Makes No Sense At All

"Yes, but it is art?" is entirely the wrong question, if for no other reason than that it doesn't matter. We're talking about an entirely subjective thing here, and while we may get wrapped up in the absurdity of the art market and the distracting valuation of something that simply is, for better or worse. The truth is that judging art is beside the point: either you appreciate the Harlem Shake, or you don't. Either you're moved, perhaps Stendhal style, by seeing the Mona Lisa up close, or you wonder what all the fuss is about. Step Up: Revolution has a 43% Metacritic rating, but that's if you're critiquing it as a film, which is inane. The dances and dancers are beautiful, Amanda Brody's script is not: the central conflict involves a dance crew attempting to be the first group to reach 10,000,000 hits on YouTube (as if some random singing cat won't do that overnight); also, while the prize is $100,000, the crew surely spends at least that much putting together their elaborate flash-mob sequences -- it's like Ocean's Eleven: Dance Edition. It's all effortlessly presented, too, such that the crew's resident street artist (who, like Teller, apparently never speaks . . . until he does) literally welds together a giant robot in the four minutes it takes to perform one of these pieces. It's ridiculous and hardly applicable to the real world, in which there'd be some sweat and tears along the way, and yet isn't the central theme of the film, of art, to break rules in the name of a greater ideal? Step Up: Revolution isn't trying to reflect the world as it is, it's not even idealizing what it could be. It's pure fantasy, and ought to be accepted as such.

The same can be said of Glee when it's at its best: don't try to justify the fact that all of these economically challenged students who live in the middle of nowhere Ohio (population 38,693) are somehow able to cobble together -- in one year -- a Glee club capable of competing on a National level, that its two leads are both accepted into the most prestigious (and fictional) arts academy out there and that despite not having jobs or incomes are able to live in (and beautifully decorate) a million-dollar loft in New York City, and those are just the most plausible of the various plot lines. Glee plays to hyper-stylized emotions rather than actual character, it attempts to be everything to everyone all at once, and would collapse -- as its gloomier, more realistic, and hands-down better rival Smash is doing -- if you believed in any of it. But when the characters spontaneously burst into song, the band just happens to be there to back them up, everybody always knows all the words to every song in the world, and choreography ain't no thang, none of the writing actually matters. You're watching a performance that is markedly standing out from the rest of that nonsense, and perhaps suddenly you realize that you're having an emotional reaction because you let your defenses down and stopped caring so much and trying to fit everything into a rigid order. Glee is chaotic, but does that make it bad? As series creator Ryan Murphy proved, and again on American Horror Story, rules are an inconvenient thing when it comes to creating something artistic, something new. Art that follows rules is, by definition, paint-by-numbers.

Which leads us, full circle, back to the new media art -- viral videos, like the Harlem Shake -- that should work, but do. They captivate because they are different, aided in part by their short form and low-cost production values, like the pencil sketches an artist does and distributes on a napkin before eventually completing their masterpiece. Blossoms like Gangnam Style are original, rebellious thoughts that need no justification. However, while the inevitable parodies that turn a single video into an Internet meme can be clever and artistic in of themselves, they are following the rules of the original, which is why they play to diminishing returns. Even when they churn out hits, Weird Al and Richard Cheese are known quantities: they have formulas. Glee and Step Up: Revolution, on the other hand, are utterly unpredictable in their musical or choreographed numbers -- each larger-than-life moment surprises, especially as the script that surrounds them grows duller and more predictable. We expect to find art in a museum -- perhaps that is why it does so little for people like me who encounter it there. But to find art in schlock, or buried beside a billion other videos-of-the-moment? It doesn't make any sense . . . but who says art needs to make sense?

An Ode to King of the Nerds

There's a mistaken belief out there that reality television is a cheap substitute for scripted programming: you don't have to write anything, the cast is generally replaceable after fifteen minutes or a season (whichever comes first), and product placement is even easier here than on, say, a game show because contestants pull double-duty as "celebrity" endorsers. This is perhaps true for follow-cam shows: you know, the ones in which a camera crew follows around a larger-than-life personality and then a bunch of lawyers and a sweatshop of tortured editors cobble together footage that demonstrates what life is "really" like . . . at least, for those of us who spend their lives with cameras following them around. But as with most stigmatized cultures, there's an entire hierarchy of such programming, and while the sleaziest may be the voyeuristic shows that are so obviously (or obliviously) fake that they need to put the word "Real" in their names, you've also got a wide variety of competition-based shows, some of which actually require skills and others which avoid pandering to demographic stereotypes by taking voting decisions out of America's hands. At the bottom of this food chain, you've got your gimmick-packed, celebrity judged "talent" shows that are about as jingoistic as it gets; higher up the ladder, you've got specialized and more refined programming that focuses on food, dancing, dragging. And then, at the top, there's King of the Nerds, which I don't think anybody's actually watching, but which is subversively entertaining. 

A few disclaimers, first. My favorite reality competition is another little-seen gem, Solitary, and I'm a long-time watcher of Survivor. These two shows are reality competitions, but they're also heavily scripted: writers have to come up with clever challenges, casting directors have to find charismatic characters, and hosts need enough information fed to them to actually carry on an intelligent conversation with the cast -- one that might change the outcome of the program itself. It's also worth noting that I think sticking similar people in a house is ultimately far more interesting than putting disparate professions together, especially when they have to later face off, ala Last Comic Standing or The Ultimate Fighter, two shows that are far more similar than they seem at first title. (Similar personalities works, too, though only if you're looking for a train-wreck, as in the ego-clashing glory of The Celebrity Apprentice, which could just as easily be called So Meatloaf, Dennis Rodman, and Gary Busey Walk Into A Bar and Search For Relevance And God In the Presence of Donald Trump.) I think So You Think You Can Dance is probably the most positive and polished of the performance-based shows, but I'm generally in awe of physically impressive feats. (Emphasis here is on impressive, so humiliation-based competitions, like Wipeout, are no good and in their episodic format are closer to game shows than reality television.)

So for those of you who have been watching, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy King of the Nerds, and not just because the references are entirely at my level. (Dance Central 3 makes a pivotal appearance, but there's no Rock Band, and I'm disappointed that Chess is the go-to board game and not Settlers of Catan or a more complex all-day euro-game like Twilight Struggle.) After all, the casting is impeccable, with people all over the emotional/social spectrum, to say nothing of varying degrees of mental capacity, from Alana Smith-Brown's leper-like claim to fame as "a comic-book fan" (who will later be eliminated in a comic-book challenge) to Hendrik's over-compensatory intellect as a geophysics engineer at MIT who, thinking he had something to prove, wound up voting himself into a one-on-one elimination round. You might complain that some cast members, like game designer Ivan Van Norman or NASA engineer Moogega Cooper, aren't nerdy enough -- but that's sort of the point. These people may have been picked on, or picked last, but they're all comfortable in their own skin -- at least, comfortable enough to be exploited on a show that "forces" them to live in a mansion called Nerdvania, a place filled with giant twenty-sided dice and Batman statues, to say nothing of the Radio Shack gadget room. They've got to be in on the joke, especially a hacker like Virgil Griffith, who doesn't mind being caricaturized as the scheming villain of the show . . . because he's straightforward and logical enough to know that his actions, no matter how malicious they may seem, are the right moves. Even the pink-haired game vlogger Danielle Mackey ultimately embraces the way she's being edited, shifting from a whiny brat to being, well . . . a whiny brat who owns it. Confessionals are often repetitive and cocky bits, spliced together after the fact to make a character seem less intelligent than they are; here, they take on a meta-level, for everyone's smart enough to self-edit and analyze exactly what's going on around them, and to offer up clever commentary on that.

As Virgil confides, however, nobody on the show is Spock. They're intelligent, but they're also young -- all of them in their mid-twenties -- and often filled with emotional quirks or insecurities, as with the creative and gangly Genevieve Pearson or the anxious professional gamer Celeste Anderson, who most likely got hooked on video games so that she wouldn't have to compete in real-world activities. And here's where the writing comes in: challenges need to push and prod to get these self-defining nerds to compete in identifiably nerdy activities while at the same time pushing them outside of their comfort zones. It has to teach the viewing audience about nerd culture, pandering to broad and accessible stereotypes, but at the same time be intelligent enough to actually have the contestants compete. For instance: solving a sudoku puzzle is too simplistic, but what if they first have to take on a physical challenge like assemble the pieces of a giant Rubik's Cube to get the initial orientation of numbers on the grid? Cosplay -- dressing up as a character -- or LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) are niche activities, and therefore easy to gawk at, especially since they're being taken so seriously. (Consider that Kevin Smith was brought on a guest judge for a Comic Book Debate, or that the musical-comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates helped to critique each team's "Nerd Anthem." These are serious credentials, though it's a shame that Jonathan Coulton wasn't available.)

If there's any real complaint with King of the Nerds, it's that it's not nearly challenging enough. Why hasn't a team had to build a robot and teach it to break dance? Why hasn't there been a mini puzzle hunt (of the MIT difficulty) in which the teams race to finish first? Then again, if the show were a true competition of nerd knowledge (remember Beat the Geeks?) or technical ability, it'd be a lot harder to laugh at. The joke is on the producers, though; whereas the similarly styled Who Wants To Be A Superhero? could only mock its (game) cast, the crew on King of the Nerds is smart enough to play this game for what it is -- entertaining television. Much as you may want to simply dismiss and laugh at each participant, they're actually forging friendships and feeling bad at having to send someone home each week, which is more than you can say of the soulless denizens of Big Brother or the occasionally offensive (and/or racist) specimens that show up on The Amazing Race, for laughs. It's hard to imagine that the writers aren't in on it, especially since they've gone through the trouble of dressing up the hosts (Robert Carradine and Curtis Armstrong, of Revenge of the Nerds) as the truly ridiculous ones, though some points have to be deducted for forcing the cast to eat Little Caesars week after week.

But hey, the acknowledged artificiality of King of the Nerds, much like the campy special effects of early yet beloved science fiction programming, is part of what makes it all so shamelessly addictive. Besides, the prize is a Throne of Games, and who can resist wordplay like that? Not this nerd.

metaDRAMA: What Are You Writing For?

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Adam Kirsch writes of the decline of the essay, describing even good writers such as John Jeremiah Sullivan (or, one would imagine, Michael Pollan) as performance pieces that mask the author rather than expose them alongside their subject. In so doing, he worries that the prose "claims the authenticity of non-fiction while indulging, with the reader's tacit permission, in the invention and shaping of fiction." Elsewhere in that issue, Adam Thirlwell discusses a different inspiration to the modern author: Baudelaire, who found a new format for his writing -- a "confessional mode" grounded in humiliation, in which the truly beautiful could only be grasped through "the banal and ubiquitous, through the everyday dresses and make-up and sex lives of one's era." According to Thirlwell, "the ultimate secret" and, accordingly, his strength, was that despite these "apparently flippant digressions and arabesques" he was "totally exposed." In both cases, we cannot perhaps change our feelings or the facts that are being recorded, but we can change our tone about them, and therein create our own style.

This is what I've been thinking about lately in regards to my own criticism: after all, I've strong opinions on pretty much every subject, even things about which I am terribly under- if not uninformed, and have often relied on this to force others into heatedly correcting me. (I've very much enjoyed playing the devil's advocate; in conversation, I thrill at seeing how others will react to unexpected or absurd lines of inquiry.) But there are now, thankfully, far more voices in the so-called blogosphere writing about the things I initially set out to cover, so there's less of a need for me to fill a void or to call attention to a subject. Moreover, I find myself less excited about certain topics and formats that are increasingly the mainstay of print journalism (or in the web-based orifices of said entities); I'd rather engage than record, and while I'm still passionate about the things I take in, it's perhaps necessary to find another medium, a new voice, in which to express them. In all honesty, the field currently undergoing the greatest renaissance appears to be that of video games, both in regards to the industry's output and the reviewer's response to it. I've read critiques written in the form of love letters, I've seen literally first-hand accounts in which people heatedly discuss their subject as they experience it (or mock it, MST3K style), and in general a more interactive form of wit, collapsing the boundaries between reader and reviewer, reaching a shared experience.

Not that this is all unique to a particular medium: the ways in which people interact with television and film have drastically changed, as superfans who all-but instantly create video parodies (or sweded homages) become supercritics on a frame-by-frame level, and hatewatching (and the corresponding reading of snarky recaps) practically becomes a gladiatorial bloodsport, giving truth to the lie (or vice-versa) that there is value in every artistic endeavor. Books can be blogged through on a chapter-by-chapter basis, or analyzed line by line, and these close-reads can be annotated directly to your digital texts: things that were once marginalia can now more than define the object itself, and this is probably where essays have most changed -- interaction moving from a more sparing wide-angle lens to a words-are-cheap ultra-zoom. With high-fidelity screenings of live performances--perhaps directly to your home--it's possible that we may consider theater differently, too, although that's most likely going to stem from the more interactive, experiential works (like Sleep No More). The artist will ever define the performative medium as the critic attempts to catch up: there's no tortoise-and-hare-like effect going on here.

All of which is a long way of saying not that I've given up but rather that I'd like to find some new way for me to talk about the arts-and-entertainment I love. I'd prefer to share an experience rather than render a judgement, or to focus on a specific moment that worked and maybe compare it or apply it to something in the world itself, as opposed to turning it back as a criticism on the larger work itself. Maybe to discuss something in a format other than an essay or your standard capsule review, perhaps with video, perhaps with audio, perhaps with art. Why should I settle or limit myself in the coverage of living, breathing art forms?

One bit of inspiration I'll certainly be taking on, however, comes from a Q&A with long-time critic Clive James (also published in The New Republic, which has been sending me free issues in the hopes that I'll subscribe). His answer to that oft-asked question of the critic's role is as follows: 

The thing a critic should do is point toward the things he or she admires, for the benefit of the next generation. I'd like to be able to go back and add things where I thought I was insufficiently attentive to the qualities of a work of art. I'd be less interested now in attacking. Only be hostile in defense of a value.

As with Thirlwell's discussion of Baudelaire, James also gets to the importance of the everyday. "There were plenty of people who were writing profoundly about the profound stuff," he says, so he focused on the telling nature of the things that weren't being talked about: "the stuff in between the shows, the link material, the sports commentators, the trivia." Did these moments do any less to shape our culture than the art that they candy-coated? Who is to say, ultimately, what observation will give us that lusted-after moment of deep and unifying clarity? To that end, I'll also be attempting to quote, gloss, and otherwise engage with things that I'm not covering -- articles that I've read, episodes that I've watched, games (of any variety) that I've played -- and see what might shake loose (about myself, about the world), similar to the work I've dabbled in at fail better.  But for now, I'll give James a last word of warning, for it cuts to the specificity that I'm seeking: "It hurts everyone's reputation to write too much."

THEATER: "Collision" is a Disaster in Slow, Slow Motion

Photo/Russ Rowland

Once upon a time, to borrow the banal storytelling mechanic used by playwright Lyle Kessler's pretentious philosophers, there was a critic who thought he'd seen more than his share of bad, overwritten plays. Then along came Collision, an awkward and occasionally distasteful tale of collegiate rebels bucking social conventions (often for the sake of bucking social conventions). Empty, broken characters like Doe (Anna Stromberg) and Bromley (Nick Lawson) are made to jump at the whims of Grange (James Kautz), a strong personality who provides them with purpose and the illusion of love. Even Grange's professor, Denton (Michael Cullen), goes from thinking him a sublime but grandiosely narcissistic personality to being a ravenous and cult-like follower; in the most implausible moment of the evening, Grange even convinces Renel (Craig 'muMs' Grant), a street-tough gun dealer with more than enough common sense, to accept a check for his wares.

To his credit, Mr. Kautz has a feral magnetism that's long made him a standout in the work he's done with the Amoralists (who produced this play), and he's well-matched with Ms. Stromberg, who radiates a far-from-typical vulnerability. (Her character also has the most developed back story; she's closed herself off ever since her beloved father overdosed. Yes. That's the most developed.) Lawson and Cullen are more intermittently reliable -- Lawson has a particularly intense outburst -- though that may simply be because their characters operate so much in Grange's shadow that it's hard to see them as anything more than yes-men. And to the play's credit -- or perhaps director David Fofi's -- Collision doesn't back down from showing some of the things it talks about, with Grange talking Doe out of his bed and into roommate Bromley's, or with the various acts of violence. But none of this feels serious (despite the play's change in description from "dark comedy" to "drama"): in fact, the more these characters talk, especially once they're leaping childishly about with guns in their hands, the less real it all seems.

The last, nearly intolerable twenty minutes of Collision is Fight Club without any of the satire, without any of the bite; at least Tyler Durden knows what he's doing. Grange knows only that he doesn't know why he's doing this shit, says only -- in lieu of actual motivation -- that "a miss is as good as a mile." In that, it's like watching a headless dog chase its own tail -- and the use of mixed and confused metaphors is intentional, as opposed to much of the verbal meandering and claptrap of Collision.

So yes, there once was a critic stuck writing about an unpalatable play, but then he finished the review, moved on with his life, and lived happily ever after.

THEATER: It Could Happen to Anyone in "Bethany"

Crystal (America Ferrara) would like you to buy a new car, preferably within the next week. Because that's when her Saturn dealership is shutting down. And she works on a straight commission. Which she needs in order to buy window guards for the foreclosed home that she's illegally living in. In order to prove to Toni (Myra Lucretia Taylor) that she's financially stable enough to regain custody of her daughter. The car, says Crystal, is like a second skin -- you can even sleep in it, as she knows from experience -- but the skin that playwright Laura Marks is pitching here in Bethany is a much tougher one. (Crystal is fragile, the character is not.) The thick skin you need to  actually wrest down the American dream. There's a reason the powerful climax of Bethany is not in its confrontation, but in the cleaning-up that follows, a torturous albeit pine-scented affair, set to a final bit of "advice" from a manipulative motivational speaker Charlie (Ken Marks): "We all have the power to manifest our own reality."

The problem with reality is that we're not the only ones manifesting it, a fact that Crystal realizes when, after breaking into an abandoned home, she encounters Gary (Tobias Segal), a slightly unhinged fellow squatter. Moreover, it's hard enough to control our immediate surroundings: Crystal can truck in some furniture from the Salvation Army, stock the fridge with some basics, but that doesn't change any of the other identical dozens of abandoned houses on the block (artfully illustrated by set designer Lauren Helpern), or shelter her boss, Shannon (Emily Ackerman), from losing her job, too:

CRYSTAL: Did you talk to headquarters? Because all they have to do is find someone else to buy out the franchise, this is crazy--
SHANNON: H.Q. doesn't give two shits about it. They're busy trying to sell the whole company.
CRYSTAL: What? Who could they sell it to?
SHANNON: I don't know. Japanese.

So much for the idea of "personal potential," yet another particularly bitter grain of salt from the mouth of Charlie; that salt grows even courser after his harried wife, Patricia (Kristin Griffith), provides more insight into his character, or lack thereof. (He's less interested in Crystal's knowledge of the car's "features" and more about the "benefits.") Even Gary's survivalist instincts essentially revolve around dropping off the grid entirely and running from the government; it's a more extreme version of declaring bankruptcy, of abandoning one's home. For all the talk about Crystal achieving her more-and-more impossible dream -- we learn that she was twice Saleswoman of the Year at her old Ford dealership and, better yet, see her skills in action as she hard sells Patricia in a move that would make David Mamet proud -- the truth is not that succeeding is impossible, but that recognizing that dream, or still wanting it after paying the very dear price necessary to earn it, is.

This price has been well paid by director Gaye Taylor Upchurch. By so starkly contrasting the pretty words of a motivational speaker with the uglier actions of a motivated individual, Bethany has about as much wiggle room as Crystal herself. Ferrera pays for this, too: she's stuck playing desperation, and her moments of hesitation, panic, or regret are all compacted into a binary form of acting. Forces act upon Ferrara and her character; they both spend the play reacting, within limited means, and there are few real surprises, given the stakes. This isn't a discredit to them, or to their style; they're true to the world that Marks has created, and this team evokes the desired emotions. But there's a difference between producing an effect and being effective; Bethany is too underwater to ever truly move from the former to the latter.

Bethany (World Premiere)
by Laura Marks
directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
produced by Women's Project Theater
January 11-February 17 (opened 1/20)