JOLLY DAYS

Pogue Goes Bonkers Over Pangea Day

David Pogue was emoting today about an upcoming global movie marathon spectacle called Pangea Day.

Pogue's hypervigilant wit and upbeat game-show-contestant enthusiasm is very winning and informative when he writes about gear — he is down-to-earth reliable about gadgets and their real world value. He's value-added Dave, putting more fun in fun stuff. Six Flags!

In addition, Pogue's manuals, which seem to reproduce in the dark, there are so many of them, reveal he is a wonderful, gifted teacher. His manuals are models of clarity and in-depth knowledge. When he wanders off that reservation he tends to devolve solely into his game-show-contestant persona, sans usefulness — not much context or depth there.

I think the quality of Pogue's enthusiasm for this event makes me sour on it proactively; in description Pangea Day reeks of the photographic Festivus, with names like “A Day in the Life of Wisconsin”. In the latter, you have people with high-priced photo gear and bucks to travel running off to arbitrary places to take pics, hoping it will be meaningful and aesthetic. It's great, for the participants, and the expectation is that the audience will react appreciatively. (It is actually predatory in its shallow use of place and people.) In events such as Pangea Day — yikes, the dumbo name: one continent, pre-human — the participants think they are protected by a bonus — an umbrella of social value. The howler is that the creator of this event thinks she will be “fostering tolerance and understanding”. The subtext here is that the public needs to be taught, in a condescending Obama sense, by the…filmmakers.

Perhaps this upcoming marathon of here-I-am-with-gear, all-over-the-place, will be a unifying force, bringing us all together, a group expression bringing us into remarkable harmony, all of us breaking into that dreadful We Are the World. I suppose, like the Super Bowl, or international soccer, there is a pleasant sensation in thinking we are, many of us, sharing the same experience.

Although there is an implication that Pangea Day has something to do with art, this is far from likely. Art at its best is interior, meditative, complex, layered, ambiguous, suggestive, individual, even uncomfortably eccentric — averse to groups and din and ideological agenda, even a do-gooder agenda. Art can be an entry way into our inner lives, our true, common humanity. Then again Pangea Day might be game show exciting.