Cynic City
By SteveIf you like some of the movies/videos by/from Michel Gondry, this interview is worth reading.
He’d be one of my favorites only for his music videos (like “Fell in Love With a Girl” by the White Stripes, which you can see a documentary on its making right here), but he also direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is in my Top 5 movies ever.
Anyway, I particularly liked this comment from the interview: “But sometimes they use the word “quirky” in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I’m doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don’t really care. They feel it’s cynical. But I don’t think I have any cynicism in me. And if I had some at some point… I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don’t like cynical people. I don’t like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to fight for it.”
I totally agree with this. It’s so easy to be cynical, it’s what we lazily fall back to when posting on message boards or when discussing most “serious” things. It seems like everyone is in some contest to be more ironically detached than anyone else from the things that interest them. Like on a message board, someone will post how much they dig something and inevitably, some douchebag pops in to say how much he hates it. And then the conversation follows that path and much of the original joy is lost. It’s one of the reasons I rarely post to message boards anymore; I’m tired of arguing, of everyone trying to out-clever each other with one-liners, of “zings,” of having people pile-on because you dare hold an opinion counter to whatever’s currently in vogue with the hive mind.
Maybe I’m old or naive or an idiot, but I miss being able to be passionate in public about something without people pissing all over what I dig. Yeah, I could ignore them, but I’m kind of hoping all the cynical hipsters will realize that they’re the ones conforming now. Maybe positivity will replace it, and maybe that’s illustrated by the success of Juno, which doesn’t have a cynical bone in its pregnant body and has proved to be a huge hit. (And is now suffering some hipster backlash.)
February 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Speaking of cynicism, I had never heard of Michel Gondry until yesterday when I read this: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/68-michel-gondry/
February 20th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Hah, I found that blog yesterday too… it must have been making the rounds.
Most of the comments there are pretty spot-on. I like that very low-key satire.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
“I miss being able to be passionate in public about something without people pissing all over what I dig.”
When was this golden age of which you speak?
February 20th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
We used to like stuff back on CompuServe. I think.
Or maybe I just miss the idea that you could actually dig something.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I just remember this being standard operating procedure on usenet as far back as the early 90s.
I’m hooked on that Heartless Bastards album. People can piss all they want. I totally dig that.
But yeah, I get what you’re saying. My forum time is almost nil now. I’ve posted maybe 200 times on Qt3 and I’ve been reading it since what…2002? And the reason is pretty much because of the hipster personas. I have no time for that. At all.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:44 am
I think the tone of everything has gotten to the point where the tone starts toxic and goes from there, but yeah… Usenet was pretty bad. I dunno, I guess I just wish there was a place I could have fun and interesting conversations about things I dig with people who’d also tell me about things they dig.
And every other post wouldn’t be, “Are you a fucking idiot?”
But seriously, Bill. You’re a fucking idiot for liking that third-rate band. They’re the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
(Not really. I bought it from amazon. It’s good.)
February 21st, 2008 at 10:27 am
Send me an email btw. I have a new PC and my Outlook importer just isn’t working. I need your email addy.
But back to forums. It’s like that everywhere. Places like Operation Sports. Man, the EA Sports/ 2K Sports flame wars are just out of control. It makes the entire forum unreadable because people just cannot accept that another person thinks “their” game is shit while liking a competitor’s product. Then you toss in the whole anonymity of the Internet and you get a big ball of digital nonsense.
Plus, as you know, it’s very uncool to truly like anything today be it music, games, movies, whatever.
Cloverfield was shit, though.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The place for enthusiasm is real life. People are generally too polite to be too dismissive in person, so they’ll let you have your enthusiasm over dinner or drinks. If they disagree, they are socially obliged to provide compelling reasons without sounding like jerks.
Of course, the last dinner party I threw broke into an impassioned debate over the merits of various opera singers. So it may be the company I keep.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Damn. This would mean I need real life friends.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
“Of course, the last dinner party I threw broke into an impassioned debate over the merits of various opera singers.”
Oh! To be a fly on the wall!
;)
February 21st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I think some of the worst offenders are on any MMO forums. The moment a game is released, especially if it is a niche product intentionally, all the haters come out. Regardless of the fact that the product delivers on its promises and the niche fans enjoy it, the forums are still full of this vitriolic hate. Can’t have a pleasant discussion about the fun aspects of the game without the naysayers jumping on board.
Heck, on Qt3, you can take a recent example of a game that is starting to suffer from this. Sins of a Solar Empire is getting rave reviews from its audience, including the original posters on Qt3. But now that it has been out for awhile, there are the nitpickers and naysayers starting to jump on the game. One thing isn’t to their standard so the whole product is shite.
Been gaming and on the internet for a long time as well and I feel it has been going downhill. Even developers are seeing this, hence why games like Tabula Rasa are released without a central hate forum.
I enjoyed Cloverfield, even if it wasn’t the GREATEST THING EVER! It was fun and enjoyable and I had a blast watching it, so there!
February 21st, 2008 at 9:45 pm
“Damn. This would mean I need real life friends.”
Or you could get married and just annex all your wife’s colleagues into your “friends” list. That’s what I did.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:56 pm
“Or you could get married and just annex all your wife’s colleagues into your “friends” list. ”
I’m fairly certain you need to meet real-life people to get married, though maybe things are different in this intartubes age.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Nonsense. Arranged marriages are perfectly acceptable in today’s hurly burly multicultural society.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Maybe I’m old or naive or an idiot, but I miss being able to be passionate in public about something without people pissing all over what I dig.
I know you’re not just being old (though I can’t vouch for the naivety) because I’ve been having the same feelings for the past several months.
I don’t understand why the level of popularity media has is considered inversely proportional to its level of quality, and I certainly don’t approve of such a scale. (nor do I think popularity justifies a lack of effort, but that’s a different, older problem) I don’t see why I can’t go back and forth between killing zombies in Half-Life 2 and the Dead Hunters pinball table (perhaps the most popular and least popular zombie games of all time in the PC world?) and just enjoy both equally because they’re both fantastic. I don’t understand the difference between Pink Floyd and Dungen apart from the English/Swedish language differences. And I’ll be damned if I get insulted one more time for saying Boston is my favorite band.
The bigger problem is that I probably wouldn’t feel secure in my mainstream opinions if I didn’t have some incredibly niche opinions (stumbled upon purely by chance) to bolster my stance against the naysayers.
Of course, the ironic element for me is that I probably caused some of this trouble when I was a bit younger.
I guess I just wish there was a place I could have fun and interesting conversations about things I dig with people who’d also tell me about things they dig.
I’m in college right now, and if such a place exists, it’s here. I’ve been finding lots of people who like to just enjoy things.
Plus, as you know, it’s very uncool to truly like anything today be it music, games, movies, whatever.
If all out rebellion was still cool today, I would be gettings lots of points for liking stuff, driving the speed limit, and playing music at reasonable volume levels. (at least while other people are listening)
Damn. This would mean I need real life friends.
Problem number two emerges… =(
Oh well, I’ll keep my fairly small list of things that I genuinely dislike and my very large list of things I truly enjoy while I wait to meet people with compatible interests. Maybe one day Google will build a database of people, so we can all socially network with the ease of the internet but find the people with similar interests who are living in close geographical proximity to us.
*with apologies for length