Justin Runge

glade |glād|
noun
an open space in a forest.
ORIGIN late Middle English : of unknown origin; perhaps related to glad 1 or gleam , with reference to the comparative brightness of a clearing (obsolete senses of glade include [a gleam of light] and [a bright space between clouds] ).

In 2008, I cursed Alabama to a Sugar Bowl loss against Utah by purchasing and then consuming a jinxed jar of queso dip; since then, I’ve sworn off all game-specific snackage (food and drink purchased solely to enhance a viewing). Now, on the eve a potential redemptive victory by the Crimson Tide, I’m feeling the destructive urge to indulge in the same gooey, zesty guillotine that thrust down upon the necks of the ‘08 squad. Am I hungry enough to ditch this superstition—and if I do chow this cheesy treat and they lose, will I ever rebound from the psychological demolition?

This year, I’ve decided to forgo ranking and ordering and instead give you five of everything that stuck out, won the day, hung around, and wouldn’t leave me alone. This list admits to limitations in time, inappropriate obsession, and nuclear-level subjectivity. Lastly, movies.

Drive (Refn)

A movie that has parked itself inside of me, out of sight and idling. Its taciturn nature bottles a condensed and corrupted cinematic heroism, which explodes like a shaken New Coke all over your polyester. Ryan Gosling manages to play a simpleton, a psychopath, and a demigod simultaneously. Outrageous in every way.

The Trip (Winterbottom)

A film can be good at documenting boredom and be boring, excel at being mean-spirited and end up unlikeable, sulk and then slouch. The Trip yawns, insults, and whimpers, but is in no way sullen or piteous. This is comedy of private invitation, the way only your best friend can make you truly belly laugh. It serves up all the quirks of cabin fever, lets us in on its inside jokes, and juxtaposes depression and self-loathing with unrestrained, stalwart glee.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog)

What a gift this movie is. Herzog can welcome all the spurious talking heads and tangential codas he wants into this world, but the Chauvet Caves stand in the center, solemn, sensuous, unfathomably wise and wild, and Herzog never undermines or undervalues them. His quixotic voiceovers are effectively manipulative, and his close-ups of Chauvet’s surfaces, loving and scintillant, like he’s photographing Garbo.

Beginners (Mills)

Mike Mills resists and submits to some pretty twee impulses, allowing those backed with sincerity to stay, weeding the winks, crafting his own fictionalized true story into a lovely, gentle thing. Fortunately, the film’s anecdotal, come-and-go structure and its meta stretches feel adult and honest, unlike (500) Days of Summer’s precocious Millenial-core conceits. Not leaden in any way, Beginners is made buoyant by its fond melancholy, and careful, caring performances.

Hugo (Scorsese)

Turns out the best way to say “I wish you could have been there” is by handing out 3D glasses. Photographing cinema’s golden age in selfsame hues, Martin Scorsese makes a mind-boggling stereograph of Paris, and piggyback’s the audience’s discovery of film’s dreamlike early days onto Hugo’s adventure. A grandfather’s warm and maybe overlong nostalgia deserves indulgence, and in this case, a seat in a real live theatre. DVD will not recreate this one quite as immaculately.

This year, I’ve decided to forgo ranking and ordering and instead give you five of everything that stuck out, won the day, hung around, and wouldn’t leave me alone. This list admits to limitations in time, inappropriate obsession, and nuclear-level subjectivity. Next up, albums.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar)

Flirts with sentimentality, co-opts the past, and applies the obtuse to disorient. The beauty of the music then becomes the anchor and the waves at once. A singular expression, collectively uttered, folded in to the consciousness.

Real Estate, Days (Domino)

As successful as any recent album in evoking nostalgia, but not for childhood or our parents’ pasts; Days dredges up night drives from five years ago, the cliffs of my honeymoon, the memory of last weekend.

Feist, Metals (Polydor)

To abuse the comparison, St. Vincent was lauded for her angularity and daring, and Leslie Feist got patted on the head. Metals is experimental because it is a shifted state of mind, not a costume change. This is warehouse-sized, warm music.

Tycho, Dive (Ghostly)

Not like the music they play at massage parlor, but more like the massage itself, with deep tissue drums and the firm fingers of actual instruments. Evocative but not saccharine, infinitely listenable but never nauseating.

Washed Out, Within and Without (Subpop)

Ernest Greene accidentally made a manifesto with “Feel It All Around,” a song like a Holodeck. Instead of claiming a happy accident, he’s extended the aesthetic, installing turns and quirks, never improving the serendipity of “Feel It” but luxuriating in its cloud.

This year, I’ve decided to forgo ranking and ordering and instead give you five of everything that stuck out, won the day, hung around, and wouldn’t leave me alone. This list admits to limitations in time, inappropriate obsession, and nuclear-level subjectivity. First up, video games.

Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick)

Put the “endless running” quasi-genre in a hadron collider with obsessive achievement collection, doll clothes, military-style ranking, and vehicles plundered lovingly from science fiction that explode on contact, and you’ve got twenty hours of bathroom breaks and counting.

Portal 2 (Valve)

This game was easy to procrastinate from playing, inducing a dread equivalent to Mensa entry exam anticipation. Once thrown into the world, even the most twisted gray matter uncoiled at the Serkis-like virtual performances and gobsmacks of über-creative “you’re kidding me” moments.

Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady)

Open-world gaming suffers from a preponderance of busywork, as if the verisimilitude snaps at the lack of a shoe-tying minigame. Arkham City solved this by making the treasure hunt pay for satisfying sidequests, smorgasbording the player with villains (and in doing some evoking every age of Batman besides the self-serious Nolanverse), and offering up an arcade mode centered around the game’s muscular fighting mechanic.

Anomaly Warzone Earth (Chillingo)

There’s something about a rails-based puzzle RTS on a tablet that makes one think a WarGames sequel, this day and age, wouldn’t be totally nonsensical. Coming out the other side of these beautiful dust-palette high-tension death corridors was one of 2011’s most consistent gaming satisfactions.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (Shadow Planet Productions)

The squirmy silhouettes of Limbo met Metroidvania exploration and Pixeljunk twinstickery in Shadow Planet, an addictive blast of inky atmosphere. Complaints of a short campaign missed the point, or at least the scenery—each square foot of organic slither and every biotech tentacle made the journey to the next grotesque gargantua a veritable divine comedy.

This article from Richard Russo has been making the rounds today, and it was just the juice I needed to maintain my holiday mission: I have tried my very best to only shop locally this season, and if my resolve holds, it’ll be a total success. Not one slashed-to-the-bone electronic apparatus rocketed to my house expedited and overpackaged.

The past year has a taught us that money and only money talks in (and to) this country. If you find that sentiment cynical, I’m sorry, but your own stance on that shouldn’t bar you from taking your wallet to the streets. I mean that literally. I promise you, one hour spent browsing at a small shop beats fifteen minutes in a big box or two online.

Lawrence, Kansas, my home, is lucky to have a diverse, family-full, kind of strange, light-bedecked downtown, and being in it has the potential to degunk anyone’s perception of riotous shopping donnybrooks. Wherever you live doubtlessly has blocks of small businesses just hoping you’ll come in. Some may even have people who open the doors for you, instead of whooshing futuristic automatic ones.

The rules are simple, painless, even benificent. Spend at the places that contribute, not at conglomerates that devour. If you spend a little more than you expected one place, spend a little less somewhere else—or on yourself. Give less junk. Imbue your gifts with meaning and thought. Shop at stores that don’t have carts (especially the online versions), so you have to actually carry the things you want to buy. Bring cash. Allow yourself to run out of money, not credit—those enormous beasts don’t need more of yours.

I have no clue what I’m getting my father for Christmas—my wife is crocheting him a scarf, so she’s set. Instead of rushing to a website, my plan is to wander downtown one night this week, and do something remarkable: look. We’re in a season that asks belief of people, and I have faith that something will present itself.

Last night, my girlfriend Kate and I watched Joni Mitchell’s American Masters episode available on Netflix. Watch it if you wish to be overwhelmed by one person’s capacity for art in its many forms. 

Joni, even when chronicled so fastidiously as this documentary does, still makes for a mythic figure, and none of Joni’s albums more rarified her than Blue. That segment of the documentary wisely relents to a live performance of “Case of You” that is cathartically harrowing to watch, just as the album is to a listener.  It’s the reason fans and non-fans refer to her as Joni in every context—the music makes her a wounded ward of its audience, a friend at sea, a deity.

Kate and I discussed how even the first chords of the songs on Blue, which are Joni’s invention or at least her province, can cause physical effects for the listener. There’s something about the alchemy of Blue that is supernatural, sourceless and unable to be replicated. It’s the untangibles of Blue that make it seminal, and it is an album that will never fall out of the popular consciousness.

With landmarks like this, belonging to some other generation, I always try to find a work that sits in a comparable contemporary throne, so I woke up in the next morning with the title of an album in mind and asked Kate what she thought it was. She guessed correctly—For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver.

I’m struck by similarities to both the musical and biographical elements of each. Both albums were generated during a period of removal for both artists, and both historically found solace in the vacant North. Both albums are, foremost, sparse; they are dangerously bare even, which exemplifies the artists’ approaches to the material. Both albums are cold, and their tracks are warm cabins you move on to. Both artists took their respective opportunities to assert a sound buttressed by history but built without precedent, and absolutely nothing about them is derivative, only inhabited.

Mostly, each album freezes the listener and crystallizes their moment of their first interaction. This is done through sincerity, which is often not in vogue, or weakly observed, in popular music. Joni’s reaction to an obsessed core of listeners and critics ready to dissect and provide indifference was to enter and exit the following decades in forms that were consistent with her identity but never the preferred vintage—just as Blue sounds years ahead of itself, every product of Joni’s after Blue, especially Mingus and Hejira, do too. A promise to never change is often made between friends, making evolution for Joni an act of deception. 

Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has yet to fully confront these challenges, as he has yet to release a true follow-up to For Emma, but the Blood Bank EP was a indication that Vernon will gradate his sound towards an entirely new hue, much as Joni did. Like her, he has already found support from fans, peers, and stars that wish him to be peers—his presence on Kanye West’s latest album echoes the embrace Joni experienced from the jazz world, which saw in her a fellowship of complexity. Vernon’s most distinctive mark is a craggy soul vocalism that speaks to the genuine agony sanded from nearly all modern R&B, and for that reason, he will cross borders as Joni did, advancing and alienating in step.

No big preamble here. Let’s just get to the discs.

(Actually, they weren’t really discs this year—Rdio single-handedly changed my method of musical consumption, exposing me to hundreds of artists on which I wouldn’t have wasted torrent bandwidth before. So I guess there’s a preamble in here somewhere, but I’m antsy to do this thing.)

Snowden, Slow Soft Syrup EP

Ever seen Poltergeist? Remember when the closet door flings open in a flood of fluorescence and the mother, tied to a rope, enters the white nothing to bring back her child? That’s what seeing Snowden live is like, and the sensation is similar with a set of headphones:  icy, weightless, awful (in the original sense of inducing awe). This EP is—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—a pay-what-you-want affair on their website. Pay handsomely.

Sleigh Bells, Treats

Once, I was asked in a coffee shop by a man in tweed to turn this album down, even though I was listening with earbuds. I obliged, but was flattered, pleased that the bleed was distinctive, a disruption. Yes, I supposed:  this is the music I listen to when I want the world to know what I’m drowning it out with.

Various Artists, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Soundtrack

On the official soundtrack, celebrated artists animate the bands of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s books however they see fit: Beck’s Sex Bob-omb is Meatloaf’s Eddie from Rocky Horror, and the cast members dizzily tear through his songs like motorcyclists with head wounds (Sex Bob-omb is my new favorite fictitious band, which is a designation that’s been in need of a home since the Spinal Tap universe fell in on itself by being impossibly serious); Broken Social Scene gives us five-second Frankensteins, grunty and bolt-necked; Metric, the sexiest of the bunch, make the Bride electrified, mechanically sultry, and the resulting “Black Sheep” my be my favorite song of the year. T. Rex and Beachwood Sparks covering Sade rep for the non-fiction.

Junip, Fields

The deluxe version did me in. At 22 tracks, including the Rope & Summit EP, I easily did with this what I would’ve done with half that—turn it on and blur. The addition of band support to José Gonzalez’s equation does a remarkable thing for his song craft by making what was already well-built a streamlined, luxury mode of transportation. Junip marries Gonzalez’s Nick Drake folk lilt with proggy hypnosis, and the occasional sentimentalism that would make one’s eye’s roll in his past catalogue, here, make one’s eyes roll back all the way, into a Krautrock trance. Pleasurable, pleasant, yes, please.

Wild Nothing, Gemini

“Nostalgia” is quickly dethroning “chicks” as the number one reason to start a band, but it takes more than slap bracelets and a Betamax demo tape—it take verisimilitude. Wild Nothing’s debut LP isn’t just corny Forrest Gump superimposition, it’s more like New Romantic steampunk, convincing and revisionist at once. The production has a flashback ripple and glow, the drums are gated like a cemetery, and Jack Tatum, mercifully, does not ape British with the vocals like other more transparent goth pop costume parties.

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

Being World’s Hugest Indie Band puts Arcade Fire in the witness stand of Cool People vs. Uncool Inc., and they are cross-examined constantly. This album is them neither crumbling into a soft sob—and when that’s Funeral, oh, what a beautifully soft sob—nor telling you that you can’t handle the truth, which was Neon Bible. This is Arcade Fire being adults about it. To do so, they splinter into many angles, or, dare I say, actors; this is not just a concept album, but a rock opera, acts and pathos and reprises and all. When “Hugest” means this huge, I’m there.

The greatest contribution movie awards season can give us is retrospective, and not just the clap-at-obituaries kind; nominations and broadcasts are often an opportunity to remember what was truly good. In a year such as 2010 that was truly horrible for film, this residual gift really is necessary in order to salvage the last twelve months of cinema.

Top 10 lists are also an opportunity for expedient reflection, and if you mash together the kajillions of them, I think you get as close as you can towards a popular critical sentiment of the year. Metacritic does a nice job of culling the results and giving us ballparks of ballparks; no matter what your perspective is on the ranking and scoring, fractionizing and decimalizing of film, these lists are helpful and, most important to remember, disposable.

Another subsequent value of these lists is a ruthless filtering of all the sludge of the multiplexes—3D everything, IMAX yadda yadda, superhero kaboom—so that we can attempt to find the signal in the noise wash.

Here are a few frequencies I picked up. I claim this list as nothing close to comprehensive, objective, or rhythmic. The best a cinematic community can do is determine which films will persevere, resonate, continue to generate conversation, and age well or be overwhelmingly of their times; below, I’ve identified six that I think will do that as the gaudy corpus of film in 2010 is left behind.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

The consensus this year accurately identifies falsehood as a predominate theme of 2010’s filmography. Duplicity, illusion, facade, and subterfuge all informed a bulk of the year’s movies in turn, but Banksy’s directorial debut serves up all of that in a manner so much fresher than its contemporaries. The documentary format is particularly prone to corruption—it’s an easy target because documentaries claim veracity more than other genres, a claim easily criticized, refuted, and made fun. At least some of Thierry Guetta’s story has to be true—the verisimilitude of his obsession and oddity is too extensive, and the first third truly does document the street art movement in invigorating fashion—but when it branches off into something fantastical, pathetic, and incoherent (a point which is debatable), truth becomes secondary and the film exists as a big gonzo question posed better than any aesthetics professor could phrase it. Like a nesting doll begun in the center, all members involved continue to find that they are not out of the container of its thought, but that it has just grown. A film as befuddling, frustrating, and fun as any in recent memory.

Shutter Island

Histrionic in performance, preposterous in conceit, dazzling in imagery—the same descriptions I would apply to Stanley Kubrick’s one foray into pure generic horror, The Shining, I would without hesitation attribute to Shutter Island, a referent-heavy B movie baton passing that both Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have been itching to execute. Marty takes much from Kubrick’s playbook, including some needle drop soundtrack work identical to The Shining, and Leo cracks up (or reveals pre-existing cracks) like Jack did when he was trapped somewhere due to inclement weather, too. The bombast is remarkablly genuine, and the gimmick of “gotta watch it again” remarkably compelling, unlike other twist-for-twist’s-sake movies of late.

Winter’s Bone

Unlike other films that offer noir’s components with interpretive plastic surgery, this is noir at its most broken-down and ugly, skeletal in construction and completely unvarnished in performance. Winter’s Bone nails its namesake by having a total mastery of temperature, chiefly the bitter cold of the Ozarks, but also the animalistic steam of violence, threadbare family warmth, and a literal and figural clammy grasp of death. It is difficult to make myth of modern America, and dangerous to do so of the poverty-stricken, but Winter’s Bone manages to do so through force of will and absence of opining that is truly a marvel. Debra Granick could carve out a Hollywood consulting career stripping the pretension and pity off of other movies, but I think this directing thing is going to work out for her. (I can only dream of two female directing Oscars in two years.)

Inception

This may backfire on me, but I claim to be able to talk anyone out of disliking this movie. Inception doesn’t allow for shallow interpretation or shallow criticism, and its convolutions are purposeful, informed, and perhaps best of all, thrilling. While I’m not interested in cataloging every criticism aimed at Inception, I can say this—by no means can a movie be detrimentally “talky” and have so much action, and be this clock-like in construction and have missing gear teeth. Nolan applies with reverence the language of myriad action film sub-genres, from metaphysical sci-fi kung-fu to mod Sinatra heist to 80s brainless shoot-’em-ups, and in doing so, tacitly explains the nature of film as our shared dream lexicon—have you ever thought what your dreams would be like if film and television did not exist?

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

This year was unstoppably Scott Pilgrim for me, from the conclusion of the graphic novel series that occupied my funemployed summer, to the faithful and frustrating beat ‘em up video game, to a soundtrack that played like musical fan fiction. And the movie didn’t disappoint. Distilled to the books’ most necessary components, as diluvial with candy and color as a sick roller coaster rider, and deserving of every synonym for fun of which one can conceive, Scott Pilgrim was destined to be a failure—too short, too OCD, too childish for today’s audiences, who demand bloated and brooding superhero movies (I’m looking The Dark Knight squarely in its coal-mascara’ed eyes). Like the superlative arcade experiences of Gen Y’s plugged-in past, this movie will continue to gobble my figurative quarters for years to come.

Greenberg

The only thing sadder and more despicable that the titular character of this Noah Baumbach outing is that these films come too sparsely for Ben Stiller to defend his increasingly indefensible filmography. Luckily, it’s enjoyably uncomfortable to watch the former unfold, even if the latter could make one grind his or her teeth to Tic Tacs. Films featuring an unlikeable character unleashed are only effective when the humanity that character tramples glints a little, and Greta Gerwig does; she plays like The Apartment’s Shirley MacClane, but without even an elevator to tell her where to go, miserable as an ASPCA commercial but without dispute the film’s heart. Rhys Ifans’s Ivan serves a dual role of backstory extractor and punching bag, and both are performed without mawkish manipulation. Stiller’s Greenberg, through the bad choices and impulses, embodies a frightening eventuality of Generation X’s ”fuck it” attitude, playing a guy who’s furious the rest of the limping world won’t give up, too. A film to be read and not felt or fallen into, Greenberg pays off the viewer who can sensitively detach from its reality—a skill at which Greenberg is so terrifically inept.

By now, the above video of a CGI Yogi Bear receiving a shotgun blast to the back by Boo Boo has gone viral. Shock and then convoluted irony are the first few things likely to sweep over a viewer, but I’m convinced that this black-as-pitch homage—not parody—provides another unintentional effect: proof that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a neglected masterpiece.

Several aspects of this video make it so awkwardly awe-inspiring, and they all point back to the source material’s brilliance. It is the melding of raw moviemaking elements—flawless blocking, consummate performances, dreamlike yet aggressive cinematography, and perhaps above all else, a devastating soundtrack—that elicit a response; when mashed with the surrealism of computerized talking bears, the effect is at once discombobulating and blunt in its craft.

Most people I know who have watched this clip are bowled over by the sadness of it. Yes, the substitution of childhood icons for amoral outlaws lends a very obvious “death of nostalgia” undertone to the video. But I firmly believe that it is the syntax of the art, done to such an elite degree in the first place, that packs the punch; it’s like hearing Barber’s “Adagio” performed by kazoo (okay, maybe that wouldn’t be as successful).

Assassination came out in 2007, a year, almost instantaneously to its conclusion, regarded as one of the most astounding for cinema in recent history. No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, though it was kept company by There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Gone Baby Gone, and Zodiac, not to mention 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Atonement, Into the Wild, American Gangster, and a bevy of genre pictures that transcended themselves, including 3:10 to Yuma, Hot Fuzz, Juno, Superbad, and on and on and on. These are mostly movies that will age exceedingly well, appreciate in value and esteem, find enviable cult status, or all three. I fear Assassination might be neglected in the appraisal.

That’s why this stupid Yogi thing is somewhat of a godsend. Not only does it revel in the language of film spoken so well by Andrew Dominik and his collaborators—it highlights this climactic moment as somewhat of an iconic one, stylistically distinctive and palpably triumphant in its achievements. Boo Boo isn’t drinking Yogi’s milkshake or yukking it up about baby batter on his hamburger phone. To do so would’ve parodied exhausted memes unto themselves.

Thus, this clip can be defined as homage—there’s no snark, nothing is subverted but the players, and, in its true weirdness, the whole thing is the polar opposite of cliché. I only hesitate for a moment is saying that the video reeks of respect. If Yogi Bear adds anything to the cacophony of cinema, at least it’s not purely noise, and thank the stars it’s a joyful one, trumpeting a film that deserves it.

Right now, I’m in the process of overhauling the paper forms used at the Kansas Secretary of State’s office. There are tons of them, and each with their own eccentricities. The objective of, ahem, formalizing these has been gleefully grueling. Not only do the requirements of the forms dictate their design, but statutes that must be observed, and databases that have been constructed with certain unbudging sequences and inputs.

Anyone who knows me knows that, creative-act-wise, there are no two things I relish more than constraint and orderliness. And yes, I do see this as a creative act. With forms, there is a distinctive Bauhaus indivisibility between form and function that I find beautiful. Their demands often force me to defend any ornamentation I choose to include. With space at a premium, everything must be purposeful. It’s a downright delight.

What astounds me is the lack of documentation, theory, or practical exercise available when it comes to printed form design. Forms exemplify pure design principle; one could say that any text on visual assemblage or grid system would do the task, yet I think they’re quirky and unique enough to warrant their own focus. They’re a great challenge, and one that encompasses aspects of interaction, comprehension, usefulness, aesthetics, pleasantness, tradition, and boiling point.

Online form design has recently seen a wellspring of terrific written work, analysis, and application, but I have a feeling that the need for the printed form won’t diminish anytime soon. Okay, I could be dead wrong about that, but until they shut down the last paper mill, people will still be asking receptionists what the date is, scribbling stubborn ballpoint pens in the margins, and signing on dotted lines—and this ubiquitous and often unappealing aspect of modern life will still need a little attention.

Limbo is the first video game by Danish developer Playdead, and it is quite a statement. So much of what makes the game fun and thrilling is derived from what makes it intelligent. It refers broadly and astutely to the spectrum of popular art, from Lord of the Flies and H.P. Lovecraft to Calvin and Hobbes and Roman Catholic theology—all without text or dialogue.

Playdead does this through a deliberately simplistic gameplay mechanic that assumes the player understands the basic function of the platformer genre (you could call it a morbid, noir Super Mario Brothers).

Many games boast immersiveness, but require bogs of exposition and contrived tutorials integrated into the first phase of play. Limbo simply opens a window and, like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, points its bony finger forward.

By now, I could have completed what is an admittedly short experience, if not for my desire to prolong my time in its dangerous and melancholic world (and impress my girlfriend, to whom I’ll eagerly hand the controller tonight). 

I eagerly snapped up Limbo on its premiere day, even with my dental floss of a gaming budget, because I knew it would be worth the money—not simply for the diversion it would provide for the next day or two, but because of its up-the-ante attitude for what games should do, and not just what they can do.

The interactive entertainment industry has inadvertently and ironically begun to counteract its artistic claims through bloated budgets and pixel pyrotechnics, forgetting that the best works of art are not conceived budgetarily or through marketing (some games, like Red Dead Revolver, can count critical acclaim along with zeros and commas).

Like many established mediums of art—film and books being Perpetrators 1 and 2—video games have fallen into ruts of tired tropes and franchise aspirations to guarantee success. Movies have already begun to feel the backlash, with audiences ignoring rehash cinema and yearning for originality. (You could hear the chant of Inception in the streets for weeks as buzz built the film into a summer savior.)

Games like Limbo continue gaming along the same path as comics twenty years ago, when artists outside of their mainstream fought not only to legitimize their work but recognize the history and conventions of the form.

I was not surprised to see in the credits that Playdead benefitted from a grant given by the Danish government to develop Limbo. In the U.S., the dream of state-supported game design seems as possible as Roger Ebert achieving 100% completion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

It’s been a good year for gaming art, and a hard one to ignore for naysayers like Ebert who continue to refute gaming’s adult, artistic aspirations. Already a critical darling, I hope Limbo and Playdead see big success, which starts a demand for evocative video-gaming that keeps mature gamers powering up their systems for increasingly sophisticated experiences.

This angers me.

Catch that statement at the end? I’m glad to know that if I create completely derivative, near-plagaristic work, I can expunge myself of all culpability by simply saying that the original artists had nothing to do with it—no “direct or indirect” influence.

In this case, such a statement is pure untruth. Christo and Jean-Claude may have not sat in on creative meetings or served as consultants, but could it be that no one working for BBDO, the advertising firm responsible, didn’t raise concern? Don’t they have a New York office?

We as Americans are lucky when art enters our cultural zeitgeist. Either BBDO feels that contemporary artistic success consigns large-scale achievements to some compulsory Creative Commons agreement, or that the citizens of the United States are ignorant morons. Obviously, they are not as ignorant as BBDO, or else they would’ve never placed that laughable legalese at the tail of their rip-off.

Hopefully, now that the iPhone 4 has launched with video call capabilities, BBDO won’t have a woman stare into the eyes of all the people in her nation-wide network, one after the other, or, to express the intensity of the iPhone’s new high-resolution Retina Display technology, embalm a tiger shark in a vitrine. But I wouldn’t put it past them.

Perhaps advertisers need some requisite art history classes before overseeing national campaigns—or at least an understanding that they’re not the only ones who have the means and ambition to share evocative images with the masses. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, advertising is “the greatest art form of the 20th century.” No, wait, I said that.

(The whole situation reminds me of this. If you have seen “The Squid and the Whale,” then you know that, when confronted with taking credit for penning the song, Walt says he “feels as if he could have written it.” Good enough.)

One of my greatest unintentional triumphs of the past month has been successfully introducing the beautiful, eerie, masterful, and often ridiculous world of silent film to my significant other. She succumbed to it the same way I did as a child—through Turner Classic Movies, a network that’s been incredibly generous towards and with that era of moviemaking.

Every Sunday night, TCM shows a silent film from their vault, often one they had a hand in restoring. I must’ve been twelve when I saw my first silent film, courtesy of TCM: Greed, one of the countless “lost masterpieces” of the epoch. An epic helmed by Erich von Stroheim, Greed’s is a film of enormous aspirations, with budget and ego to match, which inevitably relented to a machete job by the studio after the final product proved too challenging to market. The footage hacked from the director’s cut was, of course, swept up and trashed, unseen since the premier.

For preteen me, this just added to the mystique of the film, which felt created by long-forgotten wizardly aesthetes. It is, like all silent films, quite literally a strange document from another time. To see Greed is to see something monolithic and weathered, like eroded Roman architecture. There is no way to understand its scope then, and no way to deny it now, though you must use your imagination to superimpose some of the deleted grandeur.

While the percentage of all silent-era films are lost and unretrievable —the frequent estimation is 80%—an astounding amount of films were made during cinema’s golden age, meaning that hundreds of silent pictures are still available today. Seeing Greed led me first to budget-priced, unwatchable copies of seminal silents like Metropolis and Nosferatu, then to the Criterion editions of classic German Expressionism, and eventually to Kino, the true American caretakers of silent film, whom lovingly look after important filmic artifacts like Edison’s shorts and the work of the Lumiére brothers.

These films tend to bowl over those who are unprepared for the ingenuity and artistry of what are often stigmatized as histrionic antiques. The artists who were inventing the lexicon of cinema were doing so audaciously. Concepts of montage, optical effects, tracking shots, action set pieces—before they were the conjunctions of film, they were exclamations, in films like Strike!, Waxworks, Sunrise, and Scaramouche.

For decades, if silent film was available, it was in the form of an archival print, frequently downgraded from 35 to 16mm, and devoid of the enhancements an original print may have had; one of the gifts film restoration has given to silent film is the reinstatement of tinting to the negatives. Rarely were these prints “black and white,” but multicolored to evoke lighting, time of day, even mood. Some silent films featured moments of hand-painted color, such as the torches of the Basha’s approach in Frank Lloyd’s The Sea Hawk or shorts like George Méliès’ Joan of Arc. Techincolor, still in its infancy and very expensive, was even used for entire blockbusters such as The Ten Commandments and The Black Pirate,  or more selectively, as in The Phantom of the Opera’s Bal Masqué scene.

And, yes, while the acting style that predominates feels overwrought and telegraphed to modern audiences, most of these films are not meant for nuance—the nature of the films and the medium slanted the characters towards archetype. But silent film also lays claim to some of the finest performances in cinematic history: just look at Maria Falconetti’s devastating turn as Carl Th. Dreyer’s  Joan of Arc, Emil Jenning’s in The Last Laugh, or Louise Brooks in the work of G.W. Pabst.

Silent film also had a way of authoring icons, like Brooks, Buster Keaton, Theda Bara, Conrad Veidt. Their faces had graphic qualities, and their directors flanked them in style. Single frames from some of these pictures were pop art from inception, and their visual life continues to influence contemporary culture—just compare the transformation of Maria with Christina Aguilera’s cover art (not to mention up-and-coming singer/songwriter Janelle Monae’s entire concept). And most Western filmgoers know and respond to the Tramp and his dancing biscuits, Brooks’ art deco bob, the sunken, spectral eyes of Dr. Caligari’s Cesare.

Assisting my girlfriend with digging through the trunk of these treasures will be a thrill for me. These days, it’s easier than ever—Netflix is a worthy resource, our public library has a silent DVD section (to my giddy astonishment), and, as many of these films have mercifully lapsed into the public domain, a healthy selection is available online from the Internet Archive to YouTube. I encourage you to begin your excavation, and update me on your progress. I’ll keep readers abreast of my partner’s silent education.

This blog marks, to my recollection, the sixth blog I’ve started in earnest. I say “earnest” because even those blogs I’ve only managed to populate with one post were ambitiously, enthusiastically conceived—I’m looking at you, online moustache chronicle. 

Some of my efforts were valiant: I maintained a fifty-word movie review blog for nearly a year, but the word-count conceit mixed with the challenge to write one for every movie I saw proved too much. It’s fitting that His Bowtie is Really a Camera’s final post features a review of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman, complete with accompanying image of the titular character, melted. There’s an apt metaphor here.

And the web will never let me forget my first weblog, a self-conscious diary of my undergraduate years. Somehow, I just can’t seem to clean the cache on that one.

I promise to make this blog different—no high concepts, no format constraints, no personal gush. I am limiting the blog to my observations and opinions on art and culture, but within that fence, I plan to trounce around however I see fit. Also, I have no plans to stick a tombstone over this blog if I go absent for a month or two. In my current idealistic state, I don’t see that happening, but if it does, I won’t self-flagellate and shut ‘er down.

To those who care or can humor me, thanks. I hope this can be illuminating and a little bit of fun.