Category: Uncategorized

Okay, so this isn’t really a “part 2” of why I feel like Jimmy Fallon Revolutionized Late Night Television, but it is a part 2 on Jimmy Fallon, because, well…Jimmy Fallon. I didn’t have room for this in my last post, but I really really wanted to include it, so here it goes.

Also, according to Today, the 17th was Jimmy Fallon’s one year anniversary since taking over The Tonight Show, and I didn’t find out until about an hour ago. I must be psychic or something. Anyways, you read the article and see if it lines up with what I said in my last post about Jimmy Fallon.

So, in honor of Jimmy’s one year anniversary, I present to you Why I Think Jimmy Fallon Revolutionized Late Night Television Part 2: The Top 5 Jimmy Fallon Videos You Need To Watch Right Now (In No Particular Order).

5.

Most people would disagree with my choice for this “category,” so to speak, but I find the Ew featuring Taylor Swift to be so on point that it’s a must see. The will.i.am song is funny, but doesn’t give you much info on the background or the show itself. Honestly, I can’t even describe Ew because it’s just so insane. Just watch it. Close second is the Ew featuring Michelle Obama (as herself, not a character) and Will Farrell

4.

So I really couldn’t decide which #Hashtags video to go with, because they’re all so hilarious, and so inviting of the viewership at home, so I ended up choosing one that, ah, really speaks to me as a college student, if you catch my drift. But seriously, watch all the #hashtags…preferably when you aren’t procrastinating studying for an exam.

3.

While all the lip sync battles are fantastic and you should go watch them right now if you haven’t already, this one takes the cake. Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, and Jimmy Fallon all compete for the “Superbowl of Lip Sync,” and it is absolutely hilarious. You decide who wins. (My pick? Jimmy, duh.)

2.

I had a really hard time choosing a video to put in the “guest”/variety category. Jimmy just does so many amazing things with his guests, from playing charades to doing skits about dancing on jumbotrons, but I gotta say, this one is as good as any. You put Tom Hanks and Full House and Slam Poetry all in one sentence, and you get magic.

1.

So, I chose this as my last Jimmy Fallon Video You Need To Watch Right Now mostly because of personal reasons. I don’t know why this video works so well, but it just does. Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake are just perfect together for some strange reason. If I had never seen anything about Jimmy Fallon and you told me that they were good friends and do skits all the time, I’d probably never believe you because they are two of the last people I’d ever expect to be friends. But they are, and I feel like this video is just one of the many that they’ve made that shows not only that friendship but also their talent for perfect comedic timing.

Bonus:

Since this isn’t technically a Jimmy Fallon video I didn’t include it on my list, but it’s still a fantastic watch, even if only for Fallon’s on point Jim Parsons impersonation (which, I would expect nothing less, since that’s how he became popular on SNL in the first place) and Justin Timberlake’s appearance as Jimmy Fallon himself. While I’m pretty opinionated when it comes to SNL (it’s a fantastic show but poor writing has made it almost unbearable to watch the past few years), I have to say this sketch was not only well written, but also had a fantastic execution which honestly proves how much better live entertainment can be.

And there you have it. Go take a (short) study break and watch some Jimmy Fallon. You deserve it.

 

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement…There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.” ~Jackson Pollock

The digital age complicates the very basis for determining not only what constitutes “Art”, but also threatens complete destabilization of the current mediums which exist.
I reference a classic Jackson Pollock painting, Autumn Rhythm, I need not assume you have visited the museum in which it is displayed, or even have access to a book that reprints it. I can digitally reproduce Pollock’s work before your eyes:

So, as digital technology transmutes physical artistic labor into easily consumable packets of information, what then is the task of an artist? What experiences to convey to a spectator? And where can we find a stable medium for this exchange?

Digital artist and new media theorist Lev Manovich argues the first step forward is to reformulate the conditions for how art and audience connect. Rather than a medium-by-medium theory, Manovich posits a totalizing theory of “interactive art” – the advent of the software interface allows an active exchange between viewer and artist mediated through software interfaces. For example, my ability to take a Pollock painting, throw it in a program, and mess with it.

From the perspective that art is a strategy for organizing data, the artist’s cultural prerogative, according to Manovich, has always been devising a novel algorithm for data implementation. So, montage filmmakers such as Eisenstein developed techniques which “coordinate data in different media tracks to achieve maximum affect on the user.”

Manovich’s theoretical position offers a universalizing paradigm for what constitutes an artist – a savvy architect of data structures. But this definition, in conflating data manipulation and creative expression, has some truly problematic implications. Essentially, this means any and all works of art are a set of instructions which program us to reach a pattern of feelings or thoughts. The data-reception model not only compresses the flow of creative possibilities through a single channel of data, but also re-entrenches the viewer’s passivity under the false guise of software-based interactivity .

I’d like to issue a different project for the digital artist. The project of smashing the code. Or, to use digital vernaculars, glitching the interface.

The glitch aesthetic is a postmodern digital technique implemented by DJs and VJs alike, who reformulate and manipulate broken code into a new sequence.

Digital information exchange is a syntagtic model which interpolates the viewer into a preordained mode of interpretation which precludes an ambivalent and reciprocal exchange of ideas. The glitch is a broken artifact in an otherwise smooth stream. A relic of imprecision. An accident.

As Digital Artist and Scholar Michael Betancourt notes, in breaking the smooth flow of information, the glitch exposes the materiality of digital code. Rather than perpetuating a sequence of references to information, the glitch ruptures into a recursive signifier which highlights not only its own unintended presence, but the facile construction of the very code it dismantles. The glitch inflects authenticity into the code by virtue of its indeterminate significance.

Beyond resisting the hegemonic communication model of digital capitalism, I contend glitch art is new media’s cultural link back to the origins of creative impulse. Art Historian John Onians presents a methodological twist on art history he terms neuroarchaelogy – linking neuropsychology to art history – in order to consider the origins of artistic representation in the cave paintings in Grotte de Chavet.

The inhabitants of Grotte de Chavet had developed sufficient mental capacity to recognize and recall images of the animals which they hunted. Archaelogical investigation suggests the first markings in these caves were those of a bear’s claws. The neanderthals in the cave, seeing the bear’s markings, registered the bear marks as icons of the bear’s presence, drawing it on cave walls themselves as a means of symbolic communication. At some point, however, one member mis-drew the markings, creating an accidental symbol lacking a referent – a glitch in his collective’s symbolic code.

This accident, reproduced unintentionally, developed a life of its own due to a phenomenon known as neural plasticity – repetitive actions become increasingly pleasurable until they form a new habit. First, other neanderthals tried to understand the accident-symbol’s meaning. Unable to see meaning, they reproduced it for no other purpose than study. Finally, they developed a new means of communication outside the bounds of normal behavior patterns. Hence, the original glitch incited the creative impulse – an entirely new method of communication based around expression rather than illustration.

Art, whether in pre-civilized cultures, early modern cities rejecting photographic representation, or our own age, can be seen as a means of rupturing the fixed-fast rhythms of society. It is an explosion into new means of expression. And in rewriting the dictates for symbolic communication with ambivalence, Art symbolizes new patterns of communication, behavior, and consequently of experiencing reality.

Here’s a glitch GIF I threw together from a silly picture I found on the internet.

Some awesome and inspiring and informative TED talks — for your viewing pleasure. The annual TEDxUofM conference is coming up in about a month, and their speaker lineup has just been released. In honor of this amazing event, check out these talks that illustrate some of the best examples of TED talks: awesome ideas worth spreading and worth listening to. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

When you’re sick, easy things become hard. Simple things develop the complexity of string theory, and feel oh so very trivial at the same time.

Such is the case with this sick student and his homework. Here’s an old pome that describes how I feel about it and also doesn’t at all:

 

Homework Song

After Mark Levine

 

Henri. Look. It’s morning.

You watch me scramble: clock from my ear, sand

from my pocket. I am a mirror, a two-way

lazy susan. I spin on my nose and walk

in circles. I am a lens, I am convex. I magnify, concentrate

light rays like old friends, I pull their hairs

through the head of a pin, one at a time. You left,

 

Henri, how could you, my nose full of tobacco

and lint. I live just south of you. My voice is all funny.

I am the Way and the Truth: I lick your shoes and you

don’t know I’m here.

I also sing and dance, very slowly. When I see

a stop sign, I tie my limbs together. It’s easy for Henri,

 

the rabbit taught him, out of the box. But me? I

ain’t Jack. I scratch my feet with a hammer, my soles

are too thick. I talk to plants about the weather.

I smell like television. They don’t trust me,

I seem to have it all together. I am ceramic

that hasn’t been fired yet. I’m this close to finding out.

We find out when we break. I run around telling folks

to have a seat. I bisect myself, whistle, cough

up tortilla chips at the crowd’s feet. Give ‘em just

what they want: salsa

all over the place. But now I know

I prefer chervil to cilantro, I am Jacque I say

 

bonjour, I am not a pen. I am dry. I can’t stand still. Itch

my head til it burns. I shed my fur in the summer. I am the 8-ball

on the lip of the corn hole. I am black and white. I am an easy win.

The light approaches and I become the earth. I spin

on my axis, elongate into an oval, careen.

 

Henri says I am a gutter.

I think I’m just the distal toe.

He crawls into the fridge, and I

Take the low rack of the oven.

Starting off on a shot of the waters that are troubled by a ships path, The Master is a film that is as enigmatic and atmospheric as its opening sequence. Freddy, barely peeks his head above the barrier of the ship, like a turtle peeking out into the world that we do not see, with tired and withered eyes that profess a sense of boredom. Or much more?

At first I refrained from writing about this film because I feared the inevitable; my words will do this film no justice. However, given that I try to make my blog posts as impulsive as possible, instead of an approach that is calculated, I said fuck it, and now here I am, typing away on a Saturday night trying to rack my mind for things to say. Honestly, this entire paragraph has been written because I am stalling for my mind as it attempts to get online. I refuse to stop typing. Silly.

Interestingly, this film, shot on 65mm, this masterpiece, has some influences from a film called Baraka, a non-narrative documentary that is also shot on 65. The opening sequence of Baraka has a scene where we see a monkey high in the mountains resting in a natural hot spring, slowly lulling off to sleep. This very scene mirrors Joaquin’s first appearance in The Master. In fact, Paul Thomas Anderson told Joaquin about Baraka and that specific scene. (2:05)

(Another interesting influence is John Huston’s wartime documentary “Let There Be Light” check it out.)

I find this interesting, because Joaquin’s character (Freddy) is arguably devolved – a monkey in a homo-sapiens world. Whereas on the other side, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, has a God complex of sorts, believing himself to be beyond human temptations and primal urges. But Paul Thomas Anderson, in his clever way of exploring polar opposites by entering into the in-between point between the duality that persists throughout the film, suggests that even Hoffman (or Lancaster Dodd) is no more a God than Freddy is civilized.

Given this kind of in-depth and intricate character study, it is no wonder that an author like Thomas Pynchon approved of a script written by Paul Thomas Anderson (the script for Inherent Vice). But back to the master.

The film is, “technically speaking”, a very boring film. The entire movie is just people talking and all the characters kind of just end up where they began. But the gorgeous cinematography and the excellent, nuanced, and poignant acting by Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams get the viewer sucked in. You always seem to come back for more. There is something here, there is something here.

By now, I have seen this film at least five times. I dare not go into depth regarding what I think the film is actually about. So I will end it here by providing a trailer to entice those who do not like to read. Also I will say, I must say, I feel like I ruined the film for those who have not seen it. I shouldn’t have written this. And if you are one of those people who refrain from divining into these sorts of films because you are afraid to be considered “pretentious” to you I say, this film is not pretentious, it is beautiful, and also, who fucking cares?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ1O1vb9AUU