Fat greek weddings revisited

Finding some pictures I was working on for today's missive coming along rather slowly, and with A VERY IMPORTANT SPAIN WORLD CUP GAME ALMOST UPON US! (sorry, I don't know how my capital letters got activated), I thought it might be a nice day to take one of clerkmanifesto's treasures from out of our vast vaults.

So I went looking.

And I found a post from several years ago where I experimented with taking pictures of cheap crafts in Joanne Fabrics and having them recreated in AI to make them alive and magnificent, or something like that. So then I immediately started taking those pictures and doing the same thing again to mark the vast advancements in these last years. And as I was working on the first of these pictures I thought:

WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING?

I have a soccer match to watch.

So then I found another post from around that time called "Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love" and I thought, "that doesn't sound very interesting or good."

But it kind of was.

I'm sure any longtime reader will be aware of my passionate arguments on behalf of the romantic comedy, and this one kind of makes me want to write some more of those.

Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love

When talking about great romantic comedies it is easy to overlook My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Modern film culture has a long standing disdain for the romantic comedy, and much to my chagrin whenever they trot out a "respectable" example of the genre it's invariably When Harry Met Sally. I'm always wishing they would have the sense, knowledge, and brio to bring out instead one of the greatest movies of all time, Moonstruck, but I understand any anti romantic comedy bromide is going to be dead at the start if one goes in with Moonstruck.

But if they must bring out one romantic comedy as a poster child for their war, why not My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Star Wars of romantic comedies, landing in theaters and becoming an absolute sensation. (This isn't the flimsiest comparison: My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time, and it has spawned TV shows and sequels (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is coming out this fall!). Because unlike When Harry Met Sally, which appeals to non romantic comedy people by taking cues from more complex relationship movies to soften its romantic comediness, Wedding burrows into the deepest, most lovely heart of the romantic comedy, diffusing some classic elements of the romantic comedy to both invent something new, and yet emerging to capture the secret soul of the genre.

The romantic comedy is full of tropes. But they are just tropes, an assembly of rhythmic accents to the movie. The essentials of a romantic comedy are merely:

Two immensely charming and likeable people amusingly fall in love and get together. 

Nevertheless the traditional romantic comedy usually comes along with a variety of barriers to the love interests getting together. This creation of uncertainty, friction, dissolution, difficulty, and disappointment is not just widely considered essential to most narrative plotting in a romantic comedy, but is also generally considered so for all fiction everywhere. My Big Fat Greek Wedding largely eschews this convention. Our main characters, Toula and Ian, meet cute (sort of), experience love at first sight (sort of again, Ian might need the love to be at second sight), date, and get married. The main problem and impediment to their relationship is that they come from different cultures. This causes tension and comedy, but unlike the impediments of other romantic comedies it never keeps or drives them apart. This mildness and warmth of relationship is the secret success of the movie as a romantic comedy.

Of course, it's also wonderfully funny, possibly more so than almost any other romantic comedy. I didn't know this until recently, but apparently our star and screenplay writer, Nia Vardalos, wrote the screenplay, which no one was particularly interested in. So then she made it into a one woman show in L.A. which she performed to small, packed audiences for many months. This reminds me of how the Marx Brothers, before many of their best movies, took them on the road as theater, endlessly improvising and honing their material, testing what worked best and what got the best laughs, before coming back to film it as a movie. As I understand it, Nia Vardalos likewise tested her story over and over and brought out its best qualities. Not only did this provide a tighter and funnier screenplay, but it surely gave her the confidence to stick to her vision for the movie despite a gauntlet of attempts along the way to production to make it more conventional (which is just another word for marketable). Proposed, or even urged along the way, were different star actors, actresses, and ethnicity (let's make it Mexican American instead of Greek, and hire an Italian American star!). But the most telling changes requested were the ones demanding more problems between our main characters- a competing suitor to Ian, or an infidelity of some kind. The brilliant and revolutionary aspect of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the one where the movie has such confidence in its characters, comedy, and story, that it dares to get rid of nearly all of the usual narrative tensions in the romance genres. It gives the movie a warm, cozy, and open feel, and yet, despite all odds, leaves its romance every bit as satisfying, if not more so, than the romances built under the more standard "will they won't they" structure.

Plots of all kinds rely on narrative tension and conflict. The thriller is most slavishly devoted to this, and it is also why some of the most driven narratives can feel compulsive, addicting, and even manipulative. But the romantic comedy is no stranger to this structure. And yet its most appealing qualities, its warmth, characters, and rosy environments lie underneath that tumult. There is great craft in creating a narrative that is as little beholden to tensions as possible, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a great romantic comedy precisely because it does the unusual work of lessening the romantic narrative tension to give us more of the warmer, more loveable aspects that are at the heart of the romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally may be a nice reference point for a generic film fan for its filmic romantic comedy ambitions,  My Big Fat Greek Wedding would be a better example for real analysis precisely because it looks into to romantic comedy more than it looks out. It is, significantly, less about the catharsis of love, and more about, like in any good wedding, its celebration.

 

We revisit time travel

 

I'm not sure if time travel stories are a genre, a motif, or simply all of fiction. I do lean towards the latter view, which I think Kurt Vonnegut was suggesting somewhat in Slaughterhouse Five. What is narrative other than something that proceeds in a directed linear fashion like a timeline, and yet can be visited at any point at any time, defying sequence?

Well, tons of things, I suppose, but that too.

I just finished a pretty good time travel novel call The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It starts out being about a program where doomed people are plucked out of England's history and integrated into the present day. It begins as a bit of almost realistic romantic comedy and gets more spy thrillery as one goes along. Time travel stories have a way of ramping up like that. Time travel is hard to keep from running wild.

My favorite time travel stories are often only partly time travel stories, and they pull off dazzling narrative tricks with narrative, where everything makes perfect sense even if it shouldn't. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, arguably the only really terrific book in the series, pulls off a dazzling version of this where events that looked one way when we first encounter them turn entirely different in a new context, and yet remain consistent from every angle. Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite plotters ever, never goes all in on time travel narratives, but casually employs its devices at will to dazzling effect.

Of course, there are no rules with a feature I love so much. The movie About Time is a time travel coming of age romantic comedy about a family where the men can move back into points in their life and change the future. Not only is it full of charm, but it oddly manages the rare grace of keeping time travel low stakes despite its inherent Nuclear Bomb like power. On the other hand it is an absolute disaster class in time travel mechanics. I can't not notice that, and yet am regularly mystified at how little it ultimately matters to me.

There are also pure time travel stories out there that I love, with tightly assembled mechanics. I've talked about Stanislaw Lem's brilliant short story in The Star Diaries here before (The Seventh Voyage), and I've even done homages. Favorite authors of mine like Mark Twain, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Terry Pratchett significantly employ time travel. And maybe that starts to explain some of it to me. If we say that Time Travel is not a genre, it has a distinct predilection for all my favorite genres: Romantic Comedy, Farce, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Adventure. It is no accident that The Ministry of Time is all of these, as are most, no, ALL, of my examples.

But what's my favorite time travel story?

I'll get back to you.

Wonka: The movie review after actually seeing it

 

There are a number of things I don't usually do here at clerkmanifesto:

1. Review movies

I might exult wildly over a movie, or conduct societal analysis with a movie, but just... review a movie? Not really my thing.

2. Talk about art I have mixed feelings about.

I am more inclined to exult wildly, or condemn bitterly, the complex middle ground isn't usually of great interest to me.

3. Open my comments with a list of things that I don't usually do here, but am proceeding to do anyway.

And yet here we are!

A few months ago I wrote a review of the movie Wonka, despite not having seen it. But now I've seen it. So I feel a kind of responsibility, a compulsion even, to set the record straight.

In my quite favorable review of the movie without having seen it here is what I really liked:

1. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa.

2. The casting in general, though aside from Hugh Grant, most notably Timothee Chalamet as a younger Willy Wonka.

3. The colorful setting and whimsey created by the brilliant director of the charming Paddington movies, Paul King.

Having seen the movie here is what I liked:

1. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa.

2. The casting in general, though aside from Hugh Grant, most notably Timothee Chalamet as a younger Willy Wonka.

3. The colorful setting and whimsey created by the brilliant director of the charming Paddington movies, Paul King.

So one would think we were all set and I'd be urging everyone to rush off to see the movie.

But it wasn't a very good movie despite all of the above. And this I would pin down to three basic reasons:

1. Fan fiction is not good fiction.

There is an old truism, I think reasonably now debunked, that the book is always better than the movie. Indeed great movies can be made from good books (The Godfather? Or how about Paddington!). But you know what is ruinously difficult, and so rare that no proper examples leap to my mind? 

Making a movie out of the world of a previous, fully completed work of art created by other people.

This is always a kind of fan fiction, no matter how much money or artistic power is put into it.

There is nothing wrong with fan fiction. If I want to write myself a new Pooh story, more power to me. But I am just doing it as a fan wanting more and ultimately trying to imitate or failing to capture. This is why fan fiction is not good fiction. Its power of creative invention is dampened. If one is truly faithful to the original it is stiff and repetitive in a new story, and if it is inventive and creative it too easily betrays the source material.

2. Too many villains.

The lovely Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (CCF) had, let's see, technically, zero villains. Oh, it had a bunch of bad kids. And I'm open to critiques about the virtues of all kinds of characters in that movie or book, but the one true, and rarely appearing, villain in the movie wasn't, late spoiler alert, actually a villain! He was testing Charlie's character. Zero villains! It is actually part of what is clever and great about that book and the movie. 

Wonka, on the other hand, has three, count them, three whole sets of villains. There are the boardinghouse villains, the chocolate cartel villains, and the police villain. There are seven distinctly drawn, unredeemed villains in this movie. 

It's a fucking fan fic movie that misses an essential point and beauty of its source inspiration!

3. It's magic is magic.

Magic is great. Though I'll note that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (CCF) didn't exactly have any real magic at all, it was science and advanced candy making. It was about the metaphorical magic of candy. But if one has actual magic, that magic has to have rules. Wonka violates this relentlessly. For instance, if Willy Wonka can produce something like endless chocolate from his lovely velvet frock with no access to kitchens, sugar, cocoa, time to work on it, or really anything other than a small steampunk case with delightful mechanisms and small vials of colorful liquid in it, why doesn't he just conjure up wads of banknotes to free himself and all his friends?

In fact, there are so many ridiculous examples along these lines where the impossible regularly becomes conveniently possible when required, that I'd instead like to compare and contrast in this section one notable thing that appears in the two movies (Wonka and CCF): 

Flying.

Chocolate that makes you fly is big in Wonka. It's used many times and at important points. It is the result of... a random magic liquid that exists somehow? Besides violating my "magic being magic" rule, it also betrays the later events of CCF. In CCF flying inducing candy is just then being developed and is in an experimental and tentative stage. It cleverly comes from a soda. So it doesn't make much sense that Wonka had an easy to use potion for flying when he was younger. Ingeniously in CCF the soda bubbles are lighter than air and they make a person float (wonderfully, burping is what gets a person down!). An act of careful story engineering in the book, treated with careful scientific trepidation, and an actual explanation of how it works, becomes, in the prequel: 

Roald Dahl had flying candy (soda), so we have flying chocolate!

Ah, so now I have worked myself up into a lather of fury towards Wonka. 

But you and I both know what that really is all about:

I just really, really wanted it to be good.

It so almost was, and,

It wasn't even close.

Sweary, unusually long and twisted review of the movie: Wonka

 

Thinking of going to see the movie Wonka? 

That is a real god damn commitment! So you might want to check out a review on Wonka first.

Unfortunately I have seen all the reviews on Wonka and guess what?

There is only one fucking good one!

Fortunately it is by me. And you are reading it right now.

But first let's get a few housekeeping things out of the way.

1. I have had a pretty strong sidecar, which is an excellent cocktail that Queens are partial towards.

2. I have not seen the movie Wonka.

But fuck that! 

I am unpopular, I swear a lot in this post, I am on the Internet, and I am supremely confident in my opinion about Wonka. 

Trust me on this one. 

I mostly do.

Now you are probably wondering:

"If you haven't actually seen the movie Wonka, what are you going on in your review?"

Good fucking question clever reader!

I, unlike the irrelevant people who weren't asked this question, will answer it!

I am going on the following things. There are a surprising number.

1. I have seen Timothy Chalamet in the following films:

a. Don't Look Up

b. The French Dispatch

c. Dune

d. Love the Coopers

e. To the 1:39 mark of the music video "(You Made it Feel Like) Home" 

One of these was a masterpiece.

2. I have seen the movies Paddington and Paddington Two more than once (no, Paddington Two is not better than Paddington One). These are excellent auteur films and are by the director of Wonka.

3. I have seen Hugh Grant in all movies where he plays a romantic lead, often several dozen times. I consider him the greatest overall Romantic Comedy lead actor of all time and likely the best chat show guest ever created.

4. I have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 15 times and written about the book back when Hugh Grant still had floppy hair.

5. I have seen the wonderful film with Gene Wilder, called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, many times. 

6. I have seen the terrible movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory once. It is a movie where the talent and, possibly, the very humanity of Johnny Depp broke and fell back violently. Seeing it once was three times too many.

7. I have seen all the previews for Wonka.

8. I have watched every chat show and promotional feature involving the cast of Wonka. 

Now, before we get started, you probably want to know what's wrong with all the other 973 reviews, on the Internet, of Wonka.

Two things.

This is complicated. And I don't want to get into the weeds on this one, but...

The Internet has gone down two tracks:

Vehement and Professional.

Sometimes the vehement people are professional, but, whether they are or not they are always marked by ignorance. The professional people are marked by professionalism and this means they hedge their words because businesses hedge their words because they are businesses.

I am neither ignorant nor professional!

"Wait a second!" You cry out. "You are vehement and yet you claim not to be ignorant while not even seeing the movie you are reviewing!!!"

Okay.

First of all, look who's calling people "vehement"!

Second, point to you. Well done!

But you absolutely fucking know I'm on to something here, and so do I!

So what am I on to?

I can smell every single reviewers tepid professionalism and unconsciously inherited knowledge when it comes to Wonka. I have not seen a shred of independent creative analysis of the Wonka oeuvre.

The professionalism appears as all the reviewers equivocate in their recounting of the past Willy Wonka movies. Whether they liked the first (they did), or they didn't like the second (unclear), they say that opinions vary on how people felt about these.

Opinions vary on how people felt about fucking The Godfather! Who cares. It is a masterpiece!

So, one can discount the credibility of any review that does not state the obvious:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder and Peter Ostrum was obviously a culturally important and excellent movie.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp was clearly and unequivocally a misguided and bitterly unsuccessful remake.

With this alone one could dismiss every virtually every review I have come across, because they are not grounded in anything. But there's more, a deeper sin.

Possibly every review I have seen has also inherited an unconsidered reinterpretation of Gene Wilder's characterization of Willy Wonka, and then measures that blindly inherited knowledge against the film Wonka. This reinterpretation of Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka as a darker, more complex and even sadistic character has the patina of insight, but is south of the point of the character, plot, and movie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I am not sure where this reinterpretation came from originally. I don't even think it is without merit for consideration. But I would say every critic who has been taken in by this reinterpretation has embraced it without analytic consideration. They have taken it as almost their own insight, even though it is merely an alternate take on the character against what is clearly presented in the text and the film and the performance of that first movie.

Willy Wonka is simply a person betrayed by the world who remains deeply moral and is trying not to be destroyed in that.

Also, I am keen to point out that the main character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Charlie. And the actor portraying him, a mere child, is brilliant. It is significant that this doesn't come up in these reviews I have read.

Every review I have read or watched complains at least a little about the Wonka version of Willy Wonka not linking to the later, half broken Willy Wonka appearing at the start of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Those same reviews complain about their initial feelings that there is a pointlessness to a prequel to the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory story. But these two issues go together. The biopic version of showing Willy Wonka's rise and then fall to where he started in Charlie would indeed be pointless.

However, there is a movie to be made of the inspirational Wonka's rise, from the time he rose in love and creativity, and was a person of integrity and purity. This we know was there in his past from his desperate pursuit of finding it again in his contest and in the very person of the pure child Charlie, and by his conferring the inheritance of his life's work upon this impoverished, soulful kid. We know that the complex, Gene Wilder Willy Wonka, full of sadness and just a sliver of hope, has a clear eyed soul that was blinking out, and we know that it brought him to triumph in the past.

Wonka is the story of that past!

So, was it a good movie?

Fuck if I know, I haven't seen it yet.

The perfect city

 

Yesterday in this very space I had some pictures showing my "Venicification" of my city, Saint Minneapolis. I altered the sleepy streets and alleys of my neighborhood to put in calm canals and an occasional gondola, plus maybe a cat, or a parrot, or a decorative bit.

And then I talked about getting rid of cars, and the Internet went mad!

Well, they would have gone mad if any of them came here. But clerkmanifesto is read strictly by 3-14 entirely sensible people so instead everyone remained calm and sane.

So in your face car lovers! Ha!

I accidentally wrote "cat lovers" instead of car lovers at first. But think of that! What if every car were replaced with a cat? Every second, out my window, instead of a loud, world ending car roaring by, a cat would saunter along. That would be kind of lovely. But muse on this sensible person: There are so many cars thundering along relentlessly out my window, on a fairly average American street, that if we replaced them all with cats, a delightful non global warming inducing creature, there might actually be too many cats! It might be a little disconcerting to see so damn many of them marching along the streets.

But, and songbirds may disagree, it surely couldn't be worse than the current situation.

So, you see, I have not stopped thinking of my ideal city. I have not stopped my dissatisfaction with living in a car crazy city, or with having any cars at all, and I have not stopped altering pictures of my city to make them show a world that is more what I'd like to live in.

Yesterday I made my pictures first, and as I wrote the accompanying "war on cars" text of my column, I could see it would be nice if those pictures illustrated a little more of my ideal city. So when I went out and took new pictures, and when I spent the day manipulating them, that's what I had in mind.

The first point I'd like to address is the one of canals. In my pictures yesterday my canals had a tendency to make the neighborhoods look flooded, and maybe even a little post apocalyptic. And as the global climate disaster slowly ushers in the end of the world as we know it, we will regularly be treated to similar, but actual, pictures of cities like Miami, where the streets will have become waterways to disastrous effect. 

So this made me reflect: Maybe the canal isn't the ultimate agent of change we should apply to a city to improve its human scale and its transit effectiveness, even if it is the most entertaining one to add to photographs. 

But then I came to my senses. 

There is no engineering problem with adding canals to a city like Saint Minneapolis. Just as there is no fundamental problem with putting in gondola lifts running on cables above the city (another change I'd love to see occasionally in any city). Both of these things actually exist in minor ways already in my city. The new Highland Bridge development has what is more or less a short canal/stream system running picturesquely through the middle of it, and Centennial Lakes Park has an even better recreational canal system running through a rich area of dense housing and some shops, offices, and restaurants. Furthermore there are gondola cars that, though unfortunately used only during the state fair, exist at least as an operating example in our fairgrounds. So what seems as patently absurd in my pictures, already exists here and all over the world.

It is purely a matter of scale and will.

And while I'll concede that trains, trams, bike paths, trolleys, and trails are probably more efficient and cost effective than canals, the diversity of transit and its aesthetics matter profoundly. And as to cost, the amount of money we spend collectively on the car infrastructure and operation in my city could handle an absolutely profligate alternative. But that is a discussion for another time.

And so once again my build-up has likely overwhelmed my pictures. I have four today, with the images mostly originating on or near a local University campus. Canals predominate the changes, then, increasingly, density, until I work more practical pathways into the scenes. I found that the closer I got to the vision I was looking for, the more I was cutting away from what was actually in my original photographs. And so you will see a progression as you progress through the photographs to more and more changes. I have nevertheless eschewed adding people, which surely says something about me. There are cats though. If you like you can see them as replacements for cars.

 

The Wes Anderson ouvre

 

I arrived in Internetland today to find my Internetland newspaper complaining:

"Stop making Wes Anderson parody videos!"

I have not linked to this article as it has not met my standard of merit.

Someone in Internetland, using a slightly elevated suite of the same AI tools I'm occasionally whacking about with here, made a viral video of Star Wars as directed by Wes Anderson.

I have linked to this as it does meet a minimum standard of merit.

There is also now a Lord of the Rings sequel to this and a slow spill of imitators.

The article has a whole range of problems with these Wes Andersony fripperies. They're not fresh. They're not a fair representation of the intelligence of Wes Anderson. And they're not satire.

But I don't think we have to cast quite so dour an eye on any of it.

What these little short films really serve to demonstrate is that Wes Anderson has a universe, like the Peanuts, or the Muppets. And the great universality of the components of all these creative universes is equally matched by their distinctiveness. It would work to make a version of The Matrix with Muppets and it would be The Matrix, yet it would still be appealing distinctly as A Muppet Movie, at least conceptually. Both are distinctive and yet nevertheless one could fit them together modularly.

So when we watch The "Star Wars by Wes Anderson" pretend preview, in all its imperfections, we, I want to tell the author of this "Stop making Wes Anderson parody videos!" article, are not mocking Wes Anderson, or saying what he does is small, rather we are saying that the way he makes films is actually so great and powerful that there is something appealing about seeing it expressed in endless iterations.

Are these fake Wes Anderson previews groundbreaking, deeply insightful, or adept skewering of his work? No.

Are they cute and do they make me want to see a Wes Anderson Star Wars?

Yes. If he's interested.

And for that matter, a Wes Anderson live version movie of The Muppets, or a Muppet version of a Wes Anderson movie, are of equal interest to me.

Addendum:

And who then am I to resist...

The Muppet Tenenbaums:

Owen Wilson/Kermit:

Scarlett Johansson/Miss Piggy

Riddles of the Scholomance

 

As I failed to mention yesterday in my monthly memo of my cultural engagement, I am still reading Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy to my dear wife. We are on the third book of the series, The Golden Enclaves. And though I have written so many times in this space about my profound admiration for this Fantasy series, in reading it yet again I continue to find wonderful things I want to extol here on clerkmanifesto.

At this point, I will interject a major spoiler alert. Though I do expect all my readers will have read these books by now, I provide this spoiler alert as a just-in-case, so that any new clerkmanifesto reader, or iconoclastic holdouts, can set down my blog for the moment and race off to go read these books before venturing on to my very spoilery observations.

Everybody ready then?

Today I would like to address the Scholomance Trilogy's narrative fireworks.

But I find it hard to articulate what these are and why they are so impressive. Perhaps comparison will help me light the way.

Think about a riddle. Here's one:

Mary's father has five daughters. Their names are:

Nana

Nini

Nono

and

Nene.

What was the fifth daughter's name?

This is pretty simple, though it is easy to get wrong. I don't like getting  riddles wrong so when I come across one I try to skip to the answer really quick before considering it long enough to become confused. 

The answer here is: Mary.

Aha.

But when a book embeds something like this into its very narrative, one doesn't even know it's there. And so one doesn't know what to skip to for the answer. So one simply reads the book. Then when one comes to the "aha" moment, and something obvious, simple (in its way), and clarifying is revealed, well, it's spectacular.

This is really hard to do in narratives! The Sixth Sense did this and is famous for it. The third Harry Potter book, by Anita Bryant, wait, no, by J. K. Rowling, has a nice instance of it. Murder on the Orient Express maybe does it but I'm not sure because I always get too confused when I read it.

Naomi Novik pulls off the trick of this at least two times in The Golden Enclaves, probably three. These are narrative riddles that secretly bubbled along, hidden, for two full books! There is Orion's mother being a maleficer. There is the answer to the question: how are enclaves made (or, where do malmouths come from)? And there is the riddle of El's grandmother's prophecy. These are so fantastic because with a single moment they reorient everything one has read. They instantly organize and clarify and reveal, while they also change nothing from the past. I think it is a kind of distillation of the very nature of plot. Things happen and in time they are resolved, but they are resolved in us, by making sense.

Here is another riddle I came across:

Imagine yourself in a completely dark room. There are no windows and no doors. The floors, ceiling, and walls are solid. How do you get out?

Open your eyes.

Four pictures

 

I have started editing a lot of pictures lately to make myself t-shirts. It is amazing what AI can do right now, especially for me with photography. I can conceive of an image and have an AI produce endless versions that may all be somewhat like what I wanted, or it could have all of them be not even remotely what I asked for. But among them there may be ones that are randomly beautiful.  

I find that culturally, when exciting and possibly revolutionary technologies are emerging, what is shown of them is their very best capabilities and iterations. Sometimes, as critics explore the new technology, their very worst iterations are shown. But what we never see are the ways that the technology is just generally poor, we don't see its points of frustration, nor do we see the array of things that would normally, logically be part of this technology when we conceive or imagine it ourselves, but that in reality simply aren't there at all.

All that said I am doing so much working around designs, limitations, and my own ignorance while using AI Photography, that to get anything I want it's almost like I have to make the art myself!

But, so, actually I just came here today to tell you I am sick! 

I haven't tested yet and sort of assume Covid, but I would be delighted if it were just a very bad cold or a fairly mild flu. And I was going to explain briefly, in like two sentences at most, how I was tired and couldn't possibly write a proper blog post exploring technology issues today. And then I was going to offer these four pictures for your entertainment while I took it easy. 

But then... this whole thing happened (see above).

Here are four pictures anyway:

My paywall blocker

 

Internetland, myself included, has increasingly become aware of how genuinely terrible search engines have become. Aside from defaulting to bringing up either the same gigantic corporate websites, or ads, or thinly veiled ads, or the most generic possible information, or sites that have carefully manipulated the algorithms of the search engine to appear despite offering nothing of any value, or, usually, to some combination all of these all at once, today's search engines just seem really... dumb, blunt, cold, manipulated, and without nuance.

I was recently researching some... stuff for a blogpost I am writing about chat gpt and AI in general. There was only one mildly interesting result for my query. I'm not even sure if it was interesting, but it looked at least to be theoretically relevant. So I clicked on it and got...

A paywall.

And this got me thinking:

I know there are, and I have used, ad blockers, to access elements of the Internet without being overwhelmed by advertising, but what if I could turn off any, for example, paywalled content? When roaming the Internet The New York Times may as well be dead to me. And that thought was just the start. I would pay actual money for a search engine that worked for me. What if I could turn off not just paywalled sites, but anything that will make me sign up to access their content? What if I could turn off any sites that are over optimized, that is, that look like they are made too well to attract views? What if, at clicks of a button, I could turn off large websites, or how about for profit sites? I mean, this is just me brainstorming for three seconds, but the interesting possibilities of highly customizable search engines made for the user are vast. In fact, it's such a great idea I wonder if maybe it actually exists!

Too bad there's no way for me to ever find it.

Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love

 

When talking about great romantic comedies it is easy to overlook My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Modern film culture has a long standing disdain for the romantic comedy, and much to my chagrin whenever they trot out a "respectable" example of the genre it's invariably When Harry Met Sally. I'm always wishing they would have the sense, knowledge, and brio to bring out instead one of the greatest movies of all time, Moonstruck, but I understand any anti romantic comedy bromide is going to be dead at the start if one goes in with Moonstruck.

But if they must bring out one romantic comedy as a poster child for their war, why not My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Star Wars of romantic comedies, landing in theaters and becoming an absolute sensation. (This isn't the flimsiest comparison: My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time, and it has spawned TV shows and sequels (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is coming out this fall!). Because unlike When Harry Met Sally, which appeals to non romantic comedy people by taking cues from more complex relationship movies to soften its romantic comediness, Wedding burrows into the deepest, most lovely heart of the romantic comedy, diffusing some classic elements of the romantic comedy to both invent something new, and yet emerging to capture the secret soul of the genre.

The romantic comedy is full of tropes. But they are just tropes, an assembly of rhythmic accents to the movie. The essentials of a romantic comedy are merely:

Two immensely charming and likeable people amusingly fall in love and get together. 

Nevertheless the traditional romantic comedy usually comes along with a variety of barriers to the love interests getting together. This creation of uncertainty, friction, dissolution, difficulty, and disappointment is not just widely considered essential to most narrative plotting in a romantic comedy, but is also generally considered so for all fiction everywhere. My Big Fat Greek Wedding largely eschews this convention. Our main characters, Toula and Ian, meet cute (sort of), experience love at first sight (sort of again, Ian might need the love to be at second sight), date, and get married. The main problem and impediment to their relationship is that they come from different cultures. This causes tension and comedy, but unlike the impediments of other romantic comedies it never keeps or drives them apart. This mildness and warmth of relationship is the secret success of the movie as a romantic comedy.

Of course, it's also wonderfully funny, possibly more so than almost any other romantic comedy. I didn't know this until recently, but apparently our star and screenplay writer, Nia Vardalos, wrote the screenplay, which no one was particularly interested in. So then she made it into a one woman show in L.A. which she performed to small, packed audiences for many months. This reminds me of how the Marx Brothers, before many of their best movies, took them on the road as theater, endlessly improvising and honing their material, testing what worked best and what got the best laughs, before coming back to film it as a movie. As I understand it, Nia Vardalos likewise tested her story over and over and brought out its best qualities. Not only did this provide a tighter and funnier screenplay, but it surely gave her the confidence to stick to her vision for the movie despite a gauntlet of attempts along the way to production to make it more conventional (which is just another word for marketable). Proposed, or even urged along the way, were different star actors, actresses, and ethnicity (let's make it Mexican American instead of Greek, and hire an Italian American star!). But the most telling changes requested were the ones demanding more problems between our main characters- a competing suitor to Ian, or an infidelity of some kind. The brilliant and revolutionary aspect of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the one where the movie has such confidence in its characters, comedy, and story, that it dares to get rid of nearly all of the usual narrative tensions in the romance genres. It gives the movie a warm, cozy, and open feel, and yet, despite all odds, leaves its romance every bit as satisfying, if not more so, than the romances built under the more standard "will they won't they" structure.

Plots of all kinds rely on narrative tension and conflict. The thriller is most slavishly devoted to this, and it is also why some of the most driven narratives can feel compulsive, addicting, and even manipulative. But the romantic comedy is no stranger to this structure. And yet its most appealing qualities, its warmth, characters, and rosy environments lie underneath that tumult. There is great craft in creating a narrative that is as little beholden to tensions as possible, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a great romantic comedy precisely because it does the unusual work of lessening the romantic narrative tension to give us more of the warmer, more loveable aspects that are at the heart of the romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally may be a nice reference point for a generic film fan for its filmic romantic comedy ambitions,  My Big Fat Greek Wedding would be a better example for real analysis precisely because it looks into to romantic comedy more than it looks out. It is, significantly, less about the catharsis of love, and more about, like in any good wedding, its celebration.

 

The insane price of eggs!

 

Sure, I buy eggs every once in awhile. Some weeks I'm kind of into eggs, you know, for eating. But more often I just need one or two eggs to make mayonnaise.

Of course I make mayonnaise! Doesn't everyone make mayonnaise?

But recently, as you probably know, all of America started going batshit insane about the price of eggs. I mean, I wasn't that interested, but I still knew all about it because it was simply everywhere. The soaring price of eggs was, dare I say, in the very batter of public life.

The funny thing was in the afternoon before going to the grocery store to investigate the price of eggs and, uh, shop for groceries, I had been listening to a favorite podcast, while shelving books at my library, called "War on Cars". In this show they were talking about "Moral Panics". Moral Panics are when a widespread fear, often irrational and overblown, rises up on bare fragments of evidence, that some evil thing is threatening the well-being and values of society in the gravest of ways. This is often perpetuated by a kind of mass media hysteria, and fed by politicians. Examples include the Salem Witch Trials, Reefer Madness, and the dangers of Rock, and Video Games, and Critical Race Theory. The show I was listening to was bringing in the idea of moral panic to describe what was happening in relation to Ebikes, scooters, and more people using bike lanes in various cities.

But something about this egg thing reminded me of what I was learning about moral panics.

I mean, the price of everything is going up. A lot of it is extremely suspicious to me, and I think has more to do with the Corporate Monopolization of markets than things like supply chain issues, but yes, both are deeply involved. Still, why the egg?

Probably like you, any trip I make to the grocery store these days can provide me with three or four random opportunities to be stunned at the newly high cost of something. I may never have seen cauliflower at five dollars a pound before, or I might suddenly notice that it has become normal for any good cheese to now be more than twenty dollars a pound. I looked at the eggs. They had a dozen on sale for an amount that evoked no particular reaction in me, and though I believe a singular organic free-range egg was 40 cents or so, and this was maybe higher than I was used to, it was not the sort of amount to make my jaw drop. And yet as I wheeled to the check out line the screaming banner headline of our main city newspaper that I passed was about the terrible high prices of eggs.

Weird.

I suppose it was because it was a symbol, a common food, easily understandable. It could express a broader outrage about rising prices. And maybe too it had something to do with it being neatly ascribable to bird flu.

If everything is crazy, and supply chains are broken, and bird flus are decimating products, and no one will work (for low wages), and we all feel like it's a craziness tearing apart the fabric of society and there's nothing we can do about it except suck it up, or use less eggs, or embrace the new luxury of omelets, then maybe we won't look...   too...    close?

If there is an underlying reason something is 15 percent more expensive, but you raise the price 25 percent, maybe you can shrug your shoulders and make ten percent more off of everything.

Naaaah. Just kidding. It's all fate and luck and beyond anyone's control. But I'm here to help!

Here's how to save money on eggs!

Buy a cheap chicken. It can even be a remaindered chicken.

Take it home.

Put it in your countertop time machine (use the kind with the viewing window).

Dial the machine back eight weeks, but keep your finger on the "stop" button.

You can do whatever until the chicken is getting kind of cute and fluffy. Then, when the chick becomes an egg wait a couple more seconds (this is important, otherwise, yuck). You want to catch your egg just before it disappears. 

If it disappears don't worry!

Dial your time machine forward a few hours and then hit the stop.

One very fresh egg!

Enjoy!