We're Breaking Up

As mentioned in a previous post, I made a submission to Hearsay, the law school art journal. Here are some other submissions I made:
They're not real people and it's based on stuff that never happened. That's the beauty of "art."

Bitter Divisions

Today was supposed to be the annual S.A.L.D.F. Furry Family Fun Day (formerly Furry Family Day), but it was cancelled due to poor weather, which is a real bummer because up until yesterday, the weather in VT had been unseasonably pleasant. It's a shame. Here's the flyer I made for the event:
It was based entirely on this band, and specifically, this poster:

The future is passing you by

I drove down to Boston last weekend for the Future of Animal Law Conference held at Harvard Law School. On the way down I listened to the new (and as of April 15th, still unreleased) I really enjoy, and find nothing offensive or backstabbing about, Against Me!’s shift into unapologetic pop-rock fit for Top-40 radio. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m smarter or less interested in distinguishing myself from others because of an elite, and unapproachable taste in music, but as I get older, I enjoy straight ahead guitar-based pop music more and more. Doesn’t everybody? Green Day, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, the Beatles. That’s all good shit. The recreational practice of listening to music shouldn’t be an exercise in self-inflicted punishment. I just want to listen to some good tunes that I can sing along to while I drive. I invite anyone to challenge me on that assertion.

Getting around the conference kind of sucked because I’m still on crutches, which effectively makes already socially thorny circumstances all the more ungraceful and awkward. The crutches simultaneously impair my ability to partake in the conventional set course of moving from classroom to classroom and banquet hall to cocktail lounge, while drawing attention to my clumsiness. Being able to walk would’ve undoubtedly improved the conference by 25%.

The worst part of the conference was probably the first night at the Sheraton Hotel. It was the cocktail hour meet n’ greet which sucked because it’s impossible to hold a cocktail while commuting on crutches, and it’s impossible to hold a conversation with a stranger without a cocktail. And you can’t really confidently stand alone when you’re suspending yourself with crutches. It just looks dumb. It was cool, however, to see Emily Lewis, the person whose job I took over when she graduated. The best part of being an adult is hanging out with friends you know from one state in another state. Particularly when you each came separately from other states. When I was in 6th grade, the only place I saw my 6th grade friends was in our 6th grade classroom. Now I see friends 3,000 miles away from where I know them from. It’s the coolest.

The first panel was the only one I really remember. But it started off really bad. The first speaker was Peter Stevenson. He was some British guy that talked about enacting international legislation that would limit animal abuse which was essentially like standing up and reading a Spiderman comic like it was fact. First of all, enacting international legislation on anything is nearly impossible, secondly, enacting animal abuse legislation in any arena is even more impossible. I was amazed that a guy so out of touch with reality even made it on to the plane that took him to Logan Airport. Furthermore, I didn’t know there were direct flights to Boston from Fantasyland. Zing!

Everyone else on the panel was really good. Dr. Norwood was some agricultural sociologist that had a cartoonish Okie accent that made everything he said hilarious. Dr. Brown, from Stanford, had some sort of science background and gave a predictably science-y talk. Carter Dillard and Bruce Myers were both attorneys (I think) and gave true to form smug lawyer lectures, which I of course found totally relatable.

The rest of the conference was sort of a blur. It’s easy for 30 different talks about animal abuse and the law to bleed together. And with 2-days worth of incessant lecturing, it’s easy to drift off and focus on something totally unrelated, like this woman:

Bob Barker was supposed to be the keynote speaker, but I guess there was some medical emergency. I started the rumor that he OD’d on Columbian Marching Powder. This guy filled in:He was no B.B., but he did land an extremely well placed, and well timed “the price is wrong, bitch!” that brought the house down.

At the end I walked away with the feeling that animals are screwed for atleast the next half-century and a nagging sense of regret for not having tried to go to a better law school.

At least I got a meal out of it. And a Hearsay submission:
Thank you, A.L.D.F.

Looking for God

Monica asked me to make a logo to go on Secular Law Student Association T-shirts. This is what I came up with.

REVIEW: The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions

I think I saw The Matrix in theaters when it first came out. I sort of thought so at the time, and am now convinced years later, that it was one of those rare products that is culturally popular, and justifiably should be culturally popular. Even if you thought the movie was lame, you have to admit the bullet time filming was revolutionary and no one had done anything like that before. And even if you thought the bullet time filming was lame, you’ve got to at least admit that since The Matrix came out in 1999, the use of bullet time filming, or similar post-modern filming techniques, has grown exponentially.

The Matrix is an action movie that can be enjoyed even by people that don’t really like action movies. It’s like what Mastadon is to metal. Along with the groundbreaking cinematography and kung fu action sequences, The Matrix had an exceedingly well developed backstory. Science Fiction movies are rarely as thoroughly realized as this. There’s a complex preamble that encompasses a calculated smattering of eastern religion, philosophy, and technology, that surpasses Star Wars, without coming off wooly.

In the future, human beings have been subversively enslaved by sentient robots that harvest people in pods as a bioelectric energy source. An alternative reality has been cultivated by these robots to control the minds of the humans in order to keep them in their submissive state of inertia. This alternative reality is a computer programmed cyber world (like the Sims) that all people are involuntarily locked into at birth. The name of this cyber world program is “The Matrix.”

Therefore, the essential dilemma presented in The Matrix is The Matrix. People aren’t actually living their lives and are plugged into this alterna-reality while their bodies are fed off of like livestock. The protagonist of the story, Neo, is the One who’s objective is to defeat the robots in their cyber world and restore humanity to true reality. Neo completes ½ this objective in The Matrix when he ascends to the level of supreme Oneness and defeats the primary bodily manifestation of The Matrix: Agent Smith.

If The Matrix was the only movie ever made about The Matrix, it would be presumed by viewers that Neo goes on to liberate the rest of humanity after defeating Smith in battle. However, after the success of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers decided to extend the series into The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution.

In The Matrix Reloaded we discover that there is still a long way to go before the objective goal of the first film (human liberation from The Matrix) can be accomplished. There’s still an army of machinery set on defeating the Neo-led human uprising against their robot overlords. This alone would have made for an ideal plotline for the trilogy: humanity’s overcoming of their technological oppressors. That’s essentially where The Matrix Reloaded begins, and where you think the trilogy’s going to end, but the story becomes muddled in the third film, The Matrix Revolutions, when we learn that Agent Smith has evolved into a rogue virus that threatens both humanity and the machines. Initially, I thought this would just be the C or maybe B subplot to the A plot (human liberation from The Matrix), but in the final act of the final film, the Agent Smith virus subplot becomes the main plot, that the story ultimately concludes when Neo, rather than striking the death knell to his mechanical tormentors, strikes a truce with them to focus on eliminating the Agent Smith virus threat.

This is extremely frustrating, because the principal predicament established in the first act of the first film is never resolved. The Neo/machine truce allows for the robots to presumably continue to enslave humanity in their façade cocoons indefinitely. Eight/ninths of the movie is focused on the struggle between humans and machines, but in the last hour, a new struggle materializes and quickly resolved, and the filmmakers play it off like that resolution was the one we’d all been waiting for.

Look, it’s science-FICTION. That means the plot of The Matrix could’ve been about anything. Anything. But the primary constraining condition is that it needs to be a story, i.e. a beginning, middle, end. You could’ve gone Pulp Fiction and shown the beginning, middle, and end out of lineal order. But you still MUST have the beginning, the middle, and the end somewhere in the movie to fulfill the story requirement. The Wachowski brothers failed this fundamental prerequisite by totally changing direction shortly after the middle part, leaving the viewer sorely unsatisfied. THUMBS DOWN.

Je Me Souviens

Here are Brian's pictures from our Spring Break vacation to Montreal where I lost my camera.

REVIEW: Life of Brian

I had already seen virtually this entire film, but never all-at-once. Life of Brian is a popular flick for cable channels like IFC to air, so I’d previously seen bits and pieces of this movie in a non-linear sequence across 10-years. But this was the first time I sat down and watched the entire movie from start to finish.

Frankly, the most impressive thing about Life of Brian is that it was made at all. Well, maybe not that it was made at all. I mean that it is amazing that Life of Brian was made and looks how Life of Brian looks. I’m saying it looks good. It looks expensive. It looks like any other feature length film released in 1979 looks. It’s a movie that clearly had a significant budget, which is remarkable considering the abhorrent content of the film.

So abhorrent that the movie was banned in countries all around the world, and protested by picketers at theaters in the countries where it wasn’t banned. Surely such a reaction was foreseen when the concept for the movie was first considered. The movie is set up as a 94-minute parody of the theological beliefs that billions of people hold dear. Surely the Monty Python crew knew that if the movie ever got made, people would be pissed. But even if they didn’t, how is it that the studio executives who bankrolled the film didn’t forecast an incensed reaction?

Generally, the established pattern of the relationship of budget to non-offensiveness of content in movies looks something like this: At the intersection of “Budget” and “Non-offensiveness of content” you’ll find really weird porn that you can only find in Germany and Japan. Then, as you move up the curve, you find regular conventional porn. Followed by strange art house movies, not unlike ones made by Crispin Glover that feature a cast made up entirely of adults with Down Syndrome. At the very end of the curve, where there’s a large budget and a high degree of non-offensive content, you’ll find movies like Avatar or Toy Story. Stuff like that. Where you can bring the kids.

Life of Bryan, while not wholly pornographic (although it does feature full frontal shots of Graham Chapman and Sue Jones-Davies), is wholly disrespectful of organized religion. Particularly Christianity, whose cohorts, tend to be the most vociferous (topped only by cohorts of Islam). Considering where it ranks on the chart for “Non-offensiveness of content,” the movie should have had a budget just above a soft-core adult film (specially when you consider the presumably uptight mores people had in 1983, the year that preceeded the election of Ronald Reagan). But just look at the movie. It had to have cost millions. Look at the costumes. Look at the extras. Look at the sets. All that stuff costs a lot of money. It’s a remarkable feat that this movie got made and made to look the way it does. Not only are the members of Monty Python candidates for comedic brilliance, but pecuniary brilliance as well.

I can’t tell if I sincerely liked this movie because it was good, or if I liked it because I dislike religion. Either way, the fact that this movie is still widely discussed makes it mandatory viewing.
THUMBS UP!

It's a catty cat world

S.A.L.D.F. had a couple extra hundred dollars in its budget this year. So we're spending it on an 8-hour Saturday morning lecture that we're hoping people will voluntarily attend. Probably not the best idea, but hey, it's not like I lobbied for some other animal law related event. Karen Reynolds was already chummy with the ladies that are putting it on, so it was easy to make happen. Life is for the living.

I made this flyer to promote it:
Hopefully it (the flyer, not the workshop) will go over better than my last one.