free variable

The Onion reviewed this yakuza crime film set, which looks good (if pricey). However, the Amazon recommendations on that page came up with a real gem: the Film Noir Classic Collection. This $37 box set includes restored prints of five classic noir films (er, “films noir”) with commentaries and extras. Perhaps I will get it and watch them over break.

In “tragicomic Amazon review news,” one reviewer of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog makes a few aesthetic judgements and “traces the development” of two “genre features:”

…The only problem I have with the film itself is the soundtrack. Sure, the music does its job, but this movie demands something cooler.

There are many modern day examples of this film’s influence. For example, the dinner scene is very closely related to that of “Lethal Weapon”, where the older cop invites his younger partner, only to show up tomorrow to a murder. Then there’s the taking of the cop’s gun to kill people, like in “48 Hours”. If you like either film, or detective films in general, then buy this movie. Good luck trying to find a video store that carries it for rental, but buy it despite the exorbitant amount for it. This is a very cool movie.

OK, man. I will concede that perhaps the soundtrack could have been “cooler” (Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” comes to mind), but you really do demolish your critical credibility by comparing Kurosawa to Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours in consecutive sentences.

This post marks my first test of the Amazon tool in the latest version of ecto. I just got Andrea a copy of ecto for Christmas, actually — and I highly recommend it to anyone who posts to a weblog, whether under OS X or Windows.

As part of a long-planned establishment of a “board-game culture” in the house (presumably to combat the “SportsCenter rerun culture”), Andrea and I have been playing Carcassonne lately. (I got it for her based on a recommendation from the Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac.) It is one of those German tile-laying games in which you build cities, roads, &c., and is quite a lot of fun. As I understand it, it is simpler than the popular Settlers of Catan game (which I have not played), but it seems to offer several levels for strategy and can be played by two in about 40 minutes. I was on an early streak, winning our first five outings, but Andrea has walloped me in our most recent two games.

It’s time to get over my hangups and hone the cloister-building skills, I suppose.

Electronic Arts has bought exclusive video-game rights to all NFL teams, stadiums, and players for the next five years. I don’t see how this is a smart branding decision on the NFL’s part: with no competition, who’s to say that the product won’t suffer? If anything, the perennially-profitable licensed sports videogame market needs more competition, not less. Since a yearly iteration in the NFL videogame arena currently consists of removing deceased or incarcerated players from the rosters, underrating the Vikings, and coming up with a new trademarked name for the right analog stick (e.g. “Playmaker,” “Blitzmonger,” or “Defenstrator”), I shudder to think of what delightful “innovations” the new EA monopoly will bring us in the next half-decade.

Apparently, Midway (makers of the no-longer NFL-sanctioned “NFL Blitz” series) are already working on an over-the-top football game based on a Playmakers license. Fans of the departed ESPN series — which depicted players on a fictional pro football franchise doping, committing felonies, and engaging in off-field debauchery and shenanigans — may recall that it was not renewed after the NFL Players’ Association complained and the league responded by commenting publicly that it would be an awful shame for ESPN to lose its NFL TV contract.

It will be interesting to see whether and how the other publishers compete. Intuitively, it seems that the bar for unlicensed football games has been set extremely high for about twenty years now, but the market is probably too big for one product to saturate it entirely (although, if memory serves, EA does have a substantial majority of market share). I’ve only played one unlicensed sports game in recent memory: Striker Pro 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast. It was a pretty marginal game (especially compared to the FIFA series), but I probably would have been more invested in it had I been able to play as a team I recognized and cared about.

The Vikings are continuing to disappoint. Unlike last year, they will probably make it into the playoffs, but to what end? I offer only two observations on their recent performances:

1. Where was last week’s Chad Hutchinson on last summer’s Rhein Fire squad?
2. The foolhardy first-and-goal Randy Moss option play in yesterday’s game (see here; scroll to “One that didn’t work”) resulted in an extremely well-thrown interception and has been the subject of a great deal of discussion in the sports media. Many commentators (including me) apparently have inflated memories of Moss’ passing ability: in a conversation with friends earlier today, I claimed that Moss had made similar plays well “ten times.” Not so. As a passer, Moss is 4 for 8 lifetime, with two touchdowns — sure, he has a 95.8 passer rating, but there’s no way any coach would consider that option play a high-percentage play for first down. (Moss has, however, only thrown one interception — yesterday.)

Frankly, this story rules. One is reminded of the substantially similar scene in 1990’s despicable Home Alone, but how delightful to see the equivalent of an absurdly contrived state of affairs made manifest by chance and stupidity! (Link via Joystiq.)

UPDATE: Here’s a choice quote, as suggested by Andrea, who greatly dislikes clicking through from short posts:

Back in March, Sandy Wilson was taking care of her three grandsons when a group of men attempted to burglarize her home, pointing a gun at the kids.

The children happened to be playing a video game called Grand Theft Auto at the time. The game has dozens of random police scanner messages, which blare out calls such as “This is the police! You’re surrounded!” Believe it or not, Wilson says the burglars heard that message and thought police were outside the door waiting for them.

I’m currently listening to Suite in e minor for two Theorbos; I. Prélude from the album “Corbetta & de Visée: Suites for Guitars and Theorbos” by Eric Bellocq & Massimo Moscardo

“No, the problem is that we had a Stonehenge that was in danger of being knocked over by a dwarf!”

The good folks at GetReligion point out that Harry Shearer has wasted no time making the absurd into the hilarious w.r.t. the Episcopal “druidic liturgy” flap. (Bonus points for anyone who can rework “Big Bottom” into a commentary on any other recent scandal, broadly construed, affecting the Anglican Communion.)

After the Vikings’ annual collapse at the hands of the despicable New York Giants, I was in need of some serious cheer. Fortunately, “serious cheer” came from the TiVo, which had recorded an NFL Films presentation about the Vikes’ legendary 1998 season.

In 1998, the Vikings went 15-1 — a feat that only three other teams have matched in NFL history — and set all sorts of league scoring records. Gary Anderson, their then-kicker, had a perfect season as well — until, that is, he missed a field goal late in the NFC Championship Game, which Minnesota lost in overtime.

NFL Films must have the greatest production staff in the world, since an NFL Films production makes even the ugliest plays look like world-changing feats of incomparable heroism and finesse. When the source material is strong, as in the 1998 Vikings season, the finished product is flat-out moving.

However, the real strength of this film was in the Stalinist editing. As the season went on, Andrea and I were gritting our teeth (she covered her eyes at points) in anticipation of the catastrophic choke that we knew was to come. Win after win, the tension in our living room increased and increased — until, after the penultimate playoff game, the announcer said “The Minnesota Vikings had had an historic season — and Gary Anderson had had a perfect year. Now they would play for the conference championship.” Then an NFL Films copyright notice appeared, and the presentation ended. The NFL certainly knows its audience!

I’ve discovered the Public Radio Exchange recently, which is some kind of digital distribution site connecting independent radio producers to radio stations. The upshot is that you can listen to a wide variety of pieces online; they also have a “podcast.” I listened to the first half of this piece on the “remix” movement. There wasn’t a lot in there that someone who’s familiar with the electronic music scene, the EFF, or Lawrence Lessig’s “free culture” project wouldn’t already know about, but it was a nicely-done piece.

The excerpt started by talking about DJ Danger Mouse’s fantastic “Gray Album” Beatles/Jay-Z mashup (download it if you haven’t!) and ended by observing some old antique-dealing duffers’ reactions to a show of New England antiques that had been “remixed” (presumably into statements against Western hegemony) by design students.

I really find the word “remix” grating if it’s applied to some medium other than music, but it appears to be here to stay.

The broadcast was most interesting, though, in the middle, in which a classics professor from Rice discussed the cento, a genre in which a new poem is made by taking arbitrary lines from other old poems and rearranging them. As far as I can tell from a cursory googling, the cento lives on today as a marginal genre for hacks, a cutesy pub stunt for puffed-up nerds, or a rhetorical technique for certain rarely-photographed opinion columnists. This prof, however, focused on the cento of the late Roman empire. He gave an example of a poet named Ausonius, who rearranged lines from Virgil into a passage that was racier than da Ponte’s Don Giovanni libretto. Pretty cool.

I got this in my e-mail this morning:

“endures torture in the name of his beliefs?”

“maintains his faith and finds redemption?”

I’ve apparently forgotten how much Jesus of Nazareth modeled his earthly life after Northrup Frye’s rubric for comedy; clearly, the Gibson film must elucidate this lesser-known aspect of the Passion narrative.

I haven’t seen this movie, but it seems probable that the DirecTV blurb writer hasn’t either, or is at least shockingly unfamiliar with the subject matter.

I haven’t posted about baseball this postseason. Even though I despise the Yankees and they seemed to be on a collision-course with the most catastrophic foul-up in the history of the sport, I avoided posting about them. I have been careful since there is a near-perfect inverse correlation between me posting a prediction about a sporting event and that prediction not being borne out by reality.

Evidence from last year: here and here; if baseball is too provincial, see a bonus NFL Europe example.

My desire to prognosticate is further tempered by a lifetime of Minnesota sports fandom and an attendant finely-honed sense of the existential absurd. However, now it’s safe to render judgement. To paraphrase the famous MasterCard ads, there are some things that the largest payroll in baseball can’t buy, apparently. Take that, Croesus!

Speaking of ads, I’ve identified a ludicrous trend in home-electronics-superstore TV spots. The current Circuit City line of ads (featuring The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” — if you watch televised sports in the US, you’ve probably seen it) seems to be insinuating that there exists a class of people who are desperate to spend large amounts of money on top-shelf home electronics, but have no idea what they want and are panicking at the prospect. This is absolutely insulting to one’s intelligence: who could possibly want to spend four figures on a television without a very good picture of why he (in these ads, it is nearly always a “he”) was doing so?

In my opinion, though, these Circuit City ads are in conversation with the ridiculous, prurient Best Buy ads that feature an implausible combination of events:

1. Some chowderheaded customer is perilously close to making some absurdly foolish decision, like buying the wrong digital camera, microwaving tinfoil, or wearing a Vikings jersey in rural Wisconsin.
2. The customer is approached by a helpful, kempt, and nametag-wearing Best Buy employee who can speak in complete sentences. The employee does not hide or pretend to be talking on the phone or working in another department. (“Sorry, I’m in ‘produce;’ I know nothing about TVs.”)
3. Before attempting to sell the hapless customer a warranty, the employee asks some leading questions: precisely why do you assume that the tinfoil needs to be microwaved, etc.
4. In a bizarre “fantasy” sequence, the Best Buy employee appears in some crucial non-store product-usage scenario with the customer. (Some recent ads have featured a customer actually inviting a salesman into his home, which is the sort of exposition — so one assumes — that might appear regularly on late-night pay TV.)
5. Even more inexplicably, the salesperson offers critically helpful advice to the knuckle-dragging lackwit customer, preventing a microwave fire or La Crosse Lager-soaked beating.

These ads, while absurd, may portend good news for America: after all, if these drooling idiots who need to be told by Best Buy or Circuit City employees how best to spend their own money on luxury items have significant market appeal, then the economy must be a hell of a lot better than Peter Jennings says it is. After all, you aren’t worrying about whether to get a plasma TV or an LCD when you’re standing in a Soviet breadline.

My foresight-based sports commentary is spotty at best (examples here and here), but I’m pretty sure about the contents of this post. Judging by the look on his face whenever the camera found him during Monday Night Football, Mike Sherman had only one thought running through his mind: “Would I rather be an offensive coordinator in Phoenix or Tampa next year?”

UPDATE: Easterbrook points out that the Packers were held to 35 yards rushing, at home.

I’ve posted earlier about the flagrant and willful violation of Nyquist’s theorem by every procedural crime drama ever. Well, Bruckheimer has outdone himself this time. Tonight’s episode of CSI: Miami (“Under the Influence”) featured a CSI technician using “special software” to zoom in on a standard digital photograph in order to see the reflection of a killer in the subject’s eyes. Fortunately, in a nod to whatever ludicrous alternate reality in which the “enhance” feature is possible, the technician indicated that it would take a while in order to use the “special software.”

The take-home lesson? If you need to do something impossible, just give the “special software” some more time. About 20 minutes of CSI-time should do it.

Andrea got me a DirecTV TiVo receiver for my birthday (albeit six months early, so as to fit in with the NFL season). So far, I’m at least as impressed as Bill Bumgarner is, although I have a different brand of receiver than he. I’ve never used a TiVo before, so I can’t speak to how the DirecTV box is different from the standalone TiVo. I’ll have to check the “software upgrades” out so that I can use my ethernet network instead of a phone line.

Already, I’ve found a good use for it, though. I am often forced to watch ESPNEWS for longer than I’d like in order to catch something on “the crawl.” The TiVo “instant replay” button — which, I can guarantee, will get a workout on Sunday afternoons — is about the greatest thing ever to happen to “the crawl.” (Of course, it would be even better if the dearly departed “ESPN interactive” channel were to return, but I’ll take what I can get.)

Now my goal is to confuse the “automatic ratings” system as much as possible by giving “thumbs-up” to widely-varying program choices. Heh.

The kicking drama continues: the Minnesota Vikings just released Brett Conway and signed Morten Andersen. (For those of you who blinked, they had signed Conway and released Aaron Elling last week.) The URL of this announcement on the team’s official web site has a nice Freudian slip:

http://www.vikings.com/news_detail_OBJECTNAME_AndersonSignes9704.html

As a Scandinavian-American, I am acutely sensitive to the “-son” / “-sen” / “-sson” distinctions; one would assume that a Minnesotan website editor for a team named the “Vikings” would be as well — that is, unless they had figured that the Vikes would be bringing this fellow out of retirement and prepared a URL accordingly.

Andrea and I went to a great football game last weekend when we were in the Twin Cities. I’d never been to a nationally-televised football game before, and this was an exciting one to start with — it was a total track meet. Honestly, how many times do you see a team that scores nine touchdowns kick two fake punts? I posted a photo of the last touchdown at the photolog; unfortunately, my camera was set up for outdoor, bright-light photography, so the shot is a little blurry.

A word to the wise: the Metrodome concession stands offer something called a “Dome Dog” that is $1 more than a “regular” hot dog. If you’re dumb (like me), you may assume that this is probably a good deal. However, the only difference between the “Dome Dog” and a “regular” hot dog is that the “Dome Dog” comes with a nondescript bag of potato chips. (My cousin Abe points out that “Everyone falls for the ‘Dome Dog’ once.” Unfortunately, given my zeal for hot dogs and the relative infrequency of my attendance at live Minnesota sporting events, I think I’ve actually fallen for it more than once.)

Smarter people than I have devoted a lot of ink, bits, and vocal activity to the copyright, technological, and civil-liberties issues raised by the entertainment industry’s habit of purchasingaggressively lobbying for additional laws whenever the spectre of a challenged business model appears somewhere on the horizon. (Indeed, one might say that more people have written about this than I have.) To clarify my position: I am not a defender of so-called “media piracy.” Rather, I believe that copyright infringement should be a crime. However, the proper response to crime — even to widespread crime — is to enforce existing laws, not to introduce additional ones (such as the DMCA or the proposed SSSCA/CBDPTA and INDUCE acts), especially when the additional laws have the side effects of criminalizing legitimate activity (such as fair use and computer systems research). I am also inclined to agree with those (like Lawrence Lessig) who argue that the current copyright terms are effectively unlimited, and thus borderline-constituitional at best.

With that out of the way, here’s the quick thought: I was listening to a public-radio show about I, Robot and robots in general last night. As one might expect, the discussion was mildly interesting but rather dismal in terms of depth and engagement: as two examples, it seemed that the essence of “autonomy” was unclear to the host and guests, and the controversial concept of “substrate independence” (in the context of consciousness/intelligence) was implicitly assumed by all participants. However, what got me thinking was the host’s introduction, in which he contrasted Asimov’s vision of robots as virtuous, logical servants with Hollywood’s robots (and technology in general), which are malicious, destructive, or (at the very best) golems that are on a collision course with tragedy.

I realized that I couldn’t think of any movie that portrayed technology in an essentially positive light. I then briefly wondered why the entertainment industry would take such a consistently, thoroughly Luddite stance, before realizing that there’s no question there: Why wouldn’t an industry whose chief lobbyist once compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler take every possible opportunity to produce anti-technology propaganda? From within the current, well-documented Hollywood mindset, what could possibly be good about any technology that isn’t narrowly focused to extract as many dollars out of every copyrighted work as possible? I guess I don’t know a lot about Asimov, but if I put Hollywood’s protectionist dystopia up against, say, John Gilmore’s idealist view of the technological future (read through to the end), I know which one I’d rather be inhabiting in twenty years.

In other news, Logic Express is very nice. The learning curve isn’t as steep as I’d feared, although it does take some getting used to. Obviously, there are a lot of features I haven’t touched yet. I’m looking forward to getting into it some more, but my impending prelim is putting a pinch on nonessential activities. I may still post a quick track soon if I come up with something presentable.

A common cliché of procedural crime dramas and spy movies involves recovering precise visual information (e.g. a license plate number) from a blurry photograph or videotape. Usually this technique is introduced by having a hard-boiled detective asking the bespectacled computer operator to “enhance that.” Invariably the computer speedily obliges after some typing and clicking. Who knew it was that easy to violate the Nyquist theorem?

note to Nyquist-savvy readers: Ordinarily, I put explanations that I assume some people won’t need in notes like this; the typographical conceit is designed to prevent these explanations from intruding on the main text. In this case, though, the “explanation” is on the meta-level — the rest of this post is an explanation of the Nyquist theorem. If you’re familiar with the Nyquist theorem, chuckle at the previous paragraph and skip the rest of this entry. The continual presence of this “feature” in television (most recently, last night, in some show Andrea and I were watching) irritates me so much that it has inspired me to write this up; mea culpa if it’s patently obvious even to folks who don’t know the Nyquist theorem.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to have an “enhance” feature. In fact, it’s impossible. Not “impossible,” as in “‘impossible’ until the next release of Microsoft Windows descends from the sky to the platform in front of the golden calf, enabling all good things.” Not “impossible” as in “intractable, but computable if you had the age of the universe to wait for a result.” Rather, it’s “impossible” as in impossible.

The Nyquist theorem has to do with sampling analog signals into the digital domain. Basically, it states that, to reproduce a signal with a maximum frequency n, you’ll need at least 2n samples per second. A corollary to this is that, if you sample at rate n, you will not be able to recover anything that is more detailed than a sine wave with a frequency of 2n.

The above figure shows two sine waves. The red wave has a frequency of three times that of the green wave; it is also out of phase with regard to the green wave. This may not look much like a blurry traffic camera photo, but it’s the same principle — the Nyquist theorem applies whenever we sample discrete values (like a computer image or an audio file) from an analog data source (like light or sound waves) or continuous function (like the sine wave).

Let’s say that the green wave corresponds to the blurry photo and the red wave corresponds to the actual scene (presumably including the license number). Say also that we’ve taken five samples (corresponding to the tic marks on the x-axis). Notice that, at these points, the two waves have the same values. That means that, as far as our discrete representation knows, the scene could correspond to either the green wave or the red wave. By sampling, we’ve created an approximation of the initial source. In the case of digital music, like CDs, this works because the sampling is high-resolution enough to reproduce all of the frequencies that a good microphone can capture. In the case of the blurry traffic photo, on the other hand, this doesn’t work — there are infinitely many “precise images” that correspond to any one blurry approximation!

Therefore, if the “CSI” gang manages to get an indictment based on an “enhanced” license plate image, someone on the “Law & Order” side will likely manage to create reasonable doubt — since, for all we know, that blurry image corresponded to someone else’s plate.

I’m currently listening to Signore! Cos E Quel Stuppore? – Susanna, Conte, Contessa, Figaro from the album “Mozart: Le Nozze Di Figaro – Karajan” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

The first season of Sledge Hammer!, the greatest television show ever, is now available for preorder on DVD. It ships on July 27. This is very exciting news. (…and I’m not the only one to think so — this set is already ranked #472 on Amazon.)

I’m currently listening to Cancion del Emperador from the album “Classical Byrd” by Charlie Byrd

Andrea and I were watching an episode of Law and Order while I was trying to piece together what I wanted to say about the Hutchens article. In it, McCoy was struggling (not a lot) to keep his ostensible Catholicism from infecting his judgement on a matter of priest-parishioner confidentiality. He said: “I have to decide which part of the Constitution I like more, the ’separation of church from state,’ or the ‘free exercise of religion.’”

I know that Sam Waterston has done some work with a publication that exclusively employs writers who know the Constitution so well that they have even been able to locate rights in its text that the Framers forgot to include. Therefore, filming must have been quite rushed for him to allow his character to utter such an obvious mistake: the actual text of the Constitution has very little to say about the “separation of church from state,” unless you consider the “establishment clause” and the “free exercise” clause to be separating church from state. Unfortunately for McCoy, they don’t (necessarily) do so in any meaningful way, and neither clause had anything much to do with the case at hand.

Andrea and I saw Troy, Wolfgang Petersen’s current “unendliche Geschichte,” last night. It was entertaining overall (especially for $4 at the inexpensive cinema we attended — $8 at the local googolplex would have been too much). However, it was overlong (nearly 2:45!) and had some critical problems preventing it from being as good as it could have been.

note to cut-to-the-chase-savvy readers: If you want to “experience” Troy in 150 fewer minutes than it would take to do so in the theater, check out this amusing abridged version. Unfortunately, it will probably be amusing only if you’ve already seen the movie.

The first and most crucial problem is that the movie was emotionally uncompelling. None of the characters were worth caring about, with the possible exceptions of Hector and Priam. There was nothing heroic about Achilles — a cocky meathead who couldn’t make it through twelve lines of dialogue without mentioning that he was fighting for his place in the history books. I was wholly unconvinced that anyone would be willing to die because this Achilles fought with him. Paris and Helen are obnoxious adolescents, à la “Troy, 90210.” Why adolescence — perhaps the most tiresome, worthless, and deleterious aspect of industrial Western society — is constantly projected by our media on to societies that, blissfully, never knew it is beyond me. Tragic heroes are bound by duty to something external, but for the adolescent, “tragedy” is the conflict of two momentary whims — hardly a basis for mythology.

In trying to cram over a decade of war into a commercially viable movie, the mythic aspects suffered greatly. Hector is established as a legendary hero by the continued presence of cheers from the rabble. Achilles is established as a legendary hero by kicking so much ass. Unfortunately, that’s not all it takes, or Homer would have also written “Bon Jovi, Live from Budokan” or “Die Hard” (in which a wisecracking Odysseus rescues the estranged Penelope from an office building full of barbarians). While the Iliad explored the complexities of the mythical, larger-than-life personalities of the mythical, larger-than-life players, this movie followed a standard recitative-aria structure designed apparently to appeal to violence-crazed men and their fingernail-buffing significant others: emotionless but superbly filmed battle scenes sandwiched between scenes of pointless character development, sex, or spousal nagging. (Fortunately, at no point did Orlando Bloom — as Paris — “surf” down a staircase on a shield, spraying a stream of arrows at invading Greeks.) There is no “legend” in this movie, but how could there be, when there is barely any human interest, or even adult characters?

Darrell Hartman has a letter from Athens in the Christian Science Monitor today, which describes the disappointment that some contemporary Greeks have expressed at the portrayal of their ancestors; it is worth reading. As I sat in the theater, in front of several young women excitedly speaking Greek to one another, I wondered: how does this make them feel to see, for example, Agamemnon “downsize[d]…into a petty imperialist,” as Hartman puts it? (I was reminded of the news reports of Somali Americans watching bootleg copies of Black Hawk Down and cheering, for some reason.)

The score, by talentless hack James Horner, is an horrific embarrassment: almost three hours of chewing over one motive stolen from the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (perhaps Horner should “reply” to “just criticism” himself!), with occasional reversion to “ominous string sounds” and clichéd microtonal feminine Mediterranean wailing. I swear I could have done at least as well myself as a 2d-year undergraduate music major. Seriously, introducing a Falco impersonator in order to sing “Rock me, Menelaus” would have constituted an improvement.

One might assume that such a movie might have a clear, heavy-handed set of foreign policy recommendations, but one would be wrong. There are a number of clear jabs at war in general and at various situations that arise in wars (the example of a “king who is too far from combat to know we’ve won” comes up frequently in the first reel). However, this movie may serve as a foreign-policy Rorshach test. Who do you see as America? The isolationist “they’ll never breach our walls” Trojans or the colonizing “must rape the world” Spartans? Did the downfall of Troy (in the movie) result from ignoring Hector’s advice not to attack the retreating army, or from ignoring Paris’ advice to burn the horse? For the Trojans, was the abduction of Helen really “why they hate us?” Maybe these are interesting questions, but it is perhaps best that this film didn’t raise them; I can’t imagine it would have a coherent answer.

I’m currently listening to 59. Rezitativ from the album “J.S. Bach – Matthäus Passion BWV 244″ by Masaaki Suzuki/Bach Collegium Japan

Friends, which has absurdly been touted by NBC as the greatest comedy in the history of television, is wrapping up its run as I type. Given the amount of fawning, onanistic attention paid to this event by the news media, an observant extraterrestrial might assume that a large nation-state, or perhaps the whole world, was controlled by a group of six young people — perpetually-immature, vapid libertines, not yet at the the level of refinement of Kierkegaard’s aesthete — who have, tragically, passed on. These tedious characters have no sense of responsibility except to the immediate satisfaction of their fleeting whims, and they are one-dimensional and emotionally trivial enough so that the consequences of their impulse-fulfillment (whether to do so is to engage in an ill-advised tryst or to have a child) remain absent from the narrative.

Fortunately for those benighted souls who can’t tune in in time for the asinine display, NBC is offering tonight’s spectacle on DVD in five days (presumably in an attempt to recoup the $1 million they pay each Friend per 22-minute episode). Unfortunately, this DVD likely won’t offer the best part of the “live” experience. With advertisers paying up to $20 million for a 30-second spot, the spaces between the bursts of canned-laughter spiced inanity could easily be of NFL-playoff or even Super Bowl-caliber.

I’m currently listening to A un dottor de la mia sorte from the album “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” by Claudio Abbado

About a month ago, I posted an entry about Christian angst, Christianity, and the depiction of both in television; my friend Taryn raised some interesting issues in the comments. I’d like to address one of these questions now: she asks

But ultimately, I think there is a question about what function television has in society, which is an old question about the function of art or literature. Is it simply to reflect aspects of human experience, or is it to instruct? (And if to instruct, for whose purposes?) I don?t believe that it necessarily has to be one or the other, since I watch L&O for its shiny no-thoughts-attatched value, but is there a way to negotiate television as an industry and television as some form of art that may delight and/or instruct?

My concern with the depiction of Christianity on television is that it is a sort of minstrel show: a set of conventions mired in stereotype, to be produced and consumed by people who have little to no actual experience with the subject matter. It would be better, one might argue, for depictions of “Christianity” to remain entirely absent from television than for the types that do appear to be the only representations of actual Christianity in the media. Of course, ostensible “Christianity” and “Hallmark spirituality” “sell” well — ratings for shows like Touched by an Angel and Seventh Heaven are high in certain demographics, despite the fact that such shows, while chock-full of “believe in yourself” treacle, feature none of the distinctive aspects of orthodox Christianity; most are downright heterodox or heretical.

So these shows do not reflect human experience — at best, they reflect a simulacrum, constructed by the media. It seems that any “experiences” of Christianity reflected by television could be discredited by actual experience of Christianity. Certainly, these shows instruct, since a significant number of young adults have probably enriched their understanding of various Constitutional challenges to criminal charges by engaging the Law & Order franchise.

My concern is what and why they attempt to instruct. Our mass media has taken Hunter S. Thompson’s concept of “gonzo journalism” to its logical conclusion; no longer content to create stories so that they might report on them, media agents are interested in creating truth that buttresses their presuppositions. The media operates with a strange logic, in which repeated assertion of propositions increases their truth. One need not look far to see the absurd, patently false assertions that people are willing to assent to simply because of their statement by mass media. Furthermore, the media is more than willing to do violence to our language, making firm concepts into malleable ones to suit a rhetorical or political aim. When the concerns and motives of a group of people are reduced to a caricature, though, the violence is done not just to the word describing the group, but to the group themselves.

One might argue at this point that a variant of my complaint with the media could be applied to any controversial, polemical, or dishonest art, and I won’t deny that it probably could. Few would propose banning a work of art because readers find in it a coarse or defamatory stereotype. Rather, the solution to such offense in art is further reflection and engagement; one need only examine overtly-politicized liberal arts curricula to see that “further reflection and engagement” are in full bloom. (Whether or not the formulation of Fermat’s Last Theorem was informed by “heterosexism” and misogyny is a question best left for specialists.) However, the difference with the media is that it is ephemeral, ubiquitous, and is most often consumed uncritically: we do, as Taryn suggests, appreciate (some) television because it is entertaining and because we don’t have to think about it. Indeed, thinking about it would — in many cases — spoil the fun. Finally, it’s gone before we have a chance to consider it. The problem I have with the mass media, including television, is that it regularly defames people like me; is actively hostile to my concerns, to my motivations, and to my God; and that there is little or no escape.

I’m currently listening to El grillo from the album “Josquin Desprez — Motets et Chansons” by The Hilliard Ensemble

That’s how many Monday Night Football games feature the indefatigable and perennially-underrated Minnesota Vikings this year. (The full NFL TV schedule is here.) How will I bide my time while dreaming of implausibly great ways for them to avenge their inauspicious exit from contention last December? By rooting for the Rhein Fire, man. The road to World Bowl XII goes through Düsseldorf, baby!

Yes, I am seriously considering following NFL Europe this year.