The Future of the Microstory

In a show or a movie, what is more primary? The plot or the imagery? The answer is, of course, a case-by-case answer: your average mystery relies heavily on plot as it tries to appeal to the viewer's curiosity, intellect, and the satisfaction of revelation (which necessitates build-up and pay-off), but some films are more about presenting stylized imagery with a basic plot that exists only to organize the imagery.

Exhibit A

In many cases, those bare bones plot movies are more beloved and iconic not in spite of their lack of narrative depth but because of it. How many times has Tim Burton ever blown your mind with his storyline? But you remember his visuals and his style. If you have ever known a girl between the ages of 13 and 16 who fancied herself "dark," then you have seen her express all her notions of love and romance by celebrating Jack and Sally. Recall Avatar, which had its plot lifted directly from Dances With Wolves, but left some people depressed, suicidal, and feeling that they were living in a colorless world because Pandora was so beautiful. 

In other cases, even movies have have intricate plots oftentimes have their plots ignored for the sake of their iconic pictures. In Fight Club we learn that an emotionally constipated man with insomnia and an abandonment complex created an anti-consumerist, violent, destructive alter-ego for himself who was everything he couldn't be - and then in the course of the story he realizes that he was a deeply sick and unhealthy person who really just needed to let himself learn to love another person. In other words, according to the plot Tyler Durden is an extreme example of what happens when men who resent being abandoned by their fathers turn their rage on themselves and their world instead of growing up. How is this expressed in our imagery and icons?

We express it by making him a sage, of course

All this is to say that we can extract plot from films and still have something satisfying and meaningful. In fact, we oftentimes discard whatever plot was attached to our favorite imagery and situations for the sake of making them more versatile. What is the implication of this?

Media is now consumed on demand. We have more control than ever on what media we consume and the timeframe in which we do it. Further, we have more capability than ever before to generate our own media, particularly through YouTube. In the domain of comedy it has always been understood that plot was subordinate to situation: funny always triumphed over coherence. We have seen this reflected in the explosion of sketches, of varying quality, that litter the internet. 

How long will it be before it is accepted that the same principal can apply beyond humor?

It is difficult to produce a full and complete narrative, especially for an amateur, but it is completely possible to pour one's heart and soul into a single situation. Why is it that we suppose that this is only appropriate if the situation is meant to be funny? Would it be possible to create a microstory where the payoff is the satisfaction of vengeance? Or the brokenness of a unrequited romance? Or righteous indignation at some offense?

Various pay-offs require more elaborate set-ups, however it seems to be me that it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to expand the domain of microstories to payoffs other than humor. It also seems to me that it is economically inevitable that, due to the over saturation of people trying to be funny on the internet, people will begin experimenting more and more with microstories that offer alternative emotional payoffs. Eventually a few formulas will be found that work.

Or at least one can hope.

A Theistic Answer to Chaos

My response to how we are to love in chaos is that we must love ever deeper. That the answer to the inevitability of despair is more love. That the answer to uncertainty is love. And I call my answer theistic not because one must necessarily believe in God, but because I consider this response to be foundational block to a higher theism that is rooted in love of God first and treats belief as a secondary concern.

To draw out my response, I offer this scenario:

A man loves a sick woman. The woman is fragile; she may live, she may die, she may live well, she may live broken. The man loves her, but he can protect himself from despair by starving his love for her. He can take rational, tactical steps to kill his love by choosing to meditate on certain thoughts, directing his attention on certain areas, and placing himself in certain situations. Likewise he can feed his love and grow ever nearer to her, to the point that her death might leave him a broken man.

If he constrains his focus in this way he will either starve his love and become a living-dead stoic or he will feed his love and invite the world to destroy him. What would I tell this man to do?

I would tell him to love the sick woman. Love her more and more. And love his house as well, the house he can share with her and that will remind him of her if she should die. And love their friends and family who will stand near him but be able to do nothing to console him internally. Love his job, which will become a heavy burden if he has to perform it while grieving. Love the world which is so arranged that his misery is a certainty. And love God to such a degree that he will continue to love if she lives and love if she dies.

This scenario, captures what I mean by adding more and more love. If using the word "God" makes this difficult, I invite you to instead use the word "Other." Make the choice to feed your love of that which is outside of you, that which you can not control. Love what you love and love in such a way that you will love even if love leads to despair.

One may perhaps wonder if we have rendered the word "love" meaningless. What is it to multiply love in this way?

Scream that you want her to live - deepen your commitment to her and do not let yourself pull back to protect yourself. And if she dies, own your despair and defiantly spit out, "your will be done." And then live in that way still, continue loving and knowing that with or without your permission, "his will be done" and react to that with acceptance. Return at all times to a harmony between Self and Other/Perception and Mystery/Man and God, resisting both the urge to remove one or the other.

Love in Chaos

Suppose you lived in a world full of treasures that commanded your affection. It was not necessary for you to own them to love them, simply the fact that they existed made you happy. Like any love, however, you could starve or feed your attraction. Then suppose that these treasures just started shattering. You wake up one morning and some lovely statue that you would have happily sold your grandmother for now lies shattered on your feet; that night the most magnificent building ever created just sort of crumbled into a nearby lake. The rubble killed a lot of beautiful fish. The most gorgeous woman in the world let herself go at dinner last night and turned into Bruce Vilanch. The sweetest drink that would ever touch your lips got watered down and added to some Mountain Dew.

Living in such a world, what would you do with your love? Would you feed it? Would you let yourself get attached to all the stuff that was falling apart, opening yourself up to despair? Or would you starve it? Would you continue living due to some accursed Will-to-Live, but stoically trying to live without love or affection as though you were already dead to avoid the pain of loss?

Perhaps the world is not quite so chaotic, but then it is not entirely right to say that we do not live in a world like the one described. The things we love do fade - it is a certainty that any person we love will one day die and it requires the cooperation of a wide network of people in order to preserve any particular object through the ages. And neither option of starving or feeding love is exactly a winner. Indeed, it is very brave and noble and tragic to dare to love despite the inevitability of despair, but, from the point of view of the person who despairs, is it truly an enjoyable life? And a long, drawn out suicide-by-avoidance just sounds exhausting as hell to me. How could you get up in the morning if you viewed each day as an opportunity to try to avoid any attachments in life? So far as I can tell this worldview only really works if you do not acknowledge it - or only acknowledge it with feigned irony; by all means start on the porn at one in the afternoon when you finally wake up and finish up by the time you've exhausted yourself back to sleep, but how will you find the drive to even Google if you say that plan out loud?

Of course there is the Platonic/Jesus option:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:19-21

Escaping the chaotic world for the sake of another world: a world of forms or a kingdom of heaven. Something general, something essential, something fundamental, something perfect, something incorruptible. Something that isn't falling apart.

Maybe it works for some people, but I find that this leads us to one of two positions, one of which is untenable the other of which I can agree with but do not find especially meaningful. 

Sometimes we create a picture of Heaven by taking our world and stripping out everything we dislike, leaving us with something two-dimensional and unsatisfying since it is, after all, a reduction of our own world. When I see people posturing on the internet by linking to some given immorality and then saying "come quickly Lord Jesus," I do not see someone who is speaking out of love for heaven, but someone who is speaking out of loathing for earth. In fact the desire for an Otherworld seems entirely based on a recognition of the inadequacy of our own world: any attempt to actually describe what would make the Otherworld so lovely tends to reduce to just cutting off the nasty bits of our own world. Those who do try to describe their Otherworld tend to start slashing at their membership roster as one man's utopia tends to be another man's hell.

Other times we acknowledge that if there is an Otherworld, it is a mystery to us. We have no appearances to form a picture of it from. We do not know what appeal it will have for us. I like this approach in that it does not try to say more than it can say, but we must still acknowledge that it does not say much.

What then are we to do?

Style Proceeding from Substance

I want to say that style should proceed from substance, but I do not know precisely what I mean by this.

Imagine a blog written on the topic of French Cuisine that featured a background of a .jpg of homeless man repeated across the Y Axis along the top. This style is utterly irrelevant to the content of the blog - it would be a bit of surrealism or an attempt at being 'random,' and nothing more.

But when we see American twenty-somethings wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a fleur-de-lis on it, well, no one thinks that is surreal.

If I stamped my hands on the keyboard to produce nonsense text, well, we would think it odd that text was produced that communicated and symbolized nothing. But a screen door with metal twisted into curls symbolizes what exactly?

Perhaps you will object that it is just a bit of decoration and it was not intended to show or tell anything and that expecting it to show or tell something means I do not understand the goal in which it was created. This brings me back to what I said initially, I want to say that style should proceed from substance. Perhaps what I mean by this is that there should be no decoration that lacks relevance.

That is, it makes sense for a man with the last name Murray to have metal bars welded onto his screen door in the shape of a letter 'M.' It makes less sense for someone named, say, Dunahue. It makes sense for a church to prominently display a cross on top of their building, but a steeple is empty decoration*, style that does not proceed from substance. Look at this blog itself - I chose the Awesome Inc. template because it was pleasing to my eye and because I prefer white text on a dark background, but why are there diagonal lines streaking down the background? What do those indicate? Celebrate? Dedicate? Why are they there? Only to be pleasing to the eye?

Is being pleasing to the eye enough?

This may be a matter of personal preference. I prefer a thing to be functional and without decoration if I can not find some significance to the decoration. But then in the case of a question-mark, letters, flowers used as symbols, flag colors, and ninety-percent of band logos, the symbols themselves are arbitrary and only later receive significance from the nature of what they decorate. This means a bit of style may not proceed the substance, but later takes part in the substance.

So, for the moment, I conclude only that decoration without meaning is, to me at least, ugly and unwelcome.

*the historical use of the steeple has given the steeple significance; no doubt there is also some other deeper meaning that someone more familiar with church architecture could highlight. My example should still be illuminating if it is taken in the understanding in which I wrote it.

Beer and Media

Earlier this month I wrote Digestion of Media which theorized that what makes us play a song repeatedly is an attempt to wrap our minds around the features of the song that are both appealing and new to us, making repetition of music a race to make the sound boring.

Now I want to talk about beer.

Specifically the kind of beer that arrogant bastards drink.

Now, Arrogant Bastard Ale is not what you would call "pleasant," but that does not mean that it is not the greatest beer I have had in my relatively short life as a consumer of lightly poisoned bread water. This notion is, I think, baffling to many and outright nonsensical to others. I will say that Arrogant Bastard does not exist to please your taste buds, now drink it. Arrogant Bastard will make you glare at me with confusion and anger as though you thought I was someone you could trust and then I poured a bottle of the devil's piss in your glass and grinned as you drank it. Now go drink it.

Why do I say that Arrogant Bastard is unpleasant and you should drink it anyway? Because it will remain outside your comfort zone. It engages you when you drink it. I am not a heavy drinker, I can not sit down and discuss the way the hops complement the beer's dryness or anything of that sort, but I can tell you that drinking Arrogant Bastard is an experience that engages you with the beer. If you can get out of the mindset that the pleasant is all that is worth seeking, then you will be able to appreciate Arrogant Bastard's ability to keep you from growing bored with it.

In this way, I present a counter-point to what I said in Digestion of Media. There is difficult music being produced and there is music being produced that is easy to the ear. What do I mean by difficult music? I mean music that does not necessarily sound good on the first hearing, something that you have to ease yourself into and learn to appreciate slowly. It is music that does not allow you to quickly digest it and reach the point of boredom. It is also music that does not exist solely to bring you pleasure, it draws you out of yourself, it asks you to meet it halfway rather than meeting you where you are.

I, for one, don't really listen to difficult music. I suspect that anyone reading this is beginning to wonder if I'm not describing something that doesn't exist. For that I advise finding a genre of music that lacks widespread mainstream appeal, one that is largely alien to you, and then reading the way its fans describe it. Perhaps I am letting myself be duped, but when I do this I get the impression that they're seeing something that I'm not seeing. I get the impression that there is a learning curve, but once you get past it you find something that can be investigated and digested slowly without drying up quickly.

Much like Arrogant Bastard demands your attention, at least if you're willing to buy another bottle even after overcoming that first sip.

This calls for a judgment, because there are two explanations that come to mind. Perhaps this is all smoke and mirrors; maybe Arrogant Bastard is just a bad tasting beer that prints labels suggesting that the deficiency is with the drinker instead of the beer, and some idiots buy into the advertising because their trying to tickle their pride, and likewise the somewhat obscure genres of music are just sounds that are not suitably capable of tapping into human psychology and physiology to deliver the kind of widespread satisfaction that top-40 songs can. Alternately, maybe it is true, and maybe chasing after what is pleasant to us is a way of confining ourselves to our comfort zones and trying to avoid experiencing and digesting that which is difficult to us in our present state.

Art and Life

If we say that art is a reflection of life, how can we avoid saying that life lived is superior, more substantial, than art appreciated?

Here I do not advance anything factual or ask for an intellectual judgment. Instead I ask, don't you feel that the living of a life to be a more momentous thing than the appreciation of works of art?

In practice perhaps we see the greatest works of art and our participation in them to be a reason for continuing to live; there may be times when we see in art a kind of a salvation and a kind of purpose around which we can organize our lives. I too sometimes feel this way. But when I cut down to the central notion, I always find that I can not place art above the genuine article. 

P or O

GF: Okay, I have a blog for you to write, it's gonna be a good one....

Which letter is superior P or O? I think my entire approach to ethics and aesthetics can be illustrated by this question, not that I really need to illustrate it again, but it is a joy for me to do so and it's my blog so I can illustrate it as many times as I want, damnit!

At first blush someone is likely to ask 'what does it matter?' This is not as frivolous a response as it sounds, we'll come back to it shortly. Secondly someone will probably shrug and say 'which one do you like better?' This response sets up a criteria for superiority, implying that whichever letter fulfills the criteria is the superior letter. If you happen to like P more than O then P is better than O and vice versa. You could then apply this criteria in passing judgment on the entire alphabet if you so chose.

The question that can here be asked is, why should be use that criteria? Or, more properly, what is it about that criteria that makes it the criteria for absolute superiority? Because the question was not 'which letter is superior, relative to your personal feelings,' but rather, 'which letter is superior' – question mark, full stop. The question does not provide us with a criteria or a schema in the context of which we can measure the two letters superiority to some goal or desired virtue.

Perhaps instead of saying, 'which one do you like better?' we could instead ask 'which letter is simpler?' In this case O is clearly superior to P because O consists of a single rounded shape whereas P is a rounded shape attached to a vertical mark. Now perhaps we ask, 'which letter most clearly makes itself known,' in this case P is superior to O because an O can easily be mistaken for a 0 whereas a P is pretty clearly a P.

In the light of both of these criteria the question of which letter is better is not subjective and it is not arbitrary. The matter can be studied and the conclusion can be demonstrated with rigorous proof. It is not my opinion that O is simpler than P, it is a fact; it is also not my opinion that O is more ambiguous than P, this too is a fact given the existence of the number 0 as a feature of human communication. What is my opinion is the fact that we should utilize the criteria of maximized simplicity or minimized ambiguity to determine superiority. That we should use this criteria can not be shown with any kind of proof and likewise can not be critiqued by any kind of counter-proof.

Now suppose that someone comes along and says, 'language does not simply exist – it exists for a reason. And upon recognizing the reason for language's existence we will also recognize what makes for excellent language and what makes for poor language. In addition we will see which signs within the language excel as signs and which signs serve their purpose poorly. The extent to which P and O fulfill their role in language's purpose will show their absolute quality.' Perhaps the person saying this will appeal to God's intention in creation, or he will appeal to humanity's collective intention in creation, or perhaps he will point to the workings of the universe that necessitated the creation of language. It does not matter, what matters is that he identifies absolute quality as being bound up with purpose and intention.

As a brief aside, one could say the same thing about human lives relative to the meaning of life.

So now the question is simply what purpose does language serve? Language serves to communicate. This is why we make speeches and write books, to communicate with others. Therefore the absolute superior between O and P is whichever most aids in communication, in this case, P, because P is a consonant and its usage needs to be made clear whereas O is a vowel and situations wherein it is used can be roughly inferred from the consonants surrounding it, so P is absolutely superior to O.

Perhaps a neuroscientist, an anthropologist, a linguist, or an analytical philosopher might critique my statement on language's purpose, but on the whole I think most would get on with the idea that language originated as a method of communication. However, just because it originated as a method of communication does not mean that it can not be used for other purposes. Suppose a man comes along and says that he uses language to build a reflection of the world and he does not give even a wedge of a rat's ass if anyone, himself included, can understand the reflection he can created. Then suppose another man comes scatting along and says that he just pours nonsense into a microphone to make people feel things, he doesn't really communicate any ideas with his use of words.

Communication loses its claim as the sole use of language and along with it goes the claim that aiding in communication is the absolute quality distinction of signs. It becomes another available criteria to be chosen or disregarded.

To be chosen or disregarded – on what basis? I imagined earlier that someone's first response to the P or O question would be 'what does it matter?' Now I have imagined up some possible criteria that people could propose to judge between P and O, but the choice of criteria has always been arbitrary. That remains the case, but even if we allow for that arbitrariness, what in practice determines what a person would choose as his criteria? The answer is, of course, what matters to him?

What is his mission? What does he care about? What is he pursuing? Now, which criteria helps him attain the object of his game? So poets will say O, because O is symmetrical and can be used in their poetry to indicate wholeness or, in some cases, vaginas, and their criteria is whatever allows them to enrich their works with meaning. And pub owners can say P because they own pubs and they want to use alliteration in naming it, such as Patty's Pub or Pete's Pub; their criteria is whatever is most likely to stick in people's minds. Political memorabilia manufacturers can say O because our president, whose support and detraction among the populace is their meal ticket, is named Obama; their criteria is whatever allows them to develop quick ways for people to tell the person driving behind them who they voted for in 2012. People racing to the restroom while texting would surely say P because it's just that much easier to type “i have 2 P” than “I have to pee” and their criteria is whatever allows them to remain connected to their circle of friends without creating a warm wet spot on the front of their pants.

In situations where people are largely indifferent, then a judgment on the two is impossible. But oftentimes a person who is nearly always indifferent to the question will on occasion find himself in a game where the difference between O and P actually matters to him. The question does not contain the criteria for determining superiority, which may lead one to believe that it is asking for absolute superiority. It may ask that question, naturally, but it shall get no adequate response because human beings do not have a means of determining absolute superiority. In actually the criteria for determining superiority is found in the recipient of the question in his present situation with his present needs.

So when a person responds with, 'what does it matter?,' you know that he does not have a criteria according to which he can think about the question. But if you ask and the man thinks for a moment and then gives you an answer, you know that he may have real genuine reasons for answering the way that he did.

So we return to the question: which is better, P or O?

O.

Because P looks kind of phallic and I don't want to carry the connotations of choosing a phallic letter over a vaginal one.

Digestion of Media

I have noticed as of late that whenever I cycle through my phone to choose music to listen to, I invariably tap the "Recently Added" button and choose from among the first ten or so songs. I have also noticed that whenever the player moves beyond my most recent additions, my finger starts pressing the skip button.

I remember being in early High School and getting excited whenever Sublime's Wrong Way or Date Rape came on the radio. Then I remember later in High School listening to Nirvana songs over and over again. Then I entered college and began listening to Rammstein's singles. Rarely will my music player land on a Sublime, Nirvana, or even Rammstein song without my ears itching to hear something else.

I wonder if my interest in a song, or more properly my boredom with a song, has nothing to do with the traits of the songs themselves and more to do with the novelty of the song. Perhaps what keeps my attention is the extent to which the song lies outside what I am used to, the extent to which the song has not been already digested.

Imagine it in this way. You encounter a new sound, a new arrangement of instruments, a new combination of tone, accent, and emotion in a voice, and if it has an initial appeal to you, you begin playing it in your head if not playing it through speakers. You begin wrapping your mind around it, you begin making it more and more familiar to yourself. This may take a long time, it may only take a few weeks, but in time you find that whatever it was in the song that fascinated you begins to fade.

I submit that the fascination arose because there were characteristics in the song that stood outside of you. The song left impressions that were unfamiliar, perhaps only a few unfamiliar impressions in otherwise well-traveled territory. If those impressions struck you as lovely, then you are driven to consume them. Paradoxically you want to end what makes those elements interesting: the fact that you have not already made them a part of yourself.

Fascination, in this conception, is the feeling one gets when they find something outside themselves that they want to add to themselves. Contempt, then, in the usage of "familiarity breeds contempt" is the feeling one has when one encounters something with nothing new to chew on.

Wonka the Individualist Ideal and Wonka the Broken Recluse

The fundamental difference between Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka and Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka is their relation to the rest of humanity. 

Gene Wilder's character has attained a kind of superiority, has ascended to a height compared to the rest of us. He acts with full understanding, nothing occurs that is outside of his control or too overwhelming to deal with (see: the Slugworth subplot), and the o

ther characters act to prove themselves to Wonka. The disasters that befall the children are indications that they fail to live up to what Wonka needs in a replacement; when they leave Wonka hints that they may be a little wiser, that is, their encounter with the factory improves them as people. Charlie is only given the factory when he demonstrates that he would not harm Wonka even when it would benefit his family.

Wonka is an individualistic ideal. He shuts himself off from humanity and becomes someone great. He is at no disadvantage, his quirkiness is a manifestation of the fact that he is satisfied in being himself and feels no need to conform to whatever might be expected of a business of his stature or a man of his age.

Johnny Depp on the other hand is a broken man. Depp stands apart from the rest of us, but at a disadvantage. He is different from the rest of us, but his difference is a result of his estrangement from his father, there is no indication that he could have lived as a normal man and instead chose to remake himself. His quirkiness arises from not understanding himself or the world around him. He is a great chocolateer, but in almost every other area he is broken.

The children in Depp's factory are being subjected to punishment because Depp does not trust them and expects them to fail (as Charlie pointed out, the Oompa Loompas seemed to have practiced the songs that correspond to each child's catastrophe), Depp.merely wants whichever one is the least worst to be his heir. The children do not leave Wonka in any way improved - two of them walk away disfigured. When Charlie chooses his family over Wonka, it shatters Depp's perception of the world; Charlie is the teacher rather than Wonka. He had no understanding of his importance or the extent to which he and his craft are valued. Depp in fact needs Charlie to show him that his individualistic existence and his art as a chocolateer do not fully satisfy him - he must be reconciled with his father and he must find a family (which he finds with the Bucket family).

Art, Possibility, and the World

Every so often you will think of some work of art that you like, and then you will imagine another, then you imagine the whole gamut of different works between those two, and then you will image all the art outside of them. You swell up contemplating the sheer possibility that art allows for: poetry, books, movies, video games, comics, painting, what have you.

When you contemplating all the possibility, for a brief moment you will feel as though you have found a meaning of life. You will feel as though art is something that you could live for: both consumption and creation.

In these moments, remind yourself that art is only capable of reflecting the world, not transcending the world. Perhaps you say it is unfair to expect it to do otherwise, or perhaps you think it is meaningless to talk of transcending the world, all the same place the limitation on art and you (if your experience is the same as mine) will find the feeling of having found something worth living for evaporate.

I say two things. The first is that art only reflects what is in the world, so why live our earthly lives for shadows when we can also live for the genuine articles? Take them both, why exclude one? The second is that it is the concept of infinite possibility that gets our heart pounding.

The Cosmology of Gotham City

I love comic books, as a medium. Comics operate in two languages: written text and visuals. They're a middle point between the nigh-limitlessness and descriptiveness of literature and the understatement and optional depth of visual media. A drawing can be dense with information and meaning or it can be light and stylish; the reader can decide how much time he spends on the visuals and how much information he tries to gather just from what is drawn. And the text, due to the fact that it is delivered in quick, bite-sized chunks at a time, allows for a faster pace than most books allow.

I love them as a medium, but I just can not seem to really immerse myself in them as they exist in their periodical format. For me, Batman is the reason to read comic books. Watchmen too, but that does not count for the current topic, I am talking about the never-ending periodically published comics. I can not bring myself to immerse myself in them, and that is because their genres and plotlines unravel as new material is needed, and this makes it impossible to get a sense of unity from the books.

For some, unity is not that important. I am not one of them.

What annoys me about periodical comic books is their tendency to become so inconsistent over time. Characters die, but didn't really die. Awesome characters become ridiculous. Demons and ghosts appear in otherwise realistic tasting works. Beloved characters get killed, but there's some kind of reset, so that an identical character exists but you always know that it's technically a different person. There is no sense attempting to change this, really, it would be impossible to deliver the same product to each generation and it would be nigh-impossible to not delve into either insipidness or weirdness when trying to consistently produce interesting and entertaining storylines on a consistent basis.

So, it is left up to the reader to develop his own consistency. Batman being the only one I am really concerned about, it is necessary to develop a cosmology of Gotham City. The persistent and enduring soul of all Batman storylines. For me, this is that system:

In my conception of the Batman mythos, there is no age or decay in the world. The Dark Knight Returns is just a fever dream; Batman never reaches that age. Growth occurs, but not real aging. Gotham City is a giant chaotic battleground full of conflicting wills, but it is one that is also balanced through the very clash of wills that makes it chaotic in the first place. Gotham is one of the few places on earth that has not been brought under a more-or-less united system of values, instead it is place where any sufficiently powerful entity can try to remake the city in his or her image. So you have the Joker trying to make the city into one giant, bloody punchline because the only thing he loves is the anarchy of laughing at everything. Two-Face wants to create a world of duality because his nature is defined by duality and he is powerful enough to impose the peculiarities of his nature on the world around him. Likewise for Poison Ivy and plants, Mr. Freeze and cold, and the Riddler and intellectual masturbation. No matter how idiosyncratic, you can try to make the world in your image in Gotham.

Arkham is the cooling off box. The idiosyncrasies don't die, they just go into remission for a time. The police are a moderating force for a flattened out order that favors letting people live their lives according to their desires, but not imposing their desires on others, but they are too weak to prevail. Gotham is bound to belong to one of the magnificent figures in the city, whichever one proves to be most capable.

And the Batman story is the story of one freak who is great enough to prevail over all others, but then chooses not to force his will on Gotham except insofar as necessary for the citizens to lead their own private lives. Batman is always smart enough, always strong enough to prevail; Batman can only lose temporarily, he will always prevail in the end. And his will is strong, but he has self-mastery and through the use of a handful of strict rules he forces himself to see himself as a servant instead of a master. If he were to ever fail to practice his code of self-discipline, Gotham would fall into anarchy, Batman is the force that keeps Gotham balanced. And it hurts.

Batman is in constant pain. Physically, mentally, emotionally, the guy is writhing in pain. He can't have the satisfaction of cutting loose, he can't retire, he can't lighten his load, he can't go too far, he can't have the things that would bring him private happiness. It hurts him. That is the order of Gotham: as long as Batman is willing to suffer, the world keeps working. He might believe that he has to do this, but we, the audience, know that he does not. We know that he has chosen to lead his life and that he continues to choose it every day. And he will suffer for it.

To me, this is the cosmology of Gotham. From this system, we can experience the tragedy of Bruce Wayne's sacrifice, the thrill of seeing someone as powerful as Batman consistently prevail without any supernatural powers that insure his safety, the hope that Bruce can carve out little slices of happiness for himself, and the fascination of watching the strange and the insane fight to acquire their own little pieces of Gotham.

The Crowdpleaser

My blog does not have wide appeal. As I've tried to maintain: the blog exists so that I can write and post as I like, the consequence being that the blog will never be terribly popular. But I finally wrote something that is getting a modicum of attention from the Google crowd. My sarcastic remark on how Bane eats has drawn a small handful of people Googling "bane without mask." Because this is something that people want information about, and they are deceived into thinking that I can offer it to them.

Which leads me to think about the Crowdpleaser. The sort of Art that just wants to give people what they're looking for. Building off of what I said earlier about the distinction between Craft and Entertainment, Crowdpleasers are a form of Entertainment. You don't challenge the audience, you don't invite them to grow or develop you come to them and give them what they want. And there is not a single thing wrong with that.

Why does Art exist? I do not think an all-encompassing answer can be given. But one reason why it exists is to bring joy to people, to let people feel things that they like. This is why we tend to give ourselves permission to watch schmaltzy stories about elves who want to be dentists or people banding together to help Santa deliver presents around Christmas time. Christmas seems to be our chosen feel-good season, a time where we let ourselves focus on stories that turn out so well for the protagonists that we can practically wade through the cheese.

But these stories are paper thin. They only work because of our good will. Because we are in the mood to tolerate them. What do I mean by paper thin? I mean that they are not believable. There is an impulse inside of ourselves that wants to tear bullshit to shreds when we encounter it, and these Artworks have to work against that impulse. It has to gain the support of other feelings and inclinations so that we don't walk away scoffing. This is why Crowdpleasers almost invariably draw a strong negative reaction from those outside of its fandom.

Twilight gave tween (lets be honest, it's more than tweens. More than just girls for that matter) girls what they wanted: a story about a supernaturally handsome, mysterious, strong, and amazing guy who falls head-over-heels in love with a girl for no clear or discernable reason and proceeds to spend the rest of his life doing things that affirm her worth to him. Those who allowed themselves to enjoy the emotional satisfaction of the story turned the book into a phenomenon; a large portion of the rest of the world yelled "bullshit!" loudly and repeatedly.

Pro Wrestling is basically the art of teasing the Crowdpleaser. They create characters for you to love, characters for you to hate, and then tease whether or not they're going to give you what you want. And, of course, so many of its own fans have turned to calling bullshit because of how easy it is to see through the show, and non-fans looking down on Pro Wrestling is so common that all one needs to do is say that they're a wrestling fan and they will find at least three helpful people within earshot who are happy to inform you that wrestling is fake. Just in case you didn't know, of course.

You have certainly felt it yourself. You have probably watched a movie or read a book that contained a scene that just felt too unreal to you. You knew it was trying to please you, but in the course of trying to please you, it actually aroused your contempt instead. Maybe it teased the death of a character, but then relented; then it was you who demanded the character's death instead of accepting a contrived survival. Or maybe a relationship worked out that seemed destined for separation, soon you root against the relationship because you are watching something play out that can not feel real to you.

I don't speak out against either impulse, of course. Neither the impulse to have your happy endings, nor the impulse to hate stories that feel false because they fail to account for how much disappointment exists in the real world. But I do want to say that there are times when one impulse will be stronger and times when it is the other. And so I think that we all sometimes prefer a good Crowdpleaser. So here's to giving us what we want – regardless of how much sense it makes!

The Drunken Aesthetic

I have an entirely too high Blood Alcohol Content, I am retyping everything repeatedly, since my typing skills have become nonexistent. But what information can we derive about aesthetics from this?

At least this: there exists the impulse to explore. There exists the impulse to be someone different, but then to sober up and be more-or-less oneself again. So we drink, we become someone else, we see the world from a different view, and then we return from our trip.

It's just a vacation....

Craft and Entertainment

I once wrote that, "all Art is a picture of remixed Nature." My main idea being that art is a creative - and intentionally distorted - reflection of reality. You will never find something in art that is not first found somewhere in nature, it's just that art can play with the proportions and remove undesired elements at will.

And as I say ad nauseum (mostly regarding ethics rather than aesthetics, though), values belong to the subjective individual, there is no factual objective good and bad.

But it occurs to me that there is another distinction we can make of Art that may be a bit more interesting. I call these two distinct forms of Art, Craft and Entertainment. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but insofar as a work of art is Craft, it is probably not Entertainment to most people, and insofar as it is Entertainment to most people, it is probably not Craft.

Craft

Craft is Art that proceeds from the peculiarities of the Artist's heart/mind/perspective/value rather than the commonalities. Craft is not intuitively appealing, Craft does not have wide appeal, Craft is esoteric, obscure, and mysterious. The reason for this being that it is created according to a vantage point that you probably do not use yourself.

Any given person is likely to have a lot in common with a lot of other people, some things he will have in common with all other people, but there will be some things so peculiar that only a handful of others will share them, and to some degree everyone is a unique snowflake. It is possible to create Art that remixes the world in a way that pleases the peculiar or unique parts of an Artist's nature. The resulting Art is a challenge to the audience.

The challenge is this: is there enough beauty in the Art, as it appears to you now, to compel you to understand it?

We philosophical types tend to have our heads shoved too firmly up our own asses to admit that we sometimes come across things that we do not understand, but that we feel is above us rather than incoherent or beneath us. But it happens. And if you don't have that characteristic arrogance, you have probably encountered movies or books or songs that seemed like they promised you something new and something great if you could just find a way to get behind them. If you could understand them. If you could figure them out.

That is the effect of some Craft. Of course, it is also possible for Craft to just be dismal. The Human Centipede probably sprang from some esoteric parts of Tom Six's character, that doesn't mean that it's worth trying to get behind or a point of view worth trying to acquire. But, then, that's how The Human Centipede impresses itself upon my character via my perspective; a different character and a different perspective might feel differently.

The essence of Craft is how particular it is to the Artist that created it.

Entertainment

Entertainment aims to please. It wants to provide a service to the audience, and for that reason does not try to lead the audience anywhere that it might not want to go. Where Craft beckons the audience to go chasing, Entertainment offers the audience a seat and sets up the stage nearby. As a consequence of this goal, an Artist creating Entertainment tries to limit the influence of his peculiarities, the Artist wants to focus on common ground between himself and the audience, or if necessary will even try to appeal to sensibilities that he does not share (like an director who makes movies for babies).

There is nothing inherently wrong with Entertainment, but there are those snobs who want to turn their nose up at anything that exists for people where they are instead of people who have reached a certain kind of special vantage point or expertize (of course, that's basically what a snob is, isn't it? Someone who supposedly sees things that you do not, and looks down at you for the sake of elevating his advantage).

For the consumer with an eye toward the evolution of his character, there are two things to keep in mind regarding Entertainment. Entertainment will not move you forward, you will not evolve or grow from Entertainment. However,  Entertainment is also an exercise in being what you are. If you have an aggressive nature, consuming aggressive Art will let you indulge in being who you already are; a sexual character watching pornography is being who he is. And if you do not exercise your present state of being, well, then how are you really yourself?

I imagine that this distinction will be revisited often in the future.