Although L. Frank Baum insisted that his classic “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ” story was merely a modern fairy tale stripped of any unnecessary morality and lessons written for children who were already taught such things in school, historians claim there are many political undertones in the book. Of course, Baum also claimed he was attempting to remove the “horrors” and “blood-curdling incidents” of fairy tales and then included a chapter where hundreds viscous wolves and birds are brutally axed to death by the Tin Man with their rotting corpses lying in piles. So his public commentary on the book should be taken with a grain of salt. The 1939 movie – considered the definitive film version – was made 40 years later, and many of those claimed political icons would have meant as much to it’s audience as an I Like Ike button would mean to us today. There’s still a message in the film, mostly presented in dialog and scenes not in the book – one that takes the book’s theme of self reliance and pushes it deep into secular humanism and, perhaps, even atheism. More »

This is something I noticed a long time ago, but had a hard time getting the footage together to make my point. In comes Youtube and After Effects and any idiot with an inane pop-culture observation can post something hacked together in minutes. So here’s this idiot’s observation. Aparently Darren Aronofsky’s uber violent and relentlessly bleak Requiem for a Dream has a lot of imagery in common with, you’re going to love this, a Dexter’s Laboratory episode called “Topped Off”. I shit you not. Both are about drug abuse (sort of), use split screens, quick montages, and silly sound effects. And, get this, the Dexter episode was released two whole years earlier. More »

There is a growing consensus that the “art world” – that bastion of so-called serious expression – is failing. According to a Time article I just skimmed while rolling my eyes and yawning, many traditional art institutions are losing money hand over fist. Government doesn’t want to fund them, people don’t want to attend, and private donations are not as tax friendly as they used to be. But is it really that the arts need saving or that the definition of art has changed from what we have been taught all our lives? More »

Professional graphics people are a strange lot. On the one hand they embrace many technologies as they appear. Newer and better lenses and imagine sensors, higher DPI scanners and tablets, faster graphics cards, and rarely is a favorite app not upgraded as soon as the new version is released. But like audiophiles who cling to their vinyl, graphics folks can’t let go of their computer displays. Every time there is a major change in displays you will inevitably find a very angry and nearly fundamentalist vocal minority of graphic pros followed by hordes of mimicking amateurs complaining that the new tech is inferior. The difference between the graphic pro and the audiophile is that eventually the graphic pro caves to the new tech and then grows to have enough love for it to hate the very next thing as much as they hated what they are currently using at the time that it came out. What in the world is the cause of this bizarre behavior? More »