Eight hours and 759 pages later.
Well. That’s done. —Next?
A pier appears.
—courtesy of the Spouse
The power of names.
No, Barkley; no. You can cite Juan Cole all you want, but this decade will not be called the zeroes, or the naughties, or the naughts; not even the old-skool aughts. It’s going to be a little more cumbersome: the aught-naughts. As in, “We really ought not to have done that—”
—racing down tracks going faster, much faster—
Immanentise the eschaton!
You let the eschaton alone. It’ll come in its own good time.
—Competing grafitti noted in the neighborhood of I want to say Glastonbury
Set out, set out. —But there’s a couple of things that ought to be explained first, like how magic works; right now, I want to talk about a hitch in the body of time. Lord Fanny and King Mob, drawn by Jill Thompson, hanging out in a diner:
And it is, isn’t it? Getting faster. All the time.
But this has nothing to do with eschatons or apocalypses, armageddim or fifth suns. There’s no damn whirl; no damn pool. It’s all so much simpler than that. There’s just us, and here, and now, and the aforementioned body of time. —The thing about time being that your immediate, visceral sense of it, the time that has actually flowed over and past you, your experience of it, your experience, well, that time is always the same size and the same shape, once it’s set (and rather early on): it’s always the size of your life. (“No more, no less,” to tap another echo elsewhere.) As you get older, as you pack more hours and days and years into the same little box, each one is necessarily left with a smaller slice of the whole.
Pitiless, perhaps, but that’s math for you. —“See,” said my littler sister, when she told me this, “a year is like a twelfth of my life. But it’s like a twenty-fourth of yours.” Grinning like a canaried cat in the back seat. (She had every reason to, of course. Already my years were smaller, harder to see, easy to lose in the crowd. It’s only gotten worse.) —Of course everybody King Mob speaks to has been saying the same thing. Everyone ever has always said the same thing. It’s always already been getting faster.
Keep this hitch in mind, and you’ll be able to answer certain questions like a chuffed Robert Graves: why there’s always jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, for instance, and never jam today. Why every Golden Age is the same Golden Age, and where the Old Skool was; when the Eschaton will strike; where Armageddon will have been.
Forget it, and you fall prey to the anthropic fallacy—the lie of the one true only. Like a smug Frank Tipler, you’ll think that here and now is special because you’re here and now; you’ll think you can say for sure when the jam will arrive; you’ll believe it’s all finally coming to pass and in your time; you’ll know in your bones that time is actually getting faster, because every year to you seems shorter than the year before.
The funny thing about The Invisibles is that while the plot depends upon this fallacy—time really is speeding up, just as Fanny says; the age of the fifth sun is about to end in whirlpools and apocalypses, and the crowning of a dark Lovecraftian king in Westminster Abbey during a solar eclipse—but the point of The Invisibles is precisely opposite: we all immanentize the way we die: alone. Our initiation is always already about to begin; it’s never not the Day of Nine Dogs, and Gideon’s last phone call is the same as Wally Sage’s, to tap another echo, elsewhere again. (Or Jack Frost, with Gaz in his lap. —Of course there’s a plot! Of course the plot must have such a ridiculous, action-packed climax! It’s all a game, remember? Sucked from an ærosol can. Go back and play it again!) —The fact that you’re in the here and now doesn’t make this here, this now any more special than any other slice of eternity—except, that is, of course, to you. And every hour that passes you by makes every other hour that much the smaller, the faster, much faster, until they never let us out ten blocks later.
—Thus, the hitch in the body of time.
I’m hurting cultchah!
Confidential to Keen in Silicon Valley: dude, I know, he made a lot of money, but you start citing George Lucas as some sort of, Christ, I’m not sure what, a compeer of David Hockney or something, some sort of authority on art, well, you’ve pretty much gone and shot your argument in the face. (via; via)
What do you think of Internet video? Lucas says there are two forms of entertainment: circus and art. Circus is random, he says: “feeding Christians to the lions”—or, he says, as the term in Hollywood goes—”throw a puppy on the highway. … You don’t have to write anything or really do anything. It’s voyeuristic.” In short, he says, it’s YouTube. Art is not random, Lucas says. “It’s storytelling. It’s insightful. It’s amusing.”
Harry Potter and the Lost Light.
I had no idea. I honestly had no idea. (via)
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
We’re finally watching Rome. —At some point during the second episode, I say something like, “So it’s Artoo and Threepio.”
And then a little later, the Spouse says, “I’m still trying to deal with the idea of Threepio as a whoremonger and Artoo as a stolid family man.”
I frowned. “No, wait,” I said. “Threepio’s the uptight prig, right? Artoo was the id-guy.” The collapse and reversal shorted something in my brain. I grinned. “So, like, Molly’s Threepio, right?”
—Maybe you had to be there.
Magical white boy.
Oh, hell, let’s chase the red herring for a minute. I’ve got time; I’ve got nothing but time. —So: no. Morpheus is not a magical negro. If nothing else, his touchingly stubborn faith in Neo, which sets him at odds with the magical Oracle, which causes us to doubt him (though we never doubt he’s right: Neo must be the One—look at his name!), and which even causes him to doubt himself—this grants him a degree of agency and protagonism that sets him apart from the mere role of wisely aiding and abetting Neo’s enlightenment. (To say nothing of his captaincy, his popular acclaim in Zion, or the fact that he’s the one who lives to tell the tale—)
So: the One True Neo, a man with almost no past, prone to criminality and laziness, inwardly disabled by his shyly geeky nature, hated as a hacker by the powers that be, granted a terrible power so close to the very nature of things yet tempered by his need to help others, ultimately sacrificed, and all to aid Morpheus in realizing his dream—
Well, yes. That’s why the movies, flawed though they indisputably are, nonetheless have the power they have.
But I wasn’t really thinking about the red herring. I was thinking about Mercutio, and I was thinking about Nick.
—Why was I thinking about Mercutio? Right. Because we’d just finished the second season of Slings and Arrows, with its hilarious production of Romeo and Juliet running under and around the A-plot of Macbeth. Why was I thinking of magical negroes? Because I’d stumbled over MacAllister’s LiveJournal, and the most recent entry over there is a nice-enough trip through the trope. And why was I thinking of Nick?
Well, first, Mercutio; specifically, given the confluence of topics, Harold Perrineau’s, in the deliriously ludic Baz Luhrman production. Ostensibly Romeo’s foil, Perrineau’s Mercutio practically foils the whole damn film, othered to his very gills: the only black character, his gender bent in an otherwise rigidly stratified world, his sexuality—well. Even the lightest brush of those buttons with Mercutio—witty, articulate, prancing Mercutio, always a snappy dresser—leaves little room for doubt. —Forever outside the discourse of both those houses, he pushes and pulls and chides his charge until Romeo sees the light and gets off his goddamn ass, and as far as magic goes, well. Queen Mab, bitches. Those drugs are quick.
But hard as they might push in that direction, and as much power as they might arguably draw from the trope, and despite his Act III Scene 1 sacrifice, there’s no way in hell or out of it that Mercutio could ever be anyone’s magical negro.
(A conscious piss-take? I doubt it; I highly doubt it, if for no other reason than Spike Lee’s eponyming talk came five years later. —But Uncle Remus has been with us for a long, long time. Even in Australia.)
Nick, of course, Chris Eigeman’s Nick, is the Mercutio of Metropolitan, othered by his cheerfully chilly snark, his abiding concern for times and fashions past, his detached perspicacity—though perched in the very catbird seat of privilege, he is nonetheless, within his own context, his insular circle, despised; though his power is mighty (he creates a person from whole cloth, like New York magazine) and his scorn withering (ask a bard what terrible magic satire can wreak), he does little beyond push and pull and chide his Romeo, Tom Townsend, over the barest threshold of the story. (He does also insult a Baron, and start a cha-cha.) —And though he isn’t sacrificed, per se, he does abruptly leave the story toward the end of the second act (of three, of course, not five), marching stoically off to his comically supposéd doom.
But much as it might tickle me to push this WASP in that direction, there’s no way in hell or out of it that Nick could ever be a magical negro.
And not because he’s so very, very white. Well, yes, of course, but—
Nick’s a foil, like Mercutio: slipped under the gem of the protagonist to catch the light and throw it back, up and through the protagonist’s facets, the better to shine for our delectation; necessarily subordinate to the protagonist because it’s all about the protagonist. Isn’t it? —They are othered because the protagonist is by definition normal, and they must stand in contrast. They leave so suddenly because the protagonist, having been pushed, must in the end do it all alone. It is, after all, the protagonist’s story.
Yet ask an actor who they’d rather play.
There are foils that disappear behind their gems, that bow and scrape their way across the stage, that take so literally the story-mechanics of their function—to assist the protagonist, buff and polish them till they shine—that they reify those rude mechanics within the story itself, black-garbed kabuki janitors shoving the machina in place for the fifth-act emergence of a pure white deus, and they perform these tasks with little more than a wide wise smile to hint at a there in there, somewhere. And there are settings so rich and strange and wondrous that the very question of who is a protagonist and who isn’t becomes a trick of where your eye happens to light first, and what you make of it. —Nick and Mercutio fall within that spectrum (there is no doubt as to the protagonists of their stories: not them), yet much closer to the one end than the other: no mere enablers, but so very much themselves, so selfish that they’d never be mistaken for the help.
(And because they stand so flashily in contrast to protagonists who must, as noted, be so damned normal [though admittedly not too normal, in either case], a little of the life of the proceedings can’t help but leak out when they leave. There’s a lesson there, too: like all good blades, this stuff cuts both ways.)
—One final digressive note, which draws a little on the related though much less prevalent trope of the magical faggot (think for a moment of the queer eyes buffing and polishing their protagonist; now let’s move on), and specifically the o’erwhelming need for queer foils to die in order to balance out on some inhuman scale the racy transgressions they commit to foil whatever they’re foiling; more specifically, the storied death of Tara, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which Mac (most specifically) brought up in passing at the end of the post that’s one of the wellsprings for this one: well. It’s at once rather a bit less complicated than that, and rather a bit more.
The one true only.
And so we return and begin again.
You know, human batteries aside, I enjoyed The Matrix well enough right up to the very end, you know, the Nebuchadnezzar’s blowing up all around them, those electric jellyfish beating their way in, Neo lying flatlined in the cradle, Hugo Weaving with his gray-flannel smirk, and Trinity leans over Neo and says something like, “Neo—I’m not afraid anymore! The Oracle told me—”
Yes?
“—I would fall in love, and that man, the man I loved, would be the One. So you see, you can’t be dead, you can’t be—because—”
Oh, no no no no no. That’s not what the Oracle told her, dammit. Should have told her. Could have. Would have. What the Oracle should have told her is what the Oracle should have been telling every-damn-body:
You’re not the One. Not yet. Sorry, kid. Looks like you’re waiting for something. Your next life, maybe. Better luck next time.
Still bugs me, thinking about that.
Well, the human batteries, and that shoot-out in the lobby. Gratuitously nasty round of best-man-fall. That little gesture to fix the sunglasses, trying to remind us it’s only a game. —Doesn’t work, somehow.
Wait a minute—
“I say, old chap, could you explain something to me?”
“I suppose.”
“You see, well, it’s just—this wall we’re building. Of raw meat. The flensed cow-carcasses and such. It’s not I’m complaining, no, of course not, far from it, but it’s such an odd thing to be doing.”
“You want to know why we’re building this wall of raw meat.”
“Bingo! Hit it in one.”
“Well, the tigers, of course.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. The tigers.”
“It’s to keep us safe from the tigers.”
“You know, now the you mention it, I believe I’d heard something to that effect. All part of the initiative, right? Like the duct tape and the surveillance and the torture and that ridiculous television program. Of course. The wall of raw meat. Capital.”
“Well, do you see any tigers around hereabouts?”
“Do you know, I think I have? Why, one carried off poor Maybelline just yesterday. Stacking some butchered pigs on the south side, and it just swooped out of the jungle and with one gulp— Terrible thing. And one does hear them prowling about out there, roaring now and again, much more than one ever used to! Doesn’t one?”
“Precisely! So hadn’t you better keep building this bloody damn wall?”
Chin-chin.
Just taking a moment to note that while Ethan Rayne rates a rather fully fledged entry in Wikipedia, Willoughby Kipling gets jack squat.
Footnote to a prior conversation.
Dread by its nature anticipates; therefore, “anticipatory dread” is something of a redundancy. —Apologies.
We only sing about it once in every twenty years.
Everybody’s linking up the “4th of July,” but the only X song for me today is “See How We Are.” And the best post for seeing just that today is Rick Perlstein’s.
What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity—and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity—“selling out”—the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.”
I think I made a decision at some point in the past few days of McCloud Madness; I think I’ll be the better for having done so, soon enough. We’ll see. —Further bulletins as events warrant.
Burned all my notebooks. What good are notebooks?
“We have Atlantis launching sleeper cell terrorist attacks, we have the Inhumans declaring war on humanity and wanting to take over the world, we have mutantkind facing extinction and infighting, America becoming a police state because superheroes might accidentally blow up a school full of kids, and by the way, your best friend or anyone you know might be an alien invader undercover. There’s an incredible and depressing lack of openness to ‘the other’ in Marvel’s books, these days; nothing is seen as new or different or unusual in a good sense, because everything that isn’t ‘us’ is a threat (as opposed to even being a potential threat). Whatever happened to the days of The Impossible Man appearing and aliens being goofy nuisances? Or Spider-Man being misunderstood and really a good guy, not a public menace, you know? There used to be a time where it was awesome (in both senses of the world) that there was a race of superhumans living on the moon, instead of it being another band of people who want to kill us. Yes, there are a few exceptions (Iron Fist and Fantastic Four come to mind), but overall: Is it really post-9/11, post-Afghanistan invasion and post-Iraq civil war insularism informing what the Marvel writers are coming up with, or something else? And, either way, is there any way that optimism and, well, good fun could come back to these characters again?” —Græme McMillan
I’m pretty sure there’s a Mountain Goats song about this. I’m equally sure it doesn’t apply.
Last night was the second night of the Spouse’s sleep study; last night was the second night in as many weeks that my plan to spread out across the whole queen-sized bed was thwarted by Beezel, frantically burrowing under the sheets, looking for the other human who just had to be here somewhere. —And this morning I once more made a full dam’ pot of coffee before remembering I was by myself and couldn’t possibly drink it all.
