You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 1st, 2008.
A long time ago, I had a blog called Love the Life You Choose. It was my first real foray into blogging, and, intimidated, I ran it with two friends, and was an abject failure because neither of them liked posting. Oh, we all went into it excited to cover all the areas we were always talking about — film, television, art, books, and how they applied to Catholicism and vice versa — but we just never posted that much. It was one post a week, or two weeks, or month, and nobody really much read it, so eventually I shut the thing gown.
I was also going through a sort of mid-college identity crisis, trying to ascertain what sort of man I wanted to be. I guess that’s still going on in a decidedly different sphere, but still, it made the block hit-or-miss at best. Really a waste of my time and everyone’s. I think I’m mature enough now to devote the time and attention that a good blog deserves; if nothing else, it keeps me busy during these long summer months — and I hate summer — when all I have is one class a day and nothing else. I’m also much more confident as a writer, and I have three more years of training under my belt.
Of course, I still tend to launch head-first into posts without much thinking them through.
Requiem for a cartoon. I miss this show.
We’ve all been to art and history museums, and come on the ancient artifacts display. My favorite was always Egypt; the intensity of their obsession with death fascinated me. And past that, the entire Egyptian aesthetic was beautiful; even as a little kid, I loved visiting museums and looking at these strange and beautiful scultures and necklaces and sarcophagi that were unimaginably old.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, of which I am fortunate enough to live within walking distance, also houses a substantial collection of medieval art, stretching from the 600’s to the Renaissance, and that stuff is mostly church pieces. There are triptychs and altar rails, pyxes and icons. It is filled to the brim with liturgical utensils and stained-glass windows, and along with the Egyptian pieces, each is next to a small box of text explaining what, once upon a time, it was used for.
When I go now, I’m overcome with sadness more than fascination. Who were these people? What did these things mean to them? Everything in there was a functional tool, rich with cultural gravitas. People prayed before those icons, and committed solemnly those sarcophagi into the ground, intent on preserving the body to preserve the ka.
Is it possible that by placing these things in museums, we’ve robbed them of their power, their purpose? We have the baffling idea in Western culture that art is really without value except for how it makes us feel, so nothing practical. We reflect it in our utilitarian buildings and our insistence on functionality. Art is this distinct category, divorced from life as thoroughly as anything can be. We put ancient toothbrushes in museum so that the educated can see them and marvel, but we don’t decorate our toothbrushes with intricate designs. We insist on the bare minimum. Art isn’t useful; instead, it’s the very definition of uselessness. Duchamp said that art is the act of making useful things useless. If that’s our attitude, isn’t that a problem?
Shouldn’t art be a real, functional part of our lives? Or should it be confined to museums and galleries, for hoightie-toightie intellectuals like myself to enjoy?
I gotta come clean — I love Power Rangers. I was about 9 when it premiered in 1993, and I’ve stuck with it, more or less, ever since (I missed about three seasons before coming back during Ninja Storm’s run). Yeah, I know it’s not a great show, and I’m not saying it is, but it can, at times, be pretty damn interesting.
The thing that most puzzles me is how Power Rangers, because of its longevity, is the unfortunate victim of selective memory and the nostalgia bias. The show’s been running consistently since 1993, and so, within that run, you’ve had an entire generation go from childhood to young adulthood. My generation was blessed enough to grow up in the post-Little Mermaid renaissance of children’s programming — often called the Animation Renaissance — so when we look back on the things we watched as kids, it all tends to get lumped together in one, big positive blob. Alongside Power Rangers is Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs and Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego and Gargoyles (to which I am planning on devoting a major post in the future), and all of those are excellent, really and truly excellent shows that have stood well the test of time. They had their run, and when they ended, they ended, and didn’t stick around like a bad party guest.
Power Rangers is still going, and on top of that has gone through multiple incarnations since it’s inception. We have Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Power Rangers Zeo, Power Rangers Turbo, Power Rangers In Space, Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, Power Rangers Time Force, Power Rangers Wild Force, Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Power Rangers SPD, Power Rangers Mystic Force, Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, and currently running, Power Rangers Jungle Fury. This reputation for constantly retooling itself has done precious little to improve the show’s reputation among its once-loyal fans, now young professionals and college students. My generation looks back and sees early PR as something wondrous and fun, and by far better than any of the current incarnations.
Not that we have really actually watched the new ones.
I, however, do watch them, and loyally. I’ll never be able to say that its good television, but its entertaining, and its only gotten better with time. Some of the shows have shown a sophistication in storytelling that the first few years could never dream of, and character complexity rare among children’s shows; Mystic Force had a shifting set of villains constantly playing power politics beneath their unseen master. The only constant factor was the mysterious Kromagg the Knight Wolf, who defeated the heroes repeatedly, only to choose not to kill them at the last second; in the end, it turned out he was the Red Ranger’s father. And while, no, you can’t call that great by any measure, it’s a far cry from the earliest days and the bungling Goldar, when the show was literally a toy commercial with only the barest bones of plot.
And yet my peers constantly repeat the refrain: not as good as the original! And they don’t just say it casually — they make a point of it. It’s a point of pride among them to knock the new shows in our frequent bouts of nostalgia. But everything they liked about the show back then is still present, with better writings, better action, better stories and better characters than ever before.
Memory’s funny, you know; I love to think about it, how the things of the past relate to me now, and how life today will recede into the past. Above all, I’m fascinated by our ability to change the past through conscious or unconscious selective memory and recordkeeping, and the constant fight to maintain its integrity.
Now, it’s always an ongoing concern with the Church as well. We’ve been around so long that we have to continually remind ourselves of our past rather than acceding to the present interpretation, that there is more to the world than the present, and that nothing, not even Christianity, is in a constant stasis. The same mental acrobatics that propel the notion that Power Rangers has only gotten worse is the very same act that convinces Rad Trads that Catholicism has endlessly decline and the same act that convines Wiccans that they’re not a bunch of Ren Fair kids dancing at the solstice. We have a tendency to lionize the past at the expense of the present; we pick and choose what we want to recall.
All of Christianity, all biblical religion, really, is based on the memory. Remember how the Lord delivered us from Egypt. Remember how the Lord returned us home from Babylon. Remember the sin of Adam, and the promises the Lord has kept. Remember the death and resurrection of Christ. It’s hard to have a firm understanding of fidelity unless you have a firm grasp on both the past and the present, of promises made and promises kept.
What’s the quote? “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.” And the reason for memory is so that we can pretend it does, anyway.
Ok. So I haven’t actually seen the fourth Superman movie, but the from what I understand, the idea is to condemn nuclear power as destructive, and the villain is a solar-powered Superman clone named Nuclear Man. But wait. Didn’t I just say “solar-powered clone?” Seems the message is a little muddled if your principal baddy isn’t even really associated with the issue you want to criticize.
Also, geez, what an awful costume! And that hair. Who’s responsible for this?
