Even before the Boston Marathon Bombings last week, I’ve been questioning my relationship with media. A study claims that people who keep up with the news regularly are no better for it, and may even experience negative side effects. Super-productive people like Tim Ferris advocate for a low-information diet, that includes limiting Internet, TV and social media time. There are times when I log into my Twitter account and cringe. Times where it seems like a scrolling assault on my senses and emotions: Rape-Rape-Black Women Pain-Rick Ross-Patriarchy-Rape Culture- and now? Bombing Suspects. I logged onto Facebook after the news about the Boston Marathon Bombing and caught my eyes just in time to prevent them from processing the image of marathon runners and bystanders who had their limbs blown off in the bomb’s wake. A few days later, images believed to be that of one of the bombing suspects, dropping a device just feet away from 8-year old Martin Richards, who was one of the three people murdered in the attacks, started circulating on my Twitter and Tumblr feed.
When did things get so real? What I mean is, when did the rush to be first with details, images and irrelevant information about tragedy (I’m looking at you, TMZ) override a sense of compassion, not just for the victims and their loved ones, but for others?
There’s a common desire to protect children from violent and harmful images, hurtful words and general negativity, but why not for adults too? I acknowledge my sensitivity but most people aren’t special agents or Navy Seals. We all have a limit to how much we can process before it starts to affect us.
I reached my limit a long time ago, and I’m owning that. Writing and sharing things that inspire me always helps, and I pledge to do more of that in the coming weeks. This also means that this blog will be light on social analysis for a while.
Amy Poehler knows where I’m coming from. Sometimes it all too much.
Roger Ebert’s death feels personal to me. He wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times, one of my hometown papers, he went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where I attended, and I grew up knowing that if a film was worth seeing, Ebert would show me the way. His film festival, The Overlooked Film Festival in his hometown of Champaign, IL, was the first film festival I ever attended. I always wanted to meet him, and take a picture with him and Ang Lee (another Illinois alum) with the caption: Illini at the Oscars.
I trusted his good reviews as much as I delighted in his bad ones. Ebert was a lover of film, and with this love, he masterfully read any film that didn’t meet the high standards for what he knew film could be. My favorite bit of reading from the Ebert Library came when Vincent Gallo responded to Ebert’s no stars review of “The Brown Bunny” by calling him fat, and by cursing his colon. Ebert calmly stated: “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny.’” Gallo then edited the film, and Ebert review the redux, giving it three stars. The purpose of critique isn’t to destroy, after all, but to maintain standards.
I remember this as I find myself at yet another crossroads in how I want to approach my own writing. I am a writer, an aspiring filmmaker and a social justice educator, and at times it feels like these charges are in service to different masters. The writer wants to express themselves without boundaries or restrictions. The filmmaker wants to be free to make work without the burden of critiquing other artists, while the educator wants to start a dialogue about the intersections of identity and media, and one way to do this is to point out when these intersections are not addressed well, harmfully, or not at all.
With social media, blogs, vlogs and so on, everyone can be a critic. Anyone can create a platform rooting in their individual approach to shitting on something. There are a lot of noisy naysayers out there, and the targets of their onslaughts often deemed them “haters.” And maybe they are. What made Ebert such an amazing critic is that his love for film was obvious, even when talking about “The Last Airbender” (2010), a film that his said was “an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.” As I shift my writing voice from critical to creative, I hope that more people see Ebert’s career as a challenge to have a loving obsession with the medium of their choice, and a commitment to crafting your critiques so masterfully, that they inspire not just ire, but growth.
If the saying ‘You’re as young as you feel” is true, then seeing Odd Future on the Jimmy Fallon show for the first time in 2011 made me feel like I had one foot in the grave. I’m talking about in bed by nine, joint-popping, starting each phrase with ‘these young people…”-type old. Though my initial impression of their sound quickly made me feel out of my element, upon closer examination, I definitely heard the talent. Odd Future represents a generation of young artists for whom YouTube is the school talent show. Instead of waiting until they reach a certain place of industry and interpersonal maturity before the masses know who they are, they are maturing and growing right in front of our eyes.
This is helpful to remember when listening to Wolf, the third LP by OF’s charismatic frontman, rapper, producer and award-winning video director Tyler The Creator. Tyler is 22 now, almost five years older than he was on his debut album Bastard, and while this growth can be heard in his content and production, he is the same Tyler that he was at the time of his debut, only with new problems (overzealous stans, a mortgage and a broken heart, to name a few).
Part review and part analysis, here’s a rundown of my impressions of Wolf:
