To all you who want a whole lot of answers, be careful what you wish for. Or, to reword: think of the midichlorians. Who cared why some people have The Force and others don’t? It’s not just suspension of disbelief we need, but suspension of needing to know everything. After all, our own world is hardly logical, and none of us can pretend to know why so many things happen here, so why do we need all the answers on Lost?

In short, if you’re out there Damon, it’s me Jonathan. And I’m saying, don’t tell me all the answers.

For those who want them:

Web Video

10. “Too Drunk to Fuck.” I had my vid watching orgy in late 2007, but one of Luminosity’s 2008 offerings helps explain visually why Family Guy will never rival The Simpsons: Lisa and Marge are just so much better than FG’s women.

9. “Talk to Your Parents About Voting Republican.” I’ve already posted about this, in the context of its political message, but I’m also a fan of its parodic attack on the earnestness of Talk to Your Kids videos that assume older people know better.

8. “Piece of Me.” Obsessive24’s vid about Britney Spears is excellent, and a 3m21 essay on celebrity exploitation and obsession.

7. Fox News Calls Ohio. I saw this after the fact, but it’s a sweet moment, as Brit Hume and Karl Rove see the writing on the wall, and Lurch delivers the news to the bald master of evil.

6. “Yes We Can.” Will.i.am’s video defined viral, and though I still laugh at its inclusion of some pretty C rate celebs (“hey look, there’s Ashley from Fresh Prince of Bel Air!”), it laid down a gauntlet to Obama’s contenders that they’d have to deliver online. They didn’t, and they lost.

More after the fold …

5. Obama Rick-Rolls McCain. Very funny, and taking full advantage of the horrible blue-screen invitation to create mischief that lay behind McCain at the Republican Convention. Rick Astley’s Rick Rolling of the Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving was masterful (kudos, Cartoon Network), but this one is the funniest in the genre.

4. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. I hope hope hope that other writers follow in Whedon’s footsteps and experiment with web-distributed video. It took a long time till I finally watched it, and I already loved it in concept, but it bears out in actuality too, a funny and amusing piece of work.

3. Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. I could perhaps fill the list with the various iterations, but suffice it to say that I thought this was great satire, something that SNL is usually woefully inept at producing. Not only did it undoubtedly hurt Palin, but it undoubtedly helped keep 30 Rock alive. See my post about it here.

2. Obama’s Race Speech. Speeches are meant to be watched with others in theory, but I read about this one online just as it had finished, and before the reviews started pouring in. So I clicked, and started watching. Web video is, in theory, meant to be about 1-3 mins to be successful, and yet I kept watching. This was the moment that I truly drank Obama’s Kool-Aid, as he and I sat in solitary congress, and, as Jon Stewart pointed out that evening, finally an American politician talked to the public about race as if we were adults. I found it electrifying, and exciting.

1. The Onion News Network. Before The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, there was The Onion. And now, with the Onion News Network, the world of satire is all the more plentiful. I can’t list a single clip as worthy, so instead here’s a top 10:

10. Dominos scientists test the limits of what kind of crap people will eat on their pizza
9. A discussion about the “situation” in Nigeria
8. The strong women in TV awards
7. Nation of Andorra revealed not to be in Africa
6. Young girl sells cookies to fund her own attack ad
5. Bullshit revealed to be the most important issue to voters
4. Cressbeckler steals votes from John McCain
3. Iron Man trailer to be made into a feature length film (see my post on this here)
2. Latest poll reveals 430 new demographics
1. Supreme Court upholds the death penalty on the grounds that it’s totally bad-ass. I love how this clip takes the rhetoric of action film bravado and shows that it’s the “logic” behind the case for the death penalty. And the comic delivery of both announcers is spot on.

Music

This is a hard category, since I’m pretty much coasting on the music I’ve known and loved for a while, yet the list requires new material. So it’s an odd list, not wholly reflective of my tastes as much as it is reflective of what stuck this year

10. “Deewangi Deewangi.” I went to two Eurasian weddings in 2008, and this song was a total hit at both. The lyrics are totally naff (“all the cool boys, come on make some noise, and say Om Shanti Om”), but it’s wonderfully infectious
9. Adele. British singer-songwriter. I recently discovered that I don’t like listening to her while trying to park or get directions (it’s something about the whine in the voice), but otherwise I like her stuff
8. “Pocketful of Sunshine” by Natasha Bedingfield. Guilty pleasure. Very guilty
7. “It’s Time for War” by LL Cool J. I’ve joked in the past about how 50% of rap songs seem to be about being counted out, yet still being in the game, and this one is no exception. But it’s catchy, and a good song to sing in the head as one turns on the PS3
6. “Bruises,” by Chairlift. Apple ads really do stick in the head.
5. “Unnikondera Chani?” by K’Millian. This song was absolutely everywhere when I was in Malawi, and so it quickly became a summer anthem.
4. Vampire Weekend. Music stores don’t usually have a College Music section, but Vampire Weekend is exactly that (as were They Might Be Giants in an earlier age). Neat mix of sounds. Warm feeling
3. The Flight of the Conchords soundtrack. “You’re so beautiful, you could be a part-time model,” and (as a spot-on parody of the Pet Shop Boys) “The manager, Bevin, tries to abuse me, / Hey man, I just want some muesli” are the lyrics of parodic genius. Good show too
2. The Black Missionaries. A Malawian reggae group that really should be more famous overseas than they are
1. Regina Spektor. Lim’s vid “Us” introduced me to Spektor last year, but I really started exploring her other stuff this year

More later, with the extratextual categories still to come …

I find it interesting that it’s the pro-Obama side that’s calling up images of the all-white sitcom (supposed) wonderland. As amusing as the clip is (and as surprised as I was to see Griffith endorse Obama), I find it a little worrisome that the strategy aims to make Obama seem safe by surrounding him with these images of white small town nostalgia. It’s a little too close to the insistence that Obama is not a Muslim — ideally, just as I’d love to hear more of a defence of Muslims as real Americans who aren’t all hell-bent on destruction and spousal abuse, rather than a quick “no m’am, no m’am, he’s a decent family man,” I’d rather that we fight for the image of a diverse, open America that I think Obama represents, rather than surrender to the Mayberry model (cf. Pleasantville). I’m not blind to the rationale behind the strategy, or to its tactical importance when it’s the independents and undecideds who are left, but I’d rather see and herald a Lt. Cedric Daniels, Sergeant Carver, and Detective Freeman for Obama PSA.

Lively and Badgely’s ad mocks the “talk to your kids about drugs” PSAs by imploring young viewers to talk to their parents about voting McCain. Lively and Badgely are Gossip Girl’s resident good kids (well, as good as one could be in that show, I guess), and their make-believe school suffers from substance abuse aplenty. Thus, one can imagine them to be called upon to deliver the “don’t do drugs” message; instead, a more sinister behavior concerns them – voting McCain. One could imagine a more conflicted ad if the stars were replaced with Gossip Girl’s resident bad kids, Leighton Meester (Blair) and Ed Westwick (Chuck).

Hayden Pannetiere’s piece also plays with her character. In Heroes, she’s invincible, and fighting to save the world. Moreover, as anyone aware of this thing called “popular culture” knows, Heroes’ catch-phrase in Season One was “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World,” and Pannetiere was the cheerleader in question. So, when she warns of how “we’ll all probably die,” there’s a (playful) added level of horror, as if the only thing worse than Sylar, Adam, or another Ali Larter character is McCain.

I realize now that my last post was also about stars using their characters to add weight to a political message. And, of course, the obvious other example is Martin Sheen, who got many years worth of political rallies and stump speeches out of being the beloved Jed Bartlet. All are interesting examples of how to use one’s stardom as para/inter/extratext.

More below the fold . . .

I’m fascinated in this from an extratextual standpoint, as it seems an exercise in tactically authoring a candidate (as text) from the extratextual/paratextual space. Of course, all attack ads, articles, polls, etc. attempt to do this, but what’s different here is that video purports to come from within McCain’s own camp (pun intended). Thus, it lays claim to being canonical in the same way that, for instance, a Joss Whedon penned Buffy comic can yet a fan vid on Buffy can’t.

This is also the kind of satire that I often find the most inspiring and nuanced: satire that either forces the target to subvert itself or that seemingly does so. Colbert’s excellent at making people satirize themselves; Michael Moore can sometimes do it (though his self-reverence too often gets in the way these days); Sacha Baron Cohen and Chris Morris are the masters. But all of them do it in a frame in which viewers know that they set out to do this. What’s great with “Raining McCain” is that it’s not definitive that the clip is intended as satire, playfully leaving open the door that these three women really do like McCain and that this is his fan/voting base. After all, YouTube has offered us many other horrific/wonderful pro-candidate videos, such as this one and this one:

This weekend I was watching some of the SciFi original (B-)movies in which some odd creature terrorizes some people (this weekend it was Beyond Loch Ness, Rock Monster, and Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep). My wife and I agreed that the best ones (such as the inspired Mammoth) don’t break frame, convincing you that they’re genuine and sincere, not deliberately bad. Camp is so much more funny when it doesn’t label itself as camp. The difference, I think, is that self-professed camp lets you enjoy the camp spectacle on the screen, but camp that doesn’t label itself also lets you enjoy the pleasure of imagining a bunch of film-makers and actors who really thought they were producing something noble and artistic. Ditto with the “Raining McCain” video, whose camp extratextually suggests that this really is what McCain supporters see as cool. Hence its political bite as satire (and its significant enjoyment factor), in suggesting how very very uncool McCain supporters might be.

I’ll admit to being a touch uncomfortable with how the women are used here, given that the clip seems clearly to parody the Obama Girl videos, thereby suggesting that the best McCain can muster is these conventionally unattractive women. So its gender codings are regrettable, relying on the rather moronic level of effectively saying, “dude, the ugly chicks like McCain.” This therefore stops me from enjoying it completely and without restraint . . . but it’s still very funny, and as Daily Kos points out, “attacks” like this on McCain could prove monumentally important in the culture war that surrounds the election campaign.