Light synthesis.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
—Karl Kraus
Those days I don’t want to be Avram Davidson when I grow up, I want to be Kenneth Hite. A prolific author, editor, and designer in the benighted backwater of the gaming industry, his Suppressed Transmissions columns are the ne plus ultra for parahistorical High Weirdness. They are available online through the auspices of Steve Jackson’s Pyramid magazine, and access to five years’ worth of Hite archives is itself worth the $20 price of admission. He recently (okay, back in May; I’ve been busy) celebrated his 200th column with a boggling stunt: using little more than chutzpah and silly string, he tied together all two hundred of his columns—reality quakes, Roswellian interventions, Florentine superheroes, timetravelling supercops, Lovecraftian glosses, steam-powered airship empires, qlippothic ultraterrestrials, paramilitary Shakespearean dramaturgy, Fortean bestiaries, Clio’s nightmares, and the occasional UFO—into a monstrously encyclopedic timeline, the backbone continuity of the best Out There conspiracythink soap opera comic book epic that never was. A taste, a generous (if scattershot) taste:
1588: Another major nexus battle, as MI-∞ throws all its resources including a secretly resurrected Arthur and a dramaturgical inversion ritual into defeating the Spanish Armada in all timelines. Various Armadas receive Reptoid, Sphinx, or ZSS aid. A covert Strike Force Chronos team covers Dee’s back, keeping the Lemurians, the nanotech swarms, and less categorizable things at bay. During the commotion, Spring-Heeled Jack slips into reality.
1776: Masonic Civil War erupts between the Washington and Weishaupt factions. The Reptoid-backed Weishaupt faction mounts an internal coup against Dee that replaces MI-∞ with the Occult Empire. During the struggle, the RCS sets up Reality Cornwallis as a fallback, but the American Templars soak 1776 in mythic energies from their limitless Arcadian cornucopia.
1780: It is a dark time for the rebel alliance; the Occult Empire shrouds the skies of America. An elite Strike Force Chronos team flies through a trench in reality to remove the Occult Empire before it existed, leaving only an acausal eclipse over New England on May 19.
1859: To contain Dixie, Argus is forced to confirm MI-∞ agent of influence Joshua Norton as Emperor of America. The planet Vulcan enters our reality, setting off a cosmic struggle between the Sphinxes and MI-∞ over its existence; the battle spreads back in time to spark a covert space race, remove the Earth from Saturn’s orbit, and launch Monstrator.
1909: Weak between two huge impacts, reality folds back to the 1854 splashback under a Futurist assault eventually contained by Rosicrucian art historians.
1938: An astral Martian invasion nearly breaks into our reality through newly-opened Kirlian space, but is contained at the last minute inside Orson Welles’ radio broadcast. The Occult Empire makes a comeback bid by creating the Waste Land in Cleveland, but Eliot Ness’ myth is too strong for it. In the chaos, the Kriegsmarine and Ahnenerbe “stake out” an eimically-secure fastness in Neuschwabenland for the Antarctic Space Nazi Refuge.
2000: Probably unrelated to the bike controversy, a planetary alignment causes a catastrophic Pole Shift; history restored from backup on January 1, 2001. American Presidential election files corrupted in restore, which takes four tries to get right.
If you’re not up for reading them online, then I’ll point you to the first two collections of his columns, available directly from the publisher. Hie thee hence, and here endeth the plug.
Eschaton immanentize!
Via Atrios, we learn that Jack Van Impe (of the Jack Van Impe Ministries) is claiming to have drafted an End Times “outline” at the behest of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Those interested in what it might look like are invited to peruse this wonderful map, which does its damndest to update Late Great Cold War geopolitical apocalyptics for the current post–New-World-Order times, here after the end of history. (There’s also this beautiful poster image, suitable for a PowerPoint presentation.) —And can I just at this point tell you that one of my heroes is Sharon, as played by Mimi Rogers, in those last shattering moments of Michael Tolkin’s apocalypso verité, The Rapture?
My God, it’s full of—
If your eyes tire of the strain of all that redacted white and black space, then click here to refresh them with twirlingly illusory optical goodness. (Ow…) —Via Medley.
Heaping coals of fire on his head.
Roz Kaveny writes a beautiful, well, it’s an obituary, really, for Christopher Hitchens. (Via Electrolite.)
Last call for Chuck Taylors, ladies and gentlemen; last call.
Well, fuck. Nike’s trying to buy Converse:
Converse sales steadily declined in the 1980s and ’90s, and its parent company filed for bankruptcy in January 2001. Later that year, the company was bought for $117.5 million by private investors who have tried to revive the brand. They filed to make an initial public stock offering sometime this year valued at $300 million, but it stalled when Nike came knocking, analyst Shanley said.
Maybe we could get Moveon.org to take some time out from pushing Congress on WMD fact-finding, standing up to President Bush’s extremist court-packing, and overturning the FCC’s rampant stupidity, to organize a letter-writing campaign to the FTC? Get them to reject the deal on the grounds of simple human decency? This, after all, is what the deal stands for:
The marriage of the two brands gives Nike a way to shore up its low-price product line without diluting its marquee image, industry observers said. Converse also gives Nike further ammunition to capitalize on a consumer craze for products with retro and classic styling.
It’s like thinking you can get better eggs by dipping the goose in gold. —Sigh.
Bonus giggle up the sleeve, also from the Oregonian article:
“It’s a step in the right direction,” said John Shanley, a Wells Fargo Securities analyst in New York who doesn’t own shares of either company.
—Emphasis added. I don’t follow the financial press much. Is that sort of disclaimer de rigueur, these days?
Byatt’s Kool-Aid.®
Managment regrets to inform that otherwise intelligent, witty, and smashingly delightful conversationalists, with an Oregon Book Award to their credit and a heretofore infallible eye for the intriguing and offbeat, have gone and drunk it.
Falling on his sword for chickens? Chickens?
Well, PETA says he did, KFC says no, it’s just going with a new creative, and Jason Alexander’s people aren’t saying much of anything at all, which PETA insists is a classic non-denial denial. The facts, such as they are: Jason Alexander (you know, George) was the spokesmodel for a rather successful two-year KFC ad campaign. Back in May, it looked like he was going to be picked up for six more months of commercials: “It’s basically done,” said his lawyer, “not literally signed, but it’s done. Additional terms were built in and I fully anticipate going the distance.”
Then PETA threatened to boycott Alexander’s run in The Producers in LA unless he met with them. He agreed; they showed him hidden-camera videos of the appalling conditions under which chickens are farmed in this country; troubled, Alexander helped broker a meeting between PETA and KFC. (PETA’s threat to run the video on a couple of big-screen TVs on a truck and drive it through the suburban Louisville neighborhood where a couple of KFC executives live might also have played a part in those negotiations.)
The upshot: KFC has adopted a new set of humane® guidelines for farming chickens (which have nothing to do with this)—which KFC insists were in the works all along; PETA’s pressure, they say, played no part in the decision (a standard statement released in these sorts of circumstances). PETA insists KFC is lying about its record, and says it will take “all available options to stop them from deceiving people about the horrible abuse of animals they are supporting”; PETA is also claiming Jason Alexander as a chicken martyr. And Alexander is out of his “basically done” deal, and not saying much of anything at all.
—Via The Morning News: a fine, fine thing to browse over your first cup of coffee.
Stephen Hunter tempts fate, as it were.
“Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with Arabic culture or any culture. The story has been cut loose from its historical moorings and transpires in a world that never was, as overseen by gods who never were, in lands that never existed, hard by seas that were never wet.
Chalk it up to a spirit of planetary ecumenism. And, of course, the businessman’s practical grasp of market realities. But I, for one, will mourn the passing of the old tribalisms; I liked the exciting specificity of a divided world. It was nice when the Japanese had samurai, the English knights, the Arabians harems and the Greeks goddesses. This new mulch of place and thing may be safer but it sure is duller—and maybe it’s not even safer.
So the New Sinbad—voiced, however improbably, by the very Yankee Doodle-dandy Brad Pitt—plies a sea that encompasses a Fiji and a Syracuse but not an Alexandria. He is haunted by a god not called Allah or Buddha or God but, improbably, Eris. Eris? Yeah, and she’s voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer—you know, of the Valley Pfeiffers.
Eris is the Goddess of Chaos. Why would there be a Goddess of Chaos? I have no idea.
Apparently, he’s never heard of Google, either.
This one’s for Sacchi del Amy.
—Via MetaFilter: The Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products.
Accept No Imitations.
But! This one isn’t for Amy; she never was a big Buffy fan. IGN’s FilmForce (NASDAQ: IGNX, and isn’t there something fetchingly quaint about a website with its ticker symbol in the footer?) has an impressively comprehensive interview with Joss Whedon. Ten screens’ worth of stuff from an interviewer who isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions. Questions like:
On a side tangent, what was the purpose of the—I hesitate to use the phrase—sort of clumsy storytelling with the whole “Giles not touching things” thing…
But! Boarding school days, the Wesleyan mafia, lunch with Roseanne, feminism, gnomic utterances regarding cast tensions—it’s all here. A fun read, and you can cop a clue as to the underlying metaphor of Firefly for extra credit.
Sparklypoo.
Bill Mudron (who seems to have forgotten the relative difficulty of securing firearms in the Second-Amendment–less United Kingdom) pointed me to a post titled, “Mark Twain was still writing when Strom Thurmond was born” that then goes on to discuss male lactation and rounds off with a plea for sanity where Harry Potter is concerned. So how can one resist? —One can’t, when one’s will is so weak as to post a link to this. (Thanks, Mr. Humphries.)
Why I love the Antic Muse.
Second of all, could Anthony Scalia be any gayer? Why isn’t he posting in the Corner—he’s that gay.
It’s not just her Snoopy dance over the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, though; it’s also her review of the latest album by someone I might once have been to the same Tank party as at Oberlin, only we didn’t run with the same crowds because she was, like, really into Bitch Magnet, and I was a total geek. —The review, of course, is about more than just Liz Phair. Or Liz Phair, for that matter.
(There’s something—heartening, somehow, about the fact that I can go put Exile in Guyville on and press play and what comes out is still that kick-ass album I first heard in the wee hours of one dark morning in the booth at WMUA.)
Like she needs my traffic.
The Reverse Cowgirl has come up with about the funniest way to say hey, I’m taking off next week, you guys write my blog for me, okay?
If this be treason—
So I got a copy of Oskar Tennis Champion and now I’m playing track no. 9 to death—
In the Soviet Union
There’s a lightswitch on the wall
In the Soviet Union
And a canteen down the hall
In the Soviet Union
I make faces with a torch
In the Soviet Union
In the mirror on the back of the bathroom door
In the Soviet Union
Shining up the lino on the corridor floor
In the Soviet Union
Eating dead pigeons cold and raw
In the Soviet Union
Drinking vodka through a straw
In the Soviet Union
Weeping for the visions Lenin saw
I like it here, I like it fine
The radiator’s warm
The bus is on time
And healthcare is free
A job is for life
The caretaker is me
I’m switching on the lights
Me, I blame the pernicious influence of Ann “Treason” Coulter.
Today I’m alone
The war hasn’t even begun
But your king hasn’t won
One day you’ll come…
—Bonus pop culture up-to-the-moment meme in Oskar Tennis Champion: lots of pirates.
Rinsing certain tastes out of my mouth.
Tomorrow is the solstice, of course. The sun will reach the zenith of its analemma; the Oak King, distracted, will show the Holly King (who says, I only want to be sure you’re safe; I only want to know how very hard it is to harm you) the one way he can be killed, and the Holly King will turn treacher and strike. And then the days will grow shorter—so slowly that at first we will not notice, tumbling headlong through the high white heat of summer—until the first crisp breeze nips our nose, and we’re well on our way toward the cold dead end of the year.
If anything interesting happens to you in all of that, and you manage to wrap it up in 250 words of less-than-fictional prose by 28 June, slip it into a Word document and email it to Dale Keiger for consideration in the Microstories Summer Solstice 2003 project, would you? I think he’d like that.
Fluff.
Just wanted to counteract the sniggering, condescending, and spiteful links that this piece is sure to generate by noting that my own (admittedly lackluster) interest in seeing Matrix Reloaded just doubled.
No, I Claudius.
From Patrick Farley, genteel proprietor of that of which androids do dream:
The Which I, Claudius Character Are You? quiz.
(Me? I’m Clau- Clau- Claudius. Who else?)
Take the first left after Venus, you can’t miss it.
Venus:
- Diameter: 5.2 inches
- Location: Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)
- Construction: Styrofoam ball with fiberglass cover
- Constructed by: Caribou Tech Center (Caribou High School)
- Painted by: Jeanie McGowan, Curator of Collections at the Northern Maine Museum of Science and student at the University of Maine at Presque Isle
- Posts constructed by: Northern Maine Technical College, Sonny Michaud and students
- Base constructed by David Tardie and his students, Loring Job Corps, Cement Mason Program
—Via MetaFilter, the coolest thing I’ve seen this morning: a 40-mile-long scale model of the solar system, from the Sun at the Northern Maine Museum of Science at Presque Isle, to Pluto (and Charon) outside the Houlton Information Center at the junction of Route 1 and Interstate 95. It’s the brainchild of Kevin McCartney, a professor of geology at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and it was constructed pretty much entirely of donated materials and volunteer labor on a budget of zip, zero, zilch. Here’s the Smithsonian’s write-up:
Just now, newspaper ad sales manager Jim Berry is drilling a hole in Saturn’s post and remembering his first encounter with McCartney at a Kiwanis Club meeting. “I went home that night and said to my wife, ‘I met this guy today. He’s a wacko. You can’t believe what he’s going to try to do.’ “ When he got up the next morning he said, “Wait a minute. This is a great idea. I’ve got to get involved in this. This is just too good to pass up.”
McCartney has that effect on people; one day they think he’s crazy, the next day they’re painting Jupiter’s spot. His list of prominent “squirrels,” as he inexplicably calls his volunteers, runs eight pages long. Add the anonymous students who worked on a planet here or a stanchion there, and McCartney estimates that more than 500 squirrels have pitched in so far. Perley Dean, a retired Presque Isle High School guidance counselor who wears a “Maine Potato Board” baseball cap, got the job of persuading several landowners that what was missing on their property was a planet. “Many of them don’t stay up late at night reading about the galaxy,” Dean deadpans.
To infinity and beyond!
