From the creator of “Cycles,” here is a short video about the city that we live in: Kitty City. It’s a little weird here for sure, but it IS home! (Via BoingBoing.)

I had this professor in college who was a Marxist. A real Marxist! I didn’t know they still existed. He had this intense look and a wild, white beard that made him look like an Old Testament prophet. I’m pretty thoroughly non-Marxist, but he was still the best graduate professor I’ve ever had. I took three classes from him.

Anyway, he explained this theory about genre entertainment that is adapted from the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan, and Fredric Jameson. It went something like this:

Most of us have anxieties in our daily lives that we don’t have an easy solution to. For example, stress or huge responsibilities. As a result, Freud argued, we will often have anxiety dreams—dreams which symbolically depict our abstract problems in a concrete form. So, the abstract problem of high stress in your life gets manifested concretely in a dream about your teeth shattering. Being naked in public in your dream suggests some insecurities in your social setting; falling from a great height suggests overwhelming decisions facing you; running in a maze you can’t escape suggests you have problems you don’t know how to resolve.

Now here’s the kicker. What if entertainment—mass entertainment, genre entertainment—functions for society the same way dreams do for the individuals? “Whoa!”—Keanu Reeves. Thus, if you take a look at what mass entertainment is popular in an era of culture, you will get a grasp on the culture’s irresolvable anxieties. So, the monster movies of the ‘60s suggest the anxieties of nuclear world with the Soviet bloc; the lavish, graceful Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musicals of the Great Depression era were symbolic resolutions from the anxiety of being trapped in poverty. My professor noted that sales of dystopian and utopian science-fiction rose when economic times were bad and receded when they were good.

I bring this up to talk about cat videos and the Internet. What deep culture anxieties does our obsession with cat videos suggest?

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(via People)

This offers so many more questions than answers. The most important question being, of course, wait, whuuuuuut? It’s weird when celebrities interact with human beings because you find out stuff like that they’re surprisingly adept at talking shit while casually name-dropping people’s on-line avatar monikers. I also like that Jessica Alba walks in and sweeps the staring contest. Because, you know, it’s time to put the people in the internet back in their place. They’ve had a free ride for too long. Yes, Alba’s winning the real world games of financial success and physical attractiveness, but that doesn’t mean she can’t still take away the one thing you thought you had. You’re going down Marshon, indeed.

Read more about why Jessica Alba is doing great and how being famous is awesome at her MySpace Celebrity Blog. (Apparently that’s a special type of blog. Every time you write a post you get a gift bag worth $15,000.)