Momus scores a twofer.
“Downtown train,” Everything But The Girl; “The Microörganism,” Boiled in Lead; “Chickenman,” Indigo Girls; “Attitude,” John Butler Trio; “Booze Olympics,” New Black; “Quark & Charm, the Robot Twins,” Momus; “Lucky Like St. Sebastian (live),” Momus; “He thinks I still care,” Kirsty MacColl; “Wonders of Lewis,” the Waterboys; “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground,” the Decemberists.
Technical note.
You may or may not have noticed the footnotes I stick in the hyperlinks hereabouts (hover your mouse over them, if not); I like to tuck a little snarky context in them. Helps with some of the jokes. —Of course, you might have noticed the footnotes, but if you’re using Firefox, you probably couldn’t read them, since Firefox trims the <title> tag by default, and it’s downright impossible to figure out how to reset it in about:config. But luckily, there’s an extension for just about everything in Firefox; a little judicious Googling (far less than I’d feared) turned up the Popup ALT Attribute, which was built to allow people who’d been misusing the <alt> tag for tooltips (conditioned, apparently, by that evil former monolith, Explorer) to keep doing so; as a sideline, it includes “multiline tooltip,” which tells Firefox to stop truncating those mutiline footnotes. Seems to work fine so far, though of course your mileage may vary; I’m pleased to note it process a hyperlinked image properly, by my standards, which is to say it displays the <title> tag of the link rather than the <alt> tag of the image, with nary a moment of confusion.
And that’s as geeky as I plan to get today. Back to the zombies. That I can’t call zombies. Long story; I’ll tell you about it someday.
Resolver.
Almost forgot to mention: Patrick spent New Year’s Day brewing up one helluva mole, while I made the Hoppin’ John, and when we were all gathered around, him and me and the Spouse, and Anne and Dylan and Vera and Rich and Erika and Matt and Jesse, and Steve and Sara and Johnzo and Victoria, and the three cats, of course, well, it was then that Steve, who isn’t called Uncle Crackdown for nothing, started asking what our New Year’s resolutions were.
And I thought about how every year lately we’ve been standing around in varying states of intoxication groaning as the year ekes out its last. Turning our faces slowly to the next. Anything’s got to be better than that, right? is what we all say, year after year after year.
(Actually, said this person, or that, I had a pretty good year this year. —Hush, you! You’re mucking up the paradigm!)
So I thought about saying my resolution was to have a good year, but I didn’t.
I said, instead, to finish something.
I have a couple things in mind. We’ll see.
If I had a hammer, I’d do something about all these goddamn nails.
Against the law to advocate overthrowing US gov’t.
What do you mean? I’ve never done anything of the kind!
Membership in California Lawyers for the Environment, right? Worked for the American Socialist Legal Action Group, right?
So what? We never advocated anything but change!
Smirk of scorn, hatred. He knew he had me.
I had my second Afghani dinner in as many days with Julia and her husband and her brother in an exquisite little stripmall joint somewhere deep in the wilds of Queens, far to the east of anywhere I’d been before, and the sabzi challow was just as good as she’d said it would be, and when her brother and I caught a subway back to Manhattan I got to remember all over again why you never get on an empty subway car in the middle of summer.
And despite the conventional wisdom about how oddly disjointed it is to meet in the flesh someone you’ve only known online, the only really awkward moment came when it usually did, for me, at least: Why’d you stop? she said.
I shrugged and said what I usually said: I don’t know. I stopped because I’d stopped.
Got to work. Got to. At local library, on an old manual typewriter. The book mocks: how can you, little worm crushed in gears, possibly aspire to me? Got to continue nonetheless. In a way it’s all I have left.
The problem of an adequate history bothers me still. I mean not my personal troubles, but the depression, the wars, the AIDS plague. (Fear.) Every day everything a little worse. Twelve years past the millennium, maybe the apocalyptics were just a little bit early in their predictions, too tied to numbers. Maybe it just takes a while for the world to end.
I was on a bus. Late March? Early April? I was on a bus, on the way home from work, earbuds in, nose down, book open. Early April, I think. I hadn’t posted anything in a bit. My “long explore” of the Unheimlichsenke had sputtered out in a thicket of Victors and Victorias, and I was instead becoming obsessed with unriddling the koan: what I’d thought was passing for enlightenment wasn’t. (That’s it? That’s all there is to it?) —The book in my hands was The Shining Sea Pacific Edge; I was trying to find a passage I’d remembered, where Tom Barnard lays out just how simple it turned out to have been, getting to Utopia: we just told them to stop, he said, or I’d thought he’d said, or words to that effect. I wasn’t finding it. I was, instead, sticking bus transfers between these two pages, or those, obsessively marking passages I wanted to come back to, bones in the ground of the answer I knew I had to find, bits mostly from the italicized interpolations, Barnard’s notes from back in the always-already, Robinson’s commentary track, the becoming the book itself was trying to help us all sidestep—
Sometimes I read what I’ve written sick with anger, for them it’s all so easy. Oh to really be that narrator, to sit back and write with cool ironic detachment about individual characters and their little lives because those lives really mattered! Utopia is when our lives matter. I see him writing on a hilltop in an Orange County covered with trees, at a table under an olive tree, looking over a garden plain and the distant Pacific shining with sunlight, or on Mars, why not, chronicling how his new world was born out of the healthy fertility of the old earth mother, while I’m stuck here in 2012 with my wife an ocean to the east and my daughter a continent to the west, “enjoined not to leave the county” (the sheriff) and none of our lives matter a damn.
And it was maybe those words there I was reading when the opening fanfare of “Bright Blue Music” kicked its way out of the earbuds.
It wasn’t the disjunct between interpolations and interpolated that did it, no. The split between the smirk of scorn and hatred, the AIDS camps and the terror, and the all-encompassing epic struggle over a zoning designation—that spoonful of snark to help the medicine go down—it’s a flavor I’m all too familiar with. It wasn’t the encroaching conjunct between the world around us as it evermore is these days and the world Robinson was trying to wave us away from, the 2012 he was imagining from back in 1988. We always outstrip our fictions, after all, or what’s a heaven for? —It was the abjunct, sudden sharp and complete, between myself, there, on the bus, that book in my hands, and the music that was swelling in my head, the hope unalloyed, the joy in those brassy fanfares. It was thoroughly irrational, but these moments always are: the gap between seemed suddenly so vast and deep, and I looked down and saw my feet uselessly churning the air, and I closed the book and I closed my eyes to stop them from leaking. Heartsick, gutpunched, I took a deep breath and I let go. I stopped.
I stopped because I’d stopped.
All day I would sit there staring at the page, staring into the blank between my world and the world in my book. Until my hand would shake. Looking around me, looking at what my country was capable of when it was afraid. Seeing the headlines in the newspapers scattered around. Seeing my companions and the state they were in.
That’s the big thing, the outside thing; there’s also the ten thousand things inside, little and petty, maybe, but Utopia is when our lives matter, dammit; when the only things that matter are little, and petty. Zoning changes. Database issues. Typography. —The day after I had dinner with Julia and company (and I should mention that her strength is as the strength of ten, for her heart is pure, and her aim true), I was standing in Patrick’s office at Tor, and did I mention just how cool it is to meet people in “real” life that you’ve only known online? To put a voice to the words you’ve been reading? (An hour later, we were upstairs in the sort of old New York bar you find by shooting cannons, and Patrick was catching Teresa up on convention gossip in the interstices of our wide-ranging and enthusiastic triscourse, and one of those catch-ups was him turning suddenly and saying, oh, oh, did I tell you I finally got to meet so-and-so (someone, it seemed, who’d previously only been words on a screen), and Teresa, pretending great affront, said no, you wicked thing! and I couldn’t help it; I fell for them both then and there.) —The only really awkward moment came when it usually did, for me: When are you going to start it up again? he said, there in his office.
Well, I said. I shrugged. You know. I’m working on it. Trying to port it from Movable Type to WordPress. There are issues. I want to redesign it. I have to figure out the whole WordPress thing. —I was flipping through his recently arrived copy of Alasdair Gray’s Book of Prefaces and marvelling at the sheer bookness of it. I started idly pondering which bits could best be stolen for a website, and how.
That was August; this is January. There are still issues. As you can see. At least I got it ported over to WordPress. Finally. (The Spouse fetched me a copy of the Book of Prefaces for Christmas. I still haven’t figured out how to do it. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.) —And by the way, if you for whatever reason get into or have found yourself using WordPress, and have upgraded to “Duke,” and you do any sort coding yourself beyond just typing the entry straight into the little box provided, do yourself a favor? Fire up your dashboard, click on the Users tab, scroll down to Personal Options, and uncheck the “Use the visual rich editor when writing.” Otherwise, it will fuck your shit up. No lie.
Where was I?
Yes, the sailors are gone; yes, it’s all rather generically Kubrick around here. I want to redesign, obviously. I still need to figure out the whole WordPress thing. I want some posts of different categories to have different formatting, for one thing; I want to figure out the best way to integrate deltiolographs with a ruthlessly simple design. (It would be nice if there was a filter somewhere for Photoshop that made photos look like Wall Street Journal hedcuts, wouldn’t it?) I’d love to figure out how to fine-tune RSS feeds in WordPress, so that the Atom feed (say) was full-text, and the RSS 2.0 feed was just the post excerpt, so people had a choice, and the LiveJournal feeds might be nice to rescue, if anyone remembers who set them up. And where would I put the feeds from Audioscrobbler and LibraryThing? Decisions, decisions. Ten thousand things to rearrange, which I can do while I’m writing, I guess, is the point, as easily as not. I’m back, I guess, is the point, as much as I ever was here in the first place. The book is open; my eyes are open. Up and on to the next.
(And can I say how touched I was by the folks who showed up and said hi so quickly when tentative let’s-kick-the-tires posts appeared? Thank you. It’s good to see you all again. —Confidential to Lisa: of course, and soon enough, but still: a little patience. I’m looking for a hammer. Email me a snailmail addy, would you? There’s some paper I need to put in your hands, for all and sundry.)
iTunes is moody this morning.
“psychoman,” Steso songs; “Sweet Talkin’ Guy,” the Chiffons; “Plumet Attack,” Les Misérables soundtrack; “Windowsill,” Aphex Twin; “Bar Conscience,” Saint Etienne; “Take Me for Longing,” Alison Krauss & Union Station; “The Bones in the Ground,” Robyn Hitchcock; “Not With You,” Teagan & Sara; “Collecting You,” Indigo Girls; “Goodman,” Anjuli Dawn.
Blame the Feministe.
“Imamou Lele,” Boukman Eksperyans; “Trumpet Song,” Cranes; “Argument,” from the Chess soundtrack; “Going for a Walk with a Line,” Momus; “Wylin’ Out,” Mos Def; “Eurostar,” S.I. Futures; “Finisterre,” St. Etienne; “Your Belgian Things,” the Mountain Goats (live in the studios of KEXP); the Allémande from Bach’s Fourth Unaccompanied Cello Suite, Yo-Yo Ma; “...to dream,” Lisa Germano.
Hup—
For we couldn’t leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.
She’d saved our lives so many times, living though the gale.
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave?
They won’t be laughing in another day…
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow,
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go,
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain,
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
Rise again, rise again
Though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost—be it a home, a love, a friend—
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
You’ll have to fend for yourselves a bit longer, I’m afraid. Pardon the dust. —Hey, could you hand me that allen wrench?
Placeholding.
Yeah, yeah. The day job, you know, and it’s acting up again, and I really ought to get an ointment or something for that, and I’m trying to get some other writing done, and we’re going to be at APE in just over a week, so if you’re in San Francisco the weekend of the eighth, well, hey, we’ll be in the same city, and over in Nemas Animæ we’re getting ready to do up a lexicon game about magical texts, so, you know, I’m somewhat distracted. Which is why I haven’t written much of anything here, I suppose it goes without saying. That, and the fact that there’s two entries I keep alluding to that I can’t seem to get written. So I won’t mention the third. Or the fourth.
So hey! Go read the Valve. I mean, god damn would you look at that masthead.
To Robbie Conal, “America’s foremost street artist” and staff caricaturist to the LA Weekly, on the publication of your profile of Portland᾿s own Mercury Studios (and guests) in Portland Monthly—
(A preface: this is long and self-indulgent, but since when is that new on the pier? It is, though, based on a piece that’s not online. So: no link that you can read and check for yourself. Pick up a copy if you’re in town, if you must; the strips they run along with it all rock. If you’d like a glimpse of Mercury Studios, this Oregonian article is much better, and the classy photos that put faces to names are over here.)
First: hey, thanks. There’s nothing so cool as seeing people you love and things you know through someone else’s eyes. Always a treat. And while some might knock the gonzo excess of your prose stylings, well, I’ve always been a fan of exuberance, myself. Give me a voice that knows what it wants and goes after it full-tilt: I might wince at the occasional typo and grammatical misstep, but at the end of the day I’m going to like it better and remember it longer than bog-standard A1 clarity. Just a word of advice: I know they made it look easy, those gonzo guys, like all you had to do was live through it and then sit down with some liquor and stimulants and, you know, type, but it’s hard, gonzo is. Harder than bog-standard A1 clarity. Injecting yourself into your journalism requires a delicate balancing act between self-indulgence and self-awareness, and just because you’re subjective as all get-out, that’s no excuse for slacking off on the underlying facts. (Just because bog-standard A1 is fucking up on that front these days is no excuse, either.) —Oh, hell, you’re tempted to tell yourself; they’ll get the gist of it, even if the facts aren’t all that. Any publicity’s good. Don’t listen: down that road lies the devil.
But we’ll get to that.
As for myself? Well, I’ve got no complaints with how I’m handled. “Build[s] databases for corporate lawsuits.” Pretty much. I might quibble at being called an “adult,” but that’s my hang-up, not yours. (On the other hand, while I’m hardly the best there is at staining and varnishing, I’d like to think our new front door looks slightly nicer than something you’d pick up at the Home Depot.) —But! I never met you, or spoke with you directly, and anyway, I’m only in the thing for a paragraph and a half. Which, granted, is more than Craig Thompson got. So I’m good as far as that goes.
The rest? —At least, the bits I can speak to authoritatively?
Well, first, it’s Dicebox. Not Dice Box. —A small thing, but the devil’s in the details, such as the title of the comic by your subject of the moment. Or the fact that it’s not available exclusively at dicebox.net (rather than jennworks.com—but hey, URLs, who reads ’em?). It’s also and one might even say primarily available at Girlamatic. And while the checks she gets from Girlamatic might only be enough for some beer and the occasional software upgrade, it’s still not entirely accurate to say that Dicebox is “not capitalized, at all.” There’s no action figures, granted; no T-shirts or posters or stickers or tchotchkes. Yet. (We’re still trying to get her to sell the notecards she does.) But Girlamatic does sell advertising on the site; and if your readers manage to make it there, they might well be unpleasantly surprised by the subscription fee they’ll have to pay to read the archives. (We will leave out the plans for eventual print publication; a distraction.)
I know, I know: this messes with the whole “heady Northwest Linux brew collides head-on with the soy-lentil-green-indie arts scene” riff, which I’m sure tested well in the bullpen. But sometimes we must kill our favorite children to make the overall piece.
Moving on: Anodyne is not a parallel project to Dicebox. Anodyne, in fact, died back in 1999; Dicebox took off in 2002. Nor is it entirely clear to your readers that Anodyne was a freely distributed local arts monthly, not a—well, I’m not sure what they’d think, coming out of that paragraph, but it reads like an editor’s blue pencil took a bad fall in the middle of one of the sentences and never recovered, so we’ll let it slide. (But: neutrinos? Mathematical constructs that conserve energy in the equations that describe half-life decay. No half-life themselves to speak of, much less a blisteringly fast one. —I know, I know, they’ll get the gist of it. Yes yes. Moving on.)
As to the aura Jenn that exudes—“blushing rose,” at one point, shading to “purple” when she says “It’s a public form of self-expression”—and her “Buddha-esque” stature as the “gravitational center in that ethereally radiating alternate reality that is so genuinely precious and fiercely protected in the sweet funky neighborhoods of Portland”? —Well, it’s hard to quibble with someone who says something so sweet. And her “transcendentally radiant, gently surreal inner sanctum” is pretty much spot-on, as anyone who’s seen her studio can attest. (Still: “Buddha-esque”?)
But! You’re being genuinely subjective, there, expressing what you saw, as you saw it. I’m not going to contest you on those grounds. It’s when you try to do the same thing through the supposedly objective means of quoting someone directly that we get, well, iffier:
Why stay on the Web? “Distributors! The comics industry is slowly collapsing on itself. Most retail comics stores in North America that want to carry popular comics deal with Diamond Comics Distribution. It has a virtual monopoly. It sells through its catalog, Previews. If a publisher wants its product to be listed in Previews, it has to pay for ads in the catalog—no problem for the majors, but small publishers can’t afford the extra costs. Now Diamond has a rule that it won’t list any comic that doesn’t sell 2,500 copies per month. I haven’t wanted to bother with it.”
Now, granted, I wasn’t there to hear what was actually said, or in what context, any more than I know what’s actually your writing and what was inserted or amended by an editor. So I don’t know how many of the inaccuracies in the above are due to your own misunderstanding of an abstruse and marginal business plan, granted, and how many are due to Jenn hazarding guesses at some placeholder stats in the service of a more fundamental point, but when your subject of the moment says “Don’t quote me on this,” and “You need to check that before you say anything about it” and goes to the trouble of warning your fact-checker, too, well.
Can I kick off a tangent here, just for a moment? It’s germane, honest. —See, I’ve never taken a course in journalistic ethics myself, but I have written my share of feature articles and personality sketches back in the day, and I always tried to keep in mind the case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Jeffrey Masson was a psychoanalyst who, while serving as Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, grew disenchanted with the father of his art; Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker that proved less than flattering. A libel suit was filed. And, while she quoted him at length saying words she couldn’t prove with notes or tape recordings that he’d actually said, Masson lost the suit. —At one point, in fact, she says he described himself as an “intellectual gigolo” when the closest the court could find to that in his actual words was “much too junior within the hierarchy of analysis for these important . . . analysts to be caught dead with [him]”—and still, he lost.
So congratulations! As journalists, we’ve got great power: we can make shit up and stick it in other people’s mouths. (Specifically, “the common law of libel overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon substantial truth.” But that’s in America, bucko; don’t try it overseas.) —But as you should have realized the moment you set out to write about comics, with great power comes great responsibility. (It’s in the pamphlet they give you at the door.) The law sets forth the bare minimum: you can elide stuffily tedentious self-descriptors down to snappily inaccurate soundbites so long as you don’t violate substantial truth. Beyond that, well, we’ve got to call on ethics. (Do keep Malcom’s own snappy self-descriptor in mind: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”)
And at this point you’re asking yourself what the hell the fallout from a contentious multi-million dollar libel suit can teach us about a freelance puff piece on cartoonists in a $3.99 glossy ad-horse. Hell, you’re probably saying, I never elided anything! I didn’t make anything up at all! That’s what she said! I’m pretty sure! What gives?
Let’s step through it:
You’re interviewing someone about their webcomics publishing venture and you ask them, why the web? And they tell you there’s a lot of barriers to traditional print publishing. And you ask, like what? And maybe they say something like industry collapsing, Diamond monopoly, ads in the catalog, 2,500 copies. —And you do some research, and you find out that the industry has been through a rough patch, but sales in some quarters are showing signficant upticks; that Diamond in the mad bad days of the late ’90s pretty much had a virtual monopoly, yes, and it’s true that almost every direct-market comics shop in the country still has to deal with them, but there’s a number of competitors now, and new if untested markets cropping up all over, like manga in Borders and strips on, hey, the web; that no, you don’t have to buy ads in the catalog to get listed, just glancing at the thing will tell you that, though if you ask around you’ll hear dark mutterings from some quarters of preferential treatment for those who buy ads (then again, this is a business: what’s new?) and if you do more than glance at the thing you’ll note the listings are so small that it’s pretty much impossible to get noticed at all without buying some real estate to strut your stuff; that Diamond (it’s said) prefers sales of $1,000 a pop with a reliable growth curve over the first few issues, not so much a firm floor of 2,500 copies.
Given that you can make up whatever you like and stick it in their mouth, so long as you don’t violate substantial truth, what do you do?
Well. That all depends on what the substantial truth is, doesn’t it?
And this is why journalism is morally indefensible, and this is why ethics are paramount, at the end of the day. —Are you writing a drily witty, razor-keen hit piece? Well. What you’ll want to do is polish what was said until minor inaccuracies reflect the subject of the moment’s ostensible paranoia and aggrandizing sense of self-importance—conspiracies, projection, sour grapes. Ethically impeccable, morally indefensible, but hey, substantial truth, right?
Are you digging into something as an investigative reporter? Grilling a government spokesperson on the record? In that case, the substantial truth is what, precisely, was said, and when, and how; you won’t want to change a word. But you will want to hold what was said up against the actual facts—or at the very least present those facts, as if they were the other side of an argument. You know?
But if it’s a freelance puff piece on cartoonists for a $3.99 glossy ad-horse? Whose basic point is opening up a genuinely precious and fiercely protected demimonde to latte-sipping shoppers cruising the Pearl? —In that case, your subject of the moment is hardly a hostile witness. Your goals are in synch. The substantial truth is there are obstacles, yes. Your great power is to put words in their mouth. Your great responsibility is to make sure they get the job done.
So: you can change what was said to congrue with reality as you’ve found it. Don’t look at me like that. You can do this. It’s perfectly allowable. Granted, if you’re a mensch, you’re going to call them up before it goes to press and vet the quote with them, word for word, but time is short, and there are so few mensches left in this world. But that’s one thing you can do. Drop the bit about the monopoly; massage the sentence about ads until it says “to get noticed”; correct the number. Morally indefensible; ethically impeccable. Hey presto.
Granted, most writers are going to feel uncomfortable doing this. I’d balk at it myself: I’ve played fast and loose with quotes from time to time (you’ve never heard the fury hell hath none like until you’ve vernaculared the verb of a persnickety grammarian), but not with something so central to a point. In that case: well, they did say there were obstacles, right? Sin by omission: cut the quote there, drop out of their voice and into your own, lay down the facts as you’ve found them to be. —The substantial truth, after all.
(Is the substantial truth that they’ve got some particulars wrong, off the cuff like that? Is that what’s important to note? —Especially when they’ve told you “Don’t quote me on this” and “You need to check that before you say anything about it.” What morals are you trying to defend, again?
(Just be sure whatever you do that the truth you’re citing, in their words or yours, has some little substance. It does no good to say to yourself that the gist of the matter is there are obstacles and the facts merely illustrate this, accurate or not, when your readers take home a gist that says Diamond won’t list your comics unless you also buy an ad.)
But what you don’t do, and I realize I’ve blown through about 2500 words here and you’re probably getting tired of the sound of my voice on what is really a tiny problem in the grand scheme of things, but the devil is in the goddamn details, it’s all small stuff, so bear with me: what you don’t do is pretend that writing it down as if they’ve said it absolves you of the responsibility of finding out for yourself. Putting facts in other people’s mouths is a great way to humanize a story, but it’s also a cheap-ass way to dodge the bullet. “That’s wrong?” you say. “Well, gosh. It’s what they said. I can only write what they tell me.” That’s morally indefensible and ethically questionable, and what’s more, when people turn the page and read this:
The pop-culture industry has already thrown the first brick or two—and they’re gold, baby. There are 2,500 independent bookstores and 3,000 chain stores in the United States, and guess what: book sales are as flat as Nebraska—with the single exception of comics and graphic novels. How does $105 million in sales for 2003 sound?
Like a data point without context, but aside from that: who’s right? “The industry is collapsing,” or “Sales leaping buildings in a single bound”? I mean, I know how to square this particular circle, and Jenn knows, and everyone you talked to for the article knows, because we all know the shape of this thing we call comics. I can’t tell from this piece whether you do or not. But I do know that most of your readers don’t; and after finishing this thing, they still won’t.
They will have missed the gist, basically.
—Damn. I did go on a bit about a piece that’s mostly about other people, didn’t I? Chalk it up to youthful enthusiasm. (I’d sure like to.) And I’m not sure what might (or, granted, might not) be misspelled in Pete Woods’ curriculum vitæ, or out of synch in Matthew Clark’s résumé, but I can tell you that the Wendy-and-the-Lost-Boys riff you pull with Rebecca Woods is almost as old and inaccurate as the idea that cartoonists live out a delayed adolescence that escapes the rest of us benighted souls, but maybe another time. —I had a different point to make, and I hope I have: gonzo’s right, and objective journalism is a myth, yes yes: but this makes it all much harder, not easier. Far from absolving us from the responsibility of checking into the truth of what we’re living through, it goads us all the more into chasing something we’ll never reach—or it ought to, anyway. Only then can we make it all look like we popped the pills and drank the booze and just sat down to type. Easy as pie.
Even for a freelance puff piece. Even for a $3.99 glossy ad-horse, only picked up by power shoppers down from the West Hills. —If we don’t do the right thing, even in the least of what we do, who will?
(One last thing: not to snark overly, but you don’t even know who Craig Thompson is, do you. —No, wait, one more last thing: “Hey, sorry, we gotta refuel the fairy.” What?)
Upon hearing once more the serial bangs and muffled thuds of our crack circular firing squad, the words of—I believe it was Kissinger?—are called to mind.
The stakes are so small precisely because the politics are so vicious.
—No, wait, that’s not quite it.
The stakes are so vicious precisely because the politics are so small.
Fudge. That’s not it, either. Bear with me. I’m sure I’ll get it in a minute.
Old skool.
I may be getting paddled by the Happy Tutor elsewhere, but never let it be said I said he couldn’t turn a phrase on a dime and kick a white-hot nickel back in change:
You are not watching a play. My friend, you are on stage, as a member of the Chorus. The play is a tragedy, with comic or satiric interludes. What makes it tragic is that time and power are slipping away from the moderate. The tragedy is about how, through the failure of the Chorus to speak up, democracy in Athens was lost. The play ends with a Peter Karoff, or one of so many other such moderate, wise figure’s tragic recognition that it is too late for protest. They, the ones who come to their recognition too late, or express it too late, are not hauled off. Theirs is a worse fate, to live for the rest of their lives, in what had been a democracy, with the urbane shrug that was the tipping point, forced to repeat that shrug under conditons that become increasingly bleak, and to pass on to their heirs that legacy of self-subjugation.
Turbulent Velvet, meanwhile, wants to remind you of what Kenneth Burke said about satire and burlesque, and you need more than I want to paste here, so go. —As for me, all this on top of re-reading Wicked is proving a rich, rich diet:
“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories,” said the Cow. “I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant, too. Anyway, that’s one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land. The Wizard sets the standard for it, and the society follows suit like a bunch of sheep. Forgive the slanderous reference,” she said, nodding to her companions in the pen. “It was a slip.”
Elphaba threw open the gate of the pen. “Come on, you’re free,” she said. “What you make of it is your own affair. If you turn it down, it’s on your own heads.”
“It’s on our own heads if we walk out, too. Do you think a Witch who would charm an axe to dismember a human being would pause over a couple of Sheep and an annoying old Cow?”
“But this might be your only chance!” Elphaba cried.
The Cow moved out, and the Sheep followed. “We’ll be back,” she said. “This is an exercise in your education, not ours. Mark my words, my rump’ll be served up rare on your finest Dixxi House porcelain dinner plates before the year is out.” She mooed a last remark—“I hope you choke”—and, tail swishing the flies, she meandered away.
Too rich, perhaps. I need to get back to the more comfortable ground of the Unheimlichsenke. I did have one more thing to say, at least.
The long and the short of it.
While we’re at it, Joey Messina posted an interesting question at the end of an old, old entry:
just have one comment what does long story, short pier mean?
looked it up but cannot find anything
And I was going to say something, but then it occurred to me: before I open my big mouth, why not open-mike it? See if anyone out there on the other side of the screen has an answer that might be different than mine. Or theirs. Or yours.
So: what does “long story; short pier” mean? Anyone?
Like a seed dropped by a seabird.
Despite what some might tell you, it’s not that often I get memewhomped by a tune, playing it over and over and over again until coworkers and Spouses alike threaten bodily harm.
But when I do get so memewhomped? —Thank God for iPod and earbuds, is all the people around me have to say.
And this one’s particularly, shall we say, embarrassing. Revealing? —Wicked, see, is one of my all-time evermost favoritest books: Gregory Maguire’s Elphaba is one of those characters who kicked her way inside and made herself at home, and I can only imagine the fantastic damage she’d’ve wrought had the book been around in 1986 or so. When I heard they were doing it up for Broadway, I shivered: on the one hand, there’s almost nothing that can knock head and heart for the same loop at the same time like a musical done right; but on the other—how many, really, are done right? —Lately?
So now I’ve heard the soundtrack for Broadway’s attempt at Wicked. And it’s, well.
Competently played?
Except for this one song. —Well, no, not “except”: “Defying Gravity” is a king-hell slice of Disney cheese, a competently played first-act closer that bulldozes its way through what ought to be the most delicately charged moment between Elphaba and Glinda, leaping past questionable rhymes and awkward scansion straight to those triumphantly lung-punching diva belts your bones will thrum to all through intermission, and the less said about the climax, the better. And it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter. I can see the auctorial intent blundering up to me like a sloppy puppy dog, like a kid behind the wheel for the very first time, and it doesn’t matter one bit: my buttons still get pushed. Just about all of them. Hard. “And if you care to find me,” Idina Menzel whoops over the accelerating horns and synths and drums, “look to the western skies!” and it’s all I can do not to hit replay over and over and over again like some endorphin-besotted rat.
Something about doomed characters and triumphal moments anyway, in spite of. Because of, even.
(Also: the way Idina’s voice catches when she says, “Glinda, come with me. Think of what we could do, together!” —Did I mention how they’re playing up the subtext hardcore? Apparently, that’s what the reviews all mean when they say something like “adding a dose of camp,” and the collapse, right there, the tectonic shift and dizzying inversion of that word in this context, that’s maybe the wickedest aspect of the whole dam’ enterprise: femslash drag-queen divas in mutually unrequited love. —When the price drops sufficiently, high school productions of this thing will do a magnificent job of breaking hearts.)
So I put on “Now / Later / Soon,” because it’s just about the opposite in every conceivable way, except how I stop in my tracks when the three waltzes interlock at the end to build some brand new thing that soars into unexpected heights; I put on “Flying North,” because it moves with the same sweet grace of doomed exhiliration. If I have to, I’ll crack open the J-pop. “Yakusoku Wa Iranai” on heavy rotation ought to do the trick.
—But just one more listen first, okay? I can always stop later.
Now you’re just fuckin’ with me.
We should get this out of the way up front: my linking to this in no wise comprises an endorsement of the nasty tangled mess known variously as “recovered memory syndrome” and “trumped-up bullshit for which entirely too many innocent people are still serving time long after it’s been debunked.” Now’s not the time to get into why and how I might find myself saying and thinking pretty much exactly the skeptical things they’d (of course) want me to say and think; it’s enough to note I’m taking the following with as much salt as I can scare up.
And yet it’s still trickling ice-water down my spine. —After all, says Jeff over at Rigorous Intuition, “we went through the looking glass a long time ago. So there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be right, unless it’s dead wrong.”
With that in mind, let him sketch for you in a handful of dust a quick little story about John Gannon and James Guckert and Johnny Gosch and James Gannon.
And it came to pass.
I had no idea at all it even existed before I saw the cover of TIME magazine.
The idea had literally never crossed my mind. It wasn’t that it was a thing that couldn’t or shouldn’t or oughtn’t be done; it wasn’t a thing, at all. It didn’t exist. Inconceivable. —After? Well, take your pick: I’d stepped through a door that slammed shut behind me; a seed had been planted; I’d taken a bite from the apple; the world got just that much the bigger. I was that much further down the slippery slopes that fall away on all sides from Innocence and Grace. I knew a little more of what it was I didn’t know.
When did I see it? Hard to say. It’s dated 23 April 1979, but I remember it alongside the cover they ran just over a year later, when Mount St. Helens blew its top. Magazines were kept in pretty much the same place, on and around the corner end table, so I might be remembering them together because I saw them (two powerful, iconic images) in the same place and not necessarily at the same time. So it was somewhere between April of 1979 and June of 1980, sometime just before or after my 11th birthday, that I first became aware of the idea of homosexuality.
(I don’t remember the article itself, which is a shame, though you’ll note it isn’t so important that I’ve gone to the library to look it up, or indeed perform much more than a desultory googling. It’s noted here as a “relatively sympathetic post-Bryant cover story,” and I suppose it’s a measure of our post-Bryant age that we’re now fighting over basic rights for homosexual relationships instead of basic rights for homosexualists. —I do remember wondering at the the pair of female hands, there at the top: I was confusing the Latin homo for the Greek homos, even if I might not have put it that way at the time, and further mistranslating homo as man. So the male hands made sense as “homo” sexuality, but not the female. Ah, lesbian invisibility! —If I did discuss the cover with either of my parents, it was merely to clear that up, but I’m mistrusting the memories that suggest such a conversation occurred, and where does that leave us?)
How about you? Any one moment or thing in particular? A watershed, or did it just seep in, with no clear eureka between knowing and not? Or have you always known, and do you find the idea of not knowing in your bones that this is one of the ways the world works to be quaint, odd, disturbing? —It’s important, I think, to note these things.
Your first lesson in leaping with a laughing heart:
It may be justifiable anger, but I won’t trade the rest of my world for it.
Hmm? Oh. Just pasting this on my virtual refrigerator. Don’t mind me.
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
“It’s becoming silly for an actor to think, ‘If I do a Japanese commercial, the American audience won’t be aware of it,’” Kaminsky said. “It’s becoming a tiny, tiny world. Now actors think, ‘Why should I do a commercial for a foreign market and be ashamed to do a commercial for America?’”
“Audience and consumer attitudes have changed,” added Jonathan Holiff, whose Los Angeles firm, the Hollywood-Madison Group, pairs companies with celebrity endorsers.
“We have all become much more jaded and are no longer taken aback to see celebrities from all walks of life jumping into the advertising game.”
Apparently, the paparazzi really wanted the Heineken. Isn’t that funny?
Oh, wait—there’s one more piece you need:
Lenny: I brought a bag of money in case he wants us to burn it again.
Homer: I hope he tells us to burn our pants. These are driving me nuts!
It’s going to be one of those weeks.
