My lovely wife says she’s defective. She’s not. She wonders what she’s missing out on by not coveting “stuff.” Our home doesn’t look like a Pottery Barn catalog or an Ikea showroom…and I think that’s okay. Because here’s what it does look like:

Featured here are paintings from China, a print of a painting we liked on what could reasonably be called one of our early dates at the Denver Art Musuem, and a radish I drew for her last summer when she was saddish.

The oh-so-Pottery-Barn faux finish that we did ourselves, photos from China, a piece of Chinese calligraphy that is not from China but nicely fits the theme…and a couple of tubes of cat medicine.

Curtains that she made herself, a Kennedy-style rocker my grandmother gave us (and that my grandparents acquired when Kennedy was actually in the White House), a world map that reminds us of all the places we haven’t been (yet), a mobile her college boyfriend made for her, flower photos that she took herself…and a cat.

Style is personal. Is our house likely to be picked for a spread in Sunset or Better Homes & Gardens? Not especially. But is it full of things with personal significance, reminders of good times and fun adventures and the people we love? I’d say so. And I’d call that style of our own making.

Gawker, among others, has the cover and some amusing photoshoppery of Dubya’s upcoming memoir (though my understanding is that it is to a true presidential memoir as a novella is to a novel; maybe it’s a memoirella?), Decision Points, due out later this year.

Interesting title, given that Bush & Co. managed to make the exact wrong decision at nearly every crucial point that faced them for eight long, long years.

Here’s the actual cover:

And here are a few other possibilities I’ve whipped up:

And of course, Bush’s biggest and most difficult decision, one he had to make every day:“Should I pretend to be John Wayne or should I pretend to be Marshal Dillon today?”

In the early part of 1990, as Voyager 1 was hurtling out into the outer reaches of the solar system, on past the orbital paths of Neptune and Pluto, NASA did something unusual. Voyager’s mission, having long since completed its primary goal of close fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn, was to look outward, towards the far fringes of the system. But at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned Voyager’s camera around to look back from whence it had come. In 1990, Voyager took the most remarkable photo of Earth in human history:

Today is Earth Day, an observance that was inspired at least in part by the previous most distant photos of the Earth ever taken, Apollo 8′s Earthrise and Apollo 17′s Blue Marble.

Consider that image and the words of Dr. Sagan. Consider the idea that the entire epic scope of human history, everything from the cave paintings at Lascaux to last night’s “American Idol,” happened on a speck that is nearly invisible from just a few light-hours away. And consider that this speck is all we’ve got. What’s more, for every man, woman and child alive on this speck today, it’s all we’ll ever have.

We need the Earth far more than it needs us. People say, “we’re destroying the planet,” which is just another bit of human ego. Even to say, “we’re destroying the environment” is a bit iffy. All we’re doing is making the environment of the planet inhospitable to ourselves and our fellow life. If we proceed in this course, if we wipe ourselves out through nuclear holocaust or environmental catastrophe, Earth will remain. She’ll continue rotating on her axis once every 24 hours and completing an orbit of the sun once every 365.25 days. Unless something catastrophic beyond even the very twisted limits of human imagination occurs, life will go on. Just not human life. But life will go on, adapting, evolving, transforming the landscape as it has done for billions of years. If someone tells you we need to save the planet, don’t you believe it. We need to save ourselves.

In spite of what the cynics say, I think we’re worth saving. And I’d like to think that Carl Sagan would agree with me.

Roger Ebert is one of the best and most insightful film critics out there. And I guess he got bored over the weekend and decided he needed to poke a hornets’ nest with a stick again – he does that sometimes – and wrote another screed about how video games are not, cannot be and will not ever be art.

There are a number of problems with the piece, the most obvious of which is that (as many commenters point out) Ebert appears to have made up his mind about what video games are and what their potential is back when everyone was playing Space Invaders and Pac-Man and genially refuses to reconsider his position.

Many commenters have made very apt analogies here: that Ebert is unwilling to familiarize himself with the medium before deciding that it is not and cannot be art is akin to someone claiming, “Oh, I don’t like foreign films” or “I don’t like black & white movies” without watching and experiencing any foreign films or black & white movies. Ebert is guilty of practicing exactly the kind of thinking he despises and rightly decries as short-sighted within his own area of passion and expertise.

But there’s a deeper and more fundamental problem with Ebert’s opinion on this subject: his definition of “art.” Working from a foundation as shaky as his, it is no wonder he arrives at such a woefully inadequate conclusion.

In the comments, he circles around a definition without really providing one, but some comments are very telling:

To clarify: Very few movies are art.

No, I wouldn’t define bad movies as art. Hardly any movies are art. Film is however an art form.

Ah…”Pirates of the Caribbean” is not art..

And there’s the rub. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: art is not a standard by which creative work is judged. Art is the result of creative work, most especially if its creator declares it to be so. Ebert says that “very few movies are art.” So does he apply this standard to everything, then? Would he, perhaps, during a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, come across Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Purple, White and Red) and declare, “That’s not art!” It’s certainly a common enough opinion espoused by many a visitor to the Art Institute or any other modern or contemporary gallery in any art museum in America.

Maybe Pirates of the Caribbean is not art that moves you or challenges you like The Hurt Locker or 2001 or Citizen Kane. But if film is an art form (and it is) then every film is art. Art is not a standard to which a creative work or its creator should aspire. Art, as one of the commenters on Ebert’s piece quite rightly puts it, is what artists create. If painting is an art form, then Rothko and Pollock and Picasso and Matisse and all the rest whose work frequently earns a “That’s not art!” or a “My four-year-old could paint that!” from museum visitors are artists and their works art every bit as much as Raphael or Rembrandt or Renoir.

The Coen Brothers’ film No Country for Old Men was widely acclaimed by critics and filmmakers. Ebert gave it a four-star review and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Art by any measure, objective or subjective, surely. It also left me utterly cold. I wasn’t invested in any of the characters, I didn’t find it terribly interesting visually…all in all, it’s a movie that didn’t do anything for me. It didn’t make me think about much, in particular. It didn’t move me emotionally. Does this mean it’s not art? Of course not. Does it mean that I’m too stupid to understand great art?* I’m quite certain I’m not, thank you very much. It just means that it’s a piece of art that doesn’t do much for me.

* And Ebert does imply that defenders of video-games-as-art are too stupid for great art, at least a little:

Art is not an academic subject. It is a state of perception. Is there a reason a lover of Beethoven, Shakespeare, van Gogh or Dickens should play even one video game rather than move on to Mozart, Beckett, Picasso or Tolstoy? What video game should I substitute for Beethoven’s Ninth? Remember, life is short.

True, I’ve played only a few video games. I am not sure from these comments how many gamers are familiar with Shakespeare, although I suspect we both might agree he is more deserving of their time.

This is Ebert’s low point in the discussion. He makes a big deal, frequently, of how intelligent and eloquent his commenters are, but here he sneers at them and insults their intelligence for the crime of disagreeing with him.

In short, the problem isn’t ultimately Ebert’s answer to the question, “Are video games art?” The problem is that it’s not an especially interesting or useful question to begin with.

Ebert frequently defends himself against those who say, “You’re a terrible critic, how could you give Paul Blart: Mall Cop three stars?” by stating that his job and duty as a film critic is to relate his personal experience with any given film, and to do any less would be meaningless and dishonest.

In his Questions for the Movie Answer Man, a book compiling questions and answers from his newspaper column of the same name, he wrote:

The only critics of any use or worth are those who express their own opinions, which the readers are then free to use or ignore. Anyone who believes a critic must reflect the views of the public has not thought much about the purpose of criticism.

and:

The genuine critic will write in such a way as to acknowledge that he had a subjective personal experience that he wants to share with you, and which reminded him of other films or subjects. He will wear his knowledge lightly and never presume to speak for other than himself.

In other words, it is the subjective experience that matters most, not the supposed objective standard. That my opinion differs with Ebert’s as to the merits of No Country for Old Men does not invalidate it as art, nor do the occasional epic disagreements Ebert had over the years with Gene Siskel or Richard Roeper about various films invalidate any of those films as art.

Creative expression** – including video games – is art. The critical conversation that follows the release of artwork, whether it’s film, theater, painting, sculpture, music, photography, video games, what-have-you, isn’t meant to determine whether the piece in question is or is not art. That’s not a subject that’s up for debate. It’s a discussion by various people who have studied the field as to the artwork’s merits, based on each critic’s (hopefully) informed personal reaction.

** Yeah, it’s not really an adequate term, but I can’t think of one better.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that plenty of video-game defenders aren’t coming at it from the right direction, either, because they’re playing the same game. “No,” they say, “you have to look at X and Y, these games really are art, because they’re good enough to be art.” This is the same problem, just tackled from the other side.

Whether a film or a novel or a play or a symphony or a video game is “good” or “bad” (speaking of inadequate terms) doesn’t determine if it’s art. It just determines if it’s good art or bad art on its own merits within its own medium.

If Ebert doesn’t think that video games are worthy of his time or attention, that’s fine. Millions of people agree with him. Millions of others find that games are worth their own time and attention. But in the end, whether he likes it or not, he doesn’t get to decide whether something is or is not art. Simple as that.

So, yesterday was Tax Day, which means that mobs (they weren’t big enough to be hordes) gathered in public places at the behest of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity to wave badly-spelled and poorly-thought-out signs protesting the fiscal policies of a president and a Congress who have cut their taxes, but have raised the taxes of people much, much wealthier than most of them will ever be.

In honor of the occasion…come on down, folks! It’s time to play America’s favorite game, the sharp-eyes sensation that’s sweeping the nation…that’s right, it’s time for: Spot the Black Person at the Tea Party Rallies!

Well, how’d you do?

It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, surely there are African-Americans who are outraged about government bailouts of banks and government takeover of health care and how Obama is a card-carrying fascist-socialist who wants to take all of our money and give it to poor people who don’t deserve it. Must be. I guess almost all of them were just busy yesterday.

I mean, one might speculate about the notable lack of melanin in the crowds depicted here. Such an odd discrepancy might lead one to wonder just who these Tea Partiers are. It might even lead one to write a paragraph like this:

The so-called “Tea Party” is built largely on a foundation of racism. This is not to say that all or even most Teabaggers are rascists, at least not in an explicit, bedsheet-wearin’ and cross-burnin’ kind of way. That they may not be overtly racist doesn’t mean that they’re not motivated by a subtle and insidious kind of racist thinking. The fact that the Tea Party rallies are comprised almost exclusively of old white people certainly doesn’t do a lot to dispel the notion that Teabaggers might be mostly just scared by the fact that there’s a black man in the White House and terrified of the idea that White Privilege doesn’t mean what it used to and in fact means less and less every day. They’re screaming about taxes and health care and bailouts – things they only barely understand, if at all – because they can’t scream about what’s really bothering them, lest they be perceived as racist.

That’s what one might write, if one were so inclined. I certainly wouldn’t write such a thing, because then I’d be just another Liberal Elitist Playing the Race Card, and we can’t have that, can we, now?

Three guesses which movie I’m most looking forward to this summer.

Okay, if you guessed Iron Man 2, you’re probably right.

But Scott Pilgrim vs. the World just jumped to a great big fat #2.

Great trailer, too. I love the way it starts out making you think it’s yet another iteration of Michael Cera: Sensitive Doe-Eyed Manchild, and then outta nowhere…WHAM! A bit of the old ultra-violence. Beautiful.

So I’ve watched the first few episodes of NBC’s second go-round at turning Parenthood into a TV show. Not bad, not bad. The presence of good actors like Peter Krause and Lauren Graham helps dissipate the somewhat saccharine feeling that Steve Martin and Rick Moranis brought to the movie. Definitely a watchable show so far. Not earth-shattering or must-see or anything, but pretty good.

One thing is just bugging the crap out of me, though. The setting.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fan-fucking-tastic that there’s a Bay Area-centric show that’s not by default set in San Francisco. The East Bay is always criminally under- and mis-represented, so it’s pretty cool to see. But to illustrate what I find so jarring about the show, let’s take a look at some screencaps from last night’s episode:

Okay, they’ve specifically stated several times that the Ancestral Home, pictured here – the house of the parents played by Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia – is in Berkeley.

In Berkeley? Really? Where in Berkeley are you going to find a combination of (1) a house of this size with (2) a yard that gi-freaking-normous that is (3) a vast stretch of flat property with (4) a rustic and picturesque barn and a guest house flanking that huge yard?

I guess this is just the west coast version of the gigantic New York City apartments on “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” The thing is, they’re clearly shooting so many of the exteriors in the Bay Area (e.g. last night’s scene where Dax Shepard took his son for a drive was clearly actually San Francisco and Emily, a Cal alum and Berkeley resident for many years, has recognized several local landmarks), but the house that is the center of so much of the action is so very, very obviously a big and photogenic house that is not in Berkeley – and is most likely somewhere in the LA area – that it kind of ruins the effect of the Bay Area location shooting.

Okay, there’s at least one additional thing that’s bugging me about the show: I get the whole “family togetherness” thing, but why is it that the extended Braverman clan does everything together? Erika Christensen’s subplot last night revolved around teaching her daughter to swim. At episode’s end, she, her husband and daughter show up one morning at Peter Krause’s door and say, “We’re going swimming! Come on!” Cut to a (mysteriously deserted) public pool where the entire cast – and therefore, the entire Braverman family – is romping in the water.

For a show that purports to make much of the issues revolving around balancing career and family and pondering whether Erika Christensen can be both a career woman and a good mother (um, YES, by the way, but we’ll let that 800-lb. gorilla of an issue lie for now) and is constantly reiterating how little time she has to spend with her daughter, it’s just bizarre that the whole family gets together at the drop of a hat for swimming pool outings and little league baseball games and barbecues and school charity auctions and the like.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but my experience is that real families for the most part just don’t work like that. Those times when you can get everyone together under one roof or around one absurdly-long picnic table in the absurdly-huge back yard are special because they happen so rarely. That’s why we love Thanksgiving and Christmas, because those are the times when whole families really make an effort to be together. What’s Braverman Thanksgiving like? As the turkey is brought to the table, Craig T. Nelson stands to make a toast: “This is really special to have everyone here, because we haven’t all been together like this since Tuesday, when we all went en masse to Kid C’s JV volleyball game.” Then at Christmas: “Boy, we haven’t all been together like this except for those twelve times we’ve all been together between Thanksgiving and now. Here, I got you some old Betamax porn videos and a pair of stolen stereo speakers at the Ashby flea market, but you already knew that, because all 15 of us went there together.”

…creates some jarring images sometimes.