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Posts Tagged ‘History’

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.

A new Star Wars movie came out last weekend, and apparently nobody cares. Star Wars: Clone Wars opened 3rd at the box office with a gross of $14.6 million. That’s lower than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and people still reach for torches and pitchforks at the mere mention of that film. I’m still on the fence on whether to see it, but I don’t think I’ll enjoy watching Rip Taylor in Hutt form, or having a Jedi Padawan use words such as “Like, totally!” in normal conversation. I think it’s safe to say that what has kept us interested in Star Wars as a universe and franchise has gone for good. Recapturing the magic of the trilogy, or even building on it is going to be next to impossible with the way things are run right now. All that’s left is for fans like me to ask: What went wrong?

Was it the Flash Gordon clichés, with ships and lasers whooshing across space? Was it the Nietzschean interpretation of history? It doesn’t look like audiences had a problem with thing like that. Was it the Han shooting second? Jar-Jar? Close, but they’re only symptoms of a much larger problem. If you ask me, it all started when Lucas decided to make Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia brother and sister.

When Luke and Leia’s blood relationship was revealed, the love triangle between them and Han Solo was essentially frozen in carbonite and thrown into the deepest, darkest gas giant, never to return. Plus it made subsequent viewings of Empire Strikes Back a whole lot creepier. It makes perfect sense as a story decision, Luke desire to protect Leia almost made him turn to the dark side of the force at the climax of Return of the Jedi and it allowed Leia to get together with Han. However, it was kind of a cop-out. Before ROTJ came out people were still wondering if Leia was going to end up with Luke or Han. By the end of the movie Leia doesn’t go with Han because of anything specific about his personality or the way they relate, it was because she didn’t come out of the same womb that he did.

When you consider that the biggest character driven plot-line of the trilogy was resolved essentially by default, subsequent creative decisions about the films suddenly make sense. We could see through the prequel trilogy that Lucas abhors ambiguity about all things. There’s either a dark side or a light side of the force, people either love each other or they don’t. The lack of ambiguity works for Star Wars. When a bad guy dies, you want feel good about it. However, ambiguity shouldn’t be confused with facing a hard choice, which is what happened here.

The Han/Luke/Leia relationship was full of ambiguity because both Han and Luke were likable people, each with their own particular personality traits. If Leia chose either of them, it would be a hard choice to make and not everyone would be happy in the end. Lucas decided that Star Wars should be about choosing between Good and Evil, not Good and Good, so in came the deus ex machina of Leia being Luke’s sister, which left everyone happy even if they felt a little icky inside. From then on, Lucas’ films take on a deterministic feeling. It’s almost as if he feels that something like the Han/Luke/Leia triangle wouldn’t read well to audiences and we’ll all just tune out. He didn’t count on us sensing the insincerity behind that approach and just tuning out anyway.

The Han/Luke/Leia triangle gave us some of the funniest scenes in the trilogy (Han: So do you think a girl like her and a guy like me…? Luke: NO!). It turned Star Wars into less of technical demo and more of a date movie. Love triangles produce a lot of suspense, chemistry and character development. People are more themselves in a relationship than in any other situation. Creators who use this to their advantage can write their own ticket to stardom and fan fiction writers insane.

During our Trip in Nelson I got a chance to see the Nikkei Memorial Internment Center in New Denver. Sara and I went there with her friend Wendy Tagami, whose parents had met near there during the war. Over 22,000 Japanese-Canadians were interned at New Denver. Wendy told us that many of the small houses on the outskirts of town were converted from the cabins that they had to live in. The center consisted of several of the wartime cabins surrounded by a wood fence and a Japanese-style stone garden.

The garden was so beautiful you could almost forget the circumstances by which people came here. At the time, Japan had already taken over Hong Kong and bombed Pearl Harbor. The government felt it couldn’t afford to offer Japan any other gains, so it went so far as to round up its own citizens with any racial connection with that country. Many of the Japanese-Canadians, in the very spirit of “stiff upper lip” calmly signed over all their possessions and reported to Hastings Park in Vancouver, where the PNE is now. From there they were sent off to the BC interior, far from any critical civil or military infrastructure.

Many of the first nights were spent in cast-off army tents. Soon, small cabins the size of most modern kitchens were built with walls so thin that the winter ice served as the only form of insulation. The internees did everything they could to keep life going on as normal as possible. At the memorial center you can see the photos of the dances, the baseball games and the Buddhist church that still stands today. When the war was over, the internees found that most of their possessions had been sold to pay for their internment. There would be no redress until 1988.

It’s easy to deride the decisions of the government at the time as racist and opportunistic. By our standards, they most certainly were. The repatriation and redress of the Japanese-Canadians was just and lawful. However, the policy of current governments apologizing for the mistakes of past governments unnerves me. It is a great way to garner cheap political capital without having to address the mistakes we have made recently and are still making now. We in the present love to inform the past, but how often does the past inform the present?

Have we truly done away with the mindset that caused us to unlawfully sell off millions of dollars of personal property to balance a budget?

Do we still favor solutions that are more convenient than effective?

Instead of trying to distance ourselves from history, we should be trying to find similarities with it. If you think about it, all people in history are just like us. They have a lot of bad past decisions weighing them down, ideals that are impractical, and an uncertain future that’s hurtling at them at the speed of time. At so many points in history you will see people who’ve learned from the mistakes of the past, lived up to the ideals and accepted a future that will outlive them. It shouldn’t be hard for us to be like those people. They often have a lot books written about them.

While we’re on the subject of clichés, let’s talk about Stuff White People Like. You might have heard of it. It’s a blog dedicated to listing the likes of a curious race of people that are worried about the problems of the world, yet not actually worried enough to do anything about it. They will scramble to any type of product that will alleviate this long-standing guilt for whatever they’ve done in the past.

A recurring theme in the blog is a constant struggle to be unique from one another without actually doing the work of being unique. This is done by going to movies that may not actually be funny, plays that aren’t actually interesting, and listening to music that isn’t exactly played well. Being unique actually surpasses the need to be entertained, well-fed and most importantly having the money to be both those things.

White people certainly don’t have a monopoly on all of the foibles brought up in the “Stuff”. This is what happens when human beings put the problem of food and shelter so far behind them that we are absolutely stumped over what to do next.

Why do we have this soul-aching need to be unique? It wasn’t enough we were all given our very own genetic code to play with and it’s not enough that we get brought up in the richest and most advanced society in History. This probably has something to do with the knowledge that not too far in the past terms like “2,000 dead from starvation” wasn’t an atrocious statistic in our society and in some societies it is still par for the course. We need to be unique to calm our fears that we won’t be the next statistic in a plague, famine, or ethnic cleansing that happens by. We want to know that we’ll be missed, and that the world will be poorer from our passing. The fact that homogeneous manufacturing processes have created all this largesse doesn’t help.

The only remedy for this frantic search for the unique is that sometimes you can be unique for doing something well. Years of art criticism and University theses have gone into establishing the “revolutionary” idea that simply doing something well is bland, banal, and a threat to the future of the arts as we know them. This love of the esoteric bleeds into other creative disciplines turning out many jacks-of-all-trades but unfortunately no masters. However what is and isn’t esoteric changes from year to year, as is the rule with all fashion. In time, your turn will come up, and you too will be famous, if only for 15 minutes.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that more writing is going on today than at any point in human history. All it takes is 8 1′s and 0′s to make a byte, my 8GB flash drive contains well over 8 billion of those, multiply that by the billions of computers all over the world and combine that with fully industrialized printing processes, and you get the idea. Now with all this talking in stasis going on and if the Infinite Monkeys Typing Theorem is to be believed, we are going to be repeating ourselves a bit. I came across a few lists of internet writing clichés that I should try to avoid in the future.

For the Love of Blog Cheese from Lindsayism.com – A lot fun cliches but some of them are things the author can do nothing about, like having sycophantic commentators. Highlights include Calling Tivo/DVR “My new boyfriend.”, Participating in any blogging “meme” (“Write down the first three venereal diseases that pop into your head.”) and using the word “meme.”

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichs from Gawker.com – I know, they spelled Cliché wrong, but it is full of well-worn idioms from the internet age. It is frightening and shameful that I know which Simpsons episode [adjective]-y goodness came from.

Thirteen Blog Clichés from Codinghorror.com – It’s not so much a critique of internet writing as it is critique of blog design in general.

The 100 Lamest Game-Industry Clichés from GamesRadar.com – There is no greater temptation to use a Cliché when it’s 3:00 am, you’re out of coffeee, out of time, and most importantly out of money. While it mostly rails against games reviewers, I see this kind of language pop up on blogs and makes me start to lose my faith in humanity.