Friday Fun Links: Geek Culture Edition
Jesse Walker | October 26, 2007, 9:00am
1. The
Batman version of
Crime and Punishment. Weird and hilarious. It originally appeared in the art-comics anthology
Drawn and Quarterly 3, which also includes some lovely reprints of Frank King's
Gasoline Alley Sunday strips of the '20s and '30s.
2.
Prisoner-era
Doctor Who. Or, strictly speaking, some
Doctor Who that came out a year before
The Prisoner but obviously was part of the same
acid trip cultural gestalt. It's pretty awful, and I say that as a
Prisoner fan with a high tolerance for '60s sci-fi camp. But if you enjoy pop surrealism you should
check it out anyway.
3.
New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. You'll find no sunken cities, talking gorillas, or anarchist submarines here. Just the classic account of the Illuminati panic of the late eighteenth century, when prominent Federalists accused the Jeffersonians of being pawns of the secret order. Originally published in 1918, the book is now in the public domain and can be
downloaded for free from the Internet Archive.
Salvius | October 26, 2007, 2:42pm | #
Additionally, the surest sign of a hipster is vehement denial that they are a hipster.
RC Dean:
My last post was not about "indy cred" - I'll happily defend
Titanic as being a good movie. That was my honest attempt to answer the question asked up-thread about what made
Napoleon Dynamite so well-liked. As far as I can tell, being an "indy-movie-lite" is the very source of its appeal.
Yes, I do have sneering contempt for it, because my
opinion is that it's a not-very-good movie that has been wildly overrated (and, yes, if it were less wildly overrated, my contempt would probably be less sneering). But I'll admit it serves a purpose -
anything that gets people to move out of their comfort zone, however slightly, is a Good Thing. There are people who aren't ready (i.e., "don't have the balls") to make the leap straight to something more daring, but who might be willing to get out there eventually after being prepared by something like
Napoleon Dynamite first. And it's handy as a conversation-starter, for opinionated, pretentious film snobs like me to say, "If you thought
that was a good movie, you ought to see..." and thereby encourage people to see other (read: better) movies that they would otherwise have never even considered.
In other words, I may think the movie is lousy, but I think it's
usefully lousy, if that makes any sense.
