This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Michael Azerrad’s seminal history, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981- 1991.  The book traces the beginning of what we now call indie rock by profiling thirteen bands who made their own way without major label support at a time when such a move was considered an admission of failure.  Azerrad wisely refrains from attempting an encyclopedic overview, opting instead for a series of sketches, anecdotes, and origin stories.

There are the usual rock tour tales of debauchery, bad food, and worse accommodations, along with some uniquely punk ways of rewarding fans. Going to a Black Flag show meant a high likelihood of getting clocked by Henry Rollins, while Gabby Haynes (Butthole Surfers) loved to fill a wiffle ball bat with his own piss and wave it at the front row.

But the book is much more than a chronicle of bad boy behavior.  It’s a blueprint for musicians – or any artist, really – to build a career without waiting for permission from existing institutions.  Countless bands have been inspired by the book since it came out a decade ago, and several of them held a tribute concert at the Bowery Ballroom last month.  You can stream it in its entirety at NPR here.

As good as that show was, I did feel like the book could use a companion mixtape with representative songs from the original bands.  So I made one!  Download here.  (The cover photo above is from a Minor Threat show.)   Tracklist below the fold:

1 | Bombastic Intro / Big Black
from Songs About Fucking

2 | Human Cannonball / Butthole Surfers
from Locust Abortion Technician

A part of me was introduced to you
then it walked right out the door.
And tonight you’re probably feeling
like a human cannonball.

3 | Gimme Gimme Gimme / Black Flag
from Everything Went Black

You know the world’s got problems
I’ve got problems of my own!
Not the kind that can’t be solved
With an atom bomb.  

4 | Touch Me Sick / Mudhoney
from Superfuzz Bigmuff

I won’t live long and I’m full of rot
Gonna give you, girl, everything I got

5 | Trem Two  / Mission of Burma
from Vs.

The face at the window, the features I know
I try to escape but the world is too slow
The question is big, the question is wide
I can’t see around it.  I see only one side

6 | History Lesson – Part II / Minutemen
from Double Nickels on the Dime

Our band could be your life
Real names’d be proof
Me and Mike Watt played for years
Punk rock changed our lives

7 | Unsatisfied / The Replacements
from Let It Be

Everything goes
Well, anything goes all of the time
Everything you dream of is right in front of you
And liberty is a lie

8 | Indian Summer / Beat Happening
from Jamboree

Breakfast in cemetery 
Boy tasting wild cherry
Touch girl, apple blossom
Just a boy playin possum

9 | Brendan # 1 / Fugazi
from Repeater

10 | The Glory of Man / Minutemen
from Double Nickels on the Dime

Starting with the affirmation of man,
I work myself backwards using cynicism

11 | Wasted / Black Flag
from Nervous Breakdown

I was so wasted
I was a hippie
I was a burnout
I was a dropout I was out of my head

12 | The O-Men / Butthole Surfers
from Locust Abortion Technician

13 | Kill Your Idols / Sonic Youth
from Sub Pop 100

Kill your idols
Sonic death
It’s the end of the world
and confusion is sex

14 | The Model / Big Black
from Songs About Fucking

Playing hard to get, she smiles from time to time
It only takes a camera to change her mind

15 | Weatherbox / Mission of Burma
from Vs.

The air is round and the world is flat
And everything is clearly impossible
Clearly impossible
Inside the weatherbox

16 | Little Fury Things / Dinosaur Jr.
from You’re Living All Over Me

Tried to think what’s over me, it makes me crawl
Then she runs away from me, faster than I crawl

17 | In N’ Out of Grace / Mudhoney
from Superfuzz Bigmuff

Oh God, how I love to hate
Sliding in ‘n’ out of grace
Save me Lord, and fuck the race
Sliding in ‘n’ out of grace

18 | Think Again / Minor Threat
from Out of Step

A hand to your mouth, a performing yawn,
I guess you know what the fuck is going on

19 | Merchandise / Fugazi
from Repeater

Merchandise keeps us in line
Common sense says it’s by design

20 | Turn On The News / Hüsker  Dü
from Zen Arcade

I hear it every day on the radio
Somebody shoots a guy he don’t even know

21 | Sludgefeast / Dinosaur Jr
from You’re Living All Over Me

I’ve got the guts now
To meet your eye

22 | Tunic (Song for Karen) / Sonic Youth
from Goo

Dreaming, dreaming of how it’s supposed to be
But now this tunic’s spinning – around my arms and knees
I feel like I’m disappearing – getting smaller every day
But when I open my mouth to sing – I’m bigger in every way

23 | Never Talking To You Again / Hüsker Dü
from Zen Arcade

There are things that I’d like to say
But I’m never talking to you again
There’s things I’d like to phrase some way
But I’m never talking to you again

24 | Red Head Walking / Beat Happening
from Dreamy

Kiss that girl
Kiss that girl
She’ll cut your heart like diamonds
End of story

25 | Sixteen Blue / The Replacements
from Let It Be

Brag about things you don’t understand
A girl and a woman, a boy and a man
Everything is sexually vague
Now you’re wondering to yourself
If you might be gay

Your age is the hardest age
Everything drags and drags
One day, baby, maybe help you through
Sixteen blue
Sixteen blue

There’s no getting around it.  2010 was a parade of disasters, natural and otherwise.  Oil spills, earthquakes, and Republicans all conspired to up the suck  quotient on the new decade.  But musically, the year was an embarrassment of riches and narrowing this list down to fifty was an exercise in frustration.  Outside of the top ten, there’s no real meaning to the order, so take it the listings with a grain of salt.

A zip file of all 50 tracks can be found here, and my lists from 2009 and 2008 are here and here.

THE TOP FIFTY SONGS OF TWENTY TEN

________________________________________

50 | Gil Scott-Heron / New York is Killing Me

from || I’m New Here

49 | Surfer Blood / Swim

from || Astro Coast

48 | How To Dress Well / Ready for the World

from || Love Remains

47 | Record Club / I Need You Tonight

from || Kick

45 | Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith / Not in Love

from || Crystal Castles

44 | Mountain Man / Soft Skin

from || Made the Harbor

41 | Gold Panda / Quitter’s Raga

from || Quitter’s Raga

40 | Tennis / Marathon

from || Cape Dory

39 | Spoon / Written in Reverse

from || Transference

38 | A Trak / Whatever You Shoot

from || Dirty South Dance 2

37 | MNDR / I Go Away

from || E.P.E.

36 | Dominique Young Unique / Blaster

from || Domination Mixtape

35 | Matthew Dear / Honey

from || Black City

34 | The Roots feat. Joanna Newsom / Right On

from || How I Got Over

33 | Wavves / When Will You Come?

from || King of the Beach

32 | Gucci Mane / Excuse Me (Diplo Remix)

from || Diplo Presents: Free Gucci (Best of the Cold War Mixtapes)

31 | Caribou / Odessa

from || Swim

30 | She and Him / Gonna Get Along Without You Now

from || Volume Two

29 | Deer Hunter / Helicopter

from || Halcyon Digest

28 | Flying Lotus / Dance of the Pseudo Nymph

from || Cosmogramma

27 | Dr. Dog / Stranger

from || Shame, Shame

26 | Ratatat/ Neckbrace

from || LP4

25 | LCD Soundsystem / Pow Pow

from || This is Happening

24 | Kid Cudi / Please Don’t Play This Song

from || Man on the Moon II: Mr Rager

23 | Jónsi / Go Do

from || Go

22 | Major Lazer and La Roux ft. Gucci Mane / I’m Not Your Lemonade + Heroes n’ Villains Remix

from || Major Lazer and La Roux Present Lazerproof

21 | Big Boi / Back Up Plan

from || Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

20 | Gorillaz / Stylo

from || Plastic Beach

19 | Janelle Monae / Tight Rope

from || Archandroid

18 | Vampire Weekend / Contramelt A

17 | Das Racist / You Oughta Know

from || Shut Up, Dude

16 | The Books / A Cold Freezing Night

from || The Way Out

14 | Aloe Blacc / I Need a Dollar

from || Good Things

13 | Local Natives / Wide Eyes

from || Gorilla Manor

12 | Pogo/ Wishery

11 | Arcade Fire / Sprawl II

from || The Suburbs

10  | Cults / Go Outside

from || Cults 7”

9 | Best Coast / Boyfriend

from || Crazy For You

8 | Perfume Genius / Learning

from || Learning

7 | Cee-Lo Green / Fuck You

from || Lady Killer

6 | Robyn / Criminal Intent

from || Body Talk Pt. 2

5| Frightened Rabbit / Swim Until You Can’t See Land

from || The Winter of Mixed Drinks

4 | Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti / Revolution’s a Lie

from || Before Today

3 | Sleigh Bells / Rill Rill

from || Treats

2 | Free Energy / Free Energy

from || Stuck on Nothing

1 | Kanye West / Power

from || My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I should have hated this.

I’m bored with 8-bit nostalgia. I’m over ADD editing. I wanted to strangle the too-twee-for-its-own-good comic. If I never see a fourth wall broken again, it’ll be too soon. And don’t even get me started on Michael Cera’s never-ending ability to withdraw goodwill from the same old aw-shucks account he’s milked from the get-go. And yet…

I gotta give it to Edgar Wright. He took a bunch of elements that I can’t run fast enough away from and jumbled them up in such a charming way I forgot I ever hated them. Sure, it’s candy, but what’s wrong with that? Candy is delicious. I wouldn’t want every movie to be the equivalent of a Reese’s Cup, but I’m sure glad this one is. If you’ve got this much style, who needs substance?

9 | The Kids Are All Right
directed by || Lisa Cholodenko

Depending on your perspective, Lisa Cholodenko’s fourth feature is either a brave take on alternative families or a crass Hollywood attempt to shoehorn those families into the same white upper-middle-class context it puts everyone in. And apparently there are some people who think it’s a “despicable” attempt to humanize the homos, but who really cares what they think?

I just thought it was a damn funny movie. And that’s much needed at a time when Hollywood is finding comedy to be a chore somewhere between triggering cold fusion and finding Hoffa’s body on the difficulty scale. Refusing to make the movie about gay parents, Cholodenko settled for just doing a movie about gay parents. The pressure of being a poster child relieved, Kids is free to focus on the story and the characters. And Ruffalo, Moore, and Benning are in fine form navigating an awkward road of fallibility and forgiveness.

8 | A Prophet
directed by || Jacques Audiard

This is the miseducation of Malik, a young Arab youth thrown into a world where he has little power and few friends. Forced to be confidant, courier, and occasional hitman for the brutal prison crime boss César, Malik is a quick study in matters legal and less-than. A careful study of ambition and power, the film lives in details and gestures. If you’re wanting a shoot-em-up, keep looking. But if you like a little character with your crime yarns, you could do a lot worse.

7 | Red Riding : In the Year of Our Lord 1974
directed by || Julian Jarrold

“This is the North—we do what we want…”

What’s a crime trilogy that aired on British TV last year doing on a list of best movies of this year? Well, the short answer is that it got an American theatrical release in February. The long answer requires explaining what it is and why it’s so good. Patience, please.

Each film is a stand-alone work that has a different protagonist and director, with an overlapping set of villains and victims in Northern England and a consistently bleak tone serving as common thread. Very loosely based on the Yorkshire Ripper case of the 1970’s, the films are ostensibly about a set of grisly murders and police and journalistic attempts to find the perpetrator. But they’re really about a kind of moral rot and corruption that somehow makes serial killing seem like amateur hour.

Greed and grift and the repeated defeat of good by evil will wear down even the most jaded viewer by series end, to be sure. And the plotting alternates between gripping and confusingly complex. But an exquisite sense of place and mood temper the nihilistic thrust enough to make it an easy recommendation. Even though it’s not technically necessary, start with the first and best in the series, 1974, and work your way down the rabbit hole.

6 | The Black Swan
directed by || Darren Aronofsky

I’ll admit it – I like my Aronofsky unsubtle. The Wrestler may have catapulted the director to fame and acclaim, but I found it to be by far his least interesting work. The unrestrained passion of his early work was giving way to predictable, Academy-pleasing “realist” redemption hokum. Was one of the most original visionaries of the last decade turning into a terminally tasteful middlebrow award-whore? When I heard he was doing a ballet movie with Natalie Portman, I thought for sure we’d lost him.

My worries were unfounded. The Black Swan is anything but subdued. It’s high-camp body horror filtered through fairy tale logic, Grand Guignol hysterics, and frenetic direction. By design, it’s not for everyone. But faulting the movie for being unsubtle is like knocking an opera for having over-the-top emotions or a fable for having implausible plotting. That’s not what it’s about. Take it on its terms and you’ll have a much better time.

5 | The Social Network
directed by || David Fincher

Widely known as “That damn Facebook movie” before its release, the project was treated with more than a little bit of suspicion by a lot of people, including me. Sure, with Fincher behind the camera and Sorkin on story, it wasn’t lacking for pedigree.  And it had the trailer of the year, hands down.  But a movie about Facebook? Seriously? Who wants to pay 10 bucks to see some movie about status updates and Farmville?

Of course, The Social Network isn’t about Facebook anymore than Chinatown is about water department policy in Southern California. It’s about friendship, ambition, and betrayal, subjects that were old hat by the time the Bible was written. Sorkin takes these musty motifs, and gives them relevant and contemporary context by adding sex, drugs, and…depositions? Don’t ask me how it works, but it does.

4 | Catfish
directed by || Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman

Both victim and beneficiary of an aggressively misleading marketing campaign (“The best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed!”), Catfish is the movie that everyone’s telling you to see while refusing to tell you why. It’s not a thriller, know that going in. But there is a ton of tension here. While actual social networks are really only a small part of the The Social Network is about, it’s front and center here. The creators obviously aren’t in the same league of talent as Sorkin/Fincher, but they’ve stumbled onto a story a lot more profound, relevant, and destined to make you think  twice about your online presence. I’d say more, but it is a truly spoilable movie. Rent it and read no more.

3 | Mother
directed by || Bong Joon-Ho

Determination, loyalty, and a mother’s unconditional love for her handicapped son: by the end of Bong Joon-Ho’s fourth feature, these values don’t seem quite so laudable. The terse title is apt; the direction, cinematography, and writing are all superb, but it’s the mom that steals the show. Veteran actress Kim Hye-ja is the face of maternal warmth on Korean TV, a reputation shrewdly exploited here in her film debut.  It’s a masterful twist on the whodunit, and yet another reason to keep an eye on Joon-Ho’s career.

2 | Toy Story 3
directed by || Lee Unkrich

In a media world saturated with shiny baubles and distractions, forever looking over its shoulder for the Next New Hotness, creators who are consistently great over long periods can expect to get taken for granted. This is the position Pixar finds itself in. An enviable streak of excellence is seen as inevitable and thus, unworthy of much mention. But a glance at the other options for animated entertainment shows just how unlikely their track record is, and how the company deserves every bit of hype that comes their way.

The latest and last installment in the Woody and Buzz saga is a study in hitting all the right notes. It glides from slick actioner to coming of age chronicle to escape flick with such ease and authority it has to make live-action directors apoplectic with envy. Pixar is truly peerless. But even adding up the clever nods to classic cinema, the exquisitely rendered visuals and pitch-perfect editing, – in short, their all-around expertise – doesn’t do what they do justice. Everything they do in their “kid’s movies” is a testament to children, or at least values we associate with them. They’re a billion dollar company still guided by imagination, wonder, playfulness, and boundless energy. We could use a few more of those.

1 | Exit Through the Gift Shop
directed by || Banksy

Like the pilgrim that Kris Kristofferson sang about, Banksy is a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. He’s got one of the most famous names in the art world, but good luck picking him out in a lineup. His primary mode of expression is illegally graffitiing public walls in the manner of a disaffected youth, yet his works have sold for six figures and  sit next to Van Goghs, Pollacks, and Picassos in private collections. And while many of his pieces have an acerbic political bent, his few public pronouncements don’t reveal much of an ideological stance beyond “We’re all fucked.”

So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Banksy’s directorial debut would be such a slippery creature. Pining down exactly what this thing is ends up being half the fun. This documentary mockumentary prank hoax epic piss-take follows Thierry Guetta, a vintage-store owner on his journey from obsessive street-art enthusiast and chronicler to budding artist himself. Relentlessly self-promoting, hilariously derivative, and utterly absent an iota of shame, Guetta is such a perfect symbol of the trendiness and vapidity of the art world that he seems like he’s little more than Bansky’s latest chain-pull. And he probably he is, but that only makes the whole enterprise that much more impressive.

WHAT TV IS DOING THAT THE MOVIES AREN’T

In the last post, I talked about the inherent difficulties in creating original art in a medium as collaborative and expensive as film. Yet television, long considered a ‘wasteland’, is enjoying a widely acknowledged creative renaissance at the same time the movies are striking out. On first glance, this is puzzling. They’re both mediums of visual narrative aimed at a mass audience with budgets sizeable enough to preclude amateur involvement.  But I think there are key differences, intrinsic and imposed, that have made it easier to achieve excellence in television than in film – at least in the last decade.

FAILURE DIVIDED BY TIME

One reason might be that TV creators simply get more chances. Movies are a one-shot deal, while television is usually serialized over a period of months or years. Spreading the narrative out over a longer period of time relieves some expositional and character building pressure from the creators. And it allows more leeway for mistakes, since viewers see the episodes, at least in part, as distinct entities, and won’t judge an entire show too harshly based on a few bum apple episodes. In fact, most great shows not only have a few crap episodes but at least one mediocre season, but fans view that as an inevitable part of the process of getting so many hours of entertainment. To use a term from finance, television has the ability to amortize its failure over time, a luxury that films, by their very nature, don’t have.

But I don’t want to let the movie industry off the hook that easily. There are stark differences in the choices that the two industries – even though they’re often owned by the same parent company – have made in distributing their product to the people. These choices have made all the difference for the end product.

SCRATCHING THE NICHE

Since the 80’s, television has benefitted creatively from the introduction of niche markets, a.k.a. the cable networks. None of us would be talking about the current “golden age” of television if our only choices were still the Big Three. Relieving the pressure to please everyone all the time, producers can work on quality shows knowing that an audience lies out there somewhere among the cable universe. Movies haven’t really figured out to do this profitably yet. All the money is gambled on the shoot-em-up spectacles and the inane star-driven romantic comedies, with a few crumbs left over for tedious and predictable prestige pictures for Oscar bait. These days, the cinematic circus is all tentpoles with nothing underneath. The medium budget studio movie is basically dead, and with the collapse of foreign pre-sales as a method of financing last year, indie film distribution is struggling more than ever. Rather than researching alternative avenues of income and distribution, the Big Six studios keep putting their bets on bigger, dumber, and younger. Meanwhile, adults looking for thoughtful movies are out of luck.

THE WRITER AS PAUPER AND PRINCE

The lowly treatment of writers in the movie industry is the stuff of on- and off-screen legend. Robert Altman’s The Player captures the feeling most vividly when it has a producer literally kill a screenwriter and get away with it. Once a screenwriter hands in a script, he/she can expect to have it rewritten twenty times by God-knows-how-many writers hired afterwards, not to mention being shut out of the set and thus, further input.

The case of Ridley Scott’s recent stinker, Robin Hood, is a good illustration. Originally entitled Nottingham, the script took a fresh spin at the myth by telling the story from the Sherriff of Nottingham’s point of view. Using forensics, he hunts down a local terrorist, aka Robin Hood. The script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris quickly became a hot property and the subject of an intense bidding war.

Given that there have already been 111 movies about Robin Hood according to IMDB, it was essential that any new movies about this legend actually be, well, new movies. And this script, while dark and unconventional, certainly promised that. Well, till Russell Crowe, director Ridley Scott, producer Brian Glazer, and god knows how many other writers got their hands on it. First, Ridley became obsessed with archery and had the movie rewritten to be all about that. You and I might think that’s the least interesting part of the Robin Hood myth, but what do we know? We didn’t direct G.I. Jane. Oh, and then Scott thought it would be interesting to have Russell Crowe be both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Fight Club sort of twist. I almost wish they would have ran with this idiotic idea so at least the movie would’ve been spectacularly bad instead of just plain old boring bad. But cooler, more conventional, heads prevailed, and it became little more than a retread of the last big Scott/Crowe team-up.

“The script went through many, many different changes…. But to me, really, it’s more about the visuals. It’s the Gladiator version of Robin Hood.”
- Brian Grazer to Entertainment Weekly
-
Who in the hell – beside the aforementioned three – wants that movie? No one, according to Rotten Tomatoes and the box office. But it’s a familiar story in Hollywood. A studio buys a script for its unique and compelling voice, and proceeds to strangle that unique and compelling voice until it’s the same whimpering moan of mediocrity that we get every week out of these guys.

Contrast that with television, where the writer/producer supersedes the hired-hand director and has final say over what happens to their story (except for the execs, of course). I’m not saying that film needs to hand over the reigns to the writers. It is a director’s medium, after all. But somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that auteur means author. If directors aren’t going to write their own scripts, they should at least listen to the people that do, even after they write them a check. The current too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen process –a tug of war between half a dozen screenwriters, inane input from egotistical execs, clueless after-the-fact focus group suggestions – is murdering storytelling at the cineplex. Art By Committee is an oxymoron, not a business plan. I’m biased, obviously, but if you stop treating the writers like they’re disposable, you might start getting something besides throw-away movies.

IS THE CINEMATIC SITUATION HOPELESS?

So much of modern moviemaking seems to be a conspiracy against quality, where expecting a good time that doesn’t insult your intelligence is a sucker’s bet. Entertainment – to say nothing of art – rarely makes it out alive. But does it have to be this way? So many of the problems revolve around the monopoly of the Big Six studios, and their chokehold on the making and releasing of film product. Given the recent revolutions in the distribution of home entertainment like Netflix, Red Box, and on-demand, it seems odd that hasn’t had more of an effect on the production side, especially since the secondary market is where most movies make back their budget.

Perhaps this change towards digital distribution can make the digital revolution that happened in production finally bear fruit. Higher quality HD cameras such as The Red have made digital indies look less like subpar high-school productions (see The Anniversary Party, Funny Ha Ha, etc.), and more like the kind of adult art than can give the majors a run for their money. The movie industry is nothing if not unpredictable, and I wouldn’t count out quality movies as being something to compete on. Stranger things have happened.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” – Theodore Sturgeon

The successful sci-fi author delivered that gem to Venture magazine, after being bombarded with the umpteenth question about why so much sci-fi sucks so hard so often. And so was born the oft-quoted “Sturgeon’s Law”, an assertion as bitter as it is true. He was right to suggest that sci-fi doesn’t have a monopoly on mediocrity.  Whether you collect fine art or pop records, you’re going to have to sift through a ton of trash to find even a little bit of treasure.  But while I think Sturgeon’s right that it’s harder to find quality than crap in most endeavors, I think he’s wrong to suggest that they all share the same ratio.

For example, let’s take film.  If you did an honest accounting of the popular mediums, I think it would be hard to deny that going to the movies delivers disappointment more reliably than any other diversion.  In every other field, we are living in a golden age of excellence and accessibility. There is more quality television, music, writing , and design being produced now than the average person can hope to keep up with, and it’s easier than ever to gain exposure to it. But for movie fans, you could check out all the great films of most years over a long weekend. I don’t care if you’re talking about the multiplex or the arthouse, a lightweight romantic comedy or a weighty drama tackling the social issue du jour. Excellence is an endangered species in the movie world, and I don’t see the situation getting better any time soon.

A GOOD MOVIE IS HARD TO FIND MAKE

In some ways, this is inevitable and longstanding, an inherent property of the medium itself. It is exponentially harder to achieve excellence in filmmaking than it is in other mediums. Now, that’s not to say that someone who makes a great movie is more talented than someone who paints an incredible painting, records a brilliant album, or writes a masterful novel – or even a harder worker. I’m simply saying that, for reasons I’ll go into below, there are many, many more obstacles standing between the vision in a moviemaker’s head and its real world execution than there are in other fields.

Making a movie takes a lot of people. There’s no way around this fact, even for indies. And this has considerable consequences for the creation of art. A songwriter can write a song by themselves, and either record it solo or, unless they’re the Polyphonic Spree and need 28 people, recruit three or four other musicians and form a band. A novelist needs only themselves, time, and maybe an editor, to complete their book. A painter needs a few supplies and a canvas. You see where I’m going with this.

As Edward Jay Epstein puts it:

Assembling a small army of individuals with highly specialized skills on a temporary basis is not an easy task. It requires persuading individuals to contractually commit themselves, often six months in advance, to a job that may last for only a few weeks, and to forego other opportunities. They must work long and unusual hours, often with strangers who may be unfamiliar with their methods and, in some cases, hostile to them. Then, after completing their task, they must seek other employment.

Epstein’s only covering the logistical difficulties involved, not the creative ones. Imagine trying to get 100 or more people to collaborate on any other kind of artistic endeavor, and take a guess on the odds of being anything less than a muddled mush of crossed signals and pained egos.

Now, all these people we’re talking about don’t come cheap. Sure, on some indies, you can get your friends to work for free on your first or second movies, but after a while, you realize using volunteers gets you volunteer quality product. You need professionals, and professionals cost. This is why, despite their best efforts, the arthouse and the indies haven’t really stepped up to the plate where the studios fail. A talented amateur filmmaker is still an amateur.

MAMMON AND THE MOVIES

The average daily running cost on a studio picture in 2000 was $165,000. Naturally, the incredible – some would say obscene – amount of money required to make one movie has a filtering effect on what kind of art you end up with. You either somehow pony up a few hundred thousand – at the very, very low end – to make your own movie, or you come up with a script that will make a movie that an army of marketing experts think they can design a poster around. Originality and complexity are anathema to this mindset; they’re too unpredictable at the box office. Better to stick with known formulas, well-worn tropes, familiar franchises, and lowest common denominators. It’s a truism that aiming for the widest possible audience means working in the shallowest artistic pools .

This is not another rant against the idiocy and poor taste of the major studios.  Though I’m sure most movie execs probably have both traits in spades, they start the game with their hands tied.  They’re dealing with astronomical sums of other people’s – i.e., their parent company’s – money. If they continually gamble billions of dollars on aesthetic whims with little chance of profit, they and thousands of other people are out of jobs. Resolving the tension between making something worthwhile and making a return on investments of that size has always been tricky. We shouldn’t be asking why Hollywood keeps making bad movies. We should be asking how it ever makes good ones.

As Samuel Beckett knew, the act of art is the art of failing better. And success once doesn’t guarantee your next fifty attempts won’t be failures. It’s just part of the process. Great artists need thick skins, time, and persistence. But the huge hurdles of filmmaking make it so expensive to fail, most filmmakers just don’t get that many chances. And if they do get to make their script, chances are it will tampered with at every stage of the process; its unique peaks flattened to resemble proven moneymakers, its idiosyncrasies and eccentricities shaved off so as not to offend or confuse a mass audience, and by the time it’s all over the work is so altered as to be unrecognizable to its creator and unpalatable to anyone with half a brain.

In the next installment, I’ll look at why TV is enjoying a creative renaissance while films flounder, and what the movie studios can learn from that.

But why should former supermodels get all the moviemaking fun? Here are five spouses of world leaders that would cut interesting onscreen figures, even if they’re not quite the publicity magnet that Bruni manages to be.

Sarah Brown (Wife of British PM Gordon Brown)

Given the fact that Gordon Brown could very well not be M.P. in a week, the family is probably going to want to look for hobbies and alternative income streams. And what better hobby than being a movie star? I’ve knocked around the idea a bit myself, but I can never seem to find the time.

When not running to her husband’s defense after he inadvertently insults little old ladies, Sarah Brown splits her time playing the charity-circuit wife role to the hilt and being the “high priestess of Twitter” (I guess that’s a thing?) – a far cry from her days as co-founder of high-powered P.R. firm Hobsbawm* Macaulay. So, she’s reserved to the point of being chilly, tech-savvy and super-ambitious, and attractive in an angular and slightly unnerving way. Sounds like a Tilda Swinton type if I ever saw one. Team her up with Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), make her the C.E.O. of some ethically challenged bio-tech company, and the script practically writes itself. And no bad films have ever been made after saying those last five words, right?

*Apparently an actual person’s name and not a Harry Potter character.

Princess Letizia (Wife of Felipe, Prince of Asturias)

As we all know – or discovered on Wikipedia thirty seconds ago – Prince of Asturias is the official title for the heir apparent to the Spanish throne. Not a bad snag for a commoner*. I’m not surprised given how easy she is on the eyes, if you know what I mean. (I mean she’s physically attractive.)

So, she’s hot, Spanish royalty, and has a sister who resents being thrown in the tabloid spotlight just because her sibling snagged a prince? It’s probably illegal somehow for anyone but Pedro Almodóvar to tackle this kind of readymade melodrama. My Sister, My Secret or something like that.

* Maybe it’s my American lack of familiarity with vestigial figureheads, but can we come up with a less insulting term for non-royalty? Given the shoddy track record of monarchical morality, I think they should be the ones stuck with the pejorative shorthand.

Kim Ok (Alleged current wife of Kim Jong il, Batsh*t Leader of North Korea)

Don’t make the mistake I did and get her confused with Kim Ok-bin, the super-smoking South Korean actress. You will waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure that one out. Nope, this is just the old secretary turned consort deal. We’ve all been there.

Now, I’ll grant being married to the dictator of the most paranoid and isolated regime on Earth is a bit of stumbling block, sure. But let’s not let a little thing like life in a forced labor camp stop us from an inspired casting choice. Hear me out here: I’m thinking Oliver Stone. He’s already an old hand at brutally unsubtle propaganda and shameless hagiography. Sure, he may not see ideologically eye to eye with Dear Leader now, but give him a few months in a NK filmmaking education camp, and I’m sure he’ll come around. Kim and Kim: A Match Made in Worker Paradise, or somesuch. I’m not a marketing guy, gimme a break.

Chantal Biya (First Lady of Cameroon)

Let me just point out up front that this lady has an entire tumblr blog dedicated to her multiple mega-ridiculous hairstyles. That alone gets her at least one movie. And the flamboyance doesn’t end at the forehead. Biya is well known for her glamorous ways – glamour meaning the same thing in Cameroon as it does here: wearing shiny, comically overpriced things that a spouse was able to purchase by exploiting the less fortunate.

The Chantal Biya Story is a Baz Luhrmann biopic. That much is obvious. But twos of minutes of interweb research hasn’t told me a thing about her singing chops, so whether it can reach the full unwatchable ridiculousness of a Luhrmann musical is still unclear.  And for no good reason, here’s a random picture of Chantal Biya seemingly giving Carla Bruni the stink-eye at the UN.

Joachim Sauer (Husband of German Chancellor Angela Merkel)

The German media’s nickname for the quantum chemist is “The Phantom of the Opera”. But don’t let that fool you into false excitement. It’s only because he’s camera-shy and loathes attending public events with his wife. So, he’s boring, normal, and has a perfectly understandable distrust of the media spotlight. GUH. Well-adjusted people are so lame, drama-wise.

But we can work with this. Anybody see the critically acclaimed indie sci-fi drama Primer, directed by former engineer Shane Caruth? I didn’t think so. When even fans describe the film in terms like “hopelessly confusing” and “deliberately paced”, it’s no surprise that your little time-travel flick is relegated to cult status. But that’s exactly why they’d be perfect for each other. Caruth and Sauer could have a ball banging out another head-scratcher science-fiction flick that’s heavier on the science than it is on the fiction. And “The Phantom” could rest easy, knowing that appearing in a Shane Caruth film wouldn’t danger his beloved anonymity in the slightest. Done and done.

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I can answer the last two questions definitively: Yes, it did get a release, though only in four theaters, and yep, they actually try to pass off that series of cardboard boxes covered in computer paper as an actual MRI machine. But as far as the first question, I’m a long ways from a credible explanation of how and why After Last Season came into being or what it all means – even after watching it three times on DVD. But try I must. Along the way, I’ll be interspersing my thoughts with pull quotes from this Filmmaker interview with the director from last summer.

Stop Making Sense: The Plot of After Last Season

Filmmaker: What are you trying to say or communicate with this film? Region: The film covers several subjects. Scientific innovation and how it can be used to solve a murder is one of them. Showing some facets in the lives of medical students is also one of them.

After Last Season resists synopsis like Keith Richards resists sobriety, but I can at least lay out some of the pieces and hope someone else knows how to put together the puzzle. Despite supposedly being a ‘sci-fi thriller’, ninety percent of the dialogue involves incredibly dry discussions of one of three topics:

1. MRI machines and their functions

2. Directions to nearby towns and descriptions of local businesses

3. Geometric shapes

I saw one person online try to summarize the plot as “Ghost Foils Murder”. If I had to sum it up briefly like that, I guess my take would be “Medical Interns Endure Confusing Renovations, Inept Haunting”. But, in the spirit of the film, let me test your patience with a longer synopsis:

Along with several characters whose reasons for being in the film are unclear, a couple of medical student use groundbreaking, mind-reading technology (that looks like MS Paint ) to uncover (kinda) a murder from last week, and then the murderer that they saw with their thought-reading chips (more on that later) comes to get them (how would he know?) with an already-bloodied knife (?), but then a ghost one of the main characters had seen in a dream (I think) attacks the bad man with a chair, even though shortly thereafter the ghost demonstrates how he can lift a ruler but not a backpack (seriously), and I think a chair is usually at least as heavy as a backpack, right?  I give up.

But don’t get me wrong. All that ‘drama’ with the knife-murder-guy is only about five minutes of screen time and is so confusingly staged and shot, it doesn’t come close to breaking the film’s commitment to inducing bewildering boredom in the viewer.

Region: After you’ve seen it, you know the whole plot. It’s all in there. It’s very logical. I wanted to make the movie as realistic and logical as possible, it’s just in the way it’s presented. The way it’s presented it will produce some kind of thrilling or disturbing reaction. But it’s very logical and it’s all in there.

But as much boredom as the movie generates – and it’s a lot – it’s a strangely fascinating sort of dullness. It sounds odd, but my friends and I were on the edge of seats with boredom the whole time. It’s thrillingly tedious: how will they top the last banality? I’ll collected some samples of the enigmatically generic dialogue to give you an idea. Like the movie itself, I give no context. Some of these are the scenes in their entirety:

Woman on phone: “I’m on the third floor. I live in an apartment building on the east side of the city. It’s about 15 minutes from the bridge. I have a view of downtown from my windows.

***

Stacy: Did he love the town?

Anne: Sometimes, he gave me the impression that he didn’t, but my grandfather stayed in Ringham most of his life.

Stacy : (said with an inordinate amount of interest) : What did he do in Ringham?

Anne: He became a carpenter.

[Lots of mutual laughter at this for some reason]

Stacy: Well, my father also grew up in a small town. He stayed in this town until he was 15. Later on, his family moved aways to the suburbs of a large city.

***

Random Lady: My uncle saw a coyote by that tree over there. It stood there for several seconds and then went away.

***

Actual last line of the movie: We have a room next to the living room.

***

But as dazzling as the dialogue is, it’s no match for the real star of the movie, the set ‘design’.

Production Values, or Lack Thereof, of After Last Season

Region: We only had enough money to shoot the film and not enough for production design in the beginning. Additional money only came several months later for the special effects and for the computer animation. We made the sets simple. I used shots of walls to show the passage of time in some scenes and to show that something is happening at a different location in other scenes. (ed. note: Huh?) For the rest we tried to keep the sets simple because of the budget.

Let’s say I decided to walk into any random room in my apartment, lay my camcorder down on the first available surface, and spin it around violently. Odds are I’d end up with a more pleasing composition than ninety percent of this movie. And the only thing more innovatively inept than the camerawork is the ‘set’ ‘design’. I’m not exaggerating to say that my friends and I missed ninety percent of the dialogue in this movie the first time we watched it because we couldn’t stop laughing at how amazingly awful the sets, special effects, and cinematography were. Every new shot triggered another round of questions, confusion, and guffaws.

But it also incited arguments.  The thing is so poorly made it’s a provocation. Viewings inevitably dissolve into debates about intent and conspiracies over whether the whole thing is a giant put-on or not. It’s a level of slapdash halfassery that would elude the amateur.  An amateur is merely inadequate, but so much of After Last Season seems to go out of its way to be wrong.

The sets are piled with seemingly random detritus and the walls are often, for some reason, half-covered with wallpaper taped on with duct tape. Text is digitally placed on a blank sheet of white paper when it could’ve easily been simply typed and printed out. The presence of a ghost is illustrated by gray Rubbermaid boxes sliding across a floor. The movie’s plot revolves around electronic chips that two people place on the side of their heads so that one can see the other’s thoughts. Yet they decided to illustrate this ultra-futuristic technology with graphics that would’ve looked low-budget on a screensaver in 1993. The combined experience of the effects team on ASL can probably be measured in minutes.

Filmmaker: Were these people from a VFX house, or were they people who simply knew how to do things on a computer?

Region: People who knew things to do things on computer. Unknown people. We put [the effects] together from scratch.

Uniquely Inept is Still Unique

But as craptastic as the film is, it’s more than mere incompetence that makes the film fascinating. Most incredibly lame works of almost-art are compelling and sadly comic because of a massive gap between highfalutin intent and piss-poor execution. But like The Room and Troll 2, it’s incredibly hard to even begin to fathom the intent behind After Last Season. In other words, it’s so weird, I don’t even what they were going for – and that’s strangely admirable. It may not be, by any measure on any Earth, well shot, written, acted or directed, but it is highly, highly, original. And, personally, I’d much rather see some loony goofball flame out like a roman candle trying some nutty stunt than watch yet another by-the-numbers piece of boring Oscar bait aimed straight at a complacent middlebrow audience. I’m looking at you, Eastwood.

Sadly, After Last Season isn’t available on Netflix yet. You can only purchase it through Amazon. And for the record, I highly recommend pooling the resources of your Bad Movie Club and doing just that.  Here’s to originality!

Filmmaker: Is there anything else you would like people to know about you and your movie?

Region: It’s a thriller. The critics would say it better than I do. One critic said it’s a film unlike anything you’ve seen before. That’s from the critic, and that’s something we tried to do.

Over time, every mass medium evolves a way of reaching the lowest common denominator, its own specially tailored and especially shameless method of squeezing the art until it screams dollar signs. We live in a capitalist world, so it’s not surprising that artists, entertainers, and journalists can’t always pick dignity over paying the rent. Let’s review:

• Television has got its missing white girls, celebrity ‘news’, and overall bleeds = leads philosophy.

• The movie industry could hardly survive without binging on mindless explosions, sequelitis, and formulaic romantic comedies.

• Radio (it’s still a thing, right?) lives and dies by voice-tracking, dayparting, speeding up songs to fit in more ads, and, of course, an unholy arsenal of screeching shock-jocks and apoplectic political gasbags.

• And even the medium associated with the highest of brows, publishing, sustains itself primarily on a program of fad-diet books, pop-science piffle, quickie cash-in bios for the dead celebs and ghost-written claptrap for the dumb and living ones.

*******

Now, the internet is still a toddler compared to the above media, but it’s already developed some tried, true, and slightly short of dignified ways of pulling in pageviews, the metric that eventually makes the money that keeps the whole thing going. Linkbait can be good or bad, and it’s obviously part of life for any company making its living with content on the web. But it’s good to know what the internet equivalent of fishnet stockings and a low-cut blouse are, so you can spot the cheap and easies like an expert.

On the technical end, there’s spamdexing – which I could explain but it would probably put us both to sleep – and on the content end, there are several tactics to lower yourself to snag more eyeballs. There’s celeb gossip (nothing new there), unverified tech rumors, fake-feuding for traffic, and throwing in names that are insanely popular but utterly irrelevant to your post like Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber, or Justin Bieber, for example. And, of course, there’s the list. I’m a big fan of lists, even if especially if they’re silly and useless.

But there’s a limit. And The Daily Beast has not only crossed that limit, they’ve set up shop on the other side and started giving the finger to everyone who ever gave a flip about standards. Their lists are kaleidoscopically stupid; every possible avenue of idiocy is explored. The premises are hopelessly flawed, the criteria are completely meaningless, and the actual content is, well, debatable is the kindest description I can muster. (Flat-out f**ing retarded is the least kind, if you were wondering.)  OK, Tina Brown, you’ve forced me to fight fire with fire, list with list.  Here goes:

THE TEN MOST USELESS DAILY BEAST LISTS OF ALL TIME, OR AT LEAST UNTIL NEXT MONTH

10. The 50 Most Stressful Colleges

Random metrics + high interest subject = shamless linkbait.  How good is the engineering program? How much crime is on campus?  What is the acceptance rate?  What do these have to do with each other and how they do prove an amorphous and probably unmeasurable quality like “stress” on campus?  Oh, nevermind all that.  Forward this to aunt Susie – she’s got a kid applying this fall.

9. The Left’s Top 25 Journalists

OK, I won’t bring up that they lump bloggers, journalists, newspaper columnists, and radio talk show hosts all together.  I realize I’m one of the few holdouts who distinguish between commenting on the news and breaking it.  But still, Fred Hiatt is on a list of lefties.  Fred Hiatt, for crisssakes.  At #5.  Worthless.

8. The Endangered Sandwiches List

It’s really just a list of great delis across the U.S., but that wasn’t eye-grabbing enough, so TDB had to come up with a confusing/dopey title and work in some story about how delis are dying because of low margins on brisket,  their association with Jack Abramoff (huh?), and the low-carb craze (four years after Atkins went bankrupt).

7. America’s 25 Craziest Cities

Any commentary on this one would be secondary to just listing their lame criteria: psychiatrists per capita, stress, eccentricity and drinking levels.  What?  But at this point, whatever, fine.  Do your dumb meaningless list, Daily Beast. But c’mon!  You should’ve had a clue something was wrong when Cincinnati, of all places, was number one.  Cincinnati has never been number one in anything, ever, good or bad.  It wouldn’t even crack the top three in a “Lamest Cities in Ohio” list, an admittedly tough contest.

6. A-List Buddhists

Aside from putting Tiger at #1, the list isn’t that bad by Daily Beast standards.  But the tagline, “Hollywood’s Buddha-ful People” is enough to land it in the middle of the Hall of Shame.

5. The Right’s Top 25 Journalists

Again, apart from a laughably broad definition of journalist (Rush Limbaugh?) , it’s a shame to throw respectable people like Caitlin Flanagan and Nick Gillespie in with the likes of Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck. Also, I have to quote the blurb about Bill O’Reilly:

“O’Reilly, an anchor who has turned blowing hard into an art form (ed. note: no argument here), is reliably—and relentlessly—omniscient (Omniscient?  That’s the word you wanted?)  His paint-by-numbers conservatism can be off-putting even to those who share many of his beliefs, but every now and then he has his finger perfectly on the pulse of the nation. And then he’s unstoppable.”

So, Bill is reliably and relentlessly omniscient, which is good.  It sucks when someone’s erratically all-knowing.  But even with consistently godlike powers, he’s only unstoppable every now and then.  That’s why he’s only at number five on their list.

4. The Elite’s Top 50 Baby Names

The co-founder of something called nameberry.com, “which we like to think of as the high-quality, intelligent source for stylish names”, lays out the Chets,  Tiffanys, and Taylors of tomorrow so that we can preemptively hate their idiot parents.  When Seraphin, Imogen, Phineas, Atticus, and Kai become as common as Brad and Kelly, we’ll know who to kill thank.

3. The Top 25 Centrist Columnists and Commentators

Any list where Joe Scarborough follows Jon Stewart is clearly meaningless.  Evidently, Stewart is on this because made fun of Keith Olbermann one time.  I think they’re confused.  Criticizing people on your own side occasionally doesn’t make you centrist.  It makes you honest.

2. The A-List B-Cups

Somehow dumber than it sounds, it’s an inventory of celebs who’ve gotten breast reductions.  Thank God someone is recording this information for posterity.  It should also be noted that  the definition of A-List is stretched so far that it includes the likes of Soleil Moon Frye and Loni Anderson.  The slideshow contains gems like this from Kelly Osborne: “Perfect boobs is what I want.”  Enlightening.

1. The Top 20 Dog Names of the Future

With the amount of brain cells I lost just reading the title, I can’t possibly risk reading the article.  We have a winner.

All of this is well documented and widely deplored. We know the offenders: TMZ, US Weekly, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, etc. But as much scorn as they deserve – and sure, they deserve a truckload – I’m not interested in their particular crimes. I’m interested in exploring a more collective guilt, a guilt borne even by those who are simply spectators or who spend their time actively tearing apart the star system.

Some of the bloggers and critics I’m talking about are people whose work I’ve long admired and probably at one time or another poorly imitated. But my point still stands: Anyone who consumes this material or who makes a living commenting on stars and their behavior is automatically part of the celebrity machine and is at least partly responsible for the end result. It doesn’t matter whether you’re laughing at the whole enterprise while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter whether you see your warts and all only coverage as a much-needed corrective to the blemish-free bullshit of the star-making machinery. And it doesn’t matter whether you see yourself as better because you reference Sylvia Plath in your posts instead of just drawing semen on celebrities’ faces. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because, in the end, you’re not a better person than Perez Hilton or someone that works at TMZ or Star magazine. You’re just a smarter one. The person who helps produce US Weekly and the person who buys it to laugh at it and the person from Gawker who makes a living mocking it all contribute to its bottom line.

This is because the celebrity industry isn’t like other industries. The cliché is true: In 99 percent of cases, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. All the blistering takedowns and all the withering quips serve the exact same function that a puff-piece People spread does. It feeds the beast. And the last thing any of us should want to do is feed the beast, because it feeds the worst in us. It’s an awful industry driven by our basest instincts – envy, superficiality, greed and spite – and, perversely, any engagement functions as a sort of endorsement. The only way to win is by ignoring them. Like the classic Simpson’s song goes, “Just Don’t Look”.

Apart from supplying fuel to a machine they claim to hate, there’s also an inherent amount of arrogance and superiority involved in the enterprise of celeb-mocking. Like most sane people, I’m frequently appalled by the behaviors of the rich + famous, but I think it’s helpful to have some perspective. The sudden introduction of immense fame and incredible fortune present the kind of character test I don’t think most people would pass, much as they’d like to think otherwise. The amount of sinless, stone-throwing spectators regarding this or that gaffe, infidelity, or chemically-induced celebrity mishap is far greater than the number of people that wouldn’t fall victim to the same self-inflicted misfortune if they were in the same place. Besides, you get no points for resisting temptations that you aren’t offered.

The giddy thrills of the celebrity merry-go-round may seem like candy, but they’re poison, more or less. They either make us feel bad about ourselves for the wrong reasons – by presenting a fake world free of problems that makes our own lives pale in comparison – or they make us feel good, also for the wrong reasons – because we’re smugly judging public figures that are under pressures that we can’t possibly imagine. And in case you were mistaken, you don’t have a ‘right to know’ the details of a public figure’s life. Presuming you do cheapens the meaning of both ‘right’ and ‘knowledge’. I don’t care if they are a golfer, a singer, or a senator (unless they’re misusing public funds). It’s none of your business.

I say this not as a blameless scold, but as someone who’s been a producer and a consumer of celebrity news product at various times in my life. The former I did as a paycheck and the latter I did out of boredom, but, either way, I regret it – and I don’t think I’m the only that does. It’s unfashionable these days to talk about something being “beneath” us, but if we can’t say this kind of thing is below what we’d like to be, then what are we saving our standards for? And, again, it’s not any better to be a mocker than it is to be a booster. You’re boosting sales, pageviews, and ratings either way. Being draped in irony doesn’t keep you from getting dirty.

The bottom line is we’re better than this, and we have better things to do with our time and talents.  Let’s start acting like it.

Whenever I go against my better judgment and watch a clip from Glenn Beck’s show, the end result is usually not much more than a severe headache and a wrist sore from constant fist shaking. But his recent unintentionally hilarious hour-long interview with nonconsensual fondler Eric Massa actually provoked some thought from me, though not the kind Beck was intending. The lachrymose host was chomping at the bit to crown Massa a new conservative hero of the first order – the liberal apostate, eager to dish dirt on the perfidy of his previous ideological allies. But sadly, Beck ended up with little more than an hour of lame backpedaling and tickle-fight tales that made him the butt of more jokes than usual. Where did America’s favorite crazy crybaby go wrong?

Now, at least some of the blame for the primetime train wreck can be attributed to Beck’s habit of uncritically embracing every half-baked conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. But the bigger part of it has to do with the host exhibiting a trait common to nearly every conservative on the spectrum these days, whether they’re a fundamentalist railing against the evils of gay marriage or a Cato fellow ranting about the evils of the estate tax. It’s a bug that’s turned into a feature over the years: the kneejerk impulse of conservatives to choose their policy preferences, their rhetoric, and their heroes based on what most pisses off liberals.

Smells Like Teen Spite

It’s a tendency familiar to anyone who remembers being a teenager. When Mom and Dad zig, Junior’s gotta zag. Most of us grow up and grow out of this annoying trait, and at least try to pick our tastes and actions on the merits. The conservative movement’s ‘innovation’ is to take this contrarian stubbornness out of adolescence and build a thriving industry around selling it to adults. But how are right-wing leaders able to trigger such instantaneous obstinacy? They do it by manipulating a long-standing inferiority complex among the faithful.

Since Nixon, right-wingers have harbored – or perhaps manufactured? – feelings of victimhood to achieve their ends. No matter if they’re in power or out, they see themselves as the perennially beleaguered, the permanently embattled, the eternally put-upon. If the title “The Wretched of the Earth” wasn’t already taken by a post-colonialist author, I’d wager Regnery Publishing would have offer something along those lines. But, of course, the disenfranchised-in-name-only don’t lie down and take their phony powerlessness without a fight. That’s when the auto-intransigence kicks in.

Is this just a case of differing viewpoints? If they agreed with everything, they’d be liberals, after all, right? But I’m not talking about simple disagreement. I’m talking about the above-and-beyond-ness of it all, the need to rub their difference of opinion in the opponent’s nose constantly even when it would seem to go against core principles or even self-interest. But enough flat assertions – let me give some examples of what I’m talking about.

Any Friend of the Earth is an Enemy of Mine

Environmentalism was always going to be an ill fit for the big-business wing of the party. But it’s amazing to watch just how enthusiastic the ordinary conservative has become about thumbing their nose at even the most banal of conservation measures. Drive on any red-state highway, and you’ll be treated to a parade of bumper sticker belligerence about ‘tree-huggers’ and boasts about how much carbon the driver is wasting. Go on any right-wing forum on Earth Day, and read some of the ridiculous bragging about how they’re going to leave all the lights on and spray their aerosol cans in their air for no reason. Even if you don’t fully buy into the claims of environmentalists, I can’t even begin to understand the mentality of a full-grown adult who would intentionally and happily throw trash on the ground just to ‘spite’ Al Gore. This is beyond traditional liberal and conservative values. It’s the difference between a jerk and a decent human being.

Torture Porn

One of the most shameful and depressing polls in recent years was the one showing white evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supporting torture against suspected terrorists. What  Would Jesus Do?  It involves ripping out people’s fingernails and pretending to drown them, apparently.  But even seeing surveys like that, I was still under the naive belief that torture supporters only took that position with somber reluctance, a last resort for national security adopted with the utmost gravity.

Nope! Liberals hate it, so not only do they have to support it, they have to support it in the only way they know how – obnoxiously as possible, at maximum volume. From Rush Limbaugh joking about Abu Gharib being little more than hazing to Giuliani cracking sleep-deprivation quips to ‘humorous’ waterboard shirts jumping off the shelves, the torture of fellow human beings is little more than punchline fodder for the average conservative these days.  Again, I can’t grasp the mentality of someone that both supports and jokes about torturing another person.

Hero With a Thousand Angry Faces

I could point out many more examples of this nihilistic exercise in picking one’s policy positions by what happens to be the most pointlessly antagonistic to the other side. Heck, you could write a whole psychology paper on the mentality involved in the right-wing cheering against the U.S. hosting the 2016 Olympics. But even more than this or that stance taken out of spite, I think we can judge the movement by its heroes and why exactly it puts them on a pedestal in the first place.

Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Michele Bachmann: is there any chance in hell that these empty-headed empty suits would be right-of-center superstars if their main shtick wasn’t tweaking liberals? They can barely string a sentence together without sounding either stupid or crazy. They have ethics issues out the wazoo. They’re ambitious incompetents whose sole value to the conservative cause is causing steam to shoot out of liberal ears. But lucky for them, that seems to be the sole criterion for right-wing pedestal placement.

A One Way Street

We have our own ways of being obnoxious, but liberals just don’t do this sort of thing. We didn’t elevate Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, or Ward Churchill to heroes just because conservatives hated them. And the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are viciously hated by the right doesn’t make them any more popular on the left. In fact, liberals are quick to abandon and denounce their polarizing elements. Ask Michael Moore how many calls he gets returned from Dem reps. And while we have our share of partisan apparel and car accessories, they’re not nearly as gleefully combative as those on the right. “Coexist”and “Visualize World Peace” don’t exactly get the blood boiling. Sure, we had stuff like “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot”, but that’s a far cry from a “Liberal Hunting License”. Mostly, liberal gear is light propaganda, not taunting through text. One side is trying to persuade, the other is trying to provoke.

That’s a major reason why, politically, we’re at where we’re at – which is basically, nowhere. When one side of the spectrum performs their political calculus based on being the exact opposite of the other, who would expect anything to get done? In their eyes, compromise is basically surrender, or to quote Grover Norquist, “bipartisanship is just another name for date rape.” Besides, if you think government is useless, what does it matter if it fails to function?