Essay: "Detroit Needs a Statue of Robocop: Part One"

On February 7, 2011, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, in response to a direct question on the subject, tweeted that the city had no plans to build a statue of Robocop. The internet being what it is, calls for just such a statue immediately intensified, and a group of artists organized a fundraising campaign to make it happen. Within a week they had raised the necessary $50,000.

Essay: "The Problem of Good"

The "Problem of Evil" is the question of how evil can exist in the world if there is an all-knowing and all-powerful God who is good. It's a doozy. But evil also seems to be problem for secular folks, as well. Whenever anything terrible happens, when someone absconds with the trust funds or when a woman drowns her kids in the bathtub, it always seems like people just can't believe it (as satirized in this Onion article) and search desperately for a reason.

Essay: "Predators"

To see my African pictures, click here.

I recently took a three week trip to Africa which included a four day safari in Tanzania.  You have a guide who drives you around the national parks (including Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti) in a big SUV with a roof that lifts up so you can stand on your seat and look at the animals.  The animals are quite accustomed to the vehicles and so you can drive right up to them but they are otherwise living in an entirely natural environment.  Part of the magic of safari is that you never know what you might see (or, disappointingly, fail to see).

We were lucky and we saw all of the so-called big five animals.  Everyone has a favourite animal but, in general, most people seem to prefer the predators to the herbivores.

Essay: "Global Warming, Neville Chamberlain, and the Lloyd Christmas Effect"

I don't like it when amateurs talk about politics because they rarely have anything remotely interesting to say.  I also don't like it when people make analogies involving Hilter or the Nazis, because it's inflammatory and almost always innaccurate.  Having said that: brace yourself.  After having read this amusing article on The Onion, I now intend to do both.

Review: "Read My Lips"

I’ve been, for a long time, a fan of the French actor Vincent Cassel.  I first saw him in the shocking French film Irréversible and have admired most of his subsequent performances.  I often thought he deserved better roles in Hollywood (he was the moronic son of the chief gangster in Eastern Promises, for instance) and with his role in the much-hyped Black Swan perhaps that’s going to happen.


Recently, Cassel starred in two highly-acclaimed movies about the notorious criminal Jacques Mesrine.  I downloaded them both but they didn’t do much for me - they seemed to just depict Mesrine’s famous exploits rather than say anything about them.  But in a review of those films I read a description of another film (Sur mes lèvres (English title: Read My Lips)) which I later saw and I think has become my favourite love story of all time.

Essay: "The Game Ones"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very moving essay about the parallels between dogfighting and professional football in which he summarizes the medical research which shows that the rate of concussions in football is astonishingly high and provides a description of the horrors of dogfighting (the noted pastime of professional football player Michael Vick).

Gladwell then describes the quality of “gameness”: a dog’s desire to please the owner at the expense of itself. The owners of fighting dogs, apparently:

understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master.

Review: "Deus Ex"

Recently, Roger Ebert made waves when he argued on his website that not only were video games not art, they never could be art.  This provoked a lot of rage in the video game community, although Ebert himself graciously lied that he received "no more than a dozen ... cretinous comments from gamers."  As someone who admires Ebert's reviews and essays, I found his attitude disappointing and bizarre.  Fortunately, Ebert gracefully gave up his position, writing:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

Thanks Roger.  But, seriously - of course video games are art.  It is just common sense that if all that weird crap you find in galleries these days is "art" than the bar for what it takes to make "art", at least conceptually, is pretty darn low.  Basically, if it's art when Marcel Duchamp puts a snow shovel in a gallery then video games can be art.  As the boys at Penny Arcade asked, how can a hundred artists create art for a year but the result not be art?  When I doodle on the blackboard at Smoke's drunk at 3 a.m. in the morning, that's art.  It just might not be very good.

And that, to me, is the more interesting question.  Are video games good art?  Sure, you and I like to play Super Mario Galaxy.  But I mean - is it good art?