indefinite articles

What is a B-Side? Originally, on vinyl, the b-side was just the second side of an album. Quite simply, a record producer would sift through an artist’s songs and decide which ones were worthy to be pressed on the A-Side – placing them on the fast-track to radio and living rooms across America – and which would endure the fate of becoming a B-Side. For the latter, an eternity condemned to obscurity and stale stoner rooms was pretty much guaranteed. That is until the freaks and stoners crawled out from under their parents’ basements and dominated the dialogue on what’s “cool.” Now, B-Sides have become the icing, or maybe even the cream filling.

It seems that an artist can only put out B-Sides if they have already contributed a magnum opus. Not only that, but the B-Sides somehow welcome a greater intimacy between the fan and the artist(s), as if by owning the B-Sides you know the band or singer better than those chumps who never scoured the record isles. Basically, you’re not a real fan until you have the B-Sides. Well then, today I am a real fan because I have no way of describing Acme Novelty Library, Issue No. 7: The Big Book of Jokes other than Chris Ware’s B-Sides.

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Female Trouble was John Waters’ follow-up film to Pink Flamingos, and he employs largely the same cast in similar roles. What differentiates the two films are their focus: Pink Flamingos is clearly about the lows of society and the limitations of cinema and decency, whereas Female Trouble is a feminist film, crassly defending the struggle of women through over-the-top scenarios. It’s comical, but the notion is out there that views of women are somewhat tainted by societal norms rather than the content of women’s character.

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This Week: Metal Gear Solid 4, on first blush, turns out to be … actually good!

Ladies and gentlemen, sing it from the rooftops! After emerging from the vision quest mire of Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater, those monuments to design indulgence, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot is not only fun, but suprisingly so. Perhaps it has the advantage with the ornate punishment of the previous games so fresh in my mind, but this latest endeavor is refreshingly clean in comparison.

The big game of the year thus far along with Grand Theft Auto IV, Guns of the Patriot was released to massive buzz and, as is sadly to be expected of high profile releases, critical acclaim. Sons of Liberty also was lauded, with a Metacritic score of 96, and not until later did it rightly come to be regarded as the steaming pile of shit that it actually is. So, despite the initial rush of dopamine that Guns of the Patriot offers right off the bat, the true cut of its jib remains to be seen.

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This week: Exploring Doug’s wild imaginings through season one.

When placed before the mirror of ’90s pop culture, Doug is a hard program to place. Is this because Jim Jinkins created a unique rendition of pre-teen life that brought to the screen a distinct set of stories and quirks, or is it because his series turned out to be more formulaic than its fans would care to admit?

Content to let this question to loom over the Funnie household for the time being, the first season of Doug’s daily grind goes to great lengths to deliver one consistent message: The sixth grade is Hell.

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Mea Patafria is the author of the movie criticism blog Cinemango. You can find her reactions to the oeuvre of John Waters, as well as impressions of other films, there as well as on Indefinite Articles.

In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart officially stated that obscenity is impossible to define, but added, “I know it when I see it.” He was referring to what is protected under the First Amendment, and his statement officiously took the power out of the hands of moviemakers and artists; judgment of their art would be at the discretion of the authorities. The very same year, Susan Sontag wrote “Notes on Camp,” wherein she defines camp through a list of examples, exceptions and anecdotes. Camp, like obscenity, belongs to the realm of the intangible and unspecific.

Along comes the 1970’s, and with it came a new face in cinema. If there was ever a person who wanted to put a fine point on both camp and obscenity, it is John Waters. With his films that seem to portray the absolute worst of society, he lays the foundation for the Church of Camp, and the Camp Bible is none other than Pink Flamingos. In this film, he pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable, what is tolerable, and what you can portray in film. Pink Flamingos is not his first film, but it is the first that is readily available via Netflix. It is also arguably his most well-known and notorious film, which people discuss in shocked whispers. “This is the one where Divine eats shit!” “This is the one where she puts a steak under her skirt!” “This is the one with the Egg Man!”

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As someone who’s been alive since 1939, I’m very familiar with the movie The Wizard of Oz. I don’t actually remember seeing it for the first time — it’s one of those things that seems to have always been in my memory. The Oz story is still incredibly popular and influential, with two major reinterpretations coming out in the last five years. So I thought I’d go back to beginning, to a time before the songs, the Technicolor, the Pink Floyd, to explore where it all started: with L. Frank Baum’s original book series.

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Episodes viewed: “Amok Time,” “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “The Changeling,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “The Apple,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “Catspaw,” “I, Mudd”

Behold, the dawn of a new season! A program’s second stroll around the calendar is a risky venture. Smart show runners interpret a network’s decision to renew a series as a mandate to be awesome. But all too often the process of upping the budget and raising the stakes leads to a serious overstepping of boundaries; Friday Night Lights fans recoiled in horror when their favorite breezy small-town rubes chucked a corpse into a river. Trek had survived the first leg of its five-year mission – but what next?

Not a man to cower at the challenge, Gene Roddenberry instead took his beloved creation to Warp 9.

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This week: The art of controller throwing. Kojima masturbates. The final panicked hours of Snake Eater.

As the mass video game market has increasingly become a blockbuster oriented industry, big budget game design has slowed to a crawl, with gamers expectations of graphics and depth rising to previously unknown heights. At the same time, as it becomes easier to get games online through quick & easy downloads, smaller games flourish in the gaps between larger releases. As such, there’s been something of a renaissance of classic arcade gameplay, with bar-raising shooters, puzzle games, and sidescrollers coming out each month.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve diligently turned off N+ and Geometry Wars to return to the elephant in my room: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Over four consecutive nights, I sat down in front of the TV determined to beat the game before heading to bed, feeling achingly close to the end credits.

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This Week: Quimby the Mouse, collecting Chris Ware’s college comic strips found in Acme Novelty Library, issues #2 and #4.

Quimby the Mouse is by and large Chris Ware’s diary — or if you prefer to be more masculine and highbrow, his journal. It is nonsensical, often confusing, sometimes embarrassing, and, above all, exposing. Unlike other issues I have read up to this point, where the protagonists (Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown) can be separated from Ware himself – making an appearance in Rusty Brown as an art teacher makes this especially true – Quimby is a personification of Ware’s feelings and consciousness.

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This week: A few hours further through Snake Eater, Jake speaks his mind on the gameplay of the first three installments of the series.

For a game that so regularly wrests control from the player, the Solid series’ big appeal is, oddly enough, a sense of freedom. Certainly, the plot is going to play out the same way every time, and the game is ultimately one long funneled experience, but each step along the way is a sandbox within which the player is invited to experiment. Solid Snake enters an area, is given a specific goal, and must overcome a sequence of obstacles. And when that goal is accomplished, the game successfully makes you feel like you noodled a solution out all on your own.

Despite all the constant interruptions of gameplay, the leaden dialogue and thecutscene tsunamis, the game’s most invasive flaw is one which utterly undermines this sense of accomplishment. Coming to a solution is always satisfying, but the execution is anything but. As the controls and options have slowly ballooned over the course of the three games, the gameplay, once tactile and snappy, has grown so heavy that the whole structure collapses under the weight.

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