So small and flat.
How can I trust you if you write to me, but do not include an URL to your photoblog? How can I tell, first, what your face looks like? Isn’t that enormously important? Secondly, without a photoblog I cannot know if your perception of the world is stale or fresh. I cannot know if you look around you, and, if you do, what you’re looking at, and how. I cannot know how you dress, and whether it would be appealing to undress you. I cannot know to what canon of beauty you subscribe unless I can subject you to rigorous style analysis.
You may be a brilliant writer, like Ian Penman, and you may have a blog stuffed with lively wordplay and interesting opinions. But the world is already full of opinions, of commentaries on commentaries, glosses on glosses, and spins on spins. Photos, in a world where the word-snake dines on its own tail, give me hope. Maybe photos can break the ever-narrowing vicious circles of language. Break them with textures, colours, forms; the peculiarly irreducible specificities of the visual world.
I want to know what you look like, and what the world around you looks like. It’s tremendously important to me, because in the end I don’t care a fig about whether you pronounce in favour of this or that book, film or record, or what life has taught you. Don’t tell me, show me! I want to look at the new shapes you’re seeing, viddy the texture of your lips and the colour and condition of your teeth. I want to see your face and use your eyes, damn it, because mine are always stalling and failing.
You have no choice but to start a photoblog. It’s a course requirement in the art school of life.
—That’s pop star Momus on photoblogging. Lots of icy cool links, too. —And if what little work I’ve done in graphic design convinces me that reproductions of the teal blue of his shirt are just as untrustworthy as the words, “teal blue,” well. He nonetheless has his point. (Several, in fact.)
The samizdata fuck-off.
The FCC, defying the will of 98% of the thousands upon thousands of Americans who wrote and faxed and emailed and overloaded their phone systems, has voted to ease the rules restricting media ownership. “Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism,” is the money quote from FCC Chairman Michael Powell. Yeah. And bank mergers have ever and always been about better service and cutting costs.
Orwell fatigue’s setting in.
If I haven’t been writing about this or calling to arms with the fervor of days-gone-by, it’s because a) I’m tired and b) this more than anything else has been a foregone conclusion. We could have wired those three Republican FCC wonks to a Ryder® truck packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil and a suicidal Mickey Mouse,® haggard after 70-some-odd years on the plantation and more to come, ready to push the button if they dared vote yes—and, well, it still would have come down along party lines, 3-2 in favor of keeping in place the restrictive rules that lock thee and me out of the broadcast media playground, while relaxing to the point of meaninglessness the rules on those who’ve already greased their way over the insurmountable licensing hurdles.
Boom.
Time for the samizdata fuck-off: it is assumed you already don’t listen to the radio much. (Not many of us do, and fewer every day.) Shut it off. Cancel your cable; get a jump on the decline in television viewership to come, and be ready to miss the coming age of shock-block programming. (You can get your Sopranos fix from DVD if you really, really need it.) Get your news from civilized countries and scrappy under-the-radar sources, using your favorite blogs as filters and pointers. Add your own voice to the mix—pick up the slack on local coverage by covering it yourself, keeping in mind that “local” is as much the doings of the school of small press poets whose work you follow from Kokomo and Kathmandu as it is the politics of the school board race run just last week. —And while you’re waiting in your online bunker for the inevitable borgification of the net, pick up a typewriter. Buy a copier before you have to have a Kinko’s license to own one and keep it in toner. Learn to run a mimeograph machine. Let’s see a renaissance of ’zines and minicomics, chapbooks and ashcans. Home-tape your own talk shows and soap operas, existential dramas and surreal collagerie, and pass ’em around as mpegs on CD-ROMs. Solder together a micropower transmitter if you’re feeling daring and take back the airwaves with your band’s live concerts.
The net (by which I mean so much more than the internet) treats censorship (by which I mean so much more than bowdlerization) as damage and routes around it, yeah. But we are the net. We do the routing. So declare defeat. Turn off, tune out, walk away. Let them have it, tell them to fuck off, and do it your own damn self.
Let’s you and him fight.
It is at this point of anti-hierarchical anarchist debate that the correspondent from another football magazine chooses to ask Richard Essex if he is in charge. This really is the wrong question. Essex, kindly, lets it go and continues. “This is not just a case of scoring goals and it’s not just about footballing skills, other skills are required, too.”
Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them. This is illustrated early on in proceedings when Jason Skeet of the AAA, calling for the ball, takes delivery of the pass and promptly scores in the goal of the side the pass came from. Embarassingly, this is the end that Goal is defending. More embarassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.
That’s from a piece called “The Anarchist’s Ball,” an only slightly condescending description of the delightfully dotty game of three-sided soccer—rather, football. (Found while browsing Chris Bertram’s miraculously unbloggered blog.) Which puts me in mind of moopsball, for no particularly good reason—those adhering to the rules of moopsball as written by Gary Cohn (and, it must be admitted, as remembered by fallible me) would rather sniffily didain Richard Essex’s intrepidly interplanetary footballers; the sentiment, I imagine, would be rather heartily reciprocated. —Granted, the moopsballers would with their bicycles and Scadian armor and squeaky hammers probably eat the more gently anarchistic dissolvers of the homoerotic/homophobic bipolarity of two-sided games for lunch, but so what? Strength is for the weak, and easy travel to other planets always scores beaucoup style points in my book.
Oh—the comic book that mentioned moopsball was one or another incarnation of that venerable fan favorite, The Legion of Superheroes. Which, for some reason, ties it all up neatly for me in one strange and inarticulable pop-culture ball of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Well, I don’t think it’ll all fit on one page
and I’m sure some might find an item or two “unfair.” But you know what? I hear that charge levelled from certain quarters these days, and the only conceivable response is to dredge up bitterly black and bilious laughter. Anyway: George W. Bush’s resume. —Via David Chess.
The final Buffy.
As opposed, I guess, to the Buffy finale? Anyway. I didn’t end up watching it, what with one thing and another, and the fact that the show never really recovered from its sixth-season slump, a couple of decent shows this past year notwithstanding, and, well, there was the one thing and another I was up to. Washing my hair, I think, or something. But it seems I made the wrong call: the finale actually sounds like it was a hoot and a half.
Ah, well. I’ll end up catching it on DVD sooner or later.
Dicebox.
Being the science fiction comics novel the Spouse is working her way through page by page over at Girlamatic (the first chapter and a half available for free, starting here). —Anyway, Jen Contino (Heidi MacDonald’s better half over at the Pulse) has been working her way through interviewing the various Girlamatic cartoonists; yesterday was Jenn’s turn.
We’re back.
Oy and gevalt, but. One week ago successfulhosting.com updated various software packages, including its basic database program. Unfortunately, in so doing it rendered the database upon which Long story; short pier, Alas, and Jennworks depend unreadable. (Also, every other non-MySQL Movable Type database on a successfulhosting.com server.) Now, there’s a terribly simple fix—but you have to have command-line access to do it yourself.
And, uh, we don’t.
So. —It’s been a week of testy phone calls and sudden epiphanies and nail-biting tension and glowering looks and links missed and memes unblogged and a lot of Sports Night episodes more on which in a bit, maybe.
Anyway. We’re back now. Miss us?
Quirks.
On the one hand, I don’t imagine it’s all that common to hear people talking about slipstreaming their stories and think you’re going to stumble over the poor piece of fiction with fifteen other naked men at the back of Wilson’s bakery. —Oh, that poor Danny Slepstrini…
On the other, I can’t be the only person in the world with a mad mad crush on Miranda Richardson’s imperiously petulant Queen from the Elizabethan Blackadder. Can I?
Speaking truth from power.
Which is always refreshing—
We interrupt this blog post to bring you an important bulletin. —See, I was gonna add value to this link to the Warren Buffet quote that’s flying all over the Islets of Bloggerhans today by digging up that old Doonesbury strip where Zonker’s in the House of Lords and they’re voting on I think it’s Maggie Thatcher’s hideously awful poll tax, or maybe it was actually voting for a upper-class tax increase which would make a little more sense given the punchline, I can’t remember which, so anyway I go to the handy dandy Doonesbury Town Hall to punch up the full online archive of 32 years’ worth of strips so I can plug in “House of Lords” and “class” maybe (or maybe something else, it always took a couple of tries to find what you were looking for), so I could add a link to that old strip where the Lord sitting next to Zonker says, “Haven’t you ever betrayed your class before? It’s jolly good fun!” only when I got to Doonesbury.com I a) discovered it was now a part of the Microsoft family (along with Michael Savage, ain’t that a kick in the pants), and b) you have to pay to get at the frickin’ archives. Information wants to be free; cartoonists want to eat; this isn’t so much eating as putting another zero in the bottom line; why shouldn’t an artist make hay off intellectual capital; why should I pay $9.95 a year for a terribly narrow window of pop-cultural research; the tragedy of the commons; the tragedy of the tragedy of the commons, and inevitable monopolization, and the borgification of all media, and the plummeting usefulness of the New York Times as an online source—anyway, what’s important here is that more links all over the web just went dark.
So.
Fuck.
Right, right. —Warren Buffet, ladies and gentlemen:
When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a “break” requires—now or down the line—that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.
Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class.
Jolly good, eh wot?
Further evidence of the decline of values we hold in common or Cato was right.
I mean, 8 to 5, or 9 to 5:30, just doesn’t have the same ring. —And that’s what we’ve got going for us now. Before this passes.
Nutshellery.
A number of folks are linking to today’s Daily Howler because it rips rather entertainingly into Janet Maslin’s rip-job on Sidney Blumenthal’s ripping Clinton-era tell-all. Since I haven’t read Blumenthal’s book (and probably won’t), I’m not about to get into a knock-down dragout on who’s zoomin’ who here, but I do have my suspicions—Maslin, after all, ends her piece thusly:
Speaking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Clinton Wars begins with a visit by President Clinton’s entourage to the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, NY. While Mr. Clinton looks at his predecessor’s desk, Mr. Blumenthal sounds a wistful note. Those were the days when the press was too respectful to mention the president’s wheelchair.
Now, of course, the press is a diligent, wheelchair kickin’ watchdog. Why, just look at how they handled the recent dustup in Iraq.
—But the reason I want to link to Somerby today is because of the bit at the very end, where he tags yesterday’s Molly Ivins piece as a must-read. Which it is. But it’s part of a bigger picture we need to get a grip on, and Somerby is leading the way:
In essence, Blumenthal’s book describes the interaction between two distinct classes—Ivins’ group of “Shiite Republicans” and Maslin’s simpering insider press corps. Maslin’s class gains from Bush’s tax cuts, and doesn’t much care about anything else. They aren’t Shiite Republicans themselves, but if you want to get to the Hamptons by noon, it’s better to humor Molly Ivins’ gang of crazies. So Maslin pretends that Coulter has done Big Research, and pretends that Blumenthal is making weird statements. Then she’s out the door for the weekend.
“More next week,” is how Somerby closes. I’ll be there for it. As usual.
The abyss, gazing also.
Well, her links are bloggered, but Emma’s got a fun post comparing the right wing’s Clenis™ fixation with a certain Johnathon Harker—
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
Which doesn’t sound terribly dextrous yet, but! As Emma points out:
Then, of course, having survived the seduction and properly recoiling from all that sexuality, Jonathan becomes a vampire hunter. He’s going to destroy that which nearly had him enthralled. Under the tutelage of old Van Helsing, he goes on to destroy Lucy Westenra (a not-so-good girl who really, really enjoyed it and therefore deserved death), and finally to the count’s coffin and the final stake. Now safe in his bloodless daylight world, Jonathan can go on to become the perfect proper Victorian gentleman.
Thing is, I have a sneaky suspicion that Jonathan always regretted, just a little bit, his vampiric coitus interruptus…
Now before somebody starts gibbering, let me say that I am not suggesting that Limbaugh or O’Reilly are repressing unhealthy lust for Bill Clinton (please God, help me get that picture OUT OF MY HEAD!). I think Bill Clinton represents the Dionyssian side of Western culture to them, and they fear that as much as they fear Hell and hope for Heaven. Bill Clinton’s unrestrained appetites, his ability to break the rules and “get away with it,” his appeal to common folk, his simple joy in the business of day to day living, threaten their sense of propriety and social structure, not in a cold intellectual fashion, but in a visceral gut-twisting revelation of their own limitations. And I think that, deep in the darkest places of their souls, they envy him.
Which dovetails in an unexpectedly neat fashion with some things Dirk Deppey’s been saying about the X-Men (the movie, yes, but also Grant Morrison’s guilty-pleasure rethink of the venerable comic book itself)—
It was from this environment that the first two successful gay support groups—the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, the men’s Mattachine Society in New York—began their operations. Our correspondent is quite right to point out the bravery involved in running such outfits. That said, I don’t think I mischaracterized the DoB’s early outlook in my previous statement. In my mid-20s, I spent a fair amount of time in Arizona State University’s library, reading from their hardbound collections of the newsletters these two groups produced for their members. The people writing in DoB’s newsletter, The Ladder, did indeed see their ultimate goal as helping the rest of the membership secure their privacy through subterfuge—the “ladder” of the newsletter’s title represented the steps necessary to do this, with the top rung ultimately depicting a healthy and secure lesbian couple, cohabitating peacefully in the knowledge that the neighbors suspected them of being nothing more than spinsters sharing the rent.
Trust me, there’s a mutant angle in that. But! I think maybe the dovetail is as yet only visible to me. Hmm. —Making more overt the mutants-as-gay metaphor; mutants as things to be feared, outside the normal, controlled, Apollonian mainstream (add a dash of willful ignorance re: mutants, mutation, and genetics, but that’s a) taking the metaphor far too literally and b) risking conceit crash); homosexuality as something so terribly feared that the only safety is to be found hidden under mainstream trappings by industrious Mattachine Bilitians—waitaminute, it’s around here somewhere—
It may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are stopped or damned up: when they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance, than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels. So wickedness being here more stopped by strict laws and the same more nearly looked unto, so as it cannot run in a common road of liberty as it would and is inclined, it searches everywhere and at last breaks out where it gets vent.
That’s Alan Bray in his excellent book Homosexuality in Renaissance England quoting Governor Bradford’s reflections on why it is, exactly, that “sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name)” have broken out more than once in the brave New World. “At last it breaks out,” Bray says of Bradford’s conceit;
the same assumption and the same symbolism appear in David Lindsay’s description of homosexuality in the antediluvian world, which he held responsible for the Universal Deluge, its counterpart in the world of Nature. It was also the rationale of the claim that the celibacy of Roman priests was the cause of their alleged homosexual sins: the bulwark against sexual debauchery, in the minds of the Protestant reformers, was marriage; that gone and all manner of sodomy and buggery would break forth.
Which would drag Rick Santorum’s “dogs and cats living together” moment from last month. —What, don’t you remember your Ghostbusters?
PETER
Or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
MAYOR
What do you mean, biblical?
RAY
What he means is Old Testament biblical, Mr. Mayor. Real wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
EGON
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes!
WINSTON
The dead rising from the grave!
PETER
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Mass hysteria; breaking out; streams stopped or dammed up, overflowing their banks with noise and violence; the damning, irresistable embrace of a lamia. Gay marriage advocates standing up for their rights (drag queens in feather boas; topless diesel dykes on a gay-pride float); heroic X-Men saving the world with their mutant powers (Wolverine skewering soldiers with his adamantium claws; Cyclops’s uncontrollable optic blast blowing a hole in the ceiling of the train station); Bill Clinton blowing the sax on Arsenio Hall (breaking the rules and daring to enjoy himself as he gets away with it).
—And now I’ve gotten wherever it is I am I have no real idea what I’m doing with it. Beyond stating the frightfully obvious: it’s a terribly old, illogical fear, this fear of losing control, this projection onto others of the abyss into which we’ve gazed. It’s one we will always have with us, idealistic optimism notwithstanding. Bray wrote Homosexuality in Renaissance England in 1982, which is something I want you to keep in mind as I go back to the end of the passage I quoted above. I left off the last line, you see:
...the bulwark against sexual debauchery, in the minds of the Protestant reformers, was marriage; that gone and all manner of sodomy and buggery would break forth.
Such a mental universe is alien to us now.
Oops.
Crunchysmoothdigitalanalog.
Scott pinged this in the comments to an earlier post and I thought I’d drag it out here into the light. (Just to clear this up: he isn’t talking synthesizer criticism.) We will trust the reader is familiar with the concept of alignment in Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk? You don’t need to be able to write a disquisition on the semioitics of alignment tongues, mind; just get that there’s law and there’s chaos and there’s good and there’s evil, and the various combinations (plus the neutral shadings between them) give you nine broad classifications for the ethics and morals of your role playing character: lawful good, chaotic neutral, neutral evil, whatever.
—At any rate. We (being a variety of people including but not limited to myself, Scott, Emily, Vince, Meg, Barry, Chas, and others whose names doubtless rhyme with all manner of words I can’t remember were hanging out in a disused Hampshire College dorm lounge at some point crawling out of the winter of ’91 – ’92, when Clinton was still a longshot and Bush’s lips were read and found wanting), and found our various selves to be bored with this rather clumsy and granular system (to say nothing of prejudicial; quick: what do you think of a character labelled “chaotic evil”? Hmm? And how far do you think they will get in this life?). So we hemmed and hawed and hashed and hammered out a artfully nimble little alternative: an alignment system based on whether you’re crunchy peanut butter or smooth peanut butter, and whether you’re digital or analog. Which gives us a system that’s more coarse that AD&D’s, with four steps rather than nine, but, because it’s far less prejudicial, far more open to late-night bull sessions and radical reinterpretations (if not cheekily outright misreadings), it’s perversely much more flexible. (And anyway, Neutrality is a mug’s game. Off the fence, boyoh: which side are you on, already?)
For instance: Scott writes, “If Bush I was smooth-digital, then what is Bush II? crunchy-digital, that rarest of alignments? food for thought.” Aside from quibbling minorly with his hyphenation (it is not so much an adjectival phrase as it is “digital” being modified by “crunchy,” much as “good” is modified by “chaotic”), well—but I see a point being raised by the pedant in the back, who wishes to inform us that digital is crunchy by definition, as digital media and models deal with discrete, irreducible bits, those 1s, those 0s, those flashing bars on your graphic equalizer, while analog is again by definition smooth, since its data rolls off sillyscopes in rounded, unstepped waveforms, so what’s all the rumpus? —Yes, and thank you, but: remember that we aren’t talking about smooth qua smooth and crunchy qua crunchy; we’re talking about peanut butter. Pause for a moment to reflect on how much easier it is with a digital tool-kit (and thus more native) to render the texture of smooth peanut butter than crunchy. (See? Long-winded radical reinterpretations and misread bloviations may now commence.)
Bush 41? Smooth digital, yeah. There’s something faintly Agent-Smith–sinister about flustered tortured-syntax Poppy, who nonetheless headed up the CIA for 10 days shy of a year. And Bush 43 as crunchy digital fits for me, given the above example of how much more effort it takes to dummy up a convincing crunchy texture out of nothing but 1s and 0s. So I don’t think I’ll quibble with his characterization much. Me? I’d say I’m a smooth analog: more concerned with surface than with an “authentic” peanut taste, and anyway, I hate the bits that get caught in your teeth, and while I love the current incarnation of the computer as much as the next guy, I’ve got an unhealthy fondness for liminals, for things that aren’t one thing or the other, or both, and for obscure old gadgets made well (and heavy). —So. Which side are you on? Eh?
-y? -ie? Or shall we call the whole thing off?
So which is it? “Hoody”? Or “hoodie”? I could maybe if kicked marshal a half-baked argument either way. (Is it better to be wholly baked or not baked at all?) Google (what a wonderful spell-checker it is) shows us popular sentiment leans toward hoodie, which makes me partial to hoody for no other reason than maintaining my contrarian cred. Is there a specious argument I’m missing that would authoritatively tip the scales?
I do have my reasons for asking, but they are dull and meager, not worth sharing with the class. —Miss Kittin wants to know how you can call yourself a DJ if you don’t shake your ass in the crowd, and that’s as good a non sequitur as any with which to get back to work.
Where you been?
Out.
Whatcha been doin’?
Nothing.
Pretty much nothing, I suppose. Fiddling with this and that, desultorily, half-assedly. (Is it better to have a full ass or no ass? Didn’t David Chess already look into this? Like, last year?) Like Bean and Jake, I’m going through one of those “fuck tha humanz” mood swings. (You want a link? Here’s a fun one, 2 weeks old, courtesy a not-quite-as-old plug over at Unqualified Offerings. Yeah, I’ve been keeping up with my reading. Removed Where is Raed? from the linchinography Wednesday AM on the grounds that, well, no one knew where the hell Salam was; and who comes back to post that very afternoon, which I don’t find out till this morning? Which, I mean, yeah, I found out about it, and pretty quickly, too, but still. Loop outtage.)
Hmm, lessee: Friday, came home to find a large chunk of the downstairs livingroom ceiling on the floor in a puddle of water and gypsum dust. Nigh-immediately decamped to a farewell party for Johnzo and Victoria and got discreetly (?) smashed. —And I need to rescue my Sif Safaa at some point. I must say, there’s a certain je ne sais quois to the combination of Spitting Image video wallpaper and a toneless computer voice reading Roy-Orbison-in-cling-film smut over ululating Iraqi pop that, well. Facilitated said smashedness.
Saturday: went and bought a used reel mower because the new one I’d bought just over a year ago upped and died. (How do you kill a reel mower? You bend the handle beyond recognition, trying to push it through admittedly tall and wet grass.) —And I would have written about the joy and delight of buying a simple machine that works so well: solid, dependable, with a great adjustable-height widget that means I can cut tall grass like buttah with nothing more than muscle power, I would huffily have discoursed on Newfangled Crap Purchased in a Moment of Desperation at Home Depot Which Failed in the Course of the Humble Duties for Which it was Intended (though it did last over a year, and the grass was tall. And wet) versus A Solid and Dependable Piece of Fine Workmanship from Back in the Day When People Cared about the Products they Sold (and did I mention that neat adjustable-height widget?), and I probably would have reminisced about the utter loathing I had of mowing the grass growing up (as the eldest kid it was one of my many designated chores, the one I perhaps most loathed, or at least most loathe as of this writing): the way gas fumes and oil smoke and bruised, crushed grass mingle to make a nose-tickling stench which, when combined with dust and sweat and stifiling South Carolinian heat make up for me the signifiers of Summer, the Cruellest Season; I might have brought up the mighty oath I swore, struggling behind the ratty gas-powered mower that would kick the occasional bit of gravel or shredded branch zinging off the grass catcher with a retort like a TV rifle ricochet, the oath never again to mow the grass when I got to be old enough to say and do and live as I pleased, and how the reel mower has ended up a regrettable compromise with that disgruntled younger me, having all the elegance of any hair split by necessity; I might even have knocked off a tin-foil-hatted excursion into It’sallabouttheoilstan, muttering darkly about the advantage oil companies gain by convincing lawnmower manufacturers to make reel mowers today much more flimsily that reel mowers of yore, so that anyone who tries to kick the gas habit is sorely disappointed and comes slouching back to the guzzling fold—I might have done something with all of that but for the fact that a crucial plastic thingie snapped on the solid, dependable, used reel mower’s maiden excursion into the grass it was otherwise cutting like buttah. Luckily, I have a warranty on the reconditioned parts. But. Still.
Sunday, and I was laying out my weekly freelance website gig (remind me to tell you about that some other time), and we rented the X-Men DVD because Jenn hadn’t seen it yet and everyone’s buzzing about X-Men 2 (it has Nightcrawler, you see; the Spouse, an X-fan from much further back than myself, is a Nightcrawler groupie, sigh), and something about comic book movies made me go back to revisit perhaps the pinnacle of the misbegotten genre (as distinctly opposed, mind you, to movies based on comics): Batman Returns. —With which I am all too familiar: the summer it came out, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with (counts) five other people, one of whom I desperately did not want to spend any time with at all (love gone awry, long story, I do it every now and again as a party trick, as me the next time you see me). When one does not want to go home, and one has a flexible work schedule, and anyway it’s summer and hot and home has one over-worked air conditioner and the movie theater’s in the blessedly climate-controlled mall, and they’re showing a movie that not only has Batman but a blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity (because one is still sifting through the ashes of another episode of love gone awry, the tragedy of a year prior that presaged the contemporaneous farce, which involved a [taller] blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity, about which remind me to tell you some other time, and can I admit, just between you and me, that among the many little pleasures in this giddily glorious mess of a movie is the decidedly guilty shivery one when Michelle Pfeiffer pulls the derringer from her garter and picks up that broken, desperate giggle, and all Michael Keaton can do is wrap his hand around the gun to hide it and pull her close into the cold comfort of a kiss—Ladies! Gentlemen! Beware the White Knight, who thrills so keenly to see a damsel in distress…)— You spend a lot of not-so-discretionary income on half-priced matinee after matinee, is what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve seen those penguins march more times than I’ve seen the Millennium Falcon save Luke’s hide, and I was, what, nine when that came out? The point, though, is not to dredge up old memory-artefacts of cruel summers past, firing like the ghost-reflexes of a long-since amputated part, but to revel in the rich though neglected vein of political commentary that I keep forgetting is larded throughout the film, whether it’s Christopher Walken giving advice to his sock-puppet mayoral candidate Danny DeVito—“But to get the Mayor recalled, we still need a catalyst, a trigger, an incident. Like the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin”—or DeVito’s bleakly hilarious exhortation to his remote-controlled penguin army:
My penguins … We stand at a great threshold. It’s okay to be scared. Many of you won’t be coming back … Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all God’s chillun … first, second, third and fourth-born, why be biased? Male and female … hell, the sexes are equal with their erogenous zones blown sky-high … Forward, march! The liberation of Gotham has begun!
—From a movie released in 1992, mind; a little over a year after the last time we intemperately announced the liberation of Baghdad. Add to that the minor subplot involving manipulation of the energy market and, well, I’ll just leave any parallels to be drawn between monstrously vindictive sock-puppet politicians in the hands of cartoonishly evil plutocrats as exercises for the reader. So: my appetite for socio-political satire whetted, the freelance work yet to be completed, I dropped Shock Treatment into the VCR as a follow-up, and that, pretty much, was my Sunday.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Eh. Got the plumbing fixed. The leak that made the ceiling fall. Thursday? Here I am. Biggest laugh of the day? Stumbling over this old piece from languagehat on “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” which has added “barking scrotum monsters” to my rhetorical quiver. (How can you say something sensible and worthwhile about a political discourse one end of which is upheld by a crew that moniker fits so well? —Which brings us rather neatly back to square one: Where have I been? Out. What have I been doing? Nothing.)
—Actually, can I change my vote as regards the pinnacle?
Since I seem to be in a short and pithy mood.
I bagged this from last week’s New Yorker, which I’m just now getting around to reading, but which they already seem to have taken off-line or something. Omar al-Issawi, the “smoldering Lebanese” hotshot correspondent at Al Jazeera, was told by a fellow CENTCOM journalist: “You’ve risen to star status.”
“Let’s hope not,” is what al-Issawi says in response. “They say the light from a star reaches us long after it has depleted its resources.”
