As the new year approaches, I decided to make a different kind of new year’s resolution list. Instead of a cheesy list of things to watch or things I’d like to see, I thought I would make a list of the things I will resolve not to do in 2011. As a columnist writing about digital living for the last half of the year, I think the ways in which we remove technology from our lives can be as important, if not more so, than the ways in which our lives collide with the digital frontier.
The first thing my son says when I come into his room in the morning is “iPad.” He’s not quite 2 years old. He can talk in some basic sentences, and will repeat just about anything you say. He can’t dress himself yet, except for his shoes, a pair of Crocs, which are easiest for toddlers to put on themselves. He’s a wiz with the iPad. At first, I was impressed when he could simply unlock the screen. Now he can navigate to his favorite apps, open the photo album, and even manage some pinch-to-zoom gestures when he wants to see faces up close. He can’t yet peddle a tricycle, but he can already catapult an angry bird, though he hasn’t yet killed any pigs. Any day now, those pigs will pay.
I don’t remember exactly how my PlayStation 2 broke, but I do remember when it happened. It was in 2005, a couple months before God of War was released. I priced out repairs for my system, and I remember that they were prohibitively expensive (more than $100 was prohibitive on my meager budget). So, instead of repairing mine or buying a new PS2, I stuck with the systems I had: an Xbox and a Nintendo GameCube. Yup, I had all three major systems, plus a Sega Dreamcast I had never quite retired. I was an early adopter. I bought all the major systems, sometimes at launch, but usually either after the release of the first game I really wanted to own or the first price drop. But now I’m here to tell you that I have seen the error of my ways.
When I took a look back at the original Tron movie, one thing that struck me, one thing that I hadn’t remembered since I last watched the movie so long ago, was that the encapsulating plot was really about a company that was cutting off its employees’ access to the outside world. Jeff Bridges’ character Flynn can’t get access to the corporate mainframe from outside the company. So, he enlists the help of a couple old friends who still work for Encom, Those friends are disgruntled because their access has been restricted while the company conducts a security review, trying to figure out who has been hacking into the system. It turns out, the company was right to be suspicious. Even though Flynn is vindicated by the evidence he finds, the company was right that there was a security risk.
Driving home from the midnight screening of Tron: Legacy, I realized that I should have been disappointed by the movie. It’s very difficult to leave Tron and drive home on a deserted highway at 2:30 AM, with the streetlights stretching out before you and the waxing moon rising in the west, and not push the accelerator far in excess of the speed limit. I kept checking behind me to see if I was leaving a trail. Also, looking out for cops. No on both counts.
In a controversial move, TIME magazine declared Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year. Only TIME magazine can do something controversial by avoiding controversy. I’m speaking, of course, of the more obvious pick for Person of the Year, Julian Assange. With the WikiLeaks dump still fresh and flowing, there is certainly an argument to make that Assange had more effect on the world than Zuckerberg. But I think that Time magazine got this one right.
With Tron: Legacy rebooting the aging 80s sci-fi film, I started thinking about other movies from the 1980s that could use a refresh, if not a long-awaited sequel. These were usually a mix of fantasy and technology, some with a vision of the future, and others with a bent perspective on what was technologically possible. None of these have ever had a feature film sequel, though there may have been occasional TV spin-offs and such. Here’s my list, in no particular order.
In the run-up to the new Tron sequel, which opens nationwide this Friday, I decided to dust off my old copy of the original 1982 film to see what I’d forgotten, and to determine if the original movie still holds up after almost 30 years. In some ways, the original was groundbreaking. It was infamously excluded from Oscar consideration for the best visual effects category because the use of computer animation was considered cheating. But in many ways Tron is quite derivative of some of the more popular sci-fi movies of its age, most notably the Star Wars movies that had been released by then. Still, it’s a fun film to watch, and it offers an interesting preview into what the new sequel might hold.
Consider this my official holiday gift guide column. I’m not going to do a round-up of all my favorite gift ideas. I’m not going to recommend which phone you should buy, which laptop, which Lexus, or whatever. There are plenty of great gift guides to tell you all that (and I’ve even worked on some of those, myself). I’m not even going to recommend a specific product. I’m just going to tell you to buy a Blu-Ray player. I don’t really know which one to buy, and I don’t even have one myself. But it’s become the number one item on my list, and it should be for you, too.
For fans of Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan engages some of the director’s best tropes. It is thankfully more Pi than The Wrestler, more Requiem for a Dream than The Fountain. Throughout the movie, I had the vague feeling that I should be bored by what I was seeing, but instead I was constantly engaged. Even some of the mundane and tired aspects of this genre felt fresh and new under the hand of Aronofsky and the panicked eye of Natalie Portman.
In graduate school, I mostly studied –isms. Feminism. Marxism. Racism. I got a Master’s degree in Cultural Theory, which is sort of an intersection between philosophy and deep analysis of English literature. Mostly, I read philosophers who talked about literature and wanted to change the world. When I started my course of study, I thought I would get a PhD. I thought I would become a professor. But over the course of two years of graduate study, I realized that all we were doing was reading and talking. The authors we read were writing mostly in terms so abstract that you could hardly divine what they were talking about, let alone what they wanted to accomplish. It seemed a terrible way to change the world, talking but not doing anything. So, I left.
Yesterday an old friend posted on Facebook: “XXX dislikes craft stores (and all stores for that matter) that say, “no nothing Hannukah in here – we are a Christian store. We only celebrate Christmas.” Nice.” How old is this friend? I used to babysit her and her brother when they were kids. She still lives in our hometown, Columbia, Md. Columbia is a fantastic place to grow up. It is often rated one of the best cities in which one could live, along with neighboring Ellicott City. Columbia is a planned city, and a progressive city. It is zoned to be integrated, in terms of socio-economics, and most schools have a racial and religious mix that is far more diverse than the rest of the country. It is the sort of place I’d like to raise my own children, and the open-minded upbringing I had in Columbia certainly shaped my worldview for the rest of my life.
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