This Justin Bieber, Anne Frank Thing

Justin Bieber recently visited the Anne Frank house and wrote this in the guestbook:

"Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

People are pretty upset about it, but I think the critics have been too harsh.

1) He could have said "I know she would have been a belieber," but he used the word "hopefully." So he wasn't totally arrogant, or at least showed restraint.

2) I don't think it's a bad thing to hope that someone you respect would be a fan of yours and appreciate your work. I think it's pretty normal.

3) Justin Bieber isn't really an artist, he's a pop star. He's a product of a very lucrative and very influential system. From a dangerously young age he has been conditioned to believe that it is a good thing to have fans. His career has been built around growing and satisfying a fan base. Pointing fingers at him for assuming an entertainer-fan relationship with the late Anne Frank may not be fair considering so many of us have condoned the system through which he engages the world: a system in which the entertainer-fan relationship has possibly become the most significant relationship in the life of a very young man. I don't think we can play innocent.

I think it's great that people are discussing the appropriateness of Bieber's guestbook note, I don't think it was totally appropriate, but it's naive and unfair to put all the blame on Bieber.

Te'o

I was walking by a restaurant this evening, looked in the window, saw Manti Te’o running in the NFL combine, and got to feeling bad. I feel bad for Manti Te’o.

I feel like I’ve been conditioned to desire intimacy with another human being more than anything else. The majority of happy endings that I’ve been told have involved two people falling in love and living happily ever after. I don’t think that storybook romances exist, yet I chase them anyway. And I don’t think that I’m alone in that.

Where do we search for things? The Internet, right? So why wouldn’t we search for romance there as well. Many people flock to online dating sites; I’ve joined those ranks, myself. And an online, one can experience a false sense of control: maintaining anonymity and deciding when to break it. That “control,” coupled with the desire for intimacy, can make it easy for one to become vulnerable with another on the Internet. And that vulnerability makes the Internet an easy “place” for one to be taken advantage of.

There are those who would wonder why Manti Te’o needed the Internet because, as a high profile athlete, he could have had his pick of gals. But maybe that’s a problem. I know next to nothing about romance, but I imagine that being high-profile makes it even more difficult to find genuine intimacy. You would begin relationships with strangers who already know about you, and might desire to be with you for motivations other than genuine connction.

I think that Te’o was wrong for lying, but he was also a victim. I feel bad that he has become the face of something so embarrassing. I’ve heard so many people wonder how he could have possibly fallen into that mess, but I don’t. It could have happened to anyone. I know that it could have happened to me.

High School

I love film and television set in high school. I’m currently hooked on Friday Night Lights, I’m a recovering Glee addict, and I heartily enjoy the guilty pleasure teen romcom genre (ie. Mean Girls, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc.). I found, 21 Jump Street’s contribution to the genre through young adult characters to be brilliant! I’ve also spent time writing my own high school fiction. I’ve finally stopped to ask, ‘Why?’

One, I think high school is very easily dramatized. Teenagers are very interesting as they begin to assert themselves but with very little wisdom and experience. Teen angst and idealism allows for extreme dramatic shifts within a character. And the arc of high school is very satisfying: beginning as “children,” becoming “adult”, climaxing in Prom. But I think my own experience has a lot to do with it.

My move from Chicago to suburban Los Angeles before my junior year of high school split my high school experience in two, and I’m unable to take ownership of either half. Throughout my first two years, my best friends were those that I had made in elementary school, but we began to scatter and my sense of belonging to any social circles waned (the main factor in my willingness to move to a new school). Then in California, I endured a year of near-juvenile exile before my classmates were courteous enough to include me regularly. These descriptions make my experiences sound overly depressing, but actually many of my most vivid memories of happiness are from high school; I just didn’t feel like I belonged.

So I think I consume high school media, attempting to fill a void that I feel in my own experience. But I also think I am fascinated by it because I have observed it so closely. Unlike teachers—who are outsiders looking in—I studied high schoolers as one of their own, an infiltrator pleasantly drifting in and out of circles but never becoming part of one, feeling and succumbing to the same seduction of pursuing popularity (so I wasn't totally disconnected). Coupling my observations with my two very different high school experiences, I consider myself a sort of expert on high school: like an scholarly astronomer who has studied the cosmos thoroughly, but never experienced outer space firsthand.

What kind of astronaut would I have been?

The Wee Hours

Sometimes I wish I worked nights, like an overnight shift at a hotel desk or something. I'm not unhappy with my job, I just love the wee hours of the night--even though I'm often more content when going to bed early--and my 9-5 job limits my contact with that time.

I love the feeling of being up late at night or early in the morning when everyone else is asleep. I feel like the only person on a post-apocalyptic earth, and peacefully so. And I love the significance of the few human encounters that occur during those hours. There's a profound bond shared by two strangers when they are the only two stirring souls in each others' immediate lives; even if they don't speak, they notice each other in a much more meaningful way.

I also enjoy the peace of those hours. They are great times to reflect. They are also great times to create: my filter as a writer subsides and I am able to producer more interesting products deep into the night.

I think I would also enjoy work that simply allows me to wait in quiet. I could be wrong, it could prove extremely boring. But I think I would like it.

Top 5 Sports Films

My top 5 sports films. I haven't seen every sports movie, but I made a list anyway. Goooo blogs!

 5. Hoop Dreams

Widely regarded as one of the greatest documentaries of all time, Hoop Dreams remarkably follows not one but two basketball players from elementary school through their college careers. It is impressive, fascinating, entertaining (though its 3-hour run time may test the patience of many viewers) and poignant. It also affords the world a window into one of the gentlest souls it will ever encounter.

4. Happy Gimore

This is Adam Sandler’s funniest movie (face it, Billy Madison falls apart after Billy leaves Ms. Vaughn’s class). It features a ludicrous premise, a terrifically memorable antagonist (Shooter McGavin) and a hilarious use of Bob Barker. Few films are so entertaining.

3. The Hammer

I was shocked that an R-Rated, Adam Corolla-written film could be so tame. I was even more shocked that it could be so sweet and earnest. Rather than relying on crude humor and going for big, cheap laughs, The Hammer takes a less-is-more approach and goes for pleasant chuckles and moments of genuine human connection that just make you smile. It all adds up to an underdog story that you can’t help but root for. The Hammer is a real diamond in the rough.

2. Goon

Goon begins as an extremely crude and violent comedy, and it’s hilarious. But in the second act the humor fades away and it becomes a touching underdog story. The transition is so well-done that I hit a point when I realized I hadn’t really laughed in 30 minutes and I didn’t care (well OK, I cared a little bit because it was so funny, but I still liked it!) This film raises important questions about discerning and responding to your calling. It gave me a lot to think about, it made me want to be a better person, and it made me smile A LOT. Very, very few movies have done that. It also has a great “aftertaste.”

1. Sugar

This story of a Dominican baseball player in America isn’t about a baseball player as much as it is about a foreigner who finds himself in a strange new environment. Sugar communicates so much without ever saying it out loud, and it does so not due to the acting, directing, screenwriting or anything else individually, but rather through the perfect sum of each of its wonderful parts. Whenever I think of great films of all genres, Sugar comes to mind very quickly.

Spend a Life

I’ve recently been contemplating the human ability to connect with one another and the tremendous potential for harm and good that lies within it (which is brilliantly explored in the film The Descendants). I’ve come to the conclusion that the power to connect is greatly under-valued.

We are taught to stand out. From a young age, we are encouraged to pursue our gifts and we receive compliments when we do them well. The prevailing “good” message seems to be to hone our gifts despite what cultural authorities say. Stories of young people defying their parents’ wishes of having a good career to follow their own artist paths are extremely romanticized. I think that this message may also lead us astray.

I think that instead of pursuing what makes us special, we should pursue what makes us powerful. And I think that what makes us powerful is the most common ability that a person receives: the ability to love.

We are at our most capable, our most world-changing, and our most unstoppable when we love. When we forgive others we tap into a beauty that transcends our own abilities and when we care for others we offer a healing force that is stronger than medicine or art.

I don’t think it’s wrong to pursue your passions. If you love to sing, play, write or whatever, do it. Do it well, but don’t let it get in the way of your love. Don’t neglect human relationships so that you can spend time building up your own kingdom. Make your life’s work about the building of OUR Kingdom.

That’s what I think right now.

The Good Fight

For a time I had decided to boycott violent films. My media studies, observations of children (especially boys) fantasizing about violence, and the presence of violence in the world led me to categorize violent entertainment as inappropriate content. No exceptions. For a while, that boycott kept me from watching my beloved X-Men in their new film, X-Men: First Class, but I recently gave in, watched the film, and was thoroughly enchanted.

I credit the film’s success to its focus on Charles Xavier. What fascinates me about Xavier is his commitment to peace and that he risks his own life to defend those who hate him. His virtue is almost Christ-like and his reluctance to fight is heavily rooted in Just War Theory: a theory that is at the core of my personal view of violence in the world and media. Xavier’s pacifistic philosophy was enough to redeem the X-Men in my eyes, but I still find flaws in the X-Men’s distribution.

Not all of the X-Men share Xavier’s nonviolent philosophy and that is the primary conflict of the series. The battle of wills in X-Men is complex and requires a mature, contemplative audience. However, the X-Men and other superheroes are often marketed to children in the forms of cartoons and action figures. Children will catch the explosions and the punches, but miss the debate on violence’s merit. We need to take a step back and consider the risk we are taking by packaging such mature content for immature minds.