That said, the significance of Public’s story is impossible to dismiss. Though for the most part it avoids depicting 9/11 as a structuring event, the film is aggressive in drawing the fundamental distinctions between the American mass consciousness of Before and After. After eight years, Public may be the first sign that post-9/11 cinema has finally come into its own.

Josh Harris founded Internet research firm Jupiter Communications and developed a chat client for Prodigy before becoming New York’s Internet It boy of the mid-to-late 1990s with Pseudo.com, the first Internet TV network. The director met her subject in 1999 the way most people met him: by stumbling into one of his infamous downtown loft parties. At the request of Harris, Timoner soon began documenting his activities.

The film follows Harris from the heady pre-millennial Psuedo days to his first massive art project, Quiet, where he invited dozens of artists to live with him in a bunker full of beds (each outfitted with a camera and a TV screen). Life (from sex to showering to everything in between) was filmed constantly, residents were subject to the interrogation of a CIA operative, and no one was allowed to leave.

When the FBI broke up the bunker and made everyone evacuate (the feds thought it was a millennial cult, and as one member says on screen, “We were quacking and walking like a duck”), Harris and his girlfriend Tanya moved into a loft outfitted with motion control cameras in every room, broadcasting their relationship 24 hours a day to an audience of eager chatters. This, too, fell apart; Harris’ sanity was slipping away as fast as his $80 million “on paper” fortune, and in late 2001, the entrepreneur left Manhattan, first for an apple farm, and finally for Ethiopia.

Harris is fascinating as an ego monster, but Timoner’s film is most valuable for demonstrating in detail his simultaneous delusion and prescience. A decade ago, when Harris offered his life up for consumption via online video, it was such a dangerous action that it ruined his only real adult romantic relationship and decimated his fortune. Today, We Live in Public-style lifecasting has become completely mundane.

As I walked out of the Public screening, a stranger recognized me from having seen my picture next to my writing on the Internet and joked, “Hey — YOU live in public!” I cringed at the comment, but it’s true: like many people my age, I’ve Twittered, Tumblred and Facebooked my way through my twenties, creating a hybrid public/private persona which will probably eventually raise existential dilemmas that I cannot, at this point, even contemplate. Over the past decade, our lives have become as fragmented and multi-messaged as the post-9/11 cable news screen.

The difference between this ever more common use of new technologies to live life online, and what Harris was doing with his motion-controlled surveillance cameras and live chat, is that each individual now controls what they choose to broadcast where — and in turn, what kinds of broadcasts to take in, and from whom.

Late in the film, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe says he’s never heard of Josh Harris, and I imagine most of his site’s users haven’t either. The fact that Harris isn’t a household name for a new generation of web exhibitionists says more about the longevity of Internet fame than most of us would like to admit. Regardless, we’re all living our online lives better in the wake of Harris’ mistakes.

The film is not available online, but you can see the trailer here.

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But it’s not as good as could/probably should be. Maybe it’s so inevitable that any kind of Star Trek fan fic will involve Kirk and Spock pledging love that we don’t actually need to see it play out, we can fill in the gaps between an opening hint and a closing one. But that doesn’t justify the fact that when this vid gives up the courtship plot halfway through –– and despite an explosion of spectacle –– it just gets kind of boring until the tacked-on pledge of manly respect coded as expression of repressed romance.

And really: How many videos based on this simple equation do we need to see? We get it: 1+1 = gay, and gay = comedy gold. Aren’t we supposed to be demanding more, or is it naive to hold on to hope that media made outside of mainstream corporate mandates could possible transcend easy formula? Why are we so content to allow the agenda for the supposed counterculture of web video to be determined by the comic crutches of people like Andy Samberg?

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It’s a good thing feminists who are willing to put on blinders have *some* kind of symbolic victory for all of womankind to hold on to, because the results of an arguably more important contest this weekend went very badly for both the woman involved and, by extension, the image of women in power as a whole. Whilst millions of my fellow American women were waiting on line for their dose of the latest adventures of Carrie and company, I was glued to the TV, watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, held to determine whether or not all delegates from both Florida and Michigan will be allowed to vote at the Democratic Convention.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t present at the meeting, but she nonetheless haunted the proceedings (she’s the one who would have gained most from a full seating of these delegates, which the committee ultimately denied), and her supporters were out in full force, shouting, cheering, booing, and getting themselves ejected from the hall. Far more fascinating than the all-day debate are the YouTube clips of angry Clinton supporters exiting the RBC meeting — and reactions to those clips.

By now, you might have seen the above clip, featuring a Clinton supporter named Harriet Christian — as of this writing, it’s been viewed almost 450,000 in its first 24 hours on YouTube. It was posted by the liberal blog Firedoglake, as was this clip of Deborah Foster showing off bruises which she says are the result of being pulled out of the hall by security. On a different day, the Foster clip might have made cable news headlines, but it’s been far out-shined by the Christian clip, a jaw-dropping transmission of raw human emotion that’s actually difficult to watch. The clip is so controversial that it has already sparked many reaction videos; Jane Hamsher calls the original “a Rorschach test for how people view what’s going on in the Democratic party,” and compiles noteworthy responses.

So what’s the fuss about? “I am proud to be an older American woman!” Christian begins. Well, so far so good, right? But then…

“The Democrats are throwing the election away. For what? An inadequate black male? [...] And I’m not going to shut my mouth anymore…I can be called white, but you can’t be called black? That’s not my America. It’s equality for all of us! I’m no second class citizen.” When a reporter asks for her name, she responds, “Why would you like my name? Maybe you’re, the CIA, the FBI?” Then, for some historical perspective: “I was a second-class citizen before, and now I’m nothing!” Then she threatens to vote for McCain as revenge, and storms off.

In positioning the RBC’s refusal to bend a rule that would have put more votes in the Clinton column as a blow to feminist progress, Christian seems to confirm the blanket stereotype that Clinton supporters are, like the candidate herself, shrill, prone to convenient irrationality, quick to cry “sexism,” and possibly even racist. Certainly, as a portrait of a Clinton supporter, the video does Hillary no favors. As a meme, it essentially distributes the same main idea as another Hillary-related vid making the rounds this week, Jerry O’Connell’s Young Hillary. While Clinton works herself into a frenzy accusing all around of treating her unfairly and demanding reparations — thereby inevitably digging herself deeper into a hole — Obama stays quiet and scores.

I find it fascinating that while a fairy tale version of middle-aged women is dominating popular culture, an actual middle aged woman’s fall from a position of potential power and the hysteria that event has engendered amongst her supporters is dominating YouTube and the cable news cycle. Obviously, for most of us, the fake version of this demographic’s triumphs and tragedies is easier to digest. “Man, I’m not concerned with all the politics!” growls a heavily-digitized Fergie in the movie’s theme song, “Labels and Love.” Enough said.

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Such is the case with episode 26 of The Daily Freak Show, one of the flagships of WOW’s fledging web video portal, WOW.tv. Freak stars James St. James, whose memoir on sometime-best friend Alig formed the basis of WOW’s narrative version of the story (he was played by Seth Green in the film). In episode 26, St. James and crew crash the line that was forming outside Nokia Theater in anticipation of the American Idol finale.

As far as I’m concerned, St. James is the perfect man for such a job. The former club kid is now in his 40s, and his on-camera persona — droll and cynical, yet explosively (if not always sincerely) enthusiastic at unexpected moments — is like a cross between Pee-wee Herman and Andy Warhol. On steroids.

St. James cobbles an interview style out of a combination of genuine-seeming curiosity, over-it derision, and, most surprising, tough-love moralism. When any woman in the line over the age of 13 says she’s rooting for David Archuletta, St. James scolds her for being a child molester. When a group of preteen girls admit that they like last year’s winner, Jordin Sparks, St. James horrifies them with the story of how Sparks’ “vocal chords exploded.” Choose your idols carefully, girls! In such moments, the episode goes beyond being a parody of the kind of coverage of itself that American Idol works into each episode in order to kill time before the next Ford commercial — it’s almost service journalism!

In all sincerity: We’ve seen countless pieces of media “reporting” about what it’s like to wait in line for stuff, but nothing like this, which manages to spoof the milieu whilst at the same time showing real affection for the fans that it attracts.

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In the first episode, Robin pitches the web series to his professor as an investigation of “the dynamic between teacher and student, how this relationship both benefits and hinders an education within this film program.” His professor’s response? “I’m asking you to do something different…we are not here to feed your website.” Robin embarks on the project anyway, and the remaining eight episodes chronicle the personal and creative battles of Robin and his classmates as they navigate an educational system that seems at best indifferent to, and often actually an aggressive barrier to their success.

The effect of the episodes is cumulative. On their own, they seem to be just fragments, but taken together, they accurately reflect the tangle of emotions produced by any close-knit, intense creative environment. The heightened state is made a bit more explosive by Robin’s professor, whose extreme detachment and apparent aversion to active instruction enrages the students. (At one point, Robin complains “This is like the Seinfeld show––it’s a class about nothing.”) The frustration of producing art in this environment bleeds into other aspects of his subjects’ lives; as the woman at the center of episode four (Robin never tells us his subjects’ names) tells Robin, “Everything is about cinema.” Later in the episode, she starts crying in front of the camera, and immediately drops a cinematic reference to being filmed with tears on her face. She’s apparently crying because her professor/adviser has failed to flirt with her, and Kinoland hits its emotional and narrative peak with this scene.

The first six episodes of Kinoland are the strongest. Toward the end, the series seems to veer away from Robin’s stated goal of interrogating the relationship between teacher and student, and by the end of episode nine, the show seems to be moving away from, rather than towards, a definitive conclusion. But the episodes that do take on issues of power and authority in the film-school environment become fascinating, in the wake of summer‘s Sundance win and ensuing festival success, as a portrait of the filmmaker’s earlier struggles to forge an identity in a surprisingly demoralizing academic environment.

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Last Wednesday, the team behind CBS Interactive’s MobLogic went out on the streets of New York to cover the Sean Bell protests. During the protest, MobLogic host Lindsay Campbell (formerly of Wallstrip) was arrested…voluntarily. As the show’s executive producer, Adam Elend, puts it in a blog post regarding MobLogic‘s episode on Lindsay’s arrest, which went live on Sunday:

I’ve been filming at large scale protests for eight years now, and never have I been to one quite like this: The police set up a protest zone, and the protesters went to the protest zone…People who were going to be arrested signed up. Protesters with legal trouble weren’t allowed. Protesters without their IDs weren’t allowed…The mood was relaxed. You got the sense that nothing that either side didn’t know was going to happen.

In the episode, Campbell explains that she signed up to get arrested (literally) partially because she sided with the protesters, who want the state and the city to develop new tactics for investigating police brutality cases, and partially because she “wanted to be where the action was.” But this episode is most valuable for revealing the total lack of action at this event, of the mundanity and the mechanism of the contemporary political protest. The NYPD cops on display may have been, as Campbell puts it, “Keystone,” but based on MobLogic‘s footage, there’s no sign that the protesters had any intention of doing anything incendiary enough to require more than bare competence on the part of the police. It sort of puts a whole new spin on the idea of “civil” disobedience — indeed, Campbell calls it “Protesting 2.0,” with a wink in her voice.

The obvious question raised: What’s the difference between a video of protesters getting arrested produced from the outside, and one produced by a reporter so inside that she actually went to jail? Beyond the fact that there’s a close-up of a “government cheese sandwich” (and I’m curious as to how it was sourced, because it seems unlikely that Campbell would have been allowed to hold onto a camera long enough to be able to document jail lunch — a recreation, perhaps?), I think the real difference — and improvement — lies in the towards-the-end shot of Al Sharpton, rubbing his eyes, wearily answering Campbell’s questions for MobLogic‘s camera. I’ve never seen such a professionally “on” figure allow themselves to be captured so “off” before, seemingly without calculation.

Disclosure: Current MobLogic producer Scott Solary used to produce a weekly movie show called ReelerTv, on which I appeared semi-regularly as a guest.

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In segments stitched together with title cards accurately recalling the stop-start MTV aesthetic of the time, a beret-clad Mena addresses the camera with a series of complaints and celebrations. She’s mainly concerned with credibility –– she calls out a friend for being a Rocky Horror Picture Show poseur, she complains about jocks dancing to Green Day even though they haven’t “earned” it. This (mostly imagined) fight for street cred was the fundamental culture war of the mid-90s, and the war was mostly fought by Doc Marten-wearing teens and 20-somethings wandering suburban and college-town streets. Mena’s earnest obsession with the stratified authenticity of cool is pitch-perfect.

Still, if I think about it too hard, the verisimilitude of The Mena Show falls apart. In 1994, I discovered the Internet, at the age of 14, and began using it to shape and broadcast my identity. Instead of blogs, I communicated with strangers through message boards and listservs. For about six months, I had a photocopied zine, which I sold for a dollar a copy by advertising on the Weezer message boards on AOL. The idea of communicating with other people by talking into a video camera would have been completely foreign to me, and I don’t think I would have known how to do it; I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it with the easy confidence on display in The Mena Show, as if the camera was a portal to a loosely-defined audience of friends and friendly strangers. This is how we talk into cameras now, with the gaze of YouTube on our minds.

Trott positions The Mena Show as an application of today’s technology to yesterday’s cultural discourse, but that seems slightly off. The Mena Show doesn’t play as though Mena circa 1994 somehow got her hands on the gadgets available to Mena circa 2008. It plays as though Mena circa 2008 is casting a post-YouTube style of address on the concerns of Mena circa 1994. On those terms, it works.

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The Death of Father from Adam Robinson on Vimeo.

Two promos and a single episode is, admittedly, not much to go on, but so far it’s enough for me to fall a little bit in love. Father Wrote the Play is magical and bizarre, and though Robinson doesn’t pull off everything he attempts (see: the poop joke), he does manage to pull it all together.

Apparently the story will eventually involve titular protagonist Leeland Greenmess’ attempt to make good on his father’s dying wish that the son produce the father’s play, The Haunted Conifer. The first episode just gets to the presentation of that dying wish, after devoting the first half of its running time to the atmospheric depiction of life around the Greenmess manse. An unseen cat screeches over ominous music as we get a wide glimpse the kitchen. Meat hooks seem to hang in every room; in the living room, they hover above a marble column and a TV playing a bizarre Pathescope short on mental patients.

We finally meet the Greenmess men about three minutes in. Both are bald and of indiscriminate age; both wear beards that look something like Pac Man ghosts stapled to their faces. Leeland’s dad, on his death bed, tells his son that he’ll find the unproduced play in the family vault. Leeland protests that he’s ill-equipped to direct theater, but his father uses his last breath to offer words of encouragement: “Ittttt’sssss eaaaaaassssssy.” It’s somehow both creepy and charming.

In a year of writing this column, Father Wrote the Play may be the most intriguing web series pilot I’ve seen, simply because I don’t have a clue where this is train is going. Well, there are a few clues: One of the two promos currently up on Vimeo suggests that future episodes will feature a character named Malt 50, who will help Leeland produce the play; the other promo consists of a giant diamond, an owl, and a moody, borderline-spooky organ ballad.

But scant narrative pointers aside, Father Wrote the Play looks and feels like no web video I’ve ever seen. In a world in which hit-hungry content creators seem to be relying on boilerplate creative tropes at a disturbing rate, this show doesn’t fit into any pre-existing video genre, it doesn’t appear to have a defined audience niche in mind and it seems to want to confound any and all pre-conceived expectations. It could become brilliant or it could all go very, very wrong, but that risk alone is thrilling. More like this, please.

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Show me a circa-2008 satiric political web video, and I’ll show you well-meaning liberal media makers who, more likely than not, haven’t had much contact with real people (as in, not TV talking heads or vitriolic blog commenters) who represent the opposite side of the political spectrum and almost certainly have never seriously considered even a moderate Republican point of view as potentially legitimate.

This is something I think we all know about the current new media landscape, and so when confronting new works of political media art, much of the work of analysis is automatic. It’s a video about Obama? It’s probably an unquestioning celebration of style over substance. It’s a video about McCain? It’s probably kitsch-wrapped critique.

But there’s something that seems just a little bit more complex about Braxton Price: The Price of Freedom. Produced by Titan.tv and described as a “partly scripted/mostly improvised single-camera political comedy show,” Braxton stars creator Aaron Nauta as a young robo-Republican hired by the fictional National Federation of Young Republicans to host a web show-within-the show “that makes conservative ideals cool again — and also debunks loony liberal logic.”

So far two full episodes of Braxton Price have been posted; each is divided into four or five short segments, so there are ten clips in total. The series really gets interesting — and funny — in the second clip, in which Braxton holds auditions for a “liberal mole” who can get his one-man Republican propaganda outfit “in and out of hostile liberal neighborhoods safely.” As a character, Braxton is a total cartoon, but refreshingly, he’s not a right-wing bull in a sensible liberal china shop — the other side is usually painted as potentially just as ridiculous.

A one-off clip works best when it’s staccato, a series of punctuation marks hammering home the same joke in different ways, but for a series to remain engaging, even a comedy series, characters need to change. Beginning in the third clip, as he starts interacting regularly with both his “treasurer” Malkin and Jed the liberal, Braxton actually starts to show some character depth. I’m a bit worried the Braxton crew will run out of jokes, but at least they’re compensating for the limited scope of their material by creating semi-real-seeming relationships between characters.

It’s still fundamentally a liberally-minded jab at the Right’s seeming inability to play on the Left-dominated web video field. But at the very least, Braxton Price forces conflict between conservative stereotypes and liberal ones, and when that works the comic friction is unusual enough to cover for when the character comedy goes way, way too broad (see most of the most recent clip, particularly the “quit tasing me bro” retread).

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I know the jury’s still out as to whether or not the Republican candidate has the pop cultural savvy to be our commander in chief (Was that whole “Heidi Montag is a talented actress” comment made out of utter cluelessness, or was it a knowing wink at the construction of her pseudo-reality show, The Hills?) but McCain seems smart enough to generally play away from his known weaknesses.

Plus, It’s Raining McCain simply looked too good. From the hundreds of little McCains that rained on the Girls to a green-screen gaffe caused by a certain costume, the video’s very badness had a rhythm to it that was clearly intentional. But if any doubt remains that McCain Girls is something between pure parody and Obama Girl-style, cable news-baiting performance art, the Girls’ latest video should clear that up.

Here Comes McCain Again, set to the tune of “Here Comes The Rain Again” by the Eurythmics, features the same three women who appeared in It’s Raining McCain, none of whom are credited by name. On the left, there’s the older white woman, who seems enthusiastic yet befuddled and who, in both clips, is the Girl most likely to fumble her lines or choreography. On the far right, there’s a sexy young thing who resembles Obama Girl, but OG’s winking eye twinkle is replaced by the vacant stare of Audrina Partridge. And in the middle is a largish black woman, indisputably the most confident and compelling of the McCain Girls (potentially even a break-out star?). It’s a model of demographic diversity — which, in the context of the McCain campaign, seems to be a joke in itself.

The biggest difference between the first video and the second — beyond the fact that the first could be found in YouTube’s “News and Politics” section, while the second was categorized as “Comedy” — is that in Here Comes McCain Again, the central figure steps away from the pack to become a protagonist, confronting the floating specter of a miniaturized McCain in a darkened countryside. Of the three actresses, she’s clearly the one who is the most in on/the most comprehending of the joke; last week, she appeared in this video, an ostensible response to McCain Girls haters, which seems more like an effort to maintain the illusion that McCain Girls is a “real” phenomenon, pushed by three genuinely passionate McCain supporters.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but it’s not. Two weeks ago, I saw comedian Jon Benjamin at Brooklyn’s Union Hall, where he did an entire set about It’s Raining McCain, which he said he produced in conjunction with the Huffington Post’s 23/6 comedy site. Although Benjamin didn’t directly address why the video had been placed on YouTube instead of 23/6, I walked away from the show with the impression that it was done to maintain an ambiguity about where the video came from and whether or not the girls themselves were “real.” (For the record, Benjamin did say the “Girls” were found on Craig’s List, and indicated that, at least on the first clip, they were not given any sort of creative control).

This Washington Post blog entry debating the derivation of the clip is the only one I’ve seen pointing towards the 23/6 connection. Interestingly, that post also notes that the clip was virtually ignored on YouTube until the Huffington Post promoted it. That’s the funny thing about today’s YouTube climate: With the average viewer stunned into passive consumption by the sheer deluge of content, it’s fair to assume that if you’ve even heard of a video, a powerful entity has an interest in its promotion.

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