Elevator pitch.
It’s Joanna Russ meets Emma Bull for a Babe the Blue Ox show at Satyricon. No? Okay—Chris said it was like Bruno the Vampire Slayer, which is cool. Except that Jo and Bruno are kinda different. And there’s no vampires. (Yet.) I mean, I was gonna say it was like Utena the Goblin Slayer, which is maybe closer, except that actually sounds like a real anime out there somewhere. And anyway, it isn’t animated. I mean, it could work if it was animated, sure, but like I have the budget, you know? Look, if you’ve got a minute, I could maybe read you this passage from Lanark—
Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
But that’s kinda dry, actually. Come to think of it. Out of context like that. Um. There’s this line, from Yeats—
The visible world is merely their skin.
But that’s even more out of context, and anyway, it doesn’t really capture the, you know. Flavor. Of what’s going on.
Crap. We’re almost there.
Okay. Deep breath: it’s called City of Roses and it’s about this girl named Jo and what happens when she meets Ysabel, only it’s also about what happens when Ysabel meets Jo, except it’s also about Portland which is where I live these days, and it’s big and it’s unwieldy and it’s a serial with installments posted every Monday and Wednesday and Friday and there’s some work yet to be done on the website but there’s also the usual slew of oracular pop culture namechecks and also snarky jokes and the occasional sword fight, and it’s just gotten underway.
So.
Hosing down the pier.
So I’ve been having a fun morning and afternoon, squeegeeing up the spooge left behind by a couple of commenting spambots named “Lolita” and “Preteen”—the minions of one Guy McFarland, 4009 Dancing Cloud Court, in sunny Destin, Florida, 32541, 850.269.2814, who is considerably further along than his teen years, one imagines, and rather long in tooth to play Lolita. (Instead of a plague of boils on his tenderest parts, one could wish Acacia [notably vile in its own right] would take notice of his video-lo.com enterprise and sue him into oblivion. Oh, hell: in addition to. I’m in an expansive mood.)
If you read a Movable Type blog regularly, you’ve doubtless seen the fallout. If you have a Movable Type blog of your own, you’ll want to load for bear. Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light is an excellent port for this storm: good cheer, gruntled commiseration, hot tips and sandbags handed freely to all comers. —Unless, of course, you’re hosted by SISNA, Inc. Since Lolita Long-in-Tooth is using a slew of their servers to spam comments threads, just about everybody’s blocking a whole range of their IP-number thingies. (Technical jargon. Don’t worry your pretty little head.) If you try to make a comment hereabouts and find you’re blocked, send me some email. (Offers to enlarge my penis will be responded to in kind.)
Also deserving of kudos and a mention: Joseph Duemer did the legwork on this perp; a round of applause and a virtual beer, sir. And: Jay Allen will tomorrow release what is sure to be the year’s most popular Movable Type plugin, by far. As well: the intrepid Erik V. Olson, who all-unbidden dug up a related Malaysian spammer (the IP to ban: 219.95.14.69)—be on the lookout for sudden approbation for your deathless prose from www.zipcodesmap.com, y’all. It’s not “Lolita,” but it is an evil as banal.
Mistah Zevon, he sleepin’ tight.
The rains came yesterday, and I’m in a chipper mood. They started coming Saturday night: we stood on the balcony, rudely startled out of character, as a callithumpian band went rattling away down the street a block away from the one that had the fair, and I was startled to note that the air was chilly. The heavy heat was gone and the leaves began tossing restlessly in a rising wind, and I wanted to wrap up in something. Yesterday, it actually fell: the gutters overflowed and there was lightning and thunder, too, which almost never happens around here. I couldn’t stop grinning and I kept leaking squiggly little dance steps. (You ever try not moving to the boogie-woogie Ben Folds gets going in “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” when you’re in a mood like that?) Tonight I’m wearing a sweater and I’m drinking a cup of hot tea. Fuck you, summer; the new year’s begun.
I’ll be moderately upfront, since I haven’t been yet: I don’t know if I’ll make the (charitably loose) September deadline for getting City of Roses off the ground. Rather, I know I can make it: what I don’t know is if we’ll be in October and already muttering about how reruns have started. It somehow fits the generally feckless air of the whole enterprise thus far—cobbled together, catch-as-catch-can, and yet. It’s still more than it isn’t. I’ll take it as a good sign, I guess. Better than the alternative.
I have a new article up at Comixpedia: interviewing the spouses of webcartoonists and asking them about that Cyril Connolly quote about the pram in the hall, and what it was like being married to an artiste. It’s all terribly tongue-in-cheek, on everyone’s part, even if Ivy doesn’t think she said “What a load of crap!” —I was wryly amused to discover when I’d jotted down a shortlist of interviewees, I’d come up with a wife, a husband, a fiancé (as opposed to fiancée), and a long-term girlfriend (long-time companion?); this I took as a sign that something or other is better now than it ever has been before, so I ran with it.
Bruno’s back, and I owe Chris and Bethanne email. They’re in Olympia now, former home of Sleater-Kinney; wave hello as you zoom up I-5 past Evergreen State, the Oberlin away from Ohio, as some of us old Obies knew it. —While Bruno was gone, Chris was running several weeks of his new project, his latest attempt to pan for gold in the mines of syndicated commercial dailies: Little Dee, which I hope I do not diminish in your eyes by pointing out that, of all his attempts up and out, it’s the most likely to succeed—fiendishly cute, with enough of the wicked cynicism of necrophagic humor and the judicious schmaltz of an adorable moppet to deftly walk the fine line of entertaining the jaded while remaining perfectly apropos for refrigerators everywhere. Hie thee hence, and then bounce back out to the main page: after all, Bruno’s back.
While we’re discussing that fine line and those who walk it, might I also encourage you to check out Sheldon, the pig who can’t stay put? (An egg-shaped pig, a robin pulling a Casey Stengel, and rabbits. How can you lose?) —Also, I would be so thoroughly remiss if I didn’t point out that the Pants Press crew has gotten Wary Tales up on the web: the latest product available under the BitPass beta test. Which is going swimmingly, so far as I can tell; so much for the barrier of mental effort. (The soft bigotry of low expectations?) (And do note I’m knocking wood as I so smirkingly take someone who’s so much less of a dilettante to task.)
And it’s been long days at work lately, which is maybe why I stood over the latest copy of The New Yorker today after I got home for what felt like ten minutes: on the left-hand page, a full-color, full-page ad for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. “Life’s too short to eat anywhere else,” says Ruth. On the right, a sixth-page vertical black-and-white for Warren Zevon’s last album; “Includes performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Springsteen, David Lindley,” and so on (in alphabetical order by first name, you see). Both of them in the middle of an advertising circular for The New Yorker Festival (September 19, 20, and 21, 2003). The whole thing had a nagging oracular quality to it, that presque vu that I usually cherish, that I spend a great deal of time not so much chasing as hanging out in places where we’re likely to run into each other: but today it was just annoying. It was trying to tell me something, but what? —That I’d been at work too long. Next question!
(I never did get a new pair of seersucker pants.)
The rains are back. Grey skies and wind from the west, extra blankets on the bed, sweaters and tweed and whiskey in the tea, and the cats are that much friendlier. —Virgos everywhere, with their innate love of order (and here you have to imagine me looking around the jumbled wreck of my office to get the joke), look back fondly on the incipient order of the new school year (or, granted, ahead, with no small amount of fondness amidst the teeth-gnashing): the new velcro and zip-up binders, the untrammelled packs of paper, the complete sets of colored pens, the waveform of all those perfect schedules and plans that has yet to collapse into all those discretely messy particles. (Usually by two weeks into it it’s all a lost and hopeless cause: contingency is king.) But between that and their birthdays, and the change in the weather, it’s not hard to see why Virgos might consider September to be the start of something new: the high hot timeless haze of summer’s gone, and with it the beastly heat; the air is crisp again, and something wicked will be along in about a month or so. Time to finally get some work done.
So: happy new year, and presque vu. Raise one to whomever; kick up a callithumpian moment. And then let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to cases.
Things to remember:
Tiger Crouches at the Front Door; Boatman Rows a Skull; Paint a Red Dot Between the Eyebrows; Brush Dust in the Breeze; Dragonfly Skims the Water; Turn Around and Hang a Golden Bell; Pick Up Stars with an Unerring Hand; Black Dragon Stirs its Tail; Wasp Flies Through a Hole; Capture a Legendary Turtle in the Ocean Depths; White Snake Flicks its Tongue; Hold the Moon in Your Arms. —Names of maneuvers in classic Chinese swordplay. From a footnote in By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions.
Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
How I got to be where I am at the moment.
¡Journalista! is a daily must-read during the week. Dirk Deppey regularly pulls together an entertaingly varied assortment of comics-industry and comics-related news items, with occasional flights into spot-on if cantankerous analysis; just the thing for someone too terribly lazy to keep himself on top of The Comics Journal boards and Comicon.com’s boards and the Pulse and Talkaboutcomics.com and Comixpedia and Sequential Tart and all the other sites I’m leaving out, God knows. (To say nothing of the ever-burgeoning comics blogosphere.) This morning, in addition to a great John Barber rant I’d missed the first time out, Dirk pointed out an article from my own backyard: the Portland Tribune profiled Craig Thompson, whose Blankets is not to be missed. In the profile, Thompson mentions in an off-hand fashion the three books his father has read: “a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.” Those last two didn’t really engage me—I mean, Rush, you know? And if you’ve seen one stadium full of men in Tommy Hellfighter T-shirts, you’ve seen them all. But the first: Jerry Falwell on economics during the Tribulation? Damn.That’s one of those must-haves for the library, you know?
Unfortunately, some desultory coffee-break Googling (and Amazoning, Powellsing, and aLibrising) failed to turn up a likely candidate. However: I did turn up this interesting-looking essay on the politics of Christian domination—to be dug into later; it seems to speak nicely to this post over at Body and Soul—and Frontline’s site for its show on apocalyptic belief in the Western world, which includes a page on Hal Lindsey and his coattail riders (among which is numbered, of course, good ol’ Jack Van Impe), as well as some much-need historical perspective: Cliff’s Notes backgrounders on the Millerites, the Great Disappointment, and John Darby’s dispensationalism—which features a scrummy-looking chart by Charles Larkin that bounced me through Making Light to the Planet Kolob, from which hasty retreat was beaten back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and would you look at the time? So I rounded it off with a dose of Apocamon, Patrick Farley’s manga-bright retelling of the Revelation of St. John the Devine. (Coming soon—Part 3: Attack of the Locusts.) Gotta get ’em all!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little dizzy.
Bandwaggonry.
I’m on board—are you? (Yes, mine is an involuted joke. Referencing this, and this [by way of this].) —And now I’m on to something else. (For the record, akashic or otherwise: “FAIR and Balanced, Deceased.”)
And the whole dern thing has been condemned by ’Merican Express.
I think I found this over at Geisha Asobi: Mr. Wong’s wonderful Soup’Partments, quite possibly the world’s tallest virtual building. Download a basic template (one- or two-storey models available), renovate to your liking (pixels only, please; no anti-aliasing), and email it in; Mr. Wong will find a place for you.
Which reminds me of something from back in the day: the Muckenhoupt Hotel, frequented by a large part of my circle of friends (and others, of course) at Oberlin. Now, keep in mind this was back in the late ’80s: there was no web, world-wide or not, and students bringing their own computers to school was rare. We had a couple of rooms in the library full of cheap idiot terminals all plugged into a VAX 11/780—with a separate room for some MS-DOS boxes, and, my sophomore year, the experimental Macintosh lab, full of cute little SEs. Getting email out of the local network and onto the Internet (it made more sense to capitalize it then) took a little finagling—corresponding with the Runic Robot was always something of a feat, at least for me—and when you made a post to Usenet, it could take 3 or 4 days to show up. And those cheap idiot terminals had monochrome displays: you could pick an amber-on-black or a green-on-black display. No graphics, anti-aliased or otherwise.
Each student could sign up for an email address and a directory with a couple hundred kilobytes, gratis. And we rapidly found other ways to use that k than email storage and statistical analyses—there were emailed serials (most notably the late, lamented Pulp); Infosys, the bulletin board, was full of long-winded, little-read arguments on politics and religion; and of course, games: Hack (or Rogue, or whatever) and Wumpus-hunting and IF and setting up utilities for Champions character generation.
Carl Muckenhoupt pulled an interesting experiment. He set the protections for reading and writing to his directory structure to all, wrote a text file describing the lobby of the Muckenhoupt Hotel, and threw open its doors. Anyone could set up a subdirectory under his directory, and put whatever text files they wanted in it. So people would set up their “rooms,” with text descriptions of what they looked like, and files describing various objects within the rooms. People began leaving objects in each other’s rooms, since you could set your own subdirectories to allow others to write to them (I seem to recall a minor kerfluffle over an anonymously created rose). Crude hypertext hacks allowed you to move through the directories, and even set up “secret passages” that would work in the background to move you unbidden from one room to another. Someone—Carl, I think—cobbled together an ASCII elevator that could move you from one “floor” to another.
This was all in 1987 and 1988, or thereabouts. And while he was far from the only one to come up with the basic idea, and it was terribly ad hoc—there was no coding involved beyond the operating system and the directory-shunting hacks—still, it’s worth noting: this was one of the world’s first MUSHes. (Or MUDs. Or whatever.) Proto-MUSH? Maybe?
(Confidential to Amy: Yes, it is.)
It’s a spy plane! It’s a rock band!
Actually, it’s the table where I’ll more likely than not be hanging out while in San Diego for the next few days: U2, in the Small Press corner of the ridiculous expanse of the San Diego Convention Center. It should be listed under “Baldwin and Lee” in the program. Do stop by if you happen to find yourself in the area.
It depends on what the meaning of “blog” is.
I’m supposed to be freelancing, since I didn’t get a chance to put that ceiling in, and the painting took longer than I thought, and don’t ask about the wiring, and I’m also wondering how on earth I can find appropriate references to the Family and the Sygn in my tattered, dog-eared copy of Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand—wouldn’t it be cool if there were some sort of engine that could scan the letterforms on the page much more quickly than I could myself, alerting me to those passages which contain “Family” and “Sygn” in close proximity, so that my search would be that much the easier? —But you can never have too much procrastination, says I, so here I am wasting time to say: Happy blogoversary, Alas.
An open letter to Figg Vanderhyde, among others.
I don’t have a septic tank problem. Not even a “septic tank problem (bWqx2M).”
I don’t even have a septic tank. Okay?
So I don’t need to dramatically increase its life and effectiveness with SPC, which breaks down large waste materials into smaller particles and liquids so they pass through a septic system that doesn’t even exist. So I’m not going to try it out by clicking anywhere.
Given that, you might want to stop with the septic tank spam. Utterly wasted on me. Moreso than most.
(I mean, at least the barnyard lesbian lolitas attracting men with larger breasts that went all night were momentarily entertaining…)
Tuppence.
I’m sorry to see Wampum go. Come back soon, MB.
While I maybe don’t read Ruminate This or the watch on a daily white-knuckled basis, they’re invaluable pit stops for every-coupla-day perspective-taking. Keep up the good work, folks.
I used to have Mac-a-ro-nies in my linchinography. Like a lot of people, I find her a sharp-witted writer on political issues, with a knack for digging up (criminally) overlooked perspectives. But her tongue’s as sharp as her wit—too sharp, perhaps. Links drift in and out of my blogroll all the time, for the most whimsical of reasons; it isn’t a secret club, or an intellectually rigorous snapshot of me as a political animal, or a networked affinity group, or even an accurate representation of what I’m reading how often. It’s just a collection of stuff I want to remember to keep coming back to. For a variety of reasons, including what I saw to be disproportionate reactions to others’ posts (friends and not) and dispiriting ad hominem attacks, I decided a while back to remove the Mac-a-ro-nies link. —I still read her from time to time, when pointed to fresh posts by others.
So I wish MacDiva the best of luck. We each of us can only fight the world the way we see it, after all.
But every now and then it’s a good idea to stop and take a look at the way we see the world.
—And that’s all two cents is worth, I think.
Scott McCloud is right!
We do, on the whole, look less dorky in his photo than Erika’s.
We’re back.
Oy and gevalt, but. One week ago successfulhosting.com updated various software packages, including its basic database program. Unfortunately, in so doing it rendered the database upon which Long story; short pier, Alas, and Jennworks depend unreadable. (Also, every other non-MySQL Movable Type database on a successfulhosting.com server.) Now, there’s a terribly simple fix—but you have to have command-line access to do it yourself.
And, uh, we don’t.
So. —It’s been a week of testy phone calls and sudden epiphanies and nail-biting tension and glowering looks and links missed and memes unblogged and a lot of Sports Night episodes more on which in a bit, maybe.
Anyway. We’re back now. Miss us?
Quirks.
On the one hand, I don’t imagine it’s all that common to hear people talking about slipstreaming their stories and think you’re going to stumble over the poor piece of fiction with fifteen other naked men at the back of Wilson’s bakery. —Oh, that poor Danny Slepstrini…
On the other, I can’t be the only person in the world with a mad mad crush on Miranda Richardson’s imperiously petulant Queen from the Elizabethan Blackadder. Can I?
-y? -ie? Or shall we call the whole thing off?
So which is it? “Hoody”? Or “hoodie”? I could maybe if kicked marshal a half-baked argument either way. (Is it better to be wholly baked or not baked at all?) Google (what a wonderful spell-checker it is) shows us popular sentiment leans toward hoodie, which makes me partial to hoody for no other reason than maintaining my contrarian cred. Is there a specious argument I’m missing that would authoritatively tip the scales?
I do have my reasons for asking, but they are dull and meager, not worth sharing with the class. —Miss Kittin wants to know how you can call yourself a DJ if you don’t shake your ass in the crowd, and that’s as good a non sequitur as any with which to get back to work.
Where you been?
Out.
Whatcha been doin’?
Nothing.
Pretty much nothing, I suppose. Fiddling with this and that, desultorily, half-assedly. (Is it better to have a full ass or no ass? Didn’t David Chess already look into this? Like, last year?) Like Bean and Jake, I’m going through one of those “fuck tha humanz” mood swings. (You want a link? Here’s a fun one, 2 weeks old, courtesy a not-quite-as-old plug over at Unqualified Offerings. Yeah, I’ve been keeping up with my reading. Removed Where is Raed? from the linchinography Wednesday AM on the grounds that, well, no one knew where the hell Salam was; and who comes back to post that very afternoon, which I don’t find out till this morning? Which, I mean, yeah, I found out about it, and pretty quickly, too, but still. Loop outtage.)
Hmm, lessee: Friday, came home to find a large chunk of the downstairs livingroom ceiling on the floor in a puddle of water and gypsum dust. Nigh-immediately decamped to a farewell party for Johnzo and Victoria and got discreetly (?) smashed. —And I need to rescue my Sif Safaa at some point. I must say, there’s a certain je ne sais quois to the combination of Spitting Image video wallpaper and a toneless computer voice reading Roy-Orbison-in-cling-film smut over ululating Iraqi pop that, well. Facilitated said smashedness.
Saturday: went and bought a used reel mower because the new one I’d bought just over a year ago upped and died. (How do you kill a reel mower? You bend the handle beyond recognition, trying to push it through admittedly tall and wet grass.) —And I would have written about the joy and delight of buying a simple machine that works so well: solid, dependable, with a great adjustable-height widget that means I can cut tall grass like buttah with nothing more than muscle power, I would huffily have discoursed on Newfangled Crap Purchased in a Moment of Desperation at Home Depot Which Failed in the Course of the Humble Duties for Which it was Intended (though it did last over a year, and the grass was tall. And wet) versus A Solid and Dependable Piece of Fine Workmanship from Back in the Day When People Cared about the Products they Sold (and did I mention that neat adjustable-height widget?), and I probably would have reminisced about the utter loathing I had of mowing the grass growing up (as the eldest kid it was one of my many designated chores, the one I perhaps most loathed, or at least most loathe as of this writing): the way gas fumes and oil smoke and bruised, crushed grass mingle to make a nose-tickling stench which, when combined with dust and sweat and stifiling South Carolinian heat make up for me the signifiers of Summer, the Cruellest Season; I might have brought up the mighty oath I swore, struggling behind the ratty gas-powered mower that would kick the occasional bit of gravel or shredded branch zinging off the grass catcher with a retort like a TV rifle ricochet, the oath never again to mow the grass when I got to be old enough to say and do and live as I pleased, and how the reel mower has ended up a regrettable compromise with that disgruntled younger me, having all the elegance of any hair split by necessity; I might even have knocked off a tin-foil-hatted excursion into It’sallabouttheoilstan, muttering darkly about the advantage oil companies gain by convincing lawnmower manufacturers to make reel mowers today much more flimsily that reel mowers of yore, so that anyone who tries to kick the gas habit is sorely disappointed and comes slouching back to the guzzling fold—I might have done something with all of that but for the fact that a crucial plastic thingie snapped on the solid, dependable, used reel mower’s maiden excursion into the grass it was otherwise cutting like buttah. Luckily, I have a warranty on the reconditioned parts. But. Still.
Sunday, and I was laying out my weekly freelance website gig (remind me to tell you about that some other time), and we rented the X-Men DVD because Jenn hadn’t seen it yet and everyone’s buzzing about X-Men 2 (it has Nightcrawler, you see; the Spouse, an X-fan from much further back than myself, is a Nightcrawler groupie, sigh), and something about comic book movies made me go back to revisit perhaps the pinnacle of the misbegotten genre (as distinctly opposed, mind you, to movies based on comics): Batman Returns. —With which I am all too familiar: the summer it came out, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with (counts) five other people, one of whom I desperately did not want to spend any time with at all (love gone awry, long story, I do it every now and again as a party trick, as me the next time you see me). When one does not want to go home, and one has a flexible work schedule, and anyway it’s summer and hot and home has one over-worked air conditioner and the movie theater’s in the blessedly climate-controlled mall, and they’re showing a movie that not only has Batman but a blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity (because one is still sifting through the ashes of another episode of love gone awry, the tragedy of a year prior that presaged the contemporaneous farce, which involved a [taller] blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity, about which remind me to tell you some other time, and can I admit, just between you and me, that among the many little pleasures in this giddily glorious mess of a movie is the decidedly guilty shivery one when Michelle Pfeiffer pulls the derringer from her garter and picks up that broken, desperate giggle, and all Michael Keaton can do is wrap his hand around the gun to hide it and pull her close into the cold comfort of a kiss—Ladies! Gentlemen! Beware the White Knight, who thrills so keenly to see a damsel in distress…)— You spend a lot of not-so-discretionary income on half-priced matinee after matinee, is what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve seen those penguins march more times than I’ve seen the Millennium Falcon save Luke’s hide, and I was, what, nine when that came out? The point, though, is not to dredge up old memory-artefacts of cruel summers past, firing like the ghost-reflexes of a long-since amputated part, but to revel in the rich though neglected vein of political commentary that I keep forgetting is larded throughout the film, whether it’s Christopher Walken giving advice to his sock-puppet mayoral candidate Danny DeVito—“But to get the Mayor recalled, we still need a catalyst, a trigger, an incident. Like the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin”—or DeVito’s bleakly hilarious exhortation to his remote-controlled penguin army:
My penguins … We stand at a great threshold. It’s okay to be scared. Many of you won’t be coming back … Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all God’s chillun … first, second, third and fourth-born, why be biased? Male and female … hell, the sexes are equal with their erogenous zones blown sky-high … Forward, march! The liberation of Gotham has begun!
—From a movie released in 1992, mind; a little over a year after the last time we intemperately announced the liberation of Baghdad. Add to that the minor subplot involving manipulation of the energy market and, well, I’ll just leave any parallels to be drawn between monstrously vindictive sock-puppet politicians in the hands of cartoonishly evil plutocrats as exercises for the reader. So: my appetite for socio-political satire whetted, the freelance work yet to be completed, I dropped Shock Treatment into the VCR as a follow-up, and that, pretty much, was my Sunday.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Eh. Got the plumbing fixed. The leak that made the ceiling fall. Thursday? Here I am. Biggest laugh of the day? Stumbling over this old piece from languagehat on “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” which has added “barking scrotum monsters” to my rhetorical quiver. (How can you say something sensible and worthwhile about a political discourse one end of which is upheld by a crew that moniker fits so well? —Which brings us rather neatly back to square one: Where have I been? Out. What have I been doing? Nothing.)
—Actually, can I change my vote as regards the pinnacle?
