All Things Golden and Imaginary: Great Gatsby Trailer Review

So, Old Sport, I've given it some thought, and I think we've concerned ourselves with a touch too much weighty political nonsense over the last few days. Besides, I've just seen the most shocking thing. Well, perhaps it wasn't altogether shocking, but something that made me reconsider closing out my interests in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men, just to give you an honest opinion of a new trailer gracing the scene. Pull on your T. J. Eckleberg glasses, make sure to reserve all judgements, and fix your eyes on this, else you'll be miserably confused, and think me some kind of veteran bore.

Don't worry, I've no plans to babble on in Fitzgerald-ese for the rest of the post, but I couldn't resist myself, just for a paragraph. About a week ago, the trailer hit the netwaves, leaving literary nerds ecstatic (at its existence, if not uniformly at its content) and leaving the uninitiated muttering, "Gatsby? What Gatsby?" whenever they stumbled on a pack of wild squeeers/ranters trumpeting its existence across the blogs.

For a bit of background: The Great Gatsby had a monumental impact on my life, and in terms of self-contained single novels, is probably my favorite English-language work, period. I first read it during my Freshman year, while struggling with homesickness, loneliness, and a touch of depression. While most of you know it's far from uplifting, many of the sentiments Fitzgerald communicated, both in the novel itself and in certain of his companion autobiographical essays - disconnection, the sense of a life artificially constructed, a search for grounded identity, unattainable dreams, the pitfalls of materialism - resonated powerfully with me. Besides the personal connection, tGG is quite simply a master work of craftsmenship, blending themes of vapid extravagance with a formal style laden with glittering descriptions but shifting with plot, deconstructing (or, to some, reconstructing) the classic Alger myth, capturing a snapshot of the riotous, tragic, romantic 1920's in novel form. All of this to say that I was awaiting the traitor with bated breath and none-too-minor expectations.

Overall - I found the trailer remarkably effective at doing its job: transmitting to the viewer the breadcrumbs of a plot, an infusion of the overall feel, and an underlying current of the story's direction. Since I know the plot too thoroughly to sense whether the summary given by the trailer would be adequate for a neophyte (and because other aspects interest me more) I want to focus on two elements of feel and tone that peeved a number of critics in the world of chatter and clicks: the explosive lushness of the production design and the musical selections.

The former came as a shock to me, and, I would have thought, to anyone who came within a mile of F. Scott's original, over-the-top, saturated prose, describing the extravagance and brash luminosity of the parties in grand and often excessive detail. The tone of the trailer is flashy, cacophonous, and, to me, captures the tension of a society spinning faster and faster, desperately throwing themselves into hte music, and eventually towards the book's (spoiler) tragic ending. Yes, earlier films may not have been in technicolor, and they may not have involved zebras (that, I will concede, may have been a bit much) but the trailer communicated to me party scenes with all flash and no substance, no real connection or communication.

When it comes to the music, I've come across a wave of (to me, surprising) backlash against the two songs the trailer utilized - Jay Z's "No Church in the Wild" and a Jack White cover of "Love is Blindness," both modern selections, and one unrepentantly hip hop in its rhythm and tone. The latter drew the most internet ire: mostly along the lines of "Idiots, putting Hip Hop in a JAZZ AGE movie," and "you know the movie industry's going downhill when you see Jay Z in a Fitzgerald film". Whether these stem from concerns over anachronism (legitimate, but limiting when it comes to a modern adaptation) or from underlying racism (Hip Hop? That's dirty, gangster music (whisper: black), it has no place in a film adapted from One Of The Masters, one of the classics!) they come from a place that relies way more on, shall we say, textual originalism, then I do in assessment of adaptations. The entire point of dusting off old themes, old tales, and adapt them, even if you ostensibly set it in the original time period, is to make a statement that this story is still relevant, that it can move and inspire people in 2012 as powerfully as it did in 1930, and 1960, and 1990. In the specific case of Fitzgerald, I think what's most important is to imagine what Jay-Z and hip hop generally represent to the 1990's and 2000's, and parallel it to what Jazz represented to the 1920's: musical cultures grown from African American cultural experiences, loaded with rhythm and base, associated with alcohol, scandalous dancing, eventually appropriated by white culture to sap the feeling of transgression, without really internalizing the origins of the music. Given all this, given how Jazz (the intoxicating, dark, loud music) defined and inflected the the cultural milieu of Gatsby and Co, I think Jay-Z's familiar song recreates some of the distant emotional, aural and cultural aspects of Jazz, bridging the viewer into a distant-yet-familiar world of the self-absorbed 20's, when catastrophe was impending and the restlessness approached hysteria (an era painfully relevant to those of us who would have been the 30's generation back then: the ones growing up after the bubble burst).


All in all, I'm excited to see the final product. Luhrmann's built up capital with me through Moulin Rouge, though I'm unfamiliar with R&J, and since, in my eyes, he's free of major flubs, I trust him, for now.

What did you think of the trailer? What are your expectations of the film? Was it a golden consummation of your glittering hopes, or were your hopes for the trailer a distant green light, never quite matched by reality? At any rate, until tomorrow, we will stretch our arms out further, beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into June.

Wishing you all things golden, and green lights that don't frist constantly away from you as the universe expands,
Cody


Arabic World of the Day: المغرب Maghreb. The word for North Africa, taken from the word 'aghreeb, meaning both "West" and "Sunset," as addition to, in adjective form, describing the strange or unknown, much as the English world "oriental" does.

Quote of the Day: " And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." - The Great Gatsby


P.S. This will be the last blog posted on Facebook before the great hiatus of 2012, so if you want updates/communication, follow this blog and/or add me on Skype at slytherin.phoenix. 

Occupying the Classroom: Is There an Education Bubble?

I'm lucky, and I know it. When I graduate in two years times - Inshallah* - I'll be doing so free from the cloud of student loans that will be following my peers nationwide, thanks to a combination of scholarships and parental contributions that (barring financial catastrophe on either of their parts) is projected to leave me without debt in May 2014. Though under no illusions in terms of my upper middle-class privilege, I did make a concerted and occasionally painful decision to search for schools not based on aspirations but based on pragmatism. I don't mean to knock Tulane - I've had rewarding experiences there, and, more importantly to 19-year old me, met inspiring people - but the fact remains that it simply would not have been my first choice, had opportunity and life on the academic frontier been my sole concerns. That fact is relevant to highlight, not as a bragging right, but simply as a statement of fact, and an acknowledgement of the way that circumstance inflects my emotional, psychological, political and economic understandings of the student loan crisis.

The student loan crisis, exceeding total credit card debt with obligations upwards of 1 trillion in the US, exists in the public consciousness as a kind of poison - crippling graduates with debt as they flounder in an increasingly competitive marketplace.As the economy idles, student are caught between bad credit (which further diminishes their marketability), fewer middle-income jobs, and a dull, aching hopelessness born of being locked into payments that (on private loans) [were, before Obama's recent reforms] often subject to skyrocketing rates, with no potential for bankruptcy. Some economists have expressed concern that the sluggish job growth rates, in addition to the impact of student loans in deterring major financial investments, combine to make student loan burdens a primary concern for jumpstarting the economy. There's some debate over the aggregate scope of the problem - whether delinquency rates are actually abnormal, whether stories of $100K liabilities and debt until retirement are representative or sensationalized outliers - but from the standpoint of a sophomore in college, the psychological aspect of this conversation resonates pretty strongly with me, and that's the perspective I hope to adopt in the course of this post.



Certain voices, largely (far) on the left (notably the Green Party candidate Roseanne Barr) have called for some variety of student loan forgiveness, a proposition often framed in relative and oversimplified terms: we bailed out the wealthy bankers, why not bail out the poor, Ramen-sucking college student? The actual mechanics of potential Loan Forgiveness legislation (as outlined in HR 4071, a proposed but never really viable piece of legislation on the issue) require students to have paid 10% of their discretionary income (income above 150% of the poverty line, which would currently mean ~34,000/year) for 10 years, at which point, they are eligible to see the remainder of their loan commitments forgiven. For years where income fell below 34K, "contribution" would be zero, but would still be valid in counting towards the necessary ten years. For current borrowers, the amount would be unlimited, but for borrowers initiating their education after passage, it would be capped at $45K.

Practically speaking, it would fundamentally reorient the financial underpinnings of postsecondary education, by basing loan repayment on actual employment rather than assumed employment. If two people went to two different schools, one private with $45K of loans, one public with $24K of loans, and ended up with the same job and income level, let's say $58,000/year for ten years, they would end up paying the same total amount on their student loans. If the gamble behind private, top-tier schools pays off, however, and the $45 K  graduate ended up getting a $90,000/year job, he or she would have to pay down almost all of their debt before they would be eligible for forgiveness.

This bill never had a shot in hell of getting out of the House, much less through the Senate and the President. The likelihood of its policy proscriptions being put into practice is practically nil. Nonetheless, after a much-regretted hour sifting through a comment threads on an HR4071 article (and one day, I swear our generation's kids will replace the car wreck metaphor with logic-death-spiral comment threads: horrible, but can't look away), I became fascinated by the dynamics of the debate, specifically in its judgmental, responsibility-driven rhetoric, and its insistence on the individual mistakes rather than the systemic ones.

When the bank bailout was on the table, discussion centered around the "irresponsible homeowners" (even though they weren't the ones being bailed out) but it never quite zoomed in on the irresponsible bankers. This was, in my view, in my view, they handled systems so complex that the average American couldn't empathize with their experience, or because it was hard to pinpoint malfeasance or ignorant in one person, as we so love to do. The danger, we were told, wasn't to the financial futures of certain individuals, but to our way of life as a whole. If the banks collapsed, we all collapsed. It was a tough pill to swallow, but we did it. In this case, many of the same dynamics are at play, but because we see students as individual actors, and not as dominos within a dysfunctional and self-destructive system the idea of forgiving student loans seemed reflexively unpalatable to people. Even though that system was and is dysfunctional and self-destructive: with it's research-centered business models, constantly inflating tuition costs, shame culture around trade schools, and inaccurate information conveyed to teens re. the prospects for a generic graduate. Even though we know and can accept that student loans are, in aggregate, a problem: dragging down the momentum of the economy, destroying credit, dictating the mobility and discretionary spending of an ascending generation. We can bail out banks because they threaten our wellbeing, and because they're often too abstract to effectively hate. That idiot kid who majored in Sociology, on the other hand, him we can hate, him we can blame unremittingly. Just as empathy is facilitated by the focus on the individual, when we rely on caricature instead of connection, jealousy and judgement are similarly fueled by an single target.




Whatever the current bog our educational system finds itself in, it's self-evidently clear in my book that it's in need of serious, foundational reform, but reform that I think has phenomenal potential to be further empowering and democratic, rather than exclusionary. For generations, trade school  and technical employment was the purview of the lower and merchant classes, while self-enriching, liberal arts education stayed locked in ivory towards. Now, liberal arts are increasingly looked down on, as the refuge of indolent, navel-gazing rich kids with no real ambitions or productive capacity, whereas technical training is the new ideal. Though I'd be the last to disown the value of the liberal arts, I think that there's a lot of truth in that criticism: it's insane, in 2012, to PAY for a liberal arts education. Just sit back for a second, and think. Every classic canonical text, available online. Lectures from the world's best, self-teaching courses, the ability to converse with anyone, anywhere, new platforms cropping up to facilitate communication and collaboration. If liberal arts are to survive as a valued part of culture, maybe it's best hope to do that is by unhinging itself from the exclusive and often destructive university machines, and empowering students and potential teachers to engage in free schools, trade schools, interactive knowledge-sharing. Maybe, if enough people became involved in a decentralized, internet-wide knowledge economy, it could even have a chance of being formalized (methods of internet-based accreditation, records and "transcripts" of articles, comments, papers graded by peers, etc).

As more and more human labor becomes mechanized, it's unclear what economies of the late 21st century will look like, but my thinking is that liberal arts, while always valuable, may be come increasingly less valued in monetary terms. If we want respect for liberal arts to survive, I don't think clinging to an outdated system with eyes sqeezed shut is really a viable model. I think taking inspiration from the democratizing trajectory of education and imagining a new model of sharing, enriching, and connecting ourselves might be.

Wishing you sunny days and sleepy kittens,
Cody

Arabic Word of the Day: Inshallah. Literally translated as "if God wills it," but often used (as "God Willing" is in English vernacular) outside of any actual religious context. Widely, widely used in Arabic-speaking discourse, and theorized by some to indicate less of a fixation with individual control over one's life and one's future vis a vis the West. Not to be Orientalist, just an interesting perspective.


Quote of the Day: "There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit, some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis." - Rebecca Solnit, a Field Guide to Getting Lost


P.S. Is it valuable to tell kids "follow your dream/passion"? Particularly when so many talented/passionate people were able to succeed not because they were consciously able to focus on that as a career, but because keeping up a passion in parallel with an often labor-intensive paying job built discipline? Just a thought on generational shifts in parenting...

A New Blog and A New Paradigm

Every time I try to grapple with the oddness and awkwardness of writing something that is simultaneously only - in all probability - going to be seen by a dozen people, but yet something that will float around as a series of zeroes and ones as long as the internet is kicking, I just end up writing in circles and feeling stiflingly meta. So that's all the meditation on medium that I'm going to allow myself.

It was January 19, 2012, and the denizens of SoHo 2 Short were lounging around, segueing into the logistical realities of a new semester. Then, the shit hit the fan. To be more precise, a certain piece of news hit the collective consciousness of the internet, news that Megaupload and its sister site Megavideo had been shut down permanently by the US government. When I broke the news, you'd think I'd just announced the death of some venerated leader, the room was so quiet. Murmurs of disbelief. Jaws dropped open.

Silly (and possibly immoral) as it sounded, Megaupload & Co. was an institution for me and for many of my generation: hands down the most reliable, least spam-ridden, and most widely-stocked file-sharing consortium many of us non-torrenters had ever known. It had been there ever since the first time that - curious, frustrated, starved by a cliffhanger- we came to realize the cornucopia of stored media that the internet had the potential to be. To hear of it wiped off the face of the virtual map was unthinkable, until it happened.

From the viewpoint of an objective, adult observer of the media market - and not a teenager cursing the inanity of Netflix and dying to start the next season of West Wing - I understand the logic behind the frenzied lobbying and prosecution on behalf of the content-producing industry that, eventually, led to MU's downfall. I recognize that, through the eyes of baby-boomer board of directors, piracy is a direct threat to the bottom line, and simply must be quashed. Identify enemy. Aim. Shoot. Boom. Problem solved.

Except it's not. And anyone with even a passing familiarity with the highways and byways of the internet, the etiquette, the patterns, the culture, knows that - while the takedown of MU was certainly a blow to prospective file-sharers - it was hardly a fatal one. Furthermore, I'd suggest, they know intuitively that playing Whack-A-Mole with various sites is not a sustainable or ultimately an effective means of tamping down piracy. Piracy is, in my view, not a disease in and of itself. It is a symptom.

I only speak for myself and for my own anecdotal evidence here, but I'd posit that piracy is not so much a sign of opportunity and moral decline, of an outright refusal to pay for valued content - the position of the finger-wagging anti-piracy ads, likening it to outright theft - but rather a response to the changing power dynamics of the media business, a shift that - while internalized and deeply ingrained in my generation - is still seen as a threat rather than an opportunity by media execs: specifically of the major producers of audiovisual content (television, movies, etc). Back from the beginning of audiovisual media, the producers and the film business more broadly had ultimate control. They constructed the theaters, they set the times, they completely set the parameters by which media was available. Audiovisual media was something the companies deigned to offer, and to offer only on their terms. Then came the television, opening up a way to choose the location in which to view our media. Then the cam-corder, allowing us to create media ourselves. Then the VCR and DVD and TiVo,  allowing us to view media on our own schedule, at our leisure. All these developments reaped huge rewards for the various innovators and wave-riders in the film and media business, they created a pervasive television structure, they led to the creation of entire new profit-generation industries. But beyond simply being more accessible to the consumer, and thus more desirable and profitable, I think they fundamentally shifted the norms, and changed way we conceive of our relationship to media. Media shifted from something handed down to us into something we shaped to suit our lives, something we should, by rights, be able to control.

And then it came, the big kahuna of all democratizing media innovations: the internet. Now media doesn't just live in our TVs, it permeates a network in which we are immersed, a network in which a savvy enough surfer can find just about anything. The relationship hasn't been totally inverted, but I'll say it's a good 150 degree shift from the 1920's. Media can no longer be corralled and controlled, or at least not without a lot of headache and ill will. The consumers are in a position to dictate the terms of their relationships with content producers, and for an industry used to setting its own terms without complaint or objection, I'd imaging that's a terrifying prospect.

I think that the predominant reason piracy is so rampant - and why content producers seem locked in an economically unproductive, counter-intuitive, and brand-undermining war against the people who love their content - is that companies have, by and large, been either too scared or too stagnant to offer content in a way that respects the way people of my generation consume media, a way that emphasizes speed, unlimited accessibility, convenience, and self-direction, and, most importantly, STILL ALLOWS THE COMPANIES TO MAKE MONEY. Though I can only offer my own mentality and viewpoint, I fervently think that convenience and on-my-terms media - rather than FREE media - is the real draw of piracy. Because if the content producers don't offer that latest episode of Doctor Who, within 12 hours, nestled within an apparatus that generates returns, that potential consumer will likely find the episode somewhere else, somewhere where YOU, my dear media CEO, are seeing none of the profit from those lovely little dancing World of Warcraft ads.


Though I'm under no illusions that major media conglomerates care one iota what I have to say (or, more infuriatingly, what their potential consumer base is saying by "voting with their clicks") I'd like to propose a potential solution to many of the profit-draining effects of piracy, in the form of a hypothetical site, a sort of Netflix PLUS.

[[I have a dream, my friends! I, the erstwhile media consumer, have a dream that one day, the West Wing and Doctor Who will play together, in one expertly-designed site, with modest ad revenues...]]

1) This site, as I envision it, would ideally be a joint project of major industry players, would incorporate all major serials and shows from involved companies. Even if it starts out with only, say, 60% of media providers involved, ideally it would become necessary for stragglers to join to compete.

2) Impeccable design, and the fastest servers you can build. Also, we'd really appreciate taking the ax to Microsoft Silverlight.

3) Shows are uploaded within 12 hours of airing, and all previous seasons of shows are accessible.

4) The site runs on a system that replicates, to the greatest degree possible, the psychological/behavioral dynamics of the television model: of access rather than actual purchase and ownership. Offer plans with a certain amount of viewing credits (so that, on point-of-viewing, the user isn't paying actual money, but using a "credit"), and then offer unlimited plans. Offer plans with advertising, and offer plans with advertising excised. Not only does this show goodwill to consumers by offering them the choice, but it reinforces the actual value of advertising to the consumer.

5) Get BBC on board. I don't care who you have to bribe. Pay them whatever they ask. Buy out the British government if you have to.

6) Beat the service of the pirate sites. Believe me, if most piraters had a beautifully designed, efficiently run, non-skeezy alternative to putlocker and gorillavid and sockshare, I think they'd likely use it. Make it compatible with all browsers. Offer chat features so that fans can connect socially through watching similar shows (a la Spotify, the music industry equivalent to this plan) Besides which, as industry heads, the heads of the site would have the ability to offer special extras - sneak peaks, interviews, exclusive chats with creators, artists and actors - accessible only to members of the site. Lure in the obsessive fans, and you're golden.

It may be a less profitable alternative then, say, forcing everyone who watches a streamed copy of that new Doctor Who episode to pay full boat for it (the way the economic cost of piracy is often calculated on the part of the producers) but it would likely succeed in funneling some, and potentially a majority of the traffic that would, in all likelihood, go NOT towards purchase of legal content but simply towards finding alternative content, into appreciation of and profits towards your company.

I meant to ramble on a bit about the politics of student loans, but seeing as how my sentences are becoming increasingly incoherent, and how I already wrote a novella here, I'll save that for tomorrow. All the best to all of you out there reading this (particularly those here because of my jumping ship from Facebook as of Friday). 

Wishing you Butterbeer, bow ties, and beauty, 

Cody


Arabic Word of the Day مصباح Misbaah - Lamp, constructed as the operative noun (to make/bring) form of sebaah', meaning morning.

Quote of the Day

"When you do not speak, the thousand stars that la upon your tongue slide back down your throat only to be swallowed one by one, jagged, pointed, and weighing more than planets"- Tama Kieves