The other day Penny Arcade posted a link to a video by this Johnny Chung Lee guy demonstrating some pretty cool things the Wii remote can do when it’s cleverly used. He has a small handful of such videos on his Wii remote projects page, all of which are worth watching. But out of all of them, this one is the one I would like to see used the most.

This Lee person is apparently a jack of all trades, as they say. He’s also a pretty decent photographer, he invented the $14 stedycam (a device that usually costs as much as the camera its attached too), and built a slingshot capable of shotting paint balloons 180 feet in the air, among other things. This guy is pretty pro at wasting time.

David Simon (journalist, creator of The Wire) wrote an article that was published in the Washington Post a few days ago. The article can be found here. I found it to be interesting.

I’m always weary when someone tells me that a show is funny. Most shows that claim to be funny are actually much the opposite, at least to me anyways. The problem with me being so resistant to accepting that a show might be funny is that I usually miss the ones that actually are. Arrested Development was canceled before I finally gave it a chance, same with Mr. Show. Well after a long time of a few different groups of friends trying to get me to check out this show, I’ve finally given it a legitimate watching, and it’s pretty damn funny.

The show is on HBO and is called Flight of the Conchords. It’s somewhat similiar to the Tenacious D show in format, only this one is consistently funny instead of only being occasionally amusing. If you’re like me, you need some proof. So check these out. Or don’t.

If you’re still unconvinced, then we have different tastes in funny.

And following up a previous post, Dan DeLillo’s book Cosmopolis has proven to be really good so far. The book essentially brings out the greed, absurdities, obscenities, and sexuality of modern life in a major city that seem to float just below everyone’s radar. Instead of damning this, though, the book seems to fascinate itself with it – reveling in it all. It’s very Andy Warhol-ish in that way. The book was reviewed fairly negatively across the board (with a few exceptions), but I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. We’ll see how I feel about it when I finish it.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist, an author, and an expert on street gangs. I originally read about him in the excellent (I can’t emphasize the word “excellent” enough here) book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. A portion of Freakonomics tells the story of Sudhir attempting to conduct some surveys in a bad part of town for his sociology work. Much against his liking, Venkatesh somehow found himself held at gunpoint in a crack house by a drug dealing gang. Long story short Venkatesh befriended the gang, and many an interesting thing came of that, including a detailed look at the economics of Street Gangs as described in Freakonomics.

As it turns out Venkatesh is a big fan of The Wire, a show of which I also greatly enjoy. Venkatesh recently had some kind of Wire watching party or something, with all of his inner city street gang friends invited to attend. Sudhir posts the results on his blog, which basically go to show that the program is indeed very accurate and that thugs like to place lots of bets. It’s a fairly amusing read, but also very interesting to see how the people that are essentially the subject of The Wire respond to the show as opposed to someone like myself, who is indeed white and has in fact never even tried an illegal drug.

Venkatesh’s new book Gang Leader for a Day was just released about a week ago. Hm. I should check that out.

School started again, and this semester, for the first time ever (including high school), I wont be carpooling with anyone to and from school. In order to ease the boredom of the half hour trip each way with no one to talk to I decided to start listening to audio books. I just finished up Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, which was fantastic. Consider is a selection of essays which are collected in the book by the same name. The selections are read by the author, which in this case is a good thing.

Wallace’s books and short stories are not easy reads (although they are worth the trouble), but having it read to you is ideal. Wallace is brilliant and funny in a way that I don’t think many people are. Good stuff.

Next comes Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. I hope it’s half as good.

Oh and school is OK I suppose.

This is pretty old, but I still think it’s funny. In Punch-Drunk Love Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the owner of a mattress store, which is also the base of operations for a phone sex hot line, by the way. On the special features of the DVD is this fake commercial.

Apparently the commercial was stolen beat for beat from an actual commercial outtake, which is equally as funny. Maybe more.

Sometimes I get the feeling like everything in the entire world around me (including me) is just horribly vile, and I don’t mean in the germaphobic sense either. Sometimes I’ll just be sitting around, driving my car, watching a movie, lying in bed or whatever… and I feel like everything that’s gross about everything becomes suddenly visible to me. Sort of like, let’s say you have this woman. Incredibly attractive. Beautiful in any and every way you could ever imagine a girl to be. But right under that – right under her hair and skin, behind her perfect eyes, its all repulsing. It’s guts and bile and piss and puss and puke. Stomach acids and blood that would crust over and stain brown.

Maybe it’s weird, but when I occasionally get to feeling this way it’s like the world’s pretty skin is peeled back and all I can see is the puss and puke of my surroundings. I should mention that I don’t mean this metaphorically. I’m not trying to make a statement about people’s true intentions, their secret agendas, or anything of the like. I just mean the physical world and how revolting things are when you think hard about them or look closely enough at them.

On the rare occasion I get this feeling it is always fleeting – it just lasts for a moment and then it’s gone. Just enough to make me stop a moment and shudder among the dinginess of it all.

I watched a pretty awesome documentary yesterday called Air Guitar Nation. The movie follows a handful of Americans who are working their way up through air guitar competitions in order to win a chance to play in the Air Guitar World Championships in Finland. Everyone involved always seemed to take it as a complete joke at first, but after a while quite a few contestants describe it as a real art – one in particular calling it “the last pure art form,” or something of the like. Some never get passed the idea of it being a joke, others get hyper competitive. It’s all pretty wacky and fun to watch.

Something the movie does do well, though, is to not make fun of the participants. It simply presents them and lets them explain themselves – leaving you to decide for yourself it they’re crazy, just having some fun, or some kind of real performance artists.

All I know is that if there is ever an air guitar championship in Houston, I will be there, either as a competitor simply an observant – it does not matter.

Understanding Comics is not a new book. It was released in 93, putting it at fifteen years old this year (sweet holy god 1993 was fifteen years ago? So this is what aging feels like). Understanding Comics is a history, explanation, and exploration of art and art theory with a focus on the comic – told in the form of a 200+ page comic book. It took years for the book to pick up steam, but once it did it became a landmark in terms of comic books becoming more respected as a medium. It was showered with positive reviews both from the press and some of the most respected names in comics, and is one of only two comic books that I know of which is regularly studied in schools around the country (the other being Art Spiegelman’s Maus – a graphic novel memoir about the Holocaust which won a Pulitzer Prize). My first encounter with Understanding Comics was my freshman year in high school. I was flipping through my English textbook and noticed some seemingly random excerpt from this comic. I was not into comic books at the time (I had briefly collected, as much as a young kid could, some comics when I was in third and fourth grade but it never really went past that), but read the short excerpt and found it interesting. We never read it as a class, unfortunately, but for some reason I always remembered what I had read.

Cut to about seven or so years later, and all of the sudden I’m spending way to much of my time (and money) buying and reading comics. All sorts of comics. Independent comics, mainstream comics, local comics found in specialty art shops, classic comics, pulp comics, science fiction comics, and whatever other types of comics I can get my hands on… for a whole bunch of reasons. Comics for stories, comics for art, comics for sociological philosophy, comics for fun, comics for collecting, comics for political commentary, comics as something to do and talk about with friends, comics comics comics comics. Somehow though, in the midst of it all, I didn’t read this book until now.

I work in a used bookstore, and one day recently someone came and sold a copy of this book that had obviously been required reading for some college class; it had the universal “used” sticker that all colleges seem to use and the college bookstore bar code on the back. It was heavily used, but I bought it anyways partially due to convenience of it being there and partly because of the employee discount received, but mainly because I really wanted to read it and upon seeing it couldn’t figure out why I had never purchased it before from somewhere else.

I was cautious when first reading the book, careful not to simply buy into the hype, but equally careful not to dismiss it because of over hype, which is something I think happens a lot when a good book/movie/game/whatever gets a lot of attention. Anyhow, the book ended up being fantastic. It did have quite a few interesting ideas and theories about comics, but more than anything, it was the most interesting study of art history that I’ve ever read, seen or heard, regardless of the fact that it did have a focus on sequential art. Even if you don’t care about comics, if you have any interest in art history and theory, I simply can not recommend this book enough. Indeed my favorite parts of the book had very little to do with comics in particular but with art as a whole. Take for example what McCloud says is the definition of a “true” artist (remember he isn’t talking about himself. I clarify that now because otherwise the following sounds like he’s being a pompous ass).

The “fine artist” — the pure artist — says to the world: “I didn’t do this for money! I didn’t do this to match the color of your couches! I didn’t do this to get laid! I didn’t do this for fame or power or greed or anything else! I did this for art!”

In other words: “My art has no practical value whatsoever!

But it’s important.”

I know that’s basically the idea of art for arts sake explained in more words, but for some reason it had never been articulated to me in a way that has ever stuck with me as much as that has.

Since the publication of Understanding Comics McCloud has been advocate for the digital distribution of comics, for many reasons, one of them being that it gives artists new opportunities to play with the format of the comics themselves. He has many examples of experimental online comics on his website (some good and some bad), my favorite being his three part (still currently unfinished) story The Right Number.

Again, I really can’t recommend Understanding Comics enough if you’ve ever been interested in any facet of art.

I watched this pretty interesting documentary yesterday directed by Robert Greenwald of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price fame, among other popular albeit less known documentaries. As a filmmaker I think Greenwald is less than good. Long segments of Wal-Mart were cheesy and sobby, and likewise parts of Outfoxed look like they were made in PowerPoint and other parts look as if they were filmed using very cheap equipment. The cover of the DVD is also somewhat of an abomination, making massive and obnoxious use of the Photoshop liquefy filter – a favorite filter for 12 year old Photoshop users. What Greenwald does do well, however, is dig up information.

I think that anyone with any sort of skills in the art of perception is pretty positive that Fox (as a news channel) is extremely biased. Having an opinion and presenting it, however, is much different than presenting yourself as completely un-biased, then propagating to one side with unrelenting fervor, which is what Fox does and Outfoxed sets out to prove, and does a very good job via interviews with ex-employees, some of which stay anonymous, apparently frightened at the power that their former network has over their future career. Also used as evidence are memos from the top of the company dictating what topics are aloud to be covered and the angle they should be covered in, countless examples from the news network itself bending truths and ignoring or demonizing opposing viewpoints, among many other intriguing yet disturbing points.

Again, Fox being biased is no real news. What this movie does do is not point out to you that Fox is biased, but instead digs into the issue of Fox’s propagation, what effects it has had on its viewers (according to studies people that regularly watch Fox News are much, much more likely to be misinformed on simple facts such as “Did America find WMDs in Iraq?”), and how other networks have often copied Fox’s style of news being reported as entertainment and not information, because it gets ratings and every news corporation is a money making institution first and a journalistic institution second. This is definitely a movie worth watching whether you subscribe to Fox in any way for your news or not. It’s a great exposé, but remember that if you decide to watch it, I never said it was a great movie. If you’re in the mood for a cynical film about the news that is also a very great film, you might check out the 1976 classic Network. Which as it turns out was pretty prophetic.