October 28, 2004
Flick
A motion picture made to be fun. Designed from the ground up for the fun of both the audience and the creators. A good flick can be a good movie but is not likely to be a good film. For some reason art is rarely fun. That seems wrong somehow and perhaps I'll dedicate a post to that later. Some of the best flicks are bad movies, awful films, and have terrible production value. Plan Nine From Outer Space is a classic flick along with The Evil Dead and its sequels. There are more mainstream examples of flicks though. Most comedies have a flick element although many are intended as movies. Team America: World Police is beyond the shadow of a doubt a flick. It may also be a movie but its clear its creators want most to annoy and mock others, a perennial source of fun for the minds behind Southpark.
Posted by DjDuk at 08:23 PM | Comments (614)
Film
A motion picture designed as art. A Film usually has a message, or reveals a truth about the human condition, or expresses a quintessential emotion, or any one of the bullshit things art is usually described as doing. People in Hollywood hate to admit they're basically making movies. They much prefer to believe that they are making films. As a rule anybody with a beach house isn't making films.
That said, very few motion pictures aren't intended as a film to at least somebody. Most of the crew (that is, people with real jobs) enjoy making movies and are proud to do it. Directors and actors tend to be more obsessed with the idea of art. Thus to a certain extent every motion picture can be a film. The caveat is that motion pictures have trouble being movies and films at the same time. There are a lot of good movies that are bad films. Die Hard made a bundle but its 'message' if any failed to have much impact. On the other side of the coin are movies like... Alright, I can't think of any specific examples, but these are the movies that pop in and out of art house theatres every few minutes. Much rarer and more exciting are those movies that really are good films. The Spiderman movies, Citizen Cane, Whale Rider.
Posted by DjDuk at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2004
Movie
A motion picture, usually with a narrative, designed to make a profit. This covers most motion pictures shown in movie theatres. Independence Day was a movie. Spiderman was a movie. The Blair Witch Project didn't start out as a movie but it became one after its creators realized it could possibly make money. A motion picture can be a movie to one group of people and not to another. Most documentaries are not movies to their creators but they are to the distributors. Generally, if you leave a motion picture feeling like you've seen a movie and nothing more it means you acknowledge somebody got cash out of you for no good return.
Posted by DjDuk at 11:27 PM | Comments (605)
October 13, 2004
Socialism
An economic system characterized by poverty, class envy and happy bureaucrats. Socialism is the 2nd best way (behind communism) to form a breadline. At its core socialism is the belief that anything worth doing ought to be done by the government or not at all.
Under an ideal socialism (like Star Trek, although its worth noting that the socialist Federation is still terrified of its big brother Borg communism) each person will work, be paid, and return all or most of their wage to the government through taxes. The government then provides everything they need to live in a welfare state. Aside from assuming that there is no reason for a greater than subsistence lifestyle one tiny step above that of the nomadic, reindeer herding Laplanders, socialism tends to fail because I (and many like me) am a lazy person. We, the lazy, under socialism discover over time that we can do less and less and maintain our quality of life. As we produce less and less the total amount of work getting done goes down and wealth is diminished for the entire body of people. This continues until a negligible amount of wealth is produced and everybody "earns" an equal part of less than the Laplander’s lunch money.
Socialism is especially popular with people who already do nothing for money. Poets, students, and the very rich enjoy the idea of more equally distributing everybody else's cash. Even in the collapse stage of socialism a poet can probably do better off the welfare state's dole than he can on his own.
Depending on the inherent saintliness of the participants socialism can work. Marriage is essentially a socialist institution. It’s a collective of two (non-Mormon) people who have agreed to share their property (prenuptial agreements notwithstanding) and their income equally. As this couple has children they add additional, usually nonproductive, members to their little socialist utopia. It’s typical for the younger members to be eager to leave their welfare state at home and become financially independent. It’s usually those who never leave home that like the idea of including the entire nation in their little economic collective. Even larger groups than two can have successfull socialist societies in microcosm. The problem is that the only people who ever master socialism for more than 6 people at a time usually sample the wrong Kool-Aid and visit the comet, never to return and teach more gastricly cautious economists the secrets of successful social organization. On the other hand they may resort to group disembowelment to avoid having to admit they're all (collectively) broke.
Socialism tends to run its natural course in 5 stages. Note that even a limited socialist structure will tend to reflect these stages.
1. Collectivism People in some other form of economy begin to notice that through collective action they can accomplish more than any individual. This makes sense. People will unite and work together under any system to accomplish mutual goals. One example is a medical co-op where people will group together and save money. They combine resources to buy discount supplies and the group can bring resources to assist one member who is ill while the rest are healthy. This begins to lead to socialism when people are united, against their will, to accomplish somebody else's goals. Once collective groups appear certain people realize that they can achieve a private goal by "guiding" the collective group.
2. Socialism An official social structure is put in place. This differs from a voluntary collective in that contribution to the group is mandatory. For example, our medical co-op allows people to come and go. If it becomes compulsory then people will always have the care that the co-op provides but are no longer allowed to seek individual care or to leave the co-op and go it alone or to join another. If whatever features attracted a person to a collective structure change people stuck in socialism are just stuck.
3. Utopia The truth is socialism works. At least for a while. The combined economic power of a group of people is greater than its individual members. For a while resources are plenty and everything goes well. There are no differences of opinion about how to allocate resources because the resources are plentiful. Everybody gets what they want. This is the state of being of some of the successful European Health Care systems so touted by their governments. This stage is why we haven't yet finished with experiments in socialism. While it’s an undoubted fact that every large scale (bigger than bread box, at least) socialist experience has failed its proponents can always point to the Utopia period and say, "See, it works."
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That’s enough for tonight. Wouldn't want to overload Bailey. Besides, I'm tired, I'll finish up the socialism post tomorrow.
Posted by DjDuk at 01:54 AM | Comments (2)
October 08, 2004
Cat Power
According to Jim Davis a cat knows exactly when its owner will awaken on its own. It will inevitably decide to wake them manually five minutes prior to that time. Some people are like that too.
Posted by DjDuk at 11:05 AM | Comments (13)
October 07, 2004
I Dream of Jeannie
Late sixties sitcom about the wacky hijinks that ensue when Astronaut Major Nelson stumbles across Jeannie (Barbara Eden, whose last acting role was shilling cookies on 30 second spots on daytime TV), a genie imprisoned in a lamp. Nelson and the (surprisingly white) Arabian spirit hit it off and eventually marry. In an effort to keep Jeannie's magical powers out of the hands of the air force Nelson engages, on a weekly basis, in a series of ever more farcical deceptions resulting, as with any lie to a large government agency, in all sorts of benign shenanigans.
The epiphany here is that I Dream of Jeannie seems to be the template for every "Romance" or "Comedy" anime in the last 40 years. While American entertainment has moved onward and upwards, (or downward, depending on your perspective. It’s changed at least) Japanese entertainment has been stuck cycling through ever more bizarre permutations of Barbara Eden.
Posted by DjDuk at 04:04 AM | Comments (12)
October 06, 2004
Democracy
Government run by popular vote. A true democracy allows each citizen a vote on any collective government action. That is, every time a government wants to spend a dollar every citizen has to meet, debate, and approve the expenditure. For the record the U.S. and pretty much all of the other modern democracies are actually republics of some form.
Unrestricted Democracy is a nice idea but it suffers from certain problems. The foremost being the well documented stupidity of people in large groups. True democracy isn't too distant from a government of Scottish Soccer Hooligans. Since the vast majority of voters in a democracy are there simply to decide and not to perform the work they feel quite comfortable voting for impossible things. There are several examples in history where a person in a democracy will promise something impossible, convince a slim majority to vote for it, take the money voted for it, and retire to south Eastern Europe to build an impregnable castle and live in luxury. When a representative of the democracy comes to check up on the thief he usually closes the door to his fortress and that's that. Occasionally the thief gets even cleverer and claims he's working on his impossible promise and needs more money. Democracies have a startlingly bad record of giving it to him.
Posted by DjDuk at 03:03 AM | Comments (0)
Lexicon
I've gotten tired of explaining what a lexicon is. Here it is in writing so maybe I don't have to do it again. A lexicon is a dictionary. That's it. It’s the same as a dictionary.
The next inevitable question is, "Then why don't you just call it a dictionary?" I never have a good answer to this question and frequently attempt to run away at this point. It’s usually embarrassing because I'm too slow to escape all but the most placid pursuers.
In the future I shall attempt to find some way to blame Bailey.
Posted by DjDuk at 02:47 AM | Comments (612)