Dan Harmon must have realised that Community doesn’t stand a chance at being renewed beyond its current season because a lot of the recent episodes seem like an all-out assault on everything audiences are comfortable with. There are way too many inside jokes, winks at the show’s audience (see below) and off-the-wall commentary on our obsession with mediocre and easily digestible pop-culture. Add to that, the fact that Community has become considerably darker than when it started out and you have a show that’s actually trying out new things. What’s not to love about it?

This week’s ‘Visual Systems Analysis‘, like last year’s ‘Critical Film Studies’ (an homage to ‘My Dinner with Andre’ disguised as an homage to ‘Pulp Fiction’), is one of Community’s most entertaining and nuanced episodes. It may seem like an incoherent, sentimental, wildly self-obsessed mess but to anyone following the show, it was nothing short of brilliant.

Community might not be around for much longer. Give it a Chang while it’s still on.

This week, Ira Glass aired a truly spectacular episode called ‘Retraction‘ calling out Mike Daisey for fabricating key parts of his monologue, including powerful moments like Daisey’s meeting with child-laborers and an old man whose hands were allegedly disfigured by the chemical, n-hexane (used for cleaning glass screens on the production line). It was particularly uncomfortable listening to Mike Daisey squirm while trying to answer Ira’s questions and came across as someone who relies on obfuscation and half-truths to tell a good story and pass it off as fact.

Forget James Frey, I think a better comparison to Mike Daisey’s predicament would be Johann Hari’s troubles. In late 2001, it came to light that Johann Hari had fabricated elements and interviews in many of his stories. His excuse:

When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

Both Daisey and Hari seem to believe that they fabricated elements of their stories in service of what they thought was a higher cause and frankly, that seems more ethically ambiguous than downright evil (I’ve clearly glossed over the fact they are/were media hogs who profited from their ‘stories’).

Nonetheless, I am in awe of Ira Glass for the retraction. It’s not everyday you come across someone in the media who holds themselves to high standards. If only others in the media were willing to follow this example of intellectual honesty instead of superimposing fact and fiction to elicit some sort of an emotional response. Like someone once said, ‘facts are stubborn things’ but they aren’t optional.

There are also a couple of beautiful shots reminiscent of 2001.

If there was ever an underrated sci-fi classic, this is it.

• Beginners: Mike Mills

(Sure, it wears its twee and hipster sensibilities on its sleeve, but it was sweet, honest and beautiful to look at.)

• Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn

• Kill List: Ben Wheatley

(I was completely blindsided by this perfectly executed, unrelentingly brutal film that transcends genres.)

• 50/50: Jonathan Levine

(I loved that this movie about a cancer patient in his 20s was funny, brilliantly written, amazingly well-observed and moving without descending into cloying sentimentality.)

• Attack the Block: Joe Cornish

(Genre-mashing done right.)

• The Guard: John Michael McDonagh

(The Guard was arguably the most I giggled through a crime-thriller since ‘In Bruges’.)

• Hanna: Joe Wright

• Super: James Gunn

• The Trip: Michael Winterbottom

• Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen

(I’m not going to apologize for loving this film. While it wasn’t anywhere near his best work, it was tremendously enjoyable fluff that only Woody Allen could come up with.)

Honorable mentions: X-Men: First Class, Delhi Belly, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Super 8, Fright Night.

PS: I still haven’t watched Hugo, The Artist and Shame.

(Image from Kill List)

There never was and never will be anyone quite like The Hitch. I’m immensely sad but I look forward to telling my hypothetical children that I lived when Hitchens was alive.

I’ll be drinking a peg or two of Johnnie Walker Black in his memory.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. 

- Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Nanoblock kits are a great alternative to Lego kits if time and space are constraints.

I’ve put up a few more pictures here.

It was 2005 when Baker “started to think seriously that climate change was not just about the future but was already happening.” Today, the signs are plentiful. Average temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees in some areas over the past 30 years, “especially nighttime minimum temperatures,” says Baker, “a tell-tale signature of [man-made] climate change.” Hotter, rainier weather nourishes pests and disease, particularly coffee rust, a fungal plague that’s ascended Colombia’s mountain peaks, which were formerly too chilly for the organism. Heavy rains damage Arabica’s delicate blossoms—the same blossoms that eventually turn into coffee cherries, whose seeds are coffee beans. As heat and pests climb Colombia’s mountains, “the lower limit at which coffee is grown is starting to go up,” says Baker.

…

While climate change’s harshest effects won’t be felt for two or three more decades, “it would not surprise me if one of these years we get a fairly serious drought” in a major coffee-producing country like Brazil, Baker says. “That could cause coffee scarcity for quite a prolonged period.” Coffee production will continue to experience booms and busts, but Baker asserts that “in the long run, people will have to get used to drinking a bit less coffee.”

Bookstores are dying if not already dead. So it was nice to come across this wonderful little hole-in-the-wall vintage book store in Launceston, Tasmania. It’s run by an affable gentleman who told me that most of the books came from estates in and around Tasmania. I found tattered old copies of books gifted to sons and daughters and nieces and nephews. Some were signed and dated as far back as 1912. The place has this really pleasant vibe too; Billie Holiday’s My Man played as I made my way around the store.

The year is 2044. The Great Recession is in its third decade, climate change has taken its toll, poverty and unemployment are rampant and things are just shitty in general. Millions have found an escape in OASIS, a virtual reality platform (a futuristic world wide web, if you will) created by an eccentric videogame designer, James Halliday. Halliday, who grew up in the 80′s and is quite naturally obsessed with the decade (chronocentrism?), leaves behind a will that gives sole control of OASIS (and his sizeable fortune) to anyone who finds the ‘Egg’ – the ultimate easter egg.

It isn’t just young disenfranchised nerds who take up the quest; there’s a shadowy multinational conglomerate (Innovative Online Industries) that has its eyes on the prize too (their plan – take over the OASIS and set up a paywall).

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is my favorite science fiction book of all time the year. If you grew up consuming unnatural amounts of media in the 80s and/or 90s, you might really enjoy this book. While most of the videogame references were lost on me, I geeked out at every Buckaroo Banzai and Monty Python mention. Cline’s managed to include an insane amount (and most often, extremely obscure) of shout-outs to pop-culture from the 80′s and 90′s – Blade Runner, Akira, Monty Python, Rush and Back to the Future, being a few .

I’ve read some fantastic science fiction this year but Ready Player One’s the only one I’d revisit.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”