The Art of Limitations, the Limitations of Art

Bill Simmons is hands down my favorite sports writer. He's funny, he's irreverent, he's topical, and maybe most importantly, he speaks the vernacular of the fan. The "eye test" is a big one when you read Simmons' writing or listen to his podcasts. That is to say, if a sportsman looks like he sucks, he probably sucks, no matter what the media or basic statistics claim. At the same time, he's a big proponent of advanced metrics, which are statistics that take a lot of context into consideration, creating statistics that are often more in line with those "eye tests."

Last week, Simmons held a podcast with Patton Oswalt, who is easily one of my favorite comedians. Oswalt was on to hype his book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. One of the topics the book covered, and that Simmons and Oswalt went on about at length, were the struggles of the comedian in the 80s and 90s, and how niche comedy has found a place thanks to the Internet and Twitter. The pair agreed, the open nature of consumption of art is a capital letter Good Thing.

To an extent, I agree.

We'll come back to this after the jump.

Growing With Art

Monday is my TV day, for whatever reason.

There's only one show I watch every week, NBC's Chuck. Occasionally, I'll follow that up with some CW action in the form of Gossip Girl.

Now, neither of these are astounding shows. The former is a somewhat convoluted, somewhat aimless mish mash of genres that relies on the immeasurable charisma of its actors. The latter is complete early-20s melodrama that people watch because it's a new-school soap opera, with prettier people and somewhat better actors.

So, I know these shows aren't the best, so why do I watch them?

Find out after the jump.

How Art Informs Our Worldview

I re-watched the Pilot for the TV show Gossip Girl again the other day. As trashy and angsty and soap opera-y that show was, I liked the first season of Gossip Girl for many of the same reasons I liked the first season of The O.C.: Well-rendered teenage characters who were both intelligent and stupid, both mature and childish, story lines that while melodramatic were for the most part believable and romantic entanglements that were more considered with the difficulties of keeping people together than the relative storytelling ease of tearing them apart. Both of these shows became much more dramatic and ridiculous over the course of their run times, but those first seasons were full of genuinely emotional moments, and they caused me to empathize with nearly every character presented.

The glaring omission to that category would be Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass.