These quibbles aside, The Social Network is the perfect title for this movie. According to the tell all that this film is baed on, Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of social graces and personal anxieties were the driving factor in the creation of Facebook.com. When I saw the film last Sunday, it was at a preview screening held by, of all things, MySpace,[0] and featuring a panel of the stars of the film and Sorkin himself. The popular arguments are saying the film is a statement against the rampant narcissism of the generation of young people who are social networking their asses off. At the same time, though, Facebook didn’t become the zeitgeist pwner it is until it opened up to the entire public. Farmville didn’t become a thing until your relatives could fill their hours with it as much as the Tracy Flick lookalike you went to college with does. Further, Sorkin himself doesn’t care about the technological aspects of the film, as he’s said every time he’s interviewed.

The film is about how something was created to simulate college social life, and ended up destroying friendships in the process. His script gives the tech prospects their due, as it had to, but it also knows that the meat of the story is Zuckerberg himself. The first conversation has Sorkin’s standard walk-and-talk dialogue style, pioneered in the Bartlett White House, but at a bar table, and multiplied to an amazing degree. Zuckerberg’s then-girlfriend is having one conversation with him, he’s having at least five with her. As an introduction to the character, the scene works perfectly, and tells you that your fears about a boring movie about website creation were completely misplaced.

The Social Network is being pegged by some as a Revenge Of The Nerds for the 21th Century, which isn’t lazy as it is incomplete. One of the best scenes in the film, wherein a Beck’s[1] pounding Zuckerberg, dejected from a breakup of his own making, simultaneously codes a website where peers can rate the looks of girls[2] on campus and blogs a petty rant about his ex, her body, and her family on his LiveJournal[3]. This will be pointed to for generations as one of the best depictions of the code writing process that’s ever been done. The layering of shots of screens that Fincher pulls off, where Zuckerberg is writing code in something called Apache, ripping photo libraries from different campus houses, writing blip after angry blip on his blog, and tying it all together with an amazing narration penned from Aaron Sorkin and delivered by Eisenberg. These aren’t your father’s nerds, they are angry, antisocial, and ready to sell each other out and down the river to get ahead.

Back in the club, though, Timberlake’s Parker doesn’t always work. His line delivery is excellent, but his story about a girl he couldn’t get doesn’t play as believable, because, well, Parker looks like Justin fucking Timberlake. The guy gives a great performance, but the hype surrounding it overlooks the fact that he’s frequently in danger of being viewed as blatant stunt casting. He overcomes expectations, but that’s not always something to be amazed by.

Finally, the movie’s secret weapon is Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ score. It keeps the movie pushing along at a furious pace, similar to the breakneck speed at which Zuckerberg’s brain is functioning. It’s mostly been kept from the public as Kanye West’s single “Power” is the song in the TV ads, and the choral cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” is the in theaters trailer song. Once people get ahold of the score, they’ll realize that Reznor’s still to be respected, even if Nine Inch Nails is retired.

This is all to say that while The Social Network isn’t the greatest film of the year (the title is still being held by Winter’s Bone), it offers a lot to all audiences, from the kids who’ll be checking into Four Square at the theater and their parents who, much like Justing Timberlake and Jon Stewart[4], claim to have no idea what changing your status means.

[0] The screening’s obsession with crowd sourcing the questions for the panel from MySpace, and doing no work at all to make sure the questions were worth the cast’s time, was a greater indictment of the youth than anything the movie has to offer.

[1] the award for product placement of the year, this is something Sorkin talked about at the Q&A. Initially, he liked the visuals and idea of Zuckerberg pouring himself a screwdriver, which would suggest drinking to get drunk. But, their researchers found out the exact beverage that was the Ambrosia which helped birth facemash.com, the predecessor to Facebook.

[2] Slate.com’s Luke O’Brien reports that the actual facemash.com was for rating the looks of both genders, so apparently, Sorkin took some creative license here and there.

[3] Which goes to show that these tech trends come and go. I mean LIVEJOURNAL? They would kill to be mentioned in any movie, much less the biopic of the internet generation.

[4] The Daily Show interview, 9/30/10.

If you enjoyed WithAPassion.com, I’m sure you’ll enjoy The Busy Signal, if you havn’t joined that program already in progress.

That being said, WithAPassion isn’t done yet, and there are other avenues I’m currently driving down as well. In terms of where I’m writing, here’s a rundown:

Features, the serious kind, will go to The Busy Signal, and will be linked to both here and at WithAPassion’s Tumblr edition.

These articles include the piece that will go up later today, “Big Windbag … ” – a lengthy focus on Andrew Breitbart, and not only why he and his cause are phony, but how his supporters and his favorite people on the right are wrong. In two weeks at the most, “Strike Three, Walking Away From the MLB,” on how I’ve decided that baseball isn’t worth the time and attention anymore, thanks to Bud Selig, and other elderly fools.

Sub-feature length pieces, and the less than serious works, will be written for WithAPassion.com, and will be linked to at the Tumblr.

These, will be your A&E reviews. Concerts, TV, etc. Upcoming for concerts: Nas & Damian Marley @ Williamsburg Waterfront, The Arcade Fire & Spoon @ MSG, Rock The Bells @ Governor’s Island, and Aziz Ansari @ Town Hall.

Small pieces, moments to be captured, etc., will be written for the Tumblr.

Seemingly, this includes things like poor product design captured at it’s failingest, and screengrabs of equal fail (i.e. Drake getting the NYTimes.com frontpage)

Brainfarts, as always, are on the Twitter. As will be as many links to the above as I can do without alienating that whole game.

Finally, there’s an idea I’ve been kicking around called “You Do Realize …” which is still in the planning stages.

Your faithful, and at times MIA, blogger,

Henry Casey

Have you seen the clip of 2008 GOP VP-also-ran Tim Pawlenty saying the GOP should take the Elin Approach and attack Big Government (code for “A White House that doesn’t have a Republican in it”)’s car with a golf club? If not, hey, it’s above, and if I were you, I’d have watched the clip before I read the text, but that’s because I’m one of those cripplingly OCD cover-to-cover guys.

Now you’re either back or you hate me, and either way I can say this: I don’t think I’m going too far here to suggest that Pawlenty, once thought of as the last middle-of-the-road Republican, has become just another worried Republican who thinks throwing red meat to the teabagging right is what he has to do. That clip really did a lot to make me think that the teabaggers have the GOP by the teabags, at least when it comes to their public statements.

And that clip might not even be obviously red meat to you. Maybe I’m reading too much in on this one, but . . . well . . . I’m pretty sure that Pawlenty’s done the tidiest bit of race baiting we’ve seen in years. He’s arguing that the teabaggers, represented by their homogeneously white/racist/moron packs, should rise up against The White House, and naturally by entension, the black president living in it, who somehow is now the brand name for big government, after 2000-08 saw the Bush administration grow government like Mark McGuire grew his biceps.

Pawlenty’s said in this clip, that they the people, aka they the true AMURICANS, need to stand up to Big Government because it is a threat that warrants violence. This is just a more covert echo of the vile shouting that translates to “the evil black nazi commie is a threat to the white people.” But by the fact that he’s using the Tiger/Elin story as a prop, he speaks to the other radically racist right trueism that the blacks are coming for the white women.

Aligning himself with Elin aligns himself with the white woman Tiger was “allowed” to have sex with. Tiger is comprable to Obama with ease, as he’s the last time someone in this country demolished a race barrier that stood for so long. Tiger had been encroaching on territory he wasn’t welcome in on the golf course, and now that elderly white men have found out that he’s reached the double digits in their women as well as their golfing trophies, they’re pissed and they’ve had enough. Tiger’s had sex with more skeevy barroom white women than the bands Poison, Dokken, and White Snake combined, which makes him a danger, just like they’ve convinced themselves Obama is.

So what’s the point of this? I thought Pawlenty was the possible sane center of the tootsie-roll pop of nutjob that is the GOP. That he wouldn’t sell out decent moral/policy principles for a cheap laugh. That he wouldn’t get BushYearsAmnesia. But this means he’s not to be taken seriously anymore.  Which brings me to the last thing to consider of having proximity to valid on the right: Ron and Rand Paul, the sort of out Ned, Rod and Todd Flanders of their generation. I’d like to see them take the reins of the party, but I bet that Ron Paul, who does tend to rant like a crazy man screaming at the clouds, has called more than a couple things retarded over the years, so Sarah Palin’s gonna squish him to keep the spotlight on herself, right?

Heilemann says maybe Scott Brown is a guy who isn’t a big dumbass like everyone else with an R affixed to the end of their name. What evidence do we have to run on, with this? The fact that he’s voted for health care in Massachussets? Well, fuck, he’s said he wouldn’t vote for health care reform for the country now so surprise surpise, he’s just another god damn hypocrite who will support one policy and claim that when they vote against it, only after the President supports said policy, that 1) they never supported it, and 2) supporting it now would ruin our freedom and make the founding fathers cry in their graves. We all know that the only founding fathers that the GOP cares about now are the fringe lunatic bigots who are still doing Civil War reenactments where they get to take turns pretending to be The Greatest Man Alive and the new face on the $1 BIll: Robert E. Lee. Look at McCain veering hard right in fear of the teabagger polling ahead of him. All the GOP seems to care about is nurturing the jobless morons with enough time to protest on Washington and not enough brain cells to have any clue why. And yes, I’m mocking them for being unable to hold their jobs at the McDonalds drive-thru window, because I’m sure that’s the only place that would hire the people dumb enough to be writing the signs we’ve all seen.

But back to my point, that there is a positive outcome of the election in MA. It reminded Obama that he’s the head of a party of … well … they’re not all bad, but they’ve got a lot of folks who have been behaving like … well, … and I don’t mean the ones Rahm meant when he used the phrase, but … “procreating delayers.” It provoked Obama to reenact the movie 300 by taking on as many GOP climate change denying hot air buffoons that would show their face in a room with him, and to do it by himself. He knew that if he had certain members of the party in the room with him, they’re known as Conservadems, they’d probably start peeing their pants when the republicans started throwing out straw man ideas like the “Tort Reform Would Fix Everything!” shit that anyone who has been doing their homework, which obviously the President had, could disprove with less energy than it takes to keep Boehner looking like The Thing. Even Brick Tamland is more convincing than Evan Bayh.

But in the last two days, it also seems to have woken the progressive wing of the party up, most of whom seemed to have been keeping quiet during the clusterfucks organized by Chuck Grassley, because they realized that the GOP isn’t going to do anything to help pass health reform on the 25th at the Ideas To The Magical Table Summit. We all know that, because the week prior to Tuesday had been spent by people like Eric Cantor trying to say the political porridge wasn’t warm enough for him to feel safe entering a room with the President and the Democrats. I’ll change my Twitter avatar to Michael Steele if the event on the 25th does anything to help further bipartisanship, which is close to the bet that 11 progressives have made in the last two days with some of them authoring and the rest cosigning a letter to Harry Reid, telling him to bring the Public Option back, and use reconciliation to get it through. By making this statement, these democrats are saying, we don’t really give a fuck about the GOP, and why the hell should we?

That’s a sentiment that might have dawned on those watching Obama’s Question Time with Republicans, if they hadn’t felt it before. Obama’s line explaining how the GOP roped themselves into voting against Health Care Reform seems to be where the lightbulb might have finally come on. He argued that after spooking the villagers into thinking that Death Panels were fact, that there’s no way they would have voted for reform. If I’ll give the Democrats points overall in any way, I’d say that most of them know better than Obama about trusting Republicans. Why would the Republicans have spooked the hillbilly teabagging moonshining comic book ducks in a barrel if they had wanted to vote for health care? These people are at least smart enough to know that there are no death panels. Even Michelle Bachmann, I’d assume knows that she’s lying. So if they know they’re lying, then they have no intent to vote for it, so let’s forget about 60.

It kind of reminds me of Kevin Eubanks taking his guitar and telling Leno where to shove it, as it’s been announced that Jay’s gonna need to find a new chuckle buddy. The Democrats have been sitting in the corner with a mix of smiles and winces, while the big chinned morons are telling what they take for jokes and gladhanding the dipshits. It took a big kick in the face to wake ‘em up, but hey, it’s not nearly as easy to be run over by a pickup truck when you’re awake.

HBO GO is what they’re calling it, and while I’ll admit that’s a catchier name, it also sounds like something you’d order at a sushi bar. Ehchbeeyogo?

But the real problem in their service as spelled out by their website at the moment is that you must be still attatched and suckling at the cable tv industry’s teat in order to get into HBO GO. This could change with the announcement that they’re going to make about the service tomorrow, (NYM via NYT) but I’m not holding my breath. I still don’t trust the telecoms not to have lifelong deals with HBO that are punishable by death if voided. If HBO thinks this kind of measure will stem the tide of piracy against them (see this wonderful essay from Astra Taylor from the new edition of literary journal The Baffler for more on piracy, and if you enjoy it, subscribe, damn it) they’re mistaken.*

HBO’s content, by and large, smashes the competition in the face with a brick. They used to be aware of this, you know:

So you lost The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and that show where the ladies loved their shoes and hated men; HBO, you’ve still got a lot to offer and a lot to get your superiority complex back about. True Blood is great fun, and it doesn’t even feel like a guilty pleasure anymore. Even though I hate on him, Bill Maher is one of the last frank and honest people on American television. The pretty funny Bored To Death is your weaker comedy show, because 1) you have the genius that is Larry David’s ever evolving Curb Your Enthusiasm, and 2) Eastbound & Down is just so amazingly fucked in the head I’m not sure what to classify it as. I know people that swear by Big Love, and you’ve got another David Simon masterpiece on deck, Treme. For once, it’s been proven that it can be a good thing to have the market cornered on old white guys, albeit geniuses who make you piss yourself in laughter or want to get piss drunk from thinking on how shitty the country can get. And I’m not even going to discuss the stuff that works for you that I just don’t think deserves it (Entourage, Hung, In Treatment, and Real Sports). But then again, you can’t be too great: you gave Joe Buck his own show. Also, you do reality tv right: by making documentaries.

Why did I just make a laundry list of reasons to fellate HBO execs for free on the side of the road? To remind them that they know how to do things differently, and to say, HEY, STOP MAKING THOSE WHO CAN’T STAND THE CABLE TV SERVICES HAVE TO PIRATE YOUR G.D. CONTENT!

*I can’t find the new Bill Maher comedy special from this past weekend at any online stomping grounds, so they’re getting better.

While they also threw Joe Wilson, R-SC on the page too, to make it seem like they’re not trying to paint black people as the reason for the peril of civility, I’d say that Joe Wilson should have been there, because he did something that actually matters. All Kanye West did was hurt a 19-year-old megastar’s feelings, and all Serena Williams did was threaten a referee with death by tiny yellow fuzzy sphere. Joe Wilson continued the hack tradition of misleading the public to believe bullshit about the healthcare debate that is simply and easily disproven.

In the House Bill, (Sec. 246) titled “NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS,” states: “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

A rapper and an athlete were rude, but their acts, albeit in the public sphere, are far from the DESTROYING THE NATIONAL FABRIC level of sin that the mainstream media (i.e. old white people in dead tree media, like David Brooks, who had to mention Kanye and Michael Jordan in the same sentence as Joe Wilson in his NYT op-ed today) are making these moments out to be. Also, their professions are in the Entertainment industry, which I think it’s safe to say Politicians should not be classified as, no matter how unproductive they tend to be.

Is there anyone that should be blamed for demolishing the national conversation that we’ve been led to believe this nation used to have and hold so near and dear to itself?

Well, I’d say all of us are to blame, at least those of us who don’t speak out when douchebaggery goes unchecked. We let our tempers undo our thinking for us, and it leads to a nation where the phrase “Fox News Channel” isn’t always followed by laughter.

A nation where one of my favorite funnymen, Jon Stewart, during his return from a three-week vacation last night, still thinks it’s great to make Black People Yell During Movies jokes (Jon, remember: you’re the host of a quasi respectable news show, you’re not Greg Giraldo scraping the barrel of obvious at the Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav).

A nation where science is on the verge of being outlawed below the Mason-Dixon line because Jesus isn’t in The Periodic Table Of Elements.

A nation where doctors at Planned Parenthood fear for their safety on a daily routine, simply because they practice legal medicine.

Simply put: we’ve got a tendency to walk around as a nation of haters.

Yes, Kanye is a douchebag, and the Williams sisters really get into the game of tennis to the verge of orgasm-sounding guttural noises on the court, but for both of these examples, they’re far from the only ones in their field who are guilty. Tim Commerford, of the sort of defunct Rage Against the Machine, was so offended that MTV, bastion of great music programming, gave an award to Limp Bizkit and not his band, that he stormed the stage, and scaled the set and had to be talked down from his temper tantrum, which lasted FAR longer than Kanye’s did. And in terms of Tennis, I only have two words for you: John McEnroe. But because USA TODAY needs to sell copies, they forget that everybody’s been shitting on each other for far longer than this almost over decade, and the especially vitriolic last summer.

And the public loves this stuff. Almost everyone on Twitter for the last two days has just turned into Kanye Joke Spam Bots, myself included. But there’s a simple line between joke and hate: anger. Where else is anger less stomachable and obvious than when the N word comes into play.  Reggie Osse, twitter user Combat_Jack, spent a good part of tonight highlighting the guano-insane racism directed in Kanye’s direction on twitter.

It’s the responsibility of the adults in the room, who used to be the media, to step in and try to curb the anger and racism and educate people, back to sensibility, even if they’re kicking and screaming. But no, Glenn Beck, who I mentioned earlier, is at the center of this all, making himself filthy rich, not that CNN Headline News didn’t bring him there already, off of his 9/12 Movement, which is another phrase that the lunatic fringe The Birthers/Truthers/Lyndon LaRouchers/Tenthers/Deathers/etc. will be veiled in other than their real name: The Racists.

The rest of the non-Fox MSM, for the most part, gave a lot of coverage to the Glenn Beckers as they marched on Washington this weekend. Lately, in discussion with friends and family, I’ve shared my disapproval for the way Obama’s handling the health care reform. I think he’s been ineffective and too defensive. The same can be said 100 times over for the majority of the Democratic Party. What I do approve of, though, is the constant turning of the cheek that Obama’s given to the nutters in the street. I don’t know how I could have not, if I were in his shoes, spent my weekend throwing water balloons filled with piss at these groups, or at least had Rahm Emanuel do it for me. At least in this capacity, we finally have a President who displays the maturity we all should strive to achieve.

But yes, every moral high ground has an exception, and mine is Glenn Beck, who I will argue is one of the five biggest assholes on television.

Here’s an idea that I think should be able to work, and it could put pressure on the major networks or cable in general, to make content to compete with HBO:

HBOnline. $9.99/month for access to streaming HBO channels and a Hulu-like resource to get at the HBO OnDemand material. You could even download to iPod/iPhone if HBO & Apple, both known for thinking differently, could get their minds right. And yes, HBOnline doesn’t make sense if you speak it out literally, it’s just a logo kind of idea. Hell, even make a less expensive paywall’d Hulu channel for HBO content! Something.

As you may know, I havn’t had cable for a few months. I think this experiment dates back to March. And depending on which channel we’re talking about, the withdrawl has been nonexistent to harsh. For Countdown and Maddow (MSNBC) it’s not that bad, as they tend to post full episode video podcasts to iTunes, FOR FREE, an hour or so after the broadcast is finished. Most everything else hits the digital ether by the next morning at the latest, which means I can set it up and have stuff ready when I get home.

HBO, and especially Real Time with Bill Maher, on the other hand, drive me up the wall. I assume the wait until the Monday after the air date (a Friday night) has some origin in the fact that even internet bootleggers need weekends off too.

Also, the use of the word bootleggers has some grounding in the fact that I’m not paying HBO for anything. Not supporting the artist, either, as Maher hasn’t done a comedy club in NYC in a long long time. HBO clearly wants nothing to do with a la carte episodes on iTunes except when DVD’s are also out, but isn’t it about time for them to shift the paradigm on the TV world again? Curb’s coming back, and aside from that, and True Blood, which I’ve gotten into, I don’t see much reason why HBO will be getting press any time soon.

Actual Mockup Of Mariah Carey insert. Except the $$'s. Those, are my own lazy addition.

I had started a post last night about day one of All Points West, but record label Island Def Jam and that silly whore, and I use that word for reasons that will become clear in this post, Mariah Carey had to make news: the liner notes for the upcoming record Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will feature the launch of the next step in advertainment: placement of brands, and ads for brands, that fit into the garish brand that is Mariah Carey. Tear-away-parachute-pants for when you go on TRL and give that outside-the-highschool-pervert Carson Daly a quarter-assed striptease? Pills for when you go into rehab the next day? The contact info of the genius screenwriters of Glitter? There couldn’t be a more empty vessel that’s still slightly marketable like Mariah Carey is right now.

Lord knows that CD inserts havn’t been clean in years. Even the holiest of holy in hip hop, OutKast, had kennel ads inserted in their albums. This, though, is the full fledged on-the-street, Bristol-Palin-At-The-Convention, absolute whoring of the liner notes, or the libretto, if you’re my dad teaching me a term I’m not sure about anymore. I still buy CD’s and I probably would support artists whose labels weren’t forcing this cockamamie nonsense on them, but I have to say, if an artist who puts a lot of effort, be it masturbatory or not, into their liner notes, like Carey’s record label mate Kanye West does, I’d be saddened. Check this quote:

Carey was “very open” to the concept when Reid showed her a mock-up of the booklet in a magazine format that included brand imagery synonymous with her lifestyle. “I wouldn’t want to do Mariah Carey and Comet abrasive cleaner,” Reid said, laughing. “I wanted things that really reflected her taste.”

If you think of Carey like I do, that jar of Comet makes sense, for when you’re scrubbing your junk trying to avoid getting whatever Eminem must have given her. I get the fact that this is a dying industry, and that we’re all capitalists and dirty commies need to be put down, but if you really want to save the CD, here’s a simple three propositions:

1. Put out great music that lets the Artist speak for themselves.

2. Make the record look like a piece of art. From what I’ve learned in the book industry, a lot of what sells now is what’s packaged to look collectable. And a Mariah Carey cover’d Mini-Elle magazine isn’t collectable, it’s probably something at the bottom of the magazine stack that’s been growing since the nineties.

and, most importantly of all,

3. Respect the audience, and by respect the audience, I mean: do not sell them on crap they don’t need because it’s similar to the genre, by some stretch of the capitalist imagination that used to be the responsibility of MTV back when they showed music in their shows. I remember TRL to be a product pimp as much as 30 Rock jokes to be today.

If this takes over, I’m really going to have strong odds on taking to whatever Jobs has been working on with the record labels, unless those are just as bad with product placement, which, since they’re digital, and that means hyperlinking and popups are completely possible, I wouldn’t put past anybody.

What I’m getting to here is that I think one of two things will happen: 1. I will only acquire music by means that a competant RIAA would scare me from doing, or 2. I’m finally taking the plunge on vinyl.

Thoughts?