For some reason, a plotless movie with seventeen or more directors, fifteen or more actors, and the title Untitled Peter Farrelly/Charles Wessler Project seemed to get a lot of press yesterday. Apparently Hollywood thinks we’re overdue for another Amazon Women on the Moon, Kentucky Fried Movie or The Groove Tube. Maybe we are, but what intrigues me more is a thought that evolved out of a conversation with a couple of friends as we tried to recall that short list of plotless wonders. We then went on to ask: are there any really good movies that have no plot? Things got heated at points arguing about whether, for instance, Pulp Fiction or Requiem for a Dream had plots. I’ve compiled my quick list below, and I have to tell you I endured a LOT of pain perusing discussion threads on film web sites, reading commentary by the world’s unemployed film critics whose comments on a film like Requiem would go something like “the effects were kind of cool, but the movie had NO PLOT WHATSOEVER“. Which translated, clearly means “I really am quite stupid and didn’t get this movie at all but I DO have eyes in my head“. Have any suggestions to add?

	David Lynch is probably the master of making you think a movie has no plot when in fact it does. You may not care enough to figure it out, but it’s usually there all the same. Eraserhead for example has so much atmosphere that you don’t even notice it’s just a pretty straightforward “boy meets girl, knife meets chicken” story. I love David Lynch, but he finally got me with Inland Empire. I have NO IDEA what the film is about.
	Jim Jarmusch has made some of the best “plotless” films in contemporary cinema. Who cares where the story’s headed, when Roberto Benigni is the one taking you there? From the vacant longing of Stranger Than Paradise to the flip meandering of Down by Law to the stylish whimsy of Mystery Train, Jarmusch proves that it’s not so important where things begin and end as long as you get in the middle of things. And in the case of Mystery Train, multiple middles can overlap without even affecting each other.
	Two of my favorite films ever are by Michelangelo Antonioni, and both can give a very strong impression that there’s no plot stringing things together. Both Blow Up and The Passenger transport you to a sense of time and place that leaves you with a memory of having been somewhere, rather than having watched a film. I’ve seen both several times, and still don’t recall the “storyline” in any detail. And I don’t care, I’ll watch them both again.
	Although I haven’t seen Krzysztof Kieslowski’s entire Three Colors Trilogy, his film The Double Life of Veronique remains one the most beautifully compelling films I’ve ever seen, and I’ll be damned if I know if there’s a solid plot in there anywhere. But there are two lives playing out, and the mystery of what those two lives mean is story enough for me. Especially when set to the soundtrackby Zbigniew Preisner

We throw away enough computers EVERY DAY to bury most of Los Angeles:

Mmmmm. Mercury poisoning!

We used to have a weekly feature called Monday Demotivators in which we featured Flash-based games and puzzles to help you avoid actually (gasp) doing work on Monday morning. During the boom economy of a few years ago, I couldn’t help noticing that - as an aspiring entrepeneurial type - I often worked 60-70 hours a week, while my friends with “real” jobs spent an awful lot of time calling me during the day to fill time while they shopped on line or sent friends stupid links they found on Fark, or doing just about anything but their actual job. This not only had a big impact on my understanding of things like the 20-60-20 rule and the logic of overseas outsourcing, but eventually led to my amusement with spending time working to find ways to help others avoid working. Given the unemployment figures of the last year however, we decided to discontinue our little Monday feature. I mean, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have any work to avoid, right? The other day though, I received an e-mail in which the visitor said “I know this sounds crazy, but I miss your Monday Demotivators. Not because I’m trying to avoid work, but because of force reductions, I’m afraid I’ll get cut because I don’t look busy enough.” Yes, in the bizarre world of corporate employment, if you’re not the CEO that gets a bonus for running your company into the ground, you’re just a commodity that risks being shipped overseas if you’re not perceived as an asset as the ship sinks. And one of the best ways to be perceived as an asset is to not actually be an asset, but to look like one. So we’re here to help. It’s funny that “looking busy” was a valuable skill during boom times because your employer was oblivious to the same inefficiency that led to the staff cuts that now make “looking busy” a crucial skill again. Your Guide to Looking Busy at Work from 2003 is a slightly humorous piece that’s all about frittering away your surplus work hours with high-tech approaches, but last month’s NYT piece Working Hard to Look Busy was all about the new busywork, the kind that helps you keep the job that you were always avoiding. Decent management is hip to the more obvious “furrowing of the brow while clacking on your keyboard and faking a phone call” methods, so you have to get clever. This article gets down to the finer points like “abusing the interoffice envelope system” and “propping out your desk”. Following the simple suggestions in that peice should have you looking Busier than a one-legged man in a butt kickin’ contest in no time. Once you’ve successfully created the illusion of busy-ness, it still may be hard to get back to the more obvious nonsense like first-person shooter games, so you might want to try the games over at CantYouSeeImBusy.com, which are all designed to look like common office programs. Like Leadership, which appears to be a quarterly progress report, but is in fact a “navigate your rocket through the alien terrain” game. You could also resort to things like creating a fake desktop with lots of programs open (see below). Just remember that it IS fake if the boss wanders in; you’ll look pretty stupid if you start trying to drag around fake program windows. Got any tips of your own for looking busy? I have to get back to work now.

A screenshot of Leadership from CantYouSeeImBusy.com:

If you create a fake desktop background, be sure to include lots of colorful graphs:

I like to think of myself as a little more informed than the “average” citizen - whoever they are - yet I regularly find myself to be disturbingly naive (okay, just plain stupid) regarding how things really work in our government. It has bothered me for some time that our government seems to have been taken over by the finance industry, and that it operates in creepy collusion with a telecom monopoly, but until taking a closer look recently, I had no idea how active that revolving door in Washington really was. Considered “business as usual” by most Washington insiders, it even has a polite euphemism. Instead of calling it a corporate coup of our government, it’s called Agency Capture or Regulatory Capture. I believe in the old school Republican idea that government can be bad for business, but I can hardly accept the reverse, i.e.: that business is good for government. I think the recent banking catastrophes and USDA food safety failures speak for themselves; with the former you have the revolving banking industry/treasury department door, with the latter, the USDA/Monsanto door. I would be astounded if the current administration’s plans to make changes in revolving door policies were successful; the practice is simply far too pervasive. The amount of information on government agencies that are staffed with former corporate influence peddlers is overwhelming. Eisenhower warned of us the Military Industrial Complex back in 1961, and Monsanto has been a target of this scrutiny for some time; see lists like this one or this one. But these are just high-profile, extremely well-funded examples. This form of governing reaches across every industry, and at all levels of government. I’ve compiled a table of examples below, but for a really amazing resource, check out Open Secrets’ Revolving Door database. You can use it to do things like starting with a list of over 300 former public servants to track their connections, or look at revolving door employees by agency. The White House has nearly 500 on staff itself. In spite of the overwhelming number of federal employees that are infecting the way our government runs, there is a bright side. Rather than feeling paranoid and powerless against cold, inhuman, and faceless corporations, we COULD start targeting the actual people responsible with civic action. They only get away with it because we don’t pay attention. The tables and images below begin to give it all a face.

The image below was cropped from this Denver Post item.

If you were paying attention last fall, you might have caught a glimpse of the Neuroscience Audiomedical clip on the left. If you haven’t seen it, give it a look; it’s fun, and perhaps even a little disturbing. The only thing that disturbs me about it though, is that in spite of being a product-weary anti-consumer, I’m somehow disappointed that it’s NOT pitching a product at me. It has all the elements of a viral campaign or an Internet-Meme-to-be, but somehow is neither. It sort of points at the electronica DJ collective called Scratch Perverts, but none of their sites reference the clip, so you’re just left kind of thinking “Wow, that’s really neat, but WHY?” Well, keep wondering, ’cause I didn’t find much in the way of an answer myself. If you liked the video though, you’ll be pleased to know that Neuroscience Audiomedical has also done a live performance (also below). Or so say they say. It appears they used the same projection technology that was utilized for the Gorillaz and Madonna appearance at the Grammy Awards. The holographic projection method is a product called Musion Eyeliner, which allows 3-dimensional, moving, life-size holograms to appear within a live stage setting using Peppers Ghost techniques. Pretty cool. I just wish I knew what I was virally promoting here. More vids below.

Madonna & Gorillaz - Live at the Grammy Awards

Neuroscience Audiomedical “Live”

Musion’s live, transatlantic HD 3D interactive system demonstrated at InfoComm last year

More video by Chris Cairns

1.) People of color will play a significant role in the outcome.

Avatar has aroused a lot of discussion about race and class around the world, and some people will be VERY upset if this non-white nominee wins. I don’t think Obama’s nomination caused suicidal tendencies though.

2.) A powerful woman may win, but an arrogant man in her past may impact the outcome.

Kathryn Bigelow probably deserves to win for Hurt Locker, but her arrogant ex-husband could easily muck things up for her.

3.) There may be a deranged man in a wheelchair in the audience.

Although Peter Sellers didn’t win, he was nominated for Best actor for his multiple roles in Dr Strangelove. The comparisons between Dick Cheney and Sellers’ character were inevitable when Cheney showed up at the inauguration in a wheelchair.

4.) In spite of presenting itself as a fair contest, a powerful group of insiders control the outcome.

This has always been true, but oddly the presidential campaigns have been a little more transparent since 2000, when only nine people elected the president, and not much fuss has been made since then. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal points out that the Oscar nomination process is significantly flawed. And you can bet that Board of Governors makes a lot of phone calls this time of year.

5.) Gay men throw the best parties.

This is just a safe general rule. But the best Oscar parties I’ve been to were thrown by gay men, and this was also true of the best post-election parties I attended in 2008. For some reason most of my gay male friends were a LOT more engaged in politics in 2008 than in the past.

Arthur Miller said “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s no one to live in it“. Well, these are hard times; an estimated 15 million Americans can’t get work so they can even try to work their butt off to own a house, and later find themselves overextended and joining the ranks of millions nationwide who already blew it and defaulted on their mortgages. This probably has contributed to the estimated million or so homeless people already in America, the only upside being that it may have improved tent sales considerably. Heck. Even Iceland seems to be defaulting on its loans these days. I always laugh when an advertising-kludged pseudo-liberal site like Huffington Post asks stupid questions like Should Congress Take a Pay Cut?, because the fact that they’ll take a democratic legislator’s bandstanding seriously highlights in a convoluted way just how deep the problem really runs. Of COURSE they should take a pay cut. They should also think about spending less than 60 bucks on lunch each day. So. If you don’t have the job security of the guys who get paid out of the taxes they always say they don’t want to charge you, and you’ve lost your job and your home, is there still any chance you’ll ever live the American dream and have your own piece of land? Well, while you’re still homeless, you might want to get creative with your signage like these guys or abuse celebrities like this guy. And once you panhandle a few bucks, you could think about inchvesting it. Yes, for a dollar an inch you can have a little piece of Detroit. Another option would be to disregard social order altogether, secede, and claim any land you like. Think those teabaggers are crazy? You obviously haven’t heard about America’s new sovereign citizens.

If you’re not paranoid or have nothing to hide, things like the UK’s millions of security cameras, the TSA subjecting you to cavity searches, and Google tracking everything you do won’t bother you, and may even comfort you somehow. Personally, although I’m not doing anything particularly questionable with my time, and am not ashamed of the questionable activities I do engage in, I enjoy the ability to say “none of your businesss” and go off into the forest to sit on a rock and think for awhile. Back in 2002, the fact that cell phone providers were going to add the GPS-powered E911 feature to phones raised the question what do they plan to do with this information? Well the answers are finally in. If you’re the Iranian government, they’ll help you prosecute and arrest political protesters. If you’re the FBI or the White House, they’ll help you track callers without a warrant, because the current administration - much like the Bush gang - believes that cell phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when using a cell phone. “So”, you say to yourself, “I’ll just ditch my cell phone then”. Ha. Forget it. They (whoever “they” are) will still find you, either using social networking like they did with Saddam Hussein , or with the latest in reverse lookups, disturbingly referred to in China as Human Flesh Search Engines. Interested in working part time as a “Google Human Flesh Searcher”? Explore your options here. I wonder if this would work for catching Osama Bin Laden?

This is apparently the Human Flesh Search Engine team over at Google China:

Well, we added Waldo. But that’s an actual image from the volunteer recruiting page.

I’ve often said that two of the best jobs in the world to have are Economist or Weatherman. Who else gets paid so much to be wrong so often? I was reminded of this recently while reading Busted: Dean Baker On The Price We’re Still Paying For The Housing Bubble in The Sun Magazine. Granted, The Sun is about is hippy-dippy liberal as publications get, but Baker says some insightful things in the piece, key amongst them being that “Economists think they’re doing their job if they are saying the same thing everyone else is saying“. He points out that economists tend to say what their bosses want to hear, for risk of damaging their careers; a couple of classic examples of this being of course demi-god Alan Greenspan, who finally fessed up about how wrong he was, and Ben Bernanke, who’s been saying there’s no bubble since 2005. Guess who still has the sweet job? Bernanke just began his second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve on February 1. What boggles my mind at this point is that now that we KNOW top-level government and banking experts were so wrong, why do they still have jobs? If you were to make a series of decisions that bankrupted the company you work for, what would you expect to happen? The answer is obvious, so why do we - as a people - tolerate the ongoing abuse of the very banks we bailed out? Why didn’t the taxpayers get profit sharing and bonuses for bailing out the banks, instead of the CEO’s that caused the mess? I’ve been whining about the bailouts since day one, and have remained astounded at how little coverage the Quiet Coup has gotten. That Atlantic article just linked to explores what’s really happening in America right now, pointing out that “…the finance industry has effectively captured our government…” and that “…recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform…”. Which is why I’m glad some doomsayers are still saying that we’re Running On Empty or asking if maybe the government is Hiding How it Bailed Out AIG and Goldman. And finally congress at least seems to be looking at it this all as a problem. If you haven’t quite come to understand or accept the fact that your government has been “hijacked by the oligarchs” read this lengthy but level-headed Bill Moyers interview with Simon Johnson. You might start thinking that healthcare is the least of your worries.