Après le saut

After the jump: you've seen it all over, you sort of know what it means. What you may not know, which I now find myself disappointed to know, is that 'After the jump' is not a Battlestar Galactica reference.

It's a holdover from newspaper lingo. The 'jump' in a newspaper article is the point where the article is interrupted on one page and continued at that point on another page, with a notation of where to go to continue the article.

That is lame.

Further evidence of the greatness/nerdiness of our civilization

When I woke up a half an hour ago, I had no idea today would be the day that I would finally see a musical tribute to Louanne 'Kat' Katraine and Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace, set to the music of Cat Power.

The Greatest
Uploaded by xframe

It truly is a remarkable world in which someone named Hollywoodgrrl can take the entire lives of two fictional characters and a song I didn't really like all that much and simultaneously make it bloggable, convincing me of the genius of both Cat Power and Ronald D Moore. And what a great moment in time it is when there are songs like that and things on TV like Battlestar for us all to share.
I think Mr. Moore should send Hollywoodgrrl a bottle of whiskey, because she has done a lot to justify some of his recent decisions (if you've seen the video you know which two I'm talking about) in a way which I doubt he had time to edit into the most overshot, edited down show on TV.

The Galactica finds Earth

And then what happens?
Laura Roslin: It is an honor to meet you, president of Earth, lost 13th colony of Kobol.
President: . . . Likewise. Kobol?
Rolsin: Yes, Kobol, our home world. You know, Kobol. Anyway, we're the last remnants of the other twelve colonies. Our planets were all destroyed.
President: Twelve planets destroyed, eh? Was it meteors?
Roslin: No, they were nuked by Cylons.
President: . . .
Roslin: Cylons are the robots that we built that rebelled, fought us, disappeared for forty years and then came out of nowhere to destroy or planets.
President: . . . And then you all escaped.
Roslin: Yes. Also they came back once and tried to control a new colony we were trying to set up.
President: So they aren't trying to kill you anymore?
Roslin: Right. Now they mostly want to get a half Cylon baby we've got. Also some of them are in love with some of us.
President: . . . In love with you? Babies?
Roslin: Well, yeah. I guess I forgot to mention they look just like us.
President: Look just like you, you say. And they've always been able to find you?
Roslin: Yeah, no matter where they go.
President: What do you think they would give us for you?
Roslin: Oh I'd say you'd be able to broker a treaty with them if you turned us over-- wait a minute, you wouldn't!
President: Do you what frequency they transmit on?

American TV: a million times better than jazz

I always hear the old saw that jazz is America's only native art form. That doesn't sit well with me. I believe the Simpsons count animation as another one, and I'll back that. Edith Hamilton, the classicist, wrote a book, the title of which made my mom question my sexuality, The Greek Way. Hamilton was a great lover of the ancient Greeks, who she felt were high minded lovers of pure ideas and art. In a less famous companion-piece called The Roman Way, Hamilton basically performs a massive smear job on the Romans, who she sees as somewhat soulless, heartless engineery types who thought themselves into world conquest and then tried to buy themselves a high culture with their dirty dirty money. This argument strikes me as something that a modern American would come up with, with our painfully polarized, Jocks versus Nerds society. It was Hamilton's position that when we look at ancient cultures we should judge them mainly on their artistic and cultural production, and that all the rest is just filler. This is of course nonsense.
But it has a certain elegance to it, which is the thing that really gives ideas sticking power. It's a very college freshmanny, emo-y way of looking at the world, and I must confess to frequently turning to it in times of trapped-in-a-foreign-country frustration. There is no one realm in which I claim American cultural supremacy more sincerely and enthusiastically than in the domain of television. American television of late has been absolutely fantastic, to the point where I would much rather watch an episode of a good show than see a movie. I think there may be many reasons for this, but I think the two most important ones both stem from the internet. The first is the level of information available to television fans that enriches the experience, and the other, much more important one is competition from the internet for viewers.
My proof is irrefutable. In America, television has become better and better over the last several years while movies have arguably become worse and worse. In Korea, the movie industry has become one of Korea's greatest success stories (on the strength of a few excellent movies) while television is stuck in the American fifties, stylistically, recycling the same toothless soap opera melodrama endlessly with little concern for repetition and little improvement over time. Why, pray tell, would this be? The answer is simple and elegant. In The U.S., TV is primarily watched by young people, and American movies are primarily watched by the general population and, increasingly, foreigners abroad. Thus American TV faces direct competition from the internet, driving it to improve or die, while the movies face most of its competition from other forms of "going out" style entertainment such as restaurants. In Korea, the average young person has zero free time, watches a couple hours of TV with the family every weekend and isn't holding the remote control. Young people must go out to the movies just to get a few hours away from their houses, which are never empty, or else lock themselves in the computer room and play World of Warcraft until their eyes bleed. Thus Korean TV stagnates while movies are pushed by competition to improve.
So enough about that. What American TV shows are great and why? Here's a short list:

• The Wire: No show does a better job of showing how human flaws and ideals slap up against each other, how the chthonic and the technotronic intersect and influence each other. The show follows a revolving door team of Baltimore city police officers who go after a different big, intricate criminal endeavor each season. The first season paints a layered portrait of both the police running the case and an up-and-coming drug dealing empire and the inner workings of each groups. The second season takes a personal grudge between a police commander and a stevedore union boss and uses it as a jumping off point for a case including white slavery, drugs, a blue collar half black/half Polish dock culture and swarthy Greek international bad stuff traffickers. The highlight of the show is the way that police laziness and ass-covering just barely gets the job done while criminal ambition and the high stakes nature of the business makes them efficient.
• Battlestar Galactica: The epic battle between humans and the Cylon robots that they created goes to the next level when the Cylons almost annihilate the human race, leaving only 50,000 humans running through space on a ragtag convoy. This show has several similarities with The Wire, now that I think about it: lots of poorly thought out sex and bad decisions, almost too-flawed characters, the whole rag-tag angle, and so on. The third season just started and it leaves mankind living in an occupied refugee camp full of terrorism by humans against Cylons. This show will change your life. Whenever I call home my father spends the entire call talking about the Cylons.
• Deadwood: touches on similar themes with the aforementioned: like the Wire it is to a great extent about the innate limits placed on people by society, also deals with the development of networks and personal relationships in a similar way with Battlestar. The story revolves around the last and greatest gold rush in mid 1870s Dakota territory. The most infamous and colorful character is saloon-keeper and whoremonger Al Swearingen, and his foil is town sheriff Seth Bullock. The two develop a sort of adversarial equilibrium: they form a complex relationship, sometimes enemies, but increasingly on the same side. The most interesting arc in the show is the increasing level of civilization in the camp. In the first season, a good throat-cutting takes care of any problem, but by the end of the third season, violence seems less and less of an option, and politics gains more and more of a role. The other main theme that shares with both the above shows is the same one that the producers of the Simpsons claim on their DVDs all the time: people never change. Yet on Deadwood, they do. And they don't it's complicated. I mean, it should be, right?

Disappointed Ancestors

I just saw the first episode of the third season of Battlestar Galactica and it got me thinking about the way the world changes. The series starts with an apocalyptic attack by the Cylons (robots created by humans) that cuts the human race down to 50,000 people on the run in a ragtag fleet of spaceships. The second season opened up the world of the Cylons a little bit to show them to be an idealistic young race that destroyed the humans on orders from their god (they're both monotheistic and very evangelical) and have had a change of heart and now want to bring the light of god to the human race, which is polytheistic and extremely close to the godless urban/coastal America that I grew up in. Anyway, the humans camped out on a planet, built a little squatter's camp, and one year later were found and occupied by the Cylons.
So as the third season begins, the Cylons are obviously the in over their heads optimistic Americans and the downtrodden, now extremely radicalized humans are any number of peoples not American. Thus, a setup for brilliant drama, in which you have an American (and I presume international) audience rooting for an insurgent group built on the ruins of a dismantled military who use killings, bombs, and similar terror to convince the Cylons to leave them alone in their wretched new city and stop helping them into the future.
So, that got me thinking about all the historical figures who would look at the country of which they are either a hero or a founding father and shake their heads in shame. This could be for any number of reasons. Surely William Wallace would consider his own life to have been a failure, in that Scotland is now completely subsumed into the United Kingdom. The rugged individualists who built our big-ass country would no doubt cringe if taken to a strip mall (that goes for every country that's had a sweet Amerrrican fairy dust kiss). Certainly the people who wrote the constitution had another thing in mind when they made up all that stuff about "rights". The mighty Samurai of Japan would no doubt be disgusted at the leveling of Japanese culture, as would the Yangban of Korea.
The case of the Yangban is a particularly sad one, in my opinion. The Yangbans, literally "the two halves", were the noblemen of Korea, so named because they were lined up on the two sides of the King's court. They were typically Asian nobles, in that they praised refinement and learning as paramount. Unfortunately, refinement and culture have not survived into the modern world, and in fact, are probably antithetical to Democracy. If the history of Korea were a Rodney Dangerfield movie, then the snobs would have been essentially obliterated by the Japanese occupation and, when that period ended, the entire country essentially left to the slobs. This is shocking to me because I am American and we never really had much more than aristocratic aspirants, but I'm sure those in European countries with formerly rich high culture would report a similar phenomenon. The really sad thing is that the Yangban are remembered in Korean popular culture as a bunch of snobby assholes. For example, the Yangban disdained physical movement and exercise, preferring quiet contemplation. One common claim is that the Yangban were such uppity pricks that they wouldn't even run if their house was on fire.
Every time I hear this story I'm reminded of the book 1984, in which the capitalists are recalled as an extinct creature who lived off the sweat of others and always wore ridiculous top hats. That's the paintroller version of capitalism in a socialist dystopian future.