My editor and I have assembled a montage chronicling movie scenes in which one character digs his or her thumbs into the eyes of another.

I’ve completed four years of undergraduate studies with honors, and can honestly say I’ve never been more proud to put my name on a project. The blue ribbon for dedication, however, goes to my editor, who steadfastly maintained that we would only include eye-gouging that specifically used the thumb. This disqualified dozens of wonderfully gory films (including Hostel, Demolition Man, and both volumes of Kill Bill), but ultimately made for a better (and more disturbing) cinematic history. It’s important to have standards.

I of course love all our eye-gouging scenes in their own ways (they’re like my children, really), but my personal favorite has to be Marked For Death. While the rest of the eye-gougings are done by or on monsters, androids, or other fantastical characters, Marked For Death’s is done by none other than Steven Segal on a petty criminal. And though you can’t tell from the short clip above, gouging his opponent’s eyes out isn’t even close to Segal’s finishing move; he then throws him through a wall, breaks the blinded man’s back over his knee, and tosses him down an elevator shaft onto a rusty spike.

Toward the end of the 2000 movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s love-struck record store owner/narrator tells the audience, “The making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many Dos and Don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”

Cusack’s speech is as good an explanation of the mixtape’s virtues as one will ever find. Back when they were still made, the mixtape really was a kind of art. Unless your father was Quincy Jones, the most advanced piece of audio equipment under your roof throughout your teenage era probably required a lot of devotion, flipping the tape or replacing 2Pac with Joan Osborne when the time came. In other words, the creation of a mixtape was one of passion; it was a project that took up your entire evening. It was how you spent your night. 

I found myself pondering Cusack’s speech – and the art of the mixtape – earlier this week while selecting mp3s for Muxtape, a music-sharing site that allows users to create online play-lists of up to 12 streaming songs. The site has (deservedly) been praised for its ease-of-use and striking visual minimalism, but one of Muxtape’s greatest gifts to music (or the one most signifigant to me, at least) is neither technical nor aesthetic. It’s philosophical, and therefore harder to pinpoint, and it is this: Muxtape – with its emphasis on quality (12 chosen songs) over quantity (an entire iTunes library) – has revived that “subtle art” of the mixtape championed by Mr. Cusack.

To the best of my knowledge, the mixtape’s slow death began sometime in the late ’90s, when home CD-burning technology essentially killed the analogue audiocassette. In most ways, this advancement was probably a good thing: CD’s are cheaper, hold more information, and make cooler Xena-style throwing discs than tapes.

But what was lost with the audiocassette was the incentive to put extended thought into self-made albums. No longer did horny adolescents have to spend Sunday night plopped between a stack of Boyz II Men tapes and Dad’s stereo system, meticulously copying “I’ll Make Love To You” onto some audio love-letter to a cute student in their SAT Prep class. Now, a cheap CD-R and 10 minutes on Napster were all that are needed to create “personal” compilations that ensure a 45-minute make-out session in the stairwell.

Of course, a mix CD still took some time, but most of that time was spent booting up one’s Compaq Presarios and telling mom to hang up the phone. However, what used to be the most time-consuming part – selecting the songs themselves – was now, thanks to the dics’ vast data storage size, the quickest. Why the fuck would anyone waste time choosing between “Californication” and “Scar Tissue” when there’s enough room for a half a dozen Chili Peppers singles? 

But just because you can fit the entire discography of Anthony Kedis, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. After all, when you can add everything, songs start meaning nothing.

This was where the “art” came into the making of a mixtape: Throughout the Clinton years, the precious 90 minutes of recording time on a TDK compact were just enough for a satisfying lineup of songs, but still exclusive enough that the artistic pros and cons of each track had to be excruciatingly considered before being selected for your epic track listing. Yeah, you wanted to stick all of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” onto your VALENTINE’S DAY MIX ‘97, but the limits of technology forced you to choose just one of those songs to express the complex workings of your 15-year-old heart to the opposite sex  (it was probably “Candle In The Wind,” by the way). The result was a tape that was a truly thoughtful gift – but only out of necessity.

This accidental thoughtfulness helped turn the mixtape into the (pardon the expression) sonnet of “Generation X,” a Bon Jovi-hating demographic way too cool and cynical to ever make something so romantic intentionally. It’s telling that within a month of “High Fidelity’s” release, NBC’s “Friends” (which was more-or-less the GenX “Leave It To Beaver”) premiered an episode (“The One With Unagi”) whose B-plot was primarily about a mixtape that Chandler gives to Monica as an anniversary present. More recently, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” a group of young ladies insist a mixtape is a far more romantic gift to receive from a guy than a CD. While they don’t go into detail on the matter, it’s fair to assume the women were swooning over the Cusack-like dedication necessary for a man to make a woman a mixtape. And who better to take our pop-cultural cues from than the dude who (briefly) made John Travolta cool again?

But it was – who else? – John Cusack himself, as Lloyd Dobler in 1988’s “Say Anything,” who stood outside Ione Skye’s bedroom window with a boombox over his head blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel, successfully pulling off the single most romantic use of the mixtape in history.

My old roommate Robbie shot a movie in Phoenix over the summer (co-written by Logan Antill). It’s called Couchgarden, and is sure to be the best film set in Arizona since Pump Up the Volume (although with admitedly less Sonic Youth on the soundtrack).

Watch the Couchgarden trailer here!

Early this May, the blog “What I Learned Today” posted an insightful article examining American music culture’s controversial adoption of the keffiyah, a distinct checkered Arab scarf. As the garment-of-choice for both militant anti-Zionists like the late Yasser Arafat and not so militant rap musicians like “Meet the Spartans” star Method Man, the popularity of the scarf has raised a degree of National debate. 

I respectfully bowed out of this debate since, despite stumbling my way through Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” this Spring (spoiler alert: Arafat and Rabin make up in the end), most aspects of the Middle East remain a complete fucking riddle to me: Who’s good? Who’s bad? Who do I sympathize with when someone brings up the Lebanon War? What the fuck was the Lebanon War? Sometimes the answers seem at once deathly important and totally meaningless. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if Laura Dern toted an RPG and midgets were replaced with martyrs.

As a sort of built-in defense mechanism against such heavy debates, I tend to focus on trivial details of the greater story at hand. In the case of Kanye West’s controversial headscarf, I focused my energies on another foreign piece of the rapper’s attire: his sunglasses. The distinctive slotted “shutter shades,” worn by Mr. West during live performances and in the music video for his single “Stronger,” are a relic from a place far more terrifying than the Gaza Strip: the 1980s.

From the moment Kanye first donned them in 2007, the shutter shades were instantly identified as a distinctly ’80s accessory. However, visual evidence of the glasses from the period is harder to come by than I had anticipated. In the end, I was only able to find two exhibits of the glasses from their alleged decade of origin. The first is the1985 film “The Last Dragon,” in which they were worn by the character Sho’Nuff. The second is the music video for Animotion’s hit 1985 single, “Obsession.”

Depressingly, the one ’80s icon I most vividly remembered sporting a pair of shutter shades, Michael J. Fox’s randy “Teen Wolf” sidekick Rupert “Stiles” Stilinski, did not dawn a single pair in the film’s entire 91-minute running time.

He did, however, wear this shirt. Which, incidentally, is far more offensive in my opinion than even the most egregious pro-terrorism scarf…

One relatively minor but incredibly enjoyable duty of my job at a humor website involves coming up — along with a number of talented co-workers — with amusing descriptions of the Internet’s funnier viral videos. 

But a shockingly high number of those videos revolve around a single theme: poorly performed physical feats. And while nothing brings me more joy than watching arrogant attempts at sports and stunts fail most epically (the notorious “Afro Ninja” draws a guttural laugh from me to this day), there are only so many ways you can describe different gymnasts face-planting into different floors before you begin repeating yourself to at least some extent. 

An occasional method of avoiding descriptive redundancy, one first practiced by my office’s senior staff members (and probably based on some comedic principal of misdirection that I’m sure can be traced back to an ancient Greek dramatist whose name I don’t know), is to endow embarrassing videos with deceptively impressive titles. Thus, a home movie of a painful, 75-foot belly flop is titled “Sick Backflip,” and a young man hurling himself face first into a wall is described as having run up it “flawlessly.”

Of course, belly flops and minor concussions hardly need our editorial assistance to make America laugh. But it’s nice to believe the misleading caption adds at least some extra punch to the audience’s initial viewing experience. (I’m reminded of an article by Amir Blumenfeld praising the equally misleading humor so effectively used on “The Simpsons.”)

With this philosophy in mind, my friend and colleague Kevin recently suggested collecting our site’s more dishonestly described videos in a single group. I now encourage you to visit CollegeHumor’s “Misleading Caption” videos: A brief-but-in-progress listing of “incredible” jumps, “graceful” dives, and a number of other “not hilarious” stunts by “talented” individuals. True, their element of surprise may now be diminished for you, but if you’re anything like me or the slapstick-loving individuals I work with, the humor only increases with the utter wrong-ness of our praise.

This weekend, the New York Times took a break from reporting meaningless, trite news items like the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama and the fragile state of the economy to give a report I actually cared about: Patrick Swayze will still be starring in the under-production A&E crime drama “The Beast,” despite being recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The Times article was filled with the kind of positive sentiments and enthusiastic quotes from friends and colleagues that one would expect to find in a story about any good man battling a disease, but one quote from Swayze himself stood out to me. Not because it was especially poetic or insightful –- at least not in the traditional sense — but because it inadvertently encapsulated the essence of the “Dirty Dancing” star’s entire career. When asked about his upbeat attitude toward recovery, Mr. Swayze is quoted as saying, “I’m a cowboy. I’m a dancer. I’ll beat this.”

I am a cowboy. I am a dancer. With all due respect, the words read like Eagles lyrics. Life-threatening illness or not, these sentences would sound ridiculous coming from the lips of just about any other actor – or person, for that matter – on the planet. (Could you imagine the fallout – and religious implications – of Tom Cruise calling himself a cowboy?) Yet they somehow feel natural when uttered by Swayze, whose roles over the last 25 years have included bouncers, dancers, surfing bank robbers, and a shirtless banker who fucks Demi Moore on a pottery wheel. 

Yes, technically Mr. Swayze does own a ranch and is a trained ballet dancer. But the acceptability of Swayze’s words is about more than that. For the bulk of his career, Swayze has chosen roles so absurdly bodacious that they border on parodies of themselves. In those roles, however, Swayze has never given in to the urge to take them as anything less than serious. Weather he’s killing invading Russians in 1984’s “Red Dawn” or killing post-apocalyptic bandits in 1987’s similarly titled “Steel Dawn,” Swayze has never taken the “Hey, how silly is this movie I’m in?!” approach, as so many contemporary leading men (Clive Owen in “Shoot ‘Em Up,” Bruce Willis in “Grindhouse,” the entire cast of Tony Scott’s “Domino,” etc.) have done.

The surprising sincerity of Swayze’s words reminded me of a 2007 essay by “A.V. Club” writer Nathan Rabin praising the non-ironic “awesomeness” of “Point Break,” a 1991 action film about an undercover FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who infiltrates a gang of surfing, bank-robbing adrenaline junkies led by a wavy-haired skydiver named Bodhi (Swayze). If that description sounds like a joke, it isn’t. And that, Rabin argues, is precisely the point:

The key to Point Break’s enduring awesomeness is that it plays its premise one-hundred percent straight. If the film were made today I suspect it’d be filled with invisible air quotes and non-stop winks to let the audience know that the filmmakers are way too cool and hip and ironic to expect anyone to take Patrick Swayze seriously as the Buddha of the surfboard set… As “Snakes On A Plane” and “Spice World” both illustrate, nothing kills a potential camp classic quite like constantly letting audiences know you’re in on the joke.

The same way “Point Break” can have Swayze give Keanu Reeves a mid-air high five while sky-diving without a hint of irony, so Swayze can now proclaim with complete frankness that he’s a cowboy and a dancer while coming off as neither pompous, out-of-touch, or joking.

Silly choice of words or not, ironic or serious, I’m just happy to know that recent events haven’t taken the Swayze out of Patrick. Like all his fans, I wish him the best. And though I’m at a loss for the wisest words of consolation to offer Swayze at this juncture, I can borrow a few of the man’s own, spoken in “Road House” when his character, an ass-kicking bouncer with a PhD. in philosophy named Dalton, is asked what he studied in college: 

“Just man’s search for faith,” answers Swayze, “and that kind of shit.”