Faves, 2007

This is a collection, in no particular order, of some favorite movies, TV shows, videos, recordings, websites, books, etc., of 2007.

The hardest thing about writing this is remembering anything at all that happened in January, February, March, April, and May. I sort of remember June and July, which I guess is good. Could it be that most good things first appear in the fall? Film critics certainly don't mind thinking so. Seems dubious to me.

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-Fan vids by girls and women who express their sincere affection for movies and television and their performers and characters. I find these so much more resonant with my experience of pop culture these days than the too-cool mashups and home-brewed trailers that were among the big things in 2006. Here's an example by the YouTuber KristenBellfan16 paying tribute to Milly and Johnny in Because I Said So, a cheesy, can't-change-the-channel-when-it's-on-HBO rom-com from last winter. When the dialog is stripped away in favor of pop music, faces become more expressive and details of acting more prominent, like the way Mandy Moore sometimes shyly hides her eyes when she smiles and how adorably she mixes amusement and concern. And if you avoided seeing this movie because Diane Keaton is supposed to play a parody of herself (it didn't bother me), this little songvid gets rid of her entirely.



-Rihanna's totally unsubtle and seductive video to "Shut Up and Drive."

Rihanna - Shut Up & Drive (Video Premiere)
Uploaded by Alisvideo

-Rufus Wainwright’s album Release the Stars, especially the schmaltzy Phantom of the Opera quotation at the end of the apocalyptic love song “Between My Legs.”

-Which reminds me of another thing: concert videos shot from the audience. This one is of "Between My Legs" at a concert I saw at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee on August 27.



And another version of the same song, with much better audio and video quality, from a concert in Saratoga.



-Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a page-turning mystery among other things. Of 2006, though.

-Then We Came To The End (click it, really), a novel I'm only half-way through, written audaciously in the first-person plural as a non-individuated "we" (I keep wondering how it could be made into a movie in a way that preserves the strangeness of this device) and another addition in what would seem like a burgeoning genre: satire of the corporate office. (Others would include Clockwatchers, Office Space, Dilbert, The Boss of it All, and two versions of The Office.) A topic for future research.

-The Simpsons movie for that "does whatever a Spider Pig does" goofiness.

-I’m Not There mostly for Cate Blanchett in the Felliniesque sequences and also for the ambition of making a movie that would take on Dylan as he might take himself on, maddeningly and with confident, visionary poetry.

-No Country For Old Men, especially first 3/4 when it’s a masterful guy-chases-guy flick.

-Ratatouille, for the details of the restaurant kitchen. Pixar films succeed in the details. A pox on its head, though, for all that pandering Anton Ego crap to flatter critics.



-Michael Clayton, especially the climactic confrontation between Clooney and Tilda Swinton when he gets her to agree to give him all that money. We had been waiting for Clooney to turn that on.

-Jonathan Lethem’s “Ecstasy of Influence” essay in Harper’s.

-The trailer for Juno. I haven't seen the movie but the trailer's a delight. I especially like the use of the word "shenanigans" and "All the Young Dudes" by Mott the Hoople. (Update 12/22: Just saw the movie; as you might have heard, it makes you smile, laugh, cry, and eagerly await more movies from the folks who made it.)



-I also really connect with the trailer for Hannah Takes the Stairs, another film yet to come to my town. I guess I sort of like her indie hairdo and the bright yellow background for the titles. The bit with the slinky is cutesy.



-Virginia Heffernan’s TV and internet criticism, especially when writing on the uncanny modernism of reality shows.

-Songs About Buildings and Food, a blog I always want to read as soon as I see a new post no matter what else I should be doing.

-Jezebel, a site for the ladies but who cares. It manages snark without the nastiness of its big sis Gawker and has the progressive agenda of being an antidote to the "aspirational" vapidity of women's mags.

-Slate’s slideshows like the ones on houses, snapshots, asses, and parking garages.

-Amy Winehouse before she totally lost it. Yeah, even the intro/verse parts of “You Know I’m No Good” that were used on the soundtrack of every quality drama in prime-time.



-The Hills, every moment but especially the ones where you can see Lauren’s face.

-Friday Night Lights, first season only, for making us care about people we too rarely get to know so well on prime-time television.

-Mad Men. Fave of the year in any medium. Every scene is its own little exquisite artwork, and at the end of every episode I can’t wait to watch a second time. Special honors for ending the season with a beautiful, dramatic surprise. This clip is from the episode "Indian Summer" in which the ad agency is working on a campaign for the "Electrosizer," a bogus weight-loss device for women that is better used for autoerotic pleasure. Meanwhile, Betty the bored housewife gets physical with her washing machine. This is the show I will miss most if the strike spells the end of all scripted television (I'm being dramatic but seriously, things seem pretty bleak right now).



-Tell Me You Love Me for being bold enough to be intimate (and I’m not talking about sex scenes).

-Gilmore Girls, which was never as sharp, deft, or clever after Amy and Dan left but still held onto much of its warmth and charm in its last season.

-The Sopranos for its shocking, terrifying final episodes.

-Hotel Chevalier, for its miniature elegance and “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” and the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack with “Les Champs Elysees” by Joe Dassin from the film’s closing scene.



-30 Rock for making us feel like we’re good enough to understand its secret-society, inside baseball jokes.

-Knocked Up, which was very endearing, and Superbad, which was even more hilarious. McLovin' is my favorite movie character of the year.

-Hairspray for John Travolta and Christopher Walken as a loving couple and for doing musical comedy the old-fashioned way.

-Scrabulous, the only Facebook application I would really recommend to someone who hasn’t tried it.

-Yo Gabba Gabba, especially the electronic and hip-hop tunes and old-school videogame graphics.

-The gorgeous, enchanting pilot of Pushing Daisies. (Those of us who predicted it could not sustain its visuals and who thought the whimsy wouldn't work in the repetitious format of weekly television were quickly proven right.)

-My So-Called Life DVDs for the interviews between Winnie Holzman and Claire Danes where they both get all emotional.

-Netvibes, a great RSS reader. When a site offers only a partial feed, Netvibes allows you to see the website within the reader so you don’t need to click through.

-Tumblr, the blogging platform for people who don’t equate blogging with writing.

-Picnik, a brilliant online photo editor that does most of what you want to do in Photoshop, has no learning curve, and is available in a no-frills version for free.

-Lolcats and all their offshoots.

-Threadless t-shirts and more generally the art of the smart, jokey hipster t. The source for tracking these is tcritic.

-Leave Britney Alone!, my choice for web video of the year. But it was a disappointing year for web video, which I thought was supposed to conquer the world.

-And Sanjaya Malekar, a small-screen superstar for a few weeks in the spring. He's an awful singer but an enthusiastic showman. At least this performance of "You Really Got Me" was entertaining. This is the one where the little girl cries. Isn't there a little bit of her in us all?



And in this sultry Latin number, "Besame Mucho," he makes love to the camera in a way that might make you feel dirty if not exactly seduced. In its finest moments, Idol affirms that there's no business like show business.

The OMG of the week is this French YouTube video of people throwing cans in the trash. The "it's fake!" response doesn't diminish the OMG effect very much for me. So what? See also Guy catches glasses with face.

Big Love will air three flashback shorts in anticipation of its new season, first on On Demand and later on the web and on the regular HBO. My question for all such things is, if they are inessential for understanding the narrative of a series itself--and they have to be inessential because HBO is not going to risk the vast majority of viewers' incomprehension--why should I watch? I watched the BSG miniature New Caprica episodes and didn't know what to do with them. This kind of storytelling seems to be so much more driven by the desire to try out new distribution systems and media platforms than by a need to tell certain kinds of stories.

A review and appreciation of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at PopMatters makes clear just how impressive this work is, a shot-by-shot fanvid remaking Raiders done by kids in the early 80s without the aid of a VCR. They relied on memory and research and found many creative solutions to problems of recreating a blockbuster using the resources available to amateurs.

And two blog threads I meant to link to earlier in the week...better late than never:

1. I haven't read all the comments, but a number of posts at Kristina Busse's blog about fandom, fanfic, gender, and related topics make clear how passionate media scholars are about their objects of study (see especially the one that got it started about a gender divide in fandom studies and a subsequent one about the validity of fanfic that gets pretty bitchy at the end of the comments).

2. Chuck has been tracking a discussion about whether film blogs are a threat to critics/professional writers or even whether they are just changing things for the worse (1, 2). Similar discussions have been going on for several years in various quarters. Foodbloggers have changed the way the public gets info about restaurants, especially in big cities. Litbloggers are killing book review sections. Lawprof bloggers jump on Supreme Court opinions the moment they are issued, bettering the analysis offered by journalists and rendering law reviews, which have slower publication schedules, irrelevant. If this is a fight, my money is on the bloggers. They write for free and with great passion, are networked to each other, engage directly with their readers, and have few of the limits on their creative output that constrain mainstream media. Indeed, the mainstream media may succeed by co-opting many of the bloggers' forms and functions.

At Wagmedia, a new blog by an old friend, Ira Wagman is discussing Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture. In particular he wonders whether all the attention being given to the new participatory culture is slighting the casual audiences--still the vast majority of culture consumers--who aren't interested in making fan fiction or researching Survivor locations to spoil upcoming seasons or following narratives across multiple platforms. Ira writes:

Do we really want television made by and for fans? What happens to the casual (and not passive) viewer? They're important too, aren't they?

I had some similar responses when I read the book. In general I am really excited by the developments Jenkins writes about, but I also have some reservations about the way scholars talk about them. Such as...

-Is participatory culture significant because it represents a prevailing mode of engaging with media? Certainly it is not that now. I kept wondering as I was reading CC whether its argument hangs on a prediction for the future. Perhaps participatory culture is poised to become a standard way for a significant number of people to engage with media. But perhaps not. Maybe participatory culture will remain a minority, niche pursuit that is more available to those with the benefits of social and economic privilege.

-Maybe even if inequality between cultural consumers is overcome in the future, most people still won't be interested in the modes of media interaction Jenkins champions. As it is now, most people who have the education and technology necessary to engage in read/write culture (as opposed to read-only culture) aren't interested. I have been noticing this more and more as I become immersed in the read/write culture myself. For instance, most people I talk to have no idea what an RSS feed is and when I tell them about it, they react like I'm trying to sell them encyclopedias. My students, whose age might indicate they are more likely than I am to know about such things, need me to define terms like "mashup." The experience of media as an immersive obsession isn't for everyone. Most people don't use media that way, and why should they? They have a lot of other things to do. My sense is that the norm is still to use the web for e-mail, shopping, looking things up, and little else--i.e., not the way you and I use it.

-Even when people are up for an immersive experience, they might prefer the role of spectator to that of participant. Participation isn't usually what we're looking for in our entertainment. I love movies and TV because they come to me, they please me, they offer me so much. In return, I often give them nothing more than my attention and interest. And this is robustly satisfying--nothing seems to be missing from the experience. Jenkins's examples are all of spectators becoming active in the co-creation of media. I too am excited by this activity, but I am not totally comfortable with the unambiguous positive moral valence this is given. It suggests that the comparative passivity of non-co-creating viewers is a less worthy mode of engagement and prescribes a certain kind of viewing activity as preferable. I'm sure Jenkins doesn't mean to be prescriptive in this way, but this is the implication I draw from the way he stakes his position.

So in general: maybe participatory culture isn't for everyone. Maybe it's being adopted as a marketing concept by media companies eager to find the next big thing. Maybe read-only culture has a lot of life left in it yet.

Henry Jenkins admits that 90% of user-generated content is crud. And he is the world's leading champion of user-generated content!

So this falls in the 90. It might even be the worst. video. ever. It's called Goodbye Anna Nicole - Candle in the Wind 2007 - JME and its creator, Mike, offers this caveat: "I would be the first to admit I am not a singer so to any comments about the vocals I would quote Catherine Tate 'am I bothered'". Huh? It begins:

Goodbye Anna Nicole
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
That gave you so much heartache

Oh boy.

Have you been watching Anna on the cable nets? I'm with Jarvis, who writes, "Watching the coverage certainly makes me want to wash it off me."

(Pardon my opportunistic use of Jenkins...his post is of course very thoughtful and makes an excellent point about the value of participatory culture being as much about process as it is about product.)

39 Second Single, about a woman's experiences going on dates, is a nice change from the typical videoblog. Its star is neither young nor male, and she wins your sympathy.

Things you CAN'T do when you're NOT in a pool is excellent physical comedy from the online troupe Don't Be That Guy.

The daily podshow GeekBrief.TV with Cali Lewis has become an unexpected pleasure during my video iPod-enhanced workouts. I have tried watching TV shows on the iPod (no movies yet, though I do want to give it a shot) but I'm happiest watching content made for the very small screen on the very small screen (like The Show, above). GeekBrief.TV is about gadgets and I'm not that into gadgets, but I like Lewis's casual charm and, I guess, I'm kind of getting into gadgets. Thanks to GeekBrief, I really want a Nokia N800.

The Machine is Us/ing Us is a video that puts the ideas behind web 2.0 into a compelling visual form. I might show it in my Principles of Media Studies class when we get around to talking about the web and participatory culture.

In Media Res, at the Media Commons site, has been around for a few months; as of this week the curated video series is offering new entries daily. See for instance the press conference with the Aqua Teen clowns and accompanying discussion by Jeffrey Sconce.

VideOh!

Frontal reactions of girls getting waxed mostly is much too pedestrian a title for this montage of women framed head to mid-torso as they lean back in the salon chair in preparation for having their pubic hair waxed, and then as the wax is torn from their flesh. Their faces express their feelings with vividness and intimacy and a swinging electronic dance track makes their fear and pain seem a little less awful. It was directed by the British music video director Matt Kirkby, who also made Basement Jaxx's U Don't Know Me, starring Queen Elizabeth II.

How to Poop is a Japanese potty-training video starring animated cats and a dancing cartoon turd.

Parcheggio perfetto is four-plus minutes of the worst effort at parallel parking you have ever seen, with hilarious (unintelligible to the non-Italian speaker) commentary by the people around the camera, perched on a balcony above the street. Around 2:00 the driver has a shouting match with someone offscreen and the people by the camera crack up.

The Ten Stages of Opening a Jar is another comic short film by Aaron Yonda, of Madison, WI, one of the talents behind the celebrated Chad Vader series.

All the James Bonds sit at one poker table in this inspired remix called Casino Royal II - Let's Play Again by JMY. This would be a good one to show if you ever happen to teach the Kuleshov effect the same week that you teach fandom and participatory culture.

Notes on Web Video Form

I have been thinking a lot about the form of the new web videos, especially The Show With Ze Frank. These are some of my notes. My ideas are in a formative stage, so any thoughts you have in response are most welcome.

When I say “web videos” I am first of all talking about short-form streaming videos from free-upload hosting sites like YouTube, Revver, and blip.tv. I am not talking about long-form streaming video on TV network websites, videos shared using BitTorrent, or TV show or movie downloads on iTunes. For the most part I am talking about videos made for web distribution rather than content whose primary distribution is not on the internet. (The exception is user-uploaded clips of movies and TV shows, to which these observations should apply.)

(In referring to these short-form streaming videos, I am generalizing about a huge category and trying to make some sense of it by identifying some key features. Like any generalizing, this emphasizes some aspects of the category over others and might seem to leave some examples out. I think this is how we generally use categories. Some instances of short-form streaming web video might be peripheral to the discussion, but our notion of the category’s contours is shaped more by prototypical instances than by outliers. For more on this notion of categorization see this Wikipedia stub.)

Three key characteristics of recent web video, all of which are points of contrast with mass media moving-image forms like movies and TV shows:

1. Web videos are ideally short and “sweet” (in the slang sense): they have to fit into their viewers’ patterns of internet and computer use, typically characterized by scarcity of time and attention. Many are video blogs and like blogs they tend to be brief, personal, and topical. Web videos seem eager to please, to appeal to viewers and engage their attention right away. The ideal length might be around three minutes. This is what I like best about these videos (the good ones, anyway): they capture my attention, make me go Wow, and never let me go until they’re over. E.g., Ask A Ninja Question 29 "BBQ".

2. Web videos are produced not only by creators but also by communities. Web videos are an instance of participatory culture: viewers are also creators, or at least potential creators. Because of their episodic nature and the frequency of newly updated material appearing online (practically continuously), creators are able to respond to each other and to their viewers more or less in real time. This has been essential in many of the most talked-about web videos, including lonelygirl15 (which presumably pursued the occultish elements of the story in response to viewer interest in them) and The Show With Ze Frank, which according to Frank takes the form of “a conversation between the host and the viewers."

3. Web videos have an amateur aesthetic. They are made outside of the major media industries -- even if they are remixes of mass media -- and by people who lack not only formal skill and training but also the technological and economic means available to professionals. Their production is artisanal rather than industrial. Like punk and other DIY movements, web video has a democratic spirit that insists on authenticity and is suspicious of anything that looks too good. Amateur means not only non-professional or untrained; more importantly, it means passionate. An excellent statement on the amateur aesthetic comes from Ze Frank's defense of his ugly MySpace contest. Frank reclaims "ugly" as a quality that's "pretty cool" in the hands of amateurs teaching themselves to use media authoring tools. He celebrates the anyone-can-do-it mentality as essential to the new participatory culture.

Why do web videos have these characteristics? Two concepts I find useful in answering this question are functions and constraints. Form tends to follow function and I see the short-and-sweet form of web videos as a response to the function they have of offering their users a diversion from some other activity. Much blog reading and web video viewing occurs in the context of work--in the context of what corporate America calls “stealing time”--and so videos function as little breaks from studying or crunching numbers or doing whatever it is people in offices do all day. It’s for this reason that some people refer to watching these videos as “snacking.” The viewer wants something fast and dirty and doesn’t have time to watch something ten or twenty minutes long. If it’s a clip from The Colbert Report, it’s just the best few moments. Thus web videos are an interstitial form--they are for filling in time between other activities.

Another way of thinking about functions is as affordances to the user. New media scholars often talk about the internet’s social affordances: e.g., social networking sites afford people the opportunity to make friends. The internet, as a network of users rather than a channel that sends media only in one direction from producer to consumer, affords interactivity. This means that YouTube videobloggers can post response videos that have a link from the video to which they are responses. And in the case of Ze Frank, the audience can become a collaborator in producing content for the show: introductions that fans shoot and upload to the site, projects they participate in like making an earth sandwich, and even a whole episode that the community scripts collectively on the site’s wiki. Fans of mainstream media poach and remix and some movies and TV shows allow for a kind of minimal fan input, but the participation going on with web videos can be of a different kind--there may be considerably more of it, it has the possibility of occurring in real time during the process of production and consumption, and it is built into the very structure of the distribution channel. Web moving-image media affords community in a way that other forms do not.

Constraints come in many varieties: economic, technological, cultural or social. Conventions of form (like genre conventions) are also constraints. The maximum running time on YouTube videos is ten minutes; that is a technological (and for YouTube an economic) constraint. The consumer-grade apparatus and budget available to many creators is a constraint. The convention of amateurism is a constraint, too. What’s most interesting about constraints on creativity is how they are made into opportunities, how working within them produces something good. Web videos are short and sweet because people who make them don’t have unlimited time (after all they can't pay their rent making web videos), aren’t professional media producers and don't have the means available to professionals, and want to produce a regular output for episodic release online rather, as in the professional mode, than working for a long time to produce one long video. A constraint becomes an aesthetic advantage when the short-and-sweet form produces the Wow response and the tightly seized attention.

The web itself might also be a constraint because of how people use it. When I watch videos online I am typically doing a number of things at once. At any given time I typically run three or four applications (Word for writing, Firefox for web browsing, NetNewsWire for tracking RSS feeds, iTunes for music, and sometimes Photoshop or PowerPoint or Preview for reading PDFs). In Firefox I generally have multiple tabs open: e-mail, news items or blogs I opened but didn’t get to read, etc. The typical online experience involves multi-tasking, and if my attention for a video flags I might click on one of those other tabs as I continue to listen in on the audio track. Since web video creators are also users, they know about how users’ attention is potentially divided; this feeds back into their assumptions about how to make their videos. Again: it creates the conditions for short and sweet.

A lot of talk about these new web videos is about their potential to be a threat to big corporate mass media's domination. A lot of talk is addressed to the potential for user-generated media to create a democratic revolution of media production by anyone and everyone. While I share the hope of the new media evangelists, my interests as a scholar run more toward analyzing what already exists than fantasizing about what might come to pass. I'm interested in figuring out what makes this new form compelling much more than in trying to divine its implications for the future of society.

I expect to share more of this work here in the near future. Stay tuned.

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Recent faves of the web vids:

-World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion--I love little movies shot in classrooms.

-Silent Star Wars--eps 4-6 condensed and silentized.

-Season 4 of 24 in 2mn30sec--24 frames play simultaneously; eat your heart out Mike Figgis.

-101 Impressions--in four minutes!

-Puehse Twins Skateboarding--eight years old, mad skillz.

-Windows 386 Promo Video--skip to around the 7 minute mark.

Bonus: one way to feed your hunger for all this stuff is the aggregator site vidmeter, but you have to be willing to be your own vulgarity filter (or--better yet--not!). Another good way is The Daily Reel, which exercises taste and judgment rather than ranking by popularity.

SpringBoardMedia: the year's top ten stories that matter to indie filmmakers. Includes stories relating to copyright, media regulation and changing modes of distribution; #1 is net neutrality.

Two new efforts at engaging the audience: Lars Von Trier's Lookey (lookey.dk), Conan O'Brien's Horny Manatee (hornymanatee.com). In case you haven't heard: media interactivity is, like, in.

"Hosting events in Times Square, advertisers said, is like buying product placement in a TV show or a movie — except the cameras are held by consumers and the placement is on the Internet." NYT on a new kind of marketing.

Web Videos of 2006

In some ways the Long Tail era should be inimical to the creation of these year-end lists. One great thing about video on the web is that there is so much of it and that it is so various. But YouTube and other sites for viewing online video are not only an essential component of the new niche culture of sundry oddity; they are also engaging a common culture, a water-cooler culture. The significance of many of the videos below hinges on their wide dissemination. The whole idea of viral video, which I hope people will stop talking about soon, is that a wide audience is tantalizingly within reach given a winning combination of talent, zeitgeist, and good luck.

Like all such compilations, this one is cut to the measure of my idiosyncratic tastes. I don't claim that this is the best or top ten videos, just ten I think are worth recording as remarkable in some way. Most of all, I think they will be worth remembering in the future. Some have been seen by millions, others by only thousands. They are given here in no particular order.

"Let's give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." American politics might not have been truly transformed by Sen. George Allen's strange speech addressed directly to the videographer he insultingly dubbed Macaca. But many people's perception of the effect of technology on politics was shaped by this seminal moment in the YouTubification of American campaigning. And a Senate seat was lost in part because of the ease and accessibility of viewing video on the internet.

Lonleygirl15 was the first web-based serial narrative to gain wide attention and even acclaim. Some called it a new art form. If nothing else, it demonstrated the ease with which amateurs might be able to mount impressive narrative constructions and gain wide distribution for them on very limited means. Also, before the big reveal, it was a both a great story and a great metastory.

The Show With Ze Frank is a one-man production that airs five days a week. Frank not only conceives and performs his topical show, a sort of short and cheap version of Stewart/Colbert, but also shoots and edits it and writes and records original music. A show conceived as "a conversation between the host and the viewers of the program," it has inspired a rabidly loyal following of "Sports Racers," who supply Frank with intro videos and material to discuss, and occasionally script a segment or episode using a wiki. Of all the artists, amateurs, and eager kids producing content for the internet, Frank is indisputably the brightest, cleverest, and most consistently amusing. Is there anything on the internet better than The Show With Ze Frank?

Male Restroom Etiquette is a parody of an educational film of the 1950s or 1960s, with the requisite stentorian voice-over and preposterous slippery-slope reasoning. This is also an example of one of the most compelling forms of fan folk culture, the video-game-based homebrew animation called machinima. This video was produced using captures from The Sims 2. Unlike many instances of machinima, this one was made to be accessible beyond the fan community, to bridge the videogame and machinima subcultures to the larger online video audience. It won the best writing award at this year's Mackies (the Oscars of the form).

It has been on the "air" for more than two years, but Rocketboom, the daily program seen by as many as 300,000 viewers (this is a matter of some controversy), continues to be the standard against which videoblogs are measured. Its first host, Amanda Congdon, departed in July after a dispute with her partner in creating the show, Andrew Baron. She was replaced by the very funny and talented Joanne Colan, formerly a VJ on MTV Europe, who has only improved what was already a formidable franchise. After the split, Congdon did her own thing, Amanda Across America, traveling the country with her camera and microphone to interview some of the bigger personalities in web culture (Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis) among others. After that she signed on with HBO and ABC to do her new-fashioned thing on that old-fashioned medium, television.

Galacticast is a sci-fi parody videoblog by Rudy Jahchan and Casey McKinnon, the Nichols and May of web geek-chic. Galacticast's production values, although still crude next to, say, Lord of the Rings, are a dozen notches above most of the amateur content online. Jahchan and McKinnon have a green screen and aren't afraid to overuse it, and McKinnon is especially adept in front of the camera. Galacticast has goofed on everything from Dr. Who to Superman II and although it helps to be as big a sci-fi fan as they are, their videos are worth watching just to see what industrious and talented media producers can do within DIY parameters. (Jahchan and McKinnon were recently profiled on ReelPop.)

Jonathan Coulton is a singer-songwriter who makes his songs available for anyone to use in making videos. Several of them have been set to slideshows of images from the photosharing site Flickr that are remixable under a Creative Commons license. The first of these, Flickr.mov, is about Flickr itself--about all of the things one can find among the millions of photos posted to its pages. Neither the song nor the images are really outstanding, but the combination of the music and photos is a fascinating collaboration among hundreds of strangers. Of all of these videos, this one seems most emblematic to me of the aesthetic potential of the grassroots culture promoted by web evangelists. (Also see the Coulton videos Over There and Ikea.)

USA Today has called OK Go's treadmill video, "Here it Goes Again," "the YouTube Age version of Michael Jackson's moonwalk." Like so many of the things that get linked like crazy on the web, "Here it Goes Again" depends for its impact on being utterly astonishing, something we have never seen before, and utterly authentic, something made without the gloss, polish, fakery, and spin of the typical mass media productions. Like instances of early cinema (from the medium's first decade), which scholars have described as appealing with an "aesthetic of astonishment,"[1] many of the best early internet videos are short, diverting, and incredible.

The Fucking Short Version of The Big Lebowski is a prime example of one essential genre of contemporary short-form videos, the parodic remix. This one takes what is perhaps the most beloved American film of the 1990s and removes from it everything that isn't "fuck." The delight in watching is that of getting the whole narrative (assuming you've seen the movie in the first place, but if you haven't, why would you watch the parody?) in the form of characters muttering, shouting, bleating, breathing fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. A more common subgenre of parodic remix in 2006 was the trailer-mashup, best exemplified by Brokeback to the Future, which gets all of its power from Gustavo Santoalalla's haunting Brokeback Mountain score. All of the Brokeback trailer parodies depend for their comic effect on perverting what was once the interpretive practice of an oppressed group, a queer reading, to turn it into something comfortingly mainstream.

YouTubers is a compilation video, set to melancholic music, of bits from dozens of confessional videoblogs posted to YouTube . So, so, so many young people turned on their camcorders in the past year to reach out to the strangers out there, to the YouTube community, and so many of them were rewarded with conversation and camaraderie. Their faces and voices, their emotions and experiences, are nowhere captured better than here.

Honorable mentions:
-Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen. A new kind of musical virtuoso, his instrument is video editing software.
-Zidane headbutts Matarazzi. Soccer even Americans can understand.

[1] Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In]Credulous Spectator," in Viewing Positions, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995), 114-133.