Bay of Pigs

I saw "Transformers" last week and even though I knew it would be horrible, some part of me hoped Michael Bay had hired a good screenwriter for once. All I wanted was something I could endure, but it just never materialised. Ridiculous juvenile gags about robots showering snooty FBI agents with oil from conveniently placed groin-gaskets, a completely superfluous story that bears no resemblance to the cartoon, stupidly designed robots and Peter Cullen phoning in all his lines from better episodes of the cartoon. Leave it to Bay to make a movie more 2-dimensional than the cartoon that inspired it.

All the comics, cartoons and TV-shows you loved are already slated to be chopped up in the Hollywood grinder. If you're lucky, someone with a sense of taste will take an interest and make something out of it. Usually, a committee of faceless producers, directors and screenwriters will try to make bland, easily digestible sludge. You can blame them, but it's really your fault.

Mea Culpa, mea maxima culpa. I've seen Armageddon, I've seen Pearl Harbor and I now I've done it again. This is the last time I'm giving Michael Bay my money.

The Onion thoughtfully provided all of us with a list of ten other directors to lavish your loathing on. I agree with all of them, except for Steve Oedekerk. I just really liked Kung Pow, for which I can not in all good conscience apologise.

The Curd Reich

I just read Popco by Scarlett Thomas. It was one of those books that keep you on the edge of your seat, not because you care about the characters or the plot, but because you think you might if it just gets a little better. I usually stop reading books if they haven't gotten my attention by page 100, but this one of those rare occasions where I kept giving it the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed.

The main character works for a toy company, but is conflicted about the toy industry and marketing to children in general. She is selected for a weird company retreat where she is subjected to the kind of lateral thinking seminars that would probably bore me in real life as well. She keeps on remembering her fantastic childhood with her grandparents, both excellent mathematicians. This is the vaguely interesting part of the narrative, full of just enough references to Gödel and Erdös to make me want to keep reading.

But there's not nearly as much fun mathematics for humanities people as in for instance "The man who loved only numbers" by Paul Hoffman. Then all of the math is revealed to lead only to cryptography and cryptanalysis, which just so happens to be the subject of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, coincidentally also a better book. It's usually a bad sign, if a book reminds you of other, better books.

All that crypto-babble leads to the macguffin, a necklace with a weird inscription, given to the main character by her grandfather, which, if deciphered will lead to a useful deus ex machina treasure. Luckily the present day plot manages to throw up a little low-level intrigue and a pallid, effete vegan love-interest for our main character at this point.

It turns out, he and a group of other people in the company have been plotting to destroy capitalism from the inside out all along and now they want to recruit her! Thank god she's got a whole bunch of cryptography knowledge and a hidden treasure! The whole thing devolves into a lengthy J'accuse addressed to the corporate world and then an infantile revenge fantasy, which would make even hardened anti-globalists blush. That's right, go ahead and ruin the world's economic infrastructure, that'll help the environment.

That stupid ending ruined an otherwise luke-warm excersise in mediocrity. It reminded me of Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus", too many subjects cursorily dealt with by a chaotic and thoroughly unsystematic mind, hell-bent on making a hazy point about 'important things'. But where Angela Carter manages to come within an inch of coherence, Scarlett Thomas finally drops the pretense of literature in favor of a blatant agitprop. I don't think we have anything to fear from real-life vegans, though. Their low mineral, low protein diets usually leave them too exhausted to do more than complain.

The Green Carnation

When I was about twelve years old, I was at a theatre with my parents and various other people for one of those parties with family members and friends of your parents you've never seen before and will never see again. In the entrance hall was a modern art exhibition with some burnt plastic dolls arranged in a pile.

Thinking I was being clever, I said to one of the adults that I could have made that sculpture. This older man was probably a maecenas of some sorts, because he replied that this might be true, but could I have thought of it? I was unable to think of any answer to this and had to bask in the benevolent smile of the victor. 'Touché, child. I win again.', his eyes seemed to say. I was humiliated and didn't speak to anyone for the rest of the evening.

I knew he was wrong somehow, but I didn't know how exactly. It wasn't until years later that I realised what the problem was. Creativity is not the same thing as art. The Greeks separated art and craft into two categories and a truly great piece involved some of both. There has to be some craftsmanship involved, or it's just an idea. There is nothing special about those. Everyone has them all the time.
The opinion I came up with originally is what the average person has been saying since Picasso started doing things out of perspective. I forget where, but someone wrote that "just as art was becoming accessible to the masses, it became incomprehensible to them." They probably imagined droves of enlightened miners signing Marcel Duchamp's name to urinals the world over. The latest generation of performance artists seem to favor pissing in it, whenever they see it hanging on the wall. The erosion of the concept of art has now led to "outsider art" and 3 year old boys making abstract paintings. All this made possible by a gullible audience, greedy dealers and complicit critics. This 12-year-old is apparently a vandal and not an artist.

In Robert Hichens' book The Green Carnation (pdf), which was used as evidence against Oscar Wilde in his 'gross indecency' trial, the main characters, Wilde and Lord Douglas are constantly discussing the ideas of the aesthetic movement, personified by the carnation Wilde wears in his lapel. It's painted green in an attempt to force nature to adapt to it's beautiful artificiality. 'He believed that Art showed the way to Nature and worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.' The book is full of epigrams about Art, but none of them seem to apply anymore. The whole concept was synonymous with beauty, now it just means concept.

These days it's all about how much theory you know. Not that this is a bad thing, it just means that anyone smart enough, automatically becomes an artist or a critic. The borders between Art, commerce and entertainment have become completely irrelevant. For all the people who use Art as a means of self expression, millions more have never been to a museum or care much about what goes on there. And that's never going to change. Art, with a capital A will always be an elitist activity, especially now that you need to have an education to understand it at all.

But craftsmanship has made a big comeback. In films for the last fifty years or so, in television for the last ten. They're both so technically complex and expensive that it's just not worth the trouble not to take pains. And the pay-off has been fantastic. Now, we've even seen the kinds of complex ideas that made Art so incomprehensible in the first place.

Sadly, technology marches on and the cheaper it gets to film something the more crap will scuttle out of the woodwork. Home video shows were the first wave and reality TV was the second. I shudder to think what the Internet will hath wrought soon.