But Don't Try To Touch Me.

When Tinkerbell Met Nyarlathotep

2011-12-16T12:15:00.001-10:00

I'm coming to the conclusion that God might not deserve all the vitriol I've spat at It recently.

The cat we tried to save, Tinkerbell, had to be euthanized. It was kinder to end her intractable suffering than to prolong her suffering, so her short, gentle, troubled life is done. I hoped that, between the painkillers and our affection, she would have a pleasant death, but her dying moan was horrible; it seemed to contain all the suffering her little body had experienced. I tell myself that it was merely the result of drug-relaxed muscles wheezing air past vocal chords in an unusual fashion, but I'll never know, will I?

So I got very angry at God for a while. It's utterly incoherent that an all-good, all-loving, all-powerful Deity would permit and/or cause such suffering. I don't buy the usual rationalizations that try to balance that equation. You know the ones:

God has a plan that we can't know, everything happens for a reason. This hand-waving doesn't deal with the conundrum; it just refuses to engage the conundrum.
Closely related: Who are you to question God? It's the same as the first one, really, but adapted for the kind of people who lick the hands of tyrants. My response to this is not polite.
The old character-building argument. "Caring for a suffering animal made you more empathetic," that sort of thing. While this argument has merit, it doesn't really get God off the hook, does it? If I tortured your pets to death, or through inaction allowed them to be tortured to death, I doubt you'd thank me for the wonderful character-building exercise. No double standards, please.
Then there's my favorite, the Original Sin argument, A.K.A. blaming the victim. We have suffering because we did something wrong. Eve deserved it; she was dressed like a slut, so she had it coming. I suspect the whole Original Sin narrative was cobbled together by some pious soul who wanted to get God off the hook. Why do people always want to let God off the hook?

It occurs to me, though, that I may not be angry because of suffering and death per se (grieving is another matter), but because Mr. All-Loving All-Powerful fails to live up to the inflated reputation. If I were of a different faith I might not be so angry. If I were a Hindu I might just say "Well, that's how Shiva rolls. I don't like it, but there's no disconnect between this earthy horror and Shiva's reputation."

A short story that I used to read for high school forensics competitions springs to mind: Nyarlathotep by H. P. Lovecraft. I have fond memories of reading this in a manner so hammy it would make Vincent Price wince. I never won the competition, but once a judge said "I have just been through hell on earth," after I concluded, and that made it all worth it. I remember being uneasy about my reasons for selecting the story, though. It was such a blasphemous parody of Millennialist Christian theology, and I was so attracted to it despite my piety. Nowadays the religious vision in the story seems far more plausible to me than the cuddly God on offer at Churches everywhere. Sure, Lovecraft's cosmic worldview was shaped by racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and plain old misanthropy, but does that make him so different from the early church fathers?

Anyway, I conclude that I need to reexamine the Bible. It's possible that the all-loving and all-powerful nature attributed to God is more a product of Christianity's marketing department than the Scriptures. I don't doubt a more complex portrait of the Almighty comes through in the primary texts; texts which may not overburden God with more goodness and omnipotence than is compatible with the facts on the ground.

Drinking Beer on Antibiotics

2011-11-22T15:53:00.001-10:00

My shirt is ripped and bloodstained. Our office looks like a crime scene.

A couple weeks back we saw a sick-looking cat (please understand I am not using slang of any kind here) and decided to save it, if we could. We took this leaky-eyed, scrawny, clotted-fur cat home, fed and watered her (she wanted that food and water, desperately) and took her to the vet. We named her Tinkerbell (as in "clap your hands if you want her to live"). The next day we took her to the Vet, and found that Tink has FIV, a fatal disease. We did some research and found that cats can live with FIV for years, and that they're unlikely to transfer the disease to another cat (only cats can get it) unless one of the cats bites the other.

We decided to keep Tink in our office and keep her separate from Mr. Two, our cat. Miss Tink responded well to food and love, and slowly became a healthier, comfortable cat; eyedrops and medicine gradually changed her from Zombie Stray to Actual Housecat. She proved to be sweet and gentle, with a pleading stare that compelled me to give her treats. Meanwhile we kept her presence a deep dark secret from Mr. Two. We joked about the Jane Eyre/Lost-ness of the situation; Madwoman in the Attic, The Others.

Today I strolled into her room to do some trivial thing or other, when I heard a banshee yowl. Mr. Two had discovered the horrifying truth about why we were keeping him out of the office. Mr. Two (understand: a sweet, gentle, affectionate cat, but unneutered and hormone-soaked) attacked. I lept into the fray like a class-A dumbass who loves cats more than is reasonable. CHOMP!

The big questions: had Mr. Two partaken of Miss Tink's infected blood? Could I get Mr. Two's fangs out of my arm (apparent answer: not anytime soon)? Would Mr. Two rip my whole forearm off? Where did Tink just go?

I got Two off me and trapped him in the bedroom. Blood all over the house; all mine, I hoped. Blood pulsing from holes in my arm. I grabbed the cheapest-looking towel from the bathroom closet and covered my wounds, then spent the next few minutes looking for Tink. I began to seriously believe that Mr. Two had SWALLOWED HER WHOLE.

Anyway, Tink is now boarded at the Vet, Two still has blood matting his fur, and it appears the only broken skin belonged to me.

What are we gonna do with Tink? We thought we could give her a safer, more comfortable environment than the street, but apparently not. And who else can take her? No one wants a sick cat. Poor Tink did nothing to deserve this suffering. Maybe the kindest option we have is to let her suffering end.

I'm angry at our cat, but what's the good of that? He was just acting on instinct, thinking his territory was imperiled. I'm mad at myself for allowing Two to get past my scrutiny, but if I was gonna flush screwing-up out of my system one would think I'd have managed by this stage of my life. I'm mad at God Almighty for letting innocent living creatures suffer like Tink does, but God Almighty only exists so we can claim He has a reason for everything that happens. That Bastard better have some good reasons, is all I can say.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Free Universes

2011-11-21T08:00:00.001-10:00

I recently gave away a bunch of my old comic books. It was a project for the Library Science class I'm taking.

After I advertised the giveaway, many people contacted me wanting to take the whole set, sight unseen. I quickly set a 30 comics maximum to scare these people off, since part of the project involved observing peoples' search and selection processes. Once people showed up I told them there wasn't really a maximum, and I had no intention of policing their selections; I just wanted them to pick and choose, and leave the rest for someone else to enjoy. People are happy to take four boxes of free whatever, but when they have to search and select they get much choosier.

It's more fun watching kids pick comics than adults. Adults seemed to have sclerotic ideas about what they want and will accept. Familiar superheros are pretty much the limit with men, while the women seemed more interested in childrens' comics. Kids are more open to off-brands; weird stuff no one's ever heard of, where the standards are different and nothing's entirely familiar. Adults walked in and said "I'm looking for Marvels," Marvel comics having a strong brand identity. They tended to flip right past the oddball, third party, indy comics that constituted most of the selection. Kids, though, didn't look for brand labels; they looked for stuff that might be interesting. If they dug the drawing, they took the comic. Brings back fond memories of the one comic-con I attended as a kid; this was in the thick of the 80's black and white comics glut, where Elfquest and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles inspired a slew of independently published comics. Most of these comics were clumsy at best, but to the boy I was being in a room full of unfamiliar, idiosyncratic personal toon visions was downright psychedelic. These comics didn't feel as blandly proficient and stylistically interchangeable as most comics from the big companies; it was my introduction to the concept of cartooning-as-handwriting that's so important to the Kramer's Ergot crowd.

Manga was much less popular than I'd expected. Manga was the Hot New Thing With The Kidz in comics for about a decade, and it's still popular, right? But I suspect it's more popular in places with big bookstores and semi-hip readers. This is a smaller, blue-collar town that isn't on the cusp of cultural trends, and there's not a thing wrong with that, but no one, young or old, seemed very interested in manga as such. Some of the "girly" stuff proved moderately popular with the one little girl who came and highly popular with the two women who selected on behalf of absent daughters.

The most entertainment came when I told a mother of four boys that one box was "adult," and not recommended for children. The eldest boy (about 11?) openly started perusing that box. All this was done under the amused eye of his Mom, and I decided she could police (or not) her boy better than I could. The boy occasionally pulled one of his brothers over, showed him an image from some adult-oriented comic or other, and shared a shocked giggle. The boy walked out with a stack of adult comics, all with his Mom's consent.

Temptation/opportunity knocks

2011-11-04T09:12:00.002-10:00

It was the end of a school year. I dinna remember if it was 1996, my final year of college, or a year or two before. Point is, the campus was closing down. Scavenging around the campus is a good idea at this time of year. Birmingham-Southern kids are often livin' large on Daddy-Doctor dollars, and the Bank of Mom and Dad funds a lot of disposable lifestyle accoutrements. So, a few days before everybody's gotta move out of the dorms, see if you can't worm your way into the halls and see what people are throwing out. Once I saw a friend walk out of a dorm with his arms full of perfectly good lamps. He looked a bit embarrassed, but I take my hat off to him. Years later I was in need of a lamp, and it was the end of the school year, so you know where I went and what I did.

Let me be clear: we weren't STEALING lamps. We were scavenging lamps that had been left in the hall by people who had left, and didn't care about the lamps. There's a reason two BSC boys burned down churches; they'd had it too easy and never learned the value of anything. By cracky.

But this one time, I was presented with a remarkable temptation. I went to the library to turn in my last batch of library books. the library was scheduled to be closed, so I planned to use the book drop.

But the door was unlocked. No one was there.

If you'd asked me to list the library materials that I'd enjoy owning, we could have been there all day as I listed the books, videos, records and CDs that I coveted, coveted, coveted. And here I was, the only person in the library.

You think I didn't check? I strolled in, set my books on the desk, and wandered around... looking for people. There weren't any. No guards, nuthin.

Maybe there were security cameras hidden about, but judging from my friends' stories of late-night library shenanigans (up to and including sex acts in out-of-the-way nooks) I doubted there were any eyes in the sky. So it's possible I could have walked out of that unguarded library with a wonderful haul.

I'm glad I left empty-handed. For one thing, all the furrin films I'd snatch on videotape would be ruined by now, just like the videotapes I actually bought, all of which fell victim to some kind of dust or mold or something. And most of the books would be sitting on shelves still waiting to be read.

But of course I'm mostly glad because who needs the guilt?

Information. In Formation.

2011-10-08T13:23:00.003-10:00

Prologue: A note to my ~~family~~ regular readers: This post is an assignment for a class I’m taking. The subject is my information sources. I apologize for not posting lately, but like I say, I’m taking a class. End prologue.

The day begins with the alarm clock and the cat in a photo finish: one is programmed to wake me at a predetermined time, the other is inclined to wake me because he’s out of food, or there’s a cat outside, or I rolled on him, or whatever else motivates cats to do what they do.

(image swiped from Same Hat.)

One is a planned mechanical info source while the other is an unpredictable organic info source. They both wake me to deliver information, and while the information varies the result is the same: I’m getting up.

Information pervades the house. Multiple clocks remind us of the time. Sunlight slants in the windows, giving us a running commentary on time and weather. Books on bookshelves in every room. Look, there’s a novel resting on its side, perched on the ledge of the shelf!

I guess someone’s planning to get back to it. This implicit information suggests I’d best not reshelve it.

A side note: the painting that, for me, best represents the way information pervades our mental landscape is On The Balcony by Peter Blake:

(Image pillaged from The Tate.)

The artist is best known for a related information-saturated image, the cover art for Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Blake visualized a hypertextual augmented reality decades before these cyberbuzzwords existed. Although I suppose Medieval artists beat him to it, with those multiple-windows-onscreen illuminated manuscripts.

(Image five-fingered from Bibliodyssey.)

One can gather so much info about a household from its bookshelves. One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Spurgeon, talks about the pleasures of shelf-porn: photos of peoples’ bookshelves. Here’s some of ours:

A blend of brow levels and a clutter of subjects.


Uh oh! Is someone an embittered ex-actor? The fact that this shelf of theatrical texts is tucked away in an alcove of a little used hallway may be relevant info.

Here's some of my wife's books, as organized by her. Note that these books, unlike mine, are alphabetized. Maybe SHE should be the librarian.

But let’s be honest: a ton of my info-gathering happens at the computer. There are paper printouts scattered about my desk because onscreen I can’t quite bring myself to read anything more demanding than a message board. I’m well aware of the trees I’m killing with these comfort printouts, and I’m aware because my buddy Charlie is the kind of data-rich conservationist who keeps me abreast of such issues via:

• Facebook, natch

• A private message board (specifically a Yahoogroup) for my college friends to stay in touch. It’s been online since 2001. Post-Facebook it’s used less, but that’s because all our passing joke links have migrated to Facebook. We mostly save the messboard for important announcements, in-jokes, and bull sessions.

• Actual face-to-face conversation. On the Fourth of July we went to Charlie’s house to meet a passel of college friends I hadn’t seen in years, along with their children. My college friends’ children! I’d been informed that these children existed, but that information had only come to me via text on a screen, along with a few photos on the same screen. Here the children were in the flesh, building ornate Lego spaceships, informing me via words and Lego demonstrations of all the latest advances in Lego spaceship technology (and, by extension, their film/video game consumption).

• Another face-to-face meeting. A couple months ago Charlie and family made an impromptu stop at our house on a vacation return leg. This time I was able to give him some information: the local birds (he’s a birdwatcher and works for Audubon) keep eating our tomatoes. He countered with the information that he’s never heard of such a thing. Only later I realized that the birds weren’t so much eating our tomatoes as drinking them: pecking holes and sipping the tasty juice. Or so I assume; my info source on this is direct observation of the tiny holes the birds peck in the tomatoes. Not big enough to get much vegetable flesh, but enough to slip a beak in and sip.

Back to the Internet: I use my iGoogle page to keep up with my favorite pages for

• news,

• music, music, music, Mo' music, ah sweet music (and such).

• literature

• film, film, film,

• and portraiture.

Let’s move on to how I actively seek information about important topics, like one of my recurring guilty pleasures: kitsch fantasy art. I could, of course, go to fine websites like

this,

or this,

but today I’m going to pick up a book. A musty old coffee table book I bought when I was in high school.

The Flights of Icarus! (Image ganked from Digital Waterfalls.)

(Flights, plural? I’ve been well informed on the subject of Icarus’s infamous single flight via a blend of books (Bulfinch’s Mythology was the first), filmstrips, and lectures in school. Perhaps the title is meant to suggest a happier alternate ending to the cautionary tale; an idealistic hope of brighter possibilities for those who fly close to the sun. Appropriate, I suppose, for a collection of fantasy art.)

I found it in anold-fashioned paper catalogue from Paper Tiger/Dragon’s Dream, a dual publishing imprintfounded by record cover artist Roger Dean. I was enamored of Dean’s covers for bands like Yes:

(I have no I dea where I swiped this image of the gatefold sleeve Dean pained for Yes's best album, Close To The Edge.

and Asia:

Who knows where I found this image of Asia's second-least-crappy album, Alpha?

so I bought one of his coffee table art books. It included a catalog of relatedofferings, and I bought most of those offerings, though memory fails me about how I could afford such silly expenditure. One of those books was Flights of Icarus, a grab-bag surveyof fantasy artists.

The bookconsists in large measure of nerd favorites and imitators of nerd favorites,but there are a few standout artists who aren’t likely to ever join the nerd gestalt,and they’re the one’s I’m curious about.

So let’s cruiseGoogle with a copy of the book in hand, shall we?

Say, JimFitzpatrick looks interesting! Theworks reproduced in the book are an amalgam of Celtic-ish Kell-ish elements (myfirst info source on Kells: another college friend, who dabbled in reproducingthem on graph paper in colored pencil) and Barry Windsor-Smith (another ofthose nerd faves one learns about through nerd osmosis).

Thanks to GoogleI found his website immediately.

Holysmoke, he did the Che Guevara poster?

Grabbed from Jim's website.

And album covers for:

ThinLizzy (about which my initial info source was a photo of the lead singer insome magazine, probably Musician: I thought he looked cool but never followed up on the band. Years later I listened to a guy sing“The Boys are Back in Town” in a gloomy karaoke club and learned from theonscreen title info that the Boys in question were Thin Lizzy. )

and Sinead O’Conner (whom I first learned about from a friend (a Catholic, ironically) who told me I had to check out O’Conner’s video of Nothing Compares 2 You (which I never did, though I saw a short excerpt on one of those ads for compilation albums they used to hawk on TV; all the info I got on the video involves a closeup of a head against a black background singing real wide-mouthed. Let's take a closer look:

)).

So, after those nested parentheses, do you remember where we left off? If so you’ve got a useful skill: not losing the thread after a trip down the digressive hyperlink rabbit hole. Anyway, Jim Fitzpatrick.

Here’s a sample-spoon of what he had in my book:

Obviously this teensy reproduction doesn’t do justice to all the intricate detail in this image.

So, what’s he up to now?

Purty. And stands up better to image shrinkage.

Whose next on my tour of Icarus's flights? John Ridgewell, whose photorealistic yet imaginative landscapes of Green and Pleasant Land remind me of the overgrown yet not-quite-wild backroads I’ve seen all my life in Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina.

(Image "liberated" from the below-linked website.)

(I crib "Green and pleasant land" from William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (Which I first discovered on a cassette of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s bombastic arrangement of the song version:

))

Happily Ridgewell's got a website, as I mentioned in the above photo caption.

Sad info on that website; we lost him to cancer. The website protests that reproductions cannot do his work justice. I’m aware of the problem, having once seen Renoir‘s famous Luncheon of the Boating Party in a traveling exhibition.

(Image "borrowed" from Phillips collection.)

You’ve probably seen it in reproductions, but none of them prepared me for the luminous, breathing realness of the people represented in the painting. Somehow the way light springs off that painted canvas seems closer to the way light springs off living flesh than the way it reflects from conventional canvases. Renoir takes us back to the Seine of the 19th century, giving us an astonishing amount of information about what it was like to be young and alive in that time and place. Looks like it beat hanging out at the mall. Anyway, standing before the art itself I felt like I could step through the portal-frame and join the party; that’s how perfect Renoir’s illusionism was.

Back to Flights of Icarus: David O’Connor contributes a lushly colored illustration of a fearsome looking middle-aged woman in a room full of birds. Could she be bird-crazed Gertrude Groan, from my favorite fantasy series, Gormenghast? I'd scan the illustration if I had a scanner. I'd post it if I could find it online. This image, this information, must remain locked in the book. Score one minor victory for books over Dubbleyu Dubbleyu Dubbleyu.

So let’s Google David. I immediately misspell his name O’Conner and Google wraps my knuckles:

• Showing results for david o'connor artist 

Search instead for david o'conner artist.

Ya got me there. So, whattaya got on David O’ConnOr? C’mon Goog, inform me.

First link, the "I'm feeling lucky" link.

This more or less abstract multi-media work is actually more interesting to 38-year-old me than slick fantasy illustration, but it’s clearly the result of a more austere aesthetic. I like it, but sculpture suffers even more in photographic reproduction than does painting, and besides, I’m on a mission here, with my internal 17-year-old self in charge. Internal 17-year-old just likes slick fantasy art.

I switch to Google Images, and after trawling through the usual collage of off-topic pictures (including many, many faces, a rear-view of a naked muscleman, some embossed hieroglyphs, a man stroking a horse’s muzzle, a cute boy adjusting his collar) I spot a bunch of Magic: The Gathering cards that look to be by the O’Connor I’m seeking.

(Think I found this at http://www.starcitygames.com/)

Remember Magic, the Gathering? A collectible card game that I learned about exclusively from one kind of info source: M:tG crazed college friends, all of whom shared a missionary zeal for this game. It's a game which blended the pleasures of baseball card collection, Mille Bornes and hack fantasy. Word of mouth was both the game’s primary marketing and its primary anti-marketing, since the game’s fans were even nerdier than me, and down that path, I knew even then, lies madness. O’Connor’s card illustrations are rather dull compared to the prismatic lushness of his images in my book, but I suppose one has to keep it simple if it’s for a cheap card; otherwise you end up looking like this:

Oh, sorry, were you hoping for some female artists? Well, editors Martyn and Roger Dean have graciously allowed one. At least she’s a nice one: Una Woodruff.

(Image nicked from the above Una Woodruff site.)

Fits in with the work in the book, which parodies botanical illustration, but features imaginary plants whose blooms resemble animals. Reminds me of the art of John Trest, with whom I went to college.

(Image snagged from John Trest's website without even asking. Hope he'll accept it as free publicity, but I'll delete if if he asks. Ditto for the other images and their respective sources/rightsholders.)

I got John's website off a business card he handed me at an art festival. One of those situations where one hopscotches from a face to face info source, to paper-and-print info source, to Internet info source. Perhaps the reverse order is becoming more common.

Next flight of Icarus: Dick French contributes some images that look like Francis Bacon trying his hand at landscapes after reading Ballard’s Crash.

(I first learned about Bacon from trawling school library art books. I was proud to recognize his art in the opening credits of Last Tango In Paris:

(and then there's Crash:

))

Oh look, the BBC has a piece by a Dick French!

(Tooked from the Beeb.)

Not sure what to make of that. All the lavender makes it look like Thomas Kinkaide on a drunken spree. (Speaking of Kinkaide, I went Googling for info on how he works his magic, and behold.)

But I didn’t know until I just now stumbled across it that BBC has an online art reproduction gallery. I’ll waste a bit of time on this, I daresay. I like this.

And this

and this here

and also this,

which last reminds me a bit of Diebenkorn, whose work I saw in SFMOMA, where a guard served as an information source. The information he provided was that I better turn off the flash on my camera. I couldn’t seem to do this, since I’d borrowed the camera from my wife and hadn’t read the relevant information source known as the manual. The guard turned flash off for me; he’d presumably had to figure this stuff out in order to help clueless tourists like me. Sadly the camera kept turning the flash back on, so I didn’t get many SFMOMA photos. But I did get these Diebenkorn detail shots:

To finish up with Flights of Icarus, there’s some nice images from

• Bruce Pennington (my first info source on whom was my friend Doug, who had a book of Pennington’s apocalyptic work. Doug, who was and remains an evangelical Christian and gifted painter, was very taken with Pennington’s imaginative Book of Revelation-fired imagery, but was irked by an painting which purported to show the Rapture, but showed people being tractor-beamed into a spaceship. Doug informed me that some New Agers believe the Rapture is a true prophecy but that it will in fact be a removing of Christians by Wise Alien Overseers so New Age types can get on with their New Age business without Christians interfering. Not sure what Doug’s info source on this was.)

and

• Ian Miller. (Doug introduced me to Miller’s work as well, after I expressed a nervousness about Satanic art (I was kind of young). I believe Doug’s words were “Ian Miller, that’s as close to Satanic art as anything you’ll find in this house.” Now I think Miller is magnificent, and I don’t feel Satanic for it.)

Enough of this. I’m not the kind of hikikomori who lives like a fly in the Web. I’m going for a walk. Let’s see what information we can suss out from the neighborhood.

Until recently the word Espresso was lovingly lettered over this door. That information has been removed, because the coffee shop within has been removed. It was the only coffee shop in town.

Here’s one of North Carolina’s many proud furniture shops!

We’ve been informed by locals of a saying: Japan buys its furniture from North Carolina, and North Carolina buys its furniture from Japan. Despite the way the doorframe intrudes on the lettering (arguably causing some information loss) I see they sell La-Z-Boys.

Or not. Reflected in this broken window one can make out one of the buildings of the biotech research campus that is the great hope of the community. If the campus fulfills the hopes behind it, then in a year or three I'll be able to retake this photo in an unbroken pane to a prosperous new shop. Let us hope.

Next door stands this furniture outlet.

Just read the sign. You’ll have to fill in the gaps, though the missing letters are as informative, in their way, as the ones that remain.

What’s the coming attraction at the local movie theatre?

Just take a gander at the poster. It’s The Disney Muppets! “Muppet Domination,” it says down below, and we can see who’s dominating the Muppets; the new owners have smeared their corporate logo over the title so thoroughly that it appears to be part of the title.

Here’s a house for sale.

Looks like it was proud once. A neighbor, who is busy fixing up another local old house, casually informed us that the house you see here was a boarding school, then a flophouse full of junkies.

That was long ago.

Now no one lives there.

OR DO THEY?

Get me outta here. I was planning to go around back and get some more photos, but the information I’ve gleaned from a quick peek inside suggests I might want to be on my way. As a lover of fine film I’ve been informed about what can happen to inquisitive neighbors:

Though I also know not to take such warnings too seriously, thanks to this deeply informative clip a friend sent me on Facebook:

Oh, did I mention the house is for sale?

Having cross-referenced between a musty old lobrow coffee-table book and Google, then strolled around browsing the info on offer in my neighborhood, I suspect I’ve mostly exhausted my info sources. Sure, there’s my phone, but it’s not one of them there smartphones. I mostly use it as an actual phone, talking to my family and friends, one of whom I see every day, most of whom I haven’t seen in at least a year. If I had a smartphone I’d be too busy with stuff like this.

I’ve touched briefly on face-to-face communication as an info source, but in the interest of protecting the privacy of local family and friends I think I'll draw a curtain over the specifics of our face-to-face dealings. In place of such personal information, please enjoy this song about face to face communication:

(Finished with a nick from http://annyas.com/screenshots/)

Slop 100

2011-08-31T08:09:00.003-10:00

So NPR has a list of the Top 100 fantasy and SF novels, as selected by whomever showed up. Imagine if they made a list of the best BBQ places in the USA. You know, you know, for a fact you know, that the McRib would be on the list. Only an idiot thinks the McRib would belong on such a list, but there it would be, displacing some worthier BBQ source.

So this list has, along with a lot of obvious choices, a fair number of McRibs. Terry Brook's Shannara books? Really? There's no questioning their import to Fantasy Inc.'s history of homogenizing and pasteurizing Tolkien/Robert "Conan" Howard into reproducible comfort food, prefab daydreams, but what's it doing on a list that aspires to quality? And Piers Anthony? Eek. I like what I've read by George R. R. Martin, but would his work rank so high if he didn't have a breakout hit TV show? No, it would not. I like Neil Gaiman, but he's been the flavor of the month in fantasy circles since the 90s. That's a long month. Good soul that he is, I'm sure he'd be happy to bump one or two of his titles from the list to make room for Mervyn Peake, Elizabeth Hand, Robert Holdstock.

As far as fantasy is concerned, you're better off going by Ballantine Adult Fantasy. Obviously it's a bit dated, so titles like Viriconium and Little, Big aren't there, but they aren't on NPR's list either.

As for SF, seek out a copy (a local library surely has one) of John Clute's Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. It's about as navigable and profusely illustrated as a good magazine or webpage, with substantial writeups on numerous worthy texts and authors, many of whom were not included on NPR's list.

In closing, here's a silly faux-trailer for an overrated Mary-Sue fantasy novel that happily didn't make the list: War For the Oaks by Emma Bull.

I like the atmospheric opening, but the Faerie Court is pure Renfaire.

Why, do you think?

2011-08-17T19:44:00.004-10:00

I'm sure your friends aren't sending you enough Youtube links, so here.

This is pretty much the greatest thing ever. If I could do something as jaw-droppingly perfect as the first song on this clip, my life would be entirely justified. I also enjoy the way the host steals a kiss from the second act and a look of annoyance crosses her face for an instant. You know he took this gig purely out of a desire to get lucky with one of the guests. Too bad we don't get to hear the DeLorean song at the end. Truly, the 80s were a magic time. Or maybe they just seemed that way because I was a kid.

If you're wondering what Penney Peirce, the woman behind "Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?" is up to, the answer follows:

She looks happy and I'm glad, but I hope she'll put the lingerie back on and sing more outlandish punk songs for us.

Here's a video we first saw in Montreal, home of the artist:

Hope we get to see more of Socalled on our next trip to Montreal. Also hope we get to see The American Devices:

Here's a short some friends of mine made! It won awards of some kind.

And here's the closing credit sequence from Please Save My Earth becuz I love it.

And in conclusion,

Gimprov.

2011-08-12T17:56:00.004-10:00

During the President W. years (The Oughts? More like the Ought-Nots. Or the Ought-Naughts) I was affiliated with Birmingham, Alabama's only improv troupe at the time, first as a fan, then as a member. Imagine a band hiring new members from a tribute band and you've got the idea, although what kind of ridiculous band would do that? The politics could get ugly, the meetings could be like pogroms, and the shows could be like doing burlesque for The Eagle Forum. Still, there were unexpected pleasures.

Like doing shows at a dark, scary goth club. This club hired the group to perform a couple of times, once before I joined, once after. It turned out the club needed an emergency fill-in for a different kind of performance they'd had a time or two: a dominatrix doing some kind of dominate-tricks (you like that? I just made that up, with my fine mind). She'd gotten shut down by the vice squad or somebody (in Birmingham, Alabama? go figure) and there we were.

Picture the scene: a dark cavernous building with a bar like an altarpiece. The music blasted, the booze flowed, and the hair-bears and suicide grrls welcomed in the weekend with sweat and shouts.

Then the DJ stopped the music so five not-very-goth people could climb up on the tottery jury-rigged stage and make up little comic scenes. It was a bit of conceptual whiplash; people who wanted to drink and dance and meet and greet weren't really keen on this. If we'd been a band, that'd have been different. With music you can listen and/or dance and/or swill liquor and/or chat someone up. With improv you either dive right in and shout "Gynecologist!" when they ask for suggestions, or you try to ignore that weird dribbly theatre thing happening in the corner. There's only two levels of improv-engagement, is what I'm saying. Some people seemed interested in the improv... just not then and there. A few of the goth club attendees later showed up for the regular Sunday night gig at a now-defunct coffee shop, so that was nice, but no one really wanted improv at the loud goth bar on Friday night. They were polite, though, if by polite you mean "offering one of the troupe members $50 to perform light bondage." I was not either of the parties involved in this exchange, BTW, although I was present while it went down. The recipient of this offer demurred, perhaps because the public nature of the offer did not speak well to the would-be john's discretion, or perhaps because $50 is an insult. Later that night I spotted the failed bondage-john in the lobby, which for some reason had a karaoke setup right by the front door. He was doing a drunken rendition of Back in the U.S.S.R. and filling in the instrumental breaks with inscrutable erotic speculations. I'm sure glamourous nightlife has much to recommend it, but it's probably less story worthy.

I took the stage with the group on the second Goth-bar gig, and I loved it. It was as if we were sealed inside a large bubble, protected by audience indifference from the consequences of slow-wittedness. It was a terrific, if hermetically sealed, show. We were doing inventive comedy in which we could really take pride. Some of the crew was frustrated by the lack of audience response, but as a lifelong white Presbyterian I regarded apparent congregational/audience indifference as the norm.

I'm Free, Captain Peacock!

2011-07-31T18:11:00.004-10:00

It's interesting how my tastes have changed since I got married. Many cheerfully diverting shows and movies that once seemed like splendid ways to wind down at the end of the day now seem like utter wastes of time. Or maybe it's just the backlash from having watched all 6 seasons of Lost even though I was done by the end of Season 4.

We recently watched the first episode of nerd favorite Torchwood and decided to stop there. Guess my nerd card will be revoked. It's safe to say my teenage self would have fixated on this show, but now it just seems like microwaved leftovers of the same light sci-fi stuff I enjoyed... when I was a teen. We also tried a show called Monarch of the Glen. It's the upteenth BBC show about a guy who grew up in the manor house but left because he wanted to get away from all the haughty uptight stuffiness, but circumstances force him to return and set shenanigans straight. Don't forget the sassy servants and working class love interest. In the single days I would have wolfed this down like cashews. Not now.

When I'm sick, though, all bets are off. A few years back I was horribly ill and stranded in another town, far from my wife. I lay in bed watching Are You Being Served on Youtube, episode after episode. I could think of nothing (other than healing and getting back home to my love) I'd rather do than listen to Mrs. Slocombe talk about how it had rained unexpectedly and her pussy got soaking wet.

In Defense of the Mashup

2011-07-25T12:02:00.004-10:00

This review of a new book titled Retromania by Simon Reynolds makes the book sound interesting, but dismissing the mashup as a barren genre is a mistake. Mashups are the only way to resuscitate 99% of the music that gets played on Clearchannel (speaking of barren) radio.

Mashups can be salvage operations. Take a lousy song with a terrific beat, a crummy song with a catchy riff, a limp song with a powerful vocal, a dreadful song with an inspired solo, a pointless song with a tantalizing bridge. Extract the good nuggets. Blend those nuggets together with a deep love for musical structure and fresh juxtapositions. Voila! A dynamite new song that rescues the good bits of a fistful of corporate audio product.

Mashups can be glorious new sound-blends. DJ BC's Art Raps fuses hiphop with old analog electro-music and takes listeners to a sonic landscape that never existed before. Check out L'eau de Rose (second tune down the page) from DJ Earworm. Is that lovely, or what? Admittedly the source tunes are lovely too, but this blend gives me chills.

Mashups can be nostalgia-2-go. There are songs that, to use a phrase my wife detests, are part of the soundtrack of our lives, but fall into a grey area somewhere between "Need to hear again from time to time" and "Never need to hear again". Incorporating these songs into a mashup lets us enjoy what works about them without sitting through, say, a five minute song to get 30 seconds worth of nostalgic kick. By the same token, mashups can provide a relatively painless intro to modern pop confections. Who wants to sit down and listen to an hour of the latest pop jams? I sure don't. That's why selfless DJs do the dirty work for us, listening to would-be songs of the Summer and compiling them into sampler platters.

Some people are pushing sound-collage and mashups pretty far, and have been doing so for years. People like Vicki Bennett, A.K.A. People Like Us.

DJ Food's "Raiding the Twentieth Century" is a splendid tour of the mashup art, blending lecture and demonstration.

The Fauna of Kannapolis

2011-06-28T15:48:00.017-10:00

Now let's creep up on a very special animal that's probably only in town for a short visit: the elusive Vacation Bible School Panda. Laurie and I were utterly charmed by this critter.

Look, there it is!

That is one lovable panda.

But here's my favorite Kannapolis animal:

AWWWWWW.

My Fondest High School Memories and My Gloomiest High School Memories are The Exact Same Memories.

2011-06-10T14:47:00.007-10:00

Somehow my high school graduating class (Red Bank High, Chattanooga TN Class of '92) chose "Imagine" by John Lennon as its class song. My Latin teacher (a kind, enthusiastic, Christian woman) expressed her approval. "I love that song!" The original recording got broadcast over the speaker system or something one day while I was in her class, and she smiled happily. In all likelihood I mentioned to someone that the drummer on it, Alan White, would later join Yes. In further all likelihood, no one cared.

Anyway, just before our actual graduation ceremony there were a few other official celebratory gatherings, and at one of them a folk-singin' student got up and sang the song; just his voice and his fascist-killin' acoustic guitar. I was seated in sight of our Latin teacher, and I watched her with interest. I seemed she was hearing the lyrics for the first time, and her smile turned sour; without that pretty piano bit the words came through, and everyone who didn't already know realized that "Imagine" is basically an advertising jingle for militant atheism. I'm guessing a lot of kids who voted for the song had buyers' remorse.

Immediately after the performance a preacher got up and delivered a short message that ended with the hope that "Some day we can realize John Lennon's dream, and live as one." Nice try, dude. Very Hegelian.

#

My main extracurricular activity in high school was Forensics. Dead bodies didn't enter into it; the term "forensics" means gathering evidence in order to reach an informed conclusion. Or something like that. You might want to do some forensics of your own to check up on my hazy memories. Effectively Forensics just meant the debate team plus a gaggle of nominally related competitive performance activities like poetry reading. I was more into the poetry-reading end of things, cuz unlike debate you didn't have to be a sharp, quick thinker. Effective memorization (which I had with enough lead time, like all summer) and a willingness to speak in public (which, let's face it, is little more than a sublimated version of dropping one's pants in public (at least it is with me)) will suffice.

The average forensics tourney consisted of students in business attire going from classroom to classroom (or hotel room to hotel room) and running through their shticks for each other and the crack team of highly qualified parents who got suckered into judging these events. In between rounds, lots of hanging around gossiping/flirting/joking/stealing pizzas from some other team that bought pizzas/etc.

Three rounds, usually, followed by suspenseful waiting as finalist lists were posted, the final round in each competitive category went down, then more hanging out complaining/stealing cold pizza/wandering into places one wasn't supposed to go/etc. until the award ceremony, where cheap trophies made hearts soar.

A few memorable moments:

One mousy girl in a prose-reading competition read an excerpt of "Interview With a Vampire" which I've never read, but I saw the appeal after her performance. She transformed into an erotic madwoman; we practically saw the blood dripping from her fangs, and everyone in the room was flushed and sweaty by the end of the show. Suddenly she was way more appealing than other girls with clearer skin and higher cheekbones. I got to see this demonstration three times; I would gladly have watched it every hour on the hour for the rest of my adolescence. Where were girls like that in my school?

Coming in second place in the Gatlinberg Tournament Prose Reading competition. I lost to a friendly, smooth guy who confessed to me that he disliked the Christian element of his story, but went with it out of cynical judge pandering. When he won I felt like challenging the win on grounds of hypocrisy. I was sincere in my love for my story ("The Golem" by Avram Davidson) and felt that should count in my favor. I kept quiet and took my second place trophy.

BTW the Gatlinberg tourney always had an enormous turnout, because Gatlinberg is the Branson of the South. Forensics team ranks swelled when this thing rolled around; kids who hadn't bothered to show up for boring old local tournaments grabbed the first poem the Norton anthology fell open to and declared themselves contestants. Most of the competition was unabashedly going through the motions in order to hang out in Gatlinberg; I recall one girl who prefaced her performance with "I really suck, ya'll, so just take a nap or something until I'm through". This is why my generation has failed, is failing, and will continue to fail the world: we're so mush-headed we want to hang out in purgatorial bootleg T-shirt outlets like Gatlinberg. Anyway, bear the tragedy of the commons in mind while evaluating the prestige factor of my second place win. Out of a hundred or so contestants in the prose category, mebbe a half-dozen were serious about the art and craft.

The nose thing. A girl from another school told me she had a trick called "The Nose Thing." She offered to do it for me. I asked what it was. She refused to disclose. All her friends gathered around. She instructed me to lean back and close my eyes. I done it. She wrapped her lips around my nose and blew forcefully into my nostrils, making the caverns of my skull buzz. Afterwards her friends all treated me as if I had been selected for something. I couldn't understand why my parents were so upset when I told them about this.

Related to the preceding: girls flirting with me and my not realizing it until after the fact. The actual debate team kids probably picked up on flirting right away, owing to the mental alacrity you need on the debate team and don't need on the prose-reading team.

My slow ascent up the ladder of pretension. As a freshman I did Douglas Adams. A few years later I was doing Kafka and T. S. Eliot, which is a good way to get third-place trophies, the most grudging recognition possible.

Selecting material was a dicey endeavor; for example, kids who read Stephen King always got roses from some judges and the Black Spot from others. It didn't matter how the performance was; all that mattered was how the judge felt about King.

The ongoing Order Debate, the only debate the Debate Team didn't care about. Forensics kids were forever trying to suss out which was the pole position in any given round. Each round consisted of five or six competitors per room. Was it best to be first, last, somewhere in between? The borderline-theological debates over this ate up hundreds of dork-hours.

Every year I triumphed in regional finals, then went to State Finals where legends are born, and promptly got smeared on the wall in the first round by kids from the mysterious and inscrutable land of West Tennessee. My senior year I finally crapped out in the regionals (wassamatter, you don't like Kafka's journal notes?) and I ended my forensics career in a sparsely attended local tournament that had no official competitive reason for taking place. I decided to go out with proper teenage obnoxiousness and chose a new prose passage: the bit from Lolita where Humbert picks Lo up from camp, kisses her in the car, and almost gets busted by a highway patrolman.

The judges in the early rounds liked it okay, and I made it to finals (although the judges would have really needed to hate me to keep me out, such was attendance). In final rounds there are three judges. One I don't remember, but one had brought his infant daughter (who happily ignored all the performances in favor of quietly playing with a toy); this guy stared at me with a face caricatured by theatrical shock.

The third judge went to my church. She had a twelve-year-old daughter whom I had once given a piggyback ride. The girl never spoke to me again, probably under strict orders. It finally dawned on me that some people will take you seriously when you're only playing.

Scenario

2011-06-01T16:48:00.005-10:00

You meet an old friend from days gone by. You remember him as smart, creative, funny and kind. He is dear in your memory. He tells you that he's a musician now, an aspiring professional. He is terribly frustrated that he hasn't been signed yet, but he's got a band and he's performing tonight at the Yellow Stain Lounge. It hasn't been a lucrative gig, he says, but they let him play what he wants.

"It's the music I was born to play. No compromises, no pandering."

You eagerly agree to attend the show.

That night your friend takes the stage.

The band strikes up "Brick House."

Then they play "Freebird." And "Stairway To Heaven." Followed by "Margaritaville" and "Play That Funky Music White Boy". The band is ragged, sloppy, lackadaisical. Flubs abound; not charming ones. Lazy ones. Occasional flashes of mild inspiration suggest themselves, but never quite make the gig light up.

After a dishwater rendition of "Louie Louie" the band takes a break and your friend finds you.

What do you say to your friend?

Can't Stop Won't Stop

2011-05-26T10:13:00.003-10:00

I just unwrapped a twice-baked chocolate croissant, and a silverfish fled from the wrapping. I destroyed the insect, then considered throwing the pastry, which I'd been anticipating for two days, away, for fear the bug had contaminated it somehow. I'm no expert in silverfish; all I know is that they must be destroyed on sight.

I ate the pastry. I figure if you're willing to put a twice-baked chocolate croissant in your mouth, you're long past the point of worrying about the negative health effects of what you eat.

They Heard the Call

2011-05-13T07:00:00.005-10:00

So a religious group is predicting the immanent end of the world. I used to hear Harold Camping, the worldly head of the organization behind this Neo-Millerite message, on a religious radio station in Birmingham. He has an idiosyncratic voice and lumbering speech style that I found hypnotic; I barely remember any of what he had to say, except that events in the news tie in with scriptural prophecy, plus dancing is bad because you could cut in and hold his wife in your arms, which ain’t how Harold Camping rolls. Maybe he should try salsa.

I bring this up not for cheap yucks but because I wonder if some part of his mind is already working on a rationalization for if and when the Rapture doesn’t happen on his schedule. He says on NPR that there is “No plan B.” Does that mean Camping doesn’t have a Plan B, or God doesn’t? Can Camping tell the difference between his plans for God and God’s plans for Camping? Can anyone tell the difference between their plans for God and God’s plans for them?

While I’m picking on preachers, consider this guy. The story reminds me of the year I spent working at a factory in Chattanooga that made a point of hiring students from the local seminary. Many of them were inspiring guys; kind, helpful, scholarly and smart.

Others, I believe, were becoming preachers because it was the only way they’d ever get any respect. Goofy, slow-witted, mean-spirited people who wanted to don the mantle (or cloak) of goodness that preachers get by default. Assuming there’s something to my suspicions, it’s not surprising that some preachers would bark like a SEAL. Note what retired SEAL Don Shipley, who keeps track of retired SEALS for the Navy, says:

““We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up.”

As long as you're disguising yourself for cheap validation, why not add a second layer of cloaking?

BTW one of these seminarians showed two very different sides of himself depending on whether he was talking to fellow students or civilians; once when his schoolmates weren’t around he boasted of getting kicked out of the local strip club for fistfighting. This wasn't before he was saved; this was the previous weekend. I later asked him what his plan for the future was. He wanted to be a traveling evangelical preacher, affiliated with a church but going from one church/revival to another. I like to think he’s out there in Tennessee or someplace, some small town, preaching the gospel under a white canopy, winning souls, while scanning the congregation for potential Jezebels…

Kitty!

2011-05-07T15:36:00.004-10:00

The other day I was driving down South Concord, one of the main roads around here, when I saw a little orange critter trying to cross the street. It was a tabby kitten, nervously stopping and starting in the middle of the street, its round little head shifting as its big circle eyes tried to decide if my car was gonna hit it or not. I slammed on the brakes, of course; they say you shouldn't risk human lives to save an animal, but they say lots, don't they? I will cause a pileup to save a kitten. This isn't a gray area for me. Happily no one had to die that day, including the kitten, which made it to the relative safety of the McDonald's parking lot.

One of our neighbors sets out bowls of cat food and water for local strays, and many cats set up shop on her front porch. A birdwatcher friend of mine, who brings to the issue of cat vs. bird the same angry moral absolutism others reserve for Israel vs. Palestine, disapproves of this practice, but it's a practice that won points with me today. I was strolling by the cat-lady house when I noticed a new member of the kitty crew: a little orange kitten, playing with its new community of cats. Home at last.

Blablathon episodes 9 & 10

2011-04-18T11:41:00.004-10:00

Hey Aaron, why are you writing these tedious, impenetrable descriptions of a cartoon you don't seem to like much?

Good question. I think it's because we recently finished Lost, which like Rahxephon is an overcomplicated scattershot techno-mystical soap opera. OTOH I preferred the way Rahxephon grew as it accumulated.

Ep. 9. There's a Magic Temple on an island, with a door that opens or closes at narrative convenience. Heroboy and Quon the Mysterious Red-Braid Girl go inside because the other Mysterious Girl, Mishima the Deus Ex Machina Ghost in the Rahxephon, appears in it. Heroboy thinks Mishima is dead for some reason, so he goes ghost-chasing with Quon in tow. They stumble around inside the shrine while Herogirl hangs around outside, worrying about Heroboy.

Subplot: Ponytail Science Guy yearns to pilot Rahxephon himself, and Evil Albino Guy razzes him about it. Ponytail tries to get inside Rahxephon, but ghostly Mishima appears and rebuffs him.

Back in the Magic Temple, Heroboy has visions of Home in Tokyo Pooptrumpet, thereby meeting his fixating-on-the-past quota for this episode, while the two Mysterious Girls meet by a big black egg that they seem to think is a terribly important big black egg. And they talk about how music is the true shape of what the world can be, or something.

Herogirl, who's all worried about the duo in the now-closed temple, rescues them by playing some cheezy old pop song that she likes. Inside the Temple Heroboy and Quon hear the song and magically escape the Temple, so I guess the true shape of the world is cheezy pop music.

Also: lots of gratuitious fanservice.

Ep. 10. First act=lousy. Lot of vamping and boxstepping, but all that really happens is that Quon hangs out at the home of one of the middle-aged commander guys while playing fiddle music, to the consternation of various guys who have the hots for Quon and fear she's an item with Commader Guy. Weak humor about this; the show seems to be channeling Tenchi, a dire humor anime from around the same time. And I'm the guy who renamed Tokyo Jupiter "Tokyo Pooptrumpet," so when I say the humor is weak, you know it's weak. Also there's about a million shots of the commander's bluebird in its birdcage, cuz SYMBOLISM. Commander fixates on a videotape of an unseen little girl playing the violin and asking Commander to come to her recital. Say, Quon also plays violin; the same tune, even! And the tune has magic miracle-gro qualities, making flowers bloom real good.

Act Two is mostly timewasting and padding and exposition. Beyond that, Commander was once underling to a soldier who ordered him to bomb Tokyo, turning it into Tokyo Pooptrumpet (which, remember, is my conceived-at-2-A.M. joke name for Tokyo Jupiter, which is Tokyo with a Jupiter-lookin' shell over it) and that soldier is now squirreled away in TokPoop, working for Heroboy's Evil Mom. Commander meets his estranged daughter, who wants closure before she leaves Japan, so she gives him the Missing Last Page Of Sheetmusic For That Magic Tune. Turns out daughter isn't the little girl in the videotape, but that little girl wrote this magic tune despite being ten. The little girl herself is dead, and Quon is exhausted by playing the tune because it's so spiritually, rather than technically, taxing. Then Commander visits the dead girl's grave and tells her she won't be lonely for long. My bet is the girl in the grave'll turn out to be Mishima, the ghostly Deus Ex Machina Girl.

If I Can't See You, You Can't See Me

2011-04-15T17:15:00.002-10:00

One bad habit of shy bespectacled people: keeping their frames between you and their pupils. Speaking as one such shy glasses-wearing person, I didn't realize I was doing this until I was rehearsing a play and thinking about the importance of eye contact with my scene partner. I realized I was lining up the curve of my opaque frames with the eyes of the other actor, using the thin plastic to shield me from the full force-or full commitment- of eye contact. I could still see the person, and the person could still see my eyes, allowing us to maintain the fiction that I was ocularly engaged, but I was censoring our pupils from our gazes, using an instrument of vision to block vision. And I realized I did this all the time. It was time to stop, so I did. I catch other people doing it to me, though.

Maison I Cough oooh

2011-04-07T21:21:00.003-10:00

It's 3:22 in the morning. I can't sleep, because that would involve relaxing, which I can't do because letting myself go slack makes my as-if-mosquitobit uvula bounce off my postnasal drip, jarring me into a manic coughing fit. So instead of trembling next to my Wife and keeping her awake the day before she has to teach class, I'm in the office thinking about Maison Ikkoku.

Maison Ikkoku is a manga by Rumiko Takahashi, the artist responsible for the comic fantasies Ranma 1/2 and Inu-Yasha. Ikkoku, by contrast, is a more or less reality-based romantic comedy. I was obsessed with it post-college. I identified with the clueless underambitious male lead, and I was enamored of a woman who strongly resembled the comic's female lead. Since my doltish efforts to woo the real woman were all abject flops, I turned to the comic for comfort. It seemed like a more hopeful retelling of my misadventures. Every month I bought the new issue and depended on it for pretty much all the pleasure I ever got out of this thwarted-love dynamic.

Obviously I got over this unrequited relationship, but the other day I reread the last issue of Maison Ikkoku, totally out of context. It's (spoiler warning, I guess) the big wedding between the protagonists. As with most real weddings, one's emotional response is likely to be tied to one's emotional attachment to the people involved. Reading it now was like attending the marriage of someone I vaguely remembered from school.

Now We Are Sick

2011-04-05T11:52:00.003-10:00

My Wife is recovering. I am in the thick of it. I seem incapable of doing anything rigorous, like synopsizing cartoons I mildly enjoyed six years ago.

However I have written a story I'm proud of. I'm trying to get feedback on it prior to shopping it around, but this is oddly difficult. Most people I know are too busy or perhaps too shy about dropping criticism on my work. I found a message board devoted to connecting aspiring writers with other aspiring writers for mutual criticism, but I haven't connected with any fellow New Weird stylists; I'm playing bop, while most of them want techno or metal or something. Not that I object to them liking whatever they like; just that I'm not finding many fellow travelers.

So if you'd like to read and respond to a fantasy short story, drop me a line in the comments and I'll send it to you. I'm particularly concerned with making sure it make sense, given that it's a fantasy.

Blablathon Episode 8

2011-03-31T15:59:00.003-10:00

Christmas episode. Has about as much heft as the phrase "Christmas episode" suggests. Lots of monochromatic snow imagery, lots of Christmas kitsch imagery, all of which I'm an easy mark for. Dropped hints about who has a crush on whom; empty-calorie human interest subplottery. Herogirl's kid sister drops some hints about how Herogirl once bought a Christmas gift for a boy she loved but she never gave it to him. Later, it's cold and Heroboy doesn't have any mittens, so Herogirl gives Heroboy some mittens. HMMMM.

Also Ponytail Scientist Guy finds a big pretty crystal stuck in the wings of the Rahxe-Robot and doesn't stop to consider that it might be dangerous. Nope, he just puts it on a necklace and gives it to Blonde Scientist Lady. No one notices when it begins growing, as a spooky phantom Mu Pilot (all the Mu monsters have human pilots operating them be remote control) appears in the window behind her, watching, waiting...

In the second act all the pretty snow turns into freezing imagery as a wintry Mu grows from the crystal necklace and absorbs Blond Scientist Lady in its ice, with funky visual stylings. Heroboy in his Rahxephon tries to save her; he can't hit the Mu because BSL is a human shield. Mu freezes Rahxephon with wintry ice magic as BSL gives a manic monologue about how unloved she is and how cold (geddit?) Heroboy is. And she weeps blood.

Then Yellow-Ribbon Mysterious Girl manifests inside the Rahxephon and gives Heroboy a little cuddle, which warms him up and thaws the ice. Hot sphere of sun shimmers behind Rahxephon as it whips up a force sword somehow and carves BSL out of her Mu. Day saved. By cuddles. My kind of Deus Ex.

Coda: Christmas party. Herogirl's kid sister notices Heroboy's gloves and mentions that they're the gift Herogirl bought for her long lost love. HMMMMM.

Blahblahthon Episode 7

2011-03-20T14:23:00.005-10:00

Once my Brother and I were sitting around watching Akira when my Dad strolled through the room, just in time for the bit where Tetsuo, the out-of-control mutant boy, starts growing at an explosive rate, like a time-lapse tumor, and accidentally squashes the girl he loves, in gruesome explicit colorful animation. Dad said "What kind of mind thinks up this stuff?" I guess the answer is: a mind that had two atomic bombs dropped on its cities. And now Japan gets even more apocalyptic death, disease and dread.

All of which is worth bearing in mind as I finally get around to Episode 7 of Rahxephon.

This episode starts with Heroboy entering his big goofy giant robot through some kind of magic portal in the mission control room. The portal is a little pyramid with a picture of an Angel (I guess; it's a human with wings, anyway) and Heroboy just walks through the wall. His head passes through the angel's Barbie-doll crotch, because animators are bored. Then there's lots of vulvaesque additional portal for him to travel through, because animators are lonely.

Pony-tailed scientist guy and blond scientist woman run some kind of benign experiments on the boy in the 'bot while flirty-flirting. Uh-oh, here comes the evil albino guy, who knows Ponytail Guy somehow! Let's hope no love triangles develop, else Blondie might start driving too fast and squealing her tires (spoiler).

Also that Reporter suspects the Government just might be hiding a Giant Robot. And there's a colors-of-Bennington team of fighter jet pilots joining the Let's-Fight-Mu-Monsters gang.

In Act Two our hero in his Bot and the fighter jet team have to fight a robot on stilts. For a while all we see are stilts rising into the clouds, which is pretty neat imagery, then the good guys rise above the clouds and the robot hits them with fire and ice and lightning and lasers and bananas and I lost track. Squad resents running backup for a boy, goes in for the kill despite orders to hang back and cover Heroboy. Mu almost kills them.

Heroboy saves the day via the power of remembering the folks back home and getting all determined to protect them, just like in WWII movies.

Afterwards the Fighter jet team leader (a buxom Cowgirl, cuz animators are in show biz) gets dressed down by Haruka, the woman who brought Heroboy from Tokyo Pooptrumpet (I know, it never gets old!) and just might have the spoiler warning hots for him. Haruka softens the blow by saying oh yeah thanks for fighting and all.

Reporter dude sniffs that Heroboy just might be piloting a secret giant robot, and asks Heroboy why he fights. Heroboy responds that it makes him feel connected to something bigger than himself. I used to think that was just the kind of thing screenwriters like to put into characters' mouths for some reason; today I understand, which is why I write blogposts about last decades' anime. Makes me part of something grander and more important than myself: old cartoons.

Quon, the red-braid Mystery Girl, wakes up after the Mu fight, magically knows about the fight, and announces to the air that Heroboy shouldn't fight. Instead he should Tune Himself To The Song. People say things like that in Anime.

Prog Slog

2011-03-03T17:53:00.007-10:00

I've been too busy vomiting on airplanes to keep up this blog or call people on their birthdays (Four barf bags and two garbage bags. Really. I used to be able to take a plane. Wuhoppen?) But fear not, I'm going to get back to that Rahxephon recap you've all been waiting for. First I have to talk about MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" video.

I don't think I ever actually watched this back when the song was unavoidable, but for some reason Laurie showed it to me last week and I've been pondering it, probably more than whoever directed it did. Now that I've watched the thing it's obvious to me that MC Hammer wasn't a rapper so much as a dancer with a hip-hop inflected patter. Apparently it was that silly baggy-pants dance that caught Laurie's eye back when she was fond of wacky entertainments like this:

But as fun as that is, let's stay focused on Hammer. Notice that the "Can't Touch This" video's full of beautiful dancing women of various ethnicities. At several points Hammer does a little gag about watching the women and not being able to decide between them. Then in the final shot he starts dancing with the whit

est looking girl we've seen in the video, a blond in some kind of schoolgirl outfit. I think interracial relationships just might save humanity; by extension I certainly have zero problem with a black man dancing with a white woman, and if the shot were in the middle of the video somewhere I wouldn't have anything to say about it. But placing this essentially modular shot at the end of the video suggests a narrative Hammer probably never intended; faced with a bunch of tantalizing black and Latin women, he chooses a blond honky schoolgirl. What kind of message does that send? White girls are the most desirable women? No wonder White America elected him White America's Favorite Rapper, a position held in tandem with Vanilla Ice.

Anyway, I tried to extend the old school rap video watching party with one of my favorites, Egyptian Lover:

Laurie was unimpressed. I love that shot of his Dad making time with mature, plus-sized women. Inspiring. And terrible mummies make everything better.

#

So today I listened to a really long podcast (Rogue's Gallery) devoted to prog-rock, the kind of thing that used to be called Art Rock by fans and Pomp Rock by foes. I call it The Stuff I Listened To In High School.

Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator... say what you will about them, but at their best they didn't sound like anyone else. No one listened to Yes and thought "Yet another band that combines symphonic song structures, Easter Sunday organ solos, and Les Paul-inflected guitar stylings." Nobody listened to Emerson, Lake and Palmer and said "Of all the militantly atheistic bands that play Bartok-flavored synthesizer flatulence noises, which one am I listening to?" King Crimson not only sounded like no one else, it didn't even sound like itself; founder Robert Fripp continually replenished the band through the magic of firing everybody.

Modern bands that position themselves as carriers of the Prog torch, though, seem to start with the question: "Which familiar band should we sound exactly like: Styx, Kansas or Whitesnake?" None of which fit my definition of Prog, although Kansas's fancy-pants boogie and portentious lyrics make them ringers. Styx also has a Prog-influenced emphasis on fancy interplay, high harmony vocals, virtuosity and SF/Fantasy concepts, but they are disqualified for sucking. If Prog bands must be derivative, why don't they at least copy actual Prog bands? I feel like I ordered baklava and got a baggie full of crumbling Oreos.

Another question modern Prog bands seem to ask: "Should we get 12-year-old Goth girls to write our lyrics, or 12-year-old Goth boys? Hmm, decisions decisions." Not to slur 12-year-old Goths; just that their poetic stylings shouldn't be coming out of grown-up mouths. If I had cash enough and time I'd buy a few Norton anthologies and lob them at Prog bandleaders. Please, guys and girls, write lyrics that couldn't have been whipped up by Instant Lyric Generators.

In the Seventies, it seems, Prog and Heavy Metal were seen as diametrically opposed. (I'm going on hearsay with this: my age was in the single digits at the time.) Prog was by and for Eloi, while Metal was by and for Morlocks. Then Punk came along and revealed just how closely related Prog and Metal were. They shared a fussiness and conceptual goofiness that Punk could only jeer. So current Metal and Prog seem to cling to one another for support. They blend the bombastic in-your-face heaviness of Metal with the maximum-arpeggios-per-square-inch fretboard knitting and precision ADD drumming of Prog.

From a quick online not-paying-any-money survey of the situation, there are some rewarding post-Seventies Prog acts out there. I'm indebted to the book Rocking the Classics by Edward Macan for tipping me to most of these.

(Something goes wonky with the formatting past this point. I'm learning not to care.)

There's a Swedish or something band called Anglagard that, from the online samples I've investigated, made instrumental music that sounded exactly like Yes during its early Seventies peak. They were doing this in the early Nineties, when I was yearning for Yes to make that kind of music; at the time Yes could only make music that sounded like a bunch of guys who hated each other and were only back together for the money. If only I'd known about Anglagard.

Apparent fan favorite Marillion is supposedly a Prog band, but I don't hear it. They sound like a really good adult pop act, though. I wonder why they aren't VH1 faves. Does VH1 still exist? Anyway, the first stuff I heard from them sounded like Mandy Patinkin's Nyquil-fueled tribute to Elton John, but deeper listening showed some kind of real adult sensibility, with life experience and earned wisdom, seems to be encased within this prettiness; if this isn't Prog, it's probably better.

Ozric Tentacles. Jam band flirts with House. Fortunately they seemed to have recorded about five hundred albums: look for the corny Shroom art. That's how you'll know.

Edhels. French. The 17 year old Aaron within thinks this is pretty fab. A dulcet, delicate quality that defines what I loved about Yes's best efforts.

Djam Karat. Another smart (D)jam band. Forty years earlier they would have called themselves Carrot Jam. Lead guitarist looks like he knows what 3D20 means. Racially integrated, which matters more than it maybe should to this guilty white liberal. Anyway, really fun nerd-testosterone stuff.
- Hermetic Science, the band of Edward Macan himself. He was too modest to mention it in his book. This video quality matches the professionalism of the Yes concert video I had on videotape in high school. I dunno why a band that favors vibraphones over electric guitars is relegated to performing in what looks to be a hotel room.
After mentioning instant lyric generators I decided to see if there were any. Yes. I composed the following wonderfuless with it. The lousy formatting is the Generator's, not mine, and It, not me, swiped from Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. Please note that Verse 2 is structured more like a chorus than the first verse.

Public Restroom

Verse One:
Smells bad
And the whole world is driving you mad
my leg
But you may feel a little sick.Can you stand up?

Chorus:
public restroom
There was lightning in your arms and then the
vomiting in a garbage bag
Me and some guys from school

Verse Two:
public restroom
Is there anybody in there?
where's my money
Is there anybody in there?

Chorus Two:
public restroom
Is there anybody in there?
vomiting in a garbage bag
Bound to win a prize

Chorus to Fade

Eat it, Leonard Cohen, there's a new boy in town.

Blahblahthon Episode 6

2011-02-09T17:35:00.002-10:00

This is happening. I am going to rewatch and subsequently remark upon Rahxephon, a giant robot anime that I haven’t watched in years, even if it kills me (with boredom (or alcohol poisoning)). Sadly I can’t find the first disk of this series, so I’m starting with episode six, making things even more confusing than they would be anyway.

The basic plot is more or less identical to every giant robot show I’ve seen; a teen boy has to pilot a big robot (here called The Rahxephon) and use it to fight mysterious alien robots (here called the Mu) on behalf of a paramilitary organization. In this episode he tells his supervisors that he won’t fight anymore. Why? Maybe I’d know if I’d reviewed the previous episodes; he doesn’t articulate his reasons here. I suspect the real reason is that the show creators wanted him to be a less annoying version of Shinji, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the popular and influential giant robot show on which Rahxephon is nakedly modeled. Shinji spent a lot of time refusing to fight, and many fans found him annoying (how do I know this? Because I spent way too much time on anime message boards when I should have been going outside, dating, etc). I suspect the disconnect between fans and Shinji stemmed from fans’ desire to have a vicarious heroic experience; a hero who overdoes the “refusing the call” routine doesn’t contribute to the triumphalist vibe. So anyway, Heroboy in Rahxephon emulates Shinji, but replaces realistic adolescent stridency with bland unexplained insistence. Which makes him more suitable for conventional self-insertion and less suitable for fine-grained examination of maturational struggle.

There’s also a bunch of fooferall about military maneuvers that I couldn’t be bothered to follow since it was all delivered in exposition (there’s a reporter covering the paramilitary org who exists entirely to provide such exposition, and will turn out to be an undercover general for some reason oops spoiler warning).

Also in this episode (only) there’s a team member named Kim who keeps privately dwelling on the trauma of having her parents killed by Mu when they first inexplicably attacked earth; she wants revenge on them. She has a pensive conversation with Heroboy about it; he also has reason to be bitter about the Mu because:

Heroboy’s backstory! Years ago the Mu surrounded his city, Tokyo, with a pocket dimension forcefield mammerjammer that makes time run differently (like Lost Island oops spoiler warning) and keeps Tokyoians unknowingly separated from the world outside; an enforced urban provincialism. In the early episodes the exterior war-with-the-Mu irrupts into his seemingly ordinary existence, and he gets expelled from that comfortable quiet life into A Time Of War. With Giant Robots. Also the force field around Tokyo looks like Jupiter, so people refer to Tokyo plus force field as Tokyo Jupiter. As I recorded notes on each episode I started referring to Tokyo Jupiter as Tokyo Pooptrumpet, because at 2 in the morning that is hilarious.

Are you following all this? Tough. Anyway, Heroboy tells Kim that despite all the evil the Mu have done, he doesn’t want revenge. This adjusts her attitude so she stops wanting revenge. She thanks Heroboy. And pretty much disappears from the show. One nice grace note: their pensive conversation takes place on a big concrete rooftop with the sun going down, and whoever colored it got the tone of sunset reflecting off concrete just right; reminds me of college days somehow.

The basic outline of every episode is: Act One, lots of talky stuff; Act Two, Mu Attack. The Rahxephon (Heroboy’s robot, remember) looks like the dorkiest toy robot from 70s Japan ever, which I used to think was an aesthetic lapse. Now, though, I see the point; Japanese viewers see it and intuitively know this is the herobot, since it looks like every herobot in every robot show ever. The Mu look like postmodern sculpture; beautiful but enigmatic.

In this episode The Mu has two strategies: smash into your robot like a wrecking ball, and make you sink into some magical drowning dimension. Happily, if you’re Heroboy, your robot comes equipped with a Mysterious Girl (Mysterious Girls were all the rage in robot anime at the time) with a big yellow scarf who appears out of nowhere and sings, thereby breaking the spell. Then when the Mu smashes into you again it will smash into a bazillion pieces and you’ll be fine. Thanx, Deus Ex Machina girl (named Mishima, like the suicidal novelist)!

That’s Episode Six. Pray for me.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Final

2011-01-22T17:14:00.013-10:00

I was an extra in a feature-length movie a friend directed. It was a tumultuous production about which a sequel to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls could be written, but not by me. I had fun.

* * *

The last video project I've been involved in was a short written, directed and composed by Marc. Yes, composed; he was a composition student, and for a project he decided to do a soundtrack, and make the movie for which he'd write the soundtrack.

I'm terribly fond of this. Marc shares my love for Birmingham, and it shows.

Marc asked me to be in this immediately after the final performance of a play. Later an actress in the play asked me "Why wasn't I invited to be in this movie?"

"It's a gay porno," I said.

Pause.

"I was in a lesbian porno," she said.

Pause.

"I was kidding," I said.

Pause.

"I wasn't," she said.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the Second

2011-01-22T06:03:00.008-10:00

I was an extra in a corny comedy film a well-to-do young man wrote, directed and produced. I've written about it before, and can only add that this rather ambitious and expensive production (shot on 35 MM film instead of video, for which the filmmaker paid out of pocket!) doesn't seem to be available in any form. Not on Youtube, nuthin. Years later the filmmaker called me and asked if I'd volunteer to appear in his latest, lower-budgeted film, which would be an angry satire of all the local films that won more acclaim that his. I was to appear in a spoof of arty films. I'd wear a diaper and boxing gloves, and box with another grown man in a diaper. I made some excuse about having to clean my apartment, which anyone who ever saw my apartment knows was a lie. Don't ask fat guys to take their shirts off unless you know they're comfortable with it.

Later I got involved in Sidewalk Scramble, this being the "Make a short film in 48 hours" competition. My friend Deb roped me into the Scramble team "Special Needs Offenders of Televideo", a local group of bored youth with prosumer video equipment.

Anyway, I went to the initial writers' meeting and was disappointed Deb didn't show up. I was stuck with two young men and a handful of givens. Givens are things one is given by the Scramble operators, to make sure you didn't spend five months making the film you're passing off as a 48 hour production. Things like a hat that needs to appear, certain lines of dialogue, a sunrise. If you turn your film in without these elements, you don't make the cut. If you incorporate these elements in a clever way, you get points with the judges. I was very excited about the Givens, because as an occasional improviser I was excited by the challenge of weaving a fresh story out of such elements; they were pegs to weave the thread around, and I liked to see what kinds of patterns we could weave. I immediately crafted an improv-style rough-draft narrative that I thought deserved, at the least, a big gold star. The guys shrugged. So we went to the team leader's house.

His DVD shelf consisted entirely of movies you could find at Wal-Mart, and I just about left upon seeing that. I'm no snob about such things, and I like Ghostbusters as much as anybody, but I do think aspiring filmmakers should cast their nets a little wider. Then he offered us food. I was glad; I was hungry. The food was Hot Pockets. I was sad. I said No Thank You. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of our collaboration.

The next day I accidentally on purpose got lost on the way to the filming, but drove around a bunch in an effort to persuade myself I had actually made an effort. A deliberately futile effort seemed ethically superior to just staying home. Nowadays, thanks to my high-functioning Wife's example, I would either show up and do what I'd committed to do, or just call in sick like a real man.

I missed the screening, but friends assured me the short was even more dire than I'd expected. The responsible parties put their every bowel movement on Youtube, yet they haven't posted this Sidewalk Scramble effort, so go figure.

P. S. Deb went on to become a fixture on the local theatrical scene and got to do some work she was proud of.

A Life in the Sinny-Maw, Poot the First

2011-01-06T15:20:00.002-10:00

I have appeared, I believe, in 6 efforts at a film or video. I’ll try to recount them in chronological order, but I don’t know that I’ll remember chronological order.

In my mid-twenties I joined a gathering of film-besotted Birmingham locals who aspired to generate content, then slap it on public access. A man and a woman who seemed to be in good with the local video scene (let’s call them Mate and Kate) set up some kind of theoretical organization, got an alleged former producer of The Waltons to drop by meetings, and solicited short spec scripts from aspiring screenwriters. Kate said, with an I-dare-you-to-laugh stone face, “My ambition is to have a Top Ten hit show on the air in a year.” I was impressed; these people were thinking big; Alabama public access was clearly just a stepping stone.

I was besotted by Donald Barthelme and Neon Genesis Evangelion; I wrote a now-lost sketch that reflected these influences (and not much else beyond a sense of humor more informed by Monty Python than Barthelme.) It was well received, and they asked for a series. I wrote a truckload more (also long lost) and they weren’t so well received; too naively obscurantist. I got my old Theatre professor to write a rave review of this stuff, then gave it to the (ahem) Heads of Production in the belief that this would sway them. Wrong.

Happily another guy had been cranking out scripts; a sitcom series that I regarded as hopelessly out of touch with either real human behavior or professional quality laffs. I couldn’t have improved them if I’d been asked to rewrite, though, which I wasn’t. A director (from B’ham’s hyperactive community theatre scene) signed on to actually direct something; he decided that of the two series on offer both were garbage, but at least one was comprehensible. And so the pilot for the other guy’s series became a low-budget video reality.

It debuted with a block of locally produced shorts at the Sidewalk Film Festival, at the same time as American Astronaut. Everyone who attended came out raving about its brilliance, the musical might of the film-affiliated band that performed at the screening, the informative yet hilarious Q and A session; it has since gone on to be a cult fave. I’m talking about American Astronaut, here. I missed it to see the short I was in.

An amateurish, forgettable thing. I was onscreen for a split second, looking like a fat fifteen-year-old.

That was the first and last production to emerge from this crew. Mate and Kate had an acrimonious split, and the contracts we signed (oh, did I mention we signed contracts?) gave Nate the rights to everything we submitted or filmed while he was involved, for a year or so out. Kate led me to believe that Mate was actively holding up production, so I used that newfangled “E Mail” to write Mate and ask what my options for getting the stuff produced were. He responded:

“Produce away. Just remember that any resulting product or profits are mine THASS RITE BI-ZITCHES MINE ALL MINE $$$$$$$$”

or something to that effect. As Kate later reexplained, Mate was no longer actively involved in any way, and Kate refused to do any work that might benefit the guy, so a halt was called while Kate ran down the clock. By whatever time the contracts were void, so was my interest.

Then I was an extra in a professional film with real live movie stars titled World Traveller, which filmed mostly in Birmingham due to its resemblence to all the world’s finest cities, plus cheapness. I was an extra in one scene, talking on a pay phone in the background of an airport. They asked me to wear a suit and carry a suitcase; I wore a musty suit I’d outgrown (horizontally) and brought a nice fabric-lined hardshell suitcase I’d swiped from my Dad years before. I’d forgotten there was a vat of Vaseline in the suitcase (for my chapped lips, wise guys) and it melted in the hot sun and/or movie lights, ruining the fabric lining. This was representative of how I was fumbling through life at the time.

I missed the film’s local premiere; I think I was rehearsing a play, maybe? I heard it was a lot of fun; even though no one had anything good to say about the film as such, apparently there were cheers throughout the screening whenever anyone recognized themselves, their friends, or familiar landmarks. There’s no business like it.

More to come… honest…

2010-12-30T11:22:00.004-10:00

We're watching Lost. I'm not crazy about the glib O. Henry-on-amphetamines approach to character development, but I'm stuck on the show anyway.

Here's an example of why: at the end of Season Four (mild spoiler) Ben Linus turns a big frozen wheel to make some majickque happen. It's a rather Dr. Whoish plot twist and could easily have been flat mystic-shmistic hoohah but for one thing: it's been established that Linus is doing this to save his beloved island, and that as a result he will be exiled from the island. As he turns the wheel actor Michael Emerson commits. We can see just how fraught this action is for him, not in the big goofy prop wheel, but in the actor's seriously strained face. I know nothing about the actor's life, but he knows how to tap into some real pain and manifest it on his wonderful puppet face. And for once the writers didn't go overboard sentimentalizing it and trying to make us fall in love with the character all over again. The actors are better at winning sympathy than the writers are.

How To Argue About Art (Reactionary Style)

2010-12-05T15:16:00.010-10:00

I've gotten into several arguments about the recent removal of the following (not safe for work) video from a Smithsonian exhibit:

because some people found it offensive on religious grounds. I can see how a pious person could take offense at the video, but it seems more like an expression of despair at the inefficacy of traditional solaces like faith and money in the face of AIDS (from which the young artist died) than an exercise in cheap offensiveness. As a gesture of goodwill to those on the other side of the issue, here's a field guide to arguing against offensive art and the government funding of same.

1. Tell The Joke. The Joke is essential. You have to tell it. Like a blues song there is no canonical version, but a representative rendition follows:

"Hey, if they wanna be cutting-edge, I got an idea for them. Chortle! How about painting something beautiful? Something that requires skill. Now that would be avant-garde! Guffaw!"

If someone else has already told the joke, the fun isn't over; go ahead and tell it again. If a third person wishes to argue against modern art, that person should also tell the joke. Each time the joke is told, be sure to laugh as if hearing it for the first time.

As an alternative one can ask why these so-called "artists" (remember the sneer quotes!) pick on Christians, but not Muslims. Be sure to assume that every Muslim man woman and child is a murderous lunatic, and that anyone who claims to have a bone to pick with any aspect of Christianity is just petulant.

2. Do not, under any circumstances, engage the art in question. Any real exposure to the art under discussion might complicate the making of glib, snide remarks. Bonus points for asserting that Robert Mapplethorpe did Piss Christ.

3. Remember the instant-win killer app of modern art mockery: Michelangelo. Everything in the post-Renaissance art world can be obliterated by pointing out that it isn't as good as Michelangelo, with the possible exception of Thomas Kinkaide.

Don't worry; you don't need to know a damn thing about Michelangelo to make this assertion, nor do you need to have engaged his work with any real curiosity or sustained attention. All you need are the usual hand-me-down schoolmarmish articles of faith about Michelangelo, to whit:

His art was pretty.

He painted the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and sculpted David.

He was influential, and a genius.

Unlike these offensive modern artists, he certainly never indulged in anything remotely homoerotic. Pu-leeze.

That's all you need to know!

4. Government shouldn't spend taxpayer dollars on art. Art doesn't fire Patriot missiles into brown-skinned wedding ceremonies.

5. Remember: there is nothing, nothing, of any interest happening in the world of modern art. It's all the Emperor's New Clothes. There's no need to check up on this; take it for granted.

Some of you may be wondering "Are there any distinctions between 'Modern Art,' 'Postmodern Art,' 'Conceptual Art,' 'Abstract Art,' and 'Pop Art?" The answer is no. Use these terms interchangeably.

6. If the person with whom you're arguing says anything that might undermine these positions, just blow them off. Why bother engaging unfamiliar worldviews? That has nothing to do with art.

See-Oh-Ehn Spiracy.

2010-11-23T05:57:00.009-10:00

I'm fond of conspiracy theories as a sort of modern folklore, a sort of objective correlative by sleight of hand. I am, however, skeptical of real-world conspiracy theories, as my last post suggested, because of my experiences on the inside of situations that seemed conspiratorial on the outside.

When two students from my alma mater, Birmingham-Southern College, burned down a bunch of Baptist churches, I obsessively perused the blogosphere to see what conclusions people were drawing about the old school. Several bloggers found it suspicious that students from a Methodist-affiliated school (variously identified as "a Methodist College" and "A Methodist Bible College") only burned down Baptist churches. Some thought they'd uncovered proof of an interdenominational shadow war. I enjoy mentioning this to my fellow Southerners, most of whom are Baptist or Methodist, and all of whom regard it as a good joke. I can see how, given humanity's long history of sectarian strife, people who aren't familiar with the placidity of Protestant interaction around here might cook up such a narrative, but there's more animosity between Bama and Auburn fans than between Baptists and Methodists. Anyway, if you're ever in rural Alabama, pay attention to the churches you see. Chances are, most will be Baptist. I don't think the arsonists were picking and choosing. They shot a cow that same trip, on the pretext of hunting, so it doesn't seem like discretion was part of their thought process.

And then there's this obsolete old horror, posting from his cavern of Catholic kitsch about how the arsonists did what they did because they were Jewish.

They weren't, by the way, Jewish; they were typical Protestant-raised cultural Christians. One might think a barmy Catholoon would be only to happy to wail on them for being the spawn of Luther, but apparently his antiquated hate is too baroque for such linear proceedings.

***

Closer to home, my Dad is the Clay Shaw of Pinewood Derbies. Pinewood Derbies, for the uninitiated, are races that Cub Scout Packs hold once a year. Every scout makes a car from a standard kit. Block of wood, plastic wheels, pair of axles. Carve the wood, paint it, race it. Most scouts carved it to resemble the silhouette of a passenger car, which is not exactly the most aerodynamic shape. With my last Derby approaching I saw, in an issue of Boy's Life, a Derby design that looked more like a race car. Actually it looked like a doorstop on wheels, but I wheedled my Dad into helping me use this plan. He was uncertain because it was so off-model from customary design, but he went along. He even painted it really nice: black with crackling red flames; he was hoping to win the best-looking car contest, which we didn't.

But we did win the actual race. The judges scratched their heads over the unconventional design, but it didn't go against the letter of the rules; it wasn't a violation to look like the sole race car in a fleet of station wagons. A Pinewood Derby takes a while; there are many, many heats if you've got a big Pack. I think ours was over a hundred boys, but we won heat after heat, and our car took First Place. There was some grumbling about this, since the car had seemingly jumped the track a couple times and blocked other cars; probably just the result of being too light in front.

But it didn't pass the smell test. Because my Dad was the Pack Leader.

And the son of the Assistant Pack Leader won second place.

Imagine what a Truther or a Birther would make of this.

Now, anyone who knows my Dad and his Scouting Assistant knows that these are not people who would risk their good names, nor betray anyone's trust, over a Pinewood Derby. They know what a childrens' game is worth, and they know what a reputation is worth. But I can understand how, from outside appearances, this might look like a small-stakes conspiracy.

If I were an Ayn Rander I might argue that there's a correspondence between the leadership qualities it takes to be a Pack Leader and the Howard Roark qualities it takes to design an unconventional race-winning Pinewoodmobile, but I doubt my Dad would stand for it.

Note for the night.

2010-11-17T22:02:00.001-10:00

If an argument on behalf of position X is just as applicable to positions like "The Jews killed the dinosaurs!" then it's time to reconsider arguments.

Confused? Yes.

2010-11-15T10:09:00.003-10:00

I was a fanatical Yes fan in high school (I'm speaking of the band Yes, here) which is proof that I was pretty confused. I mean, it's one thing to think Close to the Edge is good stuff; that's the if-you-only-buy-one-Yes-album-make-it-this-one album. It's a recording that doesn't need much defending. But thinking Tormato is a good album? With its prissy pastiches (Most anglo funk ever), vegan-meatheaded mystic-shmistic lyrics ("boy-child Solomon"? Oy, child,) and arpeggio-workouts-disguised-as-music? That's confusion.

In the liner notes for Relayer, the other Yes record I consider a keeper, there was a note informing anyone who cared to know that the album was recorded on producer Eddie Offord's portable recording equipment. As I have since learned from interviews, this means they set up shop in a band member's house. But at 16 or whatever I visualized the band recording in the trailer of a moving ten-wheeler, cutting an album as they rolled down the road on the way to the next gig. With Eddie Offord driving the truck, which had a sound board on the dash. I'm not kidding. This made sense to me.

I still seem to lose all sense when it comes to Yes. I've been downloading awful concert bootlegs, forcing myself to listen, then deleting them from my hard drive if not my mind, in an effort at aversion therapy. It just seems to keep me fixated, though; I much prefer jazz, these days, but some part of me will always be stuck on my first love.

One thing these concerts make evident, especially if you listen to them back to back with the original studio recordings: Yes suffered from bombast creep. If a tune was sensitively played and tastefully arranged at birth, bet on it turning into a thumping, crashing, squealing, effects-laden pomp-rock disgrace by the time it's become a concert staple.

Recently I went on a solo night-driving trip to the beach, and I listened to a long bootlegged instrumental medley of Yes tunes, as performed by Circle, a band composed entirely of members or de-facto members of Yes. Circle sounds a lot like the early post-psychedelic rough and ready version of Yes, so to hear Circle's version of later Yes music was awfully disorienting... like hearing the Beatles of Meet The Beatles play tunes from Abbey Road. They stripped bombast out instead of larding it up; the reverse of Yes's usual MO. I actually had to pull off the highway and get some food, because the music made me feel too discombobulated to drive. Music has power, and goofy music has goofy power.

Routeen Halloween

2010-11-02T08:34:00.004-10:00

This Halloween, for the first time in about a decade, I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. I was oddly nervous about it because in my imagination I visualized trick-or-treaters as aggro adolescents who might deface my car if they didn't care for the little candy bars we offered. To my relief trick-or-treaters turn out to be tiny children with sweet and/or shy dispositions, the timidest monsters I've ever seen.

I was aghast, though, to see most of the kids were being driven around our safe, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in big suburban utility vehicles instead of walking. It was different for me and mine. We would go outside, in the dark and the Autumnal chill, tripping on our costumes, struggling to see through our masks, exploring our neighborhood on foot, knocking on doors we didn't know. It was a cozy adventure, almost an initiation ceremony; our parents were close behind, but still, the moonlight filtered down through the branches and made everything look like a less trustworthy version of our daytime world. Experiencing it on foot, fully outdoors, haunting or being haunted by the enormity of the starlit sky, made Halloween just a wee bit eldritch. Experiencing it from the back of a boring everyday vehicle just doesn't cut it; that's how kids experience everyday banality. It's neither a trick nor a treat; it's just average.

I fussed about this on Fecesbook (and let's face it, everybody who reads this blog is facebooked to me so you all saw it) and an old high school friend stood up for the automotive trick-or-treating process on the grounds that parents are tired. Well, I'm pretty sure my parents didn't have it any easier, but they still had the decency to lead us on our disguised walkabout. I was surprised this old friend took such a bourgeois stance, since in our younger days she'd been a devoted Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft fan. You'd think she'd retain some love for the real Halloween spooky spirit.

How To Sleep the Aaron Way

2010-10-21T06:15:00.002-10:00

If you're wondering why it's been so long between posts, it's because

1. I haven't watched anymore Rahxephon, because the first two episodes were so boring,

2. This is post # 665. Gettin' skeery! Twice in my life I've tried to purchase something, had it ring up as $6.66, and seen a cashier freak out. One gave me a penny discount, the other demanded that I buy something else. A third time the cashier just ran it through with no trouble, and her co-worker started teasing her for loving Satan. I figure I should save post #666 for Halloween.

So anyway, How To Get To Sleep the Aaron Way.

When I'm having trouble drifting off there are a couple of tricks that work for me, but I often forget about them. I hope that by typing them out consciously I'll make my waking self fully mindful of them, placing the tricks at my disposal anytime. Or neutralizing the tricks' effectiveness by dragging them into the daylight. Whichever.

One trick is a childhood favorite: Imagining that I'm being pursued through a forest by faceless heavies, but they'll never find me because I'm hidden in a cave deep within the earth. The threat of the pursuers is an essential part of the comfort here, for some reason. If I'm just underground it's not relaxing, but if I'm underground and thereby beyond the reach of danger, tension flows away. I was reminded of this recently by an Episode of Lost that employs the same basic situation; I guess it's a pretty obvious narrative troupe. Hiding underground. Works for other members of the animal kingdom, so why not us?

The best way I know of lulling myself to sleep during an insomniac mood, though, is to let my inner eye become a screen onto which my subconscious can project an animated film. Somehow when I do this I perceive a flow of images that my conscious mind could never cook up, and it's never the same twice. It's usually as if Paul Klee teamed up with Stan Brakhage, but I never know quite what to expect. Sometimes there's some Fleischer Bros. in there. Sometimes Matthew Thurber. It's a little frustrating to realize that somewhere in my cranium there's a wealth of visual creativity that I can only access as a sleep aid. Maybe I should buy some oils and some Ambien, and see what happens.

Rah Project

2010-09-15T18:39:00.007-10:00

If you're feeling a strange, intangible excitement, a sense that something wonderful is immanent, rest assured that it's not just your imagination: I've started rewatching Rahxephon, and I'm going to keep you posted on an episode-by-episode basis. You're welcome.

Why am I doing this? Because I bought the whole series (I don't know why, I just did, okay?) and might as well get my money's worth. Plus it's out of print apparently, and unless people discover a way to, I don't know, download bootleg copies of video material from the Internet or something, it may be hard to find, so someone should keep some kind of anecdotal record.

Having rewatched the first two episodes: Okay, blandly attractive boy has goofy friends (whom I found tiresome the first time I watched it, but now prefer to the endless fighter-jet and giant robot routines. This is a rare instance of something from a anime becoming LESS tiresome to me over time.) KABOOM military attack, fighter jet porn, and his friend-who's-a-girl gets a slight cut. Wait a minute, her blood is red; as I recall a key plot point about seventy episodes later is that her blood is blue, indicating that she's unknowingly a Mulian (the filthy rotten alien invaders.) Is there a continuity screwup here, or do they justify it later? Something to watch for.

So protagonist-boy runs around bumping into several Mysterious Girls. Rei Ayanami of Neon Genesis Evangelion started an anime fad for Mysterious Girls, so this show has a bunch of them. One of the other big trends in anime at the time was the so-called harem anime, in which a nebbishy boy socializes with five or six hot girls. Rahxephon tries to subtly cater to the same adolescent-boy urges while maintaining plausible deniability with furrowed-brow Lost-style seriousness and plot complexity.

The only interesting things in episode one are

1. the Mulian giant robot things look like art projects: pseudo ethnographic, with broken doll heads and such. Sadly the main herobot, Rahxephon, looks much less interesting, like a big boring robot toy, plus feathers.

2. One of the mysterious girls is actually a mysterious woman, with hips and body fat, and therefore more interesting to look at than the usual willowy mysterious girls.

The only interesting things in episode two are

1. the inevitable connection between the boy and the robot is kept uncertain for a while, which in giant robot shows represents an innovation.

2. The boy's Mom is an evil scientist who, like all scientists everywhere, is doing something nefarious. Plus her minions seem to be keeping tabs on the boy hero for some reason. Some of the best episodes will revolve around Satan-Scientist-Mom. The Japanese, like the ancient Greeks, always do well with lurid family conflict.

3. The version of Tokyo where this takes place kinda sorta reminds me of Birmingham, and all the running and driving around prettily painted urban locations sweeps me back to happy days of tooling around The 'Ham. Cheap instant nostalgia is half of what anyone watches anime for.

So far there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to keep watching this thing, but as I recall other fans who had seen more assured me that the series gets more interesting once it's established its giant robot bona fides, and they turned out to be right. One of the reasons I found this show compelling was that each episode had its own identity, even if that identity was often not much of an identity. It never quite felt as if I'd watched slight variations on the same episode three times in a row, which can't be said of most anime.

P. S. this is dated September 15 because I started writing it then, but I posted it October 2nd. Thanks, Blogger. What do you want for free?

One Man Show

2010-09-10T16:01:00.002-10:00

I recently heard an NPR story about Hal Holbrook's one man show about Mark Twain. It's got me inspired. I'm planning a show about Edgar Allen Poe in which I get drunk and hit on teenage girls, followed by a show on H. P. Lovecraft in which I have a seizure if a non-WASP is in the audience.

Color Correction and Incorrect Conning

2010-09-03T11:04:00.006-10:00

Today I was strolling across the college campus where my Wife works when a dude in a car (I don't notice things like makes and models, but it looked pretty nice) pulled up by me, leaned out the window, and started giving me a spiel. Started with a very long, very rehearsed routine about how he was a data something-or-other-supposed-to-sound-technical-and-impressive, doing fancy-pants computer work for the college, but he was in Charlotte by mistake and needed to get to Charleston and was out of gas money and his phone was booby-trapped or something, so could I do him a favor and go to an ATM with him and withdraw some money, he'd pay me back honest, he makes $130,000 a year and is totally good for it if I'd just help him out here.

Although one fantasizes about telling off con men, I slipped into my default response to such routines, which is a sort of counterspiel, a "huh, whu, I don' geddit, no speekie de engwish, duh der diddle doo, oh look a sunbeam."

He said "Sorry to interrupt you," and sharked off.

Thanks to my wife I know a lot of people who actually do work with technical stuff, actually do travel around, and actually do make a lot of money.

Item 1: They have better problem solving skills than the kind of shmoe who stops random people on the street to get help. In a jam they'd find campus security or whoever was arranging for them to be doing a job in the first place. They have connections, and even if they are desperate for money, they don't get desperate about the money, at least not in front of strangers.

Item Two: They don't lead with a Life's Work infodump. People who do sophisticated work, like people of breeding, communicate who and what they are with their bearing first and foremost. They don't bling it, they just are it. They'll bring up specifics when specifics are called for, but if they need a stranger's help they don't start with "Hey buddy, I do XYZ and I gotta favor to ask," they start with "Can you direct me to Campus Security?"

#

The other night we saw a cheezy 80's movie; what I think of as a time capsule movie, where you're not there for the narrative or whatever, you're there for clothes, hairdos, cars, all the cultural bricabrac. And we were satisfied customers. I bring it up because, in paying attention to the bright colors of the film, I noticed something you won't see in newer films.

The heroine was outdoors on a sunny day, and the different planes of her pale-skinned face were reflecting various colors, including green and blue. She really looked like a Fauvist portrait, but one would never notice it if one weren't contemplating the color scheme of the image, because our eyes harmonize this kind of thing all the time in real life. Without looking like amateurish filmmaking, it gave the picture a little reality.

You won't see that in modern films. We watched some Lost Sseason Two) the next night, and I looked for any stray bits of reflected color on peoples' faces.

Fergit it. One thing future generations will mock about current movies and TV is that they color-correct everything to death. Got a face? It'll be beige, chocolate or orange. So will the background, if it isn't blue.

That's one reason I find myself drawn to older films (okay, it was Teen Witch, pure schlock but wonderful Eighties duds and 'dos.) Whatever may be phony or false in them, the reflections on the actors' faces have some bearing on reality.

Slivers in the Tree

2010-08-24T08:38:00.004-10:00

I have a suspicion about abstract art. I suspect it came to prominence in part as a result of the imagery of the microscope and the telescope as it became widely available to the public through, y'know, Life magazine and textbooks. Images of nebulae and microorganisms provided a very different way of looking at the world and its structure(s) than the naked eye could. Most representational art takes a human's-eye-view as the baseline; abstract art takes the telescopic and microscopic views as new baselines. I'm not interested in getting into Sharks Vs. Jets stuff between abstraction and representation, because I value them both, but I think one reason the representational partisans object so zealously to abstract art is that it denies a comfortably human point of view as a sufficient base for looking at the world, and that probably unsettles some people. For some, though, it opens new possibilities. Old-fashioned God-as-man-with-beard art tried to picture God, The Sublime, in humans' eye view ways, which has its virtues and its charms, but Rothko gets much closer to my conception of God.

#

I'm reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Apparently it's caused some trouble in a high school lit. class. I'm not deep into it; about 30 pages of a 600+ page book. Still, it's clear from Chapter One that this is going to be an R-rated text. The (married) protagonist is sitting around the apartment, hoping someone will call with a job offer. Instead an anonymous woman calls and starts talking explicitly dirty to him. He hangs up, and the incident bothers him for the rest of the day. The phone keeps ringing, and he refuses to answer; he's too icked out by the first call of the day.

I can see why some people would be uncomfortable with this material, particularly for teen readers. But I can see the possible value of it. What teen can't relate to the your headspace, confusing and frustrating you, icking you out all day. I suppose the student who objected to the book saw the book itself in those terms. But still, the book offers an opening into a serious discussion about these kinds of problems, and advanced students need to get outside their comfort zones in order to address difficult topics. I hope that when the young protestor goes off to school she won't be lost at sea when sexuality gets increasingly persistent in her life, which it will. Maybe she'll remember the book and give it another try then; it contains wisdom from which she would be well advised to learn.

I recently finished Silver On the Tree, the last book in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. Computer game nerds have a term for games that aren't open-ended, games in which the player has to go along a predetermined path to complete the game: "on rails." Like an amusement park ride, right? Cooper's plots are on rails. Will and company mostly have to go along till they get to the next hypnagogic semi-interactive showpiece, then let an old guy lecture them on the Matter of Britain symbolic significance of what's happening, then repeat til the conclusion. There's a pair of nice dilemmas for some characters at the grand conclusion, but the climax itself is pretty much a matter of "Then the children hoisted the magic treasures they found in the other books, and the treasures zapped the bad guys with magic beams and the day was saved, then the old guy gave a really long speech about good and evil, the end."

I Don't Wanna Go Back

2010-08-16T16:26:00.004-10:00

I've written before about weirdoes at the laundromat, but as I sit here doing laundry in our own household machines I recall there were many as-yet undocumented but unsettling encounters. It was a 24 hour place, open to all, so all kinds of people showed up. If you were there in the early morning and wanted to have a sexual encounter with a sweaty trembling tweaker you were usually in luck. Not that I ever availed myself, you understand, but they made their presence and their proclivities known.

If you went on a Saturday afternoon you'd always have to contend with the big ruddy guy in the muumuu who didn't wash his clothes in the machines. There was a large sink the custodian washed his mop in; it was always kind of cruddy. And Muumuu Man would dump his laundry in there, pour on detergent, and turn on the faucet. He'd also smoke inside even though there were No Smoking signs everywhere. Once he stood right in front of the only exit, blocking the path with his big circus-tent-looking body, smirking as people tried to get around him. Oh, Muumuu Man.

One night was particularly noteworthy. I put my laundry in the machines and went for a little stroll around the nearby park. It was dark out, and I heard a howling that I took to be a dog. Eventually, though, the howling resolved into a phrase: "I DON'T WANNA GO BACK TO PRISON," over and over again. I went back inside. A bunch of cute college kids were doing their laundry and chatting. They were mostly white females and black males, and clearly very happy to be together. It was nice to be on the periphery of such a warm crew; like sitting near a campfire.

Then a scraggly hillbillyish guy came in, looked at them with a manic grin, walked all around the room, loudly slammed a top-loader lid, and stormed out.

Light nervous laughter. "That was random," one of the kids said.

Then the guy came back in the door with a thick branch in his hand.

"Now yew all get on out of here," he said. "We don't want yew messin' with our women."

One of the young black men said something appropriately inappropriate. The ridiculous person left. One of the kids called the police, who drove around but didn't find the guy. I wonder if he ever went back to prison.

Neon Montreal Evangelion

2010-08-09T11:02:00.022-10:00

Back from Montreal after our second visit. Montreal makes me feel like a kid in Chattanooga again, in a way that I doubt Chattanooga could. The buildings loom so high they make me feel small. Moreover, Francophone culture is just different enough from what I'm accustomed to that it makes me slightly bewildered and curious, like adult culture does to kids. I found it a pleasant sensation.

Speaking of bewildering but pleasant sensations, we just saw that new Neon Genesis Evangelion movie, the first of a planned quartet. At first I was a bit underwhelmed (having watched the original show to death, do I really need to see a slicked-up rehash?) but by the end I rather liked it. The original show (which involved teenagers piloting giant robots a.k.a. Eva units against giant monsters a.k.a. Angels) often veered into rather typical (for the giant robot a.k.a. mecha genre) monster-of-the-week stuff in which the story is, essentially, monster shows up, kids struggle to overcome it, kids heroically succeed. At its most interesting, though, the show portrayed the struggle in less sanitized-for-TV-heroics fashion. Children screaming in agony, viscera gushing from monsters and robots in full-on body horror. The mecha served as objective correlatives for puberty and its accompanying indignities, while easy power fantasies were short-circuited by fear and agony. The new movie focuses on these elements, and the final note of heroism is hard-earned, affirmative without being triumphalist.

Anime fans (at least Western ones) love to whine about how whiny Shinji, the put-upon protagonist, is, but Shinji has good reason to complain. Some anime that followed Eva tried to feature protagonists that were like Shinji only less whiny, but Eva trumps them by making Shinji even whinier. The story is stripped down to a boy struggling against internal and external problems, struggling against his nature, inclination and circumstances to find some path to heroism.

One thing I liked about the dub: the iconic character Rei Ayanami was voiced, in the TV dub, by Amanda Winn, who made Rei, an unapproachable blue-haired girl, seem mysteriously alluring. The new actress, Brina Palencia, makes her sound emotionally flat; without emotional affect, as William Burroughs described fixing heroin addicts. I can tell without looking that there's copious whining about this on anime messageboards, but while a mysteriously alluring girl was the Rei Ayanami I enjoyed in the 90s, today Rei as idiot savant makes more sense, given what we come to know of her. Emotionally stunted Rei works for me.

And now, some Montreal photos. My new phone's camera is the digital equivalent of pinhole camera, which may have some nostalgia value in thirty years.

Colored windows can produce some interesting light-play.

This is where the fancy-pants scientists gathered before meetings, fancy-pants science being the reason for the trip.

I saw this little guy from the taxi and had to catch a picture of him at my earliest opportunity.

This is what I think of when I think of Montreal. Excuse the terrible cropping, but the sidewalk was busy.

Montreal!

Montreal has paper lanterns. This was not the exterior of NOOBOX, a noodle chain my Wife fixated on, but both NOOBOX and these lanterns speak to the Chinatown element of Montreal.

As a rule of thumb, the better the Montreal restaurant, the more audacious the condom ads in the Men's Room. The model in this ad appears to be 16, so you know my goat cheese tart and turnip soup were excellent.

Montreal!

Seems like old times.

2010-07-21T11:46:00.003-10:00

I was out walking around Kannapolis the other day when I met some other people from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, where I grew up! At least I assume they were from Signal Mountain. They were leaning out of an idling car, addressing me as "faggot," and speculating about my sex life, which is behavior I associate with Signal Mountain residents. If they had then started whining about how the government takes their money and gives it to people who are too lazy to work for a living, that would have confirmed the Signal Mountain origin of these future meth cooks.

It was a nostalgic moment. It's nice to find that things which were regular parts of one's youthful days haven't entirely faded away, and can still be experienced when one is a grownup.

Speaking of asinine youthful activity, some friends and I have been talking about the perniciousness of immersive fantasy computer games, the kind that give one the sensation of going places, meeting people, solving problems, accomplishing things... all the things one wants from a life. Several of us, myself included, got pretty fixated on these games at points in our lives when we felt that we weren't going anywhere, meeting anyone, solving anything...

Well, look what I found! It's a vision statement for a game called Planescape: Torment (originally called Last Rites, apparently) which I spent pretty much all my non-subsistence time playing for many months. I always considered the game to be one of the more artful, thoughtful, and respect-worthy such games I'd experienced. But this vision statement thing showed me another side of the game:

"We gots Gold, Glory, Power and Hero Worship. Why save a world you know nothing
about and have absolutely no attachment to? F*** that. We know what you really
want to do – you want to run rampant in a world where you are a god. You want
the power to change your environment, slaughter all who stand against you, and
be a hero worshipped by the masses – everything you don't get pushing
paper or suffering through school 40 hours a week."

and

"Sure, you may be a fat dateless loser in real life, but in Last Rites, you get
the women and respect you've always craved."

and

"We will work hard to try and include positive relationships within the game –
relationships that the player may not have in real life or may desire from
watching movies. The player can have buddies that will lay down their life for
the character, Betsies and Veronicas/Gingers and Mary Anns fighting over his
affections, mentors, loyal servants, and so on. They will thank the player for
his help or fawn for his attention, giving the player additional ego-stroking."

Oy. I hate to admit it, but all that puerile wish-fulfillment jive was a big part of the appeal. It's a bit of a shock to learn that the makers of this habit-forming cultural junk food are knowingly trying to get lonely people to form those habits.

Superflat in the Back Bay

2010-07-17T05:43:00.004-10:00

I was considering doing another review of another kitsch art book, but I can't do it now because I've been hanging out in Boston's art museums and galleries for a week, and off-brand Frazetta just can't bear the comparison. One thing about galleries: in the South they assume you're broke until you indicate otherwise, and they're fine with that. Places in Boston, though, are terribly huffy about all these nonpaying looky-loos. I would have paid a reasonable admission fee to see (and sometimes resee) the art, so perhaps they should switch to a ticket-price-refundable-with-purchase-of-art model.

Miro gets closer to my idea of the Fantastic than more representational fantasy art does. He's joined Klee and Kandinsky in the first rank of my fave nonrepresentational artists.

New respect for Salvador Dali. His overexposed famous works are by no means the whole story; I've now seen a slew of his little funky drawings that gave me fresh appreciation for his skills and imagination. I've failed to find the image I want online, but the Martin Lawrence Gallery (Actually fairly friendly about the whole looky-loo thing) had a small etching or something on a Biblical theme in which little stick figures acted before soft, lovely colored background... then on closer inspection the background revealed itself to be towering angels looming over the action, some in the foreground rather than the background as a first glance suggested. A remarkable shift of perception, but also an intriguing theological statement.

Cubism works better for me live than in reproduction, and Picasso's cubism especially. He did for portraiture what Charlie Parker did for pretty tunes.

Also new respect for Warhol. I never noticed this before, but in some of his silkscreens he's hand-drawn a tracery of lines over the figures in his shaky hand. I've always liked his sketches of shoes and whatnot, and when he incorporates it into his silkscreens it really makes the images pop. So to speak.

Scroll down here till you get to "Jellyfish Eyes - Black 4" and you'll see my favorite of the images I saw that were made within my lifetime. What isn't visible at this resolution is the way each pupil has many rings of color, pupils within pupils, or multiple rings of coronas around an almost microscopic core pupil.

Oceanic art is inspiring to me in a way I'm not sure I can articulate. Currently a lot of the dreamier nerds out there are terribly excited about Transhumanism; Oceanic peoples took such polymorphing of the body for granted, at least at a symbolic level. I recall being hypnotized by the Oceanic collection at the museum in Birmingham, Alabama as well.

Cornelia Parker's Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) was my other favorite contemporary art discovery. A sort of mobile made of blackened burnt wood, suspended by thin lines tied to rough nails and pushpins in the wood. It looked like the fruit of a Clive Barker/Katsuhiro Otomo collaboration.

Also got to see some Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman photography. They both seem so necessary and so close to the truth while being so different in their approaches. Goldin is pure documentary, while Sherman is pure artifice, yet they both understand so much about our era.
***

Other delightful things about our trip to The Back Bay:

Meeting and dining with Laurie's friends (hello!) I hope to see and hear more from all. (For those who came in late: "Laurie" is my online to-protect-the-innocent pseudonym for my wife.)

Boston, or at least the Back Bay, is so pedestrian-friendly that it's driver-unfriendly. It completely inverts the Southern car culture thing where the attitude is "Why are you using the legs you were born with when you could be using a loud stinky expensive deathtrap? What's wrong with you?" In the Back Bay you can just cold stop in the street in order to focus in the conversation you're having with a fellow stroller, and all that the cars you're blocking can do is fume and honk. You could probably lie down on the nearest vibrating hood and take a nap if you chose, such is the cultural deference giving to pedestrians. My Wife's heedless jaywalking and complete disregard for driver's right-of-way finally makes sense to me. I've gotten a lot more arrogant about crossing the street.

The Guide to Fantasy Art Techniques, edited by Martyn Dean

2010-07-05T12:38:00.006-10:00

I still own this thing?

I bought this book in high school, mail order from Paper Tiger Books if memory serves, and I’m a bit perplexed that I still have a copy; I thought it had been lost in my hasty move from B'ham. Each chapter profiles a different artist (all white guys coincidentally) with interview snippets and slick reproductions of the profilee’s art. If I had a scanner I’d post some samples, but instead I’ll try to link to the appropriate websites so you can engage these artists as they present themselves 26 years later. Any quotes and such come from the book, though, not the websites.

Incidentally, back when I bought this book I actually got two copies. I was enamored of a fellow student who dabbled in art, and gave her the second copy as a Christmas gift. What she made of the nerd-fantasies and buxom pinups I’ll never know, but I did come across a copy at the local used bookstore a few months later, and always wondered if she’d traded it in.

JIM BURNS.

Science fiction book jackets, near-photorealistic representational art, spaceships, aliens. Lushly textured and polished surfaces; spaceships and costumes that look like they’ve been produced as art objects. I’ve occasionally attended showings of furniture-as-art, and Burns’ props remind me of the lacquered grainy beauty of wooden furnishings designed to beautify the way sculpture is expected to beautify.
To my untutored eyes his sense of color is rich; he knows how to make color pop for the marketplace, but he isn’t afraid of densely textured monochrome. The humans are pretty, but there’s a bit of the “I’m a conventionally attractive, highly airbrushed model who’s been glaringly photoshopped onto this illustration” syndrome that plagues book jacket illustration.

Quotes-“I put on layer after layer of thin color through the airbrush. I end up creating colors that are unavailable in tube form-there’s a transparent sequence of colors coming through. As with Maxfield Parrish’s blue-which he built up with glazes. I find that with the thinned down acrylics through the airbrush you start to get the same kind of vibrancy.

“I want my pictures to have a general appeal to ordinary people-I can’t stand artistic posturing.

“I particularly want to… convey artifacts which are the products of truly alien minds and different sets of perceptions. And to suggest materials other than wood or metal or plastic-somehow!”

I’d suggest that the opposite of “general appeal to ordinary people” isn’t necessarily “artistic posturing,” but be that as it may.

IAN MILLER.

A thicket of spidery penlines, colors that glow with the drabness of age and overcast days, ornate constructions and unsettling figures. In the 80s I was genuinely afraid of Ian Miller’s work. An artist friend described Miller, only half-jokingly, as Satanic. Today Miller is the artist in the book for whom I have the most non-nostalgic enthusiasm. Of these eight, he is the artist closest to the heart of my kinda fantasy.

Quotes- “I think that most of what I do has a very primeval root. I’ve been told that I’m medieval, but I think I’m more primordial. I have a fetish-cum-totem attitude toward images…I’m inclined to draw in a ‘frontalistic’ style, I suppose, after the Ancient Egyptians.

“I identified very closely… with the Japanese concept of ‘The Fleeting, Floating World’ and with he directness and unsullied perception of Japanese artists. Their stoicism and single mindedness is a great pointer for us all. It’s magic from sweat.”

PATRICK WOODROFFE.

I got two books by this guy; the first, Mythopoeikon was a delight to me. Sadly it fell apart after much perusal. Woodroffe was all over the place, cartoony yet capable of rich detail work. When I think no one’s listening I sometimes say “I AM BIG AND STRONG” in honor of a Felixesque cat Woodroffe drew who said those straightforward words. The later book, Hallelujah Anyway, was a bit of a letdown. Lots of photos with painted paper dolls, reminiscent of the Cottingham Fairies, but the same dolls in different little backyard contexts wear a bit thin when one’s shelled out for a coffee table edition. The full-on paintings had developed a settled style, unlike the jittery let’s-try-this attitude of his earlier work, and it wasn’t a style I loved: Twee Grandeur, like a veddy English and veddy psilocybin Thomas Kinkaide. Unlike his early stuff, which wasn’t afraid to be alarming while being charming, Woodroffe had lost his stomach for rot, decay, damage, all of which had been present in the early work. Once he would have shown us a field that looked lovely yet had all the browning and withering one finds in nature; later he expelled the serpent (or real toad) from the garden, to the detriment of his work.

Quotes:-“ Doing what reality can’t do makes the art stronger. I like to skirt the edges of kitsch because I think that’s where some of the best art comes from.” (editor’s note: if you think fairies in lingerie flying on dragonfly wings over England’s pleasant pastures constitutes anything less than a headfirst plunge into kitsch, you might be Woodroffe’s kind of person.)
“…a lot of artists make the mistake of believing that correctness is important. I build on the fact that it’s wrong. A lot of painters have done that in the past-particularly in mediaeval times, I suspect.

“I’m not acceptable in the art-establishment fields, but I have the compensation that a lot of people out there like what I do.”

PHILLIP CASTLE.

His famous Clockwork Orange poster isn’t in the book; for some reason a bunch of his reference materials are pictured, but only a few of his images. All the paintings we do see show an artist thinking “Pinup girls are sexy, and fighter jets are sexy. What do I feel like painting today?” Answer: fetishy pinup-girl/jet amalgams. The stuff is slick, but like a lot of fetish art that isn’t to one’s own tastes, this might be nauseating.

I konked out trying to find interesting quotes. Moving on…

SYD MEAD.

An industrial designer whose specialty is technologically plausible conceptual art. He designed those flying cars for Blade Runner. I admire his work, but his illustrations are more about means-to-an-end communicating possibilities to clients than about end-product entertainment for nerd eyeballs, so it’s a bit like looking at blueprints: interesting, but it rolls right off my brain.

I just looked at his website and I take it all back. I implore you, look at these cartoons. God bless you, Syd Mead.

“…get beyond the burning of fossilized petrochemicals-that’s a primitive way of doing it. We’re not so much advanced from the people who burnt oil in a lamp in Babylonian times.”

CHRIS FOSS.

Hey, it says here he did the happy hippie funtime illustrations for The Joy of Sex, but you won’t see any of that in this book. It’s all spaceships, all the time. As a youth I found his lumpy ships off-putting, but now I think they’re pretty exciting. Foss is a sort of abstractionist-he certainly isn’t into the material-as-material approach to abstraction that the Ab-Ex crowd made famous, but an artist friend of mine once described Foss’s work as “painting a cloud and calling it a spaceship,” which I would repeat, only as a complement this time. Wonderful clouds with clownfish colors. Constructivist parade floats.

No quotes this time, although he cites Picasso, Turner and Schiele as inspirations, and he rhapsodizes about dirty old trains. In high school I had no use for those artists or dirty trains-today I love them all. No wonder Foss’s work has grown on me. Please buy some art so he can afford a less drab website.

MARTIN BOWER. A spaceship model maker for stuff like Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blake's Seven, and Space: 1999. An impressive resume of SF movies and TV; he's clearly a go-to guy for spaceship models. He says he also makes miniature hobbits for fun, and the book includes a picture of a disturbing cyborg woman figure he’s made. She looks like a buxom latex, er, toy. Ewwww. None of these cyborg women on the website, but I got the proof that he made them right here. YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM YOUR SORDID PAST MARTIN BOWER. (Who am I kidding? If I'd had the skills I would have whittled a few girlfriends myself back in the lonely days.)

BORIS VALLEJO. Somewhere along the way Vallejo decided to play The Monkees to Frazetta’s Beatles, and he’s sold a lot of calendars that way. Buxom women in chainmail seem to strike a chord with a lot of working-class nerds, female as well as male, as proven by his hot musclebound wife Julie Bell, who came into his life some time after the interview in the book. I'm tempted to make fun of their art, but I won't because either one of them could clobber me with one hand while painting a buxom barbarian with the other hand.

Vallejo talks up the old masters, particularly Murillo and Velasquez.

An indirect quote from Boris struck me as a youth: “…yellow (is) brighter than white on canvas because it creates a greater illusion of brilliance, and black can be made to appear darker by adding red to it to produce a sense of depth.” This led me to consider the hard-to-notice subtleties of life around me. It’s sad when the person giving you a subtler, more nuanced understanding of life is Boris Vallejo, but you never know from whence wisdom will come.

Book Larnin'

2010-07-03T10:29:00.003-10:00

I recently finished Plus by Joseph McElroy. It's bit like 2001: A Space Odyssey as reworked by Samuel Beckett. It's a demanding text, formally complex, but I was close to tears by the end. The protagonist Imp Plus has been voluntarily disembodied, then reembodied in a mysterious bioengineered form that he/she/it must explore in an accelerated and alien version of the exploration we all make of our bodies as we grow and change. His changes happen quickly, and eventually he comes into a three-way conflict with his "parents" on the earth (Imp Plus is in orbit around the earth in a satellite) all of which leads to a Star Child transformation. I checked this out from the library, and hope to have my own copy someday so I can mark it up with crabbed, incomprehensible marginalia. I came close to giving up on the daunting text, but I'm awfully glad I stuck it out; the demands of the style force one to undergo a perplexing journey which parallels Imp Plus's journey. I don't know when I've felt so glued to a character; each page took as much effort as 3-5 pages of the average novel, but this became one of those "I don't want it to end" reading experiences. The good news is that McElroy has written a great deal more.

I've also started reading two old paperback novels I enjoyed as a teen in the Eighties: Stinger by Robert R. McCammon and Glory Lane by Alan Dean Foster. The former is about a dried-up Texas town that gets invaded by aliens; the latter is about a punk, a preppy and a valley girl type who wind up on a Spielbergian space adventure. I'm not far into either one this go-round since I've decided to restrict my reading of them to a specific context: to keep our neurotic cat happy I occasionally put him in harness and take him for strolls around the back yard (any more outdoor freedom than that and he tends to wind up having to go to the Vet.) Paperbacks are an ideal reading format for these strolls, so... once or twice a week I'll spend an hour or so with one of these adolescent favorites. I suppose I'm trying to crack the code of what I liked about these entertainments; they're both greasy kids' stuff, but I think I can glimpse some seeds of my later interests in these books. Stinger so far puts a lot of effort into setting up a dying Texan town; the author may be trying to entertain kids with a corny good vs. evil monster story, but he's interested in small-town angst, a subject I find much more interesting than monster fights nowadays.

Glory Lane's opening follows Seeth, a listless punk, as he wanders another small town, looking for fun and commenting acerbically on all he perceives. Since the days when I read this book a hundred times I've touched down with more deeply rooted punk sensibilities than a pasteurized portrayal like Seeth, but back in the 80's something with the stink of real punk would have sent this privileged Presbyterian fleeing to the exit. Seeth made me laugh as a high schooler, though, and left his mark: protagonists who can't stop with the witty social commentary still figure in my reading, from Humbert Humbert to his cousin Charles Arrowby and Martin Amis's own Self. I recently enjoyed Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand, who blends punk sensibility, social commentary, small-town (or village) angst with a remarkable rumination on art, memory, rebirth. I suppose my reading of it was made possible by my enjoying of those earlier entertainments.

Best Netflix rentals of my last few years, part the first.

2010-06-11T11:55:00.002-10:00

A few years back I did a post about interesting things I'd gotten from Netflix. It is just about the only thing anyone Googles across my blog for, so here's an update on my last few years of viewing.

In 2008 I was busy falling in love, so I spent less time in front of the TV, but I did see:

Stalker: A gloomy Russian Christian arthouse darling's bleak science fiction view of the present in future drag. The imagery of industrial wreckage is Ballardian, beautiful. The bald guy goes on a rant at the end which is a thing to behold. Slow and cheerless, it's like a bad dream. Watch it instead of actually having bad dreams.

Suspiria: Revolutionary Girl Utena as a live action slasher flick, only that makes it sound awful. A stylish and berserk vision of what a horror movie can be in a stylist's hands. And by stylist, I mean hairstylist. Or maybe shop window arranger for Macy's. Essential.

The Last Temptation of Christ: clever but a bit dull. Mixing up honkeys with non-period accents and genuine middle easterners in authentic locales is a gamble that didn't work for me, but I was in tears by the end, because the film isn't playing; it really wants to glorify Jesus in a way that makes sense for Scorsese. The protesters fixated on the honeymoon fantasy when they should have been focusing on Harry Dean Stanton's breathtakingly blasphemous turn as Paul of Tarsus.

Eraserhead: Like a bad dream after watching too many 80's sitcoms. Takes me to an unsettled spot as advertised.

Gummo: Overrated yet not without merit, this is a bit like watching a slew of homemade Youtube videos back to back, with all the trash and treasure that implies. Both the fanatical fans and the fanatical detractors look a bit drama-queenish by now.

The Saddest Music in the World: all I remember now is the style. It felt a bit like my ideal Grim Fandango film adaptation, if that clarifies anything (no.)

Galaxy High School: an 80s saturday morning cartoon that starts with a male and female protaganist going to school in space, with gloriously toony aliens. The girl gets lost in the shuffle because in the 80s everyone in the cartoon biz knew girls were icky. Ignore the dreadful plots and enjoy the colorful background aliens and spaceships and such. Or don't.

Eyes Without a Face: One of many animal-testing-reframed-as-human-testing horror movies. Austere, chilly. A doctor commits atrocities to give his injured daughter a rather less grotesque face, and while she'd really rather he didn't, defying the fat old patriarch ain't exactly her strong suit. She manages in the end though, boy howdy.

Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. My kind of comfort food. Animation with a jolly Brit sensibility, like Wodehouse joining forces with Rankin-Bass.

Inferno: a companion piece to Suspiria, less coherent (if that's possible) but with bits of delightful creepiness. A little too glamtastic near the end, but enough like my nightmares to get a thumbs up.

Black Narcissus: This drama about Nuns in the Himalayas starts slow and is marred by colonialist racism, but has such enchanting acting, costumes and photography that we stuck with it. Besides the brilliant camerawork the highlight is the MAD NUN. We gasped repeatedly during the last twenty minutes of this overripe MAD NUN fever dream. If you like MAD NUNS this is the flick for you.

The Big Combo: a noir that looks like it was made for a hundred bucks but still looks way better than any self-conscious attempt at noir revival ever. The villain does some terrific villainous speechifying.

One, Two, Three. Jimmy Cagney and Billy Wilder deliver a tour de force of corny old-fashioned cold war spoofery. If you thought The Seven Year Itch was a hoot you should see this; if not, then not.

The Rules of the Game: I'm scared to say anything about this except that it bored me stiff in college but enthralled me in 2008. I was doing my first for-real professional acting job (also my last) and trying to rediscover a naturalistic yet dazzlingly skilled approach to acting. This helped.

And that was about it for 2008. My wife also introduced me to a few TV series, to whit:

Big Love: Bill standing in the kitchen, arguing with his wives: yay! Trying to be 24: boo!

The Wire: I came in midway through the last season and instantly knew I had to watch the whole thing from the start.

Heroes: reminded me of reading old issues of X-Men, which is a bit like eating Cheetos.

The L Word: The transition from single to married can be best explained by my married reaction to this show: "When are all these hot women going to stop taking their clothes off and making out? Boring."

Battlestar Galactica: I came in near the end and was totally confused. Pretty spaceships but I was more of a Roger Dean fan than a Chris Foss fan. If you know what I'm talking about you have misspent your life.

Thanks Honey!

2010-05-26T16:22:00.002-10:00

I have a new computer! It's a nice upgrade from the TI 99 4-A I was using previously. Perhaps I'll update the blog more often now that I'm not so busy playing Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus.

2010-05-26T12:25:00.002-10:00

Went blueberry-picking today; not to eat them, but to freeze them for my wife's research. Had to eat a few, though. I hadn't realized that there are subtle flavor differences between different kinds of blueberry. Some are sharp and tart, others subtly sweet. Others not so subtly sweet, of course.

Currently trying to read Plus by Joseph McElroy. It's a science fiction novel by a writer who apparently doesn't routinely end up in the SF marketing category, the better to shelve it in the inscrutable modernism catagory. It seems (fifty pages in) that the protagonist, one Imp Plus, is a former human whose mind has been transferred into a ship or satillite of some kind, transformed into some posthuman state. It seems that his memories (of life, of words) have been altered or damaged, but he is slowly remembering and regaining his awareness of who he was, all while figuring out what he is now. It's a bit like waking up slowly, groggily, in an unfamiliar place. A tough read but I'm finding it rewarding; the notions of being in some bioengineered posthuman state and of being isolated in outer space are hellish nightmares for me, so watching this guy come to terms with it feels like it might be instructive in some fine-grained face-your-fears fashion.

Finally finished The Sopranos. Let me get out in front of the blogosphere with my thoughts on the final scene. By implying that Tony may be about to get killed, but may just be about to have dinner with his family, the show leaves us in a state not unlike Tony's every waking moment. If we're wondering if he's about to die a sudden violent death, we know what Tony has to wonder, all the time. Instead of leaving us with plot-point closure, the show leaves us with a final thematic point: a life of erratically applied violent punishment and retribution is likely to cycle back around at any moment. Just a matter of time. Like Morte Arthur, The Sopranos is full of fascinating lessons in the inadvisability of killing people.

Hollering "Uncle!"

2010-05-22T04:37:00.007-10:00

We saw a double bill of live entertainment last night. Part one was a folk music group with a former theatrical partner in crime on lovely lead vocals. Veddy nice, and well worth driving to Charlotte for. I'm no music critic, but tuneful, dulcet guitar picking, sweet vocal harmonies, the occasional burst of skilled violin playing... a joy.

Part two was a performance of Uncle Vanya. I should have known what it would be, because the crew that was doing it had made a name for itself with bootleg theatrical adaptations of nerdcore movies. As a recovered Monty Python and Tarantino reciter, I'd rather have bowel movements in public than subject myself to that kind of unimaginative nerd indulgence, but Uncle Vanya, I figured, just might bring out the ambition in Charlotte's budget theatre scene. The useless theatre opiner of record in this town wrote a typically slippery review of it in which he failed to come out and say that the show was a tedious misfire, so... there we were.

Stunt casting! A duo of brilliant local improv/theatre clowns were in the show, one of them playing Uncle Vanya, both of them providing the only relief. They knew how to suss out what their parts were about and inflect their performances with rocknroll manic brilliance that served, rather than undercut, the dramatic possibilities of the text. Everyone else delivered amateur theatrics in the saddest sense. I don't blame volunteer actors, though; they all seemed to be striving to the best of their abilities for something real, and good directors can get something real out of most anyone. Inept shmuck directors, though, becalm the actors and create the kind of artless phoniness we left at intermission last night. Chekhov's words can be dazzling if the actors discover the words and the meanings as they speak it while remaining focused on what they as the characters desire. This production, though, consisted of actors declaiming with no sense of interiority, waving their arms around, engaging in cheap pratfalls that didn't grow organically from or serve the material. Imitating humanity abominably. It often seemed that the director was conducting an R&D experiment, trying to find new ways for theatre to suck. I'm sure the director would try to pitch the whole mess (in fact he did, in his self-serving program notes) as pomo subversion, or Grotowskiesque, if he'd heard of Grotowski. Bollocks. Injecting jokes and pratfalls only works if it's done with Laurel-and-Hardy virtuosity and some sense of counterpoint; some sense of how the gags can illuminate Chekhov, even if only through artfully considered contrast. It was the worst theatre I've seen in Charlotte, and I've seen a few stink bombs.

As we drove home in the dark, a possum appeared in our headlights. It was neither crossing nor dead. It was writhing on its side, streaked with red wet blood, looking miserable. I swerved to miss it; probably would have been kinder to hit it and let it sleep. If I'd had wishing powers at that moment I would have wished for the possum and the director of that evening's theatrical entertainment to change situations, so the possum would be doing what it wishes in good health and whatever company a possum desires, while the director would be ending in unalloyed terror and agony. Too harsh? Yes. But it's what I would have wished.

Edit: Greetings, friends of the director who have found my blog! Yes, my last paragraph is way too nasty, and no, I don't actively wish suffering or death on the director; that was a description of a passing fancy, not a statement of long-term position. Beyond that, hey, it's a negative review. I've gotten 'em too.

Close Quarters

2010-05-05T15:34:00.004-10:00

I was in a movie once. A locally produced comedy short. I don't think it's available anywhere, tho I haven't checked recently.

I was acquainted with the writer/director, and he cast me wildly against type as a nerd. (The premise of the film was that nerds who make computer viruses should be taught to play sports and woo women as a rehabilitation scheme, which makes more sense to me as the years go by.) My first day of shooting was to take place in the evening at a jail in a poor town. I didn't write down the address for the very good reason that I was a fool, so when the evening came I went to both jails in town and came up empty. The guards at both facilities denied all knowledge of a film shoot. The first jail told me how to walk to the second jail, anyway, and I traipsed the few blocks from one to t'other. On the way, with the setting sun turning the sky rosy, I passed a little house with a girl sitting alone on the porch.

"Mister?" she called out. "Where are you going?"

"To see some friends," I answered, which was kind of true.

"Can I come with you? Please?"

Well, I thought. That's one way to find out where the jail is.

Anyway, I pretended not to hear her because I was that smooth. Later I found out that they'd canceled the shoot without telling me in time, and it was at a third (closed) jail that I hadn't known about.

I finally made it to the musty old jail, where the cute women doing props and makeup took me on a tour of the crude pornographic graffiti they'd discovered in the urine-scented old cells. This was unsettlingly exciting. We worked almost till dawn. The next day we spent all day at a school filming (and I do mean filming; the director comes from money and was springing for 35 millimeter film, not the video so beloved of local shorts) one scene ofter another. A lot of the scenes took place outside, doing slapstick sports routines in the sun. The cute women who did makeup and props offered to rub suntan lotion on us and we all said no thanks. Clearly our brains were scrambled with sleep deprivation and sunstroke. That evening we were the color of fire trucks. Let that be a lesson to the would-be gentlemen out there: getting rubbed down by two lovely women is better than going to the burn unit.

Meals were provided by the director. This consisted of chips, honey buns, candy bars and soft drinks, because the director thought this would give us energy. I began to see the down side of amateur filmmaking.

The final scene for the evening involved the nerds learning to play "quarters," a drinking game in which one tosses quarters into cups of beer and then drinks them or something. I'd never heard of this silly thing; all my drinking game experience involved kissing and confessing. By now we were all like kindergartners who had replaced naptime with pixy stick time, so happily we weren't using real beer. We were using flat Mr. Pibb. Once we pushed through the sheer awfulness of this we discovered a strange ecstasy on the other side; we were directed to act as if we were bonding in drunken, manly fervor, and for one wonderful, sleep deprived, sunburned moment it was true.

The film went on to win the audience choice award for local short films at the local film festival, mostly because half of Birmingham was in it and came out to vote. I drank an unusual amount of stuff that wasn't flat Mr. Pibb and was very happy to hear from our director that the cinematographer had told him "Every scene with Aaron in it is gold." In return for this complement I hit on the cinematographer's wife.

Local film!

No Comment(ary track)

2010-05-02T17:52:00.003-10:00

Someone just Googled across my blog by searching "obama reptoid cocaine white house." In celebration of this heartbreaking goofiness, I'd like to confess something.

I haven't watched any new anime releases in years, but I recently heard that they aren't buttering up anime DVDs with nonsense like dub actor commentary tracks anymore. I was actually saddened, because when I lived alone I was all too fond of the dub commentary track to Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, disk one, episode three. The show is pretty entertaining, but watching it with the dub actresses chattering all the way through it was a nice simulation of hanging out with fun people. I know, it's sad. Some people need to be married.

It's 2010 and I'm posting about Here is Greenwood

2010-04-27T12:52:00.002-10:00

Here is Greenwood is an anime miniseries that was released on videotape sometime in the late Nineties, and I bought the first two videotapes (of three (two episodes per tape for about $30 or so. Ah, the good old days)). I barely even think about anime these days, but occasionally I think about this basically disposable product for a couple reasons:

1. The first episode's laid-back anecdotal portrayal of life at a cushy boarding school played to my hot-coal-in-my-brain yearning to return to the cushy college life I'd just been forcibly graduated out of. Episode 2 onward declined into the lame plot-driven storytelling for which anime is famous, but episode 1 was content to present a loose assemblage of mini-stories that felt a bit like hearing someone wax nostalgic about their freshman year. I watched it over and over again, but since the second tape ($30) was two filler episodes (padding out that exhausting six-episode run) I figured the ambling style of the first episode was a one-off. Years later I rented the third tape and was proven right.

2. It's been dubbed twice by two different companies, the second of which rereleased the thing on DVD. I rented this just to compare the new dub to the old one. Hey, I didn't know what to do with myself, at least I wasn't roaming the streets.

The old dub is embarrassingly, wince-inducingly amateurish, but you could tell the actors cared a lot. They were fully invested. The newer dub was done by professional actors (some of whose work I'd enjoyed in the past, and yes, I researched anime dub actors online; did I mention about not knowing what to do with myself?). With the newer dub one got the sense that it was punch-the-clock-and-let's-dub-this-turkey-before-the-lunch-break day when they recorded this. The most glaringly awful line reading in this dub is less absurd than the average line reading in the first one, but it's dull. Bored pros phoning it in are less fun than total amateurs giving it their all.

For an example of a bored pro giving his all I cannot recommend Jeremy Iron's performance in Dungeons and Dragons highly enough.

Self-Pity Run Amuck

2010-04-19T17:48:00.003-10:00

My gum has peeled back from one of my teeth, leaving a gap that keeps catching on the skin of my inner mouth. I am unsettled, but I suppose it's grist for the mill.

Anyway, I spoke with one of me fellow former inmates from Marat/Sade today. She's taking pro classes that focus on getting acting work, with an emphasis on commercials, which are apparently the bricks with which an acting career is built. After UPTA I have become utterly disillusioned with the idea of working very hard to make rubbish. As a student I had sweet fantasies of making a living by doing Chekhov for the rest of my life. Oh, what a marvelous world that would be!

Watching the Eggs

2010-04-06T12:37:00.003-10:00

A bird has built a nest on a beam sticking out from the back of our shed. She's laid several beautiful blue eggs. Every time one of us passes through the back yard the mother bird flies from the nest and settles on a nearby branch.

Imagine her situation: children to incubate, but terror of these enormous creatures that occasionally lumber by. When the creatures arrive she is compelled to flee, yet compelled to stay near and watch over her eggs. Of course my wife and I are no threat to her eggs, but we know of no way to reassure her.

Afraid to stay, unable to leave. I'm incubated from such fragile circumstances, but I suppose it's the norm for most creatures, including many humans.

Healthy Living, D. C. style

2010-03-31T03:48:00.004-10:00

We just got back from Washington D. C. One of the big differences between D. C. and the Southern towns I've lived in is that hardly anyone in The District is overweight. It's not hard to figure out why. Let's compare the average day of, say, a person from my town to that of a typical D. C. person.

A person from around here gets to work by getting in the truck and driving there. Then goes to lunch (BBQ or burgers) by getting in the truck and driving there. Then goes shopping by... getting in the truck, driving to Wal-Mart, HEAVING his/her bulk out of the cab, maybe waddling a block or two during the whole shopping expedition, then getting back in the truck, driving home, parking the truck in the yard by the front door for minimum walking.

Compare this to a D. C. resident. Our D. C. person leaves home, walks a few blocks to the Metro, moves quickly and efficiently through the rushing crowd, hops the right train, takes a breather for a few stops, hops out, catches the next train, hops out, walks a few more blocks to the front of The White House, one-handedly HOISTS and SUSTAINS a large sign reading

"Who destroyed Pentagon on 9-11?

Barack Obama

Saddam Hussain

Marion Barry

in Crack Cocaine Conspiracy with Zionist Jew Israelite Homosexual

Child Sex Slavery for Hillary Clinton Reptoid Jew Homosexual"

for the rest of the day. Beaming with vitality, the picture of health.

So get in step, Southerners! Move around a little.

(I'm scared to see what kind of Google hits I'm gonna get from that sign)

The Cafe Guy

2010-03-23T06:36:00.002-10:00

Hi. I wrote the following as an entry in NPR's Three Minute Fiction Contest. Obviously I didn't win, no doubt in part because they figured out that this was little more than a non-fiction blogpost. Enjoy!

The Cafe Guy, by Aaron White.

You might think that hanging in a cafe all day every day would be an enviable lifestyle, but his face was never not scowling. He never had company; no one ever sat or spoke with him. He always had a copy of the free weekly paper open on his table, but I never saw him reading it. He preferred to gaze levelly out the window, sitting sullenly in the cafe, all day long.

The preacher of my hometown church often admonished the congregation, "You may be the only contact someone has with Christ today," and while my religious beliefs had undergone a pronounced shift since I last heard that warning, I still believed I had a responsibility to reach out to others. I was a regular at the cafe myself, and whenever I saw the cafe guy I felt a twinge of guilt for letting him sit there in his glowering loneliness. Maybe I lacked gumption. Maybe I lacked love. Maybe I was uneasy about giving an opening into my life to such a sour person. Whatever the reasons, I never spoke to him. The occasional fleeting smile was all he got from me. He always feigned not to notice.

I assumed he would always be alone in the cafe. But one day, to my astonishment, he was sitting with another guy; a large, soft man with earnest open eyes. The large man seemed to be pleading his case.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," said the large man. "I think your ideas are incredible; I think you're a genius. But if that's the way you feel, I suppose I'll leave you alone."

The two of them went outside and sat at a sidewalk table while the cafe guy smoked. I saw but couldn't hear the large man continue to plead with the impassive cafe guy. Finally the large man left. The cafe guy remained, sipping his coffee and staring into the middle distance.

Soon thereafter the cafe was bought out and turned into something other than a cafe. I switched to another restaurant across the way; one that turned out to have better coffee anyway.

The cafe guy switched to my new restaurant too. I thought I had a greater claim to it since I bought food there as well as coffee, while he only ever got coffee. I was peeved with him for hanging out at my new spot without ever sampling the excellent menu. At the old place he had been the cafe guy, but he was never the restaurant guy. He was just a guy who never got any food, and never looked happy. I no longer felt guilty for not speaking to him; he really ought to have tried the salad sampler.

Another story about carpet cleaning

2010-03-19T12:41:00.004-10:00

Back around 1999, when I was cleaning carpet, I was told to go, solo, to Sylacauga, a town about an hour from our home base. I wasn't thrilled, but I never was. So okay, off I went, the sun going down as I drove to this area I'd never seen before. The customer was a mild woman with an interesting house. Most of it was one large open room with furniture groupings and screens creating a sense of discrete locations. A bedroom, kitchen and bathroom were behind doors. I was impressed by the way it combined openness with intimacy in the little clusters of furnishing. It seemed she lived alone but was accustomed to company. The whole area was carpeted, and with the customer helping I moved every single bit of furniture in order to clean every bit of floor. It went pretty smoothly. Then it was time to put the furniture back, with plastic under to prevent any residue from the chair legs and such staining the wet carpet.

The customer was very particular about putting it all back in order. She couldn't remember how it all went, though. She wanted to put every bit of furniture back just so, but how was just so? Every chair, every sofa, every pole lamp, every screen, we had to agonize about just exactly where to place it. With few walls, corners or other fixed landmarks, she was unsure exactly how to line everything back up on the original floor plan. I didn't have the gumption to suggest we simply put the furniture any which way, and she could fix it at her leisure after the carpet was dry and I was home showering off the work day. And so putting the furniture back took far, far longer than the cleaning.

Once it was done she offered to lead me to the main highway, she in her car, me in my truck. Since it was dark and we didn't have GPSs (only a big mapbook) I eagerly accepted. I had found my way there but didn't relish trying to get back alone in the dark. That far from base my radio wouldn't reach the base, and I didn't have anything remotely resembling a cel phone, so I felt totally alone out there aside from my infuriating but genial customer.

Following the red of her taillights, I saw another reddish light flickering through the trees. Soon, despite the darkness all around, it seemed as if some small localized sun was still above some small localized horizon.

A house was on fire. Not just a bit of smoke or flame out a window, but the whole building, a residential bonfire. I'd never been so close to such a conflagration before. not far past it was the main highway. The customer turned back and drove homeward. I had a peculiar desire to discuss the fire with her, but of course our involvement with one another was over.

Dud in the Race

2010-03-14T15:40:00.003-10:00

We saw a documentary called Blood in the Face last night. It's a 1991 record of a white supremist convention where they get together in a farmhouse or something, cosplay, and rile each other up with hectoring rhetoric and bogus scholarship about race issues. The thing I found most unsettling about the conventioneers (bearing in mind that many of them were leaders in the white supremacy field) is how superficially normal they seemed. I mean, they were foolish hicks with awful ideas, self-bamboozled with less than rigorous arguments, but if they were to take off the swastikas and keep their hate in their pants they wouldn't seem that different from any number of folks you'll see at the mall. There's a lot of addlepated overweight white people around who are perfectly fine people, many of whom despise racism and bigotry, and I was uneasy about how easily the hardened haters could blend in. I'm more used to the Klan kids I rode with in the bus down Signal Mountain TN every day as a high schooler.

Man, some of those kids were proud, outspoken children of Klansman, and they really wore their white inferiority up front. Faces like Halloween masks. Second and third chins, but no first chins. Adam's apples like whiskery fists. I can't help but feel pity for these products of multigenerational malnutrition and, shall we say, bloodline purity, but is it any wonder The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a therapeutic film for me?

Our neighborhood was a well-to-do suburb, but we weren't that far from Byron de la Beckwith, the infamous killer Klansman, who once told an interviewer that he joined the Klan because he applied for membership in every club in town, and The Klan took him (I heard it on Fresh Air (that's as close to sourcing as I get)). Maybe if The Elks or somebody had taken Beckwith it would have turned out better for everyone (except maybe The Elks).

Anyway, the haters in the film are very big on rhetoric and logic that isn't really any less connected to reality than a lot of other ideas that float around, which is pretty troubling. One woman talks about how she didn't get into the racist scene because of hate (she draws a strong distinction between separatism and hate) but because she started going to a white supremist church and picked up the ideas in pretty much the same haphazard way she might have picked up any other batch of ideas if she'd ended up at a different church. She seems harmless, but it turns out her man killed an outspoken Jewish radio jock, so her apparent mildness allowed her to play a dumbed-down Camilla to her Nazi Tony (I actually feel bad comparing The Sopranos to these mooks, but the pattern of self-deluding enabling is similar). Another guy talks about his life from childhood, and it's evident that he's led a hard life with little real parental/moral guidance. And now he dresses up in Nazi bricabrac.

One of my favorite bits is when all the preachers and such are hanging out and one guy who's crazy about pop eyed biblical numerology starts going on a complicated spiel about how numbers in the Bible prove The Race War is immanent (it must be solid logic: it's got math in it!) and the other preachers' expressions go from patient, to trying-to-be-patient, to disgusted. The two most comforting things in the film for me are that

1. not that many people were at the convention, and

2. The finest minds in the White Supremist leadership are dumb guys. Not unusually dumb, though. It gets down to George Carlin's dictum that (paraphrased for delicacy's sake) there's a distinction between being stupid, being full of it, and being nuts. Racists are all three.

Muse Shift

2010-03-07T08:09:00.002-10:00

Where've I been?

Suffice it to say that I'm starting a serious new writing regimen, with professional aspirations. Currently, this means slamming the theatre door. No more theatre. I feel strangely elated; I've always been a homebody at heart, so staying chained to my desk makes more sense for me than trekking all over for elusive performance opportunities. Furthermore, all the ailments of the writer's life (uncertainty, loneliness, self-doubt, blindness, agony, spiritual rot, drunken fits) are already with me, so what's to lose?

Rest assured that I am wrestling with numerous literary angels (currently on the docket: Fitzgerald!) in an effort to win their wounds and their blessings. The slapdash writing in evidence on this blog isn't going to be sufficient. New growth begins now.

What I've Been Upta

2010-02-12T10:25:00.004-10:00

Attended a big mass audition in Memphis this past Monday.

Set out Saturday from Kannapolis for Nashville, where I was to stay with my parents. Got off to a late start in a rental car, and wound through the mountains in a dark cold pour of freezing rain. Do you remember the old Transformer type toys that had wheels which folded into the car's body as part of the car-to-robot transformation process? This car felt like its wheels were ready to fold up in just such a fashion. I finally got to my parents' house around midnight. Slept.

Sunday morning, awoke after my parents had already left for church. My brother and I had breakfast and walked the dogs, one of whom mistrusts strangers and wouldn't stop growling at me. After one walk together he mostly stopped growling... guess I'm part of the pack now. After lunch with the whole family I headed to Memphis. Trees like black twigs with silver highlights; ice flipping off the roofs of trucks. Ribbons of powdery snow rippling across the blacktop like sand on a windy beach.

Checked into my hotel, which was not the official hotel of the audition, but was a mere block from the theatre. The hotel had a groovy old lobby, narrow hallways, slow elevators and a colorful but creepy parking garage that would earn Dario Argento's location scout a bonus. A microwave in my room, but no fridge. No source for tea water, but the night clerk loaned me her electric teakettle. The internet flickered in and out, and my phone couldn't connect, so I was pretty much cut off from family.

Monday morning I went downstairs to get some lobby coffee, glanced out the glass door to the outdoor pool, and saw that the sky had dumped a load of snow all over Memphis, just in time for my audition. I attended the orientation meeting that morning (off to a late start since a bus of actors was caught in the snow) and got psyched up for my audition, for which I felt well prepared. Mingled a bit with the other auditionees. At 36 I was the wizened old crone of the bunch, shaking a palsied fist at all the twentysomethings.

Once upon a time I would have prepared for an audition by drinking Red Bull ("Can't fly without my magic feather" I was known to say) but now I sipped cup after cup of green tea. Meanwhile I perused the books-for-sale table; lots of challenging and new plays that aren't going to be produced by the theatres attending this audition. They're not doing new works by Maria Irene Fornes; they're doing Grandpa's Covered Wagon Christmas.

The moment arrived, and I auditioned like a green tea drinker instead of a Red Bull drinker. I overheard another guy's audition, and he sounded like a Red Bull drinker.

It seemed to be music theater's night, and most of the folks who auditioned and got many callbacks were singers... I chatted with/eavesdropped on other straight theatre folks, and many of them got no callbacks. The Red Bull guy I overheard was the only straight theatre person that night to get a bunch of callbacks. Back to the magic feather for me.

I attended my callback... it was mostly an informational session about the company, which I'd never heard of but have since discovered is a household name. It was a very, very enticing offer, except that it required being away from home for most of the year... and I'm a newlywed. After much agonizing I've concluded that Robert Bly be damned, I'm putting who I want to be with ahead of what I want to do. I'll just find something else to do.

Tuesday morning. Packed and loaded the car, incidentally glancing down the hall to the parking deck's lowest level to see that it was flooded ankle-deep with snow runoff.

Met an old college friend for lunch; one whom I haven't seen in years. She's looking good, sounding gloomy, so no change there.

Drove back to Nashville, getting into two GPS coffee snipe hunts. The first took me down an unfinished highway, off a ramp before the highway's end, into an area that was clearly a forest a week ago. The carelessly toppled trees and McMansion frames reveal that someone thinks there's still too much wilderness in Tennessee.

The second snipe hunt took me past a large, oddly shaped building. What was that, some office complex? Nope; it was one of the theatres that didn't call me back. After I found once again that "Sally's Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Comic Books and Bebop Jazz Cafe" was another figment of my GPS's overheated imagination, it started to snow again.

I got back to my parent's house, had a nice meal, and collapsed. Andrew Gainey, my late lamented voice teacher, appeared to me in my sleep to give me one of his spirited don't-let-'em-grind-you-down pep talks. Good timing, Andy.

The next day I slouched around my parents' house all day.

The next day I let William Gibson's Spook Country Audiobook chauffeur me home.

Transferring the Curse

2010-01-28T03:25:00.003-10:00

Many years ago (I had bangs then) I was cast in a small supporting role in a Shakespeare in the Park production. I was in the first scene as a servant to a Duke. The man they cast as the Duke was a really nice guy whom I've seen do good work in a lot of parts, but for some reason Shakespeare just tripped him out. He'd start one of his speeches and suddenly slide into glossolalia: "That strain again! It had a dying fall. Hum, lumlum lum lum, fffm mum gum mmm mmm, sum pum sumthum bum gum gum bum bum." More or less iambic pentameter mumbling whenever he drew a blank on the lines, which was frequently.

He struggled with it, wanting to get it right but never quite nailing it. He'd fix one passage and forget another. I felt a mixture of sympathy and frustration... in later years I've done a bit of study on techniques for learning and speaking Shakespeare, but at the time we were both amateurs and I had no wisdom to pass on. Still, at least I knew my few lines and was able to spit them out whenever the discombobulated Duke came to the end of his Shakespearean scat-singing.

So opening night arrived, and whaddaya know? The Duke got his speeches out letter perfect. I was quite proud of him. And he turned to me for my first cue: "How now! What news from her?"

And I said: "So please my lord, um mum gum mum mum mum bum."

Somehow he had transferred the curse to me. When I hear the phrase "The magic of live theatre," this witchery is what comes to my mind.

Goonybird Cinema

2010-01-19T04:00:00.003-10:00

H. G. Welles was famously unimpressed by Metropolis. And it seems to me that his criticisms were more or less on target... yet the film's aesthetics have enriched the world of film in ways that Well's own film, Things To Come, can't claim. Only a chimp could regard Metropolis as a worthwhile narrative, but whatever the film lacks from a literary perspective, the sets, costumes and such are rich in cinematic virtue. They suggest possibilities for purely cinematic expression that owe about as much to substantial dramaturgy as the average ballet.

Avatar is a proud descendant of Metropolis; dumb as it can be, but saved by technical brio. About all its got going for it is the range of possibilities it offers to future films; like Jurassic Park, no sensible person will want to watch it once its technical innovations have been absorbed by the film industry. The film boasts the most nuanced and expressive CGI animation I've ever seen (well, as nuanced and expressive as the acting on most Hollywood films, so it's little more than slick emotion-porn, but still, it's a step up from the faux-human acting in previous CGI attempts). The artificial environment of the film is a fine-grained engagement with the natural world which reveals the director to be more than a hollow technonaut, and for me this artful take on nature is the most exciting thing about this flick.

Problems? Most of the lines of dialogue could be changed to "I am a macho person!" with no harm done to the warp and woof of the film, the character aesthetics are straight out of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (this is not praise (god bless 'em for getting Wayne Barlowe to do the critters though)) and the just-add-water plot is marred not only by the usual paper-thin Joe Campbellianism that we expect from big loud Hollywood but by the hoary old White-Man-Impresses-The-Soul-Brothers-By-Having-Just-As-Much-Soul shtick that one would have hoped we'd be past by now. And lefty that I am, I'm uneasy about being asked to cheer the deaths of American Soldiers (yeah, I know that's not the denotation, but that's certainly the connotation. Well, maybe they're more like Blackwater, but still).

I never would have bothered posting about this film, though, if I hadn't read this post. I'm fond of the author, who gives me my weekly dose of vitamin fanboy, but "He's out to make a film that is timeless, mythic, and universal in its appeal so it should be no surprise that a story with such broad intentions would have roots in other tales that have been told many times over" stuck in my craw. It's the kind of misunderstanding that nerds generally use to excuse callow just-add-water Jungianism in their junk fiction. The logic goes something like this: "mythic, legendary stories are simple, so to tell a truly mythic tale you should strip it of complexities and idiosyncrasies." Wrong, wrong, wrong. Read Ovid. Read Beowulf. Read Malory. Lit Crit has a term: "roughen the text". This refers, as I understand it, to the ways in which texts are complicated in ways that require the reader or viewer to slow down, to get (one hopes productively) confused, to think it through, to engage the complexities nestled within the narrative. You'll find boatloads of roughening in genuinely mythic talespinning. Hollywood baby food is another story. Hollywood has taken to heart Ezra Pound's dictum: "The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention." The libretto of Avatar is not mythic; it is faux-mythic, lacking real insight into human motivations and history. Enjoy the spectacle, but take it seriously at real moral peril.

* * *

Another nutty movie we've enjoyed recently: The Fountainhead. Written by Ayn Rand, directed by King Vidor, music by Max Steiner. So you know it's gonna be a model of restraint and good taste. It didn't make me want to read Rand's doorstops, but it did make me wanna see more Vidor; the man had style, a style Pauline Kael described as "hog-wild expressionism." So he was a good match for Rand's spittle-flecked narratives. Laurie and I got a series of kicks from this film (Those dresses! Those suits! That old-movie hamming!) but found the overlong speech at the end a bit comical. It's the money shot for Rand, a propagandist first and foremost, and it goes on and on. Apparently Vidor wanted to cut it, but Rand insisted on keeping the whole thing, and the studio gave her a measure of respect they never dreamed of extending to, say, Faulkner. The speech could be summarized as "the first person to bake a pie was the first person to be hit in the face with a pie." It monkeys with the Prometheus myth in an odd way, turning the vengeful gods into grubby dumb humans. And while it's sometimes true that dumb people reject true innovators, isn't it truer to say that it's the gods, or fate or what have you, that grinds innovators down? The Prometheus myth rings truer than Rand's petulant appropriation of it, and her own continuing book sales should give her shade pause. If all those folks, not all of whom can be elite, love her so much, what does that do to her elitist position?
* * *

The great Eric Rohmer died recently, so to pay tribute we watched one of my favorite films, Le Rayon Vert, released in English variously as "Summer" and "The Green Ray." One of Rohmer's most improvised films, it excites me the way Altman does, finding life with the camera instead of constructing it for the camera. The star, Marie Riviere, shows us what real expressiveness is. I have no idea if she's an actor per se or simply an intuitive performer, but she's perfect for this film, which looks better with each viewing.

2010-01-13T14:22:00.016-10:00

Time to unload some more cel-phone photos on you.

Tile from around the way.

Union Street, Concord NC.

Fixing up the gallery at Concord.
More Concord.
Down the street from the house.
Kannapolis at night.
Striking the Marat/Sade set.
The set.
Christmas in Nashville!
The old ornaments on a new tree.
Bespectackled mouse on a swing.
Stuff.
Folks.
Backyard.
Cat.
Graveyard at the mall.

Fit The Frame

2010-01-04T10:10:00.003-10:00

I'm selling calendars in a mall kiosk part-time. It isn't what I thought I'd be doing when I was 36, but nevermind. I've learned a few things in the process.

Kid's calendars don't sell. I thought those Disney Princess calendars would fly outta here, but they just sit there, slowly warping on the shelves. I finally figured out why. Kids don't need calendars.

No one wants dog calendars. They want Their Dog calendars. When someone looks at a dog calendar and exclaims "That's my Missy! That looks just like her!" I know we've made a sale.

When women buy beefcake or cheesecake calendars, they always think they need to explain themselves.

There is a calendar publishing company called Lang that has a fiendishly brilliant scheme for locking in repeat customers. All their calendars are lovingly crafted kitsch art that're designed to look pretty on a kitchen wall and won't give you diabetes the way Thomas "No Shame" Kincaide will. But their secret weapon is the frame.

People ask for Lang calendars by name, and then tell me about the frame. Lang sells wooden frames that fit their calendars... and only their calendars. Some assembly required; women always say they bought the frame, but men always say they built a frame, as if they chopped down a tree and hand-carved it. And once people have that frame, they feel duty bound to stick their next calendar into it.

Once the Lang calendars were almost sold out (You won't find Lang calendars for sale at half price after the holidays... they'll all be gone) the Lang Frame Gang started fretting. I had customers express dissatisfaction with the few remaining Lang calendars, wander around the kiosk looking for something more appealing, and cry out "Nothing I like will fit the frame!" A common existential delimma, pithily expressed.

Do you suppose they bought the calendar they liked and decided to put the frame in the closet for a year?

Not on your life. They all bought Langs they didn't like. Gotta fit the frame.

Ne'r-Do-Well Narratives

2009-12-11T05:17:00.006-10:00

If there's one thing I've learned from being married to a scientist, it is that science can't be usefully engaged in any depth without specialized knowledge. In other words, laypeople can no more process scientific matters in depth than people who can't do their five-finger exercises can play the Brandenburg concertos. Which makes engaging the climate change issues a bit frustrating.

Out of fairness I want to engage the arguments that global warming isn't as big a problem as we've been lead to believe, but the few scientists in that corner are engaging complexities of data and interpretation that most folks, myself included, cannot follow. The rest of the denier pundits are laypeople like myself, so all they can do is craft narratives at me. Between data I can't interpret and Exxon-funded noise-machine narratives that I can interpret but can't take seriously, I'm left to fall back on faith that the majority of scientists know what they're talking about; a faith that listening to hours of scientists gossiping about their jive-turkey colleagues has shaken. Of course I could try to study the info in sufficient depth that I could overcome the knowledge gap. I could also learn to breakdance and make a baked Alaska, but don't count on it.

I figure warming or no, pumping out less pollution is probably a good thing. Some industry flacks say compliance with carbon regulation, etc. will be punishingly severe for our economy and way of life. They said the same stuff about emancipating the slaves and child labor laws. And they were right! Ending slavery and child labor clobbered our economy in the short run. Doesn't mean they weren't the right things to do.

* * *

One of my favorite aspects of Pride & Prejudice (which I finished recently) was the way Darcy changes his callow, classist ways, but does it mostly offstage. His changes are suggested bit by bit as he and Elizabeth bump into one another and she is constantly surprised by his improved behavior. Only near the end is the narrative arc of his changes explained, and it makes perfect sense as a believable process of self-improvement. I think this pleased me because it tracks with our observations of human change in real life. We see the evidence of change in unexpected fragmentary glimpses, and only later, if ever, do we get an account of the motivation and process behind the changes.

The most unsettling part of reading P&P was getting caught up in suspense over Lydia and Wickham's tawdry affair, only to remember that my frame of reference on such matters is rather different from Jane Austen's. In fact Lydia and Wickham's courtship and marriage wasn't all that different from mine with Laurie. To be fair we don't live under a dowry-based matrimonial system, from which (along with modern birth control) all the relevant liberalizations flow. I wonder which of our social structures will someday seem as bizarre and antiquated as dowries seem to us. I'd nominate employer-based health insurance for that honor.

* * *

Among movies we've seen lately: Marnie. I've seen it three times now. The first time I was a kid watching it with Mom. We both enjoyed it, but all the sexual stuff flew right over my head. I recently gave Laurie the capsule synopsis of it: Tippie Hedren is a safecracker with a crippling psychomelodramatic problem; Sean Connery hunts/heals her.

"Do they get it on?" asked Laurie.

"You know it," I said.

And so Marnie went to the top of our queue.

Two things about Marnie struck me this viewing:

1. Tippie Hedren is really, really good. She plays the type-A ice queen with submerged Freudian issues so well that she was indistinguishable from my last supervisor at my old office job.

2. Sean Connery's attempt at an American accent is such an utterly unique hybrid dialect that it resembles a new kind of speech. I love that. Bad accents that go beyond badness all the way to surprising newness are one of the best things actors can give us.

* * *

Another recently viewed flick: The Mothman Prophecies. I read a big chunk of the non-fiction(?) book this was based on. In it (IIRC) freelance journalist Jim Keel goes to a small West Virginia town where a diverse mix of insane phenomena (UFOs, monsters, Men In Black) are causing trouble. The MIBs, rather than being simply sinister, take comical cluelessness to the nth power; I remember being painfully embarrassed by their antics. I also remember being beguiled by Keel's blend of faux-hardnosedness and gap-jawed credulity. Since much of the narrative consisted of punishingly sidetracking anecdotes about how this UFO siting is similar to these other UFO sitings Keel has on file, that monster sighting is similar to these other reported monster sitings, etc., I eventually put the book down and didn't pick it up again. (If I've gotten any details wrong in this synopsis, that's entirely in keeping with the ambiguous nature of the book.)

The movie plays really fast and loose with the original narrative. The reporter becomes a top reporter for the Washington Post, gets a new name, a melodramatic dead-wife backstory, and an advisor on spooky psychic stuff. This advisor gets to be the self-appointed expert on Ultraterrestrials (as they are called in the book) so the reporter doesn't have to be a nut from the start. I would have preferred they stuck closer to the book: a nutty reporter who loves to trot out his knowledge of Fortean lore would be way more amusing than Richard Gere's glum character.

The supposedly hardnosed reporter is awfully quick to buy into far-fetched theories, though, which is hardly justified by the weirdness swirling around him. A real hardnosed reporter would try to Occam's Razor his way through such peculiar events.

The main MIB in the book, Indrid Cold, is mostly offstage but on the phone in this film, so all the wacky stuff about MIBs making public fools of themselves is snipped from the narrative. The film's awfully serious, in a furrowed-brow manner. The backstory with the dead wife comes to the fore as it appears she is, in some inexplicable fashion, hanging with Indrid Cold, unless Cold is playing some cruel Dopplerganger game. This subplot leads to some letting-go-of-the-past-and-the-dead stuff that I quite liked, but the films' top-heavy with dead-wife melodrama that the psychotronic source material didn't need.

Also the film goes for a David Lynchian weirdness, with David (Seven, Fight Club) Fincher visual stylings. The cinematography goes for sedate colors and fine-grained detailing, but then slips into highly formalized scene-to-scene and even shot-to-shot transitions. Disorienting camera angles and A Bout de Souffle editing create an uncanny mise-en-scene, but as the film progresses it piles on the cinematic funhouse gimmicks until it starts to feel like a demo reel of tricks, and each new trick seems like part of a predictably escalating succession. I haven't made a study of it, but it seems to me Lynch pulls off the uncanny with greater ease because he exercises a bit of restraint with the weird stuff. When he goes weird he doesn't simply use interchangeable tricks; the weirdness is more specific and deeply rooted in narrative than the tilt-a-whirl bamboozlement devices in Mothman.

A Season Three X-files episode titled "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is clearly influenced by The Mothman book and is closer to what I would have wanted from an adaptation: uncanny, comical and open to a near-Marenbadian multiplicity of readings. It's more fun than the Mothman movie and will take less time, so give it a try.

(This subject of unofficial or accidental adaptations that surpass the official adaptations is one that preoccupies me: Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education is a better Lolita movie than either of the entertaining but insufficient Lolita films, Ang Lee's Hulk movie is a better Neon Genesis Evangelion adaptation than Hulk adaptation, etc.)

The Box. You Opened It, We Came.

2009-12-01T05:24:00.003-10:00

Last night I had my first sip of wine in a while, and it got me rhapsodizing about the glory days... the BOXED WINE days.

In the late 90s I drank wine from The Box. Real wine was too 'spensive. I knew boxed wine was allegedly no good, and I didn't argue the point, but I figure that if it was good enough for me then it would be a shame to waste real wine on my cloddish palate. Later, of course, I learned that wasting real wine on my cloddish palate was the only way to refine my palate, but despite my college education I didn't quite grasp that I was capable of learning and growing. But that's another story.

When I shared an apartment with two other guys (and two of us weren't paying rent) it was boxed wine that smoothed over the many, many rough edges. Well, that and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was specifically calibrated for tipsy twentysomething girlfriendless nerdboys.

I eased off the box once I moved across the street from V. Richards, which had a real wine selection, but the subject of The Box came up during a production of Angels in America II. I declared that if I ever became a DJ my stage name would be Chillable Red, in honor of a particularly Kool-Aidish variety (or is that varietal?) of boxed wine (as if there's any boxed wine that doesn't taste like sour Kool-Aid). Our Prior Walter admitted that in his college days his roommates and he would remove the sack (for those who haven't enjoyed The Box: inside The Box is a wine-filled plastic bag with a rubber nozzle) from the box, hang it on the wall somehow, and squirt cheap wine directly into their mouths as they passed it. That's the good life, for college boys.

I offered to bring a Box to the cast party. Everyone laffed except for Tom, who is from Sand Mountain.

I showed up to the party and Tom met me on the porch, eyes glowing with eagerness. "Where is THE BOX?" he asked. The Box was produced and we drained it to the lees, paying no attention to the many bottles of better wine that had been brought by our betters. The evening ended with Tom and myself trying to play jug music on the nozzle of an empty plastic bag. I think it was the last time I ever wallowed in boxed wine. A fitting blowout conclusion to The Boxed Wine Era.

Thanks!

2009-11-26T05:47:00.002-10:00

Some things I'm thankful for:

We have made some fine friends during our time in Kannapolis.

We have a roomy yet cozy house with a loverly backyard. A fruitful garden, a thicket bursting with life, towering trees. Every back yard should be like this.

Our cat survived his near-death experience and seems more connected to us now.

Marat/Sade allowed me to do the kind of theatre I've always wanted to do, to meet dozens of wonderful folks, and to let all my craziness out. The toungue-clicking I developed for my character won't leave my mouth now.

My family reads my blog and yet hasn't disowned me.

I got a library card.

Now I have a part time job. Better than nothing.

I'll be attending UPTA auditions in February.

I'm married to Laurie. Every day I'm learning more about how to love and be loved in return.

Repositioning Slaughter

2009-11-24T08:32:00.003-10:00

A friend recently passed along this article about a forthcoming Nepalese festival involving mass animal sacrifice (every five years, for a goddess, etc.) My friend, who is vegetarian with vegan leanings, was of the opinion that this is an outrage. I see his point, and having recently nursed a sick kitty back to health, I'm more in touch than usual with the importance of life, including animal life, but...

I'm a meat-muncher, and a Unitarianish type who is leery of changing others' faith practices. If you're worshiping a Goddess of Power, doesn't it make sense to spill a lot of blood? And they eat the meat, so it's not going to waste...

I believe in the value of all life, but not in the sanctity of any life. Life is an accidental byproduct of impersonal cosmic forces (a splendid byproduct, but still...) and so the destruction of it isn't inherently wrong.

And yet. I'm generally against killing humans, I don't believe humans are meaningfully more important than other animals, I'm against cruelty and confinement, and animal sacrifice is as stoopid as any religious practice could be. I'm still trying to find a balance between the part of myself that is drawn to Vegan values and the part that intends to keep eating animal flesh. This festival is a troublesome issue for me precisely because I don't know quite where I stand or why I stand there.

Literalistic religion is one cause of this problem. A symbolic sacrifice can be just as powerful as actual animal slaughter; that's part of what makes The Crucifixion resonate so strongly with so many people. Animal rights activists in Nepal are trying to persuade folks to sacrifice plants instead, but plants don't make the noises and smells of animal sacrifice and so may be a less pleasing odor in The Divine's nostrils... but sometimes The Divine needs to tighten Her belt, just like the rest of us.

Another possible compromise... abortion sacrifices. They should have doctors at the festival, ready and willing to perform abortions for all pregnant comers. That's almost like a human sacrifice, right? Powerful juju. And they got overpopulation issues around that region, right? I think I've just solved this problem. Another controversy ended.

So What's Up?

2009-11-18T08:25:00.004-10:00

Marat/Sade ends this week; no more madness. No more letting my tics and twitches out. No more terrorizing the audience. No more dressing-room esprit de corps. Soon I'll have to find something else to do, like get a job. I'm working on it, like everybody else. I even got a typewriter so I can fill out applications without revealing my hillbilly scrawl.

Our cat is basically an indoor cat now, having twice returned from his outdoor jaunts with injuries, but we let him out last Saturday and he came running back, scared of something... and then was lethargic. Wouldn't eat or drink. Sat by his water bowl staring, not drinking. We took him to the vet, got him some anti-nausea drugs, and he's in good shape now. For a while I assumed that he'd been poisoned (we'd been warned that some country folks think nothing of poisoning cats) and I was close to exploding with rage, but Laurie pointed out that the cat came running back in a frenzy, as if he'd been shooed away from something, so possibly the only human involvement was beneficial rather than malicious. At first I wanted to assume a villain so there'd be someone to punish, but now I'd rather assume that there was no malice behind whatever threw him off balance. Of course it might be human negligence to blame; leaving rat poison or something out where other critters might get it.

So I've learned a bit about how much the cat means to me (I was pretty frantic for several days) and about how quickly my big dumb urges to wrath and revenge come bubbling up, non-violent milquetoaste that I am.

Speaking of which, I have started watching an old show called The Sopranos. It's pretty good and you should check it out. You heard it here first.

Also, I'm reading a book titled Pride and Prejudice. It to is worth a look. Keep reading my blog and I'll keep pointing out such overlooked gems for your consideration.

Mor for Ya'll

2009-11-05T06:39:00.001-10:00

More music. My last batch for a while.

BTW Laurie and I are thinking about moving to Vancouver or someplace like that. Lots of biotech, lots of acting work, lots of health care.

Say "Cred!" and Pro-Fayne

2009-11-04T11:06:00.001-10:00

Some songs I like.

Viva Vivian!

2009-11-04T04:08:00.001-10:00

A new link: Vivian Maier. Her work achieves the pellucid clarity I want for my life and work.

No Comment. Okay, maybe a metacomment.

2009-10-30T04:42:00.005-10:00

Our production of Marat/Sade got three exuberant reviews, one from the mainstream newspaper, one from the trying-not-to-be-mainstream newspaper, and one from the local-theatre-review-website-that-no-one-really-looks-at (although I thought the last one had an unusually insightful review, from a theatre professor as it happens).

Good stuff. Ticket sales are hoppin'. But the other day someone posted a negative comment about the show on the mainstream paper's website (I hasten to point out that I heard about this from another cast member, rather than from obsessively rereading the reviews). Once upon a time I would have been completely unable to restrain myself from retorting to the comment right there on the website. I take it as proof of personal growth that I am now able to deflect such inclinations into wry remarks on my blog, rather than tendentious direct takedowns. It would be best, of course, to instantly forget about such trivial things, but clearly I'm not there yet.

Marat/Glad

2009-10-27T17:51:00.003-10:00

When I started doing theatre I had a fantasy that it would allow me to participate in complex, multilayered and didactic artwork. I also had a fantasy that it would allow me to get all emotionally exhibitionistic, untrammeled and unashamed.

It turned out, though, that a certain amount of rigor was required. Not only learning lines and blocking, but comprehending and intelligently communicating the playwright and director's overlapping visions. So on some productions that allowed for a blending of my two theatrical fantasies (Angels in America, various Shakespearian items) I was so busy trying to jerry-rig together enough thesping craft for the job that I wasn't able to find ways of infusing the performance with both Brechtian sophistication and Artaudian shamanistic wallowing.

Until now. Marat/Sade, in which I play a mental patient, allows me to let my actual emotional state to shape my performance while giving energy to a complex exploration of revolutionary failures. Plus I get to scare people like I'm Leatherface. Utter self-indulgence yoked to a compellingly multilayered intellectual work.

Brian Eno has stated that he prefers making frames to making pictures, metaphorically speaking, and I find that my ensemble role allows me to be part of a frame. It's a bit like those faux-frame boundaries on old Mad magazine covers, though... the ones with odd little figures running around and pratfalling. Dozens of little bonus gags surrounding the main gag in the picture.

A few to lay on ya.

2009-10-13T09:04:00.005-10:00

It's allergy time for me, and all my energy has been poured into this show. Inspired by Noah Berlatsky of Hooded Utilitarian's weekly playlist downloads, I've decided to share a playlist with my readers from time to time (in lieu of actually writing anything). If you can brave an irksome popup or two and a bit of download time, you get to share some ditties I luv.
Roughly a CD worth of tunes I dig. Enjoy!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWW

2009-10-12T04:15:00.002-10:00

Today someone googled across my blog while searching for cow-then-start-touching-me.

That is all.

Get Out. Go In.

2009-10-07T04:57:00.007-10:00

EDIT, WEEKS LATER: I would like to point out that I have great respect/affection for the director, assistant director, and stage manager of the show discussed here, and my complaints in this post were made in context of a time, place and mindset that blah blah blah disclaimer disclaimer DISCLAIMER ETC.

Is there any value in making actors endure rude or abusive treatment in order to coax more genuine performances out of them? In my current production I play an inmate at an abusive mental hospital, and the various authorities in this production (director, assistant director, stage manager) have exercised a level of hostility that I have not previously experienced in the theatre. It's impossible to tell the extent to which they are being clinical or to which they are merely displacing frustrations onto us. For example, we weren't making our entrances and exits quickly enough, so the assistant director, in the midst of our rehearsal warmups, told us "I'm sick of you people. Get out." And we FLED out the exits. Ever since then we've made our entrances and exits with all the panicked speed our director wishes.

But the assistant director shouldn't be surprised if none of us comes to his birthday party.

It's evident that the hostility is being used to coax us to a deeper level of understanding, to guide us from our relatively pampered and cozy lives into the blinkered and paranoiac reality of the inmates. We sure as hell don't appreciate it, but I suppose we may as well make use of it.

In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (what, that again? Bear with me, it ties in) the cast suffered a pretty fierce level of discomfort, and director Tobe Hooper did play mind games with the actors to increase their mistrust and anxiety. He spread rumors that made the actors dislike one another. Not all of the blows and cuts on the film were faked... some were quite real. The meat that recurs throughout the film was real, and rotting in the Texas heat. It's a cruel way to work and I don't approve of it. And yet the results speak for themselves. The pain and terror is all there on the screen. Unlike most horror movies the film doesn't seem like pure artifice; it seems like a documentation of real terror. It has a shamanistic power that's like nothing else I've seen. We've endured little more than rudeness compared to that, but a little rudeness seems to go a long way towards making us fearful and resentful. I'm not sure what that reveals about us.

And To Think I Hesitated; or, I Don't Post For Weeks And When I do It's About Hellraiser 2

2009-09-29T07:10:00.005-10:00

I finally watched Hellbound: Hellraiser II. I've been a fan of the original flick for years, but I was afraid the sequel(s) would do what sequels do: dissipate the vitality of the original by overexplaining enigmas and normalizing the abnormalities that give the first film its edge. And I was right, kind of, but there are mitigating factors.

Hellraiser has a Strindbergian quality; it's very much a character-centered drama. The story could be retold as a realistic noir with only minor changes (which is not to say that the fantastical elements are gratuitous; only that they shape the symbol system of the film more than the plot itself). There are tantalizing enigmas that are allowed to remain unexplained, and I liked it that way. I didn't need to know who the Dick-Tracy-villain S&M Mobsters who function as the malevolent Deus Ex Machina of the film really were.

The sequel, of course, explains who they were, but it doesn't seem like a response to Hellraiser. It seems like like an Adults-Only sequel to Labyrinth or The Neverending Story, in which the heroine goes into a hallucinatory fantasy world on a Quest, where she meets weird creatures, etc. It resonates more with my memories of Eighties kid fantasy flicks than with my interest in Original Hellraiser.

So how is it as an Adult Neverending Story? Not bad, although it's a disservice to the movie to watch it sober. It goes for the overwrought goth lushness of a Ken Russell or Dario Argento film, and occasionally hits the right strident note. The special effects are the kind of Eighties FX trash that I love so, so much more now that I've sat through half a lifetime of CGI. Having a Monsterous Doctor for a villain is fine, but having him say things like "I recommend amputation" as he attacks people is pretty Marvel Comics.

* * *

For the majority of my readers who don't give a rip about Hellraiser: I recently won an award for my performance in last year's production of Turn of the Screw. The award is from a local theatrical alliance that throws a big cargo-cultish awards show, complete with paparazzi-free red carpet. We got to perform a scene from the show for the award ceremony, and I hammed it up shamelessly, which probably netted me more attention (for good or ill) than the award itself.

I just had an audition for a Shakespeare touring company. The director told me (bluntly but kindly) that the company mostly casts young actors, and that the schoolchildren respond strongly to young actors, as opposed to folks who seem more like teachers, generation-wise. But she liked my work, so hope springs. It just doesn't spring unrealistically high.

Needs to Happen

2009-09-18T06:44:00.004-10:00

Due to the overwhelming response to my post about Dungeons and Dragons movies, I'm doing another one. The next two Dungeons and Dragons movies will both deal with The Planes.

Dungeons and Dragons (at least back in my day) had a gonzo OCD cosmology full of Planes of Existence. Some were devoted to different elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and others to various Afterlives. I tried to find the original complicated charts online, but came up empty, which amazes me. No one wants to scan the old D&D charts of the Inner and Outer Planes? What's wrong with nerds these days?

Anyway, suffice it to say that The Planes represent all the different worlds, zones, dimensions etc. that exist in E. Gary Gygax's philosophy, and from time to time various folks who wanted to sell more D&D product tried to crank out expansions on this idea.

There should be two counterbalancing films about this. Just to keep me happy.

The first should be loosely adapted from The Manual of the Planes by Jeff Grubb, who for a time was the hardest working man in Dungeons and Dragons. I remember the book being an imaginative, or at least imagination-firing, book that told you what it might be like to visit, say, a place where everything is made of water, or where Chaotic-Neutral people go when they die (The morality and afterlife thing is highly structured in Dungeons and Dragons). The film should be written and directed by the people responsible for this,

this,

this right here

and of course this

ad. It should be produced by the employee of Birmingham Alabama's long-lost comic/game shop Lion and Unicorn who tried to sell a copy of the by-then out of print Manual of the Planes for $100. Anyone named Manuel Planes should be hired to work on this film. The movie should consist of a guided tour of each plane, undertaken by two cute teens in 80's garb with a sunglassed nonthreatening version of Ric Okasek for a guide. Pleasant synth-pop throughout, as in the ads. Really, just give me 90 minutes of Eighties-style Bubble Yum ads and I'll be happy. Normally I scorn folks who rhapsodize about favorite commercials, but I was young and vulnerable when I saw these, and I honestly love this post-You Might Think stuff. (BTW I now understand, as I didn't in the 80's, exactly why my Mom found this video so disturbing. Unstoppable stalkers are exciting to little boys but not to their Moms.)

The other film should be adapted from the groovy old D&D themed computer game Planescape:Torment, a glum and complicated adventure in which an amnesiac hero awakens in a run-down fantasy city, assembles a ragtag band, explores strange places... all the usual fantasy computer game stuff, really, but there's lots of bull-session philosophy, exotic atmosphere, and ... well, that was enough for me. Maybe if I played more of these games I wouldn't have found this one so immersive, but now I want to reexperience it without actually playing it, which means someone has to make the movie version. Make it long and dense. Make it pretty, in a smoky, spikey way. For crying out loud make it immersive. Strike a balance between talky stuff in superficially creepy yet oddly cozy settings, and fantastical action set pieces. Script should be improvised on set by M. John Harrison, under duress if need be. Directed by Jason Keener.

Somewhere between these films there needs to be a short-lived cable TV series based on D&D lamebrainstorm Spelljammer , a D&D variant that focused on magical boats flying from planet to planet. The pilot episode should be directed by whoever made this. After a promising first episode it should start to stink pretty bad. Cast a few hot guys and gals in it so Fanfic Nation will get all excited about it and get enough petition signatures to keep it on the air for an even worse second season.

It's ideas like this that have driven my blog hits into the single digits.

Life and like that

2009-09-15T07:59:00.003-10:00

Gabrielle Bell has a blog and I've added it to my links.

I'm trying to learn Marat/Sade in suffecient depth to keep the director from holding me up for ridicule. I'm trying to relearn and improve a scene from last year's production of Turn of the Screw since I'm being forced to perform it for a local theatre awards show. And I'm trying to learn sides for two original plays for which a local theatre is holding auditions. And I'm trying to learn two different new monologues for various other auditions. And I'm polishing an older monologue. So I'm not posting here much. One hopes I'll get back into maintaining this record of my life soon. My life itself will have to ease back a bit first.

In The Realm

2009-09-11T08:08:00.008-10:00

As you probably know, there's a Dungeons and Dragons movie. And it's a stinker. My D&D-playing friends and I had a good time heckling it, but that's about all it's good for. How then should a proper D&D movie be made?

I shall tell you, for the answer lies within me.

Firstly, when I think back on the old Dungeons and Dragon books I used to pour over, I can't help thinking about the shops and streets and overpasses of Chattanooga, Tn. and the hiking trails of Signal Mountain. That's where I lived and engaged D&D. So to capture the sensation of Dungeons and Dragons as I experienced it, my D&D film would be shot Alphaville-style in Chattanooga.

Alphaville was a science-fiction movie by arthouse legend Jean-Luc Godard. He shot it in 60s Paris, and made no effort to disguise the fact, even though the story took place on exotic alien planets. The conceit of the film is that no elaborate sci-fi set or camera trick could possibly create a setting more alien and peculiar than a hotel lobby or office building, so why not film in a hotel lobby or office building and pass it off as an alien planet? I propose taking the same approach to Chattanooga, which is more fantastic than any Frazetta painting if approached with photographic imagination.

The film's narrative should be loosely adapted from the B series of Dungeons and Dragon modules. The central characters should be the main characters from the old D&D Saturday Morning cartoon. They should be played by game-shop nerds with no particular acting ability or resemblance to the cartoon characters. The script should be written by a few Infocom game designers and should focus more on the red herrings, dead ends and pointless whimsies that characterize old D&D modules than on any sense of narrative momentum. The monsters should be designed by Erol Otus and realized with stop-motion animation overseen by Rick Trembles. It should be directed by a drunken Tobe Hooper, whose blend of weird dry humor, grotesquerie, uneven craft and occasional shamanism make him the ideal stand-in for the game's traditional Dungeon Master. Closing credits music by Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.

Obviously this movie will make cash by the tankerful, so the sequel should be an absurdly faithful adaptation of Ravenloft. The main vampire should be played by the Chattanooga community theatre hambone who played every role with the same exaggeratedly effeminate elocutionary style regardless of the part. Castle Ravenloft should be portrayed by Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church, one of the key locations in my life for good and ill. The film should be scripted and directed by Raul Ruiz. The protagonists should be the characters from Snarfquest. Production design by Larry "Snarfquest" Elmore and Damien Hirst. Music by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Closing credit song by The Egyptian Lover.

The Losers' Lounge

2009-09-11T04:44:00.005-10:00

We've been in B'ham, fixing up Laurie's house there. We attended a Monday night open-mike standup comedy session at an establishment which I shall refer to as The Losers' Lounge. We arrived late, and as we approached the patio we heard a snippet of a monologue in progress. A guy in his late twenties or so was explaining the following facts:

1. He was recently divorced.

2. He was having a hard time adjusting.

3. And the recurring punchline, he was spending a lot of time in a Lonely Person Activity.

4. He was hurt by the lack of Big Laffs Item 3 received from the mostly young, mostly unhappy-looking audience.

5. He was friends with the other comics, all of whom were sitting at a table up front. He would banter with them whenever he got too flustered.

That was it. No twists, no insights, no unexpected juxtapositions of two distinct frames of reference, just a repetition of those five points, over and over again. At the time I wondered if the whipped puppy attitude he was giving off was the cause or the effect of the divorce. It later occurred to me that he might have been trying to coax a punishing response from the audience. Perhaps he was trying to have his ambiguous feelings of inadequacy replaced with unambiguous, explicit awareness of inadequacy; always a minor relief for the emotionally seasick, and easier to achieve than a bolstered sense of self-worth. Sadly for him, this Southern audience was too well behaved for open heckling.

His protests at our lack of laughter grew terser as he continued; they started out like "C'mon, people, this is comedy! You're supposed to laugh!" and devolved to "Terrible!" Whether "Terrible!" was addressed to the audience, himself, or God On High, I dunno.

A somewhat milder form of masochism shaped the other performances. Primal Whimper Therapy was still in evidence, but it was from younger guys who were mystified by their inability to get with a woman in the first place, rather than reeling from a divorce, so their pain was that of heartache rather than heartbreak. They also had a somewhat better grasp on the whole "Make 'Em Laugh" thing. Still, it felt more like being collared by a succession of mournful, lonely drunks than like being entertained.

There was one young woman in the audience, all alone; a cute girl with arty garb. She smiled glowingly all through the show, and it occurred to me that I had seen her at open-mike comedy acts years before. I felt for her, or for the her I imagined her to be. Having done some tepid open-mike, I'd been approached by somber-faced women who told me "You were really funny." Meaning, "I am really lonely." I thought of them when I saw this woman. Whenever one of the performers bemoaned his inability to find a woman, I imagined her thinking "I'm right here; look at me." But that was my inference; who knows why she was really there. Maybe she thought they were funny.

The host of the show angrily shouted down a young chattering ectomorph in the audience ("Am I interrupting anything?" that kind of bit) but went way overboard; it was obvious the host wanted to do the old devastate-the-heckler routine, but lacking an actual heckler he had to settle for a nonthreatening chatterbox. The Host was mean, not witty, not funny. The young ectomorph, who looked like a sheepish bespectacled bird, sat there and looked blank during the tirade. He was with a group of college kid types, with one older heavyset woman at the head of the group. The host evidently knew her, as he flirtatiously chided her for bringing the ectomorph. The woman had that flash-of-panic-beneath-the-cool-facade look so familiar to anyone who's ever been a twentysomething. Rather than defend Mr. Ectomorph she said "I know, I know" and tried to look archly disaffected. She grabbed her purse and FLED as soon as the focus was off her again. I later overheard the ectomorph speak witheringly of her; he expected more gumption from a Queen Bee than that.

The final comic was a cute little stoner whose dipsy-doodle style charmed Laurie and myself regardless of his (mildly amusing) gags. As Woody Allen observed, personality is more important than material for a standup comic.

If you're in B'ham and this kind of sideshow sounds more to your tastes than it is to mine, here's a hint: the establishment's name is actually a reference to An Animal Sound.

The Cozily Suffocating Confines of the Nerd-Ass Comfort Zone

2009-08-31T06:53:00.007-10:00

The Idea Of Order At Key West by Wallace Stevens has been on my mind lately. It may be the best examination of the relationship between art and life that I've ever seen.

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Art, like the lights, works in the context of of the world in which we live.

Anyway, I followed a link to this blog, which I'd never seen before and which is too self-aggrandizingly nerdy even for me. It retorts to some critiques of Tarantino's hermetically sealed films in part by comparing Tarantino's work to Midsummer Night's Dream, which, the blogger argues, catered to theatre nerds by being about theatre in the same way that Tarantino caters to film nerds by making movies that are only about film.

But while Midsummer has a theatre plot thread, it nests theatre within a broader social context, and then nests that social context within the greater context of The Fairy Realm, which I read as the natural world viewed through an anthropomorphic lens.

Midsummer's rude mechanicals are there for the theatre nerds, no doubt, but the play isn't an act of total nerd indulgence. Shakespeare isn't putting foil on the windows, metaphorically speaking. His is an outward bound, omnivorous and expansive intellect, so when he includes some fun for the theatre nerds it isn't an exercise in keeping nerds inside a narrow nerd-ass comfort zone.

In closing, a quote from Eric Rohmer, translated by Carol Volk, from the introductory interview in The Taste For Beauty, a collection of Rohmer's essays (Rohmer is one of my favorite filmmakers, and an expert at navigating between reality and the artifice of film):

"...cinema has more to fear from its own cliches than from those of the other arts. Right now, I despise, I hate, cinephile madness, cinephile culture. In 'Le Celluloid et le marbre" I said that it was very good to be a pure cinephile, to have no culture, to be cultivated only by the cinema. Unfortunately, it has happened: there are now people whose culture is limited to the world of film, who think only through film, and when they make films, their films contain beings who only exist through film, whether the reminiscence of old films or the people in the profession...film is the art that can feed on itself the least. It is certainly less dangerous for the other arts."

Cheaper Than Dirt

2009-08-27T13:59:00.006-10:00

A sad moment today: our cat caught and killed a little creature. Not sure what it was since the cat hid in the shadows to enjoy his kill, but a bunny sat just outside the shadows and watched with nervous stance and wide eyes. Perhaps our cat was killing the bunny's child. It's all in the game, but I felt awful for the bunny.
* * *

I had a disagreement with a stranger the other day about the taking of cheap shots (we were discussing Ted Kennedy's passing and he brought up Mary Jo Kopeckne's death in a way that I thought was below the belt). I'm formulating some provisional rules for cheap shots:

1. If you make cheap shots, you must be sporting about getting as good as you give. Take it if you dish it.

2. Own your cheap shots. Stand behind them. No Al Jolson routines about how your cheap shot wasn't a cheap shot. No confabulating your rudeness and indecency away. Be proudly, flamboyantly horrible, or don't be horrible at all.

3. And it wouldn't have occurred to me to point this out before yesterday's discussion, but don't bling your Jesus Decoder Ring and think that gives you such a wealth of moral credibility that accusations of cheap-shottery against your person are absurd. Here in the Southeast everyone gets a fistful of Jesus Decoder Rings complements of the house; they're not hard won.

All that said, there was a deeply awful cheap shot in the original version of this post; all that business with the bunny and the cat was a setup for a swat at a vivisection extremist I've hated on in these virtual pages before, and after some remorseful rethinking I snipped it. Not sure if that's a violation of my stated rules or not.

Honorable Employment

2009-08-26T12:20:00.004-10:00

I used to do a lot of temporary work, back when there were "jobs." You kids don't know nothing 'bout that. Anyway, the most memorable of my post-college temp jobs was in a small company out of town, down the road an hour or so. It must have been to the East, because the sun was in my eyes the whole way.

The building was like a small hanger or converted garage. Most of the workers assembled in small open work stations and did... I don't remember what they did. On the other side were bins full of circular rivets, like ring tosses for folks with absurdly muscular wrists.

My job was to throw the rivets on the floor.

If the rivets sounded a solid bell-like tone against the concrete floor, they were put in the "keep" bin. If they clunked or shattered, into the "trash" bin with them.

This was a terrific job for me because it required such minimal attention, allowing me to plot my (awful) screenplay or to daydream about Ranma 1/2, an obsession at the time because it reminded me of my recently departed college life.

Enriching the experience was the fact that each of the employees had their own radios. No headphones or anything: everybody played their radios out loud, all the time. Each radio was about five feet apart. The acoustics of the place meant each radio was fully audible from where I was standing. Each radio was tuned to a different station. No one seemed to think this was purgatorial.

One of the employees was a cute young woman. Next to her stood a "simple" young man who constantly flirted with her. Flirting, for him, took the form of saying "Don't cry, baby, it'll be all right" in a self-satisfied sarcastic way every time she said anything at all, which was fairly regularly.

There was also a very pregnant skinny lady who smoked all day long.

This job ended abruptly when I smashed my car into the back of a truck on my way to work (did I mention sun in my eyes?) It wasn't on purpose, honest.

Marriage and Motorcars

2009-08-18T10:12:00.003-10:00

Laurie and I are getting married tomorrow. Concord courthouse sometime after 2PM.

* * *

In cruddier news, over the weekend I bumped into a concrete embankment when I (slowly) went round a blind single-lane onramp curve, only to find that traffic had abruptly STOPPED and I had a choice between bumping the wall or bumping another car. I made the obvious choice, and the damage was pretty minimal considering. I did have to get it fixed, though.

We've often said that one advantage of living in Kannapolis is that everyone, including mechanics, assumes you're wise in the ways of cars, so they don't try to cheat you. The drawback is that they'll ask you detailed questions about your car's specifications, and if you don't know offhand how big your rims are or how many cylinders the engine's got, they look at you like you just asked who Obama is. Auto lore is as fundamental as readin' and writin' around here.

Sniff Sniff.

2009-08-13T04:26:00.003-10:00

I'm reading "An Actor's Business" by Andrew Reilly, an informative book about making a living as an actor. It's full of useful-seeming info (I say seeming because I haven't put it to the test yet) but I was taken aback by one passage in which, while explaining the nuts and bolts of the film business, the author goes on a tangent about how foreign films sukk. To whit:

"Some foreign filmmakers... seem to be enamoured with myriad camera angles that communicate no new information and symbols that do not advance a story but but turn the story into a crossword puzzle."

And there's more along those lines. Perhaps in the next edition Mr. Reilly will take the time to explain how modern art is flimflam and rap isn't really music.

I wonder which filmmaker, exactly, he's talking about. Peter Greenaway, perhaps. And here's Mr. Greenaway's retort (Taken from "Peter Greenaway: Interviews" edited by Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras):

"...Cinema basically is illustration of the 19th century novel, ways and means of examining the world very much in the way that perhaps Dickens organized his narrative scheme. And you know, American cinema is a bit like telling children stories, to placate them-make sure the moral code is all right, and now we'll tuck you up in bed..."

Obviously I'm all in favor of telling children stories, and I'm sure Greenaway is too, but his point is well taken... Film tends to be organized around 19th century fictive modes, but it can be organized around 20th-century fictive modes, or any century's poetic or painterly aesthetics as well. Hollywood hasn't trained us for that, but that's no reason for a reverse-elitism against films that are about images, ideas or formal play rather than conventional narrative. Or as Robert Altman put it, Hollywood wants shoes and he makes gloves.

Quick Update

2009-08-06T05:58:00.003-10:00

We finally got our marriage license and are debating the level of spontaneity/sense of occasion the wedding should include. It's looking like I'm going to wake up on my wedding day without knowing for sure that it's my wedding day.

I'm in a production of Marat/Sade that promises to pull no punches. Glad to be doing something that blends Gothic excess, agitprop and all-around artiness.

I'm also pecking away at a juvenile novel, trying to write the kind of thing I liked to read. If nothing else it keeps me off the streets.

Recently rewatched Gothic by Ken Russell (inspired to do so after mentioning that Ken Russell should direct the film of Lucius Shepard's uneven but patchily rewarding erotic-political-thriller-in-vampire-drag novel The Golden) and now suspect that Russell is an under appreciated filmmaker. Tacky, tasteless and overwrought, but I think most films should be. Eric Rohmer can handle the tasteful stuff, and I'll watch that with pleasure too, but if you can't capture life with such cinematic delicacy then for heaven's sake go for broke; brilliant tackiness with dimestore psychology and theatrical lighting all over the screen. My kinda flick.

Go Fish

2009-07-29T05:32:00.002-10:00

We took a return trip to Birmingham last weekend, and I ate at The Fish Market for the first time. I lived in The 'Ham how long, and never ate at The Fish Market? We got there pretty late, and the Friday night crowd was pleasing: mellow and integrated. I liked the food (been a long time since I've had scallops) and disliked the music (Kenny G whuuuuut). But the decor was what resonated. The open spaciousness and the lighting reminded me of the cafes that were fixtures in the corny computer adventure games I used to favor. I regard it as a sign of maturation that I now hang out in atmospheric venues instead of hanging out in virtual atmospheric venues.

Every Room Has A Flaw

2009-07-28T13:44:00.003-10:00

I'll be an inmate in Cast Theatre's forthcoming production of Marat/Sade. I'm relieved I won't have to hold down a major singing part again, somewhat bummed that accepting this community theatre role means turning down some paying (but less interesting) opportunities.

In more long-term news, Laurie and I are getting closer to marriage; we haven't set a date yet, but we do have a deadline, sort of... we want to be married by the holidays of this year.

And I'm actually making some headway on a novel! Yeah, me and a billion other people. Mine's a juvenile fantasy, because that's all I read growing up, and they say you should write what you know. All I know is anthropomorphic critters and adolescent parapsychologists.

***

Speaking of which, I never got into The Hardy Boys. I tried a few times, since every other boy in school read them, but I couldn't relate to the Boys; they were too Jack Armstrong, All-American for me to grok. Heaven forbid my young self read a novel if my young self couldn't relate to the protagonist. The Three Investigators were my guys; nerds one and all, highly skilled in some areas and worthless in all other areas. That I could grok, by cracky. And after they cracked the case they'd go have lunch with their buddy Alfred Hitchcock and tell him all about it, and say "But there's one detail that still puzzles me; how did the Gypsy snort the cobras out his nose?" and Hitchcock would figure it out.

This post's title is IIRC an actual line from one of those books. I found it an intriguing notion back when most of my reading material was certain to involve someone getting locked in a room at some point.

La La La

2009-07-23T07:29:00.003-10:00

I'm currently up for a singing role in a local show. It's non-paying but locally prestigious, artistically ambitious community theatre.

I'm in the perplexing position of being half-good at something. I can sing... kinda. In my audition I sang the obscure Cole Porter song "They Couldn't Compare To You" which is a hilarious crowd pleaser, and one of maybe a half-dozen songs I feel comfortable singing anytime, anywhere. The director obviously enjoyed it, so tonight I'm called back for a big singing part in a show that isn't exactly a musical, but has some key songs.

The problem is that learning new music, learning it precisely, and actually, y'know, singing it is difficult for me; nonetheless my last paying gig and perhaps my next non-paying gig involve singing. I can sing just well enough to be an impressive audition if it's a cappella (for me matching an accompanist with whom I haven't rehearsed is like guessing an unseen person's weight) but carrying a full singing performance isn't really in my comfort zone.

It's an interesting demonstration of the truism that a good date isn't always a good mate, and vice versa.

Graves and The Golden

2009-07-17T10:20:00.003-10:00

Passed a favorite graveyard today (it has family crypts like mini-temples amidst the headstones; very horror movie-riffic) and like most graveyards in town it's actually a churchyard. Anyway, someone had knocked over and broken some of the headstones. In a city I would just write such events off as inevitable urban vandalism, but in a small country town I grasp for specific socio-economic explanations of such activity, just as I assume aggressive driving in a small town is connected to economic frustration, but in the city it's just inevitable that dense populations mean more jerks. Only today does it occur to me that I'm applying different expectations to different environments. It's irksome that some stupid person besmirched some grave markers, but it's fun to imagine the aggrieved dead rising to haunt our anonymous defiler.

* * *

Reading The Golden by Lucius Shepard; it's a political thriller set in a Gormenghastly vampire palace. The vampire stuff is used as metaphor and MSG. Shepard's short stories are more subtle, but he lets the Gothiness of it all justify some extravagant excess; then he finds the nuanced shadings within the excess. Ken Russell should make the movie.

Freaky Actors

2009-07-10T16:04:00.002-10:00

I just saw a documentary about Tod Browning, the director of such films as Dracula and Freaks. He worked with Lon Chaney a bunch, and wanted to do Dracula with him; no doubt Chaney would have created one of his famous makeup schemes as part of the character. He died too soon, though, and Bela Lugosi got the job. Lugosi refused to wear makeup and relied on his distinctive personality to create the character.

I found this more inspiring than I can probably convey. Two beloved performers who handled similar creative tasks in ways that suited their individual styles and talents. It gives me hope as an actor; I tend to fall into the trap of thinking there's some answers-in-the-back-of-the-teacher's-edition correct way to do things, and that I don't measure up, but in creative work there's many, many routes to success. Now to persuade North Carolina's casting directors.

Kannapolis to Austin

2009-07-03T16:22:00.004-10:00

Laurie and I went traveling last week. Here's a few highlights:

Visiting two delightful Austin swimmin' holes, Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. It turns out that what I didn't like about swimming was clorine.

Spending time with Laurie's sister, a hilarious nurse who filled us in on the funny and dark sides of her profession. A sample: nurses call motorcycles "Donorcycles." Also, she wants her funeral music to include "Ghostbusters". That just gets funnier the more I think of it.

My return to Birmingham, Alabama, where I reconnected with some old friends, finally ate some V. Richards bread (A staple of my B'ham days which I've been pining for ever since leaving) and discovered a groovy bar, the Red Lion Lounge, a year too late to hang there regularly. Red Lion is a good quiet bar for sitting outside with a cluster of chums, or going inside to watch a fourtysomething guy in a suit chat up a goth Gen X'er ("See, I'm the last of a dying breed...")

(sidenote: there was an apartment complex near my old digs which was full of Latin American folks. Every weekend you could walk by and hear guys speaking spanish and playing Reggaetone as they worked on their custom-painted trucks. Then, one weekend, they were GONE. All of them. The building became an exhibit on the theme of broken windows and enigmatic grafitti; I was tempted to explore it but was afraid of antsy squatters. Now the building is also GONE, replaced by a tan grassy hillside.)

Driving through small towns in Texas. My notions about modern Texas have been shaped by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, Joe Bob Briggs, and the novel Stinger by B'ham native Robert McCammon, in which aliens invade a dying Texas town. I'm happy to report that Texas lived up to my pulpy hopes... rusty trailers, shirtless country folk with sun-browned muscles, odd jury-rigged diners...

Seeing Professor Cox again. He's about to spend a year in China on a Fulbright grant, which is more that I can say, so it was our last chance to catch him.

Another interesting and mysterious sighting: a dilapidated, closed rest stop in Louisiana. I believe it's one I stopped at back in the Nineties: it stank from the moment we got out of the car, and was full of bums demanding money. The march of the moaning bums was reminiscent of a George Romero movie. Now Louisiana's rest stop is clean and bum-free. Except when I show up.

Boogedy

2009-06-18T12:21:00.003-10:00

I'm reading old spooky stories from The Horror Hall of Fame, Edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu is as refreshing as its titular beverage because it forces this MTV Generation reader to downshift his kinetic forward-thrusting narrative expectations. The basic plot could be squeezed into a story half its length with room left over for The Cask of Amontillado, but Le Fanu wants to ground his story in the real world or something, so we get, for example, a step-by-step account of how a servant looked in on his master every hour on the hour. Some narrative compression could have whittled such sequences down, but that ain't Le Fanu's way. Check out Kevin Huizenga's witty but faithful comic book retelling in his collection Curses.

The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce is the evident inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's semi-famous story The Dunwich Horror. Both involve huge invisible monsters; Bierce never reveals what it is, where it came from, or what ultimately comes of it, while Lovecraft gives us an origin story, a monster-slaying, all that. I am fond of Dunwich, but I have to give The Damned Thing the edge. For one thing Bierce is a better writer. Plus, the ultimate message of Damned Thing as I read it is "There is something that's going to kill you, and you can't see it coming." That's true, so that's scary. While Lovecraft tells us "There's something that's going to kill you, and it is the spawn of occult miscegenation." Are you scared of occult race-mixing? Cuz I'm not.

The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers was an influence on Lovecraft (The book-within-a-book The King in Yellow is a precursor of The Necronomicon, as well as the videotape in The Ring) but I find Chambers more fun to read. He's actually interested in people, and he understood one thing better than silly old Poe: a creepy story doesn't have to be creepy every step of the way. A story with charming, witty and likable characters can be all the creepier since the reader is more likely to take a rooting interest in their not getting overtaken by horrid occult forces.

Revising some previous.

2009-06-09T04:08:00.004-10:00

I was a bit off the mark in my post about Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series yesterday. What's really driving those books seems to be an interest in structures of mythic meaning interweaving with modern life, and while the forms of adventure narrative are there, the stories come across more like rhapsodically descriptive poetry than like storytelling.

For example (spoiler warning) IIRC in The Dark is Rising Will receives an antlered carnival mask for a Christmas gift. It comes from a brother who's stationed overseas, and the mask has a backstory about how it was a gift from a mysterious guy with mysterious knowledge about Will. Later in the story there's a flood as the evil forces of The Dark mount their final attack; Will spots the mask being carried downstream in the floodwater. Soon he travels to a park where Herne the Hunter lives; Will hopes to rouse Herne, who has the power to drive the Dark away. A human figure lurks nearby... the mask sweeps by on the current, the figure grabs and dons the mask... behold! The figure with the mask is Herne the Hunter, and he saves the day. A carnival mask and an English legend are broguht together, with a little help from family ties, Christmas traditions and the Thames flooding.

Note that Will didn't have to do anything to bring about the sequence of events. He receives the mask, and he observes the later events, but he's rarely an Active Protagonist. Cooper doesn't really construct narratives around heroic deeds or cunning problem solving; she constructs them around the interplay of modern life and the web of mythology and imagination that gives resonance to life, at least for Cooper. It's kind of like a Pirates of the Caribbean style ride, where threats loom but the point isn't the challenge of surviving the threats; there is no real challenge. The point is to enjoy the spectacle of the imaginative construction someone has prepared for you.

This drives some people nuts, and in interviews the screenwriter of the Dark is Rising film huffed and puffed about the importance of rejiggering the story to make Will an Active Protagonist. Ah, me.

* * *

Just to be fair to my new town:

someone thinks it's on the right track.

An Act of Will

2009-06-08T09:17:00.002-10:00

I'm reading The Grey King by Susan Cooper. It's the fourth in The Dark Is Rising series. What I find continually fascinating about these books is that Will, the young protagonist, never has to solve any problems. He's an Old One, one of several folks who just happen to have awesome mystical power and significance, and while he has plenty of problems he never really has to figure out a solution. Either his fellow Old Ones show up and fix things or he manages to reach down deep into his Old-Oneness and intuitively whip out an unstoppable solution to whatever's confronting him.

In most hands this would make for a ludicrous Mary Sue story, but for Susan Cooper it's thematically justified. Will is simply of a better spiritual class, and you know how Brits are with class consciousness. It would be rude of the universe to do more than tease an Old One. Will's apparent problems are simply a kind of roughhousing on existence's part; perhaps goodnatured, perhaps resentful, but always destined to back off upon a gentle well-bred rebuke (in the form of an ancient incantation, the kind Will can pull out of his pocket at will, so to speak).

The Shadow Over Kannapolis

2009-06-05T04:32:00.004-10:00

Some of my readers may wonder what the real spirit of my new town is like. It's like this.

Sadly freelance wife-rapist is the only employment available right now in this town (Oh boy, am I gonna get a lot of unwanted search engine hits over that). Per a TV report, the alleged rapist is black; the husband who hired the rapist is white. Think about that. Exactly what narrative was the husband trying to stage manage?

It's been said that fetishes are often the eroticization of the worst thing you can image happening to you. For some guys that could mean having one's wife raped. For some it could mean having one's wife raped by a black man. Racists are often equally repelled and fascinated by miscegenation (check out H. P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow over Innsmouth for an interesting horror-story example of this); could the recent election of a mixed-race President have indirectly inspired this crime? Is it the acting out of a Birth of a Nation notion about white men losing their position to black men? I've posted before about local honkeys getting upset about how a black man got a prominent job that has traditionally gone to white men. Some fume; others fetishize.

BTW according to some reports the police aren't sure the alleged rapist knew this was an actual rape: his ad suggested he was looking for a consensual fantasy role-play... "All limits will be respected." Some folks (Not me, ugh) get into acting out such extreme things, but here's a tip for aspiring pretend-rapists: make sure you've thoroughly talked it over with the pretend-victim beforehand, not just with her greasy hillbilly hub who keeps calling you "boy".

Speaking of stage-managing horrid fantasies, the husband was unknowingly staging one of my deep-seated (though non-erotic) fantasies: "the Horrible Hillbilly." Look, I rode the school bus with some country boys who innocently breached my comfort zone, and while I understand the problem was my youthful comfort zone rather than anything to do with them, I still have a lingering fixation on creepy white trash. I know what to do about it: watch Texas Chainsaw again. Not treat anyone badly, and not hurt anyone. Keep the fantasy on the level of fantasy. Trying to play out fantasies in a literalized and hurtful way reveals a depressing poverty of imagination.

Obviously there's a lot to be said about what this case suggests about gender relations and such, but I don't feel up to it.

Link by Link

2009-05-27T05:53:00.003-10:00

Please note the new links: Free Music Archive (Free legal music downloads; I like Double Helix) and And Now The Screaming Starts (Horror thinkpieces, and some amusing videos).

Horror

2009-05-27T04:49:00.004-10:00

California just turned into Utah.

And Dick "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" Cheney seems to be enjoying a resurgence.

It's interesting, though, that these two areas in which Cons are finding traction are both related to fear and/or loathing.

Lefty that I am, I think an intellectually and morally vibrant Conservatism is important to our country, so I'm not rooting for Conservatism to go down this fear and loathing road. I sure hope they've got some more positive stuff on the shelf! Let's check in at The American Spectator, a Conservative periodical.

A fellow named Robert Stacy McCain writes:

"Any time a liberal starts jumping up and down and yelling about a "scandal" affecting a conservative, remember this reply: 'Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.'"

Chappaquiddick jokes. In 2009. That's the way forward, folks.

(Admittedly I'm going for a straw man instead of, say, closely reading rebuildtheparty.com. I wish Cons well, but by "well" I mean that they become positive players in the future, not power players for negativity and fear.)

* * *

Speaking of Cheney, I saw a horror movie the other night called Wendigo. It's the kind of thing I wish Tobe Hooper was doing; a blend of artfulness and grittiness. It's not flawless; there's a bit in which a wise Indian gives the child protagonist some Ancient Indian Wisdom, which is okay except Only The Boy Can See The Indian. That's a bit of unnecessary musty tweeness. And the film relies a bit too much on our being scared of hunters because they're hunters, and hunters are assumed to be inherently scary. I'm not a hunter myself, but I've known many, many hunters, and they're not scary per se. Maybe Director Fessenden finds them disturbing, but he doesn't sell me on his story's hunters being all that sinister at the outset. Compare to Texas Chainsaw, which DOES sell me on hillbillies being scary, despite my hillbilly-rich background. I know hillbillies are only scary on a case-by-case basis, but these movie hillbillies are specifically scary.

Other than these quibbles, the movie's dope. Lovely camerawork, and the married couple at the center of the film seem really authentic and closely observed. The expressionistic and blatantly artificial spook-show ending put some critics (like Ebert) off, but I like expressionistic, low-fi, stagecrafty artifice in fantasy films.

Anyhow, one thing I've been interested in lately is the way good horror movies, even supernatural ones, often bring the horror back to humanity. In Wendigo the Wendigo isn't the Big Bad: it's the Spirit World's Sword of Justice, coming to get the Big Bad, who's just a mean hick. In Zombie movies, like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the Zombies are the initial problem, but the deeper problems are caused by humans disagreeing and squabbling for survival in the face of the zombie problem. In Hellraiser the supernatural monsters are only a deadly Deus Ex Machina, and the transformed human Frank is the main villain. In Alien, The Company, which puts profit ahead of human life, is a more contemptible villain than the deadly alien itself. Even in my beloved Texas Chainsaw Massacre there's a variation on this theme, as Sally flees from the crazed hillbilly killer to the comforting arms of the nice man at the barbeque place... only to find that he's part of the same Sawney Beane-style clan.

I'm pretty bad at plot analysis, but after a while even I get it: there's no problem so terrible that one's fellow human beings can't make it worse. In counterpoint, each of these films includes fellow humans who provide aid and comfort to the good guys/gals, so these aren't nihilistic misanthropic stories. I don't have any finer-grained insights, but the insights horror films offer into problems like Iraq and Afghanistan continue to intrigue me.

Theory into practice

2009-05-22T06:25:00.004-10:00

Ten minutes after publishing my last post (and believe me, the posted version is a model of restraint compared to the earlier drafts) I stepped outside to find my cat toying with a crippled bird. No points for guessing who crippled the bird. I grabbed a shovel and reluctantly but definitively killed the fluttering creature. The cat yowled at me, either because he mistook my violence for cruelty or because he was miffed about my spoiling his fun.