Bandwaggonry.
I’m on board—are you? (Yes, mine is an involuted joke. Referencing this, and this [by way of this].) —And now I’m on to something else. (For the record, akashic or otherwise: “FAIR and Balanced, Deceased.”)
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?
Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please:
Spiders 3.5 is up and running. —Mirrored here, if you’re getting sluggish downloads or 503s at the main e-sheep site.
The fight my dog is in.
So I commented on the whole gay Episcopalian bishop thing the other day by saying that I didn’t really have a dog in that fight, but, and Kevin came along and (gently, gently) remonstrated me by pointing out I had the same dog in the fight as any other decent human being would, and I kinda nodded my head and went along with it even though it didn’t feel quite right. And some of that has to do with the fact that I wasn’t raised Episcopalian—we bounced back and forth between Methodists and Presbyterians growing up—and some of that has to do with the fact that my religion as it stands (which would be, what? my beliefs? my cosmology? my moral grounding? my ethical code? my ritualistic practices? my celebrations?) is best described as “other”: lapsed neo-pagan doesn’t quite cut it, and spiritualist atheist and a-anthropic deist are too cheeky to do much good. To say nothing of the fact that, whatever queerness bends the sexual proclivities of the Spouse and myself, we’re rather comfortably ensconced in the lap of heterosexual privilege. So: yeah, gay bishop confirmed, bigots routed for the nonce, good show, but.
Then up came Roz Kaveny, who articulated precisely which fight I’d rather were kicking up dust right now:
The question is not—should the Christian churches split over the question of allowing a few LGBT people to be clergy? The question is, when are the churches going to humble themselves in abject shame for their endless crimes against gay people?
Added bonus: gummitch, in comments, links to a couple of kick-ass Real Live Preacher posts on this subject, which are required reading: the second is a shredding exegesis of the Scripture cited by homophobic bigots, but the first—oh, my Lord, the first—
There, do you see the iron furnace door, gaping open? Do you see the roaring flames? Do you see the huge man with glistening muscles, covered with soot? Do you see him feeding the fire as fast as can with his massive, scooped shovel?
He feeds these flames with the bible, with every book, chapter, and verse that American Christians must burn to support our bloated lifestyles, our selfishness, our materialism, our love of power, our neglect of the poor, our support of injustice, our nationalism, and our pride.
See how frantically he works? Time is short, and he has much to burn. The prophets, the Shema, whole sections of Matthew, most of Luke, the entire book of James. Your blessed 10 commandments? Why would you want to post them on courtroom walls when you’ve burned them in your own cellar?
Do you see? DO YOU SEE? Do you see how we rip, tear, and burn scripture to justify our lives?
The heat from this cursed furnace rises up and warms the complacent worshippers in the pews above. The soot from the fire blackens our stained glass so that we may not see out and no one wants to see in.
Do you smell the reek of this injustice? It is a stink in the nostrils of the very living God. We are dressed in beautiful clothes and we wear pretty smiles, but we stink of this blasphemous holocaust.
Every church in America has a cellar like this. We must shovel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, because every chapter and book we ignore must be burned to warm our comfy pews.
And you come to me with two little scraps of scripture to justify your persecution of God’s children?
Sit down Christian. Sit down and be you silent.
My hat’s off to you, Preacher. (And that image of the soot-covered shoveler does rather wonderful things, cognitively speaking, to the image of conservative Episcopalians smearing their foreheads with ashes in their grief. Doesn’t it?)
—In the interests of fair play, and to change the topic abruptly, I’ll point to this alarmingly good piece of news from Alabama:
The Christian Coalition of America endorsed Riley’s tax plan Wednesday, saying it represents social and economic justice for Alabama. Coalition President Roberta Combs called the plan “visionary and courageous.”
“I think this is a good plan and I think people of faith need to know about the plan,” Combs said.
This doing the right thing stuff could get to be an epidemic.
Shibboleths.
Kevin Drum has a good, if snarky, policy:
Personally, I would refuse to be baited by the kind of person who refers to paper notes as “fiat currency,” but hey—it’s Eugene’s blog and he can do what he likes.
“Fiat currency” is one of those buzz words—buzz terms, I suppose—that does, indeed, signal a certain je ne sais quois. The person using it is being persnicketily specific, to the point of spoiling for a fight: usually, about the gold standard. (Which would you rather have in your bank account: gold, or green cheese?) —Which reminds me of “valuta” (which seems much less buzzy these days), a term I recall from that portion of my youth spent poring over the pages of Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, trying to glean The Truth. It’s sort of the obverse of fiat currency—rather than value imposed by government fiat, it’s value demanded by citizen fiat, usually that of cranky old men convinced the gummint’s stealing ’em blind. (They bite down on the gold coins you give them—they know the taste of gold, you see.) They also tend to refer to “the franchise”—at least, the cranky old men in my mind’s eye do, the ones so heavily influenced by Heinlein, and I really should stop making fun: while they might have quaint ideas about valuation, and a curious semantic failure when it comes to how government works, and for whom, they would be raising holy hell about crap like this, and holy hell is precisely what we need, right now. Of course, they’d turn right around and try to limit the franchise to those who can solve quadratic equations, or who own real property in fee simple, or give you a number of votes in proportion to the amount you’ve paid in taxes, but that’s a fight we can pick once we’re done putting a stop to this black-box nonsense.
There’s another phrase set rattling by this late-night influx of cranky old men with gold under their mattresses: “blood and treasure.” At first glance, it feels and smells like another one of those cranky old men shibboleths: blood and treasure, what we have paid and spilt, a measure of what’s owed to us. It’s got a nice Founding Fathers ring to it—the Monroe Doctrine, of course:
The political system of the allied powers is essentially different, in this respect, from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. And to the defence of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
Which most likely cribbed it from John Adams:
July 1776 will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, this time forward, forever more.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost US to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see the End is more than worth all the means. And that Posterity will triumph in those days of transaction, even though we should rue it…which I trust in G-d we shall not.
Or maybe George Washington:
Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become victims of our own lust of gain?
What’s weird, and a little spooky, to me is that of all the references to “blood and treasure” that Google can find—7,930, as of 10.30 pm or so, Pacific Daylight Savings Time, August 6, 2003—3,250 of them also include the word “Iraq.” Almost half. —And while it’s not that surprising that almost half the references to blood and treasure found on the internet would refer to by far the largest and most active theatre of war in the internet age, and more than a few of those references are the sort of true-blue conservative, libertarian, isolationist, anti-imperialist, anti-preëmptive war stuff you’d expect from these cranky old men, still: there’s Colin Powell, referring to the price in blood and the price in treasure paid by the members of the Coalition of the Willing; there’s Richard Armitage, talking about the expenditure of blood and treasure; there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about how it was us that put blood and treasure on the line for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps there’s something in the water?
Of course, all of this blood and treasure makes me think of pirates. Which is maybe not the image this meme ought to conjure for maximum effectiveness in this particular case, but I’m a lost cause. (Blood? Treasure? Isn’t it more honest to make your purchases as you go, with sweat and valuta?) Thinking of pirates, of course, makes me think of Johnny Depp, and would you look how far afield I’ve strayed?
I should maybe just point you to this book on the art of money me and the Spouse picked up the other night. It’s true: American currency is ugly; the other currencies of the world are far more beautiful. More beautiful, even, than buttery, auric gold. —If we paid them with pretty fiat currency, that comes in rainbow colors and has those shiny anti-counterfeit strips, maybe then those cranky old men would stop writing letters to the editor?
Nah. The 7-11 would still refuse to take anything higher than a twenty. Where’s the justice, I ask? Where?
In your face, Fred Barnes.
Um. I mean. Not that I’m Episcopalian or anything, so it’s not like I actually had much of a dog in this fight—but how can decent folk not feel a surge of triumph when such transparent smear tactics are repudiated, and the good guy ends up winning?
And yet, I’m still not thrilled at the idea of President Dean.
From this week’s Doonesbury FAQ—
What’s up with Trudeau running a big Howard Dean campaign the last few weeks. Is Trudeau in the tank? —M. Mahoney, Sacramento, CA
Damn near. Here’s the skinny for full-disclosure buffs: GBT and Dr. Dean were childhood buddies, having first met at summer camp. During a camp wrestling tournament, the puny Trudeau pinned the athletic Dean twice, an humiliation (attention, biographers) that has haunted Dean ever since. After attending Yale together, the two lost track of one another until Dean became governor of Vermont and told a reporter that he’d developed his sense of humor hanging out with Trudeau. Trudeau wrote him to protest, because during his teenage years, GBT didn’t actually have a sense of humor. This may explain why reporters don’t think Dean has one, either. Actually he does, at least around Trudeau, so GBT gave him $2000 (maxing out early) on the promise of relief from daily Dean-For-America fundraising spam, a promise that his friend has yet to make good on. Dean has also refused to soften his position on gun control, drug reform, or any other issue of importance to GBT, so a lot of good it’s done.
Which is apparently the second source NewsMax relied on when it proclaimed that Howard Dean is the media-elite darling:
Dean is “the media’s favorite long shot for president” and enjoys an “adoring national press,” confirms Editor & Publisher magazine. Why? Because he loathes President Bush even more than his rivals do and attacks him on everything possible: Operation Iraqi Freedom, tax relief, education reform, national defense…
He has more in common with the Bush administration than he’d like to admit, however, notably the secrecy he so hypocritically attacks. The frequently out-of-state guv refused to reveal his campaign trips on his schedule. It took a lawsuit filed by local yokel newspapers and an order by the Vermont Supreme Court to force him to make public his trips campaigning for the White House.
By the way, here’s the inside story of why Bush-hating cartoonist Garry Trudeau gave Dean extra publicity in “Doonesbury”: The two are longtime friends who met at summer camp when they were 13, a fact Trudeau fails to disclose in his free plugs.
Of course, Dean and Trudeau attended Yale at the same time as President Bush. Small network, ain’t it?
Why I am in the mood I am in,
or, Tin-foil hats for the sophistimacated.
Days like today? Seems like this—
The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
—is the only possible explanation for this pending promotion—
[national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration. Rice appears to have an edge because of her closeness to the president, though it is unclear whether she would be interested in running the State Department’s vast bureaucracy.
—the pending failure of this bit of terribly necessary compassionate conservatism—
Just over half of Alabama voters oppose Gov. Bob Riley’s $1.2 billion tax and accountability package, results from a new poll show.
Less than 30 percent of voters would vote to pass the package, with the rest remaining undecided, according to the poll conducted last week by The Mobile Register and the University of South Alabama.
The survey, conducted Monday through Thursday, polled 820 Alabamians who said they were either “very likely” or “likely” to cast a vote on the plan and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
—and the utter dearth of this sort of outrage outside of a small corner of the Islets of Bloggerhans—
A CBS News tally shows this is Bush’s 26th presidential trip to Crawford. He has spent all or part of 166 days at the ranch or en route—the equivalent of 51/2 months. When Bush’s trips to Camp David and Kennebunkport, Maine, are added, according to the CBS figures, Bush has spent 250 full or partial days at his getaway spots—27 percent of his presidency so far.Meanwhile other Americans are getting no time off from their job.
Stripped of his uniform and laid flat on his back in a first-aid tent, a wounded Army engineer fixed his wide, unblinking eyes on a flimsy overhead tarp that shielded him from the desert sun.
I could go on, but. (But.) What, after all, is the point when this is seen—by anyone, anywhere—as making a valid point, political or otherwise? (You see?)
All I know is, I still don’t have any whiskey.
The mindset in question.
A confession: I’ve never been a huge fan of Spider Robinson.
A fan favorite, and something of an acolyte of Robert Heinlein, he’s most famous for his short stories (and the occasional novel) set in and around Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon—a genial sort of place: the best bar near the big SF convention after the floor has closed; a sort of Northern Exposure-ish utopia small enough so that everybody knows your name, but big enough (in heart) that everybody can be his or her respective self, warts and all. (With SF puzzles, tropes, allusions, convoluted in-jokes, and horrible, horrible puns.) —Robinson is more naïve than he thinks he is, a raging sentimentalist operating under the mistaken assumption that he’s hard-boiled, but he’s got a way with words, and a more inclusive than not view of humanity, which excuses a lot in my book. “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy”; and if celebrating that is hokey, well, we could all do with a little more hoke around here, from time to time.
But. And even though I knew he comes by a great many of his ideals via the aforementioned Heinlein (let’s just note I’m more partial to Disch and Delany and leave it at that), and that those ideals include more than a dollop of that attitude towards women mistaken by some as feminism but more usually noted as pedestalization—I was still taken aback to discover this particular Robinson quote:
Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for—is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now, there’s—largely speaking—two responses to this kernel:
- it’s basically true, if a bit overly heated—this is, indeed, the secret underpinning of the war between the sexes;
- it’s a prime example of the tragedy bred by that farce of sloppy thinking, evolutionary psychology—what a fuckin’ cop out.
(No points for guessing where I stand. Biology is not destiny, muthafuckah.)
Those two (largely speaking) responses help determine how people respond in turn to the news that Illinois has modified its definition of rape to include the following:
c) A person who initially consents to sexual penetration or sexual conduct is not deemed to have consented to any sexual penetration or sexual conduct that occurs after he or she withdraws consent during the course of that sexual penetration or sexual conduct.
Either: the stuff is more precious than heroin, and if she’s said “yes” there’s no use changing her mind, as that poor addled rapist-man couldn’t stop if his life depended on it; or good God, of course No means No, decent sex means being attuned to what your partner’s up to as well as yourself, and consent is not a binding oral contract, for fuck’s sake. (As it were.)
Do note we haven’t winnowed all the chaff by any means. There’s still grey areas a-plenty—the pedestalization that underlies l’difference that’s vived in the quote above has more than enough room for the concept of the chivalrous gentleman who damn well stops when his partner says whoa, and I’d never dream of suggesting that Robinson, say, would decry the Illinois law merely on the basis of said quote. (And on the other hand, there’s room enough for concern about the possibilities of abuse in the “what a fuckin’ cop out” camp. —And yet: even here, we find grey, we find fuzz, we find fog.)
But I now find myself in the need of fresh coffee. So.
The Further Adventures of Chickenhawk: Into the Kulturkampf!
So the Supreme Court astonishes everyone by doing the right thing and striking the Texas sodomy law from the books. Goes one further, even, and asserts a more robust right to privacy for all of us than we could have expected. And everyone wondered what the President’s reaction would be.
Sen. Santorum floats a trial balloon, and is roundly, soundly criticized for likening consensual homosexual relations with hot “man on dog” action. And everyone wondered what the President might have to say on the subject.
Pundits began to muse about the possibility of a split in the Republican party, between moderate, socially liberal(ish) swing voters and the rabidly bigoted hardcore conservative bloc—both necessary to a second four years of Bush. What would he do? they asked. How will he handle this dicey dilemma?
But through it all, the President and his various spokespeople remained silent.
Then, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll was released, showing a marked decline on the part of the American public in the acceptance of consensual homosexual relations and the right to marriage or recognition of civil unions for gays.
The President spoke right up.
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”
How nice to know he has the conviction of his courage on this one.
Essay question.
Please secure your copy of Suzanne Vega’s debut album, Suzanne Vega, and cue up the eighth track. Play the song through once, paying particular attention to the lyrics. (Those who have lent their copy to a friend and never got it back, or who realized too late it was in the glove compartment of the beater donated to save someone’s kidney, or who’ve left it at the office, or—God forbid—never owned a copy, are hereby directed to this handy crib sheet of the lyrics in question.)
Now. Take up your blue books and your No. 2 pencils—or open up the comments box and fire up your keyboard—and answer the following:
Who is the more sympathetic, the queen? Or the soldier? And why?
Remember: neatness counts, but panache counts more. And while there are no wrong answers, there is most certainly a right one. Or why else ask the bloody question?
Help wanted.
One cartoonist with excellent draftsmanship, a firm yet playful grip on masking, an eye toward the possibilities of the infinite canvas (cribbing perhaps from Patrick Farley’s groundbreaking layouts), a sophisticated color sense (modesty forbids holding up one’s Spouse as an exemplar), and no ambitions beyond realizing precisely those comics I can dimly see in my own mind’s eye that won’t stop muttering page after page of dialogue at me in the wee hours of the night. Mind-reading a plus.
Well, that’s what I’d want, anyway. Ideally. Shaennon Garrity may well have a more equitable working relationship in mind. But if even Shaennon Garrity—queen of webcomics, who’d actually be making a living from Narbonic and Li’l Mel and Trunktown if she were making that living in, say, Paducah, or one of the I states, and not San Francisco—if even Shaennon can’t just trip over a suitable slave cartoonist as she’s picking up her groceries, if even Shaennon has to take out an ad for her latest idea, what hope have we mere mortals?
A night at the movies.
I dithered over what to call this: “What we’re fighting for,” perhaps, or “Which side are you on,” or “The Family or the Sygn,” perhaps (again)—but all that’s reductive and simplistic and combative and decreasing the Us and increasing the Them and that’s not the point. —Though if I had alluded to Delany with that last title, I could have gotten in my dig at that study about conservative thought that’s mostly been (rightly) blasted, by pointing out how much more simply it could have been stated—has already been stated—
[A]ll human attempts to deal with death [fall] into two categories of injunctions: (1) Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying. (2) Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself. . . . For each adherent the other is the pit of error and sin.
But what this is about, really, is a movie. One we just got done watching. An ambling, amiable epic: Le Destin, or Destiny, or Al Massir, written and directed by Youssef Chahine. It’s a loose historical about what might have happened when the Caliph Mansur banished the philosopher Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, for the crime of insisting that faith and reason did not need to be reconciled, as they did not conflict. Most of the plot swirls around the machinations of the fundamentalist cult promulgated by suave courtier Sheikh Riad and the attempts bumbling and not so by Averroës’ friends and family to see to it that his books—his commentaries on Aristotle and The Republic, his Tahafut Al-Tahafut, his Kitab fasl al-maqal—might be copied and smuggled into libraries in Languedoc and Cairo and out of danger from pyres and fanatics. Plus: beautiful scenery, great architecture, a cast full of eye-candy, bouts of derring-do, and song and dance numbers.
—Irresistable, in other words. (Movie Madness has a copy. [I should maybe have called this “A night in front of the VCR,” but it doesn’t have the same allusive panache.] I’d bet Scarecrow in Seattle does. It’s distributed stateside by New Yorker Films, so you’ve got a shot elsewhere, too.)
And yes, it’s long, and meandering, and heavy-handed, and digressive, and thuddingly obvious, and it doesn’t matter. The flick is “unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values,” as this review put it, and that’s true (sad, but). And there’s the unavoidable echoes and appalling ironies rung off the here and now—all unforeseen, from this, to this—that will leave you in the mood to ask cheekily leading questions like What are we fighting for, anyway? and Whose side are you on? Why do we mourn the burning of a book? Why must reason and faith be at odds? Why must there only be one side to every story? What is truth, anyway, and can you ask that question without washing your hands of it?
But I’m just getting silly. Of course you can. And it was a good movie; highly recommended. Soaringly achingly delicious Arabic orchestral pop. And I did mention the eye-candy?
—I should maybe just leave you with the thoughts of national treasure Ray Davis and get the heck to bed already.
A chatroom of their own.
My first feature for Comixpedia is up; it’s about how the internet is rather dramatically affecting the ability of cartoonists to find each other and hook up in ad hoc support groups and interstitial schools through such silly, simple tools as email, chat, and LiveJournal. And how these quotidian tools are more revolutionary for comics online than such (admittedly nifty) ideas as Flash-based panel transitions and infinite canvasses. —Email: it’s still the killer app.
Anyway, the piece is essentially a reimagining of this earlier entry, about the Pants Pressers; I also look at a group of cartoonists, writers, and filmmakers who’d met in college and are handily maintaining their scattered, post-academe connections online. And right now I’m wishing I’d read this Shirky piece before I’d written either—not that I want to get hardcore into social dynamics and group theory, and not that I’d want to dwell on acrimonious dissolutions, but still. It’s a great piece, and an important vector to mull over in this vague regard.
But enough with the dwelling and mulling! How about some further Comic-Con post-mortemry? One of the kings of con reports has finally posted his take—complete with shots of what Steve Lieber was up to when he wasn’t in San Diego. Enjoy.
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.
And the whole dern thing has been condemned by ’Merican Express.
I think I found this over at Geisha Asobi: Mr. Wong’s wonderful Soup’Partments, quite possibly the world’s tallest virtual building. Download a basic template (one- or two-storey models available), renovate to your liking (pixels only, please; no anti-aliasing), and email it in; Mr. Wong will find a place for you.
Which reminds me of something from back in the day: the Muckenhoupt Hotel, frequented by a large part of my circle of friends (and others, of course) at Oberlin. Now, keep in mind this was back in the late ’80s: there was no web, world-wide or not, and students bringing their own computers to school was rare. We had a couple of rooms in the library full of cheap idiot terminals all plugged into a VAX 11/780—with a separate room for some MS-DOS boxes, and, my sophomore year, the experimental Macintosh lab, full of cute little SEs. Getting email out of the local network and onto the Internet (it made more sense to capitalize it then) took a little finagling—corresponding with the Runic Robot was always something of a feat, at least for me—and when you made a post to Usenet, it could take 3 or 4 days to show up. And those cheap idiot terminals had monochrome displays: you could pick an amber-on-black or a green-on-black display. No graphics, anti-aliased or otherwise.
Each student could sign up for an email address and a directory with a couple hundred kilobytes, gratis. And we rapidly found other ways to use that k than email storage and statistical analyses—there were emailed serials (most notably the late, lamented Pulp); Infosys, the bulletin board, was full of long-winded, little-read arguments on politics and religion; and of course, games: Hack (or Rogue, or whatever) and Wumpus-hunting and IF and setting up utilities for Champions character generation.
Carl Muckenhoupt pulled an interesting experiment. He set the protections for reading and writing to his directory structure to all, wrote a text file describing the lobby of the Muckenhoupt Hotel, and threw open its doors. Anyone could set up a subdirectory under his directory, and put whatever text files they wanted in it. So people would set up their “rooms,” with text descriptions of what they looked like, and files describing various objects within the rooms. People began leaving objects in each other’s rooms, since you could set your own subdirectories to allow others to write to them (I seem to recall a minor kerfluffle over an anonymously created rose). Crude hypertext hacks allowed you to move through the directories, and even set up “secret passages” that would work in the background to move you unbidden from one room to another. Someone—Carl, I think—cobbled together an ASCII elevator that could move you from one “floor” to another.
This was all in 1987 and 1988, or thereabouts. And while he was far from the only one to come up with the basic idea, and it was terribly ad hoc—there was no coding involved beyond the operating system and the directory-shunting hacks—still, it’s worth noting: this was one of the world’s first MUSHes. (Or MUDs. Or whatever.) Proto-MUSH? Maybe?
(Confidential to Amy: Yes, it is.)
