We’re going to change things up a bit here at SGap. Instead of presenting our weekly endorsements on Friday afternoon, we’re going to shoot for Mondays instead. There are other changes to the blog on the way too, so stay tuned. But in the mean time, here’s what three of us have been enjoying recently.

Marian
Some of us are still trying to finish our dissertations. That makes graduation season really anti-climactic – or worse, yet another excuse to succumb to crippling writer’s block. For those of us facing the unique blend of urgency and paralysis that is the PhD candidacy, there’s Pomodoro. Schemed up in the first place by a student trying to improve his study habits, the Pomodoro Technique is a strategy for cutting work time into discreet, bite-sized units – effective especially for large, unruly projects like a dissertation. The technique is named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Francesco Cirillo first used to compel himself to work nonstop in 25 minute stretches (each stretch is called a “Pomodoro”), punctuated by 5 minute breaks. Work hard and without distraction for 25 minutes – that’s one Pomodoro – and you’ll feel enough sense of accomplishment to enjoy that quick break, the thinking goes. Stack three or four Pomodoros in a row, and you’ve now put in close to two solid hours of work. Something about setting the timer – the ticking, the watching the minutes disappear – can serve as a powerful motivator. If you don’t have an old-fashioned timer at home (but those are the best, aren’t they?) there are now apps and basic websites where you can set your Pomodoro timer virtually. Here’s to finishing that thesis (or novel, or any other daunting project) twenty-five minutes at a time. Continue reading →

Cartoons, choral music, dispatches, and speeches: here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past week.

Keith
This is a double endorsement. The first is the FX show Archer, a cartoon about a secret agent with all of James Bond’s skills and talents but none of his class. The second is “Rake’s Progress,” by Charles Bock, in the March issue of Harper’s, which is ostensibly a review of Archer but is in fact a history of the adult cartoon (“adult” as in level of humor, not as in sex, although there is a lot of sex in Archer); what Bock calls “anticomedy” (a punchline that undercuts its own setup); and a particular joke that pushes the limits of repetition (for Bock, pioneered most notably by The SImpsons in October, 1993, when Sideshow Bob steps on/is smacked by nine rakes in a row over a span of thirty seconds).

The Simpsons, Bock suggests, is the first anticomedy cartoon and the first cartoon to feature high cultural fluency. That’s a pretty reasonable claim, although a case could probably be made for The Rocky And Bullwinkle Show too, which preceded The Simpsons by twenty years. From there Bock traces the grown-up, pop-culture savvy cartoon through Beavis And Butt-Head; Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; South Park; and the emergence in the late 1990s of “Adult Swim” on the Cartoon Network, a late-night bloc of programming which resurrected cartoons from decades earlier and dubbed smart, funny dialogue over the original, earnest back-and-forth – most famously with Space Ghost, Coast To Coast.

Bock relates not just the history but also the relative funny of these shows well. Crucially, he explains that a few years after the relative success of Adult Swim came a cheap knockoff that took the basic premise of all its precursors and dumbed them down considerably: Family Guy, which is basically one part The Simpsons, one part South Park, and five parts a twelve-year old who likes fart jokes.

Archer is, according to Bock, the first really good grown-up cartoon in over a decade. It’s no The Simpsons, but it’s probably one of the better cartoons on air right now. And Bock’s review is a smart take on a phenomenon that is under-commented-on, despite the pop-cultural obsession with comedy nowadays.  Continue reading →

After another hiatus, our weekly endorsement column is back. Here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks.

Tom
Sarah Polley’s made two fantastic features to date. Away from Her (2007) and Take This Waltz (2011) both revolve around the dissolution of romantic relationships:  the former chronicles the effects of Alzheimer’s on a geriatric couple’s marriage, the latter depicts how a young wife handles falling in love with another man. Together, they are two of the most emotionally honest and beautiful films I’ve seen about letting go. But her latest film (a documentary, no less) may be her best yet.

In Stories We Tell, she turns the camera inward and explores a deep-seeded family secret. I won’t say too much more about the plot because one of the pleasures of the film is how it handles revealing information (and there are a number of pretty great reveals). But I will say that it shares a number of commonalities with her two features and is an amazing film on a number of levels. First and foremost, it’s a riveting story told by a confident storyteller at the top of her game. It somehow manages to be both intensely emotional – I teared up during several scenes – and incredibly reflexive, often stepping back and asking larger questions about subjectivity and the nature of storytelling. If you’re at all interested in narrative, the ways in which we tell our own family histories, or if you like a good story, I urge you to check it out when it’s released later this month. Continue reading →