Lacking Imagination

This article by Phil Perrier made me laugh; currently working on a case study of FIASCO Magazine (if you love fashion + photography + free content, go read it), but here are two snippets of "If You Don't Like TV, You're a Bad Person" to titillate some neurons:

 ...who needs TV? I mean, when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder onto the moon, a charcoal etching was good for me. Who needs to see Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot or Kobe Bryant hitting a three pointer at the buzzer, when a friend can describe it to you? "Yeah, and then this dumpy guy in a suit comes outa' nowhere and shoots Oswald!" Isn't that satisfying?

...In truth, if you don't like TV, you may just lack imagination. Which brings to mind an old Chinese proverb in which a young man moves to a new village and he visits an old wise man (this was when old people were respected for their knowledge and not just medicated and sent to a "home." Weird, huh?) and asks, "Old wise man, what are the people like in this village?" And the old wise man says, "What were the people like in the village you just came from?" And the young guy says, "They were petty and spiteful and dishonest." And the old man said, "The people are the same here." Meaning, that we see what we expect to see. Or, possibly that the old man and the young man both lived in a village fulls of dicks. But I'd rather go with that first thing.

In a way, TV makes me sad that people don't invest time the same way they did before the Internet to reading and becoming engrossed in words that can show you something amazing without presenting a picture. But my eyeballs do appreciate TV giving me other people's visual constructions, because it widens my perspective.

(On the second excerpt, after twelve years of Chinese school, getting my native culture drummed into my head & missing the network broadcast morning cartoons every Saturday, I have no idea where Perrier got that 'old Chinese proverb.' It must be an American thing, to attribute every random, somewhat educational adage to an 'old Chinese proverb.')

The Differences Between Seeing, Looking & Watching

There's a lot of television out in the world, and there's a lot of flak about watching too much television, that it's dumbing down America and we're all wasting our lives, vegetating away in front of giant plasma screens with our super-sized soft drinks and jumbo bags of deep-fried, thinly-cut bites of artificial goodness. Mmmmm. Noming our way to a slow, sleazy and squalid surrender of sloth and gluttony.

Image via NerdFitness.

Next time you're watching a television show, though, take a closer look at what you're watching--what kind of nuances are there? Do you understand all of the jokes? Do you get all the references made by the characters in their dialog, or search for hidden clues as to discover who exactly is the villain or where the plot is going?

I'm not going to argue that television is a wholly educational or completely cognitive-challenging medium--it's really not. There's a lot of crude exploitation--of humor, of stereotypes, of human nature and of controversial subjects--but there's also a new wave of 'intellectual' programming that should not be put down, just because it's surrounded by simplistic padding.

The incredibly intelligent television show that immediately comes to mind nowadays is irrefutably, Lost.

Season 6 promotional poster. Image via IMDB.

I've never watched it (but as soon as school lets out, every episode's available on Hulu!), but when in the first episode, you have a plane crash, a mysterious tropical island and polar bears and a smoke monster, it's mind-boggling and intriguing. Reading Time's James Poniewozik's article on "TV After 'Lost,'" I discovered that Lost is more than a Gilligan's Island or Cast Away, but some funky, time-traveling and very philosophical drama that is confusing, even with a handy summary. Lost is about a lot:

...Lost would not be about tribal elections, digging wells or devising systems of coconut-shell currency. It would be a weird mystery involving time travel, the butterfly effect and conspiracies within conspiracies. It would be a spiritual journey about characters seeking redemption. It would be about big ideas: free will and predestination, science and faith, mankind's essential good or evil. Through this prism — and through narrative flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashes into an alternate reality — it would be about, well, everything.

Lost doesn't attempt to answer those eternal questions. What it does instead is challenge the audience to ponder such mysteries themselves. Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.' " Also, says Cuse, "it's usually meant to say, If you want to go deeper, here's something that you can explore." Lost is like a TV show with footnotes.

What do you see when you see this promo pic? If you said The Last Supper, you've got brains.
Image via IMDB.

Lost is part of a new wave of television watching where it's more interactive than ever, and not just because you can Tweet or update your Facebook status in real time as you watch an episode; there are fan sites and forums where viewers congregate, and it's all part of "a multimedia experience of which the show itself is the first component." Watching TV is now a really complicated thing.

A case study in Media & Culture analyzes the new wave of television:

...In contrast to older popular programs like Dallas or Dynasty, contemporary popular layers "each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads." Johnson argues that younger audiences today--brought up in the Age of the Internet and in an era of complicated interactive visual games--bring high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. "The mind," Johnson writes, "likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system."

The author referenced by the case study, Steven Johnson, wrote 2005's Everything Bad is Good For You. In a pull quote, Media & Culture highlights specifically Johnson's view on the Internet's impact complicating television.

The Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like Lost or Alias is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

I think media does a lot for us, and there shouldn't be a definitively one-sided 'television is horrible for you' kind of broad statement made by critics or parents, because it really isn't.

Multitasking--Hulu, Excessive Reading & Fashion Porn

A lot of my time is spent, obviously looking at (moving) pictures--Ronye asked 'how [I] balance all the TV shows that [I] watch,' and what I do is usually try and catch only one or two TV shows a night. On days when I don't have class, or when I've got free time, I log onto Hulu, drag the window to one half of my screen, and in a second window, go on with my Internet habits of (as afore-clarified in title).

A screenshot of what I'm doing right now.

Obviously, right now, I am watching TV (a passive activity) and typing this blog. Normally, however, I'm running through my Google Reader feed (usually 1000+ updates) and looking at static pictures.

Screenshot of my earlier entry Daily Reads displaying my daily reading list.

Go-to websites on my feed usually include The Daily Beast and Entertainment Weekly; that doesn't include the myriad of links on social media provided by the awesome people I follow on Twitter. (I love Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. You'll probably talk to more on Twitter than in real life).

 I spend the rest of my time surfing fashion blogs and feeding my inner sartorial whore; for looking up the latest fashion spreads, I have two go-to sites:

Fashion Gone Rogue

Fashion, whether you like it or not, is mostly a woman's world. FGR regularly posts up editorial spreads from every issue of Vogue, various catalogs, ad campaigns, and other magazines. High quality scans and compiled all in one place, it's like buying twenty magazines and flipping through without all the ugly advertisements and having the opportunity to compile, on your hard drive for personal use, all your favorite fashion images. As an amateur fashion illustrator, I love having an easy resource like this.

The Fashionisto

The Fashionisto is FGR's... brother site. Focusing on man candy male models, this site is the definitive place to find images of the elusive XY mannequin.  Mmmm... I think I'll leave this entry here. I've got boys to drool over homework to do.

Mike Teavee, Move Over

I watch an inordinate amount of television; in the context of being GenY, it's another facet of my overwhelming consumption of media, and looking at myself, it's kind of freaky and slightly ridiculous how much I watch. Ironically, for my Communications class, our professor is constantly urging us to watch more TV.

Here is, in a roundabout table, a compilation of my TV schedule from the last year:

Yeah, I know.

Intersperse with various filler episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims' Unit, beginning to watch many of the shows halfway through Season 3 and lots of catching up, pretty regular catch-ups of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the occasional disgusted/fascinated screening of Jersey Shore and watching through two seasons of Dirty Sexy Money in half a hectic week, and the hours of television I've consumed over the last nine months is probably well into the hundreds.

Left, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report (e.g. favorite newscaster ever), and right, Dirty Sexy Money, favorite now-defunct/cancelled-TV-show-that's-got-both-Billy-Baldwin-and-Donald-Sutherland-squee!!!!-yay. Images via IMDB.

One genre of television that you don't see in my schedule, however, is the game show; I've got nothing against game shows--Jeopardy ftw!--but being narcissistic and thinking better of myself than the people who are on these shows, I don't like to 'waste' my time failing (or kicking ass) on questions I ace at home.

Running home in the afternoons between classes to have a swift lunch, there's only one program my television receives that isn't an infomercial, a shopping channel, a soap opera or episode of Sesame Street--'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?'

ARE YOU? HUNH? ARE YOU? Image via Fox.

This show is really, really well done production-wise, but what about the basic premise of this show?

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Are you smarter than a prepubescent elementary schooler who still has recess breaks? Are you smarter than a child whose hairline is barely past your pelvis? Are you smarter than a kid who has spent the last ten years of their life sleeping, eating, crying, and occasionally flipping through picture books and scrawling through arithmetic worksheets?

True, the questions on this show are sometimes extremely specific, giving an unfair advantage to the pint-sied "assistants" of fifth-graders who are featured on the show, but there's still a large number of basic questions that are common knowledge and are relatively easy to answer. Take a quick peek below:

To the contestants on this show--are you proud that you're smarter than a fifth grader? Really? Does the fact that you're proud you're smarter than a ten-year old make you feel awkward? Or are you ashamed that you're not 'smarter than a fifth grader'? Or do you even care?

I understand why people go on this show--$$$.

But what does this television show say about America, the good ol' US of A, that this show is not only on the air, but (somewhat) popular and that people clamor to compete on air to claim that, yes, they are middle-aged, balding, fatting but still 'smart'?

Sue Sylvester, Dance on Air

My apologies for the lack of updates; school is revving up to the final stages, and I am writing currently to avoid studying. Today's focus:

You betcha. This lady is indubitably one of the driving forces behind Glee, the hit musical-comedy television show on Fox that if you don't know about, you're clearly very, very behind on what's current in pop culture; played by Jane Lynch, Sue Sylvester, cheerleading coach extraordinaire, leading citizen, Madonna fan and blackmail expert is the driving force behind many of the evils that befall the students of an Ohio high school glee club as part of her mission to stay top dog. She is unabashedly rude, racist, elicit, terrifying, egotistical... you get the point. She's ballsy, she's out there, she's the biggest, baddest, best bitch of them all--and still very much three-dimensional. Even in the most seemingly-insensitive of speeches, there's a wit that makes you laugh and adore her:

Sue Sylvester is an extremely endearing character, however, whenever she's around her Down-syndrome-affected younger sister, and in this last week's revealing 'The Power of Madonna' episode, you learn why she always rags on Will Schuester for "[having] enough product in your hair to season a wok." Earlier in the season, her brief crush on a local newscaster also brought forth a softer side that hopefully, we'll see again in the future. Jane Lynch really pulls forth the perfect combination of outrageousness and believability in crafting her character, which is why Sue Sylvester has so quickly become a pop culture staple.

Sue claims to be... 29, but whatever her age, she can really pull off a tracksuit--she knows that any kind of full-length sportswear in velour is just fugly, and you can check out a gallery of best outfits @EW. Or read some of my favorite lines:

• If I have a pregnant girl doing a handspring into a double layout, the judges aren't going to be admiring her impeccable form, they're going to be wondering if the centrifugal force is going to make the baby's head start crowning.
• I, for one, think intimacy has no place in a marriage. Walked in on my parents once and it was like seeing two walruses wrestling.
• I empower my Cheerios to live in fear by creating an environment of irrational, random terror.
• I like minorities so much, I'm thinking of moving to California to become one.
• I don't trust a man with curly hair I can't help but picture little birds laying sulfurous eggs in there, and it disgusts me.
• GLEE CLUB! Every time I try to destroy that clutch of scab eating mouth-breathers it only comes back stronger like some sexually ambiguous horror movie villain. Here I am, about to turn 30, and I’ve sacrificed everything only to be shanghaied by the bi-curious machinations of a cabal of doughy, misshapen teens!

• I’ve always thought the desire to procreate showed deep personal weakness. Me, never wanted kids. Don’t have the time, don’t have the uterus.
• When you hear your name called, cross over to my side of this black shiny thing. Santana, Wheels, Gay Kid. C’mon, move it! Asian, Other Asian, Aretha, andShaft. See, Will, I don’t want to participate in a group that ignores the needs of minority students.

My personal favorite line from 'Glee'? Brittany's, "Did you know that dolphins are really just gay sharks?" Your favorite lines? Why you love Sue?