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Fiction
Troy: I think I got half of it... which got me through the half I didn't.
Abed: Ah, like the first season of The Wire.
Abed: Ah, like the first season of The Wire.
Okay, I'm not stupid, you just reference obscure things all the time.
—Valencia, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Newspapers
Primer is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review.
Web Original
Between Logopolis and Castrovalva, we have Chris Bidmead to thank for really exploring the potential of the TARDIS as an alien and unknowable setting... The consequence of being able to gain enough momentum to escape Event One is to delete 25% of the TARDIS—I love how Bidmead uses clever science to get the Doctor out of this situation and as a small side note his description of momentum here helped me to pass a GCSE exam question. Cheers, Bidmead!
If you can't handle the complexity, I'm sorry you are stupid, because you are missing out.
—Sean Howard
, on The Wire
, on The WireMonths before seeing the pilot, I read its entire (leaked) script...I had to watch the show twice just to believe (a) how good that script was and (b) how incredibly convinced of its goodness, in every sense of “good,” it was.
Hence, my first question starts, “I watched the pilot twice ... ” But I don't get to the question part because Sorkin looks as if he wants to say something. I invite him to do so, and he asks, “Because you liked it so much the first time, or because you didn't understand it the first time?”
So huge is the hubris in thinking anyone smart enough to write about this show for a national newspaper might not be yet smart enough to understand it...
Hence, my first question starts, “I watched the pilot twice ... ” But I don't get to the question part because Sorkin looks as if he wants to say something. I invite him to do so, and he asks, “Because you liked it so much the first time, or because you didn't understand it the first time?”
So huge is the hubris in thinking anyone smart enough to write about this show for a national newspaper might not be yet smart enough to understand it...
Who was Kojima really trying to impress with MGS1? And therefore, who was he really trying to punish in MGS2? Didn’t he understand the paradox he’d created for himself? Teenagers who want to fantasize about snapping a bad guy’s neck in the middle of a blizzard, or stuffy professors and Roger Ebert? There’s not much of an overlap in that Venn diagram... America is indeed stupid, but it’s the job of artists to work around that. The themes of MGS2 are powerful and highly relevant, but they’re wasted. They may as well be in Latin and spoken in reverse. Dumb it down for the masses and work on attracting a cult following to disseminate your messages — don’t engineer the world’s greatest prank in order to prove that you’re smarter than everyone, you crazy man!
In Gehn's bedroom, you can find a spherical machine with a lever on it. If you activate the lever, you will see a video of a woman saying some gibberish: 'Blurga? Scrugla pridla bugga.' Boring, right? Well, you have to understand that this woman is in fact Gehn's wife and that the D'ni words she is saying can be translated as something like: 'Is this thing on? My dear Gehn, I will love you for all eternity'. Considering the woman in the Imager looks thirty-ish and Gehn looks almost seventy, it really makes you wonder: How old is this video? How many times has Gehn watched it during his thirty years of confinement in a lonely world? It almost makes you feel some sympathy for the despot he's become. You can also find his journal on his desk, where most of his writing is steady, self-assured descriptions of his nefarious plans, except for a single entry about his wife. It is extremely pale and shaky, ending in a smudge that suspiciously looks like a single tear. This really blows my mind: it's got to be the most understated tidbit of background information in a video game. How many games require you to have knowledge of an imaginary language to understand all the nuances of its story? And Riven is literally full of little things like these, which almost no one will ever notice. I feel for the Miller brothers since it must be frustrating. Maybe it's a bit like being the curator at the Louvres, who sees a new bunch of slack-jawed yokels walk around his museum every day, 'oooing' and 'aaahing' at the pretty sights for a while, without ever noticing anything about the deliberate use of colors, contrasts, lines or the different artistic movements and their place in history.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: In a recent essay about the dumbing down of American movies, Phillip Lopate writes, “Take Jim Jarmusch: a very gifted, intelligent filmmaker, who studied poetry at Columbia, yet he makes movie after movie about low-lifes who get smashed every night, make pilgrimages to Memphis where they are visited by Elvis’s ghost, shoot off guns and in general comport themselves in a somnambulistic, inarticulate, unconscious manner.”
Jim Jarmusch: I don’t know, man. Once I was in a working-class restaurant in Rome with Roberto Benigni at lunchtime. They had long tables where you sit with other people. We sat down with these people in their blue work overalls, they were working in the street outside, and Roberto’s talking to them, and talking about Dante and Ariosto and twentieth-century Italian poets. Now, you go out to fucking Wyoming and go in a bar and mention the word poetry, and you’ll get a gun stuck up your ass. That’s the way America is. Whereas even guys who work in the street collecting garbage in Paris love nineteenth-century painting.
Jim Jarmusch: I don’t know, man. Once I was in a working-class restaurant in Rome with Roberto Benigni at lunchtime. They had long tables where you sit with other people. We sat down with these people in their blue work overalls, they were working in the street outside, and Roberto’s talking to them, and talking about Dante and Ariosto and twentieth-century Italian poets. Now, you go out to fucking Wyoming and go in a bar and mention the word poetry, and you’ll get a gun stuck up your ass. That’s the way America is. Whereas even guys who work in the street collecting garbage in Paris love nineteenth-century painting.
So from this we learn second thing about Talmud: Talmud like to use obscure references to things that do not happen anymore AND ASSUME YOU KNOW!
Real Life
Why should things be easy to understand?
Yes, to understand this joke you need to know relativity and image processing theory. No, I am unrepentant.
People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, to keep out the scum.
Fuck the casual viewer. Seriously, who wants a casual viewer? If you're a writer do you want a casual reader? I don't want those people. Don't want 'em. Throwing them back. They're like little fish on the hook. Throw 'em back. I want the guy who's come in who wants to be told a story. A story has a beginning, middle and an end.
—David Simon, the creator of The Wire
I can say with pride verging on smugness that I've got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.
Most people just don’t bring everything they’ve got to what they do. We don’t feel we have to strip things away and make the songs more simple for people to understand what we’re about… it’s a cornucopia, a myriad.
—John Flansburgh on Flood
We've got a great show for you today... But first, I've got a bone to pick with you all, my fellow public radio listeners. NPR News recently did a survey of their listeners' favorite beach reading. Y'know, lighter fare for summertime, mindless stuff. Among the finalists submitted by NPR listeners: The Brothers Karamazov and that perennial guilty pleasure, War and Peace. Now look, you're my peeps, and nobody else is listening: c'mon guys! Haven't we had enough sand kicked in our faces? I thought we agreed to keep this quiet! Remember, anybody asks, you love Danielle Steele, and please cover up your copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason with the Us Weekly we gave you. Okay?
—Peter Sagal, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me
I accidentally bumped into a guy who was wearing a hat, had a ponytail, and had piercings in his eyebrows, nostrils, and lip. He tells me, 'Hey! You got a lot of nerve!' And I go, 'Hey! You got a... lot of... cranial accessories!' (crowd laughs) This is a smart crowd; I like smart crowds. When I get the dumb crowds I gotta go, 'Hey! You got a lot of shit on your head!'
An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark — that is critical genius.
When you were controlling the feeds, did you notice the parabolic? Hey, it's important. Parabolas are important. Here, look at this. In all the equations that describe motion and heat... in all the Feynman diagrams, what's the one variable that you can turn into negative and still get rational answers from?
— Abe Terger, Primer. (If this made sense to you, your name has the letters "MSc" or "PhD" after it somewhere.) note
I think that’s a really remarkable thing about today’s TV audience. You cannot write payoff-based TV anymore because the audience is essentially a render farm. They have an unlimited calculation capacity. There’s no writers’ room that can think more than 20 million people who can think about it for an hour a day.... You can’t do it anymore. You can’t try to fool the audience.
—Dan Harmon (of Rick and Morty fame)
I think the whole key to television's future is respect for the audience. Television keeps looking for a magic formula. I think that formula has been there from the first day—which is respect your audience and don't short change them.
—Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek
It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims; you must also serve the nation's needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience.
—Newton Minow, ex-chairman of the FCC
