Thanks Stephen Hawking

You know, and I was just about to hang out with some aliens. But after reading this article, I'm starting to have second thoughts:

British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says aliens are out there, but it could be too dangerous for humans to interact with extraterrestrial life. Hawking claims in a new documentary that intelligent alien lifeforms almost certainly exist, but warns that communicating with them could be "too risky."

Damn! There go my plans for the weekend. This is sort of like someone telling you, "Hey, don't catch the flu." I'll see what I can do.

Personally, I don't believe that aliens exist, or at least not creatures with legs and eyes and such. To me it's one of those irrelevant questions. Say that aliens either do, or do not, exist. Am I supposed to do something different with my life? Sometimes I think our fear of "aliens" is really just our own sublimated fear of each other. I know most people find it hard to believe that humans are the only intelligent lifeforms in the entire universe, but I don't. And yes, JFK was assassinated by just some guy with a rifle. Sorry to be a party pooper.

Interesting Article About Pianos...Now This Is What Slate Is For

The Wolf at Our Heals: The centuries-old struggle to stay in tune.

The article is an interesting explanation of an arcane subject understandable by a layman. The whole thing could be completely wrong and I wouldn't know. But it was a very enjoyable use of my 10 minutes.

Video Games Still Not Art

Or so says Roger Ebert.

Why not? Ebert prefers cave paintings to some game about the Waco confrontation I've never heard about.

He writes, "One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome."

So? Let's say that I convince the National Hockey League to play its next game inside of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We put ice all over the floors and somehow incorporate the stairs. That would be sort of artistic wouldn't it?

Ebert continues: "She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire."

Bad art isn't art? If what we're after is some kind of high-brow definition of art that excludes crap like Thomas Kinkade paintings then great. But this definition would also exclude a lot of the movies that Ebert likes. Also, what is and is not art would change over time as the critical reputation of artists waxes and wanes.

Ebert thinks art improves when it "improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision." Okay, great, but video games could do this.

The only real distinction that Ebert makes in the piece is that bit about rules and goals. Which is fine I suppose. But then we'd have all the art parts of a game--the story, the digital paintings, the music--and also some non-art parts. This reminds me of how in a movie you have all the guys just bringing sandwiches and calculating budgets and doing all that other non-art stuff that goes into making a movie. Wait a minute...

Personally, I don't see the art/non-art distinction being all that meaningful. I'm much more interested in the good art/bad art distinction. Or the good game/bad game distinction. Art/non-art? Well that's just something to talk about if you have nothing else to say.

Little Earl - Film Director?

Directing a short film (yes, you heard me right) hasn't left much time for El Bloggo - in addition to working full-time, searching for an apartment, trying to move into said new apartment, and following every single game of the recently commenced baseball season. But once again the day will come when I will be unemployed and antisocial, and you would be wise to take heed of the sheer sonic force that my blogging power will emit.

Battlefield Mirth

In an article in the New York Post, the screenwriter of Battlefield Earth sounds like he's accepted his infamous place in cinema history with good humor. Some highlights:

I researched Scientology before signing on to the movie, to make sure I wasn't making anything that would indoctrinate people. I took a few courses, including the Purification Rundown, or Purif. You go to CC every day, take vitamins and go in and out of a sauna so toxins are released from your body. You're supposed to reach an "End Point." I never did, but I was bored so I told them I had a vision of L. Ron. They said, "What did he say?" "Pull my finger," was my response. They said I was done.

During my Scientology research, I met an employee who I instantly had a crush on. She was kind of a priestess, and had dedicated her life to working for the church by becoming a Sea Org member. She said that she signed a billion-year contract. I said, "What! Really?" She said she got paid a small stipend of $50 a week, to which I said, "Can you get an advance on the billion years, like say, a mere $500,000?" And then she said as a Sea Org member, you can't have sex unless you're married. I asked her if she was married. She said yes. So I said, "Great! That means we can have sex!"

My script was very, VERY different than what ended up on the screen. My screenplay was darker, grittier and had a very compelling story with rich characters. What my screenplay didn't have was slow motion at every turn, Dutch tilts, campy dialogue, aliens in KISS boots, and everyone wearing Bob Marley wigs.

The only time I saw the movie was at the premiere, which was one too many times.

In the end, did Scientology get me laid? What do you think? No way do you get any action by boldly going up to a woman and proclaiming, "I wrote Battlefield Earth!" If anything, I'm trying to figure out a way to bottle it and use it as birth control. I'll make a mint!

I like this guy.

Air - "Sexy Boy"

I'd like to think that Messieurs Dunckel and Godin's campy fascination with 1970s retro cheese is purely tongue-in-cheek, but my hunch is that on some level they actually dig this stuff. They don't think it's "ironic-cool," they just think it's cool.

Perhaps they are correct. But what Air doesn't know is that their genuine retro-naivete is part of what makes them so charming. They think they are being just a little bit funny, but in the eyes of this American, at least, they are very funny, in a very unintentional way.

Perhaps this video so perfectly matches my image of the song because the graphics are an extended riff on the album artwork for Moon Safari: the crude, discofied stars, the van-slash-spaceship, the blue and yellow watercoloresque geometrical shapes. The monkey, however, is nowhere to be found - in my copy, at least.

Where Oh Where Has Our Cosmic American Logo Gone?

It was always there, glowing gently in the distance, comforting us in its own subtle way. But one day, we realized that something about Cosmic American Blog was not the same. Was it the font? The spacing? Finally it hit us: our treasured Cosmic American logo! Our wonderful satellite image of light pollution across the Great 48, colored a fittingly patriotic red, white, and blue! Where has it gone? Why did it go? Will it ever return?

I'm afraid that, until a suitable explanation can be found, Cosmic American Blog has been rendered a just little less cosmic.

Self-Awareness Can Prevent Silliness

"Considering his wealth and good fortune, you wouldn’t peg Peter Thiel as a prophet of doom. He cofounded PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion. Two years after that, he became the first investor in Facebook — a wager that earned him another fortune. Today, at 42, he runs a San Francisco venture capital firm and a hedge fund, Clarium Capital. But the past year has not been easy on Thiel. As bailouts and government stimulus policies revived financial markets, the staunch libertarian bet against the rally and lost big. Investors have been pulling their money out of his fund: Clarium has shrunk from $7 billion in assets to about $1.5 billion. Even as he was laying odds against the economy as a fund manager, though, Thiel was pouring money into audacious, futuristic projects as a VC and philanthropist: private space flight, ocean colonies for human habitation, indefinite life extension. Contradiction? He sees none. Behind both his economic skepticism and his radical utopianism is a conviction that the only way to escape a looming social crisis is to revive the science fiction dreams of yesterday."

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_thiel/

So-called "Utopian pessimist" and billionaire Peter Thiel complains to a Wired interviewer that we don't have enough visionary scientists/inventors working on things like underwater ocean colonies and life extension. Now I want to live forever beneath 20 feet of beautiful glinting blue water as much as the next guy, but let's think about this for a while.

If you can make 1.5 billion for creating PayPal, a useful but not overwhelmingly visionary service, then why waste your time designing submarine living quarters? Thiel complains that we aren't facing up to the fact that we'll need new technologies to keep growing at the rate we have been for the past 200 years. Maybe this is true, but then don't we need advances in alternatives to fossil-fuels much more urgently than this sci-fi kind of stuff? And if we want this kind of sci-fi stuff and billionaires want to fund it that's great too, but I don't think it makes sense to say that this is more helpful to society than a more productive kind of wheat or a better cancer treatment, or any number of boring things.

Up In The Air (Reitman)

Sometimes I think, if you're not trying to make Apocalypse Now, then what the hell are you doing? Sure, I understand, you can't make Apocalypse Now on the first try; you've got to work your way up to it. But I get the impression that Jason Reitman wouldn't even want to make Apocalypse Now if he actually had the budget. He's just not that ambitious.

So aiming low, he hits his target. I could think of worse outcomes. He probably thinks he's being really profound trying to make a movie about "The Economic Crisis." Honestly, for those of us with some perspective, the "Economic Crisis" is small potatoes compared to other events in human history. Sure, for our generation it's a bit bracing, but if you want to see an "economic crisis," watch The Grapes Of Wrath.

I still have a hard time buying George Clooney as anything other than "glamorous movie star." I can't even remember his character's name; in my recollections he just registers as "George Clooney." His character also feels like a screenplay construction. Are there really people like this? Or, more to the point, does Jason Reitman actually know any people like this?

Maybe I'm being a jerk. This movie was mostly a pleasure to watch. Compared to She's Out Of My League or Hot Tub Time Machine, it probably is Apocalypse Now. A friend of mine was saying, "I think there's room in the world for these little mainstream dramas. In a perfect world a movie like Up In The Air would just be average, instead of really good only because most other movies really suck." All right, well, how about this: if you're not trying to make Apocalypse Now, at least try to make ... The Graduate? Maybe it's not fair to criticize a movie just because you feel like if you met the director you wouldn't have anything in common. Call it what you want.

A final note: there's a character in this movie who says her dream job is in San Francisco. Yeah, well, wait until you ride MUNI for five minutes and have to sit next to 18 smelly quasi-homeless guys on the way to work every morning and try to find an apartment that isn't completely falling apart and isn't bleeding your wallet dry, and tell me if your dream job is in San Francisco then, bitch.

She'd probably just live in the East Bay and work in the city.

Film critic rating: ***1/2
Little Earl rating: **1/2

Lady Gaga has 'It'

Folks, this Lady Gaga has "It". There hasn't been a star like her since, well, Britney first burst on the scene in the late 90s. Seriously. Even Simon Cowell thinks she has 'it'. But where did she come from, who is she, and why the hell is her name Lady Gaga?

I can't answer these questions, and that folks is why she's so appealing. Like rock & rollers of yesteryear where the only thing you knew about that sexy frontman guy was from what you read in music mags or, if you were lucky enough, saw in concert, Lady Gaga has that 'mystique' that's sorely been lacking in music since the birth of music television. And what's truly amazing is that Lady Gaga (Ms. Gaga?) manages to build up this mystique by utilizing all those modern elements that tend to crush it.

Funnily enough I didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to her until just a few weeks ago. I suppose I saw her as the product of celebrity gossip culture. For some reason I always equated her with Perez Hilton, or Access Hollywood and other such drivel. But I didn't realize until recently that Lady Gaga is essentially mocking all of those things. Perennial favorite reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it better than I can:

"The times were crying out for a pop star like Lady GaGa — a self-styled, self-made shooting star, one who mocked the tabloid digital age while still wanting to wallow in it — and one who's smart enough to pull it all off, too. That self-awareness and satire were absent in the pop of the new millennium, where even the best of the lot operated only on one level, which may be why Lady GaGa turned into such a sensation in 2009: everybody was thirsty for music like this, music for and about their lives, both real and virtual."

I think Gaga's biggest strength is that she's a master of both style and substance. Known for wearing truly outrageous costumes and outfits, including a dress made of dead Kermit-the-Frogs, she's the master attention getter. But she also excels at making really damn good pop music. Like I said before, I don't think I've heard pop music that "popped" quite like this since Britney showed up in the school girl dress back in 1998. Even if you've never seen her videos or her wild get-ups, her songs are just marvelously crafted pop songs.

But back to the mystique. I don't know how she does it, but Gaga somehow managed to steal the spotlight last year, yet we don't really know anything about her. Most pop stars do the TV circuit, either promoting a new album on Good Morning America, expressing remorse for a bad deed on Oprah, or hosting Saturday Night Live. We're supposed to "get to know" the artist this way, what drives them, what are they feeling, who are they dating this week? Lady Gaga excels at doing none of this. If it wasn't for her Wikipedia entry I wouldn't have the slightest clue as to her real name, age, or anything else about her. While living in the constant spotlight, she manages to tell us nothing about her personal life, and, really, I just like that.

I've said before that I really can't stand celebrity gossip culture. I've always seen Lady Gaga as affiliated with that culture, but I don't think I ever caught her satire of it until I started listening to her songs. It's difficult to discern, because in one way she's relishing in the whole celebrity culture while simultaneously mocking the whole thing. Once again, Mr. Erlewine comes through better than I: "But where Gwen (Stefani) simply celebrates celeb consumer culture, GaGa bites, her litany of runway models, pornographic girls, and body plastic delivered with an undercurrent of disdain, even as she loves all the glitz." It's a fine line to walk, but she somehow pulls it off.

I decided to write this piece after a house party I went to last weekend. On the way to the party my girlfriend and I were talking about Lady Gaga (while listening to her) and I was telling her how I read that Simon Cowell had high praise for her and that she's got the new 'it' factor. Later that night at the party one of her songs came on and EVERYONE wanted to talk about her - Who is she? Did you see her in that crazy outfit? Did you see that video where she was dressed up like a robot? I'm not kidding. But perhaps more importantly someone said "You know, I've heard this song a hundred times now and it's still not getting old." That's the sign of good pop music.