How To: Make Million-Dollar Movies

Racial casting in film - The commission for racial equality

  
        I first glanced at this piece by Adam Simpson as I was looking for a different drawing of his to write a blogpost about. Instead, I found myself being drawn to this piece, because of its direct connection to the TV Tokenism presentations we finally completed in class.
        My first question is: how would this movie have been treated differently if the classic Clark Kent/ Superman icon were portrayed as an African American? In my head, I am envisioning confused viewers of movie trailers not wanting to ask the obvious question: Why did they make Superman black? due to the fear of being perceived as racist or otherwise insensitive.
        The movie would be growing closer and closer to its premiere date as advertising would be getting more and more aggressive. Soon someone might let slip the question, and the next day it would appear in all the daily magazines, criticizing the ignorance and closed-mindedness of whomever might have even thought this ridiculous question. Racial equality activists and the African American community would be in uproar, cast members of SNL and talk-show hosts alike would joke about the tension caused by the casting of this film, and pretty much all hell would break loose, forcing people to face the still ever present but suppressed feelings of racism some still feel towards non-Areans.
        But would that be a bad thing?

How To: Over-Estimate Everyone

"What's a syllable?" 
      This is the question one of my peers asked me amidst a conversation about iambic pentameter during Poetry Club last Wednesday. My initial reaction was to laugh, I couldn't imagine how someone could have made it so far in their academic career at New Trier without knowing what a syllable is.
      Her question, and more-so my emotional response, struck a cord with me. The fact that it did not occur to me that someone could have so little knowledge about a common word like syllable shocked me, because I learned it early on as a player of the game Charades, and a student of literature and poetry.
        This led me to a new question: What is common knowledge? Is it something like: the grass is green, or if you don't feed your fish, it will die? Or might we wrongly assume that something like: the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, providing the energy a cell needs to live.
      Obviously not all people know about the inner-workings of the cell, but I wonder where we can draw the line between what can be considered common knowledge and what can not. What other things so we assume everyone knows?

How To: Criticize Professionals

        George Ouzounian, or Maddox, his online pen name, is the creator of the website iambetterthanyourkids.com, where people submit their children's art to him and he posts their work on his website along with a grade and a comment. Here are a couple of my favorite entries:

On his website, the blurb about himself reads:

"I was standing around in a co-worker's cubicle at my old job one day, and noticed that she had poorly drawn pictures hanging in her cubicle. So I told her they sucked. She took offense and brought to my attention that it was drawn by her 4-year-old nephew. It changed nothing. In fact, it only strengthened my resolve to grade children's artwork, because I don't think kids should get a free pass for being kids. Coddling children ruins them. Mozart wasn't coddled, and look at him: dead and famous. Most people will only ever accomplish being dead in life. Mozart accomplished two things."

 Do you agree or disagree with his justification and rational for grading children's drawings?

(If you like these, check out his YouTube channel.)

How To: Pretend To Forget About Racialism

Portlandia
Starring: Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein
17 Episodes, 2 Seasons
Fridays at 9:00pm on IFC
18-49 Demographic