IOKIYAR.
Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.
—“Free Pass From Congress,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.)
Piece out.
I keep forgetting to snag a snap of a no fish, so until then: Hitherby Dragons backs ever-so-insouciantly into the grand pieblogging meme.
Oh, hell, one more political squib won’t hurt.
There’s been a lot of hot air bloviated about why John Edwards ought to be Kerry’s choice for second chair, and I’d link to it, but most of it’s over at Matthew Yglesias’s site, which is currently having Issues. Anyway, Matthew Baldwin just nailed the definitive argument. (Bonus: the second DVD has a priceless making-of documentary.)
Forward, ho!
Do be sure to take the time to thank the fine, fine folks at Move America Forward, purveyors of astroturf since sometime earlier this month: without their hype and handwringing, it’s doubtful Fahrenheit 9/11 would have done nearly so well as it did. Aces, guys! Couldn’t have done it without you!
So. What to do for an encore?
Well, for one thing, team up with jilted Disney to promote a feelgood counterdoc: America’s Heart & Soul, “featuring an original song by John Mellencamp.” —“One of the most inspired and inspiring movies ever made,” says Jim Svejda, a graduate of the Pat Collins school of film criticism. Oh, but I’m being cynical again: America’s Heart & Soul looks like nothing more sinister than a thoroughly inoffensive dollop of feelgood pap: a long-form Chevy truck commerical; a tossed salad of mostly iceberg lettuce with a little cilantro to jazz it up. And I’m sure Svejda is a nice-enough guy. It’s Move America Forward’s puffery that’s a hoot and a half:
Those who oppose the War on Terror have the mouthpiece of the mainstream media to disseminate their propaganda to the entire nation in an almost unchallenged effort. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week it is bash America, bash the military and bash the Bush administration.
So, of course, the only option you have to get your scrappy but beleaguered point of view across in this rigged marketplace of ideas is to team up with the parent corporation of one of the Big Four broadcast networks.
Move America Forward is also (quite) proud that it continues in the footsteps of McCarthy and Birch by hounding and harrassing a scientist guilty of nothing but being the target of an hysterical government lynch mob.
Once you’ve hit the news in a negative light, it’ll stay with you forever, no matter what happens to the contrary. Even if a federal judge in a court of law apologizes to you on behalf of the government.
Witness the strange dust-up in the state Capitol these past several days after a former legislator, Howard Kaloogian, got wind that a group of Asian-American legislators were getting ready to honor Wen Ho Lee with their first ``Profile in Courage’’ award Monday.
Kaloogian took umbrage that “a former accused spy’’ was being honored by “Democratic leaders’’ and shot off e-mails on behalf of his newly formed “Move America Forward’’ organization. The group was launched last week to rally support for the administration’s war against terrorism. He accused the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus of violating its oath to “defend against foreign and domestic enemies.’’
Lee, you may remember, was the Los Alamos scientist fingered by the Clinton administration in 1999 for supposedly leaking key nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. He was fired, his name was leaked to the New York Times and the spy case was all over the news. He spent nine months in prison, shackled in leg irons, as the government’s case slowly came apart. Fifty-eight of the 59 original counts—none of them espionage—were dropped and Lee pleaded guilty to a single charge of mishandling nuclear secrets.
Federal District Court Judge James A. Parker took the unusual step of apologizing to Lee and excoriating the executive branch for bringing its enormous power to bear on a case it mishandled: “They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.’’
That was four years ago. Sad case, upended lives, a career ruined. But settled. Really.
The Asian Pacific Islander caucus, which is holding a policy summit with community leaders from around the state, chose to honor Lee because of his perseverance in the ordeal and the way he had galvanized Chinese-Americans and Asian-American civil rights groups.
As part of the honor, the caucus planned a legislative resolution, along with a routine five-minute presentation on the Assembly floor, a courtesy routinely extended on a legislator’s request.
Republican legislators, nonetheless, threatened to oppose the resolution. The caucus canceled plans for the Assembly presentation and moved it to Monday’s dinner.
Class act, these folks. —Hey, Kaloogian? Go fuck yourself, would you?
(By golly, I do feel better!)
Ding, dong, the—well, a—okay, one of many wicked witches is dead—
My knee-jerk absolutist First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker happydance is muted just a smidge by the disquieting notion that this was yet another 5-4 split, and the underlying rationale seems to be well, heck, Congress could have spent time and money promoting (even mandating) dumbass internet filters instead of walling up everything we don’t like behind dumbass credit-card gates and age screens. But nonetheless: a stupid stupid stupid law went down in flames, and Justice Breyer is downright plaintive in his dissent:
“What has happened to the constructive discourse between our courts and our legislatures that is an integral and admirable part of the constitutional design?” Breyer asked, using phrases that Kennedy had used in another case. “Congress passed the current statute in response to the Court’s decision in Reno. . .Congress read Reno with care. . .It incorporated language from the Court’s precedents. . .What else was Congress supposed to do?”
Ultimately frustrated himself, Breyer declared that the Court may have denied Congress legislative leeway to pass laws in this area. He suggested that, if the Court means to say that nothing Congress could do would be sufficient, “then the Court should say so clearly.”
Well, I’d like to think the Constitution did that already, but see above re: First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker. I’m willing to admit I might have a little dogma in my eye.
Also: the inestimable Eugene Volokh notes a possible slippage in the meaning of “prurience.”
Oh, never mind: it wasn’t struck down, just kicked back for another freakin’ trial. —Boy, do I feel stupid with these happydancin’ shoes on.
Seduction of the innocent.
Local cartoonist Steve Lieber actively recruits the youth of today into the dank cult of comics. (Also, the cartoonist agenda.)
Not-quite-so-local cartoonist Erika Moen, one of today’s youth, is tragically already lost. (She’s even doing a signing.)
Gaudy nightstepper Jim Henley provides a cautionary tale from the mouldering longboxes of yore. (Nor does Jeff Parker escape the collective popconsciousness unscathed.)
Related words.
Pigment: Adrianople red, Alice blue, Arabian red, Argos brown, Bordeaux, Brunswick black, Brunswick blue, Burgundy, Capri blue, Cassel yellow, Chinese blue, Chinese white, Claude tint, Cologne brown, Columbian red, Congo rubine, Copenhagen blue, Dresden blue, Dutch orange, Egyptian green, English red, French blue, French gray, Gobelin blue, Goya, Guinea green, India pink, Indian red, Irish green, Janus green, Kelly green, Kendal green, Kildare green, Lincoln green, Majolica earth, Mars orange, Mars violet, Mexican red, Mitis green, Montpellier green, Nile green, Paris green, Paris yellow, Persian blue, Persian red, Pompeian blue, Prussian blue, Prussian red, Quaker green, Roman umber, Saint Benoit, Saxe blue, Saxony green, Schweinfurt green, Spanish green, Spanish ocher, Tanagra, Titian, Turkey red, Turkey umber, Tyrian purple, Vandyke red, Vienna green, Wedgwood blue, Wedgwood green, absinthe, acid yellow, acier, acorn, air brush, alabaster, alesan, alizarin brown, amber, amethyst, amidonaphthol red, aniline black, aniline blue, annatto, anthracene brown, anthragallol, antique brown, antique gold, apple green, apply paint, apricot, aqua green, aquamarine, arsenic yellow, art paper, ash, ash gray, aureolin, autumn leaf, avocado green, azo blue, azo-orange, azulene, azure, azurite blue, baby blue, barium sulfate, bat, bedaub, bedizen, begild, benzoazurine, beryl, beryl green, besmear, bice, biscuit, bister, blanc fixe, bleu celeste, blond, blue black, blue turquoise, bone black, bone brown, bottle green, bracken, bright rose, brush, brush on paint, buff, bunny brown, burgundy, burnt Roman ocher, burnt almond, burnt carmine, burnt ocher, burnt rose, burnt sienna, butter, cadet blue, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, cafe noir, calamine blue, calcimine, camera lucida, camera obscura, canary, canvas, carbon black, cardinal, carmine, carnation, carnelian, carotene, celadon, cerulean, chalk, chamois, champagne, charcoal, chartreuse, chartreuse green, chartreuse tint, chartreuse yellow, chestnut, chrome, chrome black, chrome lemon, chrome orange, chrome oxide green, chrome red, chrome yellow, chromogen, chrysophenin, chrysoprase green, ciba blue, cinder gray, cinnabar, citron green, civette green, claret, clematis, cloud gray, coat, coat of paint, coating, cobalt, cobalt green, cochineal, coconut, color filter, color gelatin, colorant, coloring, copper, copper red, coptic, corbeau, cordovan, cornflower, cover, cramoisie, crash, crayon, cream, cresol red, crimson, crocus, crystal gray, cucumber green, cyan, cyanine blue, cypress green, dab, dahlia, damask, damson, dandelion, daub, dead leaf, dead-color, deep-dye, delft blue, dip, distemper, doeskin, double-dye, dove gray, drab, drawing paper, drawing pencil, drier, drop black, duck green, dun, dyestuff, easel, eggshell, emblazon, emerald, emeraude, enamel, engild, exterior paint, face, faded rose, fast-dye, fiesta, fir, fire red, fixative, flat coat, flat wash, flax, flesh, flesh color, flesh red, floor enamel, foliage brown, fox, fresco, fuchsia, fuchsine, gamboge, garter blue, gild, glauconite, glaucous, glaucous blue, glaucous gray, glaucous green, glaze, gloss, golden pheasant, grain, grape, grass green, green ocher, grege, ground, gun metal, hazel, helianthin, heliotrope, henna, holly green, honey, honey yellow, hyacinth, hyacinth red, illuminate, imbue, imperial purple, incarnadine, indigo, indigo white, infrared, ingrain, interior paint, iron gray, iron red, isamine blue, ivory, ivory black, jade, japan, jockey, jonquil, jouvence blue, lacquer, lake, lampblack, lapis lazuli blue, lavender, lavender blue, lay figure, lay on color, lead gray, leaf green, leather, lemon chrome, light red, lilac, liver brown, livid pink, lobster, madder, madder blue, madder crimson, madder lake, madder orange, madder pink, madder rose, madder yellow, magenta, maize, malachite green, mallow, mallow pink, mandarin, maple sugar, marigold, marine blue, maroon, massicot, maulstick, mauve, meadow brook, medium, melon, metanil yellow, methyl green, methyl orange, methyl yellow, methylene azure, methylene blue, mignonette, milori green, moleskin, monsignor, moonlight, moss green, mouse gray, mulberry, mummy, murrey, myrtle, naphthol yellow, navy, navy blue, negro, neutral tint, new blue, ocher brown, ocher orange, ocher red, oil yellow, old blue, old gold, old ivory, old red, olive, olive brown, olivesheen, opal gray, opaque color, orange chrome yellow, orange lead, orange madder, orange mineral, orange ocher, orchid, orchid rose, oriole, orpiment, orpiment red, otter brown, oxblood, oxide brown, paint, paintbrush, palette, palette knife, palladium red, pansy, pansy violet, parget, parrot green, partridge, pastel, patina green, pea green, peach, peachblossom pink, peacock blue, pearl, pearl gray, pebble, pelican, pencil, pepper-and-salt, philamot, phosphine, pigments, platinum, plum, plumbago gray, pompadour green, ponceau, pontiff purple, poppy, powder blue, powder gray, prime, prime coat, primer, priming, primrose, primuline yellow, puce, pumpkin, purple lake, purree, pyrethrum yellow, quince yellow, raisin, raw sienna, raw umber, realgar, realgar orange, red lead, red ocher, red pink, regal purple, reseda, resorcin dark brown, roan, roccellin, rose, rose pink, royal pink, royal purple, rubine, ruby, ruddle, russet, saffron, salmon, sand, sap green, scarlet madder, scratchboard, sea blue, sea-water green, seal, serpentine green, shadow, shamrock, shell pink, shellac, shocking pink, siccative, silver, sketchbook, sketchpad, sky blue, slop on paint, smalt, smear, smoke blue, smoke gray, snapdragon, solferino, spatula, spray gun, stammel, steel blue, steel gray, stil-de-grain yellow, stipple, straw, strawberry, stump, sulfur, sunflower yellow, suntan, tangerine, tartrazine, taupe, tawny, tea rose, tempera, tenne, terra cotta, terra sienna, terra umbra, terre-verte, thinner, tinct, tinction, tinge, toast, toluidine red, tone, topaz, transparent color, trypan blue, turpentine, turps, turquoise, ultramarine, umber, undercoat, undercoating, varnish, vehicle, verd gay, verdant green, verdet, verdigris, vermilionette, violet, viridian, viridine green, wash, wash coat, white lead, whitewash, wine, wine purple, woad, xanthene, xanthin, yellow madder, yellow ocher, zaffer, zinc orange, zinc oxide, zinc sulfide, zinc white.
But what I really want to do is direct.
I’d begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries, but I’ve long since lost my fanfold printouts, and nobody, but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all. —I’d begin with an apology for the self-indulgent nature of this post—I’m going to be writing about (my) writing, after all (technical term: whingeing)—but it’s in the nature of blogs to be self-indulgent. If you gaze for long into a navel, the navel gazes also into you, yes yes, but meta-apology’s getting a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?
So all I have left is to, well, begin.
I mean, I was going to work on it last night. Settle in. Made another circuit of the Meier & Frank to fix some details in my head: those canister lights are only on the one particular floor, so the first image I’d had in mind as a conversational break—looking down the escalator at a slice of the chaos of the make-up counters on the first floor—wouldn’t work. The mannequins on the landing were as creepy as I’d remembered, but not in the way I’d remembered, and I’m still not necessarily happy with the creep: I need the opening image, I need the break in the rhythm, but do I need the note this particular image injects right up front, the hollow plastic eyesockets turned half-assedly into eyes with a few translucent strokes of brown watercolor to suggest lids and lashes? —Was pleased to note the specific style of dress I’d had in mind was actually available for sale; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s currently June, the scene in question is set in the middle of September, and I have no idea how seasonally sensitive this sort of designer dress is. For whatever reason, I got fixated on T-shirts: yes, they’re a sort of Dadaist Greek chorus, but I was suddenly hung up on the idea that the mannequins ought to wear a couple of “real,” “actual” T-shirts. Jotted down slogans seen here and there throughout the Misses section: “I’m a Leo! It’s all about me!” “Is it chicken or is it tuna?” “Artificial Respiration Training! (Cute boys only, please!)” “The center of attention.” Made note of a weird hall display in the landing of the closed-off floor: a glass case with a couple of fake topiaried shrubs inside, green flocking crumbling from old brown wicker frames, and lots of plaster? plastic? statues inside, including a nauseating little Cottingley fairy, all white butterfly wings and adorable turn-of-the-last-century Sunday dress, perched atop a plastic-plaster plinth, beneath which: a whole make-way-for-ducklings garden statuary set. Perfect! For what, though? They aren’t going up to housewares. There’s no reason for them to stop and stare at this halfway house. Tuck it away, for later, I suppose, next to the poisonous idea of otherkin, charitable satire thereof.
Home I hie myself, then. The laptop’s set up and plugged in. The notebook’s fished out of my bag and propped up on the corner of the desk. But there’s blogs to check, and the news; a couple of MP3s to download, and there’s that thing about Brokeback Mountain, that line about the sheep is too priceless to let slip, and I’d wanted to do something with the Mayday mystery, right? So sketch the one in quickly, fire up Photoshop for the other, but here’s Jenn, home from work, and then Bill, our current houseguest; time to heat up some dinner, and pour some wine, and we’re working our way through the Northern Exposure DVD, so there’s forty-five minutes or so while we’re eating and cleaning up, and then it’s back to the computer, but I have to finish massaging that 20 January ad and tweak the .gif and after I post it there’s the usual problem that the .blogbody CSS for hyperlinking supercedes the class override written directly into the a tag for no reason at all I can discern, which means the images have the distracting hyperlink line under them, so I see what I can do to fix that, and then we have to water the cat (old, hyperthyroid, kidney troubles, subcutaneous fluids) and feed the both of them and keep the one out of the other’s medicated bowl, and then, well, there’s more blogs to check up on, and news to read, and wow, is that the time?
(The whole time the notebook’s there on the corner of the desk, and I’m not looking at it, not at all, nossir.)
Half-past midnight I finally pack it in. I passed the first bit, there on the escalator. Got to the moment that Orlando kicks the door open and stopped it dead there in the middle of a sentence: “Orlando kicks” —Somebody once said, always leave off in the middle of a sentence. That way, you have somewhere to pick up right away when you get back to it. It doesn’t work any better than any other nostrum, but hey. Any snake-oil in a storm. (Somebody also once said, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Not that they have guns. Aheh.) I scrapped the found T-shirt slogans. Went with a Virgo variant on the Leo and a picture of Einstein with his Meyer-Briggs profile scribbled underneath it. Had to spend some time checking which is the most popular profile ascribed to Einstein, though. Of course.
Two-hundred twenty words, and that’s being generous.
(Hey, says the magpie. What about a paralitticism on Northern Exposure and utopia and reality TV? Arcadia, New Jerusalem, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World—)
Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eighty-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years.
—Joan Acocella, “Blocked“
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
The rules are simple: somebody calls you out, or you call somebody out. You pick a referee and a time and you each come up with a list of three words. The referee adds three more. When the appointed time arrives, you receive the total list of nine words. You have three hours to write a story using all nine. Go!
I managed six thousand words in three hours. Five hundred reasonably coherent words every quarter of an hour; as a genre exercise, it didn’t suck. And I was a wreck. Heart-racing, hands-shaking, couldn’t-shut-up bundle of neurotic energy. And even if the words were reasonably coherent and ended up altogether as something not worse than their totted-up sum, they were unmediated: a gormless rush of the me-est me, which usually ends up sounding like a Harlan Ellison huckster, hot under the collar—a sarcastic salesman unreeling the anecdote that’s supposed to help him close. (When I cool it off, it veers into a weird, dim echo of William Vollmann’s jiu-jitsued snark, which I like better, but, and anyway find much harder to hit.) (And maybe that’s why I impose so many rules, my own private Dogme, as if I could oulipo myself into somebody else.)
I can see how Trollope’s rate is possible. I just can’t imagine making a regular daily go of it.
(Besides, didn’t he write highfalutin’ fluff?)
(And? quoth the magpie. Isn’t that all you’re after?)
So three hundred words an hour, nine hundred words a day: this is much more conceivable. Isn’t it? It’s a serial, after all: a net serial. Eminently disposable. The words are there to get you from Point A to Point B and leave you panting for Point C to come; if they shine themselves along the way, that’s all well and good, but no agonizing allowed, bucko! Well-turned phrases be damned! You have a job to do, one you’ve done before, so suck it up and go. Point A: Point B. Begin.
(Those of you familiar with the art/craft dichotomy as, for instance, taken down by Delany in the aforementioned “Politics of Paraliterary Yadda-yadda” should start laughing now. It won’t make me feel any better about not having posted in two months—well, really, six months, and a dead computer’s good for only so much. —But I will grin sheepishly, I suppose, yeah yeah, and that’s better than nothing.)
The problem is that Point A and that Point B. Point A is usually not where you thought it was, and Point B ends up something else entirely, which can mess you up if you were dropping hints about Point C last time and now it isn’t. The words aren’t just the vehicle, after all: they’re journey and destination, too, and even if I see Point B in my head (a lightning flash: a pose, a line of dialogue, an emotional sense I feel in my bones just so—I close my eyes, I can taste it) I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down. Any critic approaching any work is one of several blind people trying to describe an elephant; a writer with a work in progress is one blind person, alone, with some blueprints for an elephant lot. They really ought to think twice before opening their yaps. (Violence: violence, and power, in the context of walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone else who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear what noise all that crockery will make, with little more than a crappy net serial, ha. Those of you familiar with the politics of genre ghettoization and the attendant shame and self-loathing and projection may now commence to chuckling heartily, ha ha. —But! Also: genderfuck, romance the way we wanted it done back in the day, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional sword fight.)
So I don’t necessarily know what any given Point B is, but I see those flashes of them, off in the distance: having gotten to this Point B, or that, is the entire point of starting off from A, after all. But you write and you write and you stop and you take a look at where you are, and it’s an utterly different Point B; the Point B you wanted is way over there, and here you are over here, except that suggests it’s the plot that’s changed, and it isn’t: those moments that make up the flash all depend on each other, and what went before, and if the words it takes to limn the image end up at odds with the words that need to be said, if what you’ve got onscreen when your hour’s up and the three hundred words have been laid in place don’t conjure what you felt in your bones, what you can still almost feel, not so strong, an echo overlaid by these horribly precise words all a quarter-turn off— I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down, but if the words end up betraying what I wanted it to be—? Where do I go? What do I do?
(Rewrite. Revise. —Oh, shut up. You’re missing the point.)
“I don’t like writing, I like having written.” Ha! I don’t like having written, either, most days. I like what I would have written, if. I like what I’m going to write.
Any day now.
Two thousand words! There. See?
Piece of cake.
So all I have left—
20 January 1988
Final scheduled Transmission, this Series: 4/27/88 (effective: 5/1/88): Winthrop rowed across the Charles, walked up Pinckney Street and into the State House while the door was unguarded, the Pigs having all taken each other to Happy Hour; Schrödinger, however, has made only partial delivery and may have run afoul of the Hanseatic Factor (last transmission was from Bremen, Lübeck remains silent)—IF Schrödinger has fallen within the aegis of the Lutine Bell, THEN Implement The New Economic Policy (1921); John W. stopped off at Epworth and Samuel advised him to obtain Letters of Marque from Whitehall; Mistah Kurtz is riding anchor off Port Royal while Melanchthon has rented a room within sight of 490 L’Enfant Plaza East, SW, 20219; John Brown has departed Haddington and checked in at Harper’s Ferry; Owsley will shortly begin networking with Alberich, after which the Embarcadero will again be laden with Sutter’s Surprise. The local opera-bouffe will, Deo volente, mercifully terminate on 5/14/88, immediately thereafter punitive operations against the Narragansett will commence. Current print-outs indicate the Iroquois will NOT come to their aid; however, initial field reports from Agitprop indicate that resistance will be fierce and it may be necessary for the advance column to fall back on New Bedford—the following sections should stand ready to receive casualties: WNW, CEC, RWG, PRMcS, KCW. If conventional ordnance does not suffice, Matthias Flacius (Illyricus) will hand-deliver FERMI’S FEAR, after which the heresiarch Roger Williams and his Pelagian cesspool at what is ludicrously known as “Providence” will be deprived of their heathen allies. Once the Black Flag has been raised over “Providence,” the liquidation of The Six Nations will proceed seriatim. The Hudson Valley will then lie open and undefended, fallow ground for the Agenda of 5/72. “Et ad haec quis tam idoneus?” ORA PRO NOBIS, ORA PRO ME.
Some unsolicited advice.
Ang? Buddy? When you set out to make a controversial movie about a couple of gay cowboys, and you cast a couple of matinee bishonen like Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as the two romantic leads, well, you raise certain expectations in certain quarters. And then when you announce maybe you’re going to back off from any actual sex scenes, preferring a more metaphorical approach, because “two men herding sheep [i]s far more sexual than two men having sex on screen,” well, you pretty much fuck those expectations over, let me tell you. —People are going to think you’re a wimp, and a sissy, and a big ol’ fraidy-cat. You really want to take that hit after the Hulk?
Let ’em make with the man-love, Ang. Won’t hurt you a bit, and trust me: the ladies will love you for it.
Don’t you mean mittelterrestrial?
So apparently Fahrenheit 9/11 is stuck with the R rating, which, as any fule know, will only make it that much more appealing to the kids we’re supposedly thinking of—hot damn! Must be gory. Faces of Death gory! —Maybe Move America Forward can gin up an astroturf campaign to independently card kids at 9/11 showings. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
Actually, though, it isn’t so much the carnage that made the MPAA bar the door to the lucrative under-seventeen market. Apparently, at one point some soldiers are shown listening to the Bloodhound Gang, and they sing along—
The roof!
The roof!
The roof is on fire!
We don’t need no water
Let the motherfucker burn!
Goodbye, PG-13.
What’s distressing though, is this: the distributors tap Mario Cuomo to pinch-hit their appeal. The MPAA declined to listen to the big gun, but here’s (part of) his argument—
Altogether the hard language and graphic pictures consume about 3 minutes in a film lasting 120 minutes.
The raters agree that there was nothing else in the film that required any cautionary notice to parents: no nudity, sexual conduct, inappropriate theme, or illicit drug use. I think it’s fair to say that given the common uninstructed interpretation by the public of the “R” rating, many of the viewers of the film would be surprised to see so few of the undesirable characteristics they expected to find in an “R” rated film.
Why then should the film not be rated a “PG 13” as was “The Lord of the Rings,” a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses—human and extraterrestrial?
Extraterrestrial?
Signs and wonders.
Hitting a paragraph like this in the introduction is either something very good or very, very bad:
To forestall uneasiness on the part of the reader when confronted with statements which are too shocking, primarily that we continue to live in a world in which magic still has a part to play and a place of honor, we have let the texts speak for themselves. We have, in the reader’s behalf, assumed the burden of understanding them in letter and in spirit. After all, the conclusions we have drawn seem to us adequate recompense for the painstaking study pursued for twelve years without interruption, study involving philology only as a means, not as an end in itself. The fact that unremitting concentration on the meaning of documents has here supplanted mere reporting of their contents suffices to explain the individuality of this work, an individuality for which we do not believe we must apologize.
Ioan Couliano wrote that in Chicago in May of 1986. In May of 1991, somebody climbed onto a toilet in the stall next to his and, reaching over the wall and down with a .25 caliber Beretta, put a bullet in the back of his head. —So he must have been onto something, right? Right?
?? whats iicf?
Matthew Baldwin strikes again:
This morning the authorities entered the home on Babson and found it deserted, the floors slick with mud and seaweed. On the computer was the LiveJournal of Zackary Marsh, with a notice reading “Update Successful.”
Revolver (four, revisited).
Er stößt seinen Speer in Siegfrieds Rücken: Gunther fällt ihm—zu spät—in den Arm.
Let’s try a précis in English, shall we?
Siegfried rejoins the hunters, who include Gunther and Hagen. While resting, he tells them about the adventures of his youth. Hagen gives him a drink that restores his memory, and he tells them of discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde and awakening her with a kiss. Suddenly, two ravens fly out of a bush, and as Siegfried watches them, Hagen stabs him in the back with his spear. The others look on in horror, and Hagen calmly walks away into the wood. Siegfried dies, lingering on his memories of Brünnhilde. His body is carried away in a solemn funeral procession.
There it is, boys and girls: the ur-Dolchstoß. Le coup de poignard dans le dos.
Accept no imitations.
He had become painfully aware of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, of his superiority in the air, of the countless tanks against which one could oppose nothing of equal force. Everyone recognized that Germany, economically exhausted and lacking important raw materials, helplessly faced the enormous harnessing of the world’s resources. But all this had nothing to do with the feeling of superiority as person, soldier, and fighter. The fact that this feeling of superiority was retained after the war’s conclusion is of utmost significance for the German future. It preserves a feeling in society that the battlefield was not left as loser, despite the lost war and the mighty collapse. The consciousness of being superior in fighting ability is the best means for maintaining the military spirit. It also helps cultivate the will to fight for the fatherland’s freedom when destiny calls.
—Friedrich Altrichter,
Die seelischen Kräfte des Deutschen Heeres im Frieden und im Weltkriege
The naïve faith that the German soldier felt himself to be and, in actuality, was a better fighter than the Frenchman, Englishman, American, or Russian reflected the officer’s own narcissism. The fallacious belief that by preserving the German soldier’s sense of superiority one gained a decisive military advantage was possibly tied to two unconscious transactions that typified the right-wing visionaries: the urge to fantasize a war of revenge that would erase the reality of Versailles (and defeat); and the underlying conviction that his and the nation’s strivings were invincible because they were congruent with God’s Plan.
—Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic
I was playing the wisecracking hero in the microscopically budgeted sci-fi thriller: Han Solo in a Clint Eastwood serape, who (interstellar archeologist and plucky sidekick in tow) stumbles over the USS Sulaco and with intuition, sarcasm, and a deeply engrained distrust of ossified authority and The Book manages to save a couple of Marines and the archeologist and his own hide from the pseudoscientific zombie menace We Were Not Meant To Know. (Mostly, what I remember is the Corridor: a couple of sheets of drywall on jerry-rigged 2×4 frames, with sliding doors on either end yanked open and shut by whoever wasn’t running the camera or the lights or staggering about as zombied Marines. “Just like they did ’em on Star Trek,” said the director, justifiably proud of those damn doors, which had eaten half his budget. —Scene after scene after scene was shot in that Corridor.) —I supplied most of the costume myself: the paratrooper boots and the East German army surplus pants I’d scored from Banana Republic, back when Banana Republic was a J. Peterman for high school kids with attitude; the serape, from the year and a half we spent in Venezuela; the khaki shirt I bought for the occasion that I still wear from time to time. But the director insisted on a gunbelt his grandfather had scored: dark brown leather with a heavy metal buckle stamped with the phrase Gott mit uns.
“Can you believe that shit?” he said, grinning. “World War I, that is. They really thought God was on their side.”
But if God is with you, and nonetheless you lose—well, what?
Obviously, you were betrayed. Robbed. The November criminals worked to sap the will of the fighting man, signing him up for Spartacist soldiers’ and sailors’ unions, filling his head with doubts, suing for peace and signing the treaty of Versailles when it was clear victory was just around the corner, if we’d just held out, if we’d just trusted in Gott, who was mit uns. And we would have, too. But we were stabbed in the back. —Just like Siegfried.
Siegfried? Why him? —He’s the offspring of an incestuous, adulterous union, after all, and it’s no excuse to point out that only such a son who knows no fear can slay the dread dragon Fafnir. He’s a murderous thug who spends most of the Götterdämmerung stumbling about as a drug-addled amnesiac, raping his girlfriend while wearing another man’s face, stealing her ring, pledging her troth to him, blundering off into the bush to go a-hunting with the son of his mortal enemy. —He is an idiot, like Nietzsche’s goddess of victory; without dizziness or fear he sets himself down on the crest of the moment, having forgotten everything from the past, and standing then on a single point he is happy as no one else is happy. He can Get Things Done, that Siegfried. Until Hagen urges him to sing of his past deeds. Until Hagen slips him the antidote to the drug he’d already slipped him, the one that destroyed his memories in the first place. That’s when the two ravens fly up out of the bushes. That’s when Siegfried turns to stare after their flight, distracted, and that’s when Hagen can stab him in the back.
With a spear, we should note. Not a dagger.
I’m just saying.
Wotan has two ravens. Had. —Caw, says the first one. Mer. Mr-no. Murnan. Mourn; remorse. Memory. Mimir. Why.
Caw, says the other one. Cwo. Cwi. Wei; wei; wei wu wei wise. Caw. How.
Hugin is the name of the one; thought. Munin the other: memory. Cwo, cwi; Mr-no. How and why.
The “Liberalist” comprises the Pacifist, the Marxist, and the Jew. He thinks rationally and is only capable of calculating. The volkish man, in contrast, lies rooted in the irrational. He opposes “ratio with religion, the individual with the collectivity.”
Reason is defamed as “whore” of the Enlightenment, as perpetrator of “empty ideals.” An appeal is made to instinct and feeling. Only when thought becomes saturated with feeling does it become acceptable and organic.
—Friedrich Franz von Unruh, “Nationalistische Jugend”
Wenn ich Kultur höre…entsichere ich meinen Browning!
—Hanns Johst, “Schlageter”
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Point; counterpoint.
So we just got back from a birthday dinner and a viewing of Shrek 2 which, better than the first, so, good humor and bonhomie all around, even if Bill’s snarking off about how it went over his head, and I’m doing the usual before-bed sweep of email and referral logs and that sort of thing, and it seems Bill Scher, who’s been slaking parched throats over at the Liberal Oasis for a good long while now, said something nice about me on the Majority Report, putting me in the rather heady (if lower-cased) company of uggabugga (diagrammatist extraordinaire) and skippy (the bush kangaroo). And so now I’m looking around at the last post a couple of days ago about a comics spat and at the litter of revolver bits lying about still to be put together and wondering about the whole poltical–non-political–apolitical blogging thing, and worrying whether the personal is political enough, but then I remember I meant to tease Jim Henley (with good humor, and bonhomie) for asserting that dance or the novel can be defined in some necessary and sufficient manner that poetry cannot, and of course attempting to define a political blog or a non-political blog or an apolitical blog is just as much a mug’s game as defining poetry, or the novel, or dance, or comics. It is what it is: Damon Knight’s definition works for everything, see. Not just science fiction.
So I’ll point you to an entry by Elkins, instead, since she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am, and it’s off to bed with me. (Though I do wonder: which definition of the novel did Jim have in mind? My own favorite, whose provenance escapes me: “A piece of writing, of a certain length, that has something wrong with it.”)
A cavalcade of comics coverage!
I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
—Vladimir Nabokov
And Me, too! I’m thinking, except there’s only really one Russian phrase that I can pick out of my foamy brainwaves these days, and that’s “Ya sliushayu jazz.” —But you’ve probably already got this. So you’ve seen the quote. Ah, well.
So we had the first-ever Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, and all in all it went quite well. The Old Church proved a startlingly apt environment for comics geeks of every stripe, for which Messr. Deutsch (Hereville!) is owed many thanks. And if you were there, and you bought a ticket from a bearded guy in a vest who kept stamping people on the palms of their hands rather than the backs or the wrists, well, that was me; hi. Sorry about that. Hope you had fun. But if you weren’t, well, I’d like you to take a look at this, for instance—
—which would be a photo of Bill Mudron (Pan” alt=”” />), Kevin Moore (In Contempt!), and Bethanne Barnes (Future Ruler of the World!), all vamping in front of guest of honor Christopher Baldwin (Bruno! Little Dee!). Also, I’d ask you to take a gander at this—
—which would be Ty and Ian Smith (Emily and the Intergalactic Lemonade Stand!) working out some sibling rivalry or other. Heck, I’ll even ask you to peer thoughtfully at this—
—if only because the pipe organ is pretty much a visual definition of boss. (You’ll have to click through for a glimpse of the stars up Bethanne’s nose, though. —It’s a long story.)
Once you’ve done that, I’m going to ask you to read this.
TO THE EDITOR: This is for “Mr. Hip” Erik Henriksen. Nice of you to feature something comics-oriented, but you forgot something very obvious—the true comics community is made up of geeks [Destination Fun, Stumptown Comics Fest, June 3]. Now I know “geek” is extremely hip right now, but I don’t mean indie rock/hipster geek. I mean the real geeks, the intelligent outcasts that played Magic in junior high while you made fun of them and hiply listened to grunge and Snoop Dogg.
Now pretty much anything in this city with an ounce of underground coolness has been taken over by scenester fucks, exploiting it until it’s sucked dry and turned to shit. But the twice yearly Portland Comic Con you mentioned in your article is not for the too-cool-for-school crowd—it’s for the real people. Not a fucking fashion show where scenesters can strut down their runway and “oooh” and “aaah” over each other’s generic black/brown wardrobes, sip wine, and snub each other (which I’m sure the Stumptown indie comic extravaganza will be).
Just become the fucking yuppies you’re destined to be and go to First Thursday like the rest of them. Stay out of the comic scene before you contaminate it more than you already have.
—Heather Lockamy
Now—and I’m being totally honest, here—it’s hard to blame Heather. It is. Really. —See, “Mr. Hip” did a very enthusiastic job of talking up the Stumptown Fest, but he did so in that inimitable Portland Mercury fashion of trash-talking everybody else on the field in question: in this case, the venerable Portland Comic Book Show, for years pretty much the largest comics event in the Pacific Northwest. Henriksen’s piece doesn’t seem to be archived online, so I’ll take me some liberty, here—
Twice a year, there’s a really horrible comic convention in the Memorial Coliseum basement, where dusty boxes of old superhero comics are hoisted out of geeks’ basements for other geeks to oooh and aaah over. It’s the type of place where you expect to see the Comic Book Shop Guy from The Simpsons waddling about, and unless your idea of a good time is debating the continuity errata of Stargate SG-1, it’s best to stay away.
Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Henriksen. This is a lazy opening, tagging such vastly overused tropes as the Comic Book Shop Guy and continuity neuroses for a cheap, crowd-pleasing us-them shot. —I’m not knocking the praise he goes on to slather over the nascent Stumptown Fest; heck no. And he was slathering that praise under a deadline, and I’ve been there all too many times myself not to recognize the siren song of said cheap shot and the easy, welcoming rhythm of a well-worn cliché. You just don’t have time to fact-check every puff-piece in the weekly what’s-doing section and deathless up the prose it deserves. (Of course, our major news media works under similar circumstance, which led us pretty much into a spectacularly stupid war in Iraq. Surely we can learn from their example?)
Said venerable Portland Comic Book Show is, indeed, in the basement of the Memorial Coliseum, and its overall ambience is one of dust and flea market. But that’s where you go for old skool superhero books and original Pogo newspaper strips and sugary J-pop soundtracks and abstruse action figures. And yes, there’s usually a buxom B-movie scream queen signing autographs next to the guy who played Second Jawa from the Left. Movies and video games steal attitude and approach from comics, to say nothing of talent; so comics in turn leans on movies and video games to draw a crowd, and if you’re going to turn up your nose at that, you might as well give up utterly on the mighty San Diego Comic-Con. —But there’s also reps from three of the most notable publishers in the industry, and writers and cartoonists from the superhero mines and the new mainstream; for years, this show has been a steady and reliable anchor in the Pacific Northwest comics scene. The Stumptown Comics Fest isn’t supposed to replace it, gentrifying comics out of the reach of ordinary, everyday geeks—it’s there to augment it. (Seriously. The Comic Book Show could only offer up ten tables for small press cartoonists. The Stumptown crew was convinced they could sell twenty. And the Old Church was just sitting there, on the corner…)
But all this nuance can’t fit in a quarter-page puff piece, and so Heather’s knee jerks rather understandably, and she misses out on a fun time and ends up calling the lot of us “scenester fucks” and “fucking yuppies,” and we’re standing around with paper stars up our noses going “Wha?” and wondering when the Buffy animated series will start already.
So really, in the end, it’s worth one of those tired, long-suffering laughs. The real people, lost in the epistemological mix, talking past each other once again. Us? Them?
Anyway, Heather: I’m sorry I didn’t play Magic in junior high. I was too old when it first got started. But I did play it, and I understand somebody who threw down with you back in the day had a book for sale at the Fest. So please, feel free to show up next year, because there will be a next year, and it’ll be as geeky as this one was. And if you don’t end up liking it? Well, I guarantee you the Comic Book Show will still be there. This town is more than big enough, and then some.
Now, I’m going to steal one last photo from Erika’s report (so I didn’t take any myself. So sue me):
Yes, that’s Jenn (Dicebox!), but the gentleman she’s speaking with is Dapper David Chelsea (David Chelsea in Love! Perspective!), who recently played host to a smattering of Portland’s finest underground inkslingers in a 24-hour comics fest. The results are now online for all to see. Go! Free comics!
Finally, a moment of silence: Dirk Deppey admitted the obvious last week. ¡Journalista!, one of the leading lights of the comics blogosphere, just ain’t coming back now that he’s editing the Comics Journal. Well, damn, says I. I hadn’t been holding my breath, but I’d still been holding out hope, a pale slender thread of it, anyway, and, well, sure, the comics blogosphere is bigger and bawdier and just plain noisier than it was when he got started, and if a lot of that’s due to him, well, it’s showing no signs of letting up since he had to go away. But still: something’s been lost. An important focal point, a dollop of healthy snark, a one-stop shop for industry gossip and pointed pontificatin’. Hats off, sir. —But he does enthusiastically recommend Kevin Melrose’s Thought Balloons, and heck. That’s good enough for me.
So there’s your cavalcade already. I’ve got to get back to reading about the Weimar Zukunfstroman which, let me tell you, is depressing as fuck. (A hasty postscript to Mr. Henriksen: no hard feelings, ’kay? The publicity really was much appreciated, and I have no doubt that Gryffindor will make up those points easily, and more besides.)
