Macklemore and Ryan Lewis recently released “Same Love,” a pro marriage equality hip-hop anthem. Yes, the rap kind of hip-hop. The hip-hop of Snoop & Dr. Dre, a genre long dominated by a hyper-masculine perception of what it means to be a man.

This song points to the hypocrisy imbedded in the land of the free limiting the rights of a select minority of its citizenry. Macklemore calls out the very real negative consequences of using the word “gay” as a negative descriptor. He speaks up for all of the middle and high school kids suffering inside the isolation created by a society whose off-handed colloquial language makes their hallways forever a dangerous place. He raps about the razorblades of loneliness and ostracism that are cutting through our beautiful gay children’s wrists, instead of the stubble of their beards.

Macklemore is not a transcendent rapper. He misses beats and finagles syllables in the herky-jerky style of a beginner poet attempting to make every third line rhyme. While he may have thrift store racks full of personal style, his flow still has a ways to go. But nonetheless, when Mary Lambert’s voice rises to meet the refrain, you hear the honesty and pain inherent to the words, “I can’t change. Even if I tried. Even if I wanted to.” You can feel the dual-motivations to be accepted by one’s peers and to love who you are, pulling gay youths in opposite directions. Have friends and fake it, or be yourself by yourself.

“She keeps me warm, she keeps me warm, she keeps me warm. My love, my love, my love.”

She has found love. She has toiled on hands and knees, sifting through the rocks, sand, and mud in the dating pool. Mercifully, one imperfect nugget of gold panned out. She can’t believe it is all her own. And yes, her nugget has a gender and a name and an identity. Most importantly, however, is that in this found love there is safety. There is relaxation. There is acceptance. In the arms of her lover the memories of those school hallways seems less constricting, the wounds less permanent.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are probably more pop/hip-hop artists than they are gay icons. More Vanilla Ice than Dan Savage. But in a world where everyone’s personal opinions, no matter how decrepit, are easily broadcast worldwide with a click of the word ‘Submit’ on a YouTube channel, this sure does seem “like a damn good place to start.”

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If we here at Spot Cool Stuff had to choose one movie that best describes the totality of Wes Anderson’s characters (which of course we must!), we’d have to say . . . The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Indeed, it’s not even one of his own films. But just as Mr. Button lives his life in reverse, Wes Anderson builds his characters backwards. The chronologically older his characters are, the more Anderson emphasizes all of their childish insecurities, emotional immaturities, and non-trivial fascinations.

This purposeful spotlight on the juvenile forces the viewer to focus on the principle that each older character is merely a collection of all the previous younger versions of him or herself, and that we just happen to have met this character now, in our present. Royal Tenenbaum, the family patriarch played by Gene Hackman, proves to be by far the most immature member of a family that includes 3 biological children, 1 pseudo-adopted son, 2 grandsons, and a beagle. In Rushmore, Herman Blume, played by Bill Murray, becomes best frenemies with a 15-year-old student from a prestigious private high school, and then proceeds to battle him for the supposed affections of one of the Rushmore Elementary School’s teachers. Not exactly grown up behavior.

The actual children in Anderson’s tales are approached with a Sendakian sensibility. What most dismiss as the melodramatic bi-polar waves of passion that define the never-ending tide of childhood and adolescence, Wes Anderson depicts as moments of true, pure, and pricelessly untainted emotion. While Moonrise Kingdom was certainly the fruition of Anderson’s grown up depiction of children’s love and loss, it was certainly not his first foray.

In the Fantastic Mr. Fox, the relationship between teenagers Ash and Kristopherson is as central to the heart of the film as the raid of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean’s factories. Moreover, we follow the youngest character, Mr. Fox’s son Ash, as he struggles through the three stages of young adulthood: self-hatred, self-discovery, and self-acceptance. When you are in your early teens, everyone feels like an unsaveable weirdo. Wes Anderson’s films celebrate the inherent saveability of all children. He revels in showing us example after example of magically bizarre individuals, not to reduce our feeling of personal weirdness, but rather to emphasize that what makes us the strangest also makes us interesting, unique, and worthwhile. His characters don’t waste their energy fighting against their own crazy, but rather they spend it trying to figure out where their jagged edges fit cleanly into the puzzle of a world that denies its own deep-seated craziness.

What does all of Anderson’s meticulous character development, deep existential introspection, and personal-relationship intertwining bring him: Hit after hit after quirky-ass hit.

Watch them again for the first time.

Wes Anderson’s characters are just . . . *hands wave* . . . different:

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Beiber. Money. Women.
A Matter of Taste
FX’s Ball-Busting Comedy: Archer
5 Most Unintentionally Offensive Movies of All Time

How else does one explain headlines such as:

“Justin Bieber hopes Anne Frank would have ‘been a believer’” (CNN)
“Justin Beiber faces bill for Monkey Care in Germany: Customs officials say food and vet visits for pet capuchin total several thousand dollars” (Rolling Stone)
“Justin Bieber fan claims singer fathered her child, if true, she may be in trouble for statutory rape” (FOX)

And so, it was only a matter of time until someone caricatured the caricature as well as VH1’s Stevie TV and its actual team of writers did:

Stevie TV drives a nail through the heart of the disease which is ‘Bieber fever’ with this hilarious faux “Win a Dream Date with Justin Bieber” comedy sketch. It all starts with casting the scrawny Bieber as a young woman. Not only does this choice reinforce Bieber’s prepubescent ‘look,’ which has morphed from transitioning lesbian all the way to Kate Moss heroin chic, but it also lulls us into a false sense of G-rated sensibility which is then summarily shattered with the first smack of the unsuspecting under-aged Belieber’s ass. And, with a female Biebs, it’s a lot easier and more satisfying to laugh at the horrible garbage that comes out of his mouth. Bieber’s game with the ladies is one part Beavis & Butthead’s love of obvious sexual innuendo, one part Michael Scott’s self-adoration, and one part Paris Hilton’s selfie twitpics. You could love him, if only he weren’t already so damn in love with himself.

Bieber’s portrayal perfectly captures his complete lack of adult sex appeal and his utter disconnection from reality due to having his life filtered through handlers since before he outgrew middle school talent shows. He’s never learned to be sympathetic to the girl blowing chunks at his side, but rather his reality is captured through the lens of a high mega-pixel cell phone camera. It has become obvious that Bieber’s Facebook reality has left velvet ropes around those areas of his brain that foster human connection.

Which brings us to the bathroom scene, a decidedly darker vision of the world of a child superstar. Frankly, it’s probably prophetic. The last musician to get this famous, this quickly, while having the talent to back it up, might have been Michael Jackson. And as VH1’s fake Bieber hands his spare Glock to the adoring Belieber to hold while watching him take a dump (“I like to have someone watch me.”), you get that uneasy feeling that the real Biebs may not be as far from a bathroom floor reality of his own. There may come a day when even the Biebs is forced to trade in his BMW lifestyle for a more responsible Korean import like a KIA.

And you know what KIA stands for, right? Ketamine. Involuntary manslaughter. Alimony.

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The intonation he puts on the word “get” is laden. It’s laden with a sensibility that implies “dance is weird and I never understand what it means, which makes it boring.” He then spends the 20 minutes expounding about the complex intricacies of the great new sound by that underground band out of Stockholm.

He is blind to the irony that his dismissal of one art form for the sake of another is drastically reducing our respect for him and this conversation. Close-mindedness aside, he’s not the first person to get flummoxed looking for meaning in an unknown medium. Whether it be a dance recital, poetry, or even a whiskey tasting, dipping your tippy-toe into an unknown art can be daunting business. The good news is, it shouldn’t be.

The wonderful trait all of these media have in common is that they are mostly subjective. Taste, in reality, is shorthand for personal taste. There is no such thing as impersonal taste (though horrid B.O. could potentially qualify). And with subjectivity comes one of the most comforting phrases in the English language: There IS no wrong answer! This is the key to understanding art and impressing the upper crust with your knowledge of the finer things.

Let’s explore dance as an example. Do some dance pieces have meanings and intentions that the choreographer hopes to convey? Absolutely. Sometimes these messages are difficult to miss (it is very difficult to ignore the African America heritage invoked in Alvin Ailey’s Revelations), while other times the messages are more subtle (think about most modern dance pieces). Occasionally, there is no message at all. Like a breathtaking painting, some dances stand on their ocular beauty alone. David Parson’s Caught enlists a strobe light to highlight the dancer as he or she appears to float across the stage, three feet above the dance floor. The dancer’s repeated leaps are shrouded from the viewer in the strobe’s dark pauses.

More often than not, however, a dance’s meaning is not a singular entity. If the choreographers exact meaning doesn’t get conveyed, all is not lost. Thankfully, no matter what message you take from the dance experience, that is what it means. For you. And in the case of taste, you are the only one that matters (FYI. This does not work as a worldview.) Even if a particular intention isn’t transmitted, whatever you felt as a viewer is still valid. Actually, it is more than valid, it is that dance’s meaning.

“But wait,” you ask, “What if what I felt during the dance is wrong and completely removed from the choreographer’s intent?” “What if I didn’t even feel anything, I just thought that how they moved around was, like, cool and kind of amazing.”

To your first question, there IS no wrong answer remember! And to your second question, you are still right. If you went up to a dancer after a show and said, “Look, I don’t know anything about dance per say, but the way you all moved was just amazing.” I promise you that she or he will take that as a heartfelt compliment.

What is even more wonderful about personal taste is that it lends itself to discussion. When asked about the dance you just saw, instead of wondering if you ‘got it,’ focus more on what you did get. You can then compare your feelings, interpretations, and invocations with the other dance-concert goers. And then, all of a sudden, you realize you’re having an educated conversation about dance, without having taken a dance class. You’ve come a long way baby, uh-huh.

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David Parson’s Caught visually amazes its audience:

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And here’s the answer. Archer takes the most adult, raunchy, filthy, potty-mouthed humor, shoves it inside the ridiculous 007 culture of Bond fame, transports it to a capitalist American “security-agency” for hire, and then adds some mommy issues. This cocktail is then shaken and served in gut-busting laughing fits that you’ll hate yourself for enjoying so much.

Again, the language they use requires a “this content is not suitable for children” warning after every commercial break. At times, it seems that the writers for this show simply made refrigerator magnets of every filthy word allowed on television, then arranged them into the best possible order, adding a few even filthier words which they will then bleep over half-heartedly.

Just look at the cast of characters. You have Dr. Krieger, the agency’s scientist whose sexual proclivities include, but are not limited to, the Japanese holo-lover he’s created for himself. Ray Gillette, a homosexual agent who has already lost and regained the use of his legs twice (three times?) in the series. Cheryl Tunt, a billionaire secretary who is as dimwitted as she is a drug addict. And last but not least, Pam Poovey, a hefty street-fighter turned office-worker, whose id has completely enveloped her super-ego. And these are not even the main characters!

Archer and his mother, along with the only competent person in the entire agency and Archer’s ex, Lana Kane, are the heart of this show. And this show needs a heart desperately. The dialogue (aka constant bickering) between these characters is so intimate and familiar, while at the same time crude and cutting, that it will make you feel like you’re at Thanksgiving dinner with your family. It reeks of authenticity. The barbs are just so perfectly tailored to their recipient, while the retorts come firing back at a Gilmore Girl-like pace. And since they’re family, all this raunchy horseplay is understandable. It is just like how your family lets your creepy uncle make all the cringe-worth statements he wants at family reunions, as long as he keeps his hands to himself.

Archer’s family owns a security agency. They all fight like children . . . incredibly disillusioned foul-mouthed children. And because they embody the absolute worst parts of our own families, we love them for it.

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Just a preview of the type of hostile work environment we’re talking about:

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1. Rocky Balboa (2006)

If you put any ten random people in a room together and asked them what the worst movie they have ever seen is, three of them will tell you it was Rocky Balboa. Three. Every time. That’s how bad this movie is. This movie is so bad that when you Google search “the Rocky Movies,” this film does not show up. This movie is so bad that the 60 year-old Sly Stallone boxing a man 35 years his junior does NOT detract from this film. You will believe Sly is a boxer more than you will believe Geraldine Hughes is a human being with real emotions. Most scenes in this movie are so stilted that they read like SNL skits commenting on the horrific acting.

And so Rocky Balboa makes the ‘Most Offensive’ list for lowering the standards for what we’ll call ‘a movie.’ When trash like this gets put in theaters we lose more than the $9 of our ticket purchase. We lose a bit of trust with the movie industry; That trust that they will screen out (pun!!!) the shlock and shmegma that gets made against many producer’s better judgments, and we will keep paying increasing ticket sales for whatever they put out next. After watching Rocky Balboa, I had to go home and screen Shawshank Redemption before returning to the theater for Beerfest, Borat, and Little Miss Sunshine.

2. 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

Ok. Imagine a script that goes like this. Good looking twenty-something woman in the city swears off sex following an intensely bad relationship. During this period of abstinence, she meets a new guy who she falls for. Right before she is ready to give herself to this new partner, her ex-boyfriend breaks into her apartment while she’s sleeping and has sex with her. She only wakes up as he is finishing. Though she is humiliated by what has happened, she is laughed at by her friends and shamed by her new lover.

Not your cup of tea? A little too rapey for you? Yah, agreed. Nonetheless, that is the lion’s share of the plot of 40 Days and 40 Nights except ‘the girl’ is Josh Harnett’s character. The ex-girlfriend actually does break into the guy’s apartment and rides him while he’s sleeping. The movie continues like that is no big deal. That is a big deal! When a candy-pop romantic comedy geared toward young adults plays down the seriousness of sexual assault, no matter the gender, that is corrupting what young minds see as the norm. This film makes the Most Offensive list for its lack of self awareness regarding the ramifications of what begins as a silly game and ends like an episode of CSI:SVU.

3. If Lucy Fell (1996)

Walking out of a movie theater mid-film is an extreme move. Something has to go down seriously wrong with the film or your pants to motivate someone out of a comfortable seat in a temperature controlled room.

Eric Schaeffer’s character Joe has been lusting after the woman in the apartment building across from his. This woman, Jane, is played by Elle Macpherson. (If you are young, and are just seeing a picture of this beautiful woman now, stop what you are doing and immediately go rent Sirens (1993). Joe finds some success in the art world and subsequently ends up inside Jane’s apartment with her. As Joe makes his way down Jane’s body, Jane makes some off-handed remark about getting turned on being watched by Joe across the way.

Joe, the semi-stalker guy, was previously unaware that Jane knew he had been watching her, and this realization somehow triggers a sudden outpouring of self-righteous morality while he is head deep below Elle Macpherson’s waist. He stops, says some version of “I don’t think can’t do this,” stands up, and walks out of Jane’s apartment. Almost simultaneously, every male moviegoer in my party screamed obscenities at the screen and left the theater. (Judge for yourself, the offending scene appears below.)

Talk about breaking the illusion. There is no way in human history that a heterosexual male in the throes of passion with the girl of his dreams is going to stop said passion for any reason short of getting his unit cut off or having a parent die. Even in the later of the two situations, the funeral arrangements may have to wait another 75-90 seconds. This tear in the fabric of reality is so offensive that it ruins the entire film. Oh, and the actual plot of If Lucy Fell involves a pact to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if Joe and his friend Lucy don’t find stable relationship partners by the end of the month. (Spoiler Alert: Shockingly, they find each other) So yah, it kinda romanticizes the hell out of suicide as well. Not cool.

4. Crash (2004)

It seems ironic that the 1996 film Crash, which deals with characters who seek and act out their sexual arousal by purposely getting into increasingly violent car accidents, did not make the list. The 2006 film with the same title, however, is number one with a bullet. When this movie won Best Picture, any lingering admiration for “The Academy,” dissipated like steam through a sewer grate.

This movie intends to shine a light on the everyday racism that is still alive and well in LA. I was expecting a storyline mixed with nuance, bias, and lots of second-guessing interpersonal interactions. Most modern racism inhabits these ambiguous situations where racist behaviors can be explained away by factors other than race. Racism today doesn’t slap you in the face, but rather it consistently ignores you and waits on the white person next to you.

Crash, instead, lines up scenario after scenario of people getting pissed off at strangers and screaming a potpourri of racist slurs in their direction. An n-word here and a Latino slur there, this kind of old timey in-your-face racism just doesn’t ring true for LA in the 21st century. More corrosively, uninformed viewers leave the theater feeling vindicated that they’ve learned something about racism in this day and age, when in reality, the movie is a noisy distraction of 1980’s racism set in 2004. Lost in this garbage bag of a movie is any real education about the function of race and racism in modern day America.

5. Highlander 2: The Quickening

This pick may be the most personal of the bunch. After a first movie that introduced a premise of immortality so appealing that even after this clunker of a movie, it still bore a successful TV mini-series by the same name. Chris Lambert’s wood-chipper of a voice aside, Highlander 2: The Quickening is a cavalcade of semi-related scenes held together by violence and ozone repairing earth shields. All of the fertile material regarding the rules and regulations that come with being an immortal are set-aside in favor of more slashing and cutting — both in terms of sword play, as well as the haphazard editing which sends the viewer bouncing around across time and space. There is a flashback to life back on the planet Zeist. Need I go on?

While The Quickening may not climb to the levels of offense that some of the earlier entries on this list reached, it makes up the gap by disappointing every movie goer who entered the theater expecting the second installment of the new sci-fi cult movie classic. Instead, the viewers were subjected to a slideshow of unrelated special effects and newly trimmed necks, which ended up decapitating this potential movie franchise.

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Or, most years it’s awarded. In 1987, the Diagram wasn’t handed out because no book title was deemed odd enough. Imagine the controversy! And that was nothing compared to the dispute among lovers of odd book titles caused by the 2008 Diagram winner: The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. That heartwarming tale, it turned out, was written by a computer! (These days the tome is a collectors item that fetches $800 per copy).

Will this year’s winner also stir debate? Will there even be a winner? As the world awaits with baited breath the announcement of the 2013 Diagram Prize tomorrow, we only hope that the selection will live up to past Diagram winning titles like Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.

Click on the covers below to learn more. And if you have a favorite title — or a book you feel was snubbed — our comment section awaits.

For the 2013, the nominees are . . .

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis

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Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts

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