woodenrocketpress

fixed and fooled.

So a couple of people have tried to buy books, and the button is down. If we need a refresher on why I hate PayPal, this is the 5th time I’ve had to fix the button. But it’s fixed. Who knows when it’ll happen again, but I’m just waiting until book purchases reach a level where I can afford a better store system.

I’ve decided to gripe a bit about the oscars, mostly because its fashionable to do so, but also because I felt that this year the award show finally turned into what people said it has been all the years past. I was, needless to say, bummed.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that the Oscars used to be for our entertainment. It used to open with video segments, comedy routines, musical numbers, everything. It also used to get railed on for its ridiculous length and, in being so long, failing to do its main function: be a watchable TV event. However, last year’s Oscars had everything from a fast run-time, to punchy ways to present the awards (see Tina Fey and Steve Martin reading the Screenplays, former winners discussing the merits of current best actor nominees), and a hilarious opening sequence that was both entertaining and witty. And yet I couldn’t figure out why people, up to this year, were still giving Hugh Jackman a hard time about his hosting duties.

Thankfully, the 82nd Annual Academy Awards showed me why. I was foolish to believe that the show was for us. A few things stood out to me that made me understand the media circus a little better:

1. Several red-carpet interviews revealing that the Actors are there for one another.

Cameron Diaz said “Our community is so spread out… it’s the only time we really get to see one another,” and Meryl herself even replied that her fave part of the awards is “Seeing all her friends.”

2. The best actor/actress nominees opening the show by standing on stage and waving out to the applause of their colleagues.

Sure it looked awkward, but it put the people, the “stars” nominated for the acting awards at the forefront. As a symbolic gesture, this foregrounding makes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences function seem to lean towards the actors’ achievements, and not the films.

3. That great throwback to old-vaudeville comedy duos.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are both so very funny… however I think that their attempt to call back to a time when jokes were more obvious and duos a little cheesier could have done well with an acknowledgment of how bad their jokes were, and did something different than follow the formula of “Look, its [point to attractive star, everybody claps, say something about them.]” Alec Baldwin said “what a performance,” so many times it sounded like he was on the Family Feud (good answer! good answer!).

4. The replacement of old winners with old friends.

Last year’s presentation of the best actor and actress nominees was lead by 5 former winners in the category, appreciating the performance of the current nominees in a way that still made it about the film. This year’s inclusion of former co-workers made it more about the intangible qualities of “good friend,” and “amazing person,” something that we at home have no connection to because we only know the people through the films.

And it’s good that these people should be appreciated by friends, through friends. But is it something TV worthy? We are only connected to them through the media they produce, so why would the Academy alienate us by making it even more transparent that the show is just about them? This is more upsetting than the time Mike Myers presented the best sound editing award with the tongue-in-cheek “The outcome of this award will send shockwaves through the industry!” The joke being, that it wouldn’t, and the underlying truth that the industry is shaped by and for the people in front of the camera. Were the best original song categories not sang for the same reason?

Colbert quipped at the Grammys that the celebrity’s favourite passtimes are congratulating one another and giving each other awards. I laughed, mostly because I thought it wasn’t entirely true.

dp

you’re welcome for this.

Tags: essay, non-fiction, tv

On Reviewing III (and the way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me)

You meet neat people in the blogodome. Friend of the press Sarah Pinder over at Bits of String has recently uploaded a brief essay on reviewing which stemmed from reading this earlier dialogue on reviewing done over at Lemon Hound and has brought me to  a point where I felt I wanted to weigh in, as both someone without reviewing experience, and someone who has a lot of ideas about why and if reviews are important.

I remember sitting in my intro to film tutorial, surrounded by the stuffed shirts that leaned back in their chairs and gave sideways comments to the teacher about the nature of light and dark in Citizen Kane, or the lack of heart in Woody Allen’s later films.* We were discussing I am Cuba, a joint production by the Cuban and Russian governments to both showcase the expansive landscape and the extreme poverty / bangin’ social nightlife of Cuban citizens. One of the sideways-sitting, longhaired, Cassavetes-nuts started off a sentence with, “I mean, it’s a beautiful film…” And I felt shocked. Betrayed. Surrounded by a room of people my own age that were raised on Hollywood comedies, action films and severe oscarbation, I felt alone in not really enjoying this swooping look at the Cuban mountainsides. I thought we were in this together.

I admit that I am Cuba was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I was younger. I’d probably appreciate it differently now. I know that. But my brain, (which I’m told is still probably the same physical size) did not have the mechanisms to appreciate it. And this guy did. His experience with cinema was fundamentally** different from mine. And of course, he was wrong.

The classroom setting of my INI115 Intro to Film Tutorial is a petrie dish example of the problem of the review in all of its microcosmic splendor (you’ve probably had a similar class and can substitute your own experience): Fresh out of high school, a room of embattled post-teens fight to dig their foothold in the great wide real world. These are people that no longer have to answer to anyone, and are willing to challenge even the established educational system at the very first opportunity. Each one hears their own voice floundering in the din of other voices. Each is hell-bent on getting their point across not because it is right, or because necessarily it offers something important to the dialogue, but at its very heart, it relates personal experience. Reviewing for a publication is no different. Offering a review of something, anything, relates your personal experience toward the genre, album, author, etc. That’s it. That’s all it can do.

But I don’t think this is a dark and cynical take on the printed review. This is the length to which its capabilities stretch–to offer another brain to the discourse, that is all. And yet we take these reviews as bible, as passable fact, as empirical evidence of a book’s worth or shit-ness. I’m not saying that people won’t go out and still form their own opinion, but we often appreciate the review for more than what it is: one person’s varied experience towards something. This is lunacy, and incredibly dangerous, because we run the risk of keeping anyone from really contributing to the discourse. As Pinder says, too truthfully, it’s easy “to be concerned about your interpretations not being correct,” and why should anyone’s interpretations of a material be wrong? Because the other people know more? We should be appreciating not what was said about a work, but how many people have spoken.

In the Lemon Hound interview, Jennifer Scappettone verbosely describes the ideal function of reviewing as, “to engage in a more profound dialogue with another writer than can be had in pre- and post-reading moments, across distance and time.”*** The review is meant to build community, but far too often is it held to an standard of exclusivity, of right and wrong. This ongoing fight for everyone’s opinion to be heard is important, and not in the “everyone is a precious snowflake” way. It is important we are still sitting, wavering, on the fence that is protecting us from a new era of experience and criticism brought on by the internet and the hideous act of blogging.

I’m the first to argue that books will not survive on the internet. Like, at all. We will never be a post-print culture because our means of understanding the things put out in the real world are better understood in that real world. But the way that we become informed, that we start to know things, is so different from person to person. There is a vast wealth of experience available from the library to the movie store to YouTube that people can access at whim, and there isn’t a reviewer alive that can argue that the way in which they access these things or the chronology in which they access them shapes how they appreciate them.

When I first saw the montage sequence in Rocky, I laughed.

We take the review as bible because it stems from a tradition of criticism that is slow: printed words coming out to attack older printed words, printed word being the only vestige of logic against printed words. The printed review these days is part of a canon of literary knowledge that is understood to be inviolable. But now criticism happens on a whim, in the form of a half-assed YouTube comment or angry e-mail, and we have no tools in our canon for this. The montage sequence in Rocky is hilarious because it had been parodied a thousand times before I had seen the original. People tell me I shouldn’t laugh when I see it because of how groundbreaking it was, but my experience towards this film cannot be made worthless simply because I didn’t see it in 1977.

I don’t know what to do with this information. We have a way of reviewing things that is treated with such reverence, but in reality, reviews should be given constantly. The reasons the internet is shifting to so synaptic a connection system is because of the vast and unfiltered experience each person has to offer each other person, and how important it is to aid that relation.**** Scappettone says that blogging helps allow for a “more fluid conversation to take place.” And yet we still cling to the idea that our ideas and reviews may be wrong; we still cling to a chronological canon that absolutely needs to be unloaded.

I’ve started going through the complete discography of the Beatles. Growing up I never appreciated them 1) because they were a pop band and very wussy to my ears, and 2) because every single person on earth told me that they were the greatest band who ever lived. Not only did I want to rebel against their quiet music, but also against the authority that deemed them to be so great. That I had to fall into that appreciation without question, and that I would just listen to them like everyone else did, humming along to “I feel Fine” and “Hey Jude” without context. Growing up long after the Beatles ended, my context was weaker than those that were raised in the era, those that pass down the fact that they were the greatest band ever.

Well now I have context. I wasn’t part of the Beatlemania generation, but I am part of the Nintendo generation, and Beatles RockBand has legitimately given me a starting point, a purpose from my perspective to explore something from the past.***** So I’m going album by album, song by song. “Within You / Without You,” is the most interesting to me so far, because it’s the first of their songs (chronologically) to cross the four minute mark, and the drums are really fun on hard.

dp

Rocky 1 – Awesome video clips here

*Caveat: Not everyone I met in film was this pretentious. Some of them are still good friends.

**Boringly.

***She argues the real reason (self-promotion and getting the word out), but this still wouldn’t change her reaction to any piece she reads.

****Whether this is actually possible is the subject of another essay.

*****I genuinely believe this. Argue me if you will but this is my reasoning. I am enjoying the Beatles discography, but literally after having played “Boys” with my parents on Beatles RockBand and hearing them say “I don’t even think I know this song,” I discovered it to be one of my favourite tracks on Please Please Me

Tags: blog, essay, non-fiction, post-print, review

i know it’s a new year, but 2003 til I die. PayPal, Prorogue, and Bloodsport.

Alright, so 2010 is upon us. While the 2009 of the year best-ofs are still lingering like so much hot air (by the way, check out mine here), I am left to try to figure out why the Vancouver-based Japandroids got themselves on Pitchfork’s top 50 instead of the band Double Dagger, who basically used the same sound and lyrical themes, earlier in the year, and better. But these top whatever lists are always subjective. Aren’t they? But that’s the topic for the next essay.

So you may have noticed that the site was down over the ass-end of the holidays. This was down because recently I’ve set up the automatic renewal of this website’s hosting on my PayPal account. Now, unbeknownst to me and, I’m sure, the bulk of others that have read the dense legalese of the PayPal terms of service agreement, PayPal has the rights to freeze the bank account associated with any purchase that it declares “out of pattern” with previous purchases. Because my only PayPal purchases were returning money to people (two dollars for shipping refunds), when I needed to re-buy $4.99 worth of hosting the unfamiliar price tag sent up red flags in the PayPal security system.

This would be an acceptable method of security to me, if I could then talk to the staff and have them unfreeze my account. Let them know that everything is going to be okay.

However when I phoned PayPal, the staff assured me that there was nothing I could do. And that there’s a freeze on my account for security purposes and not to worry because–I’m not making this up–”it wouldn’t be for a lifetime.” So I had to borrow 5 dollars and get this thing back up and rolling. PayPal then asked me to participate in a customer satisfaction survey (irony of ironies). I sent them this:

To the Braintrust at PayPal,

Why I feel “that way about my likelihood to recommend
PayPal” (a zero on your scale.):

PayPal’s “Instant Transfer” service can be suspended at
the arbitrary behest of a Security system that neither its
staff nor its supervisors understand. This is, without a better
term, terrifyingly ridiculous.

My account was frozen because the amount I tried to purchase
was “out of pattern” for my previous purchases. I can appreciate
this as a form of security, but the fact that I couldn’t then tell your
staff that the purchase was intentional and okay in order to
unfreeze my account proves that A) they do not adequately
understand the security system, or B) that your security system
needs a serious overhaul. I’m shocked that your company has
made it as far as it has by putting the screws to loyal customers
for whatever reason your Hal9000-esque security system sees fit.

And what’s worse is that my automatic transfer remains frozen!
Without any way of knowing when it will be unfrozen, your staff
supervisor simply said “Well, it’s not for a lifetime.” As if this
condescending response was all she had to offer. Is it written
in the training manual to say to the customer “don’t worry, it’s
not for a lifetime?” How long is it for? I asked. A day? Two years?
No answer. Nothing. She then suggested that I use a credit card
(the reason I use PayPal is because I don’t have a credit card).
She acknowledged (and for this I applauded her) that this was
not a satisfactory suggestion, but THE ONLY ONE SHE HAD.
The question and answer booklet you provide your poor,
defenseless support staff with does not offer any of the answers
to the problems that you throw at your customers.

I’d like to apologize for how angry I got with your staff.
I think you and I both know that it’s not their fault that they don’t
know what you’re doing.

Looking forward to your response in the form of an
unsatisfyingly short e-mail,

Dave Proctor
dave@woodenrocketpress.com

If you think that’s too harsh, I want to hear. Leave it in the comments section. I make no apologies for anything I said and acknowledge that the staff, though confused, are basically left to fail.

Also,

When I was a kid, say 15 or 16, I had to take Civics class. It was basically an introduction to the workings of the Canadian gubernatorial and legal system. We discussed the ins and outs of government, majority and minorities alike. Jonathan (who’s last name escapes me, but he always felt that he was smarter than me) would always contest me on issues that exploded in class. He was more prepared to argue, more well-versed in the issues. He read the news.

We discussed a minority government, and I questioned how it could ever be a successful form of ruling. The majority party holds less than a majority of the votes, and, if the bodies in office were as petty as the brains in Civics class, I just envisioned that every other party would shoot down whatever the ruling party wanted, and that nothing would ever get done. If any bill was introduced by the ruling party, I believed (because I projected my own sneaky thoughts on them) that the other parties would surreptitiously vote everything down, and make it look like the ruling party couldn’t get anything done.

Jonathan turned around angrily in his seat after we had been fighting about this and said “Government doesn’t work like that!” And that was the end of it. After all, he read the news.

I am proud to discover now, over seven years later, that both Jonathan and I were correct. The pettiness, the simplicity, the childish behaviour that enables a party to disable its competition like children on the playground is very much alive and well, and is in fact part of politics. However, I didn’t think it would be the ruling party that would keep all others at arms length. I didn’t think that the ruling party would take the time to shut down the house when things weren’t going its way. In my very petty view of politics, I still believed that there would be a democratic process. Shocked am I now that our ruling party has taken the pettiness one step further and abolished the democratic process, yet again, because it isn’t going their way. Our government is prorogued, again. Prorogued, a word they didn’t teach us in Civics class because it was a tactic not really used since Charles I.

A few months later in Civics class, we had a mock-election experiment. My team greeted all the underclassmen that came in with cookies. We won.

In the meantime we are hard at work here at WRP planning out how AAOYOC is gonna look and where the next Blank State event will be help. Check out the submit section if you haven’t already and get me your stories ASAP.

I’m hard at work on editing Blank State volume 1. Plus tonight I’m watching Bloodsport. 2010 is going to be our year.

PS, start referring to the previous decade as “The Naughties” (joke stolen from this guy).

yours in writing,

dp

Tags: essay, non-fiction, WRP News