| Jeremy Scott, Fashion Week and Mean Magazine |
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When Wikipedia started, I guess I had some sort of misconceived notion that it would become a compendium for all human knowledge. And while it started to look that way for a while, there’s a problem in that dream that is just now coming into focus, after more than two million articles have been created and most of the “essentials” have been covered. Wikipedia is not the postmodern Library of Alexandria it has the potential to be, because (according to some) Wikipedia Is Not An Indiscriminate Collection of Information. In order to be included in Wikipedia, an article must have an attribute called notabilty. But who decides what is notable? There are currently 1,360 unpaid community administrators who are given the authority to control the fate of new Wikipedia entries, as the only ones with the power to delete entire pages. They determine if a page is worthy for inclusion based on Wikipedia’s notability policy: The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice”. This concept is distinct from “fame”, “importance”, or “popularity”. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. So essentially, on Wikipedia nothing is eligible for inclusion until it has received enough coverage from reputable outside sources. Sure, Paris Hilton is notable– she’s been analyzed from every angle on every level of culture– but what about a butcher shop in South Africa called Mzoli’s Meats?
That question seems simple enough, but has sparked a huge debate covered by news outlets from the LA Times to the English paper The Telegraph. Apparently, there are two factions of administrators, diametrically opposed on the issue of notability. From The LA Times: Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful– why not include it? What could these “Deletionists” see in the aforementioned conceptual limitations of traditional encyclopedias? What could be wrong with hosting all the information in the world on one easily accessible, searchable server? Isn’t that the vision of so many sci-fi fantasies– a world where our robot pals could answer any question in the bounds of human knowledge instantaneously, with implied access to a centralized database containing all information? Check out The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog devoted to rescuing information before it’s eradicated from Wikipedia. And for a first-hand look at the douchebag reasoning behind Deletionist attitudes, check out this Cracked.com article entitled “The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries“. Note that since that article’s publication, several of the articles it heckles have been purged from Wikipedia– literally tens of thousands of words expunged because someone thinks it’s funny that there might be a demand– however slight– for plot descriptions of “7th Heaven” episodes!
Information is never needless! As the chart in this video explains, knowledge is power! But beyond that obvious assertion, we must come to realize that trivia is important, and beautiful. To quote two kindergarten philosophies in one paragraph, there are no stupid questions. Everything is important as long as any person, regardless of their significance, has the desire to know about it. Minutia is glorious! Divorced of the self, we are all merely information stored in other people’s brains– neurons filed away in an unknown cranial cabinet until death or senility renders those life-long memories moot. We never truly die until we cease to exist as information. Gravestones are less for presenting corpse coordinates and more for saving the names inscribed upon them from the same grisly fate that has claimed their owners. Hence, information is the same as life. Deletionism is genocide. I am a believer in the viability of Borges’ life-sized map of the world. Why not? |
I had no idea where we were going at 8:00am on a Monday morning, but I was ready for anything. My boyfriend, Rudy, was taking me to an undisclosed location for an all-day birthday surprise. Technically, my 20th birthday was on Tuesday– so this was my final day as a teenager– the last dawn before my bones would begin turning to dust, as all things must. As we exited the freeway, I figured we were going to Catalina Island, as the only other obvious destination at the exit in question was the Long Beach Aquarium, and we had been there for our anniversary. The ferry ride over was Rudy’s first boat trip, another indelible benchmark in one’s life. Luckily, he enjoyed the sensation of seafaring travel. As we pulled away from the shore, we could see a dark cloud hovering over the entire horizon– the ashes of half a million acres blowing off into the Pacific. Living in Los Angeles, you get used to this smog… but this is something else entirely. For the past three days, there has been a sepia tone filter covering the sky, causing the normally flattering sunlight to become a harsh reddish-orange. Catalina, however, was a pleasant distraction from the havoc raging throughout Southern California. Neither Rudy nor I had ever been to the island, and I was excited to find it an even more peaceful, magical place than I had imagined. We spent the day exploring the town of Avalon, rather than exploring the untamed interior (about 20 square miles of wilderness, where wild Bison roam). In Avalon (population 3,100), the de rigeur mode of transportation is golf cart. There are many beautiful homes that reminded me of Bay Area architecture, and the “downtown” area is filled with every kind of touristy business you can imagine. Most of the tourists were on their way out as we arrived, returning home from their weekend reprieves. We wandered the beach alone and took a bus tour of the area with about a dozen other quiet visitors. We played a game of air hockey in an abandoned arcade, ate at a couple of fully satisfying restaurants and completed 18 holes of miniature golf. Check out my pictures after the jump! continue reading |
Ceci Bastida is fantastic. She’s been performing since the precocious age of 15, when she hit it big fronting the Mexican punk band Tijuana No (check out this hella ’90s-looking video for their fun hit, “Pobre de Ti”). Later she became keyboardist for the amazing Julieta Venegas, and now she’s started her own solo career with a three-song EP that has quickly become a KCRW favorite. Rudy and I went to see her last month at the Knitting Factory and she gave a flawless performance with the help of the band Volumen Cero backing her up. So we headed up to Pasadena on Sunday when we heard she was performing in the outdoor Pasadena Music Festival, and I shot some video of her performance. The clip below is a compilation of songs from the show. Click after the cut to see a video of Ceci performing the song “Ya Me Voy” in its entirety. Sorry about the camerawork! I was roughing it handheld, as usual. |
[subscribe to the podcast in iTunes] For the 12th Future Shipwreck Podcast, my friend and poker buddy Kyle Buchanan takes the helm as guest DJ. Kyle is a Los Angeles-based journalist who writes for Flaunt and The Advocate. He also created the late, great Ostrich Ink, a nonfiction webzine that ran for three years and featured original work from over 75 of the city’s best young writers. When he’s not writing, Kyle is a music buff with refined tastes (as you’ll soon discover), and also hosts a weekly poker night for a unique, diverse group of nifty gay dudes. His favorite movie is Joe Versus the Volcano.
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Yesterday I went to the mysterious compound in the City of Industry where they’ve filmed every McDonald’s commercial since 1978. It’s a full-sized fake McDonald’s with a deluxe basement storage unit that houses every kind of McDonald’s wardrobe and furniture you can imagine. I was there to work as an extra in a pair of McDonald’s commercials. Much like Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, I took on dual roles for these spots. I played both an indistinguishable McDonald’s uniform-wearing blur (as seen above), as well as a fuzzy customer languidly pretending to eat stale french fries across the room. In one of those many weird, unfortunate (but not for me) and unfair (for other people) twists of capitalism, I was paid exponentially more than minimum wage to pretend I was doing the ultimate minimum wage job. I walked back and forth, picked up burger-less Big Mac containers and put them down, operated unplugged McFlurry machines, and mimed as if I were checking the empty deep frier. They had a food artist on hand to ensure that the featured meals looked irresistibly delicious. For the first spot, his task was a relatively easy one. There was no eating involved, as the star of the ad (a well-dressed, middle-aged Asian-American) simply had to gaze at his food reverently, portraying the wonder and admiration that McDonald’s food inspires in a man, without actually taking a bite.
The star had to express unbridled excitement for hours, chomping down on those unholy concoctions– at least until the director yelled “Cut!”, at which point a man whose job it was to hold a bucket just out of frame would catch the masticated faux-burger in his receptacle and the food artist would deliver his next inedible work of art. Now, that actor really did deserve to be making far more than minimum wage for what he was doing. Me and Dane Cook– not so much. But when you get down to it, how can you dislike a corporation that provided so many great childhood memories? McDonald’s needs to exist in our world, as the video below clearly proves. I’m lovin’ it!
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There was a hysteria last summer surrounding the impending release of Snakes on a Plane, because bloggers and film buffs alike had been waiting so long for for a truly modern camp masterpiece. You know the type– those shallow, extravagant, but unforgettable B-movies that become cult classics mostly on the basis of their sheer absurdity: Blacula, Xanadu, anything derided on “Mystery Science Theater” or lauded in one of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. Pulp Fiction, in fact, is in part responsible for this specific genre of cult classics almost vanishing for the past ten years.  There have been B-movies since Pulp Fiction– oh, how there have been shitty films– but Tarantino brought about a sea change that changed the landscape of bad moies. By expressing his love for the absurdist conventions of so many bygone camp classics, he created a sense of hyper-awareness about those selfsame dazzling, creative elements in B-cinema.  Wes Craven’s Scream is equally culpable for bringing this double-edged sword of self-awareness to modern B-movies. Scream made filmic meta-criticism an extremely popular parlor trick, and inadvertantly spawned a whole franchise of films (starting with Scary Movie and continuing with no end in sight) devoted solely to the purpose of lampooning genre films.  This new era of heightened awareness has in effect forced genre films to walk a tight-rope between bland, straightforward believability, and tired, reference-dependent satire. The original movies that come out these days don’t dare risk getting their toes wet in the land of reckless creativity. They’re afraid of being called out on their capricious, irrational natures, as if cinematic indulgence were a bad thing. People just don’t like their fiction to be as fake these days, and they like even less for their reality to be real. But, I digress. What I’m trying to get to here is Richard Kelly’s new film, Southland Tales. This seemingly disastrous disaster film will be all that Snakes on a Plane promised to be (yet failed to deliver, succumbing to a constant barrage of winks and nudges to let us know that it was in on the joke), and more. Here’s the trailer: Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Sorry, I couldn’t not write that. Southland Tales is Kelly’s directorial follow-up to 2001’s cult classic Donnie Darko. Someone noticed how popular Darko was with the kids these days and decided to give Richard Kelly, a former frat boy and graduate of the University of Florida, 17 million dollars and complete artistic license for a follow-up. Five years later, the nearly three-hour long film premiered at Cannes, to nearly universally awful reviews. My favorite bit of angry wordsmithery on Southland Tales comes from TimeOut London’s Geoff Andrews: “Kelly’s interminable, incoherent and profoundly unrewarding apocalyptic sci-fi satire comes across as a messy mix of ideas (I use the word very loosely) filched from the Bible (Dwayne Johnson as JC, anyone?), ‘La Dolce Vita’, ‘Metropolis’… and might that be ‘The Fifth Element’ in there, too? Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed, and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster’s alternative to ‘The Da Vinci Code’. To quote a far less verbose source, a commenter on IMDb said that Southland Tales “felt like the longest, most expensive student film I’ve ever seen.” That’s kind of how I felt, just watching the trailer. The humor is cringeworthy (”You’re gonna have to wear a bullet-proof vest.”), the acting looks obnoxious, the dialogue is melodramatic (”It had to be this way.” “I know.”), and it’s packed with the kind of set pieces and guns-blazing blow ‘em up action numbers (mixed, of course, with pseudo-philosophical ruminations) that you’d expect from a college student’s screenplay.
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