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I’ve always loved this short film. Created by legendary cartoonist/animation pioneer Winsor McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur turns 100 years old today.
Going off information from Wikipedia, Gertie was shown as part of McCay’s vaudeville act for the first time at the Palace Theater in Chicago on February 8, 1914. I can’t find any information about the Palace Theater other than the address listed on this photo. The famous Cadillac Palace Theater, which every Google search has pointed me toward, would not be built for another 10 years.
I don’t know about you but I laugh my ass off every time I watch this and if you don’t enjoy this then I don’t know if we can be friends anymore.
I don’t care how much you love this song, you don’t get to make this one yours no matter how much you identify with the handsome dudes who were cast to appeal to your sense of vanity and your not-so-secret desire to stab and machine-gun strangers to death.
Did Lou Reed know what Sony was going to do to his song when he signed the contract to this? Did he know that it was going to be completely recontextualized as an ode to violence, cloaked in superficial irony, to soundtrack a pretty blatant nod to the Columbine massacre fantasy that a whole generation of basement-dwellers kinda wish they could’ve got in on? (Don’t believe me? Skip straight to 0:44 and step straight into the mind of Harris, Klebold and Lanza as they saw themselves.) Did he care what they were going to do to it at all, or does standing on death’s door render such ideas as “artistic integrity” somewhat silly, especially when you’re facing one of the last chances to grab some cash for the loved ones you’re leaving behind?
Did the writer of “Candy Says” not understand (or simply not care?) that he was giving this song over to the most entitled, judgmental, misogynistic, homophobic, trans-phobic subcultures in the world? Was he okay with the possibility that one of his most personal songs could be recast as the soundtrack of male camaraderie as experienced by wealthy, frequently-racist, men’s rights-espousing fedora-wearers with fiercely tribal allegiances to companies whose underpaid employees work in some of the worst conditions in the entire world’s tech industry, and whose biggest passions center around the efficient mastery of increasingly-complex and realistic murder-simulation software?
Did Reed fully understand what Sony’s intent was in using his song in their advertisement? Did he know it would be sonically-butchered with new, out-of-tune vocals? Did he care that the demographic that his song would be used to hook are the most violent aggressors against any call for tolerance and sensitivity on the Internet, the same shit-eating bros who aggressively insult and threaten anyone questioning the status quo in any facet of “geek culture” that they feel remotely connected to? How could an artist whose work surveyed the lives of the down, destitute and disempowered think it was a good idea to give his song to a group of people who, indisputably on the whole, mock the very concepts of empathy and compassion?
Did he want his song to become the next “Mad World” or “Hallelujah”? Does he understand how the Internet and Internet culture have warped the meanings of those tunes and turned them into anthems for strangely-compatible nexus of Glee fans and self-righteous douchebags?
Lou Reed was never one of you and despite what Sony wants you to believe, his tumor-ridden liver was cooler than your whole toxic subculture. You don’t know what that means and never will but years of digesting cynical Internet memes have robbed you of the ability to realize that there’s anything in the world you don’t understand and can’t explain away in sentence fragments and image macros. Choke on your Doritos and fucking die already.
Why do you think you can own someone’s childhood?
Why do you think you can own someone’s future?
Why do people demand an explanation for everything?
Why were the writer and so many readers apparently so offended by this video?
In this case, how superior does the writer feel to his subject?
Do you think former child stars deserve ridicule?
If a child star doesn’t grow up into a Leonardo DiCaprio or Joseph Gordon-Levitt leading man, does that mean they owe you something?
Do you understand the Internet at all?
Did you feel good sticking it to him like this?
When you wrote “where did they find him?” and “where is he now?,” did you honestly believe he was living in seclusion somewhere?
Who does the writer think “they” are?
How did Time.com find this video in the first place?
How does anyone find this video in the first place and not know what Macaulay Culkin has been doing for the past few weeks?
Do you think this video is actually “terrifying”?
Why do you need to “un-see” this?
When did Time magazine turn into Buzzfeed?
Do people still not know how terrible Buzzfeed is?
Do people read Buzzfeed ironically?
Does Buzzfeed really use the money they make from clickbait lists full of animated gifs taken without credit from Tumblr accounts and Google image searches to pay journalists to write actual news stories?
Where are these in-depth, hard-hitting stories that are supposed to make Buzzfeed the next Vice.com?
Will Time disappear from newsstands and become a web-only “publication”?
If they could make a bigger profit in doing so, are there any moral reasons for them not to do so?
Does anyone in 2013 still read news articles that aren’t written specifically to confirm their worldview?
Do editors honestly believe that reader comments contribute to a meaningful dialogue about important issues?
Is there really a right way to eat pizza?
How much of a piece of shit do you have to be to judge how someone eats pizza?
How many of these questions were actually sincere?
How smug to you have to be to write something like this?
Does the writer actually think that Macaulay Culkin is insane, that he posted this not knowing how absurd it looks?
How did this get by editors without anyone knowing or bothering to look into why it was made?
Do people get off on reflecting about “how poorly he’s aged” and still believe that they themselves are anything but a bloated, depressing version of their childhood selves?
Is the writer actually as unnerved and annoyed by this video as he’s trying to sound?
What is the proper level of enthusiasm to show when eating takeout pizza by yourself?
How does the writer claim to know about The Pizza Underground, the existence of which explains the whole video, and still claim to have so many questions?
Did the writer know who The Velvet Underground were?
Did he know who The Velvet Underground were before Lou Reed died last month?
Do people think that this video is supposed to be “funny”?
Is it a “failure” if it isn’t?
Does our culture crave schadenfreude so much that people will rush to mock and judge something as harmless as this, with no frame of reference other than the narrative they’ve constructed in their minds based on nothing but prejudice, resentment of others, and the belief that they are the sole harbinger of objective truth?
Is “theory of mind” a 20th century concept that our society no longer has any need for?
Are we so addicted to nonstop entertainment that such a harmless and short video of a completely mundane subject is treated with suspicion or outright hostility?
Why do people choose to watch a video and respond with confusion or anger when it delivers exactly what it says it will?
Because it would get lots of views from dumb readers excited to watch what looks like a child star’s fall from grace, and is pointless and clueless enough to get a negative reaction out of anyone who’s (A) actually Internet-literate and (B) believes that journalism is serious business (even when it comes to trivial bullshit) was this article actually a highly-calculated piece meant to drive web traffic to Time.com from as wide an audience as possible?
Or is it possible that this just went completely over the writer’s head?
How is it possible that MTV understands what’s happening right now and the arts & culture people of Time do not?
How could anyone believe that the best Tumblr is anything other than this?
Cutfilm Tovent 