents, those so-called future software programmers of America, who had the gall to be nerds and still actually have sexual relations, releasing me into a world in which my genes would haunt me for the first two decades of my life.

However, my distaste for baseball goes beyond those particular fond childhood memories. There was a time in my youth when I regularly attended minor minor league baseball games, presumably because it was an alternative to bowling alleys and Discovery Zone as birthday party destinations. However, it was a short lived time, a love affair not unlike that of Chris Brown and Rihanna — intense, fast-paced, and ending in ghastly violence. One fated night under the lights of a pivotal match up between The New Britain Rock Cats and The New Haven Ravens, I watched in horror as a line drive home run was caught some two rows behind me by a middle-aged woman. With her mouth. Read More ›

Madoff behind glass. Where he belongs.

Sort of. In reality, yesterday yielded sighs of relief and frustration: Madoff’s seven fafillion investors victoriously booted the billionaire from his Manhattan penthouse to a jail cell likely no bigger than his maid’s bathroom. But at the same time, as the white-haired former businessman lumbered off to spend the rest of his life in prison, America collectively sat back and wondered, “Well fuck, what next?” The money’s still missing, retirements and savings and college education funds are still wiped out, and – and outside of one wrinkly old dude in a jail cell, we have more or less nothing to show for it. Worse, we no longer have anyone to blame.

Indeed, it was easy to feel indignant when Madoff was resting on his laurels in a massive apartment, negotiating whether to give up his artwork or concert tickets or all-expense paid trips to the moon. But now that the devil himself has fallen from grace, we are a country without someone to blame.

So here are Respect Authority’s suggestions for America’s Next Scapegoat. Read More ›