Do you remember Ghostbusters? Of course you do. If you don’t remember Ghostbusters you are probably too young to know the meaning of the word ‘Atari’, or so old you are still chewing the remnants of your last meal while battling with the complexity of double-clicking and learning the plural of the word ‘mouse’.
Pretentiousness aside Ghostbusters was/is cool. Ghostbusters did for Bill Murray what The Royal Tenenbaums did for Wes Anderson. What’s not to like? You have a racially-diverse bunch of geeks running around with car exhausts strapped to backpacks trapping the remnants of people that died (while learning to double-click).
More than that, Ghostbusters (along with Napoleon Dynamite) taught us that geeks can be cool. They don’t simply have to offer themselves up to clichés involving lunch-money and good-looking girls that finally come around in the end. They can bust ghosts while wildly steering a stretched hearse / limousine through the streets of New York. The only difference between the previous sentence and the Bush Regime is that you can replace the word ‘ghosts’ with ‘ethnic minority.’
Ghostbusters changed ‘geek’, previously synonymous with Rick Moranis, into a word synonymous with Bill Gates and Google. In short Ghostbusters helped the modern world realize that it is cool to be different – particularly if you can make a shitload of money off merchandise and sequels to your original brainchild.
Tuesday 23 September 2008
Friday 12 September 2008
Revelations on Yoda
Many people have sat down, fist on chin, and pondered the meaning of Yoda. Now for those with a problem with homonyms (homo-phobes) Yoda is not a mystical art of contortion, nor a cheap make of Korean automobile.
Instead Yoda is the green vermin that plagued The Star Wars movies with esoteric wisdom and a serious disability in the accepted methods of sentence construction. Soon will you see what I mean.
Unlike Jar Jar Binks, the acquatic incarnation of a braindamaged Rasta, Yoda is a master of Buddahism, Kung-Fu, Yoga, Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Jaundice. He capitulates the ultimate geek fetish for enlightenment through physical freakery (Woody Allen being another sound example)
He battles the impending shrowd of of darkness posed by The Dark Side and Lucas' recent filmic decline with philosophical rhetoric. He teaches Luke how how to use his glowing rod (an accident at Chernobyl) with fervor and inspires geeks everywhere to take up flourescent light bulbs and battle neighborhood thugs.
L. Ron Hubbard would have revised his entire attribution scheme had Star Wars come out in the 50's when he was hacking away a creative altar for the gullible. Yoda merchandise is bigger than Scientology and in the 70's, if Tom Cruise had been famous, it would have been risky business for his domination of Hollywood. Yoda is to geeks what John Lennon is to crusty jugglers, the equivalent of Mandela to humanitarians or Sarah Palin to neo-Nazi nihilists. Yoda is enlightenment - a religion.
My solace lies comfortably on the knowledge that there is a very slim chance that Yoda will inspire geeks to persecute semites, destroy vulnerable minds nor make the struggling feel guilty enough to give 10% of their salaries for the pastor's new beamer.Yoda is clean religion. Religion without death, fear of rejection, false promises, territorial pursuits, terrorism or mind-numbing ritual.
For these reasons I have no other choice but to declare myself a geek, shave my head and take a vow to only worship that which does not demand worship. Yoda is valuable because he is a fiction that expects nothing of you other than an appreciation of concept and character. That little green dude is profound enough to quote and humble enough to be impersonated without generating offense. In short he's a friend that you won't find in Exodus.
Instead Yoda is the green vermin that plagued The Star Wars movies with esoteric wisdom and a serious disability in the accepted methods of sentence construction. Soon will you see what I mean.
Unlike Jar Jar Binks, the acquatic incarnation of a braindamaged Rasta, Yoda is a master of Buddahism, Kung-Fu, Yoga, Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Jaundice. He capitulates the ultimate geek fetish for enlightenment through physical freakery (Woody Allen being another sound example)
He battles the impending shrowd of of darkness posed by The Dark Side and Lucas' recent filmic decline with philosophical rhetoric. He teaches Luke how how to use his glowing rod (an accident at Chernobyl) with fervor and inspires geeks everywhere to take up flourescent light bulbs and battle neighborhood thugs.
L. Ron Hubbard would have revised his entire attribution scheme had Star Wars come out in the 50's when he was hacking away a creative altar for the gullible. Yoda merchandise is bigger than Scientology and in the 70's, if Tom Cruise had been famous, it would have been risky business for his domination of Hollywood. Yoda is to geeks what John Lennon is to crusty jugglers, the equivalent of Mandela to humanitarians or Sarah Palin to neo-Nazi nihilists. Yoda is enlightenment - a religion.
My solace lies comfortably on the knowledge that there is a very slim chance that Yoda will inspire geeks to persecute semites, destroy vulnerable minds nor make the struggling feel guilty enough to give 10% of their salaries for the pastor's new beamer.Yoda is clean religion. Religion without death, fear of rejection, false promises, territorial pursuits, terrorism or mind-numbing ritual.
For these reasons I have no other choice but to declare myself a geek, shave my head and take a vow to only worship that which does not demand worship. Yoda is valuable because he is a fiction that expects nothing of you other than an appreciation of concept and character. That little green dude is profound enough to quote and humble enough to be impersonated without generating offense. In short he's a friend that you won't find in Exodus.
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