Cartoons, choral music, dispatches, and speeches: here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past week.
Keith
This is a double endorsement. The first is the FX show Archer, a cartoon about a secret agent with all of James Bond’s skills and talents but none of his class. The second is “Rake’s Progress,” by Charles Bock, in the March issue of Harper’s, which is ostensibly a review of Archer but is in fact a history of the adult cartoon (“adult” as in level of humor, not as in sex, although there is a lot of sex in Archer); what Bock calls “anticomedy” (a punchline that undercuts its own setup); and a particular joke that pushes the limits of repetition (for Bock, pioneered most notably by The SImpsons in October, 1993, when Sideshow Bob steps on/is smacked by nine rakes in a row over a span of thirty seconds).
The Simpsons, Bock suggests, is the first anticomedy cartoon and the first cartoon to feature high cultural fluency. That’s a pretty reasonable claim, although a case could probably be made for The Rocky And Bullwinkle Show too, which preceded The Simpsons by twenty years. From there Bock traces the grown-up, pop-culture savvy cartoon through Beavis And Butt-Head; Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; South Park; and the emergence in the late 1990s of “Adult Swim” on the Cartoon Network, a late-night bloc of programming which resurrected cartoons from decades earlier and dubbed smart, funny dialogue over the original, earnest back-and-forth – most famously with Space Ghost, Coast To Coast.
Bock relates not just the history but also the relative funny of these shows well. Crucially, he explains that a few years after the relative success of Adult Swim came a cheap knockoff that took the basic premise of all its precursors and dumbed them down considerably: Family Guy, which is basically one part The Simpsons, one part South Park, and five parts a twelve-year old who likes fart jokes.
Archer is, according to Bock, the first really good grown-up cartoon in over a decade. It’s no The Simpsons, but it’s probably one of the better cartoons on air right now. And Bock’s review is a smart take on a phenomenon that is under-commented-on, despite the pop-cultural obsession with comedy nowadays.
Justin
This week I want to recommend taking some time to appreciate the beauty of unaccompanied voices singing in harmony. I’ve been on a choral music tear for a few weeks now, first set in motion when I visited one of the oldest Unitarian meetinghouses in the country (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and heard a chill-inducing rendition of the old Appalachian hymn “Bright Morning Stars.” (Note: this video is not the performance I saw, but still pretty nice.) That led directly to me spending a number of hours in my basement arranging and recording old traditional songs in three part harmony. It also reminded me of how much I enjoy stripped down a capella rearrangements of very different kinds of songs, like this gem featuring three women singing Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” accompanied only by plastic cups. Finally, I recently saw this TED Talk with the composer Eric Whitacre, in which he describes how he used YouTube to assemble a virtual choir of over 2000 voices to perform one of his pieces, with astonishingly impressive results. All of these have reminded me just how amazing human voices are, and how worth appreciating in isolation.
Marian
The judgment in the trial of Rios Montt and Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez for genocide and crimes against humanity is just hours away, expected at 4pm Guatemala time today. Judge Yassmin Barrios has overseen a historical and eventful trial: historical because the first time a former head of state has been tried for genocide in a national court; eventful because attorneys for the defense have made repeated, and nearly successful, attempts to annul the trial. Eventful, too, because of the many witnesses to the genocide who spoke bravely, and many for the first time publicly, of what they experienced in the years of “scorched earth” campaign during Rios Montt’s tenure as head of state. The team behind the excellent documentary Granito have been covering the trial and posting daily video updates online, a series they’ve named “Dictator in the Dock“. These brief snapshots of the proceedings are both instructive of the high stakes of this trial, and incredibly moving.
I can’t help wishing I was in Guatemala now, to witness what the collective response to this historic national event is. I can’t help wondering how it compares to the public response within (and beyond) Israel to the controversial trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Back then, Hannah Arendt was sending dispatches of the trial to the New Yorker in the form of written analyses, eventually collected as the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. This time around, we have a visual and auditory pipeline directly into the courtroom. For better and for worse. It’s worth taking three minutes out of your day to watch these.
Tom
Over the next week or so, graduation ceremonies will take place all over the country, and, thanks to the internet, dozens of college commencement speeches will make their way online for posterity. History will forget most of them, but there’s sure to be at least one that we’ll be re-watching years from now. One of those that’s withstood the test of time (or at least the last eight years) is David Foster Wallace’s 2005 address at Kenyon College. Just a few days ago, a slickly produced short film entitled This is Water, which uses audio excerpts from the speech, went viral (at the very least it’s all over my Twitter feed and Facebook wall). But instead of endorsing the film, which is a little too cutesy and forcibly poignant for my taste — are people really still using Pachelbel’s Canon to lend emotional heft? — I’d like to recommend you go back and either listen to or read the speech in its entirety. I’m no connoisseur of the commencement speech genre, but it’s hard to imagine another speech doing a better job of hitting all of the genre’s requisite targets (be inspirational, laudatory, etc.) while disseminating such a simple and timelessness message that we should all be reminded of, regardless of age: “stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” It’s also told eloquently, thoughtfully, and with humility. Even if you’ve encountered it before (or especially if you’ve only watched the viral short), it’s well worth your time to take it all in. (Note the video below, also entitled “This is Water” is the audio recording of DFW’s entire speech.)
